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.

APRIL

A very nice review of The Sky Inside is out in the April Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books. I’ve posted it on the Sky Inside main page.

I haven’t been able to answer much mail since the beginning of March, so I’m just getting to a lot of emails from February. As I answered one of them, from a Danish reader, it occurred to me that my Treasure Hunt is very unfair to you Danes. It only works with the English books. So I’ve added directions to the two pages of the Treasure Hunt to tell you what to do to get to the hidden stories.

The Sky Inside is shipping now, and the audiobook is also available. I’ve noted this on the Sky Inside main page and also added a note about the Australian paperback, which will be out in October.

MARCH

I’m one of a number of young adult authors who will be participating in Simon & Schuster’s Pulse Blogfest event online during the weeks of March 14-March 27. Among other things, we authors are responding to questions submitted by teen readers and writers. For more information about this event, visit this website, or click on the following high-energy banner:

This morning, I updated my Author Appearances page to include an event in April in Dallas: on the evening of April 16th, I’ll be joining fellow authors Dan Gutman and Coleen Paratore for a panel discussion at a Borders Bookstore. I’ve also added to that page the phone number for the nice person who arranges author appearances at Simon & Schuster, so those of you who would like to receive a publicity kit or arrange a visit directly with my publisher can do so.

I changed the kitten image on this page from my cat Tor when he was “new” to my cat Lucy when she was “new.” (Because Lucy’s mother abandoned her at birth, we took her in when she was very new.) Even though it’s been less than a day, an alert reader has already written to ask me who the adorable kitten is. I pointed out to Tor that he was on the site for four years, and no one wrote to say that he was adorable. But then I fed him, so I don’t think he cares.

Since Becca wrote to ask about Lucy, I thought others might want to know about her as well, so I’ve put her name in the caption. I also added a picture of her as a cat that you can reach by clicking on her kitten picture.

Lately, quite a few of my replies to reader emails have been returned to me as undeliverable mail. This makes me feel very unhappy because I know you readers think I haven’t answered you. But I have! Your mailbox just won’t accept my answer. So, if you want to be sure you can receive a reply from me, be sure to go into your email system and list my email address in your address book or “white list.” (That’s the list of people allowed to send you mail.) Otherwise—Jeannette and Chad, if you’re out there, please just know that I tried. And Katie, the answer is 152.

BookPage has released a nice review of The Sky Inside, and I’ve placed an excerpt from it on the Sky Inside front page. I’ve also begun to change out all the buttons on the website for buttons that look just like them, but a little better. Needless to say, I won’t be announcing the arrival of these buttons with a fanfare on this page, but if you refresh the pages from time to time, you might notice that the buttons look a little crisper and easier to read.

Incidentally, the new photo at the top of the page is one of my cat Lucy when she was just a couple of hours old. She already knew how to get her own way, and she already knew how to purr.

JANUARY

Simon & Schuster has invited me to join them at the Texas Library Association convention this April in Dallas, Texas. I will be doing a book signing on April 17 (Thursday afternoon) at the Simon & Schuster booth.

I will be at the Grand Prairie Memorial Library in Grand Prairie, Texas, on June 14 (Saturday) to give a talk about writing and publishing and also about my own troubled teen years. I posted news of both of these events on the Signings & Talks front page.

I’ve received a number of requests for author visits, but I haven’t been able to accept any until we could get settled here. Now that things appear to be under control, I’ve updated the Signings & Talks front page accordingly. Also, the first review of The Sky Inside is out, so I’ve added an excerpt to that front page. I’m pleased to note that they find the book compelling.

DECEMBER

I’ve posted a new page under the About the Author section, a tribute to my hero, Lloyd Alexander, who passed away last May. I waited a few months to write up this page in the hope that it would be easier, but I cried just as hard over it tonight as I cried the night he died. Was I a friend of his? No, just a passing acquaintance, a beginning author who dedicated her first book to him and gushed over his work. Was he a friend of mine? Oh, ever so much more than a friend. His books gave me hope when my life was hopeless, and I will always remember him for that.

I completed the webpages I’ll be posting before The Sky Inside comes out by putting up the Librarians & Educators page, my discussion of the themes and the background of the book. Coming in March will be a Reader Questions page as well as some fun information about the elements that inspired me as I wrote the book.

