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If you're a Twilight buff and think you're up to some trivia questions, here's another chance to win a copy of Lips Touch! Sponsored by the good folks at Scholastic, it's a contest over at TwilightersAnonymous.com. The questions are specifically about the wolf pack. If, like my niece, you are "team Jacob," you probably have a good shot at winning.

Sample question: What specific fur color does Quil Ateara have in wolf form?

I don't know! Do you know? If you do, go HERE and enter. Contest is open until October 16, 12 pm PST. Have fun :-)

Meanwhile, here is some photography homework:

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Congratulations to the winners of the "Lips Touch - First Kiss contest"! Thank you for playing :-) It was really fun reading everyone's entries, both the true stories and the made-up ones. It's good to know I'm not the only person who had a totally gross first kiss. I read a lot of gross-out stories! Yeah, kissing is something wonderful that can go so very, very wrong!

But for the first winner, I want to present a kiss from the other end of the spectrum, from a blogger who's love story is an inspiration to me. Winner #1 is Phyllis Smith, who blogs as Granny Smith:

Kiss Winner #1

The first time I was kissed, other than by my close relatives, I was outraged. Phillip had no right to seize my face with a hand on each cheek and press his mouth to mine. I was almost four years old. He was a few months younger. As far as I was concerned, kissing rights belonged to one’s daddy or mama, not to a playmate chosen by Mama. Phillip lived on the high side of the street and I lived on the lower side. One or the other of us had to be escorted across the street so that Phyllis and Phillip (and weren’t those names cute together?) could play while their mothers visited.

Yes, I was truly outraged by that unsolicited kiss. I burst into tears while Mrs. Lathrop told my mother how they had always encouraged Phillip not to inhibit is feelings but to express them freely. She frowned at me. Apparently she felt that I was expressing my feelings much too freely.

With this early conditioning against kisses, I managed to avoid most of them for the next fourteen years or so. That’s when I had my first real kiss, the kind that can resonate for a lifetime.

It was a late afternoon of a spring day, the air balmy and fragrant. I felt pretty in a floaty green dress with white polka dots instead of my usual sweater and skirt for a day of classes. I knew that he - he of the blue eyes and wavy brown hair - would probably be sitting on the curb in front of the art building in which he thought that I would be working on an assigned project.
We had held hands. We had compared philosophies. We had hiked together, gotten poison oak together, sung together. But we had yet to kiss. And I wanted desperately to be kissed by Otto.

As I crossed the quad and skirted the chapel, I entered a cloud of fragrance from a planting of small trees with tiny flowers with the texture and scent of gardenias. I broke off a twig and stuck it in my pocket. The sun was setting and the first star appeared, and, quickly, before the appearance of other stars destroyed the magic, I wished on the first star that tonight he would kiss me.

I don’t remember exactly how we reached the hill overlooking lake Lagunita, on which waters of which myriads of stars were now afloat. I think I may have positioned myself so that it would be very easy for him to kiss me. And he did so.

It was the first of seventy years worth of kisses from the only one I ever loved. He couldn’t return the last kiss, which I gave to him in the hospital as he lay dying. I miss his kisses, but I have a treasure trove of ones to remember. Especially that first one.

* * *

Seventy years. How amazing. I found Granny Smith's blog via Sunday Scribblings, and it became the first link I would look for every week, to see what new fascinating saga of her life I might discover: coffee-farming in Paraguay, perhaps, or Phyllis's experiences manning a crisis hotline in Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love. Whatever it was, it was sure to be fascinating. Phyllis and Otto have led an extraordinary life of love and adventure, and Phyllis writes so beautifully about all of it. When I clicked over to her blog this past spring and read the news that Otto had passed away, it was terribly upsetting, as if I had known him personally. This long, beautiful marriage is an inspiration and an education in love.


The second winner I've selected, well, she forgot to give me her address or tell me if it's okay to use her name, so I'm just going to call her Mel for now. This piece is fiction, and I just think it's really well-written and appealing, and it pulled me very quickly into the characters' world and made me want to read more about them. So, yay for good fiction!

