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It's official! I couldn't post this when I got it because it hadn't gone through the final approval process, but now it has. Meet the wicked awesome cover for Something Wicked! (Click on the image to see it larger.)

The new cover keeps the same great design from the first book, Something Rotten, while incorporating new faces--Mac and his girlfriend Beth:













And since this is based on "the Scottish play" and set at a Scottish Highland Festival, we also get that great tartan blue! (A Macduff tartan? I'll have to check.) Love the way the blue tartan becomes the mountain sky on the back cover too. Genius! This one takes place on a mountaintop near Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee--hence the picturesque backdrop this time.

In lieu of the little skull on Something Rotten's cover we get a new icon here too--a sgian dubh, or short Scottish dagger. Wait, this means I'll have to get a new stamp made! I'm going to have to buy one of those carousels bookkeepers use to hold all their check stamps.

I'm totally thrilled with this cover, and the whole look of the series. Special thanks to editor Liz and cover designer Emilian Gregory for making it happen!

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Alan here, posting from the road as I visit five Birmingham-area schools in five days to talk about Samurai Shortstop and Something Rotten. The horrible truth: I do not have Bravo in my motel room! (Checking the channel lineup card was among the first things I did when I arrived late Sunday night.) I am faced with three options: read the continual updates on Blogging Project Runway without seeing what's really happening; miss the show and watch when I get home the tape Wendi is making of it; or go to someplace like Mellow Mushroom and ask them to switch over a basketball game to Project Runway, which ought to go over really well. There is always a fourth option, too--I'm putting out the call for Birmingham-area PR fans! Anybody got a Project Runway party I can crash!? I am recently bathed and reasonably well-kempt, and will not talk until the commercial breaks. Throw me a frickin' rope here, people!

Now on to why I'm blogging tonight when I should be working on the edits for Something Wicked. Wendi and I stopped by Steve and Barry's in Asheville on the way home from Thanksgiving at her parents' house so we could check out the winning Victorya/Kevin design on sale. Other bloggers have reported the photo police chasing them from the store, but we were lucky enough to snap some shots without anyone noticing. In fact, there were so few employees at this mall-anchor-store-sized-Steve and Barry's that we felt as though we could have walked right out the back door with armfuls of merchandise and no one would have noticed. Luckily we are made of starcher moral fiber. That and we didn't find much we wanted to steal . . .

So here's the dress:

Click on the image to see it larger. As promised, the price was a whopping $19.98:

The dress came in black and burgundy, and we, like other bloggers, liked the burgundy better. Which begs the question--why were so many of last week's designers afraid of using color? The burgundy is a far cry from the teal blue we got from Elisa/P and Christian/Carmen. I suppose it was closer to the red Ricky/Jack used, but still--bring on the color! I hope this week the designers get to let it all loose . . . although signs point to no. I'll have a preview soon that collects some of the speculation for this week's challenge. Which I cannot watch. Did I mention I don't have Bravo in my motel room?

For the sake of completism, here is the top of the outfit:

Neither of us tried the outfit on (though I was sorely tempted) but it was fun to have it promised in the store and then be able to drop by that weekend and actually see it on the shelf. It was certainly a real kudo for Victorya to have her design in a mass market retailer. I hope she and her family and friends had a little "let's go shopping party" to enjoy it. I know when I have a book hit the shelves I go around to as many bookstores as possible to bask in the glow . . .

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Totally awesome interview with me up at Jackie Parker's Interactive Reader blog!

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There's a lengthy interview with me up on Cynthia Leitich Smith's blog Cynsations today. Cynthia is a very influential children's and young adult literature blogger, and her Cynsations blog is a treasure trove of children's lit interviews, news, reviews and information. (Too bad I couldn't rhyme that last one!)

Cynthia is also the author of the YA goth fantasy Tantalize, a novel about vampires, werewolves, and fine cuisine. BCCB calls it "an impeccably paced suspense story, a sexy romance, [with] a tough and witty heroine," and School Library Journal says, "Fans of Stephenie Meyer and Annette Curtis Klause will eat it up." (And if that's not a silver bullet of a blurb, I'm a werewolf.)

