Dancing

So last month when I posted about my BIG NEWS, little did you know that that was only part of it. And now I get to announce the whole damn thing.

People who follow me on twitter know that, while I talk and talk and talk and talk about #sparklyfairyprostitute (SCRAPBOOK, Chronicle '15 woooooo) since November when I started it for NaNo I've been talking about this other book, one that I've been calling #bisexualballerina, one that is more professionally currently titled ETTA NOT OTHERWISE SPECIFIED. 

ETTA is about three things I knew very well and one thing I definitely did not--bisexuality, musical theater, eating disorders, and ballet. The four main characters are ones that I've tried to write book after book after book for through the past four years, and I had begun to give up hope that  could ever find a place where they all fit.

But then, these characters I'd had for so long, these characters I'd never even considered putting in the same book...

It just happened. And I owe it all to that weird little Etta. She's the anti-snarky narrator in what my agent called an anti-problem novel; Etta has a hundred and a half problems but it's not about them. It's about her. This tenacious, five feet nothing, curvy as all hell black ballerina who puts herself into therapy and dates boys and girls and will try really, really hard not to let her lesbian friends (the Disco Dykes, because they dress all in 70s clothes and yell 'breeder' at the zillions of straight people in rural Nebraska) make her feel like shit about it, not when there's this tiny little smoke of a girl in her ED group and a boy on a motorcycle from her musical theater auditions pulling her in another direction. Etta Etta Etta. She's made from my years and years of being eating disorded but never being underweight, my even more years and years of musical theater, my issues finding a place to fit in as a bisexual, and my obsession with toe shoes I've never been in. 

Since it's Monday and since I'm currently writing this post I have an excellent chance of failing, let's have some good news, shall we?

ETTA NOT OTHERWISE SPECIFIED will be my fifth book published by the awesome amazing Simon Pulse, this time with the fantastic Liesa Abrams, thanks to my fucking incredible agent John Cusick.

Once Upon a Time

Once upon a time there as a girl named hannah who wrote a book about sparkly fairy prostitutes.

I wrote this book about a billion (okay, two, but that's a lot when you're young and impatient) years ago, and it's without a doubt the most taxing project I've ever attempted, let alone completed. First of all it's a high fantasy, which is kind of ridiculous for me, and second of all it's from the point of view of a girl, and it was my first time trying that.

By all rights I really shouldn't have tried to write this book, because at no point while I was working on it did I honestly believe I could do it. This was something for a better writer, or a smarter writer, or really an OLDER writer. It was an ambitious project I didn't really have any business attempting.

But there were these weird little moments and images that stuck in my mind and I couldn't get rid of them. A girl who keeps the pieces of her father in a jar. A fairy learning to read. People who live on tightropes in the sky. A boy with one arm and two dark eyes, two gnomes starving and taking care of a sheep in a cottage somewhere they have never travelled (name that poem), and kisses that scrape glitter off faces.

So I finished this book. And I edited it again, and again, and again. And this beautiful amazing girl made me beautiful amazing pictures whenever it all seemed too hard.

One upon a time there was a little book that was so weird and so strange that it never should have sold.

But it did.

So once upon a time there was the happiest damn hannah in the world.

I am so incredibly amazed too announce that SCRAPBOOK sold in a two-book deal to Tamra Tuller at Chronicle.

Once upon a time my life was just too fucking awesome to deal with.