Remember how I said I'd do a Ballad related post every Tuesday and Thursday until October 1st when it came out? Well, it's managed to be Tuesday again, so here goes. I will probably post about my DragonCon/ Decatur Book Festival adventures tomorrow. Or possibly a butt kicking or hopelessly inspirational post. It's been awhile since I've done one of those.

But first, a Ballad contest. Well, actually, it's a Ballad/ Shiver contest. Because you are playing for Shiver prizes but with Ballad content. Here are the prizes:

1) A signed Shiver audio book.
2) Another signed Shiver audio book.
3) A CD of my Homicidal Faerie Mix -- the music I played while writing Ballad

There are two ways to be eligible. One is for bloggers of all sorts. You post

1) the cover
2) the link to Amazon
3) The teaser

and then comment here with a link back to your post. Every comment is an entry (if you have two blogs, comment twice).

And the other is for Facebookers; it's less image intensive. You post
1) The teaser
2) the title
3) the link to Amazon

The contest ends next Thursday, the 17th.


Here's the teaser:

And the link for the Amazon page is here. Before you go running off to pre-order on Amazon, however, any of you who are planning on possibly coming to the October 8th launch at Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, VA, listen up. Everyone who reserves a copy of Ballad at Fountain Bookstore will get a signed frame from the trailer at the launch.

Okay, onto the html. For blogger entrants who want it the easy way, here's the html to grab and paste (just choose HTML view while posting your blog, then cut and paste this text:


<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/maggiestiefvater/3248865066/" title="Ballad by Telltale Crumbs, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3092/3248865066_dbc846711b_m.jpg" alt="Ballad" align="right" height="386" width="250" /></a>This is a teaser from Maggie Stiefvater's BALLAD, a novel involving homicidal faeries and kissing that's coming out October 1st.

<blockquote>He turned towards me. For a long moment, he stood facing me. I was held, anchored to the ground – not by his music, which still called and pushed against the music already in my head and said <em>grow rise follow</em> – but by his strangeness. By his fingers, spread over the ground, holding something into the earth, by his shoulders, squared in a way that spoke of strength and unknowability, and most of all, by the great, thorny antlers that grew from his head, spanning the sky like branches.

Then he was gone, and I missed his going in the instant that the sun fell off the edge of the hill, abandoning the world to twilight.</blockquote>

Buy it <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ballad-Gathering-Faerie-Maggie-Stiefvater/dp/0738714844/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_3">here</a>. Enter the contest at Maggie's blog <a href="http://m-stiefvater.livejournal.com">here</a>.