Rachel Vincent's Blog, page 18

Winners!

I have three winners to announce this week!

First of all, if you follow me on Twitter, you probably know that last night there were 949 entries in the Blood Bound ARC giveaway, and I promised that if that number reached 1000 I’d throw in an extra ARC. The final number of entries was 1033, so today, I drew two numbers at random, and those numbers are:

Which means that the winners are:

and

Neil and Gino, I’ll be emailing you shortly. If you respond with your shipping information today, your ARCs will go out this afternoon.

And the winner of Raised by Wolves and Trial by Fire by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, as well as your choice of any one of my own books is:

Erin, I need you to email me (rachelkvincentATgmailDOTcom) with your shipping information and your choice of book from my backlist. Or my frontlist.

Thanks so much to everyone who entered, on behalf of myself, Jen Barnes, and both of our publishers (Mira Books and Egmont). And check back next week, because my inventory of foreign editions is getting out of hand and I’ll be giving several away at once!

Finished! Kind of...

[Note: I have two giveaways going at the moment. Click here to enter the Blood Bound ARC giveaway (you must be 16+ to enter) and here for details on how to enter to win Raised by Wolves and Trial by Fire (by Jennifer Lynn Barnes) along with your choice of any one signed Rachel Vincent book.]

In case the busted word count meter isn’t clear, on Monday I finished the first draft of the SHADOW BOUND manuscript! And I got to celebrate for about twelve hours before I got sick. Nice timing, huh? I spent my only day off in the doctor’s office, then running errands in spite of illness. But at least I didn’t get sick until after I finished the manuscript, which I definitely consider a blessing. The first draft wrapped up in 410 pages, 120, 300+ words. But it will get much tighter in the rewrites.

Today, I start rewriting the manuscript. For those who don’t know how this process works (and it’s a little different for every author), here’s what happens with my books after the first draft is written: I write the second draft. This draft gets sent one chapter at a time (usually several per day) to my awesome critique partner (CP) Rinda.

Rinda will read the chapters at least once each and write down everything that sticks out for her. This includes everything from nitty-gritty technical details (grammatical errors, missing words, clunky phrasing, etc…) to more story-centric stuff like world-building inconsistencies, unsympathetic characters, inconsistent behavior for established characters, plot holes, and cardboard dialogue. Also, compliments. If I’ve done something she loves, she’s usually good enough to tell me.

This involves a lot of red ink. Or rather, red text, because we do critiques online, using the Track Changes and the Comments features in Word. Though, if memory serves, Rinda actually prints the chapters to read first. This is one of the areas where our working routines vary from each other. I only print receipts and contracts that have to be signed and returned. And the occasional short story copy edits that have to be sent in in hard copy. I haven’t printed a manuscript since 2007.

Anyway, Rinda then sends me back the dissected chapters and I rewrite them again. Then I send that third draft to my editor.

Third drafts still suck. Mine do, anyway. Don’t believe me? Ask my editor, her assistant, my copy editor, or the proofreader. Books are a LOT of work to write, and even more work to polish. After I turn in the third draft, the book will go through at least one round of revisions (so far, If I Die is the only book that had two rounds of revisions), line edits, copy edits, galleys (my publisher calls them Author Alterations) and proofreading. And that’s just the editorial side. There’s also cover design, typesetting, marketing, promotion, printing, shipping, and probably another dozen parts of the process I’ve forgotten.

And that is why it takes a year after it’s been written (in most cases) for a book to hit the shelf.

If you’re interested in the numbers, here are a couple of specifics. I turned in Blood Bound on Jan 1, 2011. It’s a September 2011 release. That’s an 8 month turnaround, which is faster than normal.

I turned in If I Die on October 1, 2010. It’s an October 2011 release. That’s a normal turnaround, but we had to rush parts of the process in order to have ARCs ready for BEA this year.

I will turn in SHADOW BOUND on July 1, 2011, and it’s a Summer 2012 release. As is BEFORE I WAKE. Which I haven’t started yet. Obviously, the production of BIW will have to be faster than for SB. That’s what I get for having back-to-back releases. Again.

Make sense?

Trial By Fire ch 4 (and giveaway!)

