Ashes (Foresight #2)
They will not give up…she’s about to find out why
Scarlett barely escaped with her life the last time she ran in to The Venari; but she refuses to spend her days looking over her shoulder.
Determined to be normal, she heads to Europe, only to learn that her wish to blend in is simply not meant to be. With Jake delayed in Salem, Scarlett is vulnerable and forced to rely on new found friends, The Collective; a band of people with gifts like her own.
When her desire to bring an end to her torment leads her to the dark underbelly of Paris, she discovers what The Venari plan for her is not death, but in fact much worse.
Guest PostBest,A letter to my five year old self…
Firstly, thanks so much for having me on the blog and for signing up to the Ashes tour!
I knew I wanted to write from a very young age and something people often ask me now is what advice would I give to people that want to write but haven’t yet found their inspiration or been able to complete a story? Well, I thought a slightly different take on just churning out advice would be to revisit my own writing past and advise myself…hopefully you can see something in her to which you can relate and if not, perhaps you might just find it funny to learn a bit more about my writing journey!
Dear Five Year Old Me,
That one long sentence you wrote today about staying at Grandmas and baking at the weekend might not have felt like it, but it counts as one of your first ever works. It lacked punctuation and the spelling was nothing short of questionable, but that childish scrawl and those crudely sketched illustrations were the start of something much bigger I promise.
I know you love all sorts of things; your My Little Pony nursery, the Sylvanian Families Post Office you have, playing out and naively hacking at the hair of the china dolls you don’t yet realise are expensive and purely decorative, but that thing you feel when you write a story or a poem….that is going to out-last everything else.
In fact…the little typewriter you have now will, in a few short years, be replaced by a real, grown up electric one and you will teach yourself to type while everyone else is getting bikes and roller blades (you already have them so you don’t miss out, don’t worry) just you chose a slightly unusual present but my gosh, you will love it.
You are going to write a story, the longest one you have ever written and when you finish it, your teacher is going to read it out at school. Your classmates will love it and when you go home that day you will know that you never want to do anything else again other than writes stories. Pretty cool, huh?
When you get bigger you will sometimes temporarily drift in and out of your love affair with writing. It will never really leave but sometimes it will feel hard work and less fun. Sometimes you will start on something only to realise it is truly terrible, BUT DON’T EVER GIVE UP. One day, and I don’t want to give too much away, but one day you will have an idea that really works and is better than all the others and it will be the best decision you ever made to have chosen that typewriter way back when.
Keep writing no matter what. It doesn’t matter if you don’t always feel like it, wait for the desire to come back and do it then, or just scribble down a sentence or two to tide you over. Do it your way, the important thing is to do it.
Lots of love,
You x
AUTHOR Amy Keen
Amy works in PR by day and spends the rest of the time as a mum, wife, fan-girl and YA author. A total, unashamed book freak, she reads and writes as much as possible and has a penchant for anything ‘wordy’. If there is any time left over after all of the above, she can be found chatting at inhuman speeds, consuming absurd amounts of coffee (writer cliché #1) and attempting to diffuse her perpetual state of shopper’s guilt. Her new novel Ashes just released and her debut novel Embers (Foresight #1) came out in 2012.
