Holly Cupala's Blog, page 13

Story Secrets: HOLD ME TIGHT by Lorie Ann Grover

What a great pleasure it is to chat with rgz co-founder Lorie Ann Grover today about her verse novel, HOLD ME TIGHT.

Readers, this is a *wonderful* book, and an excellent compliment to this week's spotlighted title over at readergirlz, Lauren Oliver's BEFORE I FALL. It's thematically very different, but if you love intense stories with well drawn characters and true emotions, then you will absolutely adore HOLD ME TIGHT.

Welcome, Lorie Ann!

*****

Psst. Holly, here are few secrets from HOLD ME TIGHT.

HOLD ME TIGHT is based on my own life experiences. When I was ten, my father left our family, and the boy who sat in front of me was kidnapped. Thirty years later, I decided to incorporate both events into a novel. Here's my trailer:

And now a few facts not found in the work: *spoiler alert*

1. What Chris experienced was worse than I revealed in the book.
2. Chris' kidnapper confessed on his deathbed, 22 years later.
3. Chris offered forgiveness and friendship to the man.
4. National media reported the story here.
5. A reporter connected me and Chris when my book launched.
6. Chris' 10 year old daughter wrote me a thank you. She said I gave her a new perspective on what happened to her father.

My hope is that my novel will share that we may be victimized: children of divorce, molested, or even kidnapped, and yet, we don't need to remain victims.

In this case I have to say, thanks for sharing my secrets, Holly!

*****

Thank you, Lorie Ann, for sharing a powerful story. Now, readers, go check it out!

Hoping for a signed copy of Tell Me a Secret?

Liza at WhoRuBlog interviewed me here about secret-keeping, wicked friends, and finding your purpose...plus she's hosting a giveaway of one signed copy of TMAS! (US only)

PLUS - Oh, I know you Washington Peninsula folks have been chomping at the bit for a visit. Well, here I come!

On Friday, I'm heading to the Port Angeles Main Library to chat about TMAS secrets, writing, and...cats! And I'm signing books and giving away cool stuff like a TMAS t-shirt, music, and more.

It's all happening here:

Port Angeles Library – Main Branch
Friday, November 5, 3:30 p.m.
2210 South Peabody Street
Port Angeles, WA
360-417-8502 or youth@nols.org

See you there!

YA Bloggers Want...Category-Defying Love: Cafe Saturday

Erica from Café Saturday is in the house today, but first we must give her a big shout-out for finishing the very first draft of her very first novel!

HOORAY, ERICA!!!!!

Plus she's also rocking NANOWRIMO this next month, so stop by her blog to cheer her on. I had the pleasure of meeting Erica through the blogosphere, and I got to meet her in person when she came through Seattle not long ago.

Welcome, Erica!

*****

When it comes to relationships, books are full of swoon-worthy romances. But every now and then a book comes along about love – non-romantic love that defies labels – and it makes me want to crawl into the pages of that book and live there. In my experience, life is full of those gray, in-between areas where feelings and acceptance and honesty are twisted together into something that is more than simple friendship but not exactly romance. These relationships refuse to fit into a nice box that the outside world can wrap a ribbon around and hold up as something beautiful. Sometimes these friendships don't make sense to the outside world, and can even be messy and confusing to those involved, but they are the ones that can forever change the perspectives of the people in them. It's a hard thing to write well, but when it is I want to stand up and cheer.


Here are some books that include examples of this kind of friendship:

How to Say Goodbye in Robot by Natalie Standiford
Sweethearts by Sara Zarr
Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan
A Match Made in High School by Kristin Walker

*****

Thanks for stopping by, Erica!

Readers, what are some of the books that have struck you with their unconventional, non-romantic love relationships? Do you think a book is as compelling without the tension of a romantic relationship? I loved SWEETHEARTS and thought it was a terrific example of this, defying the norms of typical YA books. Have you read it? What did you think of the conclusion?

