Thank you to Julia, Hannah, Angelica, and Monica from Mrs. Schmidt’s class—it’s perfect! I’m thrilled!

Julia, Hannah, Angelica & Monica: It’s incredible!

If you’re a reader who feels like making a book trailer for Dani Noir, email me at nova [at] novaren.com and I’ll put it up here!

And that’s not all—because there’s a giveaway happening right now. That’s right: FREE BOOKS.

To celebrate their blog launch, the Mixed-Up Files is giving away nine (yes, NINE!) signed copies of middle-grade books, and DANI NOIR is one of them. To be the lucky person who wins all nine books—Dani Noir plus Acadian Star by Helene Boudreau, Best Friends Forever by Beverly Patt, Mudville by Kurtis Scaletta, and Palace Beautiful by Sarah DeFord Williams AND ARCs (advance reader copies) of NERDS Book Two by Michael Buckley, The Summer of Moonlight Secrets by Danette Haworth, Jungle Crossing by Sydney Salter, and What Happened on Fox Street by Tricia Springstubb—check out the blog.

The winner of their first giveaway will be chosen on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010, so go check out From the Mixed-Up Files to have a chance to win!

The site looks incredible. Thank you, everyone involved with the Mixed-Up Files blog, for including Dani Noir in your giveaway!

Well, today I’m up in the auction! You can bid on a personalized copy of the hardcover of DANI NOIR plus a DVD of the classic noir movie GILDA, starring Rita Hayworth, and support flood relief at the same time.

You can go directly to bid for DANI NOIR and GILDA here.

And check out the main page for all the other items on auction—more coming in the next few days. For writers seeking critiques of your work, there are authors, agents, and editors offering their expertise to help support disaster relief.

So, go bid!

Now I can say I read at a Barnes & Noble in my home of the Hudson Valley the weekend of a snowstorm! And what a snowstorm. Seriously, if I could have picked a worse weekend to do it this winter, I’m not sure if I would have found one. Most of the snow had let up in the Hudson Valley by Friday, and my reading was Saturday in Kingston, which somehow barely got any snow (as you can see by the picture below), so it was still on. But that meant that many of my friends and family were still snowed in and couldn’t make it…

Some schools up there had been closed for four days—in one week! No one remembered that ever happening before. Many towns were still without power… and still are right now. My own mom still has no power. I hope it gets restored soon.

And here I come up on the Amtrak, set to read from my little book. I was shocked not only that the store was still holding the event, but that people actually showed up. I’m so grateful to everyone who braved the weather and the roads to come out and hear me read and say hi. A writer friend and her little boy even brought me a belated cupcake for my birthday! I’d show you a picture, but I’ve devoured it.

You can tell I’m nervous from my expression in some of the photos, but I think I did all right! The whole afternoon went by in a whirlwind.

I still can’t believe I read something I wrote for the first time in a Barnes & Noble. What a rite of passage. The Kingston B&N was so great to host me, and I hope there will be an opportunity to go back, when my debut YA novel, Imaginary Girls, comes out in Summer 2011. (That book, too, is set in the Hudson Valley.) Thank you to Carol Scalzo for all the work setting up the reading, and to Ann Hutton for suggesting an event in the first place.

I loved meeting future readers of the book. I hope they enjoy it!

A fun moment of the event was getting to meet and talk with Kingston High School students who were on the staff of the school newspaper, Highlights. I talked with a few students who want to be writers—which is always so exciting. Best of luck to them (and fingers crossed especially for one student hoping on good news from Boston soon)!

And a very exciting surprise for me was when a woman stepped up to have her book signed and I looked up and said innocently, “Who should I make this out to?” She said, “Scarlett.” I started to write it and then looked up into her face and FLIPPED OUT. She was my ballet teacher when I studied dance all throughout high school! I was so excited to see Scarlett—and Sonny!—after all these years. I loved my years at the Saugerties Ballet Center!

After the signing, I even continued signing—here I am signing one last book even after the event was over.

Then I spent time with my beloved mom—who has made so much of this possible—and took the train back down to the city… exhausted.

My husband was at my side the whole time, helping me with nerves and getting set up for the reading. He wouldn’t want me to post a photograph, but let me just say that when I am reading it’s always calming for me to look out at the audience and find his *adorable* face. Thank you, Erik, for being there for me, always.

I’m so grateful to have had this experience. Thank you to everyone for all the support of Dani Noir. Thank you to WKNY in Kingston and Warren Lawrence for having me on the air! Thank you, Simon & Schuster and Barnes & Noble for making this possible. And a very special thanks to my local Hudson Valley publicist, Marc Breslav of Breslav Public Relations, Marketing and Advertising. Hudson Valley authors, if you’re looking for placement in local papers, on radio, and in bookstores, you may want to contact Marc! You’re welcome to e-mail me at nova [at] novaren.com for his contact info. His help has been invaluable.