I’m sure it will come as no surprised to most people that I love shapeshifters. Including werewolves. Yes, in my Shifters world I said that they were hunted to extinction because they were too stupid to quit howling at everything that went bump in the night. And yes, I did Tweet live from the theater during Wolfman, expressing skepticism that a werewolf worth his own fur would pause in the middle of a burning building to howl at the moon in spite of the risk to his soon-to-be-roasted flesh. But don’t read into my well-known skepticism on the subject of werewolves. They’re not all stupid.

Case in point: Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s Raised by Wolves series. Smart werewolves, written by a Smart Chick. Last year I had the privilege of reading an early copy of Raised by Wolves and I loved it. In fact, I passed it on to my CP, insisting she read.

Book 1

I’m not sure how that could possibly have been a year ago, but it must be because tomorrow is the release date for the sequel, Trial By Fire. And let me say the only reason I haven’t read it yet is that I am this close (picture me holding my index finger and thumb a mm apart) to finishing a manuscript due in 2 weeks. But as soon as I’m done, guess what I’ll be reading.
 Hint: scroll down.
 

Book 2

To celebrate Jen’s release, it’s my pleasure to post the entire fourth chapter of Trial by Fire right here on my blog. But before you read it, please read the first three chapters, found here:

Ally Carter, a fellow Okie, author of the Gallagher Girls and Heist Society books, and one of the sweetest people I know has Chapter 1 here.Sarah Rees Brennan, the funniest person I’ve ever met in person and author of the Demon’s Lexicon series, has chapter 2 here.Carrie Ryan, author of my favorite zombie books ever, has chapter 3 here.

And, if you comment in the corresponding Wordpress post telling me who your favorite character is from the first four chapters of Trial By Fire, you’ll be entered to win a prize pack consisting of Raised by Wolves, Trial by Fire, and your choice of any one of my own books. Comments must be posted by Friday, June 17. A winner will be chosen at random and announced the next day.

Okay, start reading!

CHAPTER FOUR

I only knew three things about Shay Macalister.

One: he was a purebred werewolf, one of a relatively small number in the country who’d been born to two werewolf parents instead of just one. Purebreds were larger, stronger, and faster and had fewer weaknesses than werewolves with human blood flowing in their veins.

Two: Shay wanted me dead. It wasn’t personal. I had something he wanted. More females in a pack meant more live births and stronger, purebred children, and the only thing standing between the other alphas and doubling their numbers—and their power base—was me.

And, okay, maybe it was a little personal for Shay, since I’d been responsible for destroying a Rabid who knew the secret to changing human girls into Weres. It was also possible that once I’d done so, I’d derived great satisfaction from putting the screws to the other alphas—and Shay in particular—flaunting the laws that forbid one alpha from taking wolves who belonged to another, even if that other alpha was a teenage, human female.

At the moment, however, it was Shay’s third distinguishing characteristic that turned my stomach to lead and blew a cold chill down the length of my spine.

Shay was Devon’s—my Devon’s—brother. He was everything Dev didn’t want to be, everything he’d spent his entire life rebelling against, and already the presence of one of Shay’s wolves on my land had sapped the mirth from Devon’s features and left something stone hard and formidable in its place.

“Hey.” I reached out for Devon’s arm. “You okay?”

Devon stood there, every muscle in his body tensed. He didn’t answer my question. Callum would have forced Dev’s eyes to his and repeated the query, but I nudged Devon’s shoulder with my head, a gesture of comfort far less human than I was and not particularly alpha in the least.

On instinct, Dev nudged me back, his muscles relaxing—but not by much. “Only you,” he said crisply, “would be worried about me at a time like this.”

Like Shay, Devon was purebred. Boy-band tendencies aside, he could take care of himself—physically.

“Seriously, Dev. You want to tell me this isn’t messing with your head at all?” I didn’t have to put even an ounce of my power as alpha behind the words. Best-friend privilege said it all.

“Well, of course it is,” Devon replied. “One of Brother Dearest’s wolves showed up on our land, beaten within an inch of his life and caught between Shifts. If you’d been the one to open that door instead of Mitch, the smell of human blood probably would have sent him rabid, and you’d be significantly less charming as a decimated pile of meat.”

Dev—do you think Shay sent him? I couldn’t make myself ask the question out loud, and Devon responded in key.

I don’t think anything is below Shay. He’s not like other people, Bryn. You know he’s not.

