What a year 2017 has been. At the end of January, I got two offers on my middle-grade novel THE BOY, THE BOAT, AND THE BEAST and now the book has a publisher, a cover (isn’t it pretty?!), a jacket, chapter illustrations, and it’ll be on shelves in six months from today! It feels like…
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I just finished writing the acknowledgements for THE BOY, THE BOAT, AND THE BEAST, and they’re extensive! Nothing we do in this world is done within a vacuum, and this book has been blessed by a lot of people during its life so far. With Thanksgiving next week, I thought I’d highlight some of the…
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I have a confession to make: I’m terrible at coming up with titles for my books. It’s true. One of the novella’s on my harddrive is called “Death Story”. (It’ll change before the book gets published.) The novel I’m working on now is called “Trees”. Very inventive. (Not really.) And the title for my book…
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I’ll never forget reading about how J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis sat around in a pub in England having heated discussions about the way books should be written. Oh how I wanted to be a fly on that wall! I can just imagine them, sitting in a dark corner, pints on the table in front…
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Yes, today is National Read a Book Day. The special day and extra spotlight is always welcome, but personally, I think reading a book should be celebrated every day. Books are amazing things and reading them has even more amazing benefits. (I’m biased, of course, seeing as I write books, but before I was a…
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Last week was one of wonder, sadness and inspiration. Four things happened that gave me a lot of perspective on life: How short it is, how incredible it is, how precious it is. First was the total solar eclipse. I’m a bit of a space geek, so when I heard the path of the total…
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Over on Twitter, I got into a conversation about how long publishing journeys can be. Sure there are those few overnight successes (a friend of mine signed with the first agent she did a conference critique with, it was with the first novel she’d written, and it sold very quickly), but those stories are far,…
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Yep, that’s right. My debut novel, WAKE, is getting into its final shape. It’s been handed off to the fantastic copy editors at Simon & Schuster, and I feel like I’ve sent out my story to get fixed up for the prom. I’ve worked on this story, loved it and lived within it, since I…
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