Featuring Authors #6 + GIVEAWAY

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Hi everyone!

Today is the sixth day of my new weekly series! In this series I feature authors!

To see the other authors I featured click here! To be featured contact me here!!

Today I’m going to feature David Meredith an author that has written The Reflections of Queen Snow White . In this post there will be a bio about the author and , an interview and a giveaway!

About David Meredith:

David Meredith is a writer and educator originally from Knoxville, Tennessee. He received both a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts from East Tennessee State University, in Johnson City, Tennessee as well as a Tennessee State Teaching license. He is currently a doctoral student in Educational Leadership. On and off, he spent nearly a decade, from 1999-2010 teaching English in Northern Japan, but currently lives with his wife and three children in the Nashville Area where he continues to write and teach English.

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About the book The Reflections of Queen Snow White:

What happens when “happily ever after” has come and gone?

On the eve of her only daughter, Princess Raven’s wedding, an aging Snow White finds it impossible to share in the joyous spirit of the occasion. The ceremony itself promises to be the most glamorous social event of the decade. Snow White’s castle has been meticulously scrubbed, polished and opulently decorated for the celebration. It is already nearly bursting with jubilant guests and merry well-wishers. Prince Edel, Raven’s fiancé, is a fine man from a neighboring kingdom and Snow White’s own domain is prosperous and at peace. Things could not be better, in fact, except for one thing:

The king is dead.

The queen has been in a moribund state of hopeless depression for over a year with no end in sight. It is only when, in a fit of bitter despair, she seeks solitude in the vastness of her own sprawling castle and climbs a long disused and forgotten tower stair that she comes face to face with herself in the very same magic mirror used by her stepmother of old.

It promises her respite in its shimmering depths, but can Snow White trust a device that was so precious to a woman who sought to cause her such irreparable harm? Can she confront the demons of her own difficult past to discover a better future for herself and her family? And finally, can she release her soul-crushing grief and suffocating loneliness to once again discover what “happily ever after” really means?

Only time will tell as she wrestles with her past and is forced to confront The Reflections of Queen Snow White.

 

Interview

Arvenig: Tell us a little about yourself and your background!

David: I am a writer and educator originally from Knoxville, Tennessee. I  received both a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts from East Tennessee State University, in Johnson City, Tennessee as well as a Tennessee State Teaching license and am is currently a doctoral student in Educational Leadership. On and off, I spent nearly a decade, from 1999-2010 teaching English in Northern Japan, but currently live with his wife and three children in the Nashville Area where he continues to write and teach English. The Reflections of Queen Snow White is my first published novel, but I’m hoping to release another one – a YA SciFi/Fantasy novel called Aaru – later this year.

A: When did you first realise you wanted to be a writer?
D: I’ve always had a little bit of the writing bug I think. I guess my very first work was a five-page short story I wrote in third grade on notebook paper and bound with shirt-boards colored with magic marker. I wrote some crappy fan-fic in middle school and high school along with some rather odious poetry, but that was all a part of the writing journey, I suppose. I think I have always considered myself a writer, but an author… Now that’s a different story. I actually did not feel comfortable characterizing myself an author until very recently – shortly after the release of this book actually. There was so much weight to the term.

When I think of the word “author” I have visions of Poe and Emerson or even Steven
King or Tom Clancy. It frankly felt a little pompous to claim that I belonged among their
mighty literary company, which is what I felt like the word “author” implied. However,
once I really began promoting my work in earnest, once I had the ISBN number and the
web site and reviews coming in and requests going out on a daily basis, I really started
to feel like my writing had suddenly ceased to be a hobby and instead was now a
vocation and priority of mine. That’s when I really began to feel like an author

A: Is there a message in your book that you want readers to grasp?
D: In short the story is about dealing with grief, loss and depression, but my primary goal in this story was to create a depiction of Snow White that felt like a real person.

In most popular retellings fairy tale princesses, particularly of the Disney variety, in spite of horrible trauma and tragedy, the heroines seem largely untouched by it. Thy just simply don’t appear to have the same weaknesses and failings as regular people and do not generally suffer any long term impacts of those traumatic experiences. If you really examine the story of Snow White as a human being, there is some really interesting potential for a great deal of darkness. In my approach, I try to more accurately examine the likely impacts that a life of neglect and abuse (like the one Snow White was forced to endure) would have on a person in real life. It’s the sort of thing that has the potential to break someone and I wanted to explore that struggle and triumph over it more thoroughly. The Reflections of Queen Snow White essentially desanitizes the story and tries to look at Snow White as a real woman, real victim, and real survivor of trauma, abuse, and depression.

A: What are you working on at the moment?
B: I’ve got several things in the pipe, but the work that is currently on my front burner is a YA/Fantasy/Sci-Fi Novel in its beta reading phase called Aaru. Here’s the synopsis:

…Death and the stillness of death are the only things certain and common to all in this future…-Friedrich Nietzsche
Rose is dying. Her body is wasted and skeletal. She is too sick and weak to move. Every
day is an agony and her only hope is that death will find her swiftly before the pain grows
too great to bear.
She is sixteen years old.
Rose has made peace with her fate, but her younger sister, Koren, certainly has not.
Though all hope appears lost Koren convinces Rose to make one final attempt at saving
her life after a mysterious man in a white lab coat approaches their family about an
unorthodox and experimental procedure. A copy of Rose’s radiant mind is uploaded to a
massive super computer called Aaru a virtual paradise where the great and the righteous
might live forever in an arcadian world free from pain, illness, and death. Elysian
Industries is set to begin offering the service to those who can afford it and hires Koren to
be their spokes-model.
Within a matter of weeks, the sisters’ faces are nationally ubiquitous, but they soon
discover that neither celebrity nor immortality is as utopian as they think. Not everyone is
pleased with the idea of life everlasting for sale.
What unfolds is a whirlwind of controversy, sabotage, obsession, and danger. Rose and
Koren must struggle to find meaning in their chaotic new lives and at the same time hold
true to each other as Aaru challenges all they ever knew about life, love, death and
everything they thought they really believed.
I’m going to try to go the traditional publishing route this Summer or Fall, but if that doesn’t work out, I may self-publish again since it has gone so well for The Reflections of Queen Snow White 

 

Giveaway

Enter to win Two ebook copies of the book!!!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Thanks for reading,
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