Believing in Stories

In the summer of 1994, my whole family up and moved to Japan. I was thirteen, and it was something my parents had talked about from time to time: Dad re-activating with the Navy and taking us on an adventure.

I don't remember much about the weeks leading up to it. I'm sure I never really thought it would happen: though the idea of living in another country was thrilling, practically it didn't compute. But I do know it was tough. We'd lived in the same house for about ten years. My friends were the only friend's I'd ever had. My neighborhood, my creek, my church - there was this mile-wide chunk of the planet that was my entire world.

I don't remember packing, the flight, or arriving except for the most vague of flashes and impressions. I don't remember what it felt like the first time I saw our Japanese house, though I do know what it looked like, and how we lived.

What I remember about that first year in Japan: it was hard.

I'd been torn away from everything that was familiar, with three years to look forward to. It was strange and tropical, everything from the Coke cans to the smell of the air was alien. I went to a public school on the military base when I was used to Catholic school. I had to carry an ID card and there were armed Marines guarding the gate. There were trains and public transportation. I had to take an hour bus ride to school every morning.

A few things made it worse. I somehow lost all the writing from the computer as it crossed the ocean. They were stories I'll never see again, ideas I put down that I mourned like my own heart had been cut out. It made me stop writing for a while. We had no heat in our house, and the letters I did write, I did so with gloves on. It was nearly impossible to get out of bed in the freezing mornings.

A few things made it better. One some days, especially in the evening time, I could look out my bedroom window and see Mount Fuji.

And we were near the ocean. I walked past it almost every day, in fact. Sure it was gray and polluted and someone told me that at the time Tokyo Bay was the most polluted in the world. But some afternoons the sun shone just right and it was blue-green and I knew there were mermaids.

When I stood in the courtyard of my school, realizing none of my friends were there, or that there wasn't a good bookstore nearby, or that I was having trouble making new friends and I didn't know why, there was one thing I promised myself. One thing I made myself believe in so hard I occasionally said it out loud.

I am here for a reason.

It wasn't a profound faith in the universe, or in God. It was a faith in books. In stories. I would imagine that my life was a book, and I was the hero. This interlude in Japan was happening for a reason very important to building my character, to pushing forward the plot. Maybe even something I would learn in Japan would circle around twenty years later and save my life.

I am here for a reason.

I said it to myself as I stared at Mt. Fuji. As I walked to the bus at dawn. When I felt alone at my desk surrounded by strange high-schoolers. You're here for a reason, Tess. Put your foot forward and deal. Get up out of bed. Be kind. Be loud. Be yourself. You're here for a reason, and it doesn't matter how hard it is or how painful it feels. You'll find something here - a moment, a person, a book - something you couldn't find anywhere else on this planet. And it will make everything worth it. Your life is a story. You're the hero. You don't waste years of your life doing nothing.

And you know what? I was completely right.

There are a hundred ways my time in Japan changed me. It broke my mind out of entrenched ways of living and thinking. It taught me to love dawn, the cold orange of sunrise when the morning star is bright, and I owe my debut novel to that love of dawn. It taught me about difference. About how adults aren't always right. About communication. And travel!

I met in Japan. Not that first year, but the second. And it would be impossible to untangle my life since from hers.

I performed for a real crowd for the first time, too. A love of theater already wiggled in me thanks to my parents and grandma. But in Japan, not five months after we arrived, I tried out for a community production and although I was only in the chorus, the muse of theater sank her teeth hard into my heart.

Any one of those things could have been my reason. Maybe all of them - because the best stories have multiple lines of character and plot development. There could even be more reasons I haven't discovered yet, because I haven't lived long enough.

But today, the reason I choose is my faith in having a reason itself.

I've said before that books saved my life. They gave me refuge, they were my only friends for several months when I was thirteen. When I was alone and lonely. But it wasn't any particular book itself. It wasn't books in general - not as we usually think of them, as separate stories, windows into imagination.

Books saved me because I believed in what they do. They tell stories. Real stories about real people with real emotions, even when there are dragons and super-spies and vampires, too. Stories that are open to everyone. Reading hundreds of books taught me enough about life that I knew, even when it was dark, that all I had to do was push forward. Not stop.

