In Which I Recount the Publication Journey

So this publication thing. It has been a wild and woolly journey, that's for sure. This week, I took another big step because I arranged for my launch party/event (I'm never quite sure what to call it; party makes me think of beer and chips or possibly pin the tail on the donkey and those little party hats with the rubber chin straps... neither of which will mostly likely be part of this event) at my local Barnes and Noble on September 12th at 2 PM! In any case, the arranging had the singular effect of making this all seem VERY REAL. As does the fact that the galleys -otherwise known as ARC's (advanced reading copies) are circulating around and will also be available at Book Expo in NYC this week!

(Yes! If you are in NYC, stop by the Sourcebooks booth and see if you can snag one. Tell them how much you love me. How important I have been in your life. How I deserve sparkly flying llamas and a parade. HowI pulled you from in front of that speeding train and saved you from certain doom. That Joy Preble, you will tell them. Without her, I would be a sniveling pile of snot. Or something like that)

Do not let anyone know that it has also occurred to me that the galleys are circulating and therefore people are reading Dreaming Anastasia and are either liking it or not and it is totally out of my control and why the hell didn't someone explain that ultimately this is what happens at the end of this long trail instead of letting me realize it in one whooshing moment of neurotic angst? People. are. reading. the. book. oh oh!

But I digress. Back to the journey thing. If you are reading this and on the journey yourself, or if you are reading this and are wishing to be on it, or if you are just thinking hmm, some random facts that I've been mulling:

Since I finished the first draft of what would eventually be titled Dreaming Anastasia in the fall of 2005, here are some things that have happened:

• my critique group read various versions of various chapters so many times they lost track.
• I queried agents and editors and got rejected. I repeated that a number of times.
• I found a great group of like-minded folks on Verla Kay's Blueboards. Some have become life long friends.
• I got yanked out of the slush pile in 2006 by Michelle Andelman, then of Andrea Brown Literary Agency.
• I danced the dance of joy!
• I revised and revised and revised. And then I revised again.
• Michelle sold my book to Lyron Bennett at Sourcebooks in 2007.
• I waited a long time and in the mean time wrote another book and started two or three othere.
• I revised some more.
• I learned that Dreaming Anastasia wouldn't be released until 2009.
• I joined the absolutely wonderful Class of 2k9. Made some more amazing writer friends.
• I went to my first national SCBWI conference and met some of the above amazing friends.
• I waited some more.
• Hurricane Ike hit Houston. At that same exact moment, Michelle changed jobs and I was adopted by the amazing and fanatabulous cowgirl agent Jen Rofe, also of ABLA. It was hard to talk to her the first week, since even my cell phone didn't work after the hurricane.
• I revised some more.
• I started getting to read the ARC's of many amazing 2k9 books. I felt honored to be among such amazing writers!!
• I got to have breakfast with Jen in Vegas. We ate waffles.
• I arrived at copy edits and got a cover!
• My editor at Sourcebooks left. But before I could panic, I got a new editor, Dan Ehrenhaft, which was also exciting because he also writes YA and he's worked on series such as Gossip Girl, which got me all swoony with excitement.
• My cover got revised. Swoon-worthy hero Ethan got added!
• ARC's arrived. I was assigned my Sourcebooks publicist. He is awesome!!
• I finally sent in my profile to the amazing Cynthea Liu and Snoop at Authors Now, where you can find me and many other amazing debut authors and to which I will be posting a link very soon! (as soon as I go to the three graduation parties I need to attend during the next um, 48 hours)
• It occurred to me that I'm an author and I have a book coming out.

So - if you add it up... well, it's a long time to keep dreaming. I fully admit that my fellow writers mentioned above have kept me sane. The ups and downs of all the above can't really be expressed in those bullet points. And honestly, when you're a little, um, older, you are fully aware that things don't always go your way and that things like, say, hurricanes, bear down on you just as your agent leaves you and thrust you into darkness and you - because you are older and wiser - realize that things might not actually be okay, even if eventually they turn out fine. If I'd achieved this at 22, I might have had a different stand on the whole issue. But that, I suppose is neither here nor there.

So what am I thinking right this second? Keep dreaming! Whatever it is you hope to achieve, you are neither too young nor too old. If others are not supportive, screw 'em. People will not always be what you want them to be. It's not their dream, it's yours. You will tell people you have a book coming out and they will say things like, "Oh. I had to write some research when I was getting my doctorate." And then they will pause, right there in the canned fruit aisle at Kroger's and say, "You know what would be great? If you joined the book club so and so is starting because she just got laid off. I bet you'd enjoy that." And you will clutch your can of peaches and realize that said person wants you to chit chat about Marley and Me and drink mojitos and has no interest whatsoever in your YA contemporary fantasy. So be it. Because if one thing has happened, I have learned that I have some amazing friends who have been pulling for me and who got so excited about the aforementioned launch event that I cried yesterday because I wasn't sure how to deal with so much love from so many folks all at once.

Someone said it's the journey, not the destination. Well, today I think it's both. The journey has been part of the fun. But the destination - well - okay, it looks pretty exciting too.

