That Time I Went to McAllen Book Festival

I don't know why I have never been down to what we in Texas call the Valley, but until this weekend, I hadn't. I didn't know what I was missing. I was missing amazing people and amazing food and landscape that was clearly different than where I lived. A library created in what had been a Wal-Mart- turning a consumer concrete jungle into a gorgeous space for people to read and create and research and learn and listen and even eat!

Let me say it right here: I love McAllen, Texas and all its surrounding cities! I had the best school visit at Fossum Middle School. I got to work and visit with amazing librarians, including Mary Rodriguez and Elizabeth Hollenbeck and Dawn Rapoza! And mostly I got to talk books, books, books, with adults and kids and everyone in between. Plus the best Mexican chocolate mocha latte I've ever had.

A few pictures for you:

Paneling with Jennifer Ziegler and Lindsey Lane

talking books with Lindsay Cummings and Chris Barton and lots of people!

A chamoy Margarita. 

Enchiladas Poblanas with mole sauce.

Fossum Middle School super librarian Mary Rodriguez

Even Gale likes reading FINDING PARIS

McAllen Library with Lindsay Cummings and Ray Villareal

Carolyn Flores teaches me and Lindsay how to draw a frog.

That time everyone wanted an arc of IT WASN'T ALWAYS LIKE THIS! 

Five for Friday

Five things I'm obsessed about this Friday:

1. The endless rain here in Texas. The drought is over, at least the severe part, but yeesh. Enough. Scary and dangerous and oops, it just thundered again. Did I mention how on Monday it rained 1 FOOT in a few hours over the Houston metroplex? That is Noah level rain, folks.

2.  Kari Anne Holt's HOUSE ARREST, which will be out in October from Chronicle Books. It's so moving and wonderfully written and my heart is already aching for Timothy and I know more is to come.

3. My tomato plant. Tomato # 2 has ripened and more on the plant but the endless rain (see #1) is too much of a good thing.

4. Season 2 of CALL THE MIDWIFE. Chummy just returned from Africa. More babies have been born. One of the nuns has TB. Nurse Lee continues to learn how much she just doesn't know about life. And on like that and I am hooked.

5. Revisions. Revisions. Revisions. But when you read IT WASN'T ALWAYS LIKE THIS NEXT YEAR, it will have been worth it.

Happy Friday y'all.

If you haven't read FINDING PARIS, get yourself a copy. I'm so proud of this book. It's sparking great conversations. I'll be talking about it with a book club in Austin next month and a bunch more next fall and so if you're a teacher or librarian and would like to see me -- either in person or via a virtual visit-- please let me know! The lovely folks at Harper/Epic Reads have created a fabulous book club guide to get you going. You can find it HERE . 

xo

Macbeth, Pep Rallies, and Other Lessons from High School

3 Lessons learned while subbing for a friend, teaching her AP English IV classes on Friday:

1. Pep rallies at 7:16 AM are still an out of body experience. An entire gymnasium filled with 3,000 students cheering and watching the drill team perform (in full makeup) and vying for the spirit stick and the sun is not even fully up in the sky. Did you see the opening sentence where it was 7:16? (not 7:15 or 7:17.)

2.  Turns out it was Blackout Friday, with hopes that this theme would encourage a high score by our team at the District Championship football game on Friday night. (personal note: I was wearing a black tunic top anyway because no matter how much I try to add color to my wardrobe, black and grey and brown just seems to sneak in there and always have. Actually, I pretty much wear the same thing now as I did in high school: jeans, t-shirt and a navy hoodie and clompy work boots of varying sorts. But that's another story. Friday I was wearing jeans and a black tunic top.) In any case, it was like being at a funeral with cheering and basket tosses and speeches by the girl's volleyball team.

3. Turns out that even if you take a three year hiatus from teaching Macbeth, if you've taught it enough times, it remains in your active memory. Every bit of it. Like rolling off a Shakespearean log. King Duncan is still a nitwit. Lady Macbeth is still scary, although much sadder to me now. I still wonder what the Macbeths would be like to have as neighbors here in the boring Houston 'burbs. Would they dine at Olive Garden? Be excited for the impending Costco? Decorate for Halloween? Would I see them ordering queso at El Bosque?

