Showing posts with label YA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label YA. Show all posts

Thursday, January 10, 2013

The Live-Action Mindjack Book Trailer Reveal
(from the bestselling Mindjack series by Susan Kaye Quinn)
With the help of over 20 cast and crew members, award-winning director Beth Spitalny has brought the concept of the bestselling Mindjack Trilogy to life on the screen. When everyone reads minds, a secret is a dangerous thing to keep.

Please share!
Ways you can share the trailer:
1) Watch the trailer on YouTube (or here)! (more views=higher visibility) 2) Post it to Facebook (copy & paste below) Check out the live-action Mindjack Book Trailer (from the bestselling Mindjack Trilogy by Susan Kaye Quinn): When everyone reads minds, a secret is a dangerous thing to keep. http://bit.ly/MindjackBookTrailer 3) Post it to Twitter (copy & paste below) When everyone reads minds, a secret is a dangerous thing to keep. Watch the live-action Mindjack Book Trailer http://bit.ly/MindjackBookTrailer 4) Share to Google+, Tumbler, Pinterest, and more Go to the trailer on YouTube and click the "share" button. Click the arrow to expand and see all the options. Easy peasy. (While you're there, click "like" on YouTube, or leave a comment!) 5) Post the trailer on your blog Grab the embed code from YouTube or email me for a copy of the HTML for a complete post announcing the trailer and ways to share!
Thanks so much for sharing!
To celebrate the release of the trailer,
I'm putting Open Minds on sale!
$2.99 now $0.99
for one week only

$9.99 now $7.99
for one week only
THANK YOU to everyone who is sharing the trailer today!
An EXTRA SPECIAL THANKS to everyone involved in making the trailer a reality, including Director Beth Spitalny, Producer Angel Acevedo, Director of Photography Lance Kaplan, lead actor Nikki Flemming (Kira) and the many fine actors, crew members, and post-production staff who donated their time and talent to the project. For the making-of the trailer, see the Mindjack Trilogy website.

Susan Kaye Quinn is the author of the bestselling Mindjack Series, which includes three novels, three novellas, and a trailer. She's currently writing a steampunk fantasy romance, just for kicks. When that's out of her system, she has ambitious plans to embark on a series about the Singularity (the time when computers become more intelligent than humans) that should appeal to fans of the Mindjack novels. Or possibly play on Facebook all day. Could go either way.

Monday, May 10, 2010

I Missed the YA Train

Yup, this post is about the HOTTEST THING IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW OMG YA LITERATURE. And also about how I'm totally oblivious about it. Yes! Shocking, I know.

This is strange, in a way. I'm an eclectic and omnivoracious reader. I read a bit of everything. There are three basic exceptions.

1) Romance (though I once read a Harlequin novel out of curiosity! Luckily it takes only 45 minutes!)

2) Westerns (though I like western movies and always think I should read some westerns and plan on it and never do. I have read some literary novels that are sort of westerns, like Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, but that's really more Cormac McCarthyish than westernish).

3) YA

Yes, I am mostly unread in YA. How did this turn of events come about? I posit three possibly overlapping theories.

1) I am really pretty lame.

2) I simply missed the train. Or maybe I didn't even realize there was a train and merely stole a pickup truck and let out a YEEHAW! and tore off down the street. I think this is pretty likely. I started reading seriously in grade three when my Mom (happy Mother's Day!) forced me to read The Hobbit. LOTR followed, of course. I read a few Hardy Boys. Then Watership Down and the Duncton Wood series (and those mole books are certainly adult, what with the sex, death, and genocides of the faith). And I've read the Prydain Chronicles and the Harry Potter books, both of which sort of start out as middle grade and evolve into YA (in my completely uninformed opinion). The Prydain Chronicles I read when young (Harry Potter as an adult, perhaps my lone adult step back into the YA realm), but after that I simply read adult fantasy, sci-fi, crime, and then classics and literary novels, and then history, science, memoirs, etc. So from about grade five onward I was reading adult books.

I'm not sure I even comprehended the fact that there was a section such as YA. It was beyond the pale (or at least my interest). My parents trusted that I could handle the older stuff. But this leaves me with a sort of experiential gap.

3) My third theory has more to do with my adult self. I could go back and read YA now... and yet I'm not really drawn to, no matter how great some books are supposed to be. Why? My theory has to do with the nature of the stories, the idea that they're often (so I randomly guess!) of the bildungsroman sort. Young people and young people's issues. But I'm not a young person. I'm in my early thirties, and have kids of my own. These kids are young, though, and so I can't really engage these YA issues through them yet (in a decade, perhaps?). They make me curious, naturally enough, about stuff to do with kids. Kids literature and point of view, stories about kids. But not really the teen/YA sort of thing. And for myself, I'm just not engaged in these issues. They're long past for me, nor do I feel I have any real unresolved issues stemming from that period. If I were consciously or subconsciously working over such issues, I'm guessing I might be drawn back into such stories. So, for me, I just feel I'm not engaged right now in the sort of character dynamics that drive the YA novels.

Yet obviously I don't know what I'm talking about! Because YA is hot hot hot right now (Thank you, Harry Twilight and the Philosopher's Eclipse)! And a fair bit of this is driven by adult readers. Sparkly Loving Moms! Dumbledorf Dreaming Dads!

So as a writer and bookseller I'm curious. What draws you to YA literature? As a reader? As a writer? There is great writing there, obviously, as there is in all types of literature. Is that it? You'll look for a good story wherever? Or is there something more, something about the nature of YA itself that draws you in? And what the hell is YA anyway? I read and liked Catcher in the Rye, and yet I have the feeling that if this were publisned now it would not be in the literature section, but rather in the YA section. How has YA changed, and why has it changed? Curious to see what you all think! Lay out my lameness, if you will.