Three Good Things and One Bad
Posted on | February 3, 2012 | No Comments
The Wicked and the Just will be getting a starred review in March/April’s Horn Book Review! Also, a nice review from a teen reader via the School Library Journal newsletter.
The Class of 2k12′s February contest is up! Come tell us your favorite childhood book and you could win special “director’s cut” editions of SCARLET by A.C. Gaughen and LETHALLY BLONDE by Patrice Lyle.
Also, Thumbkitty threw up in the blinds again. Lemme tell you, cleaning the slats is hard enough. Try cleaning the nylon cord that makes the blades go up and down.
Tags: cats with thumbs > class of 2k12 > historical fiction > medieval fiction > ya fiction
YAmazing Race Recap
Posted on | January 24, 2012 | 2 Comments
Thanks so much to everyone who participated in the YAmazing Race with MGnificent Prizes! I hope everyone had fun and no one pulled a muscle!
You guys named a lot of great historical movies – Titanic was popular, as was Pride and Prejudice. A couple of you brought up some of my favorites – The Lion in Winter and the Cadfael series – and some of you brought new ones to my attention. I’m going to have to look up Centurion, Amazing Grace and Master and Commander.
Some of you liked certain movies but weren’t sure if they were historically accurate. I prefer to think of these as “historically-flavored.” Besides, the truth is that the past is only so knowable. There are plenty of things for which there is no evidence for one way or another, so the task of historical fiction (and historical film!) is to fill in those gaps and make a story out of what evidence there is.
And finally, the winner of the monkey keg party magnet is Grace, whose favorite historical movie is Braveheart! Congrats, Grace!
Tags: apocalypsies > historical fiction > yamazing race
The Race is Over!
Posted on | January 23, 2012 | No Comments
The YAmazing Race with MGnificent Prizes is officially over! More details and the giveaway winner will be posted soon. Thanks for playing, you guys!
YAmazing Race
Posted on | January 16, 2012 | 34 Comments
Welcome to my stop of the YAmazing Race with MGnificent Prizes, a blog hop featuring over 50 debut authors where you can win prize packs including ARCs, gift certificates, swag, and more!
If you haven’t yet been to the Apocalypsies website, please click here to start from the beginning and read the complete rules. Now on to the race!
~*~
THE WICKED AND THE JUST by J. Anderson Coats
1293. North Wales. Ten years into English rule.
Cecily would give anything to leave Caernarvon and go home. Gwenhwyfar would give anything to see all the English leave.
Neither one is going to get her wish.
Behind the city walls, English burgesses govern with impunity. Outside the walls, the Welsh are confined by custom and bear the burden of taxation, and the burgesses plan to keep it that way.
Cecily can’t be bothered with boring things like the steep new tax or the military draft that requires Welshmen to serve in the king’s army overseas. She has her hands full trying to fit in with the town’s privileged elite, and they don’t want company.
Gwenhwyfar can’t avoid these things. She counts herself lucky to get through one more day, and service in Cecily’s house is just salt in the wound.
But the Welsh are not as conquered as they seem, and the suffering in the countryside is rapidly turning to discontent. The murmurs of revolt may be Gwenhwyfar’s only hope for survival – and the last thing Cecily ever hears.
~*~
Monkeys know how to party!
Bonus giveaway! Comment on this post with your favorite historical movie for a chance to win a medieval monkey keg party magnet. Please leave your email address or a Twitter handle so I can track you down if you win. (Winner will be drawn at random from among all comments by random.org.)
This is the last stop on this leg of the race – if you’re ready to take the quiz, click here!
Friendly reminder: you must complete ALL FIVE quizzes to be eligible for a prize pack.
Tags: apocalypsies > mg fiction > ya fiction > yamazing race
Never Eighteen: Project Pass It On
Posted on | January 13, 2012 | No Comments
NEVER EIGHTEEN by my friend and colleague Megan Bostic is, at its heart, about action. It’s about doing stuff that needs doing. Hopefully I’ll never be in Austin’s position, with one eye on a ticking clock, but the takeaway is the same:
Act now. Someday it will be too late.
Everyone has things in their lives that need doing. Undone things. Things you’ve always meant to do but haven’t. That you want to do, but you’re afraid. That will be weird to do, so you put them off.
Act now.
There’s something you want to tell your dad? Call him. You’ve always wanted to apologize to that girl you terrorized in middle school? Google her. Your neighbor keeps his dog chained up in all weather? Call someone about it.
