Free Pizza by G.C. McRae Blog Tour & Giveaway! {Ends 5/25/19}

Book Details:
Book Title:  Free Pizza by G.C. McRae
Category:  Middle-Grade Fiction, 360 pages | Genre:  Humorous Fiction
Publisher:  MacDonald Warne Media | Release date:  May 1, 2019
Format available for review:  print & ebook 
Tour dates: May 1 to 17, 2019
Content Rating: PG (No sex or drugs, occasional profanity.)
Book Description:
​      Brian McSpadden is always hungry. Does he have a disease? Worms? Does it have something to do with his being adopted? He spends his days at his crazy friend Danny’s house, hoping for snacks, but nothing seems to fill the void.
      Then Brian receives a mysterious birthday card that says, Free Pizza. He soon discovers the card has nothing to do with food and everything to do with the big questions in his life: where did I come from, why did my mother give me up and is there anyone out there who will like me the way I am?
Buy the Book: Amazon ~ Barnes & Noble
Add to Goodreads

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REVIEW by LAWonder10:
This is a good book portraying what many adolescence experience. It is, primarily, about a twelve-year-old boy and his friend and the mayhem they experience one summer. It is also about insecurities and "finding oneself". Brian has an additional challenge since he is adopted. However, this story strongly suggests each individual has issues each has to overcome.
Brian receives a Free Pizza card on his birthday that is not free pizza at all. This is just one event in a very confusing, yet spectacular, time period surrounding his twelfth birthday. It is surely one he will remember!
This story is well-written, with humor, action adventure and mystery included within iuts pages. However, I would not recommend it to those I am close to because of the occasional profanity, I feel, ruined it for older elementary and young adult reading. Although profanity is ramped in society, I feel it should not be encourage, especially among children. It is a poor use of literary content.
The characters were developed well and the scenes were easily visualized. The Book Title and Cover were eye-catching.
I offer a Three and a Half Stars rating.
*This book was gifted me with no requirement for a positive review. This is my honest review.
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GUEST POST:  Wiggle Room by G.C. McRae      When I do author visits to schools, kids and teachers often ask about my process. And I wish I had a straight forward answer for them. In planning for writing fiction, I never seem to get it just right. I either plan too much or too little. If anybody saw the dumb corners I paint myself into, they’d wonder how I ever got a single chapter out into the world.
        Obviously, you can’t plan everything. You still have to leave a little creative wiggle room for the actual writing process. But the wiggle room is my downfall. My brain takes any hint of freedom as license to deviate from all my careful preparations. I think I know where I’m going. But the truth is, I have flung myself into a foreign country. Things are fine when I’m on the plane and in the taxi. But the moment I step out onto the street, I notice there are wild dogs peeing on lampposts. Street vendors are trying to sell me monkey brains on a stick. And oh, look, I’ve left my wallet in the departing taxi.
       To get myself back on track, I think, I just need to write a tighter outline. Check it more often, put myself on a shorter chain. Well, with my latest book, Free Pizza, the chain was far too short. The outline I wrote was so detailed it was impossible to deviate from it without ruining the whole thing. The book gave me a cramp every time I tried to work on it.
       While I was shaking my cortices out, waiting for the cramp to ease, I started on another book, Kana and the Red Pilot. I know, I thought, I won’t write an outline at all! I’ll just have fun wiggling all over the computer screen! Things went well for a hundred pages. I had a great time breaking rules, introducing characters on the fly, abusing the rules of grammar and storytelling for dramatic effect. But when I wrote a crazy scene without any lead-up or precedent, I had to call time out. Why had I written this? What might happen next to justify it? That’s when an outline became my best friend - in order to save my characters the embarrassment of having their impassioned conversations and tender moments obliterated with the click of the Delete button.
        After Kana, I returned to Free Pizza, determined to fix it. And the only way to fix it was going to involve some bolt-cutters. The first thing I did was chop out half of the story. It was my favorite half, but I consoled myself by thinking I could use it for a sequel later, so, no loss. With a simpler arc, I now had the wiggle room I needed to flesh out the characters and situations in a light-hearted way. Whew! Catastrophe averted. Story completed. And, I must say, done far better than my outlining brain ever imagined.
    So how much outline do you need? How much wiggle room? The answers seem to be different for each book. And though I resent what seems like wasted time running after taxis and working things out to the last detail, somehow things always seem to work out.

​Meet the Author:  
        G.C. McRae is the bestselling author of two young adult novels, three illustrated children's books and a collection of original fairy tales. His writing is fall-down funny, even when the theme is darker than a coal-miner’s cough. McRae reads to anybody at any time, in person or online, for free, which probably explains why he meets so many people and sells so many books.
        In his latest work, Free Pizza, McRae spins the highly emotional themes from his decidedly unfunny childhood into a brilliantly comic yarn. After being given up for adoption by his teenage mom back when single girls were forced to hide unplanned pregnancies, his adoptive parents didn’t exactly keep him under the stairs but, well, let's just say, there were spiders.
        A lot has changed since then. McRae’s own children have now grown and he runs a small farm with his wife, who is herself an award-winning writer.
CONNECT WITH THE AUTHOR:   Website ~  Facebook  ~ Twitter  ~  LibraryThing

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 Tour Schedule

Win...
1 of 15 prizes from the author of “Free Pizza”. Two winners will receive a print book. Three winners will receive a print book + $20 Amazon GC and 10 winners will receive an ebook copy of Free Pizza (open to USA & Canada / 15 winners total!
(ends May 25, 2019)
Th Enter, Click on the Rafflecopter link Below:
RAFFLECOPTER GIVEAWEAY!

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