Today I join the group blog Genreality. To celebrate, I offer a giveaway. Aren’t you curious as to what it is?
(Hint: a similar one just sold for an outrageous $61.00 on eBay. Evil eBay seller, you should be ashamed of yourself.)
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Happy New Year everyone! I hope everyone’s resolutions and dreams and goal-settings come true. I spent New Year’s Eve in a highly productive manner: finishing my final proofs for For Darkness Shows the Stars. It’s fitting that I welcomed the New Year with work, as this is going to be a very, very heavy work year. Just look at my release schedule (anthologies and collections show my contribution in parentheses):
Fall: Under My Hat: Tales From the Cauldron anthology (“Stray Magic”) ; Foretold anthology (“Burned Bright”) There’s also another release I have been unable to find any information about. And for my overseas readers, there are a few releases I don’t have dates for yet. Like I heard on Twitter that my Brazilian publisher is putting out Tap & Gown (Rosa e Tumulo #4) “next summer”. But that’s all I know. 10 projects (AT LEAST!) out next year. Yikes. Guess that makes up for the big ol’ goose egg of 2011. (Hey, I always said last year was a “building year.”) And that’s just that I can announce yet. And, as an added bonus, all but TWO of this year’s SIX new releases are total stand-alones:
The other two include “The Hammer of Artemis”, which is set in the killer unicorniverse (it’s historical, like “Errant”) and the aforementioned unnamed secret project. Though compared to the beginning of the year, that second half of the year is looking a little bit sparse. I’ll have to get on that. Just Kidding. Sorta.
While I will not deny that there are a lot of novels out there that have borrowed the love triangle formula (in the mathematical sense) that worked so well in Twilight, it’s not a singular occurrence. Also incredibly popular after the worldwide, game-changing, publisher-floating, industry-saving and genre-creating success of Twilight? Books about EVERYTHING that Twilight was about. Books about vampires, books about beautiful immortal people, books about unusual families of paranormal humanoid creatures living amongst us, books about girls with paranormal boyfriends, and books in which high school girls fall into extraordinarily quick and everlasting love. All of these are available in ready supply right now, all of them owe at least some part of their current popularity to Twilight. This is a good thing. People finding new things they like in books and then reading more books about those things? Wonderful. And one of those things, yes, is “a girl in love with two boys” love triangles.
I have only published one book with that kind of love triangle in it: My first novel, Secret Society Girl, which came out in 2006, right when Meyer was lighting the world on fire with New Moon. Like Bella, my character Amy has to make a choice between two boys she likes who both like her. However, I have written two books with this supposedly rare “two girls one guy” love triangle: Rites of Spring (Break), in which Amy competes for the affections of a guy, and the upcoming For Darkness Shows the Stars, which is based on Persuasion, and therefore includes the Anne Elliot — Captain Wentworth — Louisa Musgrove triangle so beloved (or beloved-to-behated) by its fans.
So, having published one of these and seen years worth of reader reactions (and read enough reactions to the Persuasion one to know it’s the same), I can tell you right now why the Twilight kind is more popular:
(Note: this is very typical Louisa Musgrove treatment in Jane Austen fandom.) If the other woman is a normal woman with faults like the heroine, she is labeled an irredeemable b****. If the other woman is a saint, she is allowed to be pitied, but we still root for the heroine to get the man. Why? Because to do otherwise would mean the reader is rooting against the heroine. And, almost without exception, that ain’t good. In Rites of Spring (Break), Amy does not win her love triangle. And despite the fact that I very clearly demonstrate that the guy at the center of it is NOT the one for her, and soon after I embroil her in a fabulously delicious romance with a new guy, you would not believe the number of emails I get demonizing both other parties and wishing that Amy had won. Even though, if she HAD won, she would not have going on to her wonderful romance that they also say they love so much. The way I look at it is like this: even if you know your ex or the guy who would never ask you out in high school was TOTALLY wrong for you now, you still want to look drop-dead gorgeous at your high school reunion, right? Just because you’re better off without them doesn’t mean they shouldn’t still pine for you. It’s not the most enlightened of all feelings, but it’s a fantasy.
