It's Out! The Book is Out!

My debut YA novel, "Divided Moon" is now available!

"Hey, I just met you
And this is cra-zy
But here's my cover
so read me maybe...."

on Amazon
at Barnes and Noble
on Smashwords
at the publisher's website

Available as an e-book for now, coming out in paperback in about a month.

NaNoWriMo

What are you doing in November?

I am going to hole up with a brand spanking new project for the month, thanks to the inspiration and peer pressure of National Novel Writing Month.

If you don’t already know about NaNoWriMo, you can find out more here: http://www.nanowrimo.org/. In a nutshell, NaNoWriMo challenges writers of all stripes to write a novel in 30 days. Forget perfect prose and plot holes, the goal is to get words on paper (or, more likely, on a Word document). You win by penning 50,000 words by November 30.

I have never won NaNo, and I probably won’t this year either. There have been many great novels that were born from the project, including Cinder, the popular YA debut by Marissa Meyer. (She actually wrote 150,000 words that year during NaNo).

While I won’t win in word count, I will in focus.

That is what I love about November. For one month, I set aside everything else to concentrate on a WIP.  Sometimes that is a rough draft, other years, it is revisions. Creative writing is king during the month of November. By the time I emerge in December, with disheveled hair and a messy house, I hope to have created something awesome. 

Good luck fellow NaNo writers!

Book Review: Al Capone Does My Shirts

The school librarian recommended this book to my fifth grade son. I can see why. After browsing the internet, I see this book and its follow up, Al Capone Shines My Shoes, both by Gennifer Choldenko, on recommended lists for boys who don’t like adventure stories.

Not that there isn’t adventure in this book. Young “Moose” Flanagan braves breaching a fence of the yard in a maximum security prison to look for a baseball. That takes guts.

The heart of the story is the relationship between Moose and his autistic sister, Natalie. The meat of the story is the setting. They live on Alcatraz Island in 1935, when the renowned criminal Al Capone is in residence.

Moose is like most kids I know, or maybe he is just like my kids.  He loves his independence and begrudgingly takes on responsibility, which he takes seriously. Yet he is still a kid and drawn into the plots of the cute warden’s daughter and the appeal of the infamous.

Al Capone does not actually appear in the book, but makes a significant impact nonetheless, in a very powerful Al Capone way.