How Would You Like To Read the Fairyland Sequel Before Anyone Else Does?

I’m going to tell you how you can read The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland And Led The Revels There long before almost anyone else does.  But first, you have to understand why “Catherynne M. Valente” and “Clarion” go together in my mind.
My friend Cat Valente was instrumental in getting me to the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop.  She knew I was stalled in my writing, and needed a breakthrough.  She told me about it, she bugged me weekly about applying for until all right, Cat, I’ll submit a damn story, and when I got accepted she was my biggest cheerleader. And in the four years since Clarion, I’ve sold twenty-two stories and got nominated for a Nebula, so it certainly got me over the hump.
Which is why it’s nice, you understand, to see that she’s had some success herself since I went to Clarion.
At the time, she was breaking out with her Orphan’s Tales series, but Cat Valente has since become a genuine superstar with her YA book The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making, which became a New York Times Bestseller.   She’s been nominated for just about any major award you can imagine.  Her lush prose was famed before, but now she’s inspiring young girls everywhere with her bold, sensible protagonists.  And I couldn’t be prouder.
But good Cat Valente fans know that she’s written a sequel: The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland And Led The Revels There.  Most people can’t get their hands on it until October.  But you have a chance to win an Advanced Reading Copy, signed by Ms. Valente, and read it early!  And how do you do that?
By donating to the Clarion Write-A-Thon Fund, which helps get people scholarships to future classes.
Here’s how it works: Every $5 donated to the Clarion Write-A-thon gets you one entry into the raffle, which will be held at the beginning of August.  Cat’s book is the second of twelve planned prizes.  When the raffle is drawn, the first winner will have first choice of all the fabulous prizes to offer, and the second winner will have second choice, and so on.  (I have no guarantee on when exactly Cat will send it, but one assumes “Some point before the book is out.”)
The current prizes are:

• An ARC of The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led The Revels There.
• The book detailing the making of my Clarion classmates’ fencing-and-dance fusion “A Thousand Natural Shocks” (premiering tonight if you’re in San Francisco! Go!)

And what you get for your donations:

• Every $5 donation gets you an entry into our raffle pool
• $10 total donations will get you access to the Clarion Echo community, where I am live-plotting my novel in progress in an attempt to teach some of what I have learned at Clarion.  (You’ll need a LiveJournal account to join, so email me with your name and I’ll make sure you get in.)
• $25 will get you a story critique, if there are slots available.  You’ve got three left!  Go!