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Sunday, July 29, 2012

COUNTDOWN TO ANASTASIA FOREVER CONTEST!

Maybe it's the Olympic spirit. Maybe it's my excitement that the last book of the DREAMING ANASTASIA trilogy is almost here, which is like this total, wonderful miracle. Maybe it's because I'm just that nice.

But I'm starting my COUNTDOWN TO ANASTASIA FOREVER ON 8/7 TODAY!!

All you need to do is comment about why you are excited for the last book of the trilogy. Not sure what to say? Make up something witty. Suck up to me. Be clever!

There are three possible prizes. You get to see what they are in the video below. Yes, my hair is in a pony tail and I'm wearing my glasses. Live with it.

Contest is ON until 8/1 at midnight. I will announce winners on 8/2 before I leave for SCBWI LA!

Here's what you can win!! All prizes include bookmarks, provided by my lovely publisher, Sourcebooks!


Wednesday, July 25, 2012

What's Up Wednesday

Counting down to the ANASTASIA FOREVER release on 8/7 and the release event at Blue Willow Bookshop on 8/11 at  2PM in Houston. I'll be doing some giveaways to celebrate, starting tomorrow!!so stay tuned for the ANASTASIA FOREVER gift pack, which yeah, is as fun as it sounds.

Speaking of fun, did you know that there is a Paris, TX? Did you know that if you go there to research for a book you're writing, that you will see this?
Yup - there is an Eiffel Tower in Paris Texas. And it has a cowboy hat on the top. (full disclosure, I'd have taken more pictures but it was about 110 degrees outside.

To get to Paris TX from Houston, you also stop in Buffalo, where you can buy really amazing fried pies, with breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert varieties at the Original Fried Pie Shop. Which of course we did.

Just finished reading Nikki Loftin's The Sinister Sweetness of Splendid Academy, a fabulous middle grade which I'll tell you more about very soon. It arrives on 8/25 and I am so excited that Nikki will be stopping by the blog for an interview.

And thank you, thank you!! to both the publicity team at Sourcebooks as well as the wonderful bloggers who are currently participating in the DREAMING ANASTASIA series Deleted Scenes Blog Tour. I posted the Anne/Ethan love story essay in my last blog post.  Today I'm going to give you a deleted scene from HAUNTED, which is book 2. Ultimately I felt this scene wasn't quite working the way I needed it to, but what I'd been going for was this romantic tension between and Anne and Ethan, who's just returned from a number of months in Europe to find that Anne has a boyfriend, Ben. I wanted them to be trying but failing to talk this out-- because of course they really love each other but time and circumstance has worked against them- and what I ended up with was this scene where Anne kept eating. It has always amused me, this little deleted scene. Enjoy! And let me know what you think!


