Okay, technically the hunt doesn’t start until April 4th at noon, Pacific time. However. I’m about to dart out of town again and wanted to make sure I got this posted in a timely fashion.

The instructions are below, and remember, I’m putting this up a little early because I’m Away from the Internet, doing educational, self-improving things like writing a book and going to seminars and hanging out with MY EDITOR! (Editor! ::eeee::)

I repeat, the contest does not actually start until April 4th.

Now, without further ado:

Welcome to YA Scavenger Hunt! This tri-annual event was first organized by author Colleen Houck as a way to give readers a chance to gain access to exclusive bonus material from their favorite authors … and a chance to win some awesome prizes! At each stop, you not only get access to exclusive content from each author, you also get a clue for the hunt. Add up the clues, and you can enter for our prize–one lucky winner will receive one signed book from each author on my team! But play fast: this contest (and all the exclusive bonus material) will only be online for 72 hours!

Go to the YA Scavenger Hunt page to find out all about the hunt. There are TWO contests going on simultaneously, and you can enter one or both! I am a part of the RED TEAM–but there is also a blue team for a chance to win a whole different set of twenty-five signed books!

If you’d like to find out more about the hunt, see links to all the authors participating, and see the full list of prizes up for grabs, go to the YA Scavenger Hunt homepage

SCAVENGER HUNT PUZZLE

Directions: Below, you’ll notice that I’ve listed my favorite number. Collect the favorite numbers of all the authors on the red team, and then add them up (don’t worry, you can use a calculator!). 

Entry Form: Once you’ve added up all the numbers, make sure you fill out the form here to officially qualify for the grand prize. Only entries that have the correct number will qualify.

Rules:  Open internationally, anyone below the age of 18 should have a parent or guardian’s permission to enter. To be eligible for the grand prize, you must submit the completed entry form by Sunday, April 7th at noon Pacific Time. Entries sent without the correct number or without contact information will not be considered.

SCAVENGER HUNT POST

Today, I am hosting Kathleen Peacock on my website for the YA Scavenger Hunt! Kathleen spent her teen years crushing on authors and writing short stories about vampires. Her debut, HEMLOCK, is available from Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of Harper Collins. THORNHILL, book two in the Hemlock Trilogy will be released in September.

Find out more by checking out Kathleen’s website or find more about Hemlock here!

EXCLUSIVE CONTENT

Mackenzie and Amy were best friends. Until Amy was brutally murdered. Since then, Mac’s life has been turned upside down. She is being haunted by Amy in her dreams, and an extremist group called the Trackers has come to Mac’s hometown of Hemlock to hunt down Amy’s killer: A white werewolf.

— Hemlock Bonus Content —

The following is a deleted scene from one of the early drafts of Hemlock. In that version, Mac and Kyle actually left town in an attempt to escape the attention of the Trackers (after Kyle lied and told Mac he was still in love with his ex).

—

I turned on my side and stared at Kyle in the semi-dark. We had gotten a discount on the room because the last guest had stolen the curtains. The neon glow from a sign across the street cast red shadows on his face and bare chest, and it was hard not to let my gaze linger over the planes and angles of his body.

I had seen Kyle shirtless a thousand times, but that one stupid kiss had changed everything. “Are you awake?” I whispered.

“Yeah.”

“Do you think Jason’s okay?”

Kyle opened his eyes and stared up at the ceiling. After a long moment, he rolled onto his side and studied my expression. He reached out and brushed a strand of hair from my forehead. I found myself turning my face into his touch as his fingertips lingered on my skin. It was the first time he had touched me since his revelation about Heather.

“You’re worried about him. Even after everything he did.” 

“Aren’t you?” 

Kyle didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. We both knew you didn’t stop caring just because it was the healthier option.  

I stared into his eyes. Strong emotions seemed to bring the wolf closer to the surface and those husky-blues, still unfamiliar, gazed back at me. I badly wanted the familiar warmth of Kyle’s brown eyes, but the blue held a strange pull. Ice was dangerous: you could fall through and lose yourself in the space between heartbeats. 

Slowly, I reached out and trailed my hand from his shoulder to the top of his jeans and then back. 

I wanted to lose myself, I realized. I wanted to forget—even for just a few minutes—how completely messed up everything had become. 

How messed up we had become.

Kyle sighed, a soft rush of breath that stirred my hair. He closed his eyes and inhaled through his nose. A deep, calming breath. I didn’t want him to be calm; I wanted him to be as confused and lonely as I was. 

I rolled him and he let me. One fluid motion that put the mattress at his back with me on top. I held my face inches from his. Then, before I could lose my nerve, I lowered my lips and kissed him. 
A low groan trickled from Kyle’s throat as his lips parted under mine. The kiss was gentle at first, but it quickly slid into something feverish and almost desperate.

