Blog Tour - The Looking Glass By Jessica Arnold

My Writing Journey

By Jessica Arnold

I decided to become an author the way I make most of my important life decisions—on the spur of the moment. When I was little, I swore I'd grow up to be ANYTHING BUT an author. Then one day I woke up and thought, "Hey, I should write a book." Rational? Hardly. But no one has ever claimed that people who put themselves through the madness of trying to publish are particularly same.

The first book I wrote was a Harry Potter knockoff and it was HORRIBLE. I hate to admit this to people, because nowadays looking back at that manuscript makes me want to claw my eyeballs out. But yes, I wrote a bad Harry Potter rip-off and I (shudder) queried it to many, many agents and am rightly ashamed.

I decided to try again. Which I did … several times over. But eventually I hit upon the idea for The Looking Glass. Sadly it was inspired by the tragic death of my roommate’s niece, who drowned in a swimming pool. She was kept alive on life support for a few days, much as Alice’s body is kept alive in The Looking Glass while she searches for a way to break a deadly curse. I also happened to be reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” in one of my courses at the time, which heavily influenced the character Elizabeth’s mental decline.

Blurb

Find the diary, break the curse, step through The Looking Glass!

Fifteen-year-old Alice Montgomery wakes up in the lobby of the B&B where she has been vacationing with her family to a startling discovery: no one can see or hear her. The cheap desk lights have been replaced with gas lamps and the linoleum floor with hardwood and rich Oriental carpeting. Someone has replaced the artwork with eerie paintings of Elizabeth Blackwell, the insane actress and rumored witch who killed herself at the hotel in the 1880s. Alice watches from behind the looking glass where she is haunted by Elizabeth Blackwell. Trapped in the 19th-century version of the hotel, Alice must figure out a way to break Elizabeth’s curse—with the help of Elizabeth's old diary and Tony, the son of a ghost hunter who is investigating the haunted B&B— before she becomes the inn's next victim.

About/Find Jessica Arnold

Jessica Arnold writes YA, codes ebooks, and is currently a graduate student in publishing at Emerson College in Boston. She spends most of her time in class or work or slogging through the homework swamp. If she has a spare moment, she’s always up for a round of Boggle. Given the opportunity, Jessica will pontificate at length on the virtues of the serial comma, when and where to use an en dash, and why the semicolon is the best punctuation mark pretty much ever.

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