Audiobook Blog Tour ~ Stealing Fire - Written by Susan Sloate & Narrated by Mapuana Makia

 

Author: Susan Sloate

Narrator: Mapuana Makia

Length: 11 hours 53 minutes

Publisher: Covfefe Press

Released: Sep. 23, 2020

Genre: Romance

In glittery 1980s Los Angeles, once-celebrated Broadway lyricist Beau Kellogg is disillusioned, unhappily married and yearning for one last musical hit, while he writes advertising jingles for quick money. Meanwhile, in New York, idealistic young singer, Amanda Harary, works a demanding day job at a charming West Side hotel. From their first fiery phone conversation, sparks fly, and when they begin to talk late at night, miracles begin to happen. They weren't looking for each other but what they find together is a once-in-a-lifetime understanding, impossible joy, and piercing heartache...until they learn that some connections, however improbable, are meant to last forever. Stealing Fire is a story for romantics everywhere, who believe in the transformative power of love.

Susan Sloate is the bestselling, award-winning author of more than 20 published books, including 17 Y/A fiction and non-fiction books, and three full-length, mainstream adult novels. STEALING FIRE, a romance about 1980's Broadway, was a #2 Amazon bestseller and was honored in the 2014 Readers' Choice Book Awards. It was re-published in 2018 under her own publishing house imprint and was released as an audiobook in 2020. FORWARD TO CAMELOT (with Kevin Finn), a time-travel novel about the JFK assassination, became a #6 Amazon bestseller, took honors in 3 literary competitions and was optioned by a Hollywood company for film production. REALIZING YOU (with Ron Doades) introduced an entirely new genre--self-help FICTION. Her Ray Charles Y/A biography, FIND ANOTHER WAY!, won second prize in the 2007 Children’s Moonbeam Book Awards. Susan earned a bachelor's degree in Broadcast Journalism at the University of Southern California, while also taking classes in screenwriting and story analysis in their world-famous cinema school. She created the Writers Workshop in her hometown, bringing together playwrights, actors and directors to work collaboratively on original unproduced plays. She has managed two political campaigns, served on the Culture, Arts & Pride Commission of the Town of Mount Pleasant and has been featured in multiple volumes of WHO'S WHO IN AMERICA, WHO'S WHO IN ENTERTAINMENT and WHO'S WHO AMONG AMERICAN WOMEN. She lives outside Charleston, SC.

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TURNING LEMONS INTO LEMONADE

By Author Susan Sloate

What do you do when you’re twenty-five and madly in love with someone you don’t understand, and you don’t know how to fix the problems in your relationship? If you’re anything like me, you write about it. I was deeply in love in the spring of 1983, and I was also very young and naïve. It was my first serious relationship, and I didn’t know how to make this relationship work—it’s hard to love a married man who lives 6,000 miles away—but I couldn’t bear to walk away, either. So one night I sat down at my snazzy IBM Selectric typewriter (don’t even think about laughing at that) and started typing. And the first sentence I typed was, “Sixty would be a milestone, he thought.” And from there, the story started to flow. I wasn’t consciously planning to write a novel. I had begun many novels in the past, which had never lasted more than a few pages before I gave up. I wasn’t thinking about anything long-term. I just wanted to find a way to ease the pain of our being separated and my being alone while wishing he were there. But for some weeks, I found myself coming home, sitting at the typewriter, and typing away. And my little stack of pages began to grow. When I felt I’d gone dry on one scene I started another. When I didn’t know what to do in this part of the novel, I skipped to another part. I had no idea how it would end. In 1988 I got my first computer. Yippee! It had a 20 MB hard drive, and at turbo speed (I say that laughingly), it ran at 10Mghz. I thought I was really something! One of the first things I did after getting it was take my stack of pages and type it all into the computer. These were the early days, when Word files were pretty short, so I kept these chapters in their own small files. I labeled them STEALING1, STEALING2, etc. I kept writing in a desultory fashion. Not much changed, but the scenes got longer and better. And I found I couldn’t bear to delete them. I wasn’t ready to let this story go. Then I made a friend, a writer to whom I trusted my tentative pages. She LOVED the pages, which I now called my ‘baby novel’, and begged me to finish it. I promised I would… someday. Years later, after marriage and children, my husband found the files on a computer I’d abandoned and transferred the files to a brand-new computer with greater hard-drive capacity. I spent a full day taking all those little files and putting them into one big file in Word. It came out to 275 pages, far too much to throw away. And when an Amazon writing contest came along in 2005, I finished the bulk of the novel and submitted it. It was named a quarter-finalist in the contest, and I was thrilled. In 2013, a friend who ran a small publishing house in North Carolina asked to publish it, sight unseen. When she finally read it, after I’d agreed to let her have it, she loved it, and named it one of her top ten reads that year. The book came out in late summer and went to #2 in its category on Amazon. It was also a Hot New Release and was honored in the Readers’ Favorite Book Award competition in 2014. As of last month, it’s also an audiobook, with a growing following of devoted fans. And all this from a handful of pages I wrote to ease my own aching heart and try to find peace in an impossible relationship. Talk about making lemonade out of lemons! When your heart hurts and your mind is clouded… write about it. When you don’t know what to do about a situation… write about it. When you don’t know if you want to write or not… write about it. And one day, you never know if you’ll wake up, and a handful of pages that breaks your heart will have become the most important words you ever put down.

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