The Story is About   +  script

Guest Post: Amanda Howells (& Giveaway)

Amanda Howells

Books:

  • The Summer of Skinny Dipping (June 1, 2010)


Prologue:

There are summers you’ll always remember and summers you’ve forgotten even before they’re through. It’s never an in-between season. Whole months can slip by, and you don’t know what you did or where you were. June, July, August, they’re all the same.This is the other kind.

Long after that summer ended, I stayed stuck inside it, reliving that night, over and over, and everything that led up to it. Sometimes I still wake up shivering in the early
hours of the morning, drowning in dreams of being out there in the ocean, of looking up at the moon and feeling as invisible and free as a fish.

I know I am different, and yet also, in a way, I’m still the same, only more myself now, because that’s what happens when your life changes so completely. It takes pieces of you that you kept deeply hidden, even from yourself, and forces them to the surface like splinters working their way out of your skin.

But I’m jumping ahead, and to tell the story right, I have to go back to the very beginning. To a place called Indigo Beach. To a boy with pale skin that glowed against the dark waves. To the start of something neither of us could have predicted, and which would mark us forever, making everything that came after and before seem like it belonged to another life.

My name is Mia Gordon: I was sixteen years old, and I remember everything.



Guest Post from Amanda Howells:

I'd call it The Summer of Second Chances.

No, that's not the title of my next book; it refers to summer 2009, when I sold my first novel, The Summer of Skinny Dipping. It's kind of an unusual publishing story and Kristi has asked me to share it with you, dear Siren readers. I'm delighted to do so because—spoiler alert!—unlike my novel, the story behind it has a happy ending.

I finished the first draft of Skinny Dipping in the summer of 2001. After studying creative writing in NYC, I'd worked as a ghostwriter for a company called Alloy, where I wrote a bunch of books in Francine Pascal's Sweet Valley High and Fearless series. Ghostwriting was really fun. Although I only type with three fingers I type maniacally fast, which—along with being a good mimic—is a skill that comes in handy when you need to churn out a 50,000-word series book in 6 weeks! Beyond ghost gigs, I hadn't really planned on becoming a YA writer. But one day, I just woke up with this title in my head: The Summer of Skinny Dipping. I absolutely knew it needed to be a book. And I knew it would be a love story in a classic sort of vein—something timeless and bittersweet.

The title stuck in my head and story came pretty quickly. I felt sure it would sell. It didn't. Various editors passed on Skinny Dipping when it made the rounds in the fall of 2001. Book publishing was tricky right after 9-11 so that was one thing. But there are many reasons books don't get picked up and rejection is something you just have to get used to as a writer. So when nobody jumped on my book, I indulged in a lengthy self-pitying wallow fest shelved it and moved on.

I spent the next years writing everything but YA fiction—travel pieces, short stories, mom-blogging for a magazine... I wrote a ton, but I was totally out of the teen pub scene. Until Dan Ehrenhaft became Acquisitions Editor at Sourcebooks Fire last year, and this note arrived in my inbox, asking if I had any YA projects underway. Dan had been my Fearless editor at Alloy, and we'd worked really well together. Now he was in a position to buy books. But I didn't have anything new; I only had this old manuscript that I still thought about now and then. When Dan asked to read it, I had no expectations. So it was an awesome surprise when he bought it!

Skinny Dipping had languished in the archives of my computer for the better part of a decade, but Dan felt the story held up. It felt timeless to him, as it always had to me. And once we brushed off the cobwebs and put it through a revision, it was ready to go.

I don't usually buy into out-of-the-blue happy endings. I'm more of a realist. Because when you write for a living, chances are you'll hear a lot more "no's" than "yes'es." I've had my share of "no's", and learned a few lessons because of them. But sometimes there is such a thing as a surprise happy ending. And in the case of my rejected, almost-forgotten first original YA novel, that's exactly what happened. When I least expected a "yes," I got one.



Thanks Amanda for sharing that story!

You can win your own signed copy of The Summer of Skinny Dipping by Amanda Howells!

Official Contest information:

  • to enter, please fill out the form below
  • entrants must be 13 years of age or older
  • contest deadline is July 20, 2010
  • contest open to residents of the US only
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