Jeri Smith-Ready

Tidbit Mooseday--I mean Tuesday - Live chat, SHIFT ARC giveaway & big news!

Hey! Our internet connection here at the retreat has been super spotty, so I haven't been online much (or rather, I've been online, mostly staring at the little dots go around in a circle on my browser tab, waiting for pages to load).

But we're having an amazing time writing, chatting about writing, cooking (washing dishes, in my case), playing pool and foosball (badly, in my case), and trying to avoid the watchful eyes of the 7+ deer, two pheasants, and one moose.

Speaking of which/whom, if you want to find out what's really going on at our retreat, you should follow Freddy the Moose on Twitter. He's like the official undercover tabloid reporter, stealing our secrets and sharing them with you.

As I've been tweeting/Facebooking for the last few days, the lovely Jackson Fierce Pearce has been hosting live video chats at 8pm Eastern/7pm Central with four or five authors a night, where you can join in and ask us questions. We don't announce ahead of time who'll be on each chat, but there are only five of us left, with one last go-round tonight (at 8pm Eastern/7pm Central, did I mention that?). And...since I haven't gone yet, you can probably draw the obvious conclusion.

So please come and ask me questions about writing or food or animals or music or my YA books. One question I suggest is:


Feel free to copy and paste that ^^^^ into the chat window if you have trouble remembering.

On Thursday I'm going to give away a signed ARC of Shift, the sequel to my YA book Shade, here on the blog. Like my first Shift ARC giveaway, you enter by answering a few trivia questions, but the answers to the questions will be contained in tonight's live chat. They won't even all be about me (one thing I've learned this week is that other people exist), so you'll have to watch all the authors to get your answers.

If you can't make the live chat, don't worry--it will be posted on the site after it's over so you can watch it at your convenience. EDITED TO ADD: Sorry, mistake! They won't be recorded, so you have to be there live. Since it's not really fair to make a contest for such a small number of people, I'll hold a separate contest next week. Again, sorry for my dorkiness!

But wouldn't you rather be among the first to hear the answer to this question:


Yes. Yes, you would.

I'll only have two Shift ARCs left after that, at least one of which will go to a randomly drawn newsletter subscriber later this month. (The signup box is over there on the right sidebar of the blog. It only goes out quarterly at most, so I promise it won't be annoying.)

Oh, and since this is Tidbit Tuesday, I'll leave you with another small thing which is actually a huge thing for me: Shift's first review, by Harmony Book Reviews. She says, and I quote... (ahem):

Shift ROCKS. Hard. I read it when I was sick and wanted to do nothing but sleep and yet it still managed to make me never, ever want to put it down...Even though it's the second book in a series, it doesn't feel like the second book in a series. What I mean by that is a lot of the time, Book 2 just feels like an extension of Book 1 and is just carrying the characters along to Book 3 with no real plot, no real ending. But Shift is fully developed and the ending is wrapped up nicely while still leaving the reader with enough questions to make them want the next book RIGHT NOW.

And then she says (and this is important):

If there's one book you pre-order all year, it should be SHIFT. It's truly refreshing and is definitely going to surpass everyone's expectations.

*flails wildly*

For more details, read the rest of the review. And if you want to take Harmony's advice, here are some preorder links for Shift, including one where you can get it personalized and autographed by me, courtesy of my favorite indie bookstore, Constellation Books.

Talk to you tonight!

Labels: appearances, SHADE series

• posted by Jeri @ 11:29 AM
• 4 comments