Anna's Blog
The Winners!
October 6th, 2009
I’m so happy to say that our e-mails are recovered after the move, and at last I can announce the winners of the Dark Moon ARC giveaway! Thanks, everyone, for your patience, and thanks so much to everyone who entered. I wish I had enough ARC’s to give one to everyone.
Everyone who signed up for the newsletter (as opposed to entering via comments) will automatically get announcements about future contests and giveaways, so stay tuned! And for anyone who didn’t sign up for the newsletter but would like to, it’s never too late. Feel free to sign up any time.
And now, without further delay, here are the winners, as selected by my husband’s random number generator: Daphne and Heather. Congratulations and hope you enjoy book 2 of Trystan and Isolde’s story!
And actually, today is a perfect day to finally be able to announce the giveaway winners, because . . . it’s my birthday! I’m 31 today. And as Paul Simon sang (okay, he was singing about the day after his birthday, but still), “I should be depressed/my life’s a mess/but I’m having a good time.”
And we are. Despite occasionally feeling, as my husband put it, as though we are living a Steve Martin movie, we are–mostly–having a great time. After all, if we hadn’t moved to a new state with our two kids, one of them a newborn baby, we would never have had the opportunity to do things like this:
Vivi was loving the way the packing paper crinkled when she kicked her feet. Yeah. Nothing like a baby for keeping it all in perspective.
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Apologies
October 1st, 2009It’s the first of the month and I haven’t announced the winner of the Dark Moon ARC giveaway yet! I’m so sorry! But I do have an excuse. We just moved this week from New Jersey to the Washington DC area. With our two year old and newborn baby in tow. And the only reason we’re not gibbering puddles on the floor is thanks to all the help we had from our parents! Thanks Mom and Dad! Thanks June and Dave!
But unfortunately one of the side effects of moving is that my usual e-mail account is off line and inaccessible for the moment while our address gets transferred–which means I can’t see the entries for the contest. As soon as I can see them, I’ll announce the winner–promise!
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Welcome, Vivienne Marcella! (And Win an ARC of Dark Moon of Avalon!)
September 12th, 2009I can’t believe our new baby girl is nearly three weeks old already and I haven’t even announced her name here! Today, though, I thought I’d get down to work instead of lounging by the pool sipping lemonade, strolling on the beach–you know, all that copious free time that goes with having a newborn.
Though actually, I have absolutely no right to complain. We decided on Vivienne Marcella for her name, and she’s an angel-girl for sure. Never cries unless she’s hungry and is already sleeping in 5 or 6 hour stretches at night. I know, I know, I don’t know how lucky I am, right? Here’s a picture of her napping with her daddy.
And to celebrate her arrival–and her being kind enough to wait on being born until I’d finished writing Sunrise of Avalon!–I’m giving away two ARC copies of Book 2 of the Trystan and Isolde trilogy, Dark Moon of Avalon.
Just sign up for the newsletter if you’d like to be entered! (Or if you’d prefer not to get the newsletter, feel free to just leave a contact in the comments on this post). I’ll draw two winners on Oct. 1st.
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She’s here!
August 28th, 2009Our second baby girl arrived at 11:56 pm on Tues, August 25th. And I need to go feed her so I’ll be quick! Labor was very fast–under 3 hours. She weighed 7 lbs, 7.5 oz and was 21 inches long. And she’s utterly gorgeous! (I’m very unbiased, of course).
Here are a couple of pictures taken just an hour or so after her birth:
We still don’t have a name picked out for certain–though lots of great suggestions!
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Happy
August 5th, 2009Today I got this e-mail from my wonderful editor:
I just received the most wonderful email from a good friend of mine about your book. She and I shared a love of the Arthur legends since we were about 13, and read everything we could get our hands on then. She’s a medical student now, I’d sent Twilight of Avalon to her a while back. She said she’s been so busy this is the first novel she’s been able to read in a year. She’d been having a particularly hard time with school and needed an escape and said she sat down and read the book in one sitting. She said, “I feel so wonderful and light! I just had to tell you thank you. I’m going to do my best to channel Isolde tomorrow!” Your book definitely touched her!
