USA Today has a whole section on beach books for the summer, and Under the Rose is one of their “summer sizzlers!” Check it out:
Okay, how cool is that? I’m on the same list as Jackie Collins.
The online version even includes an excerpt.
Yippee!!!!
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Sailor Boy has picked his favorite Secret Society Girl limerick: Jenny’s a queer little lass This limerick was written by VAL. Val, please email me to receive your prize. And, by popular demand, SB’s own entry: Here’s a spoiler that’s just a tad crude Yep, ladies, he’s all mine. In other news: Author Amanda Brice has an interview with me on her blog. Make sure to drop by to learn more about my inspiration, my new YA fantasy series, and of course, the now-infamous sex scene. Also, this just in from Reader to Reader reviewer Kimberly Swan: Cool, huh? Totally makes up for the fact that I broke my new promise not to self-Google and just came across the first person who doesn’t like this book better than the first. Waaaah. Pardon me while I go find living space in the nearest dark cave. Sniff, sniff… Okay, I’m over it now. Must not self-Google, must not self-Google… In keeping with my new mantra, let’s talk about people who are not me. For instance, how about that Erica Ridley? Did you know that she just triple finalled in the TARA contest? HOLY COW!!!! Also worthy of congratulations is one Miss Kelly R., who finaled in the contest as well, and doesn’t have a blog, and promised me ages ago that she would guest here and I’m still waiting (hint hint, Miss R.) And oh no, I’m sure I’m missing other friends who finaled, but I am very proud of you all! But wait, there’s more! Check out Shannon McKelden’s new mass-market cover of her debut, Venus Envy. Now THAT’S a cover! And look what I discovered by Googling Names Other Than Mine: Publisher’s Marketplace June 25, 2007 Women’s Fiction/Romance Thing 784 that I love about my agent is that she understands the magnetic pull of hot Spartan warriors. In honor of Deidre’s latest sale (and because “frooosssttiiing!” has become somewhat of a battle cry Chez Diana and Sailor Boy), I present: Sailor Boy hasn’t had a chance to look at everyone’s poetry yet. I’ll get him right on that! In the meantime, the contest is still open. A really great description of what makes a “bad” (not scam) agent at the Bookends Blog. Also, I just found out about this crazy website that actually lists authors and who represents them. I don’t know who does it or how, but I’m on there (not that I keep it a secret who my agent is). http://querytracker.net This is a big old “well played” to the inventor of this database. It’s heaps more helpful to see what kind of books the agent is actually selling than to try to divine it from some vague genres mentioned on the usual agent listing sites. You can see EXACTLY what kind of books the agent has handled. Good going! Speaking of agents, I’m guest blogging on my agent’s blog today, about the challenges and opportunities inherent in writing a series. (And about Star Wars.) Please drop by!
(But, if you read this blog at all, you probably already knew that.) Publisher’s Weekly calls it “impossible to put down” and Booklist warns that readers will “get swept up in the sexy story in no time.” One early reader said it was fabulously witty, another “devoured it” and can’t wait for Book 3, and yet another called it a “terrific summer read.” My future sister-in-law says it’s better than the first one, my friend’s little brother says it’s surprisingly steamy, and a librarian I met at ALA last weekend said it has one of the best sex scenes she’s ever read. And if that’s not a sales pitch, I don’t know what is. UNDER THE ROSE introduces new challenges to Amy and her compatriots, including a devious website run by a paranoid conspiracy theorist, called secretsofthediggers.com. Click on the above link to learn more, and read the book to see what happens! In honor of the book’s release, my friend Carrie is giving away a copy of both Secret Society Girl and Under the Rose on her blog, and then Carrie and Erica are giving away a few more on the blog of the Manuscript Mavens. (If you are posting about Under the Rose this week, let me know and I’ll link to it here.) Are you still reading, or have you already taken off for the nearest bookstore? What are you waiting for? Conspiracy theories, hot sex, Hamlet lectures, and Halloween. This book has it all, I’m telling you… But that, my friends, is the subject of another blog post. Right now, it’s all Under the Rose, all the time around here. It’s a veritable UTR marathon. And okay, fine. Twist my arm. A giveaway. A signed copy of Under the Rose to the commenter whose Secret Society Girl series-related haiku or limerick amuses Sailor Boy the most. My friend Justine canvassing for opinions as to what makes a love story work. Tell her your favorites, tell her what you liked about them. All genres — doesn’t have to be romance (some of my personal favorites aren’t). I’m about to be really opinionated over there right now. And I’m bringing Col. Wentworth, Han Solo, and Kyle with me. I’ve woken up early today to call-in to a Providence radio show called Reading With Robin and discuss my new anthology, Everything I Needed To Know About Being A Girl I Learned From Judy Blume. