STANZIE NEWCASTLE: CHARACTER INTERVIEW & BLOG TOUR FOR ABOUT FACE BY AMY LEE BURGESS

Open Book Society has been looking forward to bringing you this great blog tour for About Face by Amy Lee Burgess and it’s finally here!  It comes to us from Buy The Book Tours and we’re delighted to be a stop on the About Face journey!  Keep reading for a fun interview with Stanzie from the book, a giveaway, and more!

 Check out our review of About Face here!

Interview with Stanzie

Hello, Stanzie.  I have a few questions for you today that I hope you’ll have fun answering.  Here’s a not-so-fun-but-necessary question that makes me a liar right off.  Can you introduce yourself? Tell us a bit about yourself?

Hi, sure.  These interviews make me nervous. Which isn’t answering your question unless it is a bit about myself. I’m Stanzie Newcastle and I’m nervous. Actually, my real name is Constance Newcastle, but everyone calls me Stanzie.  My cousin Faith couldn’t say Constance when she was little and I hate my real name so I make sure everyone calls me Stanzie.  When they are angry at me, they call me Constance.  Another reason to hate my name!

I’m a wolf shifter. I’m a member of the Mac Tire pack in Dublin, Ireland. My bond mate’s name is Liam Murphy (at least he’s my bond mate now – we’re having, uh, issues, at the moment which I devoutly hope we can smash through).  I’m thirty-two, on the cusp of thirty-three and I’m Advisor to Councilor Jason Allerton of the Great Council.  That basically means he sends me to interview people in packs that are having problems and I’m supposed to gather information and get it back to him so the Council can figure out what to do. Only in my case, I sometimes dig up nasty secrets, people want to kill me, somebody has to save me, usually it’s me, and the bad people are punished. I make it sound light-hearted, but it’s actually heartbreaking in most cases. My heart in particular. But I’m committed to helping the Great Pack so I keep going.

Speaking of keeping going, do you need any more of an intro?  If you let me talk, I’ll probably end up telling you my life story and we’ll never get to the fun questions. I want the fun questions.

Oh, I don’t know.  I thought you made a dry question interesting with your answer.  But if you want to start the fun questions, here’s the first one. What is in your refrigerator right now? On your bedroom floor? On your nightstand? In your garbage can?

Fun? You call that fun? Okaaay.  Well, at the moment I’m staying at Liam’s apartment. Or do they call it a flat since this is Dublin?  I get so confused.  So things are a lot neater than they are at my place in Boston.  I’ve tried my best to be sloppy here but Liam keeps picking up after me.

So, in the refrigerator there’s a bottle of ketchup he bought especially for me even when he thought we were broken up and we’d never see each other again. So I don’t know what to think about that bottle of ketchup. I mean, HE is the one who left ME, but then he buys ketchup and keeps it in his refrigerator and waits for me to show up to use it and I’m all like, what the hell? Why did you leave in the first place?  But I’m off on a tangent, huh?

On the bedroom floor right now there’s probably nothing. Not even lint. But I left my pajamas there and my shoes from yesterday, a really great pair of black, platform boots with silver buckles. I love those boots!  But Liam will have put everything away by now.  And made the bed too.  Cleaned up my towels in the bathroom. Put the cap back on the toothpaste. MY toothpaste because we aren’t currently sharing one, but, oh my God, I’m off again, aren’t I?

On my nightstand. Well, they are his nightstands, but my Kindle is there. Unless he put it somewhere. He might have. The cover’s kinda worn and it’s not the neatest looking thing anymore, I guess.

Garbage can. Ha. Do you think that man lets garbage pile up?  I had breakfast this morning and so there should be eggshells, a napkin and a couple of teabags, but I can’t guarantee anything.

I’m getting the impression Liam’s a neat freak and you’re…not. Okay.  Here’s the next question.  When you think of your childhood kitchen, what smell do you associate with it? Why is that smell so resonant for you?

Lauren’s kitchen?  Melted butter and burned toast. My mother is a nervous cook. Especially first thing in the morning when I was a kid. I was homeschooled, but my father had to get to work and so she’d be up at the crack of dawn making him a full breakfast, but she’d always forget the toast. Usually burned to a crisp and she’d stand at the sink, scraping the burned parts down the drain, crying because she was wasting good food and Paul would give her hell for it.  For about ten years she actually believed I liked my toast burned. I’d eat it somehow. Lots of melted butter helped to mask the burned taste.

