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Book Reviews of 3 Lucky 13 ARCs

May 5, 2013 | , , | 6 Comments

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One of the fun things about being a member of the Lucky 13s is I get to read some of the ARCs of the Lucky 13ers. Each author sends their ARC (advanced reader copy) in the mail to the first person on a list. That person reads it, signs it and then passes it onto the next person.

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Think of it as a yearbook for authors!

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I thought it might be fun to do a vlog on my experience of three of these ARCs and share it with you. The books I read for this video are: IN THE SHADOWS OF BLACKBIRDS by Cat Winters, THE MADMAN’S DAUGHTER by Megan Shepherd, & INK by Amanda Sun.

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If you think this is something you’d like to see more of, let me know and I’ll continue videoing my experiences. Since my book was bumped to 2014, I’m also part of the OneFour KidLit group and I’m thinking of doing videos on some of those books too.

 

Have you read any of these books yet? If not which book are you looking forward to the most to read?

What Inspired GILDED

Apr 22, 2013 | | 6 Comments

First I’d like to announce the winner of ORIGIN by Jessica Khoury. Thank you to everyone who stopped by and entered!

The winner is:

Anna Staniszewski!

Please email me at christina at christinafarley dot com.

Over at the OneFour KidLit YouTube channel, we’ve been talking about what inspired us to write our books. I chatted about what inspired me to write GILDED. You can watch it here below:

What inspires you and your writing?

UCF Book Festival

Apr 15, 2013 | , , , , | 35 Comments

 The UCF Arena

This past Saturday I attended the UCF Book Festival. It was such a fun experience, but then I suppose any event that celebrates books is fun. There were heaps of activities and handouts for kids. Unfortunately my boys had soccer games so they weren’t able to come this year.

The arena was filled with venders. In the children’s section, I met Suzie Caffery & Diahn Escue, authors of THE MANGROVE TREE. It’s a top to bottom book and I had to get myself a copy because I knew I could use it in my classroom.

Mangrove Tree

I was also able to catch Alan Katz and get his book, RICKY VARGAS #1, autographed. Later he was at the children’s corner for a read aloud.

Alan Katz

When I walked into the UCF arena, I must have missed the people handing out programs because it I didn’t get the brochure until later and therefore missed the YA panel. But I did make it in time for the dystopia panel, which had Jessica Khoury, author of ORIGIN, on it. They discussed the make-up of a dystopian society and what it is about dystopian themes that resonates with readers. Jessica’s tip to the audience was to “Write hot. Edit cold.”

Panel

Way up in the nose-bleed section of the arena, Jessica chatted with a group of middle graders and teens about her book and read us the first few pages.

President of the Whole 5th Grade

While there, Sherri Winston, author of THE PRESIDENT OF THE WHOLE 5TH GRADE, showed up next. My boys loved her book (and so do I!) so I had to get a picture with her.

Sherri and myself

Jessica signed a copy of ORIGIN for me to give away to you guys, my readers! This book is AWESOME guys. I love, love, loved ORIGIN. So if you haven’t read it, you need to comment below to enter a chance to win it. Or just buy it! This autographed copy is only open to US residents. Sorry!

Jessica Khoury

Have you been to any book festivals that you love?

Finding Success

Apr 4, 2013 | , , | 9 Comments

 What makes us successful in life and how do we achieve the dreams we wish to acquire? Here are some thoughts I had:

Vision Road Sign with dramatic blue sky and clouds.

1. Visualize what you want and then make a plan of action on how to achieve it.

Often we have this vison of what we want for our careers, but I think it’s important to sit down and really determine how to make those dreams into a reality. Create steps toward achieving that goal and build a system to make that happen.

Success and Failure Road Sign with dramatic clouds and sky.

 

2. Face your fears and meet them head on

One of my friends gave me a plaque that says, “If you couldn’t fail, what would you do?” I have that sitting on my mirror and I look at it every morning before I go to work. To go into a project or start something new without that fear of failure hanging over my shoulder is a freeing feeling.

You’re going to face obstacles along the way in your career. People who fail you, things that don’t come out as well as you hoped, or life falls apart around your career. Staying focused and readjusting your needs are key. But more than anything, remember the people around you: your family and friends. Those are the people who will be with you whether you’re a success or failure.

