I HAVE A BOOK DEAL!

Hey, everyone! It's so amazing to be able to announce something as cool as having a book deal. And now that it's official, you can check it out here. The original news landed in publisher's weekly, and THE LAST 8 is coming in 2019 to your shelves. Thanks so much for all the support I…

Calling Out Problematic Books

From time to time, we see this come up in book twitter. A book is flagged as problematic, or has some content that we have an issue with. First of all, this is NORMAL. Not every book is going to be perfect. I dare say we are all problematic from time to time, and make…

The Really Unlikable Female Character

I'm always ranting about Unlikable Female Characters and what exactly makes them unlikable. There are some that I want to protect, some I love, some I understand. But this other week I was reading a book that featured one of them, and I just couldn't get into her character. After I stopped reading, I finally…

How I Got My Agent

Just writing the title of this post kind of gave me all the excitment again. This is the dream post for every writer, right? Everyone wants to write one of these, and I devour them happily from all other writers. There's nothing like seeing the reward for hard work, and I always wanted to write…

Small Comment Regarding the Elections

I've been where you are. Recently, Brazilian politics have been a complete mess. There was a very illegal impeachment process for our elected president, and her vice-president replaced her. The current (illegitimate) president, Michael Temer, is from an extremely conservative party, and has taken many measures to repress protests that have been happening due to…

Bad Representation is Bad Writing

This week a friend of mine came to talk to me about Christopher Nolan's INTERSTELLAR. Although I thought that the making of the movie was beautiful (the shots! the planets! the score!), I couldn't simply set this aside and say it was a good movie because of the way the female characters were treated. To…

Pitch Wars 2016 Bio

I realized it's been a fortnight since I had posted anything, so it's finally time for my PITCH WARS MENTEE BIO!!! Pitch Wars, for those still unaware, is an awesome contest hosted by Brenda Drake where the mentees are chosen by authors and get a two month intensive mentoring. Last year I entered and didn't…

Claiming my own Identity

I'm always discussing the theme of writing diversely, so I thought I might delve in it in a little more personal manner. By now, many of you know I'm Latina, bisexual and live in Brazil. But here are some more things you don't know about me. I come from a fairly well-off middle class family.…

When the Romance gets in the way

It's been a while since I wanted to rant about this topic, so I thought 'why the hell not?' and decided to write this as a blog post. A lot of this is about writing, and a lot of it is about reading as well. As every writer, I LOVE to read. I love to…

Writing Brazilian Fiction

A couple of weeks ago, my friend/CP/Brazilian fellow YA writer Debbie spurred on an interesting conversation in twitter about Brazilian representation in fiction and how often we see it misrepresented in our own niche -- YA and MG. She put it up on storify in some eloquent twitter words, but I thought I might expand…