Mini hint: the very last word in DON'T JUDGE A GIRL BY HER COVER is "thaw".

Mini excerpt: Mom turned to Professor Buckingham. "We have alumni in Switzerland?" "Of course" was Buckingham's reply.

Mini update: Progress on the first first draft of Gallagher Girls 4...

Mini status report: This morning I woke up to the sound of the overnight delivery guy bringing me the galley pages for the new heist/kat book (to find out more about heist/kat please use the search bar at the top of the page). Galley pages are flat pieces of paper that look like a real book. (Except for being flat pieces of paper.) This is always very exciting.

Mini favor: I'm going to turn the comments back on. As always, please be respectful when commenting.

And now I have to get back to a very non-mini day of work!

-Ally

http://downloads.thespringbox.com/web/wrapper.php?file=Countdown.sbw

Edited to add:
Many have asked why the comments section was turned off. That's something I have to do from time to time when the negative/hurtful comments start outweighing the positive/productive ones.

Hopefully this will not happen anymore, but if it does I'm afraid we will have no choice but to disable the comments feature indefinitely.

Lately I've been getting a lot of questions about whether or not there will be a Gallagher Girls 4? When it will be released? What it will be called? Will Zach be in it? Etc. Etc.

The short answers to those questions, by the way, are Yes!!! (yay!); I don't know; I think I know but I'm not saying; And I'm totally not saying.

The long answers are...

WILL THERE BE A GALLAGHER GIRLS 4?

Yes, I'm absolutely thrilled that my wonderful publisher has offered me the chance to continue writing about the Gallagher Girls. I actually started the first draft of the fourth book when I was in Ireland last month and, so far, I'm about 100 pages into it. And it is bad. Terribly, painfully bad.

Because it's a first draft and that's the job of the first draft--to be bad.

In fact, I've started referring to what I'm writing now as the first first draft because this one is proving to be incredibly complicated, so I'm probably going to have to start from scratch a few times before the pieces all fall into place.

(After you guys read GG3 you'll know that GG4 is going to be a lot more...stressful. And that's all I'm going to say about that.)

WHEN WILL GG4 BE RELEASED?

Because we're still so early in the writing process I'm afraid I don't have a clue when it will be released. Because, after all, this is just the first first draft! After this there will be second and third and fifth and probably fifteenth drafts! And copyedits. And galley edits. And all the other things I talked about in this blog post a long time ago. So, in other words, GG4 won't be out right after GG3, I'm afraid. These things just take a while.

WHAT IS THE TITLE OF GG4? / DO YOU KNOW THE TITLE YET?

I do have a title in mind for this book, but I like to keep my mind open to alternatives in case a better title occurs to me while I'm writing. I suspect that once I know for sure what the title will be I'll do another contest of some kind where you guys get to figure it out.

WILL ZACH BE IN GG4?

Oh, Zach. Will we see him? Will we not? Will he and Cammie live happily ever after or will he elope with Madame Dabney and break Cammie's heart? For the answer to that, my dears, I'm afraid you'll just have to keep reading.

(in stores sometime a looooong time from now)

ps...edited to add: The Madame Dabney thing? Totally a joke.

I woke up this morning feeling especially cruel. Bwhahhhaaa. (That's supposed to be me doing an evil laugh. Did it sound like I was laughing evilly?)

So today instead of doing a straight-up mini excerpt I'm going to do the mini excerpt version of two truths and a lie.

What follows are TWO actual mini-excerpts and ONE sentence that IS NOT in the book.

I will leave it to you to theorize/guess which is which.

Bwwwhhhaaaaa!

-Ally

(And one thing Ally just wrote to be cruel.)

A. There were things we would never know--never hope to understand--and boys, I knew, were one of them.

B. "It's a by-product of very dramatic kissing," Macey went on like a doctor identifying a very common side-effect.

C. I may be a pavement artist, but Macey McHenry will always know more about boys and all things boy-related than I can ever hope to comprehend.

"Is it a pavement artist thing?"

"No," I said. "It's a girl thing."

Oh, and one more little thing...

In stores everywhere June 9, 2009

I just answered about a hundred emails and am starting to see some more trends. Here are the top ones:

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO WRITE A BOOK?

Short answer: it varies. A lot. I've done it as quickly as a couple of months, and I've had it take as long as a year and a half.

I've realized recently that--when I know what I'm writing--I write about 500 words in 30 minutes. Take a break. Come back. Repeat until book is finished.

