The Bone Dragon Blog Tour

The Bone Dragon 

by Alexia Casale

Summary: Evie's shattered ribs have been a secret for the last four years. Now she has found the strength to tell her adoptive parents, and the physical traces of her past are fixed - the only remaining signs a scar on her side and a fragment of bone taken home from the hospital, which her uncle Ben helps her to carve into a dragon as a sign of her strength.

Soon this ivory talisman begins to come to life at night, offering wisdom and encouragement in roaming dreams of smoke and moonlight that come to feel ever more real.

As Evie grows stronger there remains one problem her new parents can't fix for her: a revenge that must be taken. And it seems that the Dragon is the one to take it.

I haven't got a copy of the book yet, but it sounds really bizarre and original so hopefully I'll get a chance to read it soon. Alexia has written up a guest post for us, about deciding the best time is to get feedback when you're writing a book.

I don’t want your opinion yet! 

It’s always difficult to decide when to get feedback. Some people say it’s never too early, but I don’t agree. For me, it’s really important not to have feedback too soon. This is one of the reasons I think that the approach a lot of university writing courses take is problematic: they assume that everyone will benefit from sharing their work-in-progress, but it’s just not true for everyone.

I find getting feedback too early in the process is both demoralising and frustrating. First drafts are allowed to be a bit rubbish; if you get feedback on one, you have to expect it to be less than fully encouraging.

I’m very good at seeing past what’s wrong with my work to what it will be when I’m finished, but I do it in a weird upside-down, back-to-front dyslexic way. Most people don’t approach text in the same way, so what I see as small flaws that I can easily sort out, they see as disaster. As a result, I often get very negative feedback when I show early drafts to people.

Take The Bone Dragon. When I wrote the first five pages, I showed it one of my trusted ‘first readers’ because I was so thrilled I just had to share it. I knew it was the best thing I’d ever written, but my first reader hated it, even though she loves the finished book. The experience taught me a valuable lesson and I barely talked about the project again until I had a reasonably advanced draft. When I next asked for feedback, it was both enthusiastic and helpful.

The trick is knowing when the problem is that your draft is a mess because you’re still in the early stages of developing it and when the book is doomed. If you’re writing rubbish, it’s probably best to know as soon as possible. Equally, if you’re writing something that will be good, even if it isn’t good yet, negative feedback at an early stage can kill your confidence.

It’s all about balance and timing: getting enough feedback, and listening to it, at the right time.

For me, the ‘right time’ depends on whether the feedback will prove useful or frustrating. If feedback tells me something I know already and am working to fix then I get very irritated with the whole process: something that happened quite a lot in relation to my PhD novel because of the requirement to submit work at least every six months. In supervisory meetings, my teeth were permanently clenched against the urge to shout ‘I know that! You don’t need to tell me! I’ll fix it if you just give me a chance!’

There’s no point in getting feedback that tells you what you already know unless you’re asking someone to give you advice on how to fix the problems you’ve already spotted.

One of my rules of thumb is to ask for feedback only when I feel I’ve accomplished everything I can by myself.

Initially, I show my work to a group of between three and six ‘first readers’ who I will tell me honestly (or at least relatively honestly) what they think. Writing groups are a great way to go if you trust the other members. In this instance, trust has two main aspects: you need to trust the other group members to be honest without being unkind, but you also need to trust that they’ll give you good advice. It’s also important to find a team of ‘first readers’ who are likely to have relatively representative views – and the ability to articulate them clearly.

Don’t be afraid to share your work online, but do consider doing it via a subscribers- or members-only group rather than an open forum. Always put a little copyright notice like this © Alexia Casale 2013 at the top and bottom. Anything you write is automatically copyright anyway (even personal letters are!), but it never hurts to remind people that this is the case. For scripts, consider registering your work with the Writer’s Guild of America. A good rule of the thumb is that if you post work online, someone may steal it to repost online, but rarely will they steal it to publish it for money.

The main thing to be wary of isn’t the possibility that someone might steal your work: the biggest danger lies in getting feedback from people who are only prepared to offer praise. Praise is very nice, but it won’t help you improve your writing.

