Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball blurb

[osprey_archer]

Work is progressing on The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball. Major edits are done; I’m hoping to get it all copyedited and put in the paperback format before I talk to my cover designer at the end of April.

My plan right now is to release the book at the beginning of June. It will probably be ready earlier, but this way I’ll have plenty of time to get the proof copy and actually weed out the typos before the book is available to the general public.

Also considering posting a chapter on DW (or two chapters? They’re fairly short chapters) every Tuesday for maybe three weeks before the book drops.

In the meantime, I’m working on the blurb.

***

Eleven-year-old Piper’s been having a rough 2013. But when Piper chases a popcorn ball fifty years back in time, she meets Rosie, who greets Piper as an old friend. Although this is Piper’s first visit to the past, it’s far from the first time that Rosie has visited Piper. As Rosie explains to Piper, “It’s time travel! Do you expect things to happen in order?”

The two girls swiftly become best friends. Together they eat cake, make snow angels, talk about books, slip back in time to witness a bootleggers’ shootout, and learn how to fly during a lengthy trick-or-treating session on Halloween.

But Piper’s sister Angela doesn’t believe that Rosie exists - and soon Piper herself is worried that she won’t be able to visit Rosie much longer. Piper, Rosie says, is always eleven during their visits… and soon Piper will turn twelve.

Comments

[minutia_r]

I honestly don't know whether this is a legitimate criticism or whether it's just my brain getting hung up on being overly literal, which is a thing it sometimes does, but: Although this is Piper’s first visit to the past, it’s far from the first time that Rosie has visited Piper.

If Piper is visiting the past, then Rosie is not visiting Piper, but rather being visited by her, right?

[osprey_archer]

Rosie also visits Piper in the future! I feel like this is one of those things that is clear in the book but difficult to squeeze down for a blurb.

Maybe it would be better to say "it's far from the first time that Rosie has seen Piper"?

[minutia_r]

That seems like it should work.

[asakiyume]

That's one of the things that I really love about the book: that when Piper first meets Rosie, it isn't Rosie's first time to meet Piper. I *love* that you make their knowledge asymmetric.

[osprey_archer]

If you're gonna have time travel, you might as well really milk the time travel angle for all it's worth!

[asakiyume]

EgZactly

[silverink]

I don't think I've seen you post about this before, but this story sounds so lovely! I'd love to read the first few chapters on here if you wanted to post them!!

[osprey_archer]

I posted about it back when I wrote the first draft, but that was... seven years ago now... so it's been a long time. Anyway, I'm planning to post the first few chapters sometime in May, as a lead-up for releasing the book.

[evelyn_b]

I am going to travel back in time, slip this book on bb!me's bookshelf, and spark a lifelong obsession that peaks with 2003 me wasting an entire year of college writing horrible pretentious essays about the popcorn ball I have for a heart and how it's a crime that this brilliant little book isn't better known. Poor past me won't learn the real reason why it's not a global bestseller (because it wasn't completed until 2020) until I meet you in the mid-2010s. I have no regrets about this course of action and suspect it will probably be an improvement over my actual college experience.

Seriously, I'm excited! :D

[osprey_archer]

The dream TBH! In their heart of hearts, all authors yearn to have pretentious essays written about their books, and to have a pretentious essay written about one's book before it was technically written... I feel like that would be Peak Pretentious and all the other authors would be so jealous.