Be sure to check out Tantalize, and Cynthia's interview with me at Cynsations. Thanks, Cynthia!

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Jackie Parker over at the Interactive Reader blog has just posted a blush-worthy review of Something Rotten called "Shakespeare Noir. As it should be." Jackie's a fantastic reader and reviewer with great taste in books (obviously!) and television. I'm sure she's an equally kick-ass librarian, and if I were a teenager in her town I would probably be spending all my afternoons at her library following her around like a puppy. There's a great interview with her over at the Seven Impossible Things blog, run by my friends and fellow Knoxville, Tennessee expats Jules and Eisha, which is where I ganked the picture of her. Look closely at her shelf and you can see a copy of Samurai Shortstop! I told you she had great taste in books . . .

Next week Jackie's going to feature an interview with me as a part of the Winter Book Blast Tour, in which I discuss Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, self-help books, and Snagglepuss the pink cat. I'll give you the link when it's up.

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A new interview with me is up at Kerry Madden's blog. Kerry is a University of Tennessee alum, like me, and the author of Gentle's Holler and Louisiana's Song. I interviewed Kerry on the release of the second book in her Maggie Valley trilogy last May. Thanks for the great questions, Kerry!

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The next stop on my mini-blog tour is up at author and illustrator Karen Lee's blog. All new questions, all new answers!

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I've been blogged again!

Check out interview two of my Book Blog Tour over at Stone Soup, the blog of Jack of All Tales author Kim Norman. Thanks, Kim!

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I've been blogged!

This week begins a Book Blog Tour, of sorts, for the debut of Something Rotten. Today's entry is up at writer/illustrator Elizabeth Dulemba's blog. Check it out!

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Something Rotten has gotten another good review, this one from the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, or the BCCB. The BCCB showed the love for Samurai Shortstop last year, giving it one of its two starred reviews. No star this time, but a very good review nonetheless:

As the title and subtitle hint, this mystery story is a revisioned Hamlet, here set in Denmark, Tennessee, the home of Horatio’s boarding-school friend Hamilton Prince. The sudden death of Hamilton’s father, owner of the lucrative Elsinore Paper Plant, and the swift remarriage of Hamilton’s mother to her former brother-in-law has Hamilton suspicious; it doesn’t help that he’s still hung up on townie Olivia, who’s the daughter of the Prince family lawyer and who’s convinced that Elsinore has been covering up its dangerous and illegal pollution of the Copenhagen River. The overlay of Raymond Chandler onto the contemporary Shakespeare plot adds unnecessary gimmickry, but it does make Horatio’s narration teen-appealingly snarky, and the rest of the story capably accentuates the elements likely to intrigue the YA audience: adult dishonesty, youthful disaffection, troubled romance. There’s a hint of Chinatown as well as Chandler in the industrial pollution plot, but Gratz deftly uses that story to energize the updated Hamlet, as his alterations (Hamilton wavers between feigned and real alcoholism rather than madness, while the final face-off is a public hearing rather than a duel) are adroit and effective. The snappy patter and friendship-centered drama make this readable in its own right, and it would serve multiple curricular purposes by giving readers a chance to discuss the reasons behind the variants (Gratz kindly provides his main characters with a more hopeful ending than Shakespeare) and to gain additional understanding from viewing the plot at a different angle. Readers will find this enjoyable as a pleasure read and surprisingly painless as a curricular entry, and if the subtitle suggests sequels rather than “The rest is silence,” can you really regret the continued crime-fighting adventures of Horatio and Hamlet?

My favorite phrase from the whole piece, of course, is "surprisingly painless." I think I'll use that as an advertising teaser for the book from now on . . .

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Alan's been on the road all week promoting Something Rotten (which just went on sale today!) so I've had to take care of all kinds of things myself. Can you hear the violins?

