Author: Lisa Asanuma

Oh. My. Goodness. Gracious.

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I am all excitement.  Why, you may ask?  Because I just found out that my favorite YA paranormal series ever has now been repackaged and is on sale.  This actually came out in JULY.  Why am I only finding out about it now? I don’t know.  I’m kind of sorry, too, because I’ve just made a bit of a vow that I won’t buy a new book until after I’m done writing my own.  (I’m considering not buying ANY books in 2011, but this may prove impossible.)

Anyhow. The books used to be called Fingerprints by Melinda Metz, who wrote the Roswell High books, and I’ve waxed rhapsodic about them in the past. Rae Voight is a popular high school girl with the perfect life, the perfect boyfriend—and a very dark secret about her mother, who died in a psych ward when she was just a baby.  Still, she’s made sure to construct the perfect life for herself at her prep school, and she’s done a very good job, but one day something happens that scares Rae to her very core—because she may be going crazy, just like her mom.  And if she’s not… then that’s actually worse, because if she’s not crazy, then someone wants to kill her.

I’ve always thought it was a shame that Fingerprints came before the big YA paranormal kick, because I thought it would do so much better once the audience had been suitably prepped to receive it.  Well apparently I wasn’t the only one.  The book is now called Echoes, which puts the first three Fingerprints books in one, and it has a brand new, gorgeous cover:

Isn’t it breathtaking?  The girl on the cover is actually very similar to how I’ve pictured Rae.  She’s one of my all-time favorite girl-power protags, witty and clever, hot and sarcastic… and just a little bit spoiled.  And Anthony.  I can’t even begin to tell you how much I love Anthony Fascinelli.

Anyhow, if you see Echoes by Melinda Metz, definitely snap it up.  It is WELL worth the read.  I can’t wait to get my hands on it myself… though I may have to wait a while!

You can read an excerpt of Echoes here. Enjoy! 🙂

Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole

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Other than fantastic effects, I really didn’t know what to expect going into this movie.  My older brother said it was fantastic, but he gets caught up in visual effects anyhow.  My sister found it particularly disturbing.  She said that it was gory and violent.  From the previews, personally, I found it to be very pastel.  But I went and saw it at a little dollar theater in Salt Lake the other night, and I have to admit, I enjoyed it.

It really was very dark and violent, something I don’t think I’d be comfortable with little kids seeing, but as a friend who saw it with me reminded me, so was The Secret of Nimh*, a movie that I watched as a young child (though, now that I think about it, I never really liked The Secret of Nimh).  It was much darker, for example, than the first Harry Potter film, and more disturbing in its darkness than the more recent Potter‘s, because on the surface it’s this cute, kid’s movie where all the characters are owls.  It sold itself as an adventure, and it certainly was, but it was an adventure with particularly cruel and sinister bad guys, along with ghastly betrayals by friends and brothers alike.

Why then, can I say that I enjoyed it?  Well, firstly, I liked some of the messages involved, especially the idea that stories are so important—that they inspire us to, both to dream and to act.  What I wasn’t so impressed with was how there seemed to be no chance for redemption for any of the bad characters.  Once you chose the wrong side, there’s no turning back from it, and you’ll probably suffer horrifically for it at some point.  At least once.

Maybe I’m judging harshly, or at least prematurely.  Maybe the story is much more gray-scale in the books, and there’s eventual redemption worked in.  Or maybe not.  Can anybody tell me?

*Also, both of these are movies based on books. Are kids’ books more acceptable in darkness than movies, maybe?  Or is it just that dark kids’ adventure books get turned into movies? I wonder….

No time to dilly-dally!

/ Lisa Asanuma / 6 Comments

Okay, I really can’t sit still and blog right now… I have more important things to do, like get words on paper as quickly as possible, because last Thursday I had a big revelation as to how to finish up Jethro.  All of the major dots are now connected in my head, and it all works together so beautifully that I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.  I spent most of Thursday night hashing it all out in my head and with Isabelle Santiago, along with generally freaking out about it as much as I could.

Friday I didn’t get much writing done, as it was New Year’s Eve and I had some partying to do (with some extra reason to celebrate!) and I went with my husband and some very good friends to Salt Lake City’s EVE party, where I partook of live music, improv comedy, dancing, fireworks (of course!) and general frivolity.  Also, bounce-houses.  It was a blast, and I really enjoyed it.  Today I had some editing I needed to finish up, so I’ve been doing that most of the day… after sleeping in late to recover from last night.

