books
In My Mailbox… ARCs! (Or, Meg Scares a UPS Guy)
Apr 06, 2012
ARCssssssssss! Yeah, so I actually got them about two weeks ago. But because my cover hadn’t gone live yet, I couldn’t very well show off my BEAUTIFUL galleys without giving away what the cover of SKYLARK looked like. A few friends suggested masking the cover with a fake book jacket, but in the end I just decided to wait. There was plenty of other exciting news to share with you guys, like the new title for my collaborative novel with Amie, THESE BROKEN STARS.
So, without further ado, the story of How I Got My ARCs! (Read more…)
Title Change for Wrecked, and GIVEAWAY!
Apr 02, 2012
WRECKED was one of those working titles that stuck. At first it was kind of a joke–one of our earliest readers often teased us about our book MASSIVE CRASH–but we came to really like the double meanings in it. Yes, it’s about a (space)shipwreck, but it also describes the processes that the characters go through, and how everything falls apart so easily.
But it’s also a very simplistic title, and doesn’t quite convey everything we’d like it to about the book. Yes, it’s a science fiction story, but it’s also a romance, and it’s also a survival tale, and it’s also a story about two people breaking out of the fates and lives pre-determined for them. So with a ton of brainstorming, and a lot of help from the brilliant folks over at Disney-Hyperion, WRECKED now has a brand spankin’ new title!
So without further ado, our new title is… (Read more…)
Updates and Foreign Deals!
Feb 02, 2012
For those of you who follow my writing partner, Amie Kaufman, this will come as no surprise, as she’s already announced it on her blog. (For those of you who don’t, march right over there and follow her!) Anyway, we have some rockin’ news to share: WRECKED has sold as three-book deals in Poland (Otwarte) and Brazil (Novo Conceito)! And, because they are just that awesome, Novo Conceito has ALSO bought the SKYLARK trilogy.
Books as Fingerprints
Jan 18, 2012
It used to be that hardcopy book people would get this insane fire in their eyes when someone would ask them about e-readers or e-books or the future of publishing. It’s that “I like the weight of them” look, the “it’s the way they smell” look, the “you can pry my hard copy books out of my cold dead hands” look. In just a few short years it seems that’s kind of calmed down a little bit. I know I have. I used to be adamant that I’d never own an e-reader, but now—especially that I do so much reading of books in digital manuscript form—I can see the appeal. And I’ll probably even get one, too.
But I’ll also never stop buying physical books. (Read more…)
BOOK DEAL NEWS!
Nov 30, 2011
Some of you who are readers of either my blog or Amie Kaufman’s blog may know that we’ve been working on a collaborative novel together. We’ve been writing together in one form or another ever since we met a bit over six years ago, so it seemed like no big thing to evolve from that to writing a novel together, but—at the risk of sounding totally lame—once we started working on WRECKED, we knew it was something pretty awesome.
We finally finished the first draft at the end of October, though “first draft” is a bit misleading—through our collaboration we’d done a ton of editing for each other, so it was a much tighter draft than that implies. We gave it to our amazing agents (we knew being in the same agency would come in handy!) and they raced through it and gave us a weekend to make a few changes before they sent it off to editors.
Birthday Book Bonanza!
Jul 05, 2011
Hey everyone! Normally I would be posting tomorrow for Wisdomous Wednesday, but I’m putting that on hold this week because today is a SUPER AWESOME SPECIAL DAY: my birthday! (Pause for applause.) Nah, it’s okay. That’s not normally a reason for anybody but me to celebrate, but as it turns out, I’m getting my favorite present of all: books! In the form of money to spend on them, that is.
I need some help picking out books, because while I have a list already, I know I’m missing some awesome books that I really should be reading.
So! To celebrate my awesome birthday I’m doing my first-ever giveaway!
Books That Make You Want to Quit
May 10, 2011
Do you ever finish reading a book and just want to throw it across the room and cry and never touch paper/keyboard again, because you’ll never be that good? I was chatting the other day with my friend Caitlin about this–“So good you just want to kill yourself,” was the way she put it, though with her it’s film and animation and opera that gets her. I always end up with this unbearable desperation when I read a book like that, this fury and passion bubbling up inside me where I want to dive into my chair and write until my hands fall off, and simultaneously move away and change my name and never think about writing again.
Why YA?
May 07, 2011
Sometimes when I have the “What do you do/I’m a writer/Oh, what do you write/Books for kids” conversation with new people, I get a Look that I’ve come to recognize. It’s the “Oh. For kids. So not real books” look. (It’s similar to the “Oh, fantasy” look, but that’s another blog post.) I always find it amusing–and a little sad–because it makes me realize that these people have forgotten what it was like to read books when they were a kid.
National Novel Reading Month!
Nov 07, 2010
My posts have been scarce lately, as I’ve been in a bit of limbo with my writing and, more recently, traveling without steady access to a computer. The up side to this is that I am reading a TON.
I actually have to remind myself to read. This isn’t because I don’t love it, because I do–but I get similar pleasures out of writing and reading, and often when I make time for that in my life, the writing takes over. Especially when I have a project I’m really buckling down on, all my free time goes to writing and my pile of books gets sadly neglected. Something I’ve learned only in the past year or so is that when I don’t read, my writing suffers. My creativity falls. I get sad. Basically, everything starts to slide if I’m not reading enough!
So this month, since I’m not doing NaNoWriMo, I’ve decided to do NaNoReaMo–read as much as I can within the month! I’ll post the books I’ve read here as I finish them, along with little blurbs about them.
I’m off to a roaring start, one week into November and four and a half novels read. The half is Cassie Clare’s CITY OF GLASS, but as I started that at the end of October I can’t count it.
So on with the books!