Daisy Whitney's Blog, page 19

You can still win "Breathing"

My contest to win a signed copy of Cheryl Renee Herbsman's novel "Breathing" is still going on! So enter here to win with a 5-word entry on first love! It's so easy it'd be a sin not to enter! I'll pick a winner by March 8.

Win a signed copy of Cheryl Renee Herbsman's "Breathing!"

Hi friends and readers! I'm giving away another signed book and this time it's Cheryl Renee Herbsman's very lovely story of first love, "Breathing." Watch the video here on my blog for the details and the enter to win in the comments! I'll pick a winner by March 8.

On having a kept man…

I have this little fantasy. OK, it's a big fantasy. So hear me out.

Let's say for the sake of dreaming big that my novels become such huge hits that neither my husband nor I have to do anything else to earn a living. If that happens, I have decided to make him a kept man!

I know, I know. It's quite magnanimous of me. And, look, he does like his job. So I've had to kind of map it all out to make this offer enticing for him. Here's my plan for his daily schedule:

8 am: He takes the kids to school ...

A picture for you!

I met fellow Little, Brown author Kami Garcia Friday night on the final stop of her "Beautiful Creatures" book tour. I carpooled with "Breathing" author Cheryl Renee Herbsman up to Santa Rosa, Calif. to the fantastic bookstore Copperfields where Kami and her co-author and best friend Margaret Stohl delighted audiences with their hilarious and self-deprecating tales of writing a 600-page book on a double dog dare from their kids. Here's a picture of Kami, Cheryl, author and marketing expert

"Thaw" Revealed!

Hello! I'm participating in a ""blogsplash" today for Fiona Robyn's novel "Thaw." And that means I'll be posting the first chapter here! Fiona will be blogging the entire novel over the next few months so if you like it you can read it for free in its entirety on her site, or you can buy it at The Book Depository.

These hands are ninety-three years old. They belong to Charlotte Marie Bradley Miller. She was so frail that her grand-daughter had to carry her onto the set to take this photo...

Let sleeping dogs lie…

Today I want to tell you a story about my dog, Violet. She usually wakes us up around 5:30 a.m. to be fed. She does this by pacing back and forth, back and forth, by each side of the bed. Almost always, my husband is the first human to fall for her dog alarm. He usually lets her out back first so she can take care of dog business. Then he feeds her and returns to bed while she eats. One day last week, the dog changed up her routine. When she finished eating, she returned to the bedroom and...

How to survive edits

My friend Victoria Schwab asked me to post a video blog about edits and surviving them for her vlogging group "YA Rebels." My vlog ran yesterday and here it is!

Is a book ever done?

I just sent my page proofs back to my editor with final notes. My notes were minor, but they are also a reminder to me of how very much goes into making a book. Who would have thought at this point in the publishing process that I'd still have things I wanted to change? Granted, the changes I sent back were a word here, a line there. But still, after several rounds of edits — my agent's, my own, my editor's, my copy editor's — I still found an awkward phrase or too that needed reworking.

My q...

Inside the publishing process – page proofs

Since microblogging seemed to go over well last week, I thought I'd do some more of it! And my readers also asked for me to share more info on the path to publication so I thought I would elaborate a bit more on page proofs after I mentioned them in my video yesterday.

"First pass page proofs," as they are called, come after copy edits and before ARCs (advanced reader copies). Page proofs are the pages of your manuscript in a PDF form laid out as they will actually look in the ARC and then...

My baby is becoming a book!

My page proofs of "The Mockingbirds" arrived last week, so I kissed them! Here's the video…