Author: claudia

For STARGAZER Contest #5, I asked you guys to send in your favorite movies made before 1960. I admit, I had no idea you all would have such incredibly good taste in films. This list is pretty impressive:

The Thin Man
Roman Holiday
Top Hat
The Maltese Falcon
North by Northwest
Sleeping Beauty
Rebel Without a Cause (Lori Ann even has a James Dean tattoo!)
Casablanca
Cat People
Pajama Game
Rebecca
Bride of Frankenstein
Some Like It Hot
The Wizard of Oz
Gone With the Wind
Rear Window
Charade
An Affair to Remember
Calamity Jane
Brides of Dracula
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
The King and I
Dracula
Frankenstein
A Night at the Opera
Citizen Kane
The Philadelphia Story
Penny Serenade
The African Queen
Singing in the Rain
Meet Me in St. Louis
Rope
The Searchers
A Summer Place
Giant
Bringing Up Baby
Splendor in the Grass

I think my favorite entry came from April, who wrote that her favorite pre-1960 movie was either “Psycho or Mary Poppins.”

We had five lucky winners this time: Congrats to Shellye N., who won the grand prize of all four DVDs, and to Rozy C., Janel M., Jennifer A. and Sara M., who won one DVD each!

But there’s one more week until STARGAZER hits stores, and that means we’ve got time for STARGAZER Contest #6!

I have now opened up a Zazzle store! Those of you who might be dying for an Evernight mousepad or T-shirt or whatever may now sate those cravings. Within a couple of days, we’ll have the store linked to the website.*

make custom gifts at Zazzle

To celebrate, I’ll be giving 10 winners one item of their choice from the Zazzle store. What do you have to do to enter? As long as this contest is beginning on St. Patrick’s Day, with four-leaf clovers everywhere, just tell me: What’s your lucky charm? (If you don’t believe in luck, you can just explain that too.) Send your answer to evernightclaudia at gmail dot com, with the subject line “STARGAZER Contest #6.” You don’t have to decide what you want unless/until you win, but be sure that your entry contains a valid e-mail address I can use to reach you.

* For the record, I’m not exactly planning on making tons of money this way; it’s mostly so I can get a mug for myself. I figured I’d offer you guys the option.

— to be really excited that STARGAZER has cracked the Amazon Top 1,000? It had been hovering just beneath that for a while now, but for this hour at least, it’s at #968, baby!

Okay, possibly this is quite silly. In any case, it is certainly time for bed.

(You still have a few hours to enter STARGAZER Contest #5, you know –)

ETA from silly person: Now it’s #946!

Sorry I’m so late getting this up, guys — things are wild. Can you believe it’s only two weeks until STARGAZER comes out?

So, for Contest #4, I asked all of you to tell me your strangest dreams, so it seems only fair that I share my strangest dream with you. Essentially, I was fighting against a zombie attack with Willow and Xander from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and Regis Philbin. We were in a grocery store throwing toilet paper (full rolls) at the zombies, particularly the ones in fancy colors. (Lilac, I recall, had an especially powerful zombie-deterrent effect.) Well, one of the zombies shrunk Regis until he was less than a foot tall. The only way to restore Regis to his correct size was to run him over the checkout scanner. So I was trying to do this, but he’d gotten dishwashing liquid all over himself (clean up, aisle four) and was panicking — so he was incredibly slippery and wriggling around. It was very hard to hang onto him to run him across the scanner!

But my weird dreams? Are as nothing compared to YOUR weird dreams.

You guys have seen baby kangaroos hopping by your beds, found pirate ships trapped in your houses and spoken to talking purple cows. You have gone to black-and-white planets where there are mysterious rainbow trees, turned into Tarzan to escape grizzly bears and gotten punked by the entire cast of “Pirates of the Caribbean.” You have made friends with Hillary Duff when she walked into your bathroom, fought vampires with Clint Eastwood, seen a romantic reunion between dolls of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, looked down at thousands of green-and-orange fish that all had the faces of Keira Knightley, and listened to Winston Churchill and Tony Blair discuss how to get a large Victorian woman unstuck from a toilet. One unfortunate person even had the nightmarish vision of her entire school’s teaching faculty grinding all dirty on the dance floor at prom!

I could never pick the weirdest dream, but I did pick a winner: Congratulations to Cara S.! Sh chose the Marc Jacobs perfume and so will be Bianca-scented soon.

I’m tired of this only-one-winner business, aren’t you? Let’s do better with STARGAZER Contest #5!

This contest was inspired by a couple of readers who have written or commented to say that they checked out some old Cary Grant movies on Bianca’s recommendation and have really enjoyed them (and him). So those shall be our prizes this week. One (1) grand prize winner will win DVDs of four Cary Grant movies: “Suspicion,” which Bianca and Lucas see on their first date; “An Affair to Remember,” Bianca’s all-time favorite Cary Grant movie; “Notorious,” my all-time favorite Cary Grant movie; and “To Catch a Thief,” just because everybody in the world should see that movie. Four (4) more winners will win one DVD and can choose from any of the above — or, if you are a person of such exceptional taste that you already own all four, you can name any other Cary Grant film available on DVD, and it’s yours.

