-Zora, The Springsweet

Pretty much every writer started out as a reader; now that we’re writers, we can’t help but write about people who love books. Sometimes IN the books. It’s meta upon meta, but it makes perfect sense to us.

To celebrate books, Saundra Mitchell’s blog tour is all about sharing two great things that go great together: books + free.

Today, you can enter to win a copy of Sonia’s THE REVENANT, and a signed set of Saundra’s THE VESPERTINE and THE SPRINGSWEET. All you have to do is comment in this entry, and leave an e-mail address where we can contact you. (US & Canadian residents only, please.)

And tell us about your favorite book, too. Growing a TBR pile is the best gardening there is!

THE SPRINGSWEET
A Companion to The Vespertine
by Saundra Mitchell
Hardcover & E-book

From Harcourt

“A lovely historical romance takes readers back to the 1890 Oklahoma territory. (T)he author conjures a convincing picture of life on the Oklahoma prairie, painting an absorbing portrait of the landscape and of the people there. A high-quality, absorbing drama.”

– Kirkus Reviews, 02/01/12

It’s a long way from Baltimore to Oklahoma Territory. But Zora Stewart will go any distance to put the tragic events of her sixteenth summer behind her. So this city girl heads to the tiny frontier town of West Glory to help her young widowed aunt keep her homestead going.

When another Baltimorean shows up in West Glory, Zora couldn’t be more surprised. Theo de la Croix made the long trip out west hoping to court Zora, whom he has long admired from afar.

But Zora has developed an attraction to a rather less respectable fellow: Emerson Birch, a rough-mannered young “sooner” whose fertile land is coveted.

As Zora begins to suspect that there may be more than luck behind Emerson’s good land, she discovers an extraordinary, astonishing power of her own: the ability to sense water under the parched earth. When her aunt hires her out as a “springsweet” to advise other settlers where to dig their wells, Zora feels the burden of holding the key to something so essential to survival in this unforgiving land.

Even more, she finds herself longing for love the way the prairie thirsts for water. Maybe, in the wildness of the territories, Zora can finally move beyond simply surviving and start living.

THE SPRING SWEET

is available at Indiebound |Amazon| Barnes & Noble

Saundra Mitchell has been a phone psychic, a car salesperson, a denture-deliverer and a layout waxer. She’s dodged trains, endured basic training, and hitchhiked from Montana to California. She teaches herself languages, raises children, and makes paper for fun. She’s the author of Shadowed Summer, The Vespertine, The Springsweet, and the forthcoming The Elementals and Mistwalker. She’s also the editor of the forthcoming YA anthology Defy the Dark. She always picks truth; dares are too easy.

Here is a link to the super sweet trailer, which won’t embed for some bizarre reason.

Wanted trailer

What are you waiting for? Hurry and enter! And I hope you lose and then GO BUY THE BOOK, but you should enter, anyway. <3

And here are the contest details:

This was the bit that I came across that made me go ask my editor if I could PRETTY PLEASE show you all a little glimpse of Keira, my kick-ass heroine, and Walker, whom I have the hots for in spite of the fact that he’s fictional and I invented him.

So.

From THE GATHERING DARK:

[Keira] leaned against the edge of the keyboard. “So what about you? You must have a talent of some sort. What are you good at?”

Walker tipped his head to one side. The inviting set of his shoulders, the way his hands slid across the wooden curves of her piano – it was a reply all its own, and it sent an ache through her. “Numbers. Sleight-of-hand. Making you blush.” He ticked them off on his fingers, his lips curving up with the hot flush in her cheeks proved him right.

/end snippet

More to come as I find irresistible and non-spoilery bits. <3 <3 <3

WHAT IS AFRICA’S DEAL?

Look, Central Africa is a unique sort of mess. It’s nearly impossible to put in a nutshell, but I’m going to try. I did spend four years studying this in college, and I see no other time when my degree might actually serve me, so here goes.

When Europe “explored” the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, what they really did was colonize it. Just like they colonized the United States. They traipsed through Africa, planting flags and drawing arbitrary lines demarcating new states, and began milking the continent for every resource they could squeeze out of it.

And then, eventually, they were driven out. And when I say eventually, I mean largely in the 1960’s (some earlier, some later) which isn’t even a heartbeat on the timeline of history. In a grand scale, the vast majority of these African countries gained independence, like, yesterday. Two main problems emerged. For one thing, those arbitrarily drawn boundaries stayed after the colonists had left, leaving disparate ethnic factions fighting to control the same land. Often, the colonial governments favored one ethnic group over another, which created even more problems in the power vacuum of the post colonial periods. In many of these situations, both groups have committed atrocities against one another as they seek power. And there are good reasons to seek power. Africa is unparalleled for natural resources. From oil to diamonds to rare minerals, Africa has it all and in spades. There are enormous riches at stake.