The problem is getting to the point where you can crank out those 500 words. Today, for example, wasn't a writing day. It was a "floor day" where I sat on the floor and stared at my board of post-its that outline the story until I figured some things out.

The floor days matter too. Big time.

WHAT ARE SOME GOOD BOOKS I CAN READ THIS SUMMER?

The Percy Jackson books by Rick Riordan.
THE SQUAD books by Jennifer Lynn Barnes.
THE DISREPUTABLE HISTORY OF FRANKIE LANDAU-BANKS by E. Lockhart
BRAS AND BROOMSTICKS by Sarah Mlynowski
And there are no doubt hundreds more that your local librarians would love to tell you about.

WHERE DID YOU GET YOUR IDEAS FOR YOUR BOOKS?
Under each "book" on my website there's a page called "Story Behind The Story" that tells the whole tale in detail.

WILL YOU COME TO MY TOWN ON TOUR?
Maybe. Please go to www.eventful.com/allycarter to help us track your request.

WILL GG3 BE IN HARDBACK OR PAPERBACK?
It will most likely be in hardback first and then about a year later the paperback will be released.

CAN YOU TELL US ANYTHING ABOUT GG3?
Um...not right now. Sorry.

WHEN WILL WE KNOW THE TITLE FOR GG3?
I'm working on a puzzle kind of thing right now, and as soon as that is ready and as soon as my publisher says I can, I'll release it. Don't worry, I'll let you know in advance when that will be. We're not sure now, however.

Nighty night,
Ally

Since you guys seemed to like hearing what a day in the life of writing GG3 is like, AND because there seem to be a lot of questions/misconceptions about how long this process takes, I thought I'd show you guys that it's really a lot more than Wheat Thins and Diet Sunkist.

So here it is...a VERY rough time-table.

Step 1. Write the book.

Now, if you're a published author with a pretty good track record you may be able to sell the book before it's actually written. This is called selling "on proposal".

If you ask an author who has never sold on proposal before they'll tell you that it's not very common. If you ask an author who has sold on proposal before, they'll tell you that it's incredibly common.

The one thing that both of these authors will tell you is that most NEW writers with no publishing track record will have no option but to write the entire book before they sell it.

Now, there are people who argue about this and cite one of a handful of exceptions to the rule, but I can tell you that there's no way on earth--knowing what I know now--that I would recommend brand new authors sell their first book before it's finished. There's simply too much to learn about the process without having all that "someone's already paid me for this" pressure on top of it.

Step 2. Turn book in to editor and await editorial comments.

My editor is Donna Bray. She is awesome--beyond awesome. She is wise and savvy and when she says something about a book you can pretty much guarantee that her advice is going to make the book significantly better.

A lot of editors might read a book and say, "Oh, this is fine! Good job." and then goes on about her day.

But not Donna. She says, "This is fine. We don't want fine. Fine isn't what Gallagher Girls are about; Gallagher Girls are about amazing!"

So that means that turning in a draft to Donna is a long, long way from the end. In many ways, that's when the work is just beginning.

Step 3: Do a total rewrite.

This is sometimes the darkest hour of writing a book--when the new has worn off, the honeymoon over. Now is when you surround yourself with the negative--you see only the bad because that's what you're looking for, and it's your job to fix it.

Step 4: Continue doing drafts and getting editorial feedback until you get it right. Or die.

Yep. There's another rewrite. In fact, there may be five more rewrites. Ten. Twenty. Seriously, folks, this business isn't for wusses.

Step 5: Do a line edit.

Aren't you finished rewriting yet?!?! You may want to scream--and believe me, I've screamed myself. But by this point the big story beats should be worked out. But this is when my editor and I go line by line--word by word--through the ENTIRE book.

Yeah. See. Not. For. Wusses.

Step 6: Copyediting.

Hopefully after the line edit your editor will approve the finished book and send it into copyediting. I think a lot of people thinking of copyediting when they talk about editing. Actually, there are two very different types.

Up until this point we haven't worried much about how words are spelled and where the commas go. Now, of course, you need to use the best grammar and care of the English language that you can when writing, but those are easily fixable problems, so we leave them to the last.

A copyeditor will go through the entire manuscript looking for errors in spelling and grammar. Also, she (he) will look for consistency problems, and it's not uncommon to see comments in the margins like "On page 142 you say Bex's eyes are caramel-colored; on page 290 you say they're brown. Which is it?"

