2012 YA Debut Interview + Giveaway: STRUCK by Jennifer Bosworth

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Welcome to the Summer 2012 YA Debut Interview Series, featuring debut YA authors who’ve written books I am absolutely dying to read. I’ve chosen eleven (yes, 11 this time!) debuts to feature, and I hope by the end of this series you’ll be as excited about these books as I am.

Today’s Summer 2012 YA Debut is Struck by Jennifer Bosworth. Read on to see how this author answered the Q&A… And be sure to enter to win a Struck necklace!

Nova Ren Suma: I’ll start with the dreaded question you may be hearing already from strangers on elevators, long-lost family members, and your doctor while you’re sitting on the examination table in the paper gown during your next checkup: “So what’s your book about?” (Feel free to use the jacket copy, or describe in your own words. Up to you.)

Jennifer Bosworth: Struck is about a girl named Mia Price, who is not only a human lightning rod, but also a lightning addict. She’s survived countless strikes, but her craving to connect to the energy in storms endangers her life and the lives of those around her.

Los Angeles, where lightning rarely strikes, is one of the few places Mia feels safe from her addiction. But when an earthquake devastates the city, her haven is transformed into a minefield of chaos and danger. The beaches become massive tent cities. Downtown is a crumbling wasteland, where a traveling party moves to a different empty building each night, the revelers drawn to the destruction by a force they cannot deny. Two warring cults rise to power, and both see Mia as the key to their opposing doomsday prophecies. They believe she has a connection to the freak electrical storm that caused the quake, and to the far more devastating storm that is yet to come.

Mia wants to trust the enigmatic and alluring Jeremy when he promises to protect her, but she fears he isn’t who he claims to be. In the end, the passion and power that brought them together could be their downfall. When the final disaster strikes, Mia must risk unleashing the full horror of her strength to save the people she loves, or lose everything.

In my experience, every book wants to be written differently—and each one behaves differently from the one before it. Some novels like it out of order, and some rigidly insist on being written from start to finish. Some novels come out fast; others are excruciatingly slow. Some novels torment you, and some sing you to sleep. What did your novel want? How did you appease it? Did it ever misbehave?

Oh yes. Struck was trouble from the start. This book wanted to be rewritten so many times that I almost washed my hands of it. Actually, Struck started out as a completely different book with a completely different concept. It was originally titled Damned, and was about a teenage girl who falls in love with the Antichrist. It was like Twilight meets The Omen. But I just couldn’t seem to make that book work, so I came up with a new idea and plugged some of the characters from Damned into Struck, rewrote it a few thousand more times, and then . . . all of a sudden it started working!

Tell us about the place—as in the physical location: a messy office, a comfy couch, a certain corner table at the café—where you spent most of your time writing this book. Now imagine the writing spot of your fantasies where you wish you’d been able to write this book… tell us all about it. 

I’m with Virginia Woolf in needing a room of my own to write. I’ve never been able to write in coffee shops. I can barely manage to concentrate if there’s music on or a lawnmower buzzing outside. So I make sure that wherever my husband and I land I have a space I can use as an office. We moved three times when I was writing/revising Struck, so there’s no consistency there, except that each time I had my “space.” At one point we were living in an industrial loft with no walls or doors. That was NOT a space conducive to writing. Aside from the lack of privacy, I don’t find ultra-modern living spaces very inspiring, even though I love them from a design standpoint.

I wish that I’d written Struck in the two locations where most of the action of the book takes place. One would be a house near Venice Beach, preferably one overlooking the ocean and all the crazy people who hang out on the boardwalk.

The other perfect location would be an office on the top floor of a tall building in downtown Los Angeles. I think writing about downtown LA being destroyed from that particular vantage point would have been inspiring . . . and extremely nerve-racking.

Imagine you’re on the subway, or the bus, or sitting in a park somewhere minding your own business… and you look up and see the most perfect person you could picture devouring your book. This is your ideal reader. Set the scene and describe him or her (or them?) for us.

He’s Stephen King. He’s in a coffee shop eating apple pie and barely tasting it because he’s so engrossed in Struck, and also patting himself on the back because his Dark Tower series is what inspired the novel and he can tell. Just as I’ve worked up the courage to interrupt him and introduce myself, his son, author Joe Hill, breezes in and sits down across from King. He says he read Struck, too, and then father and son have a lengthy discussion about all their favorite parts of the book. I eavesdrop the whole time. And order pie.

