Blog Tour | Secrets & Fries at the Starlight Diner - Helen Cox

Tuesday, 10 January 2017


 


Title | Secrets & Fries at the Starlight Diner 

Author | Helen Cox 

Publisher | HarperCollins 

Purchase | Amazon UK 

Pages | 270 Pages 



About The Book 

What brings Bonnie Brooks to The Starlight Diner? And why is she on the run?

As the front-woman in a band, Bonnie is used to being in the spotlight, but now she must hide in the shadows.

Bonnie only has one person who she can turn to: her friend Esther Knight, who waitresses at the Fifties-themed diner. There, retro songs play on the jukebox as fries and sundaes are served to satisfied customers. But where has Esther gone?

Alone in New York City, Bonnie breaks down in front of arrogant news reporter, and diner regular, Jimmy Boyle. Jimmy offers to help her. Can she trust him?

When the kindly owner of the Starlight Diner offers Bonnie work, and she meets charming security officer Nick Moloney, she dares to hope that her luck has changed. Is there a blossoming romance on the cards? And can Bonnie rebuild her life with the help of her Starlight Diner friends?


Guest Post - Author Take Over 


Today, as part of the blog tour I am handing it over to Helen Cox who has a great guest post for you all. I hope you enjoy! 

Who doesn’t love a good writing metaphor? To most people who put pen to paper, New Year is a time where the year ahead feels much like a blank page. We can almost smell the freshness of the paper, like when your teacher used to give you a new exercise book at school.

It’s that sense of possibility that ignites a passion in us. The blank page is an adventure that hasn’t yet happened, and that idea is insanely inspiring.

The fact that we’ll have doodled and scrawled all over the cover in an unsightly fashion by the time term ends is irrelevant. The fact that there’ll be crossings out and spelling errors and prose that is so pretentious you want to poke your eyes out with your own pen when you read it back… who cares?

Because right now, anything can happen on that untouched blank page.

My New Year’s Writing Resolution is to embrace that sense of possibility not just at the beginning of January, but for 365 days of the year. To imbue my daily life with the magic of the written word as much as is humanly possible (told you – pretentious prose and I’m not even half way through January yet).

I’ve chosen this particular resolution because, to be honest, I’m a firm believer in living in the moment. Living by this principle means that it’s not just the next year that’s a blank page, but every day, every hour, every minute. Every sunrise can be a fresh start. Every chime of the clock, a bell heralding an unexpected and delightful plot twist.

Let’s face it, you have no idea what I’m going to write in the next few seconds. You could make some guesses but I could write any word in the entirety of the English language. Or I could make one up just to confuse you.

My giraffe is wearing a top hat.

See.

You didn’t know that was coming.

Which means it might have made you smile and if it did I’m chalking that up as a win.

For me, it’s important to keep a sense of excitement about what I’m writing. If the author is, in any way, weary or disgruntled I’m fairly sure the reader will sense it somehow. That kind of feeling is more contagious than any of us would like.
Treating each day like a blank page also helps us overleap one of the biggest obstacles we face with major writing projects: how daunting they seem at the beginning. When writing a novel, eighty thousand usable words seems a long way away when I’ve only written ten words in total. Seven of which will probably be edited out of the final draft.

Taking writing projects minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, is a prudent way of managing the self-doubt that can so easily creep in. It will also ensure that writing becomes a daily practise. And it doesn’t matter whether you only add a line of poetry to your body of work today, or whether you write a five thousand word short story in less than two hours. Every word you write is a triumph. Every word you write is filling the void before you with meaning of some kind.


Which is sort of the point of all this in the first place.



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