(Hello, exes. Yes, this is what I Iook like every single day. No, I do not currently have bags under my eyes because Q was up half the night or applesauce in my hair because, well, see previous.) And it’s that fantasy — of having multiple people madly in love with us, that is so compelling to so many readers. But here’s the problem: because it’s so compelling, and because publisher publicity departments (understanding this visceral response readers have to this storyline) have pumped it up, its prevalence in the book on the shelves and, perhaps more importantly, in the marketing material for books on the shelves, has trained readers to expect a love triangle in their novels When people complain “why does there have to be a love triangle in every YA novel” they are often complaining about things that a few years ago would not have been considered a love triangle at all. How do I know this? Because there was no love triangle in Twilight. Bella loved Edward, and Edward loved Bella. There might have been a few other people who were interested in dating Bella, just like there was some lingering resentment on the part of Rosalie that she hadn’t good enough for Edward while Bella was, but neither of those things weighed particularly heavily on either of these characters’ minds (and Rosalie has been long since happily matched up). But if that book were published today, with the microscope readers have been trained to place on any whiff of something that might be a love triangle, they might see this:
And maybe that’s a compelling story, told from the point of view of Mike or Jacob. Poor guys, they secretly love Bella, but she only has eyes for the vampire. Indeed, as the series progressed, Meyer chose to dwell on this facet of Jacob’s story. But that’s as the series progressed.
To me, that was no more a love triangle than the fact that every boy in Forks instantly goes ga-ga over the “new girl” Bella is somehow indicative of a love tetrahedron.You kinda need love to have a love triangle. Or at least the idea of choosing one over another. The love triangles in my friend Carrie Ryan’s books (The Forest of Hands and Teeth, etc.)? LOVE. TRIANGLES. Mary is in love with Travis but betrothed to his brother. Gabry feels enormously guilty over her growing attachment to Elias after her old boyfriend got infected with the zombie plague… for her. Angst galore! What will she choose? Who will she end up with? If you’ve read Ascendant, you know that’s not Astrid’s problem. And not in the sense of “she has bigger problems” (which she does), because girls on the run from zombies ALSO have bigger problems, but more in the sense that those questions are not on the plate for her. However, I also agree with Carrie’s point in her own post on love triangles, in which she says: “To me, that’s the essence of a love triangle — each man is a viable choice for the heroine but each speaks to a different part of who she is. The heroine isn’t choosing between two men, she’s choosing who SHE wants to be and that will dictate who the right match is.” I first read about this conceptualization of a story’s love triangle in a screenwriting class in 2005, and it really stuck with me. When I looked at the love triangle in my first book through this lens, I realized not only why neither prong would work but who, in fact, it was that was right for my heroine.
(When Meyers claims in interviews that the books are anti-human, this is what it means. If you can swing your vampirism the way the Cullens do — going off and eating venison in the woods — there is absolutely no downside to vampirism. Bella’s choice reflects the fact that, very reasonably, she’d rather be an eternally healthy, beautiful, young, powerful, awesome vampire then get old, get sick, get hurt, and die in a frail human form.) But of course, all choices a character makes is reflective on who she is. The choices that Astrid makes in Ascendant regarding her love life have very little to do with the boys involved, and everything to do with her depression, isolation, and eventual nihilism. And though you can argue that Giovanni is a reflection of one facet of Astrid’s character, choosing him would not magically make that Astrid manifest, and Astrid knows it. One of my favorite scenes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes from season five. Buffy and her friends have just overcome a spell that was meant to split Buffy into her component parts: normal girl and vampire slayer. Her boyfriend Riley tells her that he loves all of her — both parts. That to him, she is indivisible.The tragedy comes when later in that same episode, he posits that it is this elemental wholeness of Buffy that makes her unable to love him. (And where he goes from there is truly tragic.)