Comments are entered to win prizes (US only), and don't forget to check out the rest of What YA Bloggers Want, in honor of YALSA's Teen Read Week and National Book Month!

Drumroll...and the second book title is...

(eek, I can hardly believe it finally has a title)...




...are you ready?




....not sure if I'm ready. I hope you like it...




Here it comes....




But wait, here's a little description:

Joy Delamere is suffocating.

From asthma, which has nearly claimed her life. From her parents, who will do anything to keep that from happening. From delectably dangerous Asher, who is smothering her from the inside out.

Joy can take his words—tender words, cruel words—until the night they go too far.

Now, Joy will leave everything behind to find the one who has offered his help, a homeless boy called Creed. She will become someone else. She will learn to survive. She will breathe…if only she can get to Creed before it's too late.

Set against the gritty backdrop of Seattle's streets and a cast of characters with secrets of their own, Holly Cupala's powerful new novel explores the balance of abuse, the meaning of love, and how far a girl will go to discover her own strength.

The title?





DON'T BREATHE A WORD.

(That's it!! What do you think?)

YA Bloggers Want...Category-Defying Love: Cafe Saturday

Erica from Café Saturday is in the house today, but first we must give her a big shout-out for finishing the very first draft of her very first novel!

HOORAY, ERICA!!!!!

Plus she's also rocking NANOWRIMO this next month, so stop by her blog to cheer her on. I had the pleasure of meeting Erica through the blogosphere, and I got to meet her in person when she came through Seattle not long ago.

Welcome, Erica!

*****

When it comes to relationships, books are full of swoon-worthy romances. But every now and then a book comes along about love – non-romantic love that defies labels – and it makes me want to crawl into the pages of that book and live there. In my experience, life is full of those gray, in-between areas where feelings and acceptance and honesty are twisted together into something that is more than simple friendship but not exactly romance. These relationships refuse to fit into a nice box that the outside world can wrap a ribbon around and hold up as something beautiful. Sometimes these friendships don't make sense to the outside world, and can even be messy and confusing to those involved, but they are the ones that can forever change the perspectives of the people in them. It's a hard thing to write well, but when it is I want to stand up and cheer.


Here are some books that include examples of this kind of friendship:

How to Say Goodbye in Robot by Natalie Standiford
Sweethearts by Sara Zarr
Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan
A Match Made in High School by Kristin Walker

*****

Thanks for stopping by, Erica!

Readers, what are some of the books that have struck you with their unconventional, non-romantic love relationships? Do you think a book is as compelling without the tension of a romantic relationship? I loved SWEETHEARTS and thought it was a terrific example of this, defying the norms of typical YA books. Have you read it? What did you think of the conclusion?

Comments are entered to win prizes (US only), and don't forget to check out the rest of What YA Bloggers Want, in honor of YALSA's Teen Read Week and National Book Month!

TMAS fun at the Library tonight!

Seattle folks, stop by the Northeast Branch of SPL.org @6pm for a fun Tell Me a Secret party put on by the Teen Advisory Group - hooray! Here is the library's info page about it.

The TAG group has been hard at work putting together decorations, a program, and other fun TMAS surprises - and for my own surprise, how about a batch of my favorite cookies...?

Here are the details:

Seattle Public Library - Northeast Branch
Tuesday, November 2nd 6-7:30 pm
6801 35th Ave. N.E.
Seattle, WA
206-684-7539

What's even more amazing about this opportunity is I wrote much of the book at this very library! I go there all the time and am thrilled to be welcomed by the librarians and such a terrific group of teens. Thank you, Northeast TAG!

Also in TMAS news: Bidisha, a.k.a. Bee, wrote the most beautiful review here. Thank you, Bee!

YA Bloggers Want...Honesty and Wit: There's A Book

Danielle from There's A Book and Chick Lit Reviews is on the blog today to talk about what makes a YA book compelling and honest, and what she'd like to see on the YA shelf!

