Check out my stop on the blog tour for The Tales of Tarya series by Rachel Nightingale!
by Rachel Nightingale
Genre: YA Fantasy
Release Date: June 2017
Odyssey Books
Summary:
The Gazini Players are proud to present
For your Edification and Enjoyment
Tales of great Joy, and of great Woe
Ten years ago, Mina’s beloved older brother disappeared with a troupe of travelling players, and was never heard from again.
On the eve of Mina’s own departure with a troupe, her father tells her she has a special gift for story telling, a gift he silenced years before in fear of her ability to call visions into being with her stories.
Mina soon discovers that the travelling players draw their powers from a mysterious place called Tarya, where dreams are transformed into reality. While trying to solve the mystery of her brother’s disappearance, she discovers a dark secret to the players’ onstage antics. Torn between finding her brother or exposing the truth about the players, could her gifts as a story teller offer a way to solve Harlequin’s riddle?
Columbine's Tale (The Tales of Tarya #2)
Release Date: September 2018
Summary:
For three hundred years the travelling actors of Litonya roamed the land entertaining crowds, but secretly leaving devastation in their wake. Is Mina the only person with the power to stop them?
In the ethereal otherworld of Tarya, Mina begins to master the rare, inexplicable powers attached to her gift for storytelling. She discovers she can touch dreams, influence the real world, and perhaps find out who is manipulating Tarya for dark purposes. In the waking world Mina is on the run, beset by divided loyalties between the travellers, and caught between two men she could love and a brother who desperately needs her help.
“Mysteries and machinations, tragedy and heartbreak, love and betrayal, adventure and fantasy come together in this spellbinding book.” — George Ivanoff, award-winning author of the Other Worlds series
In the ethereal otherworld of Tarya, Mina begins to master the rare, inexplicable powers attached to her gift for storytelling. She discovers she can touch dreams, influence the real world, and perhaps find out who is manipulating Tarya for dark purposes. In the waking world Mina is on the run, beset by divided loyalties between the travellers, and caught between two men she could love and a brother who desperately needs her help.
“Mysteries and machinations, tragedy and heartbreak, love and betrayal, adventure and fantasy come together in this spellbinding book.” — George Ivanoff, award-winning author of the Other Worlds series
Pierrot's Song (The Tales of Tarya #3)
Release Date: November 2019
Summary:
When ancient stories give up their forgotten secrets, a path forward begins to appear. But love and talent are pushed to their limits as Mina and her companions come face to face with an enemy who has finally stepped out of the shadows.
Amazon Links:
Excerpt From Columbine's Tale:
Sofia patted the side of the bed and they sat down together. ‘What do we do Mina?’
‘We tell stories.’
‘And why is that important?’
Mina thought for a moment. ‘It… it entertains people. It lifts them out of their ordinary lives.’
Sofia nodded at each answer.
‘We…’ Mina followed her thoughts. ‘We show them their lives…’
She was answering like a player. She looked at her new friend, a question in her eyes.
‘We are the memory of the people, Mina. All you have said is true, but the most important thing we can do is to connect people to what has come before, and show what will come after. Show them their lives matter. We find the shape of their life, so they can understand. When you are living it you can’t see the patterns, or hear the song that threads through your days. And no one can do that on their own, regardless. It takes someone who can sit outside, listening to all the voices that remember a life, to shape a tale with a beginning and an ending.'
Rachel Nightingale was a highly imaginative child who used to pretend she was wandering the woods looking for adventures on her way home from school. Once she understood creating stories gave her magical powers she decided to become a writer. Some years, and many diversions later, she is an award-winning playwright, and the author of The Tales of Tarya trilogy, a fantasy series published by Odyssey Books. Having survived improv theatre, traveled the world and immersed herself endlessly in research and creative practice, she often finds herself at the mercy of stories that demand to be written.
Author Links:
Website - https://www.rachel-nightingale.info/
Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/NightingaleRA
Guest Post
What is your writing process like?
I am definitely a plotter. When you’re writing a mystery, as I did with The Tales of Tarya, it’s much more fun if you can sprinkle the books with clues all the way through – and to do that you need to know what’s going on behind the scenes and what happened a long time ago to lead to this point. So when I start a series, I need to do three things: world building; creating and fleshing out my characters, and deciding on the events that happened before the story. Then I spend time plotting, working out the sequence of events and character arcs that will happen during the series. I keep these fairly open – I want to leave the characters room to play. Only once I’ve got a good sense of how things work and where things are going do I sit down and start writing.
I don’t have a set number of words I try to write every day. Writing is done on the side, when I can squeeze it in around other obligations, so word counts would only add pressure. But it’s very satisfying to watch the story grow by writing regularly. And I constantly tell myself that the first draft is just getting words on the page – it doesn’t matter if they’re rubbish.
The editing stage is when you start sculpting the story, fine-tuning it. Fixing clunky language, tightening up slow patches, pulling a character back into line when they get off track. I’ve been a professional editor for a number of years now, so this is the stage of the process I find easiest – I know what I’m looking for and I usually know how to fix it.
Once I’ve got a story that I feel is pretty polished, I send it out to beta-readers, then take their comments and polish some more. I always find it fascinating to see what others have picked up about the story. Sometimes they notice things I didn’t even realise I’d done!
The final, scariest stage of course is sending the story out into the world. But that’s not part of the writing process – more part of the ‘setting my words free’ process.
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