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Read a Book, Save a Life

For the past three months I have been training for a half-marathon with a group called Team in Training. Team in Training is a philanthropic organization that raises funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Leukemia causes more deaths than any other cancer among children and young adults under the age of 20 and is the number 1 cancer in senior citizens.

I was personally touched by the disease last year, when my grandfather lost his battle with leukemia. So now, along with my Team in Training running group, I am racing to raise money to help battle blood cancers.

By September 5th, the day of the half marathon (in Disneyland!), my goal is to raise over $2000 to go toward finding new treatments and eventually a cure for this devastating disease.

So what does this have to do with you, you ask? I have forty copies of my books (including some various fun editions, like a lush mass market paperback of Fallen from the UK, the audio book, a couple Spanish and Italian versions, and even a few advance copies of Torment!) that I will be auctioning off to the first forty people who make a donation (of $10 or more) through my Team in Training website. I will sign, personalize, and send a special thank you note with the book to anyone who helps me support the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

You can visit my fundraising website here and make a secure online donation on the right hand side of the page. I’ll get an email notification when you do, and as long as you include your email and mailing address when you fill out the donation, I’ll have all the information I need to send you your personalized book. I will email you before I send your book to check whether you have special dedication wishes, or if you can read, say, Chinese and want that edition! I have no idea how many of you will be interested in this, but if we exceed the forty books I’m starting with, I’ll update my blog and maybe increase the quantity. (That would be incredible!)

These can be yours!

I know that many of you and the people you love have also been touched by some form of cancer, and it feels wonderful to know there are great organizations out there like Team in Training and the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society that allow all of us to get involved–even in a small way–to save lives.

Do I look like a girl who is about to run 13.1 miles?

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Comic Con

My first trip to Comic Con was a great time this weekend. I did a few video interviews that will be available on youtube very shortly. I got to sit on a Bite Me panel with  six other fantasy writers, where we spoke to around 350 Comic Conners about everything from demented unicorns, to how we do our research, to whether or not proper vampires have fangs.

I had a really nice signing after the panel:

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A little bit of news…

Hi everyone! Several bits of news today:

First off, I’m excited to report that I’ve been nominated for an Indigo Teen Reads award in the Best New Writer category. This is the inaugural year for the contest, run by the great Canadian bookstore, and the best part is: readers get to choose the winners! Please visit the site, fill out the very quick registration form, and vote for Fallen (and me) in the Best New Writer category.

This is what you’ll see after you vote. If you’re hard core, you can come back and vote every day!

Next up, I’m about to head out on a blog tour in the UK for a little armchair (or desk chair) travel. Tomorrow (June 30th), you can find me at Book Chick City, and I’ll be making about ten more stops after that. More details, dates, and links to come.

My Brit blog tour coincides with the perfect-beach-read mass market paperback release of Fallen in the UK, and I also have this wonderful new trailer to share. Some of you Brits might be seeing it during the theater previews for Eclipse this week!

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You think YOU read a lot?

Try going head to head with Jason. Behold the list of 100+ books my favorite PhD candidate has spent the past 5 months reading.

Yes, the monster list, taped on the back of our closet door, is taller than both of us and took three photographs to capture. But Jason still managed to slay it. See all the little check marks?

For the past five months he’s been preparing for his oral exam, which he takes this Friday (!!!). For three hours, three professors will grill him on any/all of these books, asking questions like “How would you teach this text in an introduction to Shakespeare class?” And this is just the first of two monster tests he has to pass before he writes his dissertation. Hear that, all you future English PhD’s out there? Are you scared? (I’m scared.)

So around here, it’s been one book a day, every day, for five straight months. He wakes up in the morning, he reads. I take the dog for a hike, he reads. I fool around online for seven hours, he continues to read. Because these are major doorstops of books. Tomes. Like on Tuesday: he sat down and read the Bible. The whole thing! Another day he tackled the very thrilling Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. Sounds like a real page turner, huh? Today he’s reading Paradise Lost. He’s got serious speed-reading skillz.

I marvel at his reading stamina and am feeling very proud that he’s made it through this list. As if it wasn’t already before, his brain is certainly a goldmine now.

So good luck on Friday, Jason, and thank you for always flagging the angel references for me. xx

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Book Expo America 2010

I went to New York last week for BEA, which, for those of you who don’t know, is a huge book expo held every May to showcase books coming out in the fall. I’ve been a couple times before back when I worked as an editor, and it’s always a whirlwind of book signings, banquets, award ceremonies, and lots of oogling upcoming releases. There is much to get excited about and so much swag to snag. From my own stash, I’m most excited to dig into Lauren Oliver’s Delirium and Jennifer Donnelly’s Revolution. People bring extra suitcases to schlep back all the ARCs and books they take home. I once saw a woman wielding one of those Costco-sized grocery carts.

At my signing. Thanks, Lacey, for the pic.

This year, being on the author side was so much fun. I loved spending time with my team at Delacorte and loooved hearing all about their brilliant plans for Torment’s release in a few months. I got to meet my British, Australian, and even Croatian publishers and talk about plans to visit both the UK and Australia/New Zealand over the next year. I got to see Susanne Collins accept an award from the American Booksellers Association—and had to hold myself back from tackling her and telling her how much I love her books. I sat down with my agents to talk about plans for the next book after Torment (hard to believe I’ll start writing that in a few weeks!). (more…)

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You asked for it…

Here it is:

Torment SneakPeek

And, for your listening pleasure, here’s Willie crooning about angels.

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Are you Team Daniel or Team Cam?

Click here to vote today!

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On Curiosity

(Note: I recently wrote this for a blog called Fragments of Life, but I thought I’d also share it with you here.)

A few months ago, I went to visit my parents at the house where I grew up in Texas. My mom, in her mom way, likes to make use of my presence to clean out closets.

“Can we throw out these softball trophies?”

“What about these old dance recital costumes?”

“You’re never going to wear these shoes again, are you?”

And on it goes. If Mom and I fill up a garbage bag to take to goodwill, the day has been a success. This last trip, she was going through my old dresser, tossing things into the trash with reckless abandon—until we came across an old sketchbook buried in the recesses of a drawer.

“What is that?” my mom asked, when I leapt up to save the sketchbook from its date with the trashcan. I recognized it immediately. I’d filled it up on a road trip my family took to Colorado in the summer of 1994. The binding was split and a few of the pages were loose, but otherwise, it was still in good shape. Once glance at its rough maroon cover brought back a flood of memories. (more…)

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Time Off!

I’ve been on vacation this week. Torment finally went to my editor, my parents came to visit, and it was my birthday on Sunday. A perfect little storm. My favorite thing we did with my parents was take them up to Santa Barbara for a night. We drove along the PCH through sun and fog and seabreeze, ate at the Hitching Post (of Sideways fame) and stayed in the cute Danish town of Solvang.  While we were gone, Milo went to visit his godfather, Matt.

Some say he’s a cautious dog. Easily terrified is another way of putting it. Matt captured a lot of Milo’s adventures on film. Here’s a clip of some of the fun he had without us.

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For my birthday on Sunday night, Jason took me to a secret supper club in Santa Monica. It’s run by these two cool women chefs, pops up in a new location just four times a year (you get an email two hours before the meal to let you know where to go), and is so underground that I was supposed to agree not to blog about it. Whoops! But I the food was so so so incredible and it was such a cool, special birthday present that I must at least mention it. Not by name. Below is the remains of a chocolate souffle with corn ice cream and chile-flecked cotton candy.

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The Torment Cover

Stunning, isn’t it?

Also known as “Another dress for us all to covet!”

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