Blog Tour: Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma

Today I'm excited to welcome Nova Ren Suma, the author of Imaginary Girls! I've heard wonderful things about her book and can't wait to get my hands on a copy! The book was released on June 14th, here is a bit of information on the book:

Chloe's older sister, Ruby, is the girl everyone looks to and longs for, who can't be captured or caged. When a night with Ruby's friends goes horribly wrong and Chloe discovers the dead body of her classmate London Hayes left floating in the reservoir, Chloe is sent away from town and away from Ruby.

But Ruby will do anything to get her sister back, and when Chloe returns to town two years later, deadly surprises await. As Chloe flirts with the truth that Ruby has hidden deeply away, the fragile line between life and death is redrawn by the complex bonds of sisterhood.

With palpable drama and delicious craft, Nova Ren Suma bursts onto the YA scene with the story that everyone will be talking about. 

On each blog tour stop Nova is sharing a secret about Imaginary Girls. Let's hear about Secret #2!

I’m here spilling secrets about my book Imaginary Girls. As the cover says, “Secrets never stay below the surface.” I guess not, because here’s another one bubbling up now…

Secret #2: I attempted—and failed—to write Imaginary Girls as a NaNoWriMo novel.

One year I needed a kick in the pants, so I signed up to write a novel in a month. It was November of 2007, and I decided to quickly draft my first YA novel for NaNoWriMo, aka National Novel Writing Month. That novel was an early, embryonic form of Imaginary Girls, and I gave those 1,667 words a day a solid try, even though my usual way of writing is to carefully carve and revise as I go. I got over 40,000 rough words in thirty days, which is miraculous for me, but that’s still not enough to “win” NaNoWriMo: You need 50,000. Still, it’s a good amount of words. The problem was that these words were terrifyingly bad. Awful. Cringe-worthy. In horror, I put the draft aside, unsure of how to fix it.

A few months later—when I could still barely bring myself to look at the NaNoWriMo draft—I was sitting in a café one morning before work and turned on my laptop only to find the screen ominously turn to rainbows and then go blank. Turns out my hard drive melted into nothingness and no data could be retrieved, not even by professionals. And guess what? I hadn’t backed up in months and the only place that novel existed was on my hard drive. Even if I’d wanted to revise the pages I’d written in a month, I couldn’t. They were gone forever. (Yes, I cried. Now I see it as a painful blessing. Also I now obsessively back up my computer and you should, too.)

So that’s why no words remain from my first attempt at writing Imaginary Girls. But I wanted to write the book so badly that I started over, from scratch, giving myself way longer than a single month to draft it, and now here we are.



And a few more goodies:


Book Trailer:

Book Sampler
Nova Ren Suma's website and twitter

And last but not least, a giveaway!

Here's how to enter to the winner of a signed finished copy of Imaginary Girls!

Fill out the entry form here.

Entries left in the comments of this post will not be counted.

The giveaway is open to addresses within the U.S.

You must be 13 years or older to enter this contest.

The giveaway will end July 5th at 6:59 pm Central Time.

I'm asking for your address straight up.  I will also email you so you know you have won. I will delete the spreadsheet once I have got the winner's information.