Ten Tiny Breaths Blog Tour: guest post & giveaway

By Laurie T - March 26, 2013

We welcome back our January 2013 Author of the Month, K.A. Tucker, as we are today's stop on the Ten Tiny Breaths Blog Tour. Hosted by Ink Slinger PR, we are thrilled to be a part of a tour in support of a novel we care so much about. Ten Tiny Breaths made our Top 3 New Adult Books We Love in 2012 list (here's our review). For today, we have a guest post by the author and a tour wide giveaway for everyone to enter. And we wanted to mention how much we're LOVIN' the new cover!

Ten Tiny Breaths by K.A. Tucker

New Adult contemporary*Paperback, 262 pages

Publication: December 11th 2012 by Papoti Books

Purchase: Amazon

Just breathe, Kacey. Ten tiny breaths. Seize them. Feel them. Love them.

Four years ago Kacey Cleary’s life imploded when her car was hit by a drunk driver, killing her parents, boyfriend and best friend. Still haunted by memories of being trapped inside, holding her boyfriend’s lifeless hand and listening to her mother take her last breath, Kacey wants to leave her past behind. Armed with two bus tickets, twenty year old Kacey and her fifteen year old sister Livie escape Grand Rapids, Michigan to start over in Miami. Struggling to make ends meet, Kacey needs to figure out how to get by. But Kacey’s not worried. She can handle anything—anything but her mysterious neighbor in apartment 1D.

Trent Emerson has smoldering blue eyes, deep dimples, and perfectly skates that irresistible line between nice guy and bad boy. Hardened by her tragic past, Kacey is determined to keep everyone at a distance, but their mutual attraction is undeniable and Trent is determined to find a way into Kacey’s guarded heart—even if it means that an explosive secret could shatter both their worlds.

Kacey’s Healing Process:

As with all of my books, I start the first draft after I develop a rough outline. With TTB, it was a very rough outline. So rough, I didn’t have the ending and I didn’t have the “stages” laid out, other than to know that Kacey would need to forgive in the end in order to move on. The other stages fell together as the story unfolded in what I believe is a natural progression.

I did do research on coping mechanisms and PTSD—causes, short and long-term effects, recovery—as I wanted the experience to hold true to a survivor. But, this book is about Kacey and what she needed to go through as a character, and how her personality and state of mind would react. That’s why I didn’t fit this story into a traditional five-stage recovery process that you would find in medical research. That, to me, felt forced (though the overall steps are not too far off).

There end up being nine stages in Kacey’s recovery process and she needs to face each and every one of them to move forward. I identified the stages last, as I walked through the chapters and scenes. The character transitions jumped off the page and that’s when I knew they were the right ones. I picture them along a curvy line: overall, from start to finish, the line moves upward but with waves along the way, some dipping deeply. Kacey is a fighter and in a very bad place. I knew that, to get out of that darkness, it would take significant experiences (plot points), several setbacks (the various intense scenes where Kacey lashes out, or reacts badly), and a dramatic push (her “discovery”). It couldn’t be a smooth progression to be true to Kacey’s character.

Thank you so much to Reader Girls for having me here. AGAIN! You fabulous ladies are so supportive.

About the author:

K.A. Tucker

Born in small-town Ontario, Kathleen published her first book at the age of six with the help of her elementary school librarian and a box of crayons. She is a voracious reader and the farthest thing from a genre-snob, loving everything from High Fantasy to Chick Lit. Kathleen currently resides in a quaint small town outside of Toronto with her husband, two beautiful girls, and an exhausting brood of four-legged creatures.