Can there possibly be anything better for an author to hear about their work? If there is, I sure can’t think of it. I’ve been smiling off and on all day.
And in other news, I got my first non-English copies of Twilight of Avalon. That is another of those moments that for a first-time author is really fun–and an honor, too. It’s amazing to have words I wrote translated and sent around the world. The books that just arrived on my doorstep are the Brazilian edition, published by Prumo. Here’s what the cover looks like:
Unlike the American cover, I had absolutely nothing to do with this one. The way foreign editions work, the author really has no contact with the publishers at all–everything is done through two layers of agents. So does anyone out there happen to recognize the building pictured? I’d love to know more about it!
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The Name Game
July 23rd, 2009When we were expecting our daughter we decided not to find out whether she was a boy or a girl, so almost from the time we found out I was pregnant we had two names picked out. Skylar for a boy, Samantha for a girl. I really liked both names, alternately called the baby one or the other, and was totally sure about them for basically all nine months. Until two nights before our girl was born. All through that night I kept waking up thinking “Isabella.” I just couldn’t get it out of my mind. Isabella . . . Isabella . . . it’s a girl named Isabella.
And then she was born. She looked like this:
And oh, wow, looking at that picture for the first time in quite awhile, I cannot believe she was ever that tiny. But I took one look at her and knew instantly that she really was Isabella. My poor husband was a little startled, since we’d never even talked about that name. But I was certain right from the start that that was just who she was.
(And this was, by the way, absolute karmic revenge on the part of the universe, because before she was born I completely didn’t think such a thing was possible. I remember listening to a friends story about how they’d had to discard the name they’d picked out for their daughter because it didn’t fit her and mentally rolling my eyes and thinking, It’s a newborn baby. You give them whatever name you’ve chosen. How hard can it be? )
I know I’ve blogged before about how similar writing a book is to pregnancy. But it really is. You work, you plan, you outline, you develop your characters and really think you know what it is your writing about. And then you get to the finish. You’re within sight of typing those magical words “the end” at the end of your manuscript–and then if you’re very, very lucky, the book starts to whisper in your ear, just like Bella must have whispered in mine, This is who I am.
And this week I’ve been reaching that point with Sunrise of Avalon. That point when I’m within just scenes of the book’s ending, and I finally see with scattered but intense bursts of clarity what the story is really about. Now if this second baby will just hold off on arriving long enough for me to get all those bursts of clarity down onto the page . . .
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Writer Unboxed, Part 2
July 17th, 2009Today the second part of my interview over at Writer Unboxed is up! Stop by to hear my (condensed) thoughts on balancing writing with motherhood, plus a bit more about my writing process in general. And thanks to everyone over at WU for having me!
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Another Perk
July 10th, 2009When I was an aspiring writer, I used to read Writer Unboxed, a fabulous blog about all aspects of the writing and publishing business. I’d read the interviews with recently published authors and think, maybe someday . . .
And now, today, I’m actually there! Today’s author interview! I’m beyond thrilled, and thanks so much to everyone over at the WU site for having me. Absolutely, positively one of those perk moments I talked about in my last post.
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Perks
July 7th, 2009I recently read an interview with David Cristofano, author of The Girl She Used to Be, in which he was asked about perks–which often silly and minor things about having a book published have wound up pleasing him beyond reason. (He said having his kids shout, Hey, that’s daddy’s book! on a trip to their local bookstore–which, by the way, I absolutely agree is a great one).
But it made me think about all the small moments that go into the experience of having a book published and how I’d answer the same question if I were ever asked. For me, so far, really everything has been a perk–seeing the book’s official cover, getting the box of those first advance copies, finally getting to hold the finished product in my hands . . . I could go on through signing copies for readers and every single time someone has let me know that they loved Isolde and Trystan’s story.
