Hello! Today we have the character, Sanna, with us today from Dark Parties by Sara Grant for a “this or that” post. Welcome Sanna and Sara!

Sara Grant was born and raised in Washington, Indiana. She graduated from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, with degrees in journalism and psychology, and later she earned a master’s degree in creative and life writing Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Sara is senior commissioning editor for Working Partners, a London-based company creating series fiction for children. She has worked on ten different series and edited more than 75 books.

Dark Parties is her first young adult novel.

Email: sara@sara-grant.com
Twitter: @authorsaragrant
Website: www.sara-grant.com

Hi Ivy! Thanks for inviting me on Ivy Reads. It’s a rare pleasure to focus on Sanna – the lively best friend of Dark Parties main character Neva. Sanna is one of my favorite characters. She’s lively and rebellious but also has a sadness about her.

Milkshake or Slushie?
Slushie. Sanna would love some wacky flavour, no doubt.

Valentine’s Day or Christmas?
Valentine’s Day. At the beginning of Dark Parties, Sanna has just started dating her first real boyfriend, Braydon. She’s never been the romantic kind until now. As for Christmas, her mother is dead, her father is missing and her brother’s part of a secret underground movement. The government assigned her to guardians so Christmas is probably not much fun.

Movies or TV Shows?
TV Shows. Sanna doesn’t have the longest attention span.

Reading or Writing?
Writing. Sanna wants to make her mark and rebel against the government. She would be more about creating her own adventure than reading about someone else’s.

Singing or Sports?
Either. She’s not uber athletic, but she loves to be the center of attention. Everyone loves Sanna.

Action or Drama?
Action. Sanna would take the flash over substance any day.

Email or Txting?
Texting. Sanna wouldn’t have either in the closed society in which she lives. But she’d love texting. She’d be the type of teen that would have a million friends and use her monthly allotment of texts in one week.

Dog or Cat?
Dog. I suppose she’s more like a dog. She needs attention. And she’s Neva’s best friend.

Coffee or Tea?
Coffee. Probably a double shot of espresso!
Sanna probably has the most dramatic and difficult journey in Dark Parties. The feminine camaraderie between Sanna and Neva is the underlying pulse of the book. Neva and Sanna complete each other. They finish each other’s sentences. Neva grounds Sanna and serves as her surrogate family. Sanna provides Neva with a spark and an energy.

Sanna reminds me of two of my best friends. She’s part my oldest and dearest friend Courtney. We met in college. She’s the one who understands me like no other – and likes me anyway. We have been friends for more than twenty years. We have grown up and weathered many trials and tribulations together. We are separated by a big ocean but no matter how long between our phone calls, it’s like we were never apart. She knows the right thing to say no matter what my conundrum.

Sanna is also part my newest and dearest friend. From the moment we met in 2005, we had an instant connection. We are both Americans named Sara who married Brits and now live in the UK – and have a deep love for Mexican food. She has boundless enthusiasm and is never at a loss for big ideas. She never ceases to amaze me. I can always count on her.

So thanks for letting me spend a little more time with Sanna!

Thanks Sara and Sanna for an interesting post!

Dark Parties

Sixteen-year-old Neva was born and raised in an isolated nation ruled by fear, lies, and xenophobia. Hundreds of years ago, her country constructed an electrified dome to protect itself from the outside world. What once might have protected, now imprisons. Her country is decaying and its citizens are dying.

Neva and her friends dream of freedom.

A forbidden party leads to complications. Suddenly Neva’s falling for her best friend’s boyfriend, uncovering secrets that threaten to destroy her friends, her family and her country — and discovering the horrifying truth about what happens to The Missing. . .

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Hello! Today we have Jessica Shirvington, author of Embrace, with us today for a guest post. She will be sharing her story on falling in love at the age of seventeen! Welcome Jessica!

Jessica Shirvington is the author of THE VIOLET EDEN CHAPTERS also known as THE EMBRACE SERIES. An entrepreneur, author, and mother living in Sydney, Australia, Jessica is also a 2011 finalist for Cosmopolitan’s annual Fun, Fearless Female Award. She’s also one of the lucky few who met the love of her life at age seventeen: Matt Shirvington, a former Olympian and current sports broadcaster for FOXTEL and Sky News. Married for almost eleven years with two beautiful daughters, Sienna and Winter, Jessica knows her early age romance and its longevity has definitely contributed to how she tackles relationships in her YA novels. Previously, she founded a coffee distribution company, Stella Imports, in London, and before that was involved in the management of restaurants Fuel Bistro and MG Garage in Sydney. Jessica is now a full-time novelist and living her dream.