All you have to do: Tell me your favorite movie made before 1960!

Winners will be chosen at random. Enter by e-mailing me at evernightclaudia at gmail dot com, with the subject line “STARGAZER Contest #5.” I’ll pick the winners a week from today, on Tuesday, March 17. Be sure to include a way for me to contact you in your entry. If you’re in another country, be sure to tell me what region DVD I need to get to you. Good luck to everyone!

By the way, dhfreak is trying to get a pre-release read-along going at evernightseries. I TOTALLY FAILED at announcing this last week and am very sorry. But it’s not too late, if you’re willing to read more than a chapter of EVERNIGHT a day while leading up to the big release —

I am doing an interview tonight for a journalism student who is putting together a magazine pitch as part of her project — basically, she is envisioning a smarter, edgier magazine for teen girls. She wants to write about the vampire craze, how it connects to the Goth scene and the reasons people find it so fascinating, without shrugging it off as a pure fad the way so many mainstream publications do. I’m talking with her about EVERNIGHT, but she is looking to talk to more teen girls (particularly those who would consider themselves Goth, but not only) about this. Is anyone game?

If so, drop me an email at evernightclaudia at gmail dot com, and I’ll pass your email address on to her. (Put “Interview Volunteer” in your subject line.) Right now this is only for her school project, not for outside publication.

Still one day to enter STARGAZER Contest #4!

I don’t know how many regular readers of this LJ are following the current online discussions about racism in scifi and fantasy. (If you aren’t, magicnoire has a very good summary here.) I’ve been reading this with great interest, and sometimes sadness, at the recognition of how badly scifi and fantasy writers have often let down nonwhite readers, and how much pain this has caused, and how resistant some other people are to having this conversation.

What’s worst, for me, is my own recognition of how freakin’ white the EVERNIGHT series is. I think of myself as an anti-racist person, as somebody who is fairly aware and who tries to do the right thing, but the first time I sat down to write an original YA fantasy, the characters who poured out were mostly white. (There’s Patrice, Dana and Raquel — and more peripheral characters such as Mr. Yee and Eduardo — but as much as I love them all, none of them is truly at the center of the action. I hope to God they aren’t “sidekicks,” but I have to admit they’re closer to that than to being main characters.)

I did this without meaning to. I did it without racist intent. And in a more perfect world that had ample, realistic portrayals of people from all different races and backgrounds in its fiction, one book like this might therefore not matter. But when there’s a larger pattern being created — a pattern that pretends people of color never have their own adventures (within fiction), or that they aren’t out there reading and watching (beyond fiction) — each tile becomes part of the pattern. And I hate that my first series fits into it so well.

All I can do is promise that no other series I write will ever be a part of that pattern.

Writing more characters from different backgrounds than my own* will be a challenge, and no doubt I will find new ways to go wrong in future. But I’d rather go wrong while trying than by not trying. Meaning no harm isn’t enough; we have to work to do better.

*besides being vampires, obviously

First of all, I loved reading the answers you gave to the question for Contest #3, namely, “What’s the most romantic gift you can imagine receiving?” People named everything from jewelry of various kinds (go Lucas go!) to scrapbooks or keepsakes boxes of important moments in the relationship to special outings together to flowers, and lots of people named an engagement ring. The most unusual answer was “a dog” — for the surprisingly logical reason that a dog would then bring even more love into everyone’s life. Which is a nice way to look at it, don’t you think? A lot of people talked about gifts they really had been given, or had seen given to others, such as the surprise “renewing our vows” ceremony one husband cooked up for his very pregnant, very tired wife, who had no idea when she walked into the church that all her friends and family were there to see her husband declare his love for her all over again. The one common element: Everyone agrees that the most romantic gifts are the most personal – the ones that showed real thoughtfulness and intimacy.

Despite all the truly wonderful entries, only one person could win, so congratulations to Amy D! I’ve already talked with her via e-mail, and it sounds like the most beauteous bracelet in all the land is going to a good home.

If you didn’t win, fear not: It’s time for STARGAZER Contest #4!

I shied away from using brand names in the books where I could avoid them; I didn’t want to date the books too much. But I can tell you here that the special perfume Bianca wears, the one that smells like gardenias, is Marc Jacobs. And I am giving a bottle away to one lucky reader!

If you’re a guy who wants his own prize, or a girl who would prefer to scent the guy of her choice rather than herself, then you can choose instead to get The Dreamer, the men’s cologne I sort of associate with Lucas. Basically, this whole contest is about your chance to be Bianca- or Lucas-scented.

All you have to do is answer this question: “What’s the strangest dream you’ve ever had?”

