The After Times by Christine Potter - Book Tour - Guest Post - Giveaway - Enter Daily!

Hey, lovelies!!  It gives me great pleasure today to host Christine Potter and her new book, “The After Times,” here on FAB!!  For other stops on her Goddess Fish Promotions Book Tour, please click on the banner above or any of the images in this post.

Be sure to make it to the end of this post to enter to win a $50 Amazon OR Barnes and Noble Gift Card!!!  Also, come back daily to interact with Christine and to increase your chances of winning!!

Thanks for stopping by!!  Wishing you all lots of good luck in this fabulous giveaway!!

The After Times

by Christine Potter

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GENRE: YA Fantasy – Time Travel

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BLURB:

Say you’re Gracie Ingraham, nerdy but happy high school senior. But you’re also a time-traveler from 1962 who got a bit lost and has been living in the 2000’s since 2018. That would be plenty without it now being 2020. Covid has just shut down the world. Your pandemic pod? Your BFF Zoey—and your ex-boyfriend, Dylan.

Dylan still lives to spin weird vinyl LP’s with your sort-of, kind-of Dad, Amp. So your quarantine hobby is going to have to be Being Mature About Stuff.

But then your time traveling kicks into high gear again.  And your long-lost brother and mom mix it up with a creepy, pyromaniacal force that is most likely demonic. How can love save the day when you can’t even go downtown without wearing a mask?

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EXCERPT ONE:

We’d arrived at the first of the big, fancy gravesites: nineteenth century family plots, with tall, marble obelisks and statues of weeping angels. Some of them have creepy stone and marble mausoleums. Mausoleums are tombs the size of tiny houses with windows and even gates and front porches sometimes. You could go inside one if someone unlocked the door.

Some kids had obviously partied out by the mausoleums the night before.  They’d left a White Claw can one at of the sad angels’ feet. A few more cans were tossed on the ground and on the stone stairs to one of the bigger tombs. There were beer cans, too.

Zoey shook her head. “Some people are still getting out at night.”

“They could have at least recycled!”

“Alas!”

See, Zoey, Dylan, and me… We’re the kind teachers and parents don’t worry about. We always recycle. We don’t break quarantine. We wouldn’t have gone to a midnight graveyard party before quarantine … well … not without seriously good reason.

Not that Zoey wouldn’t snag a White Claw. And I did sneak out on one serious midnight date when Dylan and I were first together. But I also had to zap a demon that evening. Which was the last time anything interesting happened to me… Up until the very next minute, that is.

‘Cause then it wasn’t a pretty April day anymore. It was very cold and very dark. Zoey and I were still in the cemetery, but we weren’t by ourselves anymore.

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GUEST POST:

The After Times: Inspired by the Headlines

Remember the beginning of the pandemic?  Panic, toilet paper shortages, so many cans of beans, not even enough masks for the local hospitals, more panic…yeah—good times. Yikes. But interesting for a novelist!

The After Times is the conclusion to the time-traveling Bean Books, which start in 1970 and end—you guessed it—in 2020.

Seventeen-year-0ld Grace Ingraham, the main character of The After Times, comes from the year 1962.  Her time-traveling parents tried to send her to safety when the Cuban Missile Crisis had the world quaking at the prospect of nuclear war.  Grace lands in 2018 earlier in the series. As The After Times opens, it is spring, 2020, during those first terrifying, locked-down weeks.

There is no vaccine yet, no proven treatment for Covid. Previously healthy people are jamming the hospitals in New York’s Hudson River Valley. Down in Manhattan, the Empire State Building is lit red, like the revolving light atop an ambulance, saluting the doctors and EMT’s trying to fight the pandemic.  The world has shut down: few flights, nothing but essential stores open, schools and churches online only, people nervously quarantining and wiping their groceries down with bleach.

Grace, who has just found her friend group in a twenty-first century high school and gotten used to the internet and streaming TV, is again facing something that feels a bit like the end of the world. She’s finds herself locked in with her BFF Zoey, her hip-to-time-travel foster parents…and her newly ex-boyfriend.

Now, as the world around us learns how to exist with a still-dangerous virus circulating, those first few months of quarantine and lockdown seem both ancient—and like yesterday. Writing Grace and Zoey in that nervous, shut-in time was both challenging and fun; a plot develops much differently when people need masks and social distancing! Masks were hard to get in the beginning of lockdown, remember? (And Covid tests—and even flour, for Heaven’s sake!) Add time travel to the mix and it gets really complex.  Should someone visiting the 1980’s from 2020 mask up?  Well, consider what would happen if that time traveler were contagious…

But time travel is so alluring when it’s the only traveling you can do!  Even though there are dangers from straight-out demons as well as viruses. The After Times wouldn’t be one of the Bean Books if there weren’t sketchy, icky maybe-villains and cool tales from other time periods. Grace has unfinished business with her early sixties bio parents, too. And her brother (especially her brother!)  And yes, that boyfriend…

And what of Bean, the original lead character in this series?  Grown now, and still partnered with her true love Zak, Bean is now a Traveling Guide, still quite central to the story.  As are long-time characters Amp and Claire.

Plus: mysterious fires, gratuitous patriarchy-smashing, a cellist with a career in three centuries, and the creepiest stained glass ever.  Not to mention pizza, kitty cats, and obsessive vinyl collecting?  Everything that went on before is history.  Now it’s The After Times!

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AUTHOR BIO:

Christine Potter is a writer and poet who lives in a (for-real) haunted house in New York’s Hudson River Valley, not that far from Sleepy Hollow.  She is the author of Evernight Teen’s Bean Books, a five book series that travels through time—and two generations of characters. Christine is has also been a teacher, a bell ringer in the towers of old churches, a DJ, and a singer of all kinds of music. Her poetry has appeared in literary magazines like Rattle and Kestrel, featured on ABC Radio News, and sold in gum ball machines. She lives with her organist husband Ken and two indulged kitties.

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CONNECT WITH CHRISTINE:

Blog:

https://chrispygal.weebly.com

Email:

chrispygal@gmail.com

Facebook – Personal Page:

https://www.facebook.com/christine.potter.543

Facebook – Beans Books Page:

https://www.facebook.com/beanstravels

BookBub Author Page:

https://www.bookbub.com/authors/christine-potter

Goodreads Author Page:

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14438885.Christine_Potter

Goodreads Book Page:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/62057861-the-after-times

Amazon Author Page:

https://amzn.to/2BcRvKZ

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BOOK BUY LINKS:

Amazon US Kindle eBook:

https://amzn.to/3B3O8EM

Amazon CA Kindle eBook:

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B0B8WQC5XX

Barnes and Noble NOOK eBook:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-after-times-christine-potter/1141982724

Kobo US eBook:

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/the-after-times

Kobo CA eBook:

https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/the-after-times

Evernight Teen eBook:

https://www.evernightteen.com/the-after-times-by-christine-potter

Smashwords eBook:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1159451

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GIVEAWAY INFO:

Christine will be awarding a $30 Amazon OR Barnes and Noble Gift Card (Winner’s Choice!!!) to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

**This post contains affiliate links and if clicked and a purchase is made, I may receive a small commission to help support this blog.  This does not cost you anything, it just helps pay for all those fabulous community outreach projects and awesome giveaways on here**

This contest is sponsored by a third party. Fabulous and Brunette is a registered host of Goddess Fish Promotions.  Prizes are given away by the sponsors and not Fabulous and Brunette. The featured author and Goddess Fish Promotions are solely responsible for the giveaway prize.