A review I loved, plus an interview

DEVINE INTERVENTION hits stores in a little over a week, and it's been fun to see reviews from readers coming in.

I particularly loved this one by a bookseller in New Mexico, who did not want to read it AT ALL until a painful leg injury trapped her at home.

An excerpt of what she said: 

"... a vein in my leg just suddenly gave out, & I was forced to while away a couple days on pain medication. Some higher power was obviously ensuring that I read it. Could have used a less painful method, I think. But I'm glad of the result, at any rate."

Read the rest.

Also, here's an interview I did with Laurisa of A Thousand Wrongs. In it, I talk a bit about what led me to write the book--and my hope that it includes some of the definitive squirrel mayhem scenes in modern literature. 

Laurisa and I are giving away a copy of DEVINE INTERVENTION plus a big of fun swag. Read the interview and enter the giveaway here.

And you can still pre-order a signed copy from Queen Anne Books in Seattle. We're throwing in The Angel Made Me Do It pins and free Skype visits for book clubs that order multiple copies.

Not Available in Stores Near You

It's a shredder's eternal nightmare: The soundtrack of heaven is of a choir of sweet-voiced nuns singing choral arrangements of classic rock anthems.

In my book, DEVINE INTERVENTION, just such a choir (called Nun of the Above, of course) makes this bad dream come true for all the troubled young souls in heaven's rehab program.  

If the lovely ladies of Nun of the Above ever do get around to releasing an album on the earthly plain, this is what the cover will look like. 

A joke from DEVINE INTERVENTION

DEVINE INTERVENTION has two main characters, a sixteen-year-old named Heidi, and her perpetually seventeen-year-old guardian angel, Jerome Hancock.

Jerome always dreamed of cutting an album--or several--with his totally awesome cousin Mike. This is what he planned to put on the cover. (Thanks to my excellent husband Adam, who made the art.)

I love the subtitle of the album, even though it's not part of the book. It's a nod to redundant album titles (Foghat by Foghat), which Adam and I find hilarious. And it also reminds me of a list we used to keep when we were first dating: Last Names We'd Rather Not Have.

"Hancock" was on it, for reasons I won't mention but that can be figured out by anyone with a similarly blue sense of humor. (And I'm truly sorry to anyone whose last name is Hancock. You can make fun of my last name all you want.)

Lately I've been asked a couple of times how I thought of X or Y detail in the book--things that seem impossibly off the wall, or evidence of some extra form of creativity.

For me, it's not really like that. Some of the most unexpected details come from the plain old life I've lived. Keeping that list of unfortunate last names was a way that Adam and I created our own secret language back then. And while that sounds a big gag-worthy, secret languages don't have to be all schmoopy and cute. Favorite songs, favorite meals, shared experience that were so awful they become funny ... these things stitch us together.

That lack of spark people sometimes complain about when they're set up on dates--I think this is just the sign that two people don't speak each other's languages. It's not to say they can't be learned, but it's so much more exciting when it happens all of its own accord.

And I like thinking of it this way, the secret language, the shared way you see the world, is a spark. When you're lucky, it combusts and is a source of lifelong warmth.

Anyway (gosh, I do go on), using this particular detail in a story lets me (I hope) entertain readers as I weave an otherwise invisible message to my husband into the text. Because it's a small detail I truly love, it helps me make my characters more vivid and lovable. So that's it. There's no magic to it. Just a bit of love.

On Judging a Book by Its Cover

Today's National Cliche Day. For real! To celebrate, I'm going to turn a silly cliche on its head (to use another cliche), and urge you to please judge a book by its cover.

So much work goes into designing a book cover. It has to be appealing, original, and compelling. It has to reflect the tone of the book. It has to stand out on the shelves without being tacky. The list goes on (hello, cliche!).

I was lucky enough to have one of the industry's best designers, Phil Falco, work on mine. (Do check out his site. There are some really wonderful images on it.)

This is the cover of DEVINE INTERVENTION, which comes out June 1, 2012:

It walks a tricky line perfectly.

• Yes, this is a book with angels in it. But they are not bare-chested angels with honey-dipped skin. They do not have wings that cause spontaneous orgasms.
• It's also a book with some romance. But it's not your everyday romance because--for starters--one of my characters is long dead (but not undead. And he doesn't drive a Volvo, because that can't be done any better than it has been.).
• And finally, despite some sad parts, it's also a funny book, which I hope that arrow through the boy's head conveys.*

Which gets me back to my point. Do judge a book by its cover. Please! These miniature works of art are put together to help tell a story. They're meant to be judged. The hope is that you'll love them, too.

Thanks to Phil, Emily Clement, and Arthur Levine for putting this one together.

* Yes, I know that in real life, an arrow through the skull is not funny.

Devine Intervention: Another milestone

This weekend I'm going over the typeset pages for DEVINE INTERVENTION. Want to see a peek? (<--Rhetorical question. You're getting one whether you like it or not.)

This is the title page. And my pen! Both are so photogenic.

And here's the first page. Also photogenic.

As I was reading, I came across a reference I made to an instructional T-shirt folding video that proved to be life-changing for my protagonist's best friend. It's not the sort of thing you can easily embed in a book (yet!), but it does make enlightening blog fodder.

P.S. If you get good at folding shirts this way, don't tell me. I've tried and tried and still can't do it very well.