Gone Too Far and Guest Post

Gone Too Far

by Natalie D. Richards

Sourcebooks

2014

 

Title: Gone Too Far
Author: Natalie D. Richards
ISBN: 9781402285547
Genre: Young Adult
Age Range: 14+

Keeping secrets ruined her life. But the truth might just kill her.

Piper Woods can't wait for the purgatory of senior year to end. She skirts the fringes of high school like a pro until the morning she finds a notebook with mutilated photographs and a list of student sins. She's sure the book is too gruesome to be true, until pretty, popular Stella dies after a sex-tape goes viral. Everyone's sure it's suicide, but Piper remembers Stella’s name from the book and begins to suspect something much worse.

Drowning in secrets she doesn’t want to keep, Piper’s fears are confirmed when she receives an anonymous text message daring her to make things right. All she needs to do is choose a name, the name of someone who deserves to be punished...

Ohioan and Double RWA Golden Heart Finalist NATALIE D. RICHARDS won her first writing competition in the second grade with her short story about Barbara Frances Bizzlefishes (who wouldn't dare do the dishes). After getting lost in a maze of cubicles, Natalie found her way back to storytelling, following the genre of her heart, teen fiction. Natalie lives in Ohio with her amazing husband, their three children, and a giant dust-mop who swears he’s the family dog.

 

Guest Post from the author:

 

Icky Clicky Cliques – or Why I Get Piper
By Natalie D. Richards

So here’s the weird truth. My schooling was a weird mix of everything. A little public, a little private, a little homeschooling…I tried it all and liked not very much of it. Homeschooling—very different those days—felt very lonely for my extroverted self, but traditional school (both public and private) had the whole social silliness that was equally annoying.
Thing is, as a teenager, I was so obsessed with finding myself I think I should have had a major in high school and it should have been navel-gazing. I hung out at coffee shops wearing very red lipstick and listening to angry, emotional music while I read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass over and over. (So help me, I had an underlined, highlighted copy. I still have it somewhere in my basement!) 

At any rate, my teen years were a desperate pursuit of self-discovery.
It was absurd. I was absurd.

And between my identity focus and my ever-changing school situation, I never found a particular slot that I filled in one specific group. I drifted through social circles at a variety of high schools my friends attended, bouncing around from goth groups to theater kids to book worms. I wasn’t unpopular, but I was often a black sheep, a weird seventeen year old convinced my maturity stretched years, maybe even decades, beyond my actual age. 

Like I said, absurd.

Thing is, Piper’s got a little bit of that in her too. She knows exactly who she is and what she wants. Her future isn’t just a dream, it’s a plan and she’s taking all the right steps to make it reality. Piper is many things I wish I was in high school, but she’s
still caught up with some of the same trappings because she’s convinced she’s above all those immature high school social games.

But the truth is, she’s perpetuating some of that childishness herself. Just the act of deciding she’s more mature than everyone else puts her in a clique of sorts. The seventeen-going-on-twenty-seven-year-olds. The we-think-we’re-above-this kids. 

We all end up in social groups, some that we choose and some we don’t. With very few exceptions, those groups inevitably consider themselves better than some other group out there. That’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s the same world all around us, but the view depends on where you’re standing.
Gone Too Far takes a hard look at social groups and the good and bad that can come out of them. It was hard for me to write, because I had to be brutally honest about my own past, and how that past continued to shade my perceptions. It wasn’t always fun, but in lots of ways, writing Gone Too Far opened my eyes to a whole new world. It was a journey and I was a traveler, sometimes just hanging on for the ride. Being a travel enthusiast himself, I like to think Walt Whitman would have approved. ;-)

Blog Tour Pick: Samantha Sutton

Samantha Sutton and The Winter of the Warrior Queen

By Jordan Jacobs

 

Sourcebooks Jabberwocky

January 2014 ● ISBN: 978-1-4022-7563-0

Trade Paper/$6.99 ● Ages 9+

 

Another thrilling adventure awaits this bold heroine…

 

Samantha is hesitant to join Uncle Jay on a second archaeological excavation. But the marshes near Cambridge, England, sound harmless after the sinister perils she faced in Peru. Or so she thought...

 

During the excavation, Samantha realizes the site could be the ancient fortress of Queen Boudica, who led an uprising against the Roman Empire. An amazing find! But Samantha’s crucial discovery threatens to halt construction on a nearby theme park that will make millions for English Lord and eccentric landowner Cairn Catesby. Unfortunately for Samantha, Catesby is also the scheming head of Cambridge University's Archaeology Department, making him Uncle Jay's current boss. Catesby will stop at nothing to discredit Uncle Jay’s theories about the excavation site’s royal ties. When Samantha is entrusted with the protection of an artifact that undeniably links the site to the Warrior Queen, she becomes the target of unscrupulous men determined to get their fortune by any means necessary.

 

On the run through the snowy English countryside, Samantha must muster the strength and wit to protect the treasured artifact—with her uncle’s professional reputation hanging in the balance.

 

Jordan Jacobs’ career as an archaeologist began with a love of mummies, castles, and Indiana Jones. He journeyed to his first archaeological excavation at age 13 in California’s Sierra Nevada. A Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge-educated man, Jordan has worked as an archaeologist at world-class institutions such as The Smithsonian and The American Museum of Natural History in New York.

 

Jordan is passionate about public awareness for the illicit looting of artifacts at globally important archaeological sites. He works with UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), where his recommendations have helped to protect historic sites and to alert agents around the world about precious artifacts smuggled on the black market. Jordan is currently a senior specialist at the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. http://j-jacobs.com/   @JordanNJacobs

I asked Jordan how he came up with the idea of Samantha. He wrote this for the blog:

"As I suspect is the case with most authors, I have a hard time accounting for my characters’ origins. One day they don’t exist, and the next they do: bursting fully to life in my head and revealing themselves--slowly, painfully, inaccurately at first--in the harsh black and white of a document in Word.


Where do they come from? In most cases, it’s some subconscious machination. From people I've met in real life, I’d guess, or some fragment of my own personality, or--an unavoidable truth--from unconsciously remembered characters in other peoples’ books or movies.


But Samantha Sutton is a little different. I can account for her.


At first, I thought she was just some projection of me as a kid: obsessed with archaeology, studious--but not self-conscious about it--and very self-consciously small. For some reason, the fact that she was female when she sprang to mind wasn't particularly noteworthy. That’s just what seemed to make sense.


It took an old home movie to realize that I was wrong. Samantha isn’t me, at all. Samantha is my wife.


We watched the video at my in-laws, in the midst of my work on Labyrinth of Lies. The video shows my wife’s five-year-old birthday, just as the scheduled festivities--a performing miniature pony--wrap up. While the other kids are content to mill around, my future wife sees the need to structure the rest of the day.




“We can either play tag in the backyard or hide-and-seek inside,” she announces. “Or, we can pretend to be horses.”




And that was all I needed. That was Samantha: serious, meticulous, disciplined in the face of chaos. So Samantha was my wife, all along.


There’s some weird (slightly uncomfortable) psychological goings-on here, I admit, and I’m not even going to begin to go there. But the realization has helped my writing. Because while facing new dangers in Winter of the Warrior Queen, Samantha gets to draw from other strong women I’ve known in my life -- and from my own personality, as well -- it’s my wife’s personality that forms her disciplined core."