YASH Spring 2019!

It's that time of year again!! When we all go crazy for a few days, trying to win piles of awesome books! This year, I'm also doing my own personal giveaway, so make sure to read all the way to the VERY BOTTOM of the post for your chance to win a signed ARC of my new release coming November 5th from Tor Teen - SISTERS OF SHADOW AND LIGHT!

Zuhra and Inara have grown up in the Citadel of the Paladins, an abandoned fortress where legendary, magical warriors once lived before disappearing from the world—including their Paladin father the night Inara was born.

On that same night, a massive, magical hedge grew and imprisoned them within the citadel. Inara inherited their father’s Paladin power; her eyes glow blue and she is able to make plants grow at unbelievable rates, but she has been trapped in her own mind because of a “roar” that drowns everything else out—leaving Zuhra virtually alone with their emotionally broken human mother.

For 15 years they have lived, trapped in the citadel, with little contact from the outside world…until the day a stranger passes through the hedge, and everything changes.

You can pre-order SOSAL by clicking HERE!!! or HERE *for a signed copy*!!

Welcome to YA Scavenger Hunt! This bi-annual event was first organized by author Colleen Houck as a way to give readers a chance to gain access to exclusive bonus material from their favorite authors...and a chance to win some awesome prizes! At this hunt, you not only get access to exclusive content from each author, you also get a clue for the hunt. Add up the clues, and you can enter for our prize--one lucky winner will receive one signed book from each author on the hunt in my team! But play fast: this contest (and all the exclusive bonus material) will only be online for until Sunday!

Go to the YA Scavenger Hunt page to find out all about the hunt. This year I'm on: 

Directions: Below, you'll notice that I've listed my favorite number. Collect the favorite numbers of all the authors on the Green Team, and then add them up (don't worry, you can use a calculator!). 

Entry Form: Once you've added up all the numbers, make sure you fill out the form here to officially qualify for the grand prize. Only entries that have the correct number will qualify.

Rules: Open internationally, anyone below the age of 18 should have a parent or guardian's permission to enter. To be eligible for the grand prize, you must submit the completed entry form by Sunday April 7th, at noon Pacific Time. Entries sent without the correct number or without contact information will not be considered.

Here's a little trivia for you - my all time FAVORITE number has always been 21!!!

This year I'm hosting Lisa Koosis!

-->In high school, much to the dismay of her guidance counselor, Lisa Koosis traded AP English for a creative writing class and a class in speculative fiction. She never looked back. Lisa is a member of the SCBWI, an ambassador for National Novel Writing Month, and an active member of her local writing community. Her short stories have been published widely. When she isn’t writing, you’ll probably find her at the beach with her dog, or chilling with her cat.
Lisa is the author of :

-->A grieving young musician must make an impossible choice about cloning the girl he loved, in this novel about memory and identity, love and loss.

Ooooh, that sounds so intriguing!! 

You can buy RESURRECTING SUNSHINE by clicking HERE!! 

And if you're a fan of the book - today is your lucky day because Lisa is sharing a deleted scene with us for her bonus material! 

As I worked on RESURRECTING SUNSHINE, I found myself writing a number of pretty surreal dream sequences. Not only do I love writing these types of scenes because writing about dreams gives me the freedom to really play with words and imagery and to be a little, well, out there, but because it also provides a way to explore what’s happening inside a character. In this particular dream sequence, as with several others in SUNSHINE, Adam explores in some depth his grief over losing Marybeth—aka Sunshine—as well as his fears and reservations about bringing back the girl she loves through this crazy process.

While the following scene was always one of my favorites, it never made it into the book in its entirety (although you may find pieces of it scattered here and there). I’m glad to have the opportunity to share it with you today.

I will warn you that this deleted scene contains some potential spoilers...or maybe I should say it hints at spoilers, but when I had the opportunity to share a deleted scene from my book, I just couldn’t resist choosing this one.

I hope you enjoy it!

~ Lisa A. Koosis

Deleted Scene from RESURRECTING SUNSHINE

I wake into the dream with Marybeth kissing me on the cheek. When I open my eyes she brushes hair back from my forehead and says, “Can you get up? I have something to show you.”

She’s wears her Sunshine get-up, that yellow dress that never stopped reminding me of funerals. Her feet are bare and black with dirt, as if she walked barefoot all the way from her own tomb. But she’s so gentle and attentive, so with me in the moment and not lost inside her grief, that my eyes burn.

I wish that for at least a few moments I could pretend this is something more than a dream.

“Please.” She holds out her hand.

I sit up. “You need to stop doing this, MB. I need to bond with the new you, and how can I do that if you keep coming to remind me you’re dead?”

She sighs. “Adam, head out of the sand. I am dead.”

I kick the sheets back, feeling suddenly, over-the-top, angry. “You think I don’t know that? I’m trying my best to move forward.”

“Forward,” she says. “Backward.” As if it’s all the same to her. And maybe it is, because what are directions when you’re dead?

“Okay,” I say. “I’m getting up.”

We leave my apartment and after a few hallways, I realize she’s taking me to the place where Marybeth 2.0 floats in her tank.

“We can’t go in there,” I tell her.

“Sure we can,” she says. “You’re getting tame, Adam. When did a rule ever stop you from doing anything?”

“It’s called growing up,” I tell her. I don’t know why I feel so cross.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” she says. “I’m always going to be almost-seventeen.”

With her words, though they’re completely off-the-cuff, all the crossness goes out of me. She pushes open the door to the nursery. Apparently, you don’t need keycards in dreams.

