What's New on the Website of Clare B. Dunkle


My books -- About Me -- What’s New -- Author Visits -- The Writing Life


	This new item was my cat Lucy during her first few hours of life. If you click on her image, you will find that she's no longer new.
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What’s New on Clare Dunkle’s Website

If you haven’t visited my website in a while, things have probably changed. This page will keep you up to date on what has been added. It is in reverse-chronological order (newest things first). Each time I mention a change, I link to its page so that you can view it quickly.

If my webpages are looking strange on your computer, you may need to refresh your browser or delete your old Internet files. Parts of those old, cached files may be showing through on the new pages, making them display oddly.

For those who are interested: I am my own webmaster, and I design, create, and maintain all of my own pages. I use Dreamweaver MX 6, Dreamweaver’s extension called Coursebuilder, Paint Shop Pro 9, Microsoft Word 2003, and SmartFTP. The ISP Parcom.net hosts my two sites.

MARCH

My dear friend Christopher Ransom, whose debut horror novel, The Birthing House, became an international bestseller, is one of the first readers of The House of Dead Maids, and he has graciously allowed me to put an excerpt from his letter about it on The House of Dead Maids front page. Not only is Chris a fine author, he is that rarer thing: a thoughtful, humble, generous, great-hearted human being. I am blessed to have such friends.

FEBRUARY

ARCs of The House of Dead Maids will be out soon, and Reka and I just finished the first page proofs. In keeping with the style of an old Victorian novel—like my old Everyman Library copy of Wuthering Heights, in fact—a small black-and-white illustration introduces each chapter of The House of Dead Maids. I have posted a link to these illustrations on The House of Dead Maids main page: click on the image there to see all of the others.

They’ve turned out wonderfully spooky—even a little gruesome! (I didn’t realize my book had such grim images in it until I saw Patrick Arrasmith’s work.) But I think they’re perfect. The artist worked very hard to incorporate all of my feedback into the illustrations, so they are true to both the letter and the spirit of the story.

DECEMBER

I was very pleased to learn that the committee for the Grand Canyon Reader Award has placed The Sky Inside on its 2011 list. This is particularly welcome news because a number of my husband’s family members live in Arizona, and he and I have spent many happy vacations in the state. My late father-in-law, a longtime Phoenix resident, would have been thrilled to know that schoolchildren all over Arizona would be reading a book of mine. (I dedicated Sky’s sequel, The Walls Have Eyes to my father-in-law.) I’ve added this news to The Sky Inside pages.

Bryce Milligan wrote a dynamite review for The Walls Have Eyes in The San Antonio Express-News. This year’s book has suffered from the downturn in the economy: everyone I worked with at Simon & Schuster has subsequently been laid off, and it’s clear that the number of review copies out this year has been very tight. Sequels don’t tend to get much review attention as it is, so I was especially pleased to read Mr. Milligan’s thoughtful review. And librarian Cindy Mitchell at Kiss the Book has posted a very nice review as well. (If you haven’t yet encountered Ms. Mitchell’s wonderful and exhaustive lists of reviews, you’re missing out on a marvellous resource!) I’ve added excerpts from these reviews to The Walls Have Eyes pages.

I recently discovered that Booklist put The Sky Inside on a Core List: Dystopian Fiction for Youth. I’ve added this welcome news to The Sky Inside pages.

NOVEMBER

I’m very happy to report that By These Ten Bones will be coming out in a paperback edition, probably very early in 2011. We authors aren’t supposed to have favorite books any more than mothers should have favorite children, but I have to admit, that book is a favorite of mine. I’ve added the good news to my By These Ten Bones pages.

OCTOBER

I’m very pleased to report that I’ve finished the background pages for The House of Dead Maids. I hope these pages challenge the way you think of Emily Brontë and her masterpiece, Wuthering Heights. You may find a complete list of the webpages concerning my research here.

Since Reka and I have just finished up our work on next year’s book, The House of Dead Maids (my Wuthering Heights prequel), I’m beginning to post the webpages that deal with it. I don’t ordinarily post a book’s webpages so early, but I’m doing so this time because I did a tremendous amount of research for this book, and I want to post the background pages that deal with that research before I forget everything I learned. Besides, I have to say, I’m very excited about The House of Dead Maids. We authors aren’t supposed to have favorite books any more than mothers are supposed to have favorite children, but this book is very special to me. It came along at a very dark time in my life, and maybe that’s why. In any case, you’ll have the opportunity to look at all the information about it well before you can actually order a copy—the cover isn’t even designed yet.

