A
Time Apart
Macauley
Series
Book
One
Rebecca
N. Caudill
Genre:
Paranormal Romance , Vampire
Date
of Publication: February 8, 2015
ISBN:
978-1508482666
ASIN:
B00TDR1O6U
Number
of pages: 211 (estimated)
Word
Count: 71,020
Cover
Artist: Rebecca N. Caudill
Book
Description:
A
love story that traverses the confines of time, life, and death,
uniting two passionate souls from different worlds and ages …
Olivia
Donnelly has spent her whole life obsessing about how she will die.
When tragedy strikes, reality comes crashing down and she’s forced
to confront her fears head on. Hoping that a move across the globe
will help her to cope with a devastating loss, she arrives in Ireland
a broken down shell of a woman looking for a second chance at life.
Almost
immediately Olivia is drawn to places she’s never been, and to a
man that she’s never met. When she crosses paths with the
mysterious and frustratingly private William Macauley, her life is
thrown into turmoil unlike any she has ever known. The two couldn’t
be more different – she’s human, he’s a vampire – but Olivia
can’t get him out of her mind. Having acknowledged her overwhelming
desire for William, now she must come to terms with how her feelings
for him will greatly alter her future.
Olivia’s
understanding of life – and death – take on new meaning as she
examines the truth of the person she once was, the woman she was born
to be, and how William is the key to her everlasting happiness.
Available
at Amazon
Excerpt
Sample
from Chapter 1
“Ladies and
gentlemen, welcome aboard Flight 716 with service from San Francisco
to Dublin. We ask that you please fasten your seat belts and secure
all baggage beneath the seat in front of you or in the overhead
compartments. At this time, please turn all personal electronic
devices to airplane mode so that they cannot transmit a signal. As
you know, smoking is prohibited for the duration of our journey to
Dublin, and that includes in the lavatories. Thank you for choosing
Aer Lingus. Enjoy your flight.”
It was usually at
this point in any flight where Olivia’s real panic kicked in.
Shortly – terrifyingly – the plane would be airborne with nothing
but land and sea below. While she knew statistically that airplanes
were safer than cars, she’d never known anyone – let alone two
anyones – who had been killed, their bodies never recovered, from a
freak accident on the freeway. Not to say that it didn’t happen
everyday; she just didn’t know anyone that it had happened to.
To distract her
mind, she listened to the crew outline the plane’s safety
procedures and then the Captain’s welcome, including the weather
forecast for Dublin – rainy and brisk, how shocking. Sipping the
champagne the flight attendant had offered her when she boarded,
Olivia felt the combination of the Valium and the alcohol take over
her body, but not quite enough that she gave up the death grip she
had on the arm rests. As she felt the tell tale tingle of the Valium
working its magic, she thought – not for the first time – that
maybe someday a plane crash wouldn’t be the worst thing to happen
to her. Maybe someday she’d just never wake up from the
self-induced drug and alcohol fueled nothingness she needed just to
fly.
Who am I kidding?
Sadly, more and more
frequently it wasn’t just plane rides that had her mixing booze and
pills. Most days she wrapped herself in a hazy blur of alcohol like a
security blanket, protecting her in a cocoon of mental fuzziness.
Olivia felt her
pulse beginning to race and her breathing accelerate, and she made a
conscious effort not to panic, not to look over at Judgy lest the
woman start advocating for professional psychiatric help. It wouldn’t
have been the first time some well-meaning motherly type had tried to
get Olivia into therapy. She stole a quick glance in Judgy’s
direction only to find that she was already engrossed in her novel,
Olivia’s neurosis and emotional paralysis the least of her
concerns.
Not too long after
she had fought back the near panic attack, the whirring of the
engines lulled Olivia into a stupor that soon resulted in a fitful
sleep. For the next ten hours she didn’t exactly fall into a deep
slumber, but she wasn’t fully awake either. Her mind seemed to
float between a dreaming and wakeful state, and she felt strangely
separated from her body. She’d see snippets of things in her head
but wasn’t sure if the images were of events or instances that she
was remembering, things she was imagining, or scenarios she was
concocting to be used in her novel.
