Albatross is out officially out today! Huzzah! Also, it doesn’t seem quite real.
Micah, Daisy and Tess insist that it totally is quite real.
I’m going to go on a quest to find a copy in the wild, and then I’m going to sit around with my friends, allow them to buy me beverages, and make them read my favorite passages out loud (I am especially fond of chapter 17). What? It’s like it’s my book’s birthday, and on your birthday you get to do whatever you want, right?
But seriously, I am a million different kinds of happy and grateful that Albatross is out, that I got to tell this story, and that (hopefully) people will read it. And (borrowed from the acknowledgments page) there are many awesome people who made this possible…
Endless thanks go to my agent, Kate Schafer Testerman, and my editor, Brian Farrey, and everyone at Flux who made this book-of-my-heart possible.
Deepest gratitude goes to my family, who have always made me feel loved and supported, and to my amazing and talented friends, both old and new.
And special love and appreciation go to my mom, who tells me “don’t have a wishbone where your backbone ought to be” whenever I need to hear it.
My joy is perhaps best summed up by one of my favorite songs:
Happy Birthday, book-of-my-heart.
Friends, Albatross is officially out in one week! It appears to be already shipping from Amazon, too, if you’re into that sort of thing (I know I am…far too often).
Also, I’m excited to share this happy-making review from Kirkus:
Music geeks walk the fine line between love and unhealthy obsession. Despite her friends’ warnings about his creepy behavior, Tess falls for intense, pretentious Micah. From the start of their relationship, Micah never fails to let Tess know that she is second to his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Daisy. Micah ignores Tess, makes remarks about her dumb, shallow friends and bites her hard enough to leave a mark, but Tess can’t get him out of her head. Her tolerance of Micah’s behavior echoes the way her mother handled her distant, critical father. Once she finds the bravery to stand up to her dad, she also finds a way to break off from Micah. Bloss shows the ways that emotional bullying can affect a supposedly loving relationship and how one teen repeats—and breaks—the cycle of abuse. Though some moments of Tess’s growth in strength are rendered heavy-handedly, her story will wrench hearts. Girls who believe in the swept-off-her-feet romance may see that a “perfect” boy’s veneer can hide an ugly, domineering personality. (Fiction. YA)
I’m very pleased that the words “heart” and “wrench” have been applied to this book multiple times. It’s my favorite verb to inflict upon one of my favorite nouns! Especially if it’s inflicted for the purposes of something Good…namely, my belief that no one has the right to belittle, manipulate or make another person feel bad about themselves. Not a parent, not a friend, not that dreamy dude/tte who seems to be otherwise perfect and alluring in every way. Albatross is my tribute to that belief as well as to one of my mom’s most helpful sayings, “Don’t have a wishbone where your backbone ought to be”. Word.
And on a lighter note, take a look at this badass trifecta:
Stand back or these girls will CUT you. With PAPER.
Here was the big news yesterday:
Beautiful copies of Albatross!!
Alas, this pose doesn’t work quite as well as it did for Band Geeked Out.
But let’s be honest, BGO will always have the edge on being my coverface.
I am very happy to be holding this lovely thing in my hands and I can never get over how weirdly awesome it is, after slaving away for months over something on a computer screen, staring at pixels for so long the words almost lose all meaning, to actually get to hold the complete product at the end. Maybe back when writers had to mess with longhand and typewriters and whiteout and fountain pens and multiple hard copies and all those sturdy, tactile things (not just fingertips on a keyboard or a palm on a mouse) there wasn’t such a disconnect. But for me, this is when a book finally becomes real.
Which might be why I got confused and tried to eat it.
What? It made sense at the time.
Hello again, blog! I’ve missed you!
I hope you all had wonderful holidays. I know that I did…especially that time around New Year’s when I basically became nocturnal. Nothing says “a mature and healthy start to a brand new year” like staying up all night three times in a row. Oh well. At least it involved a lot of karaoke! (My rendition of “Mamma Mia!” was inspired, I can assure you.)
So, the most exciting thing happening around here is that Albatross is out on February 1st…which is somehow only 25 days away! I’m happy and antsy and have been biting my nails entirely too much.
There’s a cool interview with me about Albatross over on the Flux blog. I overshare for a bit about why I wrote this rather sad and painful book after writing the two relatively cheerful Band Geek books:
FLUX: The tone in Albatross is more serious than your previous two books. Here, you’ve chosen a far darker story and style. What inspired this change?
