For some time now I have been coyly mentioning the fact that I have two pieces of big news. I have also been coyly bashing my head against tables in the presence of concerned friends, muttering wildly, ‘If only I could tell people. I want to TALK and TALK and TALK about it!’
And now I can finally announce one of the two pieces of news! I am almost unbearably excited.
I have a new book series!
Author of the Demon’s Lexicon Series Sarah Rees Brennan’s YA gothic romance trilogy beginning with LISTEN FOR A WHISPER, about a budding journalist who investigates when she realizes the town she has lived in all her life is hiding a multitude of secrets and a murderer, and the truth may lie with the ruling family who have just returned to the manor on the hill and in the whispers she hears in her head from a boy who may not be imaginary after all.
I so wanted to write this book, and I was so worried people wouldn’t want it! For I do so many things in it that I love.
I get to be goofy, and I get unlikely partners fighting crime. I got to make up a beautiful country town in the Cotswolds, one of the prettiest parts of England, and use it as a setting for murder. I have your traditional Gothic heroine – you know, unexpectedly thrown into the gloomy manor with secrets caught in the cobwebs and insane family members swooping about – except he’s this scruffy pool hustler from San Francisco. I have a lady sleuth and the answer to what the townsfolk are doing while mad stuff happens in the manor: they’re sleuthing. I get to dissect the fact that being in someone else’s head would be truly terrifying and deeply uncomfortable.
I have, in other words, too much fun.
And my editor is Mallory Loehr. She has read Diana Wynne Jones’s books as many times as I have. She thinks there’s no such thing as too dangerous an idea. She edited the new Bordertown anthology. She edits Tamora Pierce, and Tamora Pierce’s In The Hand of the Goddess was the first fantasy novel I ever read. For some people it was The Lord of the Rings, but for me it was Tamora Pierce, and ever afterwards I expected all fantasy to be funny, feminist, and exciting.
See again: almost unbearably excited. It’ll come out, we think, autumn (or… fall, as Americans call it) next year (2012). And I’m so happy. And I hope you guys will be happy and excited too.
