Women’s Fiction Book Tour & Giveaway: Belonging Places by Maryann Weston 4/16/14 – 4/30/14

Virtual Book Tour Dates:

4/16/14 - 4/30/14

Genres: Commercial Fiction, Women's Fiction, Contemporary Fiction

Tour Promotional Price:

List price: $1.99 [52% reduction] - Beginning 8am {PST}  16th April - 22 April ending 8am {PST}. 

Blurb:

Three women; three stories on life, lessons and love. Three journeys towards the belonging place; three journeys back to self.

Liliana Flint-Smith is starting out on her own. Leaving a dysfunctional family behind her and with nothing but a university degree in librarianship, Liliana moves to a remote village  in the country. Different from everyone else in the town, she must find  her place in a society that doesn’t take kindly to strangers. With the  help of an old woman who lives in the flat next to her, Liliana begins  to find herself and discovers it was never about her changing, but about learning to be herself.

Estelle Wainwright is successful. She’s burning up the career  ladder and has just made editor at a national women’s magazine. Her  husband Joel is also carving out his niche as an architect and, together with son Corey, is the picture of success. Or are they? Journey with  Estelle as she fights the tension within herself: work and home, career  and husband, businesswoman and woman, and navigates through a crisis  that will test the decisions she has made about how she lives her life.

Jill Bridges is struggling to stay afloat. With the loss of  her husband and her children busy with their own lives, she’s facing the prospect of a nursing home. But it’s her independence that makes her  life worth living and she’ll be damned if she’ll bow to society’s plans  for her. With a fierce will, Jill must find a way to triumph over old  age and emerge into a life that still holds meaning.

See The Book Trailer on Youtube!

Excerpt:

1 JOURNEYS

Liliana brushed her long, brown hair off her face and gazed dreamily out the
window. Behind the thick pane of glass the countryside whirred by –  green trees and order were giving way to the yellow straw colour of freshly harvested wheat crops. The sheep were already beginning to eat the stubble. Everything in the country was about use and reuse. Everything was valued, accounted for, and had a place. Unlike her.

It hadn’t taken much to get her to leave her home in Sydney. She hardly  ever saw her mum anymore and the reality was they just didn’t connect.  If they ever had, it was long, long ago, when Liliana was a child. She always liked to think her mum would have given her those giant cuddles and would have planted copious kisses on her baby cheeks…but she knew that probably wasn’t the truth.

Liliana did have one fond memory – the day she was beaten up at school. When  she came home with her bloodied lip to show her mum what ‘they’ had done to her, her mum had responded with uncharacteristic tenderness. Sitting down so she was at eye level, she had held Liliana’s head between her  hands and said: “Girl, don’t you ever let those bastards win. Alright?  You fight back, you hear?” And then she had begun to sob in Liliana’s ear, deflated and defeated, the black circles under her eyes deepening to a purple colour before Liliana’s child eyes.

As Liliana grew up and didn’t need caring for as much, her mum came home
less and less. It wasn’t unusual for her mum – everyone called her Mrs  Smith – to do a runner with a man she’d met at the local pub. Eventually she stopped coming back at all when Liliana was 16. And that was a relief for Liliana.

Of course the neighbours in her rundown apartment block in Blacktown tried to help, but she invented an aunt, pretending to speak to her ‘aunt’  loudly at night; shutting them all out. With enough invention and cold  shouldering they left her alone, probably reasoning that she was, after all, 16 years old and eligible to leave school and go to TAFE or get a job. Well that’s what Liliana did. She went to TAFE, but not to do a typing course like most girls in her school year; she went there to get her Higher School Certificate. With the help of a few caring teachers, Liliana finished school and enrolled in the University of Western Sydney. Of course it wasn’t as prestigious as getting accepted by SydneyUniversity with a tremendously high score, but her pass enabled her to get into a Bachelor of Librarianship and she was very happy about that, because books were Liliana’s life.