It was a good day. A very good day. The students were honestly, awesome. Funny and smart and thoughtful.

And I got to pretend I was a responsible grown up who had power to say yay or nay to their requests to go to the bathroom. (a thing I absolutely do not miss. Because if you have an active sense of living ironically, it's hard write bathroom passes for students old enough to vote, and tell them to put away their cell phones while reading an email from my agent on my own phone.)

**If you want to read an irreverent view of suburban Houston and high school life, but with mystery, angels, poison, romance, dysfunctional family life, and potential global destruction if 15 year old Jenna doesn't save the day, I'd highly recommend THE SWEET DEAD LIFE and THE A-WORD, both out now from Soho Press.

THE A-WORD IS HERE!!

It’s here! It’s here!

Tuesday, May 13^th, 2014—the birthday of THE A-WORD, the sequel to THE SWEET DEAD LIFE, both from Soho Teen/Soho Press.

Let’s let the publisher’s blurb do some of the speaking. (I got to write it, so I think I trust it to tell you what to expect!)

It's been almost a year since Jenna Samuel’s stoner brother, Casey, bit the dust and returned as her guardian angel. A year since Casey and his “angel boss,” Amber Velasco, saved Jenna’s life and helped her foil the bad guys— more or less. A year in which Jenna has solved the true mystery of the universe: how to get one Ryan Sloboda to ask her out.  

Jenna’s feeling mighty cheery about life and love. But Casey, whose doomed relationship with Lanie Phelps (who has no idea her boyfriend is, well, dead) isn’t doing much to distract him, has his own big question: Why is he still hanging around?  


Bo Shivers, a heavenly head honcho Jenna and Casey didn't even know existed, might have the answers. Bo knows something big is coming. Something that might just change everything for Jenna Samuels, who once again finds herself up to her non-winged shoulders in heavenly secrets of global proportions—just as she’s finally found the perfect Homecoming Dance dress.

First dates and first kisses. Football games. Global-sized mysteries. Earthbound angels who aren’t happy about it and the loves and losses they’ve left behind. A sibling story. And the big questions of the universe. All told by sassy, smart-mouthed Jenna Samuels, one of my favorite characters I've ever written. As Kirkus observed, "wherever Jenna goes, trouble seems to follow."*

That’s THE A-WORD.

Welcome to the world, my pretty book.

And huge thanks to my lovely publisher, Soho Press, and my ever patient editor Daniel Ehrenhaft for allowing Jenna Samuels to kick up her cowboy boots once again!

Your job, dear reader? Buy a copy today. Give another copy for a gift tomorrow.  Spread the A-WORD! Because we all still want that SWEET DEAD LIFE movie, right?

Official blog tour start Wednesday. 

And some giveaways from me are in the works as well!

Stay tuned.

*Btw, in case you don't know, I do believe this quote is the reviewer's thinly-veiled reference to one of my favorite old time movies, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows -- a story about two irrepressible best friends (one played by Hailey Mills, who also starred in a zillion Disney movies and the original Parent Trap) in a Catholic boarding school who get into all sorts of crazy hijinks, much to the chagrin of the Reverend Mother, played by Rosalind Russell. 

HAPPY PAPERBACK RELEASE DAY, SWEET DEAD LIFE!!

The paperbacks of THE SWEET DEAD LIFE hit the stores today!!
My first hard back to paperback release! Serious excitement around here!

If you see one in the wild, post a picture and let me know.
If you haven't read yet, today's the day. Buy one for a friend, too...

Texas setting, guardian angels, snarky with a huge heart narrator Jenna and her sometimes celestial brother Casey. A huge global mystery. And some doomed romance… at least until the second book. It's what an angel book should be.  Really. Plus kolaches.

