Paperback Launch of THE MEMORY OF AFTER by Lenore Appelhans!

Hey all! Today is the release of the paperback of THE MEMORY OF AFTER! I'm so excited to chat about this (I was lucky enough to read an ARC of this when it was known as LEVEL 2), but first some details:

In this gripping exploration of a futuristic afterlife, a teen discovers that death is just the beginning.

Since her untimely death, Felicia Ward has been trapped in Level 2, a stark white afterlife located between our world and the next. Along with her fellow drones, Felicia passes the endless hours reliving memories of her time on Earth and mourning what she’s lost—family, friends, and Neil, the boy she loved.

Then a girl in a neighboring chamber is found dead, and nobody but Felicia recalls that she existed in the first place. When Julian—a dangerously charming guy Felicia knew in life—appears to offer Felicia a way out, Felicia learns the truth: if she joins the rebellion to overthrow the Morati, the angel guardians of Level 2, she can be with Neil again.

Suspended between Heaven and Earth, Felicia finds herself at the center of an age-old struggle between good and evil. As memories from her life come back to haunt her, and as the Morati hunt her down, Felicia will discover it’s not just her own redemption at stake…but the salvation of all mankind.

Here's some buzz on why this is such a fantastic book:

“Appelhans brings the afterlife to a whole new level. . . . A high-voltage thrill ride through love, death, and memory that will leave you breathless.” (Jess Rothenberg, author of The Catastrophic History of You and Me)

“Absolutely gripping. My heart pounded on nearly every page. You won't be able to put it down.” (Mary E. Pearson, award-winning author of the Jenna Fox Chronicles)

...and some fantastic reviews!

“This imaginative debut brings conflict to the afterlife....An absorbing, sensitive read.” (Kirkus Reviews)

“Appelhans’ storytelling is well paced, tantalizing the reader with hints, and the compelling theme of the necessity of facing the wrongs of the past in order to move forward into the future will appeal to teens.” (Booklist)

So...I loved this book. 

I thought that Appelhans did a fantastically original job of envisioning this life in the "after" and how memories were accessed--with no small commentary on how lives on social media today are accessed by anybody and everybody. All the while, we as readers are doing the very same by plugging into Felicia's past and piecing together why she's here, and what led her to this place. 

The core of any good story worth its words is the everlasting why--why is the main character in this situation, and moreover, what is she going to do with that knowledge once she understands it? Ultimately, The Memory of After is a mystery, a story of self, and a story of unfolding redemption. It truly is a page turner, in every sense of the word.

If you haven't had a chance to read it, now you can own it in all its paperback glory. :)

The paperback of THE MEMORY OF AFTER is available on Amazon, IndieBound, Book Depository, Barnes and Noble.  Check out The Memory Chronicles Pinterest board for quoteables from the novel all this week! 

(Yeah. I'm going to have to buy this now just so I can own that gorgeous new cover!)

Revision Time: What Works for Me

All this week we're going to be giving you editing tips and tricks on the League.

I'm the kind of writer who prefers revision to drafting, and I enjoy the work of adding depth and layers to character, story and theme.

Recently I attended a revision workshop held by Author Sara Grant. Obviously I am not going to give away all her tips (you should totally attend her workshop if you have the chance), but I did want to share one tip that really worked for me on my latest revision of Chasing Before (my sequel to The Memory of After a.k.a. Level 2).

Go through and give each major and major supporting character's dialogue a different color.  Felicia is my main character and it is her POV, so she can stay in black, but I made Neil light blue, Libby is green, Nate is orange, etc.

Then read the entire MS through for each character and only that character.

This helps in two main ways:

1) you can isolate a single character's arc. Do they seem to have their own goals and motivations or do they exist solely to further the plot?

2) you can check that each character's voice is consistent and that their patterns of speech differentiate  them from other characters.

Hope this works for you too!

Launching LEVEL 2 by Lenore Appelhans

We're glad to be back in 2013 with a bang! I hope you're enjoying our new site design, because this week, we're celebrating the forthcoming launch of League member Lenore Appelhans's LEVEL 2!

About LEVEL 2: In this gripping exploration of a futuristic afterlife, a teen discovers that death is just the beginning.

Since her untimely death the day before her eighteenth birthday, Felicia Ward has been trapped in Level 2, a stark white afterlife located between our world and the next. Along with her fellow drones, Felicia passes the endless hours reliving memories of her time on Earth and mourning what she’s lost—family, friends, and Neil, the boy she loved.

Then a girl in a neighboring chamber is found dead, and nobody but Felicia recalls that she existed in the first place. When Julian—a dangerously charming guy Felicia knew in life—comes to offer Felicia a way out, Felicia learns the truth: If she joins the rebellion to overthrow the Morati, the angel guardians of Level 2, she can be with Neil again.

Suspended between Heaven and Earth, Felicia finds herself at the center of an age-old struggle between good and evil. As memories from her life come back to haunt her, and as the Morati hunt her down, Felicia will discover it’s not just her own redemption at stake… but the salvation of all mankind.

We'll be celebrating all week with Lenore and LEVEL 2 and we hope you'll take a few minutes to check out some of these great things going on with the novel.

• There's a pre-order promotion going on now! You can preorder a signed, personalized copy of LEVEL 2 at the Watermark Books website until January 15th (release day). Once you put in your cart, use the "order comments" input field to specify who you want the signed copy made out to. The first 50 preorders via this channel will also get a limited edition LEVEL 2 magnet - so order soon!