Falling in Love at 17
Falling in love is easy. Staying in love … more complicated.

At 17, life is about new experiences. It is about self-discovery, friends, adventure, mistakes, career and university choices. And let’s be honest, there are not many 17 year olds out there that aren’t interested in falling in love.

But how many are truly interested in falling in love with THE ONE at 17?

I’m not sure I was. In fact, I probably wasn’t. I was planning to take the world by storm – solo. So when I met Matt, well, actually … it was pretty darn amazing. But it was a little frightening too.

When we first got together, it was sweet and young and … perfect. I was head over heels. But things became complicated quickly. He was an up and coming athletic star and I was working in hospitality. So basically he worked hard in the day, and I worked hard at night. His lifestyle demanded routine and healthy living, mine … not so much. But we were determined to make it work.

Falling in love so deeply at a young age made it difficult to be as reckless as our friends. We watched them coast in and out of short, fun, but meaningless relationships and it just seemed so different to what we had.

Writing the Embrace series has been an opportunity for me to pour some of the incredibly intense emotions of young love into Violet’s story. It has been important for me as a writer, and a person, to recognize that it’s completely realistic for someone at her young age to experience the full effect and heartbreak of love. Violet is one hundred percent invested with her heart. She makes bad choices, but we have to. She regrets many of her decisions, because we all do. And she fights for what she loves, because she is compelled to. Violet’s story is unique to her, I don’t pull on parallel scenarios from my own life, but I do pull on the emotion of intense love. Love that I think adults sometimes forget that 17 and 18 years-olds are very capable of feeling.

I often find one question helps a lot of adults, who maybe disagree with this view, to be more open minded: Do you remember you first true love? Do you ever wonder what your life would’ve been like if you had stayed together? For some, the answer is a resounding NOT INTERESTED, but for others … the pause says it all.

Matt and I celebrate our 11th wedding anniversary in March – I believe jewelry is in order

Thanks, Jessica, for sharing with us!

CHECK OUT MY REVIEW FOR EMBRACE!!

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Hello! Today we have the character, Michal, from Wanted by Heidi Ayarbe for an interview! Welcome Michal!

What is your first impression of Josh?
Blurry. I’d just been thrown off the bleachers and had the wind knocked out of me. That, and he has a gap in his front teeth.

What does Josh do to you that made an impression on you?
He stood over me when I was trying to catch my breath. But honestly, I think it took longer to catch my breath than normal because there’s something about him – something different. Like he sees me.

What are your hobbies?
I knit, am involved in a local bell choir and spend time at the local soup kitchen. Not really. For a second, though, I bet I had you going. Hobbies? Shopping online and making money off of guys who can’t place a bet to save their lives. They know the risks. I’m just a venture capitalist in the whole scheme of things.

How did you start doing illegal acitivities?
Which ones? It just happens, you know. One day you’re worried about spelling tests and the next you’ve got a thousand dollars, money you don’t have, riding on some running back’s yardage. Then, you find yourself looking up the best ways to break into someone’s house on Internet. It’s that whole butterfly effect thing. I don’t know how it started, but now I’m here. And I don’t think I’d change anything about it, if that makes sense. I like how here feels.

If you were not involve with illegal activities, what might you see yourself doing?
I don’t know. Not knitting or joining a local bell choir. Maybe I should’ve joined Yearbook or something. Isn’t there a study out there about kids with too much time on their hands? We just get in trouble. I probably should’ve gotten involved in extra curriculars. But I can’t imagine getting the same rush in chess club like I do when I step into an empty home and listen to it breathe, finding stashes of cash hidden in prescription medicine bottles and freezer bags taped to the inside of toilet tanks.

Thanks Michal and Heidi for a wonderful interview!

A one-word text message: That’s all Michal “Mike” Garcia needs to gather a crowd. Mike is a seventeen-year-old bookie, and Sanctuary is where she takes bets for anyone at Carson High with enough cash. Her only rule: Never participate, never place a bet for herself.

