Saundra Mitchell giveaway

Posted on by March 10, 2011
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You may have heard that my most awesome fellow 2009 Deb, crit partner, and friend Saundra Mitchell has a new book out this week: The Vespertine. The Vespertine is a historical YA with a paranormal twist, with writing as lovely as the image on the cover:

I was lucky enough to get to read The Vespertine before it even sold, and I was not at all surprised to find a distinctive voice, a lush and compelling atmosphere, and unique characters who came to life on the page. After all, I was already a huge fan of her first novel, the contemporary southern ghost story Shadowed Summer, which has all of the above in spades:

To celebrate The Vespertine‘s release, I’d like to give anyone who hasn’t yet a chance to read both of these fine books. Just comment here to be entered–please leave your e-mail address so I can contact you if you’ve won. Giveaway open until the end of Monday March 14, to readers worldwide!

Tools of the Trade: Index cards

Posted on by March 8, 2011
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Just as my notebooks are a key component to the brainstorming stage of my writing, my index cards are essential to the outlining stage. I usually use 3″x5″ cards, but sometimes 4″x6″s if I know I’ll be including a lot of detail for each scene. I vastly prefer lined cards over blank ones, probably because they bring order to my sloppy handwriting (see below):

I know other writers use index cards to write down scenes randomly and mix up different ways of arranging them before settling on a final order. I’ve done that occasionally (most notably with The Way We Fall, because there were a whole lot of small incidents I knew needed to happen but I wasn’t immediately sure the most powerful sequence to put them in) but usually I outline very linearly, and if I don’t know what happens after scene A, I have to stop and brainstorm before I keep outlining. Scenes often feel meaningless if I don’t already know how they fit into the larger structure of the story.

But what I do like index cards for is that concrete sense of structure. Each card contains the notes for one scene, and separating the scenes onto different cards reminds me that each scene needs to serve a clear purpose and move the story along in its own right. If there’s nothing interesting or important written on that card, then I need to incorporate that information into a different scene where things are actually happening.

They’re also very convenient when I’m actually writing. I can much more easily prop the card for the scene I’m currently writing by the hinge of my laptop than an entire notebook or printed out paper. And if I’m writing on the go, I can just bring along the cards for the scenes I’ll have time to work on rather than the entire outline!

Revisiting high school and the teen me

Posted on by March 7, 2011
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I did a school visit today that felt a lot like stepping back in time. I went to talk with a bunch of grade twelve students at my former high school, Riverdale C.I., and it’s the first time I’ve been back in the building since graduation, eleven and a half years ago.

I’ve talked before about my time in high school, and you can get a sense from looking through the flashbacks I’ve posted from my journals during that time the various topics I angsted over and people I knew and crushed on while I was there. A lot of memories and feelings rose up when I walked through those doors. I went through the atrium, where my friends and I spent a lot of time hanging out, and then along the balcony overhead, and let them wash over me.

I spent a lot of time in the library when I went to school at Riverdale, too, and amazingly it looked almost exactly the same as I remembered.

For the presentation, the tables had been moved to the side to make room for rows of chairs. A few dozen students from the advanced English classes came to hear me talk. They were an amazing audience, answering my questions and asking lots of very smart questions of their own after I finished. Some of them are obviously starting to think seriously about getting published, and I hope I gave them both a sense that it is possible, and a sense of how much work is involved to make it happen.

Maybe in another eleven years, one of them will be coming back to Riverdale to talk about his or her first published book!

The music of Give Up the Ghost: “Country Feedback”

Posted on by March 4, 2011
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The seventh song on Give Up the Ghost‘s unofficial soundtrack is another R.E.M. song, “Country Feedback”:

Like last week’s song, this is one of the few where the lyrics don’t necessarily fit the book. I’m a very lyrics-focused music fan, so those are normally what first grab me about a song and make me associate it with a story.

In this case, it’s a song I’ve liked for a long time, and the mood is what seemed to fit GHOST. There’s a sense of desperation and longing and frustration and loss, emotions I think Cass and Tim and some of the supporting characters are facing with throughout the story.

Briefly, on not liking my books, and the books I don’t like

Posted on by March 4, 2011
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There has been rather a large kerfuffle happening online about whether a “YA mafia” exists and whether your behavior online may affect your writing career down the road. The best sum-up I’ve come across is this one, at YA Highway, for anyone who’s interested but somehow managed to miss it.

I am not posting about that, because I think everything I would say has already been said by others. But I would like to post about me, because as Janni Simner rightly pointed out, it’s important for authors to let readers know how we feel.