NOVEMBER

My manuscript is finished! And this means I finally have time to spend on the website and reader mail again. I’ve created a Sample Chapters page for The Sky Inside, and I included on that book’s front page a reader review posted on a group devoted to middle school librarianship. Special thanks to school librarian Denise Byers for her permission to include this review.

No news is good news. I finally have a home again! Every box is unpacked, and my office is an office once more. But I have exactly two weeks to deliver a manuscript to my editor, so I have had to stop answering reader mail or even thinking about the website. In late November, this crisis should be over, and I will post the jacket art and some sample chapters of The Sky Inside, as well as catch up with mail.

SEPTEMBER

My family and I are still in the hotel. This means that I have been unable to post the reader art that was mailed to me because my scanner is still somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. But I did manage to post two gorgeous pieces of art by Katherine today under the Hollow Kingdom Reader Art page. The first of these is a photograph, and I’m a big fan of it. Creative photography can produce fantastic results.

I’m still behind on my reader mail, but please don’t give up on me. I promise I’ll answer you!

JULY

Where’s Clare?

After seven years overseas, I’m finally home in Texas! I’ve been home for a week now, but my furniture is still in Germany, so I and my family will be living in hotels for quite a while. The move means I’ve had no chance to answer reader mail, but I will within the next week or two. And if you’ve been disappointed about not hearing from me, here’s something that might cheer you up: I’ve been carrying the unaswered mail with me everywhere I go, so your mail (emails, cards, and pictures) went with me through the security checkpoints and onto the planes from Germany. How many other readers out there can make that boast about a letter they wrote to an author?

I’ve updated my address on the various contact pages on the site. But if you recently put a letter into the mail to my old address, don’t worry. It should get forwarded to my new address without any problem.

JUNE

We’re preparing to move home to the United States next month, and the packing has already begun. As a farewell gesture, I’ve prepared a special webpage of European photographs under the About the Author section. The things I’ve seen, heard, and done here (such as crashing a sled into a snowbank in the Swiss Alps) will affect my thinking and writing for the rest of my life. I’m so grateful that we had the chance to live on this extraordinary continent.

MAY

Just a couple of small changes. The release of Sky Inside’s audio edition has already been scheduled, so I’ve added that to the Sky Inside front page. And the last volume of the trilogy will be coming out soon in a Danish audio version, so I’ve added that information to the proper pages as well.

Dear readers, you may have been wondering why the site has been so quiet during the last two months. It isn’t that I’ve forgotten the site, it’s that I’m waiting to add new information until we get closer to the time when my next book comes out. In the meantime, I’m working on the new manuscript. I know this makes for a dull website at the moment, but this autumn things will get lively again.

I’m itching to do some webwork, though. It’s such fun! You may be able to wait till autumn for new webpages, but I’m not sure I can.

FEBRUARY

I have created a By These Ten Bones Reader Art page, and I updated the other Reader Art pages to give them more interesting artwork on the front page. I have also posted new reader art to the By These Ten Bones page, the In the Coils of the Snake page, and the Hollow Kingdom page. I noted as well the fact that there will be a Danish edition of By These Ten Bones on that section’s front page.

Those of you who have been kind enough to send me mail or email these last few months have noticed how slow I’ve been in responding. The volume of mail is increasing, and I’ve had trouble working it into my schedule. Does this mean you shouldn’t write? Of course not! Write by all means. I enjoy every note, and I enjoy replying to them. It just means that you may have to be patient for a few weeks until your mail reaches the top of the stack. I’ve added a note to this effect to the Contact and Reader Questions pages.

Thanks to the proddings of a couple of smart readers, I’ve created signed bookplates that you can request through the mail. If you would like one, please go to this page and follow the directions. I’ve also added links and toolbar buttons for this page to the book sections, as well as to various other locations on the website where a link or a button made sense.

I’ve added a couple of additional pictures of myself under the About the Author pages and updated the About the Author and Author Interview pages as well.

I have made a number of changes to the website this week. Please do me a favor so you can really enjoy them: as you view each page, hit the Refresh button at the top of your browser (also called the Reload button, the little button with two arrows chasing each other). This brings a fresh copy of that webpage in from the Internet and ensures that you’re seeing all the new stuff on it.

