YA Holiday Survival

I love the holidays. I really do. But let's face it - this time of year can be stressful. There's so much to do! Plus, you're supposed to look joyful and triumphant while doing it. That's a big part of holiday stress, I think - living up to the expectation of what it's supposed to be.

So for today's post, let's share survival tips. What are some of your best strategies for getting through the holidays?

I'll list a few of mine to get us started:

1. Look for something you can do to brighten someone else's holiday.
Test me on it if you don't believe it works, but getting involved in some kind of service is the best way I know to forget about your own stress, plus it has the added benefit of helping someone and it makes you feel great in the process. It's even better if you do it anonymously.

2. Take control. If you have a family gathering looming and you dread the pushy, nosey questions some of your relatives love to dump on you each year, go proactive. Be prepared with topics to steer the conversation. If that doesn't work, have an escape plan in place!

3. READ! Curling up with a great book is another stress reliever. If you'd like book suggestions, we are discussing book gift ideas over on my blog this week and all of the suggestions so far sound fantastic. My TBR list is growing by the day!

So how about you? What are some of your holiday survival strategies?

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And the winner is...

Actually, before I mention the winner, I'd just like to say a big humungous THANK YOU to everyone who left comments at blogger, myspace and teen fiction cafe. You guys rock sooo much and you had so many great zombie survival tips. If only my poor heroine Mia Everett had half of this knowledge she would've saved herself a LOT of stress. Still, at least she will know what to do next time she is forced to confront the living dead (as will I!!!!!!!)

And now, the winner - drawn by random number generator(every author's favorite friend) is:

Khy

Thank you to everyone else who entered and don't forget to keep checking back in because there will be more prizes up for grabs closer to the release date not to mention a MASSIVE blog party with a whole heap of amazing authors (and a whole heap of books written by the before mentioned amazing authors!!!)

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Sweethearts giveaway results

Wow, you guys. Just...wow. Thank you. I especially loved what you had to say about not comparing yourselves to others, or to women in the media, because every single one of us has a genetically unique body (unless you are an identical twin!) and comparison is really just a dead-end street. On the other hand, I also appreciated you for pointing out that you don't just have to be defeatist about the genetic hand you're dealt---you can take good care of yourself, no matter what your size or shape, by eating well and getting enough sleep and reaping the many benefits of exercise and rejecting negative self- and other-talk.

I truly wish I could give everyone a copy because you all inspired me. Alas, I've only got two copies, and so...

My random pulled-out-of-the-hat winner is: Yan! Congratulations! (By the way, walking up and down hills is a great workout!)

And the very difficult decision of the second winner is Ruby, because her story is very similar to something that happened to me in 6th grade when I was just innocently walking down the hall to class, minding my own business, and this 8th grade boy I didn't even know looked me right in the eyes and said, "You're fat." And for some reason, it takes tremendous powers of the mind to get the unsolicited opinion of a random stranger out of my head 27 years later! I also think what Ruby says about the people you surround yourself with is important. If all your friends are constantly saying mean things about other people's appearance, you might want to think about how that's affecting your own views.

If Yan and Ruby could please email me your contact info - sarazarr at gmail.com - I will get those signed books in the mail next week.

Again, thanks EVERYONE, you are all winners to me!

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And yet more book winning: my latest contest!

I'm taking a short break from my revisions on my second novel, BALLADS OF SUBURBIA,to tell you how you can win an Advanced Review Copy of it, among other fabulous prizes.

I blogged about how over the moon I get when people tell me they were inspired by my book, I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE, and how I wanted to do some sort of fan art contest. Well, I've finally had the time to figure out details (for the most part, there are a couple of legalities I am waiting to hear back from the publisher about) so now I am happy to announce the Inspired By Contest!

There will be two categories for the Inspired By Contest: Fan Art and Soundtrack.

Fan Art Category:

Submit your songs, poems, drawings, paintings, photography, zines etc that are inspired by IWBYJR OR dress up as a character, film a scene from the book, make a She Laughs music video OR design a logo for a She Laughs band t-shirt. Basically anything creative that is inspired by the book will be creative.

You will need to submit your entries by email to stephanie at stephaniekuehnert dot com, which means that you will need to be able to send a photograph of your art project or in the case of songs or videos, you will need to send me a link to where I can hear/see the song/video like on YouTube or MySpace or whatever. Please also include a sentence or so about how the artistic endeavor was inspired by IWBYJR ie "This song is about a relationship like Emily and Johnny's" or "This is me dressing up like Emily did for her first show" or "This is a painting inspired by Louisa." Oh and yes, you can submit up to three entries as long as they are different types, ie. one song, one soundtrack, one She Laughs logo design.