We're all heading to Carpe Librum for the Something Rotten launch party on Sunday. They also want to buy some of my pendants and I promised nice packaging - so I had to do my labels myself. Alan is the VP of Graphic Design here at Gratz Industries so I floundered around quite a bit. I used Illustrator to make the stripes, but I spent a good hour going through my big Illustrator book and still couldn't figure out how to crop out a square, so I had to upload the stripes into Photoshop to do that. Of course, I couldn't figure out how to lay out a sheet of labels and add text to a doc in Photoshop. I tried it in Quark but I can't remember how to do anything there either, so I finally managed to finish the thing in (horrors!) MS Word. Alan HATES Word so he mocked me a bit when he found out that's what I had resorted to. Buy - hey - it got the job done. So here is my new fancy-schmancy packaging for my pendants. Nice, eh?
And what goes inside? Carpe Librum does really well with the classic authors and illustrators, so they're getting Richard Scarry (from Richard Scarry's Great Big Air Book)
Raggedy Ann by Johnny Gruelle and The Fuzzy Duckling, a Little Golden Book by Jane Werner, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen.I'm also making up some holiday ornaments, starting with a few from How the Grinch Stole Christmas! Here are the first three I've done (still missing their hanging loops)and here's my favorite - frontand back.The pictures are too yellow - but that's because our camera doesn't adjust for tungsten light. Or if it does I have no idea how to do it. But they're still much better than what I usually take. Why? Because I took Greg's advice and built a white box using the directions found here. I've had this page bookmarked for several months now, but Greg's comment got me to actually make it. Here it is.And if you think this looks ghetto, you should see my soldering setup. I use a wooden clothespin to hold the pendant. The wood won't scratch the glass. I use a vice-grip clamped to the clothespin to weight the thing down. Then I rest the whole setup in my lap so it's easy to shift to any angle. That's right - I solder in my lap. I know that's a bad idea, but until I get a decent clamp like this or this that's the easiest way for me to work.

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Hi kids - the day has finally come. It's Something Rotten On-Sale Day!

(And there was great rejoicing.)

I don't know about you, but I was at one of the hundreds of midnight parties held across the country last night to celebrate the unveiling of Something Rotten. This event wasn't held at a local bookstore of course, it was held in my hotel room in Cartersville, Georgia, where I'm slated to do school and library visits all day today, but it was a raucous party nonetheless. And yes, in case you are wondering, I did wear a costume--I dressed up as Hagrid, the bearded, big-hearted groundskeeper Horatio befriends at Wittenberg Academy.

Seriously, today is the day Something Rotten officially goes on sale, and if you're not already planning to join me at a launch party or signing in the next week or two, now is the time to go get your copy. Does that mean you can run down to your local Borders or Barnes & Noble to grab a copy? Alas, no. Neither of the two big chains brought Something Rotten in, and while I'm thankful to B&N for supporting Samurai Shortstop, I now say . . . forget 'em! There's never been a better reason to support your local independent bookseller than this, and the chances are very good that your local indie will have Something Rotten on the shelf. The Penguin sales reps, who meet with and sell to the independent booksellers across the country, chose Something Rotten as their kids book of the season to highlight and get into stores, and they've been terrifically supportive. Something Rotten will be well represented everywhere but the chains--and of course it's available at many fine online retailers as well.

As before, I'd love to see some Something Rotten sightings. If you've got a camera on your cell phone (like Horatio!) send me the pick via the e-mail link on the right here on the blog and I'll post it with your name.

Thanks for your support! Now I have to go get dressed up in my Hagrid the groundskeeper costume for my school visit today . . .

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Something Rotten got a couple of mentions over the weekend, first in a mini-review from the Cincinnati Public Library:

What do you get if you take one of Shakespeare’s most popular creations, Hamlet, shave a few years off of his age, and plop him down in modern day Tennessee? You get a darkly comic mystery that works way better than it has a right to. High school junior Horatio Wilkes joins his friend Hamilton Prince on a trip back to Hamilton’s hometown of Denmark, Tennessee. Hamilton is depressed because his father has recently died under mysterious circumstances. Not only that, but his mother has just married Hamilton’s uncle, Claude, who has taken over the family company, the Elsinore Paper Plant. However, when Mr. Prince's death starts to look like anything but an accident, will Horatio be able to stop flirting with Hamilton’s ex, Olivia, long enough to prove that the playa’s the thing, um, er, the main suspect?

. . . and another brief notice about my upcoming Knoxville event in the Oak Ridger.

