FAQ and January Bookplate Giveaway

Hi y'all.

It's been a long while since my last post, but I have excuses, of course:

Excuse A) I have been super busy launching my book and going on tour (more pics and recaps of the tour to follow soon.)

Excuse B) I have been SUPER busy working on edits for Book 2

Excuse C) On top of that, I just starting teaching for the semester at Pepperdine, a novel-writing class this time. My students rock, by the way, but then they always do.

Excuse D) I am still a mom and a wife and a home-owner, and I have to keep everybody in my family alive and fed and in clean underwear and my house from getting up and crawling away. This, regrettably, takes a lot of my waking hours.

So pick your excuse. But I promise, a time is coming pretty soon where the book will be done and the semester will be rolling along smoothly and then I will start playing CATCH-UP in a major way, starting with this blog.

Until then, I wanted to answer a few frequently-asked questions:

YES, there is going to be a sequel to Unearthly! I swear, I get like four or five emails a day asking me if there's a sequel. YES! See Excuse B! Oh so yes! There will also definitely be a Book 3, and quite likely a Book 4, so stay tuned.

The sequel does have an official title, but I'm not allowed to announce it just yet. I love the title, though, and it's the title I wanted almost all along for the book.

The sequel will be out, if all goes according to plan, in January 2012. I realize that this is a horribly long time to wait. I sympathize. But that's just the publishing industry. One year between books is pretty standard, or so I'm told.

I may be biased on the subject, but in my not-so-humble opinion, Book 2 will be worth the wait. :)

On to the second most asked FAQ: Will Unearthly be available as an ebook?

YES! There will be an ebook copy of Unearthly available, I swear. And SOON. I love brick and morter bookstores so much, and I love real, printed copies of books even more, but I have to admit that getting an ereader revolutionized the way I read. So I am extremely happy to know that Unearthly will be an ebook very soon. I promise, the second it's available I will be shouting it from the rooftops.

Question 3: When will you come to my city so you can sign my copy?
This is the part where I sigh wistfully. I would love to come to your city and sign a copy for you. But it's complicated. You might have noticed the basketball-sized lump on my belly if you've seen any of the current photos of me. Yes, folks, I'm creating a life right now. A girl, who I am oh-so-excited to meet. But the one drawback is that they won't let me go on an airplane after this week.

So, at least until early summer, I think, I'm grounded. I am doing a couple of events in the area, one in Los Angeles at Flintridge Books on February 13, 4pm. And the other sometimes in February at Pepperdine--we're still working out the details. But that's about it for a while.

So, if you want me to sign a copy of my book, one awesome thing you could do is to participate in my Bookplate giveaway. Here's how you do it:

1) Go to your local bookstore and take 2 pictures, one of Unearthly on the shelf in all its booky glory (make sure we can see the other books around it, too, as part of the fun for me is seeing what company I'm keeping), and one of you holding the book.

OR if you purchased your copy of Unearthly via the internet, simply take a picture of the book is some kind of humorous situation. Like this:

Sigh. I love this photo. Two girls fighting over my book. What author wouldn't love that?

Ahem, anyway, take a funny Unearthly picture!

2) Email me the photos, along with your name, address, and the name/location of the bookstore where you took the photos. My email address: writercynthiahand@gmail.com

THEN, I will:

3) add your photos to my Unearthly on the Shelf! compilation, which I will post to my blog sometime in late February.

4) mail you a bookplate, (I had these printed special and they are all purply beautiful) which I will sign so you can put it in your copy of Unearthly and therefore have a signed copy even if you can't make it to a formal signing! I also tend to throw in a signed bookmark, just because I can.

5) choose three (3) of these entries at random and mail them a signed and doodled upon (meaning, my little comments and pics in the margins every now and then) copy of Unearthly in hard cover.

Be patient with me on this one. I might not get to the actual mailing part for a couple of weeks, see Excuses A-D, but I will get to them. I am also extending the deadline for my giveaway to February 15, so you still have a couple of weeks.

Now I'm back to working on my excuses. . .