Jaclyn Dolamore

The Post in which I Dissect Revision in Excruciating Depth

2012-01-13T13:41:00.001-08:00

Recently Maggie Stiefvater posted an absolutely wonderful blog post where she dissected the hell out a first draft chapter and a final draft chapter. It is a long post, but worth the read. Even thought I am a multi-published novelist myself I really get something out of these. It never hurts to be reminded how a good story is crafted, how many little details go into it.

And when I read it, I had two wishes. One wish was that I had the time to do a similar post. The second wish was that a bunch of other authors would do them too so I could print them all up and stash them with my favorite writing books.

So then, Maggie emailed me and a bunch of other authors and asked if we would indeed like to do posts like this. At that point, I was like, OKAY I WILL FIND THE TIME. When opportunity and desire collide, what else do you say, even if your house is a disaster area of half-packed boxes with no end in sight.

But then came a problem. What selection of first draft and last draft could I offer you that would be helpful?

I don't actually have the final draft of Magic Under Stone right now, because I did line edits and copyedits together, on paper, and mailed them off, without getting finished copies yet. So that's out.

Between the Sea and Sky was kind of odd, because I wrote one first draft, which I barely revised before sending to my editor because I polish as I go and I don't save all the polishings, (although still warning her that it was kinda rough and suffering from second book-itis), which I then almost complete rewrote in revisions, cutting out entire characters and plot points and replacing with new ones, and then did more light polishing on. So there are very few chapters I can really compare in a helpful way.

So that brings me back to Magic Under Glass. It was my first novel and I did a truck-load of major surgery-type editing passes on it before it was published.

I thought, then, perhaps, instead of comparing line edits for one chapter like Maggie did, I would show you how the first two pages of Magic Under Glass changed and changed and changed again, so you will get a sense of both global edits and line edits an author might make and what the reasoning is.

Apologies that this post is very long and not formatted in a cute way but I tried to make it so you didn't have to click around too much. My comments on the pages will be in bold.

FIRST DRAFT EVER

Scarlet and green are the colors of my homeland; the colors out the window of the little house where I spent my first birthday and my fifteenth, and every birthday in-between. From the room I shared with my sisters, I could see the piercing red of Joy-Flowers blooming, and the rounded shapes of the Shai Mountains in the distance. I wanted to begin with a sense of what Nimira had left behind, and give the reader a visual of a place that was peaceful, and very different from the setting she's in now...with the serenity, perhaps, of a Chinese brush painting.

My sixteenth birthday was the first where I awoke to any other sight. Now you know how old she is and how long she's been away from home! Convenient!

No one even knew it was my birthday. I woke before the other girls and crossed the chill room to stare out the murky glass panes "chill room", "murky glass panes", ways of showing she is in somewhat distressed circumstances now. at the street below. The streets of Colsom Lake were already bustling with activity. Street urchins stood on the corner, urging passerby into impulse purchases of flowers and sticks of candy. A milkman was bringing his horse cart up one side of the lane, while a rag seller wandered door to door on the other. A faint, misty drizzle cast everything in shades of grey; mud puddled on the streets. Ah, the classic setting of the Victorian novel, you got your urchins, your rag sellers, your drizzle...I wanted to indicate to readers as quickly as possible what kind of place they're in, since Nimira herself is foreign. But perhaps it is a bit TOO commonplace.

I stepped away from the window with a sigh.

“You awake, Nim?” Saraki whispered from her tangle of sheets. Assara sprawled beside her, uncovered, still sound asleep.

“I’m walking around, aren’t I?” Nimira is snapped from her reverie, and...rather snappish for it.

Saraki sat up and yawned. “Is it time to get up yet? Has Tantan been in here? Wow, but I’m tired!” But Saraki is totally unfazed by Nimira's moods. She's an easygoing girl in every draft, although her appearance is always brief.

“Tantan hasn’t been in yet, but any moment now, I’m sure. It’s definitely morning.”

Saraki nudged Assara. “Get up, get up. It’s morning.”

I shook Feiji’s shoulder, and within moments all four of us were out of bed, sorting out clothes that we’d strewn across furniture the night before, exhausted from our last show. Now you're getting to know the nature of these girls' work, conveyed not with an infodump but with a sense of movement and setting--they're getting out of bed, their clothes are everywhere. We had no more engagements in Colsom Lake; today was a traveling day. We pulled on wide trousers of grey cotton and knee-length homespun tunics grown tattered over our months of travel, and drew our waists in with wide red sashes. When Tantan came in, we were braiding one another’s hair.

Tantan, we called her. Auntie. But she was not our real Aunt, nor could she ever be mistaken for it, with her round, red face and long, thin mouth. When she was displeased, which was most of the time, her eyes twitched, first one, and then the other. She walked like a particularly graceless fat person, although she wasn’t fat at all: slow and waddling. Her eyes twitched now, as she waddled into the room, and looked at all of us trying to tame long strands of black hair into braids.Tantan enters with this unlikable description. She was later cut, as you will see.

“Hurry up, girls,” Tantan said. “There’s been a change of plans. We won’t be stopping in Hammarue. We’re going straight to New Sweeling.”

“New Sweeling!” Saraki clapped her hands together and whirled her excited gaze around to encompass all of us, but I wondered why Tantan looked so grim. The end of page two is where we know something bad is afoot. But was that fast enough, I wondered?

DRAFT 2.0

There are few things worse than being shaken awake when you expect the privilege of sleeping in, but that is exactly how my sixteenth birthday began.This time the reverie of the Shai Mountains and Joy-Flowers has been discarded as being too slow and dreamy for the first page.

“Wake up, Nimira.” Tantan’s voice sliced through my dreams. “Get dressed.”

I opened my eyes. Next to me, Saraki stirred with a long, irritated groan. As usual, she had hogged all the blankets.

“What’s going on?” she murmured, without opening her eyes. Saraki still begins with an air of languid selfishness, hogging the blankets and not even bothering to open her eyes when she's ordered to get dressed.

I sat up, and now I saw Tantan waking Feiji and Assara in the other bed. None of us expected this; everyone began complaining at once.

“There’s been a change of plans,” Tantan said, throwing open the dingy curtains of our hotel room. “We’re leaving for New Sweeling.”

“This morning?” Feiji asked, squinting at the sunlight. “What about our show tonight?”

“Cancelled,” Tantan said. “I’ll be back in five minutes to see that you’re all dressed.” She left the room, slamming the door shut behind her. The description of Tantan has also been moved back a few pages. Now she's just a blur of opening curtains and orders. This draft is much more in-the-moment. Almost too much so. I was struggling at this point to strike the balance between action and description, information and info-dump.

We dragged ourselves out of bed, reaching for clothes that we’d strewn across furniture the night before, exhausted from our last show. My muscles ached, my head felt dull, and I shivered as my bare feet crossed the uneven wooden floorboards, even though it was summer.Description thrown in with Nimira's movement.

Feiji yawned. “Why do you suppose we’re in such a hurry?”

“Who cares?” Saraki replied. She thrust her arms through the sleeves of her tunic, then picked up her sash with a flourish. “New Sweeling!” she said, hugging the sash around her like a blanket. “Girls, don’t you know what this means?”

I already knew perfectly well what it meant to Saraki: the same thing she and Feiji hadn’t shut up about since the first day of our acquaintance. Men. To be specific, husbands. Nimira is telling you about Saraki, but in the process, she's also telling you about herself.

Sure enough. “Businessmen and sorcerers I made sure to throw in sorcerers to establish this was a fantasy before it became too late! and handsome, dashing actors!” Saraki said. “Just waiting to meet lovely foreign dancers like us. They say you can find anything in New Sweeling, and that includes the love of our lives, I’m sure of it.”

Feiji sighed, and then Saraki sighed, This version is also a bit more light-hearted than the last. and Assara, the youngest of our troupe, stared at them with eyes like saucers. I ignored them as I hunted for my slippers. I had more important matters to consider than the marriage prospects in New Sweeling.

Tantan tried to hide it, but I knew the audience for our shows was dwindling. Six months ago, we had packed the halls with ladies in plumed hats and gentlemen in tail-coats. Now we played shabbier venues for smaller crowds, and even then we often couldn’t fill them. Tantan had paid good money for each one of us. What would she do if we ceased to be profitable? This time at the end of page two, we not only know something has probably gone wrong by Tantan's behavior, but we also know what it might concern--their dance troupe is out of money, and these girls are basically slaves that need to make a profit...or what?

DRAFT 3.3

If I had been home, it would have been my wedding day. The day my village would welcome me into womanhood, with feasting and firecrackers. My sixteenth birthday. This was the first version I actually queried agents with. I combined a little of the first two beginnings...now the flippancy of the second draft is gone, but so is the dreaminess of the first. There is a brief indication of where Nimira came from, and now the new detail that she would have been married off at this age if she'd been home. Perhaps subtly implying a sense that romance will be in her future and it won't be at all what her old life would have given her. The day everything would have changed.Of course, today will also be the day everything will change. That's why I'm writing this book. =P

Instead, I woke to Tantan throwing open the curtains of our dingy hotel room. Tantan, we called her, Auntie. But she wasn’t our aunt at all. In draft two, Tantan gets no introduction, but I decided the reader needed a little more orientation from the start. There is also a touch of description sooner.

“Wake up, girls.” She shook my foot and then Saraki’s. “Get dressed, and quickly.”

Next to me, Saraki stirred with a groan. Lots of trimming has occurred. We don't really NEED a "long, irritated" groan. Most sleepy groans are not quick and chipper, after all. “What’s going on?” she murmured.

I sat up and saw Tantan jostling the shoulders of Feiji and Assara in the other bed.

Saraki swept her long hair back from her face. “What about our show tonight?”

“Cancelled,” Tantan said. “I’ll be back in five minutes to see that you’re all dressed.” She left the room, slamming the door behind her.

We dragged ourselves out of bed, reaching for clothes that we’d strewn across furniture the night before, exhausted from our last show. My muscles ached, my head felt dull, and I shivered despite the summer heat as my bare feet crossed the uneven wooden floorboards. More trimming--"even though it was summer" becomes "despite the summer heat".

Feiji yawned. “Why do you suppose we’re in such a hurry?”

“Who cares?” Saraki replied, thrusting her arms through the sleeves of her tunic, then picking up her sash with an excited Why I decided the flourish now had to become "excited", I don't know. flourish. “New Sweeling!” She hugged the sash around her like a blanket. “Girls, don’t you know what this means?”

I already knew perfectly well what it meant to Saraki: the same thing she and Feiji hadn’t shut up about since the first day of our acquaintance. Men. To be specific, husbands.

Sure enough. “Businessmen and sorcerers and handsome, dashing actors!” Saraki said. “Just waiting to meet lovely foreign dancers like us. They say you can find anything in New Sweeling, and that includes the love of our lives, I’m sure of it.”

Feiji sighed dreamily, and then Saraki echoed her. Assara, the youngest of our troupe, stared at them with eyes like saucers. I ignored them as I hunted for my slippers. I had more important matters to consider than the marriage prospects in New Sweeling.

Tantan tried to hide it, but I knew the audience for our shows was dwindling. A year or two ago, we had packed the halls with ladies in plumed hats and gentlemen in tailcoats. Now we played shabbier venues for smaller crowds, and even then we often couldn’t fill them. Tantan had paid good money for each one of us. What would she do if we ceased to be profitable?

DRAFT 4.0

If I had been home, this would be my wedding day. My sixteenth birthday. The day my village would welcome me into womanhood, with feasting and firecrackers. Instead, for the second time, I saw the value of my life in a handful of coins.After some feedback from agents and crit partners, I reworked the novel. I decided that the initial opening was still a little too slow, not enough of a hook. In the first-through-third drafts, Nimira is ultimately sold to be a maid in a rich woman's house. I decided that rather than bothering with the other girls in the troupe, who barely have a personality anyway, I'd just get her right to the turning point.

Tantan slipped the money in her purse and would not meet my eyes.This time, we get almost nothing of Tantan, except this heartless act of selling Nimira--although we know, since she won't meet her eyes, that she does feel guilty about it.

“Come along now, girl.” My new mistress’s voice was unyielding, with a highbred accent. She walked to the door without a backward glance, as if she had no doubt I would follow.

The day my father sold me to Tantan’s dance troupe had been bad enough, but to be thrust into serving some pampered lady of Lorinar— Look at me, Tantan!Our protagonist's hard-knock life in a nutshell.

Tantan kept her head bowed.

My new mistress said nothing, but the look she passed over her shoulder, a smooth mask with a hint of irritation, said it all. I trailed after her into a corridor, leaving Tantan behind, and with her, everything I knew.

“What’s your name?” the woman asked, leading me down a hall into the depths of the house. Distantly, I heard the kitchen door shut. Tantan was gone.I don't know if we really needed the final detail about Tantan, but I guess I was thinking that Nim would definitely be attuned to the final shutting of that door.

“Nimira,” I said.

“Nimira. Very good. Easy to pronounce. "Easy to pronounce"--a hint that she is a rich woman who has hired a foreign maid and mostly cares that her foreignness will not get in the way with difficult names or anything like that. I am Elsba Swanney, but that is Mistress Swanney to you. Now, I must acquaint you with some ground rules. All my staff awakens at five o’ clock, sharp. I expect you to keep your dress clean, and your face and hands. Never speak to guests, unless spoken to, or unless offering food or drink. Do not even think of stealing anything, for I am good friends with the Mighty Hollin Perris, the Ambassador of Magic, "Hollin Perris" was a considerably more comical and older villain than the young, troubled Hollin Parry in the final version. I threw a mention of him in early, again, to establish the fantasy aspect. and he has ways of finding things out. Do you understand me, girl?”

I nodded. Nim's emotions won't come out until Mrs. Swanney's instructions are all done. Her personality is still rather underdeveloped in this draft.

“Excellent. Now, this is the servants’ common room. If you’ll have a seat, I’ll call Ronna.” She pushed open the door of a small, poorly lit room with a handful of wooden chairs, a pile of mending in the corner, and a small framed print of a perfectly groomed maid mopping the floors with a smile on her face. More touches of almost-humor that were more common in this draft. I was trying for a "Howl's Moving Castle" sort of air. I didn’t sit down, but Mrs. Swanney was already leaving.

I paced on restless feet as a flurry of suppressed emotions came rushing back. In five years, I had almost convinced myself that coming to Lorinar with the dance troupe had been my choice, not my father’s. Dancing had always been my dream, so I had clung to some small delusion that I had control over my own life. Working as a rich woman’s slave had not fit into my childhood dreams anywhere. Now we get a brief look into Nimira's thoughts before Ronna shows up.

TAKE FIVE?

After sending out version 4 and collecting another slew of full requests that led to rejections, I realized I needed to write the book entirely again. Make it less comical, less of a Victorian farce, and give Nimira, and all the characters, considerably more personality and motivation. This misstep was my first attempt at this.

“Suck in your breath!” Saraki yanked on the corset strings. Saraki is back, but the personality-less Feiji and Assara never return.I gripped the banister of the stairs. The whalebone stays tightened about my already slender waist, pressing my breasts up like a shelf for the cheap jewelry around my neck.This opening is definitely the seediest. Corset strings and breasts right from the get-go.

How far my dignity had fallen these days. I hoped to make Nim sympathetic by letting the reader know how much she disliked the situation. But it was still too light-hearted and too cliche. Both the "new maid in a house" of the previous draft and the "girls tightening each others corsets" have a rather familiar ring, frankly.

Saraki tied the corset strings and handed me my dress. While the fabric might have been straight from home, the puffed sleeves and plunging neckline were in the Lorinar fashion. Only my sash was truly my own, and Saraki formed the traditional bow at my back.

