We welcome our YA Fresh friend, Holly Cupala, to our blog today, to talk about her writing and her debut novel,
Tell Me a Secret , releasing June 22 from Harper Teen!
Hi, Holly! Could you please tell us a little about your writing background and how you made your first sale?I have been an SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators) groupie for years! When I started out, I thought I wanted to write picture books. I’d written this (ok, don’t laugh, I was just starting out!) 1,600 word rhyming epic picture book poem and was working on illustrations for it…I’m an artist but have since discovered that I am definitely not an illustrator. Anyway, I kept writing and took classes and went to conferences and formed critique groups and wrote a lot of awful stuff, then actually started writing some publishable stuff. But all of it was a little bit at arms’ length.
Then everything sort of fell apart. We lost our first daughter at birth, and the stories I’d been writing just didn’t have any meaning for me. I almost gave up writing. A few months later, I went to an SCBWI conference, and my friend Justina Chen asked if I was thinking of writing about it. All of a sudden, it was like she gave me permission. Moments later, we went to Libba Bray’s session on getting to the heart of your writing, and there it was. In my lap. I started writing.
About a year later, I received an SCBWI Work-In-Progress Grant, so I kept on writing. As I revised, I realized I would probably need an agent. Out of the blue, I met my amazing agent, Edward Necarsulmer IV, who fell in love with the project and was really passionate about it. I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with him. He ended up selling it in a pre-empt to our first choice!
Holly, please accept my condolences on your painful loss, and so glad you could fall back on your craft and get support from helpful writer-friends. 
Please tell us about your novel, Tell Me a Secret, and what we can expect from your characters.It’s been five years since Miranda’s bad-girl sister disappeared into the night and died in a mysterious crash. Five years of holding her family together – her drama-obsessed mother, her disappearing father. In just one year, she will escape to college on the arm of her boyfriend, Kamran, and disappear herself. Until then, she has a new best friend with the keys to unlock her sister’s secret world. But now Miranda has a secret of her own…two lines on the pregnancy test that will shatter everything she hopes for.
Expect secrets, mystery, betrayal, forgiveness, truth, a bit of suspense…and a superhot sci-fi guy.
I can’t wait! Now, what’s up next?My editor just accepted my second YA novel, STREET CREED (tentative title) for release in Fall 2011. It’s about a girl who trades her suburban life to live on the streets of Seattle. She meets up with a group of homeless kids and the one she is looking for – a boy who calls himself Creed. There are secret reasons why she’s left home, and every one of the kids has a story and secrets of their own. Ultimately she has to make a terrible choice, and she learns a lot about what it means to love.
Would you like to close with a writing tip?My favorite writing tip is to write as honestly as you possibly can the first time, because it’s really difficult to recapture that rawness and truth when you go back to revise. Each project’s process is a little different for me – the first novel was slow and sometimes painful. I worked through it little by little when our second daughter was a baby, one day a week. Now that I have more time to devote to writing, I try to make the most of it. For the second novel, I discovered the timer, set in 15minute increments, is a wonderful device for outrunning the internal critic. Then I reward myself – with candy or tea or something. I got through most of STREET CREED that way!
Many thanks for visiting with us, Holly! And I know our readers will be thrilled to learn we’re giving away a signed copy of TELL ME A SECRET. All you need to do to be entered is tell us, in the comments, is why you want to win! The winner will be announced on Monday!
