Interview with Christopher Cloud Author of the Young Adult Fantasy Novel Adelita’s Secret

Adelita's Secret Book Tour

Today, we're shining the book spotlight on a young adult fantasy novel, Adelita’s Secret thanks to Rebecca's Writing Services. Christopher Cloud is an award winning novelist with his collection of young adult novels.  

About Adelita’s Secret 

Lost in a superficial world of materialism and social status—and ashamed of her Latino heritage—seventeen-year-old Adelita Noé is loved by two men, two men separated by a hundred years and vastly different stations in life. One man owns little more than the shirt on his back. The other, a poet at heart, is heir to a vast fortune. Their love for Adelita serves as the backdrop for the Latino girl’s quest to better understand herself and her Mexican roots.

Read Chapter 1 – 4 on Amazon

Title: Adelita’s Secret

Author: Christopher Cloud

Genre: young adult fantasy romance

Title is available at Amazon kindle or paperback

Pick up your copy at Barnes & Noble

Interview

Q: Christopher, Do you have any advice for new writers/authors?

There’s an old adage in the writing business that insists writers should write what they know. Twenty-years ago that was true, but not today. The availability of the Internet affords writers the luxury of writing in-depth on any subject. Your story may require a great deal of research, but if you’re willing to invest the time, the Internet allows a writer to qualify himself/herself as an expert on any subject. The Internet has eliminated those long, exhausting trips to the library, and outshines even the Ancient Library of Alexandria.

Q: What are your writing tips for others?

Don’t be afraid, at first, to write poorly. All writers, from Stephen King to Mark Twain, have written stories they’re not particularly proud of.  These stories are usually shoved to the back burner awaiting a serious rewrite. Most never see the light of day. I look back over stories I wrote in college and cringe, they are so poorly written. But that’s how writers improve. There can be no success without a few failures. We cannot all be a Truman Capote, who is said never to have received a rejection letter. 

Q: Tell us a little about your next book or writing project.         

At the moment, I’m between novels. I have established a few criteria for all of my novels, and my next is no exception. The story must be either middle-grade or young adult and have some social relevance. I've boiled my story ideas down to three candidates.

About Christopher Cloud

Author Christopher Cloud

 

Award winning author Christopher Cloud began writing fiction full time after a long career in journalism and public relations. He writes middle-grade and young adult novels..Cloud graduated from the University of Missouri in 1967 with a degree in journalism. He has worked as a reporter, editor, and columnist at newspapers in Texas, California, and Missouri. He was employed by a Fortune 100 company as a public relations executive, and later operated his own public relations agency. Cloud attended high school in Japan, and lives in Joplin, Missouri. His website Is: www.christophercloud.com

Visit Christopher Cloud’s website

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More books by Christopher Cloud

Latitudes: A Story of Coming Home

About Latitudes; A Story of Coming Home 

Latitudes: A Story of Coming Home

LATITUDES – A story of one boy overcoming dysfuntion, dislocation and distance…
When Father and Mother, a highflying young American lawyer and his party-hard bride, fall prey to the self-destructive lure of alcohol and sexual liberation, Will and his sisters pay the price in divorce and kidnappings that take them back and forth between the rain forest hideaways of coastal Latin America and the placid suburbs of Long Island. Will identifies with the oppressed workers laboring in his father’s fast food restaurant and longs for American freedom. Father remarries the daughter of a local aristocrat, and Will is sent off to the hothouse world of a New England boarding school.
Swimming in a sea of Fair Isle sweaters and LL Bean boots, Will discovers a core of resilience in himself that allows him to survive, thrive, and ultimately embrace the flawed and varied worlds he inhabits. Will reconnects with his Mother, sinking into a New York City world of Irish bars and one night stands he cannot save her from. With a little help from friends, and a high school Shakespeare class taught by the school’s closeted gay athletic trainer, Will begins to see the possibility of finding his true path. Latitudes charts the birth pangs of a quest for self and soul — from a tropical childhood to a coming of age on the road.

Purchase the e-book format or book format at Amazon

 
Read the Excerpt

This time of uncertainty came to an end before it could gel into something, a pattern, a new beginning or different stamp to the days. It was one day in late August, an ordinary moment that would not have remained in his memory, much as the days that preceded it. In Will’s mind he and his sisters, their new neighborhood friends, seemed born full-blown in the backyard in the midst of some forgotten game. He was immersed again, as in the swimming pool on Margarita Island, in his inner thoughts even with the swirl of kids and dogs and the sun passing through the bright blue sky, as two cars pulled up on the street, low-slung, long and dark, their red brake lights warning to stop and look. Out stepped four or five men in pale trench coats. As they walked up the driveway, Alexa gasped.

"Father," she said. Will had recognized him at almost the same moment.

"Father," he repeated and broke into a run as Father smiled and held out his arms. The other men stopped in their tracks. Father hugged the four children. It was unusual, but exciting that he’d come all this way to rejoin them. The other men from the two cars must have been his friends.

"How about an ice cream?" he asked. This seemed unusual and exciting also. They had never known him to offer treats, but maybe this was his way of breaking the ice, start in on a new footing.

"Sure," Will said, and Alexa agreed, eager as he was, speaking for all three girls. They all four sat in the backseat of the back car. Father sat in the front while another man drove. As the cars sped away, the babysitter emerged from the house and saw a knot of neighborhood children walking down the sidewalk, but not Will or his sisters. Breathing hard, panic struck. She ran back inside and grabbed the telephone.

About Anthony Caplan

Author Anthony Caplan

Anthony Caplan is an independent writer, teacher and homesteader in northern New England. He has worked at various times as a shrimp fisherman, environmental activist, journalist, taxi-driver, builder, window-washer, and telemarketer. Currently, Caplan is working on restoring a 150 year old farmstead where he and his family tend sheep and chickens, grow most of their own vegetables, and have started a small apple orchard from scratch.

You can find him at http://www.anthonycaplanwrites.com/

Order your book today, Latitudes: A Story of Coming Home