But one of the perks that I think will always especially stand out for me happened just recently. As background, I should say that I was pregnant with my girl when I had the dream that inspired Twilight of Avalon , so my memories of the writing are all tied up with my memories of being pregnant with her: feeling her kick me while I typed away at that first draft, taking a break from reading Dark Age history books to look at What to Expect When You’re Expecting and all the other books you pore over as a first-time mom.
And so all those memories are tied up with ones of my fabulous midwives, too–trips to their office, describing the book I was working on when they asked what I did. (Cautiously, because like all aspiring writers I was cripplingly shy about talking about my work). But I remember bouncing on my yoga ball through the labor contractions, listening to my midwives and my husband talk and floating away in labor-land to think about passages I was going to write, lines Trystan and Isolde were going to say to each other. And then I remember my midwife Louise sitting next to me on the bed and holding my free hand (the other one had my poor, amazing super-hero husband in kind of a headlock maneuver, as I recall) when my girl was born.
Here’s a picture from afterwards–Louise is on the right with the assistant midwife Sarah on the left. Bella is the one in the Winnie the Pooh hat.
So fast forward two years to just a couple of weeks ago, when I was having some slightly bothersome contractions (nothing to worry about, as it turned out) and Louise drove over to my house (bless her, bless her, bless her) to check things out so that I didn’t have to drag Bella all the way to their office. As a thank you, I gave her a copy of Twilight of Avalon–not really even knowing whether the book was her kind of thing. But I wanted to give her something, and–okay, being honest here–that was easier than finding the energy to bake a batch of cookies or a loaf of bread. Even so, I still felt a little bad, because when someone gives you a book that you don’t like or never wind up finding the time to open there’s always that awkward worry in the back of your mind–are they going to ask what I thought? And it’s way, way worse when the gift giver is also, you know, the actual author.
So I gave Louise the book but certainly would never have thought of bringing up the subject again. But the next time I saw her–just three days later, in fact, at our regular appointment, she told me she’d sat at home all day the day before and read Twilight of Avalon cover to cover because she just couldn’t put it down. And that she couldn’t even remember the last time she’d been captured by a story like that.
Definitely, definitely a perk moment.
The only troubling question is how I’m ever going to have more children when we move to a different state in the fall and I have to find a new practice of midwives?
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from my evil twin
July 2nd, 2009So despite all the lovely things I mentioned in my last post that I have to be thankful for, today my grumpy evil twin is taking over to say that you know you are really, really ready not to be pregnant anymore when you overhear the following conversation between your husband and 2 year old daughter:
Bella: Where’s Mommy?
Nathan: She’s in the bathroom.
Bella: What’s she doing in there?
Nathan, seeing a chance for a word on (you’ll excuse the mention of the subject) potty-training: Well, what do you think she’s doing?
Bella, giving that one careful consideration: Um, throwing up, I think?
Which I actually was not. For a change. Even when the first thing Bella did when I came out was (really!) invite me to kiss one of her pet worms. She was taking them for a nice stroller ride around the house, you see, and . . . okay, it was pretty funny. It’s tough to stay grumpy for long with my girl around. I’m so lucky to be her mama.
And for the record, I went with the “blow them a kiss” option in regards the worms. 
In other news, I’ve recently been asked some questions about the second book of the trilogy, Dark Moon of Avalon, that are spoiler-free enough that I can answer them here. The first was, “Will we be seeing more magic as the trilogy progresses?” The answer to that is a qualified yes. One of the themes that emerged as I was writing the trilogy was that the Arthurian age–and all its magic–are dying out in Britain. Though of course that magic lives eternally in the songs and stories of Arthur and Avalon. But still, I think the magical elements are a bit more pronounced in the next two books. And I would say, too, that Isolde is a bit more in control of what magic there is.
The other question was, “Will we be hearing anything from Trystan’s perspective in the next books?” And the answer is yes. Since it would have been hard to include Trystan’s perspective without giving away certain secrets not revealed until the end of Book 1, Twilight of Avalon is told almost exclusively from Isolde’s point of view. But in the next two books the point of view alternates between Isolde and Trystan.
Anyone else have questions? Just let me know!
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