If you don't believe me, believe author Michael Northrop, who just offered up this lovely blurb for THE A-WORD, the sequel that's coming in May from Soho Press/Soho Teen:

“The earthbound angels are as authentic as the down-to-earth people in The A-Word, but where the book really spreads its wings is in the interaction between the two. Resourceful teens and heavenly beings team up to get to the roots of a very modern mystery, and the big questions of the universe share space with first dates and football games. The result: a smart, original (and slightly celestial) mystery with a distinctly Texan flavor.”
—Michael Northrop, author of Trapped and Surrounded by Sharks

THE A WORD galleys are HERE!!

Few things are more thrilling than the physical evidence that a book you've been working on is almost a real thing! So when I opened the mailbox yesterday and found a fat white mailing envelope from my editor at Soho Press containing three gorgeous ARCs of THE A WORD (May 2014, Soho Teen), I did the dance of joy! (When your name is Joy this is pretty easy, but you know what I mean!)

The sequel to this year's THE SWEET DEAD LIFE is looking like a lovely almost book! Contest coming soon to win one and find out before everyone else what Jenna and Casey and Amber and a new guardian angel named Bo are up to. Plus Jenna gets her first boyfriend! I am so excited for you to read. 

More soon, but for now, here they are! Feel free to pet the picture! :)

THE SWEET DEAD LIFE Educator's Guide Adventure and other Wednesday Stuff

I've done study guide questions before for my own work. Did these for the DREAMING ANASTASIA series, which my publisher even prettied up for me in the art department, although I I never did see them around again other than on my own web site. It happens. They are good questions, by the way. Some projects, too.

This week I'm working on Educator's Guide questions for the SWEET DEAD LIFE series. There is a certain fascination and yes, awkwardness in analyzing your own writing. Because here's the secret of my writing process: I am telling a story. I spin that story as best as I can through a full draft and then when I read it over, I discover all the subtext and themes and what have you. All the things that clearly weigh on my mind about life and love and faith and courage and redemption and second chances, which somehow tend to be the things I end up writing about. As Stephen King discusses in ON WRITING, I begin with a basic idea-- in this case 'girl's stoner brother comes back after a fatal car accident as her guardian angel and they solve a vast mystery' --and then wind things out from there. Only later do I see what I was really writing about beyond the basics of the plot.

And once I'd written THE A WORD, which is the sequel to Jenna and Casey's story and set to come out next May, 2014, I saw even more. This series that had begun as light and humorous and quirky actually had a serious core to it and that core got more serious as book 2 went on. I want to say it wasn't a surprise, but I think on some level it was. And then I knew I wasn't the only one who saw all this because there was Editor Dan, emailing and saying you know, we here at Soho Press think this book should have a Common Core Educator's Guide. Which was thrilling because I had written a small story that was suddenly larger than I thought and they were good with that. Delighted in fact.

Let me interject here that I know teachers and curriculum folks have varying opinions on the CC and the attached high stakes testing. I know that my home state Texas actually does its own high stakes testing thing. But let me say this: THE SWEET DEAD LIFE guide is as delightfully subversive as the books! It's the kind of guide I would actually have used as a teacher. Because what is good education if not asking the little suckers to THINK and formulate OPINIONS and FORMULATE a rebellious idea or two. Or else what are the teenage years for?

Turns out I'd ending up writing a book about American culture and faith and the sometimes wasteland that is the suburbs in addition to writing a quirky angel book with a Texas twist that's mostly a sibling story although in book 2 is largely about love. Yes! THE A WORD gives Jenna her first love!! I am so excited for you to read!

But back to the guide!

Here's how the first draft of that guide begins right now. It will change a little, but mostly this is it:

Part mystery, part angel book with a Texas twist, Joy Preble’s THE SWEET DEAD LIFE series is at its core a Vonnegut-esque sibling story of love, loss, faith and belief, of what it means to be good and the inherent human failings that cause us to fall from that.

Through the eyes of its young teenage narrator, Jenna Samuels, TSDL presents its readers with an epic battle of good and evil set in the modern wasteland of the Houston suburbs. A fifteen year old girl and her not-so-angelic guardian angel brother find themselves fighting a global conglomerate that has weaponized memory drugs with the real potential of controlling human society. (All against the backdrop of mall culture, fast-food tacos, and Texas high school football.)