They gave me a reason to live. Not that I would have died, literally (I hope). But I didn't hurt myself. I didn't hate myself. I didn't hate my parents. I didn't hate Japan. I didn't close off from experiences. I got up in the morning and thought, "Maybe today is the day I meet my destiny."

So I had my eyes open. To beauty. To weirdness. To new things. To horrible things. I believed in the stories I knew. And they taught me how to believe in myself.


*****


I'm thinking about this because I just finished the second book of my contract with Random House. It's sent off to my editor, and as I was reading through today, fixing final issues my crit partners and agent pointed out, I kept thinking: I could absolutely, positively never have managed this character's emotional epiphany if I hadn't lived in Japan and believed in having a reason.

I've gone through various phases of religiosity in my life. A major one directly spurred by - you guessed it - an experience I had in Japan. Many smaller ones, ranging from complete atheism to neo-pagan to a simple kind of Catholic spirituality. My faith in humanity and in any kind of divinity wavers rather constantly.

One thing I have never stopped having faith in is the power of stories.

Wednesday W...stuff

1) Follow up to last Friday's post about Robin McKinley and awesome friends... Look what happened on HER BLOG.

The internet turns a small world into a Very Tiny One. And yes, my writerly idol hates my fingernails. *glee*


2) I'm interviewed at The Book Scout, aka Kelsey Jones: about blood, desert islands, traveling, and putting messages in books. By far the best interview questions I've been given in my short career.


3) Ya'll, ok. I was expecting LEGION to be bad. Awesome bad, though. Where you're like "YES! this is so bad I can't stand to turn it off! Wooo angels!" But it was BORING. A movie about the apocalypse and freaking Paul Bettany trying to save the mother of the Messiah from hordes of possessed crazies at the edge of the Mojave desert with Dennis Quaid... was boring. Instead of 90 minutes of angels kicking each others' butts, every two seconds they were all "let's have a slow moment to insert fake character development so people are fooled into believing we thought at all about this movie and the moral consequences of God deciding we suck." Well guess, what, LEGION? I don't know about God, but I definitely think you suck. I'm gonna go watch THE PROPHECY.


4) HOWEVER, discovering Veronica Mars made up for several weeks worth of bad movies. I knew the show vaguely of course, but never watched it bc it premiered during The Dreaded Grad School Years. We watched it streaming via Netflix, and I have to say the first season is basically perfect. So well written, excellent characters, great mystery - a lot like a high school Twin Peaks, actually, but without all the surreal quasi-supernatural weirdness. And with the most ass-kicking YA heroine I may have ever seen on television. Ever. I'm shocked nobody has tied me down to make me watch it before, but probably bc all the people who love it assumed I'd already seen it.


5) CROW MAGIC is at 74,000 words, I'm expecting about 10k more for the first draft. I'd say I see the light at the end of the tunnel, but there is not light and this is no tunnel. As I said on twitter, it's more like a desolate field of ashes and blood and flowers.


6) SHAKESPEARE ON FRIDAY!!!!!


7) Oh, and I made a joke referencing Wayne's World the other day, and most of the people on the email list didn't get it. THAT MADE ME SAD. It also made me remember vividly watching the movie with my mom. And a) how she was laughing so hard tears streamed down her face, but kept glancing embarrassedly at me as if she couldn't believe she'd brought her kids, and b) being at the point where I got 85% of the jokes, and the ones I didn't get I KNEW were about specific sex acts or along those lines, but I wasn't quite sure what made the joke funny. Ah, adolescence.

PS. In the email I said "it makes me feel weird. Like when we used to climb the ropes in gym class." Which I recognize is not the exact line Garth says, but dude. It's close enough. Those poor humorless heathens who thought I actually climbed ropes in gym. No. We played dodge ball and sharks and fishes like everybody else.

In Which a Friend Sends a Piece of God in a Pink Envelope

I'm in the final two weeks of novel-writing psychosis. Where I am nervous and antsy when not staring at my word document* like someone is watching me. It's a tick in-between my shoulder blades and a constant knock at my door.

Which means even writing this, which is not only fun and part of my job, feels like I'm getting away with something. And that's why my blog has been a little... how do you say it? BORING AND SUCKY recently. I promise Shakespeare and giveaways next week. And once August hits I'll be posting the kind of thing that takes effort. Passionate, thoughtful essays on stuff like character arcs and the thesaurus. (What, that doesn't sound exciting? Fine. Also LOLcats.)

