LAURIE MORRISON AND CORDELIA JENSEN INTERVIEW AND EVERY SHINY THING GIVEAWAY AND ISWG POST

Happy Wednesday Everyone! Today I have a fantastic interview with debut author Laurie Morrison and Cordelia Jensen to share about their MG contemporary EVERY SHINY THING. It sounds like a real page turner that has gotten great reviews. Before that I have my IWSG Post and awesome Follower News!

Follower News

I'm excited to share about Tick Tock: A Stitch in Crime, the new IWSG anthology. Many followers have stories in the anthology. A special congrats to Gwen Gardner, Rebecca Douglass, Jemi Fraser, Yolanda Renée,  and C. Lee McKenzie who are followers and everyone else in the anthology!

Here's a blurb:

The clock is ticking...

Can a dead child’s cross-stitch pendant find a missing nun? Is revenge possible in just 48 minutes? Can a

killer be stopped before the rescuers are engulfed by a city ablaze? Who killed what the tide brought in? Can a soliloquizing gumshoe stay out of jail?

Exploring the facets of time, eleven authors delve into mysteries and crimes that linger in both dark corners and plain sight. Featuring the talents of Gwen Gardner, Rebecca M. Douglass, Tara Tyler, S. R. Betler, C.D. Gallant-King, Jemi Fraser, J. R. Ferguson, Yolanda Renée, C. Lee McKenzie, Christine Clemetson, and Mary Aalgaard.

Hand-picked by a panel of agents and authors, these eleven tales will take you on a thrilling ride into jeopardy and secrecy. Trail along, find the clues, and stay out of danger. Time is wasting...

Release date: May 1, 2018

And here's Buy links: 

Amazon

B&N

Kobo

iTunes

IWSG POST

Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!

Posting: The first Wednesday of the month is officially Insecure Writer's Support Group Day.

The co-hosts this month are:  E.M.A. Timar, J. Q. Rose,C.Lee McKenzie, and Raimey Gallant!

I'm going to skip the question and just say that I know that I am going through those frustrating times when you have to take care of your family and accept there isn't time to write. My mom just moved to her apartment in independent living from Florida the end of last week. And I've just had to focus on all the details of her move and now getting her adjusted. 

It's frustrating because my contract writing job is slower but all my extra time is sucked up with the details of my mom's move. Soon, soon, I tell myself, I will have time to write. That's my mantra this month. What about you? Are you getting lots of inspiring time to write?

Now onto my interview with Laurie and Cordelia.

Here’s a blurb of EVERY SHINY THING from Goodreads: 

In this beautifully constructed middle-grade novel, told half in prose and half in verse, Lauren prides herself on being a good sister, and Sierra is used to taking care of her mom. When Lauren’s parents send her brother to a therapeutic boarding school for teens on the autism spectrum and Sierra moves to a foster home in Lauren’s wealthy neighborhood, both girls are lost until they find a deep bond with each other. But when Lauren recruits Sierra to help with a Robin Hood scheme to raise money for autistic kids who don’t have her family’s resources, Sierra has a lot to lose if the plan goes wrong. Lauren must learn that having good intentions isn’t all that matters when you battle injustice, and Sierra needs to realize that sometimes, the person you need to take care of is yourself.

Hi Laurie and Cordelia! Thanks for joining us.

1. Tell us about yourselves and how you became writers.

Cordelia: Thanks for having us! I have always been a writer. I wrote lots of stories and poems growing up and then majored in Creative Writing at Kenyon College, where I mostly wrote poetry. After working with kids as a counselor, I decided to try writing stories for young readers. This led me to Vermont College of Fine Arts to earn my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults, and there I worked on a manuscript that became my first published book.This is also how Laurie and I met!

Laurie: I always loved to read, but I didn’t think of myself as a writer until I was in my twenties. During my first year of teaching middle school English, I re-read a lot of the books I’d loved as a kid and discovered some wonderful new MG and YA novels. Over my summer break that first year, I was inspired to try writing a middle grade novel of my own, and I’ve been writing ever since. I was eager to develop my writing craft since I’d never really studied creative writing, so I went to VCFA, where I grew so much as a writer and made some incredible friends, including Cordelia!

