Imaginary Casting for GLITCH

I always love it when authors put pictures of what their dream cast would be if their book was ever made into a movie. Not because we ever expect for it to get made into a movie, but just because it's fun to put real faces on these characters who have lived only in our imagination. So without further ado, my dream casting for Glitch:

Zoe would be Vanessa Marano from Switched at Birth:

Adrien would be a younger version of Gael García Bernal:

And Max would look something like Alexander Ludwig (most recently seen as Cato in The Hunger Games):

The YAmazing Race & ARC Giveaway!

Welcome to my stop on the YAmazing Race with MGnificent prizes, a blog hop featuring over 50 debut authors, and prize packs that include ARCs, gift certificates, swag, and more! Click here for the complete rules!

Synopsis of GLITCH:

In the Community, there is no more pain or war. Implanted computer chips have wiped humanity clean of destructive emotions, and thoughts are replaced by a feed from the Link network.

When Zoe starts to malfunction (or "glitch"), she suddenly begins having her own thoughts, feelings, and identity. Any anomalies must be immediately reported and repaired, but Zoe has a secret so dark it will mean certain deactivation if she is caught: her glitches have given her uncontrollable telekinetic powers.

As Zoe struggles to control her abilities and stay hidden, she meets other glitchers including Max, who can disguise his appearance, and Adrien, who has visions of the future. Together, this growing band of glitchers must find a way to free themselves from the controlling hands of the Community before they’re caught and deactivated, or worse.

In addition to the ARC I'll be giving away on the race, I'm also hosting an ARC giveaway here! To enter, just leave your name and email address in the comments (+1 for entering). For bonus entries (just make a note of them in your comment):

+1 for Following this blog

+1 for Following me on Twitter

+1 for Liking my page on Facebook

Contest is open internationally, and ends on May 15th.

And last but not least,

CLICK HERE for the next stop on the race!

On Copyedits & Coming to the End

I'm almost done with copyedits. Which means, this book is finished. Like finished finished. It's another first, having brought a book through all these edits and getting it so completely polished. All that's left are First Pass Pages, and then it will be out in ARCs, and into reader's hands.

It's been quite a strange feeling, actually. I've made some bigger changes in the copyedits stage than just grammar things, but I know this is the last chance. As a writer, you can always keep perfecting, keep tweaking and changing things. But it doesn't matter, because the book will come out and it is final. So that's, you know, scary!

At the same time I'm excited to move on. I want to get back to drafting again, working on book 3. Editing can feel kind of non-productive, rehashing over the same words, cutting and re-writing small bits--but it's nothing compared to the adrenaline and pure creation stage of drafting.

Cover Reveal Week

Goodness gracious, life has been busy lately. If you didn't see, I got to officially reveal my beautiful cover! I'm so excited, I've been in love with it from the first moment I saw it. Waiting on your cover is always one of those anxiety-filled parts of being an author. But then when I got to see it, with my favorite colors (purple and black) featured, everything about the girl is perfect and the glowing input port on the back of her neck... it's seriously the cover of my dreams. And my trailer, if you haven't seen it, is here.

And so many other exciting things this week. Last Friday I got to meet my agent sister, Andrea Cremer, at the release of her last epic book on Friday. She is as awesome and delightful in person as I imagined her to be. I'm halfway through Bloodrose and loving it. It's so cool going to signings now, and not just because I know the people up there, but because I'm dreaming one day of my own release party. Because it's officially 2012 folks, and that means that my book is coming out THIS FREAKING YEAR!!!! In almost exactly eight months.

It's also strange to feel so close, and to be working feverishly through the very last rounds of edits before it's gone out of my hands. Soon it will be done and done, and before I know it, strangers will be reading it. Which is totally insane and I still can't wrap my head around it.

A Dark, Dark Forest

Thinking about hero journey's lately. For my book, and you know... life. Though I feel decidedly unheroic lately, some of Joseph Campbell's (the popularizer of The Hero's Journey idea) stuff lingers in my mind, for my fiction and who knows what else.

