UNISON SPARK will be published on Tuesday, November 8. To help celebrate, every online social network in the world has agreed to merge into one global system bent on the total subjugation of the human race through endless distraction.

Also, some incredibly awesome book bloggers are hosting me on a blog tour that begins on Monday and ends on Saturday. That’s six days of posts about social networking, the books that inspired me, cities of the future, and more.

We’ve also got some extra copies of the book to give away, so stay tuned. Please drop by and check it out. See you on the other side!

–Andy

I know what you’re thinking. You’ve been back in school for a couple of months, but you just can’t wait until the next break from classes. Unfortunately, we don’t have the power to speed up time, but we can give you a mini-vacation with some of our new Winter titles!

Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Humans and androids crowd the raucous streets of New Beijing. A deadly plague ravages the population. From space, a ruthless lunar people watch, waiting to make their move. No one knows that Earth’s fate hinges on one girl…

Cinder, a gifted mechanic, is a cyborg. She’s a second-class citizen with a mysterious past, reviled by her stepmother and blamed for her stepsister’s illness. But when her life becomes intertwined with the handsome Prince Kai’s, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an intergalactic struggle, and a forbidden attraction. Caught between duty and freedom, loyalty and betrayal, she must uncover secrets about her past in order to protect her world’s future.

In this thrilling debut young adult novel, the first of a quartet, Marissa Meyer introduces readers to an unforgettable heroine and a masterfully crafted new world that’s enthralling.

Come January, this book should be on the top of your (and everybody else’s!) reading lists. Why? Because this futuristic retelling of Cinderella as a cyborg is out of this world—I promise!

The Stalker Chronicles by Carley Moore

Sophomore Cammie Bliss has long been labeled a stalker by her peers, but when a cute new boy named Toby arrives at her small town high school, Cammie has a chance to be “normal.” Trouble is, she can’t really help herself and she’s up to her old tricks of “intense observation and following” pretty quick. Making things worse, her younger brother is dating one of the most popular girls in the school, her parents have separated, and her dad has begun to watch their house most nights. Cammie has simply got to figure out why she behaves the way she does, and end it once and for all.

Prepare yourself to laugh—and cringe. I think many readers will recognize a little bit of themselves in this slightly awkward girl who may or may not realize when she’s going too far. If you need something to cheer your up, this is the perfect book!

When the Sea is Rising Red by Cat Hellisen

In sixteen-year-old Felicita’s world, magic is strictly controlled—or so those in power like to believe. After her dearest friend, Ilven, kills herself to escape an arranged marriage, Felicita chooses freedom over privilege. She fakes her own death and leaves her sheltered life as one of Pelimburg’s magical elite behind. Living in the slums, scrubbing dishes for a living, she falls for charismatic Dash while also becoming fascinated with vampire Jannik. Then something shocking washes up on the beach: Ilven’s death has called out of the sea a dangerous, wild magic. Felicita must decide whether her loyalties lie with the family she abandoned…or with those who would twist this dark power to destroy Pelimburg’s caste system, and the whole city along with it.

If a delicious fantasy is what you’re looking for, then When the Sea Is Rising Red is just for you! Pelimburg has everything from magic to vampires, so get ready to be swept away to a fantastically foreign land!

Supergirl Mixtapes by Meagan Brothers

After years of boredom in her rural South Carolina town, Maria is thrilled when her father finally allows her to visit her estranged artist mother in New York City. She’s ready for adventure, and she soon finds herself immersed in a world of rock music and busy streets, where new people and ideas lie around every concrete corner. This is the freedom she’s always longed for—and she pushes for as much as she can get, skipping school to roam the streets, visit fancy museums, and flirt with the cute clerk at a downtown record store.

But just like her beloved New York City, Maria’s life has a darker side. Behind her mother’s carefree existence are shadowy secrets, and Maria must decide just where—and with whom—her loyalty lies.

This book is for all you music lovers out there. Maria is a character just like you! Read along and experience her first year in the wilds of 90s New York City. It’s something she—and you—won’t soon forget!

Which of these books are you most excited for?

Read it here!

It’s time to announce our October titles! We have four great titles to share with you!

Sign up for a chance to win them on our site!

