An Author’s Press Kit for Review Submission

The wonderful book review bloggers at Book Bloggers’Collaborative (BBCOLL) gave me some very valuable insights into what is necessary for an author’s press kit. When writers submit books for review, we need to make certain that we make it as easy as possible for reviewers to access all the pertinent information in order to put up a decent review.

Not only do the book bloggers have to read our masterpieces and write a review, they also need to make certain that they have links to buy the book, author bios, book blurbs, etc. Many of them are also managing giveaways, contests, and blog tours as well.

I asked the group at BBCOLL what they look for in an author’s submission. Here is a list of what they require, and I’ll explain after the list how to present those items (again, with the help and input of the reviewers.)

Here is what every author should have in a press kit:

1.     A high-res cover image

2.     Short author bio

3.     Author headshot

4.     Book excerpt

5.     Social media contact info (I put these in a word doc with shortened, custom links, which you can create on bit.ly)

6.     Link to your site and / or blog

7.     Link to youtube book trailer (as opposed to sending an actual video, which can be buggy or take up a lot of memory)

8.     Links to where to buy the book

9.     It’s very nice to include the option for a giveaway – Kindle copies of your book, for example, giftcards, or swag. That will get more traffic to the post about your book and attract more readers.

NOTE – It is better to have too much to choose from , instead of too little.

There are several ways to present a press kit. Of course, you can simply attach all of the above to an email.

You can also put these items in a zip file, ready to attach to an email. Again, this can be a bit buggy and require memory. To avoid that, Coral Russell at Alchemy of Scrawl gave me the great idea of hosting a web press kit on your site.

Create a blind page for your site that isn’t in the navigation buttons. You can send the url for this page for prospective reviewers and tell them that your info is readily accessible on that page.

Put the images (headshot, cover, etc.) on photobucket or another image hosting site and put up hot links to those images on the page (just make certain they are nice, high res images.)

Add the hotlinks with the URLs for your social media links, as well as your trailer youtube link, etc.

You can host excerpts or author bios on Google docs and give those URLs as well to the documents. Just make certain that when you create the Google documents you manage your permissions and allow anyone with the URL to be able to view them but not edit them.

Keep in mind that some reviewers will prefer separate attachments of all of the items for their review in an email. You can find this by reading their review policies. Be prepared to tailor your excerpt, bio, etc. to the reviewers' reqs. You might like to have a longer bio prepared, as well as several different sized excerpts (250 words, 500 words, etc.)

Please don't expect an email from the book reviewer giving you an update on where your book is in the queue - he or she is incredibly busy with To Be Read piles even more massive than yours. Be polite, considerate, and for goodness sake: READ THEIR REVIEW POLICIES!

And do check out the Book Bloggers' Collaborative. Not only do they repost reviews and give you groovy tips and insights, they are planning a lot of amazing host and index opportunities for authors.

Review of Cornerstone, by Misty Provencher

Nalena's story captured me from the first sentence. The image of a girl living with a mother who writes constantly, filling the house with piles and piles of paper covered with small, neat writing, was addictive. And Nalena herself is beautifully realized. Like Harry Potter in The Order of the Phoenix, she is adolescent and angry.


Her anger is understandable. She is bullied at school, and she has to lug home those reams of paper for her mom. She's pretty, and she could be popular, but because one girl saw the inside of her home, her nickname is "The Waste."

It isn't until she meets Garrett Reece that her life begins to change. He is gorgeous and kind, and his family takes Nalena and her mother in. More importantly, he seems to understand her mom and why Nalena herself is starting to experience some strange episodes of her own.


Provencher insisted on including the fantasy element in the book, to the point of rejecting agents' cries for a rewrite into a more realistic book. The fantasy is well-done, although the ending does feel a bit rushed. (As a fellow author I can sympathize; endings are incredibly difficult to pull off.) Still, it's satisfying and makes me want more.


Keystone will be the next in the series, and I shall certainly look for it.


Here's what I liked about the book:


1. The writing is fantastic. "A wave of hot, rancid stomach soup rolls through me." I remember that stomach soup feeling from my own teens. That little sentence captures that feeling of dread perfectly. 


Another example: "There's a whole library full of empty tables up front, but this boy, with hair that would probably feel like soft twine between my fingertips, has to sit here." Great description, and I'm very thankful that she resisted the urge to use the Jewel Words: topaz eyes, etc. 