Deadline is January 15th. This should give you time after the madness of the Holidays, but of course if I don't get enough entries or you guys don't think this is enough time, I'll push it back.

Judging will be done by my blog readers. I'll post a blog entry with all the photos and links and ask people to vote. Yeah, you can vote for your own or send your friends to vote for you, that's fine!

Grand Prize will be your choice of a 25$ online gift certificate to either DownloadPunk or Amazon or (if we have them) a She Laughs t-shirt PLUS a signed poster from my Metro reading with Irvine Welsh (signed by me, Irvine, and Bill Hillmann, pictured above) PLUS once I receive them (which may not be until spring), you will get a signed, advanced reader's copy of my next book Ballads of Suburbia!

Second Place will get a signed poster from my Metro reading with Irvine Welsh (signed by me, Irvine, and Bill Hillmann).

Three Runners Up will get signed coverflats of IWBYJR.

All Winners will have their work posted on or linked from my website.

And note that depending on the number of entries, I will try to do a little something for everyone who enters, like either put your stuff up on the website or send you a signed bookmark or something!

A note about the She Laughs logo design entries/making t-shirts: this is the thing I am waiting to get legal clearance on from the publisher. If we get legal clearance (which will probably involve me posting some legal mumbo jumbo and potentially having the winner sign something), I may like to use one or more of the She Laughs logos that is designed to actually sell shirts for charity via a Cafe Press store. If your design is chosen, regardless to how you place in the contest, you will receive a t-shirt with your design!

Soundtrack Category:

This is for those of you who like me, may not be musically or artistically inclined (though I could write a poem or dress up as a character and I'm willing to bet most of you could too) or who just LOVE making mix CDs.

Submit your list of up to 20 songs that would be on your personal IWBYJR soundtrack. Unless the song is super popular (ie. Nirvana' or the Beatles or Britney Spears or something), if you can give a link to where the song can be heard or a YouTube video or something that would be great. Even more awesome, do your soundtrack on Project Playlist. Send the list of songs or link to Project Playlist to stephanie at stephaniekuehnert dot com.

Deadline is January 15th.

Judging will be done by the blog readers and again, you can vote for your own or send your friends to vote for you, that's fine!

Grand Prize will be a copies of both of my soundtracks (I have one for IWBYJR and one for Ballads) PLUS once I receive them (which may not be until spring), you will get a signed, advanced reader's copy of my next book Ballads of Suburbia!

3 Runners Up will receive their choice of either my IWBYJR soundtrack or my Ballads soundtrack.

All Winners will have their soundtracks posted on my website. And depending on the number of entries, I may post all entries on my website.

Whew! That is a lot of info, but it's kinda a complicated contest. It's also the one I am most excited about running so I hope those of you who have read the book will enter, it should be really fun!

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More Winning of Signed Books: Sweethearts edition

The winning never stops here at the Teen Fiction Cafe, and just in time for the holidays! Now it's my turn, because I am celebrating two exciting publishing events. One, the Sweethearts paperback comes out on January 1, and, like every author I know, I'm excited about my books coming out in paperback. Why? Because paperbacks are pretty (with quotes from reviews that came out since the hardcover publication), they travel well, and because they're under $10 it means a whole new audience. Particularly: more actual teens! We all adore our adult fans and the libraries and schools who stock the books, and the teens who are able to buy in hardcover, but a $7.99 cover price kind of makes it accessible to a whole new group. Also, like the Story of a Girl paperback, the Sweethearts paperback includes a discussion guide. Bonus!

The other exciting event is the publication of the anthology Does This Book Make Me Look Fat? (coming out December 29) to which I contributed an essay detailing, among other things, how a doctor completely humiliated me when I was 16 and how I eventually learned to (mostly) make peace with and take care of my body. DTBMMLF? also includes essays and stories by many of your favorite YA authors, like Coe Booth, Megan McCafferty, and even some dudes, like Barry Lyga and Matt de la Pena. Now, if you've read Sweethearts, you know that the narrator, Jenna, has some body and eating issues, so the fact that these two releases coincide is kind of cool.

And, because of that theme, the way to win yourself a signed copy of the Sweethearts paperback is to leave a comment here telling me something that you do, something you've changed, something you've overcome, or something you've learned to do help keep your connection with your body & health strong and positive. Emphasis on the positive. (Like, "I make sure to only eat 175 calories a day" is not a good answer, because obviously that is not enough food to live on! "Every time I watch Gossip Girl I do self-talk that reminds me it's okay to not look like Jenny Humphrey" is better.) I wish I had a spare copy of DTBMMLF? to give away, but I don't. Instead, I'll give away two copies of the Sweethearts paperback.

