Francesca Zappia's Blog

Hi all! We're breaking out the blog posts again for the Ch1Con blog tour! If you haven't heard of it before, Chapter One Young Writers Conference is an annual conference for teen writers, by teen writers. This year, the con will take place on Saturday, August 6th in St. Charles, Illinois, and registration is currently open on the Ch1Con website for writers from a middle school to undergraduate level (approximately ages eleven to twenty-three) and at an early bird discount price of $...

Hi there!

If you're looking for Francesca Zappia, author of the 2015 YA book Made You Up, you're in the right place. This used to be a blog, but now it's just a general website to direct you to my social media (up above, to the left), about me (in the nav bar), my books (also in the nav bar), and my artwork (still nav bar).

If you want to ask me questions, the best place to do that is on my Tumblr. Please feel free to ask anonymously!

- Chessie

Well, everyone, it's 2015.

As per usual, I did a terrible job posting last year, but a lot's been going on. Writing new books, editing others, trying to figure out all of the things. Just...all of them. Life is hard. But I'm going to try a little harder to keep up with everything this year, so let's get into it!



I've been tagged by fellow 2015 debut Susan Adrian (author of TUNNEL VISION) to participate in the "Terrible Titles" blog hop, which is awesome and super funny and I didn't know about i...

OH GOD CHESSIE'S ACTUALLY BLOGGING WHAT'S GOING ON

Well, you can blame this one on Diana Urban, who invited me to be part of the #MyWritingProcess blog tour! Diana posted last week about her own writing process, and this week, it's my turn. So here goes!

What am I working on? 

At any given time, I'm working on a handful of different stories, all of them referenced by different hashtags on Twitter. (Because with as quickly and easily as titles can change, calling them the titles I have now i...

I imagine this bear dancing to "Guten Tag" by Wir Sind Helden, because what other song do I listen to while doing Ask-Again-Later-related things? (Answer: None. Maybe Flagpole Sitta.)Hey everyone! It's Announcement Day #2! (Announcement Day #1 being my last post, to say Ask Again Later isn't coming out until early 2015; Announcement Day #3, a.k.a. Cover Reveal Day, isn't going to happen anytime in the near future. Sorry, guys.) 
So there's this thing that happens sometimes with...

I'm pulling myself out of the blogging grave because NEWS. So let's dust off the dirt and bugs and Beetlejuice this thing.
Around this time last year, my first book sold to HarperCollins, to be published in 2014. I am still stoked about this, for the obvious reasons. 
However, I have come to you today to announce that the release date for Ask Again Later has been pushed back to early 2015. 
Naturally, I was a little disappointed at first. Waiting another six months? It seemed like...

Thanks to Amy Zhang, I've been tagged for the Next Big Thing meme! I've already answered some of these questions about Ask Again Later in various interviews (you can find them here), but I haven't answered others, so here we go!

1. What is the working title of your next book?

Well. Ask Again Later, obviously, which comes from the Magic 8-Ball answer. The main character in AAL, Alex, uses a Magic 8-Ball to answer some deep and pressing life questions. (And also, on occasion, to try to tell the d...

I've been drafting a novel that I originally expected to be about 90,000 words. I write regularly, and I had put down what felt like a lot of words over the past two months. When I checked, though, my total word count sat at an unsatisfying 35k. It didn't feel right at all. I knew I must have a lot more words than that, but I suck at math and I didn't feel like arguing with my computer, so I let it go and kept typing away, though admittedly at a much slower rate and rather upset.

Apparently, I...

Earlier today, I finally got to announce the news that Ask Again Later sold in Germany. This is super exciting for many reasons, one of which being that a lot of things in AAL are German-type things. My excitement over this will really make sense when people are able to read the book, but right now I have to show it to you by giving away a box of YA ARCs!
Here's what you can win: 

What was that? Why yes, I AM GIVING SOME LUCKY PERSON MY BITTER KINGDOM ARC. You are welcome.
One per...

A few months ago I got to share the news that Ask Again Later sold to HarperCollins.

Now, I get to share more amazing news...

Ask Again Later will also be published in Germany!

If you know anything about the book, you know how crazy awesome it is that the rights sold in Germany. And if you don't, I give you this picture, originally drawn for my wonderful agent Louise Fury, of Alex and Miles as a reference:


I am still so excited about this. Selling any foreign rights at all was reas...