Carter Roy's Blog, page 2
August 29, 2015
THE BLOOD GUARD nominated for South Dakota’s YARP Award!
And the happy news just keeps rolling in!
I just received notice that The Blood Guard has popped up on the South Dakota Library Association’s annual list of finalists for their Young Adult Reading Program Award. Beginning with Teen Reads week this October, students are invited to rate the nominated titles with a score of 1 to 5. Those votes help determine the winner come next spring.
It is an honor to be counted among the dozen blisteringly good nominees for this middle-grade award, and an honor to know that The Blood Guard will be read by teens in all the great places of the state of South Dakota.
I Say Things to People: Interviews
One of the developments in publishing over the past decade is the rise of blogger reviewers—passionate readers who consume novels like water, write thoughtful reviews of these books, and are followed by other similarly passionate readers. These people are true friends to books, and I look forward to their takes on my novels even when they don’t like my work.
They also conduct interviews, and the “blog tour” has become a widespread thing in publishing. Periodically, I do such interviews, so I thought it’d be a good idea to collect them here as they appear.
The packed-with-good-stuff site Fangirlish first wrote an awesome comparison of the Blood Guard series to the TV show the Librarians. I haven’t seen the show, but as a lifelong fan of libraries and librarians, I approve. And then they had me sit down for a series of silly-but-surprisingly revealing questions about Mario Bros, favorite colors, and more. Read it here.
LitPick is a wonderful site where students review middle grade and teen literature. They were kind enough to interview me about the Blood Guard series. I talk about my early life of crime, my influences, and my advice for writers-to-be.
K.E. Carson at the Underground talked to me about the many jobs I’ve held, the difference between writing for kids and writing for adults, and my favorite (?) feedback from readers. You can read it here.
Thanks to all those who took the time to interview me!
“All you speak of is real to me.”
If you’ve read any interviews with me, you may know of my love for the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. He was the creator not just of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, but also of John Carter of Mars; the land that time forgot called Caspak; the world within the hollow Earth called Pellucidar; as well as dozens of novels about other people and places besides. His novels were wildly popular during his lifetime, and for good reason: They are breathtaking adventure stories written with a kind of energy that few writers equaled at the time.
They are also—then and now—considered trash without literary merit. But the thing about the books you love as a reader? You don’t care whether or not they’re considered “art.” And, as Edgar Rice Burroughs writes to the young Forrest J. Ackerman, “If [a novel] forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.”
Hear, hear.
Interviewed by Cyrus Webb on ConversationsLIVE
I was very fortunate this past week to be interviewed by arts stalwart Cyrus Webb on his popular radio podcast ConversationsLIVE. The interview was about the Glass Gauntlet, the newest entry in the Blood Guard series, and also about the way story can empower young readers.
Host Cyrus Webb welcomes author Carter Roy to #ConversationsLIVE to discuss his literary journey and book 2 in THE BLOOD GUARD series called THE GLASS GAUNTLET.
THE BLOOD GUARD wins the Northern Ireland Book Award!
As the last of these updates about the happy news of spring, I thought I would end with a reader’s award that The Blood Guard has actually won. That’s right, the students of Northern Ireland—by all accounts a pitilessly discerning, astonishingly good-looking bunch of world-caliber intelligence—have chosen The Blood Guard from among a field of six novels to receive the 2015 Northern Ireland Book Award.
This news made me feebleminded with happiness. It’s not just because I love Ireland and Northern Ireland (my wife and I spent a blissful week traveling the whole of the two Irelands before we got married), and it’s not just that the competition this year was so fearsomely good (among them Kenneth Oppel and Holly Goldberg Sloan and Michael flippin’ Morpurgo!), it’s that the award was picked by the audience, the readers. You can keep your Newberys, your Guardian Book Awards, your fancy-pants medals given by committees of the learned—librarians and teachers and critics and whatnot.* It means more to know that a book written in Brooklyn, New York, crossed the ocean and was embraced by students in a distant country. I will never be able to thank those readers enough.
THE BLOOD GUARD nominated for Utah’s 2015-16 Beehive Book Award!
The third wonder of this spring was learning that The Blood Guard has been nominated for Utah’s 2015-16 Beehive Book Award. Like the Iowa Children’s Choice Award and the Maine Student Book Award, this award is voted upon by students across the great state of Utah after a year spent reading the ten nominees. And like those other awards I’ve mentioned, just knowing that The Blood Guard is going to be read and talked about by the very readers it was written for makes me happier than I can express with mere words.
The other nine nominees are all great books, make no mistake: from Cece Bell’s funny and moving El Deafo to Jude Watson’s great Loot, each of these novels is among the best of the year. I am beyond grateful to find The Blood Guard rubbing shoulders with this lot, and only hope that Ronan, Greta, Sammy, and Jack prevail when all the votes are tallied!
THE BLOOD GUARD nominated for the 2015-2016 Iowa Children’s Choice Award!
Yet another reason for my twitchy brimming-over-with-joy state these past several months was this grand good news: The Blood Guard has been nominated for the 2015-16 Iowa Children’s Choice Award! Iowa—home of the most renown writing program in the United States, site of the earliest contests in our presidential elections, and residence of some of the most discerning student readers in the land.
As I wrote below (in my post about The Blood Guard being nominated in Maine), children’s choice awards are, for me, among the greatest of honors in children’s books. These are awards given by the readers to those novels that they most loved during a calendar year’s worth of reading. The lists themselves make for a great roster of books for your To-Be-Read pile: among those on the list in Iowa are Holly Black’s spectacularly good Doll Bones (which won a deserved Newbery Honor), Lisa Graff’s lovely A Tangle of Knots, and Elise Primavera’s Libby of High Hopes. (Elise and I worked together in a previous life; hi, Elise!) It is humbling to be included among such superior works.
Still, I hope that The Blood Guard wins over all of them. Because c’mon—much as I love these other books, I’ve got to root for the home team.
THE BLOOD GUARD nominated for the Maine Student Book Award!
I don’t want to boast, but I had a very good spring and early summer. (Okay, maybe I want to boast a tiny bit.) Chief among the reasons for my happiness were notifications that The Blood Guard had been nominated for several state reading awards—including for the 2015-16 Maine Student Book Award!
It may be a cliché to say that it is an honor just to be nominated, but in terms of state awards, that is truly the case: Each year, a short list of books is nominated in each state, and over the following school year, students read the books and vote for their favorites. That means that copies of The Blood Guard will be stocked in school libraries across the entire state and will get passed around from student to student. And the books on these lists are often the latest and greatest—among those on the Maine list are Kwame Alexander’s Newbery-winning The Crossover, Malala Yousafzai’s I Am Malala, Jonathan Auxier’s The Night Gardener, and too many more to call out.
So, yeah: I am very honored that The Blood Guard has been nominated in the great state of Maine. Fingers crossed that it wins!
August 25, 2015
Where Is My Website?
A very good question.
If you are one of those blessed souls who visited carterroybooks.com sometime in the past, you’ll remember a colorful (though sketchily designed) site lived here—one with a biography of yours truly, quizzes, descriptions of weaponry and lore from the books, pages for educators, and much more. And now that site is gone.
What happened? you may wonder. Was the site attacked by Chinese hackers? Agent Smith from The Matrix? The fsociety team from Mr. Robot? Case and company from Neuromancer?
Alas, nothing so thrilling. No, the boring truth about it is that a pair of top-notch designers are rejiggering the site, and the job is still unfinished. Rebuilding a website from the ground up, it turns out, is serious work.
So watch this site! Because more is coming, I promise!