3. Be PROACTIVE not REACTIVE 

A successful person doesn’t wait for things to come to them, they make them happen. 

Innovation Road Sign with dramatic clouds and sky.

4. Do What You Love

As a writer, I think this is so true. When we write what we love, our heart and soul pour into the pages. My agent and I were talking about what I should write next and he reminded me once again, that it’s important to know the market, but I needed to write the project that I was passionate about.

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5. Work Hard

There is no easy path to writing a great novel. It takes sitting down and spending hours and hours with your butt in the chair. Beautiful writing and great storytelling take time and mutliple revisions. It requires looking at a story from mutlipe points of view and spending time with the characters in your world.

Being successful is hard work, it takes determination and the will to overcome impossible tasks. Are you ready to be successful?

 

Inspiring Quotes:

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Thomas Edisonsuccess

 “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill

“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” Albert Einstein

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing. ” Walt Disney

“In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure. ” Bill Crosby

Links of Interest:

The 7 Habits of Highly effective writers

The 7 Habits of Highly Successful Authors

Traveling Sparks Inspiration

Mar 27, 2013 | , , , | 8 Comments

It’s spring break for me! I’ve been very busy sleeping, reading and eating lots of chocolate. That’s what spring breaks are for, right? Okay so I’ve also been putting my hours in at Disney (it’s my secret job) and writing, too. But overall, just having lots of fun.

One of my favorite things to do during my breaks from school is traveling. Over on the OneFours, a debut group of 2014 kidlit authors, I talk about my inspirations for writing GILDED and if you read that post, you’ll see that travel has been a big part of my life and inspired nearly everything I write.

The thing about traveling is it sparks our brains. It helps us look at the world in different ways and gives us a new perspective on the world. After living overseas for a decade and traveling to numerous countries, I know my world-view is completely different. And with each journey, there is an adventure. You just have to look for it.

As I was revising GILDED last month, it brought back so many memories for me of things I did in Korea. It’s kind of crazy to think that nearly every scene in GILDED was inspired from a real life event (added in with my crazy, wild imagination).

Here’s a vlog I did while in the airport in Atlanta about how to Overcome Writer’s Block through traveling:

A Worthy Cause- Providing Medicine to TB Patients in N. Korea

Mar 21, 2013 | , , | 2 Comments

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I am so pleased to announce that a portion of all my earnings for GILDED will be donated to the Dongdaewon project. The last school I taught at, and the one which also inspired so many events in GILDED, Seoul Foreign School, raises money every year in a Unity in Action cause. The funds raised allow for the Eugene Bell Foundation to buy medicine for TB patients in North Korea.

While I taught at SFS, I was able to help raise money and be a part of the events. Now that GILDED will be coming out with Skyscape, I have the means to make an even bigger difference by giving a portion of my profits to this cause. There was something so thrilling about writing that check and mailing it off to Seoul.

EunJoo April 11

I’m hoping to bring more news to you as the years progress about the benefits of the Unity in Action cause. For now, I encourage you to visit the blog here that goes into more details in the process.

Note: all pictures were taken from Unity in Action

 

Mini Book Trailer

Mar 13, 2013 | , , , , | 6 Comments

Today over at the MiGs,  I have a post with ideas of what to do after your book deal is announced. This is part II of a series. Check it out here.

Lately I’ve been pretty busy working on revisions that my agent gave me on my latest book. I’ve also been researching a new shiny idea for a book. It involves interviewing my relatives and watching old movies. The project is daunting, but that’s the best kind of project. The one you’re not sure if your smart enough or if you have the ability to write it. I love challenges!

And, I’ve been playing around with videos lately and made this mini book trailer for GILDED. I’m planning on hiring someone else to do a much fancier one when GILDED’s release draws closer, but this was fun to make for now.

Enjoy!

 

Interviewing 9 Florida Authors

Mar 9, 2013 | , , , , , | 2 Comments

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Last weekend, I got to attend a stop on the Sunshine Tour at the bookstore down the street from my school. There I met 9 Florida authors, many good friends of mine, as well as hang out with lots of other close writing friends including Amy Parker, author of upcoming GATED, Larissa Hardesty and Tara Gallina.

