April Debut Contest Winner!!

Here it is! The moment you’ve all been waiting for!

But first, I want to say hi *waves* to all you fabulous followers, both old and new!

And, for all of you lucky winners waiting patiently for ARCs, just to let you know, we’re working madly on the cover of Personal Demons, so hopefully *crosses fingers* I’ll have one for you in the next month.

Ooo! And in other exciting news, in case you didn’t see, Personal Demons sold in Hungary, Brazil and Australia this month! Squee!!

Oh, yeah! We got some great blurbs too! So if you want to know what some totally amazing authors are saying about Personal Demons, check this out!

Do you see what I'm doing here? Making you wait for it to build the suspense? Is it working? :p

And…our little contest has exploded!!! We had 399 points accumulated by 81 entrants this month! Holy cow!!! Thanks for spreading the word! You guys rock so hard!!

Okay, so here we go...

The winner of my April Debut Contest is…*clicks randomizer*

Tricia J. O’Brien!!!!

YAY!!! Congratulations!

*Throws virtual confetti* (cuz I don't want to clean the real stuff up)

Tricia has won the fabulous prize behind door number one! Which, actually, is her choice of one of the following:

A signed ARC of PERSONAL DEMONS by moi (that’s me, in case you don’t speak French)
Guardian of the Dead by Karen Healey
The Cinderella Society by Kay Cassidy
Whisper by Phoebe Kitanidis
Mistwood by Leah Cypess

Only one problem, Tricia. You didn’t leave your email addy, so…maybe you don’t really want a book??? =) Email me at lisadwrites [at] yahoo [dot] com and tell me which you’d like!

My May contest starts Monday. Here’s a sneak peek at my May debut picks:
Wolves, Boys and Other Things That Might Kill Me by Kristen Chandler
The Tension of Opposites by Kristina McBride
The Rise of Renegade X by Chelsea Campbell
The Red Umbrella by Christina Diaz Gonzalez

The contest will officially post Monday, May 3rd, so check back then to enter! Good luck!

Sweating It Out

I have to say, publishing is turning out to be the most severe roller coaster ride I’ve ever been on, with many more ups and downs then I ever could have imagined. Things that never would have even occurred to me end up turning me inside out. Like the thought of my very favorite author reading my book. There’s something a little nerve-wracking about that. And, honestly, it just never occurred to me that might happen.

But…my editor sent copies of Personal Demons off to some fabulous authors, one of which was my all time favorite author, Melissa Marr. Because all of these authors are so…well…fabulous, I’d convinced myself that they’d all hate my book. So when Melissa Marr, who is a major influence on my writing, recommended Personal Demons on her blog, I almost fell out of my chair.

Since then, we’ve gotten quotes from other fabulous authors, including this:

“Personal Demons is as scary—and sexy—a book as I’ve read in a long time.”—Claudia Gray, New York Times bestselling author of Hourglass



And this:

"Fun and entertaining...the fight for Frannie's soul isn't going to be easy, and the excitement doesn't stop. Good versus evil shouldn't be this much fun, but it is! A hot YA debut novel."—Maria V. Snyder, New York Times bestselling author of Fire Study

But my first blurb came from the amazing Andrea Cremer, whose Nightshade is destined for the NYT bestseller list. Most of you don't know her writing yet, but you will. Here's what she said:

"Lisa Desrochers' debut is fantastic, full of shivers, surprises, and sultry romance. You'll be laughing one moment and shrieking the next - such a great read!"--Andrea Cremer, Future New York Times bestselling author of Nightshade

(I added that last part :p)

So, I’m starting to breathe a little easer. Maybe my book doesn’t suck after all. Maybe it’s sort of okay. Or maybe even good. =)

Hope you all think so when you get to read it. :p

Thank God for bloggers who want to interview me...

I’ve been a very, very bad blogger this week. I got home from hanging out with The Thunder From Down Under in Las Vegas on Monday and have been buried in my Personal Demons proofs.

Thankfully, I was interviewed today by Kristi at Random Acts of Writing, so I’m copping out on my own blog post and posting the link to hers. =)  Check it out for my advice to aspiring writers.

Another fun blog worth checking out is Waste Paper Prose's Author Insight series, featuring Kami Garcia (Beautiful Creatures), Lauren Oliver (Before I Fall) and moi. Lots of shenanigans going on over there. :p

Hope everyone's week is going well. What news?

Move Over, Tasmanian Devil

I'm lecturing in Las Vegas this week and, on my way out of the airport, drove past a billboard for The Thunder From Down Under. Once I got done swooning and looked closer, it occured to me that a couple of those hotties looked like Luc and Gabe. Turns out I was right. They've been hanging out with Frannie in Australia. Personal Demons just sold at auction there to Pan Macmillan.

I spent some time in Sydney last summer and loved it. I can't wait to go back to hang out on Bondi Beach and visit my book! The good news is that I won't need Rosetta Stone to read it. =)

Demons in Brazil!

Personal Demons is going to Brazil! That makes me feel this big!-->

I know some of my Brazilian friends out there on Twitter and Facebook will be happy that I can finally make the announcement. After a weeklong auction I can finally tell you that Personal Demons will be published by Editoria Salamandra. Their plan is to publish on schedule with my US publisher, so that means Personal Demons should be on the shelves in Brazil in September.

Personal Demons in Portuguese makes me =)! Yay! One more language I need to learn. I’m going to single handedly keep Rosetta Stone in business.