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Wendi is outdoing me lately with the blog posts - or as Jo would say, she's beating the pants off me. I may have more exciting news to come this week, but for now I have to share this very good review of Something Rotten from Kliatt, a bi-monthly magazine that, according to their web site, "publishes reviews of paperback books, hardcover fiction for adolescents, audiobooks, and educational software recommended for libraries and classrooms serving young adults." Kliatt is used by teachers and librarians across the U.S. and Canada to select "the latest and best materials." That's good news for me!

Here's what they had to say. Oh, and there's a well-deserved spoiler alert in there, so skip those two sentences if you're looking forward to reading the book without knowing some of the specifics . . .

Students who have slogged through Hamlet will enjoy this witty, modern retelling of the old story through Horatio's point of view. The Prince family lives in Denmark, Tennessee and runs the Elsinore Paper Company, which is polluting the river and stinking up the town. Not only that, Hamilton Prince (Horatio's best friend) has a new father. Yep! His uncle has married Hamilton's mother "Trudy," within two months of her husband's mysterious death. This book is rife with many clever comparisons, and Gratz has manipulated the story to fit a modern setting. BEGIN SPOILER ALERT: In this book, all's well that ends well. Olivia/Ophelia lives and she and Hamilton get back together, and the bad guys are caught. A few notable deaths and timely explosions do make the scene. END SPOILER ALERT: The title indicates this is the first of a series, leaving open the question of whether Horatio is going to show up at his sister Desdemona's wedding, or his sister Miranda's island hideaway; or maybe he'll appear on his sister Juliet's balcony in the next book. He has six sisters, so the question of where he is going to insert himself next, where no Horatio is in the cast, is one to ponder. This book is good fun and might make an excellent reward for those who score "A"s on their Hamlet tests.

Myrna Marler, Associate Professor of English, BYU
for Kliatt Magazine

Thanks, Myrna! May your children all have good teeth and high SAT scores. Although I would like to point out that you don't have to have read Hamlet to enjoy Something Rotten--but it's even funnier if you have! (If I do say so myself.)

Here's a link to a PDF of the review, if you're into that sort of thing.

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Tonight: an object lesson in the difficulties of getting good publicity for your novel.

It was a banner week for Gratz Industries, as two of our employees made the local weekly paper, the Mitchell News-Journal. ("Serving Bakersville, Little Switzerland, Spruce Pine, and the rest of beautiful Mitchell County")

First, on page 3A, was this feature story. (Click the image to see it larger.)

As Wendi says, you gotta love a town where a new crosswalk is worthy of a page three feature story. According to the caption, Jo is one of the fairly indistinguishable little kids in raincoats crossing the street at the new crosswalk. Not only is her picture in the paper, she was interviewed!

When asked if she liked it, Jo Gratz, a student at the school, responded by saying, "yeah, mmmhmm."

That's good press! But Gratz Industries wasn't done. This little item was featured on page 3B. (Again, click to read larger.)

Jo gets page 3A, Dad gets page 3B--the "Arts" page. Which, by the way, is in the Sports section. No picture, as you'll note, and no quotes. I did not warrant an interview. Perhaps if I had announced my new book while using the new crosswalk in town? And of course to add insult to injury, the headline misspells my last name, when they went to all the trouble of spelling it correctly throughout the copy.

Getting coverage from your local media is always a hairy proposition. I usually advise authors to focus their publicity efforts demographically, not geographically, but that's still no reason to ignore your hometown media. Admittedly, Mitchell County has only been my home since April of this year--but I had hoped for a bit more coverage!

Then again, considering I never got coverage from either the Knoxville News Sentinel or the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, perhaps I should be thankful they mentioned me at all . . .

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I'm back from my week-long Alabama Library Tour and my weekend-long appearance at SIBA, the Southeastern Independent Booksellers Association trade show in Atlanta. Both proved to be very successful trips. I met a ton of librarians on the tour and handed out a LOT of school visit brochures, which I hope turn into invitations!

At SIBA I participated in a panel that included Deborah Wiles. Even though Deb and I both lived in Atlanta for the two years I was there, and both haunted the same bookstores, this was the first time we had met. She was great, and her new book, The Aurora County All-Stars, looks great. (I'm forty pages in and it's terrific so far!) This year you were only guaranteed one of the free, signed books by the panelists if you attended a panel. That meant a lot of people looking for a free, signed copy of Deb's book got mine too. Thanks for letting me share in your glow, Deb!