I checked my reflection in the mirror, smoothing the rigid bodice, tugging at the knee-length skirt. I would never stop thinking how ridiculous I looked in these clothes, my legs encased in bright red stockings, my feet in toe-pinching slippers, my thick black hair in a pompadour instead of braids. Would Father still say I looked like Mother? The girl blinking back at me, with the circles under her dark eyes, cheeks drawn and sallow, didn’t look like any member of the Safei family to me. One of the biggest changes of this draft was that Nimira was no longer a slave who had been sold by her father and then Tantan, but the daughter of a dancer who comes to Lorinar of her own accord. Her mother, although dead, becomes a character in this draft, just like the final--Nimira's mother looms large in her memories as an influence, and she is always comparing her circumstances to her mother's life, which now seems far away.

I was only Nimira, lost and alone, where my family name meant nothing.Now we know Nimira's name and family is a matter of pride to her, suggesting she has come from something better than this.

Mr. Granden popped in the room. “Nimira? Are you quite ready? You’re almost up.” He eyed Saraki, who was polishing her tei-tan, a small stringed-instrument, with a cloth I never actually say, here, that Nimira is from another country, but I tried to slip in these details, like the tei-tan, to show it.. “And how is my little Saki tonight?”

She gave him a coy smile and rose without a word to go to the stage. Saki had no shame—I knew Granden gave her special favors as long as she pleased him. I would rather die than sell myself. Again--the seedy version!

Of course, every day I lived and breathed, I was vulnerable. Men could take what I wouldn’t give. Granden could. The fear of it had been with me so long that it had turned into something rock-hard inside me. I was always prepared to fight, and always aware that I might lose, any day now. The snappishness of Nim, way back in the early drafts, now has a reason. Nimira's deep desperate loneliness and desire for more meaningful relationships becomes a theme of the book, whereas in early versions she just sort of muddled through bad circumstances without having a deep yearning in her own heart. But this was too blatant.

I went rigid as Granden slipped his hands around my waist. “Tiny Nim,” he said, his waxed moustache tickling my ear. “My fingers almost meet about your waist.” His breath smelled of brandy.

“Because you spent more money on these costumes than you do on food.”

“You’re welcome to spend your wages on food.”

He knew very well I squirreled away every spare penny for a ticket home. He had promised me food and lodgings. He provided only bare sustenance.

“Kindly take your hands off me,” I said, staring at myself in the mirror. My mirror-self reassured me. Tiny but strong, she seemed to say.

His hands slid away, reluctantly. “If you please.” He chuckled. “Do you have a heart at all, Miss Nim?”

“No.” I turned from the mirror. “I have a show to do.”

Although Nim is more proactive here, I discarded it all as just being a little too heavy-handed, with Granden closer and grosser than he needed to be, and Nim both too composed and too hard-edged.

DRAFT 6.0

The audience didn’t understand a word I sang. They came for our legs. As the posters said, “Trouser Girls from the Exotic Land of Tassim!” We were billed just under the acrobats and the trained dogs.If you've read Magic Under Glass, this will finally start to sound familiar. This opening worked--it's snappy but it also establishes the situation well--Nim, the foreign dancing girl with a grim acceptance, and a slight touch of wit, about the whole thing.

While Saraki plucked the tei-tan, I paced about the stage, my slippers whispering the words "slippers whispering" actually sound rather like the sound of slippers swishing about a wooden floor! on the wooden floor. My hands curved and wove and paused, each gesture as familiar to me as the words I’d heard my mother sing in the cradle. “Gathering Flowers on My Sister’s Wedding Day” was one of the first dances I had ever learned, a reflection on family and what it means to say goodbye. I felt it was better to establish that Nim had an artistic soul, and cared about these dances, before I showed her getting all snappy with Granden and the other girls.

Before I even finished the last plaintive note, a few men began to whistle, and one shouted something I chose to ignore.More subtle seediness, now paired against Nimira's real feelings for her art. Boys on the balcony shelled chestnuts. Clusters of boarding house girls in tatty straw hats giggled to one another.Details: chestnuts, tatty straw hats. One of my favorite writing rules is to never be general when you can be specific.

My eyes leapt to a tall hat in the crowd. A gentleman. I locked upon a pair of dark eyes.This is one of those cases where writing is almost like being a director. The camera goes from the stage, to pan over the crowds, and then to focus on this single man.

He stood in the back, like he had just slipped in the door and wouldn’t stay long. Among all the dim faces that watched me, I kept my focus on him alone.

“The Dragon Maiden’s Revenge” was a favorite of mine, based on a myth of home, where I pantomimed a girl taking up her father’s sword to avenge his death. I hoped I looked very noble. Was he watching?I felt Nimira was a little too disdainful of love and romance in older drafts. This time we know she's not immune to noticing a man.

Yes. Looking right at me, in fact.

Fifteen years ago a railroad baron had married the most famous of trouser girls, Little Sadi, back when our song and dance had been the fashion, before they even called us “trouser girls”. Another thing about this later draft was, I'd begun to learn the importance of knowing where your characters and your world have been, and not just where they go. Nimira's mother, Hollin's father and uncle, the history of Trouser Girls...they pop up easily now because I'd taken the time to think about them, and give the story a sense of reality. Saraki was always dreaming of following in her footsteps. I scoffed when she spoke of it, but late at night I dreamed of things I scoffed at by the light of day.Still one of my favorite lines in the book...I do dream of things at night I scoff at by the light of day!

When I finished my song, the gentleman still lingered. The raucous crowd around him whooped, but he kept still, his eyes roving over our crude set: a painted village house on a piece of wood shorter than Saraki, and some dried flowers in mismatched vases.There is an unspoken hope quivering here--the dude is still here, ohmigod, he's looking at our craptacular set, I hope he doesn't walk out now, I'd better really pull this off...

Our last number, “The Fairest Blossom in a Maiden’s Heart”, had been my mother’s signature song. She had performed it at the King’s coronation, as a new bride of seventeen, just my age now. The song was an ode to a lover who had died, never to be forgotten, but I could never help but think of Mother. Her performance had always left the audience in tears, but no one would cry here, no matter how I poured out my heart. If her spirit still watched over me, I knew it must have been ashamed.

As I took my bow, with Saraki’s hand in mine, I sought one last glimpse at the gentleman stranger, but he had gone.And here is almost a touch of resignation--no one ever cares about the artistry of her dances, and this guy is like all the rest, isn't he...?

FINAL DRAFT (18 months and at least twenty documents after the first...)

The audience didn’t understand a word we sang. They came to see our legs. As the posters said, “Trouser Girls from the Exotic Land of Tassim!” We were billed just under the acrobats and the trained dogs.

Our voices joined in harmony My editor pointed out that Nimira is supposed to be a singer, and...she wasn't singing. while Saraki plucked the tei-tan and I pranced around the stage, my slippers whispering on the wooden floor. My hands curved and wove and paused, each gesture as familiar to me as the words I’d heard my mother sing while I was still in the cradle. I’d done six shows a week in this dank music hall since I’d stepped off the ship that carried me away from home three years ago. Much trimming of detail about the dances themselves--they are less important than the emotions involved.

Even before I finished the last plaintive note, a few men began to whistle, and one shouted something I chose to ignore. Boys on the balcony shelled chestnuts, occasionally tossing one onto the people below. Clusters of boarding house girls in tatty straw hats giggled.

Through it all, my gaze was drawn to a tall hat in the crowd, and the pair of dark eyes beneath it. A gentleman.

He stood in the back, his face still turned halfway to the door, like he had just slipped in for a glimpse and wouldn’t stay long. Among all the dim faces that watched me, I kept my focus on him alone.

Saraki let the applause wane, and then she began to shake her pick across the tei-tan’s strings, bringing forth a tense melody.

The program held no surprises. “The Dragon Maiden’s Revenge” had followed “Gathering Flowers for My Sister’s Wedding” in every show we’d done this year. Still, I hoped I looked very noble as I pantomimed taking up the sword of the fallen king of dragons. Was the gentleman—my gentleman—watching? When Nimira claims him as "her" gentleman, the stakes become ever so slightly higher--he's not just an intriguing guy in the audience. He's keeping her going, raising her hopes, even if it's all a fantasy for now.

Yes. Looking right at me, in fact.

Fifteen years ago a railroad baron had married the most famous of trouser girls, Little Sadi, back when our song and dance had been the fashion, before they even called us “trouser girls”. Saraki dreamed of following in her footsteps, charming some rich man into whisking her away. I scoffed when she spoke of it, but late at night I dreamed of things I scoffed at by the light of day.

When I finished my song, my gentleman still lingered. The raucous crowd around him whooped, but he kept still, his eyes roving over our crude set: a painted village house on a piece of wood shorter than Saraki, and some dried flowers in mismatched vases.

Our last number, “The Fairest Blossom in a Maiden’s Heart”, had been my mother’s signature song. She had performed it at the King’s coronation, as a new bride of seventeen, just my age now. The song was an ode to a lover who had died, never to be forgotten. I could never help but remember Mother, her haunting voice pitched high, her delicate gestures transforming her into the very embodiment of sorrow. Her performance had always left the audience in tears, but this audience was far from the one she had known, both in temperament and location. Toned down from "no one would cry here". If her spirit still watched over me, I knew it must be ashamed.

As I took my bow, with Saraki’s hand in mine, I sought one last glimpse of my gentleman, but he had gone.

TA-DAAA!

As you can see, once I nailed it, it didn't change too much. This is often the case with me. Sometimes I can flail about with six entirely different versions of the same story, other times it just comes out right the first time and is merely tweaked. I hope this has been helpful as far as showing the thought process of why I felt each version might work as I wrote it, and then why it changed.

Looking back on a WHIRLWIND 2011

2011-12-31T22:11:00.000-08:00

At the end of the year I like to sit and reflect on the previous year (don't we all) but instead I'm too busy packing to think about it. If anything falls through with this house at the end I'm going to be like @#&%!!!! We've probably already packed a quarter of the house. I kind of have to because of my editorial letter on the way! No time for dilly dallying!

This year everything worked out exactly as I hoped and planned in my wildest dreams. I started writing Dark Metropolis in January, finished it in May, my agent sold it in June, I got paid in October and in November I made an offer on a house in Maryland.

I'm not really sure what to say except, thank you universe, I prostrate myself at your feet, if you have feet. This year has been amazing.

Last year was the year of travel and friends, lots of conferences and school visits and the like. This year was considerably more low-key, as I expected, but I still managed to fit some fun in. Well, sort of. There was:
--Branson retreat in Feb. Loads of cool people, but then I got the flu and we were almost trapped in the snow eating each other. We shall never speak of this again.
--Key Largo retreat in Feb. Unfortunately still in Florida, but otherwise lovely. Awesome people, food, manatees. Although I learned that staying in a house and quietly writing is NOT for me. The exhausting insanity of BEA is really my ideal vacation...
--Library visit in Dallas. Delicious laid-back meal with the librarian who invited me!!
--Summer visit with my friend Amanda (who also organized Key Largo), including inspiring trip to Flagler Museum.
--December trip to Asheville where I saw my parents in their new house, and hung out with super-rad Stephanie Perkins and Beth Revis.

I still felt a bit lonely and stir crazy this year. I've been too busy to hang out much or keep up with friendships, so I'm looking forward to the social festivities of the mid-Atlantic in 2012, although I might remain too house poor to do much for some time. Thank goodness Dade and I enjoy each other's company a lot.

It was a very productive writing year. Besides writing Dark Metropolis I wrote half of three other novels. And some other tinkering, as per usual.

My dream goal for 2012: Finish Dark Metropolis sequel as well as a middle grade and sell the middle grade!

Also, enjoy my new house and spend a lot more time in the sunshine and fresh air!

I'm excited for it, either way. This year saw the loss of Lisa Madigan and the first of my grandparents to pass on, and as I haven't experienced too much death in my life so far, it all hit hard, but also spurred me on to live boldly and not just stick with what is safe and dull.

An Odd Christmas

2011-12-26T13:58:00.000-08:00

I hope you all had a lovely holiday. Thank you to all my friends who sent gifts and cards!

I have to say it was a pretty underwhelming Christmas on my end. The weather was so warm and muggy it was hard to feel festive, it was my first Christmas without my parents after their move to North Carolina, and being house-poor and moving I didn't want any presents, nor did I give any. I still got a few of course. And I really didn't want many presents. But it still feels a little odd. I also didn't buy a tree, nor did I bother to get out any decorations while I'm trying to PACK. But who wants to decorate when we've barely had a day all year that wasn't warm to hot? Apparently no one because the whole neighborhood is curiously lacking in lights and wreaths compared to prior years.

Oh, well. There were still some bright spots. The Science Channel ran an Oddities marathon. It's one of my favorite recent discoveries in TV, centering around the buying and selling of everything from taxidermy and pickled two-headed animals in jars to baby coffins and Victorian mourning jewelry in a small shop in NYC. I am not much of a fan of dead animals PERSONALLY, but the customers are so eccentric, artistic, and fascinating and the shop owners often go into their apartments and homes, crammed full with amazing collections. Also, the woman who works at the shop, Evan, seems like someone I would know and go junking with, and I'm totally crushing on the dapperly dressed employee Ryan Matthew Cohn.

Dade and I have been debating which of my characters he most reminds us of.

Besides watching DVRed episodes of Oddities throughout the holiday, I got "Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings" by Mary Henley Rubio, which has been utterly gripping. I've read all of L. M. Montgomery's journals except the final volume but Mary Rubio conducted many interviews and did a lot of research to show some different sides of her life as well as providing a terribly engaging summary of the events in her journals. I find LMM to be an endlessly fascinating personality. Proving that professional success doesn't necessarily bring much happiness, she had to deal with a lengthy lawsuit with her original publisher, a trouble marriage, bouts of depression, and many personal losses. Poor Maud. I read her when I need comfort. But I can hardly tear away from this book!

Finally, I heard from my editor for Dark Metropolis that my editorial letter is on the way soon. Despite some apprehension about juggling a 900 mile move and an editorial letter at once, I couldn't be more excited! I'm ready to dive back into this book!

(However, I don't think you'll be seeing much more of me for a WHILE.)

Also, it APPEARS that Junior Library Guild selected Magic Under Stone. Magic Under Glass was a JLG selection and I am terribly honored. I've also seen some Spanish bloggers report that Magic Under Stone was picked up by Magic Under Glass's Spanish publisher but I haven't had it confirmed yet. Foreign bloggers, we authors oftentimes depend on you to report the news, so keep on keepin' on.

2011-12-15T13:08:00.000-08:00

I keep thinking I should blog more. But blogging makes you realize how boring your brain is. Or how...unshareable.

For instance, today I am busy thinking about the middle grade I'm writing. I love it! It's about witches and their familiars...well, okay, one unusual witch and one unusual familiar in particular...in an alternate witchy version of St. Augustine, Florida. Everything about it is tremendous fun. The idea started out as "Kiki's Delivery Service in a Gilded Age hotel" and then it turned into something else, but I've been writing it like a happy little writer bee. It took me a while to figure out how to write a middle grade I would enjoy. I love middle grade voice (and am often accused of having it even when I think I'm writing YA...) but I have always had trouble writing a book without romance.

Well, this time, no trouble at all.

But what else can I say about it besides that? I don't even know if anyone will want to buy it. I'll feel like I'm jinxing it if I talk too much.

My other thoughts: ZOMG NEW HOUSE NEW HOUSE.

BTW, I don't want to show you a picture of my house, because I have known writers who have been stalked, and that's creepy, but I did draw a ghetto picture of it for you with the computer mouse. I couldn't get the front part of the brick to color in right. But attempting to draw architecture with a mouse is fun, the same way Etch-A-Sketch is fun, like, "OMG, this is so frustrating that when I do get it look like SOMETHING I feel disproportionately accomplished!"

P. S. I do still have Magic Under Stone ARCs for giveaway. See my last post for details!

Magic Under Stone ARCs and moving!

2011-12-14T14:16:00.000-08:00

First, I'd like to note that I signed copies of Between the Sea and Sky at the Casselberry Books-A-Million. They may still have some, if you're in the area and looking for one!

