Throwback Thursday (March 28) – The Host

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by The Housework Can Wait and Never Too Fond of Books.

Here’s how it works:
  • Pick any bookish or literary-related media (or non-media item) released more than 5 years ago.
  • Write up a short summary (include the title, author, and cover art, if applicable) and an explanation of why you love it. Make sure to link back to The Housework Can Wait and Never Too Fond of Books in your post.
  • Link up your post at The Housework Can Wait or Never Too Fond of Books.
  • Visit as many blogs as you can, reminisce about books you loved, and discover some “new” books for your TBR list – or some other classic!

Feel free to grab the Throwback Thursday button code from the sidebar to use in your posts.

Thanks for participating, and we look forward to seeing which books you choose to remember!

My Throwback this week is…

The Host by Stephenie Meyer

In honor of the movie releasing this week (which I am totally seeing opening night), today I am featuring that other book by Stephenie Meyer which is not about sparklepires. Here’s the Goodreads synopsis:

Melanie Stryder refuses to fade away. The earth has been invaded by a species that take over the minds of human hosts while leaving their bodies intact. Wanderer, the invading “soul” who has been given Melanie’s body, didn’t expect to find its former tenant refusing to relinquish possession of her mind.

As Melanie fills Wanderer’s thoughts with visions of Jared, a human who still lives in hiding, Wanderer begins to yearn for a man she’s never met. Reluctant allies, Wanderer and Melanie set off to search for the man they both love.

I’ll be honest – I really, really enjoyed this book. Say what you will about Stephenie Meyer and her writing (which, in my opinion, improves LEAPS AND BOUNDS between the Twilight Saga and The Host), but the woman knows how to keep the pages turning and the tension high. Yes, even when she’s writing about stalk-y sparklepires. But I like The Host so much more because it’s about ALIENS. And I love me a good alien story. Plus, while there is a love triangle in The Host – which is actually more of a love square – it’s different than in most books. The conflict is real and the solution is not obvious. HIGH FIVE for a love triangle where one of the choices is not infuriatingly stupid.

When I first read The Host – in about a day, because I couldn’t seem to stop reading it – the characters and the story stayed in my head for days after. I thought about them all the time, the choices they made, and what they would do next. To me, all technicalities aside, that’s the mark of a good story. If you think a clean alien romance might be up your alley but you’ve been putting this one off because it’s by That Twilight Lady – give it a shot. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Also, here is the movie trailer. WHO ELSE IS EXCITED? JUST ME? NO? OKAY GOOD.

This is a blog hop! Link up your Throwback Thursday post below!


Throwback Thursday (March 21): Stardust

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by The Housework Can Wait and Never Too Fond of Books.

Here’s how it works:
  • Pick any bookish or literary-related media (or non-media item) released more than 5 years ago.
  • Write up a short summary (include the title, author, and cover art, if applicable) and an explanation of why you love it. Make sure to link back to The Housework Can Wait and Never Too Fond of Books in your post.
  • Link up your post at The Housework Can Wait or Never Too Fond of Books.
  • Visit as many blogs as you can, reminisce about books you loved, and discover some “new” books for your TBR list – or some other classic!

Feel free to grab the Throwback Thursday button code from the sidebar to use in your posts.

Thanks for participating, and we look forward to seeing which books you choose to remember!

My Throwback this week is…

Stardust (2007) starring Claire Danes, Michelle Pfeifer, and Robert DeNiro
Based on the novel by Neil Gaiman

Because I am tired, here’s the Goodreads synopsis:

Hopelessly crossed in love, a boy of half-fairy parentage leaves his mundane Victorian-English village on a quest for a fallen star in the magical realm. The star proves to be an attractive woman with a hot temper, who plunges with our hero into adventures featuring witches, the lion and the unicorn, plotting elf-lords, ships that sail the sky, magical transformations, curses whose effects rebound, binding conditions with hidden loopholes and all the rest.

I’ll be honest – I haven’t read the book (YET), but I loved this movie. It’s sweet and inventive and beautiful. It’s fantasy at its best, and I hope you enjoy it.

This is a blog hop! Link your Throwback Thursday post below!



Updates and contests and waiting, oh my!

In case you were wondering about my querying/writing journey so far, it looks a lot like this:

No, I’m not going to get specific on what all is happening with querying right now. Let’s just say I’ve gotten form rejections, and I’ve gotten requests, and I can now say for certain that when you hear that much of querying is sitting and waiting, it’s true.

This week (and maybe next), in an attempt to be proactive and give myself something to obsess over other than refreshing my email every 30 seconds, I’ve entered two contests.