(I know a lot of people dislike Riley because of the things he did AFTER this revelation, and I used to be right there with you, but upon repeated rewatching, I’ve come to the conclusion that Riley’s mistakes — and he makes plenty — are not so much him having a problem with a strong woman — since he ends up marrying another — as him deciding, maybe or maybe not falsely — that he’s not good enough for Buffy without magical powers. To be discussed in detail later. People often liken Astrid and Giovanni to Buffy and Riley, though I think a more apt corollary would probably be Buffy and Xander, which never happened on the show.) Buffy may have chosen Riley, but choosing to have a relationship with this nice, normal guy (instead of her occasionally sociopathic vampire ex-boyfriend) doesn’t make Buffy a normal girl. Over and over in the series, Buffy is forced to make a choice between her love life and her job, often explicitly. Save Angel, or save the world, etc.? Again and again, they ask Buffy who she is, and her answer is “slayer.” Sometimes, the triangle doesn’t even involve another guy. Sometimes it’s about the heroine choosing not to be with someone, full stop. I am holding in my hands an advanced reader copy of what will be my eighth published novel: For Darkness Shows the Stars. It is a gorgeously designed book, filled with special fonts and curlicues and tiny touches of fabulousness that work in concert with the text to create an atmosphere of otherworldliness. I love book design. I love books where it is clear a lot of care has been taken with the design, to create something a little off the beaten path, a signature look for that book which is instantly recognizable. I’m a bit spoiled, since my first series was handled by a team at Bantam Dell for whom book design was not a lost art. My first editor had been trained up by a boss who had originally come from the design side of the publishing business. And thus, I got things like this:
And this:
And this:
And, unbelievably, even this:
I was not aware how unusual it was to have a book designed with such attention to detail, and to the various and sundry non-text objects that existed inside. I honestly think it adds to the experience.There are those for whom design is merely a distraction — they want nothing between them and the words. They want the pages and the words themselves to disappear. These are the readers for whom the Kindle revolution and the death of book design doesn’t matter. They want to be able to change the font at will — they don’t care where page breaks occur. They aren’t interested in the idea that someone went to the trouble of choosing that font, that layout, that arrangement, to create a mood and a world for the reader. I am not that reader. I love some good design. Some recent books where the design knocked me off my feet are:
But design can also be divisive. (Cf. the “black pages” for ZVU.) Anything that makes the book hard to read is going to bother people, and people have different metrics for “hard to read.” For instance, I loved the idea of the “frozen” blue text in Shiver, but I heard a lot of complaints about the green and red texts of the subsequent novels hurting people’s eyes. Design is something you lose when you read the ebook version. My “Shiver” is on Kindle. The text is kindle text. I often wonder if my love of book design is related to my love of metafiction and metatextual interpolations (this, I am told, is the proper name for the doodads peppering my first series). The Secret Society Girl series lent itself specifically to unusual design, as it was filled with metatextual interpolations, which was a style I employed heavily in that series (lists, footnotes, emails, text messages, letters, etc) and not so much with any book since. I have been in love with such storytelling flourishes all my reading life. From Nabokov’s footnotes to Clarissa’s “mad papers” to simple epistolary novels, I love the idea of books that are more than just books — that are little puzzles on the page — story and more than story, too. How will such elements survive the coming ebook revolution? When you read something with footnotes on a Kindle, it requires hypertext to flip you there and back. With Secret Society Girl on Kindle, the “Hello My Name Is” sticker is transferred like a picture, but you lose the “electronic” look of the text messages and the “script” of the letters. My early-gen kindle is black and white, but I wonder if the new colored ereaders show Shiver’s text in blue. I have NO idea how they do Clarissa’s mad papers.
