Ask me Questions for my Annotated ARC

Okay, so I've got one ARC of Masque of the Red Death left, and I'm going to use it to practice annotation. As an English major (more than a few years ago) I'm quite familiar with annotation, I even read some annotated Poe as I prepared to write Masque. But the real inspiration for creating an annotated version came from the fabulous Hannah Moskowitz, who has given away annotated copies of many of her books.  I asked Hannah what she did, exactly, for her annotated versions and she said,  basically I just write stuff
about the process of writing this scene, if it's from a newer draft,
if it's changed a lot. I circle lines tat are allusions to other
things and write what they are. I say which chapters are my favorite
and which are my least favorites.

I LOVE that idea, and also love the idea of anyone being interested enough in my books and my process and the writing process to care about it. I'm going to do an annotated version of the final copy of the book (I just saw the book jacket this week, and let me say that it is STUNNING). And if you are looking for  something stunning, do check out my interactive book cover, along with a contest for a signed ARC over at The Story Siren . 

But for practice, I'm going to annotate my last ARC, and I'll give it away over on YA Fusion next Sunday, March 25. 

This week, I'm collecting questions for the annotation. What do people want to know? This can be a general question that you would like to ask any author, or a  specific question question for me, or for Masque. If you will comment that you have a spoilerific question, and then email me, I'll try to email you and answer your question! It'll give me a chance to practice answer these types of questions. 

One out of every 10 commenters will get one of my beautiful leather bracelets, with quotes from Masque. The black leather bracelets have been mailed, so you can have a choice. I also have a few white leather ones that no one has even seen yet. Exciting! 

I look forward to digging into the ARC with my special writing pen, and getting some insightful questions! 

I'm also so excited, April is so very close! 

Get ready for a Poe-Stravaganza!!!!

Update- I'll let you know when I run out of bookmarks, so don't worry about asking for them!  I am putting in a second order, but I knew I'd have to do that. People who requested larger sets, I'll mail those at the end of the week! Otherwise I'll be mailing every few days- the Post Office is right next  to my favorite Chinese Restaurant! 

To celebrate the release of Masque of the Red Death, I'm going to be celebrating all through April, with guest posts about Poe's artistic influence, give-aways, contests, and other exciting stuff.

Right now I'm giving away some of my GORGEOUS bookmarks. These are the deluxe ones with tassels, as seen below...

Since I'm going to need addresses to mail these to, go ahead and email me, rather than putting requests in the blog comments, though blog comments are always read, too!  Let me know if you want one or two bookmarks, assuming with two that you want to keep one and give one away! If you want a whole stack of bookmarks, or a class set, I'll be getting a shipment of slightly less fancy ones next week, and I'll be glad to send some to you if you let me know how many you'd like!

I've got some other exciting swag lined up, including leather bracelets engraved with passages from Masque (I haven't gotten these yet, and am so excited to see how they look!).

And various prizes... these are the ones I've already purchased and am dying to actually keep, but I'm not going to, these are all for prizes and giveaways...

A Poe inspired reed-diffuser, complete with a quote from A Dream Within A Dream. the scent is cardamom, absynthe, and sandalwood

This cool Masque of the Red Death inspired domino- necklace charm...from Etsy.

A 16" tall Raven hand puppet with a movable beak, it can say, "Nevermore," all day long!

This awesome Masque of the Red Death hoodie from Woot!.com

This awesome copy of Poe's Tales of Mystery and Madness, which has Poe's Masque, illustrated. 

A Poe inspired candle. Also with the Cardamom, absinthe, and sandalwood scent.

I'll also be giving away an annotated copy of Masque of the Red Death with notes, written inside, author insights (not sure how insightful those will be!) and maybe even a few hints about book 2.

These are the things I've picked up already. I'm still scouring the internet for fun Poe-inspired stuff.

April is going to be exciting! 

What's Going On With Me

Hello February 2012! Haven't been around much, at least not blogging, so I thought I'd check in.

A few things the are going on...

Masque made the Indie Next List It's under For Teen Readers. Yay!

Masque is a Junior Library Guild Selection Yay!

Right at this very moment you can get copies of Masque from several places...
The Fabulous Cindy Pon is giving away some great GreenWillow books!

My Fantastically Creepy Fellow Poe Author Kelly Creagh  is giving away a signed ARC of Masque and a copy of Nevermore here http://blog.kellycreagh.com/

And there's a big contest going on on Goodreads (25 copies) as well.