2. Nalena herself. She's a well-drawn, conflicted character.


3. The tensions between Nalena and her mother. It's perfect and logical.


4. Provencher is self-published, and the format and edit are just about perfect. Too many self-published novels roll into cyberspace with myriad errors, and Cornerstone is clean of those. Again, as an author with a small (tiny) press, I appreciate this. Self-publication is an art form, and Provencher has pulled it off beautifully!


A few quibbles:


1. You know that I love female friendships. Nalena and Garrett become friends, but she doesn't have a girlfriend to chat with in the book. The one girl who hangs with her in school, Cora, is depicted as a physically repulsive, not-very-nice person. I would have preferred to see a friend who could be counted on throughout the story.


2. Garrett was just a bit too perfect. He's gorgeous and kind, as I said, but he really would have sprung to life if he had a few flaws. 


Perhaps these will be addressed in the next book. And I'm being very picky. For those quibbles, I give Provencher a 4 out of 5 stars, and I definitely recommend this as a great read.


You can buy Cornerstone here: on Amazon and on Barnes and Noble Nook
and find Misty Provencher here: http://mistypro.blogspot.com/
She is also on Twitter: @mistyprovencher

Dress Down Day, part deux

A few weeks ago I posted about how much I hate "Dress Down Days." My kid goes to Catholic school, so usually it's a no-brainer; I just pull out the severely uncomfortable, not-very-attractive clothes and everyone's happy. My job is to keep stuff clean, not to be fashion police.

But out of the blue we had another dress-down day today. You can read about how the last one went here, but let's just say, It's not pretty. And I have to pay a dollar to get all this aggravation, which is just the final insult.


This morning, she went to put on her clothes (it was Team Colors day, so she wore a Mets shirt) and, as she was pulling on her leggings, she turned to me and said, "Mmmm, I don't think I'll wear these pants after all."


I began to swell up, like a frog, preparing for a good old fashioned Mom Yell. She interrupted this by adding:


JUST KIDDING


What a joker. She nearly gave me a heart attack. 

Shopping Porn

NO, I'm not blogging about ball gags or lingerie. As a cheap-o shopper (I buy my clothes in Target, with a cart) I love to read about people who buy hugely expensive items. It makes me feel all superior as I primly clip my coupons.

Shoes, for example. Sure, I could pick up the  ruby slippers for a cool $666,000 (I could  also buy something else with that instead, like a HOUSE) or I could go all Stuart Weitzman and buy sapphire or  ruby encrusted sandals, at six figures a pop.

Would they go with my denim capris? I think not.

Or if I'm just kicking around the place, playing World of Warcraft or something, I can slip on these babies for a bargain price of  90,000$

Who has these on right now? Girl, why do you hate your feet?

 Cars - And here it is, the  most expensive car :

It's a Bugatti. It goes from 0 - Outer Rings of Jupiter in 2.4 seconds (ironically, the number  of  millions it costs)

Seriously? Who needs to go THAT FAST? And where are they driving? It better not be down my cul-de-sac, I can tell you that much, especially when the kids get out the street hockey. Can you drive that fast even on the autobahn? And where would you park that baby? My husband demands a corner spot for our 10 year old, scarred GM soccer mom mobile. We'd have to buy a parking lot to go with that car before he would drive it.

House - I don't know if I  can classify this one as a house. It's called Antilla, it's in Mumbai, and it costs 1 billion dollars. (I had to hook my little finger on my mouth even to type that.)

What do you think, you guys? I would rather relax in my back yard, to tell you the truth. Apparently this one has a 6 floor  parking garage, so I guess that would give me a place to drive my Bugatti, but then it has "entourage" floors and helipads and junk like that. As well as retractable art walls. But can a kid run through the sprinklers here, clutching a popsicle? I bet she can't.

Dessert - I always love this category. Here it  is, at 34,000$:

It has gold leaf, caviar, and a two carat diamond. Plus you keep the Faberge style plate it's served on (for 34,000, I better be able to keep the waiter too. And he must be cute.)

Dude, caviar? Fish eggs are all well and good on their own time. But I don't want them on my brownie. And what if I swallowed that diamond? Totally could happen, knowing me.  Plus, is it wrong to say that my own chocolate mousse pie can totally kick that expensive dessert's ass? Because it can.

People out there  who buy this stuff - next  time, hold back, give me half, and I'll make you chocolate mousse pie. Plus you can run through my sprinklers, for free.

