What I’ve Been Up To and Hypable Gift Guide

In For Darkness Shows the Stars news, the book was put on the Hypable Holiday Gift Guide alongside other great YA fantasies like The Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor, the Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner, Defiance by CJ Redwine, and Cinda Williams Chima’s Seven Realms series.

How cool is that?

In other FDSTS news, I’ve just put the finishing touches on the “extras” edition of the paperback, which will be available next summer. The paperback includes an exclusive reader letter from yours truly, and, possibly even more exciting, an epilogue story about Elliot and Kai entitled “Shooting Stars.”

Oh yeah, and an excerpt from Across a Star-Swept Sea. This paperback is going to rock. I’m so excited for all this new material to be out… six months from now.

But you know what’s going to be out a lot sooner than that? Shadowhunters and Downworlders, a Mortal Instruments Companion, which is a new essay collection about the series, and I’m in it. In fact, you can sign up on the publisher’s mailing list right now and they’ll email you a free PDF sample of the book, which just so happens to include my essay, “Sharper than a Seraph Blade.” (It’s about Jace.) BenBella also has a handy dandy Mortal Instruments Gift Guide up, so if you have any raving TMI fans in your house, it’s worth checking out.

Other than that, it’s been wall-to-wall secret projects around here. There’s a meme going around the writer blogs right now where people get tagged and then they talk in depth about their works in progress, and I am not afraid to say that if someone dares to tag me with that thing, I am just going to straight up ignore it. I think I’m allergic to talking much about my works in progress on the internet. When it’s subsequent books in a series, fine, whatever. But otherwise, it just gets all weird and wonky in my brain. I really believe that me working on stuff is like a photographer developing film (you know, back in the dark ages) and I need the door shut and special lights on and no one making comments as figures and objects start to appear, ghostlike, in the developing trays. That’s just how I roll.

(There were all these news stories a while ago about someone who was publicly writing her book on Google Docs and all my well-meaning non-writer friends kept sending it to me like, “what a great idea!” and honestly, I felt like having a panic attack at the thought.)

Speaking of things people are sending me: Yes, I am aware of the whole “unicorn lair in North Korea” situation. In passing, doesn’t “Kiringul” sound nice and Tolkienesque? I can just hear Gandalf intoning “Kiringul, where Tongmyong met his Doom!”

Man, I’m excited about The Hobbit. I hear Galadriel is going to shout down some walls, y’all.

So what can I tell you about my writing? I’m hard at work at what I hope will be my next book (we’ll see), and I’m also in the middle of a short story that’s unicorn-adjacent. So that’s fun.