German Secret Cover

WOW!

I've had --and loved-- the German edition of Daughter of Smoke & Bone for ages and I never knew there was this amazing secret hidden beneath its dust jacket! Thank you to Lena from Germany for mentioning this in comments to the last post of foreign editions. I had NO IDEA.

You guys. Look. Under the dust jacket, the book is printed with this gorgeous drawn version of the cover, signed "Karou." It's spectacular, the best use of ... I don't know what you call this. Publishing people, what do you even call this, when the book itself is embellished under the dust jacket? Whatever it's called, this is the best one I've ever seen, and all this time, I didn't even know it was there! 

I wonder what they're doing for Days of Blood & Starlight ...

Cheers!

Paris Is Always a Good Idea

(quote, Audrey Hepburn)

It is. Paris is always a good idea. However, I'm not going there. Not soon enough, anyway.

My best friend is currently in France, and we've had this long, long habit of making each other "airplane packages" -- parcels that can't be opened until you're sitting in your seat and the journey has begun. Airplane packages are kind of like a Christmas stocking, for the airplane. They must contain treats and sundry interesting lightweight items that won't be a big encumbrance on your travels, and also: reading material. Like magazines you can leave behind when you're done, or photocopied favorite short stories, or whatever. Or, ahem, pages of a work in progress ...

This trip coincided with my friend's birthday, and I wanted to do something special. (Also, especially when I am on deadline, the craft urge within me balloons until the pressure grows so great I must. Make. Something. So Clementine and I made this little book, and had such fun with it. It was my first adventure with this washi tape I hear so much about!)

My initial plan was to find a pretty but not huge book about Paris and alter it a little, tape in some envelopes, things like that. But I couldn't find a pretty book on Paris! I mean, a non-coffee-table book, you know? I thought there would be a zillion pretty little "Paris sketchbook" type books out there, kind of Sara Midda-esque, but of Paris. But ... there AREN'T. (So now I want to move to Paris and MAKE one. Ha. Well. One can dream!) So I used a blank journal instead.

Put in some pages from a favorite French picture book, some beautiful bande dessines (French graphic novels; if you didn't know, France is the center of the Universe for graphic novels. The bookstores are enough to make you weep). Made a "macaron Bingo" card. That might have been my favorite. I want to play!

And Passage Jouffroy! This was a favorite rainstorm stop on trip to Paris last fall. It's this glass-vaulted shopping arcade with some of the sweetest shops ever: pastries, books, toys, and dollhouse stuff! It's where the wax museum is, if you decide to look for it. So lovely.

That's all. Craft urge back under control for a while.

(Though Clementine and I did try our hands at some embroidery yesterday ...)

Just Frosting

You guys know what one of my very favorite parts of the whole publishing process is, right? It's getting foreign editions in the mail! It's been a daydream of mine since I was a wee sprout of a writer to have a shelf of foreign editions of my books (long before I had books, long before), and with the Daughter of Smoke & Bone series it has massively come true! Getting these parcels is such pure delight. It's far far after the angst part of the writing and publishing process, so it's not even like the frosting on the cake. The cake was eaten long ago. This is just frosting. A giant bowl of buttercream frosting, and a spoon. (Okay, a small bowl, because a giant bowl of buttercream frosting would not, in the long run, be a good thing to have. German chocolate cake frosting, however, I could eat for breakfast every day.)

(But I don't. I think that is important to note. I actually eat melted ice cream out of an antique silver soup tureen. With my monkey on my lap.)*

I LOOOOOOOOOVE this cover! This is the Dutch Daughter of Smoke & Bone, by De Boekerij:

Haunting and edgy and cool and beautiful. Love.

A couple using the US cover, also beautiful. On the left, Estonian. (Estonian!) 

On the right, Danish:

It's cool when a publisher puts their own spin on the blue mask image. This is the Slovenian edition:

And I've finally started to get some Days of Blood & Starlights! Here's the Italian one:

And ack! I don't know what this one is. Help me out guys. With Asian characters, I am at level 0 knowledge. It seems to be Chinese? Cool, no? 

YAY! So much fun! 

*(not really)

DREAMS OF GODS & MONSTERS!!!

Here it is, the title of book 3 in the DAUGHTER OF SMOKE & BONE series!!!!

I hope you like it :-)

It was unveiled this morning at the Entertainment Weekly site, along with the winner --at last!-- of the book trailer contest! 

GO HERE TO SEE THE WINNERS

AND 

READ MORE ABOUT DREAMS OF GODS & MONSTERS!

(thank you!)