The first is Pitch-Fest at WriteOnCon. My 200-word pitch will be critiqued by at least one agent, along with (hopefully) book bloggers, librarians, and authors. They’ll offer helpful feedback, and can request more material if they’re interested. I’m not allowed to comment on my thread while the Pitch-Fest is going on; I just have to sit back and watch the magic.

Which of course means that after I revised and polished my pitch, and even had other people look it over to be sure it was ready…I realized I deleted some rather important information. Originally, I introduced a character in the first paragraph whose actions are then developed in the last paragraph. But then I cut out his intro. So now he just pops up at the end, seemingly out of nowhere.

Oops.

Anyway, if you want to check out my pitch, glaring omission and all, you can view it here. And I can at least clarify here, for you lovely and confused folks, that Thomas is her neighbor and best friend. There. I feel better.

The second is Pitch Madness, where I email in a 35-word logline plus the first 250 words of my novel, to compete with a few hundred other people doing the exact same thing. I got word this morning that I made it into the second round, along with 126 other hopeful authors. Of these 127 entries, 60 will be picked by the judges to advance next week to Round 3, where agents will compete for a chance to take a closer look at these manuscripts.

Now, 60 out of 127 seems like pretty decent odds, but I don’t want to count my chickens. 67 fabulous pitches won’t make it through, and I could easily be one of them. However, it was nice validation that at the very least, my pitch was good enough to grab someone’s attention.

Many Pitch Madness participants are posting their entries on their blogs. Whether or not I make it to that final round, it’s been fun to hop around the Internet and see what kinds of books are being pitched. Lots of amazing ideas.

So I figured I might as well play along. Even if I don’t make it through, opening myself up to feedback is one of the best ways to get better, right? Right.

So here’s my Pitch Madness entry, for those of you who are interested! I hope you like it (and if not…be gentle. Honest. But gentle).

 

Title: DRAGONCHILD
Genre: YA Fantasy
Word Count: 100,000

Pitch: In a kingdom where magic has been illegal for centuries, sixteen-year-old Maribeth must master the dangerous powers inside her to prevent a devastating war. But first, she’ll have to escape her abductors.

Excerpt:

Maribeth stared at the paper, her legs dangling from the waist-high stone wall that wound most of the way around her family’s farm. Beside her, Thomas Whitfield surreptitiously gauged her reaction, demolishing the remnants of an apple between glances. The leaves of the orchard rustled softly, a sound she normally found soothing. But not today.

She couldn’t stop rereading the lines of carefully printed text, searching for any indication that she had misunderstood. No matter how ardently she studied them, the words remained unchanged:

WANTED:
Able-bodied Men of No Fewer than 18 years
For a Most Imperative Service to
His Royal Highness,
King Arvid of Ellymr
To Protect against a Serious and Grievous Threat to our Beloved Kingdom
Interested Men should Report Immediately to
Commander Reifsnyder, Ellymria
For Testing and Training
Generous Compensation shall be awarded to the Fortunate Selected 

Someone had been busy last night tacking dozens of identical notices all over town. This one came from the door of Gavin’s carpentry shop, where Thomas was apprenticed. Maribeth wished he had left it there. Or better yet, that he had never seen it in the first place.

“Thomas,”she said, appalled at the shrillness in her voice, “This doesn’t even say what the service is. For all you know, you could be signing up to fight a war!”

He gave her a dubious look as he polished off the last bit of core and dropped the stem in the grass. “Who would I be fighting?” He grinned teasingly.

 

There you have it, world! An update on my writing journey. In the meantime, I’m writing another novel that I love just as much as the fantasy, but is toooootally different. Maybe I’ll let you know more about it someday after it’s finished. It’s a fun time.

Blog Tour: Poison by Bridget Zinn (#POISON @HyperionTeens)

Today I am so excited to participate in the blog tour for Poison by Bridget Zinn. Poison is Bridget’s debut, but she passed away before she could see her book on shelves and in readers’ hands. This tour is being organized by her husband in her memory, and over 100 bloggers and authors are participating. To see the full list of blogs on the tour, check out this post.

Now, I have not finished reading Poison yet (although I’ve started it!), but so far I can tell you that it’s a fresh and fun fantasy adventure. And there’s an enchanted piglet, which means it’s pretty much guaranteed to be worthwhile. I’ll put up a full review once I’ve finished.

But today, for the tour, we’re supposed to talk about firsts. Any first, within the realm of information suitable for the Internet (which, despite what one might deduce from watching Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook, is not EVERYTHING).