If you notice a huge difference between the old and new versions, talk to someone about changing your web browser settings to dump all of your old copies of webpages (called “browser history” or “temporary internet files”). Some of you are seeing webpages that I deleted a year ago! And some of you are seeing odd blends of new and old pages. I can tell because this causes strange entries in my website stats. You’re not seeing the latest and greatest on any of the websites you visit.

The most exciting thing I’ve done this week is to post two more Hollow Kingdom short stories to the website. They’re the prize for a new Hollow Kingdom trilogy treasure hunt. To find and read the stories, you first need to gather up copies of all three trilogy titles. Then go to any of the trilogy webpages. From the Hollow Kingdom, Close Kin, and In the Coils of the Snake Front pages, you can click on the big link near the top of the page. For all the other trilogy pages, look for a new button named Treasure Hunt that I added to the toolbar. These take you to the Trilogy Treasure Hunt page.

The Trilogy Treasure Hunt page uses technology that will only display properly on web browsers that are newer than ten years old (newer than version 4). If it doesn’t display properly on your computer, check the version of your browser and consider updating it. I also made a “safe mode” version of the treasure hunt for those who can’t get this one to behave.

You may wonder why you can’t just find these hidden pages by doing a Google search on my name and “hidden story.” That’s because I hide the stories from the search engines as well!

Because my next book, The Sky Inside, is “final” now, and about a year away from publication, I’ve added a Front page for it. This meant that I had to add another link to the Home page, and that made it look very clumsy, so I rearranged it to make it more readable. And I’ve added a Books page now, so that anyone who clicks on My Books won’t have to go all the way back to the Home page. From the Books page, the links take you to the sections for each of those books.

A number of you have sent me some fantastic pictures in recent weeks, and I hope to load those later this week.

NOVEMBER

A reader with the perfectly lovely name of Clare has sent me two new drawings for the Hollow Kingdom Reader Art page and the Close Kin Reader Art page. She sent me her drawings in the mail, which is an excellent option for those who have no scanner. My scanner was on the fritz, but this was a good excuse to get it working again, so the pictures are up on their proper pages. Again, please remember that if you are not seeing the new art on those pages, you may need to hit the Refresh button on your browser.

This will hardly thrill you as much as it did me, but I have created an icon to represent my website in lists of favorites or bookmarks. Some browsers, such as Firefox, also use it to decorate the page name. The icon, in honor of The Hollow Kingdom Trilogy and my homepage, is a little moon that I managed to make using Microsoft Word, Paint Shop Pro, and an elegant little freeware icon maker called PixelToolbox.

Two readers have written to ask me why there are Reader Art pages for some books but not others. The answer is that I put up that set of pages only when I receive some artwork to post. Faith Elizabeth has sent in the first artwork for In the Coils of the Snake, so those pages exist now, and you are all welcome to follow her lead.

Recent changes to the site have caused the old webform links to malfunction. If you use the webform to contact me, make sure the form is on a colored page. If it isn’t, please hit the Refresh button on your browser to bring in the latest version of the form. (That button looks like two arrows chasing each other in a circle.) And if the page following the webform doesn’t have a colored background, hit Refresh there, too. In fact, those of you who have visited the site before should hit Refresh on every page. Your browser may be mixing old and new page information and giving you a bizarre display.

At long last, I have been able to make the numerous changes to the website that stacked up during a summer of computer problems. Poor Ophelia has had to wait since June to see her reader art show up on the right page! I realized many site visitors were not finding my question and answer pages, so I have updated the Contact the Author pages to give a list of webpages where answers may be found. (Contact the Author pages appear under the About the Author section, under Appearances, under Writing, and under the new Publication section.)

I received several emails last month from readers who were confused about whether my books were published. One poor fan was looking forward to the day when Close Kin would be released, and it’s been out since 2004! So I’ve added links to all four book front pages leading to Amazon.com, so that visitors who want to buy the books can easily find them: The Hollow Kingdom front page, Close Kin front page, By These Ten Bones front page, and In the Coils of the Snake front page. (I have no professional relationship with Amazon.com, but I buy books there all the time.)