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get through tot he station, but I enjoyed listening to Jennifer O’Connell, Stephanie Lessing, and the aforementioned Robin discussing the book. Ah, well. You win some, you lose some. Speaking of, by the resounding silence on yesterday’s post, not to mention the several comments disagreeing with me, it’s clear that no one’s with me about the futility of these on-the-spot critique sessions. (Ah, well. You win some, you lose some.) I stand corrected. Maybe it’s just me. I guess what I was really trying to say is though I do learn things at these presentations (an editor’s tastes, what NOT to do), that I’m not sure the writers themselves are receiving the “magic ticket” (which, as discussed before on this blog, does not exist) that makes the potential public mortification worth it. But if it works for you, keep going. I’m glad they do it. Whatever helps, right? So yesterday, I was chatting with the wife of an acquaintance, and she was telling me that during their last trip to Barnes & Noble, her husband had picked up a copy of my book and said, “I know the person who wrote this.” And then she said, “It was a great cover! It looked like a real book.” And then I made some hologram joke that fell completely flat. (Ah, well, you win some, you lose some.) Upon reflection I decided that such a comment, coming from an admitted McSweeney’s devotee, was actually a high compliment. And no, I won’t explain that. Trying to unravel McSweenical flourishes always makes me wonder why I found them amusing to start with. Or maybe my vocab’s just not hip enough. Does Dave Eggers make hologram jokes, I wonder? Of course, as I sit here, sipping ginger peach (republic of) tea, I’m getting all contemplative on the subject. I think I’ve gotten complacent, since I do know dozens of authors, and I’m always somewhat taken aback when people say, “You can get this at a bookstore? It’s just there on the shelf at Waldenbooks?” I met my first novelist when I was ten. She was my fifth grade English teacher, and she wrote young adult romances for… I don’t know which publisher, but I read them. I think because I knew her under such prosaic circumstances as elementary school, I always understood that authors were people, in society. Doctors, lawyers, firefighters, architects, nurses, teachers, hairstylists, and authors. And yet, and yet, and yet… I still get a thrill every time I see my book on a shelf in a bookstore. My book. I wrote it. It’s real. First of all, due to the popularity of Monday’s blog post, I’ve decided to give away two books! The winner of the Sophia Nash giveaways are: Vicki and Terri W. (Only one copy is signed, so whoever emails me with their address first gets the signed copy.) Speaking of emails, a little bit of annoyance. I regularly get spammed by a certain book publicity company. I call it spam because they have sent me the same (form) email about half a dozen times. Wait, did I say email? I meant, they have filled in the comment form on my website about half a dozen times with the same pat information. If they can’t find my email address, which is listed in black and blue, at right, what am I to think about their ability to contact actual media outlets? If all they can do is send me multiple copies of the same form letter, then what am I to think about their ability to devise a personal publicity strategy tailored to the strength of my book? I haven’t even heard about their work with any clients yet (oh yeah, this is NOT information they provide in their form letter, and it is of course, the only information I’m really interested in), and already, I’m skeptical of their ability to handle the basic requirements of a publicity person: having contacts, and personalized pitching. Confidential to said spamming book publicity company: your strategy is backfiring. If I’d found your website myself, I’d be more impressed with you than I am now. Moving on to another semi-rant: Two agents are discussing their efforts at on-the-spot critiques at writer’s conferences. Both feel very frustrated with the endeavor. Kristin Nelson, in her usual polite, Midwestern way, wants to know if people expect her to be honest with them and reveal that she wouldn’t read the submission after the first paragraph. Jessica Faust of Bookends, who freely admits to not being “soft and cuddly” reports that she was shocked by the openly hostile nature of the writers she critiqued. Raise your hand if you’re surprised. I’m not. I’m pretty sure by now that this whole “on the spot critique” is rarely more than an exercise in public humiliation. I’ve been at workshops like this where the agents seem to take great joy in making fun of the submissions, going as far as to read paragraphs aloud in ridiculous voices to the cruel delight of the audience. (Neither of the agents mentioned above, by the way.) You couldn’t get me to submit to one of those things for less than the price of enough martinis to get me drunk before and passed out afterwards. I’ve no doubt that there are people (such as the commenters on each agent’s blog) who do want an honest review by an industry pro, but I doubt that’s the position of most folks in that audience. A lot of the people just want the editor to say, “My God, this is brilliant. Please, let me give you a