Way cool! Everything will be good as long as they don’t make me wear one of those Brazilian cut swimsuits when I visit my book there, cuz no one wants to see that. O_O

My book is SO PRETTY!

This post is all about me, queen of the world! Okay, so, I'm not actually the real queen of the world, I just feel like it.

I got my Personal Demons first pass pages (also known as proofs) yesterday and my book is SO PRETTY! The first pass pages are the typeset pages that are exactly how your book is going to look once it's bound. My editor worked with the designers and they found the perfect font for everything. The typesetting is perfect. It's BEAUTIFUL and I can't stop smiling. Things don't get much better in the writing world than seeing what your very first published pages are going to look like!

Now that we know that my book is beautiful on the inside, and it's what's inside that counts, it just needs some totally rad clothes. Cover coming soon, I promise! (And I hope I'm not lying.)

So now I get to read my whole book again, in all it's true glory, to pick out the small mistakes that slipped through in the typesetting process.

And, incase you're interested, it's 364 BEAUTIFUL pages long. =)

ROFL

My amazingly talented agent sister Kristin Miller cracks me up sometimes, and now is so totally one of those times. You know that when most people text "ROFL" they're not actually rolling on the floor. But, I swear I did after I read this. Don’t forget to scroll through the comments. LOL!!!

A world without libraries is like a world without...libraries.

I can't imagine it. Well, actually I can. It looks something like this->

Books stimulate imaginations, nurture creativity and improve lives. It’s our libraries that afford everyone access to that magic, but little by little, support is being pulled from our library systems. In this day of funding cuts, it’s especially important to support our libraries privately, so here’s your chance to help. On this Library Appreciation Day, I’m pledging $5 to the Stanislaus County Library for every commenter on today’s post.

We all have our favorite library memories, and I would hope that we could preserve those memories for our children and grandchildren. Who doesn’t delight in watching kids run around the library with arms full of books sit quietly on their grandma’s knee while she reads them a story. My kids love going to the library to browse books. It’s like shopping for FREE! And it’s super exciting to me that, someday soon, they’ll be able to browse my titles there too. An under-funded library system is bad news all the way around. No one wins. So, do what you can to keep our libraries alive and magical…

Personal Demons in Hungarian!

More fun news today!

Personal Demons sold in Hungary! My publisher there will be Kelly Kiadó, who also publishes P.C. Cast’s House of Night series

and Sarah Dessen.

Two of my very faves! Squee!!

It’s all so very exciting! Can’t wait to work with them!

My list of Universal Truths

Just some food for thought while I'm very busy reading some amazing soon-to-be-published books! (Which I will blog about when I'm done.)

Man cannot live on cupcakes alone, but he’ll make his dentist a very rich man trying.

The winner of the rat race is still a rat.

No good dead goes unpunished. But neither does a bad dead. So to recap: nothing goes unpunished.

Good things come to those who wait. But so do bad things, so why wait?

And, while we're waiting on a Personal Demons cover, I thought I'd throw this pic in just for fun. It was done by Luc fangirl, @jujubeantea (otherwise known as Jude) =)

Pay It Forward Blog Interviews

So, I was totally lame, and didn't get my act together to do my own interviews, but Elana Johnson organized a really cool interview series with soon-to-be-published authors (yours truly included) and they posted on some fabulous authors blogs this week.

Today, I was interviewed on Kim Harrington's (Clarity--Scholastic, 2011) blog and my awesome crit partner, Andrea Cremer (Nightshade--Philomel, Oct. 2010) was interviewed on Carrie Harris' (No Pain, No Brain--Delacorte, 2011) blog. Other bloggers that participated are linked below. The series of interviews ran all week and there are some really interesting stories about these debut authors' roads to publication. There are also some pearls of wisdom for those of you thinking of heading up that alley yourselves, so you should take a look. =)

Elana Johnson
LiLa Roecker
Beth Revis
Leah Clifford
Victoria Schwab
Kirsten Hubbard
Suzette Saxton/Bethany Wiggins
Amy Holder
Tiffany Schmidt
Susan Adrian
Dawn Metcalf
Kathy McCullough
Gretchen McNeil

April Debut Contest!

Being busy is good. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway. I’ve been on an internet vacation—no Twitter, blogging, Facebooking—while I finished up Original Sin (PD#2) revisions. But it’s April 1st, which means the start of a new debut contest.

*honk noise makers*

But first, I want to say hello and welcome to all you fabulous new followers! Thanks for spreading the word! You guys rock!!!

So, a refresher on the rules:

Below, I’ve posted my four debut picks for April. All you have to do to enter to win one is comment on this post before noon pacific time on Friday, April 30th. One winner will be chosen using the randomizer and I’ll post the winner after noon on the 30th. The winner will then be allowed to choose one title off my picks list OR a signed ARC of PERSONAL DEMONS (when I get them)! Yay!

In addition to commenting (for which you get one point) you can earn extra points each month as follows:

Old follower: +3 points
New follower: +2 points
Link to my contest post on your blog or twitter: +1 points
Dedicated post with link to my contest on your webpage/blog: +3 points
Add me to your sidebar blogroll: +2 points

Also on your entry, please remember to tell me how to find you (email address).

And remember, there will be no rollover points. Points start new every month.

So, without further adieu, here are my April pics:

*drumroll* (okay, just a little more adieu)

Guardian of the Dead by Karen Healey
The Cinderella Society by Kay Cassidy
Whisper by Phoebe Kitanidis
Mistwood by Leah Cypess

Good luck everyone!!!