AS King's Pizza Delivery Blog Tour for Please Don't Ignore Vera Dietz (+ signed book giveaway!)

Ding dong. Pizza delivery. I’ve got one mushroom, black olive and extra cheese here for the awesome Lenore...



Last month my book Please Ignore Vera Dietz came out. It’s a pretty exciting time, but more exciting when you can traipse around to cool blogs and deliver some [imaginary] pizza and answer some questions. Lenore, this delivery is on me, as you've been one of the strongest champions for my first novel, The Dust of 100 Dogs. And now you really dug VERA too! That made me so happy! So, I am paying for these imaginary pizzas because you as an author, there is nothing like knowing people who get what you're writing. (And no--you are not obliged to like book #3 next year. Fair and square--you know me.)

LENORE: So...I have kissing on the brain today...What is your favorite kissing scene in a novel and why?

ASK: I'm a hopeless romantic in my own life. I found my true love and soul mate while still a teenager, so you'd think I'd love kissing scenes. But truth be told, I look away when there's a particularly long kissing scene on TV or in a movie and I have trouble writing them. (I do. I blush.) So, I cannot, for the life of me, think of a specific kissing scene. (I know! Lame!) BUT I CAN tell you my favorite love story book of all time which has plenty of kissing (and more intimate scenes) in it. Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins. Here's why I love that book so much. It's about two lovers who pursue immortality in order to stay together forever.



LENORE: Please share an embarrassing picture with explanation. [Readers, this is the question that mushrooms generated for the month of November. Stay tuned for more. Apparently a lot of people eat mushrooms on their pizza.]

ASK: Okay Lenore. I admit that you probably lucked out here. This is really the most embarrassing picture I think I’ve shared during the whole tour. There was one other (several others, actually) on the page in my photo album that were even more embarrassing from the same night, but I just couldn’t bear to share them. So—why so many embarrassing pictures from the same night?

First: This picture is me pretending to be a nun with the help of hotel towels. It was really late—I think we stayed up most of the night. We had good reason. We were all in shock.

It was my senior class trip. We went to Williamsburg, Virginia. And one of the nights, for dinner, we were to go on a dance party ferry trip around the Chesapeake Bay. Sounds good, right? And it was…until the storm came in. And it was a doozy. A real doozy. Like-a pass-out-the-freaking-life-vests and talk about how not to drown doozy. Teachers and students got sick overboard, the place started to smell like vomit. I know there was a definite feeling that we might really have to get rescued. Or—you know—that we might die.

After we made it back to shore, we loaded ourselves on our buses and we were completely silent on the drive back to the hotel. Completely hear-a-pin-drop silent. But when we got back to our hotel rooms? All of that emotion and crazy shock came out and though there were no intoxicating substances imbibed that night, the memories are a little like those of a drunken night out. I believe this was the night my friend Maria finally asked us to pierce her ear in the bathroom, and it was also the night she freaked out about the ear-piercing procedure and ripped the toilet cistern off the wall. I have photos of me dancing in a sweatshirt and my underwear with an ice bucket on my head which I just could not bring myself to share. But I have this…the nun shot.

I didn’t make a word of that up, either. You can ask the EHS class of 1988.

LENORE: That's a marvelous picture! Now back to kissing... Tell me about an unpublished kissing scene you've written, one that you'd prefer not to see the light of day.

ASK: Any kissing or sex scene I've ever written probably qualifies. But there was this one, in my fourth novel, where Henry Hawkins, an abducted 99-year-old Earthing who kisses the Queen of the planet H-125 who is not only gray and twice his height, but she also has a head that is flat and round, like a lollipop. There's a particularly awkward moment where Henry, after years of being in love with his strangely-shaped captor, has embraced her and is going to kiss her but he realizes that her anatomy might differ, and wonders if the type of kissing he was used to on Earth would suffice here on H-125. Anyway, I can't even remember what happens after that, but it is something I really never want to see the light of day. Though I have used the planet H-125 in stories of mine, the creatures from it are no longer shaped like lollipops. And nobody kisses.


LENORE: For my bonus question: What male character from one novel would you like to introduce to a female character from another? What might happen between them?
And how would Vera get along with Saffron? Very curious!

ASK: What a great question! But so hard to answer because I have so many unpublished (or about-to-be-published) characters! Okay, Sticking with just these two books. I guess I'd like Jenny Flick to meet Junior so that she can get her whole bad-boy thing out of the way with him and then Charlie and Vera could actually have a future. I'd assume Jenny and Junior would spiral into a life of drug use and other negative things, so that would be a bummer, but maybe they'd find a way out. Either way, Charlie probably wouldn't die. So that would be good.

I think Vera and Saffron would get along really well, actually. They both want out of their similar small town life and are looking to do bigger things. Plus, they both have a sensible head on their shoulders. I think Saffron might frown upon Vera's little vodka habit, and there is no doubt Vera would be frustrated as hell with Saffron's secretive trip to Jamaica. But I think Vera is wise enough for Saffron to handle without her wanting to pluck out her eyeballs.

BONUS FOR YOU!

Your topping combination means we'll have a giveaway signed copy of 

PLEASE IGNORE VERA DIETZ.

All entrants have to do is leave a comment here on your blog to say they're entering.

We'd love if you'd spread the word, too!

Giveaway ends Nov 8th 11:59pm ET

Thank you so much for having me around to the blog today, Lenore, and for your awesome questions.
And thank you again for being such a great supporter of my work. You rock.

Oh! I should really tell your readers something about Please Ignore Vera Dietz before I leave, shouldn't I?

PLEASE IGNORE VERA DIETZ
is a Junior Library Guild selection for Fall 2010
Starred in Kirkus, PW and Booklist Reviews 

18-year-old Vera's spent her whole life secretly in love with her best friend, Charlie. And over the years she's kept a lot of his secrets. Even after he betrayed her. Even after he ruined everything. So when Charlie dies in dark circumstances, Vera knows a lot more than anyone. Will she emerge and clear his name? Does she even want to? 



"Brilliant. Funny. Really special." --Ellen Hopkins, author of NYT bestselling Crank, Glass and Tricks 

“The book is deeply suspenseful and profoundly human”--Publishers Weekly