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?

"Bowties are Cool;" or Why I Love Doctor Who

I will admit this up front: I am a Doctor Who neophyte. I have not watched the series from its inception, I don’t have strong feelings about whether Tom Baker or David Tennant made the best Doctor, and I don’t really even understand the concept of a time lord. All I know is that my husband and I recently discovered season 5 on Netflix Instant, and we are loving every bizarre and frenetic minute of it. Purists criticize the latest season for pandering to American audiences (gosh, we wouldn’t want the show to make money, would we?), but if that’s the case, I say, pander away.

Boasting the writing talents of Steven Moffat (Coupling and Sherlock) and Russell T. Davies (Queer as Folk and Torchwood), the show is like Blackadder meets Star Trek, with a healthy dose of The X-Files mixed in. It’s simultaneously intelligent, whimsical, mysterious, addictive, and more than a little absurd. But it’s also surprisingly emotional.

Last night we watched an episode in which the Doctor and his partner-in-time, Amy Pond, travel to nineteenth century Arles to save Vincent Van Gogh from a horrible fate (other than his self-inflicted gunshot wound). At the end of the episode, they bring the misunderstood and depressed artist aboard the TARDIS time travel device and take him to the Musée D’Orsay in 2011, where Van Gogh tearfully listens as a critic ranks him among the best and most influential artists of all time. After the Doctor and Amy return Van Gogh to his own time and place, Amy is ecstatic, certain that their confidence-boosting mission will inspire Van Gogh to paint dozens more of his electrifying paintings. When they get back to the museum, however, they find that Van Gogh’s output has not changed at all, and worse, he still killed himself. Amy despairs that they were unable to help him, yet the art critic notes that the year after their “visit” was one of the most prolific and vibrant of Van Gogh’s career. The execution of what could have been a hackneyed “Can we go back and change the past?” plot device was so effective that I actually found myself tearing up at the end.

As with every great show, there are stand-alone episodes such as the one I just described, and a greater plot arc that unfolds throughout the series. The show has heart as well as action, and it’s a joy to watch the characters interact with each other and react to each zany plot twist thrown their way. Here are a few of the show’s unique attributes that make it almost impossible to resist:

1.     An infectiously optimistic hero. We don’t find enough optimism on television or otherwise. Matt Smith’s Doctor is refreshingly naïve, boyish and charming, but not without flaws. Sometimes he is overconfident, and his sense of alien otherness can make him blind to human emotions.

2.     A spunky sidekick. Amy Pond, the fiery redhead who has dreamed of the Doctor since his TARDIS crashed in her garden when she was a child, is tough talking and smart, although I am bothered by her penchant for very short skirts. I’m quite certain there are many fans not bothered by this in the least.

3.     A cool hook. A dapper time lord, the last of his kind, travels through time and space with his friends, trying to right personal wrongs and avert global disaster? Awesome. And the fact that the new Doctor is adorable and wears a bowtie is an added bonus.

4.     Sci-fi of the fluffiest kind. Although I’m sure treatises have been written about the world-building of the Doctor Who series, you don’t need a degree in Quantum Physics to understand the show. You do, however, have to be able to tolerate outlandish alien creatures, cheesy special effects, and occasional general silliness.

5.     A super cool icon in the TARDIS, a time machine shaped like a blue police box on the outside, but dimension defying on the inside, much like those cool tents with extension charms in the Harry Potter books. They even make mini die-cast TARDISes, perfect for those who love collecting quirky memorabilia and don’t mind being called nerds. (I’m talking to you, Craig Ferguson.)

6.     A communal forum of fans who both love and hate the show in its various incarnations, but will always provide a wealth of reasons to discuss, argue, and celebrate the power of good storytelling.

The next episode of Season 6, which airs in September on BBC America, is titled: “Let’s Kill Hitler.” Now how can you resist that? Pandering or not, I can tell you this particular American will be watching.

Has anyone else recently become a Whovian? What TV shows do you love?

TORN & TOUCH OF FROST winners!

Thanks so much to everybody who entered my website launch contest, RT'd, followed, or gave such wonderful feedback about my website! Here are the winners:

Kristina Shields is the winner of a signed copy of TORN by Erica O’Rourke.

Diana is the winner of an unsigned copy of TORN.

And Rogier is the winner of the signed ARC of TOUCH OF FROST by Jennifer Estep.

Congratulations!!! I'll email the winners for addresses.

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