When you realize that Richardson was pulling this kind of stunt in the eighteenth century, before we even had a rightful understanding of what a novel was and certainly before this kind of thing was as easy as setting up text boxes in your computer document, it’s even more impressed. Of course, he owned the printing press and so employed the poor printer he was causing this headache. Ah, Richardson, you cruel taskmaster. (I know I talk about Clarissa a lot on this blog. I talk about Clarissa a lot in general. I love Clarissa. I don’t know a whole lot of other people who have read it, or even seen the BBC version they did with Sean Bean as Lovelace. I don’t remember anything else about it, except Sean Bean as frickin’ Lovelace, people! That is a triumph of casting. I can’t actually even picture the Lovelace who lived in my head now. All I see is Bean. Anyway, if you haven’t read it or seen it, or know anything about it — let’s just say it’s approximately 2,000 pages long, it’s completely epistolary, it’ll take over your LIFE as it did me my second semester senior year in college, and it will forever change the way you, a costume drama loving, historical romance reading, Jane Austen obsessed female individual looks at her heretofore romanticized past. In short: sucked to be a woman for most of recorded history.) Where was I? Right, book design. For Darkness has gorgeous book design. Guys, even the font. I drool. And I cry, too, because I know a lot of people are going to buy it as an ebook. Which is nice, I guess — any way they read it, plus I get nice royalties for ebooks — but they’re going to miss out on some of the design. The slightly unusual font. The curlicues around each page number. (Can’t have ‘em if you don’t have pages.) You want a peek? Of course you do.
Here are some of the most frequently asked questions: Q: What is this book about? A: So glad you asked:
Q: When is it coming out? A: June, 2012 Q: Who designed this cover? A: The design team at Harper Children’s. Q: Is it a series? A: No, it’s a standalone novel. I know that’s a tad unusual in the YA world these days, and especially unusual in this brave new world of “dystopias” — yes, I’m using liberal quote marks — but I’ve done two series now and I wanted this book to stand alone, like Persuasion itself does. Q: What was the Katy Perry video still from “E.T.” that you wanted your cover to look like? A: Right. Yes. Totally meant to post that. Here it is:
I definitely see a resemblance, don’t you? If you have more questions, ask away in comments!
“Our ancestors,” Tatiana said, as the sanctuary was plunged into darkness, “took refuge here during the Wars of the Lost. Some already lived on these islands. Some came as the reach of the wars grew ever wider. But all were forced eventually underground. When the Lost realized what they’d done, that they were the last generation of healthy people, they struck out with unthinkable rage against any and all who had avoided Reduction, hoping to be the last ones, at least, left standing over a ruined world.” She blew out the final light. Above them, the miracle flickered to life.
“For years—some say more than a generation—the Luddites lived in the darkness. And then . . .” Tatiana’s voice fell silent, and they all stared up into the vertex of the cavern.
It was filled with stars. From every corner of the cavern, tiny, twinkling points of light glowed, a green so pale as to be nearly white. “In the old stories,” said Tatiana, “a man built his followers a boat to ride out the flooding of the world. And when the flood was over, God showed him a rainbow to tell him that the worst was over. And after the wars of the Reduction were over, God showed us the stars, and we knew we could come out of the caverns and take our rightful place on the surface of the world.” But Elliot knew the truth was more complicated than that. So this is the week I’m going to show you all the For Darkness Shows the Stars cover, which is my favorite of all my covers. But before I can talk about the cover, I want to talk about the title. A long, long time ago (in book publishing world), in 2005, I started writing a book called “Last of the Unicorn Hunters.” This title, I was told by EVERYONE, simply would not do. Thus began a months-long search for the perfect title. Many were considered. Some were mocked. A few were mocked with love and sincere affection (such as my Ludlum-loving friend’s ardent campaign for “The Horn Identity.”) I started making a list of titles that I loved. I had recently read a book called Valiant, by Holly Black, and I loved that title. I decided I wanted my title to have the same feel as that one. Enter Rampant. Rampant was the first book I ever sold