Author Interrupted

In between projects. I haven't been in between projects for awhile. Okay that's a lie - I'm not exactly in between, I'm just waiting for editors to confirm that what I've sent them either sucks or shines and so.... here's what one does when one is in between:

• got my hair highlighted


• worked on my materials for two conferences and the teen writing workshop I'm giving next week. (if you live in Houston and are between 12-18, come to South County Library on 10/20 at 6!! There will be prizes!)


• Started getting ready for Austin Comic Con!!! I get to eat zombie jerky off KA Holt's fingers!


• Made folders with plastic sleeves for various parts of my life that needed organizing.


• began to dig out the crap in my office. Oh the piles of crap.


• learned how to safely remove flashdrive from new macbook pro (the one thing I've found so far in which pc really excels is in anal retentive safety instructions)


• watched last night's ep of Ringer. I don't think I even know what's going on anymore and I'm curious how they could maintain this level of confusion through more than one season but I love watching SMG so it's all good. SMG and her not so dead twin's stepdaughter smiling and washing WHORE off a white picture. Could it get any better?


• Got tired of DWTS. It's okay if it's rigged. But does it have to be so obvious? And this comment is from the woman who watched Skating with the Stars!


• Speaking of SWTS, I have also spent time reading about the maybe or maybe not lost at sea/our GPS stopped functioning with Bethenny Frankel and her crew. And Bethenney I LOVE you, I really do. But why was your therapist on the cruise? Is that what people do these days? What does this mean for me? I don't even have a therapist. But I might go on another cruise some day (although what could equal the Bachelorette cruise from last March, the one where we headed out from Long Beach as the tsunami hit California? No cruise I know of), and what will I do. Maybe I need a therapist. So I can tell her/him that I can't afford to take him/her.


• Organized my tax receipts (early!) while watching Ringer... and beyond...


• Got excited by the three commercials for Vampire Diaries during Ringer. The teaser dialogue goes something like this: Stefan -- I'm going to have to feed on you Elana! And there's a timer! And I'm sweating for some reason! And Klaus is still a bastard! And I bet Damon will save the day! And damn your neck looks inviting!

til next time...

Meet Me at the Crossroads

Revving up for the Crossroads Blog Tour 2, starting on 10/22 - 10/29, created by the fab Judith Graves of Class of 2k10. I LOVED doing this last year and I'm even more excited this year. We've got an all star paranormal author cast: Not only yours truly and Judith Graves, too, but also Shannon Delaney, Carrie Harris, Kitty Keswick, Linda Joy Singleton, Dawn Dalton, Jeri Smith Ready, Amanda Ashby, Stacey Kade (with whom I had the privilege of appearing at Houston's Teen Book Con last spring), Angie Frazier, Kiki Hamilton, Lucienne Diver, Jackie Morse Kessler and Rachel Vincent! Plus amazing bloggers who are hosting us and more on them in a later post!

Click on the icon above for all the deets. Swag, giveaways, signed books.... it's going to be a spookalicious run up to Halloween! Yay!

Beyond that, it's been revision land here. Just pressed send on my Again and Again revisions back to editor Leah at Sourcebooks. Title might be changing by the way. I won't spill the beans yet, but I think you will love! I am so excited about book 3 of the DA series. Everything you've been wondering about comes together here and the romance... well, let's just say I've had fun writing.

And speaking of Sbooks, I'm reading my buddy Janet Gurtler's I'm Not Her and I cannot put this book down. I posted an interview with Janet awhile back before the book came out in the spring. But I hadn't read. Now I am and I'm ripping through the pages of this story of how bone cancer turns a family upside down, particularly the two sisters -- Kristina the gorgeous athelete/popular girl who finds herself suddenly ill and the narrator Tess, quiet, artistic, geeky, and suddenly the center of attention when her sister gets sick. I'm about a 1/3 in and it's an amazing read. Having dealt with serious illness myself, I know that it does impact family, relationships and pretty much everything in your world. I love the small moments in Janet's book -- such as when Tess feels momentarily guilty for thinking her usual mean sister thoughts about Kristina or when she's angsting over an art contest and then shifts to think of her sister's condition. It soooo accurately hits that range of emotion.... illness doesn't happen only to the person who gets cancer.

If you haven't picked up I'm Not Her (or Janet's newest book, If I Tell, also from Sbooks), you need to!

til next time...

The Great Divide

Last January I had the idea that maybe possibly it could happen--- I might be able to take a leap and write full time rather than teach. That come this past September (well August for us), I would work from home, pound those laptop keys and pick up part time gigs as needed. And as such a leap of faith needed some celebrating, I also decided that I needed to do something that I have never been able to do -- take a trip during the fall. Thus the idea of Yellowstone, WY, and MT was born. I booked three nights at the historic Old Faithful Inn. And crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

This past week, the hubs and I packed our layers and headed to Bozeman, MT and then on to the park. If you have never been -- and neither of us had -- let me say that you must go. It is beyond amazing. Geothermal wonders abound - the whole thing is basically an active volcano and there are geysers and hot springs and fumaroles and mud pots and sulphur smells and mud volcanoes everywhere. Sign after sign reminding you that the crust is fragile and you damn well better stay on the path. (we did!) Bison, deer, wolves, elk... we saw a lot of animals, a lot of boiling water and mud and steam, steam, steam. There's a Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and water falls and rapids and it's crazy beautiful and has its own set of noises and smells and your brain goes blank with the huge wonder of it all. When you stay at Old Faithful Inn (built in early 1900's) you get a front row seat for the most famous geyser. It goes off every hour or two, but each afternoon/early evening we grabbed a cocktail and sat on a bench on the second floor balcony and enjoyed the show.

