17 & Gone Blog Tour

Welcome to the Presenting Lenore stop on the blog tour for Nova Ren Suma's 17 & GONE! I am super excited for this novel and I am going to read it as soon as I can steal some time away from revising. I'm bringing it with me this weekend to the SCWBI Europe Con, so let's see!

And now ... here's Nova!

Last year, when I was deep into writing 17 & Gone, I discovered an exciting new distraction and way to collect images that fascinated me: Pinterest. What started off as maybe one more thing to keep me from writing turned into a great source of inspiration, and my 17 & Gone inspiration board was born. I’d often write with the images up on my screen, staring at them in pauses between paragraphs. On each stop on this blog tour I’m highlighting one of the photos that spoke to me and helped me find my way through the darkness of writing this book. I first discovered this photo somewhere on Pinterest or maybe Tumblr and blindly repinned it to my own board, not knowing who the photographer was or where it came from. But when it came time to put this blog tour together, I started digging and discovered that this image that spoke to whole scenes of 17 & Gone—blurry and choppy and frightening—was in fact a grayed-out image from this color series by Lauren Treece.

Source: laurentreece.blogspot.com via Nova on Pinterest

She calls it “Dancing at Dusk and Campfire Curry.” 

The girls’ hands are tightly clasped, though there’s no singing. This isn’t summer camp. This isn’t the kind of night for belting out “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and holding a flashlight to ghoul up your face and tell ghost stories. The ghosts tonight have already told their stories.  

—from 17 & Gone, page 317 

There’s a playfulness, a giddiness in the color version that’s stripped bare from the black-and-white version I used as my inspiration for writing. I guess you could see how much it stuck with me, how influenced I was by this image. It’s like a snapshot from a dream, and a scene toward the end of the book brings that dream to life.

 For spotlights on more images from my 17 & Gone inspiration board on Pinterest, keep following this blog tour! Last stop tomorrow Friday, 3/29 at Book Chic  

17 & Gone synopsis: Seventeen-year-old Lauren is having visions of girls who have gone missing. And all these girls have just one thing in common—they are 17 and gone without a trace. As Lauren struggles to shake these waking nightmares, impossible questions demand urgent answers: Why are the girls speaking to Lauren? How can she help them? And . . . is she next? As Lauren searches for clues, everything begins to unravel, and when a brush with death lands her in the hospital, a shocking truth emerges, changing everything.