Recent Ramblings
The grass is always greener · 19 February 2012
I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately.
While drafting book two, all I wanted to do was get my copy edits for book one. Book two wasn’t necessarily being problematic, but gosh, this writing this was hard. I’d forgotten how scary the blank page can be. How you are typing the words for the first time and they are often wrong and messy and awkward and in desperate need of polishing. Even though I’d initially been thrilled to start work on TAKEN’s sequel, I suddenly wanted to dive into something less rough. I wanted to refine. I wanted my copy edits so that I could polish book one instead of slogging my way through a messy first draft of book two.
Then my copy edits arrived.
An hour into them, after reading through notes and queries in the margins, approving comma edits and tweaking word choices, I instantly wanted to go back to drafting. When I was writing book two, everything was up to ME. I was in complete control — over the story, the characters, the words, everything. Copy edits were making my brain hurt. They were making me hate every word I originally wrote in book one.
And then I realized…
Only a writer would have this sort of dilemma.
When you are querying, you just want an agent. When you get an agent, you just want a book deal. Once you have the book deal, you want your editorial letter. You’re anxious to move into revisions, and line edits, and copy edits, and cover art, and ARCs, and marketing, and tours, and reviews, and seeing your book on a store shelf. And then you want to sell the next novel, and the next, and repeat the process all over again.
It’s this endless cycle where you’re always looking ahead, to the upcoming milestone. You pine for it. Long for it. Want to speed up time so that you can complete the current phase faster and get to the next one ASAP.
The next step always looks better, shinier, happier. The grass is always greener.
I’ve come to the conclusion that all steps in this process are full of green grass and I just need to stop staring at the lawn ahead of me and look at the lawn right under my feet. Otherwise I’m going to lose my balance and fall flat on my face.
This journey comes with a lot of firsts. I will only do copy edits on TAKEN for the first time once. I will only draft book two in the trilogy once. I will only go through revisions, and a cover design process, and a marketing phase for each book once.
Every single manuscript is unique, therefore making its journey unique from the manuscripts before. Each and every story only happens once.
I think it’s natural to be excited for the upcoming phases of publication because this is all so new and, well…exciting! I’m always over the moon to enter a new step of this process. But I’m also so anxious to move forward, that I wonder if I’m sometimes missing the beauty of the step I’m in.
So I’m trying to slow down. To enjoy my copy edits even when I’m pulling my hair out over comma placements. To appreciate the quiet down time between phases when I’m waiting to hear back from my editor. To be patient while drafting book two, especially when Gray decides to be difficult, when he refuses to tell me what should happen next or how he’d like to react to a given situation. It will come. It always does. The solutions always materialize. The next step always arrives. The clock keeps ticking and the calendar keeps flipping its pages.
The grass is green here and there.
I’m trying to see that. I’m trying to breathe, and pause, and reflect. I’m trying to savor each moment.
Because when I bend down and examine the ground, really, really closely, it’s impossible to ignore the truth: This is pretty freaking awesome. The blades of grass beneath my feet are nothing but the most brilliant shade of lime green: fresh and new. Like Spring and growth and amazing things to come.
I am more grateful than words can accurately express.
Happy Valentine’s Day! · 14 February 2012
Today is a very commercial holiday, but in a weird way, it always reminds me of Thanksgiving. Each and every Valentine’s Day I find myself reflecting on the number of wonderful people in my life. Friends, family, loved ones. I am truly blessed. I can’t help but feel incredibly lucky to be surrounded by so many amazing people, blog readers included!
It always warms my heart to see some of you here post after post, always leaving a comment, always chiming in. Thank you for listening to my random thoughts and being on this journey with me. I’d send you a Valentine’s card, but in the sake of saving some trees, I figured I’d share a few digital things instead.
FIRST. A truth:
I’d be lost without my book-loving friends. I adore you all for gushing about novels with me, for talking about Harry and Katniss as though they are real people, for obsessing over their stories and personalities and character arcs. You get it. You really do.
SECOND. A snippet of prose:
They say you never forget your first love, but in my case, this is an understatement. The phrase would probably be more accurate as “You’ll never move past your first love”, or “You will obsessively pore over your first love until your heart stops beating and your lungs are still.” This is me. This is my first love. This is my relationship with books.
And there is so much to love. The smell of a new volume, or better yet, an old. The feel of crisp pages beneath your thumb. The thickness of a spine in your palm. But even better still are the words, those colorless letterforms within the pages that somehow manage to take life before your eyes. Strung together they become moving illusions, captivating people and places and plots. They pull you into a world in which you do not belong. They allow you to escape. You can lose yourself thoroughly in a book and yet, at the same time, know yourself so surely.