Sonoma and Twistrose

Again with the blogging lapse. Arg. There's just so much going on right now! The book, of course, and other things I can't really talk about (I am a secret agent), and in the midst of it all, the whole Life thing just keeps right on ploughing ahead. [Re: Trailer Contest: I am not ignoring this, and again I'm so sorry for the delay! Something came up with it at the last minute, and I will tell you what it is as soon as I can! I hate to keep the entrants waiting like this :-(]

Last weekend, Clementine and I took a little trip to California to visit friends of the 21st Century variety, which is to say: dear friends whom we had not yet met IN PERSON. Ha! You know how this goes. Below is me and Tone Almhjell, of Norway, about whom you will be hearing things in the publishing world this year:

Tone and I met via my blog some years ago. She would comment frequently, and her comments just really shone through as funny and smart and kindred, and over time we began emailing and skyping, and it turned out we were both pregnant at the same time, and Clementine and Magnus (in utero they were "Professor" and "Gameboy") were born three weeks apart, and on top of it all, Tone was writing a book. She was writing a book in Norwegian. So I tried not to get too excited about reading it, but she would tell me these tantalizing snippets, and her imagination and way with words (in English) would leave me making gimme hands in spite of myself. And then she would write these short pieces for Sunday Scribblings in English, and they were so, so good. Really, truly beautiful. Even if she were a native English speaker they'd be beautiful, and since she's not, they were kind of astonishing, and there was always this unexpected lilt that came of her non-nativeness that had a way of being magical and never awkward. So. Time passed.

And maybe she'll tell the story in more detail some time soon, but it came about that she started translating her in-progress Norwegian novel into English (yay!) and as expected, I fell deeply in love with it, and ... so did my agent, Jane Putch, who took Tone on as a client and sold the remarkable TWISTROSE KEY to Dial Books, and it's coming out this fall!!!

I will tell you more about in another post, and maybe get Tone on here too, if she agrees, but you can pre-order it now if you wish! It's a middle grade fantasy novel of the sort that will sweep all ages off their feet. My blurb on the back of the ARC reads: "This book is pure magic. I want to live in it." Really, I more want to vacation in it, but living there wouldn't be bad either! You'll see what I mean when you read it. But more later, since I'm in a rush and can't do it justice right now! This is just my first push :-)

So anyway, Tone's husband Peter lived in California as a boy, and they were in Sonoma to visit family, so I couldn't have them be so near and not go and visit. Jim couldn't come, due to deadline pressure (poo), so it was just me and Clementine, and we had a lovely couple of days.

The view from the porch. Sigh:

Professor and Gameboy hit it off in an instant, in spite of not speaking the same language -- how much language is really needed for wall-walking and hammock-swinging, anyway? It was such a delight to watch them run rampant over this beautiful Sonoma garden complete with a sloping hill of grape vines!

There were excursions into town and to the Russian River. It all flashed past very quickly.

And then, as we were leaving, agent Jane was arriving to spend a few days, and we only passed each other in the airport long enough to hug.

So there was a little break from projects underway, and when we got home, we found ourselves in the middle of a fake summer of the sort that Oregon likes to throw out in the spring to tease us! Several days of pure summer weather, still ongoing. It goes on long enough that it feels permanent, and then BAM!, reverts to rainy Northwest spring and chill. Clementine is getting hooked on evening sprinkler runs, and will be bummed when they go away for another couple of months. Ah well, at least we won't have to water the lawn as much!

Happy weekend, all!

BOOK TRAILER ENTRIES!

Hi guys! There are some amayyyyyyyzing entries for the DAYS OF BLOOD & STARLIGHT book trailer competition! I am so overwhelmed by the work that competitors put into these. They are just SO GOOD.

I LOVE THEM!!! 

I apologize that the youtube channel was not behaving as it should. Such things are beyond me. So I wanted to pull the videos together into one space for easy viewing and admiration.

I find that I am not able to announce the winner quite yet, for a potentially intriguing reason, and I apologize to the entrants for the suspense, but please come back next week for updates! I promise, prizes are forthcoming. In the meantime, enjoy ...

Posted in the order in which they were submitted:

   

by TRIS KELSEY*

   

by CHYNA NGIE entry #1

   

by CHYNA NGIE entry #2

   

by THE BITTER PRODUCTIONS entry #1

   

by THE BITTER PRODUCTIONS entry #2

   

by KATANA LEIGH

   

by CHRISTINE TYLER

   

by KAYMARA

   

by REDnLYN entry #1 (serious)

  

by REDnLYN entry #2 (humor :-)

   

by LINDSAY EAGER entry #1 (serious)

   

by LINDSAY EAGER entry #2 (humor :-)

   

by DANIRA DAFNE

   

by CAITLYN ECHO

*I want to specify, that though the first trailer is beautiful, and wonderfully put together, it can't be considered for the prize because it makes use of professionally produced footage from the publishers' trailers. Sorry :-(