Aug 23, 2012

Blog Tour: Stitch by Samantha Durante

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Welcome to the next stop in the blog tour for 
Stitch by Samantha Durante! 

 Check out the complete tour schedule here. There will be a count down to Samantha's wedding on September 15th with double stops each day leading up to the BIG DAY! After that, there will be a two-week honeymoon hiatus. The tour continues in October, with a special giveaway on October 31.

Samantha answered a few question for an interview, and after you've read her great answers, make sure to enter your name in the Rafflecopter to win Stitch!

ABOUT STITCH: 

Genre/Keywords: Paranormal Romance, Ghost, Dystopian, Post-Apocalyptic, Young Adult, New Adult
Length: 75,000 words (314 pages)
Sample chapters: Ch1-5 (38 pages) http://www.samanthadurante.com/stitch/sample-chapters/
Release date: August 1st, 2012

Her heart races, her muscles coil, and every impulse in Alessa’s body screams at her to run… but yet she’s powerless to move.
Still struggling to find her footing after the sudden death of her parents, the last thing college freshman Alessa has the strength to deal with is the inexplicable visceral pull drawing her to a handsome ghostly presence. In between grappling with exams and sorority soirees – and disturbing recurring dreams of being captive in a futuristic prison hell – Alessa is determined to unravel the mystery of the apparition who leaves her breathless. But the terrifying secret she uncovers will find her groping desperately through her nightmares for answers.
Because what Alessa hasn’t figured out yet is that she’s not really a student, the object of her obsession is no ghost, and her sneaking suspicions that something sinister is lurking behind the walls of her university’s idyllic campus are only just scratching the surface…
The opening installment in a twist-laden trilogy, Stitch spans the genres of paranormal romance and dystopian sci-fi to explore the challenges of a society in transition, where morality, vision, and pragmatism collide leaving the average citizen to suffer the results.

GET YOUR COPY:

Amazon (print $9.99 & Kindle $2.99): http://www.amazon.com/Stitch-Trilogy-Book-1/dp/0985804602/
Smashwords (multiple e-book formats $2.99): https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/208278
Barnes & Noble (Nook $2.99): http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/stitch-samantha-durante/1112193442
Also available in the iTunes store ($2.99 e-book)



MEET SAMANTHA:


Samantha Durante lives in New York City with her fiancé, Sudeep, and her cat, Gio. Formerly an engineer at Microsoft, Samantha left the world of software in 2010 to pursue her entrepreneurial dreams and a lifelong love of writing. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology, Samantha is currently working full time for her company Medley Media Associates as a freelance business writer and communications consultant. Stitch is her first novel. Learn more about Samantha at www.samanthadurante.com







INTERVIEW
What's your favorite thing about writing? And what gives you the worst headaches?

The absolute best thing about writing is that the possibilities are endless.  You are literally limited only by your own imagination, so you can bring your characters wherever you’d like and make them experience whatever you want, and then you get to share that all with readers!  It’s really fun.

At the same, though, this unlimited choice is also a burden, which I’d say is my worst headache.  It took me 26 years to sit down and actually write a book, because I always felt like I needed this perfect, amazing idea for a story.  There are always so many paths you can choose – how do you know you’ve picked the right one?  Bu finally one day this year it just dawned on me that I didn’t need a ground-breaking earth-shattering idea, I just needed to write a story I’d like to read, so I thought about what I liked from other stories and how I could combine them into something new, and Stitch was born.

Of course, anytime you do something new and different, there’s always the possibility that people won’t like it, but at the same time, if you do something too familiar, you run the risk of leaving your readers feeling bored.  With Stitch, some of the early feedback I received was that the idea was a little “out there.”  After all, it’s not common for books to blend genres the way that I did in Stitch, and the reasoning behind that is perfectly sound – it’s quite simply very difficult to market a book that by the end is totally different than what the reader was expecting coming in.  How do you make sure you’re not going to disappoint?  Quite a few people encouraged me to tone down the big twist and stick to a more traditional paranormal romance path.  But the beauty of being a writer – and a self-published writer in particular – is that you have the freedom to try whatever you want and see if it sticks.  I set out to do something different with Stitch, and luckily, thus far readers seem to be liking the fact that Stitch is unlike anything they’ve read before.

Are you an early bird or a night owl?

Neither!  Or maybe both?  I’ve found lately that my sleep schedule changes a lot depending on what’s going on in my life.  If I’m excited about something (like this blog tour), I have a really difficult time shutting my mind off at night, and so I often find myself getting up late at night to go to do something productive on the computer instead of just lying in bed struggling to sleep.  But at the same time, I have difficulty sleeping past 7 or 8 in the morning, so I’ve been getting up relatively early as well!

Who are your favorite authors/favorite books?

Oh boy, where do I start??  Okay, well I have to first and foremost give credit to J. K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series for reawakening my love of reading.  For some reason every book my middle school assigned featured some sort of animal abuse – which just makes me sick – so I kind of gave up reading for pleasure after that experience.  But when I was in early high school, Harry Potter was starting to get really popular.  I held out until the time the 3rd book came out because I was (mistakenly) under the impression that it was a children’s story, but when I finally took the plunge at the behest of my mom, I just couldn’t get enough.  I’ve been reading voraciously ever since.

I’m a huge fan of sci-fi/fantasy series, so some of my other favorites are (of course) Twilight and Hunger Games, Chronicles of Narnia, Eragon and the Inheritance Cycle, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and more recently the Divergent and Delirium series.  I also really enjoyed the Samaria series by Sharon Shinn, who I have to credit with inspiring the idea to do a genre-bending twist with Stitch (read the first two books of that series and you’ll see what I mean!  Totally awesome).  I’m also a huge fan of Jane Austen – I’ve read Pride and Prejudice probably 13 times – and other period books and historical fiction, including almost anything by Philippa Gregory.  For me, all I need is an immersive world and a little bit of romance, and I’m hooked.

What book do you wish you had written?

Without a doubt, I’m going with the Harry Potter books on this.  They’re just… magical.  And also Twilight.  I read all four of them in about two weeks, and after I finished the series, I literally entered into a deep depression for about two weeks – I think I was going through withdrawal!  To be able to evoke that kind of reaction in a reader would just be incredible.

What are you currently reading?

I haven’t had a chance to do much reading the past couple months with the Stitch release/tour and my wedding coming up on September 15th, so right now, I just keep re-reading Stitch whenever I have a free moment and praying that I don’t find any typos!  But I’ve got a whole stack of awesome YA sequels lined up for my honeymoon in late September including Insurgent, Pandemonium, Linger, and The Scorch Trials.  I’m really looking forward to it!  (But as my fiancé’s reading this over my shoulder, he’s like, “You’re planning to read the entire honeymoon?” so maybe I won’t be able to get through as many of those as I’d like!)

THANK YOU, SAMANTHA!

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