Guys, Band Geek Love officially comes out TOMORROW! How did this happen so quickly? I had over a year to prepare for this day and it still feels like it jumped out at me from behind a shrubbery!
I have some sort of cool plans for tomorrow…plans that I am slightly nervous about for various reasons that will soon become clear and that will involve pictures that I will post. And because I just told all of you that, it means I HAVE to go through with the plans because everyone knows that once things are on the internet they cannot be taken back ever.
Anyway, assuming I survive the pub day plans (and no, my dear parents who are reading this, the plans do not involve jumping out of a plane…that’s for the NEXT book), I will be back tomorrow evening with a full report.
Yay, Band Geek Love !!
End/Beginning
Date: Thursday June 26, 2008Posted in: Band Geek Love!, Band Geeked Out!, Real Writer
Band Geek Love is officially coming out next Tuesday, and I’m sort of in a distracted daze about it. I’ve been thinking about how strange and a little sad it is to come to the end of this process (not too sad, since I’m shoulder-deep in the sequel right now!) but my first book represents a lot to me both professionally and personally.
I started writing the book in June of 2006, and since then, my life has changed enormously. Mostly in good ways - I try to view all change as positive - but to the point that where I am now is wildly different from where I was in June ‘06. And through it all, one thing that remained reliably consistent was Band Geek Love . I’ll miss it…the anticipation.
(Thus ends the melancholy.)
Fortunately, I am just at the beginning of the Band Geeked Out process, which is going suspiciously well. And there’s my next book, which is always murmuring in my head like a movie that you have playing in the background while you’re doing other things. I’ve also really been enjoying writing and acting in plays (I adore dialogue, so this works well).
There is always something new and interesting to be immersed in…the end of one chapter is just the beginning of another.
Dudes, Band Geek Love is already shipping from Amazon! This is very exciting (has any step of this process not been exciting? Well…maybe not wrestling with the final rounds of revisions. That was less exciting and more just grimly satisfying. But I’ll take both.) I’m just happy to know that Ellie Snow is out there in the world, messing up trumpet solos and making out with cute guys.
Anyway, if you are inclined, you can order a copy of Band Geek Love and Amazon will send it to you because that’s what they do!
I’ve already been asked to sign a few copies, which has been a strange experience. It was eerily like signing a high school yearbook, and I found myself scribbling in little messages to my mom or my friend or whomever I was signing the book for because just writing my name seemed weird. At least I stopped short of writing in a purple sparkly pen You were a kick ass lab partner! Stay cool! along with my phone number and a request to Call me this summer and we’ll chill! That would have been kind of an odd thing to say to my grandparents.
Band Geek Love got another cool review, this one from Confessions of a Bibliovore . I especially liked this part, since it was something I thought a lot about as I was writing the book:
In a lot of ways, this is a risky book. For one thing, band members are not exactly the most revered creatures in any high school. (Trust me; I went to a school with a nationally honored marching band and they were still considered the ragingest geeks to walk the halls.) Bloss not only brings us intimately into this world, she feels no need to normalize it. This is not a book where the band geek becomes accepted by the popular crowd. It takes place wholly within the world of marching band.
I received another review, but this one isn’t on the internets because it came by phone call from one of my best friends from college, Kelly. She and I met while we were waiting in line to check out our euphoniums for college marching band (both of us were switching to euph from other instruments, her: trombone, me: trumpet, and were kind of nervous about it), and have been close ever since. Since Kelly is a former band geek (high school drum major, no less) who now works as an English and film teacher at a high school in Chicago, her opinion is especially meaningful.
"It was so good! And the descriptions of marching band totally took me back," she said. "I’d get all caught up in the story and be excited about what happens next and then I’d really, ‘wait, Josie wrote this!’ Can I lend it out to some of my students?"
Um, YEAH .
In other news, the sequel, Band Geeked Out , is going really well. My editor recently showed me the cover which got me all excited about a new plot line and I’ve generally been a writing machine for the past week or so. Sometimes inspiration comes from the most unexpected places! I’ll be talking more about the Big New Plot Line as I develop it. I’m hopeful that it might allow me to follow in the footsteps of my personal writerly heroes…and get me banned!