In fact, a new supply of oil has just been discovered in Uganda, which is the subject of Invisible Children, Inc.’s film. This oil cache is extremely likely to ignite new fighting as the nations rival groups seek to control the government by controlling the oil and vice versa.

Because of men like Joseph Kony, this oil find decreases stability in the region rather bringing about any positive change. Kony and his ilk will simply try to acquire the profits from such a find in order to enrich their own coffers so that they can increase their power. The Ugandan government, in turn, will have to seek to use those oil profits to maintain their hold on power in the face of assault by groups like the LRA. Neither of these courses of action improves the infrastructure, security, or state of the citizenry of Uganda.

Both the governments and the rebel groups often fight these wars with methods of rape and murder and mutilation that would turn the stomach of even the most hardened cynic. Assuming that those cynics know about the situation, which most Americans don’t. This is exactly why Invisible Children, Inc. has created the Stop Kony video and campaign.

WHAT’S WITH THIS KONY VIDEO, ANYWAY?

Yesterday, Invisible Children, Inc.’s Stop Kony 2012 video went viral. And I mean, it went VIRAL.

I first heard about it at 8 a.m. – by 11:30 it had 1.5 million views. RIGHT NOW, at 1:30 p.m. the next day, it has almost THIRTY. SEVEN. MILLION. VIEWS.

Here’s the link. If you haven’t watched the video yet, you really should: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc&feature=g-logo&context=G2c59aeeFOAAAAAAABAA

People all over Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Pintrest are abuzz, not to mention the private blogs and websites. And, last night, the major news organizations started to pick up the story.

Just as surprising as the rapidity of the viral success of the video was the near-instantaneous backlash. The first article I saw criticizing Invisible Children, Inc. and the Stop Kony movement was on Jezebel.com.

I’m not one to put the blinders on when it comes to social movements, so I read the article.

And then I read The Washington Post’s article.

And then I read The Daily Maverick’s post.

And then I started to get frustrated.

The criticism is SO THIN. It is so easily pierced.

THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BACKLASH:

All three sources decry the organization’s expenditures, noting that Invisible Children, Inc. spent more last year on travel, filmmaking expenses, and staff salaries than direct aid.

For real? Invisible Children is not currently styling themselves as a direct aid organization. They’re making efforts to make Ugandan citizens safer with things like their early alert radio network, but I think it’s pretty obvious that making the film that everyone’s watching – that EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT – has been the main goal of the organization.

They want to draw so much attention to the issue that governments and major non-political organizations (NPOs), whose coffers run deeper than organizations like Invisible Children, Inc’s, will have no choice but to take notice.

THEY DID THAT. Did you know who Joseph Kony was before yesterday? Did you know what was happening to children in Uganda? If you didn’t know that on Monday and you know it today, then Invisible Children has succeeded. Their money has been well spent. Drawing attention to an issue is a pivotal part of any social movement, because with public attention, the movement doesn’t MOVE. You can preach to the choir all you want, but it doesn’t make your audience bigger. This movie does. I think that’s awesome, and I think that the criticism that Invisible Children, Inc. isn’t spending money the way direct-aid organizations should is comparing apples to oranges.

Which leads me to the second criticism, which appears in the Washington Post’s article among others. They claim that Invisible Children, Inc. has exaggerated the number of people harmed by Kony and the LRA.

Oh my God. Oh. My. GOD. Central Africa has been a nightmarish mess since it was decolonized. The insinuation that this organization is crying for attention that is somehow less than deserved is ENRAGING to me. It’s possible Invisible Children has used an inaccurate number. I don’t see anything that looks glaringly wrong, but I’m not going to claim I’ve checked all the math thoroughly. This is mostly because I don’t HAVE to. The totality of victims in Central Africa is incomprehensible. There is no limit to how much attention this region deserves.

Thirdly, a lot of these backlash articles, especially the one in The Guardian, are decrying the “slickness” of the video and the “Americanness” of the IC, Inc. founders and filmers.

Gag. Okay – can we all agree that the mainly white, mainly young, and apparently hip people in the video are not at fault for being young and white? We can decry their idealism, but in my opinion, that’s the worst sort of disaffected cynicism. They made a video that is WATCHABLE for thirty minutes. That holds the attention of a social media saturated market where anything longer than 140 characters is interminable. At the same time, they explained the complexities of the Ugandan situation simply enough to fit in a half-hour. I spent YEARS studying post-colonial sub-Saharan African politics in college. I’m quite impressed with what they did.

