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| 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 AUGUST I’m going on a blog tour to talk about The House of Dead Maids: So I’ve added this information to The House of Dead Maids front page. When I started this website seven years ago, Facebook and its peers didn’t exist, and blogs were not yet one to a household. The idea of contributing content to the Internet was still a little daunting: you needed to buy a domain, you needed to find a hosting site, you needed to procure an FTP program, and you had to figure out how to handle HTML. Nowadays, six-year-olds are showing off their latest photos on Facebook, and every grandpa has his own blog. The Internet has become a two-way street. Seven years ago, I began posting reader art on my website. My career was young; only about five people had heard of my work, and only about three of them took the time to write me. Those were fun days. Great reader mail came in. I loved reading it, and I loved responding. Great reader art came in. I loved it all, and I loved posting it, too. Then more than five people began reading my books, and my career became much more complicated. At the same time, my family faced life-threatening medical issues. I struggled for years to keep up with it all. Reader mail, which is very important to me, tended to stack up—sometimes for months. And the reader art lay around in small piles on my desk. Whenever I got a minute between deadlines and doctor visits, I tried to catch up on the mail, and I usually succeeded, more or less. It was the reader art that fell to the bottom of the priority list every time. I couldn’t seem to get the artwork posted. I still can’t. I love receiving it. I marvel at the creativity and insight of you artists out there. But I think of how disappointed my artistic readers have been over the years, sending me their work and waiting to see it appear... and the fact is, it just doesn’t happen. So I’ve taken down the Reader Art pages. The links have all gone away. I console myself that you artists now have easy access to the Internet, and I’ve seen for myself some of the fan art you’ve posted out there. You certainly don’t need to wait for me anymore. Early reviews of The House of Dead Maids are starting to come in. By and large, I’m very pleased. I’ve added a couple of nice comments from the Bookends blog and from Sara McClung’s Babbling Flow blog to The House of Dead Maids jacket and edition pages. I’ve added a new criticism to my Criticisms of The House of Dead Maids page. One neither can nor should answer most criticisms readers put forward about a book—tastes range so widely that I can generally find exactly opposite statements about my books if I choose to look for them. A reader’s experience of a book is intensely personal, and the criticisms arising from this experience are equally personal. Lord knows that I always find both good and bad things to say about just about every book I read, and expressing my literary opinions is one of the nicest things about being a reader. Not every writer is a good sport about it, but I used to be a librarian, so I am. I think it’s one of a reader’s inalienable rights. But in the case of this book, certain criticisms seem to me to be “teachable moments.” They concern misunderstandings, not necessarily of my book, but of Emily Bronte’s work. The scholar in me can’t resist the opportunity to do a little lecturing about Emily, so I have added the criticism, “The language in your book is too old fashioned/not old fashioned enough” to my Criticisms page in order to do a little teaching about the writing style of Wuthering Heights. Prompt as always, Kirkus is the first of the major journals to review The House of Dead Maids, and it’s a very nice review, too. I’ve posted excerpts of it on The House of Dead Maids front page and editions page. JUNE The House of Dead Maids book trailer is here! Mr. Timothy Hall constructed this astounding book trailer as a favor for my editor, Reka Simonsen. And it’s perfect. I couldn’t be prouder! So I’ve added links to it on The House of Dead Maids front page and on the reviews & editions page. For those who have been waiting to see a movie of my work—here it is! I just received word that Recorded Books will be releasing the unabridged audio edition of The House of Dead Maids. Also, it will be coming out in a Kindle edition. This is lovely news, and I’ve updated The House of Dead Maids front page and edition page with this information as well as the main books page. Also, Becky’s Book Reviews is an early-bird reviewer for this title, and I’ve added a nice quotation from her blog review to my pages. The paperback edition of By These Ten Bones will be coming out in February, 2011. Thank you, Holt! I love this book. We authors shouldn’t have favorites, but this is a favorite of mine. I’ve noted the release date on the By These Ten Bones front and edition pages as well as added it to the main books page. MAY I have to admit, I pretty much ignored poor little The Walls Have Eyes when it came out because I had changed publishing houses and was deep in the middle of getting The House of Dead Maids ready for publication at the time. But lo and behold, while I was busy with other things, The Walls Have Eyes made some good friends among reviewers and librarians. I was very happy to discover these nice reviews and have posted excerpts on The Walls Have Eyes front page and editions page. My favorite (from LOCUS): “This is an intriguingly weird world. ...” Amen! APRIL The cover art for The House of Dead Maids is here! I’ve posted it on The House of Dead Maids front page and also on the books page. The manuscript for Vanishing Girl (formerly Skeleton Girl, and likely to change titles again before this is over) is complete at last. It’s a remarkable story. There are parts of it that even I have trouble believing—and I lived them! I’ve updated the About the Author front page to reflect the newly finished book, which is my eighth, and I’ve begun talking to my editor about Book Nine. 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! Webpage text copyright 2010 by Clare B. Dunkle. Homepage photo and the above photos copyright 2005 by Joseph R. Dunkle. |