Brenna Yovanoff's Blog

In the past few months, Places No One Knows has been getting realer and realer, turning into something undeniably solid, acquiring the various characteristics that make it more and more like a book.

For instance.

It has a release date:

May 17th!

It has a cover:

It has a synopsis:

Waverly Camdenmar spends her nights running until she can’t even think. Then the sun comes up, life goes on, and Waverly goes back to her perfectly hateful best friend, her perfectly dull classes, and the tiny, nagging suspicion that there’s more to life than student council and GPAs.

Marshall Holt is a loser. He drinks on school nights and gets stoned in the park. He is at risk of not graduating, he does not care, he is no one. He is not even close to being in Waverly’s world.

But then one night Waverly falls asleep and dreams herself into Marshall’s bedroom—and when the sun comes up, nothing in her life can ever be the same. In Waverly’s dreams, the rules have changed. But in her days, she’ll have to decide if it’s worth losing everything for a boy who barely exists.

You can read an excerpt on the Entertainment Weekly site.

It’s on Goodreads and Amazon.

I wrote a book, and it’s about dreams.

It’s about sleeping and not sleeping.

It’s about boys and girls and ideas and feelings and the towering shower of sparks that happens when all those things collide.

A long time ago (no, seriously, like a really long time ago, because two years is a long time, I have been informed), Tessa Gratton, Maggie Stiefvater, and I decided we were going to write a follow-up to our short-story collection, The Curiosities. And because time is a slippery, ever-mutating thing that never seems to stay in one place, that book is done now (!)

It hits shelves October 1st and thanks to the magic of the Carolrhoda team, it is so, so pretty! It looks like this:

And sounds like this:

The follow-up to the acclaimed novel The Curiosities: A Collection of Stories by Maggie Stiefvater, Tessa Gratton, and Brenna Yovanoff.

In an unassuming corner of Brooklyn, a young woman learns to be ladylike, to love context, and to speak her mind from a very curious sort of tutor.

In a faraway land convulsed by war, a young soldier hears the desert’s curious hum as he disarms bombs with the person he doesn’t know how to love.

In a place so shriveled by drought that any drowning is a curiosity, a young writer tries again and again to tread water beneath the surface of a vast and unusual sea.

Three new stories—complete with commentary on the creative process—from three acclaimed young adult authors working at the height of their powers.

Curious?

We wrote another book together! It is about writing fiction! And also, it is absolutely full of fiction. It’s a collection of novellas, and it’s a nitty-gritty exploration of how and why and all the other complicated considerations that go into figuring out the way you want to tell a story. It was written in Virginia and in Kansas and while tucked away in coffee shops and tearing across Nevada along I-80, and parked sadly in Nevada waiting for the engine to cool, and it is about writing, but it’s also a celebration OF writing.

Mostly though, it’s a story about three different ways of getting to The End.

There is a slight-but-important distinction between the two ideas presented in this title, I swear. Also, hello, welcome to my spooky Christmas story!

Context: I’ve been mostly-in-charge-of-myself (with relatively more successes than failures) for a long time. I’m competent at Not Opening the Door to Strangers. I can use the stove and I know all the different kinds of wounds and how to first-aid them, and to never throw flour on a fire and when to call Emergency Services or Poison Control. In fact, I even have a long and uneventful history of supervising other people. Most of my income from ages 11 to 19 was derived from babysitting—sometimes as many as five tiny people at once. I’m very good at remembering who will eat sandwiches with mustard on them, and who won’t.

Over the years, I’ve proven how very much I’m allowed to be in charge of myself.

Except.

There is one specific area in which I am really, really bad at supervising myself. It’s when I’m asleep.

I’m pretty sure I know what you’re thinking right now, which is that most people don’t actually need very much in-sleep supervision.

And I’ve talked about this before, but I think maybe I didn’t convey how dramatically bad at sleeping I am. I am SO BAD that it’s almost like a joke or an urban legend. Among my distance-friends—anyone who ever has to travel with me, really—it’s become a poorly-understood but generally-accepted phenomenon, kind of like gravity, complete with concise, factual explanations for the benefit of others (Tess) and dramatic reenactments (Maggie).

Sharing a room with me is the kind of thing that no one is just born ready for. It’s an intermediate endeavor. You have to work up to it.