“If your brother wanted Bryn dead, is this how he’d do it?” Chase’s words took me off guard—not because I had forgotten that he was in the room (though I had), but because his tone, understated and detached, contrasted so sharply with the animal set to his features. His wolf wanted to touch me, to protect me, to tear Shay to pieces, but Chase’s human side wanted answers—whether asking the question was like driving an elbow into Devon’s gut or not.

“I don’t know,” Devon said shortly, his jaw turning to granite, his gaze averted from mine. “I’m not exactly an expert on the inner workings of Shay’s dark and twisted mind.”

By the time Devon had come along, his much older brother was already the alpha of the Snake Bend Pack. They weren’t exactly what one would call close.

“Okay. I had to ask. If you think of anything, let us know.” With that, Chase turned his attention from Dev to me. “What do you need?”

The look in Chase’s pale blue eyes was still feral, the desire to protect me simmering just under the surface—but he’d grown up in a world very different from the one I’d known as part of Callum’s pack, a world where females weren’t shuffled off into a back room or given bodyguards at the first sign of trouble. Chase was asking, not telling; thinking instead of acting on instinct.

I’d never been so glad that Chase was Chase and that neither one of us had been born a Were.

“I need to talk to Mitch,” I said, following his example and trying to think this through, even though I wasn’t exactly known for an overdeveloped tendency to look before I leapt. “Whatever happens, our first priority is making sure that whoever this visitor is, he doesn’t die.”

I hadn’t been an alpha for long, but even I knew that having a Snake Bend wolf die on my territory wouldn’t look good. Until I knew exactly what was going on, and how to proceed, I couldn’t afford to give Shay any reason to come here, looking like the injured party and demanding something—or worse, someone—in return.

~*~

It was two days before they let me anywhere near the injured boy—two days for his injuries to heal enough that he was in control of his wolf, two days that I spent gnashing my teeth and trying to unravel the tangled web of political possibilities surrounding his entry to our territory.

Had Shay sent him here, on the verge of death, with the hope that he’d attack me? Would the other alphas blame Shay for the action of a wolf who was clearly Rabid? Had someone attacked one of Shay’s wolves on our land—and if so, who? A member of one of the other packs, crossing into our territory to make trouble? A Rabid, gone rogue or mad and hunting anyone and anything in his way? Or, God forbid, one of my own peripherals?

By Senate law, our peripherals could attack trespassers, but what had been done to this boy wasn’t animal retribution.

It was torture.

I had to talk to him, and after two days of letting Mitch—and more importantly, Ali—tell me no, I was done listening to the word. In a happy coincidence, they also appeared to be done saying it, so I didn’t have to go through the awkward and unquestionably ill-fated process of trying to pull rank on the woman who’d been my mother since I was four.

“I want to go with you.” Devon’s voice was perfectly pleasant, but I recognized the look in his eye, because the exact same expression had been staring out at me from the mirror for days.

“Can you behave yourself?” I asked mildly.

Devon did a good impression of someone who was offended. “Moi?” He ruined the effect somewhat by brushing invisible dust off the tips of his fingers, a motion as close to popping his knuckles as someone with Devon’s sensibilities could come.

I reached out to him with my mind but hit a smooth, blank wall. Of all the wolves in my pack, Dev was the one most clearly poised to become alpha himself someday. The promise of his future dominance made him an ideal second-in-command, but there was power there, too, and that power meant that if he wanted to, Dev could guard his mind from me absolutely, in a way that no one else in our pack could.

“Dev.”

“What do you expect me to say, Bronwyn?” he asked, adopting Callum’s habit of calling me by my full first name when he was irked. “This boy—who belongs to Shay—came here, to our territory, half mad and out of control of his Shift, and plopped himself down more or less on your front porch. He could have killed you, and accident or not, that’s not the kind of thing you can expect me to shrug off like a hideous hair day.”

Challenge.

There was a whisper of it in the bond between us, and I brought my eyes to Devon’s in a staring contest that neither one of us wanted to be engaging in. For several seconds, we stood there, locked in something we didn’t completely understand, and then Devon blinked.

Literally.

He didn’t avert his gaze. He didn’t round his shoulders, but he blinked, and that was enough.

I’d won.

“I’m still coming with you, you impossibly irritating little wench.”

From Dev, that was a term of endearment, and I took the degree to which he sounded on the verge of slipping into an exaggerated British accent as an indication that he was in control of himself—and that unless my life was in immediate danger, he’d behave when cross-examining Shay’s wolf.

