At long last a LiveJournal by Jeri Smith-Ready

I'm feeling strangely zen about the release of Bad to the Bone, maybe because I still don't know whether it officially comes out Saturday or next Tuesday. (Regardless, it's already shipping from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.)

Or maybe because I'm completely absorbed in writing the first in my YA series, more big news of which I'll have on Friday.

Or maybe I've matured to the point where I realize that I've done everything I can to write a good book, and the rest will just have to take care of itself. Shyeah, right.

A few tidbits on Bad to the Bone's release:

1. It was blurbed by the lovely Joyce Ann on Publishers Weekly's Beyond Her Book blog this morning.

2. I'll be signing copies of it for the first time at Borders in Winchester, VA, this Saturday, 2-4pm. All my other books should be on sale there as well.

3. I'm doing the Freaky Friday feature this week at Bitten By Books:

The apocalypse must be nigh, because not only are dogs and cats living together, they’re now interviewing each other! Dexter, the canine vampire hero from Jeri Smith-Ready’s Bad to the Bone will sit down (or maybe lie down if he gets tired) with his feline friend Antoine. They’ll discuss what it’s like to live with adventure-prone humans (the living and the undead), the best ways to beg for supper, and which end of a dead rodent to save for last.

As an added bonus Jeri is offering up a couple of great prizes! One Autographed set of Wicked Game and Bad to the Bone plus a 2nd prize for another lucky reader. A $25.00 gift card to PetSmart or Petco (winner’s choice). Contest is open to readers worldwide!

4. My quarterly newsletter will be going out this week, and two subscribers will win signed copies of guess which book? Signup boxes are on every page of my website.

5. I'll have another Spread-the-Word contest beginning tomorrow and running until the end of the month. The helpful person who won the last contest got a $50 Amazon gift certificate. Not bad, eh? I could definitely use some help getting the word out about Bad to the Bone, because my next book is due June 1. Ack!

And with that, it's back to work.

I know, I know. Too many of my recent posts have exclamation points at the end. I can't help it if exciting things have been happening.

The latest is a bit of a dream come true, one of those career goals in the category of Things I Can't Control. My upcoming vampire book, Bad to the Bone (WVMP Radio Book 2), just got a starred review in Publishers Weekly.

( Click for enlightenment--not the Buddha kind, but stuff about how star thingies work. )

Oh, here's the actual review (if you click through you have to scroll way down to the sf/f/horror category):

Bad to the Bone Jeri Smith-Ready. Pocket, $15 paper (384p) ISBN 978-1-4165-5178-2
In Smith-Ready’s espionage farce sequel to 2008’s Wicked Game, Ciara Griffin and her vampire DJs face another threat to their Maryland radio station 94.3 WVMP, the Lifeblood of Rock ’n’ Roll. When the Family Action Network (FAN) disrupts WVMP’s Halloween broadcast by pirating their signal and jamming it with antivampire rhetoric, Ciara swears revenge. Under the aegis of the International Agency for the Control and Management of Undead Corporeal Entities, Ciara turns spy and infiltrates the cult’s fortress, armed with her wits and her vampire-healing “antiholy” blood. Aiding her are a crew of hip vamp buddies and vampire dog Dexter, whom she rescues after finding him chained to a cross outside a FAN enclave. Smith-Ready pours plenty of fun into her charming, fang-in-cheek urban fantasy, which frequently skirts the edge of parody. (May)

So yay.

Making this quick, as I’m heading into the Abject Panic phase of this Bad to the Bone rewrite. This always happens, because to make the book better, I have to dismantle and rebuild it. Right now it’s like an engine that’s been taken apart, and all the little pieces are lying around on the garage floor. If this were American Chopper, Big Paul would be screaming his head off and throwing wrenches at the head of his son Paulie and that other guy, the one I always liked (I looked it up, it's Mikey). There’d be a lot of bleeped words.

Anyway, yesterday Joyce Ann McLaughlin blurbed THE REAWAKENED for Publisher’s Weekly’s Beyond Her Book blog, saying,

The Reawakened concludes the Aspect of Crow trilogy, and fulfills the expectations raised in Eyes of Crow and Voice of Crow. I read and enjoy a lot of books, and series of books, and when I'm done, I can move along. Sometimes, though, there are stories that are special enough to touch me, and I will go back to them again and again. This is one of those. Aspect of Crow is more than just enjoyable; it is memorable.

Another Aspect of Crow fan who doesn’t want to kill me—yay!

Thanks to everyone who participated in Margie Lawson's guest blog appearance this week, and congrats to the winners of the lecture packets!