Kiss Winner #2

Gavin and I had an agreement. We made it when we were ten, forged in high ritual in the arms of our favourite tree, sealed with blood and spit. Quite appropriate now, looking back.

I knew he was gay since ever we met. It was like knowing who you could lend your favourite book to, knowing they wouldn't fold over the page corners. You just know. I probably didn't realize what it all meant, back when we were six and forced together through a Single Parent Meet 'n Greet in the basement of the Lutheran church. I just knew he wasn't like everyone else. Which, in this Jesus-lovin' shit-hole of a town, is anything but a good thing.

Anyway, the minute Rhonda shoved me in the room with three snot-nosed toddlers and tottered off on her cheap stilettos to wallow in the spiked punch, I figured it'd be one of those best-of-a-bad-thing situations and headed for the bookshelf. That's when I saw Gavin. He was perched on the edge of a miniature stool, folding paper flowers out of a Spiderman napkin. We've been best friends ever since.

We made the deal as part of our Survival Strategy. Designed to hide his gayness and my general freakitude from the predatory masses, it was the perfect cover. Everyone expected us to become a couple anyway, we just went along with it. It saved suspicion and intrigue -- nothing folk around here liked more than a witch-hunt -- and it served us well all through junior high. No-one wondered about Gavin's preference for books and art over football and moose hunting, they figured it was just him going along with his freak-nerd girlfriend who lived with one paint-splashed foot in a dreamworld and the other one more misguided impulse from a stint in Juvie. I mean, what did they expect, me being Rhonda's kid and all? Some days I wondered who was playing more of a part, him or me.

Like I said, it was good for a long time. No-one bothered us and life went on, as it does, one day blending into the next. The trouble started at Lacy Flanigan's thirteenth birthday party. It was one of those 'invite the whole class' deals, otherwise, we wouldn't have made it onto the list. Suddenly we were standing in a lavender-scented closet with Lacy's webcam pointing right at us. "Two Minutes in the Closet" with a Big Brother twist.

"We have to do it, it'll blow the cover if we don't," he said, glasses glinting in the half-light. He had way more invested in this charade of ours than I did. He'd be all but tarred and feathered and run out of town if anyone ever found out the truth.

I shrugged, not wanting to show how much the idea of kissing him weirded me out. Not that he was repulsive, quite the contrary. It was sweet scandal that he'd chosen me for his girlfriend and not one of the fleet of chesty cheerleaders from the high school that were forever sniffing around like so many randy bitches in heat. He might have been younger than them, but worth slumming for apparently. Anyway, it was weird because I knew that he wasn't the tiniest bit interested in me in that way, and it made me feel small and grubby. I hate feeling like a charity case.

"Okay then. I guess we'd better just get it on. Pucker up, cowboy!"

"Why do you have to be so crass? This is really important, Clo, really," He's got a knack for high drama. I like to point out that he's a slave to stereotype.

"Just shut up and kiss me, idiot,"

It was like one of those slow motion after-school-special kissing scenes. All that was missing was the cheesy music and fade to misty waterscapes and soaring birds. He leaned into me with his eyes squeezed shut. I know this because it was all very scientific for me at that point. I remember wondering if I should close my eyes or not, which way I should tilt my head, whether our noses would get in the way. I don't really remember how I got there, but suddenly our lips were touching. I wondered if I was expected to use my tongue.

He always smelled of sandalwood. His mother, a lapsed Bohemian, still burned incense by the wagonload, mostly to cover up the smell of their ancient cat who forgot how to get to the litterbox. The added whiff of peppermint and cinnamon from his perpetual chewing gum cocktail made me think of all the cold nights we spent huddled under a Navajo blanket after Rhonda locked me out.

His lips were cool and soft. He had a peach-fuzz of a mustache that didn't warrant a razor. A strange, but not unpleasant, tingle started somewhere at the base of my spine and flooded a rush of warmth to my face. Shocked at the intensity of the feeling, I pulled back. He stayed where he was for a moment, eyes closed and lips slightly apart. I saw that he was beautiful.

The sound of applause and cheering jolted him out of it. He pushed up his glasses and flashed me his mega-watt grin. Throwing an arm around my shoulder he squeezed me and said,

"Not so bad, huh?"