I've met Danielle through the blogosphere and found out she has a passion for sharing good books with kids and teens. So I'm very pleased to welcome her to tell us What YA Bloggers Want...

*****

After devouring nearly a book a day for the last year, I can tell you the most important thing I'm looking for when picking up my next great read is a compelling story and witty dialogue. No matter the setting, fantasy or reality, I'm hoping for more "honest" characters and causes. Even if the cause is saving humanity from an army of zombie bunnies, I want to believe humanity is worth saving (or not)! And interactions between characters that are funny and true to the nature of today's teens.

As an adult who reads YA, for me, it's all about the escape to days now past. It's an incredible experience to read and remember those feelings and situations, to bring them bubbling to the top often resulting in laughter or streams of tears. These are the YA books I'm looking forward to pulling off the shelves, the ones with a passion you can feel from page one to the very end.

Some of my current favorites in the YA arena today (besides Tell Me A Secret, of course!) would definitely be the following:

The Mortal Intruments Series by Cassandra Clare
Dangerous Neighbors by Beth Kephart
Z by Michael Thomas Ford
Birthmarked by Caragh M. O'Brien


*****

Thank you for stopping by, Danielle!

Readers, what do you love to read and remember? What captures your reading attention? Witty dialogue? Compelling, honest problems? Do you read for reflection or escape? Leave a comment for a chance to win witty, honest, wonderful books! (US only - sorry!)

The What YA Bloggers Want series celebrates YA lit for YALSA's Teen Read Week and National Book Month!

YA Bloggers Want...Mainstream GLBT: BookChic

James of BookChic and I go way back...back to the early days of readergirlz, when our base of operations was at our MySpace page - and BookChic always came out to comment on the books and chat live with authors.

So you can imagine how honored I was when he wanted to be a part of the TMAS blog tour. And he liked the book! ("It really is that good," he said. Wow. Thank you, James!)

Plus I keep running into him at conferences...here we are at ALA 2010: LK Madigan, me, Amy Brecount White, Harmony, Tiff, and James:


I'm very pleased to be able to focus on James today as he tells us what he would like to see on the YA shelf.

Welcome, James!

*****

I'd love to see more mainstream GLBT fiction. I go to Lee Wind's blog every so often and notice that a lot of books mentioned there are from smaller presses or even self-pubbed. It's heartening to see GLBT characters more and more in YA books as supporting characters, but I want to see them take the spotlight more. Maybe I'm just not looking as hard or something but it seems like GLBT main characters are fading away.

Gay YA authors like Brent Hartinger, Alex Sanchez, and David Levithan haven't published much in the way of GLBT literature in the past few years (aside from Levithan's collaboration with John Green on Will Grayson, Will Grayson, which was amazing and I was happy to see it made the NY Times Bestsellers list, apparently a first for a gay YA book). I was also happy to see in the Little, Brown YA bag from BEA a book called I Am J by Cris Beam, which features a transgender protagonist and looks really interesting. What these books do is give hope to GLBT teens that they can find love just like everyone else. It's hard to realize that with little representation.

My Top YA faves include:

The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot (started me on my YA love!)
Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers (a hard book to swallow, but just so amazing)
In Your Room by Jordanna Fraiberg (a cute romance done really well)
Burned by Ellen Hopkins (my favorite of all her books)
Bad Kitty by Michele Jaffe (absolutely hilarious, as is the sequel)

*****

Thank you, James!

Readers, do you think GLBT characters are fading away? Do you think a wider variety of characters are finding more of a voice in publishing, or less? I'm curious about this and would love to hear from some of you.

Plus your comments enter you to win a book prize! Woohoo! Thanks for coming to support YALSA's Teen Read Week and National Book Month!

Story Secrets: ADIOS, NIRVANA by Conrad Wesselhoeft + giveaway!

It seems like I've been talking about this book all summer, but ADIOS, NIRVANA by my friend and fellow Seattleite Conrad Wesselhoeft is now here!

