Dark YA Blogfest Signups!

I LOVE DARK YA BLOGFEST SIGN UPS


Meet your hosts: Kelley York, Heather McCorkle, Christa Desir, and E.R. King.

We are so excited to be hosting this month-long blogfest in November for lovers of dark YA books. The rules are fairly simple. You only need to post on Wednesday of each week. We ask that you try to participate in each week’s activity, but you don’t have to if it doesn’t work for your schedule.

RULES:

1. Put the I LOVE DARK YA badge on your sidebar or at the top of each of the posts you do for the fest. Make sure you link it back to the YAtopia linky sign-up.
2. Visit blogs of your hosts and other participants if you can. Interact. Make some friends. It’ll be more fun!
3. Your blog post needs to be up on Wednesday. You can post early if you want, but people will be hopping on Wednesdays.

The themes for this blogfest:

WEEK ONE...
November 2nd: Blog about your favorite dark YA book(s).

WEEK TWO...
November 9th: Write a 500-word or less flash fiction piece inspired by this picture—




WEEK THREE...
November 16th: Music and Movie Fun—Take a dark YA book and build a soundtrack for it or cast characters for a movie version.

WEEK FOUR...
November 23rd: #YASAVES—Blog about how a dark YA book made an impact in your life.

WEEK FIVE...
November 30th: Waiting on Wednesday—What dark YA book are you most looking forward to?


On the final day of the blogfest, your hosts will each being doing a giveaway on their blogs. Any of the I LOVE DARK YA blogfest participants may enter. Sign-ups will remain open for the entire month of October. Thanks for joining in the fun!



Note: If you'd like to help spread the word for the blogfest, please link to this post! The signup form won't be available anywhere else.

EDIT: Sorry, guys. The old linky list went screwy on me. I had to make a new one and manually move all the entries. Keep entering, we still have a few days to go!!

ARC Giveaway & Blogfest News

Interrupting your regular scheduled programing...

Just a quick note to our YAtopia followers, I wanted to share that I'm holding a contest over on my personal blog!

He’s saved her. He’s loved her. He’s killed for her.

Eighteen-year-old Archer couldn’t protect his best friend, Vivian, from what happened when they were kids, so he’s never stopped trying to protect her from everything else. It doesn’t matter that Vivian only uses him when hopping from one toxic relationship to another—Archer is always there, waiting to be noticed.

Then along comes Evan, the only person who’s ever cared about Archer without a single string attached. The harder he falls for Evan, the more Archer sees Vivian for the manipulative hot-mess she really is.

But Viv has her hooks in deep, and when she finds out about the murders Archer’s committed and his relationship with Evan, she threatens to turn him in if she doesn’t get what she wants… And what she wants is Evan’s death, and for Archer to forfeit his last chance at redemption.



HUSHED isn't out until December, but I have an ARC to give away on my blog. (Plus, you get an extra entry for being a follower of YAtopia... ;) )

This contest is only open for a few more days, so hurry over!


ALSO, keep an eye out for the beginning of October! I'll be posting the sign-up and rules for the upcoming DARK YA BLOGFEST. This blogfest is going to be all kinds of awesome. You'll have all of October to sign up, and the blogfest itself will be held in November.

Lovin' The Language Blogfest

I'm participating in my first blogfest! My friend and critique partner, Jolene, is hosting a Lovin' The Language Blogfest. Since I'm a language lover, I knew I had to participate in this one. All you have to do is share your favorite lines from a book you wrote or one of your favorite reads. Check out Jolene's blog HERE to see more of the participants!

First, I'm going to share two of my favorites from the book I just finished, LET'S GET PHYSICAL. It's about a girl who's tired of being put down because of her weight. Ready to take control of her life, she hires a personal trainer at the gym, who just happens to be a gorgeous, eighteen-year-old boy. On the surface, he's everything negative that pushed her here in the first place and she has a hard time trusting him, but soon she realizes he's so much more than that.

* "Something inside me almost…shifts. It’s like my eyes have been pried open and I see him. I’m really seeing him for the first time. Not the gorgeous boy, the flirty boy, the one who has girls checking him out left and right. No, I’m seeing him."

* "His words are my life boat. He throws them out to me and my instinct is to grab on, to let myself float to safety on them. Tegan always knows how to make me feel buoyant, as though just by him thinking I’m beautiful, or because he likes to be with me, I could make it to shore even without the boat. But what happens when he’s not here? He can’t always be here."

DIZZY is a collaboration Jolene and I wrote together. It's alternating point of view. She wrote the girl, Ziah, and I wrote the boy, Dylan. It's rich, snarky, spoiled boy who meets smart, sensible and snarky girl. Though he definitely gets a lot of girls, he's never fallen for one the way he is, Ziah. It confuses and freaks him--especially since he's seen how loving someone can leave you crushed.

* "My stomach constricts because I MIGHT HAVE WANTED IT TO BE A DATE. I mean, what is that? Dates lead to commitment and commitment leads to temporary insanity and temporary insanity leads to full on mental illness, picking out china patterns, choosing places to get married in and ends with two fucked-in-the head sons and a dad trying to hold it together when he’s just as fucked in the head as they are. So no, I definitely don’t want it to have been a date."

* "It is like a punch to the gut—no a punch to the head that knocks me out and then all of a sudden I wake up and I'm not in the dark anymore. I realized it before, but not until this moment did I comprehend how much I like this girl. That I actually want to give her those things she wants."

* "Sometimes there’s something so big in your life, something so monumental that you make up all these different life-altering reasons that it happened. Really the truth isn’t something big at all. Sometimes there aren’t reasons. There doesn’t have to be. Sometimes, things just are."

Lastly, if you liked these, feel free to stop by my personal blog HERE. I shared a few different lines from each book there as well :).