Jennifer Castle's Blog

Let’s get small! (Right now, on the inside I am the ten-year-old nerd listening to Steve Martin’s original standup comedy album on vinyl, hoping you get the reference.) During the first-ever Sherman Alexie-founded “Indies First” campaign this Saturday, November 30, over a thousand authors will be volunteer booksellers at independent bookstores across the U.S. That’s [...]

My writing routine is delicate. Temperamental. You could even say, pansy-assed. Ideally, when crawling my way through a first draft like I am now, I write for about two hours every weekday. Ideally, I work in the morning, between getting my daughters out the door to school and lunchtime, because that’s when I feel most [...]

Can you meet a person “organically online”? I hope so, because that’s how I think of the way I met the smart-n-classy Jody Casella. Right around the time The Beginning of After came out, Jody started commenting on my blog — she’d really enjoyed my book and just sold her own debut novel Thin Space. [...]

Can you meet a person “organically online”? I hope so, because that’s how I think of the way I met the smart-n-classy Jody Casella. Right around the time The Beginning of After came out, Jody started commenting on my blog — she’d really enjoyed my book and just sold her own debut novel Thin Space. [...]

In June, the lovely ladies of Epic Reads selected “The Beginning of After” for their monthly Book Club, and HarperCollins created a terrific Book Club Discussion Guide for it. You can download the guide from Scribd at this link. It’s pretty and filled with questions that make you go hmmmm. Now that TBOA is out [...]

“You Look Different in Real Life” is out. In the world. That’s cool. (I’m masking how utterly verklempt and grateful I am.) On Release Day you’re supposed to, you know, talk up your book in a whole lot of different places in a professionally sanctioned me-a-thon. I’ve done some of that. It feels unterrible. I’ll [...]

Books have chapters, and lives have chapters, and the lives of books have, well, chapters. I know that’s an awkward version of circular logic, but I’m going with it. Because that’s exactly what it feels like today, the day my debut novel “The Beginning of After” is released in paperback. I wanted to sit down [...]

When you’re in the throes of finishing a book and your publisher have given you a release date that feels about ten lifetimes away, it’s hard to imagine that yes, at some point, this thing you have written will be a shiny bound thing that sits on a bookstore shelf. I’ve said and typed the [...]

The first thing I ever had published was a short story I wrote for my 10th grade English class called “Goodbye, Annabel,” which won a local contest and got printed in the newspaper. It was a portrait of a ten-year-old girl saying goodbye to her ragdoll before being sent to boarding school, and unless you [...]

There are some YA authors you can really count on to keep producing original, intelligent, trend-proof work, book after book after book. I would like to be one of those authors; I plan to be. Michael Northrop is one already. His work includes the superb YA novels “Gentlemen” and “Trapped,” as well as the middle-grade [...]