I absolutely adored this book and reviewed it recently (review HERE) and am SO excited to host Phoebe North on the blog! Her book? STARGLASS, the amazing dystopian sci-fi novel--with a serious heartstabbing moment at the end.
Writing,
Publishing, and Transformations
It happened while my husband was out. I was home
alone, dickering around at my computer, when I got the call. My agent tried to
give me details, but my brain was crowded, frantic; I could hardly hear her. It
wasn’t until my husband walked through the door that I was able to form a
semi-coherent sentence:
“Simon & Schuster wants to publish my book!”
In the weeks that followed, I often poked my head
into his office and, grinning, let loose just one word: “Book!” He’d laugh, and
I’d smile and then scurry away. It was a strange, surreal time—we wouldn’t
announce the book deal for several weeks, yet. It was like I had a magic stone
buried deep inside me, one that gave me superpowers, but that I had to keep
hidden from the outside world when I went on walks or picked up our CSA box or
roamed the grocery store, inexplicably smiling.
It’s been a year and a half since I got the news,
and while I’ve been privileged now to share it with the world—though my book
will soon be on shelves and in the hands and minds of people I haven’t even
met—it hasn’t really gotten any less strange.
When I was a kid I loved books, but I guess, in a
way, I took them for granted: the dozens of Baby-sitters
Club novels I bought from K-mart; the thick mass market fantasy paperbacks
I traded for at the used book store. Books felt no different than the toys I
played with or the shoes I wore. While I knew, logically, that they must have
come into existence somehow, their genesis
had nothing to do with my life.
Which didn’t mean that they weren’t magic, because
they were. It’s a cliché, I know, but I was one of those kids who literally stayed up reading by
flashlight under the covers, captivated by the words of Frances Hodgson Burnett
or Madeleine L’Engle. I loved how those
dense, dark words on yellowed pages made images swirl out in my mind. Thanks to
novels like The Girl with the Silver Eyes,
I was always waiting (impatiently, sometimes) for my psychic powers to awaken.
But the transformation undergone while reading was the next best thing. I could
be transported. I could be changed. Once, I spent an entire summer day reading
Anne McCaffrey in my living room, and I swear, the light that evening was
different after that—lit golden, like the skies of Pern.
And it’s exceedingly strange to be in a position now
where my words might someday have that effect on another person. Like I said, I
always took the writing of books—the
editing and design, all those invisible man and woman hours—for granted. Now I
know that process intimately. I know how my pages have evolved and changed. I
know when my characters made me cry and made me want to scream in frustration.
I know how I labored over a single line.
But I don’t know what the book will do when it
leaves my hands. It’s scary, sure, but mostly it’s extremely humbling: why, it
will do everything. Not because my
words are special, but because readers are. You take words and thoughts and
create universes out of them. And there’s nothing more magical than that.
Starglass Synopsis
Terra has never known anything but life aboard the Asherah, a city-within-a-spaceship that left Earth five hundred years ago in search of refuge. At sixteen, working a job that doesn’t interest her, and living with a grieving father who only notices her when he’s yelling, Terra is sure that there has to be more to life than what she’s got.
But when she inadvertently witnesses the captain’s guard murdering an innocent man, Terra is suddenly thrust into the dark world beneath her ship’s idyllic surface. As she’s drawn into a secret rebellion determined to restore power to the people, Terra discovers that her choices may determine life or death for the people she cares most about. With mere months to go before landing on the long-promised planet, Terra has to make the decision of a lifetime–one that will determine the fate of her people.
Author Bio
I spent the first twenty-two years of my life in New Jersey, where I lugged countless library books home to read in the bathtub, at the dinner table, in front of the television, and under the blankets with a flashlight when I should have been asleep.
I was a dork I was obsessed with Star Trek, Star Wars (who says you can’t love both?), renaissance festivals,The X-files, Andy Kaufman, Alien Nation, dragons, and Mystery Science Theater 3000. In high school, I dyed my hair every color you can imagine–but a Tenctonese can’t hide her spots.
After college, I went south, enrolling in the University of Florida’s MFA program to study poetry. But after studying children’s literature with kidlit scholars (and geniuses) Kenneth Kidd and John Cech, I started writing books about magic and robots and aliens for teenagers. And realized I loved it almost as much as I love Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
Now I live in New York State with my husband, and many licensed novels. I like to cook, watch Degrassi, sew, take my cat for walks, and, of course, write. Despite many soaked pages, I still love to read in the bath.
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