Second, EEEEK I think this moving this is really happening! My big beautiful Victorian house in Maryland! <3 Last February when I was on a writing retreat Jessica Spotswood and I were talking about our dreams for the future and she was like, "I'd like to sell a book and become a full-time writer" and I was like, "I'd like to move to Maryland, maybe somewhere around Frederick" and I think we both thought those were POSSIBLE dreams, but big ones. I am still flabbergasted that within a year of that conversation, her first novel will be OUT (she's already a fulltime writer now) and I will be IN MARYLAND. This was like, the year of dreams in hyperdrive.

It's been the strangest year, though, because my career has gone better than ever and yet because of the house thing, I am in super-belt-tightening budget mode. Despite reading a slew of real estate books beforehand, moving is way more expensive than I thought. I allotted money for closing, inspection, appraisal, blah blah, but then all these other things have popped up.

For one thing, it was precisely like an episode of House Hunters. The prospective buyer always says "Well, my budget is A, but I'd really like to spend less, more like B."

They always end up buying a house that costs A. And yep. So did I.

I was on a tight budget anyway, we saw over a dozen houses and the one I offered on was really the only one I could honestly see myself living in. It's hard to see yourself living in a new house. I tried to go in like "Just find something, be realistic, you can always change things over time, blah blah" but once you're looking, man, you want to fall in love. And you want the house you fell in love with to not have a huge crack in the foundation or something. Luckily, this one checked out pretty well even if it's killing my budget now.

SO, with that said, I have a lot of Magic Under Stone ARCs and I'm sending them to anyone (in the US) with reasonable credentials who can pay $4 for shipping, Paypal preferred. I'd rather not move with so many. If you've been yearning to find out what happens with Erris and Nimira, just email me at fabulousfrock@mac.com with a link to your blog, or tell me you're a YA librarian, whatever. Basically, it does cost my publisher money to make ARCs (more than it costs to make real books) so I don't want to abuse them by sending the books to people who are just going to read them, keep them, and not tell anyone. I reserve the right to turn down people with sloppy reviews or no followers, quantities are limited, blah di blah.

I can't wait to meet more readers in Maryland and its many neighboring states in years to come!

Between the Sea and Sky Prequel Comic #6

2011-11-11T15:02:00.000-08:00

Last one for now, although I have written some more scripts, I just need to find time (and the proper mood) to draw them!

Between the Sea and Sky Prequel Comic #5

2011-11-09T11:47:00.001-08:00

You need to read them in order for the full effect, so if you're just joining me, scroll down. And if you've read the book, the snotty mergirl here is Lalia Tembel.

Between the Sea and Sky Prequel Comic #4

2011-11-08T12:14:00.000-08:00

See prior entries for the rest, click to enlarge!

Between the Sea and Sky Prequel Comic #3

2011-11-07T08:25:00.001-08:00

Between the Sea and Sky Prequel Comic #2

2011-11-06T07:49:00.001-08:00

Scroll down to see yesterday's entry, if you missed it! And as always, click to enlarge.

Between the Sea and Sky Comic #1

2011-11-05T11:55:00.000-07:00

Ever wanted to see a little more of Esmerine and Alan's childhood? Well, I drew a series of comic strips about it, and here's the first one. This one is the worst, because I started out with a fine tipped pen and I didn't like the first panel at all. If I were truly an artist, I would have redrawn it. But I'm lazy. So I didn't. It gets better from here.

As always, click to enlarge.

Between the Sea and Sky is out!

2011-10-30T19:43:00.000-07:00

...and I am quite behind on the blogging I wanted to do. I've been in Maryland for almost two weeks to buy a house! Maybe. We found one we liked but tomorrow is the inspection, where ALL OUR DREAMS COULD SHATTER. Although buying a house is pretty scary, so in the dead of night sometimes I want my dreams to shatter. Except, like all proper dreams, one must proceed forward. Kind of like writing. A LOT like a writing career, actually. Tense waiting for phone calls. Elation followed by awareness of sudden responsibility...

It's a big, beautiful, Victorian house. The kind of house I always imagined ALL writers must live in when I was a kid. But I come from Florida where nearly all houses are new (and according to a recent article in Huffington Post, 58% or something are behind on their mortgages, whee!) so it has taken some getting used to being up here where almost all houses are old!

Anyway, while I was up here I signed copies of Between the Sea and Sky at the Barnes and Noble in Bel Air, MD. If you're looking for one. They only had three, I don't know how long they'll last.

Between the Sea and Sky has also been getting great reviews, and I am so happy that some readers really seem to be enjoying it. My publisher has set up a ton of blog interviews with me, so if you want to know more about it, you'll be able to find me just about everywhere in the next couple of weeks. Thanks to all reviewers, interviewers, and readers for your support!

Although if someone wants to be nice and give it a 5 star review on Amazon, I will give you a virtual hug. Right now it's almost all 4-star, which is a great review, but aww, the 5-star category looks so lonely... *pathetic moment*

Launch Party in Orlando (not mine)

2011-10-15T22:13:00.000-07:00

My friend Jessica Martinez, author of Virtuosity, is having her launch party this Tuesday! This book has been getting great buzz! It'll be at the Waterford Lakes Barnes & Noble at 6:30. It should be fun!

Also, I got Magic Under Stone ARCs. A TON of them. I've already spent hundreds of dollars mailing out Between the Sea and Sky ARCs, so I stared at these with a mixture of excitement and...horror. So, I will be toting them around everywhere I go. Well, at least everywhere book-related I go. I'll have a few at this launch party. Come say hi to me and buy Jessica's wonderful book, and I'll give you a Magic Under Stone ARC. (Quantities limited, because I don't expect anyone to really show up. I think maybe three central Floridians look at my blog every week...)

Stay tuned to this space for my Between the Sea and Sky prequel comic strips! Yessss.

Ancestors

2011-10-10T10:09:00.000-07:00

My grandfather is dying. His mother is turning 100 next month. Only in the last couple of years, her memory started to go and was put in a nursing home. I was thinking about all of this last night, and how when someone lives to be 100 and their mind slips away, it's not the same kind of mourning.

I was talking to my dad about how I've been watching that Prohibition documentary on PBS, and while I watch, I feel like I can see my great-grandmother in the old footage. She would have been a teenager during the 20s. It occurred to me that because of her, the 1920s feels like as far back in time as I can really get a hold of. The 30s, 40s, and 50s, too, I wasn't alive of course, but I can imagine what they must have been like because I can close my eyes and see myself as a little kid at a family clambake, with all the old people around, I can hear their Ohio accents, and the sound of my grandfather playing the organ. I can see the decor in their houses, the bowl of soft mints, the offered bowl of cheap pretzels. I can imagine the joking around. And the alcohol. It might have been the 1980s, it might have been Florida instead of Ohio, but I think those dim memories probably had the same atmosphere as what I see in old pictures.

I remember it, but it's gone now. Gatherings aren't the same. They don't happen as often, and when they do, the mood isn't the same. The old people of my childhood have gone, and now my grandparents, who were not really that old when I was born, are now the old people. I was never that close to my dad's parents or my great-grandmother, really, not enough to have a ton of personal memories of them, but I do feel really sad for the whole atmosphere of their lives passing on.

When you're a kid you take it for granted, you have no sense of history. You don't ask questions, so you only get family stories if someone volunteers them. I think I'll always wish I knew more about my relatives, as they go. But a part of me still knows a time and place I never lived through, because it swirled around me when I was just a little girl.

But, I miss it.

The worst hot dog ever

2011-10-09T16:54:00.000-07:00

There are some authors who always have hilariously awkward stories about their lives. I love stories like that! But I rarely have them because I rarely go anywhere.

Well, last weekend I went with my sister to an indie craft fair where she was selling her art. This craft fair had one food vendor (besides people selling the ubiquitous hipster food of the moment, cupcakes) and it was a hot dog cart. Being trapped at a table for about 8 hours as we were, we got hungry and needed food from said hot dog cart. There was always a huge line, but eventually we got so hungry I was willing to brave it.

I got down the stairs and forged through crowds of people to the cart only to be told it was closed for their lunch break and would reopen in 20 minutes. About 40 minutes later (we could see it out of a window behind us) it actually opened. People lined up. They'd been waiting for hot dogs. I watched the line, focusing on a man in a red shirt near the back for visual reference. 20 minutes later, THAT MAN HAD NOT MOVED.

What were these hot dogs, I wondered? Were they grinding the meat themselves? But we were SO HUNGRY. I got in line. I was about the 10th person and after a bit I calculated that it was taking them 5 minutes for each individual hot dog.

I still don't understand. Did they have one teeny tiny cooking apparatus that could only make one hot dog at once?

I waited 40+ minutes to near the front of the line. I was almost there when they said they were out of buns and were going to shut down.

"Can I just get a hot dog without the bun?" I cried, in anguish. If you've ever known me when I'm hungry, you'll know I'm good at crying things in anguish. The man in front of me, slated to have the last bun, refused his hot dog, said I could have it, and walked off. ! Who says chivalry is dead? But I had no bun for my sister, who was perhaps even hungrier than me. I had to bring her a (veggie) dog rolling around in some mustard and ketchup.

The hot dog itself was perplexing. The bun itself had been cooked, inside and out. Although one of the main points of a bun really should be to protect one's fingers from hot dog grease, no such luck here. The bun was greasy and toasty. It was a cheap, sickly sweet store brand hot dog bun with an equally bad hot dog inside.

Guys, I'd forgotten how bad hot dogs can taste. At home I always buy Maverick Ranch lean, low-sodium, flavor packed natural humanely raised beef hot dogs and heap them with Bubbie's fresh sauerkraut (or now, the yummy sweet-hot pickles I bought from a booth at the craft fair). My sister's smelled like it was probably a TofuPup. I can't believe I paid $5 for that.

If I could go back in time, I might've lived on the cupcakes after all.

In other news, Between the Sea and Sky is on NetGalley right now, so if that's your thing, you can find it there!

25 days until Between the Sea and Sky!

2011-09-30T13:27:00.000-07:00

So here's a little news roundup.

For one thing, I've seen 2 sales for it on Amazon's BookScan feature. That means somewhere in the Philadelphia area, this book is (or was) ON THE SHELF. Where will it be next? Could you find a copy early? *waits with bated breath* Releasing a book is nerve-racking!!

Thing 2: Now you can preorder the Kindle edition, if that's your thing. I'm sure the Nook edition, etc., will follow shortly. Amazon is usually first to have ebooks posted.

Also, finished copies showed up at my doorstep! And I've got a Goodreads giveaway going on. It ends on the 20th so, if I am reasonably proactive about getting to the post office (no promises) you MIGHT get it by release date.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Between the Sea and Sky

by Jaclyn Dolamore

Giveaway ends October 20, 2011.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Also, Magic Under Stone news! I finished the copyedits for Magic Under Stone. And you know what comes after copyedits? It goes to the printer for ARCs!!! It usually takes a little while, still, because everything in publishing takes a little while, but I should have an ARC or two for giveaways fairly soon. Ish.

I'm nervous. My first sequel. As a kid, reading sequels, I was usually disappointed by SOMETHING that happened, because I'd built up an expectation. So it's a little scary to write a sequel knowing that I'll disappoint a lot of people with expectations. Of course, that goes with anything, but I think sequels are worse. Still, I really like this sequel, and it's my longest book to date by a large chunk. I'm very excited for all of you to read it.

And, Dark Metropolis!

Okay, no news about Dark Metropolis, it still doesn't come out for almost two years, but I'm excited, so I just wanted to EXCLAIM the TITLE.

Characters I Wish I'd Created

2011-09-25T15:00:00.001-07:00

Man, I suck at coming up with topics to blog about, so today I decided, you know what? Why not just draw inspiration from my old blog? I blogged at Livejournal for 10 years, and some of those posts are worth resurrecting. In one of my first posts, I asked myself what characters I wish I'd created. Here was my list, back in 2002:

Nightcrawler from the X-Men.
Jack Skellington from the Nightmare Before Christmas.
Setzer Gabbiani from Final Fantasy VI.
Jonathan the Zombie Master from the Xanth books.
Saitou Hajime from the anime Rurouni Kenshin.
Tyldak from the Elfquest comics.
Wolf from the 10th Kingdom.
Chaucer from A Knight's Tale.
Auntie Mame from the classic film of the same name starring Rosalind Russell.

I still like all these characters, but, my list would look somewhat different nowadays! I think I'd still take Jonathan the Zombie Master and Wolf. I could see fitting them into a story somewhere. (Of course, Freddy in Dark Metropolis is totally my own Jonathan if I'm being honest.) Usually when I love a character, I end up co-opting the parts of them I like and changing them into something that's mine instead.

Some characters I'd add to the list nowadays:

--Pretty much everyone from Avatar: The Last Airbender, but especially Prince Zuko. Who doesn't love Prince Zuko? And Uncle Iroh because, well, the best characters often come in groups that play off each other, and I can't imagine Zuko without Iroh. But seriously I love that entire cast so much.
--Damon from Vampire Diaries. No need to explain! He steals the show!
--Yasu from NANA. He's a lawyer, also in a rock band, and he's the fallback "protective guy" for everybody, which I love. And he's bald and everyone teases him about it. But he's also really hot. I would never have been able to create him, though, because I can't draw a hot bald guy like Ai Yazawa can. I also love George from her Paradise Kiss manga, but he reminded me of a character I already had at the time, so it's not quite the same.
--Emily of New Moon. It's not like anyone but L. M. Montgomery COULD have written Emily, but now that I'm writing middle grade, I'd kill to have created this character.
--Harold from Harold and Maude. I'm not sure I could pull off the "falling in love with an old lady" part, but I love Harold... Well, I love Maude, too, just...well, the ending of this movie was so depressing.
--Char Aznable from Gundam. Sexy, complicated...one of the most well-known anime characters of all time for a reason...
--Quinton and Sally from the Thieves and Kings comics. The whole cast of this comic is great, but I particularly love how complicated Quinton and Sally are.

I'm sure I could think of a lot more if I wanted to spend all day at this...

Have you ever encountered a character in someone else's story and wished they were yours? (I know plenty of people do, hence, fan fic! Which I did write, myself, as a teenager.) Tell me who!

On Retellings, Reworkings, Homages, Rip-offs

2011-09-09T13:58:00.000-07:00

No story exists in a vacuum. There is, as they say, nothing new under the sun. But some stories draw a bit more heavily on predecessors than others. Meanwhile, many authors bite their nails while reading new deal announcements because they think, "OH NO THAT IS WHAT I'M WRITING!" Cassandra Clare sold the Infernal Devices books not longer before Magic Under Glass sold and I thought, "Oh noes! Clockwork Prince? My book has a clockwork prince in it!!!" It doesn't take much for us to freak out.

What about when the borrowing is conscious? What's the difference between a retelling, a reworking, an homage, or...PLAGIARISM!?

Ultimately? The author will intend one thing, the reader will get another. I've seen reviews about Magic Under Glass that felt it was just a flat-out rip-off of Jane Eyre, other reviews that appreciated the nod but noted that the book goes in a completely different direction. But I'm going to attempt some definitions.

Retelling

A retelling sticks to the basic structure of the original story at heart. Retellings are usually of fairy tales, myths, or classics. If it is no longer under copyright, it's up for grabs. If character and setting is your strength as a writer and plot is not, then retellings might be a great option for you. The story is already there! The trouble, of course, is putting a new twist on it, like changing a character's gender, telling the story from an unusual POV (like the villain's perspective...perhaps we see they aren't as villainous as we thought), or picking a quirky setting.

Reworking

A reworking, in my mind, is when you take a pre-existing story and start twisting it enough that it no longer resembles the original enough to be a straight-out retelling, but the reader can still recognize the source material in there somewhere.

