Superlative Blogfest: Best In Show

Favorite Cover - The Space Between tie with Dearly, Departed tie with Chime tie with Burn Bright tie with Entwined


Cutest Couple - Nora and Bram from Dearly, Departed

Most Likely to Succeed (Or, pick a Printz Winner) - Chime

Most Likely to Make You Miss Your Bedtime (The book you just couldn't put down!) - Unearthly

Best Repeat Performance (Your favorite sequel or follow-up.) - Darkest Mercy

Romance Most Worthy of an Ice Bath - Karou and Akiva from Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Pair Most Likely to Stay Best Friends Till They’re 80 - Donna and Navin from The Iron Witch

Breakout Novel (Favorite Book by a Debut Author) - Tangled Tides by Karen Amanda Hooper

Best Old-Timer (Your favorite read of the year, published BEFORE 2011.) - The Picture of Dorian Gray

Most Pleasant Surprise (The best book you didn’t think you’d like, but totally did.) - Lola and the Boy Next Door

Most Creative Use of a Love Triangle - Tangled Tides

Sleeper Hit (Book you found so awesome you wish it had been hyped more.) - Burn Bright

Favorite Book for Adults (my category) - My Life as a White Trash Zombie

Superlative Blogfest: Elements of Fiction

Thanks to Alison Miller, Katy Upperman, Jessica Love, and Tracey Neithercott for hosting this fabulous blogfest!

Most Envy-Inducing Plot (Or, the plot you wish you’d thought of yourself.) - Dearly, Departed tie with Chime

Most Wonderful World-Building - Daughter of Smoke and Bone tie with Burn Bright

Most Formidable World (Or, the setting you most definitely would NOT want to travel to.) - Eve by Anna Carey

Wanderlust-Inducing (Or, the setting you'd happily travel to.) - Dearly, Departed tie with The Space Between

Loveliest Prose - Daughter of Smoke and Bone tie with Girl of Fire and Thorns

Most Dynamic Main Character - Yara from Tangled Tides

Most Jaw-Dropping Finale - Burn Bright

Best Performance in a Supporting Role - Brimstone from Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Best use of Theme - The Girl of Fire and Thorns tie with Chime

Superlative Blog Fest: Popularity Contest

Alison Miller, Katy Upperman, Jessica Love, and Tracey Neithercott are having a best of 2011 blogfest all week!

A popularity contest? Hmmm...sounds like high school. ;)

Biggest Flirt - Nixie from Tangled Tides

Girl You’d Most Want For Your BFF - Briony from Chime

Boy You Wish You’d Dated in High School - Bram from Dearly, Departed (yes, even as a zombie)

Quirkiest Character - Tucker from Unearthly

Villain You Love to Hate - Bananach from Darkest Mercy

(Actually, mostly I just reveled in my writer-envy of her. I seriously love her as a character. Everything about her, especially her descriptions. I always love the evil most...)

Coolest Nerd - Cricket from Lola and the Boy Next Door

Superlative Blogfest: Head of the Class

Alison Miller, Katy Upperman, Jessica Love, and Tracey Neithercott are having a best of 2011 blogfest all week! Today is the first day, and it's all about the best books in each genre. (You can tell, based on the categories I answered, that I read pretty narrowly in the same genre all the time! Haha...oops. I also cheated a bit and had TWO ties. And I may have stretched some categories or shuffled my picks around so that I could get them all on the list without listing a whole bunch under the favorite fantasy category!)

Favorite Science Fiction:

Dearly, Departed

Favorite Dystopian:

Wither

Favorite Fantasy:

Girl of Fire and Thorns and

Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Favorite Historical Fiction:

Chime

Favorite Paranormal Romance:

Unearthly and

The Space Between

Favorite Genre Bender:

Burn Bright

Don't be afraid...

Sometimes I know exactly what I need to hear. But telling myself something just isn't the same as hearing it from someone else.

Right now I just need to hear that I should do the thing(s) I'm afraid to do.

I can't tell myself, because I don't listen to myself, so I'm going to tell you instead. In case anyone else needs to hear it, this is what I'm telling you, in earnest, from the heart: whatever you're afraid of, do it anyway. Go for the thing you think you can't achieve. Write the manuscript you think you can't handle. Query the big agent you're sure will form-letter reject you. Move across the country just because you're tired of the weather. Adopt a cat even though your apartment is tiny and you don't know where the litter box would go. Apply for the job you don't think you'll get, or for the school you're sure won't ever let you in. Lean in for the kiss, ask your crush out, buy the ring, sit down across from the cute person at the coffee shop.

There are a lot of good reasons not to do something. But being afraid isn't one. It's the worst reason I can think of to hold yourself back.

Starting Over (or) How You Know When You're REALLY Ready to Query

I was thinking about something on the way to work yesterday. It has to do with querying. (You can tell what's been on my mind lately, though I am not querying right now, nor am I particularly close to being ready to query. I do have a 2012 goal to query a certain novel before the first half of next year is gone.)

