Indie Author Spotlight - AZ Green - Interview & Giveaway

Beasthood (The Hidden Blood Series, #1)

New Adult Shapeshifter Novel

May 22, 2013

Meet Jaz. She's not girlie, she's not sweet, she's not a pushover. She's feisty, she's stubborn, she's determined. She's broken and she's haunted. She thought she was human. She thought wrong.

Trapped in a world she can't escape, living with a community she resents, she soon discovers the walls of her kind are riddled with chilling secrets. As the mysteries begin to bleed through the cracks, Jaz finds herself sucked into a whirlpool of lies, secrets, murder and deceit, causing her to rethink everything she had at first believed.

What is the price of knowing too much? Well, Jaz is about to find out...

You can snag your own copy on:

AMAZON

A.Z.Green was born in 1989 and raised in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. She met the love of her life aged 16 and moved to London, finally settling down near Brighton. She has written various novels and short stories in her lifetime but has only recently decided to publish. She writes a wide range of genres such as dark fantasy, romance, thriller, historical fiction, dystopian, horror and paranormal. Her books tend to fit better into the New Adult genre as they usually have a more mature theme. Beasthood is her first published novel.

You can connect with AZ on:

TWITTER / GOODREADS / BLOG

Welcome AZ! Can you tell us your main inspiration behind this novel?

The inspiration of Beasthood is a mixture of three things, a dream, an actor and my imagination. The beginning part of the story (during Jaz's journey to Deer Creek) was based roughly on a dream I had, which sparked my inspiration to create this novel. The character that is one of my favourites, Driver, is based on an actor who has the similar voice, calm and frowning disposition and appearance as him. Though the actor is a fair bit older than Driver's character. If you're curious, look up Mark Strong, and imagine a younger version of him. His role that I think closely resembles Driver (though I wrote this before the film) is the role of Jacob Sternwood in Welcome To The Punch. My imagination created all the other things such as the beast shape-shifting creatures, their village, the whole mystery. I must admit, even I surprise myself with some of the things I come up with.

Was self-publishing your first choice? 

For this book yes. I had written a novel before Beasthood that is still in the editing process. I had sent that book to a publishers, then a few days later I started writing BH. When I got a rejection email six months later from the publishers I was so into writing BH I carried on and put my other novel on hold. I just decided BH would be better self-published so I had more freedom. I don't know why, I had considered sending that to a publishers too but the self-publishing just sort of happened. I don't regret it.

What was the most nerve wracking part of the process?

The moment I put it up. That day I was all nerves, I wanted to get it right. The hard part is knowing what format is better to convert to the kindle format. I made the mistake of converting my word doc to a PDF file and then uploaded that to amazon. It completely messed up the formatting. I was getting paranoid when two people refunded it. I checked it for myself, saw the mess and discovered using a word doc to upload to amazon was a better option. The whole issue with page breaks before a new chapter was a hassle. But I think the formatting is fine now. That's the hardest part about the publishing process. The hardest part after that is getting it noticed and promoting it.

As a self-published author, did you choose to edit your novel yourself? 

Yes. I had help from friends who read through it for me though. They aren't professional proofreaders as such but they've read enough books to know what mistakes to find. It's always helpful to have a fresh pair of eyes go through your work.

What was the biggest change you made to the story and/or characters?
The biggest change was a decision I was painstakingly deciding on about a character's fate. I wasn't sure whether to kill them off or not. It's a hard decision to make and I think I made the right one. It was important to the plot of not just this book, but the next in the series. 

Do you have any unusual writing habits that aide your process and/or character development? 

I wouldn't know if my habits are unusual but I occasionally record my voice on my phone when I'm playing out conversations I plan to write. I speak out-loud without the recorder too, and try it over and over again so I get an idea of what I want the characters to say in that scene. It helps me ground the situation and practice different ways of going about it. Character interaction is important to me. As for everything else, I write my ideas on paper then onto my laptop. Another technique I've used but not so much with Beasthood is spider diagrams to develop characters. With Beasthood I used the family tree approach and wrote down all the members of the Deer Creek community currently living there (not including those who live outside permanently/ temporarily at that time) and I gave them all names, relationships and a short description of their appearance and character. As I involved some of them in the novel I would go back to the family tree and add more info about them the more I developed them as I went along.

Is there one passage or scene from your novel that you are most fond of? 

Now that is a tough one! My favourite scenes are probably the ones with Nik and Jaz or Driver and Jaz. But then I like the scenes with Jaz and Carr, and also with Alf. I also like Garik's scenes, he was a great character to write. So I'll try and choose wisely here. Okay I've decided on an adrenaline pumped scene. I would do the lovey dovey ones but I'll leave you all hanging on that front. 

This is a long extract from Chapter 7. It is while Jaz is in the car travelling to Deer Creek and she is overcome with sickness and feels drowsy. I've always loved this scene, writing it and reading it back. It is a favourite also amongst my readers. 

Her feet and ankles were throbbing and the strange pressure made them feel like they were swollen with blood, about ready to explode. Her head was pounding, her stomach was so fragile; the little jolts as her capturer’s boots hit the ground at each step made her want to throw up again. Her whole body was bruised and sore from the struggle and the exertion she’d put it through. Her chest was feeling the worse of it. She still hadn’t recovered from being winded.

Everything hurt but that wasn’t what worried her.

She felt faint and dizzy and couldn’t think straight. She was exhausted; inches from a deep and long sleep. It made her panic.

Her breathing quickened, becoming uneven and increasingly weaker.

She wheezed in pain at the pressure her panicked breaths put on her bruised chest and winded lungs. Soon the tiredness corrected that. She tried to fight it but she could feel her consciousness slipping away with each step the driver took.

The driver marched further up the dirt road, carrying her close to his chest. He glanced down at her with a pained expression in his eyes.

As he got nearer to the two idiots that couldn’t even perform a simple task of staying hidden, his expression became furious and very frightening.

He was disgusted with himself and everyone else for letting it come to this.

The plan had been to get her in the building and let her sleep while they got down to business; no panic, no problem. The drug would keep her sedated for several hours. Only now she’d wake up in absolute fear. He’d only agreed to do this if he could be the one to break everything to her gently, and slowly. Now the very site of him would horrify her. He clenched his jaw tighter, grinding his teeth.

The plan had totally been fucked up thanks to Barry and Norm for their incompetence. He gave the two men the full force of his glare as he strutted towards them. He walked as if he wasn’t carrying a ten stone burden. That amount of weight was nothing to him.

The two men stepped aside warily as he stormed between them. He stopped just as he walked past them to growl, “You fucked it up. Youwill be dealt with, make no mistake about that.”

The two men held their heads down and warily shuffled several paces behind him.

The aunt and uncle were staring from their place by the car.

By then Jaz had lost consciousness and her eyes were completely shut, her mouth half open as she’d tried to cry out. Her furrowed brow had flattened out now as her mind was lost to the world of sleep. “I hope you’re happy,” he addressed them in a low snarl.

Aunt Erica opened her mouth to speak but her husband squeezed her arm in warning. The sight of the menacing glare on the driver’s face, and her husband’s firm hand made her close her mouth hastily.

The driver stormed forward, leaving the car behind. They weren’t far from the village now. “Let’s get this over with,” he barked loudly, though it wasn't really clear who he was talking to.