Disintegrate cover reveal!

Disintegrate

Coming April 19, 2013!

  • Young Adult, Paranormal, Suspense
  • Word Count: 51,000
  • Published By: Evernight Teen

Description:

Emily just wanted a normal life: a boyfriend, college, two parents who loved her. Instead, her dad disappeared when she was fourteen and her life at college is anything but ordinary.

When you can manipulate matter like putty and you have no idea why, how do you pretend to be like everyone else? What happens when you meet a guy who has the same powers? Do you trust him to help you find the answers you need?

Emily desperately wants to believe that Jax can help, but the stakes grow higher than she’d ever expected: someone is after them and they’re not afraid to use violence to get what they want.

editors

Disintegrate releasing April 19, 2013! – read an excerpt

My release date is official: April 19, 2013!

This is a lot sooner than I expected, but I’m thrilled. I’m sure I’ll have a cover reveal coming soon, but in the meantime, would you like to read an excerpt? If so, scroll down…

Teencoming-soon

Disintegrate, releasing April 19, 2013!

  • Young Adult, Paranormal, Suspense
  • Word Count: 51,000
  • Published By: Evernight Teen

Description:

Emily just wanted a normal life: a boyfriend, college, two parents who loved her. Instead, her dad disappeared when she was fourteen and her life at college is anything but ordinary.

When you can manipulate matter like putty and you have no idea why, how do you pretend to be like everyone else? What happens when you meet a guy who has the same powers? Do you trust him to help you find the answers you need?

Emily desperately wants to believe that Jax can help, but the stakes grow higher than she’d ever expected: someone is after them and they’re not afraid to use violence to get what they want.

Excerpt:

“I … think you’ve got the wrong impression of the two of us,” she mumbled. “We’re just friends.” And that’s all we’ll ever be, Emily told herself.

The woman shook her head. “No. I don’t think I do.” She wiped at the bar, nodding once as though making up her mind. “He’s a good kid.” She moved off, pouring a beer as she made her way down to the other end of the bar.

Emily blinked, confused by the bartender’s confidence. Jax sang on, oblivious to the conversation they were having about him only a few feet away.

And then the wall by the door exploded.

Emily froze for a split second while the bartender looked stupidly at the mess, then rushed for the stage, shoving through the few people beginning to realize something was very, very wrong. Jax hadn’t reacted and her first instinct was to get him to safety. She knew they were there for her, and she also knew they wouldn’t hesitate to destroy anyone near her in an effort to get to her. The best thing to do was get out.

Heart pounding, she grabbed him by the sleeve and dragged him down and off the stage. His guitar strap broke and the instrument hit the floor with a harsh twang. She winced, knowing it was his dad’s guitar, and important to Jax, but she didn’t stop. She couldn’t afford to do anything about it. Her skin was jumping and buzzing and she yanked—

Jax fell over her, hands raised, and Emily chanced a look back. There were three of them, huge and intent. Their faces were covered. One had a shotgun, oh God…

“Get down!” Jax yelled, shoving her over.

She ignored him, pulling until he had no choice but to follow. It was that or step on her. He still had his hands up. Something went boom—the gun, she thought—and then the staccato crunch of wood splintering around her bled through her panic. She shoved Jax ahead of her, hard. The door behind the stage hung ajar, and she stumbled for it, skin prickling as static arced around her fingers.

“Get back!” she panted, and Jax tripped. She tried to pull him up, but his muscular frame was too much for her thin frame. “Jax, you’ve gotta get up.”

He stared at her from the floor, dazed. A trickle of blood ran from a cut near his eye.

Was he hit? “Jax, get up!” she hissed.

Finally, he shoved off from the floor and staggered to his feet, falling against her. Not shot then, she thought, relieved. He wouldn’t be standing if he’d been seriously injured.

She tugged him down the dark hallway. When she looked back, she couldn’t believe they hadn’t been followed. Or at least not yet. Swallowing hard, she grabbed his hand, ignoring the electric tingle of his skin, and dragged him into the wall. He oofed as his head hit the paneling, but she had no time to worry about it. She pressed her fingers to the dirty surface and pushed, concentrating on dissolving the bonds of matter in her body and his. It wasn’t easy. She had to sort of push her energy into it, harder than she’d ever had to before. It felt a little like juggling upside down. She needed to hang onto him and release everything else, simultaneously. She had to keep his hand solid in hers while phasing their bodies out. For a moment, she thought she would fail or go mad, and then something clicked—

Thank God.