contract right away!” Anything else to them is an unacceptable outcome, a “waste of their time.” They don’t want feedback, because they’ve convinced themselves of a great myth of publishing: that the only thing keeping them from getting published is that they can’t get their book read by an editor. These are the folks who call agents the “gatekeepers” and say that they are keeping their work from reaching people who would truly enjoy it. The same folks who are so insistent that their book get read that they bring it with them to conferences and force it upon editors on sight, slipping it into their bags or under bathroom stall doors. They’ll throw hissy fits over pitch appointment sign up sheets or pay hundreds of dollars for charity critiques the quality of which they’ll loudly lambast on their blogs (though their only true complaint seems to be that the person didn’t fawn over their brilliance and offer them a contract on the spot). “If they just read it…” Unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way. Most of the time, they read it, and they still don’t like it. Does it mean that it’s not publishable? Sometimes. Sometimes not. We’ve all heard the stories of the books that got rejected everywhere, until one plucky editor took and chance and the rest was history. Whole publishing houses have been founded on the idea that the established NYC joints weren’t publishing something that the public wanted to read. Even books that sell get rejections. I’ve gotten plenty on the books I’ve sold. That’s why most rejection letters include that magic disclaimer: “This business is subjective.” The writers who get these critiques should keep this in mind. But more than that, the agents who offer them should remember that there’s a percentage of attendees out there don’t ACTUALLY want a critique. They want an offer of representation. It’s the same logic that leads to agents only writing form rejection letters: any kind of constructive criticism is going to come with a backlash. Which is too bad for the writers who actually are hoping for feedback. Still, I’m a bit skeptical of the whole process. I think it’s another myth: that all you need is someone in the industry to tell you the magic words and you’ll get it right. In the majority of cases, is feedback in a rejection letter really going to be valuable to the writer? I got a rejection once that said, basically, that the editor would have bought the book if the heroine who didn’t have a military background had a military background, if instead of being unhappy and an orphan she was happy and had a full family life with none of the baggage that formed the main plotline of the book, if it was set in South America instead of Europe, if it was about a different topic than the topic it was about, if the hero, who worked for the heroine, was actually the heroine’s boss instead, and if the villain didn’t exist, and if the ending was different. Which, fine, good to know, but how helpful is that? Clearly, she just wanted a completely different book than the one I’d written. Good to know. Good luck with that. I didn’t come away with any more information from all that than I would have from a “not right for me.” It didn’t teach me anything about what I’d done wrong in my book, just that I hadn’t pulled it off well enough for her to like it. In other words, Europe was not the problem. The fact that she was thinking about South America while I was writing about Europe was the problem. There seems to be a rising body of opinion that editors and agents are somehow responsible for teaching writers what they are doing wrong, that they OWE writers an explanation. I often hear writers say, “if they would just tell me, I could fix it.” Do you think this is true? Is the problem not knowing, or not doing? I’m inclined to think it’s the latter. When I was a beginner, I couldn’t see what I was doing wrong, but I learned to see what I was doing wrong AND do it right as part of a slow and ongoing process. It wasn’t like “your dialogue sucks –>lightning bolt —>magically good dialogue.” I’m pretty sure that if I had rewritten that book about South America, she would have started to have visions of Africa in her head. Nothing she could tell me would make a difference. I had to figure out how to write Europe so that no one would think of South America. Anyone here gotten feedback that was an instant turnaround? I’d really like to hear about it. Back from NYC and a little bit tired, so this will be a short blog today. Please Note: the Sophia Nash Giveaway is still going on in Monday’s post. Scroll down to enter. I’ll be giving the book away on Friday. Also, have you been to Target lately? Checked out their book selection? Now’s a great time to find Secret Society Girl at Target, since it’s been chosen as a Breakout Book for the next month! Looking for a free copy of Secret Society Girl? Enter the Plotmonkey Giveaway here. And The Knight Agency interviews my YA editor Kristin Daly of Harper Collins about her recent acquisition here. Speaking of The Knight Agency, I will be chatting on their website at 9 p.m. tomorrow (Thursday, June 21st) as the kickoff to the Under the Rose release party extravaganza. And, confidential to Mae: Congratulations, chica! No one deserves it more! The other week, I went to an RWA meeting about