Stick by Andrew Smith
Fourteen-year-old Stark McClellan (nicknamed Stick because he’s tall and thin) is bullied for being “deformed” – he was born with only one ear. His older brother Bosten is always there to defend Stick. But the boys can’t defend one another from  their abusive parents.

When Stick realizes Bosten is gay, he knows that to survive his father’s anger, Bosten must leave home. Stick has to find his brother, or he will never feel whole again. In his search, he will encounter good people, bad people, and people who are simply indifferent to kids from the wrong side of the tracks. But he never loses hope of finding love – and his brother.

Without Tess, byMarcella Pixley
Tess and Lizzie are sisters, sisters as close as can be, who share a secret world filled with selkies, flying horses, and a girl who can transform into a wolf  in the middle of the night. But when Lizzie is ready to grow up, Tess clings to their fantasies. As Tess sinks deeper and deeper into her delusions, she decides that she can’t live in the real world any longer and leaves Lizzie and her family forever. Now, years later, Lizzie is in high school and struggling to understand what happened to her sister. With the help of a school psychologist and Tess’s battered journal, Lizzie searches for a way to finally let Tess go.

  Desert Angel, by Charlie Price

Fourteen-year-old Angel wakes up one morning at her desert trailer home to discover her mother has been murdered by a lowlife named Scotty, who has vanished. Angel has no water, no weapon, but she knows that Scotty, an expert tracker and hunter, will surface soon in order to eliminate her as a witness. She has to run, to disappear, if she is to survive and tell the world what happened. Her flight takes her through a harsh landscape to places she never expected to be, forcing her to trust others for the first time and strengthening her in ways she doesn’t even anticipate . . . until it’s time to take a stand.

The Survival Kit, by Donna Freitas

When Rose’s mom dies, she leaves behind a brown paper bag labeled Rose’s Survival Kit. Inside the bag, Rose finds an iPod, with a to-be-determined playlist; a picture of peonies, for growing; a crystal heart, for loving; a paper star, for making a wish; and a  paper kite, for letting go.

As Rose ponders the meaning of each item, she finds herself returning again and again to an unexpected source of comfort. Will is her family’s gardener, the school hockey star, and the only person who really understands what she’s going through. Can loss lead to love?

by Caragh M. O’Brien

THE TOUR:  These days, a blog tour involves a writer shrinking down to the size of a subatomic particle and whizzing through the internet wires to pop up through other people’s computers, visit for a while, and whiz back.  It’s very high tech and very slimming.  The fact is, a couple years ago, I’d never heard of a blog tour and I had to go look it up in an online dictionary because no paper dictionaries had heard of one, either.

I would still be pretty much in the dark except for my do-or-die publicist at Macmillan, Kathryn Bhirud (née Hurley), who lined up sixteen unbelievably cool bloggers to interview me on their sites.  The interviews begin next Monday, October 24^th at Mundie Moms, and will progress to different sites, one a day, leading up to the release of Prized on November 8^th.  Interested readers can follow me from blog to blog for a couple weeks, sort of like trick-or-treating from house to house, but not really because there are no costumes or candy and we’re not second graders, much as we might like to be.

The full schedule of the blog tour is listed below, and to add a quirky bit of fun, Rachael of the Book Muncher challenged me to come up with a code that readers could decipher along the way.

THE CODE:

The Prized Blog Tour Code is intended to be a charming amusement, not torture, so if you’re the sort of person who deplores enigmas, please know that it’s quite all right with me if you skip this thing entirely.  It’s really fine.  No one’s ever going to check.

But, if you want to play, try this:

1. On each day of the blog tour, a single letter will be given at the end of each post.  (It will be clearly labeled like this: Prized Code #20: Z.)

2. Convert each letter using the key in the middle of page 201 of Birthmarked.  (If your book is not handy because you’ve already returned it to the library in a trusty manner, the key is also available on my website.

3. The sixteen converted letters will spell out a secret message.

That’s it.  That’s the whole thing.  There’s no extra prize.  You just get the one-time, real-life thrill of deciphering the secret message for the Prized Blog Tour Code and trying to guess what it says as it evolves.  The last piece of the code and the solution will be provided by Rachael in my final stop of the blog tour at The Book Muncher on November 8^th, so you can check if you have it correct.

