A DEVINE INTERVENTION review I loved

It's always nice to find a review of your book with a headline like this: "A Heavenly Debut That Will Inspire You and Make You Laugh Out Loud."

I did apparently gross out the reviewer. This is after my editor asked me to take out a puking scene (he has told me that he will never find barf to be funny, but I haven't given up hope).

Here's the thing. My dad was a doctor and my mom was a nurse, and the things we talked about over dinner were routinely so sick that it broke my gross-o-meter. For this and all my future sins, I apologize.

To read the rest of the review, stop by FreshFiction.com.

 

 

 

 

In which I visit Las Vegas

For the next couple of months I'm on a book tour with my friends Cat Patrick, Sean Beaudoin and Kevin Emerson. We're calling the tour You Are Next, and we're going all over the West Coast. Check out my Events page for more details--I'd love to see you!

Meanwhile, Las Vegas.

I'd never been. I'm not a gambler at heart. Nor have I attended a bunch of wild'n'crazy bachelorette parties (though there was the one where we gave away stripper tilt pens and almost caused a family scandal).

That said, I was beyond excited to visit Spring Valley High School and the YAllapalooza Book Festival at Centennial Hills library, and the weekend was one of those rare times when the real experience beats out the expectations.

The trip started off a bit rough. When we were waiting in the airport lobby, a group of half-dozen or so birthday party revelers let us all know they were drunk, loud, and eager to make the flight feel like Animal House on wings.

My seat happened to be directly behind them, and they were so very loud I considered taking my Sharpie out of my bag and drawing eyeballs on the bald head of the guy in front of me, who wore a Seymour Titties T-shirt. I restrained myself, though. That's my book-signing pen, after all.

We arrived in one piece with intact eardrums, and soon after were at our hotel.

The view from my window. Nice!

The next day, we were up early to meet two groups of great readers from Spring Valley High School.

Sean Beaudoin, me, Cat Patrick, and Kevin Emerson (plus our coffees)And here we are, in the library!

The students here had excellent questions about writing, and many of them were writers themselves (including one self-described Bad Poet. I REALLY want to read his work.)

The next day we headed off to the Centennial Hills Library for YAllapallooza, where the You Are Next crew and a bunch of other authors, including Lindsey Leavitt, Suzanne Young, Tera Lynn Childs, and Nancy This is me and Rachel. Hi, Rachel!Holder met with readers, answered questions, handed out PEZ, and signed books.

We did take time out for an impromptu photo shoot with Cat Patrick and Suzanne Young, who have a new book together called JUST LIKE FATE. I made them do all sorts of things--"lie on the ground!" "think about tumbleweeds"--but in the end, this turned out to be our favorite photo.

Cat Patrick and Suzanne Young, authors of JUST LIKE FATE

I had some great conversations with readers and librarians, a surprising number of which involved "Dr. Who," which has been a hit around my house for ages. And I can't wait to go back. Thank you, Las Vegas!

My kids at Comicon, dressed as a Dalek and Dr. Who

And here's a huge thanks to Crystal Perkins, Barnes & Noble, and the Centennial Hills Library.

Portland! The Dinosaur Tooth Fairy!

I'm sitting in front of this blog like a person with ten pounds of ground meat and only enough intestines to accommodate half that. How am I to stuff it all in? Woe, woe is me!!

Pardon that vile image, by the way. It comes from reading THE INFECTS by Sean Beaudoin, a brand-new zombie title published by Candlewick. Sean is one of the authors I got to hang out with at Wordstock in Portland, where we did a joint presentation and then a panel with Inara Scott, Tamara Ireland Stone, and Lish McBride. Zombies, necromancers, time travel, inept angels ... we had all kinds of fun. 

Here is Sean. Don't let the angel wing fool you. He's trouble. And before he put the wings on, there were two of them. Look for remnants of the other in his molars.

So, Portland. Mere words can't capture the excellence of this town, so I will let pictures do the talking. Below, my hipster hotel room! (I refrained from photographing the judgmental elevator needlepoint, which reminded me that I would already be on the fourth floor had I chosen to take the stairs. That needlepoint was already an attention-whore.)

Portland also had some unusual bathroom art. Here's the title: Ode to a Women's Restroom. The subtitle, in case you can't read it, is even better: A celebration of our interconnectdness to the natural world. Because if there's anything I want to think about in the loo, it's this.

And now, here's a first look at my forthcoming picture book, The Dinosaur Tooth Fairy. The incomparable Israel Sanchez has illustrated it, and I could not be MORE excited. This one's due out next summer. 

 

Thanks to everyone at Arthur A. Levine Books for making this one look so fantastic. I've never had a 400 words be treated so lavishly. 

Notes from the Road

As I type this, I am in a Houston hotel room feeling Very Fancy, Very Fancy Indeed.

Hotel pillows must be filled with feathers from angel wings, and while this might make you worry that angels are somewhere being denuded of their down, rest easy. Angels shed. Worse than werewolves even.

No, but seriously. I'm here with Jeff Hirsch and Eliot Schrefer as part of Scholastic's This Is Teen program, having an absolutely outstanding time.

Jeff is author of The Eleventh Plague and the forthcoming Magisterium, about a girl living in a deeply polarized world who discovers in a shocking way that the other side isn't what she'd always been told.

Eliot is author of, among other books, The School for Dangerous Girls, and the forthcoming Endangered. This one's about a girl in war-torn Congo, trying to survive along with a rescued bonobo. If you're not hip to bonobos, these are great apes (see illustration below by one of my kids, made when she was 6; it's an unintended preview of a quartet of ape books Eliot plans to write.) 

Last night, after sandwiches that included something called "redneck cheddar," we visited Blue Willow Bookshop, and while I thought I'd never find another store as much as I love my Seattle favorites, I was mistaken. Blue Willos is a great shop and the three of us even got to sign the wall (I tried not to mess up Cornelia Funke's masked Venetian).

I'm on a ladder!

We also met authors Varsha Bajaj and Christina Mandelski, both delightful and talented. And I got to see my cousin David and his wife Cathy.

Today we're off to Austin to sign books in advance of the Austin Teen Book Festival, which will feature more than 30 authors and something like 6,000 readers.

I'll post from Twitter and FB as I can. I hope you follow along! Meanwhile, here are more Twitter feeds to check out:

This is Teen

Eliot Schrefer and Jeff Hirsch

Blue Willow Books

Austin Teen Book Festival

 

 

In which I strip my book naked!

My book is officially in stores today and to celebrate, I thought I'd do a little strip tease. 

No, not of me, silly! That would be a strip torment, not a tease.

Instead, I'm going to reveal everything I love about the physical copy of the book itself, because I can't get over what a great job the team at Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic did. 

Like a lot of people, I love the lightweight convenience of ebooks. But with only a few exceptions, they are a design wasteland. The e-ink is grayish and bland. The covers are shrunken and pixellated, and the interior pages from one book to another look pretty much the same. It's also cumbersome on the Kindle at least to organize a library--something I love doing at home. I'm sure a lot of this will change as technology advances, but with books I treasure, I still want the physical copy. It's the same way that photographs of my family and friends are no replacement for their actual human presence in my house at backyard barbecues. 

When it comes to actual books you can hold in your hands and tuck away on your shelves, no one does a more beautiful job than Arthur Levine. It's one of the many reasons I am so happy to be one of his authors.

Here's a slide show highlighting a few of my favorite things about DEVINE INTERVENTION: