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Turning Points: Guest Post by Stephanie Burgis (+Giveaway)

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This guest post is part of the Turning Points blog series here on distraction no. 99—in which I asked authors the question: What was your turning point as a writer? Here is author Stephanie Burgis revealing hers…

GIVEAWAY INCLUDED: Keep reading for a chance to win Stephanie’s newest middle-grade novel Renegade Magic!

Guest post by Stephanie Burgis

When I first sat down to write this entry, I froze up. Too many choices were tumbling around my head. Which turning point do I talk about?

Here’s my first major turning point: the moment in 2001 when I made the absolutely illogical choice to attend Clarion West, a writing workshop I knew I most definitely could not afford. Against the advice of many smart people, I put $2,000 on my credit card and flew into the unknown for six weeks, acting as if I were a real writer whose work deserved the investment—as if my writing could ever be worth a $2,000 expense!

As if. I was physically shaking as I stepped onto that plane from Pittsburgh to Seattle. I couldn’t believe what I was doing. I was so terrified that night at our first group dinner, I actually felt like I was floating above my own body as other workshop members asked me respectfully about my writing.

I smiled and I came up with answers somehow, but inside I was thinking: Can’t they tell I’m just an impostor?

Yes, I had known since I was seven years old that I wanted to be a writer—but that was just a crazy fantasy, a pipe dream! Yes, I’d won my acceptance to the competitive workshop—but that was a fluke. It had to be! Couldn’t they tell just by looking at me that I didn’t belong with Real Writers like them?

They couldn’t…and by the end of those six weeks, neither could I. By the end of the workshop, I was calling myself a writer out loud for the first time in my adult life. Those six weeks changed everything for me—not just my writing (which improved so much there), but my whole life, as well.

Less than a year later, I was flying into the unknown again, getting onto another plane—and this time, it wasn’t just for a six-week trip. This time, I was moving to England to live with the amazing man I’d met at Clarion West, one of my favorite writers in the world, and the single reader whose opinion matters most to me.

Even beyond that, I was part of an active critique group I’d joined because of Clarion West. I was writing and submitting stories to professional magazines, coping with rejections and sending those rejected stories right out again. Everything about the way I treated my own writing had gone through a massive shift—I was finally turning my crazy dream into a practical plan, and that made all the difference.

Without having attended Clarion West…well, I would still be a writer. I’ve been a writer ever since I was seven years old. But I wouldn’t be where I am right now, not physically, emotionally, or professionally.

But that’s not the only major turning point for me and my writing. Four years later, I had to choose between finishing my PhD in music history or making another, even scarier commitment to my writing.

I was halfway through my PhD thesis when my funding ran out and I had to take a full-time day job. I knew by then that I didn’t want to be a professor, but after spending three years in a PhD program, it seemed crazy not to finish the PhD, just to put a cap on all that work. Moreover, I come from a family of academics: three of my close relatives have PhDs, and a fourth is in a PhD program now. Education, and degrees, mean a lot in my family.

“No problem!” I told everybody I knew—especially myself.

I just planned to do it all: work the day job during the day, write my fiction at lunchtime, and write my PhD thesis at night. I could finish the thesis within a year, and have that PhD diploma to make me officially a success. Easy-peasy!

Well. Guess how long that plan worked out?

I think it was on the second night of my new schedule that I started crying helplessly when I sat down at my computer, completely overwhelmed. That was when I realized that I’d made a fatal error in my planning: I’d forgotten to schedule any time with my husband, or, in fact, any time to decompress at all.

That was not a livable schedule for me. So, something had to go.

The obvious answer? Fiction writing. After all, although I’d finally published a couple of stories by then, my career certainly hadn’t taken off in any way. No one in the literary world would miss me if I just stopped writing for a year. I could always pick it up again after a year, once the PhD thesis was finished…

…Except that I couldn’t. I genuinely could not do it.

Ever since I was seven years old, I’ve known I wanted to be a writer more than anything else in the world. Writing is like eating to me; it’s like breathing.

No one in the literary world would have missed me that year…but I would have missed myself.

Because without writing, I am not myself. It comes right down to that.

Giving up the PhD was hard. It was hard to admit that I was not going to be the super achiever I had planned to be. It was hard to admit to my wonderful supervisor and advisor that their hopes for me were not going to pan out. It was hard to admit to everyone I really wanted to impress that I was not, in fact, as impressive as I had hoped.

But I have never, ever regretted making that choice—any more than I’ve regretted the fact that, a year later, I chose to finally change literary streams, switching from the darker, adult fantasy novels that had won me my first agent to write the book of my heart instead: a lighthearted, funny MG fantasy adventure set in Regency England, which has since been published as Kat, Incorrigible. I’d been writing darker, adult books because I thought that was what a Serious, Important Writer would do—and surely I had to be impressive in some way, right? Right?

Wrong. It turned out that I wasn’t Serious or Important after all…but what I really wanted to write was so much fun, I couldn’t bring myself to care anymore about what other people thought. And that was the real reward, in itself.

In the end, all of my most important turning points have come down to those moments when I had to step forward and make the choice to believe in my own (quirky! implausible! embarrassing!) dreams…

…Which really means believing in myself, the person behind all the social masks, the person I really am: not Serious, not Important, not capital-I Impressive. Quirky. Human. Me.

I don’t know a scarier step to take—but I don’t know a better one, either.

Stephanie Burgis grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, but now she lives in Wales, surrounded by mountains and castles. The first book in her MG Regency fantasy trilogy, KAT, INCORRIGIBLE, was chosen by VOYA as a Top Shelf pick for Middle School Readers. Her second book, RENEGADE MAGIC, was published on April 3, 2012. You can read the first three chapters of both books on her website: www.stephanieburgis.com

GIVEAWAY:
WIN A COPY OF RENEGADE MAGIC!