Through the suggestions made in this Educator’s Guide, TSDL will challenge students in English and Humanities classrooms to think critically about life and society through darkly humorous and satirical lens.  Those discussions will take them beyond the pages of the novel and will be useful in constructing a Common Core-aligned curriculum. We hope you and your students accept THE SWEET DEAD LIFE’s invitation both to laugh and learn.

That last sentence is important to me since I come to writing through after a long haul in public school classrooms. I believe that we can take learning seriously but still laugh. A lot. And even poke a little fun at our own foibles. Yup. (Hey, I'm a former English teacher. I can use words like foibles.) 

Hope soon to show you the A WORD cover and maybe even the new look for the paperback TSDL cover, which will be out in February! The clever folks at Soho Press have outdone themselves. They really get it, this whole book creating business. I am one lucky girl.

TEXAS IS HOT AND PJ HOOVER LETS US KNOW WHY IN SOLSTICE

Today I have the extreme pleasure to welcome PJ (Tricia) Hoover, whose YA dystopian with a mythological twist SOLSTICE just hit the shelves today from TOR books! Full disclosure, Tricia is a fellow Texas writer. I have made her guest room my second home since I seem to be in Austin every five and half seconds these days. She is funny and a fellow Star Trek nerd. She has a kickass collection of nerd t shirts that one day I will STEAL FROM HER CLOSET. If you want to see them, she posts pics regularly. Her family is equally rocking, including the two tortoises. It’s Tricia who decided that a group of us would appear regularly at Austin Comic Con. She is the only one who could convince me to wear an evil mermaid costume for 3 days in a row. She appreciated my geeker joy when I got five minutes of chat time with James Marsters (aka Spike from BTVS). I reciprocated during her photo op with Kevin Sorbo.

BTW—Make sure you read to the end! Tricia’s giving away a signed copy of SOLSTICE!

Tricia’s official bio reads like this:

P. J. Hoover first fell in love with Greek mythology in sixth grade thanks to the book Mythology by Edith Hamilton. After a fifteen year bout as an electrical engineer designing computer chips for a living, P. J. decided to take her own stab at mythology and started writing books for kids and teens. When not writing, P. J. spends time with her husband and two kids and enjoys practicing kung fu, solving Rubik's cubes, and watching Star Trek. Her first novel for teens, Solstice (Tor Teen, June 18, 2013), takes place in a global warming future and explores the parallel world of mythology beside our own. Her middle grade novel, Tut (Tor Children's, 2014), tells the story of a young immortal King Tut, who's been stuck in middle school for over 3,000 years and must defeat an ancient enemy with the help of a dorky kid from school, a mysterious Egyptian princess, and a one-eyed cat. For more information about P. J. (Tricia) Hoover, please visit her website www.pjhoover.com.

And here is the quick summary for SOLSTICE – which I have read and absolutely adore! Yes, Tricia Hoover has made global warming pretty hot in other ways, too –and yes, I’m thinking of Shayne and Reese the two love interests vying for main character Piper as she realizes that she is a much different girl with a much different backstory than she realizes… and that the increasingly hot temps in Austin are just possibly her fault…

Piper’s world is dying. Each day brings hotter temperatures and heat bubbles which threaten to destroy the Earth. Amid this Global Heating Crisis, Piper lives under the oppressive rule of her mother, who suffocates her even more than the weather does. Everything changes on her eighteenth birthday, when her mother is called away on a mysterious errand and Piper seizes her first opportunity for freedom. 

Piper discovers a universe she never knew existed—a sphere of gods and monsters—and realizes that her world is not the only one in crisis. While gods battle for control of the Underworld, Piper’s life spirals out of control as she struggles to find the answer to the secret that has been kept from her since birth—her very identity….

An imaginative melding of mythology and dystopia, Solstice is the first YA novel by talented newcomer P. J. Hoover.

