WISHFUL THINKING

Juliette hasn't touched anyone in exactly 264 days. The last time she did, it was an accident, but The Reestablishment locked her up for murder. No one knows why Juliette's touch is fatal. As long as she doesn't hurt anyone else, no one really cares. The world is too busy crumbling to pieces to pay attention to a 17-year-old girl. Diseases are destroying the population, food is hard to find, birds don't fly anymore, and the clouds are the wrong color. The Reestablishment said their way was the only way to fix things, so they threw Juliette in a cell. Now so many people are dead that the survivors are whispering war-- and The Reestablishment has changed its mind. Maybe Juliette is more than a tortured soul stuffed into a poisonous body. Maybe she's exactly what they need right now. Juliette has to make a choice: Be a weapon. Or be a warrior. In this electrifying debut, Tahereh Mafi presents a world as riveting as The Hunger Games and a superhero story as t

So the blog's undergoing some major changes in light of the coming Amazon Breakthrough Novelist Award contest, which I'll hopefully get into....provided I finish my novel on time. Till then, the blog's gonna have a hoarde of writing exercises (it'll be fun) and this is one of my favorites: QUICK TALES. Quick Tales is basically flash fiction, tiny short stories. Mostly inspired by pictures. I won't say much more, but please read the story :) from beckyrox.buzznet.com random search for inspiration QUICK TALES 1: FAIRYDUST My best friend was moving houses, moving countries, moving continents.   She announced it on the day before her departure, declaring that she will never see me again. We were lying beneath the tree in my garden, an occasional raindrop from yesterday’s rain plinking down on us. Her braided hair smelled of jasmine, and the water drops reflected millions of starbursts onto her skin. “I’m moving,” she said. “, Away. Across the

    The last thing Kelsey Hayes thought she’d be doing this summer was trying to break a 300-year-old Indian curse. With a mysterious white tiger named Ren. Halfway around the world. The last thing Kelsey Hayes thought she’d be doing this summer was trying to break a 300-year-old Indian curse. With a mysterious white tiger named Ren. Halfway around the world. But that’s exactly what happened. Face-to-face with dark forces, spell- binding magic, and mystical worlds where nothing is what it seems, Kelsey risks everything to piece together an ancient prophecy that could break the curse forever. Tiger’s Curse is the exciting first volume in an epic fantasy-romance that will leave you breathless and yearning for more. “. . . a sweet romance and heart-pounding adventure. I found myself cheering, squealing, and biting my nails — all within a few pages. In short, Tiger’s Curse is magical." -Becca Fitzpatrick, New York Times bestselling author of Hush, Hush But that’s exactly wha

As you probably know by now, I live in the tip of South India, in a green little state called Kerala. I don't think the foreign media is covering this, but the lives of lakhs of people in the state is currently at risk. A collapsing dam stands between us and the water bomb on the other side. Quakes rock the state nearly every day. The dam is 116 years old. It's lifespan is supposed to only be 50 years. If it breaks, or more accurately, regarding present circumstances- when it breaks- nearly three districts of the state will probably be affected. Lakhs of people will die, crores and crores of property will be lost, and the environmental impact of a massive wall of water slamming into the earth is beyond comprehension. This is a shout out. A post that I hope you will read so you will know that there are people living in the shadow of a water bomb, waiting for it to explode any moment. Praying for their lives, and worse, the lives of their children. Helpless. There is

  T he Daughter of Smoke and Bone might be the best written paranormal romance I've read in a while. Let me put it like this: Laini Taylor's prose is magical. She can bring to life the twisting, tangled streets of Prague or the noisy hot squares of Morocco with about as much ease as most YA authors portray American high schools. To better get this review done, let me break it into segments. Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky. In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low. And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherwordly war. Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages--not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head

Magical Healing: Should We? Magical Healing. Don’t we all love it as fantasy/ paranormal writers? Everyone is hot in romance novels, aren’t they? Wholeness matters. Beauty matters. I hate novels where the girl is described with, I don’t know, a squint or a cross-eye or as being (in one book I won’t mention because I might lose all control to think about it) “plain” (as though plain is a disability) and then the guy comes along, or some other Dumbledore like character comes along, and magically transforms her into- hey, presto- beautiful girl worth the boy!   What is this madness about? What is wrong with the girl being plain, or cross-eyed, or even crippled, for God’s sake? Won’t the guy love her enough?   I hated Twilight at one point of time because Bella kept going on about how she wanted to be a vampire because only then would she be worth Edward. (Twilight fans: maybe you have a different explanation for this, but I will never get over this weirdness) I am plain. Is th