that retained the title I sold it with. I did not realize, back at the time, that we were entering an age of one-word titles in YA fiction. Now pretty much every YA book has a one-word title. Look at the shelves: It’s one word from here to the travel section. Shiver, Matched, Uglies, Rumors, Skinned, Ashes, Ice, Need, Hunger, Linger, Divergent, Witchlanders, MOckingjay, Hourglass, Possession, Evernight, Everneath, Unwind, Intertwined, Savvy, Grace, Graceling, Fire, Liar, Leviathan, Mastiff, Devilish… and of course, Twilight. It was so prevalent that when we went to title Ascendant, we had a bit of a challenge on our hands. Quite simply — we were running out of appropriate words. In fact, I’d already gotten emails from other writers trapped in the “one word title” conundrum of a series, annoyed that their chosen titles were considered too close to “Rampant” to be acceptable. (I’ve also gotten that email in regards to Ascendant, and I live in fear that someone will use my chosen title for the hypothetical killer unicorn book three before I get to it.) When I went to title my next book, a post-apocalyptic retelling of Persuasion, I had one rule: No one-word titles. It was, of course, a tad ironic, given that Persuasion is one word, and a title that fit in quite neatly with the current YA trend. It did not, however, fit very well with my vision for the book. Again, a protracted search for titles. I paged through my dog-eared copy of Persuasion, hoping for phrases that would rock my fictional world. As I did for Rampant, I made a list of words that fit with the themes and motifs I planned to explore in my book. Up spat a lot of imagery about winter and remembrance and navigation and lantern-light and compasses and stars and engineering and Greek myths and seafaring and waiting. I came up with several titles. None were acceptable. A few found their way into the book in other guises. Eventually, I found a poem by Carl Sandburg called “Prayers After World War” which says, in part: Wandering oversea singer, And fell in love. For this, I thought, was the world I’d created. This was a world where things had been bad — so bad that people were happy to forget the past, forget the things they’d once known, and be afraid of the dreams they’d once had. It was a story about the children of the apocalypse, who had been born into a world brought low, and dared to dream that it all could someday change, dared to explore beyond their shores, dared to “make a song for tomorrow” as it says elsewhere in the poem. But “Out of the storm let us have one star” was WAY too long for a title. Still, I loved the idea, and I kept digging. I considered phrases I liked that were along those lines: “Shoot for the moon. If you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” (Hmm: Fall Among the Stars? No, too space-opera-y.) “I’ve loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” (Hmm, Fearful of the Night? No, wrong emotion.) “I would rather be ashes than dust.” (Hmm… love it, but can’t think of a fitting title.) “I love the light for it shows me the way, but I endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.” (Wait a second…) Bingo. For Darkness Shows the Stars was born. I wrote a proposal and sent it on to my agent. I did not think it was a title we’d be allowed to keep, given the trend in YA titles, but I thought it was one that my editor, and hopefully the acquisitions team, would find evocative, even if marketing made us change it. I consoled myself by remembering that Persuasion was not actually a title Jane Austen had chosen herself, but rather the one her brother had put on the book after her death. She’d been calling it “The Elliots.” (My editor later told me that she had initially doubted we’d be able to keep the title, but marketing loved it as much as we did, and here we are.) So what does this have to do with the cover? Well, when we started talking about concepts for cover art, one of the things we knew was that with such a distinctive and distinctively evocative title that we would want to play on and play up those words as much as possible. I started collecting pictures of starscapes that reminded me of scenes in the book:
And pictures that reminded me of Elliot, because I knew the other prevailing trend on covers was pictures of girls:
