Ally Condie's Blog, page 22

this week

I am listening to This Love (Will Be Your Downfall) by Ellie Goulding (thanks, Lizzie!).

I am reading an ARC of Back When You Were Easier to Love by Emily Wing Smith.

I am watching the new season of this show, starring my celebrity crush Nathan Fillion:

At least my celebrity crushes are age appropriate.

I am packing to go to Frankfurt for the Book Fair. I have never been to Germany before but I've taken a total of four years of German in high school and college. So I should basically be fluent. Or else I can just quote that scary Rammstein song about hating people. That could also work. (For those who are interested in such things, I am sponsoring my own trip to Germany. It's such a great chance to meet a lot of my foreign publishers in one fell swoop. Plus, I get to sneak over to Munich and visit my in-laws, who live there, and one of my best friends in the whole world lives in London and is coming to meet up too. I can't wait!)

I am eating lots of these:

because they are my son's favorite cookie to make and he asks to make them every single day. And who am I to tell him no? He's really into the smashing with the fork part.

What are you listening to, reading, watching, eating, doing?

speak loudly

Have you heard about the Speak Loudly controversy? Read more about it here. Also, I blogged about it today over on Throwing Up Words.

Speak loudly!

books and movies

Thanks for the congrats on the movie deal, everyone. I am really excited. As most of you know, there are still a LOT LOT LOT of things that have to line up for the movie to actually be made, so fingers crossed. But it's great to have taken that first step. I will be sure to keep you posted when I can on any developments.

So let's talk about movies. One of my favorite parts about teaching was the film unit I did each year. And a well-done film interpretation of a book? I'm all over it. As are most of us.

Here is a list of some of my favorite book-to-movie film adaptaions:

Cry, the Beloved Country: To me, this is one of the most faithful adaptations to the spirit of the novel imaginable. I cried almost as hard watching the movie as I did reading the book. Because James Earl Jones and Richard Harris were so human and wonderful in their parts. That scene where they meet at the home and James Earl Jones drops everything? And the one where the rain pours into the church and they just sit and look at each other, and the sweeping shot at the end as the umfundisi prays on the hill….

Harry Potters. Because the characters all look the way I imagined them, and because we have gotten to watch the kids all grow up, and there is this nice sense of evolution and growth in the movies and the actors as well as the plot.

To Kill A Mockingbird. Of course.

I might add more later, when my brain is working better.

I am really, really hoping that the Guardians of Ga'Hoole movie this weekend rocks, because my son and I read it for his kid book group, and I promised him I would take him to the movie, and he's soooo excited. I love going to movies with him because he gets really into it and he still holds my hand when he's scared.

Gylfie, you and your cohorts better not let my kid down, or those big eyes will get you nowhere.

What are some of your favorite film adaptations? Let's keep it positive. Negatives will be deleted because I am the benevolent dictator of this blog.

book, banner, blog

1. The winner of the second copy of The Replacement is MADIE C! Madie, please e-mail me your mailing address and we'll get that book to you ASAP.

2. I want to draw your attention to the lovely new banner, designed by Rachel. She is an author and designer and superwoman and I am so thrilled that she was willing to design a banner for the blog. Do you love it as much as I do? (The answer is: Yes.)

3. Tomorrow on the blog I think we'll have a conversation on books and movies. So be thinking of your favorite film/television adaptation of a book and we'll discuss. But we're going to keep it positive–just favorites, not unfavorites.

the penguin five: interview with brenna yovanoff and giveaway!

The winner of the first copy of The Replacement is: EMILIE. Congrats!

And now, for an interview with the lovely Brenna Yovanoff–and a chance to win the second copy of the book. Please read on…

Brenna, welcome! Can you tell us the top five things you think we should know about you?

Thanks so much for having me, Ally! Hmmm, what to say about me . . . Well, here's something you'd notice right away: I have a lot of very yellow hair that kind of makes me look like a small lion wearing a dress. Not as readily apparent: I like indoor-gardens, horror movies, cotton candy, and mittens.

The Replacement is a horror novel, but one of the most important themes is that of love. I really enjoyed seeing how the siblings in the story (Mackie/Emma, Tate/ Natalie) looked out for one another and cared for one another. Do you have brothers and sisters? Did that influence your writing of the book at all?

I absolutely love writing about family relationships. I think they're so fascinating, and it's really fun to see how they shape various characters. I do have one sister (younger than me), and I grew up with a lot of younger cousins, but strangely enough, all my main characters so far have been the youngest of the family, or else only-children, so I don't know what that means!

Music is also very critical to the story–the use of music to orchestrate and create feelings in people, the use of music as release, etc. Are you a musician? What music do you find serves some of those purposes (release, etc.) for you?