So. Because it is late and this is the only semi-interesting “first” story I can think of, you’re going to get the story of the first time I went water skiing. I shall call it:

The River Wild, But Without Kevin Bacon, Meryl Streep, or Rapids

When I was in high school, I had a small but awesome group of friends in my church youth group. And one of these friends had a dad who owned a boat. One beautiful summer day, he took a group of us out on the Schuylkill River (which is not known for its sparkling clarity, but whatever) to learn how to water ski.

His daughter went first, to demonstrate the proper technique. She was a year older than me and about a thousand times more coordinated. She made it look easy. She even dropped one ski and glided around on one leg for a while. Piece of cake, right?

No.

When it was my turn, I jumped in the water, bobbing in my life jacket like a misshapen apple in a barrel, and slipped the skis on. And by “slipped,” I mean fought desperately for several minutes. The skis wanted to be on top of the water. My body did not. This was a problem. The boat circled lazily around me as I flopped and floundered like a dying fish, until finally I had the skis on my feet.

Then came the task of grabbing the rope. The boat circled again, and the rope slithered across the top of the water behind my back. I grabbed at it, but couldn’t seem to maneuver my ski-addled body close enough. So the boat came around again. And again. And again. I flailed and flushed and considered stripping off the life jacket and skis and calling it quits (never mind that I wasn’t sure if I could get them off after the amount of effort it took to get them on, and I would most likely drown trying).

But my stubborn nature took over, and I refused to give up before I’d even attempted the actual skiing part. So after half a dozen boat passes, I finally grabbed the handle at the end of the rope.

Then I was supposed to prop my feet up in front of me, birthing style, and grip the handle between my knees. In case you have never tried to do this while wearing a life jacket and large wooden planks strapped to your feet, while floating in a semi-viscous river and watched by a group of teenage friends who are all at least three levels cooler than you, this is not as easy as it sounds. Oh, also, the rope was attached to the boat, and the boat was still moving. Which means I’m attempting to do this while being dragged slowly down the river.

Not awesome, people. Not. Awesome.

Finally — finally — I was in position. “Ready?” my friend’s dad called, and I gave a thumbs-up like everything I had done was totally cool and not at all painfully awkward. The motor grumbled and the boat surged, and I lifted up out of the water — HUZZAH! — and then pitched forward and fell flat on my face. I was upright for maybe half a second. Maybe.

That’s no problem, my friends called. That’s totally normal. No one gets up the first time. So I tried again. More flailing, more near-drowning, more stubborn pride, more face-planting. This went on for upwards of an hour.

Finally, I dragged myself back onto the boat, all spaghetti-armed and pathetic, having never actually water skied during my turn to water ski.

Other friends took turns, to varying degrees of success. We took a break for lunch. I ate a sandwich that tasted like failure. “You know,” my friend’s dad said, “you should try again after lunch. Sometimes it just takes your subconscious a little while to process what went wrong.  I’ll bet if you try again, you’ll be able to do it.”

Yes. Because if at first you fail miserably at a water sport, you should try it again immediately after eating. This sounds like excellent logic.

But even though I was sure I could never do it, I agreed to try again. Never mind that I was fairly certain my subconscious had been focused mostly on how to create a portal through the dock back to my bedroom at home, where I could hide forever until everyone forgot I had ever attempted this, and not on what went wrong water skiing. I was 100% certain I was about to fall on my face again, make a fool of myself, and possibly die.

But then something miraculous happened.

I did it.

I did it.

I pulled myself up out of the water…and I didn’t fall. I rode the wake behind the boat, the wind whipped through my hair, and I was water skiing.

And in that moment, I didn’t care about all the failures and embarrassments of the morning. I didn’t care that I snorted water up my nose. I didn’t care that the force of the water around my body as I was pulled out of the water did very uncomfortable things to the back of my bathing suit. And I didn’t care that my form was probably less water sprite and a little more hippo ballerina. I had done it. I had accomplished the thing I was sure I would never accomplish, and what’s more — I loved it.

After that, I didn’t go water skiing often, but when I did, getting up out of the water was never a problem. My brain had conquered whatever that mystical thing is that brains do, and had figured out a way around my glitch. And every time I went, I felt exhilarated, empowered, and proud. My family went to Aruba a couple years later and my brother and I went water skiing in the ocean. The guys on the boat were impressed that the waves didn’t trip us up.

The truth is, those waves couldn’t come close to competing with that first obstacle: the part of me that was sure I couldn’t do it, ever, no matter how hard I tried. Once I was able to overcome that, the Atlantic Ocean didn’t seem like such a big deal.

So, there’s my “first” story. What about you? Any big “firsts” in your life that you’d like to share?

And congratulations to Bridget, and her friends and family, on this momentous “first.”