As Kyle’s arms strained around me, as he kissed me like he could drink me down, I tasted the edge of the oblivion I craved.

“Wait…” The word was long and drawn out, as though it had been wrenched from deep inside his chest. Gently but firmly, he put his hands on my shoulders and eased me back.  “This isn’t right.”

I slid off of him, stunned. The heat that had been building in the rest of my body rushed to my face as I moved to the edge of the bed. I stared at the far wall because looking at him was suddenly impossible. “Because you love Heather?”

“Yes.” There was a strange catch in Kyle’s voice, but I didn’t examine it too closely. I didn’t want to examine anything too closely. 

An ache spread through my chest, leaving me hollow inside. 

I used to be so good at putting up walls. Walls so that I didn’t say the wrong thing. Walls so that I didn’t get hurt. It was a skill I hadn’t needed for a long time. Now, when I needed it the most, it was too rusty to be effective.

Or maybe it was just a skill I couldn’t use against Kyle.

The mattress creaked as he stood.
 
“I think I should sleep in the car.”

“You don’t have to.” My voice was dead and automatic.

“Yeah, actually, I do.” There it was, that catch again. It sounded almost like regret. But that couldn’t be it.

The door opened and shut. 

After awhile, I stretched out on my back and stared up at the ceiling. 

I didn’t sleep.

—

Yowza! Just … 0_o

(sad)

(hot)

(sad)

Whew, okay.

So. If you love reading deleted scenes—if you’re glad that this scene has been made undeleted for your reading AND angsting pleasure—leave a comment for Kathleen, check out HEMLOCK, and be sure to visit the other blogs for more exclusive content like this!

And don’t forget to enter the contest for a chance to win a ton of signed books by me, Kathleen Peacock, and everyone else on Team Red ! To enter, you need to know that my favorite number is 11. Add up all the favorite numbers of the authors on the red team and you’ll have all the secret code to enter for the grand prize!

CONTINUE THE HUNT

To keep going on your quest for the hunt, you need to check out the next author, Mari Mancusi!

EDIT: You guys, you guys, sorry for the font confusion! The number is ELEVEN. Because it’s awesome.

Tweet #YASH

Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton and Brenna Yovanoff’s THE ANATOMY OF CURIOSITY, a companion to their earlier THE CURIOSITIES, and a conversational step-by-step guide to their writing/ critiquing process and relationship, with new original stories by the authors in first and final draft forms, again to Andrew Karre at Carolrhoda Lab, for publication in Fall 2014, by Laura Rennert at the Andrea Brown Literary Agency for Stiefvater and Gratton, and Sarah Davies at the Greenhouse Literary Agency for Yovanoff (world English). Translation: info@rightspeople.com

It’s official! We get to do another book together, and it will be big and pretty and full of more stories about kissing and more pertinent annotations using the magic pens!

(I mean, these new/long/actually-revised stories aren’t written yet. Because they’re new! But I assume they’ll be about kissing.)

(At least, I know mine probably will be. Maggie’s will probably be about people not kissing even though they really, really want to. Tess’s will probably be about something that dies all over the place and gets on stuff. These are not spoilers, this is not information—I’m just listing things that happen.)

(Also, based on last time, there’s a chance some of the annotations will not be pertinent. Some of them may actually be thinly-veiled allegations about how your mom goes to college. Or … has a face? Look, I don’t even know.)

So, it’s been a really long time since I’ve done one of these posts. And I can make tons of excuses—book stuff, holiday stuff, constant travel—and they are even legitimate excuses (insofar as excuses are ever legitimate), because all those things actually happened.

If I’m being honest though, those are not the reason I haven’t trotted out teenage-Brenna in awhile. The truth is that I’m just moving very slowly now. The reason for this is that by November of senior year, the eighteen year old version of me has become a creature who thinks waaaaay too much.

Now, I just want to clarify—this concept is something I really, really hate. People have been telling me I think too much for basically my whole life. It’s reductive, it’s patronizing, and when you get right down to it, pretty much nonsensical.

However. In light of what I’m going to discuss next, I’m forced to admit that even though I hate saying so, it is actually possible to think too much. For instance, if you are thinking a lot and also doing approximately nothing. So, in sum: Less thinking! More doing!

I’m still avoiding the actual high school story, though. The real reason I’m being avoidant is that senior year is the year that is hard to break into neat and cohesive chunks of narrative. This is because teenage-me is finally faced with all the messy complicated things that she has previously only been a spectator for.