Today’s Voter Registration nag video (see below) was sent to me by fellow author Alex Bledsoe, who writes science fiction and horror for Tor Books. I had the privilege of giving a cover quote for his first vampire novel BLOOD GROOVE, which comes out April 1. Scary and funny stuff.

(Also, I forgot to give a hat tip to author Victoria Dahl for yesterday’s BotherVoting.org e-card site.)

Usual spiel: below are the states where voter registration is still open, and the blinking states close tomorrow, Friday October 10, Brett Favre’s 39th birthday,through Sunday, October 12, which is probably the next time you'll hear from me.


As always, visit VotersUnite! for rules and regs pertaining to your state of mind.

( These are not the State that Sarah Palin am the executive of )

The third book in the Aspect of Crow trilogy, The Reawakened, just received a Top Pick from Romantic Times Book Reviews. This makes it three Top Picks for three for the trilogy--hat trick, baby!

Here's the review (and a link for subscribers--it'll be up for everyone in two months):

You don't want to miss the powerful conclusion to the Aspect of Crow trilogy. Smith-Ready tells the story effortlessly and from shifting perspectives. The tension increases and never lets up. Unforgettable characters portray every emotion in a heart-wrenching, hopeful tale. Multiple storylines and escalating conflict reach an uplifting conclusion.

Summary: In Rhia's world, everyone has magic bestowed by their animal spirits. Her gift, the spirit of the crow, shows her a vision of a future that fills her with terror. Her world is threatened by The Descendants, those who disregarded their Guardian spirits to embrace technology. The nonbelievers are determined to conquer Rhia's people and suppress their magic, and Rhia's crow spirit demands sacrifices that will change her life forever. (LUNA, Nov., 480 pp., $14.95)
—Gail Pruszkowski

I was thrilled to read this, because a) did I mention 3 for 3? and b) as I mentioned in my post yesterday, I went for broke with this book, so I wasn't sure how it was going to go over with current fans. Since this reviewer loved the previous two installments (and was partly responsible for Eyes of Crow winning the Reviewers Choice Award for Best Fantasy Novel of 2006), I was anxious to see what she thought.

Big whew!

The November issue of RT should be on newsstands on October 1. No doubt my issue will arrive in the mail much later.

(Read the Top Pick reviews for Eyes of Crow and Voice of Crow.  If, you know, you want, and haven't got anything better to do, or maybe need convincing to check out this series NOW before it's ALL OVER!)

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Now playing: Architects of Sound - Government Salami - V/A
via FoxyTunes

Just got back from the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association Fall Conference in Cherry Hill, NJ. I love bookseller trade shows because hey, I love booksellers. But I also love them because I get a chance to mingle with people outside my genres, and because I get to see previews of books that aren't coming out for months. Oh, and I might have picked up a book or ARC or two. Or sixty.

My name is Jeri, and I'm a Bookaholic.  {{hiiiii Jeriiiiii}}

Anyway, the work day is over for most people, but I've got a novel to revise, so I've got a full night's work ahead of me.  So this'll be quick, another "They blog so I don't have to" moments.

In a post entitled "Eat your heart out, George Clooney," Ciara brags about a review in Green Man Review, which I have to admit is one of my favorites, too:

Wicked Game is clever, funny, creative, and way too much fun. Jeri Smith-Ready plays with a concept I always thought would work well with vampires, setting them up as nighttime radio DJs whose familiarity with the material comes from actual experience, and she does it well, throwing in a nice mixture of musical styles and character personalities. Honestly, this is a book I wish I'd written, so I'm glad someone went ahead and did it. Smith-Ready's treatment of vampires is slightly skewed from the average depiction; in her world, vampires need to find a balance between the time period in which they were alive, and the modern era, lest they become disconnected and unable to function. Moreover, they're essentially locked in to their "Life Time," unable to easily change or grow or learn new things as time marches on without them. This imbues this particular breed of vampire with a unique and satisfying vulnerability, which makes for some interesting complications in their society. She also plays with the nature of codependency between vampires and humans, showing various ways in which they each get what they want, be it sex, money, protection, or dinner (you guess which is which. . . .) Maybe it's not all entirely original, since there's only so much variation possible, but it's explored nicely here.

Ciara's a fun character in her own right, a natural con artist who's always looking for that extra angle to exploit, and that back door to escape through. She's pragmatic, and naturally skeptical at first when things get weird, reacting like any normal person would, but when the chips are down, she really shines. In fact, it's safe to say she's got some massive reserves of confidence to draw upon, and an amazing amount of chutzpah, given some of the plans she comes up with. It'll be interesting to see what she does next, after what she pulls off in this book.

Wicked Game is a sure-fire winner in my opinion, and the sequel will be one of my must-reads.

Delish.  Read the rest and see if you can figure out Ciara's favorite line.