Homage

An homage, or "nod" to a previous work, might be even farther from the original source. I also think it is different from a reworking in that you can nod to several things at once. It might not be terribly obvious except to readers who are big fans of the source material.

Still, the line between reworking and homage can be blurry indeed. I tend to feel that if your story BEGAN with the original material, it is a reworking. To me, Dark Metropolis is a reworking of the 1927 film Metropolis because it began with the premise of "What if the underground workers in Metropolis were dead?" Then I wondered what it would be like if I switched the genders of the characters in Metropolis. THEN things started getting off-track and less recognizable, but, it still began with Metropolis. Magic Under Glass, OTOH, came from the desire simply to write a book along the lines of classic novels about girls in reduced circumstances who fall in love in a house full of secrets, inspired by not just Jane Eyre, but A Little Princess, The Secret Garden, and Rebecca. So, to me, it is an homage.

Finally, we come to just plain ripping off someone else's work. This usually happens between two relatively modern works--if you write something about Lizzie Bennett, it's not longer a rip-off, it's acceptable fan fic, right? You can plagiarize anything--a character, a story, a phrase, even a style, although you can't be sued for borrowing a style!

The thing about ripping off stories is, it doesn't happen as much as readers seem to think it does. Strange coincidences happen between two books all the time. Apparently Tera Lynn Childs' mermaid books have a character named Dosinia and so does Between the Sea and Sky. It's the name of a mollusk, but I'm braced for someone to think I ripped it from Forgive My Fins. I promise you...I had nooo idea. Between the Sea and Sky was finished before Forgive My Fins came out, even though it's released much later. People seemed to come out of the woodwork to sue J. K. Rowling because they'd written a book about wizards, or had creatures named "Muggles" in their story, or whatever.

It goes without saying, obviously, published writers shouldn't plagiarize. Some writers avoid reading stories resembling their own while writing to avoid subconscious plagiarism. I, meanwhile, try to read everything that sounds like something I'm working on so that if I do find a similar element, I can change it. But no one can entirely defy the might of the collective unconscious!

If you're a beginning/intermediate writer not yet gunning for publication, however? I say, rip off characters, plot and style freely. Artists copy other artists, why shouldn't you? I was a shameless borrower in my youth, so my "original" stories often read like a fan-fic mashup with characters from a dozen different books or movies, perhaps thinly disguised by a name change. Stylewise, at different point in my life I tried to write like The Mists of Avalon, The Babysitter's Club, Francesca Lia Block, Marvel Comics, Piers Anthony, and L. M. Montgomery. Feel free to write fan fic, too, if that's your speed. My only advice for the young writer as far as borrowing goes is just to draw from incredibly disparate elements. That's how you'll end up with your own style. Look at all the writers who wrote as much like Tolkien as they could manage in the high fantasy genre for decades. Let's try and move away from that! If people praise my work for being original and creative now, trust me, it's because when I was about 13 I thought it would be a great idea to combine elements of The Nightmare Before Christmas, Seinfeld and Arthurian lore into one story...I still like to look for the quirky in my story choices, although I've gotten a bit wiser about it!

Bits of this and that

2011-09-07T14:19:00.000-07:00

If you know me, you know I love reading non-fiction. Even though I'm a fiction writer, so perhaps it doesn't behoove me to tell everyone to read more non-fiction, I think it is very brain expanding. I recently read a charming little book that reminded me of Magic Under Glass a bit, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam by Ann Marie Fleming. She also made a documentary of it, which is Canadian and unavailable in any convenient way, although I'd love to see it.

Long Tack Sam was a handsome Chinese acrobat and magician, born in 1885, who married an Austrian girl and had two lovely daughters. He performed on Vaudeville, traveled the world, and as time went on his daughters performed with him. He made loads of money and was quite a star attraction back in the day. He also had a son who barely saw his parents in his early life because they left him in Austria. When movies came along, he refused to appear in them, and so did his daughters, because of the racist portrayals of Asians in movies. The memoir itself is told in a sort of comic-book-esque style, with cartoons, collages, it's a quick and engaging read.

Of course I couldn't help but draw some parallels to Nimira and her "Trouser Girl" act. And I wished the author (who is Long Tack Sam's great-granddaughter) had been able to dig up more! I'd love to know more about the romance between Sam and his wife, which must have been quite shocking back in the day, especially since it was a quick courtship, although her family reportedly loved him. I'd love to know more about their adventures and trials around the globe across decades, countries, wars.

Anyway, it was a fascinating book, I recommend it.

Now, some miscellaneous news, most of which I've posted around Twitter and Facebook, but I do like having everything on the blog at some point.

First, my fans are awesome! Reader Holly made me Erris and Nimira dolls! (She also made a doll of my character Alfred but you don't really know him yet.) I'm posting a photo she sent me of them but she mailed them to me so I have them now. They are really awesome in person with lots of little details. I also got my very first piece of paper fan mail, which was kind of a thrill. I'm kind of glad most fan mail comes through the internet nowadays since it's much easier to write back, but it's still kind of awesome to get a real letter once in awhile!

Also, the Kirkus review for Between the Sea and Sky popped up not long ago and they were kind: “She [Dolamore] displays plenty of imagination, especially in her setting, with its 19th-century-style clothing and quaint towns. The portraits of her two leads will convince readers, and several of her minor characters, such as ex-mermaid Belawyn and Alander’s father, stand out as quirky and individual. A simple but effective fantasy."

Kirkus is kind of famous for being harsh, but they liked Magic Under Glass too, so...I guess they're just lulling me into a sense of security...

Lastly, I found out Australian audiobook publisher Bolinda is doing an audiobook of Between the Sea and Sky. I've never had an audiobook before so this is kind of thrilling!

Between the Sea and Sky Signing, Nov 12th, Casselberry, FL

2011-09-06T09:22:00.000-07:00

Hey guys!!

So I've arranged for a book signing of Between the Sea and Sky for those of you who want signed and sketched-in copies of the book at the Books-A-Million in Casselberry on November 12th from 2-4. (Or was it 3-5? I think it's 2-4.) (Casselberry is on the north side of Orlando.) They will also have some Magic Under Glass paperbacks.

IMPORTANT: The events manager there is cautious about ordering too many books. It's a very nice store, but I don't think they have a lot of events there. Orlando isn't exactly the book release party capital of the nation anyway. So if you KNOW or THINK you might be coming and purchasing books, please let me know how many copies of Between the Sea and Sky or Magic Under Glass you would like so I can give her an estimate.

(Let us all pause a moment to mourn the death of Borders, as my local Borders was VERY supportive and that was the store I was always went to and the people I always talked to. So I'm feeling a bit lost this time around... The Orlando Barnes & Noble, I must say, was ALSO very lovely, but they proved to be kind of out-of-the-way for me and most people I know.)

Also, as many of you know, if all goes well I am planning to move to Maryland by the end of the year, so if any teacher/librarian folk out there in Florida are interested in booking me for an author event, you only have a few months before I will be quite a bit less cheap and available since I will no longer live here. Just an FYI in the chance that anyone was thinking about it and assuming I'd be around awhile.

It's a new two-book deal!!

2011-08-31T08:43:00.000-07:00

It posted in Publisher's Marketplace today so I guess I can finally talk about it!:

Jaclyn Dolamore's DARK METROPOLIS, about a city in which corruption and vice are rampant and disappearances warrant a shrug from the authorities: when a girl vanishes, her best friend must search the city's underground, only to find that here, people who die don't necessarily stay dead, to Catherine Onder at Disney-Hyperion, at auction, in a six-figure deal, in a two-book deal, by Jennifer Laughran at Andrea Brown Literary Agency (World English).

EEEEK!

This book has a bit of a fascinating story. I started it back in 2007, if I recall correctly. Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis happens to be one of my favorites, and I was pondering a story based on it where the workers are all revived from the dead. I wrote the first chapter and I thought the voice came out sounding both more sophisticated and tense than anything I'd written up to that point.

And frankly, I didn't feel ready to write it. I didn't know what it was really about yet, but I knew I couldn't do it justice.

Last October, my cat died. I nursed her through cancer until she had to be put down, and the last months of her life were traumatizing for me, but she remained the cat of my heart, a cat who always spent her nights melted against my stomach like a baby in an invisible womb, with her paw tucked inside my hand. I didn't write much in November once I turned in Magic Under Stone, and in December I had a talk with my agent and decided to work on a middle grade.

But that Metropolis-story kept poking at me all of a sudden. I realized it was kind of a book about death. And until Tacy died, I hadn't been close enough to it to write that book. Even though I was "supposed" to be writing a middle grade I started writing this instead.

About a week after THAT, my agent told me that her client Lisa Madigan had advanced pancreatic cancer. I knew she would die. That isn't something people really make it out of. Lisa wasn't a super-close friend, but she was close enough that we had exchanged quite a few emails, that I had a ceramic mermaid that was a gift from her hanging by my desk. A lot of people loved her, because she was generous and funny and just a wonderful part of the writing community.

She died while I was writing this book, and in a funny way I think she helped me write it (although, obviously, I'm sure that was not her intention...), and a part of me sort of wanted to write an awesome book that my agent would love and sell well to cheer her up because we all loved Lisa, not that a book is any replacement for a PERSON, but...anyway. I finished this book really fast. It was a cathartic thing to write. It was the first thing that really made me cry.

Although it is not really a sad book, I don't think. And it has a romance--two romances, in fact, one with a girl and a magical silver-haired boy and one with a girl with strange magic of her own and another girl. It has my usual love of describing food and fashion! It was tremendously fun to research, even though it is not quite the real Weimar Berlin, because the real Weimar Berlin sort of had nothing to do with the plot of Metropolis. Still, you wouldn't know that from all my particular Googling of what hat styles were in fashion in 1927, and 1920s political theater, and other things. I listed to a lot of the Threepenny Opera.

It is tentatively scheduled to be a summer 2013 release, and I am SO very excited to be working with Hyperion and Catherine Onder, as I have heard wonderful things about both! I hope you will enjoy it!

Yes, I am an anime fan

2011-08-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

Sometimes fans/bloggers/other writers will see me mention a Miyazaki movie or something and say, "Oh, you're an anime fan?"

Well, yes, I say. Haven't kept up with it much in recent years. But yes.

And in fact, I was thinking this week about how much Japanese storytelling has shaped my life. I became an anime fan in 1996, when I was 14, the same age as Sailor Moon, who happened to be on American TV that year. But really, it started before that, didn't it? It started with the Super Nintendo game Final Fantasy II. I knew it was Japanese but I didn't really think about it much at the time. After all, RPGs back then all played off of western fantasy conventions.

But even then I was starting to pick up bits of Japanese myth (kappas), visual storytelling culture (why does a bubble come out of a character's nose when an enemy casts a sleep spell on them??) and storytelling tropes in general (men with androgynous good looks? yes please). I was obsessed with Final Fantasy almost beyond any other obsession of my life. The amount of fan fic, fan art, and board games I concocted based on it...

When I first watched anime itself I thought it looked awfully weird, but then I quickly became so hooked I would watch anything I could get my hands on, even if it was episode 9-10 of something I'd never seen episodes 1-8, even if it was boring, even if it was unsubtitled. Anime was still a hot, rare commodity at that point, not as much so as it was for 80s anime fans, but still. I joined the Japanese Animation Club of Orlando, which showed an evening of anime once a month, one movie and several episodes of various ongoing series. Then you could check out a couple of videos from the library as well. This is where I first saw all the Ghibli movies, even ones most people still haven't seen like Only Yesterday and I Can Hear the Sea.

Oh, and the guy who gave me my application to join the club? I thought he was nice, although I didn't see him again for awhile because he had moved to West Palm Beach. That was 1997. Now Dade and I have been together for 12 years. Who knows where I'd have found a partner if not for anime...

My first job also happened to be in anime, although only for a few days. My sister and I worked a dealer's room booth for one of the vendors. I mostly handled the anime CD section because I could read enough Japanese to find CDs fairly quickly. We were paid in merchandise and worked about 10 hours with no lunch break. At one point the boss would send someone on a McDonalds run just before his employees started fainting. Good times. After the day was over, though, he would buy us all dinner at Kobe.

There comes a time in every anime fans life when they feel compelled to cosplay. This time also came for me too. First I concocted a half-assed Vampire Princess Miyu out of my karate gi, then I joined an actual cosplay group (with a mom in the group who sewed everything for us, SCORE) and it was Miaka from Fushigi Yuugi in her Suzaku no Miko costume, and then Black Rose Duelist Wakaba from Revolutionary Girl Utena before I finally just started wearing a dark blue school uniform to conventions.

Which, by this time, we were actually running ourselves. Dade and his friend Fred had organized Anime Festival Orlando, floating the first one on Fred's credit card, a wing and a prayer. People showed up and the convention still happens to this day, although we no longer have anything to do with it. I handled the merchandise table, where I could also make a few bucks selling sketches of people drawn like anime characters. At one point I drew 20 people in one hour.

The thing about being an anime fan that I find so fascinating in hindsight is that it isn't uncommon to just plain get drawn into Asian culture in general. For one thing, Japanese culture begins to feel like a part of your life in a way no other culture does except whatever you grew up with. I studied the language, I learned to use chopsticks, I started seeing not just a man in the moon but also a rabbit pounding mochi, I ATE mochi, I bought Japanese fashion magazines and made my own strange fashion combinations, I learned about Momotarou, kitsune and tanuki, and who Nobunaga Oda was... The list is endless.

Japanese entertainment also tends to draw a fair bit from Chinese history and myth, so that can also lead to a fascination with and knowledge of at least some aspects of Chinese culture, so you start to also know about trickster monkeys, Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei's oath in the peach garden, a variety of adorable little hats and shoes, and the sad, beautiful sound of an erhu. And my quest for anime stuff led me into Orlando's Vietnamese district, a part of town that we NEVER went to when I was a kid, but as teenagers we begged our mom to take us there all the time, which led to us getting acquainted with bowls of pho in Vietnamese restaurants with little shrines by the door, and spending time in Vietnamese markets, sometimes striking up conversations where we learned to use clever kitchen tools or how to decorate for the Lunar New Year.

I don't know if anime is like this for everyone. But it occurs to me that I ended up growing up with this other culture, one that I had no genetic claim to at all, one that changed everything about me--the foods in my pantry, the way I dress, the way I tell a story. I don't really have any deeply profound comments about this, but it strikes me as a good thing, a step toward a world that is more inclusive of different cultures and traditions, more open to new stories. I think that after I got into anime I became more open to everything...different foods, different music, different stories. I am grateful that I have both the western and eastern to draw from, a long history with each.

I've been thinking of this lately in particular, because after several years of running conventions and dealing with fans in a particularly...annoying way, at times, we were all burned out and stopped attending conventions, stopped dressing up, stopped, for the most part, even WATCHING anime. I never stopped reading manga, as I love that form of storytelling far too much, but I saw very few anime in my mid to late 20s. I actually felt kind of turned off from it. So many ornery cosplayers out there. So much bad anime. So many ornery cosplayers dressing up as characters from bad anime. I was tired of seeing white kids yelling "Chotto matte!" at their friends instead of "Wait up!" (come ONNNN), kids wearing Tri-Gun jackets at the local mall... I guess it's what everyone goes through when their niche interest goes mainstream, but it also felt kind of like I was just growing out of it, I guess.

But this year we started watching the original Gundam series, a classic older than I am, and I have to admit, I fell in love with it all over again. I always though Gundam was about giant robots in space, but it's really about war--capturing so well how war can seem utterly futile, destructive and horrible, yet inevitable, important and sometimes even necessary all at once. It's good stuff. Although it is also about giant robots in space. And I think that's one of the best things about anime--it can be so unabashedly commercial and yet so deeply profound, all at once.

And now? I really want some Vietnamese food. Damn.

Dark, twisted, beautiful writing, and pushing my own boundaries.

