The time it was all about Ben Michaels

Have we all learned by now about my love for all things Elizabeth Norris and Ben Michaels? After countless posts about both of them, I feel like this is information that is well known.

 

After I won the arc for Unbreakable, I really wanted to do something with Elizabeth.  She's always so so so nice and so so so amazing.  Somehow I got it in my head *cough*Ava*cough* to ask for an interview and she said yes!!

 

But, before we get to that, did you know there is going to be a novella?

 

I've been waiting forever to use this gif

 

It's called Undone, it comes out on March 5th.  Did I mention that it's all Ben POV?


Before the accident. Before their universes collided. Before they fell in love.

Riveting and romantic, Undone: An Unraveling Novella contains three short stories set in the world of Unraveling, the first book in the gripping sci-fi duology by Elizabeth Norris.

Before Ben Michaels saved Janelle Tenner’s life, Janelle saved Ben when he stumbled through an interuniverse portal into a completely new world. That day, he fell in love with the girl of his dreams. And he never forgot her.

Through three stories told from Ben’s point of view, learn how Ben and his friends discovered their ability to travel between worlds, how Ben first met Janelle, and how he pined for her for years before he actually got the chance to meet her, save her life, and capture her heart. And find out what happens to Ben between the cliff-hanger conclusion to Unraveling and the beginning of its heart-stopping sequel, Unbreakable.

Doesn't that sound amazing?

Okay.  Let's get to Elizabeth now....

 

1. Was it easier or harder to write in Ben's POV?

 

It was definitely a little harder. I think Janelle's voice is a little closer to my voice (apparently I swear a lot) so I had to really make sure I thought about the differences in their character and the differences in his voice through out the whole process, and especially when editing. I also had my boyfriend read through the short stories and answer questions to make sure Ben didn't sound to girlie. At one point, I even believe we had a conversation that started with me saying, "Hey so if I died and you found me dead and all messed up, what would you be feeling?"

 

2. Did you see Ben as a character right away or did he grow in response to Janelle?

 

Ben was always a character in his own right. I think in my head, neither one of them could have existed without the other. Janelle was who I wanted to be when I was 17 and Ben was the guy I wanted to find in high school (but didn't), and then of course there's some sci-fi in there as well... 

 

3. When you started writing Unbreakable, did you know the ending right away?

 

Yes. I almost always know the ending when I start writing. It's the middle and the opening scene that sometimes take a little longer for me to figure out. (I rewrote the beginning to Unbreakable four or five times). When I started writing I of course knew where I had left all the characters at the end of Unraveling and I knew a little of what I was going to put them through in this one--but I knew where I wanted them to end. Even when I was contemplating whether to write a third book in this series or write something new for my third book, this is still where this story would have ended.

 

4. When you're writing the swoony lines, do you sit back and laugh at the flails you know you're responsible for making happen? :D

[I had planned to post an amazing swoony flail quote from Ben in Unbreakable, but I decided to let you find it all on your own. Also, I couldn't pick just one.]

 

Haha, no! I have no idea. A lot of the time when I'm writing, I think I'm in some kind of weird trance where I'm just typing away. Sometimes a scene just sort of comes together in my mind and I have to write it--I do a lot of typing in the notepad of my iphone, sometimes in the most random places, like bathrooms, the subway, department stores. And a lot of the time, I think those tend to be some of my best scenes.
 

I actually wrote part of that scene while I was walking down 6th avenue (I am that person that uses my phone and tries to walk at the same time. Once I walked into a street sign because I was checking my email and I hit my head so hard I ended up with a concussion, but it hasn't stopped me).

 

5. Who are your favorite swoony boys?

 

Jonah from Jellicoe Road, Po from Graceling, Adam from Where She Went, Adrian from the Vampire Academy books. And admittedly I was Team Edward and really wanted Hermione to end up with Harry instead of Ron.

 

Speed round:

 

1. You're in San Diego for one meal. Where do you go and what do you order?

 

It depends on how much money I have. If I don't have much, I go to Roberto's in Del Mar and get a carne asada burrito and guacamole with chips. Or I'd go to Miso Harney's in Old Town and ask Mike (he's an amazing sushi chef) to make me something spicy. He's like a wizard.

