Next Big Thing Week 21

Today I am taking part in the Next Big Thing blog hop that has been making its way through the blogosphere faster than a head cold in a roomful of people who refuse to cover their mouths when they sneeze.

I was tagged by Mindy McGinnis fellow Class of 2K13'er and author of the upcoming - OMG I can't wait to read it, please let me get an ARC in my hands ASAP -  NOT A DROP TO DRINK.

These questions are about my current work in progress. ANOTHER LITTLE PIECE is a stand alone, which means that my WIP is not a sequel but something else entirely different.

1) What is the working title of your book?

ANOTHER LITTLE PIECE came from the Janis Joplin song, Piece of My Heart from the part of the chorus where she sings: "take another little piece of my heart now baby. Staying with the song motif, my WIP is currently titled: (DON'T YOU) FORGET ABOUT ME

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?

Ummm... I'll have to refer you to my Class of 2K13 vlog about brain throw-up.Yes, you read that correctly. I said brain throw up.

3)What genre does your book fall under?

Young Adult where strange things happen.

4) Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Oye. This would be a better question for my husband to answer.  

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

That question should really be - Can you sum up your book in one sentence? And the answer to that would be: No.

6)Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

By book is currently contracted with HarperTeen.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Umm... I'll let you know when it's finished. 

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I would compare it to both The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater or The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff because these books both take place in a town where something strange or magical is excepted as an everyday thing.

9) Who or What inspired you to write this book?

Um... me?

10) What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

I am writing this book in such a way that it will make reader's teeth whiter and their hair thicker. Guaranteed*.

This is the part where I am supposed to tag some other writers for next week. But everyone else I asked had already been tagged. AAUUGHH. It was like high school gym class all over again. So, if you are reading this and have not yet been tagged - feel free to jump in next week (Week 22) with your Next Big Thing answers. Let me know that you're going to post and I'll link you up here so that others can check out your blog next Wednesday, October 31th, when it's your turn to post answers to these same questions about your own works-in-progress!

Rules:



***Answer these ten questions about your current WIP on your blog


.

***Tag five other writers/bloggers with their links so we can hop over and meet them.


*NOT really.

Cover Reveal!

I am so excited to announce that ANOTHER LITTLE PIECE has a cover!

Well, actually it's had a cover for a while now, but I haven't been able to show anyone until now.

So, let me try that again...

I am so excited to announce that ANOTHER LITTLE PIECE has a cover... AND I can now share it with all of you!!!


So where is this cover?

The amazing Ana and Thea AKA The Book Smugglers have graciously allowed me to share my cover on their brilliant blog today! Please go check it out and then come back here to let me know what you think.

And if the cover and book description have you intrigued, but you want to know more, for example, some other comparable titles - then you are in luck! Tomorrow I'm blogging on the Class of 2K13 blog and I've made a helpful comparable title infographic for ANOTHER LITTLE PIECE. 

Book vs. Movie

I'm back with another blog chain and this time the fabulous Michelle McLean gave us this question to chew on:

There are so many book-to-movie adaptations out there. Which are your favorites? Which are your least favorites? Why? Do you make sure you've read a book before you go see the movie adaptation, or do you prefer to read it after, or not at all?

Yes, it's the age old question: which came first the book or the movie? Okay, so maybe movies have only been around for the last hundred years - give or take a decade. But you know way back when in ancient Greece at a performance of  Sophocles' Oedipus Rex there was some jerk in the audience grumbling that the book was better.

But seriously, I love this question. Of course, as a reader, I am firmly in the "book was better" camp. However, that doesn't mean that I hate every book to movie adaptation.

For example, I thought The Hunger Games movie was pretty decent. I enjoyed it while watching it and upon leaving the movie theater didn't feel like I needed a literary chaser to get the bad taste out of my mouth. BUT, in contrast, I thought the book was great. Amazing. Something I will read again. The movie, if it comes on HBO I might watch a few minutes, but I can't really see myself sitting through the whole thing again.

I don't really know if I have a favorite adaptation. I think Fried Green Tomatoes is pretty great and did a really good job of capturing the spirit of the book without trying to stay 100% true to it's source material.

I also am a huge fan of Bridget Jones's Diary. And this is a cause where I enjoyed the book, but LOVE LOVE LOVE (omg Colin Firth as Mark Darcy - swoon!) the movie.However, when the sequel came out my feelings flip-flopped. I thought the book was enjoyable, but the movie was just awful.

