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Rachel Caine is our guest blogger during the week of June 1st. If you have any questions for Rachel Caine, add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is more information on Carpe Corpse (The Morganville Vampires, Book 6):

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Deidre Knight is our guest blogger during the week of June 1st. If you have any questions for Deidre Knight, add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is more information on Red Kiss:

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One question I always get at school visits is: what's it like being a writer?

First off, I do have a difficult time calling myself a writer. I like the term storyteller better because I started as a visual storyteller: painter, filmmaker, animator, illustrator. The writing came by accident. As a filmmaker and animator, I needed scripts and ended up doing them because nobody else would. The idea that I would someday be a novelist? Fugehdaboudit! Me writing a 320 page book was not in the cards.

But strange things happen and unexpected doors of opportunity open when you least expect them to.

Believe me when I say that I am an accidental novelist. I was tricked into it, bamboozled, flim-flammed. There I was writing a short story-and my writer's group liked it. Only they had questions. And they wanted more answers.

Fine, fine. I could dig deeper. Sure thing, some back story here, an extra scene there... Great stuff they said. Keep going! Keep going? Why? Its good they said. We want more. Alright, so I kept writing. The short story became a longer piece and still they wanted more! What about this? And what happens when-

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I think I may have figured out why Americans do not make better food choices. I think people are completely confused. Heck, I get confused and I work in food, study food and research the effects of food on health. I am considered an expert (whatever that means...) and if I get confused, I can only imagine what the rest of the country...who just wants to live their lives and eat dinner...feels.

And I know why we are confused. The latest addition of Men's Health magazine arrived the other day, the ‘Life in Balance' issue and it kicked off with a great...and I mean great editorial by David Zinzenko, author of ‘Eat This, Not That' and editor in chief. In the essay, he talks about Michael Pollan and eating real food, skipping drive-through and junk food; he speaks of whole unprocessed food versus the ‘edible foodlike substances' we have come to rely on in our diets. He waxed poetic about ‘pulling off the packaging and examining what's really on the end of our fork.' He goes on that our modern food culture has pulled us away from the reality of food with slick graphics, cartoons and healthy-sounding words like ‘lite.'

Well, you can imagine my excitement as I prepared to steal my husband's magazine and pore over every word of this balance issue. I could not wait to read the exposes, the scathing indictments of processed foods. Sure enough, I turn the page and there is an ad for ‘Silk' soymilk. Cool. But wait...what's this? Can it be? An item in the Table of Contents called ‘Soy's Dark Secret'? (I'd bet ‘Silk' knew nothing about this article before they bought into the ad space.)

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Ever watched the intimate interactions between a baby and their parent?  All the cooing and copying of the babies facial expressions and sounds? In doing this, we let our babies know that we understand them and we reflect that understanding back by copying and imitating them. This is instinctive for most of us; we don't need to be taught how to speak to a baby. Babies love this, all this mirroring calms and soothes them and helps them to feel safe with what is happening around them. These interactions are critical to development and have a profound impact on the how the brain functions. In fact most of the human brain's circuitry is developed after birth. As parents interact with their children, providing not only food and safety but predictable emotional nurturing the resulting attachment helps the brain to organise and begin to regulate and make sense of the complex world around it.

The human brain continues to grow, develop, and adapt to the environment throughout our lives -- not just when we are babies. Most of us mirror quite naturally with our babies but drop these efforts as our children develop language.  We begin to tell our older kids what we think they are feeling and drop all this wonderful mirroring from our repertoire. They tell us we're hungry, we tell them they can't be hungry because they just ate. They tell us they don't need a sweater, we tell them they do, it's cold outside. We no longer send messages back through our verbal or body language that mirrors or matches what we think the child is experiencing.

G. Neri, Surf Mules, Putnam Juvenile, Penguin Books

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I often say the only difference between adult fiction and young adult fiction is the main character's age. You can pretty much deal with anything you do in adult fiction--from drugs and sex, to death and war, and anything else you might find in the Great American Novel... except it's fueled by the teen mind. And seeing a story through teen eyes is the key to why I write YA.

From the writing standpoint, what's great about having a teen protagonist is that often they have no framework of experience to deal with the messes I put them into. It's all about first times: the first time you feel threatened, the first time you fall in love, the first time you steal something. There is something incredibly alive about being a teen.  There's a freedom to living your life by gut instinct since you don't have experience to draw from--it allows you to take risks adults might not. And because of the youth factor, you can often recover from a blow more quickly.

So as a writer, I can put my teen characters through the ringer and know they have the resiliency to survive. It's like they are running through the forest blindfolded: they move on impulse, not logic, and pray they don't run into a tree (but usually do).  The fascinating part is seeing how they adjust and what they do to survive. To a writer, innocence fueled by testosterone is a much more exciting prospect than dealing with an adult character who has seen it all. I love getting my young heroes in trouble because nobody ever learns from success, they only learn from failure. It's called growing up.

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Attention bookclubs: We have FOUR new reading group guides for our May titles.

Visit our Bookclub Home Page for hundreds of other guides.

Reading Group Guide: How to Buy Love of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson

Book: Hardcover | 9.25 x 6.25in | 400 pages | ISBN 9780525951148 | 14 May 2009 | Dutton Adult | 18 - AND UP 

$25.95 - add to cart

Read the author's posts on the Penguin Blog and watch the video.

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Lover Avenged: A Novel of the Black Dagger Brotherhood by J.R. Ward

Click here to listen to an audiobook excerpt on Song.ly 

Audiobook: CD Unabridged | 5.74 x 5.23in | 16 Hours; 19 CDs | ISBN 9780143144625 | 12 May 2009 | Penguin Audio | 18 - AND UP

The Sign by Raymond Khoury

Click here to listen to an audiobook excerpt on Song.ly 

Audiobook: CD Unabridged | 5.74 x 5.23in | 17 Hours; 13 CDs | ISBN 9780143144212 | 19 May 2009 | Penguin Audio | 18 - AND UP

Read an excerpt from the Hardcover

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New York, May 28, 2009  --   A Passion for Design will, for the first time, share Barbra Streisand's exquisite taste and style in a beautiful book format.  She is already an icon known and appreciated by millions for her acting, singing and directorial accomplishments. Now, at last, readers will get a view of her fabulous collections and her amazing sense of design.

Viking is pleased to announce that A Passion for Design by Barbra Streisand has been acquired by Clare Ferraro, President of Viking.  Robert Barnett of Williams & Connolly negotiated the acquisition for world rights and first serial.  Viking will publish in the fall of 2010.   A Passion for Design will be edited by Rick Kot, executive editor at Viking.

The book will focus on the architecture and building of her newest home, the dream house and refuge Ms. Streisand says she has longed for since the days when she shared a small Brooklyn apartment with her mother, brother and grandparents. A Passion for Design will be the culmination and reflection of Barbra's love of American architecture from 1790-1904.   It will contain many of her own photographs of rooms she has decorated, furniture and art she has collected, and flowers and vegetables she grows in her glorious gardens.