Audiobook Sample for Shine Shine Shine: Put it in your ears now!

When I found out I was getting an audiobook for my novel, Shine Shine Shine (read about it and get first 50 pages here!), I was happy, but sort of worried in an undefined way. When I found out that Joshilyn Jackson was reading my audiobook, I was ecstatic, and all my worry went away. Joshilyn is a spectacular actor. I remember seeing her in Chicago in a production of Cowboy Mouth by Sam Shephard. When she was on stage, she completely transformed into this other person. I know, I know, that's what actors do and they're supposed to do it, if they didn't do it it would be kind of weird. But when you see someone you know doing it, and they do it so completely, it makes you want to approach them hesitantly, ready to poke them in the face, when you see them later. It makes you wonder who they really are. And then you forget about it for years and years until someone tells you they're reading your audiobook and then you're like YES. That is a good actor, right there. She will do a good job.

Joshilyn was one of the first readers of my final draft of Shine Shine Shine. She "got" Maxon and Sunny and Bubber and Emma right away. And I'm so proud of the job she did reading them. It was not an easy job -- the book goes from Burma to the wilds of rural Pennsylvania to the moon and from autistic adults who have learned to control their pitch and volume to autistic children who haven't. There were a few awesome phone conversations where we tried out how the dialect would be, or how certain lines would sound, and then she just did her thing like I knew she would.

So here's a sample of that good work. Right click the image below to download the first chapter of the audiobook as an MP3 or just left click to listen in your browser. Meet Maxon, Sunny, Bubber, Les Weathers, Rache, Jenny, and my novel. I hope you like each other.

A Visit from Joshilyn Jackson

My excellent friend and NYT bestselling author Joshilyn Jackson was in town this weekend for a visit and some book events promoting her awesome new book, A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty! We have been friends since graduate school, but since we normally go away together to hole up in the mountains and write, we have not seen each other's children in forever. It was very nice to have her here and witness my actual life when I'm not stuffing sticks into my hair and foaming at the mouth in the middle of novel production. The children loved her. The dog loved her. She saw my new house. She saw my old house. And there was rejoicing.

We started out in Richmond at The Woman's Club. Joshilyn did a talk and Q&A hosted by Fountain Bookstore. Here she is talking:

Here we are in the bathroom, wondering what's in that abandoned glass on the counter:

Here's Joshilyn with fantastic bookseller Kelly Justice from Fountain Bookstore:

And here we are afterward at the British pub around the corner, eating sausage rolles, Cornish pasties, and absolutely dreadful fish that was full of bones and fail:

Finally, here's Joshilyn at her reading at Prince Books in Norfolk. This morning she rolled out in her orange car to travel back to Atlanta. I miss her already!