Amy Ruttan

 I’m thrilled to welcome Thomma Lyn to my blog today to celebrate her release of Mirror Blue!! I read Thomma Lyn’s Thy Eternal Summer from another publisher and she writes beautiful prose. So I am very ecstatic to see another release from my dear friend.

Take it away TL!

  Mirror Blue: The Culmination of a Journey
It’s here: May 1, release date for my debut novel, Mirror Blue.
The journey to get here started in 2004. That’s when I wrote the first draft. Mirror Blue was the second novel I wrote. My first novel is a trunk novel which will stay trunked; I think of it as my “training novel.” Then I wrote Mirror Blue, though I decided to shelve it in 2005 to work on other projects. In 2006, a novella of mine came out with a publisher that went belly-up the following year. Yup, bad luck, but I persevered. And through it all, something about Mirror Blue kept its hooks in me.
In 2007, Mirror Blue pulled me back into its world, and I rewrote it from the first word to the last. I changed it from first person to third person, from present tense to past. Time away from the story lent perspective on how I could streamline and tighten it. I did another pass-through in 2008, and it became the novel it is today.

A heads-up from a friend sent me in Black Lyon’s direction — she told me Black Lyon was looking for Literary Love Stories. And I was psyched: “literary love story” is a great description of Mirror Blue! I sent Black Lyon a query; they requested a partial and then a full, and lo and behold, they loved the novel and accepted it for publication. That’s when all of you heard me yell WOO HOO all the way from East Tennessee!
I got the idea for Mirror Blue while listening to Loreena McKennitt’s lovely musical rendition of Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott.” And I imagined a character who, like the lady of Shalott, worries that other people’s lives are more real than her own. What might she do to remedy that, and what challenges would she encounter? Into my mind was born Aphra Porter, the heroine of Mirror Blue. She’s an independent spirit and works for herself as a website designer. She’s never been in love, but for years, she has had a crush on a critically-acclaimed, regional author: Isaac Lightfoot. Aphra’s family loves her, but they don’t understand why she isn’t more “normal” like her sister Diana, who is married and has a baby on the way.
Aphra meets Isaac at a book signing, and he hires her to work on his website. He remembers a letter she’d written him when she was a teenager, a letter which helped him to re-evaluate and start to change his own life for the better. Aphra’s dream comes true — she and Isaac fall in love — then their challenges begin: Isaac’s ex-wife wants to re–insert herself into his life, she turns their grown son against Aphra, and Isaac’s mother wants to see Isaac reconcile with his ex. Aphra’s family isn’t as hostile to Isaac as Isaac’s family is to Aphra, but Aphra’s mom would prefer that she marry a younger man with whom she can have children of her own.

Mirror Blue is the story of how Aphra becomes more fully the person she’s always wanted to be. She learns that in order to move forward, she must take risks — she must go bravely forward despite fear her of pain or rejection and despite a lifetime of feeling second-best. She learns these lessons not only from Isaac’s love but also from the challenges presented by the step-family dynamic, which is increasingly faced by parents and children all over the world.
I’ll be having a Virtual Book Launch Party for Mirror Blue on my blog once the book trailer is available, date TBA. There’ll be all kinds of goodies: you can learn more about Aphra and Isaac and the other characters, meet Aphra’s cats, and try out her favorite recipes.  And there will prizes, including autographed copies of Mirror Blue! Everybody is welcome to come, and I hope to see you there.

Mirror Blue Blurb:
He’s her first chance at love.

She’s his last.

Free spirit Aphra Porter never thought Isaac Lightfoot would remember the letter she wrote to him years before. But by some miracle, he does. Now a successful Web site designer in her thirties, Aphra meets the man whose writing talents she’s always idolized—an encounter that leaves her spinning. No longer is Isaac a distant image, but a flesh and blood man who looks at her like no one has looked at her before.

A critically acclaimed author and Vietnam war hero, Isaac is one tough bear of a man. Faced with the physical and emotional scars of war, a relationship with a daunting age difference, and an ex-wife bent on tearing Aphra from his life, he’s about to learn that leaving the past behind and building a new life can be the toughest battle of all.
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Buy link (from Black Lyon): http://www.blacklyonpublishing.com/Mirror%20Blue.html
Mirror Blue is also available for purchase online from Black Lyon Publishing, Amazon.com (United States, Canada, Japan, Germany, England and France), BarnesandNoble.com, Books-a-Million.com, and Target.com.

The novel can also be ordered from book stores in the United States and Canada.

Thanks for being here today TL!! Now, what are you guys waiting for? Go out and buy!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 12:24 am and is filed under Promo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.