So, anyhow, a few vital things that need to be said:

1) Welcome to 2011!!! I hope it’s a great year for us both. 😉

2) This novel suddenly seems much more like an eventuality than a possibility, and that’s an amazing feeling.

3) I could never have gotten this far without supportive family and friends.

That about sums it up for now.  I’m off to get my writing in gear!

In which Lisa talks about the things that entertained her in 2010

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So, I have an embarrassing admission to make.  I got barely any reading done in 2010.  In all, I finished only about a baker’s dozen worth of books.  Two of those were re-reads.  One of those re-reads was scripture, so I probably shouldn’t even count it (but I do).

Two more of these books were novellas, including Bree Tanner.  (The other was Henry James’ Daisy Miller).

So, if you take those out, I read only nine books this year.  Even including them, I finished exactly 40 less books than I did in 2009.  Humph.

I have a lot of excuses for this.  First of all, I was being seriously courted and then got engaged and then had a wedding to plan and then got married.  C’mon, just looking at that sentence wears me out a little. 😉

The books I did read, though, were amazing.  Incarceron by Catherine Fisher, for example.  I’ve never been sucked into a fantastical world as quickly and fully as I was here, or at least, not in a very, very long time.

I’ve also started and thoroughly enjoyed the Percy Jackson series.  The movie, not so much.  The books, however, are a fast-paced wallop of fun, fun, fun.  You don’t see the character-development much, but when it hits, it doesn’t feel forced, either.

I also read Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, and cannot recommend it highly enough.  Such thorough detail and beautiful tie-ins with history, along with some seriously strong characters.  Lastly, I was able to read Shannon Hale’s fourth Bayern novel, Forest Born, and while it took me some getting into, I ended up loving the character as much as any of Hale’s other darlings.

I did see a lot of movies this year, a la the serious courting that I mentioned before.  My favorite was, of course, Harry Potter.  The Potter franchise really does continue to get better and better, and the fact that there’s only one film left rips me up a little bit.  The first installment of Deathly Hallows followed the book so surprisingly well (after so much was left out of earlier films) that I couldn’t help but be grateful for David Yates’ devotion to the project.  And want to read the novels all over again, pronto, which I think is something a good book-based movie should always do.

My other favorite of the year, I have to admit, was Despicable Me.  That movie was too cute for words, and I can’t wait to own it.  The littlest girl was my favorite, followed closely, of course, by the minions.  Rounding out my favorite flicks of the year?  Sherlock Holmes, Iron Man II (yes, two RDJ, but then I’ve always loved him!) and Tangled.

I’m a little ashamed to say that I don’t think I’ve made any significant music discoveries in 2010.  Really this year was about immersing myself in old favorites, and getting to know their older stuff better.  Mainly Tegan and Sara, and Badly Drawn Boy.

TV was sparse this year for me, too… but Gossip Girl continues to be a delicious guilty pleasure… and Vampire Diaries has really surprised me with how much its made me love it.  You can blame Ian Somerhalder for that.  I sure do.  I also caught up on Lost this year (again, thanks to Ian Somerhalder)… which maybe deserves a post of its own.

And that was my year of entertainment in 2010.  How did yours look?  Probably a lot more impressive than mine…

Looking Ahead to 2011

/ Lisa Asanuma / 9 Comments

There are four days left of 2010, and I find that I’ll be missing the year a little. This year has been such a significant one for me, and next year is still wide open with possibilities, and a whole world of things that I can only half begin to imagine. Change is good, though. Change hopefully means improvement.

Actually, I’ve already started some big changes… I’ve finally gotten serious about branding my name on the internet as a writer, for example, thus this new blog which I have to say I like the design of very much.

This year is a new start for Tales From the Hollow Tree, as well.  Isabelle Santiago and I realized we were doing ourselves a disservice by using it mainly as a review blog—we want to highlight our own writing much more than we have been doing, so we’re taking a page from the Merry Sisters of Fate blog and we’re going to be doing an experiment in flash fiction, providing four short stories a month—two from each of us.  We’re hoping it will teach us a lot about writing and get us out of our comfort zones a bit.

As far as life goes, Christmas was a wonderful event.  My very first spent with my husband, and a deliciously sweet little thing.  I didn’t get out any Christmas cards this year, sadly, but I have a serious resolve to do things better next year.  Then again, isn’t that true for almost everyone, every year?

Still, goals for 2011:

1) Finish Jethro, Edit and Query.

2) Iron out the plot and hopefully finish Secret Project.

3) Write two short stories per month on Tales From the Hollow Tree.

4) Blog, blog, blog.

What are you going to be working on next year?