‘Praise and only praise’ is great when you’ve just started showing people your work and don’t intend to pursue publication. If you are interested in getting published, then it’s a different kettle of fish: if you’re serious about publication, then the more criticism, the better. It can be emotionally draining but it’ll make all the difference to your writing.

It’s often a good idea to ask for feedback on specific points. People who aren’t used to giving feedback will find it helpful to know what type of input you want: often they’ll be more forthcoming if they know where to start. Pick between four and six things that you want the reader to focus on. Remember that you can always ask different people to give feedback on different points.

If you’re not used to getting feedback, and/or are terrified about what people will say, why not spell out what sort of feedback you’re willing to receive? If you find you can take more criticism than you thought, you can always push the reader to be more forthcoming. It’s better to limit things initially than shy away from seeking feedback at all.

Another thing to consider is how you pick people to approach for feedback. It might seem sensible to pick someone who is likely to enjoy your work, but feedback from someone who isn’t a natural ‘fit’ for the project can often be particularly insightful. Apart from anything else, it’ll give you an indication of how narrow your readership is likely to prove.

If you’re serious about developing your writing skills, critical feedback is vital. But remember that timing can make all the difference between feedback being helpful and counter-productive. Never submit to an agent or publisher without seeking feedback first, but do say no if friends, family or colleagues push you to show your work before you’re ready. Just be honest and explain that there’s no point having them point out errors you’re aware of: their feedback will be much more valuable when you’ve achieved everything you can by yourself and only outside input will help you move forwards.

You can read more about the book and Alexia on The Bone Dragon website. 

Later.

Drummer Girl Blog Tour & Contest

Drummer Girl 

by Bridget Tyler

Summary: It was supposed to be the summer of her life. Instead, 17-year-old Lucy finds her best friend Harper shot dead in an LA swimming pool. How did it come to this?

Lucy Gosling is the drummer in Crush, a rock band formed by five London schoolgirls that has just won the UK semi-final of an international talent contest. But when the band lands in Hollywood for the big final, things are not quite as they seem. The band's lead singer, Harper, has just one thing on her mind - using sex, drugs and rock and roll, not to mention Crush itself, to win back her bad-news ex-boyfriend. Lucy must decide whether she's playing to Harper's tune, or setting the rhythm for the rest of the band. 

I'm currently reading Drummer Girl (liking it so far), and I should have a review up within the next few days but until then, Bridget Tyler has written up a post for us about the importance of music when writing the story.

Anyway, over to Bridget:

I don’t think I really understood Lucy Gosling until the first time I sat down and tried to imagine how she really felt about drumming.  Sure, I knew Lucy was a teenage girl. I knew she had a big brother and a little sister and parents who loved her enough to be a tremendous pain in the neck. But who was she really? What did the world look like through her eyes? What did it sound like? What did it feel like?

For me, the answers to questions like these can only be found once I understand what it’s like to love the thing that my character loves most. For Lucy, that was playing her drums. Now, I’ve played music before. My mother is a piano teacher so I learned to play the piano when I was little. I mangled John William’s medleys on my flute with the best of them in middle school and I even took some voice lessons in high school.   I enjoyed it all, but I never loved making music.

And I never played the drums.

But I’m a writer, and imagining things I’ve never done is kind of my job, so I figured I could imagine what it was like to play the drums… and what it was like to love doing it. In order to do that, I had to do what I love most. I had to write.

I sat down with my laptop and started typing, and I stayed there for a long time. I wrote about Lucy’s siblings. I wrote about her parents. I wrote about the day she met her best friend and worst enemy, Harper McKenzie.  And that was when this passage came pouring out of my keyboard:

Lucy loved the drums.  She loved the pulsing snap that you could feel all the way up your arms while you played.  And the feeling you got, if you were really doing it properly, that it wasn't you playing at all, that you could look down on yourself and see this awesome, impossible dance of sticks and arms and symbols and think, "Christ, nobody can do that."  And then realize that YOU, in fact, can do that. 

Suddenly, Lucy Gosling was alive. All of the facts I’d accumulated about her suddenly added up to something, in that moment when I understood how she felt when she played her drums. Suddenly she was a real girl who laughed and cried and cursed her hair when it wouldn’t do what she wanted (which was approximately 99% of always, naturally). She idolized her brother, she loved to hate her atrocious little sister… she had a million different sorts of feelings about Trent Eisner, none of which she understood. She was a real girl with a real story.  A girl I was only able to find, once I knew why she played the drums.