JB: Though the story is darker, I think the themes of a girl finding her voice and her inner strength are quite similar to the Band Geek books. Honestly, this is a story that called to me and demanded to be written. I was going through a tough time in my personal life and when my world is upside down, it can be difficult to think or write about anything else. I borrowed significant parts of my own experiences for this book. In some ways, Albatross was my therapy and my method of productively processing these difficult experiences . . . and it’s a fist-bump to other people dealing with similar situations. Sometimes you just need to hear that you’re not alone.
You can read the whole thing here.
The interview also includes an excerpt of Albatross, or you can read the whole first chapter right here. The first chapter will be up here on this site soon in a pdf as well. The Web Guru is currently hard at work whipping up a whole NEW site for me, so I don’t want to harass him too much right now. Stay tuned for a very pretty redesign! It will involve purple.
Sometimes when I’m procrastinating about writing books, I write plays. It allows me to indulge in my love affair with dialogue, plus I get to boss around real live people on the page. I’ve only written short, 5-15 minute plays so far, and a couple of them have been produced by a local theater. It’s been such a trip to see my words performed on stage! I’m afraid I might be a little addicted.
So I’m ready to move on to bigger playwriting things and I recently incorporated two of my short pieces into an outline for a full-length play. It was just as scary as when I decided to try and write a book, but opening that new document and declaring my intentions felt like a big step. Which means, of course, that it involved lots of arguments with my jerk of an internal critic.
Critic: (In a very snotty and sarcastic Regina George-ish voice) Uh, excuse me, just what do you think YOU know about writing a full-length play? You do know that it’s basically guaranteed to suck, right?
Me: Shut up.
Critic: And you’ll just be wasting those two short plays that were fine on their own. You probably should just stick with what you already know you can write.
Me: SHUT UP.
Critic: You have no idea what you’re doing and you’ll screw up the structure and the characters will be hollow and everyone is probably going to laugh at you if they even bother to read it.
Me: SHUT. UP!
Okay, so I’m not very eloquent in my arguments with the internal critic.
But the point is that I can’t win a fight with that voice…it’s not possible to have a calm and reasonable discussion with the part of my brain that is trying to protect me from failure by keeping me paralyzed. If I do anything other than yell back at it like a belligerent Jerry Springer guest “You don’t know me! You don’t know my life! I can do what I want!”, I end up clamming up and shutting down and walking away. I’ll never move forward as a writer.
So I have to find a way to ignore it. I can’t think about the fact that I’m sitting down and attempting to write something that I’d like other people to spend a significant amount of time reading or watching on a stage…I can’t think about how ridiculous and presumptuous that sometimes feels. I have to be bold.
It reminds me of one of my favorite writing-related quotes, by Elizabeth Gilbert of “Eat, Pray, Love” fame:
I repeat those words back to myself whenever I start to feel resentful, entitled, competitive or unappreciated with regard to my writing: “It’s not the world’s fault that you want to be an artist…now get back to work.” Always, at the end of the day, the important thing is only and always that: Get back to work. This is a path for the courageous and the faithful. You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place.
Word. When I’m feeling uninspired and blocked, I think a big part of the reason why I push through is to show my internal critic how wrong she is about me.
I’m so excited to share the lovely cover of my next book, Albatross, as well as the fantastic blurb that it received from one of my all-time writerly heroes…
“Taut and emotionally wrenching…I couldn’t put it down. Josie Bloss is an author to watch.”
-Meg Cabot, author of The Princess Diaries and the Airhead Series
ISN’T IT PRETTY?! (The cover and the quote, I mean.)
I’m a little dubious of the term “book of my heart” because, really, aren’t all books from the heart of the writer? But I think Albatross has bigger and bloodier pieces of my heart in it than anything else I’ve written (um, sorry for the visual)…it wasn’t exactly easy to write. In the end, though, this result is certainly worth it. I can’t wait for it to come out!
Okay, I know summer isn’t technically over. But I work at a university and when the students come back (which they’re going to do next week) let me tell you…vacation is OVER. For the whole town.
But while things were relatively quiet, I went places! Specifically east, south and north! Places such as…
1.) New York City! Where apparently they sit around in folding chairs in Times Square?
I didn’t quite understand what was going on, but it seemed cool.
My favorite part of the trip was Coney Island…I am a total sucker for decaying amusement parks and rickety wooden roller coasters and, of course, Ferris wheels.