Today, though, I have a story about friendship and fandom that spans decades.

Back in January I wrote this post about the book I have loved most in my life. BEAUTY, by Robin McKinley. The whole story is in that post, but suffice it to say, that book changed my life and set me on this path to writing about magic and monsters and kissing.

I know this lady named Maggie, who is many other things for sure, but first of all my friend.

So Maggie emails me and says, "I just did something awesome for you. It's a secret. But it is going to make you so happy your clothes will fall off."

Me: "Sounds nice. I hope I'm not in public when I find out."

Fast-forward about six weeks. There was some angst, bc I'm not a fan of not-so-secret-secrets, but mostly I called on my strong powers of dissociation and forgot about it. Then surprise! I get a pretty pink envelope from England. I know some people there, so the only weird thing is why whatever it is didn't come in an email. I opened it, and the only things inside were two little plain sticky notes.


(To Tessa Gratton* best wishes, Robin McKinley. *whom I have been instructed to address as 'Blood Bunny.' Some people have strange friends. Very strange friends.)


My clothes fell off.

I've never been the kind of person who wrote to authors. In fact, other than writers who I know personally, I've only done it twice. A few years ago to tell Sarah Monette that I loved her books and so did my little brother who was in Iraq at the time, and when I was about 10 years old I wrote to Robert J Sawyer because of this book which had talking dinosaurs and is possibly partly responsible for my eyeball fetish/phobia. I wrote him a long letter and he wrote back and I wrote him again! I believe I may have included a 10-year-old-Tessa story about, you guessed it, talking dinosaurs.

There's always been a suspicion in my mind that authors aren't real. I know, I am one. But still. Books are magic. Nobody MAKES magic. So it never, ever occurred to me to write to Robin McKinley and tell her I loved her books and they made me who I am. It was like she was on this other plane, a goddess of whispers and love, and thinking about her as a real person was like thinking about God putting on a face and walking the earth. And when I was a kid, duh, only Jesus did that.

Basically, what I'm trying to say, is that although I know better now. Although I've written my own books, followed Ms. McKinley's twitter feed and blog and even know what her face looks like... holding these flimsy little pieces of paper was like holding pieces of God.

And God knows my nickname is Blood Bunny.


Maggie told me after I finished being dead that she also sent the link to my post about Beauty. My clothes fell off again and even thinking about it right now makes me a little nauseated. Or possibly that's the novel deadline pointing out that I've been writing this post for half an hour.

After a week or so, I emailed Robin McKinley myself, thanking her. And she wrote back. And yes, I'm saving the email exchange forever. She was silly and funny and weird. There are a million things I could say about it, about how my 10 year old self would never believe I was conversing with Robin McKinley, or how it makes time itself seem as nonlinear as the physicists claim.

Thanks, Maggie. You are a strange friend. But I wouldn't want any other kind.


And thanks to my own book fairy, I have an advanced reader copy of McKinley's newest book: PEGASUS.


It's out in November, but I get to read it the MOMENT I sent Crow Magic to my editor. It's my carrot. My dessert. My light at the end of the tunnel.

Guess that means I should get back to work.


* today Word decided that "blood" is no longer spelled "blood" and started underlining it in red squiggles every time I wrote it. Which, while annoying, was pretty apropos.

Anthology news!

This is a news post. If you want real content check out last week's posts. ;)

Back in January I was at work, minding my own business, when an email popped into my inbox asking for rights to a story I'd written over a year before for Merry Fates.

They wanted to put it in a print anthology with stories from other writers whose names made my eyes bug out. I ran outside to dance where my office-mates couldn't see, and then looked up names to make sure it was all legit.

It was. Checked with agent and signed the contract. Tried not to think about it. Didn't tell more than 4 people.

But low and behold, the table of contents is public, and the book has a page on Amazon!

That's right, I'll be showing up this fall in WEREWOLVES AND SHAPESHIFTERS: Encounters with the Beast Within, edited by John Skipp.


CHECK OUT THIS LINEUP. With the most important story in bold, of course.


