{Blog Tour+Interview+Giveaway} Butterman (Time) Travel Inc.

Welcome to my tour stop for Butterman (Time) Travel, Inc by PK Hrezo and Happy Valentines Day! This is a New Adult Time Travel Adventure Romance and the tour runs Feb. 10-21 with reviews, author interviews and a few guest posts and top tens.  It also includes a great giveaway.  Be sure to stop by the tour page for all the additional information and list of tour stops.

Book Title: Butterman (Time) Travel, Inc  

Author: PK Hrezo

Genre: NA Time Travel Adventure Romance

Recommended Age: 16 and up

Length: 267

Release date: November, 2013

Description:

It’s the year 2069 and

even though eighteen-year-old Bianca Butterman is heir to the family

biz, she may never see the day her time-craft license becomes official.

When a government agent starts nosing around the operation, Butterman

Travel, Inc. gets stuck with a full audit—part of a government take-over

scheme to shut down all private time travel agencies. Enter former boy

band superstar, Tristan Helms, desperate to retrieve a lost item from

his past and willing to pay triple fare for a time-trip to get there,

and Bianca has to find a way to complete the job and return home before

the government gets wind and shuts down the family biz for good.

Welcome

to Butterman Travel, Incorporated; a full service agency designed to

meet all your exclusive time travel needs. We’re a family owned and

operated business with one hundred years of experience. A place where

you can rest assured, safety and reliability always come first.

Anxious to attend some special event from the past? Or for a glimpse of what the future holds?

You’ve

come to the right place. We’re a fully accredited operation, offering

an array of services; including, but not limited to: customized travel

plans, professionally piloted operations, and personal trip guides.

*Terms and conditions do apply

Use our Web conferencing to

contact our frontline reservation specialist, Bianca Butterman, who will

handle all your inquiries in a professional and efficient manner,

offering a tentative itinerary and free fare quote, so you can make the

most of your time trip.
We look forward to serving you at Butterman Travel, Inc., where time is always in your hands.

 Goodreads |  Amazon Kindle  | B&N 

About the Author:

PK Hrezo is a native Floridian whose life could easily be a Jimmy Buffet song. She shares her home with her firefighter husband and their two children. When not creating characters and their worlds, PK can be found at her other job of rearranging passenger’s itineraries for a major international airline. The only hobbies she loves more than traveling, are reading, writing, and music, and when the four are combined she exists in total bliss.   

She blogs regularly at PK HREZO: Fearless Fiction http://pk-hrezo.blogspot.com/

Twitter | Facebook | Website | Blog

Giveaway:

T-shirt from outofprintclothing.com (US)

$10 Amazon Gift Card (INT)

Bettie Bookpage Pixie ornament (US)

Interview

While writing Butterman (Time) Travel, did you ever experience writer's block, or did the ideas flow?

I don’t believe in writer’s block, so no. I do get what I call “revision impotence” sometimes when I know major rewrites are looming, but in first draft mode I usually can’t keep up with the thoughts flowing from my head. I had a lot of fun writing Butterman, so in that mindset of full enjoyment, the ideas were abundant.

What made you decide to self-publish Butterman (Time) Travel Inc, and do you have any advice for others that would like to do so?

It wasn’t a spontaneous decision, I’ll tell you that. I’ve been writing for six years now and following the industry closely. Many of my writer friends have found success from SP, and while it’s not a given because of the market’s unpredictability, it’s an opportunity to have full creative control, and I’ve been really enchanted with that idea. I loved designing my own cover with my cover artist, and deciding when I wanted to launch my book. I discussed all the options with my agent, and I was upfront about wanting this project to be done my way. In this day and age, more and more authors are becoming hybrid, and I felt this project would be a great way for me to get my author name out there and start a readership.

