As promised - the excerpt from my next book is now up! Check it out under the “next book” tab.
I hope everyone’s had a nice fall season and/or semester (for those of you who are in school). I’ve been pretty caught up in school myself and have had very little time for anything else these past few months. I wasn’t even able to do NaNoWriMo this year, which truly saddened me as it was the first year since 2003 that I have not participated :(. (I will, however, still be donating to them because I think it’s an awesome project and I hope to join in again in the future). But hey, I got 5 A’s and learned a LOT, so I guess busting my butt on school work was worth it!
As for my next book: it will not be released this month, as I had hoped, because…well, because that was a REALLY ambitious goal, especially given how intense this semester turned out to be! Lol. However, there IS a mostly-completed draft, I AM still working on it and it will be released sometime, hopefully in 2012. The excerpt will be up before the year is out! That’s a promise. In the meantime, I’ve decided to donate any proceeds from the December and January sales of Fear and Laundry to the Houston Food Bank and Meals on Wheels. So if you know of anyone who needs a last-minute gift idea or is getting an e-reader for Christmas, please don’t hesitate to suggest this little 99 cent book of mine! Ha, ha :).
Thank you all for what has truly been one of the most amazing years of my life. I will never forget it. Have a wonderful holiday and I will update again very soon…xoxo - Liz
Lesson of the week: don’t leave your Kindle sitting on the couch while you get up to go do something else for a minute.
‘Cause when you get back you might, you know, forget that you left it there and accidentally kneel on it and make the screen go all wonky :(.
I’m so saddened by this! I’m addicted to my Kindle. And what a time to mess it up, too - what with summer and all it’s attendant summer-reading-gloriousness right around the corner! Here’s hoping I can get it fixed or replaced soon.
In brighter news: Meg Cabot’s post over at Forever Young Adult totally made my day yesterday. I loved everything she had to say in it. Have I mentioned that she’s awesome? ‘Cause she is.
Fear and Laundry is set in Carreen, Texas. There is no such place. However, I am originally from West Texas and strove to make the setting fairly authentic. In West Texas, there really are days near the end of the summer when you sweat to death while the sun is up and then freeze your butt off after it goes down. Makes it kinda tricky to plan your wardrobe! It’s also very windy there and sometimes there are dirt storms like the one described near the beginning of the book.
Carreen is named after a character in Gone With the Wind. Scarlett O’Hara’s youngest sister is named Caroline Irene, but her family calls her “Carreen.” It’s not so much that the character of Carreen was a particular favorite of mine or anything (although I guess she was the sweeter sister), but I used to be really obsessed with Gone With the Wind in general and wanted to give it a shout-out. I still love Gone With the Wind (both the movie and the book), but when I was younger, it really sort of bordered on a sickness. I mean, as a teenager I put together a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle of the movie poster, framed it and hung it up in my bedroom. But, um, perhaps I’ve said too much…
Anyway, I loved Scarlett and Rhett SO much. I know they were sometimes sort of awful and dysfunctional but I loved them. Even though he’s nothing like him, Clyde’s bodyguard in Fear and Laundry, Rhett, is named for Rhett Butler.
L-R: Carreen, Scarlett, and Suellen O’Hara
Today’s a happy day. There’s a new Meg Cabot book out! I was lucky enough to score an advanced copy of Abandon earlier this month at TeenBookCon and can tell you that, unsurprisingly, it’s pretty great. Eagerly looking forward to the next installment in that trilogy. According to the book tour information on her website, Meg will be here in Texas tomorrow. Too bad it’s nowhere near where I live :(!
Hard to believe the semester is almost over! It sort of feels like it just began. But I’m not complaining. I’m so looking forward to the summer break. I’ll be taking an online course but even so, I’ll have loads more time to write. And I am itching to write.
Actually, I’ve already been sneaking in a bit of writing and editing here and there these past few weeks. I’d told myself I’d wait until summer and just concentrate on school work for now, but…I can’t help myself. I’m really excited about this next book :). Like, way more excited than I am about writing 10-15 pages on “the concept of the self” or whatever (I’m a Psych. major). I hope to have an excerpt posted here really, really soon.
In the meantime, here’s a clip from Some Kind of Wonderful, because it’s mentioned a few times in Fear and Laundry. And also because it’s, um, one of the BEST movies EVER.
