In which I blog about writing, YA fiction and the occasional sparkly unicorn.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Cover Reveal and Giveaway: EXHALE

Hey everyone! I'm happy to be a part of the cover reveal for Jennifer Snyder's upcoming YA novel Exhale!



(Isn't the cover gorgeous? It was created by Once Upon a Time Covers! Go check them out!)

Summary:

Inhaling in life is easy. It’s the exhaling—the letting go— that’s the hard part.

Katie Elliot has always known the Conner twins. For years she secretly pined after one, while playfully averting the advances of the other.  Once upon a time, she was fine with that. Then came the moment when her twin of preference kissed her and changed everything.

As if realizing love can be complex—even when it’s reciprocated—isn’t hard enough, tragedy strikes, tearing Katie and the boy she’s always desired apart.  Finding herself torn between love and guilt, Katie must learn when it’s acceptable to let go—when it’s finally okay to exhale.


Release Date: December 10th, 2010

You can find Jennifer over on her blog, twitter or goodreads!
 

And look! A wild giveaway appears! Enter to win an eARC of Exhale

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Saturday, November 17, 2012

Save a Word Saturday

The lovely bloggers over at The Feather and the Rose have started a cool blog hop! It's dedicated to saving old and archaic words from disappearing into the dust of history. You can sign up and learn more about it here!

Here are the rules:

1.  Pick an old word you want to save from extinction to feature in your blog post. It really must be an old word, not just a big one. We are trying to save lovely archaisms, not ugly giants (for example, "Dihydrogen Monoxide" is not an acceptable choice). Luciferous Logolepsy is a great database of lovely words, if you're having trouble coming up with something on your own.

2. Provide a definition of your word. Use your word in a sentence (or even a short paragraph) vaguely related to the theme we have chosen this week. You may also add visual or musical interpretations of your word or your sentence. In fact, add anything that moves your creative spirit.

3. Use as many of the words as you can on the people in your life. Do leave us a note or add something to your own post to let us all know what wonderful old word you whipped out to befuddle your friends and relations.

 This week's theme is:
Tea


My word is vade mecum
n. - a favorite book carried everywhere

And here is my sentence (well, it's more like a paragraph...whatever):

Miranda sat on the banks of the river, cup of tea clutched in hand, and watched families float by in their little boats. They all laughed as everyone failed rather spectacularly at steering in a straight line. She looked at her book where it lay in the grass and mused about how funny it was that even after ten years, her tattered (and quite tea-stained) copy of Lord of the Rings still remained her vade mecum.

Stacking the Shelves #2


Stacking the Shelves is a meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews. You can learn more about it here! It features books I've received throughout the week, whether they're physical books or ebooks I bought, borrowed, received, etc.

 So here are my lovely books (That I'm super excited to read when I finish all the others I'm supposed to be reading...)

Received for Review:

 (eARC from NetGalley)

Won:

 
(Thanks again to all the authors that participated in The Apocalypsies YAmazing Race! It was a lot of fun.)

I'm super excited to get to read all of these! I have a good friend that loved Starters, and The Dark Light looks really cool. Haven't heard much about A Shimmer of Angels, but look at that cover. I mean seriously, how can I not read that?
 
What do you guys think? Have any shelves of your own to share?

Friday, November 16, 2012

Feature and Follow Friday #3


Feature and Follow is a fun blog hop hosted by Parajunkee's View and Alison Can Read. It's really easy to participate, and it's a great way to meet new blog friends! Go check it out here

This week's question: Books are turned into movies all the time! Turn it around. What movie would make a great book?

Hmmm...this is a hard one. I'm a bit of a movie junkie, but I've never really thought about it before. Martin Socrecese's The Departed is one of my favourites, so I'll go with that one. It'd be cool with alternating perspectives, what with all the spying and undercover stuff going on. We'd get a whole different look into the characters' heads.



What do you guys think? Leave a comment so I can go check your posts out!

