Jessica Bayliss
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How Christopher Pike Saved This Author from Drowning (not kidding)

4/30/2017

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Pre-order Breathless

This post is in honor of the second release of my short romantic ghost story, BREATHLESS. And yes, you read that title correctly. Christopher Pike saved me from drowning. I’m not sure if I would have died that day when I ran out of air during a scuba dive, but I suspect I there would have been medical-injury-related fallout. Probably in the form of major ear problems and a couple lungs full of water. It would not have been pretty. 
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I am not an avid scuba diver. I’ve been on two excursions for a total of four dives. Once in Florida in 2000 (I think) and THE DAY in 2013. If bets had been made on THE DAY, in light of my relative lack of experience, I’m thinking you would NOT have put your hard-earned money in the she’ll come out completely unscathed jar. But that’s what happened, and I owe it all to Christopher Pike.
Let me back up a little bit.
 
I was a huge reader of Pike’s work as a young adult. His, R.L. Stine’s, Richie Tankersley Cusick’s. Anythingscary or thrilly that had romance in it. One of my favorites was Pike’s BURY ME DEEP. I must have read that book 
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half a dozen times. In it, the main character goes to Hawaii with her friends and they take a standard scuba course. The course that he wrote about was nearly identical to the one I would eventually take in 2000. Because I read the book so many times, and because (like a nerd) I totally memorized the entire class, when I did my first PADI course, I knew all the skills. The instructor was very impressed. 

Now let’s fast-forward to 2013 THE DAY of my second dive. That scuba company did NOT go through the entire Padi course, but I still recalled all the skills. So, when I happened to take a nice old breath and there was nothing there—literally nothing, just resistance, like trying to shove a marble pillar with my lungs—I was pulled back into Christopher Pike’s world. The one where Mandy had a problem with her gear and stood up in the pool. Her dive master told her the very words that echoed in my brain when I was under all those feet of water with my last breath quickly dissolving into my blood and no more where that came from: You need to handle emergencies in place, under the water. The solution can’t be to bolt to the surface.

AND, most importantly, I recalled the words, You always have air.

Okay, that was a totally botched quote (my copy of the book is somewhere in my house, but the idea of trying to dig it out sounds as daunting as the idea of pushing a marble pillar with my lungs), but the gist is absolutely accurate.

AND IT SAVED ME. Literally. 
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I recalled the book and knew I merely needed to find another diver, and luckily they were all around me. Just like Leah in BREATHLESS, I swam to my dive master who was about four kicks away, and showed him my gauge with the needle in the deep red. And just like in BREATHLESS, his response wasn’t to immediately hand me his spare regulator, he first took my face in his hands and peered into my eyes. At the time I was like, Uh, now’s about the time I could use a little spare O2, but later—once I actually had a chance to think about it (and let me tell you, when it hit me what happened, there was a whole lot of holy BLEEP! going on)—I realized, he did that to make sure I wasn’t panicking. To make sure when he handed me that savior of rubber and metal, that I wouldn’t screw the maneuver up and end up breathing in a mouthful of salt water.
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This is the edition I have hidden away somewhere in my house.
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​This was taken during the dive BEFORE I used up all the air.
And once he was satisfied, he passed me his spare, and all was well. I recalled how to purge my regulator. No problem. That’s just the push of a button. We surfaced, pausing to let our bodies adjust to the pressure change, and I climbed back onto the boat totally and completely fine. 

​​When I think back to that day, fear isn’t the strongest of the two sense memories I have. The first is that feeling of something pushing back when I tried to take a breath. And the second was the way the dive master looked into my eyes. Never have I been more vulnerable, and never again will a stare feel that intense (at least I seriously and truly hope it won’t). The experience has haunted me ever since THE DAY.

​What’s a writer to do?
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Write a story about it, of course. And the concept for BREATHLESS was born. 

So, I dedicated this updated edition of BREATHLESS to two people: my incredible husband, Eric, and Christopher Pike, because without his book, that story, and all the ones I’ve written since, could very well have died along with me in the blue waters of the Caribbean.
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Cover Love: BREATHLESS gets a new look!

4/17/2017

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"...a great story, exploring the human soul's emotional needs with insight and an exciting touch
​of mystery and the paranormal."  -- 
Hilary Hawks for Readers' Favorite
People who are following my author journey will remember my romantic ghost short, BREATHLESS, which was released originally by Three Worlds Press in May of 2015. TWP closed it's doors in February, 2016, and ever since, this story has been on my mind. I was so sad it was gone from the world, so I decided to undertake the (even-more-challenging-than-I thought) task of self-publishing BREATHLESS.

Thank you SO much to my dear friend and wonderful author, Juliana Haygert, for all your help. I seriously couldn't have done it without you.
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Add Breathless to your Goodreads Shelf
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In honor of my cover reveal, I'm giving away (3) Amazon Gift cards. You can enter by clicking on the link to the left.
Add BREATHLESS to your Goodreads Shelf
Add BREATHLESS to your Goodreads Shelf

Look for BREATHLESS on May 15th, 2017

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Cover Love: BROKEN CHORDS by me!

4/10/2017

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Ah! I'm so excited to share this cover for my YA horror novella with Leap Book's SHINE in their Bloody Good Reads series. The book comes out October 2nd, just in time for the Halloween season. I'm always craving spooky, specter-filled books and movies at that time (Can you crave books? Well, I do .)  and this one is exactly that. In the words of my Leap editor, Judith Graves, this book is CREEPTASTIC.
They rip, they tear, they FEED, and you never come back again.
Here’s how last year’s Gypsy Cob Music Festival should have gone. Lenora “Lenny” Ragno was supposed to rock her duet with her long-time crush, Jeb, during the open-mic competition. Then, swept up in the glow of success, he’d finally kiss her. Instead, Lenny choked on stage and spent the whole year dodging him online. And avoiding playing her fiddle in public. She thought her worst nightmare was behind her, but she was way wrong.

Now, she’s back at Gypsy Cob where avoiding a public performance is about as impossible as hiding from Jeb. She thinks facing him will be the scariest part of the festival, but when one of their friends talks everyone into trying astral projection, Lenny catches the eye of a demonic entity that marks her as its own.


Whenever it wants, the demon can pluck Lenny from her reality and transport her to a hellish between-world, haunted by its countless, gruesome victims. If she doesn’t want to become one of them, she must discover the nature of the demon’s hold on her and remove it. But how can she defeat a literal demon when she can’t even get over her personal ones?
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Add BROKEN CHORDS to your Goodreads Shelf
Add BROKEN CHORDS to your shelf on Goodreads
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I'm a #PitchWars Mentor!

4/3/2017

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I am thrilled to have been selected to serve as a #PitchWars mentor in the 2017 competition. For followers of my blog, you know that I was lucky to be selected as a winner of #P2P16, which was just about a year ago now. The time around that competition was one of the most AMAZING and EXCITING of my entire life. First, just following the #tenqueries on Twitter.
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Then, seeing tweets that MIGHT have been mine... Of course, we never really knew, but sometimes we could guess. Then, finding out I was getting a request for more pages. GAH! 

Now, I'm going to have the honor to give back to the writing community. After all, I signed with my incredible agent as a result of this competition. It would be the most incredible thing to have an author I mentor go on to sign with an agent and then get a book deal. 

Check back here often for updates and the schedule of event, which I'll be posting in the near future. In the meantime, you can check out more about Pitch Wars here on Brenda Drake's site.

Until then, Congratulations to all the Mentors! We're going to have a great time!
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