Win: All Unquiet Things by Anna Jarzab

Now that I've posted a bunch of things on the fabulous All Unquiet Things, I have a chance for one of you to win a copy!

Here's a book description, straight from goodreads, in case you need it:

Carly: She was sweet. Smart. Self-destructive. She knew the secrets of Brighton Day School’s most privileged students. Secrets that got her killed.

Neily: Dumped by Carly for a notorious bad boy, Neily didn’t answer the phone call she made before she died. If he had, maybe he could have helped her. Now he can’t get the image of her lifeless body out of his mind.

Audrey: She’s the reason Carly got tangled up with Brighton’s fast crowd in the first place, and now she regrets it—especially since she’s convinced the police have put the wrong person in jail. Audrey thinks the murderer is someone at Brighton, and she wants Neily to help her find out who it is.

As reluctant allies Neily and Audrey dig into their shared past with Carly, her involvement with Brighton’s dark goings-on comes to light. But figuring out how Carly and her killer fit into the twisted drama will force Audrey and Neily to face hard truths about themselves and the girl they couldn’t save.

An Interview with Anna Jarzab, Part 2

Here's part two of my interview with Anna Jarzab, author of the recently released All Unquiet Things.

Was is harder to write the flashbacks, knowing that you had to make Carly seem alive and also to show why the narrators felt the way they did about her, or was it harder to write the parts in the present, knowing that you had to keep the mystery non-obvious and such?

Writing the flashbacks was actually a very easy, organic process for me (although calculating the exact chronology was harder; there was an emotional timeline to the story that didn't always quite match up to, you know, real human time, but we've fixed that!), since the story from the very beginning, back in version 1, was full of flashbacks. The problem with Carly is that you have to make people care about her, but she can veer into unlikeable territory. Some of the things she does are really bad, but the story wouldn't exist without them, yet a reader might find it hard to get invested in her, and if they don't care about her they might not care about who killed her, making the book kind of a wash. So the trick was to perfectly calibrate the flashbacks to create sympathy for Carly. That was difficult, but I hope I succeeded. Also, making sure Carly wasn't an unrelatable cipher was important to me, which is also hard if you want to maintain a certain mysterious quality about a person.

To the second part, keeping the mystery non-obvious was very hard. I had to know prior to starting the story who the killer was going to be--I never would've been able to write this book without that knowledge, I'm just too persnickity. But when you as an author know something, you have absolutely no idea whether or not it's obvious to the casual reader who has no prior knowledge of the story. I had to depend on outside readers for that, and even if most people say they had no idea (which is the general sentiment so far), an astute reader, especially one like me who is always second-guessing the author and trying to figure it out (although I'm often wrong because I am not an astute reader, but I always try), will probably get there before the characters do.

Just because I thought Neily sounded like a boy even though he didn't talk about a bunch of stereotypical boy things, I must ask: did you find it hard to write from a male POV? Or was is not that different? Because I know that if I try to write from a boy's POV it does not work. At all.

I never thought much about writing from a male perspective with Neily--I was just writing Neily, and I tried to stay as true to his character as possible. I think that's what saved me--if I'd actually thought, "Okay, try to write like a guy," I would've totally failed. It's too much pressure and you run the risk of overthinking it. I knew I was on the right track when a guy in one of my graduate creative writing classes said, "The male voice is totally believable," so I just kept doing what I was doing.

How do you manage to find time to write, do your job in marketing, promote your own book, read, hang out with people and sleep? Do you sleep? Are you superwoman?

I do sleep, although not enough and not very well! The time thing is becoming more and more difficult, but I'm stubbornly resistant to giving up anything that's important to me and am determined to make it work. Ask me again in six months, though, haha.

Cross-posted at: The Frenetic Reader on 15 January 2010.

Neily Speaks Out

Neily is one of the narrators of the totally awesome All Unquiet Things. He's a cool guy, so I figured I might as well as him a few questions.

I have many things I don't like about living in California. What is one of the things you don't like about it (or maybe you're one of those crazies who loves it, so if you are, why do you like it)?
Oh, I'm definitely not one of those people. It's not California I hate, though, it's the town I grew up in, Empire Valley. I felt trapped there, even physically, the place is surrounded by foothills and there's only one way in or out. You're just stuck there until you graduate, and you feel like you're in an aquarium, just swimming around while people gawk at you. Now that I live in San Diego, it's a lot nicer, although honestly that might have something to do with being four hundred miles away from my father.