Stephanie is giving away a *signed* hardcover of her new middle-grade novel Renegade Magic to one lucky winner! You can enter this giveaway either by:

  1. Leaving a comment on this post, or
  2. Filling out this entry form.

And if you do both, you will be entered twice and have two chances to win! (Also, if you tweet about this guest post and/or share it online and tell me so, I will give you a third entry. So share away.)

This giveaway is open INTERNATIONALLY! And it will close on Friday, May 25, at 8pm EST. Good luck!

There’s more in the Turning Points series. Catch up with any posts you may have missed here.

Turning Points: And Now for Something Completely Different by Bethany Griffin (+Giveaway)

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This guest post is part of the Turning Points blog series here on distraction no. 99—in which I asked authors the question: What was your turning point as a writer? Here is Bethany Griffin revealing hers…

GIVEAWAY INCLUDED: Keep reading for a chance to win Bethany’s new novel Masque of the Red Death!

Guest post by Bethany Griffin

I once sent my former agent an email with that subject…And Now For Something Completely Different. It didn’t turn out very well. But, since we are discussing turning points, it seemed a good place to start! My first agent signed me for a book called Handcuffs, and she loved that book very much.

It was a book about this horrific place called high school, and this blog post is about the meandering path—as I’m not sure there was one clearly defined turning point—that took me from writing a book set in high school to writing a post-apocalyptic slightly steampunk (or at least speculative historical) retelling of a classic Poe story.

I still love my first book in the whole slightly-cringing doting-parent sort of way. It was like trying out a hairstyle that, while flattering, didn’t really work out. And while I’ve moved on, and grown as an author, there were parts of that book that were so honest, and so me, that they still make me uncomfortable. Like this passage:

That’s how shyness works. You want to talk but you can’t. People look at you with scorn. Being an ice princess is infinitely better, even if some people think you’re a total bitch. A snob. Reserved. Those are choices a person makes, to be reserved, to be quiet, or to be a snob. Shy isn’t a choice.

I will never be able to read that passage and deny that this book is a reflection of middle/high school me, perhaps more so than fiction should be (though the plot is purely 100% fiction). But what was I doing writing a realistic contemporary novel, anyway?

As a kid, I read any and everything, but my first love was fantasy. LOTR, The Prydain Chronicles, The Chronicles of Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time, so many awesome books. In middle school I veered off into reading historical novels for several years, and then something weird and wonderful happened: My mom started giving me all these gothic…romances? By authors like Victoria Holt. I won’t argue that these were great literature, and I think my mom gave them to me because I was reading above grade level and those books never had any sex in them, but they also had all these dark haunted manor houses and moors, and secret passages, and mysterious deaths. In middle school I also read Poe for the first time, and his work obviously had an impact on me, but my love has always been the novel, which may be why I took it upon myself to take the essence of Poe and try to make it into a novel, who knows?

In early high school I read everything ever written by VC Andrews, twice, and everything by Stephen King, and then I restarted with fantasy, science fiction, and every other weird bit of speculative fiction that I could get my hands on.

What this history of my childhood reading habits is meant to show is that if there is a particular type of book that I am well-suited to writing, that type of book is NOT realistic contemporary.

So that crazy weird dark mix of genres that I mentioned in the first paragraph? My post-apocalyptic steampunk reimagining of the world created in Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death? Add in speculative history, and maybe a dash of dystopia (since there is an evil dictator) and maybe that’s what I was meant to write. Or at least what I believe I am best suited to writing. And I guess figuring that out is the turning point that this post is meandering toward.

At the time when I composed the email to my former agent, gave it a lovely Monty Python–inspired title, and hit send, I hadn’t quite figured out what I wanted to write.

But I simply wasn’t that excited about doing another realistic book, so I sent her this other manuscript that I’d written during this dreamy state that I’d drifted through during my first pregnancy. It was a weird little fairy tale that I still sort of love. But, I mean, you can’t really spring a surprise like that on a person who is expecting a book about high school and expect anything good to come from it. My former agent said the voice was fantastic, but the rest was vague (it was) and that if I wanted to write fantasy I’d need to start from scratch and define all the rules of my world before I even started writing.

So, I never mentioned that manuscript again. Not to anyone. Not until right this minute. I didn’t respond to that email, I didn’t ask questions. I mentally shelved it forever.

And I went on to write a realistic contemporary manuscript that was probably as good as my first book, but wasn’t really where my heart was, and it didn’t sell.

At that point I didn’t really feel like a writer at all. Certainly not a successful one. And I had an idea for my next story that was huge and awe-inspiring and daunting, and I wasn’t sure I could do it. But that’s the sort of thing that speaks to me (huge and daunting, very dark and quite disturbing), so I jumped in.

My former agent had left the business, and I was agentless, making it a good time for reinventing myself, though the process, for me, was never that deliberate. I was still me, just a me who had become daring enough to create the sorts of settings and characters and stories that I was more qualified, and possibly uniquely qualified, to write.

I’m sure my current agent, Michael Bourret, will be reading this, since he’s also Nova’s agent, and if I wanted to be all sentimental (I don’t) I could say that signing with him was also a turning point, because he really got what I was trying to write, and I really needed someone to get it. These words from an early email, describing my writing—It’s dark, and sexy, and just the slightest bit wrong, but all in such a delicious way—expressed exactly what I was trying to do!

And I needed that validation.

So, I set out to write something different and unique, and what I came up with was Masque of the Red Death. The voice, the world, the setting, the characters, they were all exactly what I was meant to write. The sort of story that came naturally and felt right, and happily, I think it’s the sort of thing some people will enjoy very much. At least I hope so, because I’m going to leave realistic novels to the authors who have so much more to say in that genre. I’ll stick to weird dark gothic stories, with horror, adventure, and secret passageways. And scary crocodiles.