“Yeah,” I said, punching him lightly in the stomach, “I love you, too.”

~*~

Taking a deep breath, I knocked on the door of Cabin 13, where Mitch had been tending to the injured wolf.

Lake answered the door and pulled me inside. “ ’Bout time you got here,” she said. “Now would you please tell him I can stay and to stop picking at me to take to the hills?”

Based on the mutinous expression on her father’s face, I inferred that the “him” Lake was referring to was Mitch.

“Well, go on. Tell him.” Lake folded her arms over her chest, the expression on her face an exact mirror of the scowl on Mitch’s.

Are you crazy? I asked, sending the words from my mind to hers. In response, Lake shrugged, which I took to mean something along the lines of “Yes, in fact, I am.”

“It’s okay by me if she stays,” I said, but that was as far as I was willing to go; I hadn’t thrown down with Ali on my own behalf, so I wasn’t about to press the issue with Mitch for Lake. Besides, why she would want to be anywhere near a male Were from a pack that was, in all likelihood, less female-friendly than ours was a mystery to me.

“Please,” Lake snorted in response to the expression on my face. “Have you seen this kid? I reckon I could take him with three paws tied behind my back, no shotguns, no knives.”

“If you had paws,” Devon volunteered helpfully, “you wouldn’t be able to use a shotgun.”

In her human form, Lake fought dirty, which for a Were meant using weapons other than claws and teeth. In wolf form, she was faster than just about anyone I’d ever seen, but she wasn’t as big as most males and couldn’t match them in brute strength—so she improvised.

“You three gonna squabble like children, or do you want to talk to the boy?”

I took Mitch’s question as implicit permission for Lake to stay. I could almost pretend this was just another adventure, with Devon and Lake and me alternating between keeping one another out of trouble and getting into it.

Almost.

“I’ll do the talking.” I said the words quietly, more to psych myself up for the coming interrogation than anything else. Mitch nodded his approval, and then he stepped aside to allow the three of us entry to a small hallway.

Wolf. Foreign.

The feeling washed over me as I walked forward, but it receded more quickly than it had before, like my instincts knew as well as I did that even if the boy was a threat, they were no longer needed to sound the alarm. That thought in mind, I breathed through the unmistakable smell of Snake Bend in the air, noting that it was tinged with antiseptic and something that smelled like coffee or chocolate: the boy’s scent, separate from the smell of his pack.

Lucas, Bryn. Mitch’s voice was rough in my mind, and my brain itched just listening to it. The boy’s name is Lucas.

Mitch was Pack, but even living at the center of our territory, he seemed more like a peripheral, less connected to me and the others than we were to one another. It was a testament to Mitch’s experience and age—a few hundred years, at least—that he was able to keep his mental distance and still make his words heard in my mind at will.

“Lucas,” I repeated out loud. I stepped into the room and was greeted with a face so blank that I had to wonder if he’d heard me say his name or registered my presence here at all.

The boy in question was olive-skinned, but pallor had settled over his cheeks, and he didn’t twitch or move at all as I approached. The stillness was unnatural on a Were, and watching him felt as odd as seeing a lion lying faint on the floor. He looked like someone had drained the blood from his body and then leeched his will to live straight from his soul.

I crossed the room to stand at the foot of his bed, keeping myself just out of his reach. “I’m Bryn,” I said, for lack of a better opening, “and you’re on Cedar Ridge land.”

“I know.” His voice wasn’t quiet or raspy or anything else I’d expected of it. Instead, it had an almost musical quality to it, like he would have been more at home singing along to an acoustic guitar than forcing his mouth to speak regularly. “I came here for you.”

Devon was beside me in an instant. To his credit, he didn’t stand straight, and his lip didn’t curl back to reveal canines, but his size and presence spoke for themselves. “Did your alpha send you?” Devon asked, refusing to refer to Shay by name.

The boy on the bed shuddered and then his body fell almost immediately back into stillness, like even shivering was too much for his fractured mind to bear.

“When you say you came here for Bryn,” Lake added, her eyes glittering and utterly lethal, “what exactly would you be meaning by that?”

So much for my doing the talking.

“I can’t . . . I can’t live like that. Not anymore. It’s—” The boy blinked and even that seemed to take gargantuan effort. “I just can’t do it.” Ignoring Lake and Devon, Lucas looked at me—not at my eyes, but close enough that I felt the weight of each word out of his mouth. “They say you help people. That you save them. Callum’s Bryn. That’s you, right?”