(Actually, now this photo reminds me of the cove of Saundra Mitchell’s The Springsweet. Right? With the dress and the lighting and the general feel?) So I sent these all along to my editor, and then I begged — I actually begged, and she can verify this — for an interesting font treatment, because I was busy being in love with the cover of Kami Garcia and Margie Stohl’s Caster series books. (Also: true story, their cover designer used to work for Harper, and he had once been assigned to design the cover of Rampant before he left.) And more than that, because I loved this title, and I wanted it to be an important part of the cover. But, as with keeping the title itself, I never actually expected any of this to come to pass. Anyway, time passed, and I finished the book, and then, one day, I was watching TV, and I saw a music video that stopped me in my tracks. More on that tomorrow. Here I am at the NINC Conference in sunny-but-cold Florida. And, last night I ran into none other than MJ Putney herself, which reminded me I had yet to pick a winner for the DARK MIRROR giveaway contest, so I asked her to pick a random number, and she did, and that number was seventeen, which makes VIRGINIA our winner. Virginia, I know you’re out there. Email me. In other news, there’s an interview with me up at Reading Underground, the teen blog of the Charleston Public Library (So excited for YALLFest, Y’ALL.) Did I mention I’ll have a For Darkness Shows the Stars ARC there? What, you say? You want a For Darkness Shows the Stars snippet? Well, okay, since you asked very, very nicely: Olivia’s song ended, but Donovan merely turned his music into something wilder, a more obvious dancing tune. A cheer went up from the assembled crowd. Several couples even rose from their picnic blankets to dance beneath the glowing lanterns. Kai gave his hand to Olivia to help her down from the porch steps. She tugged him toward the dancers, and after a moment, he joined her. Elliot stared down at her lap. “Aren’t they a lovely couple?,” Andromeda said. “Please go away.” Okay, off to conference. So I was looking up editions of Persuasion on the internet. Never you mind why. This, for the record, is “my” Persuasion:
Or at least, the one I’ve had since 2009, when I went to the Jane Austen’s letters exhibit in New York City. Before that I had a variety of others (including one with a salmon pink cover) and then for a few years, had only the one in my leather bound “complete works of Jane Austen” collection. But this one has a large, large index with all kinds of historical factoids (and a long digression that uses the dialogue to suss out exactly how incompetent the Musgrove sailor was on Wentworth’s ship, which is amusing). I also own this Persuasion:
And another one that I can’t find the cover to online (it’s the “Annotated” Persuasion). Harper Teen did their Twilight thing on it a few years back, complete with Twilighty title font:
But my absolute favorite is this one I just found:
How awesome is that? Because Anne would TOTALLY paint her fingernails red. That is SUCH a 1800s-daughter-of-a-baronet thing to do, you know? And the lipstick. And the cribbed-from-wicked-lovely pose. The best part of this version — I know, better even than the fingernails — is hard to read in this picture, but allow me to share a detail shot:
Yes, that’s right. “Copyrighted material.” Um… do they mean the picture? Is there an essay or an annotation or something in there written recently? Because they certainly can’t mean the text. Jane Austen is no longer under copyright, which, in the U.S., is defined as life of the author plus seventy-five years. That’s why there are so many bajillions of versions of Persuasion floating around. Because any publisher can put it up at any time. Even with blood red fingernails on the cover. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for the final cover of my take on Persuasion, which is written entirely by me, and so actually is under copyright. But, hey, I’m feeling magnanimous today, so how about a snippet? For four years she’d waited for Kai to come back, too, but he never had. Nor had he ever sent word of his whereabouts. In her dreams, she liked to imagine he’d ended up like one of the admiral’s men, content and employed. With his mechanical talent, he’d have made an excellent skilled laborer. But she’d heard too many stories of the things that happened to Post runaways. She’d heard of the dangers in Post enclaves. The brothels and the workhouses, the organ trade and the people who sold their bodies for illegal experimentation. Well, that was a week. I was sitting at my computer, twittering, when the earthquake started. At first I thought it was a truck passing closely outside. Then I noticed my tomato trellises shaking away and as the vibrations grew stronger, I put it together. (Yes, that’s a B.A. in Geology, why do you ask?) You know how they say animals feel these first? Rio didn’t even wake up. We didn’t sustain any damage and we’re all fine, here. A few days later, everyone started panicking about the hurricane. Where I come from, people prepare for hurricane