He writes: When you cross the threshold, you are passing into the dark forest, taking a plunge into the sea, embarking upon the night sea journey. It involves passing through clashing rocks, narrow gates, or the like... You may be dismembered, lose everything you have...As you now go towards the center, there will come more aids, as well as increasingly difficult trials. You have to give up more and more of what you're hanging on to. The final thing is a total giving up, a yielding all the way...it's a move into a field of action of which you know nothing. Anything can happen, and it may be favorable or unfavorable.

Let's talk about characters and the hypothetical, a far more comfortable place of metaphor (fiction and metaphor are what we have after all, when we cannot speak directly. It's why fiction began, to touch on truths we otherwise cannot pronounce or get across our tongue). I think of Hansel and Gretel, walking into that dark forest, getting lost, stumbling upon what they think is a haven that turns into a house of horrors. I think of Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown and the dark, dark forest that will imprint him for life. So many dark forests in fiction, lush with lostness.

Funnily enough, there are forests in my fiction, and they do not bode well for my heroine :) Oh, the cyclical stories that we eat up and repeat unconsciously, the "sea of stories" which we enter into and repeat and repeat and draw and recreate meaning from.

I have no conclusions. I pass from uncertainty to uncertainty. My compass is broken. I forage for food and seek nourishment. Day to day, until the light filters down through the leaves and eventually, I know again where is the solid ground.

Out and About! & My Query Letter!

Hello my lovelies!! Sorry I haven't blogged lately, I've been busy moving and setting up a new group blog for 2012 YA Sci-Fi Debuts called BRAVE NEW WORDS! Check out the link for giveaways of two recent dystopian debuts that I absolutely loved: WITHER by Lauren DeStefano and POSSESSION by Elana Johnson. Also, in the most recent post I posted my query letter that snagged me my agent! Click on the link below!

BRAVE NEW WORDS

Edits are DONE!!!!!

Fabulous celebration of finishing Edit Round #2!!!!! There were so many things I wanted to say about this edit round, blogs I wrote out loud to myself while I drove in between my house and the coffeeshop where magic edits happen. But now that they are ACTUALLY done, I'm basically like, spbhodiabypswefhrn! I have no wordz. My brainz are fuzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

The great thing about writing YA is that there is no place for flabby scenes. I feel like I was super-slasher this round, cutting everything extra to make super-sleek prose. Action, tension, emotional development: boom, boom, boom!

And I am emotionally worn out! Three weeks of intensely looking at my manuscript and I have no perspective on it. I think one moment: IT'S AWESOME and the next: why is my book so GODDAMNED LONG? Does it keep up tension, pace, eeeeeeeek!

Basically, I need a week of good rest and space from the manuscript! But, secretly, beyond all my self-doubt, I think my book is AWESOMEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! *to bed now with me!*

My Novel in Three Words

Today I was thinking about how there are a lot of YA dystopias out there this year, and more to come. I think I'll land right in the middle of the trend being published next spring (yay!), but I was also thinking, my books is dystopian for sure, but I've tried not to make it to heavy with the doom and gloom, and well, there are superpowers. Like X-Men superpowers, which is just plain fun. And kissing! I'm generally bad at describing my own book, but I realized in my mind I sum up GLITCH in three words:

Dystopia. Superpowers. Love.

The Bits of GLITCH that are Bits of ME

So I was doing my pre-writing or editing quiet/meditation time with my favorite Natalie Goldberg. Today this was the nugget that jumped off the page at me. It's chapter 4 from Thunder and Lightening, and it's all about the way we naturally write ourselves into our book.

I read a piece online lately and the young author was writing about the elderly, something far beyond her years and experiences, and the characters felt like bad imitations of stereotypes. No, Goldberg is right. She suggests we can't make a fictional character exactly like ourselves, because rarely are we able to be that vulnerable, to even understand or be willing to share all our motivations. But through fiction, the conscious and unconscious parts are ourselves pour out all jumbled up. This is a universe all in our own head, so naturally it is built of our parts - our hopes, fears, insecurities, life experiences.