Confession time: I'm awful at music. I mean, I'm so bad that I actually failed an introductory class in high school, even though I showed up every day and tried really hard. I just do not have what it takes. But I love listening to music, and I like to imagine what it would be like if I had that intuitive understanding that some people just seem to be born with. My favorites are almost always songs with clever lyrics, and I love songs that tell stories or have fascinating characters, so I'm definitely a writer at heart!

The Replacement is a book that reads very well on its own. The story arc certainly feels complete, and yet the town of Gentry (and what lies beneath!) also seem full of possibility for future books. Is The Replacement the beginning of a series? And, if not, what can we look for next from you?

As of right now, there aren't any concrete plans for a sequel, which certainly doesn't mean I won't be coming back to The Replacement in the future. Currently, I'm working on a book that doesn't quite have a title yet, but almost! It's about demons, mortal peril, moral ambiguity and kissing, and should be out from Razorbill next fall.

Can you share with us one of your favorite paragraphs/passages from your book?

Well, I've always kind of liked this passage from near the beginning of the book, where Mackie is thinking about the town of Gentry, and his place in it:

"Gentry was two different things, and at night, I could always see that second thing better. The town was its green suburban lawns, sure, but it was also its secrets. The kind of place where people double-checked the locks at night or pulled their kids closer in the grocery store. They hung horseshoes over their front doors and put up bells instead of wind chimes. They wore crosses made from stainless steel instead of gold because gold couldn't protect them from people like me."

And, finally, what are you reading right now?

Right now, I'm reading The DUFF by Kody Keplinger, and Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill. I really, really, really can't read just one book—I try and fail miserably, so I tend to read in pairs or fours. Next on the list, Nightshade by Andrea Cremer and your own Matched, which I'm so excited for! (I may have cheated and started reading it already—shh, don't tell the other books in my TBR pile!)

Thanks so much for having me, Ally!

Thanks for stopping by, Brenna–and now that I've read your writing, it's incredibly intimidating to have you read mine.

To win the second copy of The Replacement, please comment on this post. Contest open to US/Canada. You can enter until midnight Saturday night (MST) and I'll post the winner on Monday! Good luck!

some VERY big news

This was in Variety today.

I am thrilled.

Huge thanks to Jodi, Kassie, Offspring, and Disney. Thank you for believing in my story.

the penguin five: guest post from brenna yovanoff and giveaway!

And today…a guest post from Brenna, AND one of two chances to win a hardcover copy of The Replacement! I haven't had the chance to meet Brenna in real life, but she has an awesome blog and also writes flash fiction at Merry Sisters of Fate and I have high hopes that we will meet in the future.

Hi, everyone,

I'm really excited to be guest-posting here on Ally's blog and can't wait 'til November, when I'll be hosting her over on my blog to celebrate the release of her own debut novel, Matched!

As some of you may know, my novel The Replacement will be out on September 21st, and I'm here to tell you a little bit about it. Even though The Replacement is about a town plagued by fantastical creatures, it's also about feeling like an outsider. A large part of Mackie's attention, especially at the beginning of the book, is focused on just getting through high school. Because of where he comes from, he spends a lot of time convinced that people are going to learn his secret and discover that he's not who everyone thinks he is.

In the interest of full disclosure: I was homeschooled until I was fifteen, which—let me tell you—it definitely shapes you. School was such a foreign environment that at first, I didn't quite know how to act. I started writing down everything, because that seemed like a good way to learn the customs of the land, so to speak.

Now, with this in mind, it might seem obvious to assume that Mackie represents my own experience, but what I discovered was that outsiderness was not remotely limited to outsiders. One of the things I noticed while I was writing down what happened was that a lot of people felt the way that Mackie does (although with more normal origins). And when I say a lot, I mean like . . . everybody.

Because I was quiet, the other kids talked to me. I liked listening to them, and I recorded what they said in my notebook. I didn't have any sort of logical reason for doing this. At the time, I just felt like it was important to prove that someone was paying attention.

Since then, I've always been fascinated by the idea that people could be trying to grow into who they really are, while at the same time, trying very hard to appear just like everybody else, and I wanted to find an angle that would make it concrete. Mackie's supernatural origin seemed like a perfect metaphor for that anxiety, because it means he's always so worried that people are watching him, waiting for him to reveal himself as an outsider, when in some of the most basic ways, he's still just like them.

Thanks for having me, Ally—I'll be seeing you on my blog in November!

Thanks for visiting, Brenna. And for writing such a fantastic post!

For a chance to win a copy of Brenna's book, please comment here. Followers get another entry. You have until midnight MST Thursday. Come back Friday for an interview with Brenna and a chance to win the second copy of The Replacement!

Also, today is my first blog at Throwing Up Words. Come on over and check it out.