[I apologize for my poor Photoshop skills. —Nova]

Publishing a novel is full of high points, low points, absolutely surreal points, and shocking points you never thought you’d see in your lifetime. Tell us a high point, a low point, a surreal point, and something shocking or at least somewhat surprising about your experience so far.

The most surreal part was when the book went to auction. After two years of revising and criticizing and doubting the manuscript, I suddenly had four editors who wanted the book. My brain couldn’t comprehend such a thing. Sometimes it still can’t.

Low point . . . there hasn’t been a concrete low point, but one letdown all authors have to deal with is when they sell a book and discover that it doesn’t immediately change everything and fix your life. You aren’t suddenly validated and overflowing with self-esteem. Your parents probably won’t respect you more. People will continue to think you don’t have a real job. The lesson you have to learn after that is to stop needing those things and become self-validating. Easier said than done.

My favorite part—the high point! For me it was my book trailer shoot. I had an amazing cast and crew, and everything went perfectly. We even shot an entire scene from the book. Seeing Struck come to life in such an amazing, cinematic way made me feel like we should just go ahead and shoot the movie. We just needed sixty million more dollars and we could have done it.

The most shocking part was when my publisher, FSG/Macmillan, announced they were sending me and a few other authors on a two-week book tour in June. It was completely unexpected! I can’t believe I’m getting such tremendous support on my first published novel.

Dream question: If you could go on book tour anywhere in the world, with any two authors (living or dead), and serve any item of food at your book signing… where would you go, who with, and what delicious treat would you serve your fans?

I’ve always told myself that once I publish a book I will reward myself with a trip to Romania. I’d bring fellow 2012 debut authors Sara Wilson Etienne and Leigh Bardugo along with me, partly because they’re wonderful friends and amazing writers, and partly because they’re new to publishing, like me, so we’ll be equally unknown and won’t steal each other’s spotlight. Not that anyone in Romania would have any idea who we were, but they’d come for the free butterscotch pudding and bourbon, right?

If you had to pick one sentence, and one sentence only, to entice someone to read your book, what would it be? (I almost hate myself for asking you this question and making you choose! Almost.)

“My name is Mia Price, and I am a lightning addict.”

Struck will be published by FSG/Macmillan on May 8, 2012. Read on for a chance to win a Struck necklace!

Jennifer Bosworth lives in Los Angeles, California, where lightning hardly ever strikes, but when it does she takes cover. She is the writer half of a writer/director team with her husband, Ryan Bosworth. 

Visit her at jenniferbosworth.com to find out more!

Follow @jennbosworth on Twitter.

The giveaway is now closed. Congrats to the winner!

What is the next Summer 2012 debut novel I’m looking forward to? Come back tomorrow to find out.

2012 YA Debut Interview + Giveaway: AMELIA ANNE IS DEAD AND GONE by Kat Rosenfield

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Hello and welcome to my Summer 2012 YA Debut Interview Series, featuring fun Q&As with debut YA authors who’ve written books I am absolutely dying to read! I’ve chosen eleven (yes, 11 this time!) Summer 2012 YA debut novels to feature, and I hope by the end of this series you’ll be as excited about these debuts as I am.

If you’re here for some giveaways, why, you’re in luck! Each debut interview will feature a giveaway that you can enter by commenting or filling out an accompanying entry form… And at the end of the interview series, I will give away a pre-order of the winner’s choice, open internationally!

Today is the very first Summer 2012 YA Debut I’m thrilled to feature: Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone by Kat Rosenfield. Read on to see how this debut author answered my interview questions… And be sure to enter to win a signed finished copy of the book!

Nova Ren Suma: I’ll start with the dreaded question you may be hearing already from strangers on elevators, long-lost family members, and your doctor while you’re sitting on the examination table in the paper gown during your next checkup: “So what’s your book about?” (Feel free to use the jacket copy, or describe in your own words. Up to you.)

Kat Rosenfield: On a hot summer night in a small town called Bridgeton, a girl named Becca experiences a brutal betrayal at the hands of a boy she thought she could trust. The next morning, the body of a girl nobody knows is discovered on a patch of desolate country road just outside the town line. Paralyzed by fear and indecision in the aftermath, Becca retreats inward as the life she carefully planned begins to fall apart around her.

Short chapters detailing the dead girl’s final hours are intercut with Becca’s first-person narrative, as old grudges and terrible secrets bring her—and the reader—ever closer the horrifying, hidden truth about Amelia Anne Richardson’s death.