Goldberg says: "The people we befriend usually mirror ourselves, our known and unknown parts." Now this is a very big statement that makes me look around at the relationships in my life and think, huh! she's right! But it also can be said of our characters. Characters who feel real aren't ones we picked out of a stereotype catalogue. All the formative things that have happened to me, that I've read, movies I've seen, things that seeped into my psyche slowly over the years are poured out in this book. What's funny, is I didn't think to realize it until 1) I'm a year out from writing the initial first draft 2) I'm in editing, where I really think consciously about each character's motivations and 3) the fabulous Goldberg.

Now that I look at it, I'm like, holy crap! There's the obvious--my love for 80's and 90's sci-fi and fantasy movies, the melodrama of romance novels, even watching The Little Mermaid EVERY day after school for all of 2nd grade. Then there are the less obvious, the unconscious things working themselves out--I see how that rough patch in my marriage is reflected, the deep ache of longing for beauty and hope in a hard, painful world, that time I was so sick with my chronic illness that I was in a wheelchair--especially the anger of that period. I was always such a good little girl, I'd never felt anger like that, and such a sustained anger. I woke up angry and went to bed angry for a year and so now I can draw knowingly from that texture of anger.

In a way, I see that all the characters in my novel are almost stages of myself. Zoe, naive, just waking up to the world of emotion and good and evil (something I think happens with most teenagers). Adrian, at least in Book I, is most like me now in his belief in beauty and hope, though it will be tested. And Max, dear Max, you are so many things to me. You are what I have wanted and who I have been and chaos and rule-breaking. You are Id, trying to grow up, needing a little Super-ego to come along and tame some of that into a healthy place.

I'm only 29, and maybe my book reflects that too - at 50, I'm wonder if this would be a very different book? But at 29 I've been poor to the point of impoverished, have been well off while my husband had a posh office job, deal daily with chronic illness, have lived in a bad part of Chicago, have lived in a safe pattern-stamped suburb neighborhood, gone back to school, am married, have a kiddo, have swam in a river, have gone to Romania, have pooped in an outhouse, have had older adventurous brothers that I loved and wanted to emulate SO badly, have been religious, have been not religious, have been sexy and have been plain, and more, so much more. And the key to life as well as writing: hope and compassion, always.

Edit Land: Experiments with Language

My editor mentioned on the first round of edits for Glitch that she'd like to see if we could make the Glitch time and the being Linked up time (the Link is a method of societal control, with a chip in everybody's brain) have different kinds of language. As if we could really experience through language, the difference Zoe feels when she's Linked and when she glitches out from the Link. Yeah, so I had bigger things I was focusing on in Edit Round I, and now we come to Edit Round II, and she's gently nudging me about this again. And better yet, suggesting places I could do it and some ideas of how!

So I'm editing today, spending an inordinate amount of time on Chapter 1, but I think both Edit Gal and I count this as a key chapter where we set up the world and let readers get to know Zoe and want to be on her side. I start playing around with the language for when she's Linked, how a computer controlled mind might think and behave. And then it hit me: there wouldn't be personal pronouns in a group-think setting. There wouldn't be any I or me. Also, computer-think, like sign-language, wouldn't bother as much with transition articles like "the" or "as" or even forming complete sentences. They would want to get information across in as few words as possible. Period.

So anyway, I've been experimenting with this, and having Zoe transition back to personal pronouns when she's glitching, slowly learning how to get the feel of being an individual. It's exciting. We'll see what Edit Gal thinks when I turn it back in to her!!

Image via: cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com

Elements of an Edit - Picture Post

So, I looked at the calender today, thinking for sure it had been 3+ weeks since I'd gotten my edit letter. Yeah, or not. It's been a little less than 2 weeks, but I turned in my edits today, and they felt pretty massive. At least to me. We'll see what my actual editor thinks :) In the meantime, here's a picture post of the elements involved in Heather's Vortex Hermit Cave of Edits where I've been living the past couple weeks.

First of all, there is the Edit Cave :

Note: multiple coffee cups on the shelf, as well as wine bottle and glass. Both are important ingredients in the Hermit Cave. Mini-speakers on the couch arm (blasting mainly Florence + The Machine and Mumford & Sons). Also important: comfy couch space, pillows and blankets that nestle the aforementioned Heather Hermit into the couch space. And yeah, random stacks of laundry and books scattered around. This is my life.

