Our Blog

Last month's Quirk Perk and Quirk DIY Book Club pick was Creepy Cute Crochet. As part of the whole Book Club experience, we're encouraging winners to send in pictures of their projects. Last month's winners, Katie Hilton and Stephanie Johnson, were kind enough to send in pictures of their crafts, and we just love them!

Check them out after the jump!

In case you missed it, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs was selected as a World Book Night 2014 title, and we are seriously excited over here. It's a real honor to participate in such an amazing program.

The awesome World Book Night crew are busy tweeting away leading up to WBN 2014, and today they've picked Miss Peregrine as their Book of the Day. We like to play along, so we're dishing out ten paperback copies of Miss Peregrine AND a poster for Hollow City, below!

Go ahead and enter the giveaway, and be sure to follow World Book Night on Twitter for more updates!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

An eBook exclusive re-release of Sam Stall's Suburban Legends came out October 1st! So through the month of October, we're sharing excerpts from the collection of spooky stories. Because Halloween! 

They told you the suburbs were a great place to live. They said nothing bad could ever happen here. But they were wrong.

This collection of terrifying true stories exposes the dark side of life in the ’burbs—from corpses buried in backyards and ghosts lurking in fast food restaurants to UFOs, vanishing persons, bizarre apparitions, and worse. 

So lock your doors, dim the lights, and prepare to stay up all night with this creepy collection of true tales. We promise you’ll never look at white picket fences the same way again!

Read an excerpt below (The Goatman Cometh), and pick it up for $3.99 via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or the iBookstore this month! 

Take heed! If you didn’t know, November is National Novel Writing Month. The idea is simple: write 50,000 words of fiction in a month (that’s 1,667 words a day, number-crunchers). All that it takes to participate is the decision that you’re going to do it. Okay? Great. Now re-read the title of this post.

Look at that post title. Just LOOK AT IT. It’s such thrilling news that I had to use an exclamation point where the Chicago Manual of Style would probably rather I didn’t!

But that’s the thing: in NaNoWriMo, you are not going for style. You aren’t even really going for substance. You’re just going. You’re going to point your flashlight at the darkness, suss out the shapes in front of you, and plunge ahead. You’re going to load up your schooner, set a course for terra incognita, and circumnavigate the hell out of your own personal globe. You’re going to cry (I mean, probably. I always do). You’re going to be a writer because you’re going to be writing.

Now, some people look down on NaNoWriMo because quote-unquote real writers do not need to fill in goofy charts or crank out words like they are so many widgets and count them like they are so many beans. Some people are also jerks. The big secret about NaNoWriMo is that it’s just a fancy way to give yourself permission—or a kick in the butt—to do what Real Writers do every day, and that is string words together.

In other words, if you’re waiting for a sign to get started, this is it.

Someone once told me that publishers hate NaNoWriMo. Well, I’m here to say that 1. that guy is also a jerk and 2. no, we don’t. We at Quirk love anything that makes more writers, because more writers means more books, and more books can’t not be a good thing. So all this month, we’re going to bring you special NaNoWriMo-themed posts, giveaways, advice, and commiseration throughout November. We’ll talk writing, revision, and how to take your first steps into the world of Being A Writer.

Speaking of which: tell us stuff! What are you excited for or trepidatious about? What's your word-churnout-strategy? How can we make these posts interesting enough to entice you into procrastination? Leave thoughts, questions, and suggestions in the comments, and we'll pick three random commenters next week to win a copy of Secret Lives of Great Authors! 

You can also enter our Rafflecopter below! Good luck! 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Halloween is days (day?) away, but fear not, procrastinator! There’s no need to resort to a pedestrian triangles-and-smile face on this year’s decorative gourds. Try one of these groovy ideas on for size!

Dudes and dudettes, let us be real for a moment: life can be pretty gnarly at times. Doubly so if you happen to be a character in some nerd’s novel (what’s the deal with a bildungsroman, anyway?). When the proverbial shizzle hits the fan, you’re gonna need one righteous support system to safely lead you past the core conflict into a groovy dénouement. In the most trying of times, that is when you truly require a great bro.

Bros can come in all shapes and sizes. The important thing is that you find yourself a homie that will stick by your side through thick and thin. Sure, you may get all up in each other’s grills from time to time, but—at the end of the day—your bro will unfailingly come through for you, every time. So, without further ado, let’s celebrate some of the most epic literary broships of all time.