Til next time...

Bird by Bird

Reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. Yes, I should have read it before. I might have even nodded my head sagely a few times when people mentioned it, wrongly indicating that I'd done so , too. But I hadn't. And let me say for the record, I wish I had.

Lamott is funny, funny - and wise and honest. An entire chapter on professional jealousy - which we all should be honest enough to admit we feel except we never do because it makes us look grim and small and really really mean. Because honestly, who wants to be known as the person who resents that another colleague just got sparkly flying llamas while you, well, didn't? Lamott is honest enough to admit that sometimes we'd just like the llama receiver's head to explode... just a tiny bit to make us feel better.

She's also big on the need for honesty in writing and I'm with her there, too. Have had some interesting arguments with English colleagues on this very subject in fact. "If they can't think of anything to write about" I've heard a teacher say, "then I tell them to just make something up." And I stand there thinking, well, if it's fiction they're writing, that's really stellar advice. But if I'm teaching them, say, memoir or personal narrative, isn't that a bit, um, wrong? Isn't that how we got into that whole James Frey having to admit he just flat made crap up on Oprah mess?

It's at those moments that the writer part of me and the school employee part of me sort of collide and my head spins...


Til next time...

I've got my Dreaming Anastasia ARC's

ARC stands for advanced reading copy. As in - it's almost a book! As in wow, look what was in a Fed Ex bag at my front door last night, which I tripped over as we were on our way out to see Star Trek and buy a new tv since ours chose yestereday to die an honorable death!

Did you ever see the old Steve Martin film "The Jerk"? When he runs out all excited yelling, "The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!" because his name is in it and he's so thrilled?

Well this is like that! Only better.

Plus my darling hot, swoony Ethan is now on the cover on the left, all blue eyed and hunky! Whoa momma!

Til next time...

Prom Time

Chaperoned the prom last night. Most people go to one or two proms in a life time, possibly a couple of sorority formals or maybe a cotillion or two. That's it. High school teachers, though, we attend a lot of proms!

Life may come and go, swine flu attack and then ebb (looks like the aporkalypse isn't gonna fell us after all and we'll have to just stick to a slower demise by the dying economy until the next craziness leaps up and pokes us in our collective assi), but the prom - it stays pretty much the same as you might remember it if you're beyond prom age. Fabulous dresses and tuxes and make up and limos for some. Dinners out and ice sculptures and a buffet that is mostly consumed by the chaperones. ( loved the mini cheesecakes and the mini empanadas; less fond of the meatballs; didn't try the carved steamship round of roast beef) Lots of picture taking and dancing; even the requisite crowning of the prom king and queen. Tons of angst and emotion and yes, the usual amount of expectation about after parties and what may or may not occur on this night of nights. It's heart-achingly sweet to watch. Everything on the cusp for them - they're about to leave the nest and it shows in every single way even when they think it doesn't. (Yes, some kids are always hyper-sophisticated and this is really small potatoes for them. Some don't want to go; it's not their thing. But most - even if they won't admit it - really like this party in their honor, even if they only stay for the photo op and go on to the after party before the real event has barely begun. It still is a demarkation of sorts. Even if it's like the menu item you never order. You know it's there.)

I barely remember my own prom. Went with my high school boyfriend at the time - the same one I unceremoniously broke up with the following new year's eve because it was time to move on. I seem to remember that we had a live band not a DJ. We didn't stay long. We were more interested in going out afterward to dinner and to Second City. Different place. Different times. We drove downtown with the other people in our group, riding in my date's father's Buick. I like to joke that I didn't ride in a limo until my father's funeral, and honestly, it's true. But i still have the little souvenier booklet they gave out. And the pictures of me in my long floral dress and him in his tux. I was not a big school event girl back then. Honestly, I mostly despised high school and could hardly wait to leave. But even with that, I'm glad I went.

Son of mine had a much more high brow prom. Party bus and photo ops and a prom group with parental organization that topped D Day's. Very fancy restaurant meal and a girl in his class had actually won a contest from Seventeen Magazine and so Nick Lachay (as in Nick and Jessica, a big deal back in 2004) actually came and sang at their prom! Crazy, eh?

So since I'm feeling all promish and sentimental today, please, please, comment and tell me your own prom memories. Good, bad, ugly... I'm in the mood.

Til next time...

Dreaming Anastasia Cover!!

Well, there still may be a few little tweaks coming, but my Sourcebooks publicist has give the okay - particularly since the cover is up on Amazon and Target already and I think Barnes and Noble can't be too far behind - that I can officially share the absolutely magnificently beautiful Dreaming Anastasia cover!! I think that it hits the fantasy elements of the story just right and I couldn't be more excited. ARC's are coming soon, launch date is definitely September, and oh! I'm so thrilled and honored to share Anne, Ethan, and Anastasia's story with you very soon.

Til next time...