No wonder I can’t forget my first love. How natural that I refuse to move on. And why would I? Why would I ever turn my back on that magic, those plots that freeze my pulse, characters that melt my heart, and words – those simple inanimate words – that persuade me to pause and reflect, to laugh and to cry, to feel so deeply? That is a profound relationship. That is love.
I was going through some old writing journals and found this among mountains of loose, exploratory prose. It seemed very fitting today and I figured I’d share it.
THIRD. A sneak peek at TAKEN!!!
I’ve been pinning like a madwoman lately. This is my inspiration board for TAKEN, a visual glimpse into Gray’s world, if you will. It is a rough springboard for my muse, so nothing should be taken too literally, but I wanted to share this today. Because I love this novel. And I love Gray. And I love the fact that — terrifying as it is — his story will one day be out there for you all to read. I hope you love it as much as I do.
Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! May you eat copious amounts of chocolate with your loved ones. Oh, and conversation hearts. Those too.
<3 <3 <3
Go away! I’m reading. · 10 February 2012
Some people just don’t understand that when you have your nose deep in a book, it means just that. You are deep in a book. You do NOT want to be interrupted.
The other day, my friend Sarah Enni found this amazing pin on etsy:
I thought it was genius, but Tracey Neithercott promptly pointed out that it would be even better to have a dust jacket sporting this same message. It would be larger, bolder, easier to read. Sarah and Tracey started lamenting over how someone Must Make These and Do So Immediately, so I chimed in and offered up my design services.
A few days later, the three of us have a present for you. A lovely little family that we call the “Go Away” Dust Jacket series. We wrote a bunch of snarky “leave me alone” messages, I designed a few fancy covers, and now we want to share the entire batch with you.
Imagine how much easier it will be to read in peace and quiet when you look like this from across the room:
We split the family up into three different sets, and if you jump around between our sites, you can download them all!
I’m giving away this set (scroll down to access set #1):
Tracey is giving away these snarky beauties (click here to get set #2):
And Sarah is giving away these book-specific masterpieces (click here to get set #3):
Look at how pretty they look when they are all lined up together!!
Download set #1 from the “Go Away Dust Jackets” series:
Go away. I’m Reading. (pdf) // Reading > Talking (pdf) // Team Reading (pdf)
Printing Instructions:
These covers will fit the traditionally-sized YA book.* Take the PDFs to your local FedEx or Staples and get them printed on tabloid paper (11x17in). We suggest a matte cardstock (you could print on something glossy, but sometimes that causes light glares at certain angles and you want people to be able to read that Go Away message without incident). Choose a weight between 60-80lb for the paper. Anything lighter and the page will be too thin, anything heavier and folding it around your book will be difficult. You can have the store cut the printer-outs for you (it will cost a little more), or you can handle it on your own when you get home (there are crop marks in the files).
Assembly Instructions:**
So happy reading! Happy book wrapping! Enjoy your peaceful, uninterrupted reading time :)
“Go Away” Dust Jacket Series by Erin Bowman, Sarah Enni, and Tracey Neithercott is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.embowman.com.
* Massive of uniquely sized books, like Harry Potter, may stretch these dust jackets beyond their limits. You’ve been warned ;)
**I apologize for the video being backwards. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to flip it. I know it should be easy, but I’m having a blonde moment, so please bare with me. Also, please ignore the very sad and lonely shelf above my desk. I cleaned it off so that my ARCs can one day sit there. :)
Birthday celebrations & a book recommendation · 8 February 2012
Today is my birthday! Another year gone by, and yet, I don’t feel any older. Some delusional part of me still thinks I’m 16. In celebration of aging numerically but not at heart, I’m giving away some goodies over on Pub(lishing) Crawl and talking about the revision process that follows an author receiving their editorial letter — a process I’m almost done with myself! You should take a look.
But first, while I have you here, I need to gush about something. I read a certain book last week, finished it on Saturday, and have NOT STOPPED THINKING ABOUT IT since.
Let’s talk about Veronica Rossi’s UNDER THE NEVER SKY, shall we?
Summary from the inside jacket:
Exiled from her home, the enclosed city of Reverie, Aria knows her chances of survival in the outer wasteland are slim. If the cannibals don’t get her, the violent energy storms will. She’s been taught that the very air she breathes can kill her. Then Aria meets an Outsider named Perry. He’s wild — a savage — and her only hope of staying alive.
A hunter for this tribe in a merciless landscape, Perry views Aria as sheltered and fragile — everything he would expect from a Dweller. But he needs Aria’s help too; she alone holds the key to his redemption. Opposite in nearly every way, Aria and Perry must accept each other to survive.
You know that feeling when you’re reading a novel and you just know it’s something special? When you want to hug the book to your chest and each time you open it your stomach starts lurching around with butterflies? When you stress over the characters’ safety and pine for their success and start to imagine that they are real people because you want to meet them that badly?