I kept circling around all the different things people say about when you know your book is ready to go out to agents. Many people say they really weren't ready, and they got lucky. Others mention several rewrites or heavy revisions or throwing the book in a trunk for two years before revisiting it. People getting ready to jump into querying for the first time ask how you know if you're REALLY ready, if your craft is good enough, if your story is solid. It's seriously anxiety-causing.

But I'm not exactly talking about that. This is what I was thinking about: let's say you do query, and you get an agent. You have to work on the book you queried for however many months it takes you to do revisions with your new agent. And let's say the awesome happens and your book sells. You have to spend more months revising, and then you have to do all kinds of copy edits and other stuff to prepare for it to come out. Then it has to come out. You have to do book signings and readings and promote it. You have to ignore the bad reviews.

Basically, you have to spend a lot of time with that manuscript. And I had never thought about this when I'd queried before, but (at least in my case) I think you have to actively WANT to debut with the novel you're submitting. I know this probably sounds ridiculous, very duh-like. I promise, I'm not trying to state the obvious. Because for a long time this was not obvious to me.

The interesting thing is, I've never really thought "oh wow, I WANT to debut with this novel I wrote, this book is totally ME as a writer!" (at least, not until recently.) I finished whatever novel, then queried because it was the next step and a good way of actively pursuing my goal of being published. And I obviously liked what I had written or I would not have queried it--I don't mean to make it sound like I was ever blasé about querying. Blasé is the last thing I ever was. But I didn't deeply consider what any of my old novels would say about me or my ability as a writer or even what kind of stuff people could continue to expect from me if I debuted with one of those stories. Intellectually I knew it, of course. But I didn't feel it.

I didn't FEEL it until I wrote a manuscript during Camp NaNo in August and a lot of realizations fell into my lap.

So all my unpublished, unagented friends: we are in an advantageous spot. I know it doesn't always feel like it (oh, do I know) but we are still all potential, and that is a great place to be. We haven't yet defined ourselves by a manuscript. We still get to think of exactly what we want to say about ourselves as writers. And we have time to do it. We have time to write new stories and revise them, and query or not query, and go back and revise again. We can learn about ourselves in the quiet of not having a deadline or professional revisions to work on. This is a place that, once we leave it, we can't return to. We are lucky to be here.

I don't know what will happen with this manuscript I want to query before 2012 is halfway over. (I WILL do it. I will!) But I do know this: at the time of querying, in terms of everything from the plot to each individual word choice, it will be the novel I absolutely want to debut with. (Even if it ends up not being.) Because that's how I'll really know I'm ready.

When Rejection Is A Good Thing

The title of this post is funny, because rejection never feels like a good thing. Mostly it ranges from minor disappointment (when a query is form rejected by an agent you weren't particularly interested in anyway) to this times a thousand:

So how can I possibly say that rejection is ever a good thing?

You could somehow have found yourself in a situation where you're querying a manuscript that's not in the genre you want to debut in (I have done this before--in that I realized I wanted to debut in a certain genre and what I was querying at the time wasn't that genre. So I stopped querying.) You also could find that while you're waiting the long months for agents to get back to you on a full (or to hear from a publisher at all) you think of a really brilliant but seriously hefty way to revise the novel (that might change its genre or age group), but it'll take some time or you're in the middle of something else.

Rejection still hurts, no matter what. But it's GOOD if a book that isn't where you want it to be gets rejected. If you're like me, you don't want to start off your career with something that isn't for the age group or genre you plan to be writing in for the majority of your life. And you don't want an agent or a publisher to want to sign you, but when you tell them you'd been thinking of certain revisions already, they say they're not into that idea, or they only want minor changes. Can you say no to a deal you've dreamed of because your novel isn't right by YOUR standards? Would you even think of saying no?

I can think of two more examples: when a couple months after an agent rejects you, he or she leaves the business. And when you realized based on what an agent said when she rejected you (if it's not a form letter) that she would be wrong for you anyway (she doesn't like main characters with an interest in unicorn breeding and you can't imagine not writing about characters who breed unicorns.)

So what about you? Have you ever realized receiving a certain rejection was a good thing? Can you think of any other situations in which getting a rejection would be the best possible outcome?

Don't forget about me!

New books are what usually get most of the blog page-time. But some of my favorite YA books came out before blogging was even a big deal. Thankfully, almost all of these authors are still producing fantastic books (I'm still really sad about Diana Wynne Jones, though), but I feel like I should give a shout-out to these old favorites that have been on the backlist for a while!

SABRIEL by Garth Nix

TITHE by Holly Black

THE SONG OF THE LIONESS series by Tamora Pierce

CROWN DUEL by Sherwood Smith

HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE by Diana Wynne Jones

So, what's your favorite YA book from before five years ago?

BURN BRIGHT winner!

Sorry it's taken me so long! Do you ever have that thing where your life takes over your life and you have no time to do anything? I have that.

Anyway, the winner of my BURN BRIGHT giveaway is...

Paper Reader!

I've sent you an e-mail! :)

Thanks to everyone who entered!!!