Next up for me? My YA, Imaginary Girls, was turned in to the publisher earlier this month and I’m excited to dive into revisions when the time comes. You can keep up on news about this novel, and other future novels, on my main website NovaRen.com.

This spring I’ll be spending a month at the artists colony Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, working on a brand-new novel… keeping it hush-hush for now, but I’ll tell you one thing: I’m crazy excited.

Happy writing, and thank you for supporting Dani Noir! The Barnes & Noble in Kingston has signed copies if you want one, so if you’re in the area, go pick one up.

And I’ll be braving the snowstorm to travel upstate this weekend to the Kingston Barnes & Noble to read from DANI NOIR, sign books, and answer questions. If you’re in the Hudson Valley, I hope you’ll stop by the B&N at 2 p.m. this Saturday, February 27!

“Maybe this would be the part of the movie where we’d go back in time to see how it all happened. That’s called a flashback. Like I open the door to Theater 1, take a step into the darkness, and my whole life spins out before my eyes: being born, first word, first step, that time with Taylor and the Play-Doh, that time on the jungle gym when I almost broke my arm, learning to snowboard up on Hunter Mountain, learning—fine, failing—to play bass guitar, first kiss (practice), first kiss (clumsy but real), that time I held Maya’s ankles when she did sit-ups, that time she held mine, that time I tripped over my shoelaces outside the school library first week of seventh grade and fell flat on my face and everyone laughed and I wish I could forget it but I can’t, that time my best friend moved away, that time I found out someone was lying and that someone was my dad.” —page 29

In reality, I did once trip over my shoelaces in front of everyone in school and fall flat on my face—but they were boot-laces, and it wasn’t seventh grade, it was ninth. Worse: I was the new girl at school and I think it was the first week. I still can’t forget it, obviously.

I’m excited to tell you that there are plans to publish DANI NOIR in paperback, yay! I’ll keep you posted, but for now expect the paperback to release this September 2010!

So that’s where I’ve been for the past couple months: writing, writing, writing, writing. Books are hard work! But sometimes we get to celebrate all our hard work, and that’s what I’ll be doing at the end of February.

I’m super-excited to be doing my first solo reading for DANI NOIR at a local Hudson Valley Barnes & Noble on Saturday, February 27. I’ll be reading from the book and taking questions about anything and everything you may have to ask me!

Going back to Kingston for the reading is perfect, since I spent my tween and teen years very close by (even though that particular Barnes & Noble didn’t open until I’d moved away). If you’re local to the Hudson Valley, you may like to know that when I was very young, I lived in Saugerties, I went to junior high at Rondout Valley, and I spent most of my high school years at Onteora, as did my little brother and my sister. I’m thrilled to be back home for the reading.

Here are the details. I’d love to meet you, so please come by!

DANI NOIR Reading/Q&A
Barnes & Noble
Ulster Plaza, 1177 Ulster Avenue
Kingston, NY 12401
Phone: 845-336-0590
Saturday February 27, 2010 2:00 PM

For directions to the store and more about the event, see B&N.com.

You can RSVP to the event on Facebook, or get more info on the Event Page.

Thank you to the Barnes & Noble in Kingston for hosting me!

And if you have suggestions for which part of the book you’d like me to read, just let me know! You can always e-mail me at nova [at] novaren.com, and I’ll answer!

Golden Notebook Children's Bookstore, Woodstock NY

I had my first signing all on my own this Friday at the Golden Notebook bookstore in Woodstock, New York, the town where I lived during high school and the very bookstore where I picked up books to devour all those years ago. It was a great honor to return to one of my hometowns and sign at the bookstore I loved so much. Thank you to Gaela and the Golden Notebook Children’s Bookstore for having me!

If you happened to see the November 19 issue of the Woodstock Times, you may have seen the story on me in the Alm@nac: “Giving Up the Ghost: Ulster County Native Nova Ren Suma Unveils New ‘Tween Novel Dani Noir Next Friday at Woodstock’s Golden Notebook.” The story is about how I came to write Dani Noir after ghostwriting and how different—and wonderful!—it’s been. The Alm@nac story is available only in print, so I’ll scan it and upload it here as soon as I can. Thank you to the writer Ann Hutton for profiling me. And thank you to Marc Breslav for his tireless work on publicity.

Here I am at the signing table:

At the signing table

And here I am with two spectacular people—my mom Arlene (left) and my little sister Laurel Rose (right):

Me, my mom Arlene, and my sister Laurel Rose

I think the signing went well—I certainly had fun. And as a surprise I got to see my best friend from high school and her new baby! A very emotional moment after all these years… and one more reason I was so happy to return to Woodstock.

