the vault of dreamers
The Vault of Dreamers, with Cover!
A cover! Yay! The cover art for The Vault of Dreamers was created by Beth Clark on the team at Macmillan, and I couldn’t be more pleased with the result. It’s creative, risky, chilling, and inviting all at once. I keep staring at the flame-like, electrical colors in the iris. I also think it’s going to be striking to see two covers side by side, when a pair of eyes will be looking out at us.
Q. How Did You Get the Idea for The Vault of Dreamers?
A. When I started thinking about a new novel to write after Birthmarked, I was playing with the idea of an arts school for wildly talented, creative people. I was also fascinated by the way popular shows like American Idol tap into our deep-seated dreams of Cinderella-style fame and fortune, where an unappreciated talent can transform someone’s life overnight if that person just gets a chance in front of the cameras. In a more… Continue reading
Steady Developments for The Vault of Dreamers
I’m not sure how reviewing copy edits goes for other writers, but I figure any chance to go through the manuscript again is another opportunity to make it better. In short, I don’t limit myself to clicking “accept” or “delete” in Track Changes when my copy editor, Suzette Andre Costello, shifts a thought into italics, cuts a redundant word, asks if “college” or “university” is what I prefer in dialogue for a character from Europe, or capitalizes Ping-Pong for me.… Continue reading
A Little Planning Ahead: Book Tour
Excuse me. I’m rather consumed with my copy edits. They’re due Thursday, like in three days, so I’m pretty much focused exclusively on my book. It’s like having my own private time zone that no one else can enter, where we speak our own language and eat bear candies that taste like SweeTarts and talk to ourselves in the third person.
But at the same time, I’m also super excited because I’ve just seen the poster for the book tour I’m going on this… Continue reading
The Vault of Dreamers Map
My new novel, The Vault of Dreamers, takes place at the Forge School, an elite arts academy where every student is perpetually filmed for a reality TV show. The isolated campus of the boarding school is in the prairie of Kansas, where future weather fluctuates between tropical rainstorms and sunny, cool fall days. The setting, with its thousands of cameras, simultaneously bolsters the fame of the creative students and robs of them of their privacy. That mix of pressure is a key element for… Continue reading