I will pick one random winner from the commenters, and one winner for the comment that I think is especially inspiring (even though I know they will all be pretty awesome!). I'll do that on Friday, December 12, sometime after noon Eastern and post the results here. I'm really looking forward to your answers!

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Win a copy of Zombie Queen of Newbury High

OMG- there's only four months until ZOMBIE QUEEN OF NEWBURY HIGH hits the shelves and to celebrate this momentous occasion I'm going to give away my Very Last arc!

Yup, that's right, this is your only chance to get a sneak peek at what happens when Mia Everett decides to do a love spell to stop her prom date from dumping her, but instead she (accidently) releases a virus that turns her entire senior year into flesh-eating zombies who are determined to make Mia the first course in their new meat-only diet. Whoops. And now Mia's only chance of survival is if she and hottie zombie hunter, Chase Miller can find a cure before it hits the final stage. She suggests that no one wear white to prom, because things could get very messy.

Now, I love my heroine as much as the next author, but between you and me, I think Mia probably would've found it a lot easier if she'd had some sort of Zombie Survival plan. So, in order to give Mia a helping hand, and to prepare yourselves for if you should ever be in a similar situation, I want to hear everyone's best Zombie Survival Tips for what they would do if they were being attacked by the living dead.

Though, let me give you a gentle hint - don't say that you would lie there and play dead because it wouldn't work. Zombies might look stupid - what with all the crazy walking and the drooling - but they've got a serious sense of smell and they'd be pulling out the ketchup bottles and chewing on your arm before you even realized your mistake.

So, see, it's simple. All you need to do is leave me your best zombie survival tip and you can go in with a chance to win. I'm running this competition on my blog, myspace and Teen Fiction Cafe and you can leave an answer on any of them (or all of them if you REALLY want to!!!!) and I'll pick a winner on Sunday night. Easy peasy.

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And the winner is . . .

While I truly wish you could all win signed copies of EVERMORE, alas, there are only two in this particular giveaway. So after dropping all of the names into a Sex Pistols baseball cap (a Rock n- Read freebie!), I had my husband close his eyes, reach in, and pick two names . . . .

And the winners are . . . .

Wait for it . . .

Paradox & Rimasbookjournal

So, if you are either one of those people, please e-mail me at: alyson@alysonnoel.com and tell me where to send your signed copy (and who to make it out to!). And please note, these are coming straight from my box of author copies, which, usually arrive early-- usually being the key word here as the CRUEL SUMMER box arrived seriously late.

Anyway, congrats to Paradox & Rima-- and thanks to all the rest of you who entered!!!

Have a good day everyone!

Alyson

:-D

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The Immortals Series

It's promo week at the cafe and I almost missed my turn as I was in Las Vegas celebrating my b-day with my amazing husband-- Thanks babe you ROCK!!

And even though a b-day celebration is a sort of promo of sorts (I mean all that cake and champagne was kind of like a promo of moi) luckily, I made it back just in time to promote my new book.

Or rather, my new series of books.

Or even more specifically the first two books in my new series of books, EVERMORE (o2.03.09) and BLUE MOON (08.04.09)

Now, if  you've been to the cafe before, then you've probably already heard me mention my new IMMORTALS series, at least once.

Maybe twice.

But definitely no more than thrice.

Okay, probably more than thrice, but I digress.

Anyway, I'm very excited about this new series, partly because I'm the excitable type, and partly because it's been really fun to write, the research has been awesome, and it's a bit of a departure in that it's a paranormal about a psychic girl and a very mysterious boy--and yet not a HUGE departure in that the girl is 16 and lives in Laguna Beach. 

Also, during the writing of these books some very cool things have happened, EVERMORE received the 5 STAR GOLD AWARD from TeensReadToo, the first two books sold at auction in Germany, EVERMORE sold to Spain as one of their lead fall titles, and I've sold three more books in the series to St. Martin's Press (to be published in 2010)- making for a total of five! Oh, and early reader feedback has been great (and very much appreciated!)!

And since it constitutes a whole new addition to the Alyson Noel ouevre I asked the amazing Maddee over at Xuni do a little website makeover to include the new series and I think she did an amazing job!