THE COMPANY OF WOLVES – Angela Carter
THE LADY ON THE GREY – John Collier
THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH – H.P. Lovecraft
GRANDFATHER WOLF – Steve Rasnic Tem
FIRE DOG – Joe R. Lansdale
PURE SILVER – A.C. Crispin and Kathleen O’Malley
GIFT-WRAP – Charlaine Harris
SIDE-EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE – Steve Duffy
UNLESS YOU CHANGE – Francesca Lia Block
FORGIVEN – Eric Shapiro
THE COLD THAT FLAYS THE SKIN – Tessa Gratton
IL DONNAIOLO – Brad C. Hodson
WEREWOLF 101 – Mercedes M. Yardley
MANDIBLE – Alice Henderson
FAR AND WEE – Kathe Koja
BRAIDS – Melanie Tem
NOT FROM AROUND HERE – David J. Schow
THE SKIN TRADE – George R.R. Martin
THE ANIMAL ASPECT OF HER MOVEMENT – Adam Golaski
STRANGE SKIN – Bentley Little
BREAK-UP – Richard Christian Matheson
THE BETTER HALF: A LOVE STORY – Scott Bradley and Peter Giglio
WARM, IN YOUR COAT – Violet Glaze
ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN PIGGY CLASS – Nicole Cushing
HOWL OF THE SHEEP – Cody Goodfellow
PIECES OF ETHAN – Adam-Troy Castro
I COVET ALL THE WANING HOURS – Zak Jarvis
WHEN SUSSURUS STIRS – Jeremy Robert Johnson
WAR PIG – Carlton Mellick III
DISSERTATION – Chuck Palahniuk
ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD AGAIN – Neil Gaiman
SWEETHEART COME – Alethea Kontis


Did you see the Gaiman and Palahniuk and Martin? The Block and Carter? I DID.

Whew, time to take deep breaths.

In related news, a French publisher wants to buy a few stories from Merry Fates, too, and translate them into French. The language of love. MY LOVE. And I was invited to submit a story for an upcoming steampunk anthology.

Plus there's the super-sekrit-anthology-news that I'm not saying anything more about. Because it's a secret. For now. *evil smile*

*************

My only other news is that I've been listening to this song on repeat since 9am, writing a single scene for this book. claims she found her sunglasses in the refrigerator and that I left all the cabinets open in the kitchen last week, a la "Poltergeist." All I remember is laying on the living room floor and staring at the ceiling for a few hours.

Crow Magic is trying to kill me.

My Kind of P0rn

Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.

Okay, no. Not that.

MAGIC. I'm talking about MAGIC.

I read THIRTEENTH CHILD by Patricia C. Wrede over the weekend. You know, when I couldn't sleep because our neighbors thought that 2am was an excellent time for fireworks. Basically this book is LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE only with magic and monsters. And if you've been reading my blog long enough you know that all I want from a book is magic, monsters, and kissing. Well, there wasn't kissing. But

Oh

My

Gawd

did the magic make up for it.

I say in my official bio that I wanted to be a wizard when I was a kid. It isn't a joke. Not really. I still want to be one. The kind that studies for twenty years in order to learn languages and charts and delicate balance of this flow and that energy and how the stars influence power and mixing potions and understanding the way the universe is built.

In other words, like physics, but with wands and sexier robes.*

In THIRTEENTH CHILD, Eff is the thirteenth kid and her twin brother is the seventh son of a seventh son. They're in a frontier school learning math and spelling and MAGIC. Several scenes take place during classes and much of Eff's development as a character and as a person depend upon understanding the way magic works in this world. There are schools of thought (three major theories: quasi-European, quasi-African, and quasi-Asian (quasi bc it's an alternate universe)). We learn how they work together and how they don't, which is best for certain tasks, which is dominant and why, where there are prejudices, and all these great metaphors for how they work.

I was in Book Heaven.

It isn't everybody's Book Heaven, I know. But if you love magic - not just pretty magic or sexy magic or blood magic, but love the way it works, love not only when it has rules, but learning what those rules are - this is a book for you.

This is also, btw, why I love Sarah Monette's DOCTRINE OF LABYRINTHS quartet. (Course, those are also character, voice, and language p0rn.)