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine where we feature the books we're waiting for!   This week, I'm featuring Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi. Obviously half the book reading world is waiting for this book, and the ones who've been lucky enough to get the ARC tells me that it's totally worth it. Read a few excerpts and quotes, and I loved it. Also, Mafi's blog is pretty awesome. You can read her at http://www.stiryourtea.blogspot.com/   SO, I give you, Shatter Me   Juliette hasn't touched anyone in exactly 264 days. The last time she did, it was an accident, but The Reestablishment locked her up for murder. No one knows why Juliette's touch is fatal. As long as she doesn't hurt anyone else, no one really cares. The world is too busy crumbling to pieces to pay attention to a 17-year-old girl. Diseases are destroying the population, food is hard to find, birds don't fly anymore, and the clouds are the

Soooo. This is THE book I've been waiting to read for so long. I'll give you the Q and A version of a review for this one. S ynopsis Cas Lowood has inherited an unusual vocation: He kills the dead.   So did his father before him, until he was gruesomely murdered by a ghost he sought to kill. Now, armed with his father's mysterious and deadly athame, Cas travels the country with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat. Together they follow legends and local lore, trying to keep up with the murderous dead—keeping pesky things like the future and friends at bay. When they arrive in a new town in search of a ghost the locals call Anna Dressed in Blood, Cas doesn't expect anything outside of the ordinary: track, hunt, kill. What he finds instead is a girl entangled in curses and rage, a ghost like he's never faced before. She still wears the dress she wore on the day of her brutal murder in 1958: once white, now stained red and dripping with b

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine where we feature the books we're waiting for! This week, I'm waiting for: PURE by Julianna Baggot We know you are here, our brothers and sisters . . . Pressia barely remembers the Detonations or much about life during the Before. In her sleeping cabinet behind the rubble of an old barbershop where she lives with her grandfather, she thinks about what is lost-how the world went from amusement parks, movie theaters, birthday parties, fathers and mothers . . . to ash and dust, scars, permanent burns, and fused, damaged bodies. And now, at an age when everyone is required to turn themselves over to the militia to either be trained as a soldier or, if they are too damaged and weak, to be used as live targets, Pressia can no longer pretend to be small. Pressia is on the run. Burn a Pure and Breathe the Ash . . . There are those who escaped the apocalypse unmarked. Pures. They are tucked safely inside the

So this is a post about novel settings. You’ve got to love these books which are set in places that seem nearly magical. By magical, I don’t mean there has to be unicorns or singing fountains, but there has to be the thrill of discovery, of seeing a whole world through a character’s eyes. So here we go with my list of awesome novel settings! Number 1: The World within a World This has to be my favourite of all time. There’s just something about there being a hidden world right in ours! It’s totally fascinating to think that you could be standing at Kings’ Cross between platform nine and ten, on September 1, and that the Hogwarts Express is somewhere just beyond...or imagine suddenly walking into something like a gateway to Faery... This is always amazing because we KNOW the world the character inhabits in the beginning, and the magical otherworld is always just beyond the veil... My Best Books in this Category: Harry Potter, which wins hands down, and Incarceron by Catherine Fisher. Ca

Goodreads Summary (a bit shortened) : A dazzling debut, a blazingly original voice: the ten stories in St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves introduce a radiant new talent. In the collection’s title story, a pack of girls raised by wolves are painstakingly reeducated by nuns. In “Haunting Olivia,” two young boys make midnight trips to a boat graveyard in search of their dead sister, who set sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab. In “Z.Z.’s Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers,” a boy whose dreams foretell implacable tragedies is sent to a summer camp for troubled sleepers (Cabin 1, Narcoleptics; Cabin 2, Sleep Apneics; Cabin 3, Somnambulists . . . ). And “Ava Wrestles the Alligator” introduces the remarkable Bigtree Wrestling Dynasty—Grandpa Sawtooth, Chief Bigtree, and twelve-year-old Ava—proprietors of Swamplandia!, the island’s #1 Gator Theme Park and Café Russell’s stories are beautifully written and exuberantly imagined, but it is the emotional precision behind