season the same way people up north prepare for winter. It’s a given that when you hear a storm is coming, you make sure you have fresh batteries in all your flashlights, a bunch of grillable/ready-to-eat food, a full tank of gas, and a few gallons of water, just in case. The large-scale panic, I think, was entirely media-generated. Hurricanes are bad and dangerous and this one hurt a lot of people, don’t get me wrong, but the shelves empty of flashlights and batteries and red wine were a little shocking to me. Pick up some staples, and make sure you have flashlights and water. Thanks to the fact that Sailor Boy and I are part of the 9/11 Generation and we live in our nation’s capital, we’ve got a permanent “emergency cabinet” in our house (which reminds me, I need to add stuff for Queenie to my jump bag.) Even my parents, who have lived in hurricane-central for over twenty-five years, called me to report whatever piece of yellow journalism they were hearing on the news. We were all set — but we were lucky. Our power didn’t even go out. (Compare to July 2010, when an unnamed storm knocked out power to our house for a week.) We stayed indoors all day Saturday, and now there are little leaves and twigs all over my yard, but Sunday was gorgeous. We even took Rio for a hike in the park (the creek was running way high). The moral of the story is, respect the weather, respect natural disaster,s be prepared, and for goodness sake, Don’t Panic. In other news, remember when I posted these stats of For Darkness Shows the Stars? Turns out they were a little premature. No, I haven’t suddenly decided to add zombies. But I did have to do a little rejiggering of the chapters during the last round of edits. so now the chapter count stands at 43 and the unchapter count at 21. To compare: There are 26 in Ascendant and 27 in Rampant. There are 21 chapters in Under the Rose, which is the longest secret society book, and the one whose length is most comparable to FDSTS (see sidebar). That’s a significant difference, to me. I wonder if it will feel so different to readers.I think sometimes I get overly obsessed with things like chapter breaks and chapter headings and the titles of various internal parts of my novel that readers don’t really care about. I suspect a significant number of readers never read the “confessions” — let alone the chapter titles — of the secret society books. But of course, there are all kinds of crazy ways that I’ve learned readers read books over the years. Some read all the dialogue first and then go back and read the narrative. Some read the first few pages and then the last few pages and use that as a barometer to decide whether or not to read the book. Some buy all the books in a series and then hold off reading them until the series is complete. Some always skip the prologues, or never read the chapter titles, or refuse to read anything set in italic, or only read chapters with numbers divisible by six. Some of these reading habits make me wonder how the reader in question can ever make sense of a novel. Me, I’m a straight through, don’t skip a word kind of reader. I would never dream of skipping a prologue or a text block or a sex scene — the author put them there for a reason, and if I skip it, I’m missing something they designed to be part of the whole. And because I read that way, I write that way, too. I mean for all the words in my books to come in a particular order, and to be read in that order. I think you’re missing something if you don’t, but that’s the way my brain works. There are no chapter titles in FDSTS — a first for my original novels. I felt like between the parts, and the quotes, and the unchapters — well, it was starting to get a little busy in the header arena. I don’t miss them. They were right for my other series, but simple numbers are right in this case. Enough of that. You guys are going to be SO SICK of hearing me talk about FDSTS before the book comes out next June. Next. June. Ugh. Kidlit publishing moves at a glacial pace, y’all. When I wrote Secret Society Girl, I turned the draft in August 31, and it came out in May of the following year. At least this isn’t as bad as Rampant, though, which had a 12 month wait time after proofs. One day, maybe I’ll be patient enough to write a book and not announce it until the ARCs come out. Hahahahahhahahahhaha. Good one. Yes, there will be ARCs of FDSTS. Sometime this fall, I hear. This is what I’m doing to distract myself until then:
I am very excited about my new project. I am jamming it full of all kinds of things I’ve been interested in recently. Pets. Frocks. Swimming. Banter. And of course, fabulous names.
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