A long time ago (no, seriously, like a really long time ago, because two years is a long time, I have been informed), Tessa Gratton, Maggie Stiefvater, and I decided we were going to write a follow-up to our short-story collection, The Curiosities. And because time is a slippery, ever-mutating thing that never seems to stay in one place, that book is done now (!)

It hits shelves October 1st and thanks to the magic of the Carolrhoda team, it is so, so pretty! It looks like this:

And sounds like this:

The follow-up to the acclaimed novel The Curiosities: A Collection of Stories by Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton, and Brenna Yovanoff.

In an unassuming corner of Brooklyn, a young woman learns to be ladylike, to love context, and to speak her mind from a very curious sort of tutor.

In a faraway land convulsed by war, a young soldier hears the desert’s curious hum as he disarms bombs with the person he doesn’t know how to love.

In a place so shriveled by drought that any drowning is a curiosity, a young writer tries again and again to tread water beneath the surface of a vast and unusual sea.

Three new stories—complete with commentary on the creative process—from three acclaimed young adult authors working at the height of their powers.

Curious?

We wrote another book together! It is about writing fiction! And also, it is absolutely full of fiction. It’s a collection of novellas, and it’s a nitty-gritty exploration of how and why and all the other complicated considerations that go into figuring out the way you want to tell a story. It was written in Virginia and in Kansas and while tucked away in coffee shops and tearing across Nevada along I-80, and parked sadly in Nevada waiting for the engine to cool, and it is about writing, but it’s also a celebration OF writing.

Mostly though, it’s a story about three different ways of getting to The End.

Remember that time I wrote a book and disappeared from the internet for basically months and months, except when I would occasionally monopolize Tumblr to make everyone look at animated gifs from old horror movies and relive conversations that I had with D about counting jellyfish?

I remember that time …

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I keep telling myself that I’m going to be a good blogger. SUCH a good blogger. One of those dependable, accountable ones who follows a schedule and is all about tidiness and consistency and showing up to appointments on time and remembering to water the plants.

However, as we inch closer and closer to December, it’s becoming more and more apparent that all my good intentions and my attempts at time-management are … kind of a lie.

The reason for this is that oh-my-god-you-guys, Paper Valentine comes out in less than three months! (How did that happen?)

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Sometimes I dream that there’s a mean octopus on my ceiling.

The way I know it’s mean is that if it were a nice octopus, it wouldn’t lurk around on the ceiling in the dark like a creeper, it would just wait until morning and then come say hello.

But this is clearly a mean octopus, and as a result, I don’t trust it. I practice constant vigilance. I keep my eye on it.

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Also, it’s in that awkward beginning stage where I absolutely can’t talk about it in any practical sense because it’s still only a delicate collection of impressions and ideas and assorted sentences and characters I barely know.

It’s still basically an ugly little grub just waiting to turn into something fancy—as in, Tess and Maggie have seen approximately one page, and Editor Jocelyn has seen none of it at all.

However, because I’m really bad about always wanting to share all the things I’m excited about, I think I’ve worked out a way to kind of act it out in sounds and pictures without really giving anything away.

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Sometimes I talk about baking on here, which doesn’t really have anything to do with writing, but is still a reasonable thing to talk about. Because I like baking. I’ve been doing it since I was really young, thanks to the fact that being homeschooled always left my afternoons free, and early afternoon is, as everyone knows, the very best time to prepare something delicious.

I am not, however, what I would consider a natural baker. My mom and my sister both excel at it. They have a flair for it. They have an inherent understanding of this crazy thing called craftsmanship.

I … do not. I’m too meandering, too unstructured. I like flourishes and tangents and experiments and never doing things the same way twice.

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Commence radio silence in three …

Two …

One …

(gone)

While this probably constitutes retreading old ground, I feel that I should take this opportunity be very clear.

I like horror movies. A lot. Like … I really, really like horror movies.

It’s a condition that’s plagued me since childhood, and yes, I could probably even make some weird attempt to justify my obsessions or invent a cool little postulate as to why my little-girl thoughts were dominated by movie monsters, and not flowers or ponies or rainbow-dolphin-unicorns. (I was an English major with a psych minor—I’m uncommonly equipped to mangle theories into vague reflections of reality.)

But I just have this feeling that anything I could come up with wouldn’t mean that much. The true, honest thing is actually very simple. I saw my first horror movie when I was six (It was House. It was terrible.), and since then, I’ve just kind of been fixated.

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