Skylark Blog Tour: All About Skylark + Giveaway

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Book Profile

Name - Skylark (Goodreads)
Author - Meagan Spooner
Genre - Dystopian Fantasy
Release Date - 1st August 2012
Available - The Book Depository | Fishpond 

Sixteen year-old Lark Ainsley has never seen the sky.

Her world ends at the edge of the vast domed barrier of energy enclosing all that’s left of humanity. For two hundred years the city has sustained this barrier by harvesting its children's innate magical energy when they reach adolescence. When it’s Lark’s turn to be harvested, she finds herself trapped in a nightmarish web of experiments and learns she is something out of legend itself: a Renewable, able to regenerate her own power after it’s been stripped.

Forced to flee the only home she knows to avoid life as a human battery, Lark must fight her way through the terrible wilderness beyond the edge of the world. With the city’s clockwork creations close on her heels and a strange wild boy stalking her in the countryside, she must move quickly if she is to have any hope of survival. She’s heard the stories that somewhere to the west are others like her, hidden in secret – but can she stay alive long enough to find them?

The Insider's Scoop

I thought I would echo my post yesterday, and instead of telling you more about the premise of the book (which you can read about in the blurb above), I’d go for stuff you might not know. So, without further ado, here are five things you might not know about SKYLARK!

1. Lark’s home city is Washington, D.C. Of course, it isn’t, really—she lives in a fantasy world, an alternate reality to our own, where magic powers technology, not electricity. But it was based on D.C., and the buildings in the Institute are based on the Smithsonian museums on the Mall in D.C.

2. The book’s original title was THE IRON WOOD, the name of the safe haven Lark is trying to reach when she flees her city. We changed it because “Iron” in YA fantasy novels is so often code for “faeries.” And while there are pixies in this book, they are not faeries. Not even close.

3. There are two big twists in the story. One of them, I knew was coming before I even started writing the book. The other, I didn’t know until I got to the point where it’s revealed in the manuscript. I didn’t have to rewrite the story at all to fit it in—it was there all along, I just didn’t notice myself!

4.  SKYLARK first sold overseas a few weeks before it sold in the US because it went on submission during the Bologna Book Fair. There was a brief window of time in which I wouldn’t have been able to read my own book, because I didn’t speak the languages it was being published in.

5. There’s a secret phrase hidden somewhere on or in the physical hardcover book itself, a touch my book designer snuck in. It’s beautiful. But you’ll have to look to find it, and that’s all I’m saying!

I also thought I’d share with you guys a snippet of a deleted scene from the book. This was the very original first draft of SKYLARK, back when it was called THE IRON WOOD. A lot has changed about the book since then—it’s set in a straight-up fantasy world now, not a future version of ours. There are no cars, no electric lights, and the Facility is now the Institute. It was before Lark’s voice had come through, before I’d even settled on what kind of story I wanted to tell. And so I started, as I often do when I don’t know how to start, by telling myself a story. These are the first words I ever wrote for SKYLARK.

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There are stories about what lies beyond the Wall.  No one who leaves has ever come back to tell about it, but still the stories persist.  Tales of ghosts, of cannibals, of wolfmen and carnivorous stones.  My brothers once told me a story that everything on the other side of the Wall had melted away, leaving only the shadows of what had once lived there.  I dreamed that night of being chased tirelessly by ragged shadows with teeth.

But there were other kinds of stories, too.  Somewhere on the other side of the Wall was a city like ours, but filled with food, with wealth, with power.  Somewhere on the other side, they’d discovered how to make things work again, lights to shine and cars to drive, and no one went to sleep with an empty belly.  Somewhere on the other side was the sun.

These stories were why the Facility had outlawed talk of what lay beyond the Wall. It wasn’t a very well-enforced rule, not like the rules about stealing food or using magic.  Everyone told the stories, and everyone listened to them.  And most of us dreamed at night of teeth, whether they belonged to shadows or stones or men who howled at the sky.

~Giveaway~

Meagan is giving away (1) SIGNED First Edition Hardcover Copy of Skylark!

Rule of Entry -

- US Only

- Ends 20th of August

- Must be 13 or older

- Optional Entries :

   * Leaving comment on either of Meagan's posts +1 each

   * Follow Me on Twitter +1

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   * Tweeting Giveaway +1

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