Blog Tour: THE AFTER TIMES by Christine Potter

 

The After Times

by Christine Potter

 

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GENRE: YA Fantasy--Time Traavel

 

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BLURB:

 

Say you’re Gracie Ingraham, nerdy but happy high school senior. But you’re also a time-traveler from 1962 who got a bit lost and has been living in the 2000’s since 2018. That would be plenty without it now being 2020. Covid has just shut down the world. Your pandemic pod? Your BFF Zoey—and your ex-boyfriend, Dylan.

 

Dylan still lives to spin weird vinyl LP’s with your sort-of, kind-of Dad, Amp. So your quarantine hobby is going to have to be Being Mature About Stuff.

 

But then your time traveling kicks into high gear again.  And your long-lost brother and mom mix it up with a creepy, pyromaniacal force that is most likely demonic. How can love save the day when you can’t even go downtown without wearing a mask?

 

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Excerpt One:

 

We’d arrived at the first of the big, fancy gravesites: nineteenth century family plots, with tall, marble obelisks and statues of weeping angels. Some of them have creepy stone and marble mausoleums. Mausoleums are tombs the size of tiny houses with windows and even gates and front porches sometimes. You could go inside one if someone unlocked the door.

 

Some kids had obviously partied out by the mausoleums the night before.  They’d left a White Claw can one at of the sad angels’ feet. A few more cans were tossed on the ground and on the stone stairs to one of the bigger tombs. There were beer cans, too.

 

Zoey shook her head. “Some people are still getting out at night.”

 

“They could have at least recycled!”

 

“Alas!”

 

See, Zoey, Dylan, and me… We’re the kind teachers and parents don’t worry about. We always recycle. We don’t break quarantine. We wouldn’t have gone to a midnight graveyard party before quarantine … well … not without seriously good reason.

 

Not that Zoey wouldn’t snag a White Claw. And I did sneak out on one serious midnight date when Dylan and I were first together. But I also had to zap a demon that evening. Which was the last time anything interesting happened to me… Up until the very next minute, that is.

 

‘Cause then it wasn’t a pretty April day anymore. It was very cold and very dark. Zoey and I were still in the cemetery, but we weren’t by ourselves anymore.

 

 

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 GUEST POST

A Day In The Life…

 

I am a lucky writer.  I get to write every day. I taught high school English for years, and that was almost as good, but now I get to sleep past dawn.  (If you are in high school or you have kids in high school, you know I am not exaggerating about the crazy time classes start here in the States.)

 

Now, I let the light wake me up. So in the summertime, I’m at my computer pretty early.  In the winter or on a rainy day, not so much.  That alone is something about which I am deeply grateful. I take a hot bath, put on something stretchy enough to exercise later, and after I’ve done Wordle, I get down to work.

 

Social media is part of any writer’s toolkit these days, so I look around a little to see what my literary friends are up to and congratulate them for new publications.  OK—enough throat-clearing.  I’ve got coffee, and it’s time to make the doughnuts.

 

I always start writing by revising what I did the day before.  If I’m drafting a novel, I start about three or four pages back from where I left off and tinker a little. That refreshes my memory and sharpens my prose at the same time. Sometimes I pick up something that needs a bigger fix—a plot hole that needs something different a few chapters back, something that doesn’t ring true in a character’s reaction. 

 

By then I’m in flow and I move the book forward. When I’m lucky, I don’t even feel my fingers moving; stuff just happens.  Characters react, other characters react to their reactions, The Next Thing just happens.  I guess you’ve figured out that I’m a “pants-er” by now.  I know where my books are going to end, but I do not work from an outline.

 

I’m also a poet.  Especially if the fiction-in-progress is balking, I make another cup of coffee and work on revising some poems or submitting them to literary magazines. That’s something I tuck into my day whenever I can. In April, poets often gather in obscure places online and challenge each other to write a poem a day.  So if it’s April, I’m probably doing that first. Poems I sometimes like to write on my laptop before I’m even out of bed!

 

I try to get up a few times during the day to stretch and play with my cat Bella, who is almost always in my study with me. I grab some sort of simple lunch (a bowl of last night’s leftovers, a PBJ) at my desk.  Late in the afternoon, I go over to my sister’s house, where there is a good exercise bike and some Pilates stuff, ride, stretch seriously, play with the balls and bands, and watch junky TV.  I’m talking home renovation competitions and stuff.  Don’t judge.

 

Then I come back to our place and cook dinner for me and my husband.  I love to cook.  I did it for a living for a while in my twenties and thirties. I like pasta more than I should. I’m also in love with a gadget called a sous-vide circulator, which enables you to put lean proteins (chicken breast, pork tenderloin, grass-fed steak) in a baggie, seal it, and cook it at a low temperature to the exact place where it will be perfect if you sear it in a pan for a minute or two.  Couldn’t live without the thing.

 

During and after dinner, Ken and I listen to music—often classical choral stuff, because that’s what he’s done for a living his whole life, but sometimes rock and roll. I’m an old Dead Head and he and I both loved Harry Nilsson. I’m a major Robyn Hitchcock fan, and we listen to his stuff, or watch his live shows online. Then it’s whatever odd thing we’ve been streaming on TV and bed.

 

 What shows do a time-travel YA author and her singer/organist husband watch?  Well, we loved Schmigadoon! We’re super-psyched to hear that a second season of that will be available soon. We were also totally hooked on Anne with an E, the newer CBC version of the Anne of Green Gables series.  I owe a LOT to Lucy Maud Montgomery, and although this TV adaptation departs from her original plot line, I think she’d like how it does.

 

So that’s how I spend my days.  Building a book is not as dramatic as putting up a sky scraper, but it’s what I do.  Welcome to the less-glamorous part of my world.  The fancy stuff’s all in my books!

 

 

 

 

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

 

Christine Potter is a writer and poet who lives in a (for-real) haunted house in New York’s Hudson River Valley, not that far from Sleepy Hollow.  She is the author of Evernight Teen’s Bean Books, a five book series that travels through time—and two generations of characters. Christine is has also been a teacher, a bell ringer in the towers of old churches, a DJ, and a singer of all kinds of music. Her poetry has appeared in literary magazines like Rattle and Kestrel, featured on ABC Radio News, and sold in gum ball machines. She lives with her organist husband Ken and two indulged kitties.

 

 

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/christine.potter.543/

Insta: https://www.instagram.com/chrispygal/

Blog: chrispygal.weebly.com

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Christine-Potter/e/B001K7URHS/

 

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GIVEAWAY

 

Christine Potter will be awarding $50 Amazon/BN GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

a Rafflecopter giveaway