Clare B. Dunkle
What's New in Clare Dunkle's Career
This page keeps you up to date on things that have changed
on my website. I also use it to keep you up to date on new blog
posts I've written or events I'll be attending.
FEBRUARY
In January, 2017, I finally decided to return to the world of publishing, after an absence of several years. And now, in February, I already have two manuscripts completed, revised, and with my agent. I've been gone for a long time, and that's been a good thing: my family has needed my time, and I've been glad to give them what they needed. But it's nice to be writing and creating again. I've updated my About the Author page to reflect some of these recent changes.
While I was away, I wasn't paying attention to much in the world of bookselling and publishing, so it was nice to be welcomed back with news that Elena Vanishing just got put on the 2017 American Library Association "Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults" list. I've updated the Elena Vanishing webpages to reflect that.
JULY
Yesterday, I submitted a fiction manuscript to my agent for the first time in eight years. It's not a YA novel, though. My grandchildren aren't ready for those yet. It's a chapter book written for a second-grader because that's what my granddaughter is. But my Hollow Kingdom readers will recognize the style because it's another world built from folk tales: in this case, the Hansel and Gretel story. I've changed the About the Author page to reflect this.
APRIL
My poor website! This is the first time in a year that it's been up to date. What happened?
When my two memoirs launched, Elena and I were very busy writing articles and doing interviews for other people's websites. This was quite an honor, but it also took up a lot of time, and our websites slipped to the back burner. And around the same time, my husband and I began to prepare for our move from Germany back to the States.
Now, he and I have done international moves before, but this move became very complicated. My husband had taken a job in San Francisco, and that isn't the easiest corner of the world in which to find reasonable pet-friendly housing. The fact that I had to do all the research on possible homes on the Internet nine hours ahead of my potential landlords didn't make the process any simpler.
Anyone who lives in the Bay area will tell you that living small is the key. Joe and I were living in a 3,500-square-foot house in Germany. We fell in love with a 660-square-foot apartment in Berkeley. Can you say garage sale? Craigslist, local papers, flea market booths--we used them all to shed excess belongings. By the time the movers came, we were ready. The kingsize bed departed our house, a free donation to the first lucky airman who called up, exactly one hour before the moving truck pulled into our driveway.
Still, things weren't complicated enough for the two of us. We simultaneously decided to have our retirement home built--in Georgia, on the other side of the continent from where we would be living. As I was doing my book launch tour, I stole a few days to go walk the property and pick out paint colors. then I flew back to Germany to clean out cabinets and sell more furniture. It was all a kind of madness, really.
August came. Joe and I woke at 4:30 am, stuffed our willing-but-worried kitty into a cat carrier, and the three of us waited by the curb in the predawn chill for the shuttle van that would take us to the airport. During a multi-day layover on our way to San Francisco, we inspected our house in Georgia and signed the mortgage papers. Our German friends had been fascinated that an American house could be built so quickly. They kept asking how long it would last. I think they thought it must be made out of styrofoam and cardboard and would likely fall over in the first strong breeze.
A few days later, we landed in San Francisco and walked into our little apartment at last. Our empty little apartment! None of our furniture would be there for weeks. Thanks to the kindness of dear friends, we soon had a mattress and a couple of camping chairs. Our own possessions were still floating around in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Piece by piece, those possessions came home. First came the furniture and boxes destined to wait in a storage unit near our new home in Georgia until Joe decides to retire. Then, a week or two later, the furniture and boxes for our California apartment arrived. Finally, a few of weeks after that, our car arrived... in Dallas, Texas. We flew out to pick it up and drove it home, visiting friends and family along the way.
Our move was finally over--in the middle of October. It had taken my undivided attention for almost six months.
Lots of things have claimed my attention since, and honestly, they've been more fun and less painful than thinking about the memoirs again. Elena and I have both enjoyed shaking free of those books for a while. We're glad they're out there, and we're grateful they're finding their readers, but we've been happy to let them go.
Still, one can't play hooky forever, so at long last, I've started work on the website again. Elena's and my websites are now mostly up to date, with numerous little changes here and there, and I will continue to tweak them over the next few days. Among other things, I've posted the first chapter of Hope and Other Luxuries to its Sample Chapters page.
