Book Info-
Title- Stealing Fire
By-Susan Sloate
Publication Date- late August 2013 
Blurb-
“How do you recognize your soulmate?
In glittery 1980’s Los Angeles, Beau Kellogg is a brilliant Broadway lyricist now writing advertising jingles and yearning for one more hit to compensate for his miserable marriage and disappointing life.
Amanda Harary, a young singer out of synch with her contemporaries, works at a small New York hotel, while she dreams of singing on Broadway.
When they meet late at night over the hotel switchboard, what begins will bring them each unexpected success, untold joy, and piercing heartache ... until they learn that some connections, however improbable, are meant to last forever.
STEALING FIRE is, at its heart, a story for romantics everywhere, who believe in the transformative power of love.”
STEALING FIRE was a 2012 quarter-finalist in the amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest.
Links-
Amazon Kindle- http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-Fire-ebook/dp/B00DQUKI0I/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-3&qid=1379800493
Amazon Paperback- http://www.amazon.com/Stealing-Fire-Susan-Sloate/dp/1935970127/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1379800493&sr=8-3
B&N paperback- http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/stealing-fire-susan-sloate/1116263708?ean=9781935970125
About the Author-
Susan Sloate is the author or co-author of more than 20 books, including Realizing You(with Ronald Doades), a recent self-help novel, and the 2003 #6 Amazon bestseller, Forward to Camelot (with Kevin Finn), which took honors in 3 literary competitions and was optioned by a Hollywood company
She has written young-adult fiction and non-fiction, including the children’s biography Ray Charles: Find Another Way!, which was honored in the 2007 Children’s Moonbeam Book Awards. Mysteries Unwrapped: The Secrets of Alcatraz led to her 2009 appearance on the TV series MysteryQuest on The History Channel. Amelia Earhart: Challenging the Skies is a perennial young-adult Amazon bestseller. She has also been a sportswriter and screenwriter, managed two recent political campaigns, and founded an author’s festival in her hometown outside Charleston, SC.
Stealing Fire was a Quarter-Finalist in the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest and combines autobiographical experience with her lifelong love of the musical theater. She is proud to be distantly related to Broadway legend Fred Ebb, the lyricist for Cabaret,Chicago, All That Jazz and New York, New York.
Links-
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Stealing Fire Playlist:
Actually, I’m one of those writers who doesn’t listen to music while writing. (I keep thinking of Kathleen Turner in ROMANCING THE STONE, typing madly away on her romance novel while listening to the soundtrack of HOW THE WEST WAS WON, but that’s never been me.) I always concentrate better in a quiet place, and truthfully, I love certain music so much that if I tried to ‘get in the mood’ by listening to it, I’d end up too distracted to write at all! That’s happened to me before, and it became very clear after awhile that I wasn’t going to produce a lot of pages if I had music playing. So I stopped even trying it.
But since STEALING FIRE is in part about the musical theater, I WAS thinking about certain music while writing it. There are a lot of show scores mentioned, including WEST SIDE STORY, CATS, LEAVE IT TO JANE and many others. Some are very well known, others less so. I wrote in a guest blog post recently that I could sing over 100 show scores, and after writing it I wondered if it was accurate, so I sat down with paper and pencil. Twenty minutes later, I had a list of 76 shows for which I could sing virtually every song. Another 20 or so, I know at least one or two songs in the score. Scary, huh?
Excerpt:
Six-year-old Amanda wandered over to the
table and picked up the album cover. The name of the show, The Life and Times, was printed in bold letters across the top,
with a pencil sketch of a black top hat and neatly folded white gloves in the
middle. A splashy yellow sun, its rays streaming diagonally, filled the rest of
the cover. She forgot about it, though, as the record began to play.
She loved it instantly.
“Again, Mommy, again!” she said excitedly
when the first song ended.
Her mother shook her head. “Listen to the
rest first.”
Amanda sat down on her favorite soft
footstool near the big brown rocker and listened. She loved it all.
There was one song especially that she
liked. It was about blowing bubbles. She didn’t understand the verse, but she
sang along with the chorus:
“… Bubbles bursting, bursting bubbles …
Breaking dreams with every blow.
I’ll remember each dream burst
Till the final bubbles go.”
She didn’t really
understand the song, but it seemed sad to her.
As with most show
scores, Amanda asked to hear the record again and again. A few months later her
older sister Josie, tossing a ball carelessly around the room, smashed the
record.
Amanda cried and asked her mother to
please buy it again, please. Her
mother explained regretfully that the show had been a `flop’ years before.
There were no copies around, and Josie hadn’t meant to smash it; it was an
accident. “Stop crying now, Amanda,” she said sharply.
She listened to her mother and stopped
crying. But she never forgot the song about bursting bubbles.
Thanks for hosting me today, Melissa!
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