At home, the situation is normalized. It’s fine. I’m married to someone who pretty much takes these things in stride and explains to me (patiently) that no, the ceiling does not in fact have an octopus on it, and the closet is just a closet, and it’s not flooding outside, the water is not higher than the windows.

But sometimes, D has to go out of town for work, and then I’m left unsupervised.

Here is a story:

Once I woke up.

Standing in the exact middle of the upstairs hallway.

With all the lights on.

The cat was sitting a few feet from me, looking up like, “Hey. You do know how really weird this is, right?”

Over time, I became aware that my knees, which are held together by little pieces of titanium, felt stiff, and I realized I had no idea how long I’d been standing there. It was exactly like every found-footage horror movie with fixed cameras and time-lapse.

I picked up the cat and told her sternly, “Paranormal Activity is bullshit.”

Then I turned out all the lights and went back to bed and I’m like 90% sure I stayed there the rest of the night.

This is not the story of that though, because that’s actually a huge anomaly—I hardly ever sleepwalk in the classic sense. This is the story of the time I got haunted by a Christmas present, which started because of another thing that sometimes happens when D goes out of town, which is that I start getting ominous and highly-ambitious ideas.

The idea I got this time was to make a plague doctor mask for Tess to sit around having conversations with and wear at her leisure. I assume that’s what people do with masks? Sit around wearing them and having conversations? I don’t know. Anyway, it was a mask and I began to make it.

And then, as with so many things in my life, the dreams started.

Every night, I’d wake up believing that the mask was somewhere in my room—would find myself examining it, holding it, gazing into its vacant, circular eyes. Then I’d get very confused and realize I was standing in the closet, holding a T-shirt or a bra, and once, D’s Flat Bonnie soft-toy, which is suppose to live on the dresser and not ever go around at night pretending to be a plague mask.

I started working faster, more intently. I wanted to finish, if for no other reason than to get it out of my house so it would stop looking at me every night while I slept. (Also, Christmas was really soon.)

On the last night, I dreamed the mask was tucked cozily in bed with me, right there on my pillow. I picked it up and sat looking at it for a long time, and when I came to my senses, realized I was holding … nothing at all.

The next morning, I hammered a bunch of rivets into its face and mailed it to Tess. I haven’t dreamed about it since. Maybe now she dreams of it instead. Or maybe she’s like a normal person and never thinks the front yard is underwater when it isn’t.

If this were a movie, I would tell you next about how my hair has begun to turn black like a crow for no reason, or that when I catch sight of my reflection in the street, everyone around me is wearing masks.

But it’s not a movie, and so this is just the story of how my dreams do not confine themselves to the inside of my brain.

And my husband treats every spider panic and conviction that the room is full of weasels like just another day.

And no one with any common sense wants to share a bed with me at sleepovers.

I know, I know—I’m posting on a Sunday* (isn’t that weird?)!

The Summer Nostalgia contest has ended, the entries—as I’ve come to expect from you guys—are utterly delightful, and FIENDISH is officially out in the world!

Which I celebrated by immediately removing myself from all earthly responsibilities, going deep into hiding, and dropping off the face of the world.

(Not really. Really, I celebrated by attending my dear high school friend’s thoroughly excellent wedding in the mountains, far from paved roads, the internet, and cellphone service, but close to horses, rattlesnakes, and shooting stars. As you might imagine, it was gorgeous, wild, and total perfection.)

But now I’m back, ensconced in the coziest corner of my local coffee shop, it’s an all-Bob-Dylan morning on their Pandora station, and here’s the part you’re waiting to hear about.

The US winners of a signed, finished copy of Fiendish are:

AND

Our international winner is:

I’ll be emailing you three shortly, so be on the lookout!

Thank you all for showing up, for telling me about your own personal versions of summer. The little details are the best ones. They’re something I never get tired of. You are, have always been, and continue to be the very best, and I still have a whole stack of finished copies that need good homes—as my husband periodically reminds me, there’s no need to hoard them—so stick around!

*This originally said Saturday, because that is exactly how much I know what is going on at any given time.

One week from now is the 14th of August. Which means: in one week, Fiendish will take flight and land on shelves—weird and spooky and full of monsters, full of teeth and claws and tangled thickets and wind chimes. Which also means: now it’s time for a CONTEST!