About Poison

Sixteen-year-old Kyra, a highly-skilled potions master, is the only one who knows her kingdom is on the verge of destruction—which means she’s the only one who can save it. Faced with no other choice, Kyra decides to do what she does best: poison the kingdom’s future ruler, who also happens to be her former best friend. But, for the first time ever, her poisoned dart…misses.

Now a fugitive instead of a hero, Kyra is caught in a game of hide-and-seek with the king’s army and her potioner ex-boyfriend, Hal. At least she’s not alone. She’s armed with her vital potions, a too-cute pig, and Fred, the charming adventurer she can’t stop thinking about. Kyra is determined to get herself a second chance (at murder), but will she be able to find and defeat the princess before Hal and the army find her?About Bridget Zinn

Bridget grew up in Wisconsin. She went to the county fair where she met the love of her life, Barrett Dowell. They got married right before she went in for exploratory surgery which revealed she had colon cancer. They christened that summer the “summer of love” and the two celebrated with several more weddings. Bridget continued to read and write until the day she died. Her last tweet was “Sunshine and a brand new book. Perfect.”

Bridget wanted to make people laugh and hoped readers would enjoy spending time with the characters she created. As a librarian/writer she loved books with strong young women with aspirations. She also felt teens needed more humorous reads. She really wanted to write a book with pockets of warmth and happiness and hoped that her readers’ copies would show the watermarks of many bath time reads.

Purchase your copy of Poison

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

IndieBound

iTunes Bookstore

Powell’s Books

Add Poison to your Goodreads pile!

Throwback Thursday (March 14) – The Pelican Brief

Throwback Thursday is a weekly meme hosted by The Housework Can Wait and Never Too Fond of Books.

Here’s how it works:
  • Pick any bookish or literary-related media (or non-media item) released more than 5 years ago.
  • Write up a short summary (include the title, author, and cover art, if applicable) and an explanation of why you love it. Make sure to link back to The Housework Can Wait and Never Too Fond of Books in your post.
  • Link up your post at The Housework Can Wait or Never Too Fond of Books.
  • Visit as many blogs as you can, reminisce about books you loved, and discover some “new” books for your TBR list – or some other classic!

Feel free to grab the Throwback Thursday button code from the sidebar to use in your posts.

Thanks for participating, and we look forward to seeing which books you choose to remember!

My Throwback this week is…

The Pelican Brief by John Grisham

(Also adapted into a film starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington)

Remember how I always talk about how I read all the John Grisham books in high school, yet I’ve only ever featured one here on Throwback Thursday?

Well. There’s a reason for that. And that reason is: I didn’t think many of you would be ALL OVER the legal thrillers.

BUT!

I only read so many books in years past. And John Grisham was a hefty portion of them. So. We’ve reached that time where I MUST talk about Grisham, or be left without anything to blog about. And that, dear readers, would be sad.

The Pelican Brief was my very first John Grisham book, which I read following my very first John Grisham movie. You may have seen it. Julia Roberts plays a very non-Julia-Roberts role. It is tense and unexpected and smart. Oh, and Stanley Tucci. It’s important to always remember Stanley Tucci in films, because he is always a highlight. It’s a fact.

Anyway, here’s the synopsis from Amazon, because I’m tired and it’s been years since I’ve read/seen this and my brain isn’t working.

In suburban Georgetown, a killer’s Reeboks whisper on the floor of a posh home. In a seedy D.C. porno house, a patron is swiftly garroted to death. The next day America learns that two of its Supreme Court justices have been assassinated. And in New Orleans, a young law student prepares a legal brief.

To Darby Shaw it was no more than a legal shot in the dark, a brilliant guess. To the Washington establishment it’s political dynamite. Suddenly Darby is witness to a murder–a murder intended for her. Going underground, she finds that there is only one person–an ambitious reporter after a newsbreak hotter than Watergate–she can trust to help her piece together the deadly puzzle. Somewhere between the bayous of Louisiana and the White House’s inner sanctums, a violent cover-up is being engineered. For someone has read Darby’s brief–someone who will stop at nothing to destroy the evidence of an unthinkable crime.

In a nutshell, I enjoyed the movie, it made me want to pick up the book, and I loved the book. Maybe it’s because my brain is wired in such a way I like logic and complex puzzles (my parents always suspected I would be a lawyer), but I am ALL ABOUT the legal thriller. They just push all the right buttons in my brain. And thus started my long-standing love of John Grisham thrillers. They’re smart, they’re tense, and they use ALL THE LOGIC. Sometimes, a person just needs logic. Perhaps it’s the Vulcan in me.

If you, like me, think crazy conspiracies and legal loopholes are WHERE IT’S AT, you should check it out.

This is a blog hop! Link up your Throwback Thursday post below!