Laughing, he burst from the closet to shoulder slaps and high-fives. I followed, my face still on fire, to the delight of my giggling, shrieking classmates. For a time, I could be one of them.

It was three days before the memory of cinnamon faded from my lips and a week until I realized I'd fallen in love with him. Well, as much as a thirteen year old can love her gay best friend -- which, as it turns out, was a powerful lot.

* * *


The third winner. Now, I know I said there would only be two winners, but I've decided there must be three, because I just have to let the gross kisses represent too, and because this one made me laugh. It comes to us from "Flemmily" (which is funny, because we call my sister Emily that, though I always spell it the grosser way: Phlegmily :-)

Kiss Winner #3

I have a really awesome first kiss story.

Especially if by "awesome" you understand that I mean messy, awkward, and really embarrassing.

Let me take you back a few years....it was 2001, and I was about to start my senior year in high school. (Yeah, I was a prude.That'll come up again.)

I was attending the National Student Council Conference in Charlotte North Carolina. I'm from Montana, so this whole week for me is a fog of 'y'all'.

There were many bus trips involved--mostly short ones, but a few long ones as well. I believe we were on our way to the Panthers stadium, and we were playing "I've never" to pass the time.

The "we" involved was a host of student-council-loving high schoolers from across the country.

"I've never" basically involved holding up your hand in the air. Whenever someone listed off something that you'd done, you lowered one of your fingers. The first person to have a fist in the air was considered the loser, and then had to do a dare as ordered by the person listing off the activities.

At first, this was a terrific game for a prude to play. Most of the activities were either related to drinking, kissing, or sexual activities. I was safe.

So, the leader says something like "I've never made out in a hot tub," or "I've never gone to third base." With groans or embarrassed sighs, people lower a finger on their hand and continue on.

I never had to lower a single finger.

Suddenly, one of the guys caught on that a few of us were never coming close to losing, and the theme of questions changed drastically.

"I've never taken an AP class."

First finger down.

"I've never gotten a perfect score on a test."

Second finger down.

"I've never done an extra credit project"

Third finger down. I now had only my thumb and pinky in the air.

"I've never written a paper over 10 pages."

And the pinky stands alone. I hoped and prayed that I wouldn't be the first one out.

"I've never read a book longer than 800 pages."

Darn you, Anna Karenina. Darn you. With a fearful groan, I lowered my pinky.

I had only a fist in the air. I was the first one. I was officially the biggest nerd on the bus.

With an odd little smile, the Californian who had been the architect of my demise said. "Switch your shirt with the guy sitting next to you."

The guy next to me whipped his off immediately.

I was wearing a see through bra underneath my tee-shirt.

"No way." said I. I was a prude, after all.

"Okay....well, then kiss the guy sitting next to you."

Now, the guy sitting next to me was pretty cute. Hot even. He was a Texan. He was muscular, currently shirtless....

...and wearing lipstick.

Hot pink glossy lipstick.

See, he'd done a LOT of things, and lost a few rounds of "I've never" before I had.

One of the dares had involved a hasty coating of Maybelline. About six boys on the bus were currently sporting this look. Rather proudly.

"Kiss him?" I confirmed.

"Yep." Said the Californian. "And don't wipe your face for 10 minutes."

So, I did. I turned to my right, leaned forward, and got a slippery, messy kiss slopped right on my mouth. And on parts of my cheeks. It was kind of a smeary kiss, overlapping my mouth on one side and traveling over to the other side.

When it was over, we both had lipstick all over our faces. I'm pretty sure that my face was so red that you couldn't see it though.

So, in retrospect, I kinda get why guys don't love it when you're wearing lipstick, but I have an awesome first kiss story.

Yes. I was in North Carolina, and I kissed a sexy Texan wearing lipstick.

* * *

Thank you all so much for participating! I had so much fun reading about kissing. I hope you'll all give Lips Touch a read and help me spread the word about it. If you live here in Portland, remember Jim and I are signing tonight at Powell's on Hawthorne at 7:30, and also at the Wordstock Festival this Saturday at the Convention Center at 3 pm, where I'll be sharing the stage with Sarah Rees Brennan, author of The Demon's Lexicon, which is a very cool book.

