Sarvenaz Tash's Blog, page 30

Butterfly in the Sky...

...if you're humming a certain theme song based on my blog title, then we're probably on the same page (ha! See what I did there?).

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a children's book author (true!). I also wanted my book featured on TV as part of Reading Rainbow.

Reading Rainbow was a PBS show hosted by the amazing LeVar Burton. Every episode, he would be walking around, talking in his soothing voice about some sort of theme (for some reason, I particularly remember one where he was in San Fra...

The Calm

You know those moments where you can--just for a tiny span of time--step outside yourself, look around at what's happening to you, and just feel grateful and content? I had one of those last week.

I'm definitely a worrier and a fretter and a Type-A personality, so those rare moments of serenity really stick out for me. Nothing particularly spectacular or unusual happened last week, but I was just able to see the extraordinary things I'm lucky to have:

- my cover was on Goodreads, and suddenly, ...

The Book's Cover: Thumbnail Sketches and a Giveaway!

We've reached the end of Cover Blitz Week!

To celebrate, first I'm going to share with you something my editor just shared with me this week: the thumbnail sketches. These were the very first pieces of work the illustrator sent over for this project. They were used to figure out composition, before he created the more detailed sketches found here.


As you can probably tell, they went with composition number 4. Emphasis was taken off of the rose, however, so that it didn't look too girly...someth...

The Book's Cover: An Interview with Walker Senior Designer Nicole Gastonguay!

Cover Blitz Week continues!

I know I, for one, have always been very curious about the mysterious world of book publishing. How does a cover come together? Who picks the title font? Who decides what the words look like in the very beginning of a chapter?

When I got my first pass pages last month, it was the first time they actually looked like a book and not like a printout from Word. And that was owed almost entirely to Nicole Gastonguay, the senior designer at Walker who was responsible for ...

The Book's Cover: Early Sketches!

As an unpublished author working for years on different manuscripts, I have to admit that I sometimes spent time daydreaming about what the actual book might look like sitting on a shelf. I imagined what it would be like to walk into a bookstore and see it there. And I definitely wondered what the cover could possibly be.

When I first started taking children's writing classes back in 2007, one of the first things I learned was that the author has very little say in the artwork. Honestly, that'...

The Book's Cover: An Interview with Illustrator Gérald Guerlais!

Since I got to reveal my cover on Friday and I'm still SUPER excited about it, I'm declaring this week Cover Blitz Week! First things first: here's a little insight into the man behind the cover art, illustrator extraordinaire Gérald Guerlais.

Sometime in December of 2010, I got an email from my editor with a link to an artist's work. She wanted to know what I thought of having him do the cover of my book.

The link included work like this:

© 2011 Gerald Guerlais

And this:

© 2011 Gerald Guerlais
So ...

'The Mapmaker and the Ghost' Cover Reveal!!

I have been so excited to share this for a while.

So without further ado...here is the official cover for The Mapmaker and the Ghost.


I honestly cannot express in words how happy I am with it.

Next week, I'll have an interview with cover artist Gerald Guerlais on the blog, plus more fun behind-the-scenes cover stuff and a giveaway!

For now, I'm just going to thank the entire team at Bloomsbury/Walker who worked on this. I seriously could not have imagined it to be any more wonderful than it is.

Apropos of Nothing: My Take on 'The Voice', Episode 8

I spent 8 seasons getting sucked into American Idol and finally, finally felt like it was time to let it go this year. It was great. I was getting THREE HOURS of my life back every week (most of which I spent writing, honest).

And then The Voice came along. And I had to watch one episode and BOOM. Sucked in again.

To make me feel a little better about the amount of time that I am now devoting to this show, I think I'm going to use it as blog fodder. Yeah. Cause blogging is writing! Yeah! Uh-hu...

Let's Play a Game: Writer or Crazy?

Y'know, sometimes I feel like being a writer is just a more socially acceptable way of dealing with my psychoses. Not only do I hear made-up people's voices in my head (schizophrenia) but sometimes I read a chapter I wrote and feel elated and read the same chapter two days later and feel devastated by its crappiness (bi-polar disorder).

Confession: I talk to myself. A lot. Usually, I'm playing out bits of dialogue. But I do it in my apartment, on the sidewalk, in the shower.

I also stare out i...

Childhood Magic

One of the most thrilling things about writing for children is that it lets me tap into some of my fondest, most fun memories about being a kid. And--since I write mostly fantasy or fantastical elements--it makes me remember the magic of my childhood. And I don't mean in the nostalgic, wasn't-childhood-magical sense. I mean in the sense that there are places and things for all children that seem like more than they are: the curtain we want to peek behind or the stuffed animal that seems to ha...