Saturday, August 19, 2017

New Website!

joannaruthmeyer.com

Hi all!

My new website is up and running!! I'll be posting updates over there from now on, but never fear, my blog archives will remain untouched here!

So. Hie thee to joannaruthmeyer.com for latest news, updates, and soon-to-come shiny exclusive content. Thanks for following along on my publishing adventure, and I hope you'll continue the journey with me!

Much love,
gamwyn

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

My Cover!

Hey, all!

In case you missed it, my cover was revealed last week over on Mundie Moms! (Click through to read an excerpt, which includes a storm at sea, a mysterious illness, and a great creature glimmering out among the waves…)

Here's my cover, in allllll its glory:



Besides the cover as a whole (I MEAN YOU GUYS IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL JUST LOOK AT IT 😍), I ADORE the tail on the a in sea, and the long elegant r on the end of Meyer. I'm in love with the silver-blue color scheme, the way the light shines from that mysterious jar, and the expression on the model's face. The cover is so mysterious and beautiful and fantastical and eerie, and I love it to bits! I'm in awe that my book has a face now, and I'm sooooooooooo excited to hold it and stroke its pretty pages when my ARCs arrive soon!

In other news, a website is in the works, and I've been updating my Facebook author page fairly frequently, so feel free to follow me on there if you haven't already. And of course I'm allllllways on Twitter! 😜

Cheers, and thanks for following along on this marvelous adventure! 💚

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Update!

Hi everyone!

Many apologies for not posting ALL YEAR. 😳

In my defense, I've been a liiiiiiittle distracted growing and having and keeping alive this adorable guy, who will be five weeks tomorrow:


My husband and I also bought a house (with grass and trees and actual space for my ginormous piano!), so that's been keeping us busy, too.

I'm getting soooooo excited about the release of my novel, now titled Beneath the Haunting Sea, which is coming out January 9th, 2018! I can't believe how soon that is! I can't believe it's actually happening! Twelve-year-old me is still doing cartwheels. 💚

You can add Sea to GoodReads if you wish, and it's up for pre-order on Amazon and B&N, as well as my favorite local indie Changing Hands.

I've seen my cover and you guyyyyys it's so gorgeous! Cover reveal coming SOON—I can't wait to share it with you all!

I'm looking to transition to a website, Facebook author page, and hopefully a newsletter in the near future, so I probably won't be blogging much here, but do watch this space for updates and links to all the things!

Hugs and books and fuzzy cats,
Joanna

Friday, January 6, 2017

Lifelong Dreams & Magical Stoplights

Dear Readers, I have a story to tell you. An incredibly wonderful, magical story. So brew some tea, gather a cat or two, and get comfy!! I'll wait.





Ready?

Okay.

So.

Once upon a time, I signed with Sarah Davies, the most fantastical literary agent of all. (She is both powerful and wise, and I'm pretty sure she's a wizard.) With Sarah's guidance, I revised the book formerly known as The Whale and the Tree three and a half times from May through September of 2015. It was difficult and mind-bending but ultimately incredibly rewarding. And I was so proud of the final result!! Somehow, my novel—re-titled The Haunting Sea—ended up being more like itself after all the revising than it was at the beginning. The story felt deeper and richer and better.

At the very end of September, we were ready to go On Submission.

*cue excitement and terror and dreams of going to auction and selling my manuscript in under two weeks*

I'm still not sure if querying or being on sub is worse. Each has their own unique torments, but both have several things in common:

    1. Waiting.
    2. Rejection.
    3. Despair.

I'm kidding about the despair part (but not really……)

By November, we had collected a good number of rejections, and several offers to revise and resubmit, otherwise known as the Dreaded R&R. I spoke to two of the editors requesting R&Rs on the phone. One of them really piqued my interest, and after lots of brainstorming and note-taking, I screwed my courage to the sticking place and revised my book again.

I finished in January, right before my birthday, and had visions of an extra special present appearing in my inbox.

