We Need Another Book

So it's been about six months since I self-published 3 (haven't bought it yet? For shame) and it has been pretty incredible. It's been so fun having control and getting to see results in real time and hearing everyone's reactions to the book, and ngl I like the money. So...let's do it again?

This book has been a long time in the making--almost two years--and I finally feel like it's the right time to share it. If you follow me on twitter you'll know it as #Deafromance, but it has a real title...and a real cover, and since that's what you're actually here to see, I'll save the rest of my blabbing. Without further ado...

Zack Ramos is training for two things: being a parent to his twelve-year-old sister once his mother's early-onset Alzheimer's (the same kind he and his sister each have a 50% chance of developing--but let's not think about that) progresses too far, and running a one hundred mile race through the mountains of Tennessee. His support system is longtime girlfriend Jordan Jonas, who's sweet, sarcastic, and entirely virtual. They've been talking for years but still have never met in person. Because Jordan, it turns out, was still waiting for the right time to tell him that she's Deaf. 

The revelation brings them closer together, and Zack throws himself into learning sign language and trying to navigate their way through their different cultures. But with the stress of a tumultuous relationship, a new language, a sick mother, and his uncertain future, there's going to be a breaking point...and it might be out there in the Tennessee wild.

It'll be out on Wednesday, April 26th, and I'll add a link here as soon as I have one. In the meantime, let's skip ahead to reasons you should buy it, shall we?

--The Romance. I don't want to spoil, but there's something special about Zack and Jordan and their romantic arc that I haven't seen before. Maybe you've never seen it before either?? idk idk do you really want to risk NEVER SEEING IT

--The Representation. Both Zack and Jordan are bisexual and will not let you forget it just because they're in a boy/girl relationship. Zack is Filipino, Jordan is Guatemalan and Jewish. Jordan is, obviously, Deaf.
       --#ownvoices? Only for bisexuality and Judaism. I'm disabled but not Deaf, and I know ASL but...again, not Deaf.
      --Jordan does not read lips. Learn ASL or gtfo. Zack chooses the former.

--The Price. It's $3.99. You can swing it.

--The Author. uh hi have you met me I'm awesome and last night I spent $75 on lipstick good lord so can I have your money thanks

Hit me up with any questions you have about the book here or on Twitter! I'm beyond excited to bring this out into the world, and I hope you guys love it!

Happy Hannahween!

Well then!

Listen up, we got a big announcement. 

This Halloween, as in FIVE DAYS FROM NOW Halloween, I decided to do something I've never done before! I'm putting out a book all on my very own. It's ebook only and right now only on Amazon.  Here's the cover!

And here's the description!

You just have to be a brave and certain kind of person, and I don't think that I am. I'm sarcastic and loyal and a little shy. I'm quietly and slightly Catholic. I'm a daughter trying to learn how to be a sister. I'm a virgin. I'm a butterflier.

I've never been in love.

Taylor Cipriano had everything figured out, back when she lived with her single mother in Miami. Now, she's moved upstate for her junior year to live with her mom's boyfriend and her soon-to-be-stepsister and is trying to figure out who she is out of the shadow of her best friend. When she meets Theo—quirky, cute, sensitive Theo—he seems like a great match...except he has a girlfriend. Josey, icy and oh-so-intimidating. 

But Theo and Josey aren't like anyone Taylor's met before; Josey grew up in a polyamorous family, and the two of them have a history of letting a third person in to their relationship. It's nothing Taylor's ever considered before...but she really likes Theo.

Her feelings for Josey, though? 

That's where it really gets complicated.

3 unwraps who we love and how we love, in numbers as odd as we are.

why Hannah, is that a queer polyamory book for teenagers??

IT SURE AS FUCK IS

HOORAAAAAY

And you can preorder it RIGHT THE HELL HERE.  It's $3.99 and like come on, even I have $3.99. You can swing it.

So. Why am I doing this now, and why with this project? A couple reasons. 

1. Otherwise, I don't have a book coming out until 2018.

Exactly, Sam. Exactly. 

2. I love traditional publishing, but I really love the idea of getting to do a few (????) things on the side my schedule and on my terms. I've bitched endlessly on twitter about the number of adults things need to go through before teenagers can see them. This way there's only one (me. I'm old now). 

3. This book is really, really personal to me (wiiiiiiink) so it seemed like a good one for me to have total control over. 