—her hands sank into the wall. She shuddered, hating the sticky feel of molecules sliding into her like this. One finger, one hand, no problem, but her entire body? That was creepy and weird. What she was doing wasn’t natural. Humans weren’t supposed to be able to shove pieces of themselves into pieces of other stuff, and here she was trying to shove her entire body, and Jax’s too, into the filthy inside of a bar wall. She almost sobbed … it was taking too long, they were coming—

—and then Jax’s fingers tightened around hers and it felt like electricity shooting into her bones. He gasped and then they fell into the wall together, their matter pressed into and within the wood and concrete and insulation.

Nausea rose. She fought it down. No time for that, she snarled to herself. No damn space for barfing. She gripped Jax’s hand, trying to keep still and quiet and think while also somehow conveying to him the need for calm. He could freak out later.

And he would, she knew. They were completely hidden, existing half in reality and half in the shadowy space between atoms that she’d been able to manipulate since forever. He would want to know how she did it. He would want do know why she’d dragged him into this.

A short, sharp boom echoed weirdly through her. They’d made it to the hall, though she couldn’t see them. She couldn’t see anything. Her eyes didn’t work inside the wall. Jax’s iron-willed calm filtered slowly through her veins, as if she could feel his emotions. God, this was completely horrible, she thought, willing the men to just go away. She needed to run—

—and then there was silence. She didn’t know how long it had been quiet, but Jax was pulling at her. She forced herself to think move and let go and enough and she stepped forward and out—

—and they fell into the hall, coughing. She stifled a gag, her right hand burning from the rough flooring. She’d just caught herself before her head hit the opposite wall.

“Jesus, what—” Jax choked, turning to her. He wouldn’t let go of her hand.

“We need to see if they’re gone,” she managed, rubbing her face on her shoulder. Her knees hurt. She felt filthy, as if she’d ingested the dirt that penetrated every portion of the wall.

Jax leaned down and put his free hand flat on the floor. He closed his eyes.

Emily stared. What was he doing?

A second later he shook his head. “Everyone is gone.” He grimaced. “Or dead.”

“How—” she began to ask, but then the skin on her hand prickled, the one he still held. Jax looked at her arm. She looked at his palm. Tiny sparks arced between them, silver stars that made no sense.

I’m doing a reading later this month in Philadelphia thanks to Fox Chase Review!

information's avatarFox Chase Review

The Fox Chase Reading Series is pleased to present our Featured Poets/Writers Reading on April 28th with Poets Christine Klocek-Lim and Le Hinton at Ryerss Museum and Library, 7370 Central Avenue, Philadelphia, Pa. 19111. The reading will begin @ 2pm in the second floor gallery of the museum. The featured poets will be followed by an open reading.

Christine Klocek-Lim received the 2009 Ellen La Forge Memorial Prize in poetry. She has four chapbooks: Ballroom – a love story (Flutter Press), Cloud Studies (Whale Sound Audio Chapbooks), How to photograph the heart (The Lives You Touch Publications), and The book of small treasures (Seven Kitchens Press). Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, OCHO, Diode, Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired by String Theory and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net anthologies and was a finalist for 3 Quarks Daily’s Prize…

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Poem Spark Apr 1, 2013: limericks

Happy April!

It is the first day of National Poetry Month 2013. You know what that means… It’s time when all of us crazy poets try to write a poem each day for the entire month. It involves sweat, tears, sometimes blood, despair, and a sort of euphoric glee that only those who make a habit of jumping out of airplanes also possess. In spite of what looks like insanity, we continue, forging into the forest of failed poems, in search of that perfect turn of line that makes us weep in joy.

Or we write limericks.

Well, because they’re absurd. And naughty.

A limerick is a ridiculous poem that is often wretchedly punnish, sometimes lewd, but always a delight to read and an agony to write. It has a strict metrical form:

There WAS an old LAdy named ROSE
who LOVED to stuff MEN in her CLOTHES
but THEN she slipped—WHOA,
and KNOCKED her boobs LOW.
The MEN ran aWAY with her HOSE.

Here is what it looks like metrically. A dash – means an unstressed syllable, and a forward slash / means a stressed syllable:

– / – – / – – /
– / – – / – – /
– / – – /
– / – – /
– / – – / – – /

Your spark for today: write a limerick! Have fun and be creative. Good luck!

Paranoia: my bff

flash

 

Every week, on average, one of the writers on my various social networking feeds howls in horror. Why? Because they’ve lost all their work. Their hard drive failed because:

  1. computers suck like that
  2. they spilled coffee on their laptop
  3. the cat peed on their computer
  4. their toddler dumped their netbook into the toilet/tub/kitchen sink
  5. their laptop was stolen
  6. they dropped their device and it shattered

I’m totally serious.

