Iron Wolf vs. Space Mountain

So, *goes to check countdown clock,* it's exactly 17 days until I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE comes out. 17 days.... Deep breaths. Try not to hyperventilate. It's getting to be crunch time. I feel like I have a lot to do and very little time to do it, especially with working 40 hours a week. I have a big pile of blogger interview questions to answer and guest blogs to write. There have been a couple newspaper interviews (!!!) and if you look to the right, you'll see a whole bunch of traveling ahead for me. It's exciting (I've daydreamed about publishing a book since I was about six), it's overwhelming (I've been getting roughly five or six hours of sleep a night to cram in everything I need to do), and it's terrifying (what if the book is a big flop and all of this is for nothing?). Basically it's one big ass roller coaster ride and I hope that when I get off I feel like I did on my first big roller coaster, the Iron Wolf at Great America (ie. I wanna go again, again again!) and not like my mom did after Space Mountain at Disney World (she puked a lot).

One of the biggest, scariest parts of the roller coaster has been planning ROCK 'N' READ. Perhaps you remember me blogging about it back in April. I got really excited about it and then I shut up. Why? Because it really looked like it wasn't going to happen. We had all kinds of trouble nailing down a venue. Alexa Young, my partner in crime on this, finally thought of Virgin Megastore at Hollywood & Highland in Hollywood, and then they had to mull it over, which took a long time because it's actually a lot more complicated than you think to pull together authors from a bunch of different publishing houses, not to mention add bands to the mix. So we didn't get a confirmation until Monday... and they need posters and stuff by the end of next week... and it's too late in the game for our publishers to design the posters to I had to enlist the help of my two amazing friends Jenny and Elise. And Jenny is throwing together a website for us, too, www.rocknread.net, but that link might not work yet because the hosting service is being slow to register the domain. If it doesn't work, please try it again in a couple days because it will be cool, I swear. I mean, check it out, Jenny already designed these great banners for us!

(And feel free to put it on your site.)

We've also been gathering bands and authors at the very last minute. Authors we pretty much already had (and they include: N.L. Belardes, Cherry Cheva, Megan Crane, Kim Culbertson, Stephanie Kuehnert, Alyson Noël, Rebecca Woolf and Alexa Young), but bands are hard to get until you have a venue lined up, so we were scrambling a lot this week. We got some great California bands though, Lucid Nation, Noah Stone, Norfolk, and Dirty Spanglish, and we may still add some more.

So yeah, that basically took most of my week and was a very bumpy ride. I still haven't determined if it's Iron Wolf or Space Mountain. At least I have Alexa to hold my hand when I turn green, though!

But whether the publication roller coaster for I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE is Iron Wolf or Space Mountain, I'm pleased to officially announce that I will be riding again. Okay, so this was officially announced on my own blog awhile ago, but since this is MTV Books' blog, I had to wait until it was super official. And it is. I received the contract for my second book BALLADS OF SUBURBIA. Of course, even though I was stressed and not nearly as pretty as I would like to be, there had to be photo documentation.

Since IWBYJR isn't even out yet, I probably shouldn't go on at length about BALLADS, but I do want to say that I'm thrilled and relieved to remain a part of the MTV Books family 'cause I really love it. BALLADS will come out next summer and according to my contract it's "a young adult novel about a young woman's journey through the darker side of suburbia, and what it teaches her about herself." That's not very specific. More specifically it's about a girl named Kara who starts hanging out with the punks and the misfits at the park in the center of her suburb. She grapples with some pretty dark stuff like self-mutilation, divorce, and heroin addiction. You can read more about it including an excerpt here.

There is also a playlist that I updated just last night there. While I was procrastinating dealing with Rock 'n' Read and IWBYJR stuff. Cause that's what I do, I make playlists in iTunes... I even tried uploading this one to iTunes. It didn't have all of the songs (and the project playlist on my website has more, but still frustratingly not all), but I'll share it anyway:

Consider it music to ride roller coasters by. What about you do you like roller coasters or not? Share some literal or figurative roller coaster ride stories with me!