More and more, I’m forced to grapple with the new and troubling understanding that I am In the World. It’s okay if you laugh at that realization—grown-up me laughs at it all the time. And by in the world, I mean knowing that I’m THERE. With real live people who exist outside my brain and have real live feelings and experiences and problems that are too complicated for me to truly understand. And I don’t know what to do about any of it. And so, in an act of feeble desperation, I revert to the opposite of doing something about it. Which, for those playing along at home, is … nothing.

Last Thursday, Delilah and I were coming back from Diamond Shamrock. We were walking through the parking lot, heading for one of the east doors, and we saw Rooster sitting on the curb, cradling his head in his hands. […]
     Delilah touched my elbow. “Do you think we should go see what’s wrong?”
     I shook my head.
     “But it might be really bad.”
     “We can’t do anything,” I said, and left it at that, because I couldn’t explain what I really meant.
     […] So we went inside and left him there. I haven’t seen him since.
     When I picture him in my head, I only see good things about him, like those are the parts that get printed on your brain. That’s so weird. I mean, he was always vaguely kind to me in class but I never knew him. He had scars on his forehead and maybe some on his chin. What is that? A guy I barely knew, but I mostly think of him laughing, clapping #4 hard on the shoulder or elbowing him. I only remember him happy.

It was a lonely moment, and one that could have come straight out of a movie, all black asphalt and gray sky and the bright, effervescent taste of Poprocks. I couldn’t couldn’t quite tell if it was made worse because we were standing there, or better.

This creeping uncertainty will occupy my thoughts for a lot of reasons, and not just in the context of Rooster, but because the world is full of moments like this, and because Jane is in bad shape and I don’t know if my standing there can ever make it better.

Jane has an eating disorder. This is not exactly news. I mean, she’s had an eating disorder since before I met her, but now, in the fall of my senior year, it’s finally just blatantly obvious. And that’s the problem, because now that it’s undeniable, it’s not something I can just avoid thinking about anymore.

However, as a practiced rationalizer, I do my level best to keep the knowledge manageable.

#4 is important in this regard, because I use him a lot as a weird sort of emotional buffer, instead of just a pleasant crushy distraction. (Although, that too.) He seems to have just so many more feelings than I do, and I’m content (ish) to project all the ickiness of my own helplessness and uncertainty onto him. Every time he seems exhausted or overwhelmed, that’s one more time that I don’t have to be.

This morning, as I was walking to English, I heard voices I recognized even before I turned the corner.
     The low, quiet one coughed a little and said, “No, I’m—I think I’m just going to leave after 1st. I’ll probably just see you later or something.”
     The second voice was louder, but gentle in a way that’s hard to explain. A voice like a space-heater or a warm windowsill. “Hey, what’s up? Why’re you going to cut so early?”
     When I came around the corner, Holden had #4 trapped against the wall by the drinking fountain.
     #4 was shrugging a little. “I just—I really don’t feel good at all. There’s a test in history though. Important. So I’ll go to that. But after, I’m just gone, okay?” He started to cough hard and covered it up by leaning over the drinking fountain.
     I was already past them by the time Holden said, “Hey, you okay?”
     “Yeah,” #4 muttered. “I’m fine. It’s just—I can’t take this shit much more, you know?” His voice was dull and I looked back over my shoulder.
     And I’ve heard him say these things before, to Dweezil as they pass me and Little Sister Yovanoff at our locker, or to Odd on the way out to the parking lot. How tired he is, how everything about the world is too much. How he is fine.
     They just nod and don’t answer. I’ve begun to wonder if, for boys, nodding is the same as when Delilah and I hold each other’s faces between our hands. If it is meant to comfort. From the outside, it doesn’t seem like quite enough.
     Today though, when I looked back, Holden had his arm slung around #4’s shoulders. With his free hand, he was gesturing in wide sweeps.
     He said, “Yeah, you can take it. Know why? ‘Cause you’re tough, that’s why.”
     And of course #4 nodded, but right then, he didn’t look tough at all, just sick and pale and exhausted. I swear November is the worst month of the year.

To teenage me, the most fascinating part of this whole interaction is his use of the word just—this concerted effort to diminish the importance of his feelings. I feel like I’m waiting for something, always watching to see what will happen—if, when the weight of the world really is too much, he’ll implode or fracture. If his surface will crack and the too-muchness will all spill out and then, thanks to the laws of transitive denial, I will never have to deal with my own too-muchness ever again.

Also, even at the time, I understand just how dysfunctional this sort of narrative is, but I am all about balance, even totally dysfunctional balance based on magical thinking, and for every time this total stranger starts to feel like he can’t keep it together anymore, that’s one more instance I can.