Thursday, 4:30 PM, Ethan

            “Are you going to finish that?” I point to the remains of the enormous pile of onion rings that Anne has consumed along with the cheese and sausage pizza we just split at the little hole in the wall pizza place so close to the El that you can feel the trains rumbling by overhead as you eat. We’re in Evanston where I’ve rented an apartment. But taking Anne there felt like a mistake. A restaurant seemed safer. Pizza seemed safer.
I just had no idea that she ate like this.
            “Well, yeah. You need to try some, Ethan.” She plucks one off the plate, shoves it into my hand, then passes me the bowl of ranch dressing. “And dip them in this. It’s killer.”
            I try it. It’s not half bad.
            We both chew some more, both pretending that this isn’t awkward and that we don’t both remember being chased by Baba Yaga and Viktor and Dimitri to these very El tracks not that long ago. Or that it was on one of those trains that Anne figured out how to work the magic lacquer box that let us access Baba Yaga’s forest and open the door to her hut so we could save Anastasia. It doesn’t take much for me to remember how Anne looked when Viktor almost killed her that day.
Or how I felt realizing what a fool I’d been to trust him.
            It’s easier to eat pizza and onion rings and talk about what I’m going to study now that I’m back. Of course we both know that’s not really why I’m back. But neither of us has worked up to the truth.
            “See. I knew you’d like it.” She dips another ring in the bowl of ranch, opens her mouth, pops it in, then closes and chews.
            “Remember when you made me tea? You still do that? The whole loose tea, tea pot thing?” she asks me around her mouth of onion ring.
            “Yes.”
            “Well that’s good to know.”
            “We need to talk, Anne.”
            “We are talking, Ethan.”
            I frown at her.
            “I’m being difficult, right? That’s what you’re thinking. Anne’s being difficult.”
            “Possibly.”
            “That’s what Tess keeps telling me, too. Well, maybe she doesn’t use that specific word. But that’s what she means.”
            “Anne.”
            “Ethan.”
            I signal the waitress for a check. This is going nowhere. I need to find out what’s really been going on with her. I need to tell her what I’ve seen. What I suspect. Everything I’ve kept from her in hopes that maybe I could keep it from coming. I am, it seems, no less foolish than ever.
            “You know they make great cannoli here,” Anne says as she stabs her fork into the last onion ring and dunks it in the bowl of dressing.
            I fish some bills from my pocket and hand them to the waitress who’s returned with the check.  “You’re all set,” I tell her. I stand, pull Anne from her chair while she’s still chewing and guide her from the restaurant. Another train barrels by overhead.
            “Let’s go out by the lake,” I say. “We’ll walk. I’ll talk. You’ll listen. And we’re going to figure this out, okay. Really. We are.”
            “Ben loves me, Ethan. Did you know that?”
            Her face is suddenly serious. Somewhere all this onion ring eating has been about this.
            “Does he?”
            “Yeah, he does.”
            She pauses, clearly on the verge of saying something more. It occurs to me, certainly not for the first time, how very young she still is.
            “I’m sorry that he’s been dragged into this, Anne.”
            “He has, hasn’t he?” She swallows. I catch a glimpse of the Anne I really know – as much as I can say I know her. The one who’s smart and funny and brave. The one I kissed a number of times before I left for Europe and who is now seeing a boy named Ben she says loves her.
            “Sucks to be him, huh?” she adds.
            Actually, I think, it doesn’t.
           



Thursday, July 19, 2012

What's Love Got To Do With It?

My beautiful, yummy author copies of ANASTASIA FOREVER came this week. Here they are:

And a number of equally wonderful, yummy (not that I am eating them whole!) bloggers have signed on not only for the ANASTASIA FOREVER blog tour next month, but also for July's Deleted Scenes tour, which is going on right now. There isn't an exact schedule so you'll have to be on your toes. Today for example, Mundie Moms is hosting an Anne /Ethan kiss scene that my original editor has me delete from DREAMING ANASTASIA. You really do want to check it out here!

Along with the deleted scenes, bloggers have the option to post this following little musing on the Anne/Ethan Romance, which I present for you today. Let me know what you think!!


What’s Love Got to Do with It?: The Anne/Ethan Romance

Joy Preble

 The guiding force of the DREAMING ANASTASIA series is the relationship between Anne and Ethan. Anne knows from the second she catches blue-eyed Ethan stalking her at the ballet that there is just something about him. And in fact, he proceeds to turn her life upside and sideways because it is Ethan who peels back Anne’s normal world and reveals a world of Russian fairy tales brought to life, of a hidden princess and an illegitimate royal son driven by vengeance. When they touch – and I always knew that their story would begin with a physical touch setting things in motion—everything changes.

Anne is no longer just the girl who dances ballet and goes to school and mourns the death of her brother to cancer. She is a girl with power to save a princess, power to right ancient wrongs and ultimately, the power to break a curse that is holding her birth grandmother captive. But power comes with a steep price. And when Anne accepts Baba Yaga’s bargain so she can save Ethan in book 2, she steps into the witch’s forest in a way she has up until then refused to do. Of course, I wanted her to do this for love, even if she has trouble admitting that’s what it is.

This is problem for Anne and Ethan: they do not come easily to loving each other. Or rather, Ethan comes easily to loving Anne, even if he feels that he does not deserve her or a second chance at life. Which is exactly what she gives him when she rides out of the witch’s forest with Anastasia, allowing Ethan to regain his mortality. While Viktor yearns to live forever, Ethan wants only to have what he lost for a cause that was never what he believed it to be: to live and die in the proper time. That he has found the love of his life makes him both deliriously happy as well as guilty as hell.

