RI Authors Showcase - Meet Tabitha Lord/Maggie Clare

Nov 5

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Welcome to the Rhode Island Authors Showcase! Each day in November, this blog will feature a different Rhode Island author. Read the post and leave a comment and you are eligible to win this day’s giveaway!

Leave a comment every day this month for over 30 chances to win either our Grand Prize (a $200 Amazon gift card), our Bonus Prize (a $100 Amazon gift card), or a Cheer-Up Prize (amount to be determined), just in time for holiday shopping!

A winner will be randomly selected one week after the publication of the blog post, and the Grand Prize and Bonus Prize winners will be randomly selected on December 7, 2021. For the daily giveaways, the author will contact you directly to coordinate delivery. Print books for delivery within the US only, please.

What's in a name?

When Tabitha Lord started writing, she knew without a doubt that her first book would be science fiction. She loves the genre. She loves tackling real-world problems in other-worldly settings. She feels it gives her a certain freedom to explore challenging themes but with a bit of distance from those issues found here on planet earth.

Well, that first book turned into a trilogy. She then wrote and published several short fiction stories, including some horror and high fantasy, and she is currently working on edits with her agent for an urban fantasy novel. Thus far, all of Tabitha's writing fit nicely under the umbrella of ‘speculative’ fiction. According to Wikipedia, speculative fiction is a broad category of fiction encompassing genres with elements that do not exist in reality, recorded history, nature, or the present universe. While horror might be a departure from science fiction, and fantasy deals more in magic than space ships, they all share common speculative features and feel like close cousins. She was confident most of her readers would be willing to try most of those stories.

Find this trilogy and Tabitha's other books on Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/ytu8uyat

And learn all about Tabitha by visiting her website: http://www.tabithalordauthor.com

Somewhere along the way, however, Tabitha had the urge to write romantic suspense. She enjoys writing the steamy stuff! She also enjoys the deeply emotional nature of the genre and the happily-ever-after endings that romance provides. When she tried my hand at it, she found a good bit of success. Tabitha's Tactical Solutions International series sold more books in a couple of weeks than her science fiction sold in a year! Certainly, sales numbers aren’t the only measure of success for a writer, but they did give her the encouragement she needed to continue writing romance.

One of the first decisions she made when she decided to genre hop was to use the pen name Maggie Clare. She knew there would be very little overlap between her speculative fiction fans and romance fans, and the marketing and promotional work would target a completely different set of readers. Of course, that meant she'd have to maintain two separate author platforms. The Maggie Clare platform looks and feels completely different from the Tabitha Lord Author platform, but Tabitha will admit, it’s fun! When she's writing or interacting as Maggie, she actually feels more playful and flirty.

She's been asked where the name ‘Maggie Clare’ came from. Tabitha's grandmothers were two spunky ladies, very different from one another, but both avid readers. Unfortunately, they passed away before her writing career began, so she decided to honor them by using their first names to make up her pen name. As Tabitha says, she thinks they'd get a kick out of it!

And find all of Maggie Clare's books here: https://tinyurl.com/3a282a25

And visit Maggie's website, too! http://www.msmaggieclare.com

So, if you win today’s giveaway, you can choose which signed book you’d like to receive - HORIZON by Tabitha Lord, or SING FOR ME by Maggie Clare! Just leave a comment below indicating which book you would prefer to win.