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Happy birthday, Lips Touch! It seems like I've had a lot of happy birthdays lately: two new books and a new baby! We also celebrated Leroy's 15-3/4 birthday recently with a nice little meat cake :-) Still, I must soak these occasions up, because I won't be having another book birthday for a while. Got to finish some works in progress first.



And . . . Yippeeeee! Another starred review!!!! This one is from Booklist. Thank you, Booklist!

*Lips Touch: Three Times*
Taylor, Laini (Author) , Di Bartolo, Jim (Illustrator)
Oct 2009. 272 p. Scholastic/Arthur A. Levine, hardcover, $16.99. (9780545055857).
Look beyond the title and cover art: Taylor’s three novellas form a triptych of beautiful fantasy writing reminiscent of Charles de Lint and Neil Gaiman. Kisses are the unifying theme, with each story offering a different sort of locking lips, from giddy seduction to harsh power play. In “Goblin Fruit,” misfit Kizzy meets a fascinating new student, an unbelievably gorgeous young man who ignores the popular girls to seek her out. Taylor tantalizingly foreshadows the ambiguous ending, teasing and enticing the reader much as Jack Husk entices Kizzy. “Spicy Little Curses Such as These” is set in India and offers intriguing and culturally respectful glimpses of both Indian religion and British colonialism. “Hatchling” reveals a fully- realized world of sometimes malevolent immortals who steal and raise human babies as their pets. Present-day teen sensibilities blend with artful allusions to mythology and magic, pulling the reader into rich fantasy realms. The cover’s close-up of a lovely woman’s red lips, with red-orange flames licking at the super-imposed title, lacks the powerful, delicately structured, and subtle poetry of Taylor’s stories. But Di Bartolo, Taylor’s husband, provides skillfully detailed pen-and-ink illustrations that are a fine match for the lyrical, romantic text.

— Debbie Carton

I was also thrilled that Lips Touch was reviewed last Sunday in The Oregonian, our Oregon newspaper (I can't wait to read the other book mentioned, Flash Burnout, by Portland author LK Madigan). Thank you to April Henry for that review. And then there was the first posted Amazon review which really made my day. The reviewer, who blogs at FantasyLiterature.com, said, "Intelligent language seems to be failing me. I don't want to write a review so much as I want to jump up and down and squeal like a crazed fangirl. Lips Touch is chocolate in book form. It's dark, it's rich, it's delicious, and it's precisely to my taste." Isn't that awesome? Thank you, Kelly Lasiter!

So, Lips Touch! (Don't forget to enter the "First Kiss" contest from yesterday's post. The prize: a signed copy of the book.) And if you happen to be writing out your first kiss story for the purposes of the contest, you might want to pop over to Sunday Scribblings where the prompt this week, in honor of Lips Touch, is "First Kiss."

Sunday Scribblings is a writing prompt site that I co-founded shortly after I began blogging in 2006. I'd finished writing Blackbringer after two long years, and I'd sold it to Putnam (yay!), and while it was being edited, I wanted to write something different, just for fun. Sunday Scribblings was born as a place to do that, and I did, and I posted the stories on my blog. Several of those early stories, I realized, had an unplanned theme: kissing, and its consequences. They were interwoven with myth and fairy tale; they were creepy and sexy. They were, Jim thought: a book! And here is that book. I am so proud of it and I hope it makes its way in the world. Like a parent in a fairy tale, I feel like I'm sending it off to make its fortune with nothing but a loaf of bread and a rind of cheese in its pocket (okay, and maybe some chocolate). Maybe it will meet a witch at a crossroads and share its supper with her and be granted a wish.

Meanwhile, I've been taking some pictures. At my photography class this week we went "on walkabout" -- it's a night class down at the waterfront, so I used a tripod which I hadn't done in many years, and these are some of the pictures I got:


That's that scene in focus; here it is out of focus, which I know is a worthless picture, but I like this way it looks!
That was really fun. I'm learning a little, but mostly I'm getting a sense of HOW MUCH there is to learn! I don't have a technical brain, and photography is such a marriage of the artistic and the technical. I'll get better, anyway.

