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It's true, it just occurred to me that it's Friday, and I'm about to reveal the cover of FRIDAYS WITH THE WIZARDS! So exciting!
I love this cover, I think it might very well be my favorite. No . . . it is. It's my favorite. It's another beautiful painting by David Hohn. He's done all my Castle Glower covers, and he's the artist behind my amazing new covers on the DRAGON SLIPPERS trilogy. (True story: when he sent me the sketch for the cover of DRAGON SLIPPERS, I started to cry. It's my Shardas, and my Creel, and his beautiful windows!) David is fantastic, and he really tries to capture both the heart of the book, as well as highlighting the little details. On the cover of TUESDAYS, you will note that Celie is carrying her atlas and colored pencils, but did you also notice that the Castle is sort of leaning in above her? That's because, as David said, "It's giving her a hug." Couldn't you just die? Did you notice that on the cover of WEDNESDAYS, Rufus' paws are too big for him and his tail is longer than his body? He's clearly a young, gangly, growing griffin! So fantastic!
Well, this one does not disappoint.
It's based on an early design that David and I both loved for TUESDAYS, which seemed mysterious and exciting, but didn't really scream: First book in a new series! There's also some little details that I'll discuss after . . .
I . . .
reveal . . .
the . . .
awesome . . .
cover . . . !
Are . . .
you . . .
ready . . . ?
Are . . .
you . . .
sure . . . ?
Of . . .
course . . .
you . . .
are . . . !
Shall we now discuss how much we love it? Because we all love it a lot, right?
I mean, for heaven's sake, look at that griffin! That's Lord Griffin, by the way, and he is NOT HAPPY. Look at that expression! He's about to rip somebody apart like a worn out chew toy.
Look at Celie! We decided that since she's now about to turn thirteen, she needed a more grown up gown, and I just adore it!
And behind Lord Griffin we see Bran, in full wizardly regalia. And what's in Bran's hand? Well, I won't tell you, but it's really key to the story. Webmaster Mikey pointed it out to me first, and when I realized what it was, I started jumping up and down. YES! IT'S ON THE COVER!
So, I won't drop any more hints, because I know that they're maddening, but I will say that it comes out February 9th, 2016!
Aloha, fishes!
I have a little project that I'm involved in, and I'd like to take a minute to tell you all about it.
Some of you may know personally or have heard of Robison Wells, a fellow Utah YA author and good friend of mine. Rob is the author of VARIANT, FEEDBACK, and BLACKOUT, all three of which are superb YA sci fi, and I highly recommend them. You may have seen these titles on my "Best of" book lists the last three years or so. Along with being a fine, gifted writer, Rob created the Whitney Awards for LDS authors, and I'm very proud to say that DRAGON SLIPPERS won the award for Best Novel by a New Author back in 2008!
Rob also, like many creative people, suffers from mental illness.
I have struggled with depression since high school, most seriously after the birth of our first child, and mental illness is horrible and something I would not wish on my worst enemy. Which is why I am doing this for Rob, my friend. Rob has depression, OCD, agoraphobia, and a panic disorder. Yep. I keep asking him if he offended an old Gypsy woman as a child, he's a little vague on that point. His illnesses have greatly affected his life and the lives of his family (he and his sweet wife have three young children). Until very recently, Rob didn't qualify for health insurance (many authors did not, as we are "self-employed") and so the bills for his medicine and therapy came entirely out of his own pocket. Those bills have built up, and been added to student loans and delayed taxes (authors get SLAMMED with taxes). Rob and his little family are in serious debt, which only adds to his mental burden. None of this debt is from fancy vacations or shopping sprees. It's most medical, and it is weighing heavily on him and his wife.
But the good news is that Rob has a lot of author friends! And so we decided to help in the best way we could: with our writing! We've put together an anthology and started a fundraiser on Indiegogo for Rob! The anthology, called ALTERED PERCEPTIONS, is going to be fabulous! It features authors such as Brandon Sanderson, Shannon Hale, Dan Wells (Rob's brother, and also a gifted writers), Brandon Mull, Bree Despain, Ally Condie, Lauren Oliver, and over a dozen more. It will all be previously unpublished material, but the bulk of the stories will be alternate endings, cut chapters, and other goodies from our existing books! I'm contributing the original ending of PRINCESS OF GLASS, which I ended up cutting because it, ahem, encouraged gambling. Rob is adding a new epilogue for the VARIANT duology, which I am dying to read. Shannon Hale is submitting a short story that is . . . horror! No joke! This anthology is going to be incredibly fabulous, people, incredibly. As part of the Indiegogo campaign there will be other perks available as well. An e-book of the anthology is just $10, a hardcover is $28, but there are also options for signed, numbered editions, library sets, and more. You can also get a critique by one of the participating authors (not me, someone who's GOOD at critiques), have dinner with Rob, or spend a weekend at a guest house writing retreat!
