Welcome to Butterman Travel, Incorporated; a full service agency designed to meet all your exclusive time travel needs. We're a family owned and operated business with one hundred years of experience. A place where you can rest assured, safety and reliability always come first. Anxious to attend some special event from the past? Or for a glimpse of what the future holds? You've come to the right place. We're a fully accredited operation, offering an array of services; including, but not limited to: customized travel plans, professionally piloted operations, and personal trip guides. *Terms and conditions do apply. Use our Web conferencing to contact our frontline reservation specialist, Bianca Butterman, who will handle all your inquiries in a professional and efficient manner, offering a tentative itinerary and free fare quote, so you can make the most of your time trip. We look forward to serving you at Butterman Travel, Inc., where time is always in your hands.
Book One: BUTTERMAN (TIME) TRAVEL, INC.
It’s the year 2069 and even though eighteen-year-old Bianca Butterman is heir to the family biz, she may never see the day her time-craft license becomes official. When a government agent starts nosing around the operation, Butterman Travel, Inc. gets stuck with a full audit—part of a government take-over scheme to shut down all private time travel agencies. Enter former boy band superstar, Tristan Helms, desperate to retrieve a lost item from his past and willing to pay triple fare for a time-trip to get there, and Bianca has to find a way to complete the job and return home before the government gets wind and shuts down the family biz for good.
Book Two: INDUCTION DAY
The year 2069 is coming to a close, and eighteen-year-old Bianca Butterman's time-craft license is finally official. She's ready for the Induction Day she's waited for since she was a kid-the one that will secure her name on the Butterman family tree of time travelers. But ever since the media discovered Bianca is pop superstar Tristan Helms' latest new honey, everything Bianca does or says becomes a target of criticism. Having her professional credibility topping the gossip sites across social media is an open invitation for the government to step in and regulate Bianca's Induction. Now she will have to ask herself if saving 1500 people from drowning is worth losing everything she's ever worked for, including the Butterman family biz.
PK also answered some interview questions:
In addition to writing speculative fiction, you craft pixie ornaments called PK's Pixies. In what ways, if any, do these different art forms inform one another, and what do you like most about each?
I get creative fulfillment from both, but each are so different from one another. Writing requires lots of sitting still and thinking. Crafting lets me move around, work with my hands, and work with tangible colors and textures. Yet they both filter into the other. Taking a break from writing so I can craft opens up my creative vein even more which leads me to story revelations and epiphanies because I'm letting it simmer in the back of my head while I craft. I think sometimes we try to force the stories out, when what they need is time to breathe in between.
So true--must be why writing ideas (and solutions) come to me after I allow myself some mind space. How has the Butterman series grown over time, and in what ways has it informed your writing process?
I wrote the first three volumes fast, and I never expected it to go beyond book 1 when I wrote it. I realized I needed to give Bianca her induction day since it's such a big part of who she is, so I knew if I didn't write book 2, Induction Day, I'd be missing out on really developing her character. I plotted out ID, then got the idea to write a prequel of Bianca's earlier years in diary format and put it up on Wattpad as I went. It gained a large following and was featured there for a few weeks. I ended up with a 30K word novella afterward, and later published it on its own. Writing Diary of a Teenage Time Traveler BEFORE writing Induction Day was huge in so many ways. For one, it slowed me down, and although I hated that, it ended up giving me so much insight into Bianca's character. I knew her inside out by the time I was ready to take on the sequel.
I highly recommend that process for anyone hoping to better their character development. Write a journal in whatever character's point of view you want to get inside the head of and don't force any rules, just write, considering what wounds your character may have that helped developed the way they are and the goals they seek to achieve.
I'll definitely give that a try--especially since character development is something I'd like to improve on. You also have an email list. How have you found this useful in reaching readers, and what would you recommend to authors wanting to start an email newsletter?
I took a marketing class after indie publishing and the biggest take away from it was having that newsletter and adding to it. It differs from all of social media because it guarantees your readers see it (as long as they open the email) whereas social media platforms tend to pick and choose newsworthy info. If you treat your newsletter readers like loyal fans, they'll continue to support your work.
I recommend starting an email and growing it organically. Don't worry about having contests and other gimmicks to get people to sign up for it. You want REAL fans who really are interested in your work, or else you have an email list of people who don't care and unsubscribe anyway. I also recommend sticking to the AIDA concept with your newsletter content.
AIDA is Attention, Interesting, Desire, Action
Get your reader's attention with interesting content and create a desire in them to take action.
I think I need to tack that to my wall! What are some of your current projects?
I've been wrapped up in a narrative nonfiction project for awhile now. It's for a local mom of a victim of a brutal crime, and it's been a heavy project, but it's also developed my writing skills well beyond what they've ever been. Emotion is an enormous element in crafting a story that grips readers, and this story is teeming with emotion. It's really helped me learn how to better convey it, and how to move my reader with ups and downs of real life suspense and heartache and joy.
I'm also just finishing up a contemporary commercial fiction project that I hope to go on submission with in the fall. Here's the tagline for it:
Former fatty finds more than a romance with the plaza handyman when she takes on her health guru's challenge of facing temptation by working in a beachside upscale cupcakery all summer.
Great tagline!
All books in the Butterman series, as well as PK's other books can be found on her Amazon.com author page.
And to find out more about PK herself, click the below links:
PK Hrezo
~Author and Artist~
* Follow Me Down the Rabbit Hole *
2 comments:
Thank you so much for having me Karen!!
And it was so great to meet you in person. Hopefully our paths will cross again! <3
I hope so too!! Thank you so much for everything.
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