BLOG TOUR: THIRST: Blood of My Blood by R.P. Channing

Hey guys! I have an exciting guest post for you today by R.P. Channing, author of THIRST: BLOOD OF MY BLOOD, a young adult paranormal romance novel. The guest post is all about the writing process of the novel including information about how the title came to be! Check it out below but first let's learn a little bit more about the book...

240+ Pages

WITH BEAUTIFUL PHOTOGRAPHS

~Kira Sutherland~

After a near fatal accident (and getting cheated on by her 'boyfriend'), and beating up the lead cheerleader (with whom the boyfriend cheated...), and being labeled as having 'issues' in her school because she, uhm, sees ghosts, Kira is left with two choices:

1. Continue her 'therapy' (where she's told the ghost is a hallucination and also gets her legs ogled too often...)

Or

2. Go to Starkfield Academy, a boarding school for "Crazies and Convicts" (as the social media sites call them.)

She chooses the latter... 

~ Cory Rand ~

Cory Rand has not had an easy life. His mother died in a car accident when he was twelve, and so did his mother's best friend...sort of. You see, Janice made a promise to take care of Cory just before she died, and so she lingers. Undead. A ghost that watches out for him.

Brought up in an abusive home, Cory quickly falls into a life of disreputable behavior. After his third offense (which was prompted by a girl, as usual - he has a weakness) he's left with two choices:

1. Be tried as an adult and share a cell with a guy named Bubba (he thinks...)

Or

2. Go to Starkfield Academy, which Cory is pretty sure is run by vampires. But, hey, at least he'll get an education.

He chooses the latter...

It's at Starkfield that Kira meets Cory Rand, a boy with an insatiable Rage who sees ghosts, too. As well as other things, other things from his past, things that confuse him, things like fire and witches and demons.

Things he's always ignored.

Until now.

Purchase:

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“My life was perfect.”

General

In the last three years I’ve written over a million words of fiction...and not published any of it. 

THIRST was embarked upon after a six month hiatus from writing and much thinking about what I really wanted to put out there with my first novel. 

I wanted to put something out for teenagers (we’re all young at heart...)
 
I wanted to put something out that was different from what exists, but not too different.
 
And I wanted to write a story that means something deeply to me.
 
The final product was THIRST.
 

Writing Process

My writing process is simple: I write. In the first draft, I don’t plot, I don’t outline, I don’t lay out character sketches - I write.
 
The first draft is always fun.
 
The second, third, fourth and subsequent drafts? They’re murder. They’re painful. They make my head hurt. But I work until my fingers are blue to make everything fit, every little thing, until it’s perfect.
 

How it all began

It all began with one line: My life was perfect. This is the first statement Kira makes.
 
Truthfully, that line comes from another book I’ve been writing (I’ve picked it up and put it down three times - one day I’ll publish that one) and that story has absolutely zero / nada / diddly-squat to do with what THIRST contains. That story is a dystopian novel, and the main character is in her twenties (she’ll be seventeen when that book comes out eventually).
 
From that line came Jack, the ghost. (More accurately, Jack is a sangyani - an undead, incorporeal being.) Only, Jack wasn’t a ghost in the first draft. He was something else...
Anyway, I won’t bore you with the process. It all ended up with what you have now, a story about undead creatures, and one other thing...
 

The Working Title

The book was initially called STARKFIELD ACADEMY. But as the story grew, I realized this bore little resemblance to the final product. Yes, STARKFIELD is a crucial element of the plot, and most of it takes place within Starkfield’s walls, but once I added the flashbacks (later in the book), the story took on a whole new feel to it.
 
So, days before publishing, the title was changed to THIRST: BLOOD OF MY BLOOD. I like the new title much better.
 

First Book

THIRST is the first book I’ve written that I’m proud of. It took a million words to get to this point. The next one won’t take that long.
 

No Cliffhangers

I hate cliffhangers. And I promise to keep all stories in this series enclosed within themselves. My goal is that people can pick up any of the books and be satisfied that the story has a BEGINNING, a MIDDLE and an END.
 
It worked for the Golden Age of Hollywood, so why change a good thing?

--

R P Channing started writing three years ago, but never published anything even after churning out over a million words of fiction. Thirst: Blood of my Blood is the first book he dared to publish. When asked why, he said, “Because I wouldn’t feel bad telling my mother about it...” When not hammering away (most literally) at his keyboard, he can be found buried in a book, reading anything from romance to horror to young adult to non-fiction to comedy. If it has words in it, I’ll take it.