Unfurl, the official Blog Tour!

Today on the blog we featuring Cidney Swanson and her books, Rippler and Chameleon.  Today's post is part of Cidney's Blog Tour so please be sure to click on her links and continue to follow the tour. 

Welcome Cidney! It is a pleasure to have your here at Amy Jones Young Adult Fantasy Fiction!

My name is Cidney. I’m a writer, and a nerd, and I’m also thrilled to be here today at the site of the fabulous Amy M Jones! Now then: raise your hand if you’re a nerd. Of any variety. Maybe you’re a little too into ballet. Or Star Trek. Or you’re the only girl ever to like Halo. You think Middle Earth is a real place. You study obscure facts about World War II aircraft. You’ve read every work in the library’s biography section. Go on; raise your hand if you’re a nerd.

I won’t laugh.

As soon as I was old enough to scrawl my name across the back of a library card, I lived in libraries: the county library, stately with a cupola on top, the children’s section in a warm cozy basement; the school library, with large windows along one whole wall and ugly blue-gray carpeting that made your knees itch. Librarians became the fairy godmothers and fathers who provided me with riches beyond compare.

I was on my way to Nerd-dom.

When I grew older, a number of factors contributed to making me a quiet and withdrawn teen. If I’d lived in libraries as a child, I lived in books as a teen. Here I found the safe harbor from the raging sea that is middle school. I had friends, I had hopes, I had dreams--all within the pages of book after book after book.

During these years I formed deep relationships with words, sentences, and paragraphs. I’d always written stories; now I explored essays, poetry, and imagined histories. Writing was personal, private, and provided a place I felt safe. And it might have remained a private thing except for the Nerds.

As my stories grew longer and explored the angst and pain of growing up, I realized I didn’t want to keep my stories to myself any longer. I thought of all the libraries and classrooms filled with nerds like me. The time had come to pay forward all that I’d been given. (A tiny something--just a few drops in a rich ocean.) I felt pretty confident the world hadn’t run out of kids who needed a safe place to explore their questions and pain, or even to escape from them. I began putting my stories out there because I had something I wanted to give back to the ‘tweens and teens that were now what I had been once.

And then it happened last month. A quiet ‘tween approached me to tell me how much she’d enjoyed my book. I could see the conflict behind her eyes: I want to talk to this author; I don’t like talking to strangers. She was so brave it made my insides squirm. A part of me recognized a part of this young woman. I hope I told her thank you in a way that she could hear. I was so overwhelmed by the beauty of her courage that I have no idea what I actually said to her.

But I went home glad to have a job that lets me pay forward all the gratitude I feel for those librarians, those authors, those books that got me through the rough patches. I was a book-nerd. Ha! I still am. And I don’t think I’m alone.

I’d love to send a kindle-version set of my Rippler Series trilogy to one of you. Just fill out the Rafflecopter form below and Shazam! Someone wins!

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Linkies:
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Thank you so much, Cydney for including us in your tour. Make sure you enter the raffle to win The Rippler Series Trilogy and stay tuned to everything Cydney Swanson!