Books for kids, teens, & those who are young at heart

Tag: Witches (Page 1 of 3)

Happy Book Birthday to WITCH TEST by Katie L. Carroll and Bonus Playlist

Jump for joy! Throw confetti! It’s release day for WITCH TEST!!! I’ll be live on TikTok (@katielcarrollauthor) today at 11:00 a.m. (ET) to celebrate.

It feels really good to be releasing a book after what feels like forever since the last one…and to have another coming next month with MOMMY’S NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS.

I recently said that writing WITCH TEST was like giving a hug to my 11-year-old self, and I can’t think of a better way to describe how I feel about this book. It’s about finding yourself in the saddest place you’ve ever been in your life and feeling like the only way to get through the day is to put yourself in a bubble of protection. And how do you find your way out of that mindset?

As I mentioned in my post “The Historical and Personal Inspiration Behind WITCH TEST,” it’s also about long grief and about mourning someone you never really knew. Chapter 40, titled “Ritual,” makes me cry every time I read it, and I’m not a crier!

Some of my favorite things about the book are the crows, the Halloween night corn maze, the trio of witches, and tea time at Mother Goose Apothecary.

Anyway, thank you for all the support of this book and my author career in general. If you do end up reading the book (or a young person in your life reads it), please leave a review on Amazon. You don’t have to have bought the book there to leave a review. It helps boost the visibility of the book to help it find more readers.

Here’s a little playlist I put together of songs that I think Liza, the main character, can relate to. It includes a couple from my two favorite bands: “Are You Sad” by Our Lady Peace and “Good Grief” by Bastille. My new favorite song “W.I.T.C.H” by Devon Cole is the first on the list because this should totally be Liza’s theme song!


About WITCH TEST:

Liza is sinking in a bubbling cauldron of middle school rumors.

When the entire eighth grade begins studying the Salem witch trials, it seems everyone is on a witch hunt…with Liza as target number one. Worst of all, her ex-best friend is the one who started a rumor that Liza bewitched a boy with a love potion.

As the bullying intensifies, Liza’s loneliness grows. More than ever, she wishes her mother were still alive. A glimmer of hope arrives when Liza finds her mother’s diary…until she actually reads it. Turns out Liza’s family connection to witches goes back for centuries. So much for the witch stuff being rumors!

If Liza can channel her inner witch at the Halloween night corn maze, she might find the strength to stand up for herself. If not, she risks losing a piece of herself to a growing depression and any hope of happiness.

WITCH TEST is an upper middle grade Mean Girls meets The Craft novel for pre-teens and young teens.

Get it now from my Purchase Books page for signed copies, or find it on Bookshop, Amazon, Barnes & NobleKoboGoogle PlayIndieBoundApple BooksBook Depository (for international folks), and many of your favorite book retailers!

WITCH TEST Cover Reveal & ARCs

It’s here! The cover for my upcoming middle grade WITCH TEST is such a mood. I love Liza’s stance and the glowing moon reflecting off of everything. It’s got the corn maze and the crows, which are so important to Liza’s story. Big shout-out to MiblArt for creating the cover!

WITCH TEST will be out on September 13, 2022. I’m working on getting it up for pre-order on all the usual book retail sites and scheduling events for the fall. In the meantime, ARCs (advanced reader copies) will be going out in the next few weeks. If you’re interested in receiving an early copy to read and review, you can fill out the ARC form here.

WITCH TEST blurb:

Liza is sinking in a bubbling cauldron of middle school rumors.

When the entire eighth grade begins studying the Salem witch trials, it seems everyone is on a witch hunt…with Liza as target number one. Worst of all, her ex-best friend is the one who started a rumor that Liza bewitched a boy with a love potion.

As the bullying intensifies, Liza’s loneliness grows. More than ever, she wishes her mother were still alive. A glimmer of hope arrives when Liza finds her mother’s diary…until she actually reads it. Turns out Liza’s family connection to witches goes back for centuries. So much for the witch stuff being rumors!

If Liza can channel her inner witch at the Halloween night corn maze, she might find the strength to stand up for herself. If not, she risks losing a piece of herself to a growing depression and any hope of happiness.