Publishing continues to be one of the main topics of website mail, and because this career is so difficult, I often find myself depressed over having to write discouraging replies. To try to help site visitors make informed decisions, therefore, I have created an entirely new section of the website, with pages giving information about agents, editors, and publishing houses, as well as a page listing important statistics about the industry. I’ve split up my favorite quotations into those applying to writing and those applying to writing as a profession, and created a new quotes page under the Publishing section. I’ve also provided a page of advice to young writers interested in pursuing novel-writing as a career. And, for the curious, I have provided a description of the process a manuscript goes through on its way to publication.

The homepage has changed to include this publication section, which now appears together with the writing section under the new heading of “The Writing Life.” That now leads to a very nice front page featuring some of my husband’s photography, in this case from the Issenheim Altar in Colmar.

Beyond these changes, I’ve made hundreds of tiny changes to the pages, fixing links and generally cleaning things up. For instance, I discovered that this page had gotten very long, so I deleted over half of it. Who needs that much old news?

OCTOBER

We had hoped that my next novel would be out by summer 2007, but this summer my editor Ginee was occupied with a much more important Work in Progress, her newborn son Drake. Consequently, The Sky Inside will coming out in early 2008, when my family and I will be back in the States. I’ve updated the author index page with this new information.

As if life weren’t crazy enough, a cat abandoned two newborn kittens under a bush in our yard. When we found them, they were only a few hours old and already close to death. One of them was too weak to make it, but the other was strong from the start, pretty much a tiny Marine. Here she is on her first day, already able to purr. And here she is at five weeks, a couple of days ago. She’s a kitten to make any mother proud, and I’m her mother, of course. No firm name yet, but the favorite at the moment is Bussi (German for “Kisses”).

Here’s a sad story for you: The other day, I was testing links on the site and found that I couldn’t score above 95 on the Coils Quiz. One of the questions wouldn’t generate its five points. So I went about checking the link and fixing that question, only to find out that I had chosen the wrong answer! Yes, that’s right, the author fell for one of her own trick questions. It’s possible to earn a perfect score on that quiz, but only if you’re sharper than I was.

This summer and fall, I have been plagued by computer problems. First, I was unable to get to the Internet or to my email for weeks, and then my cut-and-paste function died. It is next to impossible to do webwork with no ability to cut or paste! In all the madness, I couldn’t answer email, so those of you who wrote me in July are still waiting for an answer. I can finally reply to those emails now. And Laura (“Silent Philosopher”), your email got trapped in my spam filter and deleted before I could read it. I just saw the header, and then it was gone. Those of you who may be having similar problems emailing me, please try my other email address or the web form.

In the meantime, The Hollow Kingdom has come out on paperback. The rest of the trilogy will follow in December or January. I noted this on the front pages of those three books.

AUGUST

I finally managed to add all the new Reader Questions to the In the Coils of the Snake Reader Questions page and the By These Ten Bones Reader Questions page. Enjoy!

JUNE

I’m on the downhill stretch with my new manuscript and should have it finished in a week or two. I can’t wait! Once it’s shipped off, I hope to spend quite a bit of time on the website catching up with all your Reader Questions. Right now I popped in to add the notice that both By These Ten Bones and In the Coils of the Snake are Bank Street College of Education Best Books. What lovely news! I’ve also learned that there will be Danish audio recordings of the two first books of the Trilogy, although I do not yet know which company will be producing them, and we’ve been told that they will be out in November. Also, I recently learned that VOYA included both of the Recorded Books recordings of the first two Trilogy books on their A+ Audiobooks list. I’ve updated all the front pages to reflect this new information.

Delightful news from the Mythopoeic Society: By These Ten Bones is one of five finalists for the 2006 Children’s Literature Award. That book is a favorite of mine, and I’m delighted that it’s getting some attention. I’ve added the link to the Ten Bones front page.

MAY

As I am in the middle of a new manuscript, I have been neglecting both your letters and my website. I’m sorry! I’ve popped by quickly to correct a typo and add some detail to the author index page, and I hope within a few weeks to add more reader questions.

APRIL

This month has already brought some pleasant news. By These Ten Bones has been nominated for the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award, and In the Coils of the Snake has earned a place on VOYA’s latest “Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror” booklist. I have added these items to the front pages of both books.