APRIL, 2015
The book launch is only a month away, so this is a very busy time for me. I just completed an overhaul of Elena's and my websites to make them display properly on tablets or phones, and I just overhauled the blog as well. You can see these changes for yourself if you make your browser window as narrow as a phone. It isn't a dramatic shift, but it will hopefully help you readers have a better experience here. Once I finished that redesign, I wrote a blog post about it. You can read that blog post here.
One of the most important things I did during this website redesign was to incorporate Google Fonts into all my pages. Yes, I know, Google is on a mission to take over the digital world, but here's one great example of how that takeover is paying off.
Fonts are one of the elements that allow your documents or webpages to have their own style, like this or maybe like this or even like this fun little font here. But before Google Fonts, a web designer couldn't rely on all fonts being available to all users. Let's say I used a common Windows font like Calibri in my web design. That meant the Mac, Android, or Unix users wouldn't be able to see it, so their systems would substitute some other font for it that might not look remotely the same. Fonts back in the day were a hodgepodge.
But no longer. Thanks to Google Fonts, I can specify that the italics at the top of this page be in Old Standard TT, and no matter what device you use to look at them, that's how those italics will display. It's clean, beautiful, and incredibly helpful. All hail our benevolent digital overlords!
MARCH
I couldn't be more excited to announce that Elena and I have been invited to be guests on the Diane Rehm Show. The interview is scheduled for Wednesday, May 20th, from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm. I listened to Diane Rehm for years when we lived in the States on my local public radio station. This is a tremendous honor. I've posted the event on my appearances calendar page.
I just replaced all my regular webpages with responsive-design pages. What does this mean in English? It means that if you look at my webpages on a computer, almost everything looks the same. But if you look at them on a phone or a tablet, you should now see a friendly, easy-to-navigate display that is properly sized for your device.
The blog is not yet changed, so those pages still won't fit properly on a tablet or a phone. (Or at least, if they fit, the font will be tiny and hard to read.) I'll work on the blog next and hopefully change it over to responsive-design soon.
IF YOU ARE NOT SEEING MOBILE-FRIENDLY PAGES ON YOUR PHONE OR TABLET, PLEASE HIT THE REFRESH BUTTON ON YOUR BROWSER. (That's usually a little arrow chasing its tail.) IF THE PAGE STILL ISN'T DISPLAYING PROPERLY AFTER YOU HIT THE REFRESH BUTTON, PLEASE DELETE YOUR BROWSER CACHE. THEN GO TO MY WEBSITE AND TRY LOADING THAT PAGE AGAIN.
Why would you need to do this? Because your browser tries to help you out by storing parts of webpages on your local drive. This way, if you go to a site often or if you look at several pages on a site, the browser doesn't have to keep pulling in all of those files. It combines the files it has stored with the new files it brings in from the website, and that speeds up your browsing.
Ordinarily, this mix of files isn't a problem. But when my webpages change drastically, as they just have, your browser may be mixing old files with new files. That's why refreshing the page or clearing the cache can help: it forces your browser to bring in fresh new copies of all the files needed to view that webpage.
I've posted book jacket copy for the two memoirs on the Elena Vanishing book jacket page and on the book jacket page for Hope and Other Luxuries.
FEBRUARY
This last month has been a busy time for my webpages, but none of the changes are uploaded yet. I'm changing the entire site to a responsive design. That's a lot of pages! Currently, I'm about halfway through, so I hope to be finished in late March.
JANUARY
Interest in Elena Vanishing is rising, so I'm working on two new pages for her website. One is a page of photos. The other is a reader questions page. I've started it off with four questions we received from The Bookseller, which is England's version of Publishers Weekly. I'm also continuing to post tweets, Instagram messages, and Goodreads reviews about Elena Vanishing on Elena's What's New page.
DECEMBER
Events have rattled along faster than I could manage to post them here! Both Hope and Other Luxuries and Elena Vanishing have been picked up by Junior Library Guild for a book club edition, and Audible will be releasing audiobooks of both books. I've noted this on the Hope and Other Luxuries and Elena Vanishing index pages.