Yeah, I had that experience with this book.
I loved this novel. LOVED. The world is terrifying, the stakes are high, and the whole thing is un-putdownable (my favorite type of read). I adored this book the way I adored THE HUNGER GAMES and BLOOD RED ROAD.
Aria and Perry could not be more opposite. She’s lead a sheltered life, surrounded by technology, while Perry has grown up fighting to survive with his tribe in the wild. Their paths cross when Aria is exiled from her home for a crime she didn’t commit and the two strike up an unlikely alliance.
The dual POVs in this novel are executed brilliantly. Even in third person, the voices are distinct and the narration effective. I have a soft spot for Perry, though. He is tough and raw and viciously guarded. His relationship with his nephew, Talon, is endearing and sweet. Perry may be deadly with his arrows, but he has a caring side as well, and one that Aria slowly comes to see over the course of the novel.
The romance that develops between Aria and Perry is a slow, steady thing that builds as the two learn to trust, respect, and appreciate one another. Where at first there is nothing but hate, that slowly melts as the pair is forced to rely on each other. And I believed every moment of it. It was believable when they were at each others’ throats, and later, when the tables are totally reversed, I was swooning and cheering them on. Rossi writes their arc as a couple flawlessly.
But the world! It may have been my favorite part of this novel. Yes there are pods and hover crafts and fancy technology like there are in many sci-fi novels out today, but between the Aether storms and the Outsider tribes, UNDER THE NEVER SKY offers something fresh and unique to the dystopian genre. The storms are both beautiful and terrifying. (I sort of want to witness one. But from afar. With binoculars. And maybe from the safety of a pod.) Perry’s culture was also amazingly well done. From Blood Lords (chiefs of the tribe) to the mutations that have given certain members exceptional skills (sight, hearing, smell), every aspect is captivating and developed.
About 50 pages from the end I worried this would end on a cliff-hanger, but thankfully, it does not. This is a fully satisfying and complete first novel, with new challenges just beginning to appear as the story comes to a close. I am desperately awaiting the sequel. I already miss Perry (MAN, did I love-love-loooove him), and I’m anxious to learn how Aria continues to fit into the world under the never sky. I have a feeling the stakes will only be higher for these two moving forward.
Please, please, PLEASE go read this novel so we can discuss it together? I haven’t wanted to gush about a book so badly since Katniss pulled out those red berries at the end of the HUNGER GAMES. There’s even a chance to win a copy of Rossi’s brilliant debut in my Pub(lishing) Crawl post today! Go enter. Go read. You won’t regret it!!
What I’m Reading: January edition · 1 February 2012
This past month was perhaps my busiest in a very, very long time, and yet I somehow read a record number of books. Go figure!
Here’s what I read in January:
CATCHING JORDAN by Miranda Kenneally was such a pleasant surprise! I could really relate to Jordan because I was one of those “jock” girls in high school. I played sports, got along better with the guys, and enjoyed pigging out nearly as much as I did working myself to death at a hard practice. This novel was full of adorably sweet moments. Jordan’s best friend, Henry, steals the show though. He had me laughing out loud, literally, several times throughout the novel. One of those instance may or may not have included a fake baby named Jerry Rice. But while much of this book is sweet and light, there are some lovely undertones as well — about family and friendships, dedication and dreams, love and lust. I can’t wait to read what’s next from Kenneally!
John Green’s THE FAULT IN OUR STARS was almost my favorite read this month, but then I read a book that beat it out by just a fraction of an inch. Coincidentally, they both dealt with cancer and love and loss. TFioS is perhaps the funniest sad book I have ever read. I alternated between hysterical laughing and uncontrollable sobs over the course of this novel. There is very little I can say about it coherently other than the fact that I loved it — I was hugging the book upon completion — and that it is my favorite of Green’s since LOOKING FOR ALASKA. The characters are still smart and sarcastic, a stable of Green’s protagonists, but I felt an ability to relate to them in a way I hadn’t since Pudge left in search of a great perhaps. If you haven’t read this one yet, you should.
Also, this one line: I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once. Perfection! I instantly added it to the list of quotes associated with the book on goodreads, something I’ve never done before. It is such a wonderful line and I had to share it.
Oh, oh, oh! And venn diagrams. This books has the best venn diagrams known to man. That is all.
The best part of joining Pub Crawl as a blogging contributor has been the opportunity to read all the other member’s MSs. OK, maybe not the best part, but it is definitely a perk. The ever-lovely Kat Zhang let me read her upcoming debut WHAT’S LEFT OF ME and I am so very grateful! The novel follows Addie and Eva, two souls living in a singular body. In their world, souls are supposed to settle at a young age, picking one dominant soul while the other fades into oblivion. In Addie and Eva’s case, neither girl won out and the girls live with Eva’s identity still present, but secret. The way dialog is handled between these two girls is fascinating, often treated like an internal monolog. Where most people would say “I,” they say “we.” I want to say this is a story about sisters, but it’s not. Not really. Addie and Eva share an even tighter bond, and their relationship in this book is simultaneously beautiful and claustrophobic. They are never one without the other. WHAT’S LEFT OF ME comes out this September.
