Celebrating the Good Things with a Giveaway

I love New Year's because it feels like you get to start over again. All the mistakes you've made in the last year are packed in a little box and placed on a shelf labeled "Occasional Shameful Nostalgic Thoughts." There are only things to look forward to, the potential productiveness of the upcoming days not yet marred by procrastination and failure.

Blogiversaries sort of have the same implications.

These dates bring forth the possibilities of all the posts you have yet to write and all the things you'll do to have even more to write about. It makes you speculate about all the blogs you'll read, the blogs you'll discover, the people you'll meet through those blogs.

However, with this post I wanted to let speculations of what will happen rest and focus on what has already happened. It's been two years since I first posted on this blog. I've done a lot of things in that time.

I finished my first rewrite of THE LULLABY which was my main goal when I began on this Internet journey. I've completed the first drafts of THINKING OF YOU, SHADOWMAN, and GHOST SISTER plus gotten ideas for plenty of other projects. I've become a two-time winner of NaPoWriMo and wrote a short story almost every week for a year with the Chrysalis Experiment. Three pieces of my flash fiction were published in an anthology called CAMPAIGNER CHALLENGES 2011. I've experienced my first few rejections and started working on my first round of revisions.

What have you accomplished in the past year?

In celebration of these things, I'm hosting a giveaway. I went through my bookshelves and picked out three books for the occasion. They're all been read, but are still in great shape.

Girl Meets Boy edited by Kelly Milner Halls

What do guys and girls really think?

Twelve of the most dynamic and engaging YA authors writing today team up for this one-of-a-kind collection of he said/she said stories - he tells if from the guy's point of view, she tells it from the girl's. Stories of love and heartbreak, like the good-looking jock who falls for a dangerous girl and the flipside of the toxic girl who never learns to be loved; a basketball star and the artistic (and shorter) boy she never knew she wanted; and a gay boy looking for love online and the girl who could help make it happen, teach that us that relationships become complicated because there are two sides to every story.

The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler

It's 1996, and Josh and Emma have been neighbors their whole lives. They've been best friends almost as long - up until last November, when everything changed. Things have been awkward ever since, but when Josh's family gets an America Online CD-ROM in the mail, his mom makes him bring it over so Emma can install it on her new computer. When they sign on, they're automatically logged onto Facebook...but Facebook hasn't been invented yet. Josh and Emma are looking at their profiles fifteen years in the future. Their spouses, careers, homes, and status updates - it's all there. But it's not what they expected. And every time they refresh their pages, their futures change. As they grapple with the ups and downs of what their lives hold, they're forced to confront what they're doing right - and wrong - in the present.

The List by Siobhan Vivian

An intense look at the rules of high school attraction - and the price that's paid for them.

It happens every year. A list is posted, and one girl from each grade is chosen as the prettiest, and another is chosen as the ugliest. Nobody knows who makes the list. It almost doesn't matter. The damage is done the minute it goes up.

This is the story of eight girls, freshman to senior, "pretty" and "ugly." And it's also the story of how we see ourselves, and how other people see us, and the tangled connection of the two.



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