📚 A Bookish Chat with 'Northern Echoes' Author Melody Ash | Author Interview | #AuthorInterview #BlogTour #Interview

Today we welcome Melody Ash to The Writer's Life e-Magazine! Melody is the author of the novel, Northern Echoes. This interview is part of her Northern Echoes Blog Tour by Pump Up Your Book. Enjoy!

Caitlin Benoit assumed the next destination would be her time, her world. Instead, the stone thrusts her further into the past and onto a different continent.

Now in 1831 England, she’s discovered by William, the Duke of Lancaster. By sheer luck, he’s willing to allow her into his manor. While she fights to gain a footing in this new time, Caitlin discovers the stone also ripped John from Charleston.

Everything she thought she knew about how the stone worked is false, and neither John nor her understand how to escape the grip of the past. As they work to uncover the mystery of the stone, an acquaintance of the Duke plots an intricate scheme certain to destroy them all. She and John must solve the puzzle in an unknown amount of time or risk getting stuck—or buried—in 1831.

Book Information

Release Date: March 3, 2020

Publisher: Independent

Soft Cover: ISBN:979-8619635171; 301 pages; $9.29; eBook $4.99

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3IQZteU

TWL: Welcome to The Writer's Life! How did you come up with the idea to write your book?

Melody: Thank you for having me!

The inspiration for the series, (because it was the series that I understood before I knew the story of Northern Echoes) came from a lot of different interests of mine: movies, exploring, gaming. Even the main character is based on, and a combination of, my two kiddos.

TWL: Can you give us a short excerpt?

Author: Absolutely!
Air emanated through Caitlin Benoit like life itself as she inhaled with lungs still recovering from the constriction of time travel. A full rich zephyr. She heaved another breath, the fresh rush inflating her chest. Relief electrified every nerve, and Caitlin's pulse quickened. One more time, a bit slower now, the breath cleansed as she gazed through eyes still blurred from travel.

Sketchy lines of a horse and its rider slowly came into focus, and as the man stopped in front of her, his gentle brown eyes seemed laced with confusion. Dressed in a navy tailcoat over a white silk shirt and beige wool pants, he looked more Georgian than Victorian, and those clothes placed him—and now Caitlin—in the early eighteen-hundreds. And the location…

Her eyes strayed from the man to the grounds beyond the rider. Trees, sloping hills, a magnificent manor house. The far forests seemed to stretch for miles in a thick blanket of green. But they couldn't be relied upon to pinpoint a location, not when similar woodlands spanned the globe within the temperate woodland biomes of the world. It was the house itself that provided the clues, one she recognized from several period movies—a Hollywood favorite.

Chatling Hall, an aristocratic home to a Duke of England. Only that made little sense. After traveling in time to the plantation in South Carolina and living among slaves for a week, she'd been instructed how to utilize the stone she'd discovered at the archeological dig in 2018 and followed those instructions to the letter. Should have earned her a one-way ticket out of 1859 back home. But if this was England, then not only had she traveled further into the past but also managed to hop the large pond between two continents.

"Madam? Can I be of some assistance?" the man asked for what Caitlin thought might be the second time. Maybe the third. Her brain was only just beginning to focus, to wrap around the context of what her eyes saw.

"I think I'm lost," Caitlin muttered as she shook her head.

"I venture to guess so much. Pray tell, what is your name?" He slid from the horse, boots raising a cloud of dust. The man removed his hat, hung it casually from two fingertips. Manners that screamed early-century Europe.

"Caitlin Benoit." She held out one hand, though a handshake wouldn't fit the customs if she was standing in—what?—eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Britain. Still, surprise tickled her when the man took hold of her hand and gently kissed her fingers.

"It is my pleasure to meet you, Miss Caitlin." After a bow of his head, the man replaced the top hat and straightened. "William, Duke of Lancaster."

The duke himself. The stone couldn't give me a little break and place me at the feet of a peasant or a groomsman. "Is this your home?"

"It is," William said with a smile. "Madam, if you are indeed lost, I welcome you as a guest of Chatling Hall until your traveling companions return."

"Thank you. I appreciate that."

He tilted his head, studied her once more. Her modern English against his very proper British accent likely sounded as strange to him as his did to her. And her clothes were as far removed from anything a proper English woman would wear. They wouldn't even be invented for nearly a hundred and fifty years. Caitlin shifted her weight, glanced over his shoulder. If she was in danger, what escape could she have?

"Are you familiar with riding on the back of a horse?"

The question cut through the noise in her head. Caitlin raised a brow. Horseback riding was one of her favorite past times, but the way she rode would make nineteenth-century women blush in shades to match their pretty, fancy dresses while men would question their value as a proper lady.

TWL: What part of the book was the most fun to write?

Melody: Actually, Northern Echoes was a lot of fun to write overall. With the story being set in the 1800s England, the research was fun and easy. The characters were cooperative (unlike later books in the series), and storyline came out how I was expecting. That doesn’t happen very often, so I really enjoyed it.

TWL: What’s one fact about your book that would surprise people?

Melody: The main character is actually a good combination of my two kiddos. It wasn’t necessarily planned that way, but it’s how it worked out.

TWL: What other books are you working on and when will they be published?

Melody: Right now, I’m working on finishing this series. The last two books in the series, Familiar Echoes and Western Echoes, will be available in a box set hopefully by the end of the year, or at the latest early next year. I also have another series planned, and the first book in that series is already written and ready for release when Web of Echoes has been fully released.

TWL: Finally, what message are you trying to get across with your book?

Author: Northern Echoes truly focuses on trusting those around you, even when you know you’re strong enough to do it on your own.

TWL: Do you have any final words?

Melody: I just want to say thank you for having me. It’s been a lot of fun.

Title: Northern Echoes
Author: Melody Ash
Publisher: Independent
Pages: 301
Genre: Scifi / Time Travel

Caitlin Benoit assumed the next destination would be her time, her world. Instead, the stone thrusts her further into the past and onto a different continent.