After all, Bianca does keep having those odd dreams in the books — rather meaningful dreams — so it seemed like an appropriate question to discuss.

Enter by emailing me at evernightclaudia at gmail dot com, with the subject line “STARGAZER Contest #4.” Tell me your answer to the question and be sure to leave me a way to contact you. You have until Tuesday, March 10. And let me know if it’s okay to tell people about your dream in the blog: It absolutely does not affect your chances of winning if you’d rather I didn’t, but I thought if a few people were willing to share, it might make for some fun entries!

(BIG note: Do not tell me your sexy dreams, people! This is not a thing to tell random people on the internet! OK, I’m not entirely random, but there is a very good chance I could be eating and read about the freaky and, like, choke on something.)

FYI, due to various technical difficulties, the Contest #1 prizes went out after the Contest #2 prizes, but they are all on the way (or there) by now. And although I have not yet had the opportunity to send out ARCs for those of you who blog, I will be doing so within the next couple days, so there’s still time to get requests in!

As you might already know, we’ve had quite a lot of snow in New York, and more is supposed to be on the way — the sky has that gray, anticipatory look. I am perverse enough to like this, now that we’ve had a little break from the brutal cold that gripped the city all January. Something about snow brings out the cat in me: I could just sit and look out the window in a state of total zen reflectiveness for hours.

The day job doesn’t really allow for this, though. So the next best thing is listening to what I always think of as snowy day music — songs that may be great at any other time, but somehow perfectly the odd, tranquil-yet-melancholy mood those gray skies create.

My personal choice for the all-time greatest snowy day music artist is Bjork; there is no better snowstorm music than her album “Vespertine.” This morning I discovered, to my consternation, that I don’t have this loaded onto my iPod — what could I have been thinking? Or not thinking, as the case may be? — but other Bjork songs work well too. So do the Cocteau Twins. Right now I am listening to a new-to-me song, “You May Be Blue” by Vetiver, that is hitting the perfect note.

Do you guys have favorite snowy-day music? If so, tell me about it — I need more songs. I need a playlist, really. A Bjork-heavy playlist.

By the way, you’ve got one more day to send me your idea of the most romantic gift ever, and in so doing have a chance to win the prettiest bracelet ever —

First of all, any of you out there on Twitter — you can now find me as claudiagray. I will be synching this up with my website soon, but for the next week or so you might want to friend me direct.

Second, we’ve sold yet more foreign rights for EVERNIGHT, this time to Hungary. I’ve always wanted an excuse to go to Budapest — hmmm. Talking about the sale with friends, I wondered whether Romanian rights would ever sell. Do Romanians want to read about vampires? Or has the country that defeated the idea of a Dracula theme park just had enough of vampires for all time? Only time will tell. (Or Romanians could tell, if any happen to be reading.)

Finally, a couple things I forgot to mention about STARGAZER Contest #3 (this time for the jewelry!) — first, I’ll pick the winner next Tuesday, March 3, and second, while the address to send your entries is the same as the “Contact Claudia” section of my website, it would be better to just e-mail me straight. That way you can have the subject line “STARGAZER Contest #3,” I can find you more easily and you have a better chance of winning the most stunning bracelet in all the land. Good luck!

First of all, the big winners of the STARGAZER ARC are Marcy, Amiee, Ingrid and Audra! That’s right, there are four winners — I finally got my ARCs and advance copies in, so I upped the prize count. (If you have a review blog and want to request a copy, now is the time to strike; I’m going to go through my e-mail and try to find everybody who has asked, but I could very well miss some people, so if you want to be sure, e-mail me at evernightclaudia at gmail dot com and request again.) Now there are plenty of friends and groups on Facebook, which is excellent news.

Now comes Contest #3. I hope you guys like this one, because I do.

Lucas has both his virtues and his flaws as a boyfriend, but there’s one thing the guy definitely understands — it’s hard to go wrong with a gift of jewelry. So this week I want you to tell me: What would be the most romantic gift you can imagine receiving?

One lucky winner chosen at random will get this:

Isn’t it beautiful? Take a look at it from another angle.

So, you want one of the STARGAZER ARCs and have already entered the second contest, by friending me on Facebook and/or starting and joining groups dedicated to the book and the characters.

So now you can be a member of Evernight fans — or the Bianca Olivier Fan Club — or For the Love of Lucas Ross or even It’s Okay, Balthazar, I’ll Go to the Autumn Ball With You. You can even attend the STARGAZER release as an event. You guys are so great with this!

Still several days to enter, so join the STARGAZER fan club (if you are very confident you’ll enjoy it) or some more of the groups. (And if I didn’t name your group, don’t take it personally — gotta save something for the weekend, and I love them ALL.)

I had to stay home this morning for repairs but am now at the office. Even though I woke up at the same time as usual, having those extra few hours in yoga pants seems to have made the whole day more relaxed. Funny how that works.