In my experience, every book wants to be written differently—and each one behaves differently from the one before it. Some novels like it out of order, and some rigidly insist on being written from start to finish. Some novels come out fast; others are excruciatingly slow. Some novels torment you, and some sing you to sleep. What did your novel want? How did you appease it? Did it ever misbehave?

My novel wanted to be written, and it wasn’t afraid to take drastic measures to make it happen. For a long time, it wasn’t a novel at all; it was just a few thousand words that I’d written as an exercise (in what, I no longer remember) and then left sitting on my computer for two years. But then, in 2008, I lost my job. And in the two months I was unemployed, I decided to finish my first draft.

At which point I very foolishly went back to ignoring the book. And exactly a year later, I lost my job again—and this time, I used the ensuing months of unemployment to finish the revision that ended up being bought by Dutton. And by then, the story had been pent up inside of me for so long that it came flying out, head to tail, at a hundred miles per hour.

So basically, I firmly believe that my book secretly sabotaged my career—twice!—in order to get my attention. Which, on the spectrum of bad behavior, probably puts it somewhere between “grocery-cart toddler having a tantrum in the candy aisle” and “Real Housewife of New Jersey.”

Tell us about the place—as in the physical location: a messy office, a comfy couch, a certain corner table at the café—where you spent most of your time writing this book. Now imagine the writing spot of your fantasies where you wish you’d been able to write this book… tell us all about it. 

I was living in a long, dark, railroad apartment in Brooklyn at the time that I was writing Amelia, and I did pretty much all my work on the bed—there was nowhere else to sit. As a result, substantial portions of this book were written with my cat sitting on my hands and my dog trying to sit on my lap. Which was a problem, since he weighs as much as I do.

As for my fantasy writing spot, I’d like it to be in a turret. That’s all. I don’t really care where the turret is, or to what structure the turret is attached; any turret will do. If you have one available, I will take it.

Imagine you’re on the subway, or the bus, or sitting in a park somewhere minding your own business… and you look up and see the most perfect person you could picture devouring your book. This is your ideal reader. Set the scene and describe him or her (or them?) for us.

I would be beside myself if I ever came across anyone reading my book in the wild, really. But here’s my dream scenario: I would be flipping through some haute publication that covers the lifestyles of the rich and famous—like the NYT Style section, or Vanity Fair—and I’d come across a photo from a big-deal, black-tie party. Everyone in tuxes and evening gowns, celebrities everywhere, and the main subject of the photo would be a group shot of, say, Julia Roberts hanging out with George Clooney and Heidi Klum. But in the background, at a table, there’s person—sitting all alone, head down, completely uninterested in the party going on around him.

And it’s Christopher Walken.

And he’s reading my book.

And then a unicorn walks across my lawn.

Publishing a novel is full of high points, low points, absolutely surreal points, and shocking points you never thought you’d see in your lifetime. Tell us a high point, a low point, a surreal point, and something shocking or at least somewhat surprising about your experience so far.

The high point was definitely calling my mother on the night that I found out I was being published and shrieking, “MOOOOOOOM! IT’S HAAAAAPPENIIIIIIIING!” It was a moment I’d dreamed about—for me, the best part of good news is being able to share it—and she went “EEEEEEEE!” and I went “AHHHHHH!” and it was just perfect.

On the downside, there have been a series of these terrible moments—from getting my first editorial letter to re-reading my ARC and thinking, “Oh, God, why did I choose that word!”—when I’ve felt daunted and terrified and in over my head, and generally convinced that I’m not cut out to do what I’m doing.

And at this point, I think the most surreal and most surprising thing are one and the same, which is seeing the book being talked about by other people. I still think of my novel as this silly, self-indulgent thing I made in my apartment, and it’s mind-blowing to realize that soon it’ll be out in the world, in people’s hands, doing things and making friends that I don’t know about.

Dream question: If you could go on book tour anywhere in the world, with any two authors (living or dead), and serve any item of food at your book signing… where would you go, who with, and what delicious treat would you serve your fans?

I’d invite Dorothy Parker and Edward Gorey to accompany me on a tour of Europe, where we’d serve oysters and champagne cocktails to our delighted attendees. Apart from the book-related events, I imagine this trip would mostly consist of Dorothy and I sitting in a corner, drinking whiskey, and trading bitchy bon mots about everyone we’d met, with Edward occasionally looking up from his drink and whispering, “Do you ever wonder what spiders are thinking?” and then Dorothy would be like, “Geez, Edward, you’re such a freak!” and then we’d all laugh and laugh and laugh.