Beth Kephart posted a beautiful blog post about Elena Vanishing, which you can read here. Beth is a courageous memoirist herself; she has won awards and honors, and she teaches the genre to university students. She received the very first ARC I signed, and it couldn't have gone to a more wonderful writer or more compassionate soul. I've added a quotation from her blog to the Elena Vanishing What's New page.
I'm in the process of converting my website pages to a more legible mobile form. This may result in a minor difference in how certain pages look, but I think cell phone users will appreciate it.
SEPTEMBER
My daughter and I designed her website together, and I'm very proud of the work we put into it. From now on, it's going to be your go-to source for information about her memoir, Elena Vanishing.Review information, book jacket art, and background stories: all these things are over there. I'm stripping out all links that referred to these things on my website and pointing you to that information on hers. The only page left on my website referring to Elena Vanishing will serve as a jumping-off point to explore her website.
You can also go to Elena Dunkle's website find out where she will be appearing to promote this book. Since my daughter is in the country, she will be much more accessible for events and speaking engagements than I will be.
We have book covers for the two memoirs! I couldn't be more excited and pleased with them. Mine looks delicate and sober, which is an interesting change for me: it's my first adult-market book cover:
I've updated all the Hope and Other Luxuries pages to match this new look, including the reviews page, the jacket page, and the background notes page.
Elena's memoir book cover has that feeling of angst and threat I'm used to from my YA book covers, and I love it!
With its black, gray, and red, it already matches the design I put together for the Elena Vanishing pages. All I had to do was put it in its proper place on the Elena Vanishing jacket page. And I've also updated my books page with the new covers.
And we have a firm date for the release of the memoirs now! They'll be out in May, 2015. I've updated that information throughout the website as well.
AUGUST
Now that we have exact dates for the NCTE Annual Convention and ALAN Workshop appearances, I've updated my Author Appearances page.
My daughter Elena's memoir has a new title! At the last possible minute, after the cover had already been designed, we had to change the title of Vanishing Girl to avoid confusion with another book coming out next year, a book about--guess what?--a girl who vanishes. Oh, well. These things happen.
The new title is Elena Vanishing. I've changed the entire website to reflect that. The book cover should be final any day now, so I'll be sharing that with you soon.
MAY
At this point, the redesign of the website is complete. Just for fun, I've added a photo to each page. Joe has taken so many gorgeous photos over the years that I couldn't resist finding new uses for them. For instance, the photo above was one of our very first photos of my kitty, Tor, when we first got him as a six-week-old kitten. Unfortunately, you'll find out when you read the beginning of my new book, Hope and Other Luxuries, that Tor is no longer with us.
This will be a crazy couple of days for the website. It's been moved now to a new, faster server, and it's sporting the latest version of WordPress. But the DNS servers around the Internet will take a couple of days to update its location, and that means you visitors will be seeing a crazy patchwork of old and new pages for the next forty-eight hours as you get directed either to the new server or to the old. Please bear with me. It's going to be worth it!
We're at copyedit stage with the memoirs, so I've gone ahead and created their website sections. This will give you the first peek at sample chapters. Flap copy and book cover art isn't available yet, but I've posted family photographs in the meantime.
To recap: Elena Vanishing is my daughter Elena's memoir, which I cowrote with her. It describes the mindset of an adolescent with anorexia nervosa through every stage of that disorder, from its early days to recovery. Here is Elena Vanishing's book jacket page. Please note that until the DNS servers settle down, you may be directed to "page not found" pages because these are updated on the new server but not on the old one.
Hope and Other Luxuries is my memoir about helping my daughters through their psychological trauma and illnesses. Ginee Seo, who edited Elena Vanishing, asked me to write it because she feels it will help other parents who are in a similar situation. Here is Hope and Other Luxuries' book jacket page, here is its editions and reviews page, and here are my background notes about it. Again, for the next several days, these links may lead nowhere because these webpages aren't on the old server.
Because two new books have joined my old books on the index page, I've done a little pruning. For over a decade, The Hollow Kingdom has proudly led the parade of my books there. But now, in the interest of helping new readers find their way around, I've reversed the order on the index page and put the newest books at the top, and I've consolidated the trilogy into one entry at the bottom. I'm adding Book I, Book II, and Book III buttons on the menus of the trilogy books so that trilogy fans will still have an easy time getting around the website.
