Exclusives

Teaser Time 

We have the first official teaser of The Perpetual Quest for The Perfect Life. Meet the crew!

 

Teaser #1

Nicole woke gasping for air as she sat straight up in bed. Her heart galloped in her chest like a stallion and her eyes darted around the bedroom. Momentarily unsure of where she was, she felt panic set in. By the sunlight streaming through the curtains, it was obvious she’d slept the entire night, and she realized she was in her new bedroom. She shook her head and her long blonde hair to tumble wildly around her. She covered her eyes, as if to block out the images from her reoccurring dream about her late husband.
The details of the dream rarely changed: Ryan, dressed in green scrubs, stood drinking a cup of coffee at the nurses’ station. Red eyed, he was the resident on-call nurses’ station. Red eyed, he was the resident on-call and he’d had no more than two hours sleep. He’d picked up call for a friend, leaving Nicole home on maternity leave. Though he was granted two weeks off for the birth of their son, after only six days off, Ryan joked that he’d get more sleep at the hospital in a crappy on-call cot. Nearly finished with his second year residency, he lived and breathed medicine; scoring brownie points with the staff docs was his number one goal. Nicole often wondered how different her life would be if he’d only stayed home another week as originally planned He’d been showing off Ike’s baby pictures when the ER doors slid open and the hooded man stormed in and began shooting. He gunned down two nurses close to the entrance, then an orderly. He took out a patient who attempted to flee in her wheel chair. Ryan, always playing the role of savior, tackled the gunman from the side. The shooter managed to get off two shots on his way to the ground.
Ryan hadn’t died instantly; he’d bled out over the next few minutes as the ER erupted in chaos. Sitting in her sunlight drenched room, Nicole rubbed her eyes as if to erase the vision her subconscious had concocted of her husband’s last moments. She reached into the bedside table and pulled out a bottle of Zoloft and Xanax. Swallowing two tiny pills, she looked over her shoulder. In the center of her bed, her son Ike slept soundly, his thumb in his mouth. Over two and a half years old, he was the spitting image of his father, except with her fair hair and skin. He would have no memory of his dad, and she wondered if that was going to be a blessing or a curse. Ike usually slept in his own bed, but on the first night in a new house, he’d wanted Mommy and she’d obliged.

Author Interview with Michelle Pace and Tammy Coons!

Michelle Pace and Tammy Coons! Thank you so much for joining us at Word for FURY DAY! Today is all about hottie bandmates and their FURIES! So, let’s get right to it…

*Fury is about two best friends, Cheyenne, a journalist, and Steph, a photographer, that get all access passes to tour with the secretive band Fury. What sparked this story in your heads?

Tammy: Teenage fantasy. Who wouldn't want to tour with a band.

Michelle: We were fan girls of a certain band years as teens and wrote a bit of fan fiction about what we thought they'd be like.  When we were a bit older, we took the general idea from our early fan-fic and fleshed it out into a more plausible scenario.  We recently updated and reworked that story and it morphed into what is now called Fury.

*How long did it take you to write Fury?

Tammy: Fury has been in the works for about 20 years.

Michelle: Considering me response to the first question, I would have to say YEARS.  In all honesty, the reworking and fine tuning that we did was more like four months of back and forth with editing, which was mostly us waiting in a que for an understaffed trade publisher.

*Explain to me what the Furies are. 

Tammy: The Furies are our fans who absolutely adore Fury.

Michelle: They are the fans of Fury.  They are crazed women who want at Fury.  The fictitious press in our universe simply refer to them as "the Furies", since they are fanatics and a force to be reckoned with in mass. I cam across the following definition when we were writing the book and it seemed appropriate:  Furies in Greek & Roman Mythology were three terrible winged goddesses with serpentine hair, Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, who pursue and punish doers of unavenged crimes. 

*You are co-authors- Can you explain your process?

Tammy: Lots and lots of collaboration!!!!!

Michelle: Typically when we are in the first stages of a story we create character dossiers of our primary characters and then one of us starts writing.  We pass it back and forth for a while and tend to rewrite a bit as we go.  Sometimes we'll send scenes to each other that we're not quite ready for and then write the transition to the scene.  Then we do read-thru and read out loud to each other so we can tweak dialogue and see what doesn't make sense or doesn't sound natural.  Sometimes we find incongruity during the read-throughs.  I highly recommend reading out loud to any author who struggles with dialogue.

*Which character can you best relate to?

Tammy: Cheyenne. Like her I have faced many ups and downs throughout my life. ( No I have never been a stripper)

Michelle: I personally fell in love with Steph. Steph is me if I had looks, money, and status.

*Which rocker was your favorite to bring to life? Phillip may have hit a soft-spot  in my heart, I love badboys!

Tammy: Scot, he is a hopeless romantic.

Michelle: Phillip was a lot of fun since he's such a diva hothead ("do you know who I am?").  Nathan was a good time-he's the typical "I have no consequences so I'll behave like a three year old" rock star.

*I absolutely adored Cedric, who is a sarcastic priest, where did the inspiration for his character come from?

Tammy: Cedric is a creation that just happened. He wasn't in the original book.

Michelle: Cedric came about in the eleventh hour.  I woke up one morning and thought "Steph has a brother and he's a total contrast to her".  I feel like he's the heart of the story and we haven't seen the last of him.

*Goddess was hilarious in the whole book, is there a real life Goddess to watch out for?

Tammy: Goddess is Goddess. Not sure if there could be a real one!

Michelle: Goddess was the comic relief, at first.   Then we decided we wanted there to be more going on with her and that was when the story came together for us. 

*I have heard some rumors about you ladies giving us little more about Steph, any truth to this?

Tammy: Yeppers!!!

Michelle: We've had multiple requests for a sequel.  The crowd seems hungry for the rest of her story...and we have some ideas.  A few pages have already been written.

*How about the other rumor;) A new novel coming?

Tammy: Tammy-The Perpetual Quest for the Perfect Life. Its totally non Fury. And of course Rage the sequel to Fury.

Michelle: We have a book that's nearly ready.  it's no Fury related, though we have decided that the characters live in the same universe.  It's called The Perpetual Quest for the Perfect Life.  The setting was a lot easier to research.  It's slightly more mature and explores a lot of serious themes. 

Thank you so much Michelle and Tammy for being here at Word and answering our questions!  We loved every minute of chatting! To find more updates on this writing duo visit  https://www.facebook.com/#!/MichellePaceAndTammyCoons