Sin, by Shaun Allan : Cover Reveal

I read Sin (available on US Kindle, UK Kindle, and print) by Shaun Allan last year, and I was blown away. The book is completely different from anything I'd read before, and Allan is a very unique voice. 


Today he is on Fresh Pot of Tea, to reveal the new cover for his book. Here it is, and it looks like a bestseller!

The new face of Sin. Look at the eyes! 

Welcome to Fresh Pot of Tea, Shaun! Have a biscuit. Could you please tell about your book, Sin?

Hi Allie.  Thanks for inviting me in.  Just the one sugar and not too much milk please.

Sin.  Well, to be honest, Sin seems much more than just a book, now.  He’s almost a person in his own right.  Where the book is concerned, Sin is a psychological thriller/urban fantasy in which Sin, the main character – who just wants to be an ordinary guy – finds himself the centre of some extraordinary circumstances.  People die around him and, to stop this, he incarcerates himself in a mental asylum but, when that doesn’t work, a failed suicide attempt finds him on the run – from himself and from the one other person who knows his secret.

Sin is an anti-hero.  You don’t know whether to like him or not, but often you can’t help but sympathise with his situation.  But, hero or anti, people still die.

Sin took ten years, from his initial short story (which is now the prologue) to complete.  I’m hoping the sequel won’t take half as long, but the way the character talks to me, and is so much a part of me, I really don’t think it will be.  Besides, he has been so well received, it seems to have made him MORE talkative.

The character of Sin has a great deal of me in him.  His sense of humour, his tangential thoughts about life, the universe and the price of fish, and so on.  Naturally, people don’t die around me, which is nice.  They say ‘write what you know’, and for a good while, I had to figure out just what I actually did know, but when I started writing Sin, it sort of flowed.  He had his own voice and I automatically seemed to base it around my local area.  Now this was a place, being from there, I thought of as almost boring, but then places like The Seven Hills became key locations, and they had a life I hadn’t seen before.

Sin was a sort of voyage of discovery for me, in a way.  I discovered a new viewpoint on where I lived.  I discovered odd thoughts and ideas that seemed to click together and I discovered a sense of humour in a dark side of myself.  Apart from that, as I had no idea what was going to happen until it did, I surprised myself by new characters and situations as they happened.

Shaun Allan

Sin has had a long journey towards a final cover. Could you please tell us about this final image and how you arrived at it?

I love the new cover.  It’s the third instalment – and the last.  The cover for Sin was originally that of a local asylum, but it didn’t show Sin himself, or his plight.  This cover does that superbly.

Thanks to the help of a certain wonderful person, Allie, I managed to find this image of a man literally cracking up.  Throughout the book you wonder if Sin is actually sane or crazy, and he, himself, feels he is falling apart and not in control of his own destiny, not least when his dead sister makes an appearance.  He simply wants to be an ordinary guy and would rather kill himself than have the awful things happening because of him.

As Sin is a narrative, the title text is my own handwriting, and I think Lisa Daly, the cover artist has done an excellent job of working that into the final cover.  I especially like the way his face seems to be dissolving away to sand, especially as a beach does play a part in the story.  It shows that he feels as if he’s losing himself.

And if you look in his eye, you can see the coin that was the catalyst for his whole series of misadventures.

It’s almost difficult to decide if Sin is a sympathetic character or not. To me, he’s brilliantly real because of his flaws. Do you like him?

I do.  I have to, I suppose, as he’s almost like me looking through a mirror into a sort of twilight version of myself.  For all his slightly twisted sense of humour and for all the bad things that happens, in the end, Sin just wants to be like you or me.  He wants to be ordinary.  The sort of person you’d pass in the street with little more than a nod to say hi.  The sort of person who can toss a coin just to decide whether to watch a movie or a soap.

Unfortunately, such decisions are taken out of his control, and that really isn’t his fault.  Whether he makes good choices or bad, he does them with the best intentions.

The book asks the question – could you kill a killer?  If you were to kill someone who was going to kill others, would that make you a hero or as bad as the person you killed?

And what if that killer was yourself?

Are good intentions a defence?

It’s not up to me to make up your mind for you.  Nor is it up to Sin.  But I hope, in the end, you’ll at least feel something for his plight.

What is your next project?

