When I do school visits, one of the first questions I get asked is, “What is the life of an author like?” It’s a good question. History has often portrayed writers in the past as solitary people who are lost in their words and walk through life scrawling ideas down on scrap pieces of paper. […]
Micah Holland was just fifteen years old, and had not yet reached puberty, when life as he knew it changed forever. Curled up in a sleeping bag on the floor at his friend Brandon’s house, he was jarred awake at three in the morning by a group of police officers waving guns in his face. […]
A never ending amount of work goes into each aspect of a book before publication. Just settling on the right title can take months of discussion, as it did for Our Story Begins: Your Favorite Authors and Illustrators Share Fun, Inspiring and Occasionally Ridiculous Things They Wrote and Drew as Kids. Read on to hear from […]
The title for my upcoming book, First We Were IV, came to me almost as soon as the first impulse of “I want to write a book about four best friends who start a secret society to play vigilante-pranks, but it ratchets way out of control and twists into a weapon of revenge, costing all […]
I have a friend I was especially close to in college and in my early twenties. I was in a band when we first met, the only band on our college campus who dared to write their own songs and be part of the Punk/New Wave movement of that time. We were terrible of course, […]
“It’s almost like being good is the perfect alibi for being bad.” – Riley Stone, Such a Good Girl First of all, I want to say this: I am so incredibly lucky to be able to write a character like Riley. A smart, complicated character who is able to make complicated decisions and have a […]
When I first came across the true story that inspired my second novel Here Lies Daniel Tate, I knew instantly that I wanted to adapt it into a YA novel. I say “adapt” because I knew there were lots of elements of the true story I would never be able to use. They were simply […]
Last week, we mentioned how excited we were that Riveted recently joined Wattpad. We kicked off our new profile with a serialization of Blake Nelson’s Girl and we’ve got a LOT more great reads in store for Wattpad for the rest of the year so definitely don’t miss out! Our Wattpad profile’s been growing quickly […]
“Where do you get your ideas?” Authors get this question a lot. For me the better question is “What do you do once you get an idea?” I’m lucky that I’ve never had a time when I’ve not known what to write next. Because my genres are fantasy and science fiction, I’m constantly observing and […]
I grew up in a small town much like Thunder Basin, Nebraska, the setting for Dangerous Lies. Like Stella, the main character, I worked as a carhop at a local diner. As a seventeen-year-old girl, I spent a summer making shakes and onion rings by hand, listening to The Beatles on my Sony Walkman, sunbathing […]
