Blog Tour & Giveaway: Keeper of the Bees by Meg Kassel
Keeper of the Bees by Meg Kessel is a companion novel to the Black Bird of the Gallows and just released this week! Check out all the guest post from Meg Kassel, the book information below, and be sure to enter the tour-wide giveaway..
Keeper of the Bees
by Meg Kasselon September 4, 2018
Genres: Young Adult, Paranormal
Bookshop
Goodreads
KEEPER OF THE BEES is a tale of two teens who are both beautiful and beastly, and whose pasts are entangled in surprising and heartbreaking ways.
Dresden is cursed. His chest houses a hive of bees that he can’t stop from stinging people with psychosis-inducing venom. His face is a shifting montage of all the people who have died because of those stings. And he has been this way for centuries—since he was eighteen and magic flowed through his homeland, corrupting its people.
He follows harbingers of death, so at least his curse only affects those about to die anyway. But when he arrives in a Midwest town marked for death, he encounters Essie, a seventeen-year-old girl who suffers from debilitating delusions and hallucinations. His bees want to sting her on sight. But Essie doesn’t see a monster when she looks at Dresden.
Essie is fascinated and delighted by his changing features. Risking his own life, he holds back his bees and spares her. What starts out as a simple act of mercy ends up unraveling Dresden’s solitary life and Essie’s tormented one. Their impossible romance might even be powerful enough to unravel a centuries-old curse.
Series:
Black Bird of the Gallows
by Meg KasselPublished by: Entangled Teen
on September 5, 2017
Genres: Young Adult, Paranormal
Bookshop
A simple but forgotten truth: Where harbingers of death appear, the morgues will soon be full.
Angie Dovage can tell there’s more to Reece Fernandez than just the tall, brooding athlete who has her classmates swooning, but she can’t imagine his presence signals a tragedy that will devastate her small town. When something supernatural tries to attack her, Angie is thrown into a battle between good and evil she never saw coming. Right in the center of it is Reece—and he’s not human.
What’s more, she knows something most don’t. That the secrets her town holds could kill them all. But that’s only half as dangerous as falling in love with a harbinger of death.
Guest Post:
In my books, I tend to overwrite when I begin a project, so I end up cutting a ton of material. The final version is much slimmed down from the early drafts! I’ve never cut less than 20K words from my books. One time, it was over 60K words—enough for a whole other book! That may seem like a lot, but so much of it is stuff I need to write to understand the character, or the world, but doesn’t necessarily move the story forward. My newest release, Keeper of the Bees is no exception. I cut the heck out of this novel long before it came before an agent or editor’s eyes. Take the passage below. I like how I wrote it, but since this section was in the “cut text” folder, I can only assume I found a better way of saying Essie can’t sleep, preferably by working it into dialogue.
I don’t remember cutting this, or why, but it probably had something to do with the fact that this is all “telling” versus “showing” and anyone who has studied fiction writing recently knows that “telling” isn’t the ideal way of conveying information. It’s not active. It’s so very, very skim-able. Still, set apart from the book, this passage illustrates the state of mind of one of the main characters, Essie, as she grapples from a most gruesome discovery in a park near her.
Deleted Excerpt:
The nighttime hours are when the twisted monsters of my subconscious runs free. Those terrible little things lurking at the corners of my mind, the edges of my vision––the night is their domain. They reign over me, dragging me down into sick, frightening dreams where there is no real world, no Aunt Bel, no pills to pull me out of it. I endure the night and the tortured sleep that comes with it. Morning is a relief. I don’t remember ever having a pleasant dream. Tonight definitely won’t be the night that changes.
For the past three nights, since discovering the corpse of that poor dead woman, my dreams have been filled with her, but she’s not lying still and dead on the bushes––oh no, she’s a grotesque corpse chasing me through the woods, flinging her severed toes at me, or another equally horrible variation.
Giveaway:
Blog Tour Organized By:
YA Bound Book Tours
