Thursday 21 May 2015

Blog Tour + Guest Post + Giveaway - Joshua and the Lightning Road by Donna Galanti


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Title: Joshua and the Lightning Road

Publication date: May 19, 2015

Publisher: Month9Books, LLC.

Author: Donna Galanti

 

Stay away from the window, don’t go outside when it’s storming and whatever you do, do not touch the orb.



Twelve-year-old Joshua Cooper’s grandpa has always warned him about the dangers of lightning. But Joshua never put much stock in his grandpa’s rumblings as anything more than the ravings of an old man with a vast imagination. Then one night, when Joshua and his best friend are home alone during a frightful storm, Joshua learns his grandpa was right. A bolt of lightning strikes his house and whisks away his best friend—possibly forever.



To get him back, Joshua must travel the Lightning Road to a dark place that steals children for energy. But getting back home and saving his friend won’t be easy, as Joshua must face the terrifying Child Collector and fend off ferocious and unnatural beasts intent on destroying him.



In this world, Joshua possesses powers he never knew he had, and soon, Joshua’s mission becomes more than a search for his friend. He means to send all the stolen children home—and doing so becomes the battle of his life.







Purchase links:

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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Getting Published
In becom­ing a nov­el­ist I lost the one thing I had loved all my life. Read­ing.
Hard to imag­ine, right? My dad likes to brag that I had read every book in the school library by the time I was eight.

But now it was as if I had traded my love of read­ing for a new love, that of writ­ing. And writ­ers need to read to write. If suc­cess comes with sac­ri­fice must it be the one thing that I need to do to be a writer? Could writ­ing and read­ing not live side by side?

It struck me in way it was like hav­ing your first child. When my son was born all my love and affec­tion went to him. It was so intense, this new love. It col­ored my entire world. It was a force that hit me and cov­ered me in need, dri­ving all my energy to it. The love for your child is a crazy intense love that takes you unaware. Even­tu­ally, I found my own iden­tity again as a mother and wife. 

I had bal­ance again. Well, almost…I still needed to find bal­ance as a new author. I had become so sucked into the world of cre­at­ing that I lost the juice to sustain it. My brain burst with words, ideas, dia­logue, action, and char­ac­ters speak­ing to me and I couldn’t slow my thoughts down. I’d lost my love of read­ing and now all of my energy went toward writing.

I knew I would need to force myself to read. Slow down my brain and allot time to read. And I did. From book to book I moved. I would read a few pages then move on like some wan­der­ing nomad. I couldn’t find my joy again. I couldn’t con­cen­trate on the words.

Then a friend told me some­thing that changed every­thing. She said now that I was an author I wouldn’t be happy with reading the kinds of books I once read. I needed to explore new genres and new kinds of stories. What I once loved to read had changed. She was right. I wanted to be affected by what I read. Changed, trans­formed, and moved. And I learned that middle grade and young adult books were what now fired me up.

Stephen King once said, “The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of your­self with your pen.” 

I aim to be less of a fool for sure.

So then I thought, why not re-read my favorite books over again from long ago? The ones close to my heart. The ones that made me fall in love with reading. And that’s just what I did. I re-read White Fang by Jack Lon­don, The Secret Gar­den by Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Crys­tal Cave my Mary Stewart, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl, and Island of the Blue Dol­phins by Scott O’Dell. I quickly fell in love with them again – and quickly knew my love for reading was founded in books for kids. And this fueled my love for writing for kids, with writing my Joshua and the Lightning Road series.

As a writer I need to keep read­ing. And I’m glad I found my lost-love again. The Argen­tin­ian writer Jorge Luis Borges said, “I have always imag­ined that Par­adise will be a kind of library.”
I’m glad my par­adise is back. Have you ever lost and found your par­adise?







About the Author


Donna is the author of the Joshua and The Lightning Road series and the Element Trilogy. She is a contributing editor to International Thriller Writers the Big Thrill magazine and blogs at www.project-middle-grade-mayhem.blogs..., a cooperative of published middle grade authors. Visit her at www.donnagalanti.com and www.ElementTrilogy.com. Donna wanted to be a writer ever since she wrote a murder mystery screenplay at seven and acted it out with the neighborhood kids. She attended an English school housed in a magical castle, where her wild imagination was held back only by her itchy uniform (bowler hat and tie included!). There she fell in love with the worlds of C.S. Lewis and Roald Dahl, and wrote her first fantasy about Dodo birds, wizards, and a flying ship (and has been writing fantasy ever since). She’s lived in other exotic locations, including her family-owned campground in New Hampshire and in Hawaii where she served as a U.S. Navy photographer. She now lives with her family and two crazy cats in an old farmhouse and dreams of returning one day to a castle.





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