Instead, we waited.

And waited and waited and waited.

And collected more rejections in the meantime, until all my fragile hopes were pinned on that R&R.

In April, we finally heard back from the editor……… and it was a no.

I was absolutely devastated, and began to think that this book wasn't going to be The One. I was busy working on something new, and tried to channel all my energy into that.

We sent out a few more submissions. More Rs came in.

At the end of May, Sarah mentioned we might want to think about putting this manuscript aside.

*cue despair and sobbing and ice-cream-eating and way too much Candy-Crush-playing*

On a Tuesday in June, I called my husband whilst driving to go teach piano lessons, and basically expressed to him my deep despair. He told me not to give up yet.

On that same Tuesday in June, whilst driving back from piano lessons, I checked my email at a stoplight. Incidentally, this happened to be the very same stoplight where, in November of 2014, I checked my email and discovered a full request from the agent who eventually became my very first offer of representation, leading to three additional offers and resulting in me signing with Sarah.

So in my inbox on that Tuesday in June, at the stoplight that might be a little bit magical, I found a note from Sarah. She'd forwarded me an email from an editor who had previously been a reader for one of the editors we'd submitted Sea to, but was now an acquiring editor for Page Street Publishing (follow?). Page Street was launching a YA line, and the editor remembered Sea, and was writing to ask if it was still available!

Sarah sent the editor the revised version of Sea, and that curious creature called Hope came out of hibernation and started following me around again…

The editor liked it, and passed it on to her higher up. Sarah had a conference call with everybody at Page Street. Hope stampeded through my living room and made me some cupcakes.

We got a tentative offer… as long as I was willing to do a sample edit of the first few chapters with them. I said HECK YES (in a super professional way, of course). I spoke with them on the phone. I emailed back and forth with the editor I'd hopefully be working with. I actually got excited about digging back into this wretched book again.

I wrote two and a half brand new chapters in three days, and emailed them to the editor.

She emailed back the next day…… and said she LOVED them. She passed them on to her higher up. And HE loved them.

They made their offer OFFICIAL.

THEY MADE THEIR OFFER OFFICIAL, YOU GUYS.

My weird little novel that I first penned during NaNoWriMo 2006—the one about the girl who's cast out from her homeland and the moody boy who plays piano and the talking whale—PAGE STREET WANTS TO PUBLISH IT.

In fact, Page Street IS going to publish it!!

You guys, I am so profoundly, deeply, overwhelmingly blessed to announce that The Haunting Sea is going to be a REAL book—A REAL BOOK, YOU GUYS—and it's coming to a bookstore near you Winter 2018!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here's to stories and waiting, to wizardly agents and fairy-godmother editors, to magical* stoplights and dreams coming true.

Here's to happy endings!!


November 30th, 2006:
The newly-completed first draft of The Whale and the Tree.

December 16th, 2016:
Signing the contract for The Haunting Sea a decade later!


______
* I don't actually believe** the stoplight is magical.

** Although, of course, it might be. ;-)

Thursday, December 8, 2016

December Days are Here Again

Happy December, everyone!

So sorry (again) for my scant posts this year. Let's see if I can catch you up!

As of yesterday, I finished the rough draft of my weird little WIP. I totally rushed through the ending just to have something down on paper, and as a whole, the manuscript is *probably* the worst thing I've ever written 😒, but at least now I'll have something to work with when I eventually revise! I was juggling a lot in this book—a huge cast of characters, landscapes/settings that I didn't totally work out/have clear in my head, and an unwieldy plot that doesn't really make sense as it stands. But. You can't revise a blank page, as they say, and for now I am quite happy to have completed my eighth novel!

At least it looks good! I ran out of white paper, so the last quarter is green, haha

And now, as I like to do, here's some stats for Novel No. 8:

Word Count: 66,110
Begun: August 3rd
Finished: December 7th (I was only working on it off and on)
Number of Dangling Plot Threads: At least twelve
Number of Badly Handled Plot Twists: Two
Number of Badly Developed Characters: All of them!! 😐
Number of Times I forgot I had a Whole Army Stashed in a Cave: Too many to count!!