We were featured in the Deseret News today:
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865601820/Anthology-to-benefit-Utah-author-with-mental-illnesses.html?pg=all
And here, finally, is the link to the Indiegogo site with all the details, including a full list of the authors involved :
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/altered-perceptions#home
Check it out, and if you're able, please help us help Rob!
If we go over our goal, we will be setting up a fund to help other authors who have looming medical expenses. No penny will be used to produce the book or any of the perks, 100% of the money will go to Rob or another struggling author.
Congratulations to Heather of Precarious Optimism, who just won the complete DRAGON SLIPPERS trilogy!
And congratulations also to Carolyn of Risking Failure, who just won the ARC of THURSDAYS WITH THE CROWN!
If you ladies would please email me your mailing info and make sure you tell me who you want the books signed for!
Email: theauthorATjessicadaygeorgeDOTcom
And to the rest of you: I'm sorry, and don't worry. More contests will come!
How much do we love the David Hohn covers for my books?
SO MUCH?
The correct answer is SO MUCH!
I have looked forward to seeing the final covers for every one of my books like it's Christmas, and you know how much I love Christmas! I mean, look at these gorgeous new DRAGON SLIPPERS covers!
Webmaster Mikey says that SPEAR is his favorite, but I have to admit that I cried a little when I saw SLIPPERS. It's Shardas and Creel in his cave! So beautiful!
These are available now, wherever fine books are sold, as paperbacks! Buy one (or all three) today!
Wait . . . you think I should give away a set? Well, all right! Leave a comment to enter to win a set of the DRAGON SLIPPERS trilogy with fancy new covers!
And now on to THURSDAYS! I think it's safe to say that the cover of THURSDAYS did not disappoint. I love it wholeheartedly, and so will you!
So without further ado, I present the cover of THURSDAYS WITH THE CROWN, which will hit the shelves October 7th, 2014!
Do you love it? I JUST LOVE IT SO MUCH!
I love it so much that I am about to give away an advanced reader copy! THAT'S RIGHT, KIDS! Comment and you could win an advance copy of THURSDAYS WITH THE CROWN!!!! Do it now! I will close the contest on Saturday night at 10 pm!
This is going to be hard to write, and I'm mostly doing it for me, so if you don't want to read any further, I will understand.
My Pippin, my little baby dog, died last Sunday, October 21st.
She had been sick a long time, almost two months. She'd lost a fourth of her body weight, which is a big deal when you only weigh five pounds. She'd had two surgeries, one to remove a benign mass from her stomach and the other to attach her intestine to her gallbladder, when the scarring from the first surgery compromised the valves from her gallbladder and liver to her intestine. Over the past two months, her stomach had stopped working, her kidneys, liver, and gallbladder had all started failing, and finally her little heart could not take any more.
I'm glad that my little girl isn't hurting any more, but I'm so heartbroken that she isn't here with us.
Mike and I got her when she wasn't even eight weeks old, in March of 2003. We didn't have kids then, and she was our baby. A week after we got her, she had a hypoglycemic seizure and we rushed her to the vet. The breeder we bought her from had sold her to us before she was properly weaned, and she hadn't been eating enough. I remember speaking calmly to the vet on the phone, then turning to my husband and wailing, "They might have to keep her over night!" I bawled all the way in, holding her wrapped in a fleece blanket. Even after just one week, she was my little girl.
But her true favorite in our house? Mike. He refused to be called the dog's dad, so he insisted in the beginning (half-joking) that he be called Master, and it stuck. She loved Master, and they truly had a special bond. Even when she was sick, towards the end, if I said that Master was home when I heard his car in the garage, she would hurry to the door to greet him. If he sat in a bedroom to rock a baby, she oozed in the door to lay by the rocking chair, or if the door was shut, she would lay outside the room and wait for him. If she was on the bed with Master, she laid on his lap or on my side of the bed, even on my pillow. She never laid on Master's pillow if he wasn't there. Instead she would lay at the foot of the bed and wait for him.
