Let fly the 
pages of magic! Girl in the Shadows (the companion to the little book that could Girl on a Wire) is out today! It’s not overstating to say that dreaming up the Cirque American was a life-changing event, and I hope you enjoy your visits there. You can read these books together or separately.
Early book sales are extremely important to books, so you earn my undying affection when you pick new releases up ASAP. (In this case, it makes the possibility of a Dita book that much more likely!) Plus, you can grab Girl in the Shadows and issue #1 of the comic book standalone story Girl Over Paris in hard copy for less than $15 and in e-book versions for less than $10. Can you beat that? I don’t think you can. Girl in the Shadows is also available in audiobook, if that’s your pleasure.
If your bookstore doesn’t have it in stock, just have them order it for you. I’d consider it an excellent birthday present if you picked it up and, if you feel so inclined and enjoy it, leave a review at Amazon or Goodreads or wherever-you-please.
Buy links for Girl in the Shadows:
And for Girl Over Paris:
- Get it at your local comic shop, or
- Buy it from Amazon or Comixology (Amazon will ship the print issue to you, if you don’t have a handy LCS)
We are off on my birthday/book release adventures to New York for Hamilton and to see a few friends and meet with our middle grade series editor and then on to Boston for an event there and Readercon!
Here’s my public schedule. Do come out to Porter Square (or Readercon!), if you’re local! And if you need to flag me down to sign something at Readercon, feel free. I’m always findable via the twitter machine, but it’s even easier to find me in person now that I have teal hair. Just look for the teal hair.
- The DIVINE Molly Gloss, one of my favorite writers, and I will be doing a joint event together at Porter Square Books in Cambridge at 7 p.m. on Thursday, July 7. Come see us!
And I have but one thing at Readercon on Friday, July 8! But will be around all weekend.
- 1:00 PM 5 Why Women Become Protagonists . Gwenda Bond, LJ Cohen, Rosemary Kirstein, Hillary Monahan, Navah Wolfe. In a 2015 essay about portrayals of female protagonists in crime fiction, Sara Paretsky writes, “Detectives like V.I. came to life in a time of bravado, when my peers and I… wrote out of a kind of cockiness: we’re doing a job because we want it, we like the work, no one can stop us. Today, the female hero often has been brutally assaulted… or suffered some other form of serious trauma. It’s as if the only acceptable reason for a woman to embrace the investigative life is to recover from damage, or get revenge for it—not because she takes pleasure in the work, and comes to it as a free spirit.” Let’s explore the reasons that female protagonists decide to protag, and discuss the many ways to motivate them other than assault and trauma.