We finally got to bring Cleo home on Saturday, and are currently in trying-to-convince-her-and-Bertie-to-be-friends mode. So far Bertie seems into it, and Cleo just wants to kill him……… they're in separate living quarters right now, but we're trying our best to introduce them slowly! Cleo is THE SWEETEST cat around people, but we think she had some baaaaad encounters with other cats when she was a stray, so we gotta convince her that Bertie is a friend!

Hubs and I celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary in October! We went to San Diego, and one of the highlights of our trip was a visit to the Maritime Museum—we got to wander about on a bunch of old sailing ships, which was super awesome!!

That's the HMS Surprise behind us!
So anyhoo, that's a bit of what's been going on in my neck of the woods lately! Currently gearing up for Christmas, and enjoying the lovely cool weather I waited sooooooooo long for.

Until next time!

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

WIP Love—Halfway Home!

Earlier in the year, I had a weird novel idea sparked by—I kid you not—watching that show Little Big Shots hosted by Steve Harvey (super great show!!).

Things sorta spiraled out of control from there, and whilst waiting on other things, I decided to plot and outline this weird (WEIRD) story. I officially started writing it on August 4th, and have been working on it off and on since then, time permitting. As of this evening, I am OFFICIALLY halfway to my projected word count of 75,000!! *confetti*

Look, I made a mini white board out of a picture-frame shaped like a whale! :-D
Anyway, I'm having a lot of fun with it, even though I'm definitely remembering why revising is SO, SO, SO necessary once you hit that final period on your rough draft…

I'm also getting to the point in the story that excites me the most, which is pretty awesome. But holy cow, I don't think I've ever juggled this many characters before, I'm writing in first-person present, and I'm doing my darnedest to keep SEKRETZ from the reader, which is a super interesting plot device I've never attempted before.

I don't know if this acrobat-turned-assassin-magical-boy-army-of-bears thing will ever see the light of day, but at least it's keeping me out of trouble (sort of) for now, right??

Happy writing, all!

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Writing & Reading & Minecraft (oh my!)

Hey everyone!

Just another little quick update… Apologies for the dearth of posts lately! Sometimes it's easier to say nothing at all than to come up with random things to write that aren't what you *really* want to write about but can't yet for whatever reason. (Okay, that was cryptic!!)

But let's see, here's some of the things I've been up to lately:

  • I wrote Part One of Weird New Novel and got up to 26,046 words! It's strange and not well-written yet and confusing and there is literally zero character development, and most of it is spent wandering in a cave, but I think there might be something there anyway…… maybe?? In other words, it's an UNCOMPLETED ROUGH DRAFT. Hoping to get back to it soon! :-)
  • I hit my 30 books reading challenge on GoodReads and am still going strong, which is good, because I have a lot more I want to read before the year is over!! I just finished THE CROWN'S GAME, by Evelyn Skye and I loooooooooooved it.
  • On a related note, my three favorite books of the year so far are:
    • THE WINNER'S KISS, by Marie Rutkoski
    • MY LADY JANE, by Brodi Ashton, Cynthia Hand, and Jodi Meadows
    • THE CROWN'S GAME, by Evelyn Skye
  • I got to meet up with some lovely Arizona-based YA writers a few weeks ago, and it was a blast. I had no idea there were so many of us stranded out here in the desert! :-)
  • Hubs and I have been playing a lot of Minecraft lately. It's awesome. The other night we wandered away from our base and almost got hopelessly lost forever, but made it back in the end. I tamed a couple of cows and some sheep and am gonna try for chickens next!! :-D
  • Am currently obsessed with this song, and also this band in general:
And hmmm, I think that's about it! Happy reading and writing and living your life-ing. Until next time!