And then Olivia saw,
quite clearly, the face of a man she had never met and yet she felt
like she had known him all of her life – blue eyes, sharp and
unnaturally piercing as if he could see deep into her soul. She saw a
field of green that stretched far and wide, rolling hills dotted with
sheep and lined with stacked stone walls. She saw herself as a child
chasing a puppy larger than she was down by a river while laughing
that high-pitched squeal that only a child can make as the dog raced
back toward her covered in mud and dripping with water. And then that
image changed as quickly as it came and she saw her mother as a young
woman, happy and carefree, in love with a man who was not Gerald
Donnelly.
And as she always
did when in one of her fitful states of sleep, Olivia saw all the
ways she could die – car accident; mugging gone horribly wrong
after having put up a brave fight; her house on fire, the flames
licking at her feet as she tried to run; her body weak and broken as
it was ravished by cancer; or her heart slowly stopping as she lay in
her bed, blind from old age and hunched with the rigors of time.
And in these dreams
she was ready for it – any of it – almost welcoming the vast
blackness that would follow whatever her death would be.
And then she saw
that face again – the man she didn’t know but felt so deeply that
she should. He whispered her name, longingly, “Olivia.”
About
the Author:
Rebecca
Caudill read her first novel when she was just four years old and has
been hooked on books ever since. When she wasn't writing her own
stories, she was sneaking copies of her mom's paperbacks to read late
into the night.
Fast
forward several years later and Rebecca graduated from the University
of Pittsburgh with a B.A. in Journalism and a minor in English Lit,
which gave her new insight into the written word. Following college,
Rebecca embarked on a career in tech PR in the famed Silicon Valley,
which eventually led to her leading Global R&D communications for
a Fortune 500 company that everyone knows by name. Finally, after
more than a decade of writing words ascribed to other people, in
December 2014 she quit her job to pursue writing full time.
Today
Rebecca lives with her husband and beautiful-but-neurotic cat in
Oakland, California. When not creating fictional worlds inhabited by
strong women, rakes, rogues, and dashing heroes, she is planning her
next vacation, trying out new recipes, or drinking Islay scotch.
Interview:
Rebecca N. Caudill
Where
are you from?
I was born in Southern California, but have lived in
Northern California for the past 13 years.
Tell
us your latest news?
I’m really excited share with you today my debut
novel, A Time Apart: Book One of the Macauley Series. While it falls squarely
in the world of the paranormal (after all, the hero is a vampire), it is first
and foremost a romance, and at its core it’s the story of two souls who defy
the confines of time, life, and death to be together.
When
and why did you begin writing? When did you first consider yourself a writer?
That’s a really hard question to answer. It seems
like I’ve always been writing. I won my first writing contest in elementary
school and it just snowballed from there. I majored in Journalism in college,
and then I had a pretty successful career in PR and corporate communitions,
which required endless hours of writing, albeit most often under a client’s
name.
What
inspired you to write your first book?
I had been wanting to get back in to creative
writing for awhile, but it was incredibly hard to juggle the demands of my
career with the desire to write. After 10-plus hour days in the office, I’d come
home and want to just vegetate in front of the TV, or I would have more work to
do. Then in 2008, two friends told me about NaNoWriMo, which they were both
participating in, and I decided to join them. I guess you could say that was
the push I needed to start writing my first book.
Unfortunately, I was horrible at it. I’d write a
page and then edit it, resulting in practically an entire re-write. By the end
of November I had only written an official 10,000 words, although with all of
the edits I’d made, I’d actually written closer to 25,000 words. I tried it
again the following year and failed just as spectacularly. It was then that I
realized that NaNoWriMo, while an amazing program, just wasn’t amazing for me.
With A Time Apart: Book One of the Macauley
Series, I basically wrote what I would want to read. I’m a voracious
reader, but there’s a recent trend to write really young heroines. There’s
nothing wrong with that at all – I’ve read and loved these books too! – but I
really wanted a heroine that was slightly older, and had a bit more of life
under her belt so that older readers could more easily identify with her. So
the first thing I did was visualize my heroine, Olivia – who she was, what drove
her, what her challenges were. From there, I set out to develop a hero who would
be her match. At that point, I’d already figured out the scenario that would
get them together – or in some cases, keep them apart – and I just went from
there, writing on a time table that was manageable.
