Wednesday, April 17, 2013

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.