WITCH TEST is an upper middle grade Mean Girls meets The Craft novel for pre-teens and young teens.

Doesn’t it look so pretty next to PIRATE ISLAND? I love how my two middle grade book babies complement each other.

WITCH TEST Book Announcement & ARC Reader Search

I’m very excited to announce that my middle grade novel WITCH TEST will be coming out later this year! I don’t have an exact release date, but look for it in September. Of course, I’ll have all the details here on the blog as things move forward. You can make sure you’re subscribed to the blog by entering your email address on my website homepage https://katielcarroll.com.

I talked a little about this book in my post “WIP Update: Witchy Middle Grade & a Fear of Asking for Help.” Think of it as an upper middle grade Mean Girls meets The Craft.

Not the real cover…just something I was playing around with.

Liza thought her summer fight with her ex-best friend, Abby, would blow over, but a month into eighth grade and the rumor firestorm has reach a whole new level of awful. And everyone believes that Liza is a witch! Even as a rekindled passion for art leads to new friends, Liza retreats into a bubble of depression. All these feelings get tied up in the never-ending grief of having lost her mom at a young age.

A glimmer of hope arrives when she finds her mother’s diary…until she actually reads it. Before Liza was born, her mom and aunt performed a ritual to conjure an ancestor persecuted in the town’s witch trials. So much for the witch stuff being rumors! As Liza digs into her witchy ancestry, everyone else is making plans for the Halloween night corn maze. If Liza can channel her inner witch on Halloween, maybe she can find the strength to stand up to Abby. If not, she risks losing not only her new friends but also a piece of herself to the growing depression.

I’m currently working on edits and developing a cover with the cover artist (not the real cover above, just a fun visual I put together myself). Some of my favorite things about this novel are the crows, the Halloween night corn maze, Liza’s aunts, her aunt’s shop Mother Goose Apothecary, and all the tea drinking! And the ending of this story never fails to get me all choked up, no matter how many times I read it.

I’ll be looking for ARC (advanced reader copy) readers soon, so let me know in the comments if that’s something that interests you. What is an ARC reader? That’s someone who gets an early copy of the book (these will be in ebook form) in exchange for a honest review.

WIP Update: Witchy Middle Grade & a Fear of Asking for Help

After pushing last fall and winter to get ELIXIR SAVED ready for publication, I was planning on taking a break in the spring to read and fill up my creative well. Then all the pandemic stuff happened, the kids moved to distance learning, and I didn’t get a chance to fill up the well.

I got to a point at the end of the spring when I felt like I would never figure out how to get back into writing and still felt totally burnt out. But I was also itching to get working on this witchy middle grade book I’d started last fall when I did an Unworkshop at the Highlights Foundation (you can read about that amazing experience on my post “Highlights Foundation Unworkshop: A Little Creepy, A Lot Productive”). I’m the type of writer who needs breaks, but when the itch to write comes back, I get antsy. It’s like my body is reacting to my brain’s need to write.

And I really love this witchy middle grade I’ve been working on. It’s about breaking up with toxic friendships, middle school bullying, historical and modern witches, crows, painting and art, mourning the loss of a loved one and how that process never really ends, and a Halloween night corn maze. I even got a crow t-shirt for my birthday to really get into the creative spirit of it.

So I thought about what would help me get back into it and came up with the idea of an accountability buddy. Having someone to check in with where we could be like “Did you get your words in this week?” would make it so I would be letting them down if I didn’t do my work.

A thing you may not know about me is that I’m not very good at asking for help. I hate the idea of putting people out for my benefit…even if it’s not necessarily an inconvenience to them or maybe it’s even something they would enjoy or benefit from. This avoidance of asking for help isn’t something I consciously do; it’s more like it’s in my nature not to bother others. Most of the time I don’t realize I’m doing it (or not doing it as is most often in these situations).

Anyway, I was super nervous when I reached out to one of my writer friends about being accountability buddies. I tried to be totally casual about it, prefacing it with statements like “only if you’re interested and have the time.” I didn’t even suggest the writing together (virtually, of course, because of the pandemic).