Pick one!  Well, I have a children’s book, an offbeat collection of poetry called Zits’n’Bits, which is hopefully going to be worked on.  I have another children’s book which I am working towards completing called Puddlebrain, about the youngest of three witches who have lost their powers.  She must save the villagers from a shadow that’s stealing everyone.  I’d actually written 30,000 words of this and then promptly forgotten about it whilst working on Sin, so I think it deserves to be resurrected.

Of course, there’s Sin’s blog, his diary from within the asylum, which is ongoing.  Sin never really likes to be quiet.  As such, once Puddlebrain is finished, there’ll be Sin’s sequel, Mortal Sin, to write.  That’s if no other characters or ideas muscle in first!




You can also find Shaun on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

The Importance of Girlfriends

I have read many books in my time, but there is something very special about a story that showcases a great relationship between two women. I've found that having good girlfriends is one of the most important things in my life, and unfortunately that often gets ignored in literature.

I've blogged about books with great female friendships before, here. Today, instead, I want to celebrate the friends in my life:


First, I have my shopping friends. There is one pal in particular who is a genius at finding you what you need. I can call her and say, "Hey, I've got to find a lavender sunshade" and BLAM, she tells me where to go. And gives me a coupon. 


Shopping isn't nearly as fun with a husband; they tend to say, "No, you really don't need that. Put it back" when a girlfriend is all, "OMG, it looks so cute on you! You have GOT to buy it! and look - here are shoes to go with it!" 


So, here's to my shopping girlfriends. You guys are the funnest day out ever, especially when lunch is included.

Girlfriend, just get them all.

Next are my mommy friends. Bub has made friends herself with some lovely kids, and they have wonderful parents. The moms support each other, so I know I can call a mommy friend and ask for a favor. And they know they can do the same with me. I don't know how prairie women did it. Love, love, love my mommy friends.


My author friends are a special class, because we share a certain understanding and insight into each other's worlds. (Of course, there are men in this class too, and they are great as well.) I can sit and chat for hours with my author friends. 


Why am I the luckiest woman in the world? Because I still have some friends from high school to giggle with, that's why. Despite all the weird things that happened to me in my life, my old friends stuck with me and supported me through it all. 


Here's to you, old friends. You truly are better than gold, or emeralds, or chocolate mousse pie, even.


And here's to my daughter, who's becoming one of my best friends. It's getting to the point now where we can gossip and chat and go shopping together, which is just priceless. You can't buy that.


But I've saved the best friend of all for last - my dear sister and best friend. My sister and I have gone through dreadful experiences together, and it only brought us closer. She is a rock, and I'm blessed to have her in my life.


That's why I'm delighted when a movie showcases a lovely friendship between girls or women, instead of snarky jealousy or deadly rivalry. Friends are treasure; they are magic that is real.

Travel Food

I'm all about travel. The  sights  are  lovely, but let's get real. It's all about the food.

Some of my most memorable were:

The chocolate eclair from Paris - Once, my husband and I ran away to Paris for the weekend (WAAAAY before Bub came along.) We walked down the Champs d'Elysee and had eclairs in a tiny cafe. The pastries were so large they were like chocolate bombs. (Actually, mine was cappucino flavored.)  The waiter, an impossibly handsome Parisian, looked like Cary Grant. I was on a match  collecting kick at the time, and I thought it would be cool to have some  from Paris. I requested them in French, trying to impress "Cary." Unfortunately I asked for streetlamps instead of matches.

They come in all flavors in Paris. Raspberry, lime...

The churros y chocolate from Spain - Again, preBub. We were in Spain with some friends right before  Christmas. I told my husband I'd do anything he wanted, but I had, had, had to get churros for  breakfast one morning. He thought churros were those large, sinewy things you get at the mall. When he discovered they were little, delicate donuts you dipped in thick hot chocolate, he warmed up to the whole idea. They were served in a noisy bar, and we ate at a table surrounded by Spanish workmen. That was a good day.

And while we're talking about Spain, I  can't forget - The  plate of tiny mussels I shared with a group of my friends  in a tapas bar one night. We were poor students, so that's all we could afford. We sucked down the delicious mussels and called for bread to slurp up the  wine / garlic / butter sauce. I swear you can eat the paving stones in Spain.

Fresh coconuts in Haiti - Bebe Doc was still in power. The poverty was overwhelming. The beaches were lovely. For one dollar, a boy offered us a fresh coconut, large and green, which he cut down with a huge machete. We drank the juice, and he chopped it open so we could eat the  moist, fragrant insides. It was completely different from those hard, brown things you see in supermarkets.