I wish I could keep this copy of NEVER EIGHTEEN forever. See how nice it looks on my shelf?
Thumbkitty agrees. “Monkey, let’s keep this butt-warmer–er, I mean book–forever.”
But a book like this is meant to be shared. This one will go to my mother, who will help it find a home in Eastern Washington University’s curriculum library where soon-to-be teachers can use it in classrooms to discuss ethics or philosophy or just to inspire.
My very own copy will arrive any day now.
Do something today. Maybe it will motivate someone else to do the same.
Tags: class of 2k12 > contemporary ya > megan bostic > never eighteen > ya fiction
Anyone remember Sassy magazine?
Posted on | December 28, 2011 | No Comments
Here’s what I learned from it. It’s probably not what you think.
2k12 Sib Cover Reveal
Posted on | December 21, 2011 | 2 Comments
Corrine Jackson, a fellow member of the Class of 2k12, has a stunning cover for her debut, IF I LIE.
We have to wait allllll the way till September to read it, but here’s a teaser:
Quinn’s done the unthinkable: she kissed a guy who is not Carey, her boyfriend. And she got caught. Being branded a cheater would be bad enough, but Quinn is deemed a traitor, and shunned by all of her friends. Because Carey’s not just any guy—he’s serving in Afghanistan and revered by everyone in their small, military town.
Quinn could clear her name, but that would mean revealing secrets that she’s vowed to keep—secrets that aren’t hers to share. And when Carey goes MIA, Quinn must decide how far she’ll go to protect her boyfriend…and her promise.
Find Corrine: Goodreads ~*~ Twitter ~*~ Facebook
A very merry Thumbkitty
Posted on | November 28, 2011 | 4 Comments
Dear Monkey:
The only reason I have not yet bitten your face completely off is that I do not wish to have the taste of your face in my mouth.
No love,
Thumbkitty
Tea and Sugar
Posted on | November 16, 2011 | No Comments
It’s 2:20 pm, and we all know what that means. Time for tea and sugar!
Today’s tea: loose-leaf generic Market Spice from the Winco Foods bulk section.
Today’s sugar: slightly stale and not very cinnamony cinnamon Satans obtained for $0.25 per pound during a post-Halloween candy purge of the Winco Foods bulk section
Today’s tea and sugar has apparently been brought to us by the Winco Foods bulk section. Um, yay?
Four things I changed about my creative process…
Posted on | November 10, 2011 | No Comments
…in the year leading up to signing with my agent:
Read slower. When you’re in grad school, you’re expected to read an average of 500 pages a week, so by necessity you learn to skim. After a while, it becomes habit for your eye to glide over the page and gather the gist while letting the details slide. Instead, I started reading every word on a page. Every word. This is harder than it sounds, but it’s absolutely necessary to read fiction this way. Which leads into the second change…
Read more closely. This is a close sibling of reading slower, and a direct result of it. When you read slower, you see things. How details work. How word-choice nudges readers in a given direction without the need for clunky blocks of prose. How to erase scaffolding and still keep the plot intact. When you only get the gist, you understand that a book works or doesn’t work, but you don’t always see why.
This is hard to do when the writer does her job well. Ideally, I’m pulled so thoroughly into the story that it doesn’t occur to me to stop and reflect on why that reveal worked so effortlessly. But these moments are important to dissect, because I sure as hell want to duplicate them.
Read diversely. This is a bit challenging, as the struggling library in my dumpy blue-collar town works hard to keep the lights on, much less maintain a diverse collection. However, to build diversity into my reading, I began to keep lists and choose books before I even walk into the library. I read new things and old things, praised things and panned things, award-winning things and obscure things, and I read them in every genre.
The big takeaway: I don’t always like these books, but often I learn more from books that don’t work than books that do.
Keep a log. This is perhaps the most profound of the changes I made to my writing process, as keeping a log crystallized and formalized the other three changes I made. In January, I dug out a spare composition notebook left over from September’s school-supply orgy and began to record every book I read over the year – plot, character, hook, detail, setup, resolution. What worked, what didn’t, and why. When I stopped reading and why. I’ve been keeping it on paper, so I’m completely honest. Brutal, even.
Honestly assessing someone else’s work tends to highlight challenges and strengths in a way that plain ol’ reading doesn’t. And a lot of the stuff about what worked and didn’t wasn’t really new to me, but writing it down made it stick. Writing it down made it useful.
I bought another composition notebook in September. I’m ready for another year of books.
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