2011-08-12T20:46:00.000-07:00

Today I was pondering my next YA. I'm working on a middle grade now, so I'm just knocking around ideas for this in advance. I want it to be a companion for the last YA I wrote, which was the darkest, creepiest thing I have written to date. The hardest thing I've written, too. I realized that in a lot of scenes, I was shying back. I don't want to spoil you on that book, so let me tell you about a scene that was hard to write in Magic Under Glass.

(Stop reading now if you haven't READ Magic Under Glass and don't want to be spoiled!)

It was the scene where Nimira sees clockwork man Erris with his face appearing perfectly human but his skin removed, so all his clockwork innards are visible, and the villain is twisting his key, hurting him, and forcing him to speak in front of people who see him as somewhat of a monster.

I've had quite a few people say, "I loved Magic Under Glass! Especially that scene where..."

It's always that scene.

And I feel a certain relief and say, "I love that scene too." Because I DO. But it was hard to write. Not because I felt bad for Erris. Nope. Because I LOVE TORTURING HIM SO MUCH.

But I never really thought about that consciously. I just realized I shy back from a certain kind of scene. And today I had a revelation as to what that sort of scene is. I think it's a marriage of something positive--like love or bravery--with something disturbing.

In the Hunger Games, for example, I think part of the reason these books are such page turners is because Katniss's strength and bravery is paired with the brutal deaths of so many people all around her. It is so unflinching. But one of the very best examples of it, I think, is the Queen of Attolia. (So, more spoilers if you haven't read that.) In the beginning of the book, the Queen of Attolia cuts off the hand of the protagonist, Eugenides. This is unflinchingly described, too, and Gen has to deal with all the aftermath--pain, humiliation, having to learn to do things over again, never being able to do certain things... This is compelling enough but what really makes it memorable is that he then FALLS IN LOVE with the Queen of Attolia.

And as a reader, this is precisely what I want to happen. This exquisite combination of pain and love is a rush to read. As a reader, I adore it, even though for some reason I feel perhaps, a little ashamed. Why am I so delighted by such circumstances? In real life I wouldn't find it exciting at ALL if me or one of my friends had their hand cut off and then fell in love with the person who had done it! But as a reader, it also doesn't matter if I find strange, uncomfortable situations delicious. It isn't like the whole world is reading with me, measuring my heart rate. Nor do I think, "Goodness, this Megan Whalen Turner is certainly twisted!" It's not like the Queen of Attolia is some kind of crazy erotica novel or full of gratuitous violence.

As a writer, however, it feels different. It feels uncomfortable to be sharing with the world something that is deliciously painful. It feels like...well, I shouldn't enjoy it TOO much. If I do, I am probably going too far! ANYBODY could read this and go, "Goodness, this Jaclyn Dolamore is certainly twisted!"

With my last book, I kept pushing myself to go farther. To make things more horrible. To describe unpleasant sights and conflicted, shiver-inducing emotions in more depth. I sensed my discomfort but I pushed past it because I kept thinking, "The book will be more memorable for it." But it was...surprisingly hard, actually. I didn't really realize why until I was thinking about it just now. I also didn't quite realize until just now why that made the book more compelling. It was more of a subconscious thing.

So, huh.

I guess that Jaclyn Dolamore is a bit twisted. And people seem to like my writing better for it.

I was thinking today maybe this feeling in writing is kind of like the flavor "umami". The savory flavor that we didn't quite have a name for and didn't quite realize we needed...

In defense of true love forever in YA

2011-08-11T13:59:00.000-07:00

I just want to make a brief vent about this.

It irks me when I see people complaining because all the true love forever in YA isn't realistic. It reminds me of the feeling I would get when I was in a group of girls complaining about how much men suck. Maybe the men they knew sucked. But I knew men, as a whole, did not suck. Maybe not everyone is ready, or should be ready, to enter into a committed relationship as a teenager, but that doesn't mean some people aren't.

I am not defending, mind you, that it is exactly WISE to become a vampire to be with your sexy vampire lover forever. BUT. It also isn't quite fair to say that teenagers can't and don't make wise relationship choices and find their future husband or wife at a young age. In fact, have noticed there is actually a fairly high proportion of stable long-standing relationships among YA writers. Maybe there's something to that! Maybe we write YA together-forever romance well because we've actually lived it.

Not that there is anything at all wrong with having rocky relationships either, as a person, or in a book. Not at all! I just wish people wouldn't knock serious teen love as unrealistic. I got together with my boyfriend at 17 and I was VERY serious about the relationship. Very cautious, but very committed. Cautious, in fact, because I was committed. He was serious too. Of course, he was also 25 at the time. Scandal!! I'm sure to some outsiders I looked like a naive young thing and he seemed like an older dude looking for some hot young geek action, but believe me, it wasn't like that. We were very good friends with a lot of common interests, affection and respect for each other.

I'm sure if I wrote that as a novel everyone would say it was totally unreal, I should make the guy into a jerk and the whole thing into a cautionary tale of sorts, and have it end with the girl wising up and walking away.

The other reason, of course, for all the true love in YA, is that it's told from a teenage POV and even if the relationship would be doomed later, the MC isn't going to think that at the time. Of course, we could all end our books with the breakup instead of the happily ever after, but how much fun would that be? -_-;;

I think some of the source of this ire is actually how many bad, rushed, and even unhealthy true-love-forever relationships are in YA. But that isn't the fault of the basic premise. Just the execution.

Where I begin: A post on settings

2011-08-10T09:59:00.000-07:00

A question that has popped up a few times is, "Do you start with plot or character?"

Really, the FIRST seed of a book is usually a premise that includes a hint of plot, character, and setting, such as, "A mermaid who likes to read falls for a winged boy."

But from there, I go to setting. Setting comes before plot or character for me, because everything else springs forth from it. From the moment a character is born, where they live makes a mark on them. Nimira grew up in a place that was warm and beautiful, with gardens and misty mountains, surrounded by female dancers who valued beauty and pride, who loved men but mostly lived in a separate sphere from them. From there, she went to a farm, a family unit where everyone was expected to pitch in because livelihood depended on the sweet potato crop, the health of the goats, and such. If she had STARTED in the farm, she would value family and community a lot more, probably. She'd be more of a team player, less proud perhaps, but any artistic side of her nature would either have to be carved out selfishly, or incorporated into the group life--singing while she worked, or in the evenings with her family. She'd have different skills, different tastes.

And that's just the two places she lived within her home country of Tiansher.

From there, of course, she came to the Victorian-flavored world of Lorinar, dragging her background with her. Magic Under Glass takes place mostly in Hollin Parry's manor house, and to Nimira it will always be seen through the lens of places she has already been, especially the royal palace of Tiansher. In Magic Under Stone she is once again needed for manual labor, stuck in a big house with a lot to do and few people who can do it, so she thinks back more upon her time at her uncle's farm.

Every character in Magic Under Glass comes from a different background, subtly influencing everything they are. Hollin Parry, an only child growing up in a wealthy but cold home, wishing for the exotic life of his traveling uncle. Annalie, another only child but a dearly loved and petted one. Her parents emigrated to Lorinar before she was born, so while she was fascinated by travel just as Hollin was, it was not an escape for her, but more of a curiosity about the "old world". Karstor Greinfern himself came to Lorinar as a teenager and has a different cultural mindset. Erris, of course, is a fairy whose youth was spent romping in the woods with a pack of siblings and dogs; being jovial comes easy to him but being serious and emotionally open does not. He probably rarely had any time with his parents, tutors or what have you where he was alone and encouraged to talk about worries or fears.

Even in a contemporary novel set in America, setting and background have a huge effect on people. Culture in America varies hugely. Even cookie cutter neighborhoods vary. And the ethnic background of your character will influence them too. My German branch of the family has certainly left a huge mark on me, from my taste for intellectual matters to my love of sour-tasting cabbage based cuisine. And I'm also conscious of where I diverge from my background. I've never loved hiking, but boy, don't tell that to my German relatives... -_-;;

Where is your work-in-progress set? Where are your MCs roots? And what is your favorite book for setting and background? I suspect my preoccupation with it may come from L. M. Montgomery. Emily and those Murrays!

Books I LOVED so far this year, part 2 of 2

2011-07-23T15:11:00.000-07:00

In some ways, I feel a little silly about this one, because there is nothing especially profound or life-changing about it. But Kerstin Gier's RUBY RED is probably the most FUN I've had with a book in a while. For some odd reason I thought this translated-from-German time travel story would be more "epic romance" or dark in some way. I suppose the Germans gave us the Grimm Brothers, sturm und drang, and NOSFERATU, and on some sub-conscious level I expect them to be serious. Well, plus, I have quite a few relatives from Germany and as lovely as they are, "hilarious" isn't how I'd describe them.

This book was fun and funny. (It's not really HILARIOUS either, but, it is amusing.) It's actually set in England, and concerns Gwen, who comes from a family of time travelers. Only certain people time travel, and it is prophesied before their birth, so Gwen thinks she's just an ordinary girl while her cousin is expected to time travel, until she finds out that her mother lied about the day she was born, and she's actually the one. There is kind of a secret society built around the time travelers, and a number of mysterious figures that Gwen isn't sure if she can trust. She's sort of thrust into this web of plans without preparation, accompanied by fellow time traveler (and, OF COURSE, hot boy her age), Gideon.

This is just the beginning of the story, and I cannot WAIT for the next installment.

Things I loved about it:
--Big old-fashioned eccentric families. I LOVE them. This is why I love Nancy Mitford and CONFESSIONS OF THE SULLIVAN SISTERS. This book even has ancestors from previous times, so, tons of potential, but even in the present we have the intimidating grandmother, and the sort of loony but lovable aunt, and all sorts of semi-tropes that I nevertheless adore. And there are lots and lots of secrets that I want answers to.
--Gwen's friendship with her best friend Leslie. I am so TIRED of girls in paranormal books that are themselves serious and studious and gorgeous but they have a wacky boy-crazy best friend. Gwen and Leslie's friendship? I actually bought it. They are both sort of silly typical teenagers who love to watch movies. (They are not boy-crazy.) They have a lot in common. I don't know about you, but my best friends growing up and now were actually a lot like me. They weren't "wacky" in comparison to me. I like seeing this. Leslie already knows about Gwen's time traveling heritage and provides support when Gwen finds out she is actually the time traveler.
--"Fun" history. As a history buff I love the time traveling aspects, but I also love that this book doesn't take itself over-seriously. In some ways the tone actually reminded me of early Harry Potter books, with charm and humor to spare and memorable characters. Middle grade readers could appreciate it, but it certainly has plenty of hints at romance for older readers as well.

A good read for a lazy summer day.

Books I LOVED this year so far, part 1 of 2

2011-07-10T09:58:00.000-07:00

So, at some point earlier in the year, I was asked to blurb a book. My first reaction:

"WOW, YES! I would LOVE to blurb a book! I can't believe someone would value MY name recommending ANOTHER book! This is a rite of passage!"

Writers gets excited about these things! But then it occurred to me that I am a pretty picky reader. I feel bad to be so picky, but I am. I can ENJOY many books but ADORE few, and I don't want to put my name on a book about which I had misgivings. Still, I couldn't very well pass up the opportunity to blurb my first book.

The book in question was called A LONG LONG SLEEP and was described as a sort of sci-fi Sleeping Beauty tale. It arrived, and not wanting it to get lost in the dread TBR piles of doom, I started reading it as soon as it arrived...

...and didn't stop (except for life obligations like dinner) until that night when I was done.

"Holy guacamole," I thought. "They asked me to blurb THIS? This is the kind of book I want to clutch to my bosom and never let go, except that I also want to immediately lend it to everyone I know so they can share it with me." (In fact, I was going to give away an ARC with this review but I ended up lending it out to a string of people, sorry!) I seriously haven't taken a book to my heart so much since Graceling.

Part of that is definitely the boy situation. There is nothing that gets me so much as getting a crush on a book character, and I must say that alien boy Otto is there with Graceling's Po and Edward from A True and Faithful Narrative as far as book boy crushes. When he was first introduced I thought he was going to be sort of a brooding angst-muffin weirdo, but he actually turns out to be sweet and intelligent and his relationship with the main character is founded on intellect and heart rather than hotness. But I say "relationship" instead of "romance" because the boy situation is complicated:

Let me backtrack a bit. This is the story of Rose, whose parents own a huge corporation and who frequently put her in stasis, a sleeping tube basically, while they gallivant around being rich important people. Anyway, as it turns out, while she is in stasis a plague wipes out much of the population and she is forgotten in her tube for 60 or so years. She is discovered and awoken by a boy named Bren, and we also get flashbacks to the boy she left behind, Xavier. All these relationships are interesting and there is no formulaic love triangle situation. There is also a definite bittersweet note and no HEA, but it's not sad either. It's just the kind of ending I like: hopeful and thoughtful and a little complicated but not cliff-hanger-y.

Other things I like:
--Rose herself can be a little passive at times, particularly in the beginning, but she does grow throughout the book, and her initial passivity makes sense. Also, she is an artist and it doesn't feel tacked on, which I loved.
--It's futuristic and sci-fi, but not a dystopian, IMO. The dystopian part has basically already come and gone. Maybe post-post-apocalyptic or something.
--The Plasticine. So creepy! I love it!!
--The book knocks the whole GMO food thing in a couple of spots. I saw a review complaining about how the reasoning doesn't make sense scientifically, but frankly I find GMOs in real life disturbing, insufficiently researched, the company that is pushing them consistently evil, and the public very unaware and uninformed about them. What can I say, I'm an ethical foodie. So I like seeing it addressed fictionally.
--It's a page turner but also lovable. I frequently find that page turners tend to be gripping, stressful types of books for me, whereas books where I fall in love with the characters meander more, sometimes too much. Why this is, I'm not sure, but anyway, this book grabbed me both plot-wise and character-wise which is rare.

I've seen some complaining about the sci-fi aspects in general or the future-speak (which I usually don't like either, but in this book I was okay with it), so this will be a YMMV kind of book especially if you're coming into it as a sci-fi fan. But as a character story, I loved it SO SO much and everyone I know who's read it has agreed.

A Long Long Sleep comes out August 9th.

Now I finally just found a second book I'm in love with this year. I'll blog about that one soon.

MAGIC UNDER STONE! AHHH!

2011-07-08T15:29:00.001-07:00

Magic Under Stone just went up on Amazon!

Amazon is where many authors learn important things about their books, lol, and this is no exception. The release date is April 12, 2012!? That could be highly subject to change, but it's some proof that this book really is coming. It isn't an imaginary thing I wrote and sent into the publishing ether.

And how about that cover! Same model as Magic Under Glass (v. 2.0 )...I adore it. The book and the greenery both really capture the feel of book 2 I think.

And here is a description:

For star-crossed lovers Nimira and Erris, there can be no happily ever after until Erris is freed from the clockwork form in which his soul is trapped. And so they go in search of the sorcerer Ordorio Valdana, hoping he will know how to grant Erris real life again. When they learn that Valdana has mysteriously vanished, it’s not long before Nimira decides to take matters into her own hands—and begins to study the sorcerer’s spell books in secret. Yet even as she begins to understand the power and limitations of sorcery, it becomes clear that freeing Erris will bring danger—if not out-and-out war—as factions within the faerie world are prepared to stop at nothing to prevent him from regaining the throne.

I can't add much to that yet because I still haven't done edits!!

Winged people!

2011-07-05T10:09:00.000-07:00

Between the Sea and Sky has been getting a fair bit of attention from mermaid lovers in the YA community, which is AWESOME, I love mermaids and always have. My sister's 6th (I believe?) birthday party was mermaid themed and my mom made us a mermaid costume which I wore at the party and refused to take off even though you couldn't walk in it.

However, I feel a little bad for Alan and the winged folk in the book, because they just don't get the attention. There are very few books about winged people in general. I'm not talking about angels, just regular down-to-earth, if you will, people who have wings. Surely I'm not the only person who dreams of flying?