While I signed copies of Something Rotten for booksellers, I also handed out little packets of bookplates. Wendi and I had the idea that we should offer something else with the books, and we realized that bookplates would be a great giveaway. The idea is for booksellers to take these back to their stores and put them in copies of Samurai Shortstop and Something Rotten, thus instantaneously creating signed copies. As my writer friends say, "A signed book is a sold book!" That's the hope, anyway.

Here's how we created the bookplates. First, we printed out bookplates eight to a page on sticker paper, and I signed and stamped them.


Then they got cut out.

Five of each kind got put together in a plastic baggy, along with a postcard thanking the booksellers for their support and telling them to e-mail me if they want more bookplates. (Click on the pic to see them larger.)


They were a hit! I gave out every packet I created. Some folks from the HarperCollins publicity department who were there with an author one table down were salivating over them. They said I was clever. Time will tell if they're right . . . but I'm always trying.

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The first official review of Something Rotten is in and it's . . . pretty good. Here's what Kirkus had to say:

Gratz is cornering the niche market of novels containing dissimilar topics. Here he combines Hamlet and hardboiled detective pulp. During a vacation from their academy, Horatio Wilkes accompanies his buddy Hamilton Prince to Denmark, Tenn. Just two months after his father passed away under suspicious circumstances, Hamilton's Uncle Claude has married Hamilton's mother. Claude now controls the Elsinore Paper Plant, a multibillion dollar company blatantly polluting the Copenhagen River. Horatio, with a knack for investigating, is determined to expose Claude's corruption while Hamilton, dismayed by what he believes is his mother's betrayal, drowns himself in alcohol. Ultimately, Horatio relies on environmentalist protester Olivia to reveal secrets about Elsinore. The many parallels to Hamlet are interesting, but Gratz wisely avoids producing a carbon copy of the tragedy. Horatio admirably plays the loyal friend but has a cocky voice that is too self-assured and as a teen rings unauthentic. However, this well-crafted mystery has appeal for readers familiar with both Raymond Chandler's novels and Shakespeare's masterpiece.

The reviewer is completely right to say that Horatio is too self-assured and has an unauthentic voice. It was never my intent to write a truly "authentic" teen voice in Something Rotten. My goal was to write a highly stylized voice to mirror the style and tone of 50s and 60s noir. Horatio talks and acts like I wished I had when I was a teen; just as Chandler's Philip Marlowe is the man every man wishes to be, Horatio is the boy every teenage boy wishes he could be.

Horatio always has the right snarky comeback at the right moment - not minutes or hours or days late like the rest of us. Horatio speaks the language of the teenager working on his lines alone in front of the mirror. It's aspirational fiction, in a way; Horatio's character is enjoyable (I hope) because we like to imagine ourselves ever being that cool, even though we know it's impossible. (Well, at least it is for me.) I feel the same way about Veronica Mars. Could any teen ever be that cool and smart and confident? We only wish.

And the idea that I could have cornered the market on anything after just two books reads like a compliment to me. :-)

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I jut got my new Something Rotten stamp back from the printer today. Pretty cool, eh? The skull image is ganked from the cover of the novel. (Well, it was too small to scan clearly for an inch and a quarter stamp, so I dropped it into Illustrator and redrew it one night.)

My hanko stamp has proven so popular at signings that I wanted something like it for the Horatio books. The best part - I can use this stamp for all of them, since that skull will be incorporated into every cover design!

And the stamp in action.

A touch of class. Macabre class, but class.

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Friday afternoon as I left to pick Jo up from school, I got a package from editor Liz in the mail. The size and weight of it made me think it was another galley she'd been able to scrape up for me, but it was something far, far, better -

- an early copy of Something Rotten in hardcover! My official author copies won't come until the middle of October, when the book ships to bookstores, but Liz was able to grab one for me and send it early. It looks sweet! Click on either of the images to see it larger.