Delilah is experiencing similar emotional lockstep, but hers is way more intimate and has completely different results. It’s like the worse Jane gets, the worse her own state becomes.

We never talk about any of the things that are wrong. Delilah has always acted like she doesn’t care about anything, but now, all the caring is coming out in huge, unpredictable storms, just all over the place. She’s been making a (bad, bad) habit of drinking in the bathrooms before first hour, and there’s this strange new voice inside me that feels a personal responsibility to her in a way that I’ve never, in my whole dispassionate little life felt responsible for anyone. (This is what’s known as “forming human relationships.”) And I want to fix her. I want to say, “You’re fifteen,” and I want to say, “Don’t you realize this is an awful, awful way to cope?” And I want to say, “Stop.”

But the words never quite form and instead, I buy her a cup of terrible hot-plate coffee from the cafeteria and take her home when she’s crying.

She says it’s not because of Jane, but I suspect that if we want to be honest about it, it has to be—at least a little. They don’t get along the way that Little Sister Yovanoff and I do, but they are bound together in this fierce, destructive way where they seem to feed off each other’s feelings, and the bad ones most of all. It’s weird to imagine being anchored to a person who brings out your very worst, but that’s the upshot of it. That’s them.

I know that I am supposed to do the right thing, the responsible thing. To tell someone, tell her aunt, her uncle, an administrator, tell a teacher. I know every maudlin plot-point of the problem-novel script. I’ve read books and magazines and watched TV. I’ve had health class. But all the presentations and the pamphlets are not lining up at all with real life.

In school assemblies and in class, we’re still constantly being presented with the fiction that things are under control and adults can come and solve our problems. The mythology is that someone else will know what to do, and now, when it comes to Delilah, this is demonstrably not the case.

The ugly truth is, there’s no one to tell because everyone already knows.

Delilah is always getting caught and nothing has ever changed. She spent all of summer break up at the reservoir, getting obliterated with the Bad Kids from her church. Once, she didn’t come home until almost five in the morning. She got grounded for a month and her aunt took away her Sublime CD.* She’s on notice. She has a substance abuse class and a counselor. She gets detention all the time.

Everything else just stays the same.

More and more, the weighing of things arrives in my head, a complicated monster. Sometimes people get caught doing something self-destructive and then everything turns around. They are magically helped by people who love them. Delilah’s aunt has caught her drinking. Nothing happened. I don’t know what would be optimal or right. I keep thinking about all the ways this drama could play out, the inciting incident, the consequences. In health class and in Critical Skills, they were always talking about consequences. I can imagine the screenplay, but can see no way that the conflict is resolved in real life. Mostly, I can’t imagine a way in which the situation would be helped by her getting suspended from school.

The problem with these high school posts is, I feel a little bit (a lot) like I should be setting a good example. The problem is, I’m talking about a very different version of me, and eighteen-year-olds—even the most measured, pragmatic, thinky ones—are not really very good examples of how to deal with problems.

Grown-up me is speaking with the advantage of experience, not to mention a lot more confidence in my own ability to judge a situation. Grown-up me is full of ideas. But the thing is, at eighteen, I am logical and independent, but not an adult—not really. Not even close.

Grown-up me says (imagine her voice sounds very reasonable) Well, there are LOTS of things left to do. Talk to a specific teacher. Sure, Delilah hates all of hers, but you don’t hate yours. Or talk to Shar in the scheduling office—she loves you in a sincere, straightforward way that you will not understand until you’re older, but trust me. If you ask her for advice or ideas, she’ll come through. Or, if all of that sounds blatantly impossible, just skip the adults and start with Delilah. She listens to you. See if you can help her think up ways to deal with the feelings at the source, rather than defaulting straight to burying them. Talk to Gypsy and see if you can convince her that her new job is to flatly refuse to day-drink with Delilah in the baseball dugout. Anything, just say anything.

But feelings are uncomfortable and the situation is messy and the Brenna in this story is 18 and distinctly not an adult. She takes a deep breath. She treats the immediate situation not as a crisis to be averted, but more like a controlled slide.

Some of this self-doubt and paralysis has arisen straight from the situation, but another huge contributing factor is that at 18, I’ve spent so much time thinking that the reason I’m so unsure of everything is because I was homeschooled, because I’m alien or weird or a late bloomer or just disconnected. I think this, and then make up reasons not to trust my own judgment, like I am somehow eight or nine steps behind. When really, no one else has any idea either.