Have/do you ever wish you weren't The Smart Kid? Why/why not?
Always. When I was younger (I mean in grammar school), I was this shy, bookish kid that nobody noticed enough to like or dislike, and then one day I took a standardized test and scored off the charts, and then somebody took a look at my grades, and suddenly I was The Smart Kid. I thought that was my ticket out of invisibility. I was really hoping to meet people like me at Brighton, and I guess I did, in a way. But there was all this pressure--from my dad, the principal, and the worst of it was that I was desperate to live up to all their expectations, so in a way I put a lot of pressure on myself. It took a while for me to figure out who I really was and who I really cared to please. Looking back, it just doesn't feel worth it.

What one thing reminds you the most of Carly?
Empire Creek Bridge. I know that's morbid because she died there, but she did a lot of other things there, too. She laughed there, she read there, she sang there, she danced there, she talked there, she jumped there, she cried there, and she was brave there. I'm never in Empire Valley anymore, but if I was I'd be there every day.

What scares you the most?
Making another mistake and losing someone else.

Any New Year's resolutions, or are you not into that sort of thing?
I'm not very good at resolutions, but I'm trying really hard to keep in touch with my old friends. It's a work in progress.

Cross-posted at: The Frenetic Reader on 13 January 2010.

An Interview with Anna Jarzab, Part 1

Here's part one of my interview with Anna Jarzab, the fabulous author of All Unquiet Things.

Why did you decide to tell the story from the points of view of both Audrey and Neily? Why did you also decide to have the two narrators have a hundred or so pages before switching, unlike many other multiple POV books that switch every other chapter?

The first version of All Unquiet Things was only told from Neily's point of view, because Audrey didn't exist then. When I was rewriting it, I added her in, and I was still planning on only telling the story from his POV. Then I got to the end of Part 1 and I didn't know how to continue. I told my thesis adviser (I was writing AUT for my master's thesis at the time), "I think I need to do alternating POVs," and he said, "Are you sure you're not just being lazy?" I laugh every time I think of that now, because I know he was half right--I'm sure I could've found a way to do it, but I didn't feel like it, so I was being lazy, but then again I think alternating POV is the best way to tell the story.

Having Audrey's POV is really important for a few reasons. First, Audrey is such a huge part of the story--a much bigger part than I originally intended--that she needs her own voice. I think the book and the character would suffer without it. Audrey and Neily are such fundamentally different people--he's very open and forthcoming, and she's very withholding. If she didn't have her own POV, all you'd know about her is what she says to Neily, and that's just not enough to understand her. Second, I knew that there was going to be a point where Neily and Audrey's paths diverge and they would stop sharing information with each other, so Audrey would be in possession of knowledge and perspective Neily wouldn't have, which would mean that the reader wouldn't have it. There's ways around that, of course, but I prefer it this way. Plus, it allows you to see each of the two principle characters from someone else's perspective, which I find interesting. Even Carly, who is dead, gets a voice in the novel. I wanted to give them all a shot at telling their own story.

I read that it took you over six years to write All Unquiet Things. Yay for it finally being out! Did the storyline stay relatively the same (same narrators, same ending, etc.) throughout most of the rewrites and edits, or did it go through a lot of major changes?

The book went through what I consider two phases: Version 1 and Version 2. Version 2 is the version you'll see in the finished book--it has generally stayed the same throughout the revision process, although I've added, deleted and altered things, of course. Version 1 was entirely different than Version 2. It was all from Neily's POV, Carly died at the end, and it was super melodramatic. It was also awful. Basically, all I kept from Version 1 was Neily, Carly, Neily's parents, Carly's father (Carly's mother was added in Version 2), the school principal (whose role was much larger in Version 1), and the title. Every other character--including Audrey--was added and the plot is entirely different. I don't even think I have a copy of Version 1 anymore. Maybe somewhere on an old harddrive, but if it's lost for good I'm not too torn up about it.

Cross-posted at: The Frenetic Reader on 12 January 2010.