Plaice in Ireland - My mother used to rush to the  market in Dun Laoghaire to buy us tiny flatfish that had just been caught in the bay. She dipped them in milk and flour and sauteed them in Kerrygold butter. Heaven! 

In Ireland and England we used  to eat Fuller's Walnut Cake, until Fuller's went out  of business. You can still get the  recipe, though, here, for the most delicious, moist cake in the world.

Southern Barbecue - I'm talking North Carolina. I'm talking home made coleslaw on the side, a soft  bun filled with sloppy barbecue. I'm talking a cold one to go with. Maybe two cold ones. 

Ice Cream in Mexico - I'm a huge fan of Mexican food and drink (I even adored the fresh pulque, served out of a dipper in a tiny fishing village) but my very favorite, besides FRESH GUACAMOLE SERVED WITH A BOHEMIA BEER, was the ice cream stand my boyfriend at the time took me to. There were one hundred flavors (Honey! Fish!) (Yes, I really said fish!) but the  best one was the avocado ice cream. Didn't I say I loved guacamole? This was like a sweetened, cold version in a cone.

We all see why I love to travel, now don't we. Next up: Italy, Germany, Denmark, and Finland. Get in my belly!

Sin, by Shaun Allan: Cover Reveal

I read Sin (available on US Kindle, UK Kindle, and print) by Shaun Allan last year, and I was blown away. The book is completely different from anything I'd read before, and Allan is a very unique voice. 


Today he is on Fresh Pot of Tea, to reveal the new cover for his book. Here it is, and it looks like a bestseller!

The new face of Sin. Look at the eyes! 

Welcome to Fresh Pot of Tea, Shaun! Have a biscuit. Could you please tell about your book, Sin?

Hi Allie.  Thanks for inviting me in.  Just the one sugar and not too much milk please.

Sin.  Well, to be honest, Sin seems much more than just a book, now.  He’s almost a person in his own right.  Where the book is concerned, Sin is a psychological thriller/urban fantasy in which Sin, the main character – who just wants to be an ordinary guy – finds himself the centre of some extraordinary circumstances.  People die around him and, to stop this, he incarcerates himself in a mental asylum but, when that doesn’t work, a failed suicide attempt finds him on the run – from himself and from the one other person who knows his secret.

Sin is an anti-hero.  You don’t know whether to like him or not, but often you can’t help but sympathise with his situation.  But, hero or anti, people still die.

Sin took ten years, from his initial short story (which is now the prologue) to complete.  I’m hoping the sequel won’t take half as long, but the way the character talks to me, and is so much a part of me, I really don’t think it will be.  Besides, he has been so well received, it seems to have made him MORE talkative.

The character of Sin has a great deal of me in him.  His sense of humour, his tangential thoughts about life, the universe and the price of fish, and so on.  Naturally, people don’t die around me, which is nice.  They say ‘write what you know’, and for a good while, I had to figure out just what I actually did know, but when I started writing Sin, it sort of flowed.  He had his own voice and I automatically seemed to base it around my local area.  Now this was a place, being from there, I thought of as almost boring, but then places like The Seven Hills became key locations, and they had a life I hadn’t seen before.

Sin was a sort of voyage of discovery for me, in a way.  I discovered a new viewpoint on where I lived.  I discovered odd thoughts and ideas that seemed to click together and I discovered a sense of humour in a dark side of myself.  Apart from that, as I had no idea what was going to happen until it did, I surprised myself by new characters and situations as they happened.

Shaun Allan

Sin has had a long journey towards a final cover. Could you please tell us about this final image and how you arrived at it?

I love the new cover.  It’s the third instalment – and the last.  The cover for Sin was originally that of a local asylum, but it didn’t show Sin himself, or his plight.  This cover does that superbly.

Thanks to the help of a certain wonderful person, Allie, I managed to find this image of a man literally cracking up.  Throughout the book you wonder if Sin is actually sane or crazy, and he, himself, feels he is falling apart and not in control of his own destiny, not least when his dead sister makes an appearance.  He simply wants to be an ordinary guy and would rather kill himself than have the awful things happening because of him.

As Sin is a narrative, the title text is my own handwriting, and I think Lisa Daly, the cover artist has done an excellent job of working that into the final cover.  I especially like the way his face seems to be dissolving away to sand, especially as a beach does play a part in the story.  It shows that he feels as if he’s losing himself.

