#183 -- First Kiss

A surprise: this week's prompt has a potential prize! My (Laini's) new book, Lips Touch: Three Times comes out TODAY from Scholastic! YAY!!! If you've been here at Sunday Scribblings for a long time, you might know that the book started life right here. The whole reason Meg and I founded this site was to get ourselves writing for fun. For myself, I'd spent more than two years on my first novel, and after it was done I really wanted to do something different: quick, fun, not precious. The kind of writing where you don't know or care where it's going and serendipities can just roll off your fingertips. So I wrote short fictions and had a blast, and I noticed after a few months that a number of these little fictions shared a theme:

Kissing. First kisses. Kisses with consequences. My husband Jim had the idea that the stories could be a book, and since he's an illustrator and we love to work together, we thought it could be an illustrated book. I spent some time revising and expanding the stories, Jim did some sample art, and to our delight, editor Arthur A. Levine at Scholastic went along with our vision and now, several years later, here is that book:
It's got gorgeous art by Jim:

And it's printed in two colors, which is really unusual for a novel. It's so beautiful, I'm swooning! Also, to my great delight, it has so far garnered two starred reviews, from Publisher's Weekly and Booklist. Yippeee!

All this is to say, thank you very much, Sunday Scribblings, and thank you Meg for the prompts without which these three stories would not exist. And thank YOU all for participating! The prompt this week is "First Kiss" and if you're interested in winning a signed copy of the book, you can email me your entry as per the guidelines in this post. I'll be picking two winners.

Whether you enter or not, this week write about first kisses: yours or someone else's or an entirely fictional one. Have fun!

(I've still been unsuccessful in resolving my Linky issues, so put comments in the box, but perhaps Meg can swoop in and fix it?)

Cheers!