I wrote this book because there are fireflies in Arkansas and none here. Because when you’re little, the world is big and the middle of the creek is over your head, and Little Sister Yovanoff was born without any propensity for angst. Her mind is astute, her appetite for stories is voracious, but her attitude toward melodrama has always been one of frank bemusement: “I liked the [generic spoiler for the story of your choice] and how they solved the [shocking plot point],” she said to me once. “But why are the people in books always So Upsetting?”

Clementine DeVore—main character of Fiendish—is not upsetting, and that’s the truth.

Clementine is the kind of person who gets things done. The kind of person you can depend on to sally forth. To want to do the right thing. There’s a special version of dramatic tension inherent in a character who wants to do the right thing. A person who loves everything and everyone, and just wants to do right by the world.

So. We come to the part that concerns you: I arrived back home from the highly entertaining, slightly chaotic excitement of Comic Con and Maggie’s Sharp Teeth road trip and three weeks away, to find … a big box of finished books!

Which means, it’s time for me to figure out how to use rafflecopter again.

Today my contest is about a very certain kind of joy. I want to know about summer pastimes. What is that very particular thing that means summer to you—the thing you think of wistfully sometimes when it’s gray and sloppy out?

The prizes are as follows: two finished copies up for grabs for US residents, one copy for international.

I take the internationalness of this contest very seriously, since I’m never allowed to give you guys ARCs, so we’re going to try a thing. I know that automatically makes this whole endeavor about fifty times more complicated, but bear with me:

If you live in the US this link is for you:

a Rafflecopter giveaway for US residents

If you DO NOT live in the US this link is for you:

a Rafflecopter giveaway for international residents

You can get points by commenting here and sharing your most quintessentially-summer pastime, and also by tweeting the message that’s included in the rafflecopter. Contest ends next Wednesday at midnight Eastern.

Sally forth!

It transpires that it is July—that the asphalt is hot, the hail storms are erratic, and my neighborhood is beset by earwigs. That my cohort, critique partner, and dear, dear friend Maggie Stiefvater is currently in the throes of a cross-country road trip of outrageous proportions (that’s mostly just how she likes to do things).

Thanks to the physics of traveling cross-country, if she points west and accelerates for long enough, she’ll reach Denver. At which point I will throw my suitcase in her 1973 Camaro, hope the AC holds, and we’ll drive out to California, probably engaging in some light mayhem on the way, and definitely acquiring our third merry sister Tessa Gratton somewhere in Utah.

Beyond that, the finer points are kind of soft around the edges—if the car breaks down, I’ll push, if there’s a dirt bike or a pony, I will totally ride it—but here are two things that are definitely-definitely happening:

First, on July 24th at 7:00, the three of us will be at Kepler’s in Menlo Park, CA, talking about writing, critique, and why group chat and a constant stream of red panda gifs are absolutely necessary to productivity.

Second, on July 26th, I’ll be participating in a horror panel at Comic Con in San Diego, talking about scaring people on purpose (signing of Fiendish to follow)!

So.

If you are at all in the vicinity of either of those places, you should definitely come see me!

Otherwise, you can watch Maggie’s (and by extension, mine and Tess’s) progress west at Sharp T33th.

(You have absolutely no idea how much I hope there’s a pony …)

And now, the first Fiendish contest has officially drawn to a close! (And let me just say—I’m amazed and kind of delighted at how many people’s early memories involve food, pets, favorite toys, or playing in the dirt.)

Your entries have been tallied, your personal anecdotes have been thoroughly enjoyed by me, the winners have been randomly selected, and now I present to you:

Lily D

Cynthia P

and

Anne Tedeton

I’ll be contacting you guys shortly for your mailing addresses!

To everyone who entered, I had a wonderful time reading through your stories and will endeavor to think up an equally-answerable themed question for the next contest, so stayed tuned for more giveaways!

*Of the book, I mean. I’m sure you’re very lovely people

This is a book I wrote:

It has a pretty face!

Kirkus gave it a star (!!!) and said this:

The atmosphere in Yovanoff’s latest is eerily reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird, if only Harper Lee’s Maycomb residents had been given magical families as a focus for their bigotry.

I say this:

It’s about magic and monsters—even more monsters than I have ever written about before, and also more magic. Also: girls, boys, cousins, best friends, Trans Ams, tattoos, and catfish. It’s about a girl who has spent ten years underground, and now she’s finally waking up.