Please hit refresh on any page of this website that appears garbled. As the redesign goes on, old cached files still sometimes come up and interfere with the new display. Also, files that have not yet been changed over (that have their menu bar on the left instead of the right) have small display problems, but that should go away by the end of the week.
The manuscript of my adult memoir is still with my editor, so I'm working on a redesign of my website. In the two years since its last redesign, the way we look at websites had changed enormously. Now we have two or more tablets lying around, we read webpages on our phones, and there are so many browsers for so many platforms that it's very difficult to keep everything in working order. Also, my website was starting to look very dated.
Section by section, I'm changing the formatting and updating all the obsolete coding. This will take a couple of weeks to complete. In the meantime, you may notice that not all of the new formatting plays nicely with the old pages. The most annoying feature I've noticed is that visited links turn dark on the old sidebars. Rather than do a workaround, I'm just trying to update the pages quickly. I'd rather build strong code for the future than find a workaround to accommodate the old stuff.
APRIL
This poor website! I haven't touched it in an entire year. I've been working diligently on my memoir, which is now named Hope and Other Luxuries: A Mother's Life with a Daughter's Anorexia. This manuscript was so painful to write that I didn't allow myself to do anything that might distract me from it. That included reading new books, writing blog posts, or working on my website.
Those of you who are old readers may have noticed how much I've isolated myself this last year or two. Even though I've had good news to share, I haven't shared it. The memoirs take the blame for that. I've been living and reliving the darkest days my family ever went through. Not only that, but I've had to find ways to talk about those darkest days. And I've had to live with the knowledge that total strangers will be reading the most private details of my family life.
Quite simply, the process of writing these two memoirs was devastating. It was even more horrible than living through the events as they happened. I would write for an hour or two and then just find myself in bed in the dark with the door closed. I couldn't face the memories, and I couldn't face the thought of all those strangers reading the memories.
But now that it's almost over, I'm hopeful that the result will help people. All I can do, as an author, is tell the truth as I've experienced it and hope that truth helps others gain an understanding that they might not have had otherwise. Adolescent anorexia nervosa is so tremendously complicated that many people never come to grips with the truth. I was privileged to have a daughter willing to share that truth with me. If she was brave enough to reveal her experience to the world, the least I could was join her there.
Fortunately, the manuscript is now almost final. It's going through the very last few weeks of line edit work, and the Chronicle Books book designer is already hard at work on it. ARCs should be available in fall.
My daughter Elena's memoir, Vanishing Girl, is already final. It just went through line edit and is currently going through copyedit. Both books will be available in spring of 2015.
I have not yet created webpages for these two books. I won't do that until this summer or fall, when we have final versions of them both. But I have revamped my Books webpage to change the order of the books there. Instead of listing my books from first to last, it now reverses that order and lists newest books first.
OCTOBER
Those of you who visit this website may have wondered if I've fallen off the face of the earth this last year. No, I've been writing! I'm working very hard on my first adult manuscript, Elena Underwater. This is a memoir of my experiences helping my daughter survive anorexia, and it's designed to match my daughter Elena's memoir, Elena Vanishing, which Chronicle Books bought last July. The plan is to release both of our memoirs at the same time. The new manuscript is with my editor now; hopefully, I'll soon have information on when those books will be released. I don't know at this point if they are still on the schedule for fall, 2014. But I have updated the About the Author page to reflect the fact that this manuscript is now complete.
AUGUST
This has been a very busy half-year for me. I now live in Rodenbach (Rheinland-Pfalz), Germany, so I will no longer be doing school visits or author talks in the States. However, those of you in the Ramstein or Kaiserslautern areas may wish to contact me for a visit. I've updated the About the Author and Author Visits pages about this and changed my address on the Request a Bookplate page.
Those of you who have written to me this last year, please accept my sincere apologies. I haven't been able to get to my Stateside mail for much of the time, and I fell behind on my email as well. Now that the move is over, I should have more time for reader mail, so please send or resend. I loved getting your letters, and I wish I could have told you so.