I am not offended by anyone disliking my books. I am awaiting the release of The Way We Fall review copies knowing there will be people who do not like it. No book is for everyone. That’s part of what makes creativity and the arts so exciting and varied. I am totally okay with people discussing my writing critically or expressing the fact that they don’t happen to like it. I’m just glad to see people reading my work and finding it meaningful enough to be worth discussing!

I do not make critical comments about other books on this blog. Even if a book is not for me (even if it really really isn’t for me), I don’t feel comfortable saying something that might dissuade readers from picking up a book by one of my writer colleagues. Because they are my colleagues, and we’re in this together, and I don’t like the idea of potentially hurting someone else’s career, even in a very small way, over what is really most often just a matter of my personal taste. So if I’m talking about a book, it’s because I really enjoyed that book, and I want to share it with others. (If I don’t like a book enough to want to recommend it, I simply don’t talk about it.) However, that is what makes me feel comfortable, not a standard I expect any other writer (aspiring or published) to follow. I’ve never thought less of anyone who defined their comfort levels differently.

So that’s where I stand. And I hope I’ve never given anyone reason to think I felt otherwise!

Tools of the Trade: The notebook

Posted on by March 3, 2011
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Every writer has their favorite writing tools. One of the most important of mine: my Hilroy notebook.

I’ve used a lot of different notebooks over the years, but these days I stick with my 5-subject 8″x5″ Hilroys. They’re small enough to easily carry around, but not so small it’s difficult to write anything substantial. And the five sections allow me to separate out random ideas from notes on specific projects. Less time spent searching for that brilliant inspiration for the WIP.

I was very sad when the closest stationary supply store stopped carrying them. 🙁 But thankfully I can get them online!

I bring my current notebook with me everywhere. I write down any ideas that strike me while I’m out and about, and I continue working on my writing during my commute and any other opportunities I have. I usually do preliminary outlining in my notebook, and I’ll also often break down the scene I’m going to write next in more detail, or brainstorm solutions for problems I’ve run into. For some reason I think differently with a pen and paper than in front of the computer. And the thinking I do on the paper lends itself better to exploring ideas.

When it comes to the pen part of the equation? I really don’t care as long as they last a long time before going dry!

Flashback: Childhood fortune telling

Posted on by March 2, 2011
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When I was a kid and a younger teen, my friends and I played a whole lot of games that were really about fortune telling.

I think our first favorite was the paper fortune teller:

We made it and played it exactly the way explained here, except that we did three number choices instead of just two. And we didn’t make all our fortunes good–usually it was about 50/50 good/bad, and someone was always getting upset about receiving a fortune like “You smell funny.” 😉

Around the age we started to giggle about boys, MASH became the game of choice. I’ve seen online that there are many different variations–the way I played it looked like this:

For those unfamiliar with MASH, the title letters stand for Mansion-Apartment-Shack-House. The 0-3 on the bottom right were for how many kids. After the recipient gave the names of boys, jobs, and cars, the MASH maker would count through the options and cross off one every time they hit a specific number, until each category had only one option left, which was supposed to be a prediction of your future. The way I played, to pick the number to cross off by, the MASH maker would draw a zigzag line in the middle out of the recipient’s view until the recipient said “Stop!” and then the number of points would be counted, and that number used. (So, in my example above, you’d count by 7, starting with M, and the first option crossed off would be the third boy.)

We obviously didn’t take it very seriously, because people would have more than one MASH done on them for different results in the course of a single day, but there was something kind of thrilling about getting a mansion or the job you wanted most, all the same.

There was another, boy-centric fortune-telling game we played with cards. I’ve never heard anyone else talk about this, so maybe we made it up, but if you played this too, let me know! The game didn’t have a name, but it focused on the jacks.

You could do this for yourself, or have a friend do it. First you picked which boys the jacks represented. The jack of hearts was the boy you “loved”, the jack of diamonds the boy you only liked, the jack of clubs a boy you particularly disliked, and the jack of spades an unnamed mystery man, someone you didn’t know yet. If doing this with a friend, you didn’t actually have to tell them who you were thinking of for each one, but usually with prodding the truth would come out.

Once the jacks had been named, they were placed face down and switched around until you know longer knew which jack was where. Then they were laid out in a square. You or your friend would shuffle the rest of the cards and deal them out one by one around the square, on top of the face-down jacks, sorting them by suit. When all the cards had been deal, you counted up how many of each suit were on each jack. The hearts represented how much you and that boy would love each other, the diamonds how much money you’d have together, the clubs how many kids you’d have, and the spades how much you’d fight.

