Busy Days are Here

Can't believe Halloween's already less than a week away! I'd originally planned to be Effie Trinket from The Hunger Games, but then I got lazy and ended up as a witch instead. Here I am on my way to my friends' Halloween party last weekend.

Early this month I finished a pretty major revision of my current work-in-progress, Underbed. It's now back with my agent. We decided to make it a middle grade project rather than YA, and I think the change suits it well.

And of course, NaNoWriMo is only a few more days away! I'm all set to start working on a somewhat gritty YA fantasy project called Moth & Moon. Can't wait to spend my afternoons curled up in coffee shops with a mug and my laptop! I'm Fire and Air over on the NaNo site.

Recently I've been interviewed by two blogs, The Book Cellar and YA Librarian Tales, about Spookygirl. Spookygirl is also getting more and more reviews online, including this lovely one by indie author Amy Martin, who was guest-reviewing on YA Reads. Thanks, everyone!

Also, Young Adult Books Central is giving away five copies of Spookygirl! You can enter until Halloween, so stop by and take a chance. That link also includes my guest post about the most haunted house I've ever encountered.

And finally, I just noticed that Spookygirl's Publishers Weekly review has been posted! PW mentions Spookygirl's "straight-talking, level-headed protagonist and smooth storytelling" -- not bad, not bad!

A Monster of a Manuscript

I'll continue my series about ABNA and Spookygirl as soon as I have more news! Meanwhile...

Why is it that a brilliant editing brainstorm is always bound to hit right after you've submitted a manuscript? You can pick at a project for weeks, but as soon as you send it off somewhere, BAM, that's when you realize how you can make it even better.

Or maybe that's just me. I sent off the current draft of Underbed to my agent, and minutes later the ideas began to hit -- a way to restructure and strengthen the climax, a detail that will tighten Jeremy Serpent's connection to one of his enemies, etc.. Oh well. I'll be revising again soon enough; those things can happen then.

I'm not sure how I feel about Underbed. The concept's been lurking in my head since last year; I originally meant to write it during last year's NaNoWriMo, but November was taken up by Spookygirl revisions and holiday monster sales. So I took the idea -- a teenage girl revisits the childhood nightmares that still lurk under her bed -- and filed it away for later.

I finally wrote the first Underbed draft during the last three weeks in January. I revised it while I was out of town in February. That's the fastest I've ever churned out a revised draft, and it's still too fresh in my mind for me to be objective. I always go through an UGH IT'S TERRIBLE TAKE IT AWAY phase with new projects, and I'm still there with this one. Still, some of its details make me smile, and at least I finally found a story for Serpent. (He's been waiting for six or eight years. He's shown extraordinary patience for a monster.) So maybe there's so merit in the mess. We'll see.

Now it's time to let it simmer, wait for feedback, and tackle more of my own monsters in the meantime.

Eight-Legged Company

I've been visiting friends in Georgia for several weeks, and tomorrow I'm heading home to Florida. While I've been here, I've been working on a new manuscript, known for now as the Underbed project. I'm currently revising the (very) rough draft. I've been describing it as Alice in Wonderland meets How to Train Your Dragon, but it's evolved a bit beyond that concept. More on Underbed soon.

One of my Underbed characters, Sling, is a girl with an...affinity for spiders. It seems fitting that my friend's tarantulas, Tiny and Slippers, have been my writing buddies while I've been here. That's Tiny in the pic.

Tiny and Slippers also kept me company (always from the safe confines of their cages) while I was revising Spookygirl here last summer. Should Spookygirl become a series, I have plans for a Tiny cameo in a future installment.

And now I need to pack. And pout. I like it here. Not at all ready to go.