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Vivi and I

Vivi Barnes and I are both a part of the OneFour KidLit debut authors so we got together and interviewed the 9 authors.

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Kristen Simmons, Anna Banks, and I

Some of the questions Vivi and I asked:

  • What is your piece of advice for writing a series?
  • How does your love for painting and photography work its way into your writing?
  • How do you balance agenting and writing each day?
  • What advice do you have for writing books with duel points of view?

Heather Birch

Heather Burch and I

Check out this video to see it all in action!

 The authors were very generous and offered stacks of swag and autographed books to giveaway. If you go to the OneFour YouTube site, and comment, you can win autographed books, posters, and bookmarks.

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Chatting with Leslie Stella, author of PERMANENT RECORD

Mar 5, 2013 | , , , | 4 Comments

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I’m thrilled to have Leslie Stella, author of PERMANENT RECORD, here on my blog. I got a chance to read a sneak-peek of PERMANENT RECORD on my Kindle and fell in love with not only the story, but the characters, which became alive and real for me by the time I finished the book.

Here’s a blurb of the book:

Being yourself can be such a bad idea. For sixteen-year-old Badi Hessamizadeh, life is a series of humiliations. After withdrawing from public school under mysterious circumstances, Badi enters Magnificat Academy. To make things “easier,” his dad has even given him a new name: Bud Hess. Grappling with his Iranian-American identity, clinical depression, bullying, and a barely bottled rage, Bud is an outcast who copes by resorting to small revenges and covert acts of defiance, but the pressures of his home life, plummeting grades, and the unrequited affection of his new friend, Nikki, prime him for a more dangerous revolution. Strange letters to the editor begin to appear in Magnificat’s newspaper, hinting that some tragedy will befall the school. Suspicion falls on Bud, and he and Nikki struggle to uncover the real culprit and clear Bud’s name. Permanent Record explodes with dark humor, emotional depth, and a powerful look at the ways the bullied fight back.
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Now to my questions for Stella:

1) What inspired you to write PERMANENT RECORD?

The escalating amount of school violence in our country, especially since Columbine, is horrifying. You see the faces of these killers all over the news with little to explain how they got there. I couldn’t stop thinking about it: how did they get to that point? Bullying, mental illness, lack of love, lack of family?  I wanted to explore several themes that don’t fit neatly into talk-show soundbites or the ticker on news programs: 1) Bullying, and the fine line between standing up for yourself and taking revenge, 2) the cyclical effect of bullying and school violence, and how they feed off each other, and 3) the perpetrators themselves, and the idea that someone who fires back at those who have hurt him may not in fact be a monster, but a wounded human being.

As a teacher, my heart breaks for those who have these kinds of needs and I love how you have shown us through PERMANENT RECORD that each person is real and has needs.

2) I think one of my favorite components of PERMANENT RECORD is Bud. He’s such a rich, complex and utterly original character. What instigated you to develop such an individual?

I wanted to see a put-upon, trashed-by-life kid struggle against his darker urges, someone who desperately tries to be a good guy despite having, as Bud puts it, “a brain that misfires.” He grew from what began as a caricature in an earlier novel of mine, which I cannibalized to write PERMANENT RECORD. Even in that early, rough form, he had that very appealing quality (to me, anyway) of struggle: a good person who does bad things, a bad person who does good things. It also helped that we are alike in some ways, having both grown up disadvantaged by that one-two punch of being weird and shy. We also have common interests in Dungeons & Dragons, botany, and minor explosives.

3) I also love how you don’t shy away from tough issues that teens face in schools these days such as suicide, hazing, and racial discrimination. What instigated you to bring these issues into the book?

As you said, these are real issues that real teens face. I’m not making this stuff up for the sake of a story. I realize not everyone has these same experiences, but for God sake, we’re human beings, and I hope we can empathize with what other people go through. For example, I was never bullied to the point that Bud was, but I received my share of suffering at the behest of my classmates. Crippling introversion and being known for being strange doesn’t make for an easy adolescence, but on the other hand I didn’t have to deal with a physical or mental issue that would call up daily shitstorms of abuse. But there are people—teenagers; children—who have those issues, and who do endure that kind of daily abuse.