And Anne, well, she’s a smart girl. Even when she’s not, she has Tess watching her back, making sure she sees things as they are. Anne sees loving Ethan as an impossibility. He is too old even if he looks young. He has secrets and a long, long past. She is only sixteen. And yet I think she loves him from the moment he tells her his story. But she holds back; she is indecisive. In fact, these traits hurt her in all aspects of her life. She has trouble committing. Ethan, on the other hand, is an all-in kind of guy.

So what did I do to these two? I made them inhabit a reverse fairy tale. It is Anne who ends up saving Ethan over and over. It is Anne who is the hero. And ultimately, it is Ethan (no spoilers for book 3 quite yet) who needs redemption and forgiveness before he and Anne can be together. A happily ever after, but hard won. And not without suffering and sacrifice. This is after all, a Russian fairy tale. No one knows endurance like the Russians.

And so it goes: Ethan and Anne, circling and circling love, each running from the other, each doing the hero’s job. The question becomes, will they figure out that they belong together before it’s too late?

Of course they will!

But with these two, love isn’t simple. I think that makes them equal parts of smart and stupid. Not forbidden love. Not crazy love where the passion burns out everything else—and I think we all need some of that in our lives.

When Anne and Ethan finally figure out that they belong together, it will be a love that entwines them like two puzzle pieces, marveling at how perfectly and easily they fit. And how foolish they were not to know it.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Counting Down and Other Tuesday Stuff plus t shirts!

So the countdown to ANASTASIA FOREVER has begun. Less than a month until 8/7. Book 3 enters the world. Time to celebrate!

Please come on over to Blue Willow Books in Houston on Memorial at Dairy Ashford on 8/11 at 2 PM for the book launch. For full info click here.  There will be yummy cupcakes baked by my friend Amanda. And some of my Anastasia Street Team members will be there wearing these:
Yeah, I know -- they're amazing! Thank you Webb Uniforms for helping me create the kick-butt ANASTASIA FOREVER tees!

And I will be giving away at least one more .... okay maybe two... at the launch event!

Maybe I'll even give away one on this blog.... maybe I'll give an entire ANASTASIA FOREVER gift pack in August... hint... hint...

Other stuff:

  • Excited to be doing writing workshops/author appearances at two libraries:
  • I'll be at Huntsville Public Library this Thursday 7/12 at 4:30!

And I'll be at Bay City Public Library on 7/26 most of the afternoon for their 100th anniversary celebration!

If you are in either of these areas, please come on by.

Reading GONE GIRL right now by Gillian Flynn.... oh my! When both narrators are clearly unreliable, it's a mind -f--- of wonderful proportions. Another book that I was fortunate to snag at BEA and it's signed! And its deliciously dark. Oh yeah.

Last night on the way home from SCBWI meeting, the fabulous Kristin Rae (aka -KristinCreative) caught me up to speed on the wonderful world of K-Pop. So yes, the drive home from Houston goes faster when you're caffeine up on Coke Zero and listening to Korean Pop bands on her iPhone. Seems there are Korean dramas I can watch, too -- with subtitles. So who else knows about this? I sense a new addiction coming on.... which is scary because Top Chef Master is about to return. And I'm not all caught up yet with Lost Girl season 2. And yes, I'm hanging in there with Bunheads. Plus Awkward Season 2 and then there's Teen Wolf... and the train wreck that is the RHONY....

But okay - go ahead and scream at me: We rented The Artist and while it is definitely a party trick, I kept dozing off, waking up to comment: This is like A Star is Born, yeah? Wait! Didn't wasn't that scene in Citizen Kane? Hey there! Didn't this all get covered in Sunset Boulevard. (Yes, I'm film literate-ish) Anyone?

Excited for SCBWI LA which is coming up soon!

And mostly today, I'm excited that Annie and Augie are back tonight on Covert Affairs.
Yeah, I'm kinda addicted.

But until then it's back to work on the WIP. Not telling about it quite yet. Just a couple words: Mystery. Vegas. Elvis. Okay that was three words.

Til next time...