I expect the tank to be empty since Marybeth is here, with me, but it isn’t. Inside, Marybeth 2.0 floats, eyes closed, lips pressed tightly together. Whatever she’s reliving right now isn’t pleasant.

“Probably that day Daddy Jacobsen decided my bed was more interesting than his own,” the dream MB says.

“God, MB! How can you say it like that, so matter-of-factly?” How hard I’ve been trying not to think about her reliving those things.

“How else can I say it, Adam?” she says, almost gently, as if she’s protecting me more than herself. “It was my life. Now she’s stuck living it.”

I look from one Marybeth to the other. Seeing them side by side makes my chest squeeze. Or maybe it’s the thought that even now Mr. Jacobsen is sliding between the sheets of fourteen-year-old Marybeth’s bed as she pretends to sleep, hoping he’ll come to his senses and go away.

“Not all of my life experiences happened with you there to try to protect me.”

We look at each other, me and this girl I love with my whole heart, this girl so long in the ground.

“But that’s not what I wanted to show you.” She pulls me away from the tank.

Beyond the bank of computers that nobody’s tending to right now, a door appears. It wasn’t there a second ago. It swings open on its own.

From inside, I hear bubbling, like Marybeth’s nursery tank, only a hundred times over. My feet feel heavy in the way of dreams, and I force myself forward, reminding myself that that’s exactly what this is. No matter what’s in the room, no matter what fear-brought-to-life exists in there, it’s only the product of my thoughts and worries and paranoia.

I step into a room filled with tanks. In each one, a clone of Marybeth floats.

“Go on,” Dream Marybeth says. Her fingers press lightly against my shoulder, nudging me forward.

I move toward the first tank. The Marybeth inside is identical to the Marybeth standing beside me. Her eyes are open, staring through the pale fluid as if she’s really seeing me rather than just whatever exists inside the current memory being piped into her.

“MB.” I put my hands against the glass. Up close I see the faraway look in her eyes that I know so well, and my mind supplies an image of her sitting in the tour bus, her dress traded for jeans, her head tipped against the tinted windows, looking out at something only she can see. I can’t...

I move to the next tank. The Marybeth in that one is younger, but only slightly, judging by the shoulder-length of her dark hair.

I walk to the next, and the next, looking at the Marybeths in each one.

The Marybeths.

The.

As if she’s a product rather than a person.

I look to the Marybeth next to me. “Am I taking away from who you were by doing this?”

“Does it matter?” She shrugs, and then points to the tanks where the older Marybeths float, Marybeth when she was Sunshine. “Hadn’t I lost who I was by then anyway? Wasn’t I already a commodity?”

I shake my head. “Not to me.”

She smiles, the kind of smile you give someone you’re sad for. “I know. Thank you for that.”

Together, we walk to the far end of the room. I can pick out the ages of each by the hair length, the roundness of her cheeks, her height. My dream-guide Marybeth accompanies me, speculating on what memory might be getting pumped into each particular clone.

The Marybeths get younger, until they’re younger than the first time I met her. I see Marybeth at maybe the age of seven or eight, cigarette burns running up the length of her bare arms. I see Marybeth at around four or five, her hair short and choppy, as if she cut it herself. In some of the tanks she’s nothing more than a baby.

“This doesn’t make sense,” I tell the original Marybeth as we stare in at the young clone. “Her hair wouldn’t change in the tank.”

“Dummy,” she says affectionately, “this is a dream. Your mind has to make its dream-points somehow. Duh.”

“But what is the point? That she had a life before me? That she’s reliving everything?” I feel that crossness again, and suddenly I’m cross with her, even though I kind of realize that the dream her is really just my subconscious pretending to be her.

“Sure,” she says. “That. But maybe the point is this. When would it make a difference to stop the memories? When we were with the band? Before I met them? The day I met you? Or before? Or was it something just inside me, Adam? A ticking bomb that started the day a sperm met an egg, something in my genetic code that’ll be there no matter what you do?”

“And there it is,” I say. My pulse pounds in my jaw. “Poor me. Right, MB? You had a hard life. Well you weren’t the only one. You weren’t the only one who lost your family, who lost LaLa and Jeddy. You weren’t the only one who got stuck in shitty foster homes. You’re not the only one who had scars. You’re not the only one who’s ever thought about…”

I can’t say it. But Marybeth just keeps on looking at me, her gaze steady. In fact I feel all of the Marybeths watching me from their tanks.

“Go on,” she says.

“What is it you want to say to me, Marybeth? That it’s my fault you’re dead? That I gave up on you? You gave up first, Marybeth. You gave up a long time before me.”

I bang my fist against the nearest tank. It shudders, but neither the Marybeth inside nor the one next to me so much as flinches.

“I followed you onto that stage, Marybeth. I followed you into that ridiculous fame we had. I would have followed you to the ends of the earth. And still it wasn’t enough.

“You quit, Marybeth. You quit us. You quit life. And you left me to live without you. You left me when you knew it was going to hurt me the most. When it would look like it was my fault and not yours.”

“Go on,” she says.

“And I am so mad at you, Marybeth. I am so mad at you for leaving me here all alone, just like everyone else did.”

Add RESURRECTING SUNSHINE to your Goodreads list

To continue the hunt, make sure to go visit Melinda Cordell by clicking HERE! 

But first - make sure you enter my giveaway of an ARC of SISTERS OF SHADOW AND LIGHT right here : 

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