4) What was the most difficult part of writing PERMANENT RECORD?

The most difficult part was writing the scenes where Bud treads that line between standing up for himself and revenge. I had to throw out or rewrite a lot of scenes where he reacted too strongly, did things that were ultimately cruel and out of character for him. Bud is definitely a hero—a flawed one, but a hero. I had to keep that complexity in his characterization.

5) If you could have your readers come away with at least one theme from PERMANENT RECORD, what would it be?

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Bud is powerfully moved by the book THE CHOCOLATE WAR by Robert Cormier, which he describes as a realistic portrayal of human cruelty and conformity. Its school setting is an ominous portent for life after high school, for some of us. So I would say, if you haven’t read THE CHOCOLATE WAR by the time you’ve turned 25, there may be something seriously wrong with you.

And here are some quickies:

1. Favorite type of chocolate: Nothing sold as a fundraiser by any organization.

2. #1 country you’d like to visit: I have a pathological fear of travel; even this question is sending me into an anxiety attack.

3. Favorite mode of transportation: Feet

4. Preferred writing method: (i.e.) computer, pen, pencil: Laptop in the silence of my local library’s quiet-study room.

Stalk Leslie on: Twitter Website

Thank you so much for coming by and chatting Leslie!

Interviewing Anna Staniszewski

Mar 4, 2013 | , , | 6 Comments

My Epic Fairy Tale Fail Final Cover RGB

I am excited to have Anna Staniszewski here on my blog to celebrate the release of her latest middle grade, My Epic Fairy Tale Fail! I must say I love the cover. It’s such a clever twist of the traditional fairy tale title.

Here’s the blurb:

Jenny has finally accepted her life of magic and mayhem as savior of fairy tale kingdoms, but that doesn’t mean the job’s any easier. Her new mission is to travel to the Land of Tales to defeat an evil witch and complete three Impossible Tasks. Throw in some school friends, a bumbling knight, a rhyming troll, and a giant bird, and happily ever after starts looking far far away. But with her parents’ fate on the line, this is one happy ending Jenny is determined to deliver.

1. What was your favorite fairy tale as a kid and why?

When I was young, I really liked “Cinderella” (all the different versions of it) partly because I enjoyed the make-over part, but mostly because I loved the idea that a regular girl could become a princess.

2. How did your love of fairy tales inspire My Epic Fairy Tale Fail?

I’ve been a fan of fairy tales since I was very young, so writing a story that was full of fairy tale elements seemed like a good fit. At the same time, fairy tales can seem strange by today’s standards, so I had a lot of fun twisting them and making them bizarrely my own.

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3. If you could be a character in a fairy tale, which one would you be?

Oh that’s a hard one! I love the tale “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” which starts off very much like Beauty and the Beast and then morphs into a story about a heroine having to venture off to rescue her prince. I admire how brave and driven she is, and since I’m usually a big wimp, I’d love to experience that kind of fearlessness.

4.   What was the hardest part about writing My Epic Fairy Tale Fail?

Keeping expectations from creeping in was a challenge. I wanted to make sure that readers of the first book would enjoy the second one, and I didn’t want to let my editor (or myself) down. It was hard to shake off all that pressure, but I finally managed to focus on the characters and the story and push most of those insecurities into the background.

Anna Staniszewski

And here are some quickies:

1. Favorite type of chocolate: All kinds! But there’s nothing better than a dark chocolate truffle.

2. #1 country you’d like to visit: I’ve always wanted to go to Iceland. Based on picture I’ve seen, it looks like a place that shouldn’t even exist on this planet. (Or perhaps like something out of a fairy tale…)

3. Favorite mode of transportation: I take the commuter rail into Boston on days when I teach, and I really enjoy it. For a brief period of time, someone else is doing the driving, and I can just relax, or read, or get some writing done. I’ve had some great brainstorming session on that train!

4. Preferred writing method: (i.e.) computer, pen, pencil:

I use my laptop for most things, but when I’m stuck, I usually grab a pen and start scribbling away. It’s amazing how many ideas flow through my pen that refuse to come when I’m typing.

Links: http://www.annastan.com/

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/AnnaStaniszewskiAuthor

Twitter: https://twitter.com/annastanisz

Book Trailer

 

 

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