It turns out, she was totally on board with it (and I never should have been nervous about reaching out to her in the first place). She had been getting up early in the morning to write before her daughter woke up and asked if I’d be interested in joining her in those early morning session. Which I was super excited about!

Except for one thing…so something else you might now know about me (you’re just all learning so much about me today!) is that I am 100% not a morning person. Before kids, I used to sleep in on weekends until 11:00 and stay up all hours of the night reading or writing. On the other hand, my husband and our two older kids are early risers. I think I’ve had to wake up the kids to get ready for school maybe once. They have a clock in their room, not to wake them up with an alarm, but to let them know when it’s 6:30 a.m. and they’re allowed to get out of bed. They are my alarm clocks!

But, I could see how getting up early would allow me to get back to writing. And if my friend was already doing it, then it wouldn’t be an inconvenience to her at all. That’s why three mornings a week, my phone alarm rings at 5:30 a.m. and I roll out of bed to get my tea ready in time for our 5:45 writing sessions.

I’m not gonna lie and say it’s gotten easy the more I’ve done it…I still hate waking up that early and it feels totally unnatural. (It helps that it’s at least somewhat light this time of year.) But it feels so good to get all those words on the page before breakfast. My word count for the witchy MG is over 35,000 now. I’m past the muddy middle and working my way towards the end. Plus, it’s really fun to write with someone else and to spend at least a few minutes chatting together about our writing projects and life and stuff.

Once school starts back up again, it’s going to be a little trickier to do these early morning sessions (and it’ll be darker in the mornings), but I’m going to try for at least one morning a week. So keep your fingers crossed for me! If I can get this first draft done by the beginning of October, I will have drafted this novel in less than a year…which would be a first for me.

Highlights Foundation Unworkshop: A Little Creepy, A Lot Productive

The long weekend I spent earlier this month at the Highlights Foundation for an Unworkshop writing retreat now almost feels like a dream. Time moved differently there. The words flowed during the uninterrupted hours of writing, my fingers moved swiftly on the keyboard, but in the moment, time went slowly. Yet when it was all over and I was back home, it felt like the weekend had flown by.

My personal writing mantra in the word garden.

Did it really happen? (Yup, I got the bill for the tolls in the mail just the other day.) Did time stand still while I was there? (Nope, I had to go grocery shopping the day after I got home because of all the food the kiddos ate while I was gone.) So not a dream, and I really do have over 5,000 words written for my next middle grade book.

Inside the Barn where they serve three delicious meals a day, have 24-hour snacks and beverages, and writing spaces.

If you have the means and time, I would definitely recommend a writing retreat. And I recommend going with a friend (or five). My writing friend Katlyn Duncan and I went together, and it was so nice to have her there. She created a schedule for us and was a fun driving companion. We ate all our meals together (the food is as good as everyone says it is!), kept each other accountable, kept each other company during most of our writing sessions, and even took a nice hike one day.

The beautiful (and muddy) hiking trail.

Katlyn vlogged about her experience, and it’s well worth the watch to get a feel for what it’s like there. We’re working on planning a group retreat for next fall!

The Highlights campus in October was the perfect place to start the draft of my witchy, mean girls story. Maybe too perfect a place. Another writer who was there for an Unworkshop happened to have stayed in my cabin when she was at Highlights last year for a workshop. She told me of a ghostly encounter she had one night, and it promptly freaked me out. I lay in bed that night in the dark and couldn’t fall asleep. It was just so quiet! And, as you can imagine, with three growing boys, quiet is not something I’m used to.

The view from my (haunted?) cabin.

Unfortunately I haven’t cracked that document back open since being at the retreat. I’ve had freelance work, author events, and this never-ending Elixir book to work on in preparation for it releasing next year. All good stuff, but that witchy story is itching at my mind, just waiting for me to scratch it.

Geese are turning out to be important in this witchy WIP, so it was very fitting to have this writing companion next to me one writing session.

I’m hoping to use the excitement of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) in November to get back into the draft. Katlyn and I have already scheduled a few writing meet-ups for the month. Anyone doing NaNo this year? My username on the website is ktlc1113.

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