At first I thought it was because, scientifically, winged people just aren't very possible. But then...um, mermaids? Yeah, they're no better and there are lots of mermaid books, especially this year. But there are a fair amount of mermaid myths. Maybe it's the combination of implausibility combined with relatively few myths that keep winged people off my shelf. =(

I'll admit, my interest in winged people was sparked in childhood when I was heartily obsessed with the Elfquest comics. There is a tribe of levitating mountain-dwelling elves in the story, who can fly for a short time but also ride giant birds for longer distances. One elf, Tyldak, really wanted to fly with his own wings so he got Winnowill, the villainous shape-shifter, to painfully shape his arms into wings. He wasn't the hottest looking elf around after that (for one thing, he couldn't really wear clothes around his bat-esque body so was reduced to wearing a little V-shaped fur thing--IN THE SNOW--why was he not freezing??) but he was still one of my favorite characters, especially since he was sort of an anti-hero which is always fun.

I was always eager to rip-off Elfquest around age 12, so I made a bat-winged race who also lived in a mountain. They could wear normal clothes for some reason. I didn't really explain. But the door was open for winged people of all kinds. Feathery wings, bat wings, winged sea fairies with green "fin wings", wings instead of arms, wings plus arms--lots of wings. Although for some reason, I kept sticking my winged people in cold mountains and fairly primitive societies, and the only winged character I really loved actually had crippled wings which he had amputated so he could live a human life. So despite my love of wings, it never quite clicked.

Another story I loved as a kid was Gwinna, by Barbara Helen Berger, which was sort of in the "meaty picture book" format. Gwinna started to grow wings from her back so her foster mother tried to bind her chest to stop them, but of course that doesn't work, and of course she learns to fly and...I don't know, stuff happens and the pictures are pretty. I guess I should reread it. But my young angst-loving self was mesmerized by the attempt to suppress her growing wings and the lovely pictures of a flying girl.

Of course, if there is one thing possibly more mesmerizing than a flying hot guy (er...I mean, person) it is a flying cat! I also loved the Catwings books by Ursula K. LeGuin as a kid. I mean, they are SO cute! I could DIE of how cute they are! I wish someone would make merchandise of this! I want a BAG and a THERMOS!

I actually didn't originally intend for Between the Sea and Sky to be about winged people at all. I always felt like poor mermen always got shafted in stories so I firmly intended to make the love interest a merman. But...oh, well. Shafted again. I had a minor character who was a semi ill-tempered winged man who was Esmerine's boss, and one day I was drawing him and I realized This is the man for her. Unlike the cold weather tribal winged folk of my childhood stories, I based the winged people in Between the Sea and Sky more on the astrological element of air--they're intellectuals and scholars, and they mostly stick to warmer climates. Physically, I tried to make them semi-scientific so they have "bat" wings rather than arms. They still need some magic to fly, but, well, less. And I tried to make them attractive! Bat-winged boys might be a little too weird for some readers, but on the other hand, if you've always WANTED a bat-winged boyfriend, well, right now I pretty much have the monopoly on that market... ;)

I do need to scan some better pictures of Alan!

An ode to my agent on the anniversary of my first "YES"!

2011-07-02T14:49:00.000-07:00

It took me three years (plus a week, if we want to get technical) to find an agent. I had given myself four before I'd told myself I better start pursuing another career path, even if I kept writing on the side. At the time, it felt like forever, but in hindsight, I'm glad, because Jennifer Laughran wasn't even an agent for much of those three years. Sometimes things take a while for a reason, clearly.

As soon as she started agenting, she moved to the top of my pile. I knew of her from the children's writer boards known as The Blue Boards. I found her a wee bit intimidating, but smart and hilarious and helpful, and I LOVED her taste in books, which is not easy to do with me. I'm a persnickety reader. And although she was new, which I suppose holds an element of risk, she was with the Andrea Brown Literary Agency. A lot of my friends were repped by agents there. They sold a lot of books, almost all children's/YA, which has always been my passion. I'll admit I dreamed of being able to say I had an ABLA agent.

It actually took me two tries to get a yes from Jenn, but on July 2nd, 2008 (well, it was just after midnight, so technically, July 3rd, but she was in California at the time, so CLOSE ENOUGH), she emailed me about the full manuscript of Magic Under Glass that she loved it and wanted it. It had been one heck of a journey getting to that point, a road paved with glowing rejections and revision requests, friends getting agents and book deals, a lot of persistence and rewriting and an occasional pit stop in "Will it EVER be my turn!?" land.

Technically, it took another week to be official, because I had other fulls out, but I positively GLOWED my way through the family 4th of July party. I've never cared for summer but I have to admit it seems to be my magic season, career-wise. In a little over a month I'd have a book deal, and I was relatively mellow in comparison on that day because I still could hardly believe I had an agent!!

Of course, every writer dreams of getting an agent who will sell their book. I was willing, at the time, to accept a semi-mediocre agent so I could get my book on editor's desks. I just didn't really know better, because people weren't very vocal about bad agent experiences. It wasn't until after I HAD an agent that I really got to hear horror stories, see friends struggle with agents who might sell a book but drop the ball in other ways--and subsequently, struggle with the question of exactly when is an agent not doing their job enough that one should actually part ways? I have thanked my lucky stars many times over that Jenn had been the first agent to fall in love with my writing, because my career path has had its share of bumps, to be sure, but Jenn knows when to send a Youtube video of kittens, and when to just tell me I'm awesome. She gives great revisions suggestions and uses the cutest stationary. She's fed me when I was starving in NYC and been the voice of reason when I've freaked out. Her other clients are a pleasure to know and a lot of them are my friends. I've never doubted that I landed in the right place.

Anyway, I'm not usually one for the public gushing, but three years feels like a milestone to me, because so many things in my career have happened in three-year or three-week increments. It feels like a "looking back" point now. And I am truly grateful for all the wonderful events of the last three years. This time three years ago, I was just working in a health food store and dreaming, dreaming of just the sort of email that would finally appear in my in-box that night...

Betsy the cat

2011-06-24T19:16:00.000-07:00

I have three cats. Oskar thinks he is a dog or perhaps our toddler, Puru is pure teasing kitten, and Betsy? Well, we are convinced she is an alien. I drew a comic illustrating some of the weird things she does, although I think I've only halfway captured it.

I can't really draw her tortie markings so I also provided a picture of the genuine article.

Click on the comic for a larger image!

Musings on public speaking, flying, and fear

2011-06-15T07:40:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I flew to Dallas for a library visit. As my friends know, I do not like flying. I especially do not like takeoffs. And I especially do not like turbulent takeoffs, which is what I experienced flying home from ALA last year, and at which point my dislike of flying turned into a full-on phobia.

On the way to Dallas I had a terrifically reassuring seatmate. I began to relax. On the way back, the pounding panic came back during takeoff, especially since I had to fly American and they don't have satellite radio, but it was a very smooth takeoff, and once we hit 10,000 feet, I relaxed quickly and stayed astoundingly relaxed. Sure, I still got a tension headache by the time I got off, but at one point the plane was rattling a bit, I could see a lightning storm up ahead, and yet I realized I was just enjoying the show. With the Buzzcocks blasting through my headphones, my mood was a mixture of "this is pretty!", "F*#@ you, fear" and "Bring it ON."

(Luckily, nothing much ever was brought, or I might have changed my tune.)

Meanwhile, between these two flights was my library visit. It was not my most successful visit ever because the audience didn't really know each other, they were mostly in that most-nervous-age-of-your-life, and they didn't laugh at many of my jokes or ask many questions. "How can you DO that?" or "I could never do that" were reactions I got from several people about the idea of library/school visits in general and shy audiences in particular.

And I don't really KNOW how I can do it. I can look at an empty room of chairs and think, "I can see how this would be intimidating" and then I can see those chairs half-filled with staring faces waiting for me to entertain them with chatter for the next hour and think, "Yes, this would be a problem for some people, I understand completely", and yet, I'm just not afraid. I've even gotten better at just forging ahead when I ask if there are any questions and no one says a word. Okay, nevermind! I'll give you random writing advice. Or read an excerpt from Between the Sea and Sky. Do you like it, audience? Can I tell? You are so quiet!! Eh, too bad, you're getting it anyway.

I still envy people who are particularly stellar public speakers, who are consistently hilarious and/or thought-provoking. I think I am humorous and informational but I wouldn't go as far as hilarious and thought-provoking. Sometimes I lose my train of thought. Sometimes I stammer. But my heart doesn't pound, not like takeoff on an airplane. I recover quickly.

When I was a wee kidlet I wanted to be a stand-up comedian. (Before I realized one would have to write one's own routine and not just repeat one of Steve Martin's.) I try to think of writer talks the same way. Good comedians are willing to humiliate themselves, and when things go rough, I just think of that.

But if I ever pee my pants on a turbulent plane, I'm not sure that'll work.

Contest Winners

2011-06-13T10:21:00.000-07:00

Wow, it was really hard to pick top contenders for the Magic Under Glass embellished paperback. But I selected my three favorite reviews, and random.org sez:

Mindy McGinnis!

She will receive an embellished Magic Under Glass paperback and a Between the Sea and Sky ARC.

Then, I numbered all the entries for Random.org to win a Magic Under Glass UK paperback and Between the Sea and Sky ARC and that winner is:

Jennifer Hopwood!

Congratulations to both of you and thank you so much for all the entries. I wish I could send you all ARCs, but I DO still have a stack to give away one way or another so stay tuned...

Apologies!

2011-06-09T16:08:00.001-07:00

Sorry I am late on announcing the contest winners. I have learned my lesson not to plan contests to end right before I go out of town for the weekend! I need to find a good spare moment to review the entries, so, early next week I promise!

In the meantime, don't forget to stop by and see me on Saturday if you're in the Dallas/Fort Worth area! Deets here:http://catalog.cityofirving.org/rooms/portal/page/24745_Author_Visits

It looks like the event IS open to everyone, not just teens as I previously stated. I'm so excited to see some Texan fans, so please come!

Tasha Tudor and Shaping A Life

2011-06-02T11:42:00.000-07:00

I reread The Private World of Tasha Tudor yesterday, a book that never fails to inspire me.

If you are not already aware of the awesomeness of Tasha Tudor, she was an illustrator and, well, what you might certainly call an eccentric. She believed she had lived before, in the 1830s, and still lived on a Vermont farm wearing 1830s dresses (some authentic), spinning wool, raising goats, cultivating a lovely garden, and doing all manner of artsy and folksy things...marionette shows, teas, dollhouses... She also had quite a collection of antique clothes and she believed in WEARING them to pieces, not packing them away. In the book there are pictures of young women and children sporting some of her Victorian clothing collection and lovely as they are, you can see a spot where the dress is disintegrating. I kind of love that.

Tasha says in the book, If I do have a philosophy, it is best expressed by Henry David Thoreau, "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." (Yes, it's a quote within a quote, I know that's a little weird.)

And yes, I've heard that Tasha Tudor could be prickly or that her quaintness was calculated and commercial or that her children were fighting over her estate after her death or whatever, but...well, that sort of thing is their business. What I love about people like Tasha Tudor and David Bowie and countless other artists of the ages, people who were artistic eccentrics first and successful people second, is the important reminder that one can't just sit around and wait for an amazing life to be handed over to one. No matter how poor a person is, how small their home, how limited their time, we still have the power to choose a direction to head toward. We can gather bits of our dreams, cultivate them and let them grow.

As I read the book, I saw things I desire and still don't have...like a house of my own, in a state with seasons and history and fresh apples in the fall and cherries in the summer. But I also read about Tasha Tudor's Christmas tree, decorated with beautiful ornaments handed down from her great-grandmother, and I thought with a smile about my own collection of Christmas ornaments--shiny 1960s orbs from an estate sale in my neighborhood. A woman named Susan had died, and her taste was very like mine, and she had clearly traveled and had money. Her house was full of lovely things. I have several of them now. Sure, they aren't 19th century ornaments, but you can't buy them anymore (except on Ebay and such of course), and they have a history that I don't know but imagine I feel.

60s Christmas ornaments. Quirky shoes with a work uniform. Herbs grown on a stoop. An hour dedicated to writing or art or music. Fresh baked bread. Small things matter.

Shadows on the Moon review

2011-05-28T08:59:00.000-07:00

Today I am posting a rather overdue review of a lovely book, Shadows on the Moon by Zoe Marriott.

Zoe and I are Twitter friends, and some months back, she proposed a swap. She'd send me a Shadows on the Moon ARC if I'd send her a Between the Sea and Sky ARC when I got them. Despite the expensive postage to England, it's still a sweet deal because we get to read one another's books early.

And this is a LOVELY book, kind of a Japanese-flavored Cinderella. Let me tell you some of the many things I loved about it!

--The prose. It's simple yet lyrical, the perfect fairy tale pitch, especially for a Japanese fairy tale. The prose kind of FELT like Japan, if that makes sense.

--Suzume. She's a strong heroine, tough but still feminine. She goes through a LOT and I really felt for her. Just when I thought she was in a slightly better position, the rug gets pulled out from under her again. One thing I thought was fascinating is that she using cutting to cope with all she's going through in the book. This isn't played up TOO much but I can't recall ever seeing this addressed in a historical fantasy. Or actually any historical OR fantasy. It's nice to see heroines with "issues" branching out of issue books, that's for sure.

--The world. It's not QUITE the Japan we know, more of a fairy tale Japan and a fairy tale court, and it is lovely. Dark-skinned foreigners come from another land as guests of the royal court, and although we never see this land, the culture and people feel well-realized too. The love interest is a part of the foreign party, which brings me to:

--Otieno. He could have had even more screen time in my opinion, but still, it was enough, and he made a compelling impression when he did show up. He came across as strong yet gentle and I feel like he had a real sense of presence. One of my pet peeves in a book is multiple description of hot abs or pouty lips as stand-in for character in a love interest (especially my personal boy preference is skinny rock stars...hot abs and pouty lips won't get me, although I admit to being kind of a sucker for nicely described hands for some reason). There is none of this here. Yes, you'll see some physical attraction to Otieno but it's more than that.

Also, bonus points for dance, music, riches to rags to riches again which I always enjoy, and a transgender character.

If I have one quibble it's that the pacing does drag in a few spots, particularly around the end when the heroine is making certain choices for revenge and honor and you KNOW she's going to end up going a different route in the end. Although I think this made sense for her character I'll admit to getting a little impatient with her at that point. For god's sake, woman, OTIENO.

This is a wonderful read and I really think it will appeal to Magic Under Glass fans as it shares some themes. It releases in the UK in July (and you can always get UK books via The Book Depository although don't wait as I notice they tend to run out of them sometimes, grr) or, I believe, a little later in the US.

Between the Sea and Sky bits and pieces

2011-05-27T19:20:00.000-07:00

Between the Sea and Sky was at BEA! I know there are a decent amount of ARCs trickling out now, and reviews too. My critique partner Jessica Spotswood compared it to a "fantasy L. M. Montgomery" on Twitter the other day. I promise I won't spam you with review quotes, but, this is why you always hurry up and send your dear friends ARCs before anyone else, because they like you and they will probably like your new book, so that by the time the first bad review comes along, you have kind words to CLUTCH.

Anyway, I've done a few a Sea & Sky guest posts I wanted to point you to:

At Windowpane Memoirs I talked about the setting of Between the Sea and Sky.

She's also running a contest to win a copy, so check that out. You can also win a copy at my post here:
http://jaclyndolamore.blogspot.com/2011/05/m-is-for-may-and-magic-under-glass.html. It runs 'til June 7th and your odds right now are very good!

And I've got a Goodreads giveaway going on. The odds are not quite as good of course, but entering couldn't be easier!

And this post is already a month old, but I never mentioned it here...at The Book Rat I talked about how I drew from fairy tales for world building mermaids, and how I developed the winged folk (who didn't have much in the way of myth to draw from).

