Monday 23 June 2014

Blog Tour + Guest Post + Giveaway - Where Life Takes You by Claudia Y. Burgoa


Find the tour schedule here.




Where Life Takes You by Claudia Y. Burgoa
Publication date: July 31st 2013
Genres: Contemporary, New Adult

Synopsis:

Becca Trent lived her childhood next to a cruel woman—her mom—who lived to torment and neglect her. During her high school years, her mother married; bringing home not only a new husband, but a step sister her same age. The latter took over her Mom’s role—making Becca’s life miserable. Including stealing Ian—Becca’s best friend and boyfriend—Lisa treated her worse than her mother had for the previous fifteen years. A couple of years later, things ended up in tragedy.

Becca buried that part of her life in the deep corners of her psyche, but that only work during the days when the nightmares didn’t come back to haunt her. Her best friend, Dan gives her that family love she always lacked. Everything was close to perfect, until everything and everyone from her past came back. Now, she’s trying to figure out how to survive and keep that bond which seems now to be held together by a thread.


Note: This is the first part of a two book novel.

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AUTHOR BIO


Claudia lives in Colorado with her family and three dogs. 

Two beagles who believe they are human, and a bichon who thinks she’s a beagle.

While managing life, she works as a CFO at a small IT Company. 

She’s a dreamer who enjoys music, laughter and a good story.




Author Links:








10 Things I Wish I Knew About Being an Author I Didn’t Know Before 


1. Professional help is not optional.
DIY—do it yourself—a great concept, but is it worth it? As you finish your first draft and consider the possibilities to share it with the world, you think about the next step. Conventional or Self-publishing? Either way, you need to get that manuscript ready for an agent or the public. Yes, you might’ve the credentials to DIY; but paying a third party to polish that MS will open get an agent ask for more than ten pages; or the readers to say that was a book worth reading. Presentation, presentation…presentation. 


2. Just because it worked for them, it’ll word the same for you.
So here I was, newbie trying to find a way to get my first manuscript ready to be published. Followed the usual steps, editor, formatter, and cover…Where to find them? Recommendations form fellow authors, hired the first without doing my homework and verify that X editor was a good fit, Y formatter would work the way I like and so on. I just made the mistake of hiring what worked for them and barely lived to tell the story of how I banged my head again and again and…you get the idea. Five months later I found the team to fix it. Yes, fixing your mistakes is better than ignoring the big elephant in the room.
Note: Find the team that works for you. Shop around, it’s an investment. 


3. Twitter, Facebook, Blogs…
Once that pretty shiny new book of yours hits the cyber shelves, yes the one you’ve been working on for the past—insert time—you’ll spend the same amount of time promoting it. You
have now two missions, one promoting and the second, writing your next book…two balls to juggle and you better not drop either one.


4. Blogs, Tours…who knew about them?
Not me. Blogs are your best friends, blogs aren’t a trend that will go away, and they are the places where one gives ones opinion to the cyberworld. There are all types of blogs, including reading blogs. They are the door to your reader, the ones that can share an excerpt of you book and give your future reader a glimpse of what your novel is about. Approach them, approach a tourbook company and let the public have a taste of what you can do. So far I’ve encounter amazing people who has nothing but open their doors to my books and share a piece of us—my books and I—with others. 


5. Your work isn’t for everyone.
My work is like my child, it’s something I created that comes from the deep dark side of my imagination or another times from the happily one. Either way, I’m giving a huge part of myself while I’m doing it and for the same reason I want everyone to like it. But also, that creation is subjective and as everything in that class I’ll get the ‘I love it and I hate it all’ within one day from different readers. That’s life. 


6. Talking about likes, loves and hates…
Reviews are the reflection of the reader, not your work—unless the reviewer says your book is full of typos. Then, that’s all you. Don’t take them personal, if they didn’t like your MC, that doesn’t translate on a: I don’t like you. I appreciate each person that has left me a review, good or bad, it reflects that they took their time to read my book. 


7. There’s a life outside the computer
Personally, I like to obsess to a point of forgetting there’s another life. At the beginning, there were weekends when I sat in front of my computer for more than twelve hours. Between tweeting, facebooking, writing and researching; there’s no time to have a life. Wrong, there is and you need to get out there. Family exists and you should set your own pace, your deadlines and as everything accept there’s more to life than what you love to do—for me is writing. 


8. Reminders are your friends
As I get wrapped up about my character’s lives, time flies and I forget to do my day job, go to doctor’s appointments or leave on time to pick up my children from school. Post its work, but maybe setting an alarm on your phone that will ring when needed might be the best. 


9. Don’t forget why you started it.
I did because it’s a way to express myself, to have fun typing all those daydreams that since I was little lingered around my head. Either it was the dream of being an alien, a fairy, a witch—I could, I was born on October 30th—fix world hunger or something in between. It’s a job, but the job you love, celebrate each milestone, each sale and love each new word you type too. 


10. There’s always something new to learn.
We don’t have all the knowledge and we should always be open to learn a new trick. Writing is also a learning process about the world or ourselves. Never be stagnant and be open for the next stage.






Tour-wide giveaway

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