Picture Post- Books, A Cat, and Melted Candles!

Quick News- I was interviewed over at Peace, Love, Vote Books! Go check it out here!

Yes, I'm back with another Picture Post!! I took these pics in two bookstores last week- both Barnes and Noble, I think.



Photographic proof of Project Sweet Life by Brent Hartinger and Shadowed Summer by Saundra Mitchell are both on bookstore shelves!! I loved Shadowed Summer- check out my review last Friday on the myspace blog and enter the contest- and am in the middle of reading Project Sweet Life right now! You can also see Envy by Anna Godberson and Kisses and Lies by Lauren Henderson.



TONS of books here. Was just trying to get the bottom two shelves, but that wasn't working out so I just did a faraway shot. This was to mainly capture Miss Match by Wendy Toliver (bottom right) and Geek Charming by Robin Palmer. But there's also lots of other amazing books on display!!



This was the first time I'd ever seen this book before in person- Sophomore Undercover by Ben Esch. I'm supposed to get a review copy, but none has arrived yet sadly. But here it is in the bookstore! I really love the cover and the book sounds amazing. I hope I get to read it soon! :) By the way, this was taken in the second bookstore as is this next one.



Yes, yes, another picture of Bound South by Susan Rebecca White (Lauren Myracle's sister). They had FIVE copies of this on their shelves, which were originally spine-out with the three books next to it face-out. Well, I remedied that problem, lol. Now, Bound South is in its rightful place, facing out into the store so that people will walk by and be sucked in by the awesome cover and then buy it. :)

And now, the final pic, which has a bit of story behind it. Our heat doesn't work properly. You turn it on and then it keeps going and doesn't stop, so the temperature keeps getting higher and higher. You can't keep it at a set temperature. With the AC, you can though, so I don't understand that, but whatever.

ANYWAY, I was out of town and coming back Wednesday evening. Wednesday morning, my roomie leaves the house and accidentally kept the heat on while she was at work. As you know, we have two cats. My roomie is at work until 5pm and she leaves at like 7:30am. So the heat was on that entire time with no respite for the cats, so she comes home to find them PARCHED and DYING (not really, as they're sturdy creatures, but that's what my roomie said, lol). So she refills their water dishes with cold water and ice cubes, and also puts them in cool areas. Maya happens to be in my bathroom, as there's no vent there so it stayed pretty cool since the door was shut. And Samson was just in the living room with my roomie over near the porch door which was open to let the cool air in.

I arrive home shortly after. I also have to pee. So after my roomie tells me the whole story, I go to my bathroom, knowing that Maya is in there. But I wasn't expecting this:



Isn't that just ADORABLE?!?! Although she did kinda look at me with a "I'M using the bathroom now." expression, lol.

Actually, I have two more pics. We have candles on our dining room table and this is what the heat did to them:






So there you have it! Next week, I'll be posting pics of my bookshelves and piles of books! :)

In My Mailbox- Week of Feb. 16

Here is my vlog for this week's In My Mailbox. I didn't get very many books, yet I ramble on for like 7 or 8 minutes. You'd think less books = shorter run time but no, it's actually less time = more time for me to ramble on. So I hope you all enjoy rambling!



By the way, I forgot to mention that I have a contest going on over at the Myspace blog! Here's the link to it- it features reviews of Shadowed Summer and September Sisters, and you can enter for the chance to win one of them! :)

Fresh New Voice of YA- Saundra Mitchell guest blog!

A short story is like a kiss in the dark from a stranger. -Stephen King, Skeleton Crew (Introduction)

If it weren't for Stephen King, an overdue vacation, and a movie gone wrong, I never would have written a novel.

For fifteen years, I've been a screenwriter. It's been my pleasure and privilege to write- and see produced- nearly four hundred short films. But film is the ultimate collaborative medium. I finish a script, and hand it off-- six months later, the historical drama I wrote may show up on the screen as a futuristic comedy.

Hundreds of hands touch a film before it's finished. Sometimes, this creates a transcendent film that's better than the one you wrote. But sometimes, it creates a terrible film that you wish you could pretend never happened at all. No, no, I realize the credits claim I wrote this, but I swear to you- I wrote a historical drama. There were no giant clown feet from Mars in the movie I wrote!

And it happened that I wrote one script that meant so, so much to me. It was deeply personal- so personal that I made a rare call to the producer to beg a promise he wouldn't change the ending. He promised. Then he changed the ending anyway. I was devastated.

Ordinarily, I would have cried to my best friend Wendi for a couple of days, and then gotten over it. But it happened that for the first time in years, Wendi had decided to take a vacation with her family. A long vacation. Without Internet access.

Left alone, I picked up Stephen King's "On Writing." I've always loved King- though always his short stories better than his novels. And what I especially loved were the author's notes to readers that came with his anthologies. The way he talked about writing- as if telling a story were something intimate- resonated with me. I picked up "On Writing" because I hoped it would be an entire book of those personal, murmured author's notes.

And it was.

I spent three days of my best friend's vacation reading "On Writing" again and again. I spent the rest of it working on my first novel. Then my second- which at the time was called "The Incident with the Landry Boy."

