(Cross-posted from the The Elevensies.)

Pull up a chair, bring your appetite for a great story, and raise your glass as we celebrate the launch of a new Elevensie title!

LUMINOUS is about a Mexican-American girl, Consuela Chavez, who discovers that she can remove her skin and reveal herself as a pearlescent skeleton, able to craft skins out of anything--air, water, feathers, butterflies, fire--to save people from dying before their time. She joins a cast of archetypal teens with extraordinary abilities in a parallel universe known as the Flow. But when someone starts killing her newfound friends, will she be able to make it back home alive?

***HAPPY BOOK BIRTHDAY, CONSUELA!***
So if we're going to toast to Consuela or Luminous or me, it has to be with chocolate and, trust me, there's nothing better than Cafe D'Amore's Bellagio's Sipping Chocolate! What can I say? I'm an indulgent chocoholic hedonist and with this being the realization of a lifelong dream come true, I want the best! Want to join me?

Hot sipping chocolate and my favorite writerly mug. It doesn't get any better than this!

A packet of this little bit of heaven is included in my Luminous Summer Grand Prize Giveaway Contest, along with amazing Elevensies ARCs, "Fan of YA" bookmark collections, sparkly tattoos, and other tasty and beautiful swag & it's happening RIGHT NOW until midnight tonight. Click here to enter! But exclusive to the Elevensies fans, you can leave a comment at the Elevensies with your email for an *extra bonus entry* to win!

Gorgeous prizes look like this:

Grand Prize: Three Luminous Chicks of Paranormal Fic!

What people are saying:

• "[V]irtuoso prose...."
  — Publisher's Weekly
• "The Prose is simply stunning…With her vivid fantastical landscape, evocative descriptions…and facility with powerfully grotesque imagery, Metcalf is a stylist to watch."
  —The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
  
• "With this dazzling debut novel, the author proves herself a highly talented wordsmith."
  — Connie Goldsmith for New York Journal of Books
• "You'll love it if... You were all about Twilight, but now you're so over the whole vampire/werewolf thing. Luminous still has tons of romance and fantasy, but with a totally original plot that is nothing like you've ever read before!"—SEVENTEEN magazine

Luminous is now available at
Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Borders | Indiebound

You can also follow my antics at a safe distance on:

My website: www.dawnmetcalf.com
My blog: Officially Twisted
Twitter: @dawnmetcalf
Facebook: dawnmetcalf

Thank you so much for celebrating this incredible moment with me! Salut!

My book is coming out tomorrow.

...

What a totally surreal feeling!

The first time I got my hands on a bound, book-like thing with my name on it, I poked it with my finger, getting a solid and satisfying 'thump'. My brain, fueled with nothing more than random inspiration and an overactive imagination, produced something that went out into the publishing world and became (after a long, hard slog accompanied by research, luck, and a helluva lot of waiting) a book. A real, honest-to-goodness thing of paper and ink. And it will sit on shelves and be mailed across the country and its characters and ideas will take up residence in someone else's head besides mine. Potentially *lots* of heads.

It's mind-blowing, really.

So tomorrow's launch date will be celebrated by posting requisite online thingies, driving kids to and from various summer activities, and finally conclude in an actual date-date where I plan to go out to a lovely dinner with my husband at a quiet restaurant and together toast the realization of a childhood dream. (Good food? Babysitting? Quality time with Better-Than-Boyfriend? Bliss!) And in July there will be fireworks and parades, signings and events, and some great times scheduled for the Luminous Summer months, but online, there will be PRIZES!

Oh yes, my friends, there shall be prizes!!!

So here's how we party:

• Tomorrow (June 30th) is the last day to enter the Luminous Summer Grand Prize Giveaway so go here to enter! Like what you see in the above photo? There's more! (In fact, I've received even more awesome 2011 Debut bookmarks so there's additional surprise cool points thrown in just for fun!) Contest ends at midnight.
• Tomorrow (June 30th) will also be the Elevensies Lunch & Launch announced here. Smiles, folks: it involves chocolate!
• Have you been following the LUMINOUS book tours?* If so, you have collected various letters that can be unscrambled and entered into a Super Special Location to find the Secret Stash of Goodies hidden on my website, www.dawnmetcalf.com.

Here's how that works:

1) Gather up the letters. There should be 15 in all.
2) Unscramble them into a phrase commonly found on summer postcards. (The phrase has 4 words.)
3) You have approximately 24 hours to solve the puzzle or the baby becomes one of us forever! (No, wait, that's Jim Henson's Labyrinth...sorry.)
4) Go to my my website and click on the "mariposa" on the main page.
5) Follow the instructions, enter the phrase, and get your Secret Stash of Goodies!

Then, tomorrow, June 30th, please join me as I become a real published author.

*tick*tick*tick*tick*tick*tick*tick* YAY!!!

Yes. This.

* If you haven't, that's okay! The letters are: E, U, S, E, R, O, E, H, I, E, W, E, Y, R, H (not in that order). What can I say? I'm a giver. :-)