I.
I never remember to talk about my books.

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.)

It’s New Year’s Day! It’s 2013! Which kind of makes me feel like life is rushing by in one long, ungainly sprawl, but whatever!

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 know I said I was taking a blog hiatus. That I was on a deadline and way behind with all-the-everything, and that until I got caught up and mailed stuff and finished my draft, I wasn’t going to be doing much of anything else. But here’s the thing.

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!)