Can My Spirit Animal Be a Dragon?

Hello everyone!

Oh dear, I know, two months away from the blog!  Terrible!  Anyone would think I’d been eaten by the holidays and deadlines and nonstop winter illnesses and snow days and birthday party planning and all these books that are due RIGHT NOW ACK!  🙂

What books? you might ask.  Aren’t I all done with writing Wings of Fire book 5?  (which is coming out NEXT MONTH, holy dragons!)  Yes, I am, of course, but there are Exciting New Things on the horizon!

Is one of the Exciting New Things . . . MOOOOOOOORE Wings of Fire?

YES!  YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!

But more on that in another post; in THIS post I have to tell you about something else EVER SO exciting, which I have been meaning to blog about forever but I’ve been too busy actually writing it, because it was really really due RIGHT NOW.

Some of you may have heard of The 39 Clues or The Infinity Ring — these awesome series published by Scholastic where a lineup of amazing fabulous authors like Rick Riordan or Lisa McMann take turns writing each book in the series.  Well, there’s a new one that just launched called Spirit Animals . . . and they asked me to be one of the amazing fabulous authors!  Me!

Seriously, it’s crazy, you guys.  Look at this breathtaking lineup:

Book 1: Brandon Mull (of bestselling Fablehaven fame!)
Book 2: Maggie Stiefvater (she wrote The Scorpio Races! One of my favorite books EVER!)
Book 3: Garth Nix and Sean Williams (astonishing Abhorsen! Keys to the Kingdom!)
Book 4: Shannon Hale (I have a huge author crush on Shannon Hale.  Princess Academy! Austenland! Rapunzel’s Revenge!  And she’s amazing and prolific and brilliant and writes a lovely blog and does all that with FOUR young children!  That’s twice as many as I have!  Yeep!)
Book 5:  ME!
Book 6:  Eliot Schrefer (National Book Award Finalist!)
Book 7:  Marie Lu  (yes, the same one who wrote three of my absolute Favorite Books from last year!  the Legend trilogy!  eeek!)

You can read about all of us at the Spirit Animals website!  That’s also the place to go to play the Spirit Animals game — how cool is that?  There’s also a mini-interview with Brandon Mull here, which has more information about the series, too.

Oh my goodness, how did I sneak onto this incredible list?  I mean, EEK YAY!  SO EXCITING!  I can’t even handle seeing my name that close to Shannon’s.  Look at all that amazingness!

Want to see some gorgeous covers?

  Hunted cover

  

Oh goodness, they’re all so shiny and glorious!  I can’t wait to see mine!  Eeeeee!

Plus I can tell you that I’ve read all four of these (even though you guys won’t be able to get book 3 until March, I think, and book 4 in July…of course, I got an advance peek so I could write book 5!), and they’re absolutely thrilling, action-packed, and full of awesome animal adventure.  I think anyone who likes Wings of Fire, Seekers, or Warriors will really enjoy these, too!  (Fair warning, there are no dragons…unless a Komodo dragon counts!)  🙂

I hope you guys will read them and come back for book five — spoiler alert, there will be a GIANT OCTOPUS in mine!  (I totally got the coolest Great Beast.)  🙂  I’ll post about it again in October when it comes out, and hopefully before then if I get a cover to show you.

In other news, I now have over 2,000 likes on my Facebook author page, which is so lovely that I think I should do something to celebrate, don’t you?  So if you’re over there (or if you’re not, come join us!), keep an eye out and I’ll post a giveaway contest or something sometime in the next week.  Yay!

Hope you’re all staying warm — spring is really going to be here soon!  Or at least eventually!  🙂  In the meanwhile, at least all these snow days means lots of snuggling on the couch and reading…the four-year-old and I are charging through all the Nate the Great series and have fallen in love with Kate DiCamillo’s Bink and Gollie books (oh my goodness, so hilarious — if you like her book which just won the Newbery, Flora and Ulysses, you should check out these as well — younger, but so funny).

More soon!  (I hope!)

Quote of the Day:  “There’s no such thing as a kid who hates reading.  There are kids who love reading, and kids who are reading the wrong books.” — James Patterson