Jennifer Castle's Blog, page 5
June 7, 2011
"The Beginning of After" ARC giveaway, again!
Holy time warp, Batman. Was it a whole month ago that I did the last giveaway? That went fast. And now here we are, THREE months until pub date for "The Beginning of After." Thirteen weeks! (I was going to do a whole "that's the same as one trimester of a pregnancy" riff but realized [...]
May 30, 2011
BEAing me
Souvenirs of my time at BookExpoAmerica 2011: A bunch of craveable galleys, several hideous blisters, one enormous totebag, and the everlooping memory of that half-hour when I handed copies of "The Beginning of After" to many lovely readers who didn't seem to care how much my handwriting sucks. Being a debut author at BEA is [...]
May 21, 2011
The sad and curious tale of my 15th summer
Something about this week's familiar panic of seeing bathing suits in stores makes me want to share this story about the summer I was fifteen. Actually, the story starts recently, when I'm sitting in the waiting room of a dermatologist's office, bored out of my mind and annoyed that I'm still dealing with breakouts at, [...]
May 17, 2011
A few unimportant things
Yay for Petra aka Safari Poet for winning the ARC giveaway! And thanks to everyone who entered because it's still such a cool and quietly amazing thing to me that there are people out there who are looking forward to reading "The Beginning of After." I hope that novelty never wears off. I thought about [...]
May 6, 2011
"The Beginning of After" ARC giveaway
When I first met my editor in the summer of 2009, she told me that "The Beginning of After" would most likely be published in the fall of 2011. Over. Two. Years. Away. It seemed like a lifetime. Ironically, the six years it took me to write the book seemed like only half a lifetime. [...]
April 30, 2011
Window shopping for stories
Once or twice a week, I leave the comfort of my home sweatpants-and-sofa writing cocoon and spend the day at a community workspace, where for a monthly membership fee I can show up with my laptop, grab a desk or comfy chair, and do my thing against the backdrop of four different walls. It's not [...]
April 2, 2011
90 minutes
Some ramblings about "the process." The other day, my friend Kim Purcell and I were talking about how much writing we can get done in a single session. (Kim has her own debut YA novel on tap. It's called "Trafficked" and it will be published next spring by Viking, and it is fabulous. There, I [...]
March 9, 2011
About that cover
It's been a rather ticklish week for me. Since the HarperCollins Children's Books Fall 2011 catalog went out, I've gotten some seriously spirit-bolstering correspondence from YA book bloggers and readers (when you've spent years working on your first novel and now it's sitting on the runway, painfully far back in the line for takeoff, even [...]
Proof
Opening the gigantic padded envelope from HarperCollins and sliding out the stack of paper that is the first uncorrected galley for "The Beginning of After" was definitely A Moment. Look, it's got a page with the lovely title treatment. The first line of each chapter is smartly accessorized with a stylistic letter. The font is [...]
Worth stopping in
I made an impulse stop at the farm down the road to get some Honeycrisps and homemade apple cider. Instead of Luisa, the lovely lady who runs the farm stand, I found this. On a day when I've had only a half-night of sleep because our cat ate the class frog we were caring for [...]
