Next week, I’ll be getting first pass pages in the mail to proofread. I have been waiting for this moment because it’s the last step I have to do before Fall for Anything is published, which is AWESOME. It’s kind of like saying goodbye, but not really. Except yesterday I was looking through the word doc and I am pretty sure I discovered a typo that no one caught, which means it will show up in the ARCs. This is why I tell people to hold onto the ARCs. I pretend those typos make them VALUABLE, instead of just something that happens with ARCS. Valuable, I say! Like diamonds! Also have I mentioned I should be sharing my cover soonish? I can’t wait.

Just FYI, I’ve updated my contact page. If you have a request, make sure you check it out. I’m crunched for time lately and I’ve had to reluctantly weed out what I am and am not available for. I wish I could do everything, but if I did I would never write another book and that would be just no good unless you hate my books and then I assume you would think that’s great.

Anyway, the reason for this blog entry is that I took out my camera again today and I wanted to show you all a local attraction:

I also took these photos. WOULD YOU BELIEVE THEY ARE TOTALLY UNTOUCHED? No, you would not.

COURTNEY SUMMERS’S BLOG: COME FOR THE VOLCANOES AND STAY FOR THE RANDOM PARAGRAPHS ABOUT BIRDS.

Seriously the most uneventful summer ever. But seriously, I’m not complaining!

In other news, you should click this widget:

For now.

…

In less sad news, the winner of my Awesome Books Week giveaway is Angie! Angie was contacted and the books are one their way to her as I type this. Thank you everyone for taking the time to read the interviews, as well as commenting on them. It was my pleasure to spotlight and share some fabulous, contemporary YA fiction with you. I hope you’ll check them out!

Other than that, not a whole lot is going on. At least, nothing that makes a very good blog entry. Post-Fall for Anything it seems like I am dealing with a little creative burnout, writing wise! I’ve been trying to write through it (it’s what I’ve got to do!), but the other night, I MAY have taken a break to transfer some old photos from one computer to the other and got a little bit nostalgic. It made me realize how much I missed taking photographs. There was a point in time where I didn’t go very far without my camera. It was a nice outlet, and a revealing one; I could always tell writing was not going that great when I picked up my camera and that the writing was moving along when I was neglecting it…

Anyway, I haven’t played around with my D80 like that for a while. Which is terrible because it is a fantastic camera. And also lame of me because photography plays a huge part in Fall for Anything (spoiler: Fall For Anything is actually about killer and/or posessed cameras!), so ANYWAY, I took out my Nikon today and here are some photographs I took:

image via my confined space

image via wikipedia

image via google

Fun Fact about this Canadian: I did not always say “eh,” but my friends did. And I wanted to be just like them so I forced myself to say it until it finally became second nature. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if they decided to jump off a bridge? Probably I would have done it with them while screaming, “EEEEEEH!”

And they would have thought I was so cool and finally accepted me for the person I pretended to be when I was around them. *sniff*

I am celebrating Canada Day with this movie:

jerk

Also I liked how many artful Jason Vorhees shots it featured:

True story: this part of Friday the 13th Part 2:

IT’S TRUE.

Anyway, sometimes I look at where these blog entries begin and where they end up and I am amazed I write books.

The election results were an unsurprising disappointment and that is all I will say about that. The most exciting part about Tuesday was when I walked up the hill to the voting station with my family and realized just how out of shape I was. Oh my God, people. I should really do something about that.

Last week, my family and I checked out the local fall scenery which was pretty awesome. I took a million pictures and vowed not to share any until I had the bulk of them digitally post-processed and could make some kind of blog entry picture show, but I haven’t had the time because I am a time management FAILURE, so here are three!

I can’t remember if I said this, but I am working on my third book while I whip the second into shape. This is sort of daunting and also exciting because I’ve never really worked on multiple projects at once. I mean, without failing horribly. This time around, I fully intend to pwn, though, so that’s good (ha ha ha!). But it occurred to me that BOOK 3 NEEDS A RIDICULOUS WORKING TITLE for my blog. I considered passing Your Mom onto it, but YOUR MOM’S BEEN DONE, so I brainstormed and here are the contenders for my new ridiculous working title. Help me make my choice:

Your Dad
Your Sister
~*Sparklepants*~
Bessie

I don’t know. They all seem sort of vaguely uninspired, don’t they? I mean, maybe I should just let the good thing have its day, give up on the ridiculous working titles and call it the name I’ve graced the word document: book3. How compelling is that?! I would say it is more compelling than ~*RPATTZ*~’s sexy ridiculous hair and sexy movie star glasses, both of which he was wearing in third and final Twilight trailer, which OH MY GOD YOU GUYS IT WAS SO HOT I COULD CLIFF-DIVE TO SHOW YOU HOW COMMITTED I AM TO SEEING THAT MOVIE.

See see see!!!

Sometimes I pity my sister, who I am taking to this ~*sparkly vampire movie*~ affair because all she will hear through the whole thing is one long continuous EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE from the person sitting next to her (aka me).

