Pretty Bookmarks!

Despite a crazy weekend dealing with the tropical storm and inches of water in the basement (ugh!), I got a lovely surprise on Saturday when my bookmarks arrived!

Aren't they pretty? Fellow Apocalypsie, Jill Hathaway, recommended the designer: Keary Taylor from www.indiecoverdesigns.com. She designs bookmarks, covers, and other swag, and as you can see, she's amazing!

If you would like a small stack of bookmarks for yourself, a friend, or your local library, please send me your address, and I'll mail some out to you!

A BREATH OF EYRE Cover Reveal Contest Winner

Thanks so much to everybody who entered my cover reveal contest, RT'd, followed, posted on their blogs, or gave such wonderful feedback! And the winner is:

Sandy of Pirate Penguin Reads 

Congratulations!!!

For those who didn't win, please check back in the upcoming months for more posts and giveaways. Hope to see you soon!

A BREATH OF EYRE COVER REVEAL CONTEST!

I am so happy to be able to share the cover for A BREATH OF EYRE!!!

Isn't it lovely? The model's eyes are so arresting; it's hard to look away. Despite the intensity of her gaze, the model is only 16 years old, exactly the age of my protagonist, Emma. I think she’s perfect! And the dress, the pose, the color? I couldn’t be happier. A huge thank you to the art department at Kensington for making my cover dreams come true!

A BREATH OF EYRE is now available for pre-order on Amazon, and you can add it to your GoodReads list, too!

And if you haven’t seen the book trailer yet, please stop by my website to check it out: http://www.evemariemont.com/books.html

To celebrate the cover (and being only seven months from publication), I’m giving one lucky commenter a JANE EYRE-themed book package including:

 

You guessed it, Charlotte Brontë’s JANE EYRE

April Lindner’s JANE

Jasper Fforde’s THE EYRE AFFAIR

and a gorgeous JANE EYRE pendant

All you have to do to enter is comment below with your thoughts on the cover, JANE EYRE, or anything JANE EYRE related, but you’ll get:

+1 entry if you retweet this post (A BREATH OF EYRE cover reveal contest: http://tinyurl.com/3l9efjc)

+1 entry if you post this link on Facebook

+2 entries if you post the cover on your own blog (please leave a link here)

Contest is open until next Thursday, August 25, at midnight EST.

The contest is open to U.S. and Canadian residents only.

Stress Dreams & Writing Deadlines

I was an anxious little kid. Consequently I used to have a lot of stress dreams. As a child my fears were big and amorphous, and my dreams followed suit: lions outside my front door, tidal waves bearing down on my house. As I grew older and my fears became more concrete, so did my dreams: showing up for a test I hadn’t studied for, realizing I had worn underwear to class. Even now I often have teacher stress dreams about showing up for school without a lesson plan or not being able to subdue an unruly classroom full of kids.

But two nights ago, I had what I think is my first identifiable writer’s stress dream. Oddly, it begins with a search for a seafood restaurant that’s gotten good reviews but is known for being in a sketchy neighborhood. I am scouting it out at dusk, just as it’s getting dark and the crowds are thinning out. I have trouble finding the place, and when I do it’s an unassuming little white building with no signage. I knock on the door, and a bland almost faceless male guide opens it and ushers me in, but he moves so fast I can’t keep up with him.

Once inside, I’m not in a restaurant but a shabby house with exposed pipes, chipping tile, and peeling wallpaper. I walk down a long white hallway toward a swinging 2-way door, the kind that normally leads into a kitchen. Only when I go through it, my guide has disappeared, and I have no idea which way to go. I turn left and go through a door to find myself in a tiny claustrophobic room. I’m suddenly terrified I won’t be able to get out. I pull aside a long curtain that hides a changing room, then try another door that’s locked. I begin to panic until I realize I can leave through the same door I entered.

However, this only brings me to more hallways and similar dead-ends until I open a door that leads to an enormous, cavernous space. The room seems to grow downward as I watch in awe. Concrete ramps appear, but the space is mammoth and dark and rugged, like the Mines of Moria in The Lord of the Rings. I’m beginning to wonder just what I’ve gotten myself into when a fluorescent light flickers above me, and the space slowly transforms into a giant library. Rows of bookshelves appear, and books magically fill them. The scary ramps are no longer frightful, so I descend into this basement library, wondering what I’m doing here when I was supposed to be finding a restaurant.

Even though I’m a fiction lover at heart, something compels me to the non-fiction section at the other end. I walk past rows and rows of books until I come to a library carrel holding a large folio laid out to showcase the portrait of a female figure. Just as I’m about to read who she is, I wake up. 

Eventually I fell back asleep. When I woke later, I told my husband about the dream and asked him what he thought it meant, and he turned to me and said, “It's probably about your writing.” And you know, I think he was right. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working feverishly on my sequel and trying to write an outline of the entire book for my editor. The dream seems to tap into a lot of the fears and self-doubt that have plagued me. 

In the dream, I go looking for a restaurant that doesn’t look like much on the outside but has gotten good reviews. These, I think, represent my expectations going into the writing process. But as I plunged into the actual writing, I found blank white hallways that led nowhere; exposed pipes and peeling wallpaper—all the messy false starts and loose story threads and dead-ends of writing a first draft.

The deeper I went, the darker and more overwhelming the entire manuscript became until it seemed like an endless cavern, too terrifying to investigate any further. But then—light! And books! And a sense of relief that I was in a library, a place of comfort and order and new ideas. Somehow I had crossed a threshold, turned a corner that let me know everything was going to be okay.

That mysterious open book in the non-fiction section still bothers me, but maybe my subconscious mind was directing me to take a look my own life and experiences and draw from those. Sometimes we’re so lost in the world of our fictional landscape that we forget where all good fiction ultimately stems--from real life. I have a feeling if I’d had time to investigate that book more closely, the woman in the portrait might have been me.

Do you have stress dreams? What’s the wildest one you’ve had?