Over on Lisa Chellman’s blog, she discusses some current trends she is seeing in book covers, using Band Geek Love as one of her examples (and how awesome do I feel to see my book sandwiched between Maureen Johnson’s Suite Scarlett and Meg Cabot’s Allie Finkle’s Rules for Life: Moving Day ? Um, really awesome.)
My very cool editor, Andrew Karre, discusses how the Band Geek Love cover (which I adore) came into existence in the comments …it’s pretty interesting stuff.
Chaining myself to the computer to work on Band Geeked Out is easier after reading some nice reviews of Band Geek Love.
Calling all band geeks! If you’re a band geek and control freak like I was in high school you are going to love, love, love Band Geek Love by Josie Bloss.
I really, really enjoyed this book. I give mad props to Josie Bloss for writing an atypical story of a girl dating a younger guy. Josie’s unorthodox parents are a huge factor that causes her to be so rigid and focused on being a band geek, and I found that aspect to be very real as well. The story had humor, a realistic portrayal of high school life, and of course, a very sweet romance as well. I really enjoyed all of the characters and was pleased Josie Bloss took the time to focus on the very endearing secondary characters and concluded their respective storylines in a satisfactory way as well. Overall, I give Band Geek Love a resounding two thumbs up and will look forward to what Josie Bloss writes next!
I feel very honored…many thanks to both reviewers.
And now, back to work!
Okay, guys, I was wrong. There was awesomer mail in store for me, and it was two genuine, like what’ll be on the shelves shiny copies of Band Geek Love (plus a lovely flat version of the cover that my editor suggested be framed…which I’m totally going to do).
I opened the package and was afraid to touch the books for a good ten or twenty minutes, convinced that they were actually holograms from the future or perhaps hallucinations born of too many Coke Zeros and yogurt covered pretzels consumed during the sequeling.
But it turns out they are real!
WTF!
There isn’t much that competes with holding one of your attained goals in your hands…it’s been a good week.
It’s an exciting time here in Band Geek Love land, with the release date less than two months away! It just seems to be sneaking up on me…I find myself looking over my shoulder a lot.
The other day I received some very awesome mail. Perhaps the awesomest mail that has ever been addressed to me. I opened it, and the contents looked something like this:
I can haz trumpet?
It’s the first time I’ve held a book that I’ve written in my hands (well, at least since I wrote that story about a spider with identity issues in the third grade and the teacher laminated it and I then went around telling people I was a published author), so I’m somewhat and rather…excited. Did I mention that? The excitement? The exciting excitingness of it all?
Anyway, to celebrate, I’ve put up the first chapter of Band Geek Love on this here website. All sorts of crazy things happen within that first chapter, but perhaps the most important parts are the very last two paragraphs, so I recommend you read all the way until the end in order to properly cringe along with poor Ellie. Well, either cringe along with or cringe at, depending on your sense of humor. I personally tend to think that the experience was good for her.
Hi all!
Sorry I’ve been so absent…I swear I haven’t been lost in a cave this whole time. I actually started a new job (which has been great! And I’m not just saying that because I know all my lovely new co-workers are reading this! I really mean it!) and have been busy wrestling with the sequel to Band Geek Love.
That’s right…there’s going to be a sequel, and it’s going to be called Band Geeked Out. (How proud am I of that title? I can’t really say because you’ll think I’m conceited). I was nervous because I didn’t know much about writing sequels, but fortunately I’ve found plenty of excellent advice on the internets…such as my personal writerly hero Maureen Johnson’s article on Inside a Dog.
Per Maureen’s helpful second suggestion (the first being to remember what you wrote in the earlier book), I’m currently trying to figure out how to introduce a zombie at Winslow High School. Do you think the walking dead could manage a musical instrument and/or a flag? Because I just watched “I Am Legend” the other day, and I’m pretty sure that brand of zombie wouldn’t be a terribly productive addition to a marching band…but maybe one of the more sedate varieties could be a drummer or something (oh, burn!)
Little Willow said nice things about Band Geek Love!
She also interviewed me last week with some of the most fun questions I’d ever hope to be asked. Thanks, Little Willow!
One of the coolest parts about this whole process has been meeting all sorts of people for whom band (even if not marching band) was or still is an incredibly important, formative experience. That’s pretty much the reason I wanted to write Band Geek Love…and there are so many more stories there to be told!