I didn't even know Conrad until recently, but I'd heard such good things about his writing from our mutual friend Molly Blaisdell, who said we should be friends. We read each other's books, and so we are! We even just did a panel together at Third Place Books in Seattle.

ADIOS, NIRVANA is powerful, poetic, funny, and...savory. As in, you want to savor the flavor of it as you read, and taste each and every nuance. And one of you will get to win a copy (details below).

Welcome, Conrad!

*****

ADIOS, NIRVANA is about a teenaged poet-musician who survives the first anniversary of his twin brother's death with the help of a dying blind man, the best group of "Thicks" a guy could ask for, a demanding school principal who wants him to play the "pussiest song in the world" at graduation, and one very special guitar.


Holly Cupala: Tell us about the origins of ADIOS!

Conrad Wesselhoeft: I stumbled upon this quote in a newspaper column: "In darkness, it slowly came to me that what happens to a man isn't nearly as important as how he meets it." The author of the quote was Victor Riesel, a labor journalist who was blinded when a mobster flung sulphuric acid in his face." I jotted Riesel's words in my journal, then added, spur of the moment: "Story about a young man who becomes a stenographer/writer of a blind man's life, and in so doing exorcises his own demons."

In 2007, my agent, Erin Murphy, asked to see some of my ideas for future projects. I sent her a long list. The idea for Adios was buried near the bottom, barely an afterthought, yet it was this idea that spoke loudest to Erin. So the fermentation process began with a nudge from her.

Later that year, my teenage son, Kit, began to bring home a group of buddies who would sit at our kitchen counter, devour microwaved burritos (heavy on the ketchup), talk with abandoned irreverence, and then rush into the living room and jam on guitars and piano. Their combination of humor, appetite, music, and energy was an important part of the creative process for me.

That summer, my father passed away. He'd spent his last year and a half in a hospital room, coping with multiple illnesses, but nonetheless alert, funny and wise. He became the model for the blind man David, and his experiences as a Navy lieutenant during World War II became the template for David's war experiences.

Also at this time, a friend's mother was slipping into Alzheimer's. We'd greet her with "Hello," and she'd respond in the most bizarre way, but just close enough to some mark to make you wonder, "Hey, does she know something I don't?" So my friend's mother became the model for Agnes, the Oracle at the Delphi.

Eventually, all of these ideas and characters began to criss-cross and merge. I'm especially grateful to my son, Kit, and his friends for their unwitting help. I remember one night checking on Kit as he slept and whispering, "Thank you—thank you!"


Holly: Who inspires your writing?

Conrad: My kids and their friends. I love to hear them speak—because their collective voice mixes confidence, frailty, arrogance, timidity, enthusiasm, laziness, idealism, courage, cadence, spontaneity, and so much more. Basically, all kids are centrally engaged in the evolution of language—their minds make dazzling linguistic leaps that older minds can't. As a result, new words get born every second. I'd be doing dishes or driving them somewhere and these kids would be handing me golden nuggets, so to speak.

Holly: How has your life illuminated your writing?

Conrad: All things of the heart—love, regret, joy, disappointment, and so much more—help you to write your story. You can't write without living; observing alone doesn't work. If you can take a personal disappointment or tragedy, for example, and weave it into your every day, it can heighten and sharpen everything around you, so that you see and appreciate more intensely. The line of a tree becomes more graceful, or the glint in a child's eye more startling. Understanding that things are hitched together is a vital part of being a writer. It's a never-ending, bewildering, extraordinary journey. I'm still just getting started.


Holly: What do you hope your readers will take away?

Conrad: Jonathan, the main character, wants to give up—because something terrible has happened to him. But the people closest to him won't let him. I'm reminded of what Winston Churchill said to the students at Harrow School in the darkest hour of World War II—what Churchill called the "finest hour." It's the message echoed by old Agnes the Oracle, and it's what I hope readers will take away: "Never give up. Never give up. Never, never, never, never--in nothing, great or small, large or petty--never give up."

