Hiya all!
So my book is now out a whole day! Wahoo! To continue with the celebration, my friend Shaun interviewed me on his blog. Via modern technology he put his video questions alongside my video answers, and it’s like we’re there together! Pretty cool. 🙂 So if you still can’t get Pieces of Us out of your head or want to know more what’s behind the story and the characters, check out this video interview on Shaun’s blog. Enjoy!
PIECES OF US will be out tomorrow (March 8) and there has been a lot of talk questioning its appropriateness for teens. There is also a movie, Bully, coming out March 30. It, too, has been questioned for its material. This documentary has been given an R-Rating due to its “too real” content. Therefore, the very teens who need to see it, will not. It’s disturbing that the we’re trying to shield teens from the very horrors many experience daily is by limiting access to vehicles that could make them feel less alone. To see more of my thoughts on this topic, read my guest post on Shaun Hutchinson’s blog here.
Yesterday, Cheryl Rainfield and I did a Twitter chat about breaking the silence in YA books. We talked about the important of writing about painful issues and how often a book is the only one who understands what we are going through. Readers shared books that saved them and their wish to have had the edgy, raw, dark (often thought by others as “too dark”) books available when they were teens. I am so thankful to the YA authors who push the envelope, whose books have inspired me to write mine.
And I am also grateful that I will be joining a lot of them at this year’s NYC Teen Author Festival, created by David Levithan (one of those awesome envelope pushers). Imagine so many teen authors all in one room! For a week!
Here are the deets: From Monday March 26 through Saturday, March 31, authors of Teen Lit will be reading from their books, discussing issues they write about, saying what makes their characters tick. All will culminate in a MEGA author signing on April 1 at Books of Wonder. Check out the full schedule for all events here on the NYC Teen Author Festival FB page (and please re “like” the page even if you have before because there was some cooky FB stuff that erased the first page). I’m also posting it below if you want to scroll through.
Want to know what I’ll be doing there? Glad you asked! I’m so psyched to be part of the Saturday (March 31 from 2:50-4) symposium at the NYPL on 42nd street. The topic is Moments of Truth: Characters at a Crossroads about defining moments that changed our characters, and not only does the panel put me in amazing company (see the fab authors I’m with below!!) but the wonderfully talented E. Lockhart will be the moderator. What more can a girl ask for?? And, if you want a signed copy of PIECES OF US, I’ll also be at the Mega BOW signing on April 1 (I’ll be signing 1:45-2:30). Hope to see everyone there!
2012 NYC Teen Author Festival
Monday, March 26 (Mulberry Street Branch of the NYPL, 10 Jersey Street b/w Mulberry and Lafayette, 6-8):
Plotting Dangerously: Doing What it Takes to Find the Story
Coe Booth
Jen Calonita
Paul Griffin
Deborah Heiligman
Melissa Kantor
Morgan Matson
Kieran Scott
Melissa Walker
moderator: David Levithan
Tuesday, March 27 (McNally Jackson Bookstore, 52 Prince Street, 7-8:30):
The Mutual Admiration Society Reading
Madeleine George
Ellen Hopkins
David Levithan
Jennifer Smith
John Corey Whaley
Wednesday. March 28 (42nd St NYPL, Bergen Forum, 6-8):
Things Fall Apart: World Building and World Destroying in YA
Anna Carey
Sarah Beth Durst
Anne Heltzel
Jeff Hirsch
Andy Marino
Lauren McLaughlin
Lissa Price
Jon Skovron
moderator: Chris Shoemaker
Thursday, March 29:
The NYC Big Read
NOTE: SPECIFIC MANHATTAN LIBRARY LOCATIONS TO COME
Queens – Long Island City branch of the Queens Public Library (37-44 21 StreetLong Island City, NY 11101)
Tara Altebrando
Brent Crawford
Gina Damico
Jeff Hirsch
Andy Marino
Jon Skovron
Alecia Whitaker
Manhattan – Locations to come
Jen Calonita
Anna Carey
Matthew Cody
Jocelyn Davies
Melissa De La Cruz
Hilary Graham
Christopher Grant
Leanna Renee Hieber
Anne Heltzel
Gwendolyn Heasley
PG Kain
Kody Keplinger
Lauren McLaughlin
Sarah Mlynowski
Eugene Myers
Micol Ostow