Fiendish hits shelves August 14th and then everybody can have it! But three of you can have it RIGHT NOW, so the contest part:

I’m giving away three ARCs, and unfortunately (as usual), ARC rules means no international entries. HOWEVER. As soon as I have finished copies in my hot little hands, I’ll do another giveaway, with prizes set aside exclusively for international entries.

Also, today I’m trying something new. It is called rafflecopter. You probably know more about it than I do, because I set it up this morning. I think it even works. If it doesn’t, we’ll … just roll with it?

You can get entry points by commenting here and telling me about a childhood memory, and also by tweeting (it’s all in the … rafflecopter?). Contest ends next Tuesday at midnight Eastern.

Okay, here we go!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

I’ve been away. I know this.

I’ve been away, writing an all-new secret book, full of all-new secret words and kisses and the kind of deep relational dysfunction that was all I ever, ever wanted to hear about at sixteen.

Now, that book is safely in the capable hands of Agent Sarah, and even though many esteemed writers of my acquaintance are often driven to anxious rocking and madness by this part of the publishing process … I kind of love it.

Not because I’m willfully contrary or a masochist, but because in that brief window of Circumstances Yet Unknown—for that one finite spoonful of time—this whole physical world/gainful employment/concrete consideration/behaving sensibly business is distinctly Not My Problem. I LOVE when things are not my problem!

However. I realize there’s a flip-side. That flip-side is: uncertainty.

I have a long, storied, and overly-complicated relationship with uncertainty.

(This is not a post about Fiendish.)

Let me tell that relationship to you.

(Later, I will make a post about Fiendish. MANY, even. Right now, though, this is a post about personal growth, the power of literature, and the confusing phobias of my youth.)

Oh, childhood—a simpler time. A time of knock-off-Disney pop-up books, velcro sneakers, and hugely, gloriously irrational fears.

The thing I am about to tell you is ridiculous. You don’t believe me yet, but you will. No, seriously, it’s nonsensical. It is—to be quite honest—virtually incoherent.

The year that I was five, I became terrified of infinity. I was obsessed with it. Paralyzed by it. It was simultaneously the most mind-blowing concept I had ever encountered, and the worst thing I could think of.

This was not a fear that I could adequately express to anyone. Even within the vast and baffling pantheon of childhood fears (dogs, bees, quicksand, the shower drain, the garbage disposal, butterflies), my fear was weird. It was intangible. Abstract. It couldn’t bite you or kidnap you or live under your bed. It could not inhabit physical space (or else, it was everywhere all the time) and so, it could never effectively be banished.

While my various friends plucked their stuffed toys bald at the possibility of pit vipers and werewolves, and then exhausted themselves, I lay blank-faced—long after everyone else in the house (possibly the neighborhood) (possibly the entire world) had gone to sleep—thinking about the startling revelation that the universe didn’t end and didn’t begin and time was a horrible, circular creature, and also something I didn’t really understand because I was five and clocks were still kind of hard.

The thing about infinity was, you didn’t have to understand it in order to grasp how scary it was. You could walk pensive circles around it, kick the tires, and possessing only the haziest inkling of it, still come out of the whole existential fiasco with a sense of impending doom.

I became deeply afraid that I would never amass enough information to understand the universe. I became afraid that my brain would break. The gears would jam, I would become irrevocably locked in place. I’d be perpetually trapped in one never-ending moment, stretching on and on until forever.

This fear was stark, icy, and all-consuming. It occupied my nighttime thoughts for roughly one calendar year.

The thing that saved my neurotic little self was a book by Russell Hoban, called The Mouse and His Child. It was a dark, convoluted, and oddly philosophical story. (Also, the page I’m sending you to with that link is super, super yellow.) I loved the book with the kind of fanatical devotion that prompts a short, fanatical person to draw nineteen pictures of odious slave-trader/main villain Manny Rat. I loved it like it was the charming-yet-esoteric story of my own tiny life. This is not a post about the book though, because the book was only the instigating factor.

There was an old animated version of the story that played on TV sometimes at weird hours, usually late, late at night, and this animated version is where I came to fully and therapeutically understand the concept of the last visible dog, and so, to make peace with my strange child-version of infinity.

For the sentimental and brightly-colored Youtube clip that you are about to see, I’m heartily sorry. (Read the book. It’s way, way better) For the slew of ominously recursive dogs, I am also heartily sorry, but in a different, more vindicated way, because if you watch them and find yourself in any way unsettled, know this: now you can totally appreciate the kind of bizarre horror that gripped child-me as I watched the dogs reduce,* following them down the long hallway of the Bonzo can label into the center of the universe.