So, yeah, burned toast and melted butter, that’s Lauren’s kitchen.

It’s spring cleaning day. What is easy for you to throw out? What is difficult to part with? Why?

Ha!  Didn’t I just tell you I’m not that big on cleaning?  It’s not that I live in filth, just clutter. But okay, for the sake of this interview let’s pretend I’m going to actually spring clean.  The easy stuff to throw out would be all the accumulated junk mail and the all the old clothes I don’t wear anymore.

The hard part would be my shoes. I know I should get rid of some of the shoes that are out of style, I never wear much or I wear all the time and they are worn out, but I just can’t throw out shoes.  It’s like this thing with me. So I have these racks in my closet full of shoes that are old, outdated and worn out, but I just like to look at them sometimes and remember when and where I wore them. I’m freaking weird, aren’t I?  That was a weird thing to say, huh? I just love shoes.

I don’t think it’s weird, I think it’s something many people do. Maybe not with shoes, but old love letters or homework papers or photographs, but it’s in the same memory ballpark.  Okay, last question. It’s Saturday at noon. What are you doing? Give exact details.

Saturday at noon?  This is going to be embarrassing coming after the question before this one, but I’m shoe shopping. I like to shop on Saturdays. I’m at John Fluevog Boots & Shoes on Newbury Street. I LOVE that store. All these boots and fantastic shoes surround me. I’m like a little kid on a playground. I’m trying on a pair of blue suede Provogs – they’re like sneakers gone wild. I tie the laces and I’m walking around the store, transported with joy. The only note of potential despair is whether I should buy the blue ones or the black ones. The black ones will go with everything, but the blue ones have such character.  They are SO SO SO SO SO cool. Okay, there’s no question. I’m going with the blue ones.  You want to take a peek at them, here’s a link:  Stanzie’s New Blue Suede Shoes

And, yeah, I’m aware that I’m in Dublin and I’m talking about a shoe store in Boston, Massachusetts, but, horrifyingly, I don’t know the shoe stores here yet and haven’t had a Saturday afternoon to shop.

Thank you, Stanzie, for indulging me with all these fun questions.  Was this interview so bad? Are you nervous now?

No, I’m thinking about those shoes. I forgot to pack them!  I don’t have them here in Dublin. Now I’m not nervous, I’m depressed. I really have to find a decent shoe store here.  Like right now when I leave!

About the Book:

Synopsis:

Stanzie’s job as Advisor to the Great Council is discovering other people’s secrets. When those secrets are being kept by the ones she loves most, can she find the courage to expose them?

Under orders from a Councilor, Stanzie journeys to Dublin and the MacTire pack. Her mission: warn her estranged bond mate, Liam Murphy, to abandon his overzealous search for the man responsible for the death of his first bond mate. Not only is he endangering himself, but also disrupting the delicate balance between opposing factions in the conspiracy threatening to tear the Great Pack apart.

Liam needs Stanzie’s help to protect their Alpha, who has entangled himself in the conspiracy’s deadly web. But he also desperately wants her back. In a race against time, Stanzie and Liam discover enemies often wear the faces of friends.

CONTENT WARNING: Vulgar language, sexual situations, some violence
A Lyrical Press Paranormal Romance

You can buy About Face at the following places:

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes | Lyrical Press

About the Author:

Amy Lee Burgess is a transplanted New Englander living in Houston, Texas with two dogs and lots of DVDs. In an attempt to bond with the city after being forced out of New Orleans post-Katrina, she turned to her writing. Determined to finally finish that novel she’d been hacking away at since high school, Amy managed to come up with a wolf shifter character named Stanzie Newcastle. She and Stanzie have been BFFs ever since.

In addition to Stanzie, Amy has also forged a relationship with several vampires, a witch or two, and other assorted supernatural creatures she hopes will entertain her readers. But she will always have room for coffee and butterscotch squares with Stanzie.

You Can Connect with Amy with the below links!

Amy’s Website | Twitter | Facebook | Goodreads | Amazon Author Page

Now are you ready for a chance to win a copy of your own or a $15 Amazon gift card?  Click the below link to enter!!

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