I'm trying to brainstorm titles for book 2, trying to finish book 2 (so close, but so far away) trying to be a halfway decent mom (January was a bad month for sick kids, February has been much better, but I still feel like we are playing catch up. Also, two kids to the dentist the day before Valentines day = 8 cavities!!!)
We have all new standards at work, and I'm spending lots of extra time trying to develop new lessons, I like the standards, but it's more work, so less time to blog!

I'm also in the process of ordering fantastic swag. I have beautiful bookmarks being made, some really cool leather bracelets with quotes from the book, and some cool Masque of the Red Death (Poe) items from easy and various other places to give away on release week.

How Things Change 2009-2012

Okay, so last week I was home for several miserable days, with sick children and then a migraine (from being up all night with sick children). The end result was monotonous mindless internet clicking. Hours of it. And wow, an author with an upcoming book can find out a lot of stuff. More, really than anyone needs to see or know.

In late 2008/early 2009, when my first book came out, I wasn't on Twitter, not sure if ANYONE was, and Goodreads was around, but not nearly so all-emcompassing.

Now, I'm not going to get into the Goodreads fiasco, (fiascos?) that happened last week except in a roundabout way, discussing how the internet landscape (the endless distractions!) for an author have evolved. Ah  Goodreads, we love you and we hate you. You can be an ego-booster or a complete downward spiral into suicidal depression (joking, joking...sort of).

I realize, in my rational brain that Goodreads isn't about authors, though tons of us are obviously on there.

 Goodreads is all about the reviewers. It's a REVIEW site. I am so astounded and impressed by the amount of book blogs that have popped up since 2009. The features that seem to have been designed JUST to drive authors crazy, make a lot of sense for the reviewers.They can review as they read, post status updates, connect those to Twitter, discuss the books!

 Goodreads is a community of readers, not a community of authors obsessively refreshing their pages. But those writers are absolutely out there, I was one last week. It was not...healthy.

Which is not to say I haven't refreshed twice in the last (30 seconds). I've been watching the numbers climb on my contest http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/18690-masque-of-the-red-death (50 copies, enter right away!) and when people post updates while they are reading, OMG, that is pure torture. But the thing is, they aren't posting these things for ME. and I know that.

As a person who wears a LOT of hats, (teacher, author, mother)  I feel for authors who also try to review. I don't, because I'm no good at it. I do put ratings on Goodreads occasionally, but I've never done a review. I have a lot of respect for people who can get to the heart of a story, but I tend to read completely for diversion, or completely for study of the writing process, with little in-between. I respect reviewers, authors or not, who give negative reviews, because it's a lot harder to say what you don't like about a book than to just give it five stars. Or than to just give one star, to actually say WHY, that's hard and time consuming. I very much enjoy reading reviews, especially after I've read a book, to see if others shared my opinions. I am so glad there are book reviewers out there.

But as an author, you have to turn off your google-fu. This power to know what people are thinking about page 12 of your novel will not help you write another book, it may stymie you, forcing you to type a mere three words at a time before you refresh your various pages and searches. It leads to madness!

On the other hand, how cool that this information is out there! It helped divert me from the pain of my migraine, that's for sure!

Ubiquitous End of the Year Post

Okay, so 2011 is a year that can be summarized in writing/publishing steps and milestones. I'd like to (happily) say that there was other stuff in there too, much of it good, some of it stressful.

 Overall, my kids were happy, healthy, brilliant, and beautiful, with the exception of Ezra's face-plant in his school parking lot, which resulted in a few hours at the emergency room and having his tooth repaired. We took small trips this year, two trips to St. Louis, a trip to Indianapolis. A day trip to Cincinnati. Next year I have plans for bigger trips, but this was a year of small steps.

We put our house up for sale and spent 6 agonizing months keeping it clean, only for it not to sell. Lee lost his job and started a new job. A certain amount of uncertainty there, and looking at houses, and making important grown-up decisions, keeping track of things for taxes, eating my vegetables (I put on weight this year, but this isn't a list of resolutions, so I'll just keep my thoughts on that to myself).

But all in all, writing milestones dominated 2011.

January 2011- I was hard at work on a manuscript- my agent sent me an email in December saying he loved the pages I had sent him, and asking when it could be ready. From that point, until mid February, I wrote non-stop. In February, we wrote a description of the book for the DGLM newsletter, and at the same time I was polishing like crazy.

