Announcing ODD & TRUE

I'm so happy to announce that I sold two more YA novels to my editor Maggie Lehrman at Amulet Books! My incredible agent, Barbara Poelle of the Irene Goodman Literary Agency, brokered the deal, and she just alerted me to the fact that news of the sale has already appeared in Publishers Marketplace. Here's the official announcement:

The first novel of this two-book deal is tentatively titled Odd & True, and it's currently slated to be published in Spring 2017. An official synopsis won't be available until approximately late 2016, and I still need to write most of the book, but I'll go ahead and share the synopsis that I created for the proposal.

ODD & TRUE

A dark Edwardian adventure involving corseted heroines, deadly beasts, and the war between reality and imagination.

Once upon a time there lived two sisters, Odette and Trudchen, known to all as Od and Tru. Younger sister Tru, a girl with a severely injured leg and a talent for reading tea leaves, has grown up believing she was born in a castle to a monster-slaying mother and a bohemian father, the latter of whom disappeared from their lives because of a magician’s curse. Older sister Od has fed such stories to Tru to protect her from the family’s secrets, which include scandal, heartbreak, violence, and murder.

Carrie (left) and me (right) in 1977.

I came up with the idea for Odd & True after visiting my own younger sister, Carrie, in San Diego in September 2014. While down there, I told her about various book ideas that had been kicking around in my head. We also drove past the freeway exit for an old "castle" in the hills of northern San Diego County, a fairy tale-like structure that had inspired my imagination as a child. After I came back home to Oregon, all of the those various ideas and experiences melded together and turned into a book plot.

Currently, I think of Odd & True as an Edwardian Big Fish meets Don Quixote meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer. After tackling some heavy-duty issues in my March 2016 YA novel, The Steep and Thorny Way, and delving into dark psychological horror for my Fall 2016 adult novel, Yesternight, I'm excited to dip a little bit more into the realms of fantasy and legends.

I have until July to finish writing Odd & True, and then I'll need to figure out what the second book of the contract will be.

The year 2016 looks to be another extremely busy one for me, with two new book releases, several yet-to-be-announced appearances around the U.S., and two more novels to write, but I'm extremely grateful that I get to continue to be a working author!

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