making collages. Okay, full disclosure: I’m not much of an art person. I have always appreciated looking at it, and adore museums and pretty things. I’m simply not gifted in that arena. Seriously. I can’t draw stick figures. But I can write, and so I’ve never much minded that I can’t do visual art for shit. People have been telling me about the collage thing for quite a long time, and, given my lack of skills in that area, I’ve always been highly skeptical about Making Collages Work For Me. But hey, I can wield a pair of scissors and a glue stick and I had nothing else to do that afternoon, so why not indulge my inner child and play arts and craft. The speaker, Beth Fedorko, had a slightly different method to collaging than I’ve seen in the past. We were instructed to go through stacks of magazines, and simply rip out any pages that spoke to us. Most of the magazines were Oprah’s. My book is a Rome-set fantasy about killer unicorns. I was not optimistic. But, with the interest of keeping an open mind, I started ripping. And the more I fell into the almost hypnotic rhythm of flip, look, rip, the more I started seeing possibilities in the play of colors on the page. The Oprah magazine has amazing advertisements. Lush, beautiful, with extraordinary color, textures, scenery, models… I found most of my stuff on those pages. For the most part, I remained literally minded. I was looking for people, for ruins, for unicorns… but as I kept the various settings, creatures, and peoples from my book at the forefront of my mind, I couldn’t help but be drawn to unusual things — a purse with a strange pattern to the leather, a gorgeous pen, a series of black and white jewelry commercials. They were connected to the book, I just didn’t know how. But I wasn’t thinking about that — it was just: connection, rip, go. Later, when the time came to cut and paste, I could figure out how it all fit together. Oddly enough, I found this process worked for me. When it came time to actually piece together the bits of the collage, I found that I knew where to put it. A dog lent his canines to give the unicorn fangs; a bit of unusual leather became the ever-changing dappled coat of a kirin; a gorgeous bridge, was, properly trimmed, a secret and mysterious passageway. The only downside was the images of people. In almost every book I’ve ever written, I’ve “cast” the various characters in my book. I always know exactly what they look like in my head, so if I don’t have those images on hand, I’m not going to be able to “replace” them with people I *don’t* see. So I only got two characters from the book (and I was actually pretty amazed, especially given that the shot of Alison Lohman was actually from White Oleander, where she plays a character named Astrid), and the biggest image in the whole collage is actually of a minor character. Here it is. Cool huh? I’m thinking this will probably serve as a jumping off point for a bigger collage. I don’t know if I need to write more of him in order to nail him down or if I need to cast him in order to write more. (All three, I shouldn’t wonder.) Sometimes it takes a couple of chapters of screen time to really figure out what makes a person tick. I remember when I was first drafting Secret Society Girl and writing the initiation sequence. I didn’t know Amy was afraid of the water until Poe put her in that coffin and she started screaming. It just clicked, and it in turn made Amy click into place for me. I could suddenly see so much more of who she was and what her background was. So then I could go back and rewrite the opening scenes with more of that in mind. (Why, for instance, she’d been so bored in Myrtle Beach that spring break.) I know a lot of writers who talk about how characters will suddenly “speak” to them and tell them what their deals are; tell them all the secrets they’ve been keeping. I know Laurie Halse Anderson describes her process that way — especially in Speak. I never do character interviews or worksheets or anything like that because it feels false to me — like I’m deciding someone’s favorite ice cream flavor without ever having met them. If the character has a favorite ice cream flavor, they’ll tell me in the scene where they are eating ice cream. If they’re afraid of the water, we’ll find out because the guy running the initiation knows… even if the author doesn’t. Clever Poe. Which just goes to show you that even if you’re a big time plotter like me, characters can still surprise you. Today I’m going to New York, so I won’t be around for much commentary.
(In passing… wow, check out that cover!) A Courageous Outcast . . .
Check out the Chicago Tribune review! “Richly emotional and lusciously sensual, ‘A Dangerous Beauty’ is simply superb.”
The book is peppered (somewhat anachronistically, as the writer herself acknowledges) with epigraphs lifted from Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, a personal favorite of mine. Bierce’s work, in fact, inspires part of the storyline. (No one said he was the first to write such a tome!) I found the quotes hilarious, as always, and eminently suitable for the chapter they each began. To win, all you have to do is leave a comment on this post. If you’re curious as to what to comment about, a few prompts:
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