Stephanie Perkins
Jessica Rotherberg
Lena Roy
Erin Saldin
Leila Sales
Eliot Schrefer
Samantha Schutz
Mark Shulman
Arlaina Tibensky
Brooklyn – Brooklyn Public Library, central branch, Grand Army Plaza
Kate Ellison
Gayle Forman
Melissa Kantor
Barry Lyga
Michael Northrop
Matthue Roth
Victoria Schwab
Melissa Walker
Bronx — Bronx Library Center – 310 East Kingsbridge Road, Bronx
Elizabeth Eulberg
Paul Griffin
Alissa Grosso
David Levithan
Sarah Darer Littman
Kieran Scott
John Corey Whaley
Friday March 30, Symposium (42nd Street NYPL, 2-6)
2:00 – Introduction
2:10-3:00: Being Friends With Boys
Elizabeth Eulberg
Jenny Han
Terra Elan McVoy
Stephanie Perkins
moderator: Sarah Mlynowski
3:00-3:50: The Writer as Time Traveler: Writing the Past While Sitting in the Present
Judy Blundell
Matthew Cody
Jennifer Donnelly
Leanna Renee Hieber
Suzanne Weyn
moderator: David Levithan
3:50-4:40: No Ordinary Love: How to Create a Satisfying Love Story and a Satisfying Supernatural World at the Same Time
Andrea Cremer
Melissa de la Cruz
Jeri Smith-Ready
Victoria Schwab
Margaret Stohl
moderator: Barry Lyga
4:40-5:30: New Voices Spotlight
Emily Danforth
Kate Ellison
Lucas Klauss
Carley Moore
Aleica Whittaker
Friday March 30, Barnes & Noble Reader’s Theater/Signing (Union Square B&N, 33 E 17th St, 7-8:30)
Andrea Cremer
Emily Danforth
Lucas Klauss
Stephanie Perkins
Siobhan Vivian
John Corey Whaley
moderator: David Levithan
Saturday March 31, Symposium (42nd Street NYPL, 1-5)
1:00 – Introduction
1:10-2:00 – Rising to the Challenge: YA Characters Facing Down What Life Throws Them
Tara Altebrando
Matt Blackstone
Susane Colasanti
Kody Keplinger
Siobhan Vivian
K.M. Walton
moderator: David Levithan
2:00-2:50 — Killer Instincts: Death, Murder, and the YA Novel
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Gina Damico
Kim Harrington
Barry Lyga
moderator: Marie Rutkoski
2:50-4:00 — Moments of Truth: Characters at a Crossroads
Natasha Friend
Margie Gelbwasser
Jennifer Hubbard
Stewart Lewis
Sarah Darer Littman
Jess Rothenberg
Daisy Whitney
moderator: E. Lockhart
4:00-5:00 – Looking Forward to Fall
David Levithan
Marie Rutkoski
Eliot Schrefer
…and more authors reading from their upcoming books
Sunday April 1: Our No-Foolin’ Mega-Signing at Books of Wonder (Books of Wonder, 1-4):
1-1:45:
Jennifer Barnes (Every Other Day, Egmont)
Matt Blackstone (A Scary Scene in a Scary Movie, FSG)
Caroline Bock (LIE, St. Martin’s)
Jen Calonita (Belles, Little Brown)
Anna Carey (Eve, Harper)
Susane Colasanti (So Much Closer, Penguin)
Andrea Cremer (Bloodrose, Penguin)
Gina Damico (Croak, HMH)
Emily Danforth (The Miseducation of Cameron Post, Harper)
Jocelyn Davies (A Beautiful Dark, Harper)
Sarah Beth Durst (Drink, Slay, Love, S&S)
Elizabeth Eulberg (Take a Bow, Scholastic)
Gayle Forman (Where She Went, Penguin)
Natasha Friend (For Keeps, Penguin)
Kim Harrington (Perception, Scholastic)
Barry Lyga (I Hunt Killers, Little Brown)
Daisy Whitney (The Rivals, Little Brown)
1:45-2:30
Margie Gelbwasser (Pieces of Us, Flux)
Alissa Grosso (Popular, Flux)
Jenny Han (We’ll Always Have Summer, S&S)
Leanna Renee Hieber (Darker Still, Sourcebooks)
Anne Heltzel (Circle Nine, Candlewick)
Jeff Hirsch (The Eleventh Plague, Scholastic)
Jennifer Hubbard (Try Not to Breathe, Penguin)
Melissa Jensen (The Fine Art of True or Dare, Penguin)
PG Kain (Famous for Thirty Seconds, S&S)
Melissa Kantor (The Darlings in Love, Hyperion)
Kody Keplinger (Shut Out, Little Brown)
Lucas Klauss (Everything You Need to Survive the Apocalypse, S&S)
David Levithan (Every You, Every Me, RH)
Stewart Lewis (You Have Seven Messages, RH)
Sarah Darer Littman (Want to Go Private?, Scholastic)
Elisa Ludwig (Pretty Crooked, S&S)
2:30-3:15
Carolyn Mackler (The Future of Us, Penguin)
Andy Marino (Unison Spark, FSG)
Wendy Mass (13 Gifts, Scholastic)
Terra Elan McVoy (The Summer of Firsts and Lasts, S&S)
Lauren McLaughlin (Scored, RH)
Sarah Mlynowski (Ten Things We Did, RH)
Carley Moore (The Stalker Chronicles, FSG)
E. C. Myers (Fair Coin, Pyr)
Michael Northrop (Plunked, Scholastic)
Micol Ostow (What Would My Cell Phone Do?, Penguin)
Stephanie Perkins (Lola and the Boy Next Door, Penguin)
Jessica Rotherberg (The Catastrophic History of You and Me, Penguin)
Marie Rutkoski (The Jewel of the Kalderash, FSG)