Since I'm back in Germany, I'd like to start the blog up again. But right now, not only are Ginee Seo and I working on my new memoir and fine-tuning the draft of Elena's memoir, but I'm also writing a YA fantasy novel that's been sold to Reka Simonsen at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. So I just don't have time for the blog right now. I'll add blog posts as I can.
JULY
I'm very pleased to announce the sale of Elena's and my memoir, Elena Vanishing, to Ginee Seo at Chronicle Books in San Francisco, and I've agreed to write a memoir to tell Elena's story from my perspective for Ginee Seo and Lorena Jones at Chronicle Books as well. Both books will come out simultaneously in the fall of 2014, one on the teen list and one on the adult list. I've added this information to the About the Author page.
JANUARY
Dear friend, if you're a returning visitor, please click the circling arrow button to refresh the webpage you're viewing on my website. This month, every webpage has changed not once but several times. You may have to click the refresh button twice.
My statistics are telling me that visitors are looking for webpages or parts of webpages that have been gone from this site for three years! If something looks strange, please refresh your screen. Better yet, go into your browser and click the setting to dump your cache files. If you're seeing three-year-old pages on my site, then your browser is showing you three-year-old webpages everywhere you go. That can't make browsing the web a fun experience.
Over the weekend, I completed a project to make the fonts on my pages display more consistently across the Windows, Apple, and Linux platforms, and cooperate better with tablets too. Some of you will see a much nicer looking website now--but you'll probably have to refresh the browser view a couple of times to get the new fonts to come in properly.
The project to update my webpages for tablet viewing is now complete. I'm very pleased about this! Now even the Trilogy Treasure Hunt scales properly and no longer provides a garbled view on a tablet or phone. If you're having trouble displaying a page, you may need to refresh your browser not once but twice. Beyond that, if something on the site looks odd, please drop me a note at claredunkle at gmail.com (or you can use my webform).
All seven of my published books are now available as ebooks. You can find them for sale for your Kindle or NOOK on Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.com. I'm very pleased about this because I myself hate to wait more than a minute to start reading a new book, and it pleases me to know that my readers won't have to wait to read mine. So I've added that information to the Books page and added a Kindle edition "buy" link to the Book Jacket page for each of my titles.
Over the last month, I've made numerous changes to my webpages to optimize them for tablet browsing. This project is almost complete, but there are still four or five pages to change. I've also added the language code to each page so that my foreign readers can easily get to a language translation option with plugins like Google Translate. I've put my gmail address on the Contact pages, altered the banner across the top of each page, and made picky little font changes to help the pages look good on Apple devices as well as on Windows and Android devices. Why have I done all this tinkering? Well, I'm living in a little furnished apartment over here in Germany, with no dog to walk or house to clean. So I've been cleaning my website instead.
NOVEMBER
The project to add "My Blog" to the top of every web page is now complete! It appears in the "starry night" banner that stretches across the top of each page. Take a look as you browse my site, and if you don't see "My Blog" as the second choice in the banner on each page, please click the refresh button in your browser (the arrow chasing its tail). That will bring the new version of the page to your browser.
I'm inordinately proud of the fact that all the images on my website are now scalable to make my website display neatly on a tablet or cell phone. Only a handful of pages remain to be optimized for tablet viewing. (The Trilogy Treasure Hunt pages are the main ones for me to tackle now.)
As I've been doing webpage maintenance, I've started deleting the images that aren't used anymore. These are images I dropped from my webpages a full three years ago. Still, I'm discovering that some of you are still looking at ancient versions of my pages, and that means you're seeing broken image icons now. Please do me a favor: when you look at one of my webpages, please hit the button on your web browser that shows an arrow chasing its tail (the refresh button). This will make your web browser download a fresh copy of the page. You might be surprised at what you see.
The House of Dead Maids appears on this year's Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books Guide Book to Gift Books. I'm honored to be in excellent company on this list, and if you're looking for Christmas or Hannukkah ideas, this is a great place to start. I've added the link to The House of Dead Maids reviews & editions page.
The work to change over the website to integrate my blog into the banners at the tops of my webpages is taking its sweet time. That's all right: it gives me something to do when I'm procrastinating. I can't explain why I find webpage construction so absorbing, but it's something I love to do.