And if you look in his eye, you can see the coin that was the catalyst for his whole series of misadventures.

It’s almost difficult to decide if Sin is a sympathetic character or not. To me, he’s brilliantly real because of his flaws. Do you like him?

I do.  I have to, I suppose, as he’s almost like me looking through a mirror into a sort of twilight version of myself.  For all his slightly twisted sense of humour and for all the bad things that happens, in the end, Sin just wants to be like you or me.  He wants to be ordinary.  The sort of person you’d pass in the street with little more than a nod to say hi.  The sort of person who can toss a coin just to decide whether to watch a movie or a soap.

Unfortunately, such decisions are taken out of his control, and that really isn’t his fault.  Whether he makes good choices or bad, he does them with the best intentions.

The book asks the question – could you kill a killer?  If you were to kill someone who was going to kill others, would that make you a hero or as bad as the person you killed?

And what if that killer was yourself?

Are good intentions a defence?

It’s not up to me to make up your mind for you.  Nor is it up to Sin.  But I hope, in the end, you’ll at least feel something for his plight.

What is your next project?

Pick one!  Well, I have a children’s book, an offbeat collection of poetry called Zits’n’Bits, which is hopefully going to be worked on.  I have another children’s book which I am working towards completing called Puddlebrain, about the youngest of three witches who have lost their powers.  She must save the villagers from a shadow that’s stealing everyone.  I’d actually written 30,000 words of this and then promptly forgotten about it whilst working on Sin, so I think it deserves to be resurrected.

Of course, there’s Sin’s blog, his diary from within the asylum, which is ongoing.  Sin never really likes to be quiet.  As such, once Puddlebrain is finished, there’ll be Sin’s sequel, Mortal Sin, to write.  That’s if no other characters or ideas muscle in first!




You can also find Shaun on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

Summer in April

Summer came early yesterday, with soaring temperatures and nary a cloud in sight. It's a bit unfair when this happens in April, since I am just not ready. My feet need severe attention, meaning I have to give them a pedicure to go and get a pedicure, just maybe I need to shave my legs, and my skin is fishbelly white.


Sooooo, that means it is time to dig out the self-tanner stuff. I'm a self-tanner pro; it goes with the territory of being the Palest Woman in the World. I know how to avoid the dreaded orange palm syndrome and achieve a good line of demarcation on my arms. Of course, I don't aim to look tanned, you understand. No, my goal is to appear "Somewhat Normal."

You forgot to - oh, I'll just be over there.

Good stuff comes with early summer too, though, and you know what I'm talking about:


1. Sprinklers, see Running Through - Watching your kid do this is one of the best things you can get for free.

2. Those popsicles with two sticks - Orange flavor for me, just so I can get that weird looking tongue. (Blue is too obvious.) And let's not even start with the Ice Cream Truck, aka Kid's Major Begging Potential.


3. Open windows - As long as it's not too hot, I'm going to open my windows and get as much fresh air as possible. Until that pollen wave comes along, of course.


4. BBQ'ed Food - Time for burgers and dogs and foil wrapped fish on the grill! Ever bake a potato on there? I swear, they're so good you don't need butter. And once one neighbor starts, the smell makes everyone else grill too. It's like dominoes.

which leads to...


5. Eating outside - The sun! The breeze! The fun! The flies! 


6. Squirting each other with a hose when you are supposed to be washing a car - (self-explanatory.)


7. Eyeing up the pool wistfully - and then going back to the hose.


8. Flip-flops - I really, really have to get that pedicure. 

9. Tree frogs - Who is the person who works the switch that turns those suckers on when the temperature hits a certain level?


10. Fresh corn and tomatoes - They're nearly here! 


11. Time to plant those sunflower seeds - so that, this year, my kid can grow the tallest plant in the world. Hey, it could happen!


12. And, out of the blue, one last random point - Last night I dreamed about hummingbirds. Does that mean anything significant? Maybe it was just cool for its own sake.

Dude - you ROCK

Time to go and drag out the aloe shaving cream and self-tanning lotion, but at least I'll be able to breathe fresh air as I suffer.

The Lamplighter's Special : Cover Reveal

 I'm doing a cover reveal today in conjunction with Danielle Sibarium-Tsapp. You can find her here.

