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Because you may in fact have grown weary of listening to me go on about the You Are My Only Treasure Hunt, I introduce this final clues installment with pictures of puppies.  Everyone still loves puppies, right?  And especially ones with hats.

In any case, here we go.  The fifth and final guest post telling the story behind the story of You Are My Only has now gone live out there in the blogosphere.  This one appears on a blogger site that I find visually fascinating and deeply textured, like the best designed Project Runway dress (I'm thinking Mondo crossed with Anya).  This blogger (who is herself a fine writer) describes herself as a pain in the you know what (but I rather love her), has a close relationship to Hicklebee's (she's the resident blogger), wears tiaras, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.  I do not know if she dances.

Post 5 begins like this:

If you’ve been following these blog posts, then you understand already that I don’t write my books in some preordained sequential fashion. I don’t outline a plot; I don’t consult the trends; I don’t go with the fashions. I write about what will not let me sleep, and over time, and through countless drafts, the separate aspects of my obsessions knit themselves into a story.

One of the things that was keeping me awake at night while I was working on this book was the stories I kept reading about urban explorers—those fascinating souls who explore abandoned buildings, often illegally, and create entire underworlds within them. For many years, a northeast Philadelphia asylum known to many as Byberry was a favorite haunting ground for these folks. This gigantic structure had been left to rot after being shut down in the 1990s, and the urban explorers (or “cavers” as they are sometimes known) had taken over—held rave parties there, ridden their motorcycles through connective tunnels, dug through the patient records and film reels and all the wild and disturbing “stuff” that had been so haphazardly left behind.

Your job is to find this post and to also find the four other posts that very kind bloggers have lodged on their blogs.  If you do that—find all five posts, put the links on your own blog, and send me proof of your cross linking in any comment box by October 24—you will be entered into a drawing.  The two randomly chosen winners will each win a signed copy of You Are My Only as well as an opportunity to have 2,000 words from a work in progress be critiqued by yours truly.  For the full details go here.  Winners will be announced October 25, the day that You Are My Only launches.

Here, again, are the clues.

Post 4 is housed at the psychodelically-hued (we know that isn't a real term) home of a certain chick who loves lit.  I met this wonderful person at the BEA this past summer.  She was part of the awesome gang of many who surprised me with a YAMO blast a month or so again.  The post you are looking for begins like this:

Those who know me know that I’m only intermittently good at devising titles.

Undercover was called Come Back to Me, for example, until Laura Geringer asked me to please think again on that one. Still Love in Strange Places was named by my son moments b

5 Comments on The You Are My Only Treasure Hunt Final Installment: What about that asylum?, last added: 10/14/2011

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Serena said, on 10/12/2011 10:01:00 AM

I had fun with the treasure hunt.

Anna Lefler said, on 10/12/2011 10:11:00 AM

This is co cool!

I hope all your readers are out there tweeting this to get the word out...

XOXO

A.

Wendy said, on 10/12/2011 9:12:00 PM

Ha ha - what fun! I found them all and posted them here: http://www.caribousmom.com/2011/10/12/you-are-my-only-treasure-hunt/

Bonnie Jacobs said, on 10/13/2011 3:23:00 AM

I left the link to my blog about your five guest posts where you announced the treasure hunt. Is this where it should be? Either way, here's my link:
http://bonniesbooks.blogspot.com/2011/10/blog-hop-treasure-hunt.html

Serena said, on 10/14/2011 2:30:00 AM

Here is my post for the treasure hunt: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2011/10/you-are-my-only-by-beth-kephart-treasure-hunt-giveaway.html

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Readers of this blog know that a You Are My Only treasure hunt is under way.  The hunt goes something like this:  I've written five guest posts about the making of this book.  Those posts have now begun to pop up in the blogosphere.  Your job (should you choose to accept it) is to find those five entries and then post them collectively on your own blog.  Send the link to me, in a comment box on my blog, and your name will be entered into a drawing. 

Two winners will be selected. Each will win these two things: A signed copy of You Are My Only AND a critique (by yours truly) of the first 2,000 words of a work-in-progress. As many of you know, I teach memoir at the University of Pennsylvania and served as the inaugural readergirlz author in residence. I have written in multiple genres and critique adult fiction for major U.S. newspapers. Your manuscript can, I am hinting, be in any genre, save for a screenplay, about which I have absolutely zero expertise.

To make this contest a little easier, I am reprinting here the first paragraphs of the two entries that are now floating out there in the virtual world.

The first, titled "The (furious) metamorphosis of Sophie," is hosted on a blog that has the clever subtitle "Looking better in black since 1234."  It appeared on September 9th, and it begins like this:

Several years ago I began to write a novel for adults that had a certain Sophie as its focus.  She was in her late thirties and her boyfriend, Vin, had recently left her.  She was alone, a writer, and trying to piece together the unresolved oddments of her past.  Strange things were being left on Sophie’s doorstep—signs, masks, even a pot of soup—and the only thing that Sophie knew for sure that she was being lured to an abandoned asylum on the other side of the woods by people she wasn’t certain she could trust.

I’ll be honest.  Cloris and Helen are two characters who have been living with me for more than a decade.  That’s right.  I carried these two dear souls, these more-than-best-friends ladies, through a variety of novels I’d been writing.  They were bird-obsessed in one book (not so strange, since all of my books have at least one character who is obsessed with birds).  They were digging a huge hole beneath their house in another.  In an early version of the book that became You Are My Only, it was Cloris who had been committed to the asylum.