Kristen Landon's Blog, page 8

Today is the Day!

The Limit is officially out and available for sale today! I'm really proud of this book and excited for young readers to get to start diving into it. Since I'm pretty much an unknown author at this point, please help me spread the word about The Limit.If you've read it and enjoyed it, tell a friend about it. I think it's a book a lot of kids will really enjoy.

So many people have helped this book become a reality, and I want to thank every last one of you. I won't name you by name. You know...

I Love this Review

This is from Flamingnet.com, and it's so cool because it was written by a 13 year-old.

click here for review

Pre-Release Reviews

One more week and THE LIMIT will hit bookshelves nationwide! Here are some links to a couple of great pre-release reviews:

click here and click here

A Book For Every Kid – Recap

I think it has taken me all week to recover from the writing for charity event held last Saturday. Days like this are more emotionally and mentally draining for me than physically–but I absolutely love them! The daytime event was for writers. It started off with a panel featuring about twenty authors (including me). We then broke into smaller groups depending on genre for aQ&A session. I got put into the contemporary fiction group, probably because of Life in the Pit. If we stick to the same ...

A Book for Every Kid Charity Event

I'll be participating in this fabulous, worthwhile event. Please join me and 20+ other amazing authors.

Readers and Writers SAVE THE DATE!

August 21, 2010

The Waterford School

1700 East 9550 South

Sandy, UT 84093

The Children's Literature Association of Utah (CLAU)

and

The ROCK CANYON CHILDREN'S AUTHORS AND ILLUSTRATORS of UTAH

PRESENT:

A BOOK FOR EVERY KID CHARITY EVENT

Help us put books in the hands of underprivileged kids in Utah!

DAYTIME WRITING WORKSHOP: (Pre-register by August 15...

Shop till you Drop!

I just spent a fun mini vacation in Park City Utah with my mom and five sisters. Yes, you heard that right–I have five sisters. I have two brothers as well, but they were at their homes in Houston at the time and besides, this was a girls' outing.

See, the boys would not have appreciated what turned out to be our number one favorite activity of the trip–shopping. We did some other fun things as well, but we stumbled across a sale in the outlets at Park City that held our attention for hours...

To The Top!

I think I'm recovered now. My shins have been killing me all week. Last Saturday I hiked to the top of Mount Timpanogos with my husband and two of my kids. It was tough going–especially on the way down for some reason. The amazing scenery along the way made it all worth it. I've done this hike before, but I wanted to do it again because the main character in my next book (after The Limit) has a goal to do it. If he can do it I can!

Point of View

Recently I served on a jury in a local criminal case. It was an interesting experience, although it took a huge chunk of time out of my summer. (Man-oh-man do lawyers love to talk! But that's an entirely different topic.)



The case turned out to be quite silly, actually, when you got down to the basics of it. The problem was, everything that could have possibly gone wrong in the situation that led to the charges did go wrong. Wait. Maybe not quite everything. Someone very easily could have gotten killed, and they didn't. So that was good.



As I listened to all the testimonies and heard more than a dozen people tell the same story over and over again, one thought stuck out very vividly in my mind. Each story was different. Every single witness fully believed that he or she was telling the absolute truth, and every witness told a different version of the events. None of the stories matched exactly. Some of them were quite similar. Some of them were totally opposite. It was quite an interesting phenomenon.



It made me think just how important point of view is when telling a story. The way the story feels, and the way the reader or listener feels about it, totally depends upon whose point of view it's coming from.


Get more on Kristen Landon at SimonandSchuster.com

Summer 2010 so far

Every week so far this summer I think, things will calm down now. I'll have a nice relaxing week and have time to get a lot of work done.

Yeah. Right.

My weeks have been full of driving kids to camps, lessons and activities. We've had some house-guests, and we've also had a couple of fun family vacations. We went camping and hiking in some really cool places in south-east Utah that I've never been before. I live in an amazing state. One of the hikes was in a slot canyon–which was so narrow in p...

2 Months and Counting!

We're getting close. The official publication date for The Limit is only two months away–September 7, 2010.

This month has been crazy busy. I'll write an update soon about some of the things that have been occupying my summer so far–some have been fun, some have been not so fun. I also have a few exciting announcements I'll be posting soon. So stay tuned!