Magicp0rn: in which the magical system of a world is discussed at length by the characters. At length and at depth. Repeatedly.



I suspect I'm a fan because of early indoctrination by Mercedes Lackey. I haven't read her stuff in ages, but I recall chapters of nothing but characters sitting around talking magic the way I sit around and talk about Book Scan numbers. The Arrows of the Queen trilogy was all about Talia** learning to control her magic and be a Herald. The Winds trilogy was all about Elspeth going and learning cool stuff from the Hawkbrothers. I had a huge crush on Firesong when I was 14 and it was probably because every time he was around all he thought about was sex and magic.

D&D also caused my obsession with magical theory. Because I hated everything about the magical systems in every game I played, but couldn't NOT be a wizard because hey, it's what I wanted to do with my life. This led to repeated arguments with the GM and everyone in my game hating me for stopping play to yell but that makes absolutely no sense! Where's the theory behind these arbitrary rules! Don't tell me it comes from some MOON! Why do I have to rememorize a Magic Missile 8 times when Mr. Shiny Pants Paladin doesn't lose his sword every time he swings it?


*ahem*

Anyway. I love my Magicp0rn. There just might be a little of it in BLOOD MAGIC and CROW MAGIC. But not a lot. I'd say only the tip of the iceberg. I know everything there is to know about How Magic Works in my books, but you'll never have to sit through lectures. I promise. Mostly.


Any recommendations for other books with Magicp0rn? I would like to read more now.***



*also like Harry Potter, but actually more like Howl, bc let's face it, eating hearts is more my thing than Hogwarts and I'd have ended up in Azkaban and we don't like to think about that.

** I am impressed I remember all these names. AW NOSTALGIA!

*** Just because there is magic IN a book doesn't mean it is Magicp0rn. Harry Potter, frex, is not Magicp0rn. If Snape ever actually told us a theory about why this potion needs to be heated to a simmer, but that one works better frozen under the full moon, THAT would be Magicp0rn. If Dumbledore told us WHY a mother's love worked against the most powerful of evil magics, THAT would be Magicp0rn.**** For the p0rn part, you need depth and repetition. Of theory!

**** Nothing against HP. I <3 HP. But for things other than the magic.

Writing Books is Hard

I don't really even HAVE to add anything to that title.

Except this: writing books to a real, professional deadline is harder.

But not because of pressure from an editor or having an audience to please or an advance to earn out. (Ok, maybe those things are there, but they certainly aren't any worse than worrying about whether you're any good or how you'll get an agent or whether or not this character should die. Editors and earning out advances and reviews are the new part of hard, not a harder part of hard. You know what I mean.)

What makes having a professional deadline harder is, well, having a deadline.

Last week I had one of those normal novel-writing crises (yes, there are normal novel-writing crises) where if it had happened while writing any of the books I've ever written before IN MY LIFE I would have put it down, backed slowly away, and not looked at it again for two weeks, while instead sipping mojitos on my front porch and reading and reading and reading until I remembered why I wanted to be a writer and why I was writing this particular book so that I could pick it back up again with all my problems solved. Voila.

With a deadline, I don't have that luxury. I don't have two DAYS much less two WEEKS to find a slice of perspective.

Let me just say that cramming perspective into as little real time as possible not only was hard, but basically made me a basket-case. A gloom-and-doom, this novel sucks and nobody will love it, basket case. That's not to say I wouldn't have hit those points if my perspective had been able to stretch out over two weeks. But they'd have been stretched out. One on Tuesday, one on Saturday. Instead, they followed on each others heals like Olympic relay runners.

I never doubted I'd make my deadline (rewrite: I don't doubt I'll make my deadline, since it hasn't occurred yet), but I doubted that it would matter because it would all SUCK. I would suck, my books would suck, my life would suck, and boy-howdy would I drag everyone down with me.

One of those days.

Then I was sitting on the sofa with this guy who designed this awesome thing and he handed me a glass of wine and said, "Look, Tessa, you just have to accept that you might die."

Me: O_O

CK: blah blah *awesome things about samurai* blah blah *insight I don't remember word-for-word but that boils down to "how can you be brave if you aren't prepared to die? how can you be at peace and not stress the eff out if you don't consider all possible outcomes?"*

Basically, he said BE THE SAMURAI, TESSA.

