Thursday 15 May 2014

Autumn In The City by Kirby Howell Book Highlight and Giveaway!


Kirby Howell
Jessica “Kirby” Alexander & Dana “Howell” Melton
Authors of The Autumn Series: an apocalyptic YA romance with a sci-fi twist


17831374This began their work on The Autumn Series, an apocalyptic adventure romance for teens with a sci-fi twist.  In 2010, they signed with a literary agent, and in 2011, they signed with a publisher.  After an unhappy ten months (where nothing was accomplished except a seriously hideous cover), they broke ties to publish the books themselves.  In April 2013, Autumn In the City of Angels and Autumn in the Dark Meadows were released on Amazon where they immediately began collecting positive reviews (by people other than their mothers) and caught the attention of Outlier, a company owned by Mark Morgan, who is known for acquiring the rights to Twilight and producing all five movies.  He’s also known for adapting and producing the Percy Jackson books for the big screen.  They’re hoping to do the same with The Autumn Series. 

17831380Dana and Jessica both live in Los Angeles with their husbands.  (Jessica met her husband through Dana, which is a great story involving breakfast burritos, a golf cart, and a concussion.)  They’re currently working on the third installment in the series, Autumn in the City of Lights, which is scheduled to be released later this year.  They can be found (wearing stretchy pants) at any location that boasts a decent wifi signal, serves tasty coffee, and whose chairs are generously cushioned.


 Kirby Howell

Jessica “Kirby” Alexander & Dana “Howell” Melton
Authors of The Autumn Series: an apocalyptic YA adventure romance with a sci-fi twist

Dana Melton and Jessica Alexander, who write under the name Kirby Howell, have been writing together since 2000 when they met as freshman in their first scriptwriting class at the University of Alabama.  Dana, a native Southerner, quickly introduced Jessica to the joys of living below the Mason Dixon Line.  Having lived in nearly every other part of the country, it didn’t take Jessica long to acclimate to sweet tea, grits, and football.  They graduated in 2003, each with a film degree, and headed for the west coast, Hollywood, and their future careers in television.
                   
Dana immediately got to work after winning an internship from the Television Academy and was placed on CBS’s The District where she started as a production assistant and quickly moved up to be a researcher for the writing staff.  When the show was canceled the following year, she went to work assisting the writers for ABC’s Desperate Housewives for three seasons, then on CBS’s CSI:NY for another three seasons.  She’s now a producer of docudramas for Discovery and in the midst of pitching her own docudramas to multiple production companies.  Jessica landed a job as an accounting clerk for a production company that made commercials and music videos, then moved over to NBC’s The Biggest Loser, where she worked for three seasons in both accounting and casting.  After a move to Shine America (MasterChef, The Bridge, Gracepoint), she settled into a (so far) seven year accounting gig handling their TV projects in development.

During their ten years in Los Angeles, Dana and Jessica worked on their ‘library’ of scripts, including original pilots, short films, and specs (a script for a current show containing original story ideas – a type of fan fiction – which helps illustrate a TV writer’s talents and capabilities to potential agents and producers).  The last script Dana and Jessica wrote together was an original pilot about a turn-of-the-last-century American circus family trying to get back in the game after a devastating fire.  Dana and Jessica never managed to shop it around town because Jessica (who is handicapped by an overactive imagination) had a terrifying dream about living underground after an apocalypse, hiding from gangs roaming the surface, and a strange doctor-type (handsome) guy who seemed to have all of the answers.


                                       
Giveaway!


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