Pretty Girl-13 Blog Tour: Guest Post and Giveaway

I'm thrilled to have the Pretty Girl-13 Blog Tour stopping by today with guest post from Liz Coley! Plus, you can win a brand new finished copy.

Pretty Girl-13

by Liz Coley

3/19/13

Katherine Tegen Books

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Reminiscent of the Elizabeth Smart case, Pretty Girl-13 is a disturbing and powerful psychological mystery about a girl who must piece together the story of her kidnapping and captivity.
Angie Chapman was thirteen years old when she ventured into the woods alone on a Girl Scouts camping trip. Now she's returned home…only to find that it's three years later and she's sixteen-or at least that's what everyone tells her.
What happened to the past three years of her life?
Angie doesn't know.
But there are people who do — people who could tell Angie every detail of her forgotten time, if only they weren't locked inside her mind. With a tremendous amount of courage, Angie embarks on a journey to discover the fragments of her personality, otherwise known as her "alters." As she unearths more and more about her past, she discovers a terrifying secret and must decide: When you remember things you wish you could forget, do you destroy the parts of yourself that are responsible?
Liz Coley's alarming and fascinating psychological mystery is a disturbing - and ultimately empowering page-turner about accepting our whole selves, and the healing power of courage, hope, and love.

How long does it take to write a book?

by Liz Coley

My short answer to this often asked question is: “November. It takes November to write a book.”

Ever since I discovered National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in 2006, I have participated in this frenzied month of caffeine-fueled writing. For those unfamiliar, the goal of NaNoWriMo is join a virtual international community of 300,000 writers who have committed to trying to put a 50,000-word downpayment on a novel (200 pages) into their computers. What happens afterwards is up to each individual. No one reads or criticizes or publishes the result automatically. The reward for making target is the ability to print yourself a Winner Certificate, and that’s it. I have always made target. It’s like putting peer pressure on yourself.

If you do the math, that’s 1666 words a day, or about seven manuscript pages. The basic rule of NaNoWriMo is “you can’t edit an empty page.” The goal of November is to crank out the raw material and edit later. I break this rule. Unless I’m in a transcendental flow state, I fix and work over and lightly edit as I go along; I go back to yesterday’s work to get a running start on today’s. Overall I produce six hundred new words an hour. My son kindly pointed out, “Mom, that’s ten words a minute. I can type two-hundred ten.” So there’s the sad but true difference between writing and typing.

NaNoWriMo is like foreign language immersion. It’s painful and confusing and it works. Something about the day after day grind puts the subconscious mind into a different gear. Story elements rise of their own volition. Plot connections appear like miracles. Characters leap to life, maybe even intrude on your dreams. After thirty days of this, I’m elated and exhausted.

I plan the rest of my year around NaNoWriMo. The fifty-thousand word manuscript is the “white room” version of the story. One revision pass through it fleshes out the setting, the descriptions, and the action beats in unbroken passages of dialogue. Anther pass examines the story arc, finds missing scenes and fixes pacing. Then it goes out to first readers and comes back for another round of fixes, often at the story or subplot level. Another round of polishing and a final out-loud read-through, and it is ready to go to my agent. Agent level revisions continue around the calendar as the season changes from spring to summer. My goal is to make the manuscript submission ready before the next November.

Pretty Girl-13 was my November 2009 NaNoWriMo novel. After more than a year in revision and half a year on submission, it was bought in the summer of 2011. The manuscript has waited its turn in the long production chain since then and was released internationally in March 2013.

I hope it finds its way into your hands and heart.

Liz Coley
Site / Goodreads / Twitter / Facebook
Liz Coley writes fiction for teens and for the teen in you.
Her first published work was science fiction short stories, published in Cosmos magazine and several anthologies.
Self-published YA novel Out of Xibalba features a contemporary teenager thrown back to ancient Mayan times. 
The story starts when the world ends.
Pretty Girl-13 from HarperCollins will be released in at least ten languages on five continents, in print, ebook, and audiobook.
Liz lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with her husband, her teenaged daughter, a snoring dog, and a limping old cat. When she's not involved in writing-related activities, she can be found sewing, baking, shooting photos, playing tennis, and singing.
Liz loves reading aloud.

Win a finished copy of Pretty Girl-13!

Thanks to the awesome people at Harper Collins, I have one shiny, finished copy to give away.

DETAILS

-US ONLY (it's shipping directly from me)

-will run from 3/27 - 4/7

-must be 13+, one main entry per person

-winner will be emailed and must claim prize within 48 hours

-I am NOT responsible for lost, damaged, or stolen prizes in the mail

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