I don't really like to think about dying, or failure, as the case may be. But as I sat there on the sofa and started imagining all the worst case scenarios, I somehow, miraculously, began to feel better. Not in some morbid, pessimist way (though I have great love for morbid thinking), but actual peace and calm. Because the more I thought about "dying" the less likely it seemed. The less like a crisis my crisis felt.

Not that when I sat down to write the next day it was any easier. But I felt easier about it. I pushed through with a little less angst, and by Sunday managed to find my path again and steam through 4,000 words in one day. And today I'm coming up over 2,000, with more in me.

CK sent me a page of Samurai Death Poems, too, to get me in the mood. This one had the most impact:


Had I not known
that I was dead
already
I would have mourned
my loss of life.

Ota Dokan
1432-1486


The next time you're a basket-case, just remember:

BE THE SAMURAI!

The Galavanting Post

BUT FIRST: don't forget to go enter my Epic Contest of Awesome!. Because wow it's hilarious and fun, folks. Ya'll are killing me with your own awesome.

NOW BACK TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED POST: A couple of weeks ago I flew off to Washington D.C. with who was going to some little thing called the National Science Foundation Conference.

I just went to have fun. Also because my brother and his wife live there. Here we are, chilling in the National Museum of the American Indian. ---->


We got into town on a Friday morning and my Brother The Doctor picked us up at the airport. Yes, he looked shockingly like my Dad the Doctor in his suit and tie after coming off a 30 hour shift. He drove us home past stuff like the Washington monument and the Watergate Hotel. Then he dumped us off with his wife and went to take a nap. We walked to the National Zoo. And guys.

THEY HAD A BABY GORILLA.

I can't properly express the cuteness that was the baby gorilla. It frolicked. It climbed up the wall and flung itself down into the piles of hay for fun. It play-attacked all the adults except the silverback. One of the aunties rolled on her back and picked up the baby to play Superman with him. We sat there for over half an hour. Despite going all over the city, the baby gorilla might have been the best thing.

We ate lots of excellent food. That's definitely something DC has over Lawrence. We had Ethiopian, Ramen, fancy Mexican, whoopie pies, and a crab boil.



That would be crab boil with fresh crabs we got from the docks!

(Note: yes, you'd think a crab boil would be right up my ally. Violence, eating small creatures, violence... but man. I only had one. It was too much work for not enough payout. Everyone else disagreed with me.)

On Saturday we visited an open air market, then wandered our way west to the Mall. We spent about two hours or so in the Native American Museum, which is new since the last time I was there. I gotta say, it was BEAUTIFUL with some amazing artifacts and great presentation, but I was disappointed by the lack of historical, anthropological, social, or any other kind of context. They did have an exhibit by this amazing artist Brian Jungen. He makes wicked stuff out of every-day things. Like a whale skeleton out of plastic lawn chairs. Or this skull made out of baseballs.



It rained quite a bit during the weekend, but that's what tapas bars are for, right?



Sunday we were joined by to tear around the Natural History Museum. I wanted to see the dinosaurs. Of course, the dino exhibit looks exactly the way it did twenty years ago. And it's still painted 1970s orange. FORTUNATELY, they had this cool little exhibit about forensic anthropology. There were skeletons from Chesapeake Bay, and lots of theories about who they were and how they died. PLUS THIS:

A 300 year old doctor's case. LOOK AT THOSE TOOLS.

This was my favorite:


it's a fleam, and was used for bloodletting. Humans and animals. You put the hump part of the blade against the vein, then tap it sharply down with a small mallet. It was supposed to be more precise and cause less accidents.

Because bleeding patients isn't bad enough. However, for blood magic, it's a perfect instrument. *love*


I spent Monday with Maggie while Natalie did Secret Science Stuff. We worked for a surprising length of time. But there was also much fun had.

And here are bonus pictures of eating crickets. To mine and Maggie's horror. Very glad I'd had my fill already, because that was it for me.





The rest of the pictures from our trip can be found at our flickr page! Including more food, some Chinese lions, Maggie pretending to be George Washington, and my favorite portrait from the National Portrait Gallery!

Epic Tessa is Awesome Contest Extravaganza!