And just maybe, the occasional love triangle.

Bethany Griffin spends her days coaxing teenagers to read, and her evenings writing books that someone else can coax teenagers to read. She spends too much time reading and on the internet, and not enough time doing anything else, but rationalizes that everything else is overrated, anyway. Masque of the Red Death was just released on April 24, by GreenWillow Books.

Visit her online at www.bethanygriffin.com.

GIVEAWAY:
WIN A SIGNED COPY OF MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH

Bethany is giving away a *signed and personalized* hardcover of her new YA novel Masque of the Red Death to one lucky winner! You can enter this giveaway either by:

  1. Leaving a comment on this post, or
  2. Filling out this entry form.

And if you do both, you will be entered twice and have two chances to win! (Also, if you tweet about this guest post and/or share it online and tell me so, I will give you a third entry. So share away.)

This giveaway is open in the US ONLY. Please make sure you have a mailing address in the US if you enter. And the giveaway will close on Wednesday, May 23, at 8pm EST. Good luck!

There’s more in the Turning Points series. Catch up with any posts you may have missed here.

Turning Points: Guest Post by Claire Legrand (+Giveaway)

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The Turning Points blog series is back with more guest posts! I’ve asked authors the question: What was your turning point as a writer? Here is debut author Claire Legrand revealing hers…

GIVEAWAY INCLUDED: Keep reading for a chance to win an ARC of Claire’s debut middle-grade novel The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls!

Guest post by Claire Legrand

My turning point didn’t come when I wrote the book that got me a publishing contract.

It came with the book I had to let go.

First of all, I have to say as a disclaimer that I’ve already told this story in bits and pieces on my blog. But the more I talk about it, the stronger I feel, the more encouraged, the more determined. So, here it is again:

I still remember how the idea for that story—the one I had to let go—came to me. The summer after I graduated from high school, I visited Washington, D.C., with my family. On the flight home, while staring out the window and daydreaming, I had a vision. Calling it that makes me want to roll my eyes, but it happened. An image popped into my head, one I had to explore.

It would later become one of the final scenes in the final book of a trilogy that I have yet to write.

Two years later, halfway through my undergraduate degree, I changed my major and left music behind, at least in a professional sense. Part of the impetus behind this decision was that vision that wouldn’t leave me. The story of it haunted me, begging for existence. I changed my major rather listlessly to English literature. I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself, at that point. But I knew I was going to write this book.

I spent the next two years brainstorming. I scribbled aimlessly in notebooks and wrote fan-fiction for characters that have yet to see the light of day. I composed glossaries and encyclopedic essays, designed clothing, and dreamed up spectacularly elaborate fictional histories, maps, wars.

In 2008, I finally started writing. I still remember the feeling of sitting down that first day and typing the word “Prologue,” my fingers shaking. (Yes, prologue! Haters to the left.)

This was the beginning of the book that would get me published. I just knew it.

Funny how things so seldom work out the way we thought they would.

I finished that first bloated, ridiculous, beautiful first draft about a year and a half later, in the summer of 2009. Immediately, I started querying this book that was approximately 200,000 words too long. (Yes.)

Part of me was very practical about this whole process, this dream of being a published author. I was in graduate school, after all; I would earn my librarian degree, I would have a back-up plan. Not that I would need it. This mammoth book would be my ticket to the big time.

How could I have possibly thought such a thing?

I think a lot of it stemmed from fear. It was like I knew, somewhere deep and unacknowledged in my gut, that this wasn’t going to work like I hoped. That I needed to do more research, take time to learn the craft. I scorned words like “craft” and “process” because I was confident that I somehow knew it all innately. That sounds like arrogance, but really, truly, it was fear. Fear that, if I took that extra time to research and plan and hone, the window of opportunity would close for some reason. Fear that, at any moment, someone would pop up, point and jeer, and say that I wasn’t good enough.

I therefore rushed into things way too fast, before my poor, bursting book was even halfway ready.

I queried, and queried, and queried. My original query letter was two pages long. Two pages long! I didn’t include the word count. I didn’t do anything that I was supposed to. Somehow, miraculously, I still managed to get requests, and my rejections were always kind (bless the hearts of those nice agents who could have laughed me into smithereens, but didn’t). However, they were still rejections. These requests never panned out.

Until this one, about six months after I started querying. They say it only takes one.

They’re right. Well, sort of.

I don’t remember how I stumbled upon Diana Fox, exactly, but somehow I ended up at her blog in November 2009. She was going to attend a conference near me in the spring, and I thought, “How fortuitous!” I sent her my query and the first few pages of my prologue. A couple of weeks later, she requested my full manuscript.

And it was a fortuitous thing that I didn’t say how long my book was in that query, and that Diana requested it anyway. That she didn’t open up the Word document, curse, laugh, and send it back to me with a standard rejection.

In February 2010, I checked in with her. In response, I received the longest, most thoughtful email I had yet received from any agent. She had read my book. She liked many things about it, she said, but lots of things still needed work. Perhaps we could talk about it over coffee at the conference in April? I agreed. I probably danced a happy dance of some kind.

April 2010. I went to the conference, all dressed up and sweating profusely. God, I was nervous. This would be, I was convinced, The Day. Sure, Diana had some reservations about my book, but if she saw me in person, if she heard my passion firsthand, she would change her mind. Maybe we could talk revisions, with the promise of representation afterward. Maybe! Maybe!

But a voice kept whispering in the back of my mind, “You know that’s not going to happen, Claire.”

The voice was right. That didn’t happen.

What did happen was that Diana and I sat on the poolside patio of her hotel and chatted about—well, everything: writing, books, my book in particular, life—for three or four hours. I nodded and smiled and said, “Uh-huh” and admitted numbly that no, I hadn’t read that book . . . or that book . . . or that book. I took notes. More sweating.