Because it’s not just me—I am not the only person who doesn’t know what to do. And I’m living in a world where Rooster sits alone on the curb with his head in his hands and doesn’t know we’re watching, and #4 tries helplessly to explain to Holden the weight of every painful, bad thing, and where Delilah tries to act like she isn’t crying when she actually is and so we both pretend that when I hug her, she’s not leaving wet spots on the shoulder of my coat.

We are none of us inhabiting the space of anyone else. But the saving grace—the part that matters—is that Holden has his arm around #4 and Delilah still wants to help Rooster, and she doesn’t even know him. The part that matters is that we are still standing next to each other.

*****

I’m going to lecture you right now. I promise that it will be short, and it won’t become like a normal installment, but I want to tell you several things. First, I am not in any way an official resource for help with depression or disordered eating or substance abuse, but those resources exist, and there are links and phone numbers right here.

No, what I want to say is far less concrete, and it is this. The thing with turning into a grown-up (and not the kind I’ve talked about before, where you have a job and car and start being in charge of buying your own clothes—I mean the real kind), is that you eventually hit a place where you have to start making the kind of hard, important choices that no one else can make for you.

And that’s okay. Really. You have my permission to make grown-up decisions.

Yes, I realize that my telling you that is totally backwards and kind of counterproductive. But sometimes I think it helps just to hear it.

So you—yes, YOU. You have my express permission to be in charge and take initiative and use your own very best judgment.

Just as long as it involves doing something and not nothing.

I trust you.

*Here is me dating myself.

II.
This is weird, because I think about them a lot, and not just while I’m writing them. I think about structure and nuance and what things mean, and how I think something should look in order to communicate efficiently or illustrate a point I want to make.

This is because, as much time as I’ve spent inventing made-up people, as much as I love to submerge myself in imaginary worlds, the thing I have always cared more about than anything else in the entire storytelling world is THEME.

And I know that even the broadest, most universal theme can’t sustain a story all by itself—that theme is not the same thing as plot. Themes are not characters. They’re not story arcs or scenes. Maybe most importantly, they aren’t morals or lessons or platitudes or personal statements. Themes illustrate abstract concepts, but they don’t tell you what to think (you have to deal with that part on your own).

I’ve always been like this—aggressively focused on the significance and the symbolism, the underlying implications, and I think now that the root cause of this is very simple. It’s because underneath the fancy English-classness of it, themes are really just ideas.

You already know this about me—I know you do—but I’ll say it again, because repetition is a useful rhetorical device and because I never get tired of saying it : I love ideas.

I love them and collect and hoard them and cuddle up to them like warm, fuzzy fleece blankets that are also made of sunshine and happiness. I would eat them, sleep on them, bathe in them, if there were any way that could result in me not withering away to nothing while simultaneously being sleep-deprived and really unhygienic.

What I’m trying to say is that theme matters to me, because much like the nucleotides that form DNA, theme is one of the most basic building blocks of what something is about.

III.
Now, here is where I describe the book—not what it says on the jacketflap or the website, or even what I say on panels and in interviews when people ask me what the story is.

Paper Valentine has murder in it, but it’s not a murder mystery. It has ghosts, but it’s not a horror novel or a supernatural thriller. It has kissing, but it’s not a romance, and it has grief and loss and bullying and disordered eating, but it’s not an issues book and it’s not an after-school special. And you are one-hundred-million percent absolutely free to read it and consider it and then disagree with me wildly on every single claim I’ve just made, because books are made by writers, but they are understood to by readers, and any time I start tossing around lofty blanket decrees and announcing what something is NOT about, I can and will be … wrong.

No matter how much I might want to, no matter how hard I try, I can’t tell you what my book will be for you. All I can do is tell you what it is for me, and here is the heart and soul of it:

Paper Valentine is a love story about two best friends, and one of them is dead.

There. That’s it. One sentence. And all the ghosts, murders, kissing, social scuffling and jockeying and backbiting—those things are there, they’re story, and story is gorgeously, vitally important. But it’s different from DNA.

So now here’s my longer answer, because there’s always a longer answer (don’t let anyone tell you there isn’t). Paper Valentine is the book I wrote because ever since high school, I’ve never stopped thinking about all the varied and intricate ways that the world can be dangerous to girls—physically, socially, emotionally, psychologically, and how you can arrange those dangerous ideas to make a spiral. A BAD spiral. An eerie, prickly spiral that’s hard to see, but can still exert a tremendous amount of influence, making its own little house of mirrors as it goes, so that death reflects love, which reflects separation and autonomy, which reflects violence and power and sex, which reflects control and hierarchies and expectations, and you walk along it, knowing that every step of the way will mean peril.

Paper Valentine is about peril, and about choosing to move forward anyway, because your life is your life and letting someone else impose a role on you—any role you didn’t choose yourself—is just one more insidious and ill-defined danger.

