Entrapped by Barbara Kyle Blog Tour: Author Guest Post

I am thrilled to share with you an author that I have been following lately and her new book Entrapped. From one glance at the cover I was interested and it reminded me of a foreboding tale that really grabs your attention from line one.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Nurture Your Books Virtual Touz for allowing me to showcase this author and her work.  Thank you!

Book Summary:

Entrapped is a thriller of high stakes: life and death, love, and oil.

Set in Alberta, Entrapped is the story of Liv Gardner, an ambitious young oil executive intent on stopping farmer Tom Wainwright who is sabotaging her rigs after a spill of lethal "sour" gas poisoned his wife. Desperate to save the company she built, Liv plants evidence to frame Tom. But when the evidence is used to indict him for a murder he didn't commit, Liv alone can save him.

About the Author:

How do you make God laugh? Make a plan. I studied classical theater (Shakespeare, Shaw, Moliere, Congreve) at the National Theater School of Canada, planning a “distinguished stage career," and then spent the next twenty years acting mostly on television in made-for-TV movies, series, sit-coms, and soap opera. But I thoroughly enjoyed all that TV work, and I did use my stage training too, performing in dozens of plays across Canada and in the US. I loved being an actor.

Barbara Kyle on the web HERE 

Enter my Giveaway for TWO of Barbara Kyle's Books HERE

It felt like a natural extension of my acting to create characters for fiction, and in 2008 Kensington Books published my first historical novel, "The Queen's Lady". Set in the court of Henry VIII, "The Queen's Lady" features Honor Larke, a (fictional) ward of (the real) Sir Thomas More. More was a brilliant scholar and a loving father, but as chancellor of England he banned books and burned men. My story turns on Honor's passionate conflict with her once-beloved guardian as she tries to save More's victims, enlisting rogue ship-captain Richard Thornleigh in her missions.

Readers found these characters so engaging, I wrote a sequel, "The King's Daughter," featuring Honor and Richard's daughter, Isabel. When Henry VIII's bitter daughter, Queen Mary, launches her reign with a vow to annihilate heretics, Isabel Thornleigh must act quickly to save her family. Determined to rescue her father from prison, she entrusts her mission, and herself, to a ruthless soldier of fortune, Carlos Valverde.

The third book in this "Thornleigh" series is "The Queen's Captive" (2010). When Queen Mary releases her 20-year-old sister Princess Elizabeth from the Tower, hoping she'll make a false move and condemn herself, Honor Thornleigh returns from exile with Richard and their seafaring son, Adam, to help Elizabeth in the fight of her life. Playing a dangerous game as a double agent, aware that a false move of her own will expose her past as a condemned heretic, Honor finds her task made harder when Adam and Elizabeth fall in love. To save her family and Elizabeth, and herself, Honor must turn a headstrong princess into a queen before "Bloody Mary" destroys them all.

Next in the "Thornleigh Saga" is book 4: "The Queen's Gamble", coming in August 2011. Isabel, the Thornleighs' daughter, returns to London from the New World with her Spanish husband Carlos Valverde and their young son, and is swept up in the first international crisis of the young Queen's Elizabeth reign: the French, who control Scotland, have landed troops along England's border, threatening an invasion. The Queen recruits Isabel to take money secretly to aid the Scottish rebel faction trying to drive out the French. But when Carlos is sent to Scotland as a Spanish military advisor to the French troops, he and Isabel find they are on opposite sides in this deadly war - and the Queen has made their little boy her hostage.

I love writing about the Tudor period, whose "on the make" characters and life-and-death intrigues - to say nothing of the era's religious paranoia - speak deeply to our own time. I hope you'll agree, and will enjoy being caught up in the passions and setbacks, adventures and strivings of the Thornleigh family - Honor, Richard, Isabel, and Adam - as they befriend, and sometimes betray, their willful kings and queens.

I'm also very excited at the release of my contemporary novel, "Entrapped," as an e-book. "Entrapped" is a thriller of high stakes: life and death, love, and oil. Set in Alberta, it's the story of Liv Gardner, an ambitious young oil executive intent on stopping farmer Tom Wainwright who is sabotaging her rigs after a spill of lethal "sour" gas poisoned his wife. Desperate to save the company she built, Liv plants evidence to frame Tom. But when the evidence is used to indict him for a murder he didn't commit, Liv alone can save him.

Thanks for taking the time to find out about my books. I do hope you'll enjoy reading them!

Author Guest Post:

My Writing Day

I thrive on routine. Early morning, around 7:30, is for answering emails. It’s a joy to hear how my books have touched readers, and to hear what they’re up to. I happily reply to each email. This is also the time when I post updates on my Facebook Author Page and post on Twitter. I like Twitter, checking out the fascinating links that other authors and book-business people post, so I have to cut myself off at 9:00 a.m.

The rest of the morning I spend on “fixing” – that is, re-writing – whatever scene I wrote the day before. I enjoy this process and could fix all day, so again I have to cut myself off, at noon.

The afternoon is the challenging part of my day: it’s for creating the next “bit.” I need that morning of re-writing to build up momentum for the afternoon’s creating. I strive to write 5 new pages a day, but I rarely accomplish that. Usually it’s 3 to 4.

At around 4:00 I’m pretty drained. That’s when I go to the gym, or, in summer, go for a long walk.

Throughout the day, I constantly jot down notes about anything and everything, big and small: from a change of one word in a dialogue exchange, to a change of the turning point in a whole scene. I keep these hand-written notes in a folder on my desk and continually re-read them, discarding each one as I’ve incorporated the note into the draft.

    By the way, I always work from an outline. I can’t imagine working any other way – it would be like building a house without a blueprint. In fact, the most helpful tip I can offer any emerging writer is: take the time to write an outline. Take a long time. The outline is where the heavy lifting of creation takes place: the invention of your characters and plot. I spend four or five months writing my outlines, while concurrently doing research. I call the outline a “storyline,” because as writers we must never forget that we’re telling a story. In the workshops for writers that I give, I enjoy teaching the principles of outlining. I did a video on this subject in my online video series called “Writing Fiction That Sells.” Anyone interested can watch a clip on my website: www.barbarakyle.com.