She did not offer me representation. She did, however, tell me to stay in touch.

“Stay in touch.” The three most evil words since “It’s not you . . . ”

Later, when I got home, I cried as hard as I did when my parents told me they were getting a divorce, as hard as I did the first time someone broke my heart.

I cried because it had finally hit me: how much work I needed to do, how much time I had wasted, how this was the end. I would have to stick my characters in a drawer somewhere until neglect eradicated them.

I cried because Diana had been so ruthlessly honest, and yet so kind. She loved it, but not enough. I had been so close.

A couple of days later, I started revisions, struggling to incorporate everything Diana had suggested, not pausing for one second to think that rushing into this wasn’t a good idea. Instead, I plowed through, revising and re-writing and re-thinking.

It still wasn’t good enough, though. I wasn’t good enough. Not only was I not living up to my own standards, I was also letting my characters down. I wanted to be good enough for them because the feeling of them in my chest was like solid, warm little knots, made up of me and embedded in me and breathing through me.

But I wasn’t. Every query ultimately led to a rejection. So, I put my first book away—and that right there, that decision—changed everything. I put one book away, and I started another one.

This book was something different. This was not a story requiring glossaries, prologues, and an encyclopedia. It was fun, it was creepy, and it cleansed me. For so long, I had been stuck stubbornly trying to hammer out this story that was too big for me. I had focused on it at the expense of all else—reading, researching the industry I so desperately longed to be a part of, developing relationships with other authors.

My turning point came when I realized all this, and took steps to fix it.

When I said good-bye to the book of my heart and started a new book, a step I had never imagined I could stomach taking.

When I admitted that I had work to do, and did it.

That’s when everything changed.

I finished this book, The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, and sent it to Diana, with whom I had stayed in casual contact. She requested it, and by the time all was said and done, she had offered me representation, as had two other agents.

I chose to sign with Diana. A couple of weeks later, we started submitting to editors. A couple of days later, we had our first offer, and we ended up selling the book to my brilliant editor Zareen Jaffery at Simon & Schuster.

I like to think that that first book, the book of my heart, was the hand scrabbling resolutely at the door to the publishing industry. It left behind some blood, some fingernail splinters. But it wedged that door open a smidge, just enough for my Cavendish-shaped foot to slip in and open it fully.

What will happen to that first book? I honestly don’t know. I know that I think about it often. I know that I’ve re-written the prologue, that I’ve re-tooled much of my world-building. I know that, when Diana speaks of it, it is with genuine enthusiasm, and I know what couple she ’ships (an aside: there are many awesome pairings to choose from; I’m just saying). I know that I will return to it, someday.

I also know that, without that first book, without the vision on that plane, I might not have started writing again. You know, I might not even have changed my major. My ambition in life might still be to play in the New York Philharmonic, and I might be spending money on mouthpieces and piccolo trumpets instead of books and printer cartridges and BEA.

We all need that first book, that book of the heart. This isn’t to say that all the books we write aren’t from the heart. But there is always that one book that gets us started, that inspires and propels us. We all need that book—to write it, to slave over it, to get it out of our systems.

Sometimes we even need to let that book go. I know I did.

But whether that book gets published or sits in a drawer, whether it becomes a best-seller or not, whether people love it or hate it, it is the book that made me dream.

And that, the dreaming, is what makes all the difference.

Claire Legrand is a full-time writer and former librarian living in New York City (although she will always be a Texan at heart!). Her first novel, The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, will release on August 28, 2012, from Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers. Her second novel, The Year of Shadows, is due out August 2013, and her third novel, a re-telling of The Nutcracker called Winterspell, is due out the following year, both from S&S BFYR.

Links: blog | twitter | facebook | goodreads | tumblr

GIVEAWAY:
WIN A COPY OF THE CAVENDISH HOME FOR BOYS AND GIRLS!

Claire is giving away a *signed* ARC (advance reading copy) of her middle-grade debut, The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, to one lucky winner! You can enter this giveaway either by:

  1. Leaving a comment on this post, or
  2. Filling out this entry form.

And if you do both, you will be entered twice and have two chances to win! (Also, if you tweet about this guest post and/or share it online and tell me so, I will give you a third entry. So share away.)

This giveaway is open internationally and will close on Monday, May 21, at 8pm EST. Good luck!

There’s more in the Turning Points series. Catch up with any posts you may have missed here.

More Summer 2012 Debut Giveaway Winners!

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It’s time to announce the rest of the winners for the Summer 2012 YA Debut Interview series! Maybe it’s YOU…

Did you win a Summer 2012 debut?

The TWO WINNERS of *signed and personalized* hardcovers of False Memory by debut author Dan Krokos, to be mailed when finished copies are available in August are… Christine (A Reader of Fictions) and Ashley Orellana!

The winner of a *signed and personalized* ARC of Grim by Anna Waggener is… Tandra S.!

The winner of a *signed and personalized* hardcover of Hemlock by Kathleen Peacock is… Doodle!

The winner of a pre-order of Something Like Normal by Trish Doller is… Maggie at Young Adult Anonymous!

The winner of a *signed and personalized* hardcover of Counting Backwards by Laura Lascarso, to be mailed when finished copies are available in August is… Alicia!

The winner of a *signed and personalized* hardcover of Fingerprints of You by Kristen-Paige Madonia, as well as a temporary tattoo!, to be mailed when finished copies are available in July is… Ames!

And… there’s one last winner to announce…

The winner of the finale INTERNATIONAL GIVEAWAY is Becky! And the book Becky chose out of all the debuts is… The Little Woods by McCormick Templeman! Yay, hope you love it!

