Stun: A Book Launch with Becky Wills

About Stun:

In the fictional Chicago suburb of New Lawn, a young woman grows up with a workaholic father and a dysfunctional mother who has a predilection for Stun—a prescription drug prone to abuse. Between Dad’s business trips and Mom’s affairs and overdoses, she grows self-reliant and introverted, possessed of an interior life possibly more interesting (and seemingly more safe) than the real one. Navigating the challenges of work, school, sexuality—and above all, her own feelings—she searches for her own place in the world. Until at last she finds that she, too, has a taste for Stun.

About Becky Wills:

Becky Wills received a BA from DePaul University, an MFA from The New School, and a PhD from University of Surrey, where she teaches creative writing. She is the founder of Own Your Life Writing, a not-for-profit organization offering educational tools and resources to give people the confidence, skills, and support to write their own life experiences. Originally from Chicagoland, she is based in the UK. Her novel-in-fragments, Stun, is forthcoming from Tortoise Books.

About Tortoise Books:

Remember the fable of the tortoise and the hare? We all learned as kids that slow and steady wins in the end. But the publishing industry’s dominated by the hares. You’ve seen them: fast-reading, fast-selling books with a big name on the front. They loom large on the doorway displays one month and are relegated to the bargain bin thereafter—unloved, unremembered, and easily replaced by next month’s Next Big Thing. (Hare today, gone tomorrow, you might say.)

We’re looking to change that.

Tortoise Books focuses on quality, not quantity. Or more accurately, we know quality will bring quantity down the road, in the slow and steady race to win discerning readers. We’re a small, independent publisher that’s using the best attributes of the old industry (extensive editing, heavy pre-publication publicity work, and a financial structure where we’re invested in the future success of our authors) plus the best attributes of publish-on-demand (the ability to get something good out there without regard to whether or not someone thinks it has a market, or whether it fits into some multinational conglomerate’s busy schedule) to build a brand readers will trust.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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