So the copyeditor will go through the book. Then I'll go through the book. Then I'll send it back to the publisher.

Step 7: Typesetting.

I'm not sure if that's the right word or not, but anyway, now's the time when the book will get changed from a plain old ordinary Microsoft Word document and into something that looks like a book--with chapter headings and cool fonts and everything like that.

Step 8: First pass pages

I will receive a copy of the typeset pages all laid out and looking very book-like. They won't be bound or anything, just really big pieces of paper that have book-like looking printing on them. I'll go through them again and try to catch any typos or anything that might have slipped through the cracks.

The tough thing about first pass pages is that it's incredibly expensive to re-typeset things, so you can only change the BIG things--the embarrassing things. This isn't the time to change a "but" to a "however" in other words.

Step 9: The publisher will print Advanced Reading Copies

Usually ARCs are printed and distributed to booksellers, reviewers, and other VIPs several months prior to a book's release. For example, Cross My Heart came out in October. They had the ARCs done in June.

Step 10: The book is finished.

So that's pretty much it, gang. It's a long, slow, and frequently painful process, and even though I'll have a draft ready to show my editor early in January, we're still a long, long way from finished.

In fact, the real work hasn't even started yet.

So...do you guys STILL think you might be able to buy a copy for Christmas?

I wish it were that easy.

But, sadly, it isn't.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

-Ally

Hey guys!

Thanks so much for all of your awesome suggestions of things that can get me out of my blog rut! I'll be going utilizing those suggestions very, very soon I'm sure!

In other news I decided to blog about writing GG3 because I knew you guys would get a kick out of that.

Now, I'm not blogging ABOUT GG3--that would be cheating. Of a sort. But instead I'll blog about writing. A fairly typical day of writing, to be exact.

10:00 turn on Alphasmart.

10:05 look at little, tiny Alphasmart screen, expecting words to magically appear

10:22 words have STILL not magically appeared, so my body starts trying to type some

10:30 can't type to save life, so get up and go eat some wheat thins instead

10:45 body is now capable of typing adequately so it types a little

10:46 check to see how many words you've typed so far: 42!

11:05 decide that it's close enough to lunch time to eat something.

11:46 check word count again: 512!

12:20 have momentary panic attack when you realize that your book is bad. So terribly, utterly, supremely bad that you're going to have to change your name and leave the country!

12:22 have momentary panic attack when you realize that your book is good. So extremely, monumentally awesome that no future book that you will ever write will ever compare with its awesomeness and you must therefore change your name and leave the country!

12:24 start wondering where your passport is and spend the next hour and a half looking for it

3:00 get into a scene that you really like. Write 1,200 more words!

3:47 what did I do with those Wheat Thins?

3:49 what do I have in the ice box that goes well with Wheat Thins?

3:52 ooh, I have dip in here! I love dip!

3:58 sit down to write with dip and Wheat Thins

3:59 do I have any Diet Sunkist?

4:14 Yum. Orange pop is fun!

4:19 Start writing a really crappy scene

4:20 is this scene not over yet?

4:21 check word count: 19!

4:22 oh my gosh, could this scene BE more boring?

4:23 word count: 21!

5:05 word count: 27!

6:20 oh heck--I've got to cut this crappy scene!

6:21 What did I do with those Wheat Thins?

The super cool people from the Young Writers NaNoWriMo program have asked me to play Stump the Librarian, which prompts two things from me:

1. how freaking cool is any game called "Stump the Librarian"?

2. the purpose of "Stump the Librarian" is to ask research questions that pertain to our current works in progress, so...

I'm not saying there WILL be a hint there.

But there might be.

Maybe.

(Don't say I never give you anything!)

-Ally

It seems I've been getting a lot of reader emails lately (and someday soon I will hopefully have time to reply to each and every one!)

In the meantime, though, I thought I'd take a stab at answering the most frequently asked questions here.

So here goes!

#1: Will there be another Gallagher Girls book after CROSS MY HEART AND HOPE TO SPY? What will it be called and when will it be out?

Yes! There will be another book! I'm afraid that right now I can't really tell you what the title will be or when it will be in stores. I'm working on it, though, and I REALLY like it! And I promise that I'm going to do my best to make it as good as possible, but that's all I can really promise right now.

#2: Will Zach and Cammie get together in GG3?

Come on...do you REALLY think I'm going to give that away?