In these The House of Dead Maids pages, you can find another of my husband’s photograph collections. These were taken in Yorkshire during my research for the book. I’m afraid the allusions to various characters or locations in the book won’t make much sense right now, but at least you can enjoy the scenery.

I had to redesign my homepage to accommodate the new book title. That’s quite a collection of book titles on the homepage now! It seems like only yesterday when we were putting up the pages for The Hollow Kingdom. Tempus fugit indeed!

JULY

The release of The Walls Have Eyes is right around the corner now, and the first review is already in (from Kirkus, which cultivates as always the virtue of promptness). In honor of the review, which was quite nice, I’ve posted a full set of pages for The Walls Have Eyes. I’ve put up two sample chapters, some early reader questions, and edition information, as well as a page of background notes describing a bit about how the book came to be written.

I’m aware that The Sky Inside still lacks a reader questions page, and I apologize to those of you who took the time to write me with questions. I hope to have those questions posted soon. This has not been the best year for me to get to reader mail!

MAY

This has been a tough year in the Dunkle household. If you’ve written to me and haven’t heard from me, that’s because I haven’t been spending much time at home. My younger daughter is in intensive treatment for anorexia in St. Louis, and I’m living with her there.

The good news is that my writing projects are going well. Both books currently in production are moving smoothly toward their release dates. And my daughter and I have started a collaborative project, a memoir about our experiences with her disorder. Its working title is Skeleton Girl.

I’ve made changes to the About the Author page to reflect this new project.

FEBRUARY

Bookplates are back. I’m very happy with my new bookplate, which is based on a classic Antioch bookplate design. The old Antioch bookplates have a special place in my childhood memories. You may request signed bookplates by following the directions on this page, and if you too miss the wonderful old Antioch bookplate styles, by all means contact BookplateInk.com, as I did, and order a set of your own. It’s what the well-dressed book is wearing.

I’ve added another couple of author visits to my calendar on the Book Signings and Talks main page. One of these is during the Texas Library Association convention: I will be signing at the Simon & Schuster booth on Wednesday from 1 to 2 pm. ARCs should be available there of The Walls Have Eyes. I will be doing further signing at TLA, with the times to be announced closer to the event.

Those of you who are working on publicity items for author visits may be glad to learn that I’ve added a high-resolution photo of myself to the website. You can reach it by clicking on the oval picture of me on any of the About the Author pages and download it for your documents or banners.

DECEMBER

I’ve temporarily withdrawn the mailing address for bookplates from the Bookplates page. Those of you who have ordered them lately have noticed that you haven’t received anything. That’s because my last batch of bookplates looked sad indeed, and I couldn’t bear to send them out to you. I’m in the process of ordering new bookplates that won’t be quite such an embarrassment, and when they arrive, I’ll fill the requests I have on hand as well as repost the mailing address on the website.

The Hornbook recommends The Sky Inside. I added an excerpt from their review to the Sky Inside main page as well as the Reviews & Editions page. I also found two very nice reviews of the audiobook Sky Inside, so I added those to the Reviews & Editions page. And The Walls Have Eyes now has both cover art and book jacket copy, so I added the cover illustration to the books page as well as to the Walls Have Eyes main page.

I’m trying to find the time to answer some of the reader questions that have come in about The Sky Inside, but that may have to continue to wait. Reka and I are working on the revision to The House of Dead Maids right now, and that work will probably occupy me until the end of January.

NOVEMBER

I’ve completed the website’s facelift. As some of you may know, before this month, my website had not had an overhaul in some time. In dog years, my website is middle-aged. In Internet years, it’s more than senile. It’s dust. It’s clay tablets with cuneiform writing! So an overhaul was definitely due.

Every page now has a menu bar on the lefthand side, with the exception of the Home Page and the Writing Life page. If you’re not seeing that lefthand-side menu bar when you look at my pages, you’re looking at old data that your computer has stored for you. Force a refresh by clicking the button on your browser that has the two arrows chasing each other (Internet Explorer) or an arrow chasing its tail (Firefox). This will give you the latest version of the page.

I’ve updated all the photographs in the two photographic sections of the site: these are the About the Author photographic section and the By These Ten Bones photographic section. Monitor resolutions have changed considerably since I first posted these pages. My photos had shrunk away to almost nothing! Now they’re back, and I added quite a few new photographs to the About the Author section, as well as a new page about life in Europe.

Now, if only I can get to my reader mail...