Okay, so this is a bit of a cheat-y post, but my hands hurt and I have synopses to write, so...it will have to do for now.

Here is the news, coming to you every hour on the hour...*

2011-05-17T11:24:00.000-07:00

...or every month or so, at no particular time. You know!

I finished my new novel this week. I'm very excited about it. Then again, I'm very excited about every novel I write. But, that includes this one. It's the first time I cried while writing an ending!

Sometimes when people are looking for an agent or waiting to sell, they complain about how long it takes. It took me three years to find an agent. But the whole time I was dabbling in various projects. This particular novel I just finished? I started it back in August of 2006.

My 8/15/06 blog entry:

"I have a constant need to play with fresh ideas. This one has been percolating for awhile and I finally had a chance to work out the plot and character basics today. My #1 setting I wanted to play with was a domestic Victorian one. Done and done! #2 on the list is sort of a dark Germanic art deco, so I fired up my Klaus Nomi and my Gary Numan on the old iTunes and started taking notes."

I wrote a partial, then had no idea where it was going and set it aside. For years! I wasn't ready to write it until I had a few other books under my belt. It only took me four months to write, which sounds so fast (unless you're one of the HYPER-FAST writers who churns out two tomes a year), but the reason it was so fast is that I've been THINKING about the darn thing for almost five years, and researching it for the last year.

Plus Dade had some particularly awesome plot assistance ideas this time. I didn't get stuck much. Yay!

Now I can get back to some lighter works, which I'm also looking forward to. And I can stop listening to the soundtrack of Metropolis. Which I LOVE, but seriously I am so over it.

Also, appearances.

I am delighted to report that I'll be doing a library visit at the West Irving Library in Irving, TX on June 11th at 1 pm as part of their teen book club, so if any of my teenage fans are in the area, please drop by!

I'll also be returning to the science fiction convention Oasis here in Orlando the last weekend on May. I must say this is really an old-school sci-fi convention so I wouldn't attend just to see me, unless you are into old-school sci-fi yourself. But I do enjoy being on writer panels, so I like going anyway.

Lastly, the Magic Under Glass paperback hits shelves on Tuesday, and I know some of you will be at BEA at the time, perhaps picking of an ARC of Between the Sea and Sky! I wish I was going, but I can't wait to hear the reports.

*Total bonus if you know the song with these lyrics in it. I'm such a nerd.

M is for May and Magic Under Glass Contest!!

2011-05-03T13:48:00.000-07:00

It's MAAAAAYYY!

News flash: I just got in my Between the Sea and Sky ARCs. And there are enough to go around! So I'm revising this contest and giving away two ARCs! And I'm extending the deadline until June 7th, the original Between the Sea and Sky release date, so you have a little more time. Sorry about the rule tweaks, I don't usually do that, but it's an EXCITING rule tweak.

That means the Magic Under Glass paperback will be available in three weeks! And I just got my first official paperback in the mail. It is pretty! It has a Between the Sea and Sky teaser inside!

So, I want to have a contest for FANS of Magic Under Glass. All of you guys who have read the book and talked about it have my gratitude. But what can I give you? I can't just hand out paperback copies because obviously you've already read it. But I can give out an extra-special copy. So, the grand prize winner of this contest gets:

--A paperback copy of Magic Under Glass laden with sketches of all the characters and handwritten notes about the writing and research and maybe a couple of hints about what happens in Magic Under Stone!
--AND, an ARC of Between the Sea and Sky!

There will also be a runner-up prize of a signed UK copy of Magic Under Glass with a sketch of Erris and Nimira in the front AND, an ARC of Between the Sea and Sky.

How do you enter?

Well, there are two ways. Write a review of Magic Under Glass and post it your blog that mentions the paperback is coming out May 24th (if you don't have a blog, I'll also accept Goodreads or Amazon, in which case you don't have to mention the release date), OR if you have already written a review, make a post that mentions the paperback release and links back to your old review.

OR if you aren't the reviewing sort, you can create any kind of show of love for Magic Under Glass: fan art, fan fic, animation, movie, collage, doll, performance art, Erris-trapped-in-clockwork mime on a street corner, WHATEVER.

Post here and link to what you did. I will select my favorite 20% of these reviews or fan creations and randomly draw the grand prize from among them. I will randomly draw the runner up prize from ALL entries.

Other details:
1. Contest ends June 7th.
2. International entries are welcome! However, it is really expensive to ship overseas and I am kinda poor, so international winners will have to choose between having the first prize shipped now, or both prizes shipped around the release of Between the Sea and Sky.
3. Can you enter with a less-than-positive review? Yes. I don't want people to start freaking out about their reviews having critical comments. Thoughtful reviews are always appreciated even if they are mixed.
4. Can you enter more than once with say, a review and fan art or whatever? Well, sure! That would be awesome. You are welcome to enter up to three times with a review and/or different fan works, and I'd be surprised if anyone wanted to enter more than that anyway...

The Sketchbook Project

2011-04-28T12:22:00.001-07:00

Yesterday my Mom sent me a link to The Sketchbook Project.

http://arthousecoop.com/projects/sketchbookproject

What a cool thing! The idea is that you sign up for $25 ($20 additional to digitize the sketchbook), pick a theme from their ample list, and they send you a 32-page sketchbook to fill with art based on the chosen theme. The sketchbooks--ALL of them, whether you're famous or a no one or how talented you are judged to be by any given person--then tour North America. The 2011 sketchbooks are going to be near me at the end of July so I definitely have to go check that out!

After the tour the sketchbooks will be kept at the Brooklyn Art Library.

Although $45 is a lot of money for me right now, I signed up for the sketchbook and the digitization, because I love the idea of people being able to see such an intimate piece of my art and thumb through it and enjoy it without having to visit me and ask me to see it, and I like the idea in general. I chose the theme "Time Traveler" and I'll be filling my book with characters from my books and their historical trappings. Since it'll be digitized you can see it online even if you can't get to the tour stops or the Brooklyn Art Library.

I also love the "themed sketchbook as art piece" idea in general. I have slews of sketchbooks but none of them are themed. I think it will be easier to buckle down and create something good if I know it will be out in the world.

Why does kidlit hate hippies?

2011-04-27T15:38:00.001-07:00

Seriously. This is something I have noticed many times over the years as a reader. I keep thinking it will get better, and MAYBE there have been fewer books published about crazy hippies recently, but there are not any sensible new age folk taking their place.

There was a discussion on the Blue Boards recently about portrayals of homeschoolers in kid/YA lit, where this link was referred to: Homeschoolers in Fiction. I have read a few of the books on the list that made me cringe in the same way they cringed, and meanwhile I did thank David Almond when I met him for writing Mina as a sensible, normal girl. I've also read a couple bad portrayals that weren't on the list. I won't name names, but one book stands out for making fun of ORGANIC APPLES.

That is where I start losing my cool, guys. Mocking the way I was educated? That is one thing. You mess with my organic apples? WHYYY? Organic apples are the way apples have been for most of history! They are tasty and free of poison! Some homeschoolers are crazy (hey, I have watched Wife Swap) but I can't live without organic apples.

But the portrayals of homeschoolers as wacky, crazy people who can't cope in normal society and have never seen television is only one aspect of a larger trend to portray all people with "new age" beliefs as nutjobs.

Note: When I say "new age" or "hippie" I am referring to a lifestyle that MAY incorporate such things as (but not limited to):
Homeschooling, unschooling, vegetarianism or other diets such as vegan; raw; macrobiotic, making ethical food choices (or even growing your own organic food), going off the grid or making environmental choices in your life, rejecting conventional medicine in favor of holistic medicine such as homeopathics, herbs, energy medicine and acupuncture to name a few, meditation, yoga, astrology, Reiki, etc etc etc. It can also mean a spiritual belief system that draws from various religions. Or it might be a lifestyle choice for one's life on this planet that can fall under the banner of Christianity, Buddhism, Paganism, atheism...anything.

I was raised that way and I don't believe everything I grew up with or everything my Mom believes but overall it was a wonderful, joyful childhood and I think that I am a smart and responsible adult who deeply cares about other people and the planet. I try to live my life in a way that is in harmony with the values of holistic living and sustainability, and I'm proud of that. I TRY not to push it on other people (yeah I am a nag about food sometimes). I'm not much of an activist, even. But as childhoods go, mine was set pretty high on the hippie dial. I made my own tie dye AND my own Native American-style (exactly what style of Native American, I do not know, that was just how it was billed) drum, attended sweat lodges and crystal shows, and was unfazed by talk of Lakota medicine women or Indian gurus because that was pretty normal. It wasn't until I went to 2nd grade that I had a huge culture shock that has never quite left me. I am weird. I have had to defend my lifestyle and choices all my life. Why I didn't go to school, didn't go to college, don't take Tylenol when I have a headache, try to avoid GMOs.

In kidlit, OTOH, many hippie characters are parents that the MC is desperately trying to distance themselves from. I have seen mockeries of recycling! Herbal tea drinking! And, lest you forget, poor tasty organic apples! How dare those mean old parents foist environmentalism on their groaning teenagers! Even though in the real world I often see kids caring deeply about the planet. And I think the children of environmentally minded parents don't usually reject everything their parents taught them. Ditto other lifestyle choices.

But what about parents who won't let their children watch TV or play video games? Gasp! This is a common "thing" in books with hippie parents. Well, let me tell you, there were plenty of video games and television involved in my childhood. In fact, one of my childhood friends drove me nuts because he had, like, EVERY GAME FOR EVERY SYSTEM EVER that I wanted. This was the same family that always put nutritional yeast on their popcorn instead of butter. I can't recall anyone who didn't have a TV. Although my mom did try to restrict our TV time sometimes, it never lasted very long.

What about that other trope of the new age character? The teenager. The VEGETARIAN ACTIVIST TEENAGER. Sometimes they are all right. After all, they care about things! They teach the MC an important lesson and inspire everyone! But that is my problem with them. They fare similarly to "goth" or "witch" teenagers in falling into the mold of the supporting character who behaves somewhat predictably. While we might admire these kids for always starting the "Save the Planet" club at school and thrusting flyers in everyone's face and hugging trees and playing their guitar, these neo-hippie children still perpetuate the idea that all unconventional children are pushy about their beliefs and don't have many friends. They are oftentimes revealed to be rebelling against something. Like conservative-minded parents! Aaand we come full circle.

I would really like to see more kids in YA/MG books like the kid I was--who care about the things I cared (and still do) about without it being SUCH a THING.

Although...I do wonder if the lack of it isn't because we're all off writing fantasy books! No childhood makes a better writer than an unschooled magical hippie childhood, I daresay. When I was ten, magic was close enough to taste.

BTW, if you have read any books with new age/hippie characters that aren't stereotypes, please tell me!

Stuff I Dig: Underground New York

2011-04-25T15:23:00.000-07:00

I often see people say that they prefer when authors talk about themselves and their lives on their blog. I would love to do that, but seriously my life is SO boring. When I worked in retail I talked about my life a lot more because I was out doing things and encountering strange people. And some authors travel a lot and have fascinating adventures. I, alas, mostly sit at home and do a relatively limited amount of activities: writing, reading, cooking, watching TV or playing video games with Dade. I hope my life will become more blog-worthy someday (in a good way, not like my adventures trying to fly out of Branson). But for now, I'm thinking that maybe on Mondays I will try to briefly talk about something that is not so writing specific. Something I've been liking or doing or thinking about. I can come up with one interesting thing a week, right!?

So, a couple of scenes in my current book take place in abandoned subway tunnels. I have to admit I am pretty fascinated by the subway. My first subway experience was the one in Toronto, which I barely remember, but when I went to NYC the second time, for a week, I learned to actually USE the subway. Maybe it's because I don't drive...but the magic of walking down into this subterranean world, stepping on a train, and coming out somewhere new is pretty enthralling to me.

Anyway, I needed to do some research on underground cities, but my library is not exactly flush with books on the topic. At the university library I found New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City by Julia Solis and I found myself reading every word. I knew there was some pretty cool stuff under the city--I remember when they found a whole 18th century ship at the World Trade Center site. But this book covers a lot of ground, tantalizing with mysteries like, how many stories down does Grand Central Station go, and what is down there? Is there an old locomotive buried in Brooklyn? Ooh.

And then I found this video, of urban explorer Steve Duncan going to several underground sites. Not only is the history and architecture fascinating, but the video is well-shot with a raw sense of danger as he and the cameraman dodge cops and MTA workers. I was riveted. (Plus I think he's kinda cute. Heh.)

(Blogger cuts part of it off. Yuck. Well, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWF3IDk9Gek. I'll just leave the embedded movie up so my blog looks visual.)

This is what my brain looks like right now

2011-04-24T09:09:00.000-07:00

First drafting is exhausting. I immerse myself in images, music, research, characters, flashes of scenes, and try to hold it all in there for months at a time and write as fast as I can before it starts to slip away again. Not that my brain in a sieve, but you know, I want it to be potent.

In case ya missed YA Lit Chat...

2011-04-19T12:19:00.001-07:00

So, a week ago I participated in YA Lit Chat on Twitter! There were so many people there, it was almost impossible to follow even while it was happening, so I thought I'd repost some of my answers to the questions. The questions have been edited for brevity/clarity/combing a couple questions into one/etc. These questions were posed to everyone in the chat, but these are just my answers obviously.

How long does it take you to finish a draft?
I've had some that took years and some that took six months.

What is the most effective marketing thing you've done?
Just being around and about and friendly. & Goodreads giveaways work well.

What do you do when you're stuck?
I either sit down and work out the problem, or let my subconscious stew.

How many words a day do you write?
I used to write 6k a day fairly often but I ended up ripping up a lot of it. 1k a day and I keep a lot more. I do edit as I go along and before I write the last chunk I stop and do an editing pass.

How do you develop your characters?
I sketch, and think about them before bed when I'm all half in a dream world. Live with them in your head. Think about them outside the story! That's what I do anyway.

Before you got the call, how confident were you in your writing?
Um...well, both very confident and very nervous about it at the same time if that makes sense!

Do you write in reaction to trends in current publishing?
Well, I do dip into collective unconscious, with a mermaid book in 2011! But I try to write a book NO ONE would write but me. If I'm worried about someone else having the same idea, I throw it out or mix it up.

How do you research characters and locations?
I am always collecting books on the topics I am or will write about. I own SO MANY non-fiction books.

Would you ever consider writing an MG?
I started an MG...I was having trouble not making it YA-ish though...I love reading MG, but I like realistic MG best and I write fantasy, that might be part of the problem too!

When you send out final proofs, is the story finished to you, or are there still things you'd rather change?
I kinda hate reading final proofs because I'm forced to think about the story this story will never be.

Do you start with plot or character?
I've actually been starting with SETTING... Maybe that's totally weird.

What books do you re-read?
Little House, Betsy-Tacy, Emily of New Moon, Jane Eyre.

Any advice on writing sequels?
I added a new POV to my sequel to give it a fresh angle.

What is most painful; brainstorming, drafting or revisions?
I really <3 all parts of writing, except the stuck parts (which pop up anywhere)

Did you start out writing YA or did it evolve into that during submissions?
I used to think I wrote adult fantasy b/c YA wasn't such a "thing", but...during subs it was always intended YA.

How many conferences do you attend a year?
Like...0-3? I'd love to do more things!

How much planning do you do before and during drafting?
I think about my books on the back burner for months or years while writing something else. I do some on paper too, but only when I write. Then I just sort of freeform ask & answer questions to myself.

Do you outline?
I used to not outline, but I never finished anything. I have to outline, personally. But not everyone does.

How nervous are you when you submit new projects to your agent/editor?
Depends on how good I feel about it, but...it's definitely never NOT AT ALL nerve-racking...

If your characters were real, who would your best friend be?
Ha! That's a great question. No one my fans know them yet... But I'd be friends with a lot of my characters.

