Blood Entwines by Caroline Healy [Blog Tour]

    

Blood Entwines by Caroline Healy is a YA Urban Fantasy published by Bloomsbury Publishing (Sparks). The tour runs October 20th- November 16th with reviews, interviews & guest posts. Check out the tour page and schedule.

Blood Entwines by Caroline Healy

A dark compelling story of love and its more sinister elements…possession.

 In the aftermath of a blood transfusion that saved her life, Kara feels different. Her senses are stronger ... she can hear whispered comments not meant for her ears ... she can hear the person following her. When Jack, her stalker, reveals himself and insists that Kara has something that belongs to him, she does her best to avoid him. But he’s determined to talk to her, convinced that they’re linked through the blood she received during her transfusion.

Jack is struggling against a dark and dangerous demon. His body is host to the evil power that wants Kara’s blood and will stop at nothing to get it. If Jack is able to gain control he can warn Kara. But which is stronger, the power of the blood they share or the force for evil. How can Kara help save Jack without risking her own life?

 

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Guest Post

Where do your ideas come from?

This is a simple question but a hard one to answer.

I would love to say that there is an Ideas Bank that I go to and select a perfectly formed, pre-packed idea. Or that, in a meditative state between the hours of 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. they come to me unhindered.  The notion that ideas are like the common cold, easily caught.

I suppose all and none of the above are true.

An unsatisfying answer to the question is that ideas just happen!  A smell, a word caught on the breeze while out walking the banks of the River Lagan, a photo, a newspaper clip, the flash of a specific hair colour, the rendition of a sad memory; the world is the Ideas Bank. Sometimes they come fast and free flowing, sometimes idea catching is like squeezing rocks for elixir.

But when they do come, then they occupy my mind completely. I get an idea, then a voice, then the silhouette of a character, then the characters move and talk and react unexpectedly and I, as the writer, have no choice but to record their activities.

I write literary fiction, collections of short stories, novellas, children’s fiction, Y.A. books and adult fiction. I cannot limit myself to one genre, one age range. If a character gets in my head then I have to write the style and genre that the character demands.

This is nice, in that it allows me to explore my own creative potential, to try on for size an abstract, magical realism story of one thousand words or a novella about an immigrant trying for citizenship, or indeed a paranormal Y.A. story.

My most recent novel Blood Entwines is about a seventeen year old, Kara Bailey, who suffers terrible injuries in a car accident and must have a blood transfusion. When she recovers from her surgery, she finds that her senses are heightened, that she is quick to anger, her personality somehow altered. Things get creepy when a man appears outside her school, outside her house, watching her as she walks home, attempting to talk to her on a dark, winter’s eve. He tells her she has something that belongs to him, and that he wants it back. The blood in her veins is mutant. The blood in her veins belongs to someone else. The blood in her veins is the only thing keeping her alive.

Blood Entwines, when I think about what is beneath the plot, I realised that it centres around the notion of family. I wanted to challenge the commonplace family dynamic, there are absent parents in this book, adopted children, single parent family units; there are families of all shapes and sizes. I wanted to get under the skin of my two main characters and through them, challenge the notion of belonging and what, in terms of the teenage psyche, constitutes the idea of family.

Where do I get my ideas from? Well, I have enough inspiration for at least another five books, all from this single topic.

Ideas and inspiration are – to borrow from something Walt Disney said – like flowers that bloom in adversity, they are the rarest and most beautiful of all. So once you have good ideas you must cherish them and help them to grow.  

I might not have an Ideas Bank that I can make swift withdrawals from at any time of the day or night but I have the potential of ideas to cultivate into something magnificent.

About the Author:

Caroline Healy is a writer and community arts facilitator. She recently completed her M.A. in

Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast.

She published her first, award winning collection of short stories, entitled A Stitch in Time in August 2012. Her work has been featured in publications such as Wordlegs, The Bohemyth, Prole and the Irish Writers’ Centre Lonely Voice.

She writes literary fiction and young adult fiction, with her Y.A. book Blood Entwines released with Bloomsbury Publishing in August 2014.

Caroline loves drinking tea from mis-matched china, doing yoga, as well as reading, writing, talking and thinking about all things bookish. She also has a penchant for cake and dark chocolate.

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