 

2. If you could wake up one day, just knowing how to do something, what would it be?

 

Dance. And I mean like So You Think You Can Dance dance.

 

3. What are you reading right now?

 

I just finished Pretty Little Liars which I had never read before, and I'm about to start Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn.

 

4. Are there any authors out there that you fangirl over?

 

So many. I met JK Rowling at her signing for Casual Vacancy in NY and I was so in awe of her. I also totally fan-girled Melina Marchetta, Gayle Forman, and Kristin Cashore when they did a signing together, and I think I probably always will.

*sigh*

Isn't she just awesome?

Huge thanks to Elizabeth for taking the time to deal with my fangirling answer my questions!!

Now. 

Remember when I mentioned winning an arc of Unbreakable? I actually won the grand prize in Elizabeth's contest and the chance to name a character in Undone. [There is actually a hilarious story that goes with this, but I'm far too lazy to go into the specifics.  Just know that it was funny.]

Let's all take a guess as to what name I picked.

And this last part is just bragging, but I'm gonna tell you about it. 

Ben was the very first boy that was given to me, thanks to Kassiah.  After winning the arc of Unbreakable, I was on a quest to get an arc of Unraveling to complete the collection. I posted it on Twitter and Ava told me that she was working on it, to give her some time.  Less than a day later, she told me that she had found a copy, but wouldn't give me the details via text.

Turns out, she got me an arc straight from Elizabeth.  From her personal collection.

 

                                                               Yah, I kept the post-it.

Anyways...

To celebrate the release of Undone, I'm giving away stuff! There will be three winners.  The grand prize winner will win a hardcover copy of Unraveling, an e-book of Undone and a hardcover copy of Unbreakable [when it is released on 4/23/13]. Two winners will get an e-book of Undone.

The grand prize winner will get books from The Book Depository. Winners of the e-book copies will choose between Barnes & Noble or Amazon for delivery.

Rules for the giveaway are listed under the "terms and conditions" on the Raffelcopter widget.

Good luck!!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The time there was a candy bar

I heard about If I Lie from Kassiah, read it in one night and absolutely loved it. The story was heartbreaking and lovely at the same time and had such a strong female character. So, of course I wanted to meet Cory and when her launch party for Touched was announced, I knew I was going.

We picked up Ava and headed up to MGRB. It goes without saying that we were extremely early, so we killed time by having coffee. Crystal met us up there and we had a great conversation about all things books.

Around 7:15, a woman [who I think was Cory's sister, I'm not sure, but will refer to her as that for the remainder of the post] came by and starting setting things up. She put up a raffle cup and guest book [a copy of Touched for us to sign], a cake, swag bags and a candy bar.

 



She then walked around holding out the cup for everyone to pick the raffle tickets. Crystal and Ava both picked two numbers on accident and we all started laughing about how we were all trying to cheat. I said something about if people can figure out how to cheat at a raffle, high five to them and then she high fived me.

Cory was introduced by the lovely Gretchen McNeil. Gretchen talked about how Cory had a full time day job and two books released this year and just finished her MFA in creative writing.

Cory came out and talked about working on her MFA. She hasn't planned on writing YA, but got an idea about a girl who could heal people with her touch. She asked her program advisors if she could change to YA and ended up writing 140k words that would become Touched. She then read the first chapter.

Cory knew that she wanted to write a book where the girl did the saving instead of the type of girl who sat around, twirling their hair, waiting to be saved by a boy. Another thing she really wanted was there to be a cost to her character having powers. In the case of Touched, whatever the character heals, she absorbs. So when she heals a set of broken ribs, her own ribs crack.

 

After about 20 minutes of talking, the Q&A started. With that, she talked about the difficulties of writing two different books with two entirely different themes at the same time. She constantly went back to read the books and probably read Touched 80 times while writing Touched 2.

With her writing process, she is super type A and outlines everything. She will write 50 pages to get the voice of the character and then do an outline, including all of the relationship arcs for everyone in the story. She tends to write backwards, first planning the very worst thing that will happen and working from there.