For as long as she could remember, she had immersed herself in other  people’s words, and worlds. The grimy, yellow walls of her flat, and the mildew growing on her bathroom ceiling, couldn’t contain her fiery  imagination. She left her life far behind when she travelled with the  characters that inhabited those pages. At first she learned all about England through the eyes of a 12 year old heroine who had magical powers and lots of friends. Bethany Flint became Liliana’s idol and she began styling her hair like Bethany – braiding the front so it didn’t hang limply around her oval face. Unbeknown to her, pulling her hair back away from her face showed her eyes – almond shaped and golden, and it was a distinct improvement on the Gothic look she had been cultivating. It was around that time she added ‘Flint’ to her name in a tribute to her heroine; the beautiful, rich and popular Bethany Flint.

Shemarked her ‘serious’ stage at around 14 years of age with an ode to Hemingway, reading copiously and learning about cosmopolitan Paris. She took on the same joie de vivre as Hemingway after that – at once distant and detached, and passionate and life affirming at the same time.

So, as Liliana Flint-Smith and with a world of books in her head, she had  progressed through her three years at university, barely there in the back of the classroom but soaking up the lectures and the knowledge of her generous tutors. Although her reports always said she needed to find her voice, Liliana let the books do the talking for her. Between her books and letting everyone else speak, she really didn’t have to make much of an effort, seeing as all the people she knew – the characters in her books and the real people in the streets and at university –  loved to speak…a lot! It really didn’t much matter that she had little to say each day.

Buy Links:

Amazon 

About the Author:

Maryann Weston is a professional writer, training initially as a journalist and editor.

She has made it her mission to follow her dreams, including writing novels, and has combined her love of new challenges and new horizons with a vivid imagination and ability to tell a good story.

Maryann has a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) and is also a qualified teacher and counsellor, with a Graduate Diploma in Education and a Diploma of Community Services.

She currently works as a journalist, editor and public relations  professional and is a mum to three boys. She lives with her family in rural NSW, Australia.

Maryann also writes action/adventure books for teenagers including  Shadowscape and Dawn of the Shadowcasters. Both are available on Amazon under her pen name M.R. Weston.

Author Links:

Twitter, on Facebook at Imagine If – Maryann Weston Books , follow her blog or visit her website.

The story behind the story

Last year I had an itch that needed scratching. I had been thinking a lot about what it takes to belong; that sense of place and a feeling that says ‘this feels right to me’. And, conversely, the feeling that says ‘this is not right for you; a hundred years could go by and it still wouldn’t be right’. A sense of belonging is a feeling felt at the spiritual level that can’t be ignored, I believe.

I also believe that when something is felt on a spiritual level, and that tug is strong and unwavering, the universe conspires to let you know that there is not only something you must confront, but there is also another path for you to follow. These watershed moments set you on a journey back to self.

I have a favorite quote that has been with me for years. It belongs to TS Eliot and around 25 years ago I discovered it, not really understanding its significance. Now I know that it means the journey is always towards self-discovery and back to self.

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know that place for the first time.”

And so with something that needed to be said on my chest, I began writing Belonging Places. I broke it into three stories to represent a woman’s life stages: Young Liliana – a girl at odds with the world and moving from the desolate city to a small country town where she finds herself; Estelle the up and coming career woman and mother feeling the tug of war that most working mums confront; and Jill, the elderly lady who loses her life partner and must find her way back to herself and a new life.

These three stories will not be unfamiliar to women, indeed they may have experienced similar circumstances, patterns and, ultimately, decisions. I know I did. But the external journeys these women take are overshadowed by the enormous internal processes they undergo. Through confronting their feelings and finding the courage to change their lives, they find a way through their spiritual crises.

Once I finished writing Belonging Places, I felt much better. The itch had gone and I could look at my characters and, through them, understand my own journeys and decisions over the years. In one way Belonging Places was an intense period of reflection for me that brought with it renewed understanding of what it means to be belong. As a result, I don’t get taken in by smokescreens anymore because in writing this book, like my characters, I have confronted what I deserve, and that is the right to belong and when that is absent, the courage to step forward to find my belonging place.

Giveaway:

Enter to win a print copy of Dawn of the Shadowcasters!

Click here to enter.