Congratulations to all the winners! I will email everyone shortly for mailing addresses.

(All winners were chosen thanks to the random magic found at Random.org, with extra entries factored in. Thank you to everyone who entered!)

Win the Summer 2012 Debut of Your Choice! (International!)

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Thank you to everyone who read the Summer 2012 Debut Interview series! To say thanks, I have one last giveaway—and this one is international.

To enter, just fill out the form in this post and choose which Summer 2012 debut you’d most like to win. I will mail the book to the winner once it comes out this summer. This giveaway will close in one week, on Tuesday, May 8, at 8pm EST!

The giveaway is now closed. Congrats to the winner!


And if you missed any of the interviews in the series, here they all are!

Thank you so much to all the authors who took part in this series and generously donated their books for giveaways! Summer 2012 is going to be an incredible season.

2012 YA Debut Interview + Giveaway: FINGERPRINTS OF YOU by Kristen-Paige Madonia

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(Image adapted from cover; cover art © 2012 Terry Ribera)

Why, hello there. Today I have the last Summer 2012 YA Debut Interview in the series! Yes, the very last interview of these summer debut YA authors who’ve written books I am absolutely dying to read!

The final Summer 2012 YA Debut is Fingerprints of You by Kristen-Paige Madonia. Read on to see how this author answered the Q&A… And be sure to enter to win a temporary tattoo and a signed and personalized finished copy of Fingerprints of You!

Cover Art © 2012 Terry Ribera

Kristen-Paige Madonia: Fingerprints of You is about that strange but brilliant time in life when you realize the world is much larger than you thought, and that you have the ability to decide what kind of person you want to become. It’s about a pregnant teenager and the cross-country road trip she takes in search of her father, a man she’s never met. It’s set on the road and amidst the inspiring music and art scene in San Francisco, and the book explores the challenges of growing up in a single-parent home and the various ways we can confront our pasts, our skeletons in the closet. But at the heart of it, Fingerprints of You is about hope. About the comfort we find in one another and the security of family; not blood-born family necessarily, but the families we create for ourselves from the people we love and the people that love us back. The book is about a seventeen-year-old named Lemon Williams and her discovery of hope and strength as she stands on the brink of adulthood.

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?

In general, the book came fairly fast, and the characters arrived in my imagination with great stubbornness and spirit. I was actually writing a different book when I first created the central characters in Fingerprints of You, but once they existed, I just couldn’t leave them alone. I began the book as a short story but quickly realized it was much larger than that, so I wrote a second story, and a third. Once I accepted that I was working on a new novel, the manuscript came quickly. I wrote the bulk of the first draft chronologically during a one-month writing residency in Key West in 2008, and then, as I always do, I took some time away from it to let it breathe. I rewrote the book during another 4-week residency in New York and felt fairly confident I had told the story I was supposed to tell. Of course there was a lot of revision and editing that followed, but the process was rather straightforward. And the book belonged to Lemon from the first day I started it—it was always driven by her voice, her restlessness, and her journey into adulthood as she tried to determine the kind of person she would become.

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. 

It began in the coffee shops of San Francisco where I was living at the time, but I wrote the majority of the first draft in a wonderful studio in Key West with a Mango tree climbing through my deck and a sculpture garden in the back yard. The second draft was written in a large writers’ studio in a converted barn in upstate New York at the Millay Colony. I lived in Charlottesville by then, so I reworked the novel and edited it in various rooms of a small house my husband and I were renting at the time. And somewhere in between, we spent about three months living out of our car during a road trip we took to Alaska, so, like Lemon, I moved around a lot during the writing of this novel. There was no one place, per say, but a number of places that were as different in size as style, but they each contributed to the making of the book in some way. I feel fortunate because I was living in transit when I wrote the novel, just like Lemon was, and I think it worked well to help me understand her wanderlust and, at the same time, her craving for stability. In that way, we’re very much alike… And in hindsight, that was the ideal way to write this particular book.

Life on the road in Alaska during the writing of FINGERPRINTS OF YOU

Life on the road in Alaska during the writing of FINGERPRINTS OF YOU

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.

That’s an easy one: The ideal reader would be a person so absorbed in the book, so involved and engaged that they forget to get off the bus, they don’t notice their subway stop was an hour earlier, they don’t realize the park is now dark and the day has slipped away from them. Other than that, there is no perfect reader; I hope the book appeals to a broad range of people—men and women, teens and adults, people living in big cities and small towns alike.

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.

I’m writing this about five months before the release date, so I still have a ways to go, but needless to say, getting the offer from Simon & Schuster was THE absolute high point because it marked the beginning of a long and wonderful path to the publication of my first novel. My agent phoned with the news, and it was nice because I was alone when I got the call. I had some time to myself before the champagne and celebrations and the calls to family and friends; the news was just mine, it was private, and that was really lovely. You work so hard for so long, and most of that work you’re alone, so it seemed fitting to be alone when I found out we’d sold the book. It was perfect, really, to have an hour or so when that news, that thing that I had been fighting for, for so long, was all mine.

