All this time I’ve been looking for something to claim as my own, something to define my value when the only company I have are the faint rays of moonlight, something to paint me with density, meaning, individuality in front of others, something not someone.

To finally feel at home, not absent from reality, not a two-dimensional piece that can’t even be disposed of in the nearest recycling bin, like it has never felt the guiltiness of not being able to be useful more than once.

Stop letting people be your landing coordinates, stop them from making you feel like they have a life and you are leftovers of their words, of last night’s dinner on the kitchen counter, stop promising yourself that you need an external factor to change, because we all know how temporary your metamorphosis is, and I know best how easily you get discouraged and think “oh no, not you again” when you realize it was not permanent.

Make a haven out of your own flesh without needing the stories of strangers to seem interesting in the brown eyes fixed on the mirror, make it look like standing alone, observing nature, or picking at the horizon with your hair strands is not boring at all, use loneliness as the building block for the bridge that will lead you back to your core so you can repair your rusty locks; it’s inspiring to hold your own hand and draw circles on your back when distractions are not enough to put you at ease, find something only for you when all your friends have already made it through.

“What’s your name” people ask whenever they meet someone new but they never start off with something creative, that comes later on after the unknown transforms into facts.

So my question is does your name define you or can you, in the least, lousily relate to the first letter?

It serves the purpose of a sticker proudly sitting on your chest or shyly peering over your shoulder and making the person opposite remember all past encounters with your name and without permission they can assume that you are all alike in essence not simply by coincidence.

But you are much more than letters in some random order designed to represent unity and in some cases remind you of an inside joke, a fit of laughter or a piece of yourself lost somewhere along the string of time.

Those letters are a convenience society needs but do they serve only the best to you?

So when people start off with “what’s your name” I answer with a date to slightly introduce myself; “I am the 29th of February – I seldom appear and it takes me years to gather up the courage to show my face but when I do, I am celebrated by all of those who were born amidst the leap of the Earth’s orbit and our too human effort to stay consistent in timekeeping results in the artificial product of a year with a limp and I am the outcome of stardust with hiccups.”

The novel Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray had a subtitle when it was originally published in 1848, and it was: A Novel Without a Hero. And while I’m not sure Glitter goes quite that far, it come awfully darn close.

So why would Aprilynne Pike, a YA author known for her “clean reads” write not one, but TWO books with a heck of a lot of bad people in them?

Because I wanted to.

That’s really what it comes down to.

I wanted to write a story that was exciting and had questionable morals and pretty dresses.

I wanted to write a story where you don’t know who to root for, because success for one person equals bad things for another. Because a lot of these ends do not justify their means. This is a story where you keep reading to see what happens because no one is safe.

And it was so fun!

However, by the end of the book, I hope that people will see that one of the themes of this book is that you can’t make bad choices and not be touched by the consequences. They might be delayed, they might be smaller than expected, they might be far larger than deserved. But you cannot dally in the drug-underworld without partaking in the darkness.

And believe you me, it only gets worse in the sequel.

So uh … I hope you like it?

So Glitter went through SO many incarnations as I made it into a book. I have never, ever rewritten the first half of a book so many times. At first it was set in space and had a Tudor-era English culture. There was sister involved, and the engagement was for a second marriage, and the king was, like, thirty-five, and ... well, there were a TON of changes. A ton. (And I’m glad for every single one! But it was a long road.) One of the last changes we made before my editor moved forward and acquired the book at about half-written, was taking out what I like to call The Articles. The tumble of events that led to my big corporation, Sonoma Agriculture, Inc., buying the Palace of Versailles could almost fill a book by itself. I think I make it clear enough in the book, but originally each chapter began with a short news article that essentially took the place of backstory in the book. The decision was finally made that readers would flip past the articles and wouldn’t understand the backstory. Which may or may not be true, but I went ahead and cut them out.

But I kept them. Because deleted scenes are awesome.:) So, with two weeks left before Glitter comes out, if you’d like to read the backstory of how the kingdom of Sonoman-Versailles came to be, you can. It starts with a grain blight that begins in ... seven years. It’s heavy reading. Articles, interviews, a Black’s...er... Grey’s Law encyclopedia entry. It’s not reflective of the voice in the rest of the book, but I worked hard on them, and I think they’re fun.:) Here’s the first article:

The Governor of Central California sought federal aid today after the Department of Food and Agriculture confirmed Norwegian Blight in wheat crops across the state. The Blight—named for its destruction of Norway’s modest rye crops in 2022—has been blamed for food riots in the Middle East and economic tension in the European Union and Asia. This is its first confirmed appearance in the western hemisphere.

The announcement comes at an inconvenient time for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which only last week defended existing trade regulations as “sufficient” to safeguard American crops. The administration’s remarks were likely prompted by Dr. Lydia Williams of Johns Hopkins University, the research scientist who recently predicted that Norwegian Blight would appear in the United States within the year. Her peer-reviewed models show over three-quarters of grain crops on all six habited continents at imminent risk of destruction, with global famine to follow by 2025—something never before experienced in the United States.

Whether Dr. Williams’ dire predictions of rationing and starvation will come to pass remains to be seen, but the consumer price index is already on the rise as the meat and dairy industries brace for a sharp increase in the cost of feed. The Renewable Fuels Association, a trade consortium of ethanol manufacturers, has also announced a $25 million bounty for an effective treatment of Norwegian Blight, which has thus far proven impervious to known fungicides.

Fox News, USA 18 March 2023

If you’re interested in reading the rest, there’s almost 5k words of articles. Here’s the link:

She hugged him tight and he said: “don’t ever let me out of sight, if you could just stay and hold my hand even when light years away, I’d blow soap bubbles into your hair and give you daisies if you get scared.”

So a thunderstorm came, one of those electrifying summer night games which lit a spark in her eyes and she said: “oh gosh, it’s been so long since someone last heard my cries.”

He almost strangled her with kissed then and said: “I told you, don’t trust those other men!”

The sun had set in a blushing haze after maintaining a whole day of the white-blue maze and her hands were all over that boy trembling and seeming suspiciously coy; then the question mark on his forehead got stuck and forgotten somewhere on the bed and he lost its upper squiggly line only the circle captured his lips as he whispered: “you know, I think your jib is on the same wavelength as mine.”

Just as plants grow back every spring when the birds never cease to sing she leans back into his collarbone and admits: “would you say in your hands I’ve grown? I was never made of stone.”