“You didn’t come here to kill Bryn.” Devon’s voice matched the tone in Lucas’s almost exactly, and I wondered if Dev even realized he was doing it. “And your alpha didn’t send you?”

Lucas moved, and I braced myself. At first, I thought he was leaping to his feet, but when he stopped moving, he was still on the bed, kneeling and no longer covered by the threadbare sheet.

Angry white scars crisscrossed his torso and arms like tiny Xs and Os. He’d been cut, long and deep, over and over again. “You want to know if Shay sent me?” he asked Devon. “If your brother sent me?” Lucas breathed in raggedly and lowered his voice. “You look just like him.”

Devon didn’t even blink, but inside, I winced for him, knowing that Lucas’s words would undoubtedly have left a mark.

“I suppose whether or not Shay sent me depends on your definition of the word sent. He beat me. He hounded me. And when it got to the point that I couldn’t think of fighting back, couldn’t even muster up the strength to keep wishing he was dead, when I thought that things couldn’t get any worse for me in Snake Bend”—Lucas settled back, his eyes blank, his voice soft—“they did.”

“Why?” The word burst out of Lake’s mouth a second before I could give voice to the question myself. “Why would your own alpha do something like that?”

Now Lucas didn’t look at Lake, or at me. He looked at Devon, and I wondered if he was really seeing Dev or if he was still caught up in memory, seeing Shay in the features the brothers shared.

“Why?” Lucas repeated. “My alpha is the type who needs a punching bag when things are going badly.” He shifted his gaze from Devon to me. “And lately, things haven’t exactly been going well.”

Lucas’s words hit me hard, the image of his bloodied body interwoven in my mind with that of the scars that still marred his flesh. Shay had done that to Lucas. He’d done it because he was a bully and because he couldn’t touch the person he most wanted to hurt, the reason things had not been going according to his master plan.

Me.

Six months earlier, Shay had gone to Alpine Creek, Wyoming, expecting to return with fresh blood and females for the Snake Bend Pack, and because of me, he’d gone home empty-handed and watched as a human girl walked away with everything he’d wanted for himself.

I’d seen the bloodlust in Shay’s eyes. I knew how badly he’d wanted to slam me into a wall, to rip out my insides and watch my body crumble to the ground. But thanks to the power Callum held over the rest of the werewolf Senate, thanks to the Senate’s own laws, Shay couldn’t touch me.

In the wild, when an animal is forced to pull back from attacking an adversary and turned its wrath on an easier target instead, they called it redirected aggression.

There was a chance—a good one—that what Shay had done to Lucas he’d done because of me.

“What do you want from us?” I asked Lucas, unable to keep myself from taking a step closer to the dead eyes that looked up at me from the bed. “Why did you come here?”

I didn’t bother telling myself that the only one to blame for Shay’s actions was Shay. It didn’t even matter if I believed it. I wasn’t the kind of person who could look at someone like Lucas and walk away with something as pat as an “it’s not my fault.”

In response to my question, Lucas tilted his head to the side, a gesture more animal than not. “I want you to claim me,” he said, like it was the simplest, most obvious thing in the world. “I don’t want to be Snake Bend anymore. I want to be Cedar Ridge.”

Interested? You can order Trial By Fire here: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Indiebound

Blood Bound ARC giveaway!

Interested in my new adult series? Want an early copy of

Questions about ARCs? Leave them in the comments and I will answer them.

Unbound Book 1

And…! Coming up tomorrow, check in here for the fourth and final part of Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s Chapter Trail event, wherein I will post the entire fourth chapter of her new young adult release Trial By Fire. Click here for information on where you can find the first three chapters, which have already been posted!

 

A Raised By Wolves novel

Enthralled Winner (& other news)

Okay, the random number generator has spoken, and one of you has won an ARC of Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions. Out of 516 entries (after the duplicates were deleted), the winner is:

And number 466 is:

Stephanie, please check your inbox for an email from me. If you can give me your shipping information today, your book will be in the mail this afternoon, along with the others I have ready to go out.

Up for next week:

I will finally be giving away an ARC of Blood Bound, as promised! Check back Sunday for the entry form.

A Raised By Wolves novel

And on Monday, I get to be a part of something special. To help celebrate the release of my friend Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s second YA werewolf novel, Trial By Fire, I will be posting the fourth chapter here on my blog, as part of a four-part promotional series. For details on where you can find the first three chapters, click here.