That. That is what the book is about.

Also, anything else you might feel is happening anyplace in those pages. It’s probably that, too.

(And look at me—for possibly the first time in my life, I just talked all about my book with NO SPOILERS. I think this means I should probably eat some cake.)

(In an ephemeral and transitory sense of the word.)

(As in, I’m back until I leave again on Sunday.)

BUT, I’m happy to report that this last month has been really excellent and full of All Good Things.

Paper Valentine has been out for two months. Seriously you guys, I can’t even explain how grateful I am for all the reader-love it’s been getting, and how fantastic it was to talk to so many of you during the Breathless Reads tour.

(Just so you know, I love touring a LOT. I love meeting you guys, and I think it’s awesome that Penguin sends me out with other authors, because it’s basically like a weeklong book club/sleepover/dance-party with friends, only every day we get to meet a whole bunch of new people who love reading as much as we do!)

Also, pretty much as soon as I came home, I got to go to Norway with D. Which is, no joke, literally the first time I’ve ever left the country. We were in Oslo, a place that is breathtakingly beautiful and full of museums and art. Even their graffiti was fantastic. (Subtext: if you ever get a chance to visit, DO IT.)

Other things of note:

1) Paper Valentine is an official Junior Library Guild selection, which means that Paper Valentine will be even more widely available in schools and libraries, and that means widely available to you!

2) I started a Tumblr, so feel free to add me, and do ask questions—lots and lots of questions.

3) I bought my first-ever pair of skinny jeans.

Now, I’m fully aware that people do not really come to this blog intent on discussing fashion, but I’d like to take a minute to talk about skinny jeans. I am not one of those people who undertakes shopping lightly. I don’t like feeling confused and uniformed—about anything, really—and so I tend to research things extensively before I buy them.

Now, if you venture onto the internet, you will find a seething mass of anxiety and confusion when it comes to these jeans. You’ll find people asking if they can wear skinny jeans if they are skinny, if they aren’t skinny, if they’re short, tall, all hips, NO hips, big thighs, short waist, long waist, blue eyes, shallow nail beds, green hair. Basically any permutation of the human form you can think of.

And the answer to all these questions is yes. Yes, no matter what your body type, you can, in fact, look totally kickass in skinny jeans, but they have to fit right and different cuts will look good on different people and your choice of shoes, tops, jackets and accessories are important, The End.

However. (And I know you knew this was coming.) There’s one thing that was never really covered. Something that, I’ll admit it, I didn’t even think of.

The one crucial question I never saw asked:

Can I wear skinny jeans if I have really, really ginormous feet, but essentially no calves?

The answer, internet, is Yes, But.

Yes, but just be aware that to take them off, you’re going to have to sit down on the floor.

Yes, but you’re probably going to have to turn them inside out, hook the legs over the top of the bedpost and pull.

Yes, but if at all possible … look for the ones with the little zippers at the bottoms. Because otherwise you’re just going to find yourself tangled in your own pants, debating whether or not the situation would be remotely improved by texting someone to come and help pry them off your really ginormous feet.

There. See? I’m looking out for you.

Now … I plan to do many things. For instance, wash some socks, make a pot roast, eat little red candies shaped like raspberries, and watch a million billion episodes of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, but before I do that, here is this very awesome, important thing!

Which is a list of the dates for the West Coast leg of the Breathless Reads Tour, featuring:

Andrea Cremer
Jessica Khoury
Marie Lu
and me!

Sunday, February 10th – LOS ANGELES 
Barnes & Noble, The Grove, 2pm
189 The Grove Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90036  
 
Monday, February 11th – LOS ANGELES 
Mrs. Nelson’s Toy and Book Shop, 7pm 
1030 Bonita Ave., LaVerne, Ca 91750  
 
Tuesday, February 12th – SAN FRANCISCO  
A Great Good Place for Books, 7pm
6120 La Salle Avenue, Oakland, CA 94611
 
Wednesday, February 13th – PORTLAND, OR 
Barnes & Noble, Clackamas, 6:30pm 
12000 SE 82nd Avenue, Portland, OR 97086
 
Thursday, February 14th – BOULDER, CO  
Boulder Bookstore, 6:30pm 
1107 Pearl Street, Boulder, CO 80302 

Friday, February 15th – AUSTIN  
BookPeople, 7pm
603 North Lamar, Austin, Texas 78703
 
Saturday, February 16th – SALT LAKE CITY  
Barnes & Noble, Orem
330 East 1300 South Orem, UT 84058

If you are any of these places, or even sort of/kind of NEAR any of these places, you should totally come see us!

