Pick Any YA Novel Giveaway

 

Look at all the goodies you have to choose from! So many great books, such a  hard decision for the winner! If you win the month of June's giveaway you are entered for the GRAND PRIZE of a full set of The Forest of Hands and Teeth trilogy SIGNED by Carrie Ryan + a key necklace + a signed ARC of Compulsion by Martina Boone! Sounds pretty awesome, right? How about also a small interview with the author of Compulsion, Martina Boone!

Q: Why did you want to tell this story?

A: Pirates, ghosts, witches, voodoo, treasure, forbidden love, mystery, murder? Who wouldn't want to tell this story? LOL. Seriously, it's the loneliness of the characters, their quest to find each other, and ultimately their ability to save each other or destroy each other. The characters became as real for me as my own family, and I wanted to share them to make them live for other people, too.

Q: COMPULSION is part of a trilogy, right? Did you already have the series written when you submitted the manuscript?

A: I never meant to write a series, but I knew I wasn't done with Watson Island yet, so after I'd written the second draft, I gave both Eight and Cassie little sisters, and I intended to let them help me explore the magical aspects of those families in companion novels. When my agent and I were getting ready to submit COMPULSION to publishers, I very quickly wrote synopses for the novels. Just quick sketches. And then I immediately went to work writing the second book to keep from going crazy while I was waiting to see if COMPULSION would sell. We already had a phone call scheduled with a publisher for a Monday, and my agent called me at five o'clock on Thursday night to tell me that Annette, my future editor, wanted to talk to me the next day, and did I have time. Um, does McDonalds sell hamburgers? Also, he said, Annette wanted to know if I would consider making the other two books a series. Sure, I said. Of course. And then I had until ten-thirty the next morning to come up with ideas: plot and character arcs for the series, a plot that was progressive instead of episodic, themes that would carry across the books. All that. So I called my critique partners and begged for brainstorming help. We were all focusing on plot at first, and then when I was just talking things trough, I finally realized what the character progressions had to be. Instead of crying about the loss of what I'd already written in Book Two, I got excited about the series idea instead, and I also realized that I could use what I'd done for Book Two. Just in a different way.

Q: How did the phone call go?

A: Awesome. I fell in love with Annette. We talked forever, and it went by like it was five minutes.

Q. Did anything change in the story as you were writing COMPULSION?

A. Besides me, you mean? Um. There was a character who was meant to be a very minor character who kind of took over the book. But also there were things that changed in every draft: motivation, or past history, or character, or plot. I got to know my characters better each time, and the more I knew them, the more something changed.

Q: What was the most surprising part of writing COMPULSION?

A: How it turned out. People who read my blog, AdventuresInYAPublishing.com may know that I used to think of myself as a plotter. I wrote outlines. Long outlines. Thirty or forty thousand word outlines. And if someone asked me to write a synopsis of a book, I had to first write the outline – at which point, I eventually realized that I wasn't writing an outline at all; I was writing a first draft. I don't know where I first heard the word, but someone somewhere mentioned doing something they called a discovery draft. Coming across that term was one of the biggest AHA! moments of my life. So yeah. It turns out I'm not a plotter, but I'm also not completely a pantser. I'm a plantser. With COMPULSION, I knew where I was going – I had that draft to use as a roadmap, but things kept changing. I was constantly surprised.

Thank you so much to Martina for thinking of us as one of the hosts of this fabulous giveaway!

 

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