The Cover Contessa: Blog Tour and Giveaway: Darkside Sun byJocelyn Adams @JocelynAdams

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Title: DARKSIDE SUN (The Mortal Machine #1)

Author: Jocelyn Adams

Publisher: Entangled Embrace

Pub. Date: March 10, 2014

Pages: 291

The dead have been waiting for her…

Addison Beckett tries hard to pretend she’s normal, but she’s far from it. Since she was six years old, she’s seen the world around her unraveling, as if someone is pulling a thread from a sweater and it’s all slowly coming undone. When she ignores it, it goes away, so that’s what she does.

Enter her arrogant-but-hot professor Asher Green. He knows all about her special brand of crazy. In fact, he might be just as nuts as she is. Asher insists that the dead from a parallel dimension are trying to possess the living in this one. And since Addison seems to be the only one who can see these “wraiths,” she just might be the key to saving the world.

Addison wants nothing to do with Asher or his secret society, The Mortal Machine. But as their animosity grows, she finds it harder and harder to ignore the chemistry between them. And when she discovers that Machine laws forbid her from touching him, she realizes that’s all she wants to do.

Stop the wraiths. Break the rules. Save the world. All in a day’s work.

Normal was overrated, anyway.

I’ll begin telling you about my writing process by confessing that I have the attention span of a kitten in a yarn factory. My mind can jet off in another direction without warning, and often I have no choice but to chase after it to see where I’ll end up. At any given time, I’ll have 3-4 story worlds begging for my attention. Needless to say, getting myself to focus long enough to finish a novel from start to finish has had its challenges.

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Guest post from Jocelyn Adams:

I’m a pantser, through and through, which means I don’t plot anything. Ever. Even if I do try to plan out a book, within the first three chapters, I’m so far off the map my carefully laid plans are meaningless, anyway. I’m also the kind of girl who needs to know how a book will end. Like, now. Because I’m a pantser, most of the time when I begin a book, I don’t know how it will end—add in my attention issues from above—and I need to finish the story fast.

I’ve finally developed a way to accommodate my issues and get the crowd of characters out of my head and onto the paper. When an idea strikes, it blooms into a full story in a short period of time. I use that quiet time between waking up and getting up to assemble a few scenes in my head, and at the first available moment, type them out in skeleton form.

What I mean by that, is I put in the dialogue and a few speech tags to keep track of who’s speaking. No descriptions. Very few internal thoughts. No emotions. It’s the bare bones of the story, including where are we, what happens, and who says what. That way I can motor through the main plot all the way to the end in a hurry.

Once I have the skeleton and my own curiosity is satisfied, I can take my time adding the flesh, like descriptions of the characters and places, remove dialogue tags and insert actions so the reader can see what’s happening in the scene in their mind, etc.

After that comes the color and texture. I add emotion and reactions to each crisis as it comes along, humor, and give the characters their unique voices.

Using this method, I pumped out the first draft of my very first published novel in seventeen days. It took three months of editing after that, of course, and I was mentally exhausted, but it worked so well I’ve continued using it and now have six published novels.

Now if I could just clone myself a few times, I might be able to keep up with all of the voices in my head.

Jocelyn Adams lives in the Muskoka region of Ontario with her high school sweetheart and young daughter. She writes dark, romantic fantasy, is a wife, mother, blogger, carbaholic, and a former IT geek.

Find her Young Adult-friendly persona here.