She likes to collect character traits that she finds specific to a person and write them down for later use. Her examples were her mechanic brother who hates to get his hands dirty and a brother and sister who grew up in a motel and would count the space in the room by the number to steps it took them.

She talked for about 40 minutes altogether before they signaled for the signing to start. Somehow, I got up to her first [and definitely NOT from the prodding by Gretchen who told me that by now I should be taking charge and getting the people in line properly].

I thanked Cory for being at the store and congratulated her on the book released. She remembered me from Twitter [still not sure that RL picture is a good thing] and thanked me for coming out. We had a brief conversation about If I Lie before getting a picture.

   

And then we hung out with Gretchen and she told us about her upcoming holiday plans, preparing for BEA, and her future book plans.

Cory's maybe sister came around to start calling numbers for the raffle. As she was getting everything ready, I showed her my two numbers and told her either of them could be called so I could win. She started laughing, but I ended up being one of two winners and got this awesome tote bag full of stuff!!

Cory Jackson is as sincere as the books she writes. She has a wonderful presence and a unique style to writing. I look forward to all of her future works.

I also think that it's important to mention that inside the swag bags were blank note cards with envelopes to write letters of thanks to the military men and women, some of who never get mail.  Check out the website to participate:  www.amillionthanks.org

The time I laughed a lot.

I had gone back and forth trying to decide if I was going to go to the Christopher Moore signing at Mysterious Galaxy. I had read some of Lamb, but ended up giving it up after getting through about half of it. Not to say that it wasn't funny, because it certainly was.  I think it was just a bit too dry for me.

The topic of his new book, Sacré Bleu combined Paris and Van Gogh, so I was definitely interested , but not sold on the idea. On the day before the release, I got the email newsletter from MG highlighting the release of Sacré Bleu. I was intrigued to find out that only the first editions were going to have color pages. That got me closer to wanting it. And then I saw that the release date was the same as another book I was going to pick up, so I figured I might as well.

On the night of the signing, I got down to MG around 5:30. I stayed in my car until I started seeing people streaming through the parking lot. A woman who was parked next to me stopped at my car and told me that they were already lining people up... It wasn't even 6pm yet and the Q&A was scheduled to start at 7.

After some brief instruction about not leaning on the bookshelves, they let us into the store. The few amount of seats were taken right away and the bookstore quickly became standing room only; however, time went by surprisingly fast [sharing Post-it's and Sharpees will do that].

Elizabeth was posting on Twitter about the signing and posted this:

Apparently, I was the first one to respond to it, so I won a mug and 10% off anything else I was going to buy before the night was over. Since I am in the loyalty league, I already get 10% off, so I just took my free [and purple!] MG mug and fought my way back to my spot.

Picture from MG website. I left the mug in my car & I'm too lazy to go get it.

Christopher came out right on time. He had a stapled group of papers that were speaking topics and he just went through all of them saying "I don't want to talk about that...I don't want to talk about that" as he skimmed through the sentences.

The easiest way to summarize this signing? He. Is. Hilarious. I don't think I've ever laughed as much as I did during his monologue. I don't even think I could do him any justice by repeating some of the things he said. Alas, I will try.

He talked about writing a book about the color blue, being a "little bitch" when it came to how the cover and color art inside Sacré Bleu looked, the crazy people in Kansas and wanting to get some set of brothers to "burn them to the ground and let a cat shit in their ashes".  He talked for about 40 minutes. One because he was sick and on a NyQuil high and two because MG didn't have their PA working, so he had to yell.

After the signing was done, we were all sent outside to line up in order of our ticket. I was #55. They let us back into the store 10 at a time, the line wrapping around the shelves.  They had an employee at the head of the line so control who went up to the signing table when. I thought it was very cool that when you went to the table, you didn't have people breathing down your neck.

I didn't really have anything clever to say.  Thankfully, as I was walking up he was using some hand sanitizer and it went everywhere.  That led to a few comments by Christopher about everything being clean for me.  He signed my book, I thanked him for taking the time to be at the store and that was it... As I was walking away, he called me back to give me a Sacré Bleu temporary tattoo.

All in all, it was a fun night.  Christopher Moore is a great speaker and I'll definitely be going to future signings.  Even if I haven't read any of the books.