I am so excited to welcome Terese Marie Mailhot to the blog today, and introduce her and her searingly beautiful memoir to the Deb community! About Heart Berries: Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman’s coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder…
What Do We Want? Success! When Do We Want It? Now!
I had the great good fortune to meet a group of wonderful veteran YA authors about a year before my book came out, and their greatest advice to me was to manage my expectations. Very few people hit the NYT list, and those that do get there because of publisher buy-in and enormous marketing campaigns, a thing The Diminished was never going to have. My friends told me to set reasonable goals,…
Julie’s Five Minutes of Zen
I am the queen of low expectations. Especially in publishing. But I’m also a believer in setting your intentions, because the universe is listening to what you put into it, and is ready to give it back to you. Did I expect my book to hit the New York Times bestseller list? No. I knew early on The Ones We Choose wasn’t going to get the kind of push…
The Top Three Things That Surprised Me About Publishing A Novel
This week we are talking about the differences between expectations and reality when it comes to traditionally publishing. I’ve compiled a run-down of my top three surprises regarding the process but if I had to sum up my debut publishing experience in one word it would be this: intense. The doctor in me feels compelled to point out that my limbic system took a beating this year, whirling around in…
If You Can Visualize It, It Can Be Yours—Or Maybe Not
I held a story in my chest and this story breathed when I breathed, and it flowed through my veins and pulsed with my heartbeat. I couldn’t shut it off. Everything else I tried to write was colored by it. My story needed to be told, so I put it down on pages and it became a book, and then I didn’t have to carry it any longer. As I…
Expectations and Exceptions
Debut authors get told, a lot, to moderate their expectations. I didn’t need to be told that. Sure, I might dream of selling millions of copies of From Unseen Fire, getting a Netflix deal, having people obsessively discuss the series and write fanfic and wonder what will happen next. My parents certainly think all that’s going to happen. I want all that to happen. But expect? Of course not. I…
[News Flash] July 15, 2018
Congratulations to Kris Erin Clink, winner of our #DebBallGiveaway of Sarah Kuhn’s Heroine Complex. News from the 2018 Debs: Julie Clark had a great time with the Oceanside Moms book club…a very special group near and dear to my heart. Kaitlyn Sage Patterson is excited to finally be able to share that she’ll be in Greenville, South Carolina for Read Up! Greenville in October! Cass Morris is drafting. Definitely not working…
In Which Lara Lillibridge raves about RED: A CRAYON’S STORY
I am breaking with the interview format today because I am so completely nuts over RED by Michael Hall, a 40-page picture book about a blue crayon who is mistakenly given a red label at the factory. While it is a wonderful resource for trans and gender-queer kids and those who love them, I think it will resonate with anyone who has ever felt as if the world expects them to…
Breadcrumbs in The Diminished
I didn’t think much about Easter eggs when I was writing The Diminished. So much of my focus was on making something new, something fresh, that everything I did, every choice I made, was in pursuit of writing something that no one had seen before. That said, when I went back and edited the book, I wanted to leave a few things behind. Though it doesn’t exist on the page, there…
Hidden Gems in The Ones We Choose
I don’t have very many hidden Easter eggs in my book…aside from locations that Angelinos might recognize — Pitfire Pizza is a real restaurant on Venice Blvd, Annesley College where Paige works is located where Pepperdine University resides, although I completely rewrote the architecture and overall vibe to match my own University of the Pacific in Stockton (Pepperdine architecture is much more modern than the brick and ivy buildings I…