Next item of importance: midway through edits, printed out manuscript, with more chicken scratch:

And last but not least--the beacon guiding in the dark: THE EDIT LETTER, in all it's 18-page gloriousness, marked up, highlighted, and each item crossed off one by one as I work through Amazing Editor's thoughts and suggestions for manuscript.

And then there is the Heather Hermit in the Aftermath. That's right, I am sleeeeeeeeeeeeepy. But wait, what? Grad school needs my attention? Bahhhhhhh!!!

Edit-Land

I've been knee-deep in edits for a week now, deep vortex style. I'm sure there's a saner way to do this, but it's generally how I work--all consuming delving into the book and nothing else for awhile until I finish. At least that's how I've operated in the past, but the combination of school + motherhood + writing is kind of kicking my ass this time around! Nevertheless, the edits are progressing and the stakes are being raised in the safe parts of the book. And my child is getting fed regularly and taken to school, and I think I even remembered to eat and shower today too. Maybe. I think... :)

This edit-round is strange. Bigger than I've done w/ the previous shelved novels I wrote, and maybe that's because the stakes are raised in real life too? I know this will be published and on shelves and really representative of my first major effort as a writer and artist. And I want it to be GREAT, like the best of the best of what I read. Like John Steinbeck wrote in the Preface to East of Eden, this book is the box that I'm trying to put the most important bits of myself in--philosophical themes about what I think is most important in life, a heroic action story-line, and my fears and hopes about life could and should be. You know, not to put too much pressure on myself ;) I just feel like I have a chance to do something really great and stunning with this novel, and I want it to live up to its full potential.

Which equates: lots of hours spent in Edit Land. It's amazing what a few months away from a novel can do to your perspective. Raising stakes, erasing safe moments, making emotional arcs more seamless. I can't decide if it's exhilarating or exhausting, it's probably an equal mix of both.

Path to Publication

Just read Jessica Shea Spotswood's blog about her path to publication, and I agree! I love hearing people's stories about getting published too! So I thought I'd share mine--important dates in bold if you're in a skimming mood ;)

• Spring Semester 2010: amorphous period where I start planning out Glitch. My last novel has just been rejected by enough agents, even ones who'd read the manuscript, that I figure it is time to move on with a new project. I'd always wanted to write a dystopia since I read and LOVED 1984 in high school, so I sit down and write out my favorite elements of dystopias and think about what my ultimate imaginary dystopic future might look like.
• Chatting with computer science-y husband, and he brings up this article he'd just read in Popular Science. Ideas about implanted computer bits in humans start germinating.
• Came up with the love interest hook and start falling in love with my characters and story For Serious.
• June 2010: exhaustion from previous semester and some life things prevent actual starting of book. Instead, complete scenes play out over and over in my head, mostly at night when I am trying to fall asleep!
• July 2010: FINALLY! Time and energy to write! I take after it like gang-busters and have a first draft by August 1st.
• First week of August: edit non-stop for a very intense week, and start querying, probably before I should have, but oh well, I have the patience of a gnat!
• August: get lots of requests from agents to read the manuscript! yay! and then:
• Sept. 15 2010: Charlie Olsen of Inkwell Management emails saying he'd read the first third of my book and was loving it and would like to set up a phone call with me!! An actual phone call! with an agent! just like I heard about with others authors but had never happened with the two other books I'd queried. I still remember the coffeeshop chair I was sitting in when I got that email. After trying for YEARS to be a writer, I had my first indication that the impossible dream might be actually possible!
• The next Monday: we talk on the phone, and I am a lot less nervous than I thought I'd be, even though Charlie is less excited about the second half of the book, parts where it dragged. We talk potential edits, he mentions what he'd like to see, maybe some scenes to add, and I am super stoked, because not only was I talking to an ACTUAL AGENT, but he really GETS the feel of the book, and all of his ideas are totally in sync with what I want the book to be.
• Rest of September: Heather goes into Crazy Edit & Rewrite Mode.
• Mid-October: I send in the edited manuscript, and Charlie asks for Outlines of Book II and III in the intended trilogy. I say 'sure!' then sit down and try to figure out how the hell to write an outline ;)
• October 27th: Another phone call! Offer of representation! Giddy jumping up and down! I have an agent!!!
• November: More edits. We decide to wait to submit to editors till after the holidays.
• January 15, 2011: Book goes on submission!!!!
• January 15th-26th: Absolute worst ten days of my life. A few editors pass. I am sure I am DOOMED TO ABYSMAL FAILURE, HOW COULD I HAVE DELUDED MYSELF INTO BELIEVING I COULD BE A PUBLISHED AUTHOR? OH GOD, WHAT DO I WRITE NEXT? I THOUGHT MY BOOK WAS GOOD BUT NOW I'M SURE IT'S A STEAMING PILE OF SH---- then I get a call from my agent. We have an offer!
• January 26th: Omg, an offer! From a super awesome publishing house, a 3-book deal! And not just any house, but St. Martin's Press! A publishing house that I have not only heard of, but one that publishes some books I've loved, that are sitting on my shelves RIGHT NOW! Squeeeee!
• Feb 1st: Deal is official. Holy shit, I'm going to be a published author, slated for Sp/Su 2012. I walk around in a daze smiling so much my mouth hurts by the end of the day.
• 2nd week of February: Magical foreign rights agent at Inkwell, Lyndsey Blessing, solidifies deals for Glitch trilogy in Germany and France!! OMG!
• Feb. 10th: first call with my editor from St. Martin's, Terra Layton. She is AWESOME and so excited about my book! We talk for an hour about the edits and the process and I feel so lucky to have gotten such a rocking editor!