Wonder Wheel!
2.) Then I went south to Kentucky to go on the Bourbon Trail where, incidentally, you don’t really drink a whole lot of bourbon. It was mostly about the pretty rolling scenery and the gift shops. Well, and getting locked in the stocks. There was that.
Me: Guys, you’re going to come back and let me out, right? Guys? Hey, where are you going?
SIGH.
3.) Then I headed up north to the Keweenaw Peninsula (where last year I saw a BEAR. In the WATER.) This year was slightly less exciting in the wildlife department but the weather was near perfect and my favorite lighthouse was as lovely as always.
Purty.
And now I am home and ready to get back to work. This is going to be an exciting year…Albatross is coming out next spring (I get to post the BEAUTIFUL cover later this week!), I’m hard at work on something new, and maybe I’ll get to plan a trip out west to cover all my cardinal directions. Fingers crossed!
I went to see this band called Grizzly Bear the other night…I love their new CD and the concert was awesome, and they were also so adorable I wanted to shrink them all to 1/15th size and carry them around in my pocket.
See?
(Disclaimer: They are slightly cuter in this video then they are in real life. That one dude’s voice is just as lovely live, though.)
One guy, the blond in the video, played like every instrument there is and some that are not (a radio tuned to white noise?). The venue was nice and relaxed and the music was good and I started thinking over this plot of a cool new story and decided Grizzly Bear would be the soundtrack and everything was going great…
…except we just so happened to sit behind the biggest Grizzly Bear SUPER! FAN! in all of Bloomington, Indiana. Seriously, this girl was excited. She screamed during the silences and yelled out requests at inappropriate times and she flailed…literally. She actually got in a fight with her boyfriend, right there in front of us, because she hit his head so many times with her flailing arms that he asked her to stop so she started yelling at him because telling a SUPER! FAN! to calm down is always a mistake. High drama.
There wasn’t anything else for to do except make her a character in this new story, silly barrettes and all.
First of all, and I think most of you probably already know this, don’t mess with marching band girls. They have INSTRUMENTS and BATONS and they know how to USE THEM.
From the Associated Press via the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
Calif. high school band girl beats off muggers with marching baton
A 17-year-old high school marching band student beat up two assailants who tried to mug her as she walked to school in this high desert community about 40 miles north of Los Angeles, sheriff’s officials said Tuesday.
The girl punched one of the men in the nose, kicked the other in the groin and beat both with her large baton before she ran away on Friday morning, officials said.
“The moral to this story is don’t mess with the marching band girls, or you just might get what you deserve,” said Los Angeles County sheriff’s Deputy Michael Rust.
A couple of people sent me this link and were all “This is TOTALLY Ellie”. Just substitute a trumpet for the baton, and I think they’re right.
Second, check out this cool mention of Band Geeked Out on Meg Cabot’s blog!
And third, a little late to the party, but my awesome agent Kate gave away copies of Band Geeked Out to whomever could write the worst query letter. The contest is over, but you can see the finalists right here and boy howdy they are hilariously bad. Check it out!
Cool Review and Scavenger Hunt!
Date: Wednesday April 15, 2009Posted in: Band Geek Love!, Band Geeked Out!
Wow, check out this awesome review of Band Geeked Out by a teen reader at the School Library Journal:
This story isn’t a fairytale story about how wonderful high school is—the characters have legitimate problems, nothing works out according to plan, and some relationships don’t work out. In other words, it’s like real life, and that’s a perfect reason to read it.
I would recommend it to all of my girlfriends, even if they weren’t band geeks. It’s a very realistic depiction of the college search process, parental pressures, and dating issues. I found it very easy to relate to Ellie and the struggles she was going through. Her thoughts, ideas, interactions, and reactions to situations were all very realistic, making her even more likeable and drawing me more into the book.
Now THAT is a happy-making review. Read the whole thing over here (though beware of a MAJOR spoiler in the last paragraph)!
Also, I’m taking part in Kay Cassidy’s Great Scavenger Hunt, which you can learn about right here. The questionnaire for Band Geek Love is already up on the site, and Band Geeked Out should be there soon! (If you’re a teen reader and want to become a “hunter”, you’ll have to ask your librarian to enroll in the program). It looks like a whole lot of fun and a great excuse to devour a pile of books, plus who can argue with a $50 B&N card? Happy hunting!
