Interviewed by Cyrus Webb on ConversationsLIVE
I was very fortunate this past week to be interviewed by arts stalwart Cyrus Webb on his popular radio podcast ConversationsLIVE. The interview was about The Glass Gauntlet, the newest entry in the Blood Guard series, and also about the way story can empower young readers. The link to the episode is here. Host Cyrus Webb welcomes author Carter Roy to #ConversationsLIVE to discuss his literary journey and book 2 in THE BLOOD GUARD series called THE GLASS GAUNTLET.

THE BLOOD GUARD wins the Northern Ireland Book Award!
As the last of these updates about the happy news of spring, I thought I would end with a reader’s award that The Blood Guard has actually won. That’s right, the students of Northern Ireland—by all accounts a pitilessly discerning, astonishingly good-looking bunch of world-caliber intelligence—have chosen The Blood Guard from among a field of six novels to receive the 2015 Northern Ireland Book Award. This news made me feebleminded with happiness. It’s not just because I love

BLOOD GUARD a finalist for South Dakota’s YARP Award!
And the happy news just keeps rolling in! I just received notice that The Blood Guard has popped up on the South Dakota Library Association’s annual list of finalists for their Young Adult Reading Program Award. Beginning with Teen Reads week this October, students are invited to rate the nominated titles with a score of 1 to 5. Those votes help determine the winner come next spring. It is an honor to be counted among the dozen blisteringly good nominees for this middle-grade


BLOOD GUARD a finalist for the Maine Student Book Award!
I don’t want to boast, but I had a very good spring and early summer. (Okay, maybe I want to boast a tiny bit.) Chief among the reasons for my happiness were notifications that The Blood Guard had been nominated for several state reading awards—including for the 2015-16 Maine Student Book Award! It may be a cliché to say that it is an honor just to be nominated, but in terms of state awards, that is truly the case: Each year, a short list of books is nominated in each state,


BLOOD GUARD a finalist for the 2015-2016 Iowa Children’s Choice Award!
Yet another reason for my twitchy brimming-over-with-joy state these past several months was this grand good news: The Blood Guard has been nominated for the 2015-16 Iowa Children’s Choice Award! Iowa—home of the most renown writing program in the United States, site of the earliest contests in our presidential elections, and residence of some of the most discerning student readers in the land. As I wrote below (in my post about The Blood Guard being nominated in Maine), chil

BLOOD GUARD a finalist for Utah’s 2015-16 Beehive Book Award!
The third wonder of this spring was learning that The Blood Guard has been nominated for Utah’s 2015-16 Beehive Book Award. Like the Iowa Children’s Choice Award and the Maine Student Book Award, this award is voted upon by students across the great state of Utah after a year spent reading the ten nominees. And like those other awards I’ve mentioned, just knowing that The Blood Guard is going to be read and talked about by the very readers it was written for makes me happier

“All you speak of is real to me.”
If you’ve read any interviews with me, you may know of my love for the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He was the creator not just of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, but also of John Carter of Mars; the land that time forgot called Caspak; the world within the hollow Earth called Pellucidar; as well as dozens of novels about other people and places besides. His novels were wildly popular during his lifetime, and for good reason: They are breathtaking adventure stories written with

Where is my website?
A very good question. If you are one of those blessed souls who visited carterroybooks.com sometime in the past, you’ll remember a colorful (though sketchily designed) site lived here—one with a biography of yours truly, quizzes, descriptions of weaponry and lore from the books, pages for educators, and much more. And now that site is gone. What happened? you may wonder. Was the site attacked by Chinese hackers? Agent Smith from The Matrix? The fsociety team from Mr. Robot? C