For the most part I like to read the book before watching the movie. Or I like to read the book and just skip the movie entirely and save myself the pain. The Time Traveler's Wife is a good example of that. I thought the book was fantastic, but the movie looked really bad - so I skipped it.

There are times though when I see a movie without realizing it has literary roots. This is the case with one of my favorite movies ever: The Shawshank Redemption. Unlike The Hunger Games film, when this movie comes on TV, if I watch even a few seconds I get so sucked in that I end up on the couch watching it until the very end. Despite my love for Shawshank I have never read the Stephen King novella that it is based on. It's on my to-be-read pile though and I know that one day I will get to it, so that I can see if this is another case of the book being even better.

Okay, that's it from me, but this is only the beginning of the blog chain and there is a lot more book vs. movie discussion yet to come. Next up is Sandra's post tomorrow - make sure to check it out!

Class of 2K13

Hey everyone, today is the official launch day of the Class of 2K13. We are a group of 20 MG and YA debut authors with amazing books coming out in 2013. To celebrate our launch we are having a HUGE GIVEAWAY! Please check it out on our Facebook page! Or to save you some time you can enter to win right here on my blog! Just use the Rafflecopter below!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Going Visiting

Today I am taking the SAT over at Mindy McGinnis's blog Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire. Luckily, this was not the high school type of SAT where a number 2 pencil was required. Nope, here it stands for Successful Author Talk. Pretty cool, right? You can find it here.

A Rose By Any Other Name...

I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it. I don't believe a rose would be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk-cabbage. 
-Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables

Today I am the first in choosing a question and getting things rolling again for the brand new but mostly old - blog chain. This is the question I came up with:


What's in a name? What if Harry Potter had been Larry Snotter? What if Edward was Jacob and Jacob was Edward? What favorite books had character names that you loved or hated? And how do you come up with your own character names? 

This whole subject of naming and what's in a name has been on my mind lately because of a certain little guy who entered my life a few months ago.

This is the puppy we brought home in early July. He was only seven weeks old. He was the cutest damn thing you've ever seen - I mean just look at that picture.

The only thing we knew about him then was that he was going to get bigger. A LOT bigger. His mom was a St. Bernard and his dad a Great Dane. On the ride home we also found out he got carsick. We actually found that out 3 times on the way home. It was a long ride home.

This wasn't a lot to go on for naming purposes and so it took us a while to settle on a name. By the end of the first day we had it. We named him Copper for his pretty fawn coloring and for The Fox and The Hound movie, which was a favorite of my husband's when he was growing up.

Time passed. Copper got bigger. On August 26th my husband and I celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary. Like most people who have been married for seven years, we had no idea what to get for each other. Using the power of Google we looked up the list of traditional anniversary gifts for a seventh anniversary, and they were... copper and wool. Yup, Copper. It turns out we had already given ourselves the perfect anniversary present without even knowing it.

So, that little bit of Kismet is what made me start thinking about names. About how names seem to fit certain people just perfectly, while others change your perception of what a name means. For example, prior to Twilight I'm not sure that many people would've connected the name Edward with  a guy who is sparkly and dangerous.

For ANOTHER LITTLE PIECE, I wanted to give my heroine a distinctive name. Not just a first name, but first middle and last that seemed to fit together as one whole piece. I took my inspiration from the TV show, Veronica Mars. This was a BRILLIANT series (well the first two seasons, and the last episode of the third season, anyway). I highly recommend watching it if you have not already done so. And if you do watch it, you'll notice how often the characters call Veronica by her full name. According to show creator, Rob Thomas, this is because the two names "just sound great together" and "rolls of the tongue". That's what I wanted when I gave my character the name Annaliese Rose Gordon. Maybe not quite as snappy as Veronica Mars, but it did what I wanted it to do.

And where did those three names come from? I stole the middle name Rose from my sister Amanda. I honestly can't recall where Gordon came from... But Annaliese (pronounced Anna-lee-suh) was a name that my husband and I had on the short-list for our second child. We ended up naming her Zoe instead. A good call by the way - she is DEFINITELY a Zoe. And that left me with a wonderful name that I needed to use somewhere - at the time I had a new work in progress where it fit just perfectly.

Okay, that's it for my time on the blog chain. But there's still more naming fun - to see how the rest of the chain deals with the name game, make sure to check out Sandra's blog tomorrow.