I could refute individual points for a long time, and if you want to bring up additional criticisms, I’ll be happy to discuss them in the comments. What I’d like to do now, though is talk about cultural zeitgeist, backlash, leading and belonging. In other words:

I’M COOLER THAN YOU ARE:

When everyone’s talking about something – when you can’t log on to Facebook or turn on the news or pop onto Twitter without seeing the same topic – that’s cultural zeitgeist. Something born of a moment, something that hits with such perfect timing that it saturates everything.

Lots of things do this. Political movements and social movements and religion and even books. I’m going to use Twilight as an example, because I’m a young adult author and I think it’s appropriate.

So. Years ago, Twilight was published. The juggernaut grew quickly, and soon EVERYONE was reading Twilight. Everyone LOVED Twilight. *I* loved Twilight. It became an enormous phenomenon. A major best seller with a movie deal and calendars and mugs and general saturation of the culture. It became completely mainstream. And then the tide turned against it. People pointed out that there are some feminist issues with the book. And pedophilia issues, if you think about it a certain way. And the writing was bad. And quickly, it because much hipper to hate Twilight than it was to love it. Is Twilight perfect? No. It wasn’t perfect when it became popular. And the criticisms – some of which are valid – don’t make it terrible, either. The point is, the leading edge of the zeitgeist changed. And that’s the same thing that’s happening to Invisible Children, Inc, on a warp-speed scale.

This is all tied up with our need to be socially accepted. Almost no one wants to be seen as a tag-along – a last minute addition to a group. We’d rather be part of the leading edge, or at least solidly in the middle, of a cause or a trend that we ascribe to. And when something gets to a certain, undefinable point of popularity, the only way to lead in relation to that book – or that movement – is to lead the backlash against it.

This is not to say that criticism is just latecomers trying to be cool at any cost. It’s not. Well reasoned examination is direly important in political causes. We must continually examine our motives and those of the organizations we support. Intelligent and careful debate is something that should never be squashed. It is also important, however, to examine situations in which the criticism might be less about the subject itself and more about the critic seeking to head a new pack. Much of the backlash I’ve seen against Invisible Children, Inc. and the Stop Kony movement feels suspiciously like the latter. I’ll continue to read articles that challenge the organization, and if I see something that makes me legitimately concerned, I’ll happily take it under consideration.

For now, though, all I see is an organization that set out to open America’s eyes to an atrocity that – for most of us – had been completely invisible. They’ve succeeded in that. I applaud their efforts, and I am excited to see what happens next.

Julia Karr, author of XVI and Truth, immediately leapt into action.

Here’s the post from her website:

“On March 2nd, tornados ripped through Southern Indiana, killing 14 people and devastating several communities. Among the towns that were practically erased from the map was the small community of Henryville. Its elementary, middle, and high schools were torn apart, shredded, and flattened. All the books in the school libraries were ruined.

Some students have lost their homes while others have lost loved ones. All of them will have to be bused to various nearby schools in order to finish out the school year. It is too early for us to even know what the future holds for them or how soon the Henryville schools will be rebuilt and reopened.

But, no matter what, Henryville needs help! And so this group of Hoosier authors are inviting writers from all over to help us raise funds to either restock the Henryville school libraries or donate to the Red Cross.

In the coming days, we’ll be listing all the wonderful signed books, book swag, and any other goodies that the generous writing community is offering as prizes for donating to the Henryville cause.  We’ll also let you know exactly how to donate to help and get a chance at one of the fantastic prizes!”

I’m part of the Authors for Henryville. You can be, too. Let’s rebuild a library, people! Stay tuned for more details.

Sorry it’s been so long, y’all. I could give you a whole list of excuses about WHY I haven’t posted lately, but let’s just agree not to talk about it and move forward, m’kay?

So. Today is the big blackout protesting SOPA and PIPA. Wikipedia’s dark today, as is Reddit, and lots of smaller sites have taken themselves offline as well. Google is up and running but has a dark bar across it’s name on the homepage and if you click it, it will take you to all sorts of information about the two bills that are at issue.

If you want to learn about what’s going on, I suggest going to:

1) The Wall Street Journal’s Q&A
2) The actual SOPA bill (this version’s nicely searchable for the problematic paragraphs).

If you want to protest what’s going on, you can go to Google’s homepage and follow their links to contact your representatives.