• Read an excerpt of LEVEL 2 at The Memory Chronicles Facebook page.

• There's a cool trailer about the cover creation of LEVEL 2!

• Order LEVEL 2. And find LEVEL 2 on Goodreads.

• Find Lenore on the web:
• Blog
• Website
• Twitter @lenoreva

Congrats to Lenore and LEVEL 2!!

Four Chapter Excerpt of Level 2 online!

I'm in Kyrgyzstan this week, so no huge post from me, but I did want to alert you to the fact that you can now read the first 50 pages of LEVEL 2 on the new Facebook page for the Memory Chronicles series!  You can also grab a countdown widget and just generally get excited for its January 15, 2013 release date.

Run for your afterlife!!

Book Blogger Appreciation Week

This week marks the 5th year of Book Blogger Appreciation Week, a yearly event to celebrate book bloggers that started my first year of book blogging back in 2008. After only four months of book blogging, my blog Presenting Lenore had already made enough impact to be nominated for Best YA blog that first year (an honor I won in 2010).

It's hard to believe how far I've come in five years, and I'll never tire of saying just how much book blogging was instrumental to my success as an author. In my acknowledgements for LEVEL 2 I say thank you to book bloggers for challenging me and enabling me.  What do I mean by that?  Let's break it down:

Challenging me
Book bloggers love creating and joining reading challenges, and though I've never been terribly successful at completing them, they have been my impetus for expanding my reading horizons (i.e. trying out an adult category romance book and reading more POC novels and more overlooked gems in general).  And book bloggers challenged me to read MORE books.  Before book blogging, I read maybe 50 books a year - which I considered a lot. After book blogging? More than 150 a year.  All this reading fed into my idea kitchen and gave me an excellent basis to start writing.

Enabling me
Ask a book blogger if you should buy/read a certain book always leads to the inevitable answer of YES.  So thanks to book bloggers for expanding my book buying habit about 30 fold.  Book bloggers have also been incredibly supportive of my writing habit - forgiving me when I go days at a time without posting on my once incredibly active blog.

But it's not just that. Coming from a book blogger background I am intimately aware of how much commitment it is to review one single book. Let's say an average time needed to read a book is 4 hours.  Then you have writing a review which may take around 1 hour.  Then there is the time spent formatting it and finding links and extra content as well as linking the review on twitter, facebook and other social media - not to mention uploading it to amazon, Goodreads, LibraryThing, and NetGalley which can also take up to an hour.  So the average book review you see on a blog? Takes that blogger 6 hours. And they do it for free. Because they love books.  And that's why I'm always amazed and incredibly grateful when book bloggers review LEVEL 2. It's a remarkable gift that I will never stop appreciating.

THANK YOU.

 

Level 2 at Book Expo America

There's been a lot of excitement on the LEVEL 2 front, what with the spectacular cover reveal and all.  But maybe the most surreal moment so far was actually holding the LEVEL Advance Reader Copy in my hands at the Simon & Schuster Blogger Preview last week.  Behold the awesome (photo taken by Sarah Pitre of Forever Young Adult):

How much more excited am I going to be to hold the finished copy in my hands come release date in January 2013?

What Color Is Dystopia?

I've been thinking a lot about covers because I finally get to reveal the cover of LEVEL 2 in one short week (cue breathless anticipation)! I can give you a little hint though today - the main color on my cover is white. Why? Well, LEVEL 2 is set in a starkly white afterlife that is almost more sinister in its brightness than a shadowy, dark place would be. White, to me, also denotes order (where black represents chaos) which goes along well with dystopias that rule with an iron fist (where black goes along well with post-apocalyptic stories).

Kate Hart has an interesting recent post on covers that goes a long way towards refuting the idea that YA is too dark (at least visually).  And you might think, well dystopians and post-apocalyptic books are dark, ergo dark covers.  But you only have to look in the sidebar of this blog to see that's not (always) the case. So, what do we think? Could the color of dystopia actually be white?

Celebrating Bloggers

Where would I be without blogs and bloggers? Maintaining a book blog and reading a ton of other book blogs and author blogs is what originally sparked my interest in YA lit – and in writing my own YA novel.

By keeping up with blogs, not only do I keep up with the zeitgeist, but I also learn what readers love and love to hate (insta-love, red-headed best friends, inaccurate college application timelines to name a few) as well as a ton about craft and how to improve my storytelling.

Let me give you one example of a blog event that directly impacted LEVEL 2. Frankie Diane Mallis (writer, blogger and member of The First Novels Club) puts on an event in January called the No-Kiss Blogfest, where participants are challenged to find or write an "almost kiss-- the rising, crushing, excruciating, longing, tension that comes when two characters get oh-so-close to kissing that you can just feel it, want it, NEED it....and then...they don't!"

Well, it just so happens that in January 2011, I was about to sit down to revise chapter 1 of LEVEL 2 when I stumbled upon Frankie’s post. My first draft of LEVEL 2 had my main character reliving one of her favorite memories with her boyfriend and it involved a kiss. But Frankie got me thinking … could the scene be even better with an almost kiss? So I tried it out. And guess what? It upped the excitement factor tenfold – and had a profound effect on the plot going forward too.

So thank you Frankie, and thank you book bloggers and writing bloggers who continually inspire me with your insights, passion and love of literature. I am proud to be a part of the conversation.

PS: For more tales of blogger love, check out YA Fusion.

Lenore's Blog