Sunday, December 2, 2012

In Which I Inundate You With News and Cool Stuff

This is what happens when you finish a series.

*Rolls up sleeves.* Young Adult Scavenger Hunt Scavenger Hunt Puzzle

Scavenger Hunt Post

Today, I am hosting Jennifer Armentrout on my website for the YA Scavenger Hunt!

Buy the book from here! "No one is like Daemon Black.

Together we’re stronger… and they know it."

Exclusive Content - Chapter One of Apollyon

Time's up on the Scavenger Hunt. Thanks for coming, but I have to take the content down now. :(

Enter the Contest

And don't forget to enter the contest for a chance to win a ton of signed books by me, Cynthia Hand, and more! To enter, you need to know that my favorite number is 34. Add up all the favorite numbers of the authors on the blue team and you'll have all the secret code to enter for the grand prize!

Continue the Hunt

Enter The Extra Hallowed Giveaway

In honor of this special event, I'm going to give away 2 extra signed copies of Hallowed. Just follow the directions in the rafflecopter below:

Posted by Cynthia Hand at 9:42 AM 160 comments: Labels: YA Scavenger hunt

Thursday, October 18, 2012 Labels: covers, ebook, novella, Radiant

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Boundless, Aussie style

I'm up tonight, putting the finishing touches on Boundless, which goes into production tomorrow. Whew, it's been a long haul. So happy to see it done.

But before I press send on that, I thought I'd share the AUSTRALIAN cover for Boundless, which is too beautiful for words--one of my favorite covers EVER. Posted by Cynthia Hand at 9:14 PM 12 comments: Labels: Boundless, covers

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Boundless Description Here it is:

Amazon | Barnes & Noble
(and now, back to revising!)
Posted by Cynthia Hand at 11:02 AM 19 comments: Labels: Boundless

In the Cave

This is me in my revision cave right now:

I'll catch up with you sometime next week.
Posted by Cynthia Hand at 6:32 PM No comments: Labels: revision

Diving Deep

Okay, so I've got my new edits letter back from the lovely F, my editor, so I'm ready to dive deep into the next draft of Boundless. Only one big change this time, so hopefully we'll be in production soon.

And school just started, for me and my son. And I am writing the scenes for my short story, which is due soon, while my students are doing their writing exercises. Yes, I have reached that point where I may draft almost an entire story IN CLASS. I love the idea. I have 6 scenes to go. It tells you how tired I already am that 6 scenes seems like a lot.

I'm officially overwhelmed. I am keeping the metaphorical paper bag close by, just in case I need to breathe into it for a while.

So I don't have a lot to blog about currently, because blogging will take up time I don't have, but instead of my own post I thought I might offer you this, which is an interview I did that's up this week on the Starry Eyed Revue. I talk about my writing life, Boundless, my favorite characters, and a little bit about my new projects. I am also offering a signed copy of Hallowed for their giveaway and two little swag packs, so be sure to enter the contest while you are there.

Here it is! Enjoy.

I'll be back next time I come up for air.
Posted by Cynthia Hand at 7:45 PM 3 comments: Labels: Boundless, interviews, revision I'm back to the grindstone with Boundless, working on a new round of edits. And I'm preparing for my son's grand debut into kindergarten. And I'm prepping for two classes that I am teaching at Pepperdine, also starting next week: my Intro to Creative Writing class and a YA lit class that I've never taught before and therefore have a ton of extra prep work to do. And I am writing a short story for an anthology. I have a very long interview to write up. And reading a friend's manuscript. And a bunch of other stuff.

So, in the midst of all this craziness, I am coming back to Boundless with the intent to cut at least 5,000 words. At least. Whole scenes are hitting the cutting room floor. Whole scenes, people!

In the past, I've taken some consolation in the fact that the deleted scenes from my books can be made available in different ways. I can use them as exclusive content for the Young Adult Scavenger Hunt, which I do twice a year, and there are a few other sites where my cut stuff has ended up since Unearthly was published. It makes the cut sting a bit less, knowing that even though the scene wasn't good or important enough to make it into the book, that doesn't mean that nobody will ever see it. Deleted scenes are fun!

Hmm, where to begin? Okay. Here goes. I try not to read reviews. I am getting better at it, too, the not-reading-reviews thing, I mean. I hardly ever check Goodreads anymore, because I ultimately think that it's not good for me as an artist. If I read too many reviews I start thinking differently about my story, not for the sake of the art, but for the sake of people pleasing. I start having imaginary conversations with people I don't know at 2am, where I say to them, pleadingly, "Yes, yes, I know that it's a love triangle, technically, but really, if you'd just examine the entire thing more closely, you'd see that it's not a real love triangle. . ."

It makes me think about Daniel Radcliffe during an interview, when he was asked, "Do you read what people say about you?" and he immediately responded, "No. That way lies madness."

Yes. Reading your own reviews=madness. I get that. I try to resist the temptation. Most of the time.

So imagine me this morning, sitting down to chop away at my current manuscript. I work for a while. I check Twitter. I check my email. A Google alerts comes up, which alerts me to the fact that somebody has just reviewed Unearthly 2.1. Wha?????! I think. But no, mustn't read a review, I think. But what the heck is Unearthly 2.1?

I click the link. Yes, it's true. There is an Unearthly 2.1, a cut scene from Hallowed. 252 people have rated this scene, and something like 30 people have reviewed it.

My first thought is, Cool, 252 people have read my deleted scene!

My next thought is, Wow, there are about 20 people who really don't like this scene.

