"Making of Nightspell" Guest Post

Today I am so excited to welcome the incredible author Leah Cypess -- author of Mistwood and the soon-to-be-released Nightspell, which I really, really loved. Today Leah is here to talk a bit about her writing process for Nightspell - including some very awesome pictures of her writing notebooks. 

Making of Nightspell: Notebooks

This is the first of a four-part “Making of Nightspell” feature I’ll be doing as part of this blog tour. Ever wanted to know what goes on behind the scenes of an author’s work? Ever suspect it’s not half as exciting as what goes into making a movie? Well, here’s your chance! Starting with the glamorous world of notebooks.

I write my first drafts in longhand. Needless to say, because I’m a writer, I get obsessive about what type of notebook I use. It used to be that I used all types of notebooks, but would stand obsessively at the drugstore trying to figure out which specific notebook was right for this particular story. The notebook I ended up choosing when I first started writing Nightspell – at the age of 17 – was this one:

I filled about half that notebook, and wrote myself into a complete mess. Since I couldn’t see how to extricate myself, I ended up putting the notebook away and starting something new.

Ten years later, having quit my job to give full-time writing a try, I pulled that notebook out again and went through it, trying to figure out which parts of what I had written were worth salvaging. Most of it got nixed:

In fact, out of that entire notebook, I ended up with maybe a page’s worth of actual writing I wanted to salvage. And then I started from scratch. This time, my taste in notebooks had changed, ever since a friend in law school introduced me to these awesome notebooks from Japan:

I do a lot of writing on the playground these days, and these notebooks are wonderful for that: they’re really thin and fit perfectly into a small backpack. You can also fold them open and closed several million times without having them fall apart. These are the notebooks on which Nightspell was REwritten… for the first time.

For the next part of the Making of Nightspell, check out Books Complete Me on June 3!

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Many, many thanks to Leah for stopping by and sharing her notebooks with us! 

Nightspell by Leah Cypess

Four years ago, Callie was forced to leave her home and family as part of an arranged marriage to the prince of Ghostland, despite being too young to marry at the time. Still she remained in Ghostland - essentially as a hostage to ensure a tenuous peace between their two countries.

From the day Callie was sent away, Darri vowed to rescue her beloved younger sister. Finally Darri gets her chance when she and her subtly cunning brother Varis travel to Ghostland to deal with the dangerous inhabitants there. More than a simple rescue mission awaits Darri in Ghostland however. Her sister is much changed, the politics of Ghostland are seemingly endless, and the people of Ghostland themselves prove extremely ruthless. That and the fact that it is almost impossible to tell who is still among the living and who is actually a ghost.

Once again, Leah Cypess has caught me with her unique writing, her unforgettable characters and her fantastic pacing in Nightspell. Even after experiencing the fantastic world building of her debut Mistwood, I was enthralled by the complex territory of Ghostland and its inhabitants. Leah Cypess doesn't write easy characters by any means. With the point of view switching from Darri to Callie to Varis and even various Ghostland inhabitants, you are given time to occasionally mistrust or love every single character. Literally everyone had some secret or other up their sleeve and the added tension of complicated court politics ensured that someone was always up to No Good.  And that includes the enigmatic and devious Clarisse whom you may remember from Mistwood, who true to form, manages to stir up trouble whatever land she happens to reside in.

As one of those authors who respects her readers enough to not have to spell out every single detail within her stories, Leah Cypess leaves much of the puzzle of Nighspell to her audience to discover. It's a quality I highly appreciate actually. It's also a quality that had me continually flipping back pages trying to work out details and the significance of certain passages. It's work, but a type of work that I enjoy as a reader and something that makes the reading process that much more enjoyable in  my book. In other words, Nightspell was one heck of an enjoyable book.

**Be sure to stop in on Friday -- Leah Cypess will be here to share her writing process for Nightspell.

series reading order:
~ Mistwood - my review
~ Nightspell

Because Everyone Likes a Second Opinion:
Eating YA Books review
Kirkus Reviews
My Bookish Ways review

book source: ARC from the publisher