Behold!
If you don’t follow me on the socials, you may not have seen this, but I was able to share my book cover! And what a lovely cover it is:
As I mentioned in my stories, the reveal came as a bit of a surprise. I was scrolling Goodreads one fine morning and happened to see that someone had added my book to their shelves. Both my editor and I were caught off guard, but my editor has been out of the office for a while and I think she missed the memo that the cover was live. So, I rather hastily put together a cover reveal post.
And now, I come before all of you with a favor: if you’re on Goodreads, would you click Want to Read on the title?
The more adds, the more Goodreads will promote my book to other readers. Advance buzz can help persuade a stretched-thin marketing team to devote more money and resources to promoting your book, so every add helps!
It’s really wild to think back to my very first Harbinger newsletter back in 2023 when I was trying to get an agent (and the story was so different than it is now!). Thanks to all of you who have rooted for Thief for so long; it’s been a blast bringing you along on the journey.
Speaking of….
Help Christine Launch Her Book!
I’m trying something new with this book release, so if you have been along for the ride AND you would like the opportunity to help me launch Thief, would you fill out this form? I sent it out a few months ago (if you filled it out then, I have your response still!), but now that we’re eight months from release, I’m trying to get more organized.
If you agree to be part of the street team, you’ll get an email from me in the next few weeks with more details. Like I said, this is my first time doing a pre-launch campaign, so you’ll get a front-row seat to me figuring things out as I go. Hopefully you’ll also get some fun insider news and swag and the opportunity to be part of street-team-exclusive giveaways. Plus, we’ll get to chat on Signal or an email chain or wherever I decide to host this shindig. As I said, I’m still in the planning stages. :)
What I’m Working On:
See above. Haha. It’s book launch season! I’m currently in Canva trying to figure out how to make bookmarks.
I gave a lecture at a conference in Seattle in mid-May which took quite a bit of prep work (but was a lot of fun). It was a deep dive into voice, and I’m looking forward to doing a longer version for Realm Makers in June.
MFA residency week is almost upon us, so I’m prepping for that as well. And, Joe and I filmed our fourth Read Good show, this time discussing The Great Gatsby. If you have a Canon+ subscription, look for that in the next month or so! And if you haven’t yet, you should go listen to our episodes on Till We Have Faces, Frankenstein, and Pride and Prejudice. I was telling Joe that so far every book we’ve picked wasn’t appreciated during its time. That wasn’t intentional, but it is interesting!
What I’m Reading:
I started the month off with a YA book from 2004 called Heir Apparent (back when YA felt much younger and more marketed to the youth than it does now). It was recommended to me by a friend when I was pitching my new novel idea to her, and I enjoyed it while also feeling like it had a lot of untapped potential.
I also reread The Great Gatsby for Read Good and felt like I could fill a whole commonplace book with all the great lines from that book.
On audiobook, I made it most of the way through Leviathan Wakes before having to DNF. I didn’t realize it was book 1 of 9, and the grittiness was too much for me to commit to 9 books. However, Corey is very good at space opera.
Lastly, I read Against the Machine for book group. This is a good book group pick for sparking wildly disparate emotional responses in the readers. I suppose if you want to know what I think, you can email me and ask.
A Writing Tip:
Here’s a nice, narrow one: do you know about asyndeton and polysyndeton? They’re opposite rhetorical devices. Asyndeton is when you make a list and you omit conjunctions (and, or, but), while polysyndeton is when you repeatedly use conjunctions.
Here’s polysyndeton:
The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
As you can see, it lengthens out the moment, giving a particular cadence (that matches the feel of soldiers marching) and mood to the sentence. The repetition of words also helps to set the scene.
Here’s asyndeton:
Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.
Do you see how asyndeton adds a sense of urgency to the sentence? All the descriptors tumble together into one big mash of disparate ideas (a common theme in the story). Interestingly, the very next sentence is polysyndeton: “Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps…”
So my tip of the week is to work both of those into your stories, depending on what the scene needs!
That’s all for May, see you in June!
