Vampire Crush Tour: Guest Post and Giveaway!

I'm kicking off the 10 day Vampire Crush Tour today! At the end of each post for the tour will be hints for the one big giveaway so make sure you visit them all! 

If you haven't heard of Vampire Crush here is the Goodreads page, and my review from December for more information on it. If you haven't read Vampire Crush yet I high recommend that you do, it was very good!

Here's the Gust Post from the author of Vampire Crush, A. M. Robinson. 

The Sims: Vampire Crush, or One Way to Cure Writer’s Block

All together, it took me about fourteen months to finish a first draft of Vampire Crush. Five months of writing the first half, five months of writing the second half, and four long excruciating months where I could only tap out a few sentences before getting frustrated and deciding that my time was better spent familiarizing myself with the available options on Netflix streaming. (“Oh!

How nice. Twenty bazillion seasons of everything.”)

I know that some people claim that writer’s block doesn’t exist; I suspect these people are robots. Or, okay, maybe that’s crazy. If they are not robots, perhaps their family is being held hostage by robots until they complete their manuscripts. Because a definite something happened to me around the halfway point, something that made it feel like writing two-hundred pages was the literary equivalent of climbing a crazy ton of stairs. To this day, I’m not sure why it happened; I still loved joking around with Sophie and the zany crew of vampires who descended upon her school for evil and teen magazines. And it’s not like I didn’t have any idea what would come next—gosh darn it! I had an outline! And, okay, it was on the back of a Starbucks receipt, but still! Basically, all I knew was that every time I opened the document, all I could manage was a few rounds of tweaking words back and forth before I inevitably had to go to bed so I would not be Work Zombie the next day. (Fiiilessss. . . Outlooook. . . Mrghhhh).

After months of this, I knew that something had to be done. Perhaps I just needed to find a way

to have fun with the characters that did not involve a Word document. Then, one day while I was decorating an elaborate mansion in The Sims, genius struck! (For those of you who aren’t as familiar with The Sims, it’s basically a computerized dollhouse where you create characters that look like all of your favorite TV characters and put them in elaborate houses you have painted in jelly-bean colors and then spend several hours of your valuable time trying to get them to make out in a hot tub that is not the normal hot tub but the hot tub specifically designed for making out. . . But your experience may vary if you are, in fact, sane.).

Anyway, I was convinced that this was THE BEST IDEA I HAD

EVER HAD. Not only did The Sims let you turn characters into VAMPIRES, they had aspirations that fit perfectly with all of my VAMPIRE CRUSH CREATIONS. I was so excited I was thinking in caps at this point. Vlad was obsessed with climbing up the vampire social ladder, so his aspiration would be Popularity; Violet was boy-crazy so hers would be Romance; Sophie just wants the facts so hers would be Knowledge; James missed his parents so his would be Family. THIS WAS AMAZING. All I’d have to do was watch and the rest of the book would write itself! I was going to get some sort of medal for this, and not just from the Society for Creative Procrastination.

Unfortunately, none of what The Sims gave me was usable. James’s Family aspiration made him want to grow up and have babies with pretty much every lady sim he saw, while Sophie would sneak away from every attempt to make things romantic to go look through the telescope on the roof in search of aliens. What’s more, none of computers vampire sims wanted anything to do with Vlad! . . . Okay, that one was

actually pretty accurate, but it also meant that I couldn’t vampirize Vlad. And if you can’t vampirize your main evil vampire, well then, what do you do?

According to the Sims, you throw water balloons and practice yoga. According to me, you decide that it’s much, much easier to just write the book the way you want it, without your characters wandering off to eat grilled cheese all the time.

Yep, I was cured. Although I imagine there are easier ways.

Thanks to A.M. Robinson for the guest post! I've never played Sims but i've always wanted to and making characters like that sounds fun. Plus if it can cure writters block whats not to like?

Here's the information for the Giveaway.

A.M. Robinson will be giving away three PRIZES to three different people who follow the tour. To enter, all you have to do is visit every Blog (Mine being the first)to copy the secret code and also follow A.M. Robinson on Facebook OR Twitter. At the end of the tour, your final stop will be Good Choice Reading where they will have a form for you to fill out and submit everything you have collected. It is not a requirement to follow my blog, but I would really appreciate it if you did. 

These are the amazing prizes!

Here are the prize packages and Andrea said it is INTERNATIONAL

GRAND PRIZE:
+++Signed HARDCOVER copy of Vampire Crush
+++A pair of whale-dotted pajama pants, a la Sophie.
+++Bat-shaped cookie cutter
+++Cute vampire monster mirror
+++"Vampire Blood" hand gel.

TWO ALTERNATE PRIZES
+++Signed paperback copy of Vampire Crush
+++"Vampire Blood" hand-gel

Here's the first part of the Secret Code : He looks

^I want all of these! Whale pajama pants? How awesome is that? (These are mentioned in the book in case you haven't read it yet) 

The next stop in the Vampire Crush blog tour is Once Upon a Twilight (www.onceuponatwilight.com). 

These are also the links to A.M. Robinson's Facebook and Twitter pages. Make sure you follow both if you want to enter the contest.

--Danielle