Sign up for Melanie's newsletter --> Sign me up!
I began 2024 hoping I would find my way back to writing and I now have TWO unfinished manuscripts. While I would prefer to have a complete first draft, I’m back on track and believe I’m heading in the right direction. And that direction is forward.
I’ve always loved to tell stories. From songs and short stories as a kid to novels later in life, words have always held an importance to me unlike most anything else. I revel in crafting an interesting tale, then watching for my audiences’ reaction. Even my day job is in marketing and communications and my top StrengthsFinder strength is Communication.
If you’ve spent any time in bookstagram, bookthreads, or any of the book-themed social spaces, you’ve probably seen a graphic featuring a book cover surrounded by short phrases and cutesy arrows pointing to the book. These graphics provide readers an at-a-glance summary of what themes they can expect in the book, and oftentimes these images include details that might be left out of the “official” book description, which makes them a valuable piece of a marketing plan.
You can finally reserve your copy of The Quiet Unraveling of Eve Ellaway! At the moment only the ebook is available for preorder, but the hardcover (that’s right) and paperback will soon be options as well.
I’ve been working on this book for so many years that it feels a little unreal that it’s almost a real book! It’s been two years since I’ve published my last novel — my longest gap in almost a decade — so getting to reveal the cover is extra sweet!
The young adult psychological suspense manuscript I’ve talked about FOR YEARS — mostly on social media — is going to be a book! I first wrote The Other Me in 2018-19, polished it again in 2022, and it can be in your hands in February 2025.
Creativity often comes in bursts, and the more you cultivate it, the longer the burst lasts. After not writing for half of 2023, I created a month-long challenge for myself to get back into writing. Each day I wrote roughly 250 words. I tried genres I don’t typically write in, styles atypical to my own, all in the hope that I’d wake up that part of me who loves words.
As you all know by now, I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, but this year I kind of sort of have a few. I’m not calling them resolutions because then my weirdo brain will skitter away and any chance I had of succeeding will disappear faster than the eight dozen cutout Christmas cookies I made.
At fifteen, the school motto — Nihil Sine Labore (nothing without labor) — was just one more thing that terrified me about moving away from home and into a dorm. By the time I was eighteen, I understood that the phrase meant you had to work to succeed, but it still struck me as something added to the school crest to make them seem fancy. Thirty years later, I have a better understanding of what the founders of my school were trying to teach us.
Being part of the children’s literature community, I feel like I’m more aware of these sensitivities. I think it’s because the words we choose and how we tell stories impacts young minds that are still forming how they view the world. Many of my writing friends do not write YA, and I’ve learned that a lot of these shifts in language have not trickled up to “adult” books. Which is why I’m writing about this.