So, I have this awesome thing that nobody else in the entire world has. And that calls for a contest. A blatant self-promotion contest.

On the surface it's a one-in-a-hundred thing: an advanced reader's copy of LINGER by Maggie Stiefvater. But when I was gallivanting around D.C. with her two weeks ago, she did something so cool that it makes this ARC absolutely, 100% one-of-a-kind.

She wrote the first line of FOREVER, the third book of the trilogy, at the end.

Oh yes, you read that right.

And now I'm going to give it away to one lucky winner.

Unfortunately I don't have a cover for my book BLOOD MAGIC quite yet, and I don't have a trailer or other visual goodness for you to plaster across the internet. But what I do have are stick-figure cartoons. Because that's how I roll.



Here's all you have to do to win:

- Post one of these cartoons with a link back to my website. Post it to your own public blog, your Facebook, your Twitter. There are three parts: text, cartoon, and link. If you post all three you get two points, if you only post two (text and link) then you get one. Like this would work for Twitter: TESSA GRATTON DANCES ON THE MOON (and she writes books, too!) Visit her at tessagratton.com.

The link must be present!

- Bonus points: Feel free to draw your own cartoon. Make me something awesome. An astronaut. A tomb raider. Anything cool. If you draw and display your own Tessa Is Awesome cartoon, you get a bonus entry point. As long as I am awesome and not killing babies or something.

- Comment back to this post and give me a link so I can see your entry and you can get your points!!!


Next Wednesday, June 16th at 8pm CST I will randomly select a winner for the LINGER ARC.

Additionally, I'll select 5 runners-up who will get to pick a book off my Recently Read bookshelf and I'll draw some cartoons inside and mail you a copy. (Recent reads include stuff like BEAUTIFUL CREATURES, BRIGHTLY WOVEN, THE IRON KING, FALLEN, IF I STAY, FIRE, and more!)

Here are the other cartoons available:

Here are the cartoons and their HTML for copying below:



Visit her at tessagratton.com!




Visit her at tessagratton.com!

For HTML please visit my LJ blog so you can easily cut and paste it!!! Contest post with HTML

Have fun! Be creative!!! Spread word of my awesomeness around the internets!!! Let me know if you have any questions!

Monday Mania! (also known as "I have no title")

- I finished my copy edits! That means we're one more step closer to my responsibility to BLOOD MAGIC being totally, completely over. The only thing I have to say about my first copy editing experience was that STET never got old. Maybe because I only used it about 12 times in 98,000 words. But still. Not old.


- I posted a short story over at called "The Vampire Box." It's been sitting in my brain for a few months now, but I didn't know what it was about. I figured out in the shower yesterday what the point was. And voila! The Vampire Box

I *might* be a little bit obsessed with the old-vampire/teenage-girl relationship. It's everywhere these days, right? It's hitting lots of buttons for lots of people. I mean, I had an affair with Lestat when I was a teen, even though I knew it was bad for me. I've written about this exact thing several times.

There's no kissing in this one, though. Which is shocking. I usually make it a goal to put some kissing in my short story. There is blood though. I mean, jeez, it IS a vampire story. It HAS to have one or the other.


- So yesterday after I finished my copy edits and did some prep for the next Shakespeare monologue (which will have a Surprise! Guest! Star!), I read If I Stay by Gayle Foreman.

I picked it up when I was in a kid's bookstore in Alexandria, VA with a couple of weeks ago. I was all "didn't you like this?" and she said "Oh, yes." So I bought it because I wasn't sure I had a book for the airplane home. I didn't end up starting it, and now that I've read it, I know that GOD OR SOMEBODY WAS LOOKING OUT FOR ME because if I'd read it on the plane it would have been horrible.

Because basically, I spent three solid hours crying.

Yes, it was sad. There were a few moments of complete tragedy. But most of the things that made me cry were moments of perfect, beautiful human compassion. When horrible things bring out the best in people. I'm not talking big gestures, but the little moments. Quiet stuff that nobody witnesses because it happens when nobody's watching. The decisions you make that are small and momentous at the same time, and can change everything.

What I loved about this book though, was that it did exactly what it set out to do. It was simple, forthright, not trying to be more than it was - and let me tell you, what it was was PLENTY. I couldn't have taken anymore. It was short and sweet. To the point. And beautiful.