Then in Shane's World, our favorite vampire DJ (well, my favorite, anyway) waxes nostalgic about 80s video games, and shares with us a clip from a hilarious spoof of "Pac-Man the Movie."

Off to eat my first real meal of the day and then get crackin' on the manuscript.  Tomorrow I'll be back with the results of Spencer's story contest. 

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Now playing: Calico Horse - Awake In the Clouds
via FoxyTunes   

Stuart and Glory Jaffe's Eclectic Review discussed Wicked Game again, even more in depth than in last month's episode. This time it was in the context of recycled art and how the novel puts unique twists on the old vampire conventions.

Stuart also remarks on the unobtrusive use of first person present tense (something that usually annoys him) and how he didn't even notice it until a third of the way through. I discussed my choice to use that technique in my answer to the first question in the Fangs Fur & Fey interview, if you're interested.

Speaking of which, I'm posting over there today on the Topic of the Week (today's is pen names), because that's how I deal with Mondays.

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Now playing: Drunken Lullabies - Flogging Molly
via FoxyTunes    

Podcasters Stuart and Glory Jaffe of The Eclectic Review discuss the evolution of the portrayal of vampires, from Dracula to Anne Rice to the Anita Blake books to Buffy to...Wicked Game in their latest episode, "Vampires are Deadly and Fun Part 2".

Very interesting discussion. Check it out! Apparently there'll be more about Wicked Game in a future podcast, so stay tuned.

And here's a new shot of Tommy:


It's very hard to get them to stay still for a photo, as I mentioned before.

That's all for today--I plan to finish a rough draft of my sample chapters by tonight (note to self: rough draft means it doesn't have to be perfect.  Let yourself put in too much backstory this time around.), so I'll be offline most of the day.

Have a good one!

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Now playing: Home Of The Blues - Johnny Cash
via FoxyTunes   

Time for a few sundry items.

Bitten by Books reviewed Wicked Game yesterday. I post a link not only so you can read the review (Five Headstones!), because I don't blog about every review (seems a bit brag-alicious, and besides, if you're reading my blog regularly you've probably already decided whether or not to buy Wicked Game), but also to introduce you to this fabulous new site. Rachel Smith has put together a great design and a very active community, so if you like paranormal fiction, it's the new place to be!

Ciara has blogged again, this time about her fear of being interviewed by Dante from A Rush of Wings. It'll happen soon, whether she likes it or not. I mean, I give her free room and board--the least she can do is field a few interviews for me.

Misha was walking wobbly this morning, with his back legs giving out on him, so I rushed him to the vet, fearing a thrombosis (blood clot). Of course, once we got there, he steadily improved and now seems a lot better. (Probably regretting getting into the Jim Beam.) The vet said to keep an eye on him all weekend to make sure he doesn't get worse. He's a very athletic cat, so it's sad to see him sort of feeble.

Speaking of beasts, Baron went into a foster-to-adopt home, so we're not sure which foster dog we're getting and when. I'll be sure to update you and post pictures when I find out.

Still working on Monroe's story and planning to have it up on jerismithready.com on Monday. Will post when live! Have great weekends.

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Now playing: Robert Johnson - Sweet Home Chicago
via FoxyTunes    

There's a review of Wicked Game in the May issue of Realms of Fantasy magazine. I got an electronic copy of the review ("a fun, fast read" with "sexy, witty banter"), but I'd really like a hard copy or two.  Since it's off the newsstands and the website gives no clue as to how to order back copies, I need some help.

So if you have a copy of the May issue, please message me.

There might be something sweet in it for you. :-)

UPDATE: *facepalm* Duh, I just realized it's the August issue, not the May issue.  I have one offer from a reader to mail a copy to me, and I can get further copies on the newsstand if they're not sold out by the time I drag my butt to B&N.  So never mind!  Thanks!

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Now playing: Arco Arena - CAKE
via FoxyTunes   

Guess which book Charlaine Harris just mentioned in this week's Book & Blog post?

Just when I think the vampire genre must be exhausted, just when I think if I read another clone I’ll quit writing vampires myself, I read a book that refreshed my flagging interest. Jeri Smith-Ready’s WICKED GAME was consistently surprising and original.

For those of you outside the genre, Harris is the bestselling author of the wonderful Southern Vampire series (most recently From Dead to Worse), which is being turned into an HBO series called True Blood, written by Six Feet Under's Alan Ball and starring Anna Paquin, beginning this fall.

Needless to say, I'm weak-kneed with thrill-dom.

Don't forget, you have until Friday to comment on Nancy Haddock's interview and get a chance to win a signed copy of La Vida Vampire!

Back to work now...travels are over...time to hermit.