2. Where did you get the idea for EVERY SHINY THING and what made you decide to write it together?

In 2015, Cordelia was on a panel for her first novel, and two of the other panelists had co-authored their book. Laurie was at the event, and Cordelia remembers looking into the audience and thinking, “Laurie and I could write a book together!” Laurie thought that sounded amazing, and, just a few days later, we had come up with an idea and had written the first chapters. Our characters came to us first: Cordelia envisioned Sierra and then Laurie worked off of that vision to create Lauren. We already both lived in Philadelphia, shared the same agent, and were great friends and critique partners, so all of that helped to make the process run smoothly. 

3. That's just such a great story of how you started writing together and getting the idea for your book. Your book is told in alternating POV and in both prose and verse. Did you always plan to write the story in prose and verse and what were the challenges in writing your story this way?

We always planned to write the story this way, in part because Cordelia was already a verse novelist

and Laurie writes in prose, and in part because those styles fit our two characters. Sierra is going through a hard time emotionally, and verse is a great form to gently guide readers through a character’s intense emotional journey. Lauren’s chapters carry the bulk of the plot of the story and it made sense to give her as many words as possible! Using these two forms helped us make the girls’ voices easily distinguishable from each other, but in early versions we did have trouble making the transitions between sections smooth enough. They were kind of jarring in places, so we had to work hard to finesse them.

4. I’m always curious how co-authors write a manuscript together. Share what that process was like for you.

Well, Laurie wrote Lauren’s sections and Cordelia wrote Sierra’s sections. We wrote in chronological order in a shared Google doc. One of us would write a chapter and then the other person would write and so on. We had some big brainstorming and planning sessions throughout, so we knew which plot points would come up in each chapter. And each time we revised, we made a plan together but then took turns making the edits to our individual character’s sections,.

5. Sounds like a really organized way to work together. Tell us a bit about your two main characters—Lauren and Sierra. They both sound like compelling characters that have really drawn readers into your story. What are your tips for developing characters that make the reader want to turn the page?

Lauren is a compassionate, determined seventh grader who is just beginning to examine her own privilege and see the injustice in the world. Her new neighbor and classmate Sierra is a loyal daughter and friend who is resilient and used to being a caretaker for her mom and, now, her new friend. In terms of developing characters that will draw in readers, one thing we recommend is to think about the situations that would be hardest for your characters and put them in those situations and see how they react. At the start of our novel, both of our girls have temporarily lost someone they care about greatly, and these losses fuel their emotional journeys and lead readers to feel empathy for them. It also helps to give characters a clear desire, even if that desire is misguided, so that readers will understand what’s driving them.

6. That's great advice to put your characters in challenging situations. Your agent is Sara Crowe. How did she become your agent and what was your road to publication like?

Cordelia: Sara became my agent soon after graduating from VCFA in 2012. Although she was the first agent I queried, acquiring an editor for my first book took ten months. It also took about that long to find the right editor for EVERY SHINY THING. Being an author means being patient!

Laurie: I signed with Sara in 2013, soon after I finished the novel I’d started during my time at VCFA. Cordelia recommended that I query Sara, and Sara immediately requested my full manuscript and then very enthusiastically offered representation within 24 hours of my query. I was so excited and so hopeful that my book would soon sell after what seemed like such an auspicious start! But unfortunately that book didn’t sell, and neither did the next two books I wrote. EVERY SHINY THING was the fourth book I had on submission to editors. I was basically on sub for two and a half full years with three different books before I got my first book deal! So, yeah. Being an author means being patient...and persistent!

7. Awesome how you both had separate journeys to the same agent. Cordelia has a YA book in verse, SKYSCRAPING, that was published in 2015 and was an ALA best book for young adults in 2016. Congrats! How have you drawn on Cordelia’s experience as a debut author in terms of planning the release of this book and your marketing?