I'm still living in Germany temporarily, and my blog about life in Germany is in full swing. I post six times a week: three posts about interesting German words I've encountered and three longer posts with photographs about subjects that catch my fancy. You can read new posts by clicking on the "My Blog" link at the top of the page. Or, if you have a favorite blog reader, you can subscribe by going to my blog page and pointing your reader to the "feed" version (available under the orange "feed" button at the right side of each blog page. And of course, you can also like its Facebook page if you'd prefer hearing about updates that way.
OCTOBER
The House of Dead Maids is now out in paperback from Square Fish! Just in time for Halloween. I've added this information to The House of Dead Maids reviews & editions page.
SEPTEMBER
I've continued work on the blog I started last week about life in Europe. Now, rather than checking back here, you Facebook users out there can "like" its Facebook page in order to bring information about new blog posts into your Facebook news feed. And, for you blog subscribers out there, I've set up a newsfeed link also, under the orange "feed" icon on the right side of each blog page.
I'm also adding "My Blog" to the banner menu across the tops of all my webpages, but that's slow work. So, at the moment, you'll find that some sections have their "My Blog" link and some still don't.
AUGUST
This has been a quiet summer for the website but a busy summer for me. I'm now in Germany for several months, and I've started a blog on the website about life for an American in Europe. You can visit my blog here. I've also had to shut down author visits and signings for the foreseeable future, so I've noted that on the signings page.
APRIL
Only today did I nail down my signing times for the Texas Library Association conference—which starts today! Better late than never. I will be signing for Overlooked Books, the wonderful Texas bookselling company run by the equally wonderful Pat Anderson. Overlooked Books specializes in books about Texas, Texan authors, and hard-to-find biligual books. I'll be there on Wednesday from 12:30 to 2:00, signing books, and on Friday from 10:15 to 12:00.
FEBRUARY
By These Ten Bones is coming
out in paperback this month. I'm very fond of this book, and
I couldn't be happier that it will have a chance at a wider
readership now. I'm going on a blog tour to promote the paperback
release. Here are the dates of the tour:
Feb-14 MacKids
Feb-15 The Book Faery
Feb-16 Bookworming in the 21st Century
Feb-17 The Compulsive Reader
Feb-18 The Hate-Mongering Tart (Review)
Feb-21 TheNeverending Shelf
Feb-23 Tales of the Ravenous Reader
Feb-24 Tempting Persephone
Feb-25 WORD for Teens
Feb-26 In Bed with Books
Feb-28 Mundie Moms
Mar-1 The Hate-Mongering Tart
Mar-2 Rebecca's Book Blog
DECEMBER
I added another question to The House of Dead Maids reader questions page this morning. It had showed up in Yahoo!Answers last week. I also added a note about the Square Fish paperback edition, which is coming in September 2011, and the changed date for the Recorded Books audio release, which has moved to January, to The House of Dead Maids reviews & editions page.
Another 5Q from VOYA! That makes me very happy. That's three 5Q ratings out of seven books—not bad at all!
The VOYA review for The House of Dead Maids is out, and it's very favorable. I've posted an excerpt on The House of Dead Maids reviews & editions page. I don't yet know the Q/P rating, but I'll post it as soon as I do.
NOVEMBER
I'm very pleased that The House of Dead Maids has been nominated to the ALA "Best Fiction for Young Adults" list. (This was previously known as the BBYA or "Best Books for Young Adults" list.) I've noted this nomination on The House of Dead Maids jacket page and reviews & editions page.
Now that I'm starting to get questions about The House of Dead Maids, I've added a reader questions page to that section of the website. Also, a new blog entry out there in Internet land has prompted me to add a new criticism and answer to my criticisms of The House of Dead Maids page.
Bryce Milligan, book reviewer of the San Antonio Express-News, has given The House of Dead Maids a strongly worded positive review. Needless to say, I've wasted no time adding it to that book's front page and reviews & editions page. And, since the blog tour is now finished, I've moved the list of blog sites to the bottom of the reviews & editions page and the background notes page and added brief descriptions of each of the blog posts. I've also added the list of blog sites to the author interviews page.