THE CHAT: On the day the blog tour wraps up and Prized is released (Tuesday, November 8), my blogger friends and I will meet up virtually in an interactive chat on Goodreads.  Here’s what is great: you can join in, too!  We’ll be coming and going all day as we have the chance, quipping and laughing as we’re wont to do, and I’ll be sure to be there in the evening around 9:00 p.m. EST.  Friends, fans, and followers are all welcome to drop in and participate.  If you don’t know Goodreads yet, it’s a free and easy site for book lovers.  You can find us in advance here.

Check back here on MacTeenBooks for info on other bonuses, like “Tortured,” the free e-story that’s coming soon, and be sure to leave a comment if you have any questions or suggestions.  Special thanks to Kathryn, who really has been a dynamo through all of this.

I’m off to practice my shrinking!  May the blog tour begin!

By Andy Marino

In ninth grade I was driven crazy several times a day by the feeling that I was forgetting something. It was as if I’d lost my wallet or neglected to write a paper that was due in an hour – that kind of sudden panic – except it was never triggered by anything so mercifully specific. I’d often have to stop what I was doing to focus on this weird brand of anxiety until it passed.

After dealing with these episodes for a while I realized that determining a cause was hopeless. It wasn’t something I lost or forgot to do, and it wasn’t some vague existential thing, either. It was NOTHING AT ALL, which in retrospect seems totally bananas.

As I grew up these little spells became infrequent and then stopped altogether. It wasn’t until social networking became a pervasive force that I experienced something like that gnawing distraction once again. Except now it wasn’t the sense that I might be forgetting something that was driving me nuts – it was the cumulative effect of the status updates I barely glanced at, the photos I ran my eyes over, the endless bids for online attention.

This is much more complicated than it appears, because no matter annoyed and jittery I get, I keep coming back. It seems that some part of me – maybe the same desolate corner of my brain that used to trigger that nagging sense of forgetfulness – actually cares about all the indignant rants and pictures of food and links to netherworlds of internet weirdness. I am compelled to stay in the loop by an impulse I barely understand. My brain doles out impatient reminders that I haven’t checked my Twitter feed in eleven whole minutes and there is Stuff Happening that I’m missing.

If I’ve recently updated my own status or posted a link or tweeted something, then it’s an even stronger and uglier mental pull, the kind fed by ego and a desire for positive feedback. I assume that 1) I’m not crazy and 2) lots of other human brains work more or less like mine, so it’s not that hard to see the correlation between social networking and daily feelings of self-worth and security. What’s going to happen as technology continues to integrate social networking deeper into human consciousness?

In Unison Spark, logging in is a thought process rather than a few keystrokes on a computer. If the future actually brings us social networking in the form of an enhanced, augmented version of reality, logging off and ripping yourself away from the community is going to feel pretty crappy. That terrible left-out feeling – right now I’m missing something! – is going to be a whole lot more distracting. It won’t be just a bunch of unseen pictures and missed updates anymore. It’ll be a deceleration from the hyperdrive of mass connection to the crawl of being alone.

One of the items that Rose receives in her Survival Kit is an iPod. It’s full of music, but Rose must find strength within herself to listen to music again and create her own playlist.

Want to know some of the songs she picked? Then listen to an abridged version of Rose’s playlist below!

By Stan Nicholls, author of Orcs: Forged For War

There are times when all of us feel like outsiders.  Authors and movie-makers have long recognized this, and rebels, loners, recluses, mysterious strangers, tragic heroes, private eyes living on the edge of the law, and even serial killers regularly feature. The current passion for vampires and the popularity of Harry Potter are two examples of outsiders as central characters. It’s easy to understand why. Most of us can relate to feeling that we don’t quite fit in, that we stand apart from the rest of humanity. And there’s something very appealing about the idea of being an ageless, romantic denizen of the night, or discovering that you possess magical powers denied to the rest of the population.