Here we are six years later with the first book of
the series, which clocks in at around 71,000 words.
Do
you have a specific writing style?
Yes! I like long
sentences with as many Oxford commas as possible. (I’m only partially kidding
about that.J) In general, I write how I think people talk and
think. While there are certainly rules of grammar that must be followed, I am
not at all formal in my writing style. I try to make my words a conversation
with the reader, so there’s also a nice flow to them as well.
How
did you come up with the title?
I had the title figured out as soon as I settled on
a main narrative arc. I thought it was fitting since a major plot point in the
novel is the anguish of the time that William and Olivia were separated from one
another.
Is
there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
I think at the end of the day we all want to be
loved, and A Time Apart is really the
story of two people whose love cannot be contained.
How
much of the book is realistic?
The fact that it’s a novel with a hero who is a
vampire puts it squarely in the fantastical. That said, there are real things
in the book. For instance, all of the places that Olivia visits when she’s
wandering around Dublin do exist, and tourists and visit them. Macauley Castle
doesn’t exist, but it is based off of several other castles that I visited in
Ireland.
Are
experiences based on someone you know, or events in your own life?
Not overtly or too directly, but I did pull tiny snippets from my
life to help inform the characters. Like Olivia, I had a rough relationship
with my father, albeit in much different ways (most importantly, we weren’t
rich), and people who are close to me will recognize some of the names in A
Time Apart. For instance, Donnelly is a family name, and Heather is the name of
my best friend. We joke that book Heather is much saner than real Heather. J
What
books have most influenced your life most?
I don’t know
that I have any books that I would say have influenced my life. I took a course
in college called The Roaring 20s and it opened me up to new authors like F.
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who I love to this day. In terms of other books
I’ve read, Anne Rice first fueled my love for the paranormal, specifically for
vampires with her Interview with a Vampire, and witches with The Witching Hour.
If
you had to choose, which writer would you consider a mentor?
I don’t know
that I would say that I have a mentor who is a fellow writer, but as I
mentioned above, I have a great friend who is a fellow
author who has been a
great partner for me to work with. I love being able to bounce ideas off of
her, or pick her brain about scenes, and get her feedback when I’m questioning
something I’ve written. I think having someone like that who isn’t a family
member, but who is someone you know has your best interest at heart, is a very
valuable thing.
What
book are you reading now?
I’m currently
reading three books but that changes on a daily basis since I go through them
pretty quickly. I just downloaded about twenty more books onto my Kindle this
past week. My current “to read” list is on Goodreads. Also, if your readers are interested in hearing what
I think of certain books, I also post reviews of the ones I like on my blog.
Are
there any new authors that have grasped your interest?
Because I’ve been heads down working on the
promotion of this book and prepping for future installments, I can’t really say
for sure who is considered a “new” author. I feel like I’m hearing about books
well after they’ve been out for a great long while.
I can tell you, however, that I really loved Amy
Stearman’s debut novel, Altered.
It reminded me of everything I first loved about the Sookie Stackhouse series
and I can’t wait to read what comes next in the Chronicles of the Creed series.
What
are your current projects?
Right now I’m
working on edits and revisions for Blood
of My Blood: Book Two of the Macauley Series. Those who read A Time Apart will have seen a sneak peek
of that book. It picks up exactly where A
Time Apart leaves off, and we learn more about William’s life after he
became a vampire, as well as how Olivia is settling into her new, preternatural
life. All’s not sunshine and rainbows for our hero and heroine, so we see how they
tackle challenges from the outside world.
I’m also working
on a regency romance that has been simmering at the back of my mind as I’ve
been obsessed with the period for many years now. I don’t want to give too much
away about it because it’s still in the early stages, but there’s a paranormal
angle there as well and I’m really excited to mix the genres as they’re my two
favorites. I’m hoping to enter it into a writing contest, but I need to find
time to devote to tweaking it so it’s just right.
What
would you like my readers to know?
I love interacting with people on social media,
especially Twitter. Oh, I’m also a selfie junky (I tend to use it as a means of
tracking my ever-changing hair styles), and I take a lot of pictures of my
food. Since I’m a pretty good cook, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Twitter
- @rebecca_caudill
Facebook
- https://www.facebook.com/rebeccancaudill
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