Stealing Fire
Susan Sloate
Expected Publication Date- late August 2013
“How do you recognize your soulmate?
In glittery 1980’s Los Angeles, Beau Kellogg is a brilliant
Broadway lyricist now writing advertising jingles and yearning for one more hit
to compensate for his miserable marriage and disappointing life.
Amanda Harary, a young singer out of synch with her
contemporaries, works at a small New York hotel, while she dreams of singing on
Broadway.
When they meet late at night over the hotel switchboard,
what begins will bring them each unexpected success, untold joy, and piercing
heartache ... until they learn that some connections, however improbable, are
meant to last forever.
STEALING FIRE is, at its heart, a story for romantics
everywhere, who believe in the trans formative power of love.”
STEALING FIRE was a 2012 quarter-finalist in the amazon
Breakthrough Novel Award Contest.
Excerpt #1
Six-year-old Amanda wandered over to the
table and picked up the album cover. The name of the show, The Life and Times, was printed in bold letters across the top,
with a pencil sketch of a black top hat and neatly folded white gloves in the
middle. A splashy yellow sun, its rays streaming diagonally, filled the rest of
the cover. She forgot about it, though, as the record began to play.
She loved it instantly.
“Again, Mommy, again!” she said excitedly
when the first song ended.
Her mother shook her head. “Listen to the
rest first.”
Amanda sat down on her favorite soft
footstool near the big brown rocker and listened. She loved it all.
There was one song especially that she
liked. It was about blowing bubbles. She didn’t understand the verse, but she
sang along with the chorus:
“… Bubbles bursting, bursting bubbles …
Breaking dreams with every blow.
I’ll remember each dream burst
Till the final bubbles go.”
She didn’t really
understand the song, but it seemed sad to her.
As with most show
scores, Amanda asked to hear the record again and again. A few months later her
older sister Josie, tossing a ball carelessly around the room, smashed the
record.
Amanda cried and asked her mother to
please buy it again, please. Her
mother explained regretfully that the show had been a `flop’ years before.
There were no copies around, and Josie hadn’t meant to smash it; it was an
accident. “Stop crying now, Amanda,” she said sharply.
She listened to her mother and stopped
crying. But she never forgot the song about bursting bubbles.
Susan Sloate is the author or co-author of more than 20
books, including Realizing You(with Ronald Doades), a recent self-help novel,
and the 2003 #6 Amazon bestseller, Forward to Camelot (with Kevin Finn), which
took honors in 3 literary competitions and was optioned by a Hollywood company
for film production.
She has written young-adult fiction and non-fiction,
including the children’s biography Ray Charles: Find Another Way!, which was
honored in the 2007 Children’s Moonbeam Book Awards. Mysteries Unwrapped: The
Secrets of Alcatraz led to her 2009 appearance on the TV series MysteryQuest on
The History Channel. Amelia Earhart: Challenging the Skies is a perennial
young-adult Amazon bestseller. She has also been a sportswriter and
screenwriter, managed two recent political campaigns, and founded an author’s
festival in her hometown outside Charleston, SC.
Stealing Fire was a Quarter-Finalist in the 2012 Amazon
Breakthrough Novel Award contest and combines autobiographical experience with
her lifelong love of the musical theater. She is proud to be distantly related
to Broadway legend Fred Ebb, the lyricist for Cabaret,Chicago, All That Jazz
and New York, New York.
Visit Susan online at http://susansloate.com.
STEALING FIRE JOURNAL GIVEAWAY
Thanks for hosting me, Jenny!
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