Godspeed, Teeny.

Anyway, things here are pretty quiet and I am woefully behind in getting back to people about stuff. Canadian Thanksgiving is coming up which means food! Also giving thanks. And I hear we’re having an election next Tuesday. I made a promise to keep most politics off my blog, so I will refrain from telling you that I am voting Liberal. Meanwhile, I am doing the writing thing.

(Blog topics, I needs them!!!)

Cracked Up to Be round-up: the trailer can be found on bookscreening.com–bookscreening is a regular visit of mine because I think I’ve made it clear my life depends on watching book trailers–and was also briefly featured on veoh’s front page (it’s down now, but Daisy Whitney and my twitter pals witnessed it, I swear)!

Michelle reminded me that Cracked Up to Be is also in this Library Journal article about tracking down first fiction of 2008 (like I said, my book is a Time Lord). Scroll way down the list of forthcoming debuts and it is one of the two books under ‘Canada.’ You also still have time to enter my Last Lazy Galley Giveaway, AND, tonight while google-stalking myself (what), I discovered Cracked Up To Be is part of LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program. If you’re a member of LibraryThing, you can request an ARC under the stipulation you review it, I guess! Check out the rules to see if you’re eligible etc. It’s over here.

If you are sick of all that Cracked Up to Be talk, I suggest taking a breather from it by reading the first two chapters of C.K. Kelly Martin’s upcoming release, One Lonely Degree. They are amazing.

Eeeeeeeeee!

My author page is up on the St. Martin’s Press website, which is surreal. There is an ‘Interview with Courtney Summers’ on it, even! I think I would have talked less about zombies if I had remembered the St. Martin’s Press author pages were written in a Georgia font, which just seems very zombie-disapproving as far as fonts go.

AND on the Cracked Up to Be page–it has a page too!–there is a Q&A, also with this Courtney Summers person, whoever she is. The answers there are slightly more serious. So I think I have unintentionally done an excellent job of presenting myself as a big inconsistent flake with a zombie obsession. Except I totally did that on purpose. YES.

Also: ‘I enjoy watching zombie movies in my free time.’ Note how I couldn’t even expand on that. No, I don’t go out or have friends or even watch zombie movies inside WITH friends. I just sit in front of my TV and watch reanimated corpses eat brains by myself. 24/7.

I’m kind of tempted to sign up for my own author alerts. Is this egotistical? I figure it would be a good way to find out what I was up to since I don’t even know half the time. Like right now I thought I was typing a blog entry but I’m actually playing an air guitar.

Here is a photograph of a cow that I took over the weekend:

Here are the photographs:

But before you give me your input (please), here are notes on the photos, which we will call Canadian Brick Wall Face and Australia T-shirt Face respectively.

Canadian Brick Wall Face was in the running, then it was out of the running and now it is the running again! It was taken at the end of May. The PROS for this photograph is that the brick wall is pretty hot (please note the green will be cropped out if selected) and check out my hair! That was a pretty good hair day and I wouldn’t mind immortalizing that, since they don’t happen often. It looks like it was intended to be an author photo. The CON is that I have been told the photo makes me seem aloof and unapproachable.

Australia T-shirt Face was never meant to be an author photo, which is not a point against it. I just thought I would mention that. It was taken like, 5 months ago. The PROS for this photo is that I have been told it is warm and smiley, and I like to think I am both of these things when I am not giving you a death glare while secretly judging you. Also, people might assume I am Australian and Australia’s pretty hot. That’s a pretty big PRO right there, actually. The CON is that you can totally tell I am holding the camera and taking a picture of my face and that makes me think of self-portraity MySpace photos, which do not exactly exude an author vibe.

So.. what do you think, everyone? Which one do you prefer? Canadian Brick Wall Face or Australia T-shirt Face? Because between all the social networking sites I’ve got going on, there’s not enough angst in my life. Gimmeh gimmeh moar, as Britney would say. Judge my face!

(Thanks!)

I took this photograph yesterday (the white space is a part of the photo):

I think God would not have invented Hello Kitty pajama pants if he did not want me to live in them.

Also, I think if you had sex with a zombie, you would probably become one.

I think a lot of things.

I’ve had a twitter account since June 10th and have decided the internet is much richer for having a place where I can tell you exactly when I am eating skittles and how much I’m enjoying them. I’ve discovered most of the social networking sites I belong to give me a heightened sense of self-importance, except for MySpace, which does a pretty good job of keeping it in line.

This is what a degu looks like at 10%:

My percentage might be off there, I don’t know. I doubt it, as I’m not usually wrong about anything. That’s Ichabod! In the second picture, he is admiring my face at 10%. Most people and animals do.

PSEUDO-FAST DRAFT MAY!

I’m really excited. I’m going to pseudo-fast draft the hecks out of this book. It worked for Cracked Up to Be and it is going to work for Your Mom.

And I am not jinxing myself by saying that.

Welcome to Day 1.
12, 618 words so far.