Then Josh Ellison moves to town. He pushes Mike to live her life, to feel a rush of something — play the game, he urgest, stop being a spectator.

So Mike breaks her one rule. She places a bet, feels the rush.
And loses.

In an act of desperation, she and Josh — who has a sordid past of his own — concoct a plan: The pair will steal from Carson City’s elite to pay back Mike’s debt. Then they’ll give the rest of their haul to those who need it most. How can burglary be wrong if they are making things right?

WANTED will thrust readers into the gritty underbelly of Carson City, where worth is determined by a scor, power is derived from threat, and the greatest feat is surviving it all.

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Hello! Today we have the author of The Crescent, Jordan Deen, with us for a guest post about “Creating Chemistry!” Welcome, Jordan!

Chemistry is a hard thing to convey through words. It takes a lot of finesse and a certain feeling for your own main characters in order to make the right words and emotions come together on the page. For me, I think it’s important to be very detailed in the right moments. To give almost too much insight and information into the characters thoughts and feelings. As a reader, I want to be connected, and almost privy, to the private thoughts, feelings and emotions of a character—so, as a writer I try to give the reader the appearance that they are having a personal conversation with the character at their darkest (or lightest) of moments. I love having a fan tell me that they hurt for a character, or love a character, or situation in one of my novels. That is when I know I’ve done something right in my story.

Thanks to Jordan, she is offering a signed copy of The Crescent for one lucky reader of Ivy Reads!

Hello! Today we have the author of Truly, Madly, Deeply, You, Cecilia Robert, with us for a guest post of what she does when she’s not writing! Welcome Cecilia!

Cecilia Robert enjoys the play and weave of words that make up a good story. She enjoys creating fantastical worlds and getting lost in them. She often meets a prince, a princess, a pirate, ordinary and badass boy or girl who take her through the wonderful world of dreaming and fantasy.

She doesn’t have particular leanings to any kind of story as long as it captures her attention She reads and enjoys urban/dark fantasy romance, paranormal, contemporary, sci-fi, mystery or horror as much as her children’s school books. Some nights, you can find her reading Puss in Boots for her daughter, or trying to understand how to read Manga comics from her son.

You can find her on her website, Twitter, Facebook. Check out her publishing house and her book GoodReads!

Writing helps me to connect with my inner self, as well as explore ideas and see how far my creativity can take me. But if I was to write all the time with no other activities in between to break the monotony, I am sure I’d probably end up detesting the writing itself not to mention run out of ideas eventually. There is nothing worse than sitting in front of the laptop, with fingers hovering over the keyboard and no idea of what to write. So to break the writing monotony, as well as get some fresh air and live a life, I take breaks and include some stuff in my daily routine.

1. Day time work: I work as an assistant nurse 30 hours in the week, but in actual fact totals to 40. It isn’t the easiest job in the world – but what job is? The most rewarding thing about it is, to see the impact your work on the people. And as a side thing: get to study different characters.
2. Take any and every opportunity I get to spend time with my two children.
3. Knitting and crocheting: I enjoy this immensely. This helps me to think things through, whether it has anything to do with my writing or just life in general, this is one activity that calms me. The good thing is, I can knit while watching TV or listening to music.
4. Read: Other than an afternoon nap, this is one of the most relaxing ways to relax. I usually do my reading in bed, or on the sofa in the living room. And when I have to go to work, I read in the bus.
5. Perform house-ly duties: laundry, clean and cook. Spring cleaning is around the corner. I’m not looking forward to that.
6. Archery: I started this last year in September after a friend convinced me I wasn’t going to shoot myself on the foot. Haha. I found the therapeutic value in it – back problems that come with my profession – as well as how fun it was.
7. Sleep: I am a HUGE fan of sleeping. I love sleeping in, especially on the weekends.
8. Watch TV/movie: There’s nothing like a good movie to get those creative juices flowing.
9. Shopping. Yes. I LOVE shopping. Shoes, clothes, or just window shopping. I’m all for it.
10. Hanging out with my friends, either in beautiful, old cafes here in Vienna, going dancing or just in the park.

Thanks for hosting me on your blog Ivy.

Thanks for sharing with us what you do when you’re not writing!

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