This Thursday, July 15, I’ll be doing a presentation about writing, publishing, and GIVE UP THE GHOST at the St. Catharines Public Library, Central Branch, starting at 7pm. The program is free and open to readers aged 12 to 18.
If you’re a teen or know a teen who’d be interested, you can register in the library or call 905-688-6103 ext. 227 for more information. Looking forward to meeting you!
It’s been posted in the official places now, so I can share: I’ve just accepted a three-book deal with Disney-Hyperion!
The Publisher’s Marketplace announcement:
Megan Crewe’s THE WAY WE FALL, in which a 16-year-old challenges her fears, finds a second chance at love, and fights to keep her family and friends safe as a deadly new virus devastates her island community, to Catherine Onder at Disney-Hyperion, in a significant deal, at auction, in a three-book deal, for publication in Winter 2012, by Josh Adams at Adams Literary (NA).
I am sooo excited to be working with Catherine and Hyperion, and to know I’m going to get to share three more books with you! THE WAY WE FALL (which, BTW, is the project I talked about here) has been consuming my brain for quite a while now. I hope you’ll love it as much as I do.
(For the curious, the second of the three books will be a sequel to THE WAY WE FALL and the third is yet to be decided.)
I’d say more, but a large part of my mind has been doing little more than going EEEEEEEEEEEE! since the deal was finalized on Wednesday, which makes coherency a little difficult. 😀 So I’ll just invite you all to happy dance with me!
How many edits did you go through before deciding ‘Give Up The Ghost’ was ready for agent eyes?
If we’re counting an “edit” as a revision big enough for me to create a new file for it (which I usually do for each draft, both because of my habit of rewriting rather than just editing and because I want to have the old stuff in case I realize I took something out that maybe I shouldn’t have), then the answer would be approximately 4 and 1/3.
The 1/3 is the original version of the story, that stalled (as you might guess) a third of the way through. I’d written myself into a corner I didn’t like, and I couldn’t figure out what to do instead. So the story sat for about nine months percolating in my head.
Then I tried again, and made it through the whole first draft. Woohoo! 🙂 As usual, I knew there were plenty of problems with the rough draft, so I rewrote it without showing it to anyone, fixing the things I knew needed fixing. I sent that second draft to my crit partners, who pointed out all the things I hadn’t realized needed fixing. I did another rewrite. Then I printed out that third draft and marked it up with red pen (I find it hard to do line-edits on a computer screen). The draft after line-editing (fourth) is the one I sent to agents.
And that’s pretty standard process for me, in terms of when I think a book is ready for professional eyes, though it does vary a bit from book to book.
I just found out that GIVE UP THE GHOST has been nominated for the Sunburst Award! (Scroll down for the YA list.)
The Sunburst is a Canadian award for speculative fiction, and I’m very excited to see GHOST in such great company. Cross your fingers for me! 🙂
A quick reminder for Toronto area folks: This Sunday I’ll be appearing at the Indigo – Toronto Eaton Centre in the teen section, from 1pm to 3pm.
I’ll have bookmarks and buttons to hand out, and would love to chat with any readers who stop by!
As part of Indigo’s Local Author Days, there should also be other authors in different sections of the store for you to meet.
Hope to see you there!
Can you tell us what you are working on next? Or at least give a couple hints?
The book I’ve been working on recently is another YA, separate from GIVE UP THE GHOST. Three things I can share about it:
1. I’ve already talked about it on the blog twice, once giving a taste of the “soundtrack” and once discussing the format.
2. I printed off and marked up a calendar to figure out what was happening when and keep my timeline straight:
3. The story takes place on an island, and I drew a (very rough) map on my whiteboard to make sure the main locations stayed consistent:
More soon!
What was your favorite cartoon when you were a kid?
For anyone who doesn’t know how old I am, this is going to do a good job of dating me. 🙂 When I was really little I had a number of cartoons I loved: She-Ra, My Little Pony, Carebears, and The Raccoons, just to name a few. But I think my absolute favorite was Thunder Cats. I have many memories of playing Thunder Cats with friends, pretending to be one or another of the characters and racing off on great adventures.
As I got older, I stopped watching most cartoons, but there were a couple I still enjoyed in later childhood: The Little Prince and Belle and Sebastian.
It’s been forever since I’ve watched any of those, though. Now I’m feeling all nostalgic!
Okay, readers: What are your favorite childhood cartoons?
When I first heard about the iPad, like many people I scoffed and thought, What’s the point? It’s just a big iPod. Then I got to play with Debbie Ohi’s at a Toronto Kids Lit meet-up, and I was hooked. In this case, big makes a, well, big difference. It’s a lot easier to type on and read off, just for starters. I immediately saw all sorts of possibilities, and as soon as they went on sale in Canada, I went out and picked one up:
I haven’t been able to use it to its full potential yet, as I was too cautious to let it leave the house until the screen protector I ordered arrived (yesterday), and I’m still nervous about the idea of taking it out places like the public transit. That said…
What I’m already doing with it:
–Staying organized. I was using an online calendar for reminders of major responsibilities, but I still ended up scribbling out little to-do lists for the day or week to keep track of smaller goals. Now I have both integrated into one app. My desk looks much less messy than it used to! (Which means it has gone from horrendously messy to very messy.)
–Taking notes. I brainstorm best in handwriting, and I’ve found an app that lets me scribble down notes (I use a stylus) and organize the pages so that I can group all the notes for any given idea together… instead of having to search through as many as five different notebooks for them, like I have in the past. I’ve also used the basic Notes app for little things like making up a list with my husband to try to figure out what we’d want to do for the house next.
–Reading. I haven’t yet tried to read a book on the iPad (too many print ones waiting for my attention here), but I have been enjoying newspapers, news feeds, and magazines, all of which I’m finding far easier to read on the pad than on my desktop computer’s screen.
–Music. Since I didn’t already have an iPod, or any other sort of mp3 player, I can now carry my music around with me and listen to it wherever I want.
What I’m looking forward to doing with it:
–Checking e-mail and surfing the web on the go. There’s wifi everywhere, and if I decide I really need it I can get a 3G plan. I can see this being *really* useful when traveling in particular.
–Word processing on the go. If I want to work on a story when I’m out of the house, the iPad is far lighter than my laptop. And I’m hoping it’ll also be a good alternative for reading manuscripts I’m critiquing–until now I’ve always printed them off because I hate reading off the desktop’s screen so much, but that’s been a lot of paper and ink.
–Networking on the go. I’ve got apps for updating my blog and logging into Twitter.
–Figuring out where the heck I am. I’m going to be driving up to the cottage for my critique group’s annual writing retreat this year, for example, and now I’ll have GPS to keep me on track.
And that, I’m sure, is just the beginning. 😀
Anyone else picked up an iPad yet? What have you been using it for? Got any other tech that you love?
Remember a couple weeks ago I told you about how awesome Tara Kelly’s HARMONIC FEEDBACK is?
Well, now’s your chance to celebrate her debut and maybe win a signed copy! You can also get cool swag like bookmarks and guitar picks, and two other autographed books: my GIVE UP THE GHOST or Stephanie Kuehnert’s BALLADS OF SUBURBIA. And because Tara is so cool, she’s even letting you request the prize(s) you most want. 🙂
To enter just head on over to Tara’s blog and follow the instructions posted there.
Good luck!