Lisa was in my school in fifth grade: a tall, beautiful girl with short  golden hair that stood straight up on top of her head. I couldn't take  my eyes off her. Her clothes were gorgeous, in a "I don't care what  the world thinks; I'm going to wear what I want" sort of way.

I never thought that, years later, we would become best friends. We went to Ireland and Paris together. We hung out and talked for hours in the bamboo forest behind her house. She designed and made my prom dress. 

And now she is my cover artist. I'm incredibly lucky to have a designer that is extremely talented but and also one of my oldest, dearest friends. When we get on the phone to discuss cover issues, we always end up in fits of laughter, and at this point, after all this time, we can  read each other's minds.

Here is the cover she designed for my upcoming book, The Lamplighter's Special:

 

I love the way she contrasted the beautiful woman with red hair (my arch villainess, Barbara) with the fishbones on the side. And as The Lamplighter's Special is a steamship, the water detail on Barbara's arms and back is perfect.

And here is an excerpt from The Lamplighter's Special. The characters are on the steamship, and they are in the middle of a very strange voyage, through time and space, called The Passage:

The Passage

Lizzie felt herself get shaken back and forth, the way that the little dog in the alley behind their old house used to do with the large rats that lived there if he managed to catch one in his mouth. “Help me, someone! I can’t bear it!” she shouted. It was as though she had no words. The sound of her voice was snatched away. Ninna screamed something too, but Lizzie couldn’t hear her sister either.

Under Lizzie’s hands, the machine seemed to get warmer. She could feel the heat. Something mechanical moved inside; it felt as though cogwheels and clockworks in the box that had been sealed up rotated faster and faster. She peered into the container that held the instrument, but the typing ball appeared the same as always – a delicate, brass machine with the letters sticking up from the apparatus like spikes on a hedgehog.

She looked up suddenly. She could smell something. There was a scorched taste in the air that she could sense in her nose and on her tongue. In fact, it was almost as if she could hear the burnt smell, or even see it, although of course that was impossible.

At that moment a shower of sparks flew past the window of the observation room. They landed on the sills and were followed by more sparks. It was hard to follow the arcs of the burning embers, due to the continuing motion of the ship. The glowing pieces shook in front of Lizzie’s eyes. Without her eyeglasses, she saw them as fuzzy stars. She wanted to put on the spectacles, but she didn’t dare let go of the box and the machine inside.

The motion increased in speed. Lizzie realized she was moaning with the effort of staying in one piece. A rapid “Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh!” was forced out of her chest as the ship shook faster and with more force.

Priam’s figure danced in front of her eyes. Next to her, Ninna rattled like a balsa puppet. Even Toby’s face, as close as it was, jittered in front of her vision like some kind of fevered dream.

Oh, please, make it stop! Lizzie wanted to shout. But, no, that wasn’t really what she wanted to say. She looked at Priam, considering that she didn’t know Toby’s younger brother very well. From what he had seen, though, he seemed like a survivor. He was physically strong, and usually good-humored; he might be thoughtless at times but he seemed nice enough, at least until he had kissed that Miss Wilkins on the stairs.

And Toby – it seemed terribly important that Toby was there, beside her, his warm hand next to hers. At that moment she sensed that it would always be that way, no matter what happened to them both.

She formed a desperate, silent plea in her mind. Her one thought was: Take care of Ninna. She’s not that strong. Take her through this safely. If there is someone out there who can hear this, then guide my sister through this – this Passage.

Cover Reveal on Monday, April 16

Just a quick note to tell you that I'll be doing a cover reveal for my upcoming book, The Lamplighter's Special, on Monday. I'll add an exclusive excerpt, so be sure to stop back!

Books on My Bedside Table

My husband just shakes his head when he sees the huge, tottering pile of books by my bed. He is a methodical reader; he grabs one book and starts at page 1, reads it for a few months until he reaches the last page. He puts it aside, and that's it for that book.


I'm more of a Buffet Restaurant reader. Life has handed me all these amazing titles, so why not read a bunch at once? I have my couch book, my bed book, my meals book, even my cooking-the meals book, which explains a lot.


Here's what's on my bedside table. I'll be writing more about these books soon. For now I'll tempt you with the titles and covers:


1. Cornerstone, by Misty Provencher 

2. The Search for Wondla, by Tony DiTerlizzi 

3. 1Q84, by Haruki Murakami

4. The Prospect of My Arrival, by Dwight Okita

5. Darkness Rising, by Ross Kitson

6. The Bolter, Frances Osborne