Jeri Smith-Ready

Final Crush Tourney incentive

So yeah, here we are with four and a half hours left and 2000 votes down. It's not looking good for a Zach victory, but the last 19 hours have been an amazing good time, and once again, I'm overwhelmed with the love you've shown for this sweet Scot.

Now, I'm well-known for springing final-hour incentives in these things to stage giant Team Kilt comebacks. Like most things I do, they're never planned, always spontaneous.

The most famous example came last year during the Final Four round. I'd promised that if Zachary won, I would write him a short story. Things looked bleak, and I really wanted to write it, not just for me, but for the readers who loved him. So with an hour left I said I'd still write the story AND put Team Kilt members in the acknowledgments, if Zachary got 5000 votes.

Which he did. And he won, which was TOTALLY not what I was trying to do. I just wanted Team Kilt to go out with a sense of pride and accomplishment.

This time, I thought of a final incentive, but not last minute. I wanted to share it with you now.

The number 3 is significant throughout the SHADE series, but especially in SHINE. Going through Eowyn's research, Aura and Zachary find mentions of the "third thing" that may have been created at Newgrange, that started the Shift. Zachary breaks out the Hegelian dialectic: A, Non-A, and B, referring to a thing, its opposite, and a third thing that is a synthesis of the two.

(Yeah, Hegel. Who says paranormal YA has to be dumbed down? Pfft.)

Aura, as always, puts it in plain speech (SHINE page 100):

Zachary wasn’t a replacement for my first love. He was my third half, as odd as that sounded. With him gone, I felt—not incomplete, exactly. More like unfinished. Like there was something I was meant to be and do and discover. Without Zachary, that something would always be out of reach.  

This thing between him and me had turned into Us, an entity to be kept alive at all costs. 

And then again at the end (page 389):

Us. That entity we'd create, the one that craved a life of its own, the one that could only be nurtured by each of us equally. If Zachary or I--or both--put ourselves before the other, that Us would wither until we were just another couple who met, fell in love, and grew apart. We'd be ordinary. And after all we'd been through all we'd overcome to stay together and alive, we were anything but ordinary.

Heh, that last line definitely applies to Team Kilt. You are anything but ordinary.

With that in mind, here's my final incentive, having to do with the number 3, and all of you:

If Zachary receives 3000 votes before midnight, I'll add all of the CURRENT Team Kilt members to the acknowledgments of Zachary's novella, "Shattered." 


How do you know if you're Team Kilt? If you tweeted, Facebooked, blogged, or even just voted for him today, you are Team Kilt.

So as not to flood my own inbox, if you want to be in the "Shattered" acknowledgments, please write to  Zachary at jerismithready dot com and say, "I am Team Kilt!" Say how you want your name to appear--your full name, first name, or twitter name, whatever. And say something nice to Zach while you're at it.

Now go vote and show him you love him. And let's have us a PARTY!

Labels: YA Crush Tourney

• posted by Jeri @ 7:28 PM
• 6 comments