Funny Call story or reason to bury your face in a pillow and scream your head off. I'll let you be the judge. :-) Either way enjoy and congratulate Liana on her release day!
Did you hear the one about the author who forgot the
title of the book she was querying?
Now, that’s a funny story…
Way back in the day I wrote a book I titled JANE DOE. I
loved that title! It worked well for the book and I queried it under that
title. And that query got nowhere.
So, like every author desperate to get a bite on a query,
I rewrote that little sucker. I rewrote it, and edited it, and rewrote it
again. In the rewrite the query just happened to end with the words, “… the day
before.” It was kind of catchy, so I put it in all caps and pretended that this
was the title of my book and all of this was intentional.
____________________________________________________________________
Is it a human corpse … or is it just a piece of discarded property?
Agent Samantha Rose has been exiled to a backwater assignment for the Commonwealth Bureau of Investigation, a death knell for her career. But then Sam catches a break—a murder—that could give her the boost she needs to get her life back on track. There's a snag, though: the body is a clone, and technically that means it's not a homicide. And yet, something about the body raises questions, not only for her, but for coroner Linsey Mackenzie.
The more they dig, the more they realize nothing about this case is what it seems … and for Sam, nothing about Mac is what it seems, either.
This case might be the way out for her, but that way could be in a bodybag.
______________________________________________________________
And then I promptly forgot that I had changed the title.
Fast forward a few months (and one revise-and-resubmit)
and an email showed up one evening with the subject line: The Day Before-
Marlene.
The entirety of the email was something along the lines
of, “You did. Let’s talk.”
I almost deleted the email.
What had I done? What was this about the day before? Had
something happened yesterday? I had no idea.
Three hours later, I realized Marlene was talking about
JANE DOE! She wanted to talk about my book!
I was over the moon. This was it. My big break. THE CALL.
Everything was set up for a Monday morning phone call. I
had my list of questions to ask, my phone was charged, the kids were in the
basement play room watching My Little Pony… and we ran out of something. Cereal
or diapers or something we could absolutely not live without.
There was a full hour between when Marlene was supposed
to call and that moment, and the grocery store was five minutes away. My
phone’s battery had been on the fritz, so I left it at home to charge, ran to
the store, came home, and set everything back up again.
9:06 A.M. … My
phone was upstairs charging, and I felt calm and in control.
Then I looked at the clock again, remembered that Marlene
lives in Florida which is an hour ahead of where I was in the Midwest, and ran
upstairs.
Yeah.... two missed phone calls.
I had an agent who wanted to talk representation, and I
missed her phone calls. Not so professional.
I panicked. Wouldn’t you? She’d tried to call me twice
and I’d flaked on her!
After about five minutes, I calmed down, and realized
there was still a chance. A million-to-one, last desperate chance to secure my
agent. Shaking, I called Marlene Stringer back…
She, being the most wonderful agent on the face of the
earth, forgave me. We laughed about the mistake. I learned to always verify
time zones. And JANE DOE/THE DAY BEFORE had a champion in the publishing world.
THE DAY BEFORE was sold in a 3-book deal to David
Pomerico of HarperVoyager, and released May 2015. The last book in the trilogy
is coming out September 13, 2016. Look for DECOHERENCE everywhere ebooks are
sold, and watch for the print edition in October 2016.
Readers of Blake Crouch's DARK
MATTER and Wesely Chu's TIME SALVAGER will love Liana Brooks' DECOHERENCE--the
thrilling, time-bending conclusion to the Time & Shadow series!
Samantha Rose and Linsey
MacKenzie have established an idyllic life of married bliss in Australia, away
from the Commonwealth Bureau of Investigation, away from mysterious corpses,
and—most of all—away from Dr. Emir’s multiverse machine.
But Sam is a detective at heart,
and even on the other side of the world, she can’t help wonder if a series of
unsolved killings she reads about are related—not just to each other, but to
the only unsolved case of her short career.
She knows Jane Doe’s true name,
but Sam never discovered who killed the woman found in an empty Alabama field
in spring of 2069. She doesn’t even know which version of herself she buried
under a plain headstone.
When Mac
suddenly disappears, Sam realizes she is going to once more be caught up in a
silent war she still doesn’t fully understand. Every step she takes to save Mac
puts the world she knows at risk, and moves her one step closer to becoming the
girl in the grave.
Links:
Liana Brooks write sci-fi and crime fiction for people
who like happy endings. She believes in time travel to the future, even if it
takes a good book and all night to get there. When she isn’t writing, Liana
hikes the mountains of Alaska with her family and giant dog. Find her at
LianaBrooks.com or on Twitter as @LianaBrooks
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