This weeks Unpublished Me post comes to you from the author of one of my all time favourite books Geekerella, Ashley Poston! Ashely loves dread pirates, moving castles and starry night skies. She graduated from the University of South Carolina with a B.A. in How to Kick Butt Without Even Trying (aka English), and fell in love with the Romantics. When not proclaiming her love for Lord Byron (in that #problematicfavs sort of way), she's in search for her next great adventure. She lives in South Carolina with her bossy cat, and they are firm believers that we're all a bunch of weirdos looking at other weirdos, asking for their usernames.
Dear Ash of 2015,
You’re bent over a manuscript,
editing by the kitchen light in your small Brooklyn apartment. There is snow on
the sill of your kitchen window, and outside you can see the neighbor across
the way putting up his Christmas tree in the living room. Don’t look at the
clock, you’ll just be reminded of how long you’ve stared at page 294 (and that
you still have work in the morning).
Your chest is tight from
anxiety—or is it heart burn from the day-old pizza? Or are you having a heart
attack? Oh god, you hope you aren’t having a heart attack. You can’t—you have
to turn in this R&R to the editor who might buy this book and change your
life. Nothing will stop you. Nothing can stop
you.
You are the living, breathing
embodiment of absolute stubbornness.
You can’t even remember the
last time you bathed okay, so it was this morning because otherwise you’re a
shambling zombie with exciting hair), or the last time you ate (five seconds
ago, because you stress-eat peanut butter like PacMan noms dots). All you know
is that this story—this book—has been your lifeblood for so long, you have
Dragon Ball Z Fusion’d yourself with it to create a superior Ashley Poston—
Ultimate Super Author Ashley
Poston!
ULTIMATE SUPER AUTHOR ASHLEY
POSTON MEETS DEADLINES.
ULTIMATE SUPER AUTHOR ASHLEY
POSTON WILL MAKE BOOK PERFECT.
ULTIMATE SUPER ASHLEY POSTON
CAN DO ANYTHING.
RAH-RAH-RAH!
Your stubbornness only grows
when you remember all the people who told you that being an author is a nice
dream—but when are you going to get a real job? You’re haunted by the memory of
an empty college classroom the day you were to read your short story, your
classmates having skipped yours because you wrote YA. You remember the
fifty-six agent rejections you pinned to your wall, and you remember the
feeling of finally—finally—getting an
offer of representation. For this story, no less! For these characters! This
world! This idea!
So you’re fueled by so many
things, and they all keep you ravenous
for more.
This is your shot, you tell
yourself.
Be like Hamilton and don’t waste it.
But really, you don’t look
very Ultimate Super Author. You just look tired. You’re missing a December
snowfall you’ve never gotten a chance to see before. You haven’t yet gone to
Rockerfeller to stare in awe at the gigantic tree. You haven’t gotten presents
for your family—you barely remember your work’s holiday party. The month has
gone by in a blur of computer pages, and unbeknownst to you, you will never
live in a New York City December again.
Take a breath, Ash. Skype your
cat, who you miss dearly. Go outside and feel the bite of cold against your
nose and inhale the city air fresh with snowfall. See the tree, take a picture
or two, make jokes about what big balls
it has (ornaments, they were tree ornaments).
That passage your stressing
over won’t even be in the final draft. The character you’re thinking of
cutting? Tomorrow you’ll realize that you need to add his POV.
While you’re lost in a world
you created, don’t forget that the world outside is passing you by. Be in it,
enjoy the moment—and don’t be afraid of setting this story aside for the
evening. Because what you don’t realize yet is that you will never leave the
world in your head, you’ll carry it with you wherever you go.
Meet new friends, go to book
events, stare up at the impossibly tall buildings and revel in the moment
because you are in New York City. You
just signed a work-for-hire for this little publisher called Quirk Books, and
you don’t know it yet, but that little story of Cinderella at a Comic-Con will
take you places you never thought possible.
So don’t worry about this R&R—one
story will never define you, because you will write multitudes of stories, and
each one of them will build your castle.
Because in March? You’ll get
the call. And you’ll cry at your work desk, not because of the news itself, but
because you realize that after all these years of writing a story about a girl
searching for home, she finally found one.
Three years later, on February
27th, 2018, you will share Heart
of Iron with the world. And still you won’t feel like Ultimate Super Author
Ashley Poston, because there’s another deadline, and another edit, and another
book.
And so you build your castle.
Forever
with Love,
Ash
(PS –
Please wear your wrist guards.)
Pages: 480
Publisher: Balzer + Bray
Publication Date: 27th February 2018
ISBN13: 9780062652850
Summary
Seventeen-year-old Ana is a scoundrel by nurture and an outlaw by nature. Found as a child drifting through space with a sentient android called D09, Ana was saved by a fearsome space captain and the grizzled crew she now calls family. But D09—one of the last remaining illegal Metals—has been glitching, and Ana will stop at nothing to find a way to fix him.
Ana’s desperate effort to save D09 leads her on a quest to steal the coordinates to a lost ship that could offer all the answers. But at the last moment, a spoiled Ironblood boy beats Ana to her prize. He has his own reasons for taking the coordinates, and he doesn’t care what he’ll sacrifice to keep them.
When everything goes wrong, she and the Ironblood end up as fugitives on the run. Now their entire kingdom is after them—and the coordinates—and not everyone wants them captured alive.
What they find in a lost corner of the universe will change all their lives—and unearth dangerous secrets. But when a darkness from Ana’s past returns, she must face an impossible choice: does she protect a kingdom that wants her dead or save the Metal boy she loves?
