If you hadn’t already heard, it’s Banned Books Week. (Google it!)
To celebrate, I read Judy Blume’s FOREVER for the first time. (Okay, it was really because my friend Kim couldn’t believe I had never read it, but it happened to fall in the right week.)
Here’s your challenge: which banned book will you read this week?
I’m not a very patient person. But even if I were, a year and a half is a long time to wait for something that you know is going to change your life.
The day before Thanksgiving last year I accepted HarperCollins offer for a 3-book deal. They told me that the first book would be published summer 2011. (The date has now been set as either May or June.) At that point, summer 2011 seemed SO FAR AWAY. It still does. Right now, eight months feels like forever. But, luckily, there have been little events along the way that have helped the wait.
The hard slog of editing Book 1 made the winter and spring months pass by. The title was chosen. Foreign rights deals came in little by little. I met with my agent and editors in New York and shot my train-wreck of a video. The book was copy edited. A mock-up was made of the book’s cover art. Then the model was chosen. Then the photo shoot took place. And just a couple of days ago I got to see an almost-done version of the cover that looks AMAZING.
I should be able to show you the cover end-October. And then, at some point this Autumn, the ARC (Advance Reading Copy) version will come out and we’ll get to see what the put-together book looks like.I would expect some reviews will begin to appear after that (*fear and trembling*) and then, at some point, the publicity junket will kick in and I’ll have to practice saying intelligent-sounding insightful things about my book so that I won’t choke when all eyes are focused on me.
In the meantime, I’ve written a rough draft of Book 2. I’m sending it to my editor today. So what comes next? Besides waiting, of course. I’m tempted to go ahead and dive into Book 3. I pretty much know what’s going to happen in it. However, it might be wiser to wait until the changes are made on Book 2, in case they alter the outcome. But, then again…I’ve never claimed wisdom as one of my assets.
I wanted to write background stories for each of DIE FOR ME’s characters, so I could launch into that. Or I could step out of that world altogether and pick back up another already-begun project—I have three or four sitting around, waiting for my attention. Waiting patiently. A lot more patiently than I am.
Before writing DIE FOR ME, the only young adult books I had read since I myself was a young adult, were the 4 tomes of the TWILIGHT series. Which, I won’t hesitate to confess, gave me the initial motivation to write my book. Not because I wanted to write something in the same vein as Meyer’s books. But because after finishing her last novel, all of that yummy hotness that was Rob… READ MORE…