Orcs are one of the most reviled races in fiction.  In JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson’s movies, orcs are portrayed as evil, savage and mindless.  The ultimate outsiders. But I wondered what it would be like if orcs weren’t evil.  Peerless, ferocious warriors, yes, but not really villains. Maybe they were on the losing side once and, given that it’s victors who write the history books, their name was blackened.  So why not make them . . . heroes? And if orcs are misunderstood heroes, the logical villains must be humans. That basic idea formed the premise of six novels and a bunch of short stories. Now the orcs have gate-crashed the visual medium in Orcs: Forged For War, with suitably blood-drenched artwork by Joe Flood.  We hope the graphic novel gives you all the excuse you need to root for the alienated.

So let’s hear it for the green-skinned horde.

As a guy who’s occupied his share of desks, I’ve often found myself up close and personal with the concept of workflow – the method of breaking huge projects into smaller parts and feeding them to various departments so that everyone can contribute in an efficient and logical way. This is eye-gougingly boring to me, and further evidence that inspiration is a strange and unpredictable thing. While I was writing UNISON SPARK, paying attention to the less-than-glamorous aspects of daily life turned out to be pretty helpful.

In the book, the Unison social network isn’t a magical entity; it’s a vast, complex system that has to be built and maintained by real people. One of these people is Ambrose, the son of Martin Truax (inventor of Unison), and already a rising star in the company at the age of fifteen. His job is to predict the path of Unison accounts in order to construct an ideal experience for each individual user.

Instead of going to school, Ambrose spends his days analyzing Likes and Dislikes (along with hopes, dreams, fears, insecurities), assigning Friends, and changing the very landscape of the world to suit each user’s tastes, with the ultimate goal of making people want to stay logged in for a very long time. His uncanny ability to organize massive amounts of user data in the blink of an eye is a highly evolved, second-nature kind of skill – a far cry from the little charts, lists, mental games, and procedural mazes we use to plan our own lives.

In a roundabout way that probably requires a flow chart of its own to describe (I’ll spare you this riveting visual aid), learning about workflow helped me figure out the inner workings of a futuristic social network. In an even more unexpected way, it led me to consider how a teenager like Ambrose, with the ability to be a nuanced human algorithm, might be a valuable asset to such a network – and how that ability might impact his life in the real world.

Between work and school, modern life delivers a never-ending supply of unforgettable characters and absurd situations. This is awesome stuff for anybody who wants to be a writer, but it can’t hurt to tune out all that juicy human drama once in a while to absorb the mundane, the bland, and the routine. You never know what’s going to stick in your mind.

So how about you? Has an otherwise boring situation ever become an unexpected source of inspiration?

By Lisa Manchev

The curtain has gone up on So Silver Bright, the last book in the Théâtre Illuminata series, and has also come down. The performers have taken their bows. Roses have been scattered on the stage. The house lights have come up, and the green glow of the Exit sign beckons the dream-wakened audience. Now I am fielding emails, Facebook messages, Tweets, and Tumblr posts from readers who want to know if this is the last we’ll hear from Beatrice Shakespeare Smith and her fairy cohorts, many of which include some version of, “the ending made me cry!”

My response to that is some version of, “You and me both!” I never in a million years expected to, but I cried writing the last chapters of So Silver Bright (never mind that I was also pregnant when I was drafting it… oh, hormones!) I sniffed over the revisions. I welled up during copy edits and final page proofs. And the day the book came out in stores, I sat down to type a blog post, wishing the novel a Happy Book Birthday, and I cried a bit then, too.

I count myself very lucky to have spent five years and three books wandering my imagination-summoned settings with characters that I both love and are very much a part of me. When readers tell me they cried, I know they came with me on the journey. I know they saw the miraculous landscapes I visited in my mind’s eye. I know they loved (or hated) characters that I knew as friends. I know that the words, that the story, meant something more to them than mere ink on paper.

That shared experience, that magic, is what keeps a writer going, long past midnight, long after the coffee pot is empty, long after everyone else is in bed and the house is quite for the first time in a long time. Moving a pen across paper or typing out the story, our hand reaches out into an infinite darkness and connects with other hands, hands reaching out through time and across continents. The tears and laughter of our readers are just as sweet as applause in the ears of performers.

And I am reminded once again that the magic of books is the same beautiful magic that is conjured when the lights dim and the curtains go up.

The Management of the Théâtre Illuminata thanks every member of the audience on behalf of the Company. Your patronage means the world to us.