The secondary characters were drawn so well. Great use of flashbacks. If you want to know how to make me as a reader invest in a character in two sentences, read this book. Ditto for learning how to weave in flashbacks and tell a whole story with them.

When I finished I was wiped out, the way you get after a totally incredible, intense experience. I was staring at the cover and all I could think was I am so glad I didn't try reading this on a plane followed by does that blurb really say 'will appeal to fans of TWILIGHT'? REALLY? Did they read the same book I did? Anyway. Any light you want to throw on that, it's welcome.


- JUNE IS SHAKESPEARE MONTH OVER AT KELLY R FINEMAN'S BLOG! She's having great conversations, picking apart plays, and hosting contests. Not only is Kelly awesome, but she's wicked smart and a poet! <3 What else could you possibly want?

Tessa Does Shakespeare in High School!

Hey all! Have I got an embarrassing treat for you! Two videos: one I recorded yesterday... and one from 1998.

Because this month I've gone back to my theatrical roots.

The first Shakespearean monologue I ever performed was Helena's initial whiny solo in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." It was my Junior year of High School, and the entire experience was so much fun. I got to learn about stage combat, and spend weeks immersed in the Bard's work. If I hadn't already been hooked on theater, this would have done it for sure.

I've never particularly liked Helena. She's whiny, dumb, and hysterical. She pines over a man who's totally dissed her, dropping her for her richer, (supposedly) prettier friend Hermia. However, I DO like this monologue, because Helena goes off on a very brief philosophical tangent about Love Personified. She offers up reasons for why humans imagine Love to be the way he is, and not only is it poetic, it totally makes sense from her perspective.

A voila! I present Act I, Scene i, HELENA.





I found a lot of layers of subtlety to this speech, as Helena seems to be trying to convince herself that she truly has no choice. That this is Love's fault, and she is his fool. Yet some part of her seems to understand that she's letting that be an excuse. Because she needs the attention? Enjoys the pain? Because at some level this is better than nothing? Possibly there's anger there, at everyone. Resentment, jealousy, sure. But mostly I think she's hurt, and not wise enough to figure out a better way to deal. So she falls back on this idea that Love is the only path, even if it hurts and is hurtful.

Of course, when I was trying to figure it out back in 98, I went with forcing some pretense of strength, because I couldn't stand the idea of playing a whiny, dumb, hysterical girl. We did cut out the middle chunk of philosophy, and I think it does a great disservice to Helena's character to undercut that moment of thoughtfulness. (Sorry, .)

And GUESS WHAT? I happen to have a recording of me, at the tender age of 17, performing that version!

Yes, it's poor quality. And yes, I recorded it off my TV while it was playing in the VCR. But you can still see my wild, flailing gestures, and the butt-long hair.





Here's the text (the part cut from At 17 is italicized):

"How happy some o'er other some can be!
Through Athens I am thought as fair as she.
But what of that? Demetrius thinks not so;
He will not know what all but he do know:
And as he errs, doting on Hermia's eyes,
So I, admiring of his qualities:
Things base and vile, folding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity:
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind:
Nor hath Love's mind of any judgment taste;
Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste:
And therefore is Love said to be a child,
Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.
As waggish boys in game themselves forswear,
So the boy Love is perjured every where:
For ere Demetrius look'd on Hermia's eyne,
He hail'd down oaths that he was only mine;
And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt,
So he dissolved, and showers of oaths did melt.
I will go tell him of fair Hermia's flight:
Then to the wood will he to-morrow night
Pursue her; and for this intelligence
If I have thanks, it is a dear expense:
But herein mean I to enrich my pain,
To have his sight thither and back again."

What do you think about the comparison? I can't help ascribing a relationship to the way teens are portrayed in many books and movies - sometimes they're given range and depth, and other times we only look at the surface - at the stereotype and resentment and, well, hysteria. I've been thinking about this since writing my rant on Wednesday about TV teens and caricatures.

Thanks for stopping by for the May episode of Tessa Does Shakespeare. There's no giveaway this month, because I have a hugely awesome thing to give away soon, but am concocting a devious plan for it. >:D


ps. Why didn't anyone ever tell me I needed bangs in high school?