But the thing I most wanted to do was to stand on the Continental Divide. There's something just freakin' amazing about doing this and I got to do it twice as we explored the lower loop of the park. There's a lake there - Lake Isa. And half the lake flows into the Pacific and half flows into the Atlantic and I am the geek girl who was just blown away by the wonder of that - esp. because the WEST side of the lake flows EAST and the EAST side of the lake flows WEST... at least according to the sign. We stood there, hubs and I and took it all in. The interconnectedness of nature and life and people. How small we are, really, and how fragile this world is and how important it is that we take care of what we have. We thought a lot about all this. A truly spiritual experience, this Yellowstone. That and the thrill of peeing in an outhouse when it's 39 degrees out... Plus dinner and lots of wine in Bozeman MT with my pal Janet Fox and her husband later in the week...

Check this one off the bucket list. But I'll be checking it again because I am not done with this place.

What's on your 'bucket list'? Comment and let me know!

Friday Five

1. Have begun creating wedding album of the best. wedding. ever. Prodigal son and bride are adorable. Yup. So happy.

2. Edits. Edits. Edits. Or as editor Leah likes to call them, "merciless edits." But oh so worth it.

3. Vampire Diaires last night. Oh yes!! Oh Stefan. Oh Damon. Oh Jazz Age flashback. Oh secrets. Love. Fangy love.

4. Yes I am still watching Real Housewives of BH. Yes I am a teensy bit ashamed of my Housewives habit. But Anderson Cooper watches. So if it's okay with Coop...

5. Hart of Dixie... eh. I'll give it another ep. But as much as I love Rachel Bilson, I'm not believing her as a doctor. Sorry.

And the Winner Is

And the winners of fabulous paranormal YA books by fabulous
Texas authors are:

Drumroll please........

Tillie N - wins a signed copy of Jennifer Archer's Through Her Eyes

Chloe Sumner - wins a signed copy of Sophie Jordan's Firelight

Both Tillie and Chloe (as well as some others!) correctly identified the Cynthia Leitich Smith trilogy titles in my post as: Tantalize, Eternal and Blessed. Bravo! I wish everyone could have won, but the contest hat reminded me that there were only tw0 prizes this time. Stay tuned for more contests soon! And I will also be giving away all sorts of fabulous swag at Comic Con in Austin in November. More on that soon, too!

Congrats, ladies!!

And please email me at joypreble at gmail dot com with your snail mail so I can send your prize!

Who Shares Your Day?

I like birthdays. My birthday, your birthday... birthdays are good. I debated this post -- a bit ego-centric-- then thought what the heck. When friends surprise you with a cookie cake with really yummy pink frosting after a bunch of you go out to dinner and you even indulge in a retro Mai Tai solely because it comes with a little paper umbrella, I say celebrate! As I established here, I believe in cake. I believe in ordering dessert.

Over the past few years, I discovered that a statistically impossible number of the staff at the high school where I've been teaching share my birthday. So I hope that Lisa, Carlanda and Darla are having a super birthday, too!

And since I'm the geeky girl who loves factoids and especially loves knowing that famous people share my birthday (I'm even excited that agent Jen shares, if not my birthday, at least my birth week), I can proudly announce that September 26th is the day that the following fab and diverse humans came into the world over the years: tennis star Serena Williams, Melissa Sue Anderson (she played Mary on Little House on the Prairie), actress Linda Hamilton (Terminator), Olivia Newton John, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, Winnie Mandela, composer George Gershwin, philosopher Martin Heidegger, poet TS Eliot, Pope Paul VI, actress Donna Douglas (who played Ellie Mae on the original Bevery Hillbillies) and my fave of all - Johnny Appleseed!

Last day for the giveaway contest in honor Cynthia Leitich Smith. Check it out here!

So who do YOU share a birthday with?

Graphic Novels and Guilty Pleasure TV

As always, last night's visit to Blue Willow Bookshop rocked! As did the indomitable Cynthia Leitich Smith and her husband Greg, talented and adorable and also with a new book! That's Cyn's new Tantalize: Kieren's Story, a graphic novel posing with us. Kieren is a secondary character in Tantalize and now we get to see his own story in this very fascinating art form.

Hadn't thought much about graphic novels lately. But Cyn described the creative process and the close collaboration between writer and artist, much closer in many ways than the relationship between author and illustrator when creating picture books, at least as the model currently exists in publishing.

Speaking of Cyn, contest still going on in her honor to win signed copies of Jennifer Archer's Through her Eyes and Sophie Jordan's Firelight! Check it out here, but only through Monday.

Missed Vampire Diaries last night (do not spoil it for me anyone!) so I'll have to catch up on line. Oh Damon! What shenanigans were you up to while I wasn't watching?

Also missed SMG's Ringer this week and will have to find that, too! I'm hooked enough to keep going.

And yes, I haven't broken my Housewives habit yet --- but am awaiting the return of Bethenny Ever After, or whatever it is she'll call the new season.

Secret Circle -- I'll give you a few more eps, too.

What are you watching this season? Let me know!