Erin Saldin (The Girls of No Return, Scholastic)
Leila Sales (Past Perfect, S&S)
Kieran Scott (He’s So Not Worth It, S&S)
3:15-4:00
Melissa De La Cruz (Lost in Time, Hyperion)
Alyssa Sheinmel, (The Lucky Kind, RH)
Jennifer Smith (The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, Little Brown)
Jeri Smith-Ready (Shift, S&S)
Jon Skovron (Misfit, Abrams)
Victoria Schwab (The Near Witch, Hyperion)
Mark Shulman (Are You Normal?, National Geographic)
Margaret Stohl (Beautiful Chaos, Little Brown)
Arlaina Tibensky (And Then Things Fell Apart, S&S)
Siobhan Vivian (The List, Scholastic)
Melissa Walker (Small Town Sinners, Bloomsbury)
K.M. Walton (Cracked, S&S)
John Corey Whaley (Where Things Come Back, S&S)
Alecia Whitaker (The Queen of Kentucky, Little Brown)
Maryrose Wood (The Unseen Guest, Harper)
Natalie Zaman and Charlotte Bennardo (Sirenz, Flux)
Abuse. Bullying. Violence. It needs to stop. Empower victims with a voice and help break the silence.
Join Cheryl Rainfield (SCARS, HUNTED) and me for a Twitter Chat Monday, March 5 at 7 PM, as we discuss the need for realistic YA, writing about painful issues, the importance of breaking the silence and more. We’ll be using the hashtag #BreakSilence, so if you use something like TweetChat it’ll be easy to follow along. Ask us questions during the chat, or send your questions ahead of time to twitterchat @ jkscommunications (dot) com.
5 lucky #BreakSilence Twitter chat participants will win 1 of these 5 prizes:
PRIZES:
1 signed copy of PIECES OF YOU + signed bookmarks
2 signed copies of HUNTED (paperback Canadian version)
2 ebook review copies of HUNTED
Tweet #BreakSilence and help spread the word.
When Margie Gelbwasser wrote her first YA novel, INCONVENIENT (Flux, 2010), her dad said, “The writing is nice, but there are very few Jewish alcoholics.” A Russian woman who read it said, “Yes, to Americans it may seem like the mom is an alcoholic, but she isn’t really.” And then there were those who thanked her for telling their story. Too much of real life is kept behind closed doors, with victims thinking their plight is
the norm or that this only happens to them. 
She’s been told “These things may happen, but they shouldn’t be written about.” It’s the silence that causes cycles to repeat. “Too dark” for some, is another’s reality. By allowing the “too real,” victims gain strength. Confront the realistic in YA and #BreakSilence.
Visit Margie at her website.
YA author Cheryl Rainfield is an incest and ritual abuse survivor. Her abusers frequently told her that they’d kill her if she talked, and since she’d seen them murder other children, she knew they could kill her, so became became terrified to talk. Writing became her safe way of “speaking”, her way to have a voice. Books, too, helped her survive–helped her escape the abuse she living, helped her dream and hope, and in some small ways helped her know she wasn’t alone. But she never fully found her own experiences reflected in books, and that’s why Cheryl wrote SCARS and HUNTED. She wrote the books she needed as a teen, and couldn’t find. She talked about the things others never seemed to talk about–self-harm, sexual abuse, being queer (in SCARS) and cults, torture, bullying, and homophobia (in HUNTED).
Meghan Cox Gurden in the WSJ called SCARS (and many other YA books) “too dark.” But Cheryl lived “too dark.” Many teens now are living “too dark.” We need reflections of our own experiences to know that we’re not alone, and to give us some hope that things can get better. Join us and #BreakSilence.
Visit Cheryl at her website.
Keeping in theme with the loveydoviness of this week, this round’s blog chain was started by Amparo. She asks,
“Since Valentine’s Day is around the corner, I think it’s only appropriate to pay homage to those we love. But instead of our better halves, family members, and friends, this blog chain will be all about loving the haters:write a love letter to your favorite literary villain/villain-ish character. It can be short, long, serious, funny. You can use song lyrics or poems instead. Choice is totally yours 🙂
I love the idea of writing to a villain, and here is a letter to one of my faves. Be sure to check out Tere’s before me and Jon’s next.