I counted with the Mouse Child, trying to calculate this awful depth, panicking when the dogs began to flash by faster and faster. The interlude seemed to last much too long, suddenly. I’ve never been very good at telling how much time is passing, and I became convinced that the moment would never end, and I would be permanently stuck there in front of the TV, as the visible dogs marched on and on and on.

And then suddenly, they stopped. There was white space beyond the endless parade. The Mouse Child had found infinity, and it was not the bottomlessness of the universe. It was made of himself—of thoughts and ideas and memories—and if the dogs were to be believed, eventual white space. It stared in, not out.

Now, this whole philosophical conundrum was something Russell Hoban had basically already covered in the book, but it took actually seeing it in front of me to truly believe that the Mouse Child could be infinity. I could be infinity. We travel in instead of out.

Every writer I know is weird. This is the lesson, I guess. I’m sorry this still doesn’t really explain my relationship with uncertainty, but I guess it explains why I love The Mouse and His Child.

Every writer has a weird, infinite, ungovernable universe inside them. Every person has a universe inside them. As Whitman famously said: I contain multitudes.

Infinity is us. Uncertainty is us. In its own conceptual, higher-functioning way, eternity is us. And even though that was once the stuff of childhood nightmare?

These days, I kind of enjoy it.

*You totally can’t, can you? Because this is a child’s cartoon from the 1970s and no one is traumatized by it but me. It’s cool. I totally get it.

Today is 2014. Which seems vaguely implausible, since yesterday it was decades ago and I was nine and twenty-four and twelve and also eighteen and thirty, because historically, I have a very hard time noting/remembering/reconciling myself with the passage of time.

(I think it might be fake.)

Here are some of the things that happened this year:

In Winter, Paper Valentine came out, and that was on January 8, 2013, which means a year ago minus one week. (See? I’m doing time!) (Or … at least math.)

In Spring, I left my hibiscus tree outside because it likes it outside, but then it got hailed on because weather is like that here, and now it looks kind of ragged and aggressive. It has become a potted tree with an attitude. This was a sort of a learning experience, and I’ve since vowed not leave it outside unsupervised again, no matter how nice the evening looks.*

In Summer, I finished edits on Fiendish, and it became, in essence, a real live book that has corners and edges and takes up space and exists!

In Fall, Maggie, Tess, and I got our picture taken together for the Beyond Words charity calendar, which features a variety of wonderful authors in fancy costumes, and if you are in the market for a calendar (which I know you are, because today is 2014), consider this your opportunity to totally get one.

Then, just this last month … Paper Valentine was named a best book of the year by both NPR and The Boston Globe, which is squirmy and twirly and overwhelming and I-don’t-know-what!

(A really spectacular way to end a year, is what.)

Now though, it is 2014, which means it is the future. So here are some things that are happening in the coming year.

1) Fiendish will be out this summer, which means that soon (ish), I will be talking about it a lot—like probably all the time*—and having contests where you can win ARCs and prizes-not-specified, and telling you long, disjointed stories about when I lived in Arkansas, and trying to think of stories that don’t involve snakes, because about 85% of my Arkansas stories are about snakes, because 85% of Arkansas is made of snakes.

2) I am currently working on an A-plus-1#-top-secret book, because working on books is what I do, and while I can’t promise you any what’s and when’s because these things take how long that take, I can say that I’ll be very delighted if it doesn’t have to be secret for tooooooo much longer, because while publishing is full of many secrets and while I am, in many respects, an inveterate secret-keeper, there are certain things that are simply much better shared. This is one of them.

3) In a week (!) I will be meeting up with Tess and Maggie (!) to drink coffee and pet goats and work on the impending follow-up to The Curiosities (!), which will feature fiction, discussion, revision, and most likely … ridiculousness?

That’s pretty much what I know about the coming year, and also (let’s be honest) only slightly less than I know about the year that just passed.

There will be more things.

There will be prizes and announcements and surprises.

There always are.

*What I mean is, I will probably leave it outside again, like, tomorrow.

**I’ll endeavor to keep it under control so that you can find yourself marginally as excited for Fiendish as I am, rather than lovingly thinking back to a time when I didn’t talk so much about it! (However.) (You are warned.) Prizes!