The Science Behind GLITCH

All good sci-fi starts with the imagined possibilities of what could be based on what is. Some writers like Margaret Atwood prefer to call their work 'speculative fiction' rather than 'science fiction', because she says that all tech in her dystopian futures have seeds in realities and research that exist today. While I'm not quite as hard-core (there's certainly a large place for FICTION in my science fiction) most good sci-fi stories have to be believable, and, like The Terminator, demonstrate both the fears and hopes about the interaction of the human race with technology. (and yes, I watched this movie hundreds of times as a kid!)

When I started planning my dystopian sci-fi trilogy, my husband had just read this article in Popular Science about computer chips that mimicked brain function and could be used as brain implants to help memory loss in Alzheimer's patients and a variety of other illnesses. My interest was immediately sparked. Sure, brain implants might start out as hopeful solutions for medical problems, but what if widespread brain implants became the norm in society, to be used as a means of social control??? I immediately recognized this as the basis of a good sci-fi story.

There were also some articles I read at the time about the equivalent of Blackberry/Iphone implants, and this too made sense to me. Our cell phones are already our constant companions, attached to our hip or even our ear, like BlueTooth headsets. How far a stretch is it to imagine the advertising of the cell phone you never misplace, never lose, that is always as close as your own forearm? I'm on my computer probably an average of 8 hours a day, constantly glancing at my Twitter and Facebook status updates, multi-tasking with six or more windows open simultaneously, always wired in and connected. What if that wiring was moved from my fingertips, however, to inside my head?

Take for example, Michael Chorost's book World Wide Mind: The Coming Integration of Humanity, Machines, and the Internet. I found this book after I'd already written Glitch, but it perfectly demonstrates the possibility of things that are now only fiction. He's a hearing-impaired writer who has computer chips implanted in his ears that feed information his brain has learned to interpret as the English language. Chorost writes, "A surgeon drilled an inch and a half into my skull, countersunk a ceramic-encased microchip behind my left ear, and threaded sixteen electrodes into my inner ear... it took me months to learn how to interpret the software's representations of vowels and consonants as English" (6).

His book is pretty much an optimistic thought experiment, grounded in current science and research, about how such "human machine integration" might increase exponentially (7). He likens the interaction of the human body and implanted chips to the hardware/software interaction on PCs, envisioning how "the systems [might] become increasingly mutually dependent on each other" (7). When talking about humans and the internet, he asks the question that is the stuff of sci-fi: "What if we built an electronic corpus callosum to bind us together? What if we eliminated the interface problem--the slow keyboards, the sore fingers, the tiny screens, the clumsiness of point-and-click--by directly linking the Internet to the human brain? It would become seamlessly part of us, as natural and simple to use as our own hands" (9-10). This is not simply a flight of fancy. While we might not have the present technology to make all of this a reality, it has foundations in things that already exist.