In which I am unwound by Neal Shusterman's Unwind

So I'm roving about the classroom yesterday as students work on drafting their research essays. "What do you think?" one guy asks. I read his intro. "It's okay," I tell him. "But just okay. It doesn't grab me, doesn't make me want to read on." And what I'm thinking is, that I'll have to anyway because that's my job. Which doesn't exactly fill me with thoughts of glee. What it mostly makes me think is what I expressed next - in a slightly kinder form than you'll see it here - which is that if there's one thing I want to express to student writers it is that good writing makes readers feel that the writer is so passionately engaged in the task that whether we agree or disagree, whether it pleases us or horrifies us, we feel compelled to read on. We do not sit or stand there thinking, huh! I'm going to have to read this and when I'm done, the only thing that will occur is that I'm 10 minutes closer to death (20 if it's particularly unintelligible and lengthy, which somehow often seem to go together) and I will have spent those minutes on this paper, minutes that I'm never getting back and during which I might have done any number of things more pleasurable, including but not limited to root canal surgery.

Which gets me to something that I've now read four times in a row and will probably read more times because it's so wonderfully and skillfully horrifying that I can't stop reading it, which is the actual unwinding scene near the end of Neal Shusterman's Unwind. If you haven't read it, Shusterman's Unwind is a dystopian YA in a future that is far enough away that iPod's are no longer in use and in which, after a 2nd Civil War over abortion rights called the Heartland War, abortion is outlawed, but parents can legally "unwind" a child during ages 13 - 19. Teenage years. Once the "unwind" orders are signed by mom and dad, there's no going back. You won't be dead - you'll be in a "divided state" - having been completely gutted, taken apart and re-harvested elsewhere. Your kidney to someone with kidney failure. Your arm to someone who's been in an accident. The three main protagonists are Conner, whose rebellious ways have caused his parents to sign the orders - and purchase tickets to the Bahamas for the rest of the family for the day after he's sent off to the Harvest Camp; Risa - a ward of the state who is going to be unwound because she no longers shows sufficient promise as a pianist ( parents, btw, can also "stork" their newborns, which means that they can legally abandon them on someone's doorstep and if they're not caught, then the family who received the baby has to raise it); and Lev - who initially seems happy that his family is "tithing" him at his thirteenth birthday. He's going to Harvest Camp feeling all spiritually moved by his impending sacrifice. Through a series of circumstances, these three are thrown together and the plot twists and turns and scares the pants off you from there.

But back to that scene. I haven't read a scene for awhile that dug in like that and was so starkly scary. This one is. You read it and you know you're in the hands of a master of the craft. And then you read it again.

So if you're reading this, please let me know. What scenes - for whatever reason- have you read that simply won't let you dig them out of your head?

Til next time...

Tyra's going to UT and other dreams come true

If you watch Friday Night Lights (okay, if you are planning to watch FNL, spoilers coming, so either stop reading or read on and live with it), then you know that Tyra Collette, who finally came to believe that "college is possibility" and finally stopped having enough hate in her heart to jump start a car and finally believed dear Landry when he told her that he believed in her no matter who else didn't, got into UT in the season finale. And while that took the teensiest bit of suspension of disbelief for we Texas folk because we know Texas still has the top ten percent rule and that UT's freshman class last year was comprised of over 70% of only top ten percenters and that in the real world, Tyra would probably not only have been wait listed, she'd have had to go to UTSA first for year, it was still a moment that made me cry. As did the moment when big brother Billy Riggins ("fixin' cars and drinkin' beer, what else could you want?") grabs hearthrob Tim Riggins and tells him he's going to college even if it's hard because he needs to set that example for Billy's yet unborn kid that you can do better and you will do better, end of story. And I cried when Lyla finally forgave poor Buddy and admitted that she really did want to go to Vanderbilt. And when Matt Seracen decided to stick by grandma... Guess I've been crying a lot here.

But here's the thing about why Tyra's story really grabs me the most. She is a girl who has been vastly underestimated her entire life. She has been pigeon-holed as the girl from the wrong side of the tracks, dismissed as the girl who could make it but won't. And with some luck and a couple of people who never stop believing in her, she proves those naysayers wrong. She didn't give up in her heart - not ever - even when she could barely stand to keep believing because it was so easy to stop.

And I guess that's how I feel about how crazy wonderful it is to log onto Amazon and see a book for sale with my name on it. I am not from the wrong side of the tracks, but when you go with a whole heart after a dream for so long, it's easier to believe it won't happen than to believe it will. Less risky that way. And you discover that some people find it hard to be generous about other people's dreams, which kind of stings. But like Tyra, you eventually come to the understanding that you're not doing this for other people. You're doing it for yourself, for the story, for the sheer joy of the craft, and for the simple reason that the Muse has given you a gift and it would be a travesty to waste it.

So I guess that's why I've loved FNL and why I loved the indie film Sunshine Cleaning that I saw last week. They're about possibility. About never ever giving up, especially if it feels easier. Success it seems is part hard work, part unexpected gift. It doesn't always happen with the quick ease of a slot machine win, at least it hasn't for me. As agent Jen and I discussed just recently, some people are the slow and steady types. Like Coach Eric Taylor - to leap back to FNL one more time - he isn't about the show and the glitz. Some people fail to see the value of that slow climb. But I'm not one of them.

Til next time...