Posted in contests, Unbound, Young Adult | 3 Comments| Edit

Look what's out! (Updated)

Well, it looks like I published this post too early. So, here are a couple of pieces of news I left out, and below is the main post/release announcement:

News the first: My Soul To Keep has been shortlisted for The People’s Book Prize. The finalists were chosen by committee, but the finalists are now up for public vote. If you liked My Soul to Keep and would like to vote, click here for details.

News the second: The internet is a very powerful tool. And a very fast tool. Evidence? I got scooped. Again. We were waiting for a better time to announce this, but since Goodreads beat us to the punch… In December, Harlequin Teen will release a Soul Screamers omnibus including “My Soul to Lose” (the ebook prequel in print for the first time!!!), My Soul To Take, and My Soul To Save.

I’m very, very excited about this. Not only is this your chance to read MSTLose in print for the first time, you can get it and the first two novels all together for around ten dollars (US). (Don’t quote me on the price, but I believe that’s what I heard.) So if you’ve been thinking about starting the series, this is a very convenient, cost-effective way to do that.

I haven’t seen a cover yet, but I’m sure it’ll be awesome. When I have a preorder

(In case you didn’t see it yesterday, I’m giving away an ARC of Enthralled here.)

I spent all day yesterday at Six Flags (It was 99 degrees. What was I thinking?) and completely forgot to announce that yesterday was the official release for Chicks Kick Butt!

I’m so thrilled to be a part of this urban fantasy anthology along with an amazing list of contributors, including two of my fellow Deadline Dames. And I’m extra thrilled because this anthology gave me a chance to write what is so far the only Shifters-world short story I’ve written. Thanks so much to Kerrie Hughes and Rachel Caine (the editors) for including me!

My story is called “Hunt” and it features Abby (Faythe’s cousin from Stray) a couple of years after Alpha/the end of the series. In the story, Abby goes on a camping trip with some of her college roommates and things go horribly wrong. Naturally. This story is my take on the out-in-the-woods slasher category, but with a Shifters twist. It was fun to write, and it was great to see Abby come into her own.

Here’s the official blurb:

About the Chicks Kick Butt

Chicks are awesome–and never more so than when they are kicking some serious vampire/werewolf/demon/monster butt.

Chicks Kick Butt is an anthology that features one of the best things about the urban fantasy genre: strong, independent, and intelligent heroines who are quite capable of solving their own problems and slaying their own dragons (or demons, as the case may be).

Edited by Kerrie Hughes and Rachel Caine,Chicks Kick Butt features original stories from thirteen authors, eleven of whom are New York Times bestsellers:
- Rachel Caine (with a story from her bestselling Weather Wardens universe)
- L.A. Banks
- Rachel Vincent
- Karen Chance
- Lilith Saintcrow
- Cheyenne McCray
- Susan Krinard
- Jeanne Stein
- Jenna Black
- Susan Krinard
- Jeanne Stein
- Jenna Black
- Elizabeth Vaughan
- Carole Nelson Douglas
- P.N. Elrod
- Nancy Holder

Enthralled ARC giveaway!

I’d intended to give away an ARC of Blood Bound this week, but I’m not quite ready for that, so instead, this week’s giveaway is an ARC (Advance Review Copy) of Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions, a young adult anthology edited by Kelley Armstrong and Melissa Marr, comprised of stories by some of the best writers in paranormal YA. You can read more about how the anthology came to be here, on Melissa’s blog.

My contribution is a Soul Screamers short story featuring Emma and Sabine on a road trip detour through Niederwald, a tiny, creepy town in Texas where the barrier between our world and the Netherworld is very thin.

Almost two years ago, when I moved to San Antonio, I passed a sign on the highway for an exit to a town called Niederwald, and I knew from that moment on that I wanted to write a story set in a fictional version of that town. Enthralled gave me that chance.
 