If you had to pick one sentence, and one sentence only, to entice someone to read your book, what would it be? (I almost hate myself for asking you this question and making you choose! Almost.)

“The night before Amelia Anne Richardson bled her life away on a parched dirt road outside of town, I bled out my dignity in the back of a pickup truck under a star-pricked sky.”

I could only choose this sentence—it’s the very first one in the book, and it’s one of the few things that has remained unchanged and untouched from the day I first wrote it five years ago. Cheesy as it sounds, this is the sentence that made me a writer. It drew me in to the world of Amelia then, and I can only hope it will draw other people in now.

Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone will be published by Dutton/Penguin on July 5, 2012. Read on for a chance to win a signed copy!

Kat Rosenfield is an internationally-published writer, illustrator, and advice columnist. When not working on a new novel, she can be found gossiping about people’s outfits on MTV’s Hollywood Crush and giving flirting pointers on Barnes & Noble’s SparkLife. She lives in Connecticut with a dog, a cat, and one charming gentleman.

Visit her at katrosenfield.com to find out more!

Check out Kat’s blog at pinkindiaink.tumblr.com.

Follow @katrosenfield on Twitter.

The giveaway is now closed. Congrats to the winner!

What is the next Summer 2012 debut novel I’m looking forward to? Come back tomorrow to find out.

What YA Debuts Are You Dying to Read This Summer?

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Keep an eye on this space, because starting this Monday I’ll be telling you what debut YA novels I’m dying to read this upcoming summer season (May through August). And not just that…

I’ll be interviewing each of the authors with some fun questions about their dream book tours, their favorite sentences from their books, their ideal readers, and just how badly their books misbehaved… Plus, the debut authors have generously donated for giveaways for YOU—and you could win signed ARCs, pre-orders, signed finished copies, and swag. Each day is a new debut I must read, and I hope the interviews will make you want to read the books, too!

Now, tell me: What Summer 2012 YA Debuts are you especially looking forward to? Let me know… we may just have some of the same books on our madly-excited-to-read lists!

Nova, Are You Home Yet?

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Tomorrow! I am home tomorrow!

And here are four things I want to tell you now that I’m back to real life:

My new novel 17 & Gone is moving along and I can’t wait to update you and tell you all about it! All I can say for the moment is that the season is Spring 2013 (which could be anywhere from January to April, 2013). I don’t have a cover yet, but the cover nightmare I had—incongruously involving an unrelated cameo from a young Leonardo DiCaprio—has not come true, so we’re good.

The 12-week *online* YA Novel Writing Class I’m teaching with Mediabistro starts NEXT WEEK, on Thursday, April 19, and as far as I know there is still room in the class and you can still apply! I can’t tell you how much I look forward to working with all the writers in the class. We’re going to have a blast… and get a ton of writing done. (I wish I could also tell you I’m teaching the same class in person this summer, but alas my summer schedule is still up in the air as I wait for some applications I have out, so I couldn’t commit. But if I get the chance to teach a future class with Mediabistro, in person or online, I will keep you posted.)

You can still donate to support me in my walk for my sister in Walk MS: Philadelphia next month. Here’s why I’m walking and links to donate if you want to help me reach my fund-raising goal.

And what’s happening next with this blog, huh? It’s time for the resurgence of a blog series you may remember from some months ago:

On Monday, April 16, It’s time for a new round of the YA Debut Interview series, in which I pick ten debut YA novels that I’m excited to read from the upcoming season and do a Q&A with each of the authors. But here’s an exciting thing… For the Summer 2012 series, there are 11 debuts to be featured here! (One of the debuts that had been fall turned out to be summer, and I was way too excited about the book to not include it.) So come back on Monday for interviews with the authors and ways to win signed ARCs and pre-orders of these Summer 2012 YA debuts… Each day I’ll reveal a new debut!

Next time I post, it’ll be from New York City. xo

Connections and Disconnections

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I’ve been away at the residency in the gorgeous California mountains for four weeks as of today—and I leave for the flight home on Thursday.

I got some good work done here (one piece in particular is especially exciting… E knows what piece I mean), much of which will need to be continued once I get back, but I’m ready to go home now. To E! Also, to my routines. To all the very many things I need to do once I get there because I’m getting overwhelmed just thinking about it. And to, you know, my life, which I guess is still waiting for me. I sure hope it is.