She couldn't fetch, she couldn't jump on the couch, and after years of trying to get her to play dead when I pointed a finger and said, "Bang!" she would only leisurely lie down. Not because she didn't understand, but because she refused to demean herself. She would sit to receive a treat, and she knew exactly when she was due for a treat. At noon and dinner time she would sit in her spot at the edge of the carpet and wait, and if we didn't deliver, she would woof at us. And it sounded just like that, "Woof." If I was in another room at noon, and showing no signs of heading to the kitchen, she would come and get me. She was an expert at getting you to follow her, she would look at you until she had your attention, run forward, circle back, run forward, circle back, drawing you after her to the back door, or the treat cupboard, or the front door where she swore she heard an intruder. After she got brushed or came back from the groomer, she would stare at you, quivering, until you said, "You look so pretty!" then she would rush to the kitchen for her reward. (Pretty girls get treats, of course.)
Her tail was a mood barometer. It curled up over her back when she was happy, or well, and if it went down you knew something was wrong. If she hung her head plus having her tail down, you knew she was ashamed of something . . . perhaps an accident (though they were rare) or she'd gotten sick. When she wagged her tail it tended to stay on the right side of her back, and made her look like a lady fanning herself with an ostrich plume fan. She could give you "five" and kisses, and she was nocturnal. All day she would walk around, nap, and eat, but as soon as the kids were in bed, she would come alive. She would lure one of us over to the love seat and we would have to chase her around it until we caught her. Then there was often a rousing game of slappy paws, until she started nipping, and we would tell her, "Oh no, puppy is sharp!"
She was an alpha female. On a walk when she was a puppy, we started to pass our neighbor's cocker spaniel, which probably weighed six times what Pippin did. Pippin immediately veered toward the larger dog and locked her joints, strutting up to it with her head high. The cocker cowered and slinked away, and Pippin strutted back to my side. She was locked in a constant, hilarious bid for dominance with my mother-in-law's equally alpha toy poodle, Zsa Zsa. Pippin used to cruise by Zsa Zsa and swipe at her, then run off when the other dog growled. Once she strutted up to Zsa Zsa and sucker punched her. Greatest thing I've ever seen in my life. Pippin went up, lifted her right front paw, and when Zsa Zsa looked at it, Pippin whacked her on the nose with her left front paw. (Pippin was a southpaw. I should have warned Zsa Zsa.) I laughed until I cried. Not that I don't love Zsa Zsa, but c'mon: that was hilarious. My mother-in-law's other poodle, Sasha, is not an alpha female, and Pippin would wrestle with her with great delight, always ending when Sasha clearly rolled over and allowed herself to be pinned.
Pippin had a cluster of spots on her pink belly that were almost exactly the shape and size of her own paw. It looked like someone had stamped her with a pawprint, and we used to joke that she was the Chosen One. She was a Maltese, an ancient breed from the island of Malta, popular with the Romans, and I used to make up stories about how her ancestors would work together to bring down deer in their natural habitat, with bones stuck in their hair instead of bows.
She had an "excess of personality," as my sister said. Pippin had friends and admirers, and she knew them by name. If we said that my sister was coming over, she would go check the spot where my sister would leave her shoes and purse to see if she had arrived yet. She loved all her extended human family, but she adored my mom in particular. If she heard anyone say that Grandma Day was coming, she would wait by the door until she arrived, and follow her through the house every minute my mom was here. When we went to visit my parents, she would try to get into the car the minute we started packing, to make sure she wasn't left behind. And, while she was quiet for most of the ride, she seemed to know when we were almost there. Once we pulled off the freeway, she would start to rustle around in her crate. Once when my book club was at our house, Pippin was making the rounds greeting each person. One of the women, who is not a "dog person," pointed a finger at Pippin and said, "You're cute, but that doesn't mean I like you." I watched the rest of the evening as Pippin circled wide around this woman, going over to sniff the others and be petted, but not even looking at non-dog-lover.
Pippin is in the DRAGON SLIPPERS books. She is Princess Amalia's little lapdog, who seems rather put out with her mistress, and in later books she belongs to the dragon Fenuil, which suits her better. I tried to capture Pippin's excess of personality in the books, and I hope that I succeeded. She was one-of-a-kind, a companion and friend who cannot be replaced.
She will be missed so very, very much.
