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