OCTOBER
There's a lovely article out in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that reviews three classic Halloween reads: Bram Stoker's Dracula, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House—and The House of Dead Maids! I've added an excerpt from it to The House of Dead Maids reviews & editions page.
Unfortunately, I have had to raise my author visit rates. Because of the activity associated with the new book, I haven't had as much time as I would like for my new manuscript, and this helps to protect my writing time. The new fees are still quite competitive, though. You can find them at the visits & signings main page, along with my current schedule.
School Library Journal's review is out, and it's another good one. Unfortunately, spoilers abound so thickly in it that I could pull out only one phrase to quote without ruining the surprises of the book! I've added that excerpt to The House of Dead Maids reviews & editions page.
I'm recovering from a cold and poking around the website, so I just reworked the very-out-of-date author interview page to bring it up to date.
What a wonderful day! Brontëblog has just posted a fabulous review of The House of Dead Maids. I put into the book many tiny details that only a Brontë scholar would notice. (Other readers respond to those details unconsciously.) And I've been waiting for the day when such a scholar would come along and say, "Look at this tiny detail—it adds so much to the book!" That day has arrived at last. In a true scholarly review (with seven substantive footnotes, no less), Brontëblog has called attention to a number of the details that—to my mind, at least—make this book much more than a simple work of YA fiction. To have earned the respect and praise of such a knowledgeable, careful, and insightful reader is truly a dream come true.
This review and The Horn Book's star have arrived on the same day. Only one other day in my publishing career compares to this one: the day I won the Mythopoeic Award for The Hollow Kingdom. But this day is even sweeter than that. I worked harder for it! Needless to say, I put excerpts from the review on The House of Dead Maids front page and editions page.
Did I say last month had been a banner month? Nope, it's this month that earns that title. The Horn Book just starred The House of Dead Maids, calling it a "worthy companion to its classic literary inspiration." It doesn't get any better than that! I've added the quote to The House of Dead Maids front page and its editions page, and also had it painted on my living room wall. Well, no, not actually—but I'm thinking about it!
SEPTEMBER
This has been a banner month so far. To add to the excitement, I received a jpeg of the new cover for By These Ten Bones that will appear on the Square Fish paperback edition coming out in February, 2011. I can't wait! I love that book. I've added the cover to that book's front page and edition page, as well as to my books page. And the blog tour is continuing to garner attention for The House of Dead Maids. I've added the link to my favorite review of this book (and possibly favorite review of all time) to the front page, right under the blog tour schedule, and to the editions page. (Look for 'Tabitha' at Black Gate.)
At the request of Publishers Weekly, which is featuring my blog tour in their e-newsletter, Children's Bookshelf, I updated my publicity photo, and I've added it to the About the Author front page. We had a lot of fun taking these photos, so I've gone ahead and offered several different publicity shots to those who might need them for events or webpages. You can find my author publicity photos page from any page in the About the Author section of my website by following the link below the photo on the purple menu bar.
The book has launched, and the blog tour has begun. It's lovely to see the Internet attention The House of Dead Maids is getting! Booklist and the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books have also done very nice reviews for the book, so I've added excerpts from them to The House of Dead Maids jacket page and editions page.
AUGUST
I'm going on a blog tour to talk about The House of Dead Maids:
September 15—MacKids blog
September 20—In Bed With Books
September 21—The Compulsive Reader
September 22—Teenreads.com blog
September 23—The Book Butterfly
September 24—Carrie's YA Bookshelf
September 27—The Neverending Shelf
September 28—The Book Faery
September 29—Bookworming in the 21st Century
September 30—YA Books Central
October 1—Rebecca's Book Blog
October 4—Babbling Flow
October 5—Steph Su Reads
October 6—BrontëBlog
October 7—Mundie Moms
October 9—Jenn's Bookshelves
October 11—The Spectacle
October 12—Darkly Reading
October 13—Adventures in Children's Publishing
October 14—Sonderbooks Blog
October 15—Tor.com (delayed)
October 18—ScFiGuy
October 26—WORD for Teens
October 29—Cynsations
So I've added this information to The House of Dead Maids front page.