My next thought is, Oh come on, people. It's a DELETED scene. Which means it didn't make the cut. It wasn't good enough. Relax! There are real scenes, IN THE BOOK, so go read those.

And I'm back to having imaginary conversations with people I don't know.

Sigh. Well, that's why I avoid reading reviews, isn't it? I remind myself. No biggie. Except now, when I go back to work on my Boundless manuscript, I think, well, this scene has to go, but is it good enough to ever see the light of day? Because if I release this scene, it will probably get REVIEWED.

This makes me want to revise the scene I'm going to cut. Which is so not the point of cutting extraneous scenes. And so not a good use of my time.

And, ultimately, it makes me less likely to want to share my deleted scenes. I cut them because they weren't good enough. To cut them and then have people criticize them for not being good enough is a bit like pouring lemon juice in my paper cut.

Now, I also want to make a few things clear. Prepare for the disclaimer:

1. Goodreads is good. As an avid reader, I adore Goodreads. As an author, it kind of terrifies me, but that's okay. That's natural. As an author, I should be scared of Goodreads. But I am 100% glad Goodreads exists. In fact, I attribute Goodreads to a big part of Unearthly's success. To date Unearthly has 3,781 reviews (and over 25,000 ratings), so many of them good. People are talking about my books, and I am so grateful that there is a place like Goodreads where they can talk about my books.

2. I think people, on Goodreads and elsewhere, have an absolute right to their opinions, and should be able to write whatever they want in their reviews. Period. I have imaginary conversations with some of my negative reviewers, but never in a million years would I ever dream of actually communicating with the writer of a negative review. They deserve to be able to voice their opinions without being confronted by the authors or their friends. (I do, however, sometimes think wistfully about the old days when all the critics ran in the same social circles as the writers and occasionally Hemingway liked to quote a critic's bad review back to him at a party and then punch him in the face. There was a kind of accountability for what you said, back then, before the basic anonymity of the internet.)

3. I most likely will release more deleted scenes, not to worry, because my publisher thinks it's good publicity and because, at the end of the day, I still like those scenes, and it makes me happy to be able to share them with people who will get a kick out of reading them. Which leads me to. . .

4. Maybe I'm overreacting. I am willing to consider this possibility. Maybe this whole post is a kind of knee-jerk reaction to the surprise of being reviewed on something I didn't expect to be reviewed on.

So tell me, what do you think? Are reviews for deleted scenes a good thing? Do you think this practice will make authors more hesitant to release deleted scenes, or is it just another sign of the technological age we live in, that we get to see and judge all content, not just what makes it into the pages of a print book? What should become of all that extra stuff on the cutting room floor?
Posted by Cynthia Hand at 6:12 PM 16 comments: Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Writing Short

I'm a writing fool.

I finished a novella yesterday, which was great fun. Unfortunately I can't tell you much about it. Stay tuned.

I celebrated finishing said novella by having ice cream for dinner. Don't judge: it was 86 degrees in my house at seven o'clock last night. (For more of why I don't just buy an air conditioner already, see this old post from last year's hot season. Still true this year.) I had a chocolate shake from McDonalds. With a cherry. Mmmmm. It was delicious. It was 750 calories. That's dinner.

This week I'm also working on a short story, which has brought a few things to light:

1. It's been a long time since I've written a short story. Like, more than six years. This blows my mind since writing short stories used to be what I did best. That's what I was trained in, after all. I have written two separate collections of literary short stories. I also got my publishing start with short stories; in fact, it was an old short story of mine that brought my agent to me. So writing a short story again feels like visiting a past version of myself as a writer. A ghost of the writer I used to be.

She's more concise than I am.

2. Writing short stories is hard. Before I'd written any novels, back when I was simply a proud short story writer, I used to tell my students that good short story writing was actually harder than good novel writing. You have to be ruthless. Economical. Smart. You have to make an arc fit within the span of fifteen or twenty pages. You're not free to ramble about the way novelists do. Every single word has to count.

Then I wrote a novel. And another. And another. Today, if somebody told me that short story writing is easier than novel writing, this would be my response:

And then I would quite possibly slap him/her.

Short story writing is not easier than novel writing. You don't have to keep 1400 pages of story straight in your head all at once. But short story writing is hard. It requires an intense focus. It's like a fast sprint, whereas novel writing is a marathon.

3. I am rusty at being ruthless. I find this odd, since my writer's brain is in good shape right now. I've been bench pressing more than 1000 words a day for quite a while. I'm fit. But this week as I sat down to write this story, thinking to myself, this will be easy, I can do it in an afternoon, I'm sure, I was struck by how lazy I've become when it comes to word count. I'm used to writing horizontally as opposed to vertically, which means that I often just let myself go and write whatever strikes me, focusing on getting something down and fixing it up later. (As the writer Chris Offutt used to say, "When I write, I throw in everything but the kitchen sink. . . and then I throw in the kitchen sink and turn on both faucets." Yeah. That's me. Sidenote: Is Chris Offutt that guy in the rocking chair on the credits of TrueBlood? Because I swear that's him.) Writing this way allows you more surprises, more discovery of the story as you go, but it's also less meticulous than writing vertically, when you don't leave a sentence until it's as good as it can be.

Writing horizontally also makes for chubby drafts.

This is the part of this blog where, if my editor was reading this, she would snort and point out that my last draft of Boundless was close to 115,000 words.

It's not fat. It's big boned, I keep telling her.

So this writing a short story is good exercise. I'm slimming down.
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