My advice for those considering SP, is to make sure all your ducks are in a row first. Know your market—who you’re writing the story for, and form a marketing plan. This, of course, is after having your story critiqued, beta read, revised and polished multiple times. Then have it either professionally edited, or proofread, depending on the skill set of your critique partners. I’d also suggest reading all the self-help self-publishing guides out there before you publish, so you can make sure you’re doing it right and putting your best product forward. I’ve read a few SP novels where I could tell the author hadn’t taken the time to learn the craft, and the last thing you want as a writer, is for readers not to believe in your author name. Also, if you’re considering SP, be ready for the expense. Set money aside now and expect to spend about a thousand dollars or more on the launch alone.

 

How long have you been writing, and when did you start writing Butterman (Time) Travel Inc?

 I’ve been making things up since I was a child, but I started writing novels seriously about six years ago. I’ve written seven novels to date, most which will never see the light of day. I started writing Butterman in April of last year, finished it, revised it with the help of various CPs and beta readers, polished and launched it November 12.

Why is the story's setting so unusual? 2069 Alaska? 2068 New York City? 1969 Woodstock?

 Well, because I’m unusual. I knew I wanted Tristan and Bianca to go back in time to Woodstock, but I wanted it to be terribly odd for Bianca. She needed to be futuristic, modern, dark, etc., to really contrast with the setting of a 1969 hippie-fest. Visiting New York in 2068 allowed me to get futuristic and play with the sci-fi element of the story, while Alaska just felt like the wildest place for a time travel agency to be. I have this thing for Alaska and I love writing about it, and in keeping with the idea of the Buttermans moving away from mainstream society, it worked as a setting. You have to keep all that technology safe, you know? J

Thank you so much for having me here today and featuring Butterman (Time) Travel, Inc.!

Review

*I was given this book for a blog tour which does not in the slightest affect my honest review of this book*

The first thing I would like to say for BTTI is that I had way to many annotations for it which in Sofiaworld is  good thing because she has a problem with making notes while reading (she also has a problem speaking in third person). I have to say that I just loved this book. Everything about it, the plot, the setting(s), the characters, everything seemed perfectly crafted and refined. 

What inspired Tristan Helm's character, and all the layers he had? He was a golden-boy popstar one moment, down-in-the-dumps starving artist type musician, and drug addict the next.

When I began plotting the story, I knew I wanted him to be the opposite of Bianca, and I wanted them to play off of each other. I knew Tristan would be an ex-boyband star fresh out of rehab. I wanted him to be a golden boy, but show his weaknesses too. The media has a way of portraying musicians as idols, when they’re as vulnerable to temptation as the rest of us. So many performing artists have suffered from addiction. Tristan was sort of an amalgam of all of them—just a regular guy thrown into this charmed life of superstardom and unable to get a handle on it, because he’s a human being with an addictive personality. But through it all, holding tight to his passion for music, in the hopes his art can redeem him in some way.

My favorite character was Tristan Helms, the person whose problems were what made the story go 'round. As she said, he was supposed to be Bianca's polar opposite, which he definitely was. While Bianca was busy telling him about the DOT's regulations, and making him read handbooks, he was the free spirit blowing in the wind, unrestrained by anything in the world. Unfortunately, he is also the bad example for all you little'uns at home for what not to do when you become an international pop star. 'He's fresh out of rehab' after being put in their for an addiction to helios because he was unable to handle superstardom. But that wasn't all Tristan was. He, like some of the modern pop-sensations at the moment, wanted to prove himself to everyone that he actually could produce good music, and was talented. One moment he's deep, the next he's insecure, then he's arrogant-basically, extremely bipolar.

On top of that, he's hot with "irises of smoky gray mixed with cobalt blue, like twilight in the mountains". 

Another part about Tristan is that he goes through some major character development, and Bianca gets to know him as a person, not an image the media has tried creating. "for once, he looks real--not Tristan Helms the golden-boy-pop-superstar, but like any other regular guy in the middle of some major sh*t. Stripped of his royalties and status, but trying to make it like everyone else."

 PK also provides some insight on addiction with Tristan's problems, and puts it in a way that is easy to understand, and not in a way that is shameful, but something that could happen to the best of us. "Easy to think you'd never do it, til its right in front of you...and you're curious...and it opens your mind and shows you things you didn't see before."

Was it difficult for you to decide all of the ins and outs, and rules of time travel, especially the coincidences?

