I asked Beth Revis just three questions for the following Q&A. This week is the release of her debut YA novel, ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, and I knew she'd be crazy busy. Yay, Beth!*
Beth is one of the first bloggers I met online when I started blogging less than two years ago. She is funny, smart, interesting, caring and honest, which has made me love her blog and now her book.
If you don't know her publishing story it's an incredible one. In the time I've known her she's gone from aspiring to agented to major book deal to published with starred reviews. She tells this journey best in her own words, which she does on her blog, including a five-part series of posts in June 2010.
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My three questions for Beth:
Q: You wrote a wonderful post once about how you realized a writer doesn't need to be a scientist to write good sci-fi/dystopian stories. Please tell us what allowed you to strap on your personal jetpack and step into far reaches of space.
A: Honestly, I think it was just doing it. It's like the old writer's mantra: butt in chair. When I started thinking about my story, I realized I needed a sci fi setting--so I started writing a sci fi setting. When I came to something that I didn't know or understand, I'd trot off to the internet. A little Google-fu, a little emailing to people who really WERE scientists, and I'd get enough info keep writing.
If I had thought about it, I would have talked myself out of writing sci fi. I'm so unqualified. But I didn't think about it, I thought about the story, and that led to the words, and that led to a novel, and the rest is history.
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Q: What was the first idea for Across the Universe? How did that concept take off for you?
A: Oh, I can't be too specific here! The first idea was the end. I thought of a neat twist, and I built the story around it.
A: Honestly, I think it was just doing it. It's like the old writer's mantra: butt in chair. When I started thinking about my story, I realized I needed a sci fi setting--so I started writing a sci fi setting. When I came to something that I didn't know or understand, I'd trot off to the internet. A little Google-fu, a little emailing to people who really WERE scientists, and I'd get enough info keep writing.
If I had thought about it, I would have talked myself out of writing sci fi. I'm so unqualified. But I didn't think about it, I thought about the story, and that led to the words, and that led to a novel, and the rest is history.
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Q: What was the first idea for Across the Universe? How did that concept take off for you?
A: Oh, I can't be too specific here! The first idea was the end. I thought of a neat twist, and I built the story around it.
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(Drat! *pouts* Guess we have to wait for books two and three to find out.)
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Q: If you have one piece of advice for other writers from what you learned this year, what would it be?
A: Write the next book. I had so many trunk novels, so many rejections. But I kept writing. And you know what? I always thought the book I was working on would be "the one." I'd write my heart out, then edit, and rewrite, and revise, and submit....and nothing. But doing that for all those failed novels helped me to write one that didn't fail--and kept me writing, which was the most important thing.
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Q: If you have one piece of advice for other writers from what you learned this year, what would it be?
A: Write the next book. I had so many trunk novels, so many rejections. But I kept writing. And you know what? I always thought the book I was working on would be "the one." I'd write my heart out, then edit, and rewrite, and revise, and submit....and nothing. But doing that for all those failed novels helped me to write one that didn't fail--and kept me writing, which was the most important thing.
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Thanks, Beth. As always, I appreciate your words.
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So Beth has this Launch Contest, which nudged me take this photo of me with the reverse side of the book jacket for ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.Other people are going to be a lot more clever, I think, but I did hang up my swirly cosmos scarf-like cape thingie.
And that's the super-cool diagram of the spaceship, Godspeed.
Everybody's got until Jan. 25 to buy the book, take a photo with it and try to win some fabulous prizes.
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In case you've missed the blurb on ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, here 'tis:
A love out of time. A spaceship built of secrets and murder.
Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awake on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon and that she would be thrust into a brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules.
Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone—one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship—tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn’t do something soon, her parents will be next.
Now, Amy must race to unlock Godspeed’s hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there’s only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.
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Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awake on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon and that she would be thrust into a brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules.
Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone—one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship—tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn’t do something soon, her parents will be next.
Now, Amy must race to unlock Godspeed’s hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there’s only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.
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Wishing you a long, star-filled journey, Beth!