Now let’s hear from PJ Hoover herself!

Joy: Your stories and even your blog title have a focus on mythology. Tell us about that.

PJ: I adore mythology. It started back in sixth grade when I read that book, Mythology, by Edith Hamilton, and it never went away. I love those tales of epic quests and heroes. And I find studying and comparing mythologies from around the world fascinating. I guess that’s why I always find a way to use it in my stories. And the blog title? That’s because so many things in our modern society have their basis in mythological beliefs, most people don’t know about them, and that’s just cool.

Joy: Where did the idea for SOLSTICE come from?

PJ: Well, it came about first and foremost from my love of mythology. So many people were writing fairy tale retellings, but as much as I love fairy tales, I didn’t want to jump into that playground. I wanted to hang out in a playground much closer to home. I started thinking about myths. But instead of a retelling, I wanted to write about what came after the myth, and that’s where the idea for Solstice came about.

Joy: Piper is torn between two hunky guys, but those characters have a great purpose than just the traditional love triangle. Can you tell us about Piper's love interests.

PJ: Well, without spoilers, maybe the best way is to contrast them.

Shayne is all about responsibility.

Reese is all about breaking the rules.

Shayne is willing to wait for what he wants.

Reese is likely to grab whatever he wants with no care to what happens as a result.

Shayne has a deep bond with Piper.

Reese can’t control himself around Piper . . . and she can’t control herself around him either.

Shayne has a temper.

Reese understands the value of chocolate.

The guys are so different, and that’s what made writing both of them so much fun in Solstice!

Joy: For those unaware of the story of Persephone, could you give us the quick, down and dirty version?

PJ: Sure! We’ll go with the traditional version.

Girl is very innocent. Girl never leaves her mom’s side. Until (you guessed it) one day, girl’s mom stops watching for a moment. Evil god comes and steals girl away. Evil god takes girl to Underworld. Never wants her to leave. Tricks her into eating food, thus binding her to the Underworld. Mom is mad. Crazy mad. But King of the gods, makes everyone happy, having girl split her time between her mom and evil god. The end.

Joy: How did you decide the near future Austin in global warming details that build the world?

PJ: Why Austin? Because I live here! It’s a great city and one I know well.

Why the near future? Because of the “what happens next” aspect of the myth. There was no other logical conclusion.

Joy: I'm going to meet Piper for the first time and I ask you to tell me about her. What would you say?

PJ: You totally might think Piper’s meek, based on how her mom controls her every move. But give her an inch of freedom, and watch out! All bets are off. Piper will surprise you (and herself) every chance she gets.

Joy: The one or two sentence SOLSTICE elevator pitch. Quick! What do you tell that Hollywood movie scout!

PJ: Solstice is a futuristic story, set amid a global-warming devastated world, about an eighteen-year-old girl who opens a mysterious present and discovers a world of mythology she never knew existed. And then the world really turns crazy.

Joy: What's next for PJ Hoover?

PJ: I have a middle grade Egyptian mythology book coming out in Fall 2014. It’s called Tut: My Life as an Immortal 8^th Grader, and it’s about King Tut who is fourteen, immortal, and living in Washington D.C. with his one-eyed cat, Horus, when his crazy uncle from 3000 years ago shows up and is out to get King Tut. I am so excited for it to be published!

 Lightning Round

-- M&M's or Twizzlers?

M&Ms!

--unicorns or zombies?

Hobbits J

--favorite guilty pleasure TV?

Star Trek

--book(s) for a desert island?

The Silmarillion

--favorite breakfast foods?

Sunnyside-up eggs and bacon. And coffee. Never forget the coffee.

--wine or whiskey?

Red wine, dark and dry

--fave myth?

Cupid and Psyche

--a song that reflected the high school you?

D’yer Mak’er by Led Zeppelin

 **Joy's note: Zep is the BEST BAND EVER*

Want to know more about PJ Hoover? Check out her WEBSITE

 AND NOW!! Want to Win a signed copy of SOLSTICE? Enter here! 

a Rafflecopter giveaway