Some of you may have noticed that I rarely use my blog to expound upon Ye Writerly Methodes and Modes, and hand down words of Ye Wysdome. There is a very good reason for this. Who said I have Ye Wysdome? I'm a writer. A published writer. This is my goal and my dream and the life which I have chosen (and been lucky enough to succeed at). However. This doesn't mean that if I tell you how I got published, the same thing will happen to you. This doesn't mean that if I tell you how I write, it will work for you. Being a published author does not qualify me to tell you anything, except how I work, and what works for me, but we're all different. Very different. For instance, I like Dragon Flight. I wrote it, slaved over it even, and presented it to you, the reader, when I was sure that it was the best that I could make it. Today I read a review online of Dragon Flight that was written by someone who loathed it. They found it to be almost unreadable, and would not recommend it to anyone. This person is not a professional reviewer, so normally I would ignore the review. Everyone is different, and it's well known to my friends and book club members that I have hated with a mad passion books other people love and vice versa. This review, however, inspired me to write this blog entry because the reviewer is an aspiring writer who had heard me speak at a conference. From my books (she has also read Dragon Slippers), and what I said at a conference, she analyzed my "writing process" and where it had gone off the rails, resulting in my books not being very good. Now. The big confession. Several of them. First off, I have nothing against this woman. She thinks her thoughts and has her opinions and that's all dandy. But. She was wrong. What she described is not at all how I write. For one thing, she called me a "discovery" writer, because I (apparently) said I didn't outline. (By the way, I have no clue what conference this was at, so I have no idea what I may have been yakking about.) There are, in this blogger's opinion, only two types of writers. Those who outline and worldbuild first, and those who are "discovering" the story as they go along (I got the impression that she thinks of this as almost a stream-of-consciousness situation). I can't be 100% certain, but I believe that if you interviewed 100 writers, you would find that all of them have a different writing process, rather than just falling into the Forman Outline, No Formal Outline categories. The Biggest Confession of All. I am not very articulate. I know, I know, I could talk the hind legs off a tauntaun. But stick me on a panel and ask me a writing question, and I go, "Uh, I dunno." Part of it is because, well, I'm used to sitting with my little computer and writing my thoughts, deleting the ones I don't like, changing them around, pondering, changing some more things, and then posting/publishing them. So I have long suspected two things about Me At Writing Conferences: 1. I sound like a moron. 2. I am not explaining anything well. Let me clear that right up, to the best of my ability. I am going to tell you about My Writing Process, that you may behold it in all its beauty. Perhaps it will anger you, perhaps it will inspire you. If you, too, are a writer (and many of my blog readers seem to be), please feel free to use the comments to discuss your writing process! Step 1. Inspiration! An idea will come to me, whether it's a plot, like Dragon Slippers, a character like Galen in Princess of the Midnight Ball, or a setting like a little something I'm working on now but don't want to discuss! I mull this all over for a while, thinking about the characters, their stories, how it will fit together, and get a general sense of where the story will go, whether it's one book or a series, etc. This could technically be called an outline, but it's not that formal. I do make notes: character and place names, thoughts, good dialogue snippets, to make sure I don't lose anything as I sift it all together. This could take anywhere from days to years. Step 2. Writing! This is basically the rough draft. So when I say that I wrote Dragon Slippers in three months, this is what I mean. I didn't go back and make any changes, I just wrote it all out from beginning to end before I lost the broad thread of the story. That was the shortest time I've ever spent on a rough story, too. Some of them have taken a year, my last couple of books have been around six months each. The end product of Step 2 is not a finished book, and I would NEVER let anyone see it, not even my husband. It's like prancing around in unsexy underwear: strictly for the eyes of myself and occasionally my stuffed dragon Magne who I still talk to when I am upset. (While I'm confessing things, I thought I might go all out. . .) Step 3. Revising! I read back through, make changes, cut boring bits, fine tune characters and dialogue. Then I give it to my agent, and she critiques it and I fix things, and then it goes to my editor. Step 4. Editing! I hate step 4. My editor sends me notes. I make changes, or don't, depending on my Vision. I sweat and swear and dance around. I eat too much. I read and reread the manuscript, the editorial notes, I dither over every change. Then I send the manuscript back. My editor either suggests one or two more things, or she puts it through to the copyeditor, or Grammar Police, and then we all go over each line and consider each word and its usage until I want to start screaming. Step 5. Behold! A shiny new book! This is how I roll. So tell me: How do YOU do that voodoo that you do so well?
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