Very special thanks to the tween readers! And shout-outs to Arianna, Diana, Elizabeth, Elyse, Kathryn, Leah, Megan, and Quinn… Hope you enjoy the book!

p.s. After the signing, we went to Taco Juan’s for lunch—had to! Yes, there really is a place called Taco Juan’s in Woodstock and I hope they don’t mind the homage. I’ll be back in the summer… for some ice cream.

p.p.s. There are more signed copies of Dani Noir at the Golden Notebook. Contact the bookstore directly if you want one—ask for the children’s annex.

Here’s a snippet from the interview:

JD: How do you switch gears between YA and adult fiction?

NRS: I used to write only adult fiction, but switching gears to YA was far easier than I expected—and felt so natural. For me it’s two things: Being true to the voice, and the point from which the story is being told. If I’m writing an adult character, I’m writing an adult story. If I’m writing a teenager, it’s likely I’m writing YA. I always write in first person—it’s my favorite voice to try to capture as a writer, and also my favorite voice to read—so it’s my characters who decide what I’m writing more than I do.

But there’s more to it than the voice. For me, when I’m writing for adults I feel more removed—I tend to write those stories as if looking back from a distance. I think I could set out to write the same coming-of-age story about the same girl, but if I decided to write it as an adult story it would have a far different flavor than writing it as YA.

Dani Noir, for example—which is technically tween, not YA—was so in the moment, it came out in present tense. There’s no sense of the future, no perspective, and I think that speaks to my character more than anything else. You watch her make her mistakes as she makes them; only later does she gather any wisdom about what she’s done.

Right now, I’m still all about writing in the moment. The novel I’m in the midst of writing, called Imaginary Girls, is YA and it feels so alive, so exhilarating to put down on the page, that sometimes I think I’ll never go back to writing adult fiction. Not to mention that the YA community is so phenomenal, I can’t imagine living without it. So we’ll see. I’m happy here, so I think I’ll keep my gears where they are for a while.

For the rest of the interview, visit barnesandnoble.com!

First, check out “A Passion for Books,” where you’ll find me talking about Dani’s voice and big attitude and what I hope readers will take away from the book. Here’s a peek:

Dani has such a spunky attitude and she had me laughing the entire time with her creative remarks. Was her voice easy for you to write?

I’m glad she made you laugh! Her voice was very easy to get down—sometimes too easy, to the point where I could probably write hundreds more pages in Dani’s voice, even though the story is long over. Maybe you noticed this about Dani when you were reading her, but she’s sure not afraid to say what she thinks, and her imagination tends to take her up and away from reality in crazy little diversions. I loved going off on those movie-inspired fantasy sequences with her. There was a point, during the writing of this novel, when I was walking around in my own life going, “Now, if this were a movie, I wouldn’t have to stay at work all day. I’d just jump out the window…”

No writers got hurt jumping out of any windows during the writing of this novel, though, don’t worry!

Check out the full interview here.

And that’s not all! Guess I can’t shut up this week. Because you’ll also find me interviewed on Shelf Elf as a part of the Winter Blog Blast Tour 2009, in the company of some amazing writers—check out the full tour schedule, and go read those other interviews!

In the interview you’ll find me talking about how strongly I really believe in the motto “What if?”, my cure for writer’s block, three films that changed my life, and much more. Here’s a peek:

Best Writing Advice:

Make your own rules, and then break them when you need to.

I think it’s important to make up your own rules for YOU. Other people may have great success with their writing methods, but that doesn’t mean they’ll translate for someone else. I try to force myself to write every morning; some people write better at night or like to save it all up for the weekend. I outline first; lots of writers abhor outlines (and I admire them for it!). I line-edit my first draft as I go; apparently that’s a big no-no and it would probably be the worst possible advice I could give another writer. Once you start experimenting, you’ll know what works for you.

As for breaking the rules. I do this more than I should, but so far it’s worked for me. Like, when I was writing DANI, I was determined to write it straight through from start to finish, no skipping around and no putting scenes aside to write later. Then I got all muddled up in the middle and had no idea how to get myself out. I was NOT ALLOWED to skip any chapters (this was my rule), so for weeks I struggled and fought and put down awful sentences and then erased them and replaced them with even more awful sentences. Then I realized I was the only one keeping myself to this rule of not skipping around. So I jumped—to the end of the book. I wrote the last four chapters and went back and wrote the middle. It was exactly what I needed to write that particular book. Now I’m writing a new manuscript without allowing myself to skip around (but I’ll totally break my own rule if I think I have to, shh!).

There’s much more—so be sure to check out the full interview.

Blog interviews are so much fun. Thanks to both A Passion for Books and Shelf Elf for having me—and thank you for letting me be a part of the Winter Blog Blast Tour!