The stories in the anthology include:

Giovanni’s Farewell by Claudia Gray
Scenic Route by Carrie Ryan
IV League by Margaret Stohl
Red Run by Kami Garcia
Things About Love by Jackson Pearce
Niederwald by Rachel Vincent
A Mortal Winter King by Melissa Marr
Facing Facts by Kelley Armstrong
Let’s Get This Undead Show on the Road by Sarah Rees Brennan
Bridge by Jeri Smith-Ready
Skin Contact by Kimberly Derting
Leaving by Ally Condie
At the Late Night, Double Feature, Picture Show by Jessica Verday
Gargouille by Mary E. Pearson
The Third Kind by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Automatic by Rachel Caine

To enter the giveaway, fill out the form found here. One entry per person. International entries welcome. You  must be 13 or older to enter.

Winner! (And brightly colored stats.)

First, let me say that I am stunned by the response to the If I Die ARC giveaway. There were 822 individual entries (I tried my best to catch and delete duplicate entries as they came in, and I believe I got them all.) and I really wish I had more than one ARC to give away. And truthfully, I do, but I’m going to give it away closer to the release date, I think. And later on, when my author copies come in, I’ll be giving away at least one full set of Soul Screamers novels.

But for now, the winner! And some stats in graph form, for those who like transparency and data. Or pretty colored graphs. You can click any of the images to see larger versions.

The winning number, as chosen by a random number generator:

The winning entry, as shown in the Google Docs form:

Crystal, please check your inbox for an email from me.

And, the stats. This first chart shows which books in the series have already been read by those who entered the giveaway. The categories are truncated on the left, but the full details are on the right. (Only a handful of entries did not provide this information.) The vast majority of those who entered have already read everything available in the series, which is great. And it doesn’t really surprise me, because as several of you pointed out, most people won’t enter a contest for the fifth book in a series if they haven’t read any of the others.

This second (blue) chart (pie charts, FTW!) shows the age ranges of those who entered the contest. Most of those who entered are between 20 and 35 years of age, and I love my adult readers, but I am very pleased to see that nearly a quarter of the entries came from teens. The actual target audience. Especially considering that in my experience, fewer teens enter online contests for a variety of reasons including restricted time online, parental permission, and the generally smaller percentage of teens who follow authors online.

This last (red) chart shows where those who entered said they originally discovered me/my work. (Only a handful of entries did not provide this information.) As you can see, the number of people who found my books in a traditional book store rallied dramatically after the first day of data. Not sure why that is, but I’m very pleased by it. And this chart fascinates me most of all, I think.

To be fair, many of those who checked the “other” box actually found me through one of the listed means, but evidently wanted to elaborate. Which is kind of awesome. There were tons of “I found you through the Shifters series” comments and a bunch of “I found you through [specific friend/family member/blogger name]. There were also several who found me on Goodreads, on sale at Audible, at a conference, at a signing, and one who found me through an ad in People Magazine! (I suspect many more found me through print ads, but those aren’t necessarily the ones hanging out online and entering internet contests.)

Thanks so much to everyone who entered, and check back next week if you’re interested in an ARC of Blood Bound, the first in my new adult series!

When the straight line bends.

First, in case anyone hasn’t yet entered, the If I Die ARC giveaway form can be found here. There are well over 600 entries now, and I’m pleased to report that more and more people are reporting having discovered my work in an actual book store. For the record, I don’t mind my books being found/bought online. Any legitimate sale is a good sale, and I appreciate every one of them. I was just a little disheartened at the apparent lack of visibility in actual brick-and-mortar stores. But that appears to be a matter of perspective, so, yay!

Second, in case you haven’t heard, I have short stories appearing in two anthologies this year. The first is “Hunt,” in the Chicks Kick Butt anthology. “Hunt” is a Shifters world story featuring Abby, Faythe’s cousin, a couple of years after Alpha. Chicks Kick Butt will be available in the US on June 7, so if you haven’t preordered your copy, this is an awesome time to do that!

Second is “Niederwald,” in the Enthralled anthology. “Niederwald” is a Soul Screamers story featuring Sabine and Emma, which takes place between My Soul To Steal and If I Die, and the anthology actually comes out the very same day as If I Die (September 20, 2011). I have several advanced copies of Enthralled, which I’ll be giving away soon.

Now for the meat and potatos…

Typically, I’m a very linear thinker/plotter/writer. This means I tend to think things through in a straight line. I take point A to point B, then head right for point C, etc… until I get to the end. But that hasn’t been the case with Shadow Bound, maybe because of the 1 hr/1000 word writing sessions I’ve been doing.