What lesson can we learn from this? Yes. You guessed it: paranoia is your friend (in simpler terms: back your shit up).

A long time ago I used to worry about my house catching fire (long before the era of smart phones and freaking cloud computing). Everything I wrote was on scraps of paper and inside notebooks. Most of it was/is drivel and not worth saving (give me a break, I was ten years old), but I still worried about what I would do if everything spontaneously erupted in a ginormous fireball of horribleness and smoke.

What do you get when you add a childhood fear of fire to my weekly feed of lost-my-writing laments?

A writer who backs up all of her stuff obsessively.

I have five different backups.

Six.

Okay, okay, maybe seven.

I backup to an extra hard drive connected to my computer. I back up weekly to a separate extra hard drive. I back up daily to an internet back up service. I copy stuff to a flash drive when the mood strikes (which is about every two days). I backup my laptop work to my desktop and vice versa. I use a cloud service to sync my work from my laptop to my desktop to my phone and there’s a backup built into that. Last, I have a tendency to email myself stuff.

I have never lost my work.

I know I’m just asking for it, putting that out there in plain text, but it’s true. My hard drive failed a little while ago. I knew it was failing, so before I took it in to get it replaced, I made yet ANOTHER back up of my entire hard disk to an extra drive we had lying around (my husband is a geek, so yeah, we have random computer equipment all over the place).

All I can say is THANK THE UNIVERSE I did that. Because the new hard disk did NOT work properly without a lot of flinging of obscenities into the air and wiping of the drive and other crap I still don’t understand.

Dear everyone I know: back your stuff up. I always feel so bad for you when I read your cries on the internet. It makes me cry, too.

Two poets have gone

I had the wonderful fortune to publish two brilliant poets in Autumn Sky Poetry, both of whom passed away last week. I didn’t know either man personally, but their words and verse will resonate with me for a long time. RIP Paul Stevens and Elisha Porat.

Paul Stevens — The Allotropes

First love is justly praised;
Last love has beauties too,
Here at the end of days:
Antique me, new-minted you,

Our times untuned, our fates
Quite unaligned – yet we,
Disjunct, together make
A disparate unity

Of opposites, where time
And space are playthings of
Your musing eyes, which dream
Us: allotropes of love.

Published in Autumn Sky Poetry #12

________________________________

Elisha Porat — There Are Those Who

There are those who count on their fingers
as if they were counting their dead,
and there are those whose friends constantly explode
with the whistle of the wind in their ears.
As if they kept coming and coming
from those fields, from the black
basalt stones.
And there are those who look up
now, to the cleansing sky,
and see thousands of mourners
whose tortured hearts
are also their own.
And there are those who sit
quietly on the drive,
touch their grimy necks
and are silent.

Translated from the Hebrew by Cindy Eisner.

Published in Autumn Sky Poetry #1

My five favorite young adult novels

TheBlueSword
1. The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley — I’m starting with what I consider to be the very first young adult novel I read. This novel came out in 1982, long before there was a category called “young adult,” but it has all the hallmarks of a fabulous teenage girl’s most delicious fantasy: strong heroine, strange land, a magic sword, and at the very end, true love.

pawn-of-prophecy
2. Pawn of Prophecy by David & Leigh Eddings — Yes, this is still old school, but it is the book that got me hooked on fantasy. I began reading this series (The Belgariad) when there were only two books out: this one and the second, Queen of Sorcery. This was before we found out that Mr. Eddings wrote these books with his wife, and long before his death. It has a boy, a mysterious aunt, and an incredible depth of suspense I can’t adequately describe except to say that it lasts for the entire series.

Pfeffer_Life_As_We_Knew_It_2006
3. Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer — This is, quite simply, one of the most creative, disturbing, fantastic books I have ever read. I bought the digital version, then promptly bought the hardcover. What would you do if a meteor hit the moon and broke it? The girl we follow in this book is heroic, selfish, selfless, funny, sad, and a myriad of other things that it’s best to discover by reading this book right away.

matched
4. Matched by Ally Condie — I first read this book as an ARC I picked up from Book Expo America in Manhattan a few years ago. I loved the cover. Then I read the book and was completely flabbergasted. The social commentary and moral issues are brilliantly interwoven within the character development and plot of this novel. It’s awesome.

TheHungerGames
5. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins — If you haven’t read this yet, um, where have you been? I assure you, it’s actually a wonderful read. I love the main character and the part where she totally kicks butt? Awesome.