Cheers! Send me your kiss stories (see last post for details :-)

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Eek! Did you notice my blog banner is looking different? I finally got the go-ahead to post the Lips Touch cover, so after much mystery and waiting . . . [drumroll please] . . . here it is!!!!!! Yippee!
(Beautiful art by Jim Di Bartolo)

To properly unveil the book, I will let it introduce itself. Each of the three tales -- which are about kissing -- begin with a short introduction:


GOBLIN FRUIT
There is a certain kind of girl the goblins crave. You could walk across a highschool campus and point them out: not her, not her, her. The pert, lovely ones with butterfly tattoos in secret places, sitting on their boyfriends’ laps? No, not them. The girls watching the lovely ones sitting on their boyfriends’ laps? Yes.

Them.

The goblins want girls who dream so hard about being pretty their yearning leaves a palpable trail, a scent goblins can follow like sharks on a soft bloom of blood. The girls with hungry eyes who pray each night to wake up as someone else. Urgent, unkissed, wishful girls.

Like Kizzy.

* * *


SPICY LITTLE CURSES SUCH AS THESE
Kissing can ruin lives. Lips touch, sometimes teeth clash. New hunger is born with a throb and caution falls away. A cursed girl with lips still moist from her first kiss might feel suddenly wild, like a little monsoon. She might forget her curse just long enough to get careless and let it come true. She might kill everyone she loves.

She might, and she might not.

A particular demon in India rather hoped that she would.

This is the story of the curse and the kiss, the demon and the girl. It’s a love story with dancing and death in it, and singing and souls and shadows reeled out on kite strings. It begins underneath India, on the cusp of the last century when the British were still riding elephants with maharajas and skirmishing on the arid frontiers of the empire.

The story begins in Hell.

* * *


HATCHLING
Six days before Esme’s fourteenth birthday, her left eye turned from brown to blue. It happened in the night. She went to sleep with brown eyes, and when she woke at dawn to the howling of wolves, her left eye was blue. She had just slipped out of bed when she noticed it. She was headed to the window to look for the wolves --wolves in London, of all impossible things! But she didn’t make it to the window. Her eye flashed at her in the mirror, pale as the wink of a ghost, and she forgot all about the wolves and just stared at herself.

It was no trick of the light. Her eye was an eerie white-blue, the color of ancient ice in a place that never thaws, and as startling as it was, there was something profoundly familiar about it too. Esme’s blood quickened as a shock of memories pulsed through her: a world of snow and spires; a milky mirror framed in jewels; the touch of warm lips on hers.

Esme swayed on her feet. These weren’t her memories. This wasn’t her eye. She clamped a hand over it and ran to wake her mother.

* * *

Oh man, I had so much fun writing these stories, and I love them so much! It's really hard to say which one I love the most. This book came out of play, out of loosening up and writing for pure fun, about the kind of things that are most exciting and juicy and scintillating to me. Let's see . . . what are those things? Kissing, of course! Curses, the British Raj, heresiarchs, demons, goblins, shape-shifters, teenage girls, souls, immortality, forbidden fruit, LOVE. Serious soul-deep love.

And did you know, this book is illustrated? And it's printed in two colors? That is, it's your typical b&w novel, but with the addition of red, which is so awesome! Of course, I haven't really seen that yet (except in Jim's original art, here at home), as the ARC is not in color, but I can see it in my mind, and it's going to be so gorgeous and decorative. Jim's interior art is so beautiful, and the illustrations really tell whole stories of their own. Also, the fabulous designer, Chris Stengel at Scholastic, did a marvelous job making everything look so pretty, delicate, ornate, and memorable. SO. COOL!!! I can't wait to see and hold the real book. Can't WAIT! (Must wait, unfortunately. The release date is October 1.)