My dearest Gargamel,
As a child, my sister and I watched you every Saturday morning while you pondered and planned for yet a new way to destroy the smurfs. A part of you detested their jolly, smurfy demeanors (which I get; I mean how can things be smurfy all the time?), and another just wanted to eat them. It’s the latter emotion that confused me. Why? Why did you think they would be tasty? To each his own, of course, but then you had to get poor Azrael into it. I think your motives confounded her too. After all, why would a cat want to eat a smurf?!
The thing is, dear Gargamel, your frustration amused me. There you would be trying to create one contraption after another, only to be foiled again. After a while I started to wonder if you were sabotaging yourself on purpose. Don’t feel bad. You wouldn’t be the first to fall for the prey. But what else could I think? Every time you’d catch smurf, you’d spend precious minutes muttering threats when you could have just eaten it there on the spot.
I hope you had a good Valentine’s Day, Gargamel. And don’t give up hope. One day you’ll get to taste the smurfy ones–that is if you really want to. If you want to know the truth, though, I think it’s all an act. They need an enemy; you happen to be it. You can let the idea go and just be friends with them. I won’t tell anyone. Promise.
Your friend,
Margie
Hi everyone!
Today is one month to the release date of PIECES OF US!! Wahoo!! To celebrate and get everyone hyped up (or to spread my hype….), I’m throwing a contest! Winners will receive a signed ARC of POU and a signed copy of POU! Contest will run until February 29. Here is how it works.
1. Go to Flux’s website and read the excerpt from PIECES OF US. This is from the final copy and it’s different than the ARC! So some of it has never been seen before!
2. THEN, come back here and leave a comment about what you read.
3. And that is it. 🙂 Canada and U.S. entrants only, please. Oh, and please spread the word!
I think it’s fantastic that K.M. Parr and K.C. Neal organized this blog chain against bullying. And when I heard about it, I wanted to take part as well. Please check out K.C.’s blog for a list of participators.
And now I wanted to share my story. When I was in high school, some boys thought it would be funny to call me a whore, slut, harlot (we were studying Chaucer and the 1200s that year)–I hadn’t even kissed anyone yet. I ignored it at first because I knew they were just being stupid. My friends thought it was funny because of my inexperience and told me I shouldn’t care. I didn’t. For a while. But one day, I just broke down crying because it was too much. They stopped, and I let the incidents pass. A few years later, I started college. I was excited to start fresh with new kids who didn’t know me or my small town. I met great people, went to some parties, kissed a few boys at said parties. Apparently, this last thing gave people new ammo. I heard from friends that people from back home had asked them if it was true that I had become easy and a slut. My friends found the whole thing amusing because “it isn’t true, so who cares?” They were only words, right? Why should it matter? But it did. Eventually, other things proved more exciting to gossip about, and eventually, I put all of that to the back of my mind.
In the last few years, however, with bullying–especially digital–on the rise, I thought about this stuff again. I thought about how lucky I was that this was 1990s and not 2011. How lucky I was that the words disappeared after they were uttered instead of living forever in cyberspace or people’s phones. Of traveling by phone or mouth from person to person, instead of to hundreds or more with just one click. That’s sobering, isn’t it? If I was a teen now, all of the above would have been much worse. There would not just be rumors of me kissing boys at parties, there would be photos as “proof” spreading like wildfire, posted on people’s FB pages.
My next novel is called PIECES OF US and will be published by Flux in March, and my experiences and those of other teens were the inspirations. In it, one of the main characters–Katie– is told to perform sexual acts or risk the release of another damning video. Bullies bank on victims’ fears, rely on the victims not telling, not fighting back. Victims think they can’t. They think they CAN’T tell anyone or say no. Or they think they are left without a choice–fight back or have a video/text/sexy pic exposed. It doesn’t have to be either or. There is another MC in the book–Alex. He is a misogynistic, crass, abuser. He is also Katie’s boyfriend. He is the type of guy who puts virgins on a pedestal, who defines worth by what a girl will or will not do. He abuses Katie and she keeps going back to him because she feels she deserves it. He was hard to write, and from what readers said, equally hard to read. So why did I do it? Because there ARE guys like that. I’ve known guys like that. Many women have known guys like that. It is important they don’t stay hidden. It is important people can recognize them and point them out. It is important they are fought.
It is a different world today than in the ’90s, but people are not all that different. Victims need support and need to know people will listen. That no amount of bullying is ok. That nothing is too small. If it hurts you, it’s not OK.