So, in honor of all of my excitement, and in honor of YOU for reading this far, I'm giving away 2 signed copies (I'm talking hot off the press author copies!) of EVERMORE to two randomly selected commenters who visit my website, clicks on the EVERMORE cover, enters the portal, goes to the "Extras" page, picks a song from the playlist, then comes back here and posts the song in the comments section. (Not as involved as it sounds-- I promise!)

And all you have to do to start the journey toward winning is click HERE.

The small print starts here:  Contest closes at midnight, Laguna Beach time. Two winners will be chosen at random, and announced on Monday, December 8. Author copies usually arrive before the books hit the shelves (scheduled bookstore drop is on Feb 3, 2009) but please keep in mind that my CRUEL SUMMER copies didn't find their way to my doorstep until very late, and as these things are out of my hands, your patience is very much appreciated.

Oh, and speaking of . . .CRUEL SUMMER was nominated for the Best Books of 2008!!!

Click HERE to see the full list, and learn how to vote for your favorites!!

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Authors at the Party

Sometimes I get to see lots of other authors in one spot, and that is always kind of magical, like seeing a unicorn under a rainbow with a leprachaun. Or something.

Anyway, a night like that happened this week at the book party I co-hosted at Butter (a favorite Gossip Girl eatery) with Gamer Girl author Mari Mancusi, who rules. Here she is signing her book. Isn't she pretty in purple?



We were celebrating Gamer Girl (which has a purple-ish cover) and Violet in Private, so I wore purple tights, too, but I have no evidence of that. Sorry! Here (with me, left) were awesome authors Bennett Madison (The Lulu Dark mysteries) and Deborah Gregory (Cheetah Girls series and Catwalk).



And Mari and I got to rub elbows with Scott Westerfeld (Uglies) and Diana Peterfreund (Rampant). They came with fellow fabulous authors Justline Larbalestier (How to Ditch Your Fairy) and Maureen Johnson (Suite Scarlett).



Mari put games on the table, so here's Becky, Jeff and Dave getting into Hungry, Hungry Hippos.



Great crowd too--attendees from Vogue, Teen Vogue, ELLE, InStyle, Daily Candy, CNN and, of course, Mari's colleagues from Better TV. We also had socialites, publicists, a ton of great authors, and Dorchester and Penguin editor types.

What other authors were there? Glad you asked! Michael Northrop (Gentlemen), Liz Maverick (Wired) and Anisha Lakhani (Schooled). It was cool.

Oh, and we had signature chocolates that looked like they had gold in them. It was like magic!

Thanks to everyone who came and celebrated with us--too many awesome people to name. Also, thanks to Butter, and to Clarins and Lierac for the gift bag contributions. We had a blast!

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Books. Or: my love for author introductions of re-issued classics

[Edited to add: After I posted this, I worried that it wasn't teen-fictiony enough for TFC, but then I thought about how the separation between YA fiction/authors and "adult" fiction/authors is one of the things I don't love about the industry, and how fans of both overlap, and I like that overlap, and that as authors and readers we read and think widely, and admire widely, I hope!]

I’m going to start with a fangirly story about Richard Peck, but I promise that this post will eventually get to the topic at hand this week: books and reading. At the Utah Book Festival, I had the lucky chance to spend some quality time with the acclaimed and bemedaled Mr. Peck, and marvel at his career longevity and energy. At one point, he asked my husband and me about favorite movies. After we answered, we asked him about his favorite movie, and without hesitation, he said: Dodsworth. Now, I think of myself as pretty film literate, across genres and decades, but not only had I not seen this movie, I’d never even heard of it! How humiliating! I don’t like to not know things. It conflicts with my image of myself as the all-knower-of-things. Anyway, because I developed a great affection for Richard and wanted to prove myself worthy of his friendship, I of course ran right out and got hold of Dodsworth. It was great. In the long run, it’s mostly a movie about ideas, and I liked the ideas it explored and the way it explored them. But this post is not about movies, it’s about books!

So, Dodsworth the movie is based on Dodsworth the novel, by Sinclair Lewis. I checked the Kindle store to see if it was available, as a lot of classics are, on the cheap (like $5 and under for Kindle versions, much of the time). No sign of Dodsworth there, but I did find a bunch of other Sinclair Lewis books, including one of his most well-known, Main Street, in a Modern Library eBook Edition. I started reading it the other night and it includes an introduction by the author. I love author introductions! They tell you so much about who the author is and what kind of relationship he or she had with his work in the process of writing it, and later at the time of writing the intro. They tell you if the author has a sense of humor about life and work, or is a self-important blowhard. They also offer inspiration and understanding to authors who might feel uninspired or misunderstood. Lewis’s introduction made me immediately love him and feel inclined to love his work. Here are some quotables:

“To me (and I think to most writers) there is no conceivable subject so uninteresting as one’s own book, after you have finished the year of ditch-digging and bricklaying, read the proofs with the incessant irritation of realizing how much better you might have said this or that if you had had another year, then fretted over the reviews---equally over those in which you are hoisted to the elevation of world master, and those in which you are disclosed as a hypocritical illiterate.”