I wish I could play the drums--I was ridiculously hopeless at it in school. But anyway, as part of the blog tour there's also a giveaway (UK only for this one, sorry), just fill out the form below if you'd like to enter to win some of this make-up:

Contest Closed

You can find the other stops on the blog tour over in the sidebar. 

Later.

This Love Cover Reveal!

This Love

By

Nazarea Andrews

Mel Stevens of The Illustrated Author created the cover art.

  

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She wants a summer job and a ride to a wedding.
He wants an assistant and a distraction from the mess his life has become.
They didn't know they needed each other.

Avery Emili needs two grand. Two grand and a plane ticket--her sister is counting on her to get to Jamaica for the wedding. But the semester is over, and tutoring college freshman and high school students has dried up until the fall.
Atticus Grimes needs help--the messy split with his wife left the twenty-eight year old professor scrambling to keep things together as the semester winds down. Now he's got a research grant he has to actually do research for and all he wants to do is drown himself in a tall bottle of bourbon.
When Avery sees his ad for an assistant, all she's thinking is a summer job. But as they spend time together, in the office and out, both of them begin to realize something is there. Something that can't happen--he's a professor and she's a student. And both of them have histories, pasts that won’t let go. Can two broken people pulled apart by expectations find a way to be whole?

Coming JUNE 2013

 Doesn't this sound fantastic? As soon as Nazarea emailed me, I knew I had to get my hands on this book. And because I'm super interested, I figured some of you probably would be as well.

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Add it to your to-read list on Goodreads!

About the Author:

Nazarea Andrews is an avid reader and tends to write the stories she wants to read. She loves chocolate and coffee almost as much as she loves books, but not quite as much as she loves her kids. She lives in south Georgia with her husband, daughters, and overgrown dog.

You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

So, now that YOU want to read the book too....

Enter to win an ARC of This Love

a Rafflecopter giveaway

--Julie 

Discussion (also, help?): LGBT Books

I think every reader has experienced--or will at some point--that frustration when you can't find the right book for you.

You read book after book but you just can't find that one book that, even if the story isn't exactly your story, still feels so...you. The character feels things that you have felt, they experience things that you have experienced--and when you find that book, it just clicks with you and it's kind of like that feeling you get when you meet someone and they just get you in a way that most other people don't.

When you read that book, it's like the author rummaged around in your head for a while then wrote down things you've felt that you couldn't find words for and you just have that moment of, "Yes, that's it. That's exactly how I feel."

Every reader deserves to have books like that in their life. So maybe you can help me find that book for someone.

On our book blog tumblr earlier, we got a message from someone who is trying to find That Book and since I couldn't think of one that fits what he is looking for, I decided to ask you guys if you can think of any recommendations.

Basically, he's looking for a book where the main character is gay. In his words, "A boy whose life doesn’t revolve around the fact that he’s gay, but yes, who just to happens to be gay." and you can find a more detailed version of what he's looking for on his tumblr in this post and this one.


What he's searching for? That's one of the main reasons I can't think of any books for him. I don't read much LGBT fiction, and it's not because I don't want to, it's because none of the books are what I'm looking for (closest that comes to mind is Will Grayson,Will Grayson by John Green by David Levithan).

So many YA LGBT books still come across as Issue Books. The ones that get shoved into the same category as teens dealing with eating disorders or self harm or that sort of thing, and they all focus on the Coming to Terms With Your Sexuality/Coming Out stage in the characters life.

And that's fine, that's great, and maybe some of them are wonderful. It is something that should be written about. But trying to find books that are written after that point, and the character is gay and they're not questioning it, they're not in denial, not dealing with the whole coming out thing and they're content with who they are as far as their sexuality and gender identity goes? Trying to find books like that is is like trying to find a needle in a haystack (at least for me).

There are teens out there who are struggling with their sexuality, and it's good that there is books out there that explore that, but shouldn't there also be more out there for the ones who aren't at that stage and just want a book that represents who they are now too? Or, even for the ones still struggling, shouldn't there be books out there that can show where they can be once they figure things out? 