It's so very strange to finally hold the real book in your hand. For so long a novel is a collection of words on a computer screen, maybe a stack of manuscript pages every now and then. And for so long a novel is a mutable thing, changing on a monthly or weekly or sometimes daily basis as you and your editor make edits and fixes and additions. But when that book finally arrives in hardback, with the nice slick jacket and all the incidental information filled in and official, it really settles in. This is it. This is the novel. It's finished. It can't be rewritten anymore. It's one step from making its debut in the great wide world.

It's exciting and nerve-wracking, all at the same time. But way more exciting.

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It hath begun! Check out the write-up of Something Rotten on Propernoun.com.

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Something Rotten doesn't hit bookstore and library shelves until October, but I've just gotten word from Editor Liz that my YA murder mystery has been picked up by the Junior Library Guild! This is great news. The JLG has great taste in books, and often their picks predict what will be well-reviewed and popular in the coming months. And of course they had the great taste to choose Samurai Shortstop last year. :-)

I suppose it's getting on toward that time when reviews and buzz (if there is going to be any) will begin to trickle in. I'm glad I stopped biting my fingernails back in eighth grade. They'd be stumps already.

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I've added a few new events to the calendar!

First, I'll be at the Annual ALA Conference this weekend (June 23 & 24) in Washington, D.C. for a VERY limited engagement (all day Saturday and half of Sunday). Penguin plans to push Something Rotten galleys from 11-12 on Saturday morning, and I'm going to be there to shake hands and sign books.

Next up I'll be one of the judges at Malaprop's Bookstore's Harry Potter Party on July 20th before book the seventh goes on sale at midnight. If all goes well, I'll be going dressed as Hagrid (as I'm fairly Hagrid-sized) and I'll post pictures for you.

I've also added the Haywood County Book Mania festival on August 3rd and 4th, sponsored by the good folks at Osondu Books in Waynesville, NC. I was invited to this event last year, and look forward to it again (especially since it's now a lot shorter drive!)

And last but CERTAINLY not least, I've added two "launch parties" for Something Rotten this fall - first the o-fficial launch party at my hometown Carpe Librum Booksellers in Knoxville, TN at 2 p.m. on Sunday, October 21st, and then a reading and signing at my NEW hometown bookstore, Malaprop's Bookstore in Asheville, NC, on Friday, November 2nd at 7 p.m.

Hope to see you at one of my upcoming events. And as always, you can keep up with where I'll be (and when!) on my calendar at www.alangratz.com!

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They're here! The Something Rotten galleys have arrived.

Unfortunately, I wasn't around to hear the wonderful sound of the box thunking outside our door - I was off getting the oil changed for my Tuscaloosa school and library visits today and tomorrow instead. Wendi had the galleys unpacked and on display for me when I returned though, which was a treat. And thanks to our mad packing for our imminent move, we have plenty of empty bookshelves to spare!

I continue to marvel at the wonderful cover by Emilian Gregory and the interior design of the book by Jasmin Rubero. The little skull in the O shows up at the top of every chapter, and is visible on the spine. I just love that. I may have it made into a stamp, like the hanko I stamp into signed copies of Samurai Shortstop. Thanks to Liz and everyone else at Dial who made this book look so great!

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The Gratz Industries publicity department has been hard at work lately. First, Wendi got a brand-spanking new web site to feature her quilt projects. Now Alan gets a brand new web site too - featuring Samurai Shortstop and Something Rotten, which starts stinking up bookstores this fall! Check the new web site out here, and let our publicity department know if you see any broken links or misbegotten typing!

(And if you don't get it by now, Alan is the publicity department.)

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After receiving a gentle yet stern reminder that I had posted the unofficial Something Rotten artwork prematurely (oops! my bad!) I took the images down. Today I received the new and improved artwork, with permission to post at will!

Without further ado, here is the cover of Something Rotten!


I totally love it! And here's the whole front and back, laid flat:




The fabulous jacket design (front and back) is by Emilian Gregory. Check out that fantastic paper plant and the whispy smoke. The trees even bring in the environmental/rural angle of the story into the jacket!

I just could not be happier with the entire look and feel of this book. I recently got the inside page layout as well, and each of the chapter headings features one of those mini Venture Bros./Scooby Doo skulls. Very cool!

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