Saturday, November 10, 2012

Stacking the Shelves #1


Stacking the Shelves is a meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews. You can learn more about it here! It features books I've received throughout the week, whether they're physical books or ebooks I bought, borrowed, received, etc.

Without further ado here are the books I've somehow acquired this past week:

Received for Review:




(An eARC from NetGalley)
Won:




 (Thanks to the awesome authors over at The Apocalypsies for their YAmazing Race!)



I've heard a lot about Venom on the web so I'm excited to read that, and Freakling looks awesome! Pantomime looks really cool too. So what books did you all get?

Save a Word Saturday

The lovely bloggers over at The Feather and the Rose have started a cool blog hop! It's dedicated to saving old and archaic words from disappearing into the dust of history. You can sign up and learn more about it here!


Here are the rules:

1.  Pick an old word you want to save from extinction to feature in your blog post. It really must be an old word, not just a big one. We are trying to save lovely archaisms, not ugly giants (for example, "Dihydrogen Monoxide" is not an acceptable choice). Luciferous Logolepsy is a great database of lovely words, if you're having trouble coming up with something on your own.

2. Provide a definition of your word. Use your word in a sentence (or even a short paragraph) vaguely related to the theme we have chosen this week. You may also add visual or musical interpretations of your word or your sentence. In fact, add anything that moves your creative spirit.

3. Use as many of the words as you can on the people in your life. Do leave us a note or add something to your own post to let us all know what wonderful old word you whipped out to befuddle your friends and relations.

 This week's theme is:
Snow

My word is Aurated
          adj. gilded
And here is my wonderful sentence:

Alice woke up early that morning. The cold seeped in from outside and wrapped her in thin tendrils. She jumped up and raced the window, her toes curling up as they touched the cold floor. The front yard had been covered with a blanket of white, aurated with glittering snow and untouched by anything alive.

(Just a random note, my original word was "Tarchanjan", from Old High German. It meant "to hide, to conceal" but I can't speak German, so I was unable to use it in a sentence :(  It's a cool word, though. It's theorized that it's where we get our word "dark" from, which is originally from Old English.)

Friday, November 9, 2012

Feature and Follow Friday

Feature and Follow is a fun blog hop hosted by Parajunkee's View and Alison Can Read. It's really easy to participate, and it's a great way to meet new blog friends! Go check it out here

This week's Question: Do you mind books with similar ideas to other books? Similar concepts, backgrounds, retellings or pulled-to-publish fanfic? 

Hmmm, this is a hard one. I'm one of those people that believes that there's not really anything new under the sun. But it's not really the basic idea that's important, it's what you do with it. Basically, I don't mind when an idea is similar to another, as long as it's spun in a different way. There were stories about magical boarding schools long before J.K. Rowling came along, what made her so awesome was that she managed to do something entirely unprecedented with the idea. Do something crazy, and new and completely awesome with an old idea and I won't hate you for it, in fact it might even make me love you all the more! As for retellings-- I love retellings, especially fairy tale ones (however, this may be in part due to my love of fairy tales in general. So bring me ALL THE FAIRY TALE RETELLINGS).

Published fanfic *sigh*. This is a complicated topic. I, quite adamantly, find nothing wrong with fanfiction. The fanfic writer isn't making any profit of another author's work, and so it doesn't negatively impact anyone in any way. And for that matter, there is a lot of beautifully written fanfiction out there (sometimes it's just a little hard to find). Now, when a fanfiction story is re-vamped and slated for publication, things get a little bit tricky. If the story is a completely different one, where there are similar themes or origins (like Cassandra Clare's Immortal Instrument series) that's fine. But when you get a story where basically only the names and some slight aesthetic details have been changed (like another story I won't name here), that's when you get into dangerous territory.

So, in short (even though this wasn't short at all), similar ideas are fine with me. As long as the authors do something cool with them.

What are your thoughts on the question? Leave a comment so I can go check out all your awesome posts!