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Saturday, July 31, 2010

Last day for a great contest!

Thanks for entering my Blogaversary Giveaway, everyone!

I will count up the entries and let Random.org help me choose winners later today, and post them Monday.

Today, I'd like to point you to the lovely Candyland's super giveaway. It's for a great cause, and today is the last day to enter. The prizes are FANTASTIC! Check it out!



See you Monday! :)

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Tuesday Tunes

Have you entered my giveaway?  What are you waiting for?

So today, I'd love to talk music.  Do you listen to music when you write?  What do you listen to?  Do you have a playlist per ms, per character, per scene?  Tell me in the comments!

As of right now, I have two playlists.  I do a playlist for each manuscript. 

The playlist for LURE is mostly by my brother's band, The Rise of Defiance.  Here are a couple of my favorites.  (These are just simple videos with a static image of their album cover.  They are working on making real videos.)






The only other songs on the LURE playlist are a few of my favorite Evanescence songs.

Happily, my new wip also called for Evanescence.  It's playlist consists of Evanescence's The Open Door, and Flyleaf's Memento Mori, with a few extras thrown in.  When I get some more money, I will probably add more Evanescence and some Paramore, because that's how this ms rolls.  Here are a couple of favorites.





Tell me about your favorites in the comments!

Larissa

Sunday, July 25, 2010

WooHoo! Blogaversary and 100 Followers GIVEAWAY!!!

As I mentioned in my last post, today is my one-year blogaversary!  And, as luck would have it, I am also at 100 followers exactly!  SQUEE!

In celebration of those two awesomesauce events, I'm having a GIVEAWAY!

My amazing friend Jackie Dolamore recently went to BEA and ALA, and brought back a ton of ARCs.  She gave two to me, and now I will pass them on to you (of course I read them first - lol).

The first is FIRELIGHT by Sophie Jordan.



The second is LOW RED MOON by Ivy Devlin.



There's a third prize! I'm also giving away a 50-page critique by yours truly!

So, how to enter:
- You must comment on this post to enter and leave some way for me to contact you.  Please also tell me if you have a particular prize you are or are not interested in. +1
- Current followers: +5
- New followers: +2
- Spread the word (blog, twitter, facebook): +3 for each, please leave a link.  I'm @lchardesty on twitter.
- Total your points: +1

Maximum entries possible: 16
Giveaway ends Friday, July 30 at 10pm est.

Before I leave you to it, I'd like to give a shout out to two people:

Tara McClendon was my very first follower!  Hi Tara!  You should go check out her blog!

And, of course, my lovely 100th follower: The Brad.  Thanks so much for following, Brad! Check him out at bradmouth.com, he's hilarious!

That's it!  Thanks so much for reading!  I love you guys!

Larissa

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Crazy Summer

Hi everyone!

I have been having the most insane time with computers this summer.  You may recall that my laptop crashed.  Then a lovely friend gave me an old laptop she doesn't use anymore, and I was super excited!

Then, that laptop had a virus on it.  A horribly icky bad, bad virus that required complete wiping of the computer. UGH.  So I was back to using my iPod Touch for email access for about two weeks.

The laptop is back now, but I have to reupload Office onto it if I want to use it for writing, it's okay for blogging and email checking, but not safe for any type of financial online activity, and (this isn't new, but it's annoying) the keyboard kinda sticks, and I've had to retype half of this post because of missing letters and particularly spaces.

Anyway, enough complaining. Maybe I'll sell a book and I'll be able to get a MacBook and a laser printer (my printer is broken, too - no, I'm not kidding). 

So, in the comments, please let me know if there were any amazing blog posts I missed in the last two weeks.  If something was tweeted, I may have seen it, but looking at things on that tiny screen is frustrating, so it had to sound super fascinating for me to click through.  LOL.

Coming up: I will share the amazingly crazy story of why I have been living out of my house for almost two years. Hint: my kids call it "The Broken House."

Also, my one-year-blogaversary is coming up.  I just checked, and I posted my first blog on July 25!  Wow.  I'm also very very close to 100 followers, so if I get to 100 followers by my blogaversary, I guess I'll have to do a contest, right? ;)  I do have a couple of signed ARCs...and I could probably do a critique, too...hmmmm...

Larissa

Monday, July 5, 2010

Perseverance


I have good news and bad news. The good news is, I am not posting from my iPod! YAY! The bad news is that my laptop is completely dead. I've got my desktop computer, and an AWESOME, AMAZING friend gave me an old laptop. Another AWESOME, AMAZING friend's AWESOME, AMAZING husband retrieved everything from my old hard drive, too. I am really, really blessed.

But that isn't what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about sticking it out on this completely crazy road to representation/publication. Not the whole "Publishing takes forever and it takes the average writer ten years to get published" stuff, because as far as I'm concerned, that's just depressing. I mean, I get that, yes, this is hard work, and you have to have patience. But. I think that sometimes we get too caught up in "keeping it real" that we forget to be encouraging.

With that in mind, I'd like to point you to the lovely Tawna Fenske's post about drawer novels. Sure, most published authors have drawer novels (I guess the average is seven?), but that doesn't mean that the novel you're working on RIGHT NOW isn't the one for you, whether it's your sixth or your first. No one can tell you that without reading it (and you definitely need feedback from others, but you already knew that, right?).

And then, the always amazing Maggie Stiefvater posted about the odds of getting published vs. the odds of getting killed by a ham sandwich. It's a brilliant post.

Finally, I am a big fan of So You Think You Can Dance. If you watched last week, ballet dancer Alex got assigned a hip hop routine with one of the best hip hop dancers they've had on the show, Twitch. It should have been a train wreck, or at least mildly uncomfortable to watch. But it wasn't.


 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WghpdgPc-24   (Sorry, Embedding is disabled, but it's worth clicking, I promise).


 

If you saw the show, it kind of *was* a train wreck at first (they show some rehearsal footage before each performance). But Alex had PERSEVERANCE. He probably worked on it every spare second he had that week, and it paid off. Big time.

All that to say, don't give up. Like Maggie said, you're probably already ahead of the game – don't quit. You can move on, work on something else, but don't give up. Everyone's path to publication is different, so forge your own.

What do you think? Have you seen any inspiring posts lately? Share with me in the comments!

Larissa