Not necessarily difficult, but tedious. I researched time travel for a good month and designed the operation before writing a first draft. It helps that I’ve been in the commercial travel business for sixteen years, so I’m very familiar with the DOT and regulated airline travel. Leaning on that knowledge while applying it to time travel and the speculated paradoxes made a lot of sense. The rest, like the coincidences, I relied heavily on my imagination for. 

Something I loved about this book was obviously the time travel, and with the time travel comes the problems there always is. Ripping the delicate fabric of time, destroying the space-time-continuum, seeing your past or future self, and everything else. What I loved was that PK managed to give us a lot of detail on the time travel process without us becoming bored and saying, "just get back to the story," There are so many ins, outs, rules, regulations, loopholes, and coincidences that it would make your head spin around, and Tristan thinks Bianca is a huge party-pooper for doing reminding him.  Especially since Butterman Travel Inc is one of five independent time travel businesses that the DOT permits. These are just a few of many confusing ones that made Bianca and Tristan's journey one hell of a trip.

"You can't have time without space. They're relative." "SO the time craft doubles as a spacecraft, is that it?" "Right. But we're entering space at warp drive through a vaccum packed vortex, not a lift off like shuttles leaving Earth's atmosphere. We're using dimensions to play Cosmic Chutes and Ladders with the time tunnels."

And we must remember that even though the BTI is independent, the DOT can still take away their license, but they can't actually not permit time travel from happening, "Would be like trying to claim a piece of the sky as private property."

"I can't absorb my knowledge from my timeline if I've been on either side of it, right? So during the time window, when I'm in the past or in the future, life around me continues, but when I return to my present, I have to catch up on what I have missed." 

But of course, you cannot have a story like this without some villain, and in BTTI, that villain is Garth, a worker for the DOT that is fiercely intent to bring down BTTI.She is sort of like the head Seeker in the book, The Host that wouldn't stop until she found the Resistance. It's the same thing in BTTI, except that she's only chasing after one person. She finds Tristan and Bianca in both time periods they travel to, and won't stop until she destroys them once and for all. *Tell me you didn't just hear an evil laugh*

What is Garth's ulterior motive that fuels her drive in the quest to take down Butterman (Time) Travel Inc?

For the most part, it’s her sense of duty to her job and the DOT, but she does briefly mention her purpose, right before Bianca and Tristan set off to Woodstock, and that’s that she wants to finish the job her father started. This will be explored in further detail in the sequel and following volume, as Garth and her father believe time travel should be run only by the government and not private agencies.

Part of what’s explored in the first book, and part of what Evan and Evangeline fill Bianca in on, is the that the future of the DOT is not what they expect. Garth has some knowledge of this, though not all, and is working to influence Bianca to make different choices that will alter the course of the future.

That’s all I can tell you for now.

I loved this book so much, and cannot wait for Induction Day *hint hint PK Hrezo* which I will definitely be reading when it comes out. What we already knew was that Bianca wanted to stop the Titanic from hitting the iceberg, but what don't we know. This is as much as I could get out of her.
 
What can you tell us about Bianca Butterman's Induction Day, especially because of the sequels title? Also, what inspired you to choose the Titanic?

The first draft of Induction Day is almost complete. What I can tell you, is that she does get the induction she’s been waiting for, but not at all like she expects.

Researching and recreating Titanic has been a mixture of emotions. It’s always fascinated me—the thought of all those people and that massive ship just going down? Completely haunting. There’s a romantic element tied to the catastrophe, possibly because of all the glitz and glamour associated with Titanic’s maiden voyage, and it’s something a young girl could read about and become attached to—especially a time traveler who knows she gets one opportunity to tamper with a timeline. Remember, the Induction Day isn’t commercial travel, so the DOT regulations don’t apply, but Bianca still has a responsibility to the timelines. Exploring this in the sequel has been intriguing in the biggest way. How would you change what happened to Titanic? You really have to delve into the particulars and form an action plan. It’s mind-bending.

Thank you so much PK for answering my questions, and thank you CBB Book Promotions for letting me read this wonderful book.