In honor of When Stars Die, I am doing another giveaway. The paranormal book giveaway was a success, and the winner has already been chosen and notified via e-mail. This will be done via Rafflecopter, so just follow what the rafflecopter shows, and you will be entered! This will go on for 3 weeks. Currently the box set of GoT is very cheap, but that may change, so I want to make certain I have enough time to scrounge together some money for this–while also having extra padding.
Since WordPress cannot use Rafflecopter, you’ll simply have to click on the link.
In honor of When Stars Die, my assistant, Mariah Wilson, and I have decided to put together this wonderful cover art contest. What you Stars will do is choose your favorite cover, and the author will win a promotional package that includes a mini book tour with author/book features, and a one hour Twitter interview on a chosen date that all three of us can make. So here are the book covers you have to choose from:
The cut-off date will be September 25th at midnight. Have fun!
Congratulatoins to lindalitebeing for winning The Looking Glass Wars giveaway! Now this week I will be giving away 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher. Here is a little blurb on the wonders of this book:
Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers several cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker – his classmate and crush – who committed suicide two weeks earlier. Hannah’s voice tells him that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he’ll find out why. Clay spends the night crisscrossing his town with Hannah as his guide. He becomes a firsthand witness to Hannah’s pain, and learns the truth about himself-a truth he never wanted to face.
The rules are the same with this book. You must be following me and you must comment to be entered. This drawing will occur on Saturday at 9 PM. Enjoy!
I am also going to have a book giveaway going on over at my Facebook page. Like my page to the right for your chance to participate in it!
I hate the concept of the rough draft. I hate that rough drafts are, by nature, rough and prone to innate crappiness. I love writing, but I hate writing rough drafts because revision ideas are already floating through my brain by the time I’m done with a chapter. I’m able to move on, but it doesn’t take away the fact that I really want to get to the revisions because that’s when things really become fun for me.
What exactly do I do to prepare for a first draft? Well, first I get the idea and let it stew for a week, pretty much being the character and playing out various scenarios in my head. If I can’t let go of the idea, I start to outline each chapter with a rough summary. I never used to outline. I’d just go by the seat of my pants; however, outlines keep everything in order for me and make revision notes that much easier to come up with. And as I’ve said before, outlines prevent writer’s block for me.
Then I just start writing. As I’m writing Stolentime, I’ve been very surprised with what I’ve naturally come up with that isn’t in the outline. The outline is guiding me, my story is going in the direction that the outline has it going in, but I’ve invented scenes I didn’t plan out, and that has been incredibly fun and surprising for me. It makes the drafting process more bearable, but still, I really want to get to the revisions. This story has a lot of promise and doing the revision outline will really bring everything together.
So I have been drafting a chapter a day, or have been trying to. In fact, I should probably be doing two since there is still daylight left to burn when I finish with one. I’ll get that much closer to revisions. I plan to finish the draft some time next month and hopefully have it revised before school starts. Then I’ll give it to my beta reader and see what happens from there. I know I’ve only mentioned Stolentime and haven’t really spoken of what it’s about. Well, this is the post where I’ll finally do that.
I have a vanity charm necklace that I will be using on the cover. Not this one though.
Gene White is a suicidal teen with treatment-resistant depression. Believing he is untreatable, his attempts to drown himself fail when Claude, a puppeteer and doll maker, rescues him from his suicide attempt. He decides to take Gene on as an apprentice and teaches him through bizarre and terrifying adventures that there is value to all life, including Gene’s.
So this is the story that I am working on at the moment. While the draft sucks (because don’t they all?), the story is coming together rather nicely, even though there are elements of it that will need major tweaks, like obvious inconsistencies I haven’t cared to fix.
Also, don’t forget to check out the Coraline book giveaway going on! The post is here. You must leave a comment to be entered and be a follower. Simply liking the post will not put you in the raffle. This will go on until I have my 230th follower, and then I will draw a name from the comments’ section. If you want this drawing to happen soon, share, Tweet, reblog, whatever.
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