#3: Will Cammie ever find out what happened to her dad?

Ditto.

#4: I'm an actress and I think that I would be perfect to be in your movie, so can you please tell me where the movie tryouts are going to be?

I'm afraid that I really don't have any information on the movie tryouts. As far as I know they are not currently casting any of the parts and--if and when they do start casting--I won't be involved in the process at all. I wish I had more information to share, but please believe me when I say I don't.

#5: I heard you were writing a new book called Kat, but does this mean you won't be writing any more Gallagher Girl books?

Actually, I hope to be doing both! Kat will be the main character in a new series that I will be writing in addition to the Gallagher Girls series.

#6: When will Kat and GG3 be out?

I'm afraid I don't know exactly, but as soon as I find out I'll let you know.

#7: I have a great idea for a book. Can you help me sell it?

Congratulations! Really great ideas are rare, so cherish the ones you get. The first thing you need to do is write the book. Don't talk about writing instead of writing the book. Don't join a bunch of writers groups where everyone complains about how hard it is to get published instead of writing the book. Don't read a bunch of books on how to get published instead of writing the book. Are you noticing a trend yet? Can you tell that I'm a firm believer that a book can't be sold/published until you've WRITTEN the book? So get to writing!

#8: Have you read the TWILIGHT books? And do you know Stephenie Meyer?

Yes! And, sadly, no.

#9: Can you give me a hint about GG3????? PLEASE? I'm DYING for a hint?????

Oh....um....I know what the story is and what Cammie's goal will be and lots of really cool stuff about GG3, but I'm really hesitant to say too much too soon. After all, you guys have got a looooong wait ahead of you, I'm afraid. I will say that GG3 will pick up during summer vacation after GG2 and it will take the girls through the fall semester of their Junior year.

And that's it. Lips. Officially. Zipped.

#10: I know you said that you can't tell me anything about the movie tryouts, but if you know something about the movie tryouts, can you please tell me?

Sorry. I honestly don't have anything to tell.

#11: Will Zach be in any future books at all?

No comment. I will say that Cammie sort of already asked Zach that question and he already sort of answered it.

#12: How many books about the Gallagher Girls are there going to be?

I've gone back and forth about whether or not to say this here, but I'm going to go ahead and put it out there...

My plan right now is to write a total of six books about the Gallagher Girls. Of course, plans change, and I have to go where the story takes me, and the last thing I want to do is stretch out--or rush--a plot just because I'm committed to a six book series. But my PLAN right now is to do a book a semester for Cammie's sophomore, junior, and senior years of spy school.

That could change, of course, but right now that's my intention.

Okay, gang, that's all I've got for tonight. I'm afraid things have been really, really busy lately (and they won't slow down until February), but in the meantime thanks again to all of you for being so utterly awesome.

have a great week!

Ally

I just got word from my editor that CROSS MY HEART AND HOPE TO SPY is slated for its FIFTH week on the New York Times Bestseller List.

Five.

That's five weeks, people.

As in more than a month.

As in I'M FREAKING OUT HERE!!!!

So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to everyone who has bought the book--or recommended that a friend buy the book--you guys did this. And I adore you.

In other news, I had a kind of challenging writing day because--after waking up and getting to the library early this morning--my space bar broke. Do you know how crucial the ability to space is when writing a novel? Well, it turns out, it's really, really crucial.

But then I called the helpline and got expert advice on fixing the space bar, so catastrophe averted, but I still managed to waste several space-free hours.

Speaking of hours, (or not really hours, so much as time, but hang with me...) as excited as I am that you guys are excited about GG3, there's something you need to know:

I'm working on a ROUGH draft. As in bad. As in needing many, many more drafts. As in it really will be a long time until the book is in stores. I'm sorry--so, so, so sorry--that it's going to take this long, I'm afraid that's just how these things work.

In the meantime, though, there are a lot of other great books coming out in the coming months...

Like THE SQUAD books by Jennifer Lynn Barnes.

And HOW TO BE BAD by Sarah Mlynowski, E. Lockhart, and Lauren Myracle.

Not to mention THE DISREPUTABLE HISTORY OF FRANKIE LANDAU-BANKS, also by E. Lockhart, which is probably the best book I've read in a long, long time.

So see...so much good reading!

And don't worry, I am writing as fast as I can, but this book is big--like really, really big--and I've got to get it just right because...well...I'd tell you, but then...you know.

later gators,
Ally