Which means that Paper Valentine is now available in stores—stores like my unassailably-awesome indie, The Tattered Cover, where they are super-nice and friendly and invite me to sign copies and even let me take pictures!

Here is Paper Valentine in the wild. I took this picture myself, which is why it is characterized by very weird composition. But that’s okay, because I think Paper Valentine looks nice nestled in with all its book-friends.

[Here is the spot in this blog post where I was going to tell you more about the actual book and what it’s like on the inside, but it turns out that I am way too starry-eyed and scatterbrained and discombobulated, so any informative content will simply have to wait!]

[Until then, look! Paper Valentine! In stores!]

*Also, no, seriously—what day is it, because D has been on a business trip all week, which means that now I don’t have a bedtime and sometimes it’s very hard to tell if it’s a new day, or still the same day and I was just napping.

Due to some general publishing shuffle-y-ness, resulting in a random (and I’ll be honest, not entirely unwelcome) deadline reprieve, I am still writing the first draft of my current book. Yes, that one. Still. Also, it is—hands down—the longest book I have ever written.

However, right now I’m taking a little break from battling the Ever-Expanding Wordcount because I have about nineteen really exciting things to say about Paper Valentine! And by nineteen, I mean six.

Also, when I present you with this list of six things, you have to promise to keep reading all the way to the bottom, because I’m saving the biggest thing for last. You can tell I’m getting better about spoilers, because that is not actually a spoiler, because I didn’t actually tell you the identity of the big thing. Progress!

Now, without further ado, here are the awesome things:

1. Paper Valentine comes out in exactly one week. That is soon.
2. Paper Valentine is on the Indie Next extended list (Scroll down. No, seriously—keep scrolling.)
3. Paper Valentine is a January Editor’s Pick on Amazon, and is in some pretty excellent company.
4. It has a starred review from Publishers Weekly!
5. It has a starred review from BCCB, which you can’t see yet, but which I assure you is super-fantastic, because they really, really totally understood and liked every single thing I was trying to do when I wrote the book! (Which, as you can probably imagine, is basically one of those times that writing books is so gratifying I can’t even explain.)

And.

AND.

On a scale of the actual size of things, here is the biggest awesome thing, which is that in February, I’ll be participating in the West Coast leg of this year’s Breathless Reads tour (!!!) It is a week long, and has just a bunch of stops! Needless to say, I am pretty much over the moon.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be back with a post dedicated to the dates, locations, and of course, the lovely fellow-Penguin authors I’ll be appearing alongside! In the meantime, though, you can find out way more by checking out the Breathless Reads Facebook page.

Okay, that’s the big news for today—and honestly, probably for the week—but I promise I will be back with more information shortly. After I write some more scenes about flooded bridges. So stay tuned.

I have a book coming out in a month!

I know, right?

Remember this little guy?

To preface what will surely wind up being one giant disorganized ramble, I just want to say that I have the most awful time talking about my own books. It is sort of like when I talk about other people’s books, only even less coherent, with even more spoilers.

There’s this thing that I get asked about periodically—mostly by people at events, where I don’t have adequate time to gather my thoughts, and then I flail around and give terrible answers, but the thing is, I KNOW the real answer. Sometimes I just can’t figure out how to say it right.

The thing people get curious about is, how much of what I write is based on my own life.

Now, if we’re talking about The Replacement, the short answer is … none. As anyone who reads my high school posts could tell you: the real, actual-person teenage-me had very little in common with Mackie Doyle. And by very little, I mean that she probably would have stared blankly at him, blinked in confusion a few times, and then wandered away to eat Skittles and make up mathematical postulates about emo boys with hoodies and persecution complexes, and think critical, judge-y things about Sid Vicious, who died before she was born and is not around to defend himself.

She was kind of pitiless and cynical that way.

Also, fine, yes, I’ll admit it—the wry, loyal, affectionate dynamic between Mackie, Roswell, and the twins is loosely based on a lot of guy-friend-groups I’ve known, so that part is totally something I stole from real life.

In The Space Between, one could argue that I put a decent (ish) amount of my adolescent self into Daphne, and that seems pretty true. She’s curious. She’s dispassionate and analytical. Occasionally callous, but also benevolent. She’s that fish out of water who doesn’t really care that there’s no water. Other parts, though, are totally, totally made up. For instance, the part about being the daughter of the devil.

(Okay, fine. I have been young and alone in Chicago one time.)

(Everyone was super-friendly, and the food was very good, so that part is true.)

But Brenna, you say, because in my imagination you are helping me stay on-task, Brenna, what about Paper Valentine?

And I devote some serious thought to your question, and then conclude that my main character, Hannah Wagnor, is yet again nothing like me.