I've just scanned over email from that time period, which was super-fun. The difficulty writing a synopsis for book 2, the agony of waiting, the phone calls, the excitement. Wow!

So, Masque of the Red Death officially sold to GreenWillow books on March 3. After that came rounds of editing, and I have to say that it's a much better book now, much better for the editing with no changes in mood or story. Lots of revision during the summer, with short stints of working on book 2. And then there was the excitement of the cover, the ARCs, so much happening (though, at the time it didn't always seem that way.

I really am amazed, here at the end of the year, I have two careers that I love. I have two beautiful children, I have Lee, who is supportive and amazing, I have good friends, and family, and 2012 seems like it will be an even more amazing year. So great, that I wouldn't be completely shocked if the world did end in 2012.

Resolutions

Eat better- exercise more
Spend quality time with the kids instead of auto-pilot time. Ezra doesn't notice, but Noel does.
Don't stress about the things I can't control.

So, goodbye 2011, I will remember you fondly.

Lots of Free Copies of Masque!

Wow, got up this morning and signed into the hotel internet (we were visiting friends in St. Louis) only to see that HarperTeen was giving away 50 copies (yeah, I had to stare at that number for awhile, too) of Masque of the Red Death on Goodreads. http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/18690-masque-of-the-red-death

Is Education Broken?

After blogging last week about why we even go to school, I found myself less enthusiastic to write about education than I had expected. I think because of the time of year. Finishing finals, ready for a new batch of students (we're on semesters) gave me a certain sense of exhaustion and great happiness to have two weeks off.

But as election season heats up, it's inevitable that we hear the phrase over and over, 'our education system is broken'. And that combination of words makes me furious. How can something so big, so experimental, so unique to each student, be broken? And yet, it's a buzzword that gets repeated over and over.

So, let's start with some facts. The idea of educating every child in America didn't come about altruistically. Child labor laws were written to keep kids from 'taking' the jobs of adults, and resulting in gangs of youngsters roaming the streets of big cities. That was when it became mandatory for students to stay in school until the age of 16. The moral of that story is that not all laws were made with the best interests of the kids in mind, or at least not to specifically benefit the kids. And that to this day, you have a certain segment of the population being educated who are a little more than...resistant to the idea of being educated.

I've never been one to wring my hands and lament the state of kids these days, or the way parents have changed over the years. My philosophy is to take the things you can't change in stride and to keep going. But lately I've become more frustrated than I've ever been with apathy. I understand kids who miss homework assignments and even kids who stubbornly refuse to do difficult papers. I understand students who do a first draft and refuse to revise. I've been there and done all of that. What I don't understand is kids who are not interested in anything. Who, when given a chance to research, stare blankly at the computer and ask, 'what should I do?", when asked 'what are you interested in?" their answer is "nothing."

To be fair, this response is not the norm. I love seeing classes get off tangent asking about things that interest them (not that I let them get off tangent, of course). This year when we began research, one of my Sophomore English classes was fascinated by Jack the Ripper, the other by Waverly Hills (a local abandoned sanitarium that is regularly listed among the most haunted places in America). I love seeing their fascination with events and places and people that until this point they may never have heard of. (we basically discuss papers from the past and topics and ideas in a big brainstorming session).

But, back to apathy, we have always had people in the population who were uninterested in learning. The difference today, is perhaps a push to educate them to the same level as the people who want to learn.  My solution (which no one will ever pay attention to, but still) is to allow the apathetic to go work at McDonalds and then provide them with incentives to finish their education when they are 25. Not a GED test, but some actual classes that could prepare them for college. And, since that's too complicated (though I do think that a good many young people would do better in high school and college if they weren't so young) to offer more and varied vocational classes. I'm all for creating an educated thoughtful citizenship, but...when learning is what the kids decide to rebel against, and when fundamental rebellion against the ideas of others is so much a basic of what our nation is about...well, you get a segment of our young population who simply do not do well in school, and who baffle and frustrate even the most well-intentioned of educators.

I wish I had a magic want that would fix education problems, but it comes down to....every student is different, every day is different, every learning opportunity is different. And when you are fifteen, staying up all night playing video games, dieting on Mt, Dew and crackers, and using all of your brain power during class to think of ways to sneak out your phone and send a text, all seem like good ideas.

Oh, to be young again....