Conrad shares writing secrets:
I'd like to share my "sneeze analogy." The way I plot a novel pretty much parallels the way I sneeze. That's because a good story, like a good sneeze, both contain:

1. The "inciting moment" when you know something's going to happen and all other thoughts fly out of your head.
2. The mindful build-up that contains a sense--and hope--of inevitable culmination.
3. The culmination itself--very cathartic and satisfying.
4. The mopping up.

*****

Ha! Thanks, Conrad!

YOU WANT TO READ THIS BOOK! So leave a comment. ;)
You have until Monday at midnight to tell us a) why you want to read ADIOS, NIRVANA, b) have you ever wanted to give up because of loss or hardship, and what was the outcome, or c) if you're a writer or aspiring writer, what is the process of writing like for you?

Oooh, and check out the trailer (set in Seattle and starring Conrad's teen son and daughter):

YA Bloggers Want...A Wish List from Lauren's Crammed Bookshelf + Winner!

Awesome blogger Lauren from Lauren's Crammed Bookshelf is here today with a wishlist of what she'd like to see (and a little of what she does not want to see) on her YA shelf.

Lauren was part of the original TELL ME A SECRET blog tour, so I'm very pleased to be able to feature her.

Welcome, Lauren!

*****

The Top Four Things I Want to See More of (and Less of) in YA

Everyone has areas of YA, or any genre for the matter, which make them shake their head or want more of, and here are some of the many things I want to see more and less of in the YA genre.

1) More Epic (Romance) Fantasies
Kristin Cashore books are some of my favorite and they fit in this category. They are romantic, have strong, tough-as-nail protagonists, rich writing, and are set in one of the most interesting and creative worlds in Y.A. In other words, they are amazing with a capital A, and quite simply, I want to see more books like them.

2) Less Clichés
I'm personally sick of always seeing main characters in love with the *bad* boy or the *popular* boy that doesn't notice how amazing they are, but then does. I want characters that are in love with average boys and have realistic relationships with them. I want characters who want to be part of the popular crowd and when they land in it, find out it's more than they could ever image, not something dreadful and negative, like in most books. I want uniqueness.

3) More mean girl main characters
Courtney Summers does a great job of this, because not only does she make some of the best mean girl protagonists out there, but she also makes them realistic and even relatable in some cases.
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4) Less Vampire Books
I've seen enough vampire and mortal girl love stories to last a life time, so quite simply I want to see less of them. I mean, how many times can you truly have a girl falling in love with a vampire before it gets boring and overused to the extreme?

*Disclaimer: Some writers (like Richelle Mead) do still write amazing vampire book that I love. So I do want to see more vampire books in some small areas.*

So, now take a moment to think about some of the things you want to see less of in YA or more of? Is there anything mentioned above that you agree with?


Top 5 Current YA Favorites:

I Now Pronounce You Some Else by Erin McCahan
(one marriage propsal + one funny, unique protagonist + one swoon worthy guy = win!)

Firelight by Sophie Jordan
(It involves draki. What's not to love about that?)

Life, After by Sarah Dareer Littman
(A beautifully written book!)

Grace by Elizabeth Scott
(Perhaps Scott's best book so far!)

Where the Truth Lies by Jessica Warman (A very, very good book!)

Thanks for having me! I'm looking forward to seeing what others have to say.

*****

Thank you for stopping by, Lauren!

Readers, what's on your top four wish list (or don't wish-for list)? Comment for a chance to win this week's book prizes! (US)

The What YA Bloggers Want series celebrates YA lit for YALSA's Teen Read Week and National Book Month!

Ok, so now we have a prize to award to...

Mrs. DeRaps!

Mrs. DeRaps, contact me here with your first, second, and third choice for a book prize and include your info. I'll hold prizes for two weeks. Here's my prize video, and keep commenting for more, everyone!