Someone on Facebook asked me, in a nutshell, what this was all about, so I decided I’d take some time to talk about my thoughts on the issue. Let’s face it, Internet piracy is a problem. If, like me, your livelihood depends on people purchasing copies of something you’ve created, it’s a BIG PROBLEM. Authors are forever getting up in arms about Internet piracy and rightly so. To me, it’s very telling that one of the main communities SOPA and PIPA are intended to protect are one of the most vocal opponents of the bills.

The problem is, because of the language in the bills, they COULD be interpreted in a way that would allow the government to shut down websites that weren’t actually in the business of selling other people’s stuff in an illegal way. Sites like Wikipedia and Facebook and Twitter, which function primarily based on user-uploaded content that is not vetted by the host site before posting could be targeted/punished for having pirated material.

There’s also a DNS conversion issue at stake, but it seems like it’s being resolved. (This gets really technical. You can look it up if you want, but since it doesn’t seem like something that’s going to happen, I’m not going to talk about it right now.)

If SOPA and PIPA become law, they probably WOULDN’T be used to limit free speech on the Internet. That’s not the intent of the bill. The problem is that it’s been badly written enough that it COULD be interpreted that way, and who knows what crazy thing could happen years down the road and so why not WRITE IT BETTER so that there isn’t so much grey area for the attorneys and elected officials to muck around in later?

Yes, piracy’s awful, but congress needs to go back and craft a more careful bill. That’s what the protests are about. And lots of people are frustrated with Congress’s unwillingness to do what authors do EVERY DAY and rewrite something so that it’s better than it was before.

Personally, I think the real problem is that the bill has been written by (mostly) old men, many of whom are out of touch with how the Internet really functions as a global community. Ergo, THEY don’t see the problem with what they’ve written, while our generation is saying “Hey! HEY! Don’t write it like that, you guys!”

I don’t think anyone is out to squash the free speech of the Internet in the United States (though other countries, namely China, certainly aren’t shy about this, and I think it feeds the fear of the protestors.) I think everyone wants to protect the interests of authors and movie makers and other people who are at risk for e-piracy. I think it’s good that Congress wrote some bills trying to help stop that stuff. I think it’s good that people who are better versed in the virtual world than Congress is looked at the bills and said “these need some work.”

I think it’s pretty lame that Congress has, so far, said “Nah. It’s good enough.”

I hope they change their minds. I hope, like all good authors, they listen to the well-reasoned criticisms they’ve received and revise the bills for the better. I guess we’ll see.

Authors Against Animal Abuse

The Humane Society fundraising auctions are OVAH!

Authors Against Animal Abuse

Finally, after much plotting and planning, the auctions are LIVE. Why are we doing this? Because of a horrible situation I encountered a few weeks ago.

And because YA authors are generous and awesome, YOU get to help abused and neglected animals while getting some amazing books.

100% of the proceeds from these auctions will go to benefit the Humane Society of Indianapolis. Additionally, Carrie Ryan and Diana Peterfreund will both match the aggregate of the high bids with up to $1,000 each, to be donated to their own local animal shelters. I will be donating volunteer hours at the Humane Society of Indianapolis – 4 hours for every $100 raised by the auctions, up to $1,000.

Here are the links to the individual auctions, as well as their contents:

1) The Mortal Instruments series (City of Bones, City of Ashes, City of Glass, City of Fallen Angels) by Cassandra Clare, in hardcover, each containing a signed bookplate. ALSO, Claire de Lune and Nocturne by Christine Johnson, Claire de Lune in paperback and Nocturne in hardcover, both signed.

2) The Forest of Hands and Teeth trilogy (The Forest of Hands and Teeth, The Dead-Tossed Waves, The Dark and Hollow Places) by Carrie Ryan, in hardcover, signed. ALSO XVI and an ARC of Truth, by Julia Karr, both in paperback, both signed.

3) The Iron Fey series (The Iron King, The Iron Daughter, The Iron Queen, The Iron Knight) by Julie Kagawa, in paperback, signed. ALSO Struts and Frets, plus Misfit by Jon Skovron, both in hardcover, both signed.

4) Across The Universe by Beth Revis, in hardcover, signed. ALSO Ashfall by Mike Mullin, in hardcover, signed. ALSO two Ashfall posters.

5) The Vespertine in hardcover and an ARC of The Springsweet by Saundra Mitchell, both signed. ALSO, Everlasting and The Eternal Sea by Angie Frazier, both signed and in hardcover.

6) Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver, in hardcover, signed. ALSO an ARC of The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin, signed. ALSO The Revenant by Sonia Gensler, in hardcover, signed.

