Virtual Book Tour and Giveaway: Seized by Lynne Cantwell

Today we're welcoming author Lynne Cantwell to the blog on her tour with Goddess Fish Promotions for her urban fantasy story, "Seized" available now -- and with one of the most eye-catching covers I've seen.

Lynne is awarding a $10 Amazon GC to one randomly drawn commenter during the tour. So comment today AND follow her tour (if you click on the banner over there on the left, it'll take you to a list of her tour stops) -- the more you read and comment, the better your odds of winning. You could be introduced to a great new author AND win a GC!

Lynne is sharing five things we'd probably never guess about her -- read and enjoy!

5 Things about Lynne Cantwell

• I have been in forty-nine of the fifty US states. When I was a kid, my parents and I would take a driving vacation every summer. I nailed forty-five states with them, missing only North Dakota, Minnesota, Oregon, Hawaii and Alaska. Since then, I’ve whittled the list down, and now Alaska is the only one left. Maybe next year….

• When I was just a teeny writer, maybe ten or eleven years old, I got into paper dolls, to the point where I was making my own. I would draw and color them on cardboard and cut them out, and then make clothes for them by tracing around each doll on typing paper. I had probably ten or twelve dolls, all told. Of course, they were all friends (some were siblings), and they had their own rock band called The Leading Lamplight. And then I wrote several stories about them, one of which I turned in as a class assignment in fifth grade. I put a note on the story that the characters actually existed as paper dolls that I had created. My teacher, bless her heart, didn’t quite seem to know what to do with that information.

• I went off to college intending to major in music – specifically, clarinet – but I was so intimidated by the TA who was my instructor for private lessons that I never even auditioned for admission to the school. I went home for holiday break after my first semester with no clue what to do next. Then I overheard my mother tell a neighbor on the phone that maybe now I would go into journalism. So thanks, Mom, for inadvertently pointing me in the direction of my first career.

• Former presidential candidate Howard Dean once called me from a humvee in the middle of an ice storm. No, really! I was working for Mutual/NBC Radio News at the time. There had been a pretty severe ice storm in Vermont overnight, and I was delegated the task of calling the state’s office of emergency management to try to get some comments. The woman who answered the phone took my number and said she would have someone call me back. A little while later, then-Governor Dean called me while he was touring the affected area. This was in the days of brick-sized cell phones, so having someone call you from a car was quite the novelty. He proceeded to give me an enthusiastic description of trees bent to breaking under the weight of the ice, power poles snapped, and so on. I always thought afterward that if politics didn’t work out for him, he had a promising future in sports announcing.

• Another time at the same job, I got to interview Larry King. He used to do his radio show from our studios, so we had his direct number in our rolodex. Frank Sinatra had been hospitalized – this was toward the end of his life – and our producer on duty said, “Larry is friends with Frank’s daughter Nancy. Call him and see what he knows.” So I did, and he was very gracious about it. But I’ll tell you, it was a little disconcerting to be interviewing one of the best interviewers in the business.

The winter solstice 2012 won't be the end of the world. It will be the beginning of the end....

Naomi has a pretty sweet life. Respected as a skilled mediator, she has an almost uncanny knack for getting people on both sides of a dispute to agree. And her handsome boyfriend Brock has just proposed to her. But a white buffalo calf is bowing to her in her dreams. And who is the Native American man who has been following her around?

Naomi doesn’t know it, but things are about to change....

Lynne Cantwell has been writing fiction since the second grade, when the kid who sat in front of her showed her a book he had written, and she thought, "I could do that." The result was Susie and the Talking Doll, a picture book illustrated by the author about a girl who owned a doll that not only could talk, but could carry on conversations. The book had dialogue but no paragraph breaks. Today, after a twenty-year career in broadcast journalism and a master's degree in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University (or perhaps despite the master's degree), Lynne is still writing fantasy. Her third novel and her first urban fantasy, Seized: Book One of the Pipe Woman Chronicles, was released in March.

Amazon author page: http://www.amazon.com/Lynne-Cantwell/e/B005JTP5NE/
Smashwords author page: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/lynnecantwell
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/696603.Lynne_Cantwell
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Lynne-Cantwell/172485489493956
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LynneCantwell
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lynnecantwell
Blog: http://hearth-myth.blogspot.com/