The first novel is in my dresser drawer, an ugly child never meant to be seen by the world. But the second, you know now as "Shadowed Summer." And it never would have been, if not for a bad movie, an overdue vacation and Stephen King.

Thanks, Steve-o.

Fresh New Voice of YA- Interview with Jillian Cantor

News
Go check out the guest blog from Jillian over on the myspace blog that I posted yesterday!!

And also, thanks to everyone who participated in the Eyes Like Stars scavenger hunt! I'm glad you all had a fun time and I wish you the best of luck in winning! :) Thanks also to my 5 new followers, and to everyone for leaving comments!


Interview
1) How did you get the idea for The September Sisters?

Once I got into my twenties, and my sister and I actually became friends, I started to think a lot about what our relationship was like growing up. (We hated each other when we were younger!) At the time I wrote the book, there were also a lot of stories in the news about missing children, and it occurred to me to think about what might happen to the sister of a child who disappeared. How would my life have been different without my sister?


2) What are you working on now? Can you tell us anything about it?

My second book for teens, THE LIFE OF GLASS, will be out from HarperCollins in Winter 2010. It’s the story of a girl who learns about loss, life, love, and beauty during her Freshman year of high school. I’m going through the copy-edits now, and I’m super-excited about it! I can’t wait to be able to share more about it!!


3) Are you anything like your main character Abby? Or more like another character in the book? How much of yourself do you put into your characters, particularly the main ones?

I am a little like Abby in that I am also quiet, serious and love to read and write. I’m also the older sister in a family of two sisters, like Abby, and I played a similar role in the relationship with my sister growing up. I was always the one who lost at fights (like the inner tube in the beginning) and shied away from attention.

I always feel like I put my emotions into my main characters more than anything – the events aren’t true, but the feelings are, if that makes any sense. All of the conflicting emotions Abby feels about her sister – I felt that growing up (only much less heightened since my sister didn’t disappear). But also, whatever emotion I’m feeling as I’m writing seems to seep its way in. Just before writing The September Sisters, I got to visit with a close dying relative for the last time, and that emotion of loss is something I couldn’t help but write into the story


4) What brought you to write for the YA genre? Had you been a fan before writing your novel, or are you still new to it all?

I’m very new to YA, and I fell into it by accident. The September Sisters was, at first, an adult novel, and my agent tried to sell it that way for a few months. When it wasn’t selling, my agent suggested that maybe it was really a YA novel, and she also suggested ways to tweak it to make it feel more YA (which I did). When I originally wrote the book, I never thought about the difference between YA and adult or writing for one or the other. I just had a story to tell, and it happened to be about a teenager.

When The September Sisters sold in a two-book deal, I realized I was going to get the chance to write another YA book, and I had no idea what that really meant. So I started reading -- I read about 20 YA books just to get a sense of the genre and what was out there. And now I’m still trying to catch up reading YA books – which, by the way, I’ve discovered that I really, really love!


5) What is a typical day like for you? What's your writing process like?

On a typical day, I spend the day with my kids (I have two young sons.), just doing normal mom stuff, play dates and story hour, making lunch, playing games, changing diapers, etc. After the kids go to bed, at night, I write. I usually write or do something writing related (like interviews!) every week night for two or three hours.

My writing process is to try and set goals for myself and keep them. I’m a big fan of self-imposed deadlines! When I’m working on a draft, I write five pages each day, and I make myself write them even if I know they’re not perfect or I know I’ll erase them later. I’m also a big reviser, and I will put my draft through many, many revisions on my own before I show it to my agent or editor.


6) What's your favorite jelly bean flavor?

Cinnamon. I love the sweet and spicy taste together!


7) What book(s) are you reading now, or are about to start?

I’m in the middle of working on two new projects right now, and when I write, I can’t usually read at the same time (I need to concentrate totally on my own characters). So I’m sorry to give a boring answer and say I’m actually not reading anything right at the moment. I recently read Sweethearts by Sara Zarr and One True Theory of Love by Laura Fitzgerald, both of which I really enjoyed.

Soon I’m going to start A Taste of Magic by Tracy Madison. It comes out on Feb. 24th just like mine, and Tracy and I blog together at The Novel Girls (www.thenovelgirls.blogspot.com).

Thanks for stopping by, Jillian!!

Thanks so much for the awesome interview, Book Chic!

Waiting on Wednesday (10)

Waiting For You by Susane Colasanti
Derek
Friendly and popular
Style: Cali surfer boy
Awesome at flirting
Future career: landscape architect
Boyfriend potential: high

Nash
Shy but sweet
Style: totally geeked out
Only talks to girls when absolutely necessary
Future career: robotics engineer
Boyfriend potential: none

Derek is clearly the boy Marisa's been waiting for, but there's just one problem. He has a girlfriend. Nash is wrong for Marisa, but he wants to take care of her. As if life wasn't complicated enough, Marisa's also dealing with overcoming a major problem from her past, a family that's acting totally bizarre, and a secret crush on a guy whose identity is a mystery - even to her. The course of true love never did run smooth...

Sophomore year is going to be intense.

My Thoughts: I really enjoyed Susane's previous novel Take Me There and I really need to read her first one When It Happens, but I'm looking forward to her upcoming novel, Waiting for You. It sounds like it'll be a fantastic book and I can't wait to read it! :)