In order to actually write 1000+ fresh words in an hour, repeatedly and consistently, I have to know what needs to be written before I sit down in front of the screen. And even with my obsessively detailed synopsis, that isn’t always possible, because things change. At some point during the writing of the rough draft, it becomes obvious that point D doesn’t actually lead to point E with anything resembling a logical progression. So point E must be scrapped in favor of some other point, and right now, these new points look/feel more like some abstract math problem (point 3x/$) rather than any simple letter (point E).

But my point is that in order to keep the words flowing, I’ve gotten very self-indulgent with my rough draft. I write whichever plotted-but-yet-unwritten scene feels most exciting to me at the moment. And so far, that’s worked. It’s kept me from getting bored with the manuscript, and it’s even led me to a few surprises. So what’s the problem?

This book isn’t told from one point of view.

If this were a Shifters book or a Soul Screamers book, I could write the scenes in any order I wanted and piece them together later, because all the scenes would be narrated by Faythe (Shifters) or Kaylee (Soul Screamers). But the Unbound books are told from two different 1st person points of view. Which means that if I skip around now and write a scene from Kori’s POV, when I start piecing the scenes together in logical order, it may turn out to be Ian’s turn to talk when that scene comes up.

This is a problem.

Ideally, as I’ve learned writing the Unbound series, any scene should be told from the POV of the character who has the most to lose/learn/feel within it. The character the events impact the most. But also ideally (and sometimes contradictorily) the scenes should alternate somewhat regularly, so I don’t wind up with four scenes in a row from Kori’s POV, and the occasional sprinkling of Ian’s. (Note: this is for a 2 POV book. This changes significantly with 3rd person and/or multiple 1st person POVs.)

So, plotting and writing this book has become a very painstaking process in which I have to balance the narrative between two different perspectives while also volleying evenly between those perspectives. Without losing any of the excitement of the story. This process has given me a great respect for writers who regularly write from multiple perspectives. Especially those who write from multiple 1st person perspectives. Especially especially those who write from multiple 1st person perspectives including one man’s and one woman’s POV.

I’m looking forward to switching back to the Soul Screamers universe after this, because it’s simpler. Because there comes a point in every book at which the writer hates the book being written, and I’m nearly there with Shadow Bound, which makes the next Soul Screamers book (which will probably frustrate me to no end when I’m actually writing it) look like a greener lawn, just beyond the proverbial fence.

Also, today’s a crazy day for me, full of personal obligations that may not leave me time to make my word count goal today. But I’m going to try. I need to get to 84,000 words today. Here’s where it stands now:

 

81,040 / 100,000
(81.04%)

The data.

First of all, I should admit, I’m not a numbers person. While I’ve loved words all my life, math and I are acquaintances, at best. But since I posted the If I Die ARC giveaway yesterday, I’ve become obsessed with the statistics coming in with the entries, thanks to the optional questions on the form. (If you haven’t already, click here to fill out the form and enter the giveaway.) I’m thrilled to say that nearly all of the 400+ entries received so far have answered all three optional questions, and given me loads of data to sort through.

The interesting bits:

Most of the entrants fall into the 20-35 year old age range. I don’t know that that’s the average age of actual readers, but the vast majority of those who entered the contest fall into that range. Does that mean there aren’t many teens online right now? Or that they’re not searching the internet for books? Not sure how to interpret this one.Very, very few of the entrants first discovered me and my work in an actual book store. That’s not entirely unexpected, considering this is an online contest. Most of those who enter will naturally be people who spend a lot of time online and likely find most of their reads on the internet. Still, it kind of bothers me that only a handful (literally fewer than fifteen) out of more than 400 entrants report first finding my books in an actual store.Only a couple of the entrants report being younger than 13. This is good. I consider the Soul Screamers series (especially book 3 and beyond) more appropriate for readers 14 and older.At a glance, it looks like most people checked the box indicating that they’ve read everything available in the Soul Screamers series, but the second most commonly checked box in that category is those who’ve read one or more of the novels and online only novellas. The smallest category is people who haven’t yet started the series. Which tells me that I’m not reaching many potential new readers through this giveaway. And I’m not sure how to fix that.

In other news, I’m still typing away at SHADOW BOUND (Unbound book 2). As of this morning, the book stands at 78,061 words. I need to get to 81,000 words today, which is going to be tricky, because I have carpal tunnel, and my right arm is feeling pretty bad today. I’ll have to take lots of breaks. Wish me luck!

 

78,061 / 100,000
(78.06%)