However, many other things in this book are true.

I wrote Paper Valentine because I grew up in a city very much like Hannah’s fictional city of Ludlow—clean, sprawling, suburban, full of city parks and open spaces. It’s routinely ranked as one of the most livable cities in the country. It’s really very lovely.

I wrote Paper Valentine because even though it’s a very lovely city, we still had bad years. Because once a guy was dressing up as a cop, pulling girls over and killing them. And once the Dutch Elms all got sick and died, and a man was breaking into girls’ houses and the reservoir dried up and the state park was on fire for so long one summer the whole sky turned red and ash rained down like snow and once the birds got sick and died and the creek flooded and washed a train off the tracks into a trailer park, while my friend Tony stood outside of Chuck E. Cheese in a mouse costume with a cigarette in his hand and watched it happen, and so a lot of my memories feel very surreal.

Paper Valentine is about those feelings. Not those actual things, but about the way bad things can happen in nice places, and a city can become a kind of bright-and-dark fairyland and there’s nothing you can do about it but grow morning glories on your balcony and eat snow-cones and drive around and not pull over for cops unless it’s in a public place, and even though it’s insanely hot out, you still lock your windows at night.

So those are some true things—some feelings I put into the book, even if I didn’t put them on the page—but the truest thing of all is that my aunt and uncle own a photo shop, where I worked for most of college.

Which means the part about the crime scene photos—that part’s true.

The thing about the crime scene account is, nothing shows you faster or more clearly what your city is actually like.

When you do the crime scene account, you always know how many people have died. You know when and where. Even the ones that didn’t make the papers. You know how many assaults happened last week and how many break-ins and drunk and disorderlies, and what it looks like when they have to use the jaws of life to get you out of your car.

You know the dark corners of a city—how the inside part doesn’t always match up with the surface. You know that even though you’re quick and methodical and really good about case numbers and multiple sets of instructions and never accidentally giving the original negatives to the assistant from the DA’s office, you’re mostly only in charge of the crime scene account because you’re the one who doesn’t wind up sobbing in the bathroom, which makes you feel a little bit like a sociopath.

And okay, fine. That last part is not in the book.

But still, it’s where the book came from, along with all that other stuff.

(Hannah is not a sociopath.)

(Neither am I.)

(But I was still really good at the crime scene account.)

(Hey! Someone had to do it!)

The winners of the Random Contest of Randomness are, in no particular order and with no particular regard to specific prizes:

Alexandra Shostak

Kasumi

You know the drill—I’ll be in touch shortly!

Second things.

Post office!

Okay, so I’m going to be very blunt right now. I hate going to the post office. Of all my various procrastinations, there is no procrastination I cultivate more aggressively than my avoidance of the post office. (Except maybe my avoidance of the gas station and the bank.)

Which is to say that all the books for like the last n number of contests … are not mailed. They are sitting on the kitchen table, waiting patiently for me to send them out into the world. Except for one, which has gone AWOL*. Which, what the hell, people? How can I just lose a book? (Easily. Because I live in a House of Books, and I suspect that the lost one is now comfortably ensconced somewhere in my office, mixed in with the thousand other books.) (Which means that in order to find it, I will have to organize my office.)

So, if you are waiting on a book, it’s coming.

Just as soon as I organize my office.

Followed by:

Email! Seriously, you guys. It wants to kill me. By the sheer force of its accusing triple digits.

So, to every person out there who has yet to be informed of something pertinent, or is waiting for a response to a pressing question, or needs some piece of vital scheduling information, I’m getting there—I am!

Slowly. Very. Very. Slowly.

And last—massively, massively last—Book!

Which is the reason for all the other disorganization in my life.

Because the thing is, I keep pretending that I’m awesome at time management. Which is definitively Not True. I’m good at time management when I have lots of time and not much to manage, but it is downright amazing how quickly my little semblance of order falls apart the deeper I get into a new book.

Also, don’t get me wrong, I love this book. LOOOOVE it.

Also, it is the book that will never end. I mean, it is seriously the longest draft I’ve ever written of anything, and there is currently no end in sight, which is semi-bad drafting-wise, because it’s due at the beginning of December. Which means that hell or high water, it will be done by then. Just don’t expect me to make much sense between now and December 7th,** because quite frankly, I feel I’m doing well to have on matching socks right now.

Wait. There’s a hole in one of them.

Damn it.

*Found it! It was totally behind the door. Why? Who knows.

** That part’s mostly for D. Also, he got the stand mixer down from the cupboard the other day and put it on the counter in preparation for all the stress-baking that’s about to ensue. That’s love, people.