ANNA DRESSED IN BLOOD!! This novel by Kendare Blake is one I had heard nothing but good things about. I put off reading it for so long because I despise being scared, but eventually curiosity got the best of me. I’m so glad i picked it up. I love Cas. Boy, do I love him. It is so refreshing to read a YA novel told from the boy’s POV and Cas is nothing short of awesome. He is tough and determined and hilarious to boot. The book wasn’t so much as terrifying as it was creepy. Between ghosts and voodoo and witchcraft and mystery, there were several scenes where I read just a little quicker, worried something was going to jump out at me from between the pages. Anna’s history is equally entertaining. This novel stood out as unique to me; very different than anything I’ve read these last few months and thoroughly enjoyable.
Marie Lu’s LEGEND reads like a blockbuster; it is no wonder the film rights have already been snatched up. Day and June are both compelling characters who grew up in very different situations. Day is the Republic’s most wanted criminal, living a scavenging life on the streets, while June leads a privileged life, training as the Republic’s protegee soldier. Their paths overlap when June sets out to find the person who murdered her older brother. While I sometimes had a hard time believing that two characters could be so skilled and talented — especially while being so young (they are only 15!!) — I had no problem sympathizing with them and rooting for them to the end. Day, especially, won my heart. Packed with action, this is a great novel for adrenaline-junkies and lovers of dystopias.
LOVE & LEFTOVERS by Sarah Tregay is the first verse novel I have read in a very long time. I knew nothing about it when I picked it up and was pleasantly surprised by the story. When Marcie’s father announces that he is gay and pursuing things with a new boyfriend, Marcie and her mother head to New Hampshire for the summer. Her mother, however, slips into a bought of depression and when September arrives, Marcie finds herself still separated from her home, friends, and boyfriend in Idaho, and attending a new high school in Durham, NH. There is so much emotion packed into the sparse prose. Marcie deals with a broken family, the crippling depression of her mother, and the pull between love and lust (her boyfriend at home, and a far too cute guy at her new school). While a few plot points may seem a stretch beyond believable, I found this to be a touching novel about family, friendship, and passion.
Last month I gushed about Sarah J. Maas’ THRONE OF GLASS, and this month I’m going to gush a little more…about the first novella in the ToG series, THE ASSASSIN AND THE PIRATE LORD. This is one of four novellas to be published in the coming months, each of which precede the events in ToG. In this novella, a younger (but still stubborn and brave) Celaena is sent by the Assassin’s Guild to collect a debt owed by the Pirate Lord. What she finds is a payment not of money, but of slaves, throwing her into a moral dilemma. Though it is a quick and easy read, this novella is packed with action and intrigue. It is impossible to not root for Celaena and her partner-in-crime, Sam. You will lose yourself in the swashbucklingly epic adventure and you will enjoy every minute of it!
I read yet another fellow Pub Crawl gal’s MS this month, Susan Dennard’s SOMETHING STRANGE & DEADLY, which comes out July 24th! Let me just say upfront that this book surprised me in the best way possible. I knew very little going in, and the cover lead me to believe the book would be filled with glitz and glamor and pretty dresses; a quieter type of read. There were plenty of corsets and parasols, but oh my goodness is this book packed with action! And when I say action I mean zombies, and escapes, and chases, and spirits, and scandals! Eleanor is such a fabulous protagonist — she is determined and stubborn but incredibly passionate –and the Spirit Hunters are so very epic (they remind me of Ghost Busters of the past, with a bit of steampunk thrown in). My favorite part of this novel though was the setting. Dennard brings a historic Philadelphia to life effortlessly, and this alternate history, walking Dead thriller, is a total romp. I am thoroughly looking forward to the sequel!
And my favorite read of January…
Kiersten White blogged about A MONSTER CALLS by Patrick Ness awhile ago. I thought the book sounded fabulous and I added it to my TBR list. It took me forever to get around to reading this novel, and I really wish I hadn’t waited so long, because this was my favorite novel this month.
I recently recommended this book on Pub Crawl, and you can read the full review there, but this is such a gorgeous, haunting, lyrical, and honest story about life, love, and loss. The illustrations capture the mood and tone of the novel perfectly. Conor deals with some horrible situations (bullying, broken families, illness and death) and he does it with such authenticity that I was left in tears by the final page. Read this book. It is beautiful and you will love it.
Man, does a review post of this size leave me exhausted! What was the best book you read in January?
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