I’ve realized that being away for all this time has made me feel strange. I feel so disconnected, even though I have been checking in online. Part of me wonders if people are being polite, knowing I’m at a retreat, and not contacting me. The other part of me looks at the Twitter stream and all the tiny faces going by and feels absolutely separate from all of it, like when I tweet I’m talking to a wall and no one hears me. Have I made this up? Created this feeling because I feel so physically far away? When I’m not on the East Coast do I disappear? Strangeness.

All I know is I want to do the following things once I get home and they have nothing to do with the internet, so maybe feeling disconnected from the exciting world of Twitter isn’t such a bad thing… I want to:

• Blast my music and make a lot of noise

• Order Thai takeout online

• Get a slice of Joe’s pizza

• Watch all the TV I missed (ahem, Mad Men)

• Go outside at like one in the morning for a random item at the bodega across the street just because I can

• Walk through Washington Square Park in the evening when the lamps come on and remember why I truly love this city

• Eat an actual bagel (not bread with a hole in the middle), sesame and with cream cheese and toasted perfectly and served to me in a basket while I sit in a crowded café staring at strangers

• Go to the New York Public Library and take out as many YA novels as I can physically carry

• Travel somewhere on the subway without ever having to set foot in a car

• Dance around my living room and make a big, gigantic mess

• Most importantly, see E!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I miss him so much.

So I may be a tad homesick for NYC, but what an incredible, creative, inspiring experience I had here. Bet you I’ll be homesick for Djerassi as soon as I touch ground on the East Coast. I met some amazing people here, and I hope we stay connected beyond our time on this mountain.

p.s. to Writers, Visual Artists, Media Artists, Composers, Choreographers: You should apply to come here. The next deadline is in February, so keep it in mind for the future! We just saw the stacks of admissions applications in the office tonight… good luck to everyone who sent in an application. I hope you’ll have a chance to spend an amazing month here!

p.p.s. I’d meant to post about my awesome San Francisco/Berkeley trip, but I’ve been working on a novel and haven’t gotten to it yet. I will try, but here’s a peek of me in my first tourist T-shirt I’ve bought in probably 20 years (of course it’s for a bookstore):

Walking for My Sister

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Surely by now you’ve heard me talk about my baby sister. If you’ve read Imaginary Girls, you may have noticed her name on the dedication page, and maybe you read this interview I did with her on release day. Maybe you were in the audience during one of my readings weeks before the book came out, when she sat on a chair before the stage, and in the darkness surrounding the spotlight it felt like I read only to her.

I adore my little sister, Laurel Rose. If you know me, you are well aware of that, because I can talk about her a lot.

What I haven’t talked about here before is that while I was revising the very last of the editorial rounds of Imaginary Girls—when the story was what it was, and Ruby and Chloe already chose to do what they did… I learned that my own baby sister, the one I would do anything for, was diagnosed with MS. I don’t want to talk about how devastated and helpless I felt, wishing I could take the disease away from her and take it on myself. I want to tell you that my little sister, Rose, is strong and brave and someone I admire to the ends of the earth, even when this disease is hard on her. She is truly amazing, and she will fight this—as will the many of us who love her want to fight by her side.

This May 5, for the first time, I am taking part in Walk MS in Philadelphia—my sister’s city. I am on her team, and all of us are going to do the walk to help fund-raise for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, to help those living with MS today—and to find a cure. This cause is very personal to me, as you can imagine, and that’s why I’m posting about it on my writing blog.

I posted the link to my Walk MS page on Twitter and Facebook last night, where you can donate to support me, and donate to support my sister and her team—and already, within one night, I met my fund-raising goal, thanks to two very, very generous donors! (Thank you so much, Lauren and Christine!!) But Walk MS is over a month away and now I’d love to exceed my goal: for my sister, and for others living with MS. You can donate any amount, nothing is too small, and be a part of my walk beside my sister on May 5. Or you can donate to sponsor my sister’s walk—or her whole team. Up to you!

If you decide to, you can donate here:

Here is more information about my sister’s local chapter of Walk MS and the organization your donation would support.

When a Novelist Wishes She Could Write Short Stories

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File this under: Current Distractions.

"Yield to Whim" by Frank Foreman, 1983, on the road leading to the Djerassi Resident Artists Program

I know I’m working on a new novel proposal right now, quite possibly two, and I know I just revised a novel and will be revising said novel again soon enough—did you see that 17 & Gone has a season? It does! Spring 2013! Plus, I’ve been gobbling up a strange array of novels since I landed at the artist colony, but I can’t seem to quit my attachment to short stories.

I adore short stories.