He started the book fifteen years before it was published. Originally it had a different protagonist. He threw out his original material and started over. About 30,000 words into the do-ver, he decided that he wasn’t up to it yet. (And writes, “Whether I was up to it in 1919 [the year it was published], either, I must leave to critics less prejudiced.”) He went off and wrote short stories for awhile and sold a serial to the Saturday Evening Post. That gave him enough money to take a year off and he put nose to the grindstone, “eight hours a day, seven days in most weeks, though a normal number of daily hours of creative writing is supposed to be about four…I never worked so hard, and never shall work so hard, again…unless Comes the Revolution and I am driven from writing to real work, like bricklaying or soldiering or being a nursemaid.”

Despite the fact that I sometimes see all the different versions of classics as just a cheap way for publishers to make money on expired copyrights, a good edition tells you stuff you might never get to know about a writer who died before we all had blogs. This edition also has commentaries from ten other authors, including E.M. Forster, Dorothy Parker, H.L. Mencken, and Sherwood Anderson. I’m not reading those yet, because I like to know a book myself, first.

Speaking of the book, I’m loving it. It’s about small town Midwestern America just after the turn of the century. The protagonist is a college grad from St. Paul, who marries a country doctor and reluctantly moves to one of the prairie towns that she so hates and fears. Here she is taking a walk on the first day in her new town:

"She stared with seriousness at every concrete crossing, every hitching-post, every rake for leaves; and to each house she devoted all her speculation. What would they come to mean? How would they look six months from now? Which of these people whom she passed, now mere arrangements of hair and clothes, would turn into intimates, loved or dreaded, different from all the other people in the world?"

And one last note about the Kindle itself as it relates to the books/reading topic. After owning mine for a month or so, I'm finding that I go to it for very specific things: reading manuscripts, reading one of those "through the bible in a year, for dummies and lazy people!" bibles, and finding cheap but good electronic classics. Often the versions at the library are either big heavy hardcover editions, or mass market paperbacks with tiny print and yellowed pages. Something about having a classic on the Kindle makes it feel accessible and new, and you're not thinking, "Damn, this is an old book!" as you read. Which is good for a reluctant reader like me.

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Book Vlog!

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Books: Let's Hear It For the Boys

Recently there's been a lot of talk about how the poor economy is having a negative impact on book sales. One area where agents say editors are still aggressively looking for new titles is novels for tweens and teens with male protagonists. To understand why this is so, one need only stroll through a bookstore to see how female-dominated most offerings are. Since the theme at TFC this week is Books, I thought I'd go through the list of books I've read thus far in 2008 to see which ones with male protagonists I could recommend. And here they are:

DEADLINE, by Chris Cruthcher. After being diagnosed with an incurable form of leukemia, 18-year-old Ben Wolf decides to forego treatment and keep his illness a secret, instead electing to pack an entire lifetime worth of living into his senior year.

GYM CANDY, by Carl Deuker. A high school football player resorts to steroids to amp up his game.

BOY TOY, by Barry Lyga. A then-and-now story about how the sexual relationship a boy has with his teacher at age 12 still affects everything in his life now that he's 18.

KNIGHTS OF THE HILL COUNTRY, by Tim Tharp. Think "Friday Night Lights" only in small-town Oklahoma, where sometimes football even ranks ahead of God and country.

GETTING THE GIRL, by Marcus Zusak. An earlier work from the best-selling author of "The Book Thief," set in Australia, about family dynamics and competition between brothers.

And since I'd be remiss if I made such a list and didn't give a shout-out to my own husband:

SOMETHING HAPPENED, by Greg Logsted, about a 13-year-old boy, still mourning the death of his father, who falls prey to the attentions of a hot new teacher; and ALIBI JUNIOR HIGH, forthcoming, also by Greg Logsted, about the globe-trotting son of a CIA agent, forced into hiding, who now faces the real challenge of his life: junior high.

Oh, and I just happen to be working on a new book myself with a male protagonist.

QUESTION OF THE DAY: WHAT BOOKS HAVE YOU READ WITH MALE PROTAGONISTS THAT YOU CAN RECOMMEND?

Be well. Don't forget to write.

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