I've written from time to time here about how this book came to be, but I want to recap, because it's completely enmeshed in my blogging history, and would never exist at all without this space right here, for which I am so, so grateful. (Blogging, I love you!) The story begins almost exactly three years ago, when I was brand new to blogging, and during which time I was awaiting my first ever editorial letter, for my first novel, Blackbringer. Now, that was scary, that waiting. I was filled with aimless, nervous energy, and though I'd sold the Dreamdark sequel, Silksinger, I didn't feel I could begin writing it during that time of uncertainty, before I knew what my editor thought of the first book! I just wasn't ready.

To tell the truth, I really needed a break from writing a novel! I'd been working on Blackbringer for over two years, and had written nothing else in that time. When I started blogging, this strange new world was unfurling around me into cyberspace, I was meeting new people, writing in a free new way, and I had the idea -- which coincided neatly with an idea had by another blogger, Meg in England -- that I'd like to write short fiction for fun. For the pure joy of it. So we started Sunday Scribblings, a weekly writing prompt site open to all.

The first prompt was "What would you attempt if you knew you would not fail?" which is a quote that I love. Here is my writing on that, which says essentially (but with pizazz) that I would write more, and that I would write more freely, and find a way to let the stories out of my mind and onto the page. The second week I started to do just that. Meg posted the prompt "Real Life" and within minutes of sitting down to write something for it, a first line had popped into my head: "Six days before Esme’s fourteenth birthday, her left eye turned from brown to blue." The story was called "Hatchling". Writing it was an exercise in pure fun like I could never remember having while writing. No angst! I probably don't need to tell you what an amazing experience that was, I'm sure you understand :-) (And it's not like I'd turned some corner and from then on writing was only ever pure, dazzling joy, but from time to time, writing from prompts with no expectations, I can tap into that.)

So that was the beginning. I kept writing little stories for Sunday Scribblings. Here's one I love, "The Eleventh God" which is about the origin of chocolate, according to my imagination. Here is one of my favorites, "Gentlemen Send Phantoms" about a ritual three girls perform to learn who they're going to marry. And there are a lot of others. I fell in love with the way I could conjure a story out of nothingness, with only a short prompt to get me started. Later that summer of 2006, from the prompts "Music" and "Monster," came a pair stories that had something in common:

Both hinged on a kiss that had supernatural repercussions for the kissers' souls. And I thought, "Hm." And Jim thought: "Book." And I agreed that would be very, very cool. And together we dreamed it would be illustrated.

And now, three years later, it exists! It exists as a book! Thanks to the vision of the marvelous Arthur Levine, it is very close to our original daydream idea, but even better, even cooler. And that's the story of Lips Touch, at least the beginning of the story. See, those initial short fictions were very short, and I went back to each one and revised them into long stories (and in the case of "Hatchling," a novella), which wasn't always the same kind of pure joy as the initial writing, but you know what? It was still pretty dang awesome, as writing goes.

If you suffer from perfectionism as I do, I really recommend trying short pieces from prompts as a way of freeing yourself from your expectations. And even if you don't suffer from perfectionism, this is a great way to generate ideas for novels! The book I am writing now rose up out of a Sunday Scribblings prompt (but I'm not saying which one.) When I sit down with a prompt, I usually just brainstorm a little at first, jot down ideas until something strikes me as an exciting place to begin exploring, and then I just write and see what happens. When I'm writing a novel, I can't always find that freedom, though I have various techniques to try. I've learned so much from writing this way, I really can't recommend it highly enough!

I don't participate in Sunday Scribblings that often anymore, mainly because if I wrote a new story every week I'd never get any work done on my novel, but every once in a while I do it as a diversion, and it can be such great joy. Here's a more recent one with the delightful title, "Strangers Will Be Stabbed".

But back to Lips Touch. It's up on Amazon and open for pre-order (yay!!!) (and there you can find a brief description of each tale), as well as being available now to purchase, in ARC form, at auction (proceeds to benefit the Project Book Babe charity). There's a single copy, with an awesome ink illustration by Jim, and it's HERE.

To my EXTREME DELIGHT, Lips Touch has the honor of being one of six books presented at Book Expo America in May at the YA Editor's Buzz Forum. Hurrrrrrayyyyy!

Also, CHOCOLATE & TATTOO BRIBE still in play.

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