Author Ambush & Giveaway with Kerry Schafer

Kerry Schafer lives in Colville, Washington, with her family, which includes two cats, a rescue fish, and a preternaturally large black dog. A self-styled perpetual student, she earned an RN from Royal Alexandra Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta; a BA in English (Honours) from York University in Toronto, Ontario; and an M.Ed. in counseling psychology from Washington State University.

Kerry is the creator of "BEWTWEEN" the first book in the new urban fantasy series The Books of the Between.  Let's take a look at the synopsis to see what the book is all about…

BETWEEN

Coming January 29, 2013

Amazon / B&N  

Vivian Maylor can’t sleep. Maybe it’s because she just broke up with her boyfriend and moved to a new town, or it could be the stress of her new job at the hospital. But perhaps it’s because her dreams have started to bleed through into her waking hours.

All of her life Vivian has rejected her mother’s insane ramblings about Dreamworlds for concrete science and fact, until an emergency room patient ranting about dragons spontaneously combusts before her eyes—forcing Viv to consider the idea that her visions of mythical beasts might be real.

And when a chance encounter leads her to a man she knows only from her dreams, Vivian finds herself falling into a world that seems strange and familiar all at once—a world where the line between dream and reality is hard to determine, and hard to control…

Sounds great huh?  Before you run off to preorder the book, let's check out Kerrys Guest Post about and see what she had to say about the "Invasion of Dragons"!!

An Invasion of Dragons

The dragons in Between were not intentional. In fact, they didn't exist at all in early versions of the book. But they found their way in through the crevices of my imagination and invited themselves onto the page. I ask you this – who is going to argue with a dragon?

Well, Zee would. And Vivian.

Me? I'm not much for arguing with dragons so I let them have their way. Still, their unexpected appearance in my writing did set me to wondering about where they came from. A little introspection made me realize that some sort of personal dragon mythology is embedded deeply in my psyche, and has been since I was a little kid. The question is, where did it come from? My mother was never much for fairytales, so the hours she spent reading to me before I learned to read for myself did not include dragons. Nor was there much by way of dragon literature readily available to me.

Maybe it was something I watched, then, - Maleficent, the evil fairy in Disney's Sleeping Beauty, who transforms herself into a dragon. Or something I read in the Arthurian tales I discovered in the school library. I know it wasn't Eustace the Dragon because I discovered C.S. Lewis and Narnia late in my teenage years. Tolkien's Smaug came to me even later.

And then it hit me, chapter, text, and verse. My earliest dragons were Biblical, drawn straight out of the terrifying parts of Revelations:

"A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born."

Now there's a dragon for you – powerful and mysterious and deadly. And, of course, evil, since Revelations goes on to make it quite clear this is the Devil we're talking about.

I've since met kindlier dragons. Puff, that very sad dragon who lived by the sea. Draco, the dragon voiced by Sean Connery in the movie Dragon Heart. The wise (and dangerous) dragons that Ged encounters in A Wizard of Earthsea. The very civilized dragons Princess Cimorene takes care of in Dealing with Dragons. I discovered that in some eastern dragon mythologies the creatures are considered wise and the bringers of good fortune, and I'm indebted to author Laura Bickle for introducing me to The Dragon Ladies.

These dragon stories have tamed my original terrifying and evil dragon, but not by much. If you look at the cover of Between you will see that Vivian is holding a dragon in a crystal sphere. I've had a lot of people say to me, "I want a dragon in a crystal ball."

To which I respond, "That's all well and good until the dragon gets loose."

Kerry's publisher is giving away a copy of BETWEEN to one winner in the US/CANADA.

Fill out the Rafflecopter form below to enter.

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