Monday, January 30, 2012 at 10:05AM I just joined Pinterest and I had a lot of fun making a little "board" of presents for Ruby, the main character in my novel DROUGHT. Check it out; I hope you love it!
Next up: presents for Oscar. If you have ideas, leave me comments or make your own Pinterest board and let me know where it is!
Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 10:06PM Hopefully you've heard Ruby's story. Now listen to Ford's part of DROUGHT:
And be sure to enter to win a DROUGHT prize pack until 6:00 PM ET on Monday, April 18!
Wednesday, January 26, 2011 at 12:00PM
As DROUGHT's release date neared, everybody had one question:
"What are you going to do that day?"
I did not have a good answer. While I knew I could spend the day wandering bookstores, looking for it, I also knew that stores might not have even taken it out of the box yet. And that would make a happy day just a plain old depressing day. So how else DO you celebrate?
Here are the awesome things that I, and my wonderful family and friends, came up with!
--Tweets, Facebook posts and blogs: thanks to EVERYONE who announced DROUGHT's release yesterday! Special credit to my sister, who announced that she had no water in her apartment yesterday and completely had me worried for her until she reminded me that it was "DROUGHT Day". Ahhhhhhh yes.
--An old-school steak lunch at Capital Grille with my Patron of the Arts, aka my husband.
--Flowers! My lovely mother, sister and husband all treated me to flowers. The house looks so pretty today. I warned the house not to get used to being so fancy all the time. :)
--Happy hour out with friends, one of whom spent the day tracking and finally chasing down the DC Cupcake truck so I could try their cupcakes. And may I say they were spectacular. I will be posting more soon in a DC Cupcake round-up blog entry!
--Gifties!! I've got a bottle of bubbly stuff for celebrating, thanks to a lovely friend, AND check out this very cool item, at right. It's a vase made from a spoon. Which is absolutely perfect for DROUGHT, since the enslaved Congregation has to harvest water from living leaves with... spoons!
--And finally, we had a marathon viewing of Showtime's new series, EPISODES. It's about two screenwriters, so that seemed tangentially appropriate. I. Loved. It.
DROUGHT has been warmly welcomed into the world and I feel like the luckiest author around, today.
Monday, January 24, 2011 at 10:45PM Tomorrow, Jan 25, DROUGHT releases into the wide, wide world. Like any book it's been a long time coming.
So what does an author do the day before her book releases?
Works. Hits the gym. Gives her kid a bath. Reads SCAREDY SQUIRREL to her kid for a bedtime story. Finishes a couple of blog interviews. And then she finishes writing a chapter for her NEXT book!
In other words... kind of same old, same old. But with a little jangling noise in the back of my head. Psst. Book releases tomorrow. Tomorrow! TOMORROW!
Thursday, November 4, 2010 at 10:29PM I take naming my characters very seriously. There isn't a single character in my books that doesn't have a name of significance. Sometimes readers can pick up on why I chose that name--but other times it's a private meaning, just a touchstone for me.
A few examples:
--In my upcoming book, DROUGHT, the main character's name is Ruby. I chose that name for a number of reasons. First, rubies are a precious stone, and Ruby is precious to the Congregation that is her family. Even though most of them don't know it, her blood sustains their lives. I also liked naming this character after a gemstone that needs cutting, polishing, to be made beautiful--because Ruby will have to go through transformations before she reaches her potential too. And then there's the most obvious reason: rubies are red. So is blood.
--But the main character in my first book, CANDOR, got his name--Oscar--quite differently. In the first draft of CANDOR, he wasn't the son of the town founder. Heck, he wasn't even the main character. No. He was the son of the school custodian. He had the bad luck to be named Oscar, which meant he had to deal with a lot of kids teasing him--the custodian's kid living in a trash can just like Oscar the Grouch, etc. That gave him a chip on his shoulder. It's one of the few characteristics that survived as he evolved into the rich, smooth main character with big secrets. Somehow, I couldn't bear to change his name. I figured it sounded fancy, like a boy born into privilege. Besides, he wouldn't let me call him anything else.
--I won't reveal any of the names in my new book, since it's still just a little baby idea and these things DO change, but I will share a few of my favorite places to research names:
Happy character naming!