4. I'm curious what will happen. 

So! Shake them piggy banks, preorder (once again that link is RIGHT HERE), tell all your friends and families and enemies, and watch my twitter for updates. Ciao, bellas, and happy Hannahween.

Cover Reveal!!

I'll keep it short and sweet, since nobody clicked on this to hear me talk--here's the cover for my next YA book, NOT OTHERWISE SPECIFIED. I am unbelievably in love, and still freaking reeling that we found a girl who's Etta Etta Etta all over (look at her '70s clothes! and her ankles crossed in SUBTLE BALLERINA FASHION! and her eyes SEEING INTO YOUR SOUL).

Sooooo...

right? RIGHT? I could pretend to be modest but I mean I didn't design it so LOOK AT THAT DAMN THING.

Here's the summary of the thing: 

Etta is tired of dealing with all of the labels and categories that seem so important to everyone else in her small Nebraska hometown.

Everywhere she turns, someone feels she's too fringe for the fringe. Not gay enough for the Dykes, her ex-clique, thanks to a recent relationship with a boy; not tiny and white enough for ballet, her first passion; and not sick enough to look anorexic (partially thanks to recovery). Etta doesn’t fit anywhere— until she meets Bianca, the straight, white, Christian, and seriously sick girl in Etta’s therapy group. Both girls are auditioning for Brentwood, a prestigious New York theater academy that is so not Nebraska. Bianca seems like Etta’s salvation, but how can Etta be saved by a girl who needs saving herself? 

The latest powerful, original novel from Hannah Moskowitz is the story about living in and outside communities and stereotypes, and defining your own identity.

And here is where you should add it on goodreads 'cause I'm gonna be watching that like a creeper today. 

Thanks for clicking! Tell me what you think, please!!

xoxoxo miss hannah

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.

Why I Read YA

Lately--lately, in this instance, meaning always--there are some opinion pieces making the rounds comparing YA books to
adult
literary
reeeeeal
books.

Sometimes my dad tells me that he likes my books and he thinks I have real talent, and he thinks I really could write a real book. He asks me when I'm going to write the
great
American
nooooovel.

I'm currently a senior year English major. You have no idea how many people I know whose big goal is to write the great American novel. In class, I read great piece of literature after great piece of literature and I really, genuinely like some of them. I do. But when it's time for me to curl up with something I'm actually looking forward to? When stretched out on a towel on the beach or balled up crying on my bed and I need that book, it's Melina Marchetta or Amy Reed or Steve Brezenoff or David Levithan or Jaclyn Moriarty, to name a few. It's YA.

People used to ask me if I would write
reeeeeal
books
when I grew up.

I am twenty-one-and-one-half as of last Friday. I'm not saying I'm ancient (I'll leave that to my infant girlfriend) but I'm unquestionably outside of the YA age group. I know I'm far from the only adult reading YA, and I don't know if it's my on-the-cusp age or my body of work or my major that has people so fucking confused by the fact that I care a lot more about stories about girls by their lockers than about men who want to fuck their sisters (what up, Faulkner, write a different book why don't you).

And see, that there is part of it. When my dad asks me why I haven't written that great American novel, I have totally told him, "Because I'm a Jewish girl."

There are some fucking fantastic literary ('what the fuck is literary anyway?' is a topic for a different post and a better writer) adult books written by women, but, um...where are they? Ohhh that's right, they're being ignored and shoved aside by literary purists just like YA books are! Come sit with us, ladies, our table is ever-expanding.

I've mentioned this before, I think, but I had a teacher in high school who once said to me, after Break sold, "I just feel like there's a level of depth missing in YA books, you know?" in this thoughtful voice like she expected me to agree.

Well, you know what? No, I don't fucking know.

There is a reason adults come back to these high school stories, and it isn't a reason I can figure out how to articulate. But it's the same reason people who very much aren't teenagers love Glee and Friday Night Lights. There is something enduring and universal about these stories.

And there is something twisted and weird and personal and so, so not monolithic. And while we're still working on the diversity-of-characters thing (and trust me I am giving myself a get-out-of-fucking-nothing-free card, I have written waaay too many books about white boys to get off scot-free--I mean, I love my books, but write a fucking Asian girl, hannah) we have a ever-changing, ever-evolving body of authors. 

And I get that literary canon moves a lot slower. I get that.