7) The Stupid Cupid trilogy (Stupid Cupid, Flirting with Disaster, Pucker Up,) by Rhonda Stapleton, in paperback, all signed. ALSO Spotted; Your one and only unofficial guide to Gossip Girl by Crissy Calhoun, signed, in paperback.

Circus Galacticus by Deva Fagan, in hardcover, signed. ALSO The Midnight Tunnel by Angie Frazier, in hardcover, signed.

9) Rampant and Ascendent by Diana Peterfreund, both in hardcover, both signed. ALSO a limited-edition ARC of Shine by Jeri Smith-Ready*.

10) Love Bites; the Unofficial Saga of Twilight by Liv Spencer, signed in paperback. ALSO Love You to Death; the unofficial companion to the Vampire Diaries AND Love You to Death; the unofficial companion to the Vampire Diaries, Season 2 by Crissy Calhoun, both signed and in paperback.

Please help us by bidding on the auctions, spreading the word, or helping your own local animal shelter with volunteer hours or donations. If you have any questions, I’m available to answer them at christine at christine johnson books dot com (no spaces) or on Twitter, @cjohnsonbooks.

Thank you. Really.

*Shine ARCs aren’t being printed until January – ergo, this auction lot will not ship in its entirety until late January.

There is no happy ending.

Here’s what happened – and it’s horrible.

Eight days ago, on Sunday morning, my family was at my parent’s house. They live in about 20 minutes from me in a nice family-oriented neighborhood. We were out front and my parents were complaining about their across-the-street-and-one-door-down-neighbor. The house is owned by a very old lady who lives in a nursing home, and for a few years, it was occupied by her irresponsible grandson. The house has been abandoned for some time. Basically, he trashed it and then moved out. The windows upstairs have been open for months. The bushes are overgrown. It smells.

My husband, Erik, got curious and he and my mom and my kids wandered over and strolled around the house. A few minutes later, they came SPRINTING back across the street, announcing “We have a problem.” My mother was holding back tears. I thought one of the kids had hurt themselves.
I sort of wish that had been the case.

They found a dog – a German Shepard mix – locked in an enclosed porch off the back of the house. It was without food and water, living in its own excrement, and gravely malnourished. It was obvious that it had been eating the fiberglass insulation which it had ripped out of the walls. We called the police and filed an animal control report. We also gave it water and a little bit of food through a rip in the screen (we were afraid to give it too much food after it had obviously been so long without any.)  The worst part is that the dog never barked. The house is situated on a corner lot. So many dog lovers live on the adjacent blocks, and any one of them would have taken that dog in; fed and housed it until they could find a good home for it. Instead, this awful person just abandoned it there.

For eight days, there has been a neighborhood effort to feed the dog while we waited for animal control. I’ve been following up with the city twice a day, for eight days. Eventually, they filed a report. Eventually, they filed for a warrant to take the dog. And then Monday morning, the porch was unoccupied.

We have no idea where the dog is, other than knowing that the city didn’t take her. She was there Sunday evening. We hope that the owner came in the middle of the night (as he occasionally does,) opened the door and just let her out. We hope to find her, but we don’t know that we will.

It stormed here last night. The whole time, I wondered about that dog. If she’d found a place to hide. If she’d found something to eat. If she was scared of the thunder.

I’m angry. I’m angry and I’m sad and I am very, very tired.

I tried to do the right thing. I waited with decreasing patience for the city to come and rescue this abused dog. While I waited, I got increasingly upset about the whole situation. Sunday night pushed me over the edge. I am not just going to sit here and do nothing.

The unscratchable itch to do SOMETHING has led me to reach out to my author friends. I’m still getting donations together, but I can tell you this much. In a few weeks, there will be an on-line fundraiser for the Humane Society. Because the young adult author community rocks, you will all have the opportunity to bid on several absolutely AMAZING sets of signed books.

Actually “they rock ” doesn’t actually begin to describe the YA author community, because the winning bids? They’re going to be parlayed into even more money – more details forthcoming, but we have $1,000 in matching funds for the aggregate of the high bids from Carrie Ryan, author of The Forest of Hands and Teeth Trilogy, to be made as a donation to her local humane society. Additionally? Those winning bids? They’ll translate into volunteer hours that I’m ponying up for the Humane Society of Indianapolis.

I didn’t save this dog. I tried. I failed. I don’t know if I can get over that.

I do know that there are thousands of others out there just like her. I can save some of them. WE can save some of them. I hope the auction will do just that. Stay tuned for more details, and if you have a dog, give them an extra scratch today.