If someone wants to read a LGBT romance, for example, then why can't it just be about two people falling in love; just a romance. Why does the whole falling in love thing have to seem like an afterthought with the fact that they're both male/both female stealing all the limelight?

I've also found that girl/girl seems to be easier to find than boy/boy, but maybe I'm just not searching hard enough.

I was trying to find books that have LGBT characters, and these are the ones I could find that seem to have a gay protagonist that doesn't sound like the focus is on coming out or all about sexuality related angst. But, I haven't read any of them so I don't know for sure if they're any good or like the summary makes them sound:

• Outtakes of a Walking Mistake by Anthony Paull (at a glance, the reviews look promising)
• Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

And that's all I got...there will be more out there, it's just a pain trying to finding them (I think I read over the synopses of about 30 books and only found those two that didn't include coming out, or struggling to come to terms with being gay, or mention of a gay guy dating a girl).

Anyway, it's 4:30am and I have not slept, but before I shut up, some questions for you (the first obviously being the most important one):

1. Can you recommend any LGBT books (preferably with a male main character) that are good and might be what this guy is looking for?

2. Have you read any of the books I listed? If yes, did you like them?

3. Just something I'm curious about: what do you think of the approach most YA books seem to take with the LGBT subject matter (i.e. putting a lot of focus on the issues, writing characters who are Gay Characters instead of characters who are gay)?

Later.

Book Jar

One of my most annoying flaws (and by that, I mean flaws that annoy me about myself--there's probably a multitude of flaws I have that annoy other people) is that I can be ridiculously indecisive.

I'll be in the mood to watch a movie, but I can't choose which one to watch. So I don't watch any.

Or be in the mood to write, so I'll wander through my Idea Graveyard folder and choose some novel outlines I want to work on...but I'll open up about 6 of them and scroll through what I've got to work with so far and then I'll still be sitting there an hour later not knowing what to choose. So I just procrastinate on tumblr or something instead and end up not writing anything at all.

And I do the exact same thing with books.

I find myself really wanting to read but not knowing what to read, and I stand in front of my shelves and there's just so many books to choose from that it's like...like 100 people trying to get through a doorway at the same time and they just get stuck in the doorway and none get through. The easy solution is for them to walk through it one-by-one but it's just not happening. It's a really ridiculous thing to do, it's not that difficult to choose a book and just read the damn thing, but fvdkjvbldkjbv. Sometimes, I do not make sense and this problem is an example of those times.

I've whined about being in a reading funk before, so I won't do that again, but this indecisiveness is always especially annoying when I'm in reading funk mode (like I am now).

And all this rambling is basically to say I'm going to try this book jar thing. A booktuber I'm subscribed to is doing this and it looked fun and like it could be a solution to my inability to ChooseADamnBook! So...yeah.

Basically, you get a jar and you fill it with pieces of paper, and on those pieces of paper you write down your TBR books and you use the jar to choose what book you're going to read next. 

I've made two jars, the first is a jar for sequels (for if I've read at least the first book in the series and own the next one/the rest of the series). If I own more than one sequel from the series, I just wrote down the series name for each book in the series I

own, that way I wouldn't pick out book 4 before I've read book 3 or something, I just pick out the series title and read whichever book is next for me.

The second jar is basically just everything else; it has everything from childrens to adult books (most are YA though) and it has a bunch of genres. Normally I'm a mood reader, so that should be interesting.

I haven't included every book I own, just the ones from my main TBR bookcase (I have another two; one has mostly classics on it, the other is books I've considered getting rid of/I'm not as interested in reading anymore but I will still give them a try at some point). I own a lot of e-books too, it would've taken me forever to write all those down so if I ever include those in this challenge, I probably won't make a jar, I'll just use a random number generator to choose or something.

I'll start by just choosing one sequel a month and two from the other jar. Ones for this month:

Sequel: Second Helpings by Megan McCafferty (Jessica Darling series #2)
Other: Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin and Remembrance by Michelle Madow

...This post has been way more rambling than necessary, sorry (another one of those annoying flaws I have that probably annoys other people as well as bugging the hell out of me).

Anyone else going to try this? Or have you done it before? And does anyone else have this same problem (where you want to read but don't know what to read, so you don't read anything)?

Later.