But maybe it means literary canon needs to shut the fuck up a little bit. Because this isn't 1950 and writers aren't (just?) impotent men with typewriters and dark rooms and alcoholism and complexes. Writers are moms and teenagers and gay boys and black women and Jewish girls trying to tap out a blog post while the aforementioned infant girl watches RuPaul's Drag Race. 

Maybe it doesn't have to be such a fucking art all the time. Maybe I shouldn't be getting a degree in this shit. Maybe I just don't get it.

Maybe I should go back to just reading my little YA books on the beach or balled up in my bed.

God, what a fucking waste that would be!

When I was a sophomore, a creative writing teacher told me that after he finished his

great

American

novel

he wanted to write some really commercial book about zombies. What a fucking joke, right! A real writer deigning to write about zombies!

Last month I ran into a girl from that class who has him again this semester. I asked if he'd finished his great American novel yet.

He has not.

My zombie book came out ten months ago.

(I love the taste of brains in the autumn. Tastes like legitimacy.)

TEETH Teaser, shall we?

how about the first chapter? 

---

At night, the ocean is so loud and so close that I lie awake, sure it's going to beat against the house's supports until we all crumble onto the rocks and break into pieces. Our house is creaky, gray, weather-stained. It's probably held a dozen desperate families who found their cure and left before we'd even heard about this island.

We are a groan away from a watery death, and we'll all drown without even waking up, because we're so used to sleeping through unrelenting noise.

Sometimes I draw. Usually I keep as still as I can. I worry any movement from me will push us over the edge. I don't even want to blink.

I feel the crashing building. I always do. I lie in bed with my eyes open and focus on a peak in my uneven ceiling and pretend I know how to meditate. You are not moving. You are not drowning. It's just rain. It's your imagination. Go to sleep.

That pounding noise is pavement under your feet, is sex, is your mother's hands on your brother's chest, is something that is not water.

It's not working, not tonight. I sit up and grab my pad and pen to sketch myself, standing. Dry.

Sometimes the waves hit the shore so hard that I can't even hear the screaming.

But usually I can. Tonight I can, and it hits me too hard for me to draw. I need to learn how to draw a scream.

I close my eyes and listen. I always do this; I listen like I am trying to desensitize myself, like if I just let the screams fill my ears long enough, I will get bored and I will forget and I will go to sleep.

It doesn't work. I need to calm down.

It's just the wind.

Not water. Not anyone. Go to sleep.

Some nights the screams are louder than others. Some nights they're impossible to explain away, like my mom tries, as really just the wind passing through the cliffs. “Like in an old novel,” she says. “It's romantic.” Her room doesn't face the ocean.

Fiona, down on the south end of the island, says it's the ghost, but Fiona's bag-of-bats crazy and just because we're figuring out some magic is real doesn't mean I'm allowed to skip straight to ghost in an effort to make my life either more simple or more exciting, God, what the fuck do I even want?

I should figure it out and then wish for it and see what happens. Who the hell knows? Magic island, after all.

Magic fish, anyway. They heal.

That's the real story, that's the story everyone believes, but it's hardly the only one that darts around.

There are creatures in the water no one's ever seen except out of the corner of his eyes.

The big house is haunted.

Maybe we're all haunted.

I only take the legends seriously at night. The house is rocking, and the stories are the only thing to keep me company.

Stories, me, and ocean, and however the hell many magic fish while my family sleeps downstairs and my real life sleeps a thousand miles away.

At home, I never would have believed this shit. I used to be a reasonable person. But now we're living on this island that is so small and isolated that it really feels like it's another world, with rules like none I learned growing up. We came here from middle America. We stepped into a fairy tale.

And my brother is better but isn't well, so color me increasingly despondent, magic fish.

Out in the ocean, the shrieks continue, as high and hollow as whistles. I get up and press my face against the window. My room is the highest part of our kneeling house.

The panes on my windows are thick and uneven. Probably the window was made by hand. Even if it weren't so dark, I'd still hardly be able to see. Everything's distorted like I'm looking through glasses that don't belong to me.

But I can just make out the waves, grabbing onto the shore with foamy fingers and sliding back into the surf. I squint long enough and make out white peaks in the dark water.

“Go to sleep,” I say.

I close my eyes and listen to the screams. I pretend it's my brother, my little brother, who has cystic fibrosis and this fucked-up chest and can't scream at all. Pretend this island has done the magic it was supposed to do, and he's okay. And we can go home.