(Guest Post) Lilian Duval

Today I am honored to have Lilian Duval guest posting today at Cindy’s Love of Books.

Lilian Duval is the author of You Never Know: Tales of Tobias, An Accidental Lottery Winner.

About The Book:
What happens when an ordinary person becomes extraordinary?

Tobias starts out in life much the same as any of us—not rich, not poor, with imperfect parents and unlimited ambition. When he’s twenty years old, his future is altered in irreparable ways after a tragic car accident pushes him down a new path. The once-promising anthropology major is forced to abandon his dreams in order to care for his orphaned, brain-damaged younger brother.

In his late thirties, Tobias works in a bookstore, trying desperately to make ends meet to support his family. His daily grind only reinforces the sadness that broken dreams and bad luck bring in their wake.
How many times have you heard someone say, “If only I won the lottery?”

When Tobias finds he has won the Mega Millions lottery, his unimaginable bad luck seems to have changed into unimaginable good luck … or has it?

Over peaks and valleys, this uplifting journey will challenge the limits of luck, life, and what we value most.
Find out more about the complications of Tobias’s friendship and rivalry with his best friend, Martin; the effects of all this bad luck and good luck on his marriage; and the struggles of his brother, Simeon, once a talented cartoonist, in … You Never Know.

About the Author:

Lilian Duval lives with her husband George, a native of Singapore, in a small house in New Jersey overlooking a large county park. They have two sons and a daughter, all independent and ambitious, and several cats. She’s an amateur classical guitarist and enjoys attending concerts and plays in New York City.

But writing has always been her calling. In her own words, “The most enjoyable activity I can imagine is to invent some characters, make them a little larger than life, set them bickering and thrashing against each other and their fates, and enact a fictional resolution that makes more sense than the chaos and unpredictability of our complicated lives.”
Lilian’s latest book is You Never Know: Tales of Tobias, an Accidental Lottery Winner.

You can visit Lilian’s website at www.lilianduval.com. Connect with her on Twitter at @lilianduval and Facebook at Lilian Duval.

How to Get Even With Horrible People While Writing Fiction
By Lilian Duval

  1. Oh, I know, this sounds so mean. But, really, anything that makes you write is good, right?
  2. Think of someone annoying who just gets under your skin, but for one reason or another, you simply cannot stop him or her from bugging you.
  3. Insert that person into the chapter or story that you’re writing. Be sure to rename him or her first!
  4. I’ll give you an example. A former classical guitar teacher of mine was always bragging that he didn’t own a TV. The implication was that anyone who did own one, such as me, and who watched any TV, such as me, was inferior, worthless, and stupid.
  5. Within the confines of the teacher/student relationship, I could not shut him up. But boy oh boy did I ever get even with him in my novel You Never Know! He has been immortalized as an unbearable irritating customer in a bookstore. In one paragraph I settled my score with this showoff. And I got an interesting peripheral character out of him, too!

Happy writing from Lilian Duval

I want to thank Lilian for taking the time out of her busy schedule to do this guest post for. The book sounds really good. Also thank you to Dorothy at Pump Up Your Book for arranging this.

copyright 2010, Cindy (Cindy’s Love Of Books)
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