Day 10 – Advent Calendar and Kindle Contest!
Happy December 10th! The Kindle contest is still underway. Here's how it works: you nominate a friend/family member/coworker/etc. who you think needs a Kindle (tell us why they need/deserve one!) I'll be collecting entries until December 21st and then a winner will be chosen and the person nominated and the one who nominated them will both receive a Kindle! You only have to nominate a person once but you can nominate different people on different days if you want to. All you have to do to enter is comment on one of the Advent Calendar posts between now and then. But there are also daily giveaways of cool stuff too! Daily winners will be selected from that day's comments.
Yesterday's winner of a signed copy of Violet Eyes is Jen. Congratulations! To enter today's giveaway, just comment below. Today's goodie is an excerpt and some behind the scenes infro about Midnight Pearls, my retelling of The Little Mermaid. Today's winner will receive a signed copy of Midnight Pearls.
To read an excerpt of the book click here or to buy it click here.
Midnight Pearls was my first solo book. I wrote it while in the middle of writing the Wicked series with Nancy Holder. My original concept for the story was set in present day California at a marine animal park. A young adopted girl had an after school job there. She was also a member of a school swim team. She ends up discovering that she was born a mermaid, kidnapped, and changed into a human by the sea witch who has been waging war against her people. In the final version of the book Pearl lives in a fairy tale village with the fisherman who rescued her from the sea as a child and his wife. It was after I made this change that I came upon the idea of starting several of the chapters with a flash forward to events that happen at the end of the book. Between writing the Wicked books and this book I ended up picking up a particular style trait. Many of my books have some sort of header that goes with the chapter. For Wicked it's spells written as poems, for Crusade diary entries from the main character are interspersed with vampire propoganda poetry and excerpts from an ancient Hunter's Manual, for Kiss of Night it's Bible verses about blood.
When I have a book concept that's not working I often stop and think about Midnight Pearls and ask myself if there is something fundamental about the setting or the plot or one of the characters that I can change that will alleviate the problem. I've made a few adjustments to things because of this, but no book has changed so much from concept to publication as that book has. In fact, it seems that book is all about change. After all, the publisher keeps redesigning the cover and the version currently being sold is the third different cover for the book!