Tracking devices implanted in humans are already a reality (again, starting with people such as those with dementia) as a means of locating them if they wander off. It started with pets, it's moved to people. The idea of implanted computer chips in the human body doesn't seem that far-fetched anymore. While full cyborg transformations might be a little further off, what do these baby steps toward such a future mean?

Now, I don't actually think all of this is horrific or implicitly a doomsday scenario. I think some of this hardware-in-our-bodies stuff makes sense. I'm a realist. I see the benefits, I see how intertwined our lives have already become with technology, and I don't think it's actually bad. How could I? I love the internet, I can't imagine life without it anymore! In the end, technology is as good or evil as the use we put it to. The biggest example is, of course, nuclear technology. We have the technology to destroy our world a hundred times over. But we haven't used it. At some point, morality and the value of human life (or at least the value of self-preservation) prevents catastrophe.

That said, in my sci-fi trilogy GLITCH, I get to explore what would happen if we DID go too far, what shocking adaptations of the complex human organism might occur, and how the future of the entire earth might depend on humankind's ability to navigate such technology, for better or for worse.

Journey to a Book Deal

So it's been about a week since I found out about my book deal... and yeah, those three words together--'my book deal'--still sound a little bananas. I've spent the week walking around in daze, giddily connecting with other writer's whose books debut in 2012 too (also known as The Apocalypsies), completely blowing off reading for my grad school classes, and using far too many exclamation points in every email/post/tweet. I've been thinking about how I got here, and wanted to put it on paper (like the way moms always want to tell thier gory birth stories after they pop out a kid):

I got my agent the old fashioned way: hard work, querying, rejection, more hard work, more querying, more rejection, you get the picture :) Glitch is the third book I’ve written all the way through and queried, and each manuscript along the way was a necessary (if grueling) step on the path to becoming a better writer. The first one was bad, but it taught me plotting. The second one was a little less bad and I’d gotten better at dialogue and keeping tension up during scenes, but agents rejecting it said it didn’t have a strong enough or unique voice. And the third one, I finally figured out what the hell they meant by voice. Which is actually one of the most important things to figure out (though some people, and yes I am insanely jealous of them, come by it naturally). Best definition I’ve found for what ‘voice’ is: Steven Malk’s Interview on Literary Rambles. To sum up: figure out who’s telling your story and make their personality come through in the way you tell it.

I’d been thinking through Glitch all of the Spring semester (I can’t seem to use academic brain and creative writing brain at the same time!), but wrote it mainly in July 2010. I started querying agents in August, got more requests for manuscripts than ever before, and in September, Charlie Olsen emailed saying he wanted to set up a call with me. He said he liked it, but wanted me to do some edits before he’d take me on as a client. I dug in, and in October, he offered representation! Then we did more edits, and decided to wait for the new year before submitting. And voila, started submitting in January and last week got the offer from St. Martin’s Press. I don’t know if that’s whirlwind or if it just feels like it to me, like it’s too ridiculously wonderful a dream to be true, but here we are. I’m sure more deep edits are headed my way, but I love getting to dig into the story again like wet clay. Or maybe kneading bread is a better analogy. That’s the picture in my head when it comes to edits: knuckles in, muscles working, to shape a dull lump into something glossy and magical shining.

GLITCH - Quick Plot Summary

I figured there should be some place on my blog until I get my website up saying what my book is actually about! Glitch is the first in a young adult romantic sci-fi trilogy, pitched as 1984 meets X-men.

Quick Summary:

Seventeen-year-old Zoe Gray is a cybernetically-enhanced teenager living in an underground society when her internal hardware begins to malfunction. She slowly realizes that her body is changing, that she’s developing powerful telekinesis, and that she’s not alone. Even though getting caught could mean reprogramming, or worse, deactivation, Zoe begins to seek out other glitchers in society, including a dreamer named Adrian who can see the future, a boy named Max who can mimic other’s appearances, and a young girl named Molly with X-ray vision. They work together to plan their escape, but soon learn there is another powerful faction at work whose ambitions threaten all their carefully laid plans.