Contest on the blogosphere!

The Book Scout is doing a YA Author/Pets contest.  There are pictures of animals posted as well as a list of YA authors.  Whoever matches the most pets with their YA author will win some really great prizes!

Check it out here.  There are lots of little cuties on there, including one of the animals who lives with me!

TV DUB: Mr. and Mrs. Smith

This is what they said when broadcast on cable TV, but didn't really say at all:

Brad Pitt: Chicken twit!

Angelina Jolie: Pansy!

Publishing stuff

I received my 1st pass pages for FREEFALL. Then I wrote about them. And posted pics here!

First pass pages.

I received my first pass pages on Tuesday.  I let Dwayne read the acknowledgments for the first time and I cried a little and he cried a little and then we went out to dinner because what else were we going to do on First Pass Page Day?

For those of you who don't know, the pass pages are unbound, but they show exactly what the printing will look like on the pages of the final book.  I've been reading books for all but the first four years of my life (and even then I was always looking at picture books), but it never occurred to me that so much work went into this.  Books actually have interior designers!   Who knew?

So one really fun thing the designer did for FREEFALL is have the time stamps for the start of each new scene in Seth's handwriting.  (Or, at least, I think it's supposed to be Seth's since it isn't mine!)  See?  See?

Also, the running heads (that's my name and the title, I've learned) are on the sides of the pages as are the page numbers.  Like so:

   

(This doesn't look quite right since I took the pictures at different distances.  But in real life, the text is the same size on both pages and the running heads match up exactly.)

And the best part of all is that it's set up so that the running heads are printed near the top of the page at the beginning, but gradually move down so that when you get to the end of the book, they are near the bottom of the page.  So if you flip the pages quickly from the start to the end (you know, like those little flip books where you can make stick-figure drawings into live-action stick-figure drawings?), you can watch the title as it FALLS DOWN the page! 

My job for this part of the process is to read through everything on the pass pages and look for errors.  (And Pulse will have a proofreader doing the same.)  So it isn't all fun and games here.  But it's still pretty exciting!

Author Events

I was busy on Saturday!  I went to author Kimberly Derting's launch party AND a signing for Carrie Ryan.   I wrote about it on my LJ and posted a few pics, too!  Check it out!