And I guess, in contrast, as with anything, the process inevitably involves disappointing moments as well. For me, the one disappointment that has come with the novel is the realization that, in some venues, there is still a slight stigma attached to the YA label. For example, I have a friend, a highly educated published author in fact, whom I saw recently, and when the conversation turned to the release date of my novel, she made the comment, as she always does, that she couldn’t wait for her daughter to read the book. There’s certainly nothing wrong with her excitement at giving the novel to her sixteen-year-old, but to me her comment implies she doesn’t plan to read the novel herself. Of course I realize it’s a personal sensitivity for me as I continue to adjust to being labeled a YA writer, a sensitivity I hope I’ll shed as more time passes. Margo Rabb published a wonderful article in The New York Times a few years ago entitled, “I’m YA, and I’m O.K.”, which I recommend to anyone writing fiction that straddles the line between YA and adult; like myself, she wrote a book she imagined being labeled as adult literary fiction but was sold to a YA division. There are inevitably challenges that come with that process, and many adults still don’t realize the high caliber literature that can now be found on the YA shelves. It’s such a funny thing—these labels based on audience—and I find it fascinating that literature is the only art form that’s adopted the YA category; we don’t classify visual art, paintings or sculptures, for teens versus adults just as we don’t claim music to be one or the other. But it is what it is, and at the end of the day I couldn’t be happier with the home that Fingerprints of You found at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

In terms of surprising moments, I’d have to say my first visit to NYC to meet my editor was pretty astonishing. I was incredibly nervous and intimidated, but when I arrived everyone was unbelievably normal. Everyone was kind and gracious and welcoming, and as odd as it sounds, I was surprised by that. Publishers are in the business because they love books, and it’s easy to forget that sometimes when you’re collecting rejection letters and reading the heartbreaking stories about authors who get orphaned or novels that get lost in big houses. But the staff at S&S is one hundred percent amazing, and they work incredibly hard because they care about stories; that’s the bottom line, and writers need to remember that. S&S has done everything possible to make me feel like I’m part of the team, and when I realized that was going to be how our relationship worked, I was surprised, and so very thankful.

And as for surreal, it was the same day, during my first visit to S&S. My editor spent the morning showing me around and introducing me to people in the office, and when we met someone from the art department in the hallway, and he introduced us, she told me she was in the middle of reading Fingerprints of You. I remember thinking, “Really? Why? I don’t even know you!” Besides my agent and my editor, my family were the only people that had read the book, and it was the strangest thing to listen to her talk about the different sections she liked and the characters she connected with. It’s obvious, of course, but it was surreal, and I think that was the moment, that girl in that hallway, that was when I realized it was actually happening. Other people were going to read the book, and as wonderful as that is, it also means that, in a way, the book isn’t really mine anymore. That’s what I love most about writing, one of the fundamental reasons I do it, but it’s also what I struggle with: it’s yours for so long, and then, it just isn’t. Once it’s out there, it becomes the readers’, and they’ll bring their own experiences and emotions and viewpoints into the novel. It’s really not mine at all anymore.

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 would love to go on book tour in Europe, to take the train for weeks at a time and immerse myself in unfamiliar cultures. I’d give intimate readings on houseboats in Amsterdam, drink thick dark beer with book clubs at pubs in Ireland, and lead literary discussions in Paris while sipping small cups of espresso at sidewalk cafes. And I’d bring Flannery O’Connor to keep things honest and Hunter S. Thompson to keep things a little bit Rock and Roll. For food I’d serve red wine, dark chocolate, and extravagant cheeses and baguettes.

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.)

For me the first sentence is still the sentence that tells you exactly what the book is about: a mother and daughter relationship on the brink of that moment when the child becomes an adult…

My mother got her third tattoo on my seventeenth birthday, a small navy hummingbird she had inked above her left shoulder blade, and though she said she picked it to mark my flight from childhood, it mostly had to do with her wanting to sleep with Johnny Drinko, the tattoo artist who worked in the shop outside town.

Fingerprints of You will be published by Simon & Schuster on August 7, 2012. Read on for a chance to win a signed and personalized finished copy of the hardcover—as well as a temporary tattoo!

Photo by Christopher Gordon

Kristen-Paige Madonia is the author of Fingerprints of You, a young adult literary novel, and recent stories can be found in the New Orleans Review, upstreet, and American Fiction: Best Unpublished Stories by Emerging Writers. She has received scholarships or residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, Hedgebrook, the Millay Colony, the Studios of Key West, and the Key West Literary Seminar. She holds an MFA from CSU, Long Beach and teaches fiction in Charlottesville, VA.

Visit her at kristenpaigemadonia.com to find out more!

Follow @KPMadonia on Twitter.

The giveaway is now closed. Congrats to the winner!

Want an *international* chance to win any one of the Summer 2012 debut novels featured in this interview series? Come back tomorrow to enter!

Week 1 Summer 2012 Debut Giveaway Winners!

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I’m here to announce some giveaway winners from the first week of the Summer 2012 Debut Interview series! (And to remind you that quite a few giveaways are still open and taking entries.)

Want to know if you won a Summer 2012 debut?

The winner of a *signed and personalized* hardcover of Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone by debut author Kat Rosenfield to be mailed when finished copies are available in July is… Cosette LeMay!

The winner of a Struck lightning-bolt necklace from debut author Jennifer Bosworth is… Lisseth Torres!

The winner of a *signed and personalized* ARC of All These Lives by debut author Sarah Wylie is… Melissa Montovani!

The winner of a *signed and personalized* ARC of Zoe Letting Go by debut author Nora Price is… Justine!

The winner of a pre-order of The Little Woods by debut author McCormick Templeman is… Jen Chan!

Congratulations to all the winners! I will email all the winners shortly for their mailing addresses.

(All winners were chosen thanks to the random magic found at Random.org, with extra entries factored in. Thank you to everyone who entered!)

But wait. Do you want to win something? Enter these open giveaways!

Enter to win a *signed and personalized* hardcover of False Memory by Dan Krokos—to be mailed to the winner when finished copies are available in August. TWO WINNERS WILL BE CHOSEN! Enter here.

Enter to win a *signed and personalized* ARC of Grim by Anna Waggener. Enter here.

Enter to win a *signed and personalized* hardcover of Hemlock by Kathleen Peacock. Enter here.

Enter to win a pre-order of Something Like Normal by Trish Doller. Enter here.

Enter to win a *signed and personalized* hardcover of Counting Backwards by Laura Lascarso—to be mailed to the winner when finished copies are available in August. Enter here.

