Happy to announce a new book!

Here's the announcement from Publisher's Marketplace.

I've been working on this book for a long time, revising and revising some more, trying to get it right. I'm doing another revision now, for my editor, due mid-March. I'm really excited about this one though and can't wait for readers to meet Nora and travel along with her to Paris!

I need to give my friend and author extraordinaire, Daisy Whitney, a shout-out here. She read an early version and her encouragement and helpful insight really kept me going!

photo credit: morguefile.com

Merci for reading!

Have a great weekend!!

Exciting News - Another "Cupcake" Book!!

This was in PW Children's Bookshelf yesterday:

Lisa Schroeder (The Day Before) has signed with Simon & Schuster for two new books. Annette Pollert at Simon Pulse has acquired her fifth YA novel, Falling for You, which will pub in spring 2013. Her first YA novel not in verse, it tells the story of a teen girl who relives the love of a dangerous boy as she hovers between life and death. At Aladdin, Alyson Heller signed Schroeder for Frosting and Friendship, a companion novel to It’s Raining Cupcakes and Sprinkles and Secrets. Scheduled for fall 2013, it’s about a girl who wishes she shared her friend’s talent for baking. Sara Crowe at Harvey Klinger brokered the deals, both for world rights.


I announced Falling For You last week, But Frosting and Friendship is brand new news,  and I am SO EXCITED! Like, this is me right now:

I need to say a big thank you to all of the kids, parents, teachers and librarians who have bought and shared and loved It's Raining Cupcakes and Sprinkles and Secrets. It's because of YOU there will be another book! Writers can only keep writing when there is a demand, so thank you from the bottom of my heart for embracing Isabel and Sophie so there can be another book.


I don't want to say too much about the third book, because I am still writing it, and that's a fragile place to be. First and foremost, I need to get lost in the story and FINISH it!! But I can tell you the main character is Lily, and she is a disaster in the kitchen, but longs to be a great baker like Sophie and Isabel, who are in the book a lot too.


So excited for 2013! Now... back to that book!!

A new book - YAY!!

So... yesterday, Publishers Weekly posted a few deals, and one of them was mine! (And check out Jessica's amazing deal too, while you're there. We sipped virtual pink champagne over twitter. It was awesome!)

The announcement requires at least one side note. First, it's not YA, as you can probably tell from the description. It's very much middle-grade. Also, the title will probably change. And okay, one more note, it's a book that's really hard to explain, and has so much more to it than that little description. Like hummingbirds. Yes! Hummingbirds!!! I'm so excited about the birds, I can't even tell you!

So how did I come to write this MG fantasy that's hard to explain and needs a new, amazing title? I thought I'd share a little bit about it today. Last spring I was trying to revise another fantasy attempt from YA to MG, and I wasn't happy with how it was going. Every word was a chore. So one day, I opened up my idea journal and turned to a page where six months prior, I'd written:

Events happen in and around a garden - a beautiful flower garden. 

There is a gypsy.

There is a bird.

There is a girl and a boy.

There is a king. 

How can a small hummingbird help a girl and a boy?

I had turned to this page many times before. When I did, I would look at the words I'd written, ponder them for a minute, and quickly move on when nothing came to me. But not this day. This day, I looked at the page in my journal and said to myself, "I want to write THIS story. I just have to figure out what this story is." So I did what I don't allow myself to do very often. I sat and stared out the window for a long time, turning it all over in my mind. And what came to me was, what if a girl is trapped in a tower next to a beautiful flower garden?

That's how it began. It turned into something different, something more, as books usually do when you start with a small seed. Some of those original ideas changed like, although there is a king, the queen actually plays a bigger role. And rather than having a boy and a girl, there is just a girl. And there are other characters I won't bore you with who are important to the story too.

I had so much fun with this story! I checked out all kinds of books about castles, and every day the story swept me up and away to a distant land and I LOVED every minute of it.

My friend Lisa Albert critiqued the manuscript, and I want to thank her for giving me the encouragement I needed, and also giving me an idea that made the ending SO much better! It's scary, trying something new and branching out. But as I told someone recently, as an artist, there are times when the pull to create a specific something planted in your heart is so strong, there is almost no stopping it. And once I started writing, so was the case with this book.

I don't have a publication date yet. I believe Christy hopes to find a fabulous illustrator for it, and there may be black and white sketches throughout. If so, that will, of course, take time.

Anyway... that's how the book came to be in a nutshell. Or perhaps, a hummingbird's beak?