Based on those figures, you’d decide which jack you wanted to be with, and turn it over to see who your ideal future husband was.

One other card fortune-telling game I used to play, for myself and for friends, I made up, but it was pretty simple so others may have come up with it too. First, I’d lay out the aces like so:

Then I or the person I was fortune-telling for would ask a yes or no question. I would shuffle the rest of the cards and start dealing them out on the aces. The first card to match the suit of the ace (e.g., a diamond on the ace of diamonds) was the answer to the question. Hearts was definitely yes, diamonds probably yes, clubs probably no, spades definitely no.

It was a rather inexact process, but part of me really wanted to believe I could figure out how various situations in my life (usually to do with boys) would turn out from asking them. I actually referred to the outcome of the cards in journal entries from time to time, as it was relevant data. 😛

My friends and I grew out of the whole fortune telling thing by fourteen or fifteen (I don’t remember exactly), which makes me wonder what it is that drew us to it so strongly when we were younger. I’d say it was because life was pretty uncertain and difficult to control as a kid/young teen, but I’m not sure it got any more controllable as we got older. Maybe we just became too jaded to get any comfort out of the pretend certainty of the fortune telling games?

Did you play at fortune-telling (or maybe you still do)? Any games beyond the ones I’ve mentioned that were popular with your group?

A few thoughts on sequels

Posted on by March 1, 2011
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Ways in which writing a sequel is easier than writing a standalone/first book:

-I already know the characters (well, the ones that are returning; there are new ones too) and generally what they want and how they will act in various situations.

-I have conflicts already built into book 1 that can continue to unfold.

-People have already enjoyed book 1, so I can go into this story with a reasonably good expectation that if I write it well, people will enjoy finding out more about those characters and their conflicts.

Ways in which writing a sequel is harder than writing a standalone/first book:

-I have to find new and exciting things to do with characters who have already been through a lot, or people are going to wonder why they are bothering to read more about them.

-I need to come up with fresh yet equally-engaging conflicts that still fit within a world and backstory I can’t change now.

-People have already enjoyed book 1, so they are going to have certain expectations of enjoying book 2, so I had better write it really really well.

Yes, I am back to work on the The Way We Fall sequel. Inspire me! What are your favorite sequels, and why?

Reader question: Work post-agent, pre-publishing

Posted on by February 28, 2011
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In your experience (and from the people you know), how much work goes into into a manuscript after you’ve signed with an agent and before the work is ready to submit to publishers? And what is that process like?

This varies very much from book to book, and agent to agent.

With Give Up the Ghost, my agent at the time asked me to do some line edits and expand/add to a few scenes. She wrote comments and corrections in the manuscript using Track Changes, sent that to me, and I revised based on her thoughts. Timeline: I signed with her in late October and the manuscript was ready for submission in early December.

With The Way We Fall, my agent didn’t ask for any changes. He felt any concerns he had were minor enough to be considered personal taste, and it would be better to leave that to the editors. I volunteered to make one small change based on comments I’d gotten from a couple other agents I’d talked to, which took maybe half an hour. Timeline: I signed with him on a Friday and the book went on sub the following Monday.

Obviously, how things worked with TWWF is about as fast as they can go. On the longer side of things, I know authors who’ve spent more than a year revising for an agent they hadn’t even signed with yet before that agent offered representation and went on to submit the book, and who continue to work for several months on new projects with their agent.

Some agents are very editorial and want a real hand in shaping a manuscript. Others will only get involved if they see major problems. Some are not editorial at all and expect their clients to send them work that’s already submission-ready. Just one consideration to keep in mind if you’re looking for an agent yourself, and trying to figure out who would be the best fit!

The music of Give Up the Ghost: “Understand the Dream is Over”

Posted on by February 25, 2011
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The sixth song on the unofficial soundtrack for Give Up the Ghost is “Understand the Dream is Over” by The Juliana Theory.

(Excuse the Kingdom Hearts footage. This is the only video I could find with the album version of the song)

Mostly I just like the feel of the song; the angry and defiant tone with hints at sadness and fear, that I think fits Cass’s perspective rather well. And you could see it as being about Tim’s struggle to accept that his life and his friends aren’t as great as he thought they were. Both characters are dealing with new truths and understanding, and trying to decide where to go from there.

Where do we go, from here… Oops, sorry, having a Buffy musical moment.

Just six more songs and six more weeks (until GHOST’s paperback release) to go!