Thanks for reading the debut interview series! There will be one more debut interview on Monday… and then an international chance to win the debut of your choice. So stay tuned.

2012 YA Debut Interview + Giveaway: COUNTING BACKWARDS by Laura Lascarso

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Time for more in 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 Counting Backwards by Laura Lascarso. Read on to see how this author answered the Q&A… And be sure to enter to win a signed and personalized finished copy of Counting Backwards!

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.)

Laura Lascarso: Counting Backwards is about a girl who wants to escape—her home, her family, and even at times, herself.

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?

This novel wanted to be written again and again. The first draft of CB I wrote in 2007, which I submitted to agents, then rewrote it with the advice of one of those agents who ultimately passed. I then submitted that revised manuscript (CB 2.0) to Caryn Wiseman at Andrea Brown Literary. She took me on (squee!) and we then went to work on it again. We took CB 3.0 to editors in 2009, and it was picked up by Namrata Tripathi at S&S. Two years and three rewrites later, we have CB 6.0, which is by leaps and bounds better than my original story. My one word for new writers out there: Perseverance.

Then I took a nap.

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 have three writing locales. One is my desk at home. I will not lie, I decluttered my desk before taking this photo to bring you the shining vision of order you see here.

My second spot is my critique partner’s house which is blessedly quiet with a full fridge and small library of fabulous YA and middle grade books.

The third is a coffee shop where they make the best café con leches around. Coffee + sugar = word magic.

My fantasy writing locale is this beach in Florida, though I won’t say which because I don’t want to play favorites.

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.

My ideal reader would be found in a high school gymnasium. There is a pep rally going on and everyone is screaming and chanting, but then, somewhere in the stands is that one teenager who is so engrossed in my book, that they’ve totally tuned out everything around them. They’re so into it, in fact, that they’re gnawing on their cuticles or chewing their hair in concentration. That’s my ideal reader.

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.

I think the most surreal/amazing moment was when I got my first look at the cover proofs. The Atheneum team was very gracious in letting me give my input as to how I envisioned the cover. They even let me choose the cover model, which was kind of incredible in itself—that they would set up a photo shoot with an actual model. The cover was important to me because I wanted it to represent the book well, and also because I’m a very visual person. The double image on this cover is both intriguing and revealing of Taylor’s character where denial is a big theme. The lighting also has an institutional feel, which is both subtle and relevant. With this cover I feel they carefully considered my input, and their delivery far exceeded my expectations.

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 take Kurt Vonnegut and Dr. Seuss on a road trip from Miami, Florida to Seattle, Washington. We’d decorate our tour van to represent their life’s work. One side would be a mural with the Lorax, Sneetches, Thing One and Thing Two… The other side would be aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. I’d record their discourse and post it on my blog so that the whole world could glean from it their brilliance. For sustenance, we’d eat peanut butter and Nutella sandwiches. And we’d sign some books too.

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.)

It’s a beautiful day for escaping.

Counting Backwards will be published by Atheneum / Simon & Schuster on August 14, 2012. Read on for a chance to win a signed and personalized finished copy of the hardcover!

Laura Lascarso is a writer of young adult fiction and companion to Lucy, a dog who not only gives great cuddles, but also knows the difference between how to lie and how to lay. 

Visit her at lauralascarso.com to find out more!

Follow @lauralascarso on Twitter.

The giveaway is now closed. Congrats to the winner!

What is the last Summer 2012 debut novel I’m looking forward to? Come back on Monday to find out.

2012 YA Debut Interview + Giveaway: SOMETHING LIKE NORMAL by Trish Doller

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Time for more in 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 Something Like Normal by Trish Doller. Read on to see how this author answered the Q&A… And be sure to enter to win a pre-order of Something Like Normal (giveaway open internationally)!

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.)

Trish Doller: From the flap copy:

I just came home from Afghanistan.

My parents are splitting up.

My brother has stolen my girlfriend.

(He also stole my car.)

And I’m haunted by the ghost of my best friend.

Then I run into Harper.

(Technically, her fist runs into my face.)

She’s beautiful, smart, funny…

…and she wants nothing to do with

the messed-up Marine who ruined her life.

Sometimes the best you can hope for is something like normal.

Sometimes what you get might be even better.

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?

When I first started writing this book, I thought it belonged to a girl whose reputation had never recovered from being labeled a “slut” in middle school. Travis was meant to be the golden boy who trashed her reputation, now home from Afghanistan, broken both in body and spirit. Except when I tuned into what he had to say about his character, I discovered that his voice was loud and clear and demanding to be heard. When I made him the main character, he took up residence in my head and guided me to a very different story. While I’ve never been a fast writer, the story came out much quicker than I expected.

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 wrote Something Like Normal on my living room couch. Not a very romantic or writerly location, but I do have a very comfortable couch and I find that public places are much too distracting for me.

The writing studio of my dreams—and one I’m really hoping to make a reality one day—is a VW Westie/Vanagon that I can drive wherever the mood strikes, yet still maintain some semblance of privacy. And with a built-in fridge, I can bring my own snacks.

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.

Actually, I kind of imagine a guy dressed in camouflage, maybe sitting on the ground, back propped against the wall. Maybe he’s deployed to somewhere hot and dusty. Maybe not. Either way, he’s reading, with an occasional smile, or laugh, or nod of the head when he gets to something he’s done, or said, or felt. That’s not to say I don’t want girls to read the book. I definitely, totally, and absolutely do. In fact, I want them to fall wildly in love with Travis. But for a guy in the military to love the book, too? That would be the best compliment.