Thanks! Cordelia knew some about event planning and swag and social media, and we were able to get the ball rolling on things like ordering bookmarks and reaching out to bookstores pretty early on thanks to her prior experience. But a lot has changed in just three years, and some things are different for MG than YA. Laurie also learned a lot from participating in her own 2018 debut group and could draw upon her experiences and connections from teaching middle school for ten years, so she does a lot of social media outreach with educators and librarians.

8. What are your marketing plans for EVERY SHINY THING and what advice do you have for other authors debuting about marketing their 

We’re doing a lot of interviews, guest posts, bookstore events, and school visits! We also made an educators’ guide and some fun swag that we love sharing with readers. Through the Electric 18s debut group, Laurie has connected with some other MG debuts, and those connections have led to some great opportunities for us. Our book is part of an exciting 2018 MG Scavenger Hunt that we’re just beginning to share with kids, librarians, and teachers, and it’s also the May selection for the Middle Grade at Heart book club That means the MG @ Heart team, which Laurie is part of, is creating a newsletter with some great content about the book, posting about the book on mgbookvillage.org, and hosting a Twitter chat about the book, and we’ll also be guests on Corrina Allen’s Books Between 

Our advice is to develop a strong network of other writers. They are your best allies in this business that is quite competitive but also can be quite supportive. Also, decide what’s most rewarding and important to you, and prioritize those things. For us, that’s been anything that connects us directly with teachers, librarians, and kids.

9. You both have other books that you are writing alone that have been just released or will be released in the next year. Share a bit about them and how you worked on them while also working together on EVERY SHINY THING.

Cordelia: My second YA verse novel, THE WAY THE LIGHT BENDS, just came out in March. It is a bit dizzying having the books come out almost simultaneously. Fortunately, however, in terms of the editing process I managed to not have to work on them both at the same time very much. Mostly (by some stroke of luck) it would flip flop and I would have to work on one and then turn it in and work on the other. THE WAY THE LIGHT BENDS was also sold on proposal, so I was starting with a first draft from the beginning of the editorial process. So, overall, that project was more time consuming than EVERY SHINY THING. 

Laurie: I have a middle grade novel called UP FOR AIR coming out in spring 2019. It’s about Annabelle, a thirteen-year-old struggling student and swimming star, who is thrilled when she gets called up to swim on the high school team and gets a lot of attention from older teens, but has to navigate some social situations she isn’t quite prepared for. I wrote some of it before EVERY SHINY THING sold and some of it between rounds of edits for EVERY SHINY THING. The only tricky part has been working on edits for that book right around the launch time for EVERY SHINY THING, but I’ve mostly been able to spend some days focused on one and some days on the other, and it’s energizing to be doing two very different types of work (revising one while promoting the other). As you can imagine, after all those months on submission with close calls and kind passes but no book deal, I’m extremely excited and appreciative to be juggling two books now!

Thanks for sharing your advice, Laurie and Cordelia. You can find Laurie here: https://twitter.com/LaurieLMorrison

https://www.instagram.com/laurielmorrison/

https://lauriemorrisonwrites.com/

And you can find Cordelia here:

https://twitter.com/cordeliajensen

https://www.instagram.com/cordeliajensen1/

http://www.cordeliajensen.com/

Cordelia and Laurie have generously offered a hardback of EVERY SHINY THING for a giveaway. To enter, all you need to do is be a follower (just click the follow button if you’re not a follower) and leave a comment through May 19th. If your e-mail is not on your Google Profile, you must leave it in the comments to enter the contest.

If you mention this contest on Twitter, Facebook, or your blog, mention this in the comments and I'll give you an extra entry. You must be 13 years old or older to enter. This giveaway is U.S.

Here's what's coming up:

Monday, May 7th I have an interview with debut author Kristin Perez and a giveaway of her YA fantasy SWEET BLACK WAVES

Wednesday, May 9th I have an agent spotlight interview and query critique giveaway with Amanda Ayers Barnett

Monday, May 14th I have an interview with debut author Megan Bannon and a giveaway of her YA fantasy

Monday, May 21st I have an agent spotlight interview and query critique giveaway with Natascha Morris

Thursday, May 31st I'm participating in the Beach Reads Giveaway Hop

Hope to see you on Monday!