In fact, I wrote a story just a couple of weeks ago, and it was a wild, familiar experience I’d forgotten, and all I can think is how I want to write more. What is it about a short story that calls to me so much? I really don’t think it’s all about the length… though how nice to write something under 300 pages, right? (I won’t tell you the current page count of 17 & Gone.) I think it’s more about the experience of reading short stories: intense, exquisite bursts of attention. And then it’s over. I like that feeling. I also like how, in a story, every moment is there for a reason, every single word is significant. For someone who loves a good sentence as much as I do, it’s the perfect form.

And yet, for someone who can’t seem to shut up, the way I do, a novel really is more suited to my writing… but I can cheat a little, can’t I? Not to mention that, often, a short story for me can be the jumping-off point for a new novel. Imaginary Girls was first conceived as a short story, after all.

I want to write some more stories this year, and I want to start sending out to journals again like I haven’t in years. Maybe I’ll somehow get myself to a summer workshop so I can work on this.

…After I finish those novel drafts, of course.

Do you love short stories, too? Tell me why!

Inside an Artist Colony

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What happens at an artist colony? I keep getting asked this, and each one is different, but here at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in the northern California mountains I’ll give you a small peek of what happens:

I would just like to take a moment and say the trees in California are REALLY tall!

You must apply to get in, and international artists of many disciplines can apply, so right now I am here with seven other artists: another fiction writer, a playwright, a choreographer, a composer, a media artist, and two visual artists. We live together in two shared spaces (an Artists’ House that holds mostly writers and an Artists’ Barn that holds special studios for dancers and composers and visual artists). We don’t pay to be here and we’re not given a cash prize: The award is the time and space itself. It’s the month of being here, doing our work. We eat dinner together at night and share presentations with one another. In fact, my presentation is tonight! (Nervous.) We talk. We crave cake and pounce on it when the amazing chef provides a dark chocolate Guinness cake with cream cheese frosting (oh my!). And during the workdays and late at night we wander the house in our pajamas, deep in our creative stupors, going back again and again for more coffee or more tea.

You’re here to do your work, at your own pace, for yourself, in any way you want. No one is policing your time—or your internet usage. If tomorrow I want to lie on the porch outside my sliding glass door with my notebook on my face and “write” in my head, I can do that. If I want to stay in pajamas all day and have a strawberry breakfast and write as much as my fingers will spit out, I can do that also—in fact, I might just do that.

We’ve also been: amusing ourselves with poems and scary stories; trading books; laughing; sharing chores; baking sweet potatoes over a wood stove; admiring the amazing view of the land and the Pacific Ocean in the distance; eating the delicious food the chef makes us for weeknight dinners; not watching TV; and working, tons.

The on-site staff members who live and eat with us are also artists—so you’re surrounded at all times by creative people. Oh and animals. So far I’ve seen: one snake, two bunnies, multiple deer, one hummingbird, and Neil Young’s cows.

The Pacific Ocean sometimes looks like a part of the sky. And on the property, in the woods, are a series of sculptures made by artists who’ve been residents here. They’re like treasures, peppered throughout the trees, made to last as long as they will and then weather away and become a part of the forest.

"Vanishing Ship" by John Roloff

Faery by Derek Johnson

"Orpheus Coyote and Friends" by William King

(someone forgot to write down what this sculpture was)

Feel free to ask me questions, but I hope this explains it!

To find out more about Djerassi artist residencies and sculpture tours open to the public, visit www.djerassi.org. 

____

A tiny note about the world outside the artist colony: Yes yes, I know The Hunger Games opens tomorrow. Yes, I am in mourning that I don’t have a way to see it. Please don’t tell me how awesome it is. I won’t be able to contain my jealousy. Just please go and make the movie very, very popular so it is still in theaters when I get back to New York City on April 13!

A Good, Creative Day

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I finished the draft of a short story today, ate a cheese sandwich, did laundry, saw the lucky bunny outside my sliding-glass door (three times!), got a special care package containing my writers colony galoshes and more, took a short walk even though my bad ankle is bothering me, looked around at where I was, and just felt really happy to be here.

The Artists' House, where I'm staying.

The Artists' House at the top of the hill

The shortcut path between the Artists' House and the Artists' Barn

A view from the shortcut path

The Artists' Barn

View from inside the Artists' Barn (that blue there between the sky and the land is the Pacific Ocean!)

That really is a view of the Pacific! Wow.

Tonight after dinner and after the night’s presentation, I’ll make some revisions to the story. It’s due! Then what’s next when I turn it in? Can’t wait to find out.