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 low point for me actually came before Something Like Normal was conceived—when the first book I sold was canceled by my publisher and failed to sell on our second attempt at getting it published. While we were still out on submission with that first book, I started working on Travis’s story, which actually leads to the high point. My first book was inspired by another writer’s style and I secretly hoped that perhaps I’d become the next her. But with Something Like Normal, I discovered my authentic voice, my own style. And I realized that instead of wanting to be the next her, I’d much rather be the first me. The high and the low combined gave me what I think is a much stronger debut in Something Like Normal—and takes most of the sting out of that first deal gone bad.

There have been a lot of surreal moments—like opening the box of ARCs or seeing readers tweet that they can’t wait to read my book—but the most surreal was when I entered the ISBN in the computer at work (my day job is at B&N) and Something Like Normal was there.

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?

Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, and I would pile into Steinbeck’s Rocinante and hit the U.S. highways, especially the small, old ones like Route 20 and Route 66. We’d stop at greasy spoons. We’d drink a lot. Kerouac would say stuff I wouldn’t always understand, but I’d laugh anyway. And when we signed, we’d serve pie—pumpkin, pecan, apple, banana cream, and lemon merengue.

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.)

I’m not sure how enticing it is, but this line is my favorite (and never fails to make me laugh):

My mom—the only parent on the planet to try and talk her kid into doing drugs to keep him out of the Marines.

Something Like Normal will be published by Bloomsbury on June 19, 2012. Read on for a chance to win a pre-order!

Trish Doller: I’ve been a writer as long as I’ve been able to write, but I didn’t make a conscious decision to “be” a writer until fairly recently. For that you should probably be thankful.

I was born in Germany, grew up in Ohio, went to college at Ohio State University, got married to someone really great, bounced from Maine to Michigan and back to Ohio for a while. Now I live in Florida with my two mostly grown kids, two dogs, and a pirate. For real.

I’ve worked as a morning radio personality, a newspaper reporter, and spent all my summers in college working at an amusement park. There I gained valuable life skills, including counting money really fast, directing traffic, jumping off a moving train, and making cheese-on-a-stick. Also, I can still welcome you to Frontier Town. Ask me sometime.

These days I work as a bookseller at a Very Big Bookstore. And I write.

Visit her at www.trishdoller.com to find out more!

Read her blog at trishisthinkingagain.tumblr.com.

Follow @trishdoller 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: HEMLOCK by Kathleen Peacock

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Time for more in 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 Hemlock by Kathleen Peacock. Read on to see how this author answered the Q&A… And be sure to enter to win a signed and personalized finished copy of Hemlock!

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.)

Kathleen Peacock: Hemlock is about friendship and secrets and what happens when the people you love turn out to be so much less—or more—than you need them to be. It also happens to be about werewolves.

And (since I always turn into a tongue-tied fool at this particular question) here’s the jacket copy:

Mackenzie and Amy were best friends. Until Amy was brutally murdered.

Since then, Mac’s life has been turned upside down. She is being haunted by Amy in her dreams, and an extremist group called the Trackers has come to Mac’s hometown of Hemlock to hunt down Amy’s killer: A white werewolf.

Lupine syndrome—also known as the werewolf virus—is on the rise across the country. Many of the infected try to hide their symptoms, but bloodlust is not easy to control.

Wanting desperately to put an end to her nightmares, Mac decides to investigate Amy’s murder herself. She discovers secrets lurking in the shadows of Hemlock, secrets about Amy’s boyfriend, Jason, her good pal Kyle, and especially her late best friend. Mac is thrown into a maelstrom of violence and betrayal that puts her life at risk.

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?

I’d like to say Hemlock misbehaved, but I think it would be more accurate to say that I would occasionally wander away from what was important and the manuscript would (justifiably) throttle me until I was dazed and senseless.

Ideas for projects often come to me in flashes of scenes. With Hemlock, I got a flash of three friends in a hospital room with secrets stretching between them until something snapped. The important thing was always the friendship and the way their feelings—and their secrets—pulled them apart and bound them together. Sometimes I’d lose sight of that when writing. When I did, the results were always scenes that didn’t work and which needed to be rewritten.

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. 

Most of Hemlock was written in my messy home office on a computer that does not have internet access.

My fantasy writing spot would probably be a small room overlooking the ocean (or at least a bay that leads to the ocean). Large bodies of water always seem so infinite; they make me feel endless.

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.

They’re sitting on the subway, hips and knees just brushing. She’s reading Hemlock and he’s listening to music. They’re opposites. He looks a little scruffy and his hair sticks up at crazy angles. She looks neat and tidy—although her jacket is a little threadbare and the glasses she’s wearing were in style a year or two ago.

Her mouth quirks up in a shadow grin and she tugs on his sleeve. He fumbles with his iPod as she shows him a page and points to a paragraph. He sees the name of an artist or band he likes and smiles.

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.

High: Telling my family and friends about the book deal.

Low: Crying at my desk because I was stressed about book one. Not my desk at home. My very visible day job desk.

Surreal: Writing a blurb request to an author I’ve had a crush on since I was twenty-one.

Surprising: How very “It’s a Small World After All” publishing is. One of my best friends (who has a completely different agent) ended up with the same editor at the same imprint.

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?

DOUGLAS ADAMS! NEIL GAIMAN! CUPCAKES!

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.)

Oh, you are evil. No wonder Ruby came out of your brain…

Hmmmm…

Death had made her a bad liar.

Short and sweet and Amy-centric.

Hemlock will be published by Katherine Tegen Books / HarperCollins on May 8, 2012. Read on for a chance to win a signed and personalized finished copy of the hardcover!

Kathleen Peacock spent most of her teen years writing short stories. She put her writing dreams on hold while attending college but rediscovered them when office life started leaving her with an allergy to cubicles.

Visit her at kathleenpeacock.com to find out more!

Read her blog at kathleenpeacock.blogspot.com.

Follow @kathleenpeacock 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.