I've updated a few things around elizabethwrites.com, mostly the Living Dead Girl page, where you can now read an excerpt (please note that the book is listed for ages 16 and up and is darker that the books I have out now), check out an interview I did with ALAN, and see my brand-new Kirkus review, which has made me very happy. (Which is to say that when my editor emailed it to me, my reply was all !!!!!!! and YAY!!!! because although I want to be dignified and say things like "Oh, that's wonderful news, thank you so very much," I--well, I'd rather squee. But I promise that the rest of the time I behave in an utterly dignified fashion, except for a brief period of time this morning where I didn't realize I had my shirt on inside out. And backwards.)*

Links:

Lisa Schroeder on defining success

Meg Cabot linked to this awesomely handy indie bookstore finder

A great interview with editor Liz Scheir, an editor at Ballantine Books

Also! Don't forget the Picture This! contest--I am seriously in love with all the photos that have been sent in so far--please keep 'em coming!



*And okay, there was the time I wore two different shoes to work. That wasn't really dignified either. **

**Although only one person noticed, which either says volumes about the people I used to work with. Or me. Probably both.

Dear Head,

Most of the time I like you, but this 24+ hours of sinus pain you've been dishing out is kind of cruel. I mean, must even my teeth hurt?

Anyway, if you could allow the inside of my face to no longer feel like it's being gouged by fork-wielding fiends, that would be awesome.

Love,
Me

In other, not-my-stupid-hurting-head news, the Breaking Dawn party on Friday? FABULOUS! Everyone at B&N was so nice, and I loved being a part of a huge book celebration. Because really, seeing people so happy and anxious to read a book--how can you not love that? Plus a special super Thank You! to everyone who picked up one of my books. Make sure you drop me a note and tell me what you think!

Things you don't want to do in DC in July: Hope on the Metro to go meet someone, only to find that the Metro's a/c isn't working. Feel vague sense of unease, but brush it aside. It is the summer, after all, and maybe they're trying to save on power costs!

Read for a while, and then notice that the Metro has stopped moving. Notice other people noticing. Eventually get static-filled mumbled announcement about "track problems."

Sit. Sweat. Sit some more. Completely miss meeting the person you are supposed to be seeing and--you guessed it--sit. And sweat.

Finally, end up paying about $10 for the privilege of parking your car in a lot and then sitting on a subway GOING NOWHERE.

And people say no one in DC knows how to have a good time!

However, all is not sweat and sitting! I got an email from my lovely editor at Harper yesterday letting me know that Stealing Heaven has been nominated for the American Library Asssociations’s Best Books for Young Adults! YAY!!!!!! It's a total surprise and real honor to be nominated, and my heartfelt thanks to whoever did so.

Finally, if you live in the DC area, I'll be doing a book signing tomorrow, Friday, August 1st from 9:30-11 PM during the Breaking Dawn party at the Barnes and Noble in Reston, Virginia.

P.S. The pictures that have already been sent in for the Picture This! contest have been FABULOUS. Keep them coming--I can't wait to see what your picture will be!

Picture This! contest

Own one or more of my novels? Then take a picture of it and you could win a prize!

Here's the deal:

Take a picture of your copy of Bloom, Perfect You, or Stealing Heaven. Be creative! Take a picture of Stealing Heaven buried in the sand at the beach, or Bloom hanging out with flowers! Take Perfect You shoe shopping, or have it meet a bottle of vitamins!

Send that picture to elizabethscottcontest@gmail.com

You can enter up to three times--once for each of my three books. And for those of you who own Stealing Heaven...all Stealing Heaven pictures will be entered twice, as it costs about twice as much as Bloom or Perfect You.

You have until August 29th to send in your photos, and then I'll pick the five most creative pictures. The five winners will have their photos posted on elizabethwrites.com and will each get not one, not two, but FIVE young adult novels of their choice. This contest is open to anyone and everyone, regardless of where you live (I will ship books overseas) or if you've won something from me before.

Random question for those of you who read this blog and are under 18: Do you like poetry? If you do, what poets do you like?

I ask because I had lunch with a friend the other day and afterward, I got to thinking about the time she and I were looking through one of those huge anthologies they make you read when you get to college and take your first literature course, and she got to talking about poetry she'd read in high school and I had to confess I'd never had to read any. I sure wish we had, but instead I had to read The Fountainhead AND Atlas Shrugged in order to graduate from high school.*

Also, I don't know what's made Morgan Freeman pop up in everything recently, but doesn't he have the best voice? His voice-overs for all those Olympic ads are actually making me interested in the Summer Olympics, which I like far less than the Winter Olympics, which have skiing. (And, all right, skiing crashes. I know! But there, I've admitted it. What can I say? I'm old enough to remember ABC's Wide World of Sports and the big old ski crash during the opening. It always made me feel better whenever I had to go skiing and ran into a tree. (And I always ran into a tree. Always.))**

Meg Cabot is always hilarious and awesome about everything, but I especially like this: "Usually when you find the right story, you love it so much, you want to finish it (well, sort of. 99% of writing is keeping your butt stuck in the chair while the rest of your friends are out having fun. Try to think of how good you’ll feel when you get paid for it write the words THE END. That always helps me)."

Jennifer Smith, author of The Comeback Season, is having a really unique contest that really runs with her book--the grand prize is tickets to a Chicago Cubs baseball game!



*Yes, for real. And yes, both of them.

**You can find logo shots and Jim McKay's voice over ("and the agony of defeat") on YouTube, but not the actual opening. Though you can read about the skiing clip that I've babbled over. What in the world did I do before the internet? What did any of us do????

Have you ever wondered how many blogs there are out there? I have. (Can you tell I have oodles of work to do? Next thing you know, I'll be announcing that I'm going to clean out closets*)

The answer seems to be that no one is really sure, but it's an awful lot. Possibly hundreds of millions. And if you go to blogger, they have a little thing where they list updated blogs and during the minute I counted, 36 blogs were updated, including one called Rural Postal Carrier News, which I had to check out, because well--if you've read my bio, you probably can guess why.

Anyway, let's see what else is going on.

Two discussions on writing advice: the worst you've ever been given, and the best

Two very interesting blog posts about the always popular subject of the difficulty of making a living as a writer-- here and here

Thoughts and opinions solicited on writing groups

Elizabeth Bear writes about how her latest book isn't showing up in bookstores because it's not under one of the major distributors' listings by either her name or its title--and I think she says it best "Yes, the life of a writer really is this perilous."

Scary stuff.

Two more things:

Congrats to last week's contest winners: Brittany, Liviania, Ashley, and Sarah!

I'll be doing a book signing at the Barnes and Noble in Reston, Virgina on August 1st from 10-11 PM during their Breaking Dawn Party--it's going to be a lot of fun, and I hope to see you there!


*This will never happen. Once I fill a closet so full of stuff I can't get the door open without things falling out, it stays shut. To date, there are two closets in the house that no one opens. Perhaps if I leave them alone long enough, everything inside will disappear? Oooh! Or better yet, turn into bookstore gift certficates! I could live with that.

I was lucky enough to see a screening of American Teen--a documentary that follows a group of high school students from Indiana through their senior year--a few days ago, and I *loved* it. Granted, I suppose that's a given since I write young adult novels, but I thought it was refreshingly nonjudgmental and very honest about what it's like to be a teen in America today, right down to the fact that sometimes parents can be astonishingly cruel when they're trying to be "helpful."

It was also totally fascinating to see who everyone in the theater identified with, and how they reacted when certain things happened--I swear there was actually hissing a few times, and some glad "awww"s at others