In response to POV discussion...
I did 1 POV with first two books, 2 POVs with third, current one has 3 POVs! #proceedingwithcaution I've written in 1st and 3rd, single and multiple, but I can NOT write in present. Must be past. I can read present, but not write. I write in third more often generally even though Magic Under Glass was first. I actually like multi POV cause when I get stuck I can switch POV.

What YA novels do you think are underappreciated?
A TRUE AND FAITHFUL NARRATIVE! Love that book! Also, Hollow Kingdom trilogy, Sharon Shinn's Dream-Makers, etc.

Do you get attached to any of your characters?
I actually get attached to ALL my (important) characters. I love them! I can't write without feeling that love.

Have you ever done any screenwriting?
i would gladly write comics. I think screenwriting is too far out of my brain zone.

On books into movies:
I have a not-so-secret fantasy of Studio Ghibli adapting Between the Sea and Sky. I dream about this ALL THE TIME...

Do you read your reviews?
I do read my reviews. I like to know the general opinion and I'm not too bothered by bad ones.

Do you like happy or sad endings?
I like happy or bittersweet endings but not outright SAD.

What time of day do you write?
I usually write after lunch and then sometimes after dinner. Basically I like writing on a full stomach. I usually sleep from 2 or 3 am until 11 or noon.

All right! Hope you found the recap a bit easier to keep up with! =D

Short Story: The Trouble With Procreating Immortals

2011-04-17T17:59:00.001-07:00

I had one of those wild short story-writing hairs today.

This is a Det and Stan story, set when Stan is 17. I've been writing about these characters for 15 years, and one of the continuing conflicts between Det and Stan is... Well, there are plenty of stories about beautiful, dangerous, magnetic immortals and the girls who love them. But what if said immortal (in this case, "immortal" = someone who lives a WHILE, but not forever) had a kid, who was not quite as beautiful and dangerous and magnetic as their parent?

Such has always been poor Stan's woe.

(YES, TWO BLOG POSTS IN ONE DAY AND ON A SUNDAY TOO. I know it's not practical...but I gotta post while I'm in a postin' mood.)

The first time she looked at him, he wasn’t sure it meant anything. She’d wandered into the coffeehouse and ordered a drink, then planted herself against the back wall not far from where he was sitting, glancing at the blues act on-stage between texting.

Stan smiled back at her. He liked to think he was good at flirting, but he’d never had that confirmed. And he didn’t have much experience. Homeschooling wasn’t known for its dating pool.

She glanced at him again. Still with a little gleam in her eye.

“Hey,” he said. “If you want to sit down, you can have this chair.” He pulled out the one next to him. They were in short supply.

“Oh! Yeah. Sure.” She sat down, still absorbed in her phone, red curls spilling over her face. Was that natural? Maybe. She had that pale red-head skin, but she was the cute kind of red-head. Not overly freckled. Not actually freckled at all. All fairy tale princess-like, Rose Red in blue jeans—oh, song title—except for the braces, but they were kind of hot too.

She looked up. “Do you like this kind of music?”

“Uh… Well, this band is just okay. In theory, maybe. I like all kinds of music.”

She nodded at his shirt. “I like your shirt.”

It was a Beatles shirt. The cover of Let It Be. Maybe not a great revelation in things-in-common, but he’d take it. “You like the Beatles?”

“Who doesn’t love the Beatles?” She tucked her phone in the pocket of her jeans and put her chin in her hand. Her hoodie was a little too big so the sleeves covered most of her hands. The blues band was thanking the audience and packing up their guitars.

“Next up is Gray Reilly,” Stan said, making a possibly ill-advised attempt to show off his insider knowledge of the Cherry Coffeehouse’s “Folk You 2011” lineup. “He’s one of the best banjo players around, so you can take that as a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your banjo stance.”

“I have a pretty neutral banjo stance.”

“One time this guy stole Gray Reilly’s car, and then he brought it back and said, ‘Here you go, man.’ Gray said, ‘Why’d you bring it back?’ He said, ‘I can’t get the new banjo smell out.’”

She laughed. “You must be a musician. Quick on the draw with the banjo jokes.”

“I play guitar.”

She leaned a hair closer. Girls liked musicians. They didn’t like folk musicians quite as much as rocker boys, but he guessed it was still better to be a musical geek than most other flavors of geekery. “How long have you been playing for?”

“Like…five years.”

“Oh wow. Do you go to college here?”

He thought she was a college student already. Nice. He prayed his dad wouldn’t walk in too soon. Det had wandered off to the bookstore around the corner half an hour ago and it was hard to say when he’d be back. Still, he wasn’t sure if he should lie about college. If she ended up being really interested, lying was a bad idea, so he reluctantly admitted, “No. Not yet.”

“Oh. It’s okay. I graduate next year. From high school, I mean. Do you go to Lincoln?”

“Homeschooled.” He made a face. “But not in a weird way. Well, maybe kind of a weird way, in the sense that everything is weird. In its own way.” Yuck. No. Not the rambling.

She still seemed to like him. “I’m Reese, by the way. Like the Pieces and the Witherspoon.”

“Stan.”

“That’s not a name you hear too often anymore.”

“Yeah, well. It was my dad’s cousin who died when he was young, I don’t know.” He rolled his eyes.

“Oh. Family names. That’s why my middle name is Gretchen.”

“Gretchen is a cool name, though.”

“But, Reese Gretchen? Doesn’t roll off the tongue.” She had shifted now to truly face him. They were really getting somewhere. Closing in on exchanging email addresses or something.

He was already imagining it. His first real girlfriend. The thing with his neighbor didn’t really count, because for one thing, she was a neighbor, and they were both hormonal, but they only kissed once. More of a test run than a girlfriend, really. He had cried when she dumped him for some kid at school—not in front of her, of course—but the next day he realized he was kind of relieved.

But Reese Gretchen, here, she could be the real deal. He could write her a song like, Reese Gretchen, your name is awesome and weird/ like a 19th century beard… He’d work on the rest later, but that could be a start.

And this was a pretty good story, talking to her with a backdrop of Gray Reilly on banjo in a busy coffeehouse, in the spring, when all good love stories began…

Reese looked up somewhere behind his head, and a shadow fell across Stan.

Dad.

He took in the coffeehouse in a glance. No more empty chairs. “Well, boy, you seem busy,” he said.

“Yeeeah. I mean, kind of. This is Reese. I’m boring her with banjo jokes.”

Reese giggled, eyes shyly pointed toward Det. “Nah.”

“Ah. Well…” Det tucked a newly purchased book under his arm and checked his pocketwatch. “I suppose I’ll get a coffee and lurk a bit. Someone will leave soon.”

“Yeah.” Stan tried to look like, As far as possible, please.

Det went to the counter.

Reese leaned in very close now, but her eyes remained stuck on Det. “Who is that?”

“That’s just my dad. I know. We don’t look alike. He’s weird.”

“Your dad?”

Stan had never really found his father attractive. Of course, it would be really strange to find his father attractive, so that was definitely for the best. But women did. No denying they did. Yet, every time, when they saw Det, he couldn’t help engaging in a losing battle to convince them otherwise. “Yeah. I know. You’re probably wondering why someone as tall, dark and hip as me has a dad that is so small, pasty and old-fashioned.”

“I love his fedora,” she whispered. “But no way is he your dad! He’s too young. Isn’t he?” Her eyes were still riveted to his back. Det’s age always confused people. His air of maturity didn’t match his appearance. He hadn’t really aged a day since…1962 or something.

“Yeah, well. We think maybe he’s actually from fairyland.”

It was the closest he’d ever come to telling her the truth. Especially when he knew she’d never look at him the way she looked at his father.

Magic Under Glass, 3 years later, and writer growth

2011-04-17T08:49:00.000-07:00

First, a couple bits of news. Between the Sea and Sky ARCs exist! I had it confirmed by some bloggers who were at TLA! Can I just have a moment to flail with mingled joy and terror? *FLAILS*

Also, I got a sneak peek of the Magic Under Stone cover. (Whoa, I almost spelled that "peak" after having a whole Twitter convo yesterday about people who screw up peek, peak and pique...) Anyway, it'll probably be ages until I can show it off (AND NO I do not know what season in 2012 it comes out) but it's preeeetty.

Between the Sea and Sky sold in Turkey! So to all my Turkish blog readers, which as far as I know is zero, you may rejoice!

And, last but not least, Magic Under Glass has been chosen by Amazon UK for their Easter E-Book promotion. From tomorrow to May 2nd, UK readers can purchase the e-book of Magic Under Glass for a mere 75p!

All right, so I've been thinking lately about how it took me three years to get an agent. My writing, by the end of my search, was a light year ahead of where it had been at the beginning. I could see myself grow in a trail of increasingly better rejections, but more than that, I could see it in the books. I knew they were better.

It has now been three years since I finished the version of Magic Under Glass that got me an agent and sold. Two years, even, since I did revisions with my editor. A mere 16 months since it was released. But man oh man, I can't wait to have another book out. I'm sure my writing won't always keep growing with every book (it would be nice, but few people seem to peak right before death...) but for now, I think it has. A book I wrote three years ago already feels like ancient history. Not downright embarrassing...actually, I'm never really embarrassed by my work because I think it was always good for the time in which I wrote it...but that time is over now. If I wrote Magic Under Glass all over again, it would be a very different book now.

They say the best way to grow as a writer is to write another book. I think that's true. I've been thinking over the books I wrote and when I wrote them, and how each of them advanced:

Selkie Rock, age 18: The first novel I ever finished. I had a lot of unfinished works before then, but this was where I learned how to tell a story from beginning to end.
Untitled Det and Leslie novel, age 23: I learned I could write more than one novel! And quickly! So there was no longer any excuse for not being a writer.
Magic Under Glass, age 24-26: I tore up and reconstructed this book three times. I really learned to revise with Magic Under Glass, how to tighten my writing, make a book page turning, and push the characters and themes deep enough to compel someone to buy it.
Between the Sea and Sky, age 27: Magic Under Glass was more plot-driven. I wanted this book to have more character depth and heart.
Magic Under Stone, age 28: This book had two POVs. (Actually my second novel with two POVs, but I left the other off the list because it is somewhat out of sequence with the rest of the timeline.) My first sequel, so it was a bit messy in that regard, but because I already knew the characters I could push them deeper still.
The Dark Metropolis, age 29: Not finished yet, but this one has been more experimental than my others, with three points of view, darker themes and several elements I am somewhat surprised I'm tackling.

After TDM, what I really want is to be able to write a series! But we'll see.

An Ode to Book Bloggers

2011-04-07T10:16:00.000-07:00

I've been getting quite a lot of requests for ARCs and interviews for Between the Sea and Sky, many more than for Magic Under Glass--I'm not sure if it's that I am more well known or if winged dude/mermaid romance is such a good hook, but it makes me happy, and most of the requests have been very professional, with blog stats and some personal notes about the reviewer's interest in the book, etcetera.

I know there is periodical hammering on book reviewers/bloggers. Are they important, do they think they're more important than they are, should they review things negatively, do teens even read them, etc. etc.

Well, sure, most of the books I've sold probably weren't because of book bloggers, but I know a chunk of them were. Maybe 1%, maybe 20%, I don't know.

And yes, I've seen some reviews for Magic Under Glass that were really snide and unprofessional. Sure. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of book bloggers out there and not all of them are absolutely sterling examples of humanity, but it would be silly to expect otherwise from any group of people.

Do teens read them? Well, some teens ARE book bloggers themselves, so sure, some teens do. Most teens probably don't. Most teens don't know who even the hottest selling YA writers are besides Meyer and Rowling. Books are already a little off the beaten path, book blogs moreso.

But the thing is, I don't really care about these things. What I do care about are the worldwide community of readers who are passionate about books--talking about them with each other, talking about my books with me, doing interviews and contests and guest posts and super cool events like the upcoming Fairy Tale Fortnight at The Book Rat and Books from Bleh to Basically Amazing!, or fan sites that have evolved into community sites like Mundie Moms.

I don't want to sound like I'm kissing up. I do think SOME authors overestimate the power of book blogs. Some of the most popular authors don't appear on book blogs or engage with bloggers and reviewers and they do just fine. I don't really worry about the career benefits, for better or for worse. I just love it because it's fun. Bloggers, you guys love books, you talk about books. It makes my day when you ask me for an ARC or an interview. It makes my LIFE when you run up to me at trade conferences, recognize me, and want my autograph or picture!

Librarians, teachers, booksellers, professional reviewers, etc., do a LOT to get books noticed. And I love all those people too. But usually, they're invisible--behind the scenes--unless they themselves are book bloggers, of course! I might stumble across a mention of Magic Under Glass on a school or library reading list (YAY), but I'm not privy to the discussion. I might see a nice trade review, but they're short and kinda dry and I don't get to squee with the reviewer about Jane Eyre unless I bump into them at ALA (that totally did happen, though, it was awesome). Most of my life is spent in a quiet room, in pajamas, surrounded by chocolate wrappers, sun deprived and slightly lonely. You guys give my life scope, reminding me my books are going all kinds of places, all the time, even when I can't.

I always try my best to make time for you because I just enjoy the heck out of it. I don't really care if a blog interview doesn't sell many copies (although huzzah if it does), it's amazing to have such engaged readers. Your excitement over Between the Sea and Sky makes ME more excited about it (and I was already pretty excited). As I wrote Magic Under Stone, interest in Magic Under Glass spurred me on. Even when your reviews sting a bit, I'd rather see more talk than silence.

So, thanks. Really. Just stop asking me where I get my ideas.

YA Lit Chat 2011

2011-03-30T15:53:00.000-07:00

Just a head's up that I'll be a participant in the YALITCHAT 2011 Made From Awesome event! I'll be chatting on April 13th from 9-11 EDT. It's on Twitter at #yalitchat!

http://yalitchat.wordpress.com/88-2/

Sketchbook Pages

2011-03-22T14:03:00.001-07:00

As many of you know, I sketch to develop stories. Whenever I go to school visits and things kids love to look at my sketchbook, but most of the drawings are just little heads or fashion sketches so I don't upload them as much as I should because I feel like I have to wait until I have something special, which rarely happens (although stay tuned, I have a little comic series upcoming!). So I decided I'll just start periodically throwing up pages from my sketchbook, special or not, without even erasing the random little heads and ugly pictures. Most of these characters have yet to appear in published books (well, since I only have one published book that isn't hard).

Page 1: In the top left I started sketching someone's little dog at a craft fair, with the intention of sketching many hipster beards, hipster pets, hipster clothes, but it was too cold to draw. Otherwise, this page has Between the Sea and Sky characters. Top: Lalia Tembel, Esmerine's bitchy friend, as a kid. Left: Protagonist Esmerine and love interest Alan as kids. Right: Alan's little sister Karinda. (Wings are such a PAIN to draw but dang is she adorable.) Bottom: Just a wee sketch of young Alan.
Page 2: Sketch of the back view of our retreat house in Key Largo. Otherwise known as "playing with my new pens". While I was drawing a bird wandered in, and then left, so I quickly captured him in the bottom corner.
Page 3: Top left, Det petting his cat, top right; Alfred apparently having a serious conversation with Lester and then Thessia; random heads; Ifra from Magic Under Stone.

Friend celebrations!

2011-03-14T08:14:00.000-07:00

My critique partner got a book deal! And it's a big one!

http://www.jessicaspotswood.com/2011/03/14/cramazing-good-news-revealed/

Putnam Kids Ponies Up for YA Debut
In a high six-figure world rights deal, Arianne Lewin, executive editor at G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers, bought three books by Jessica Spotswood, including the debut novel Born Wicked (formerly called Thrice Blessed). Agent Jim McCarthy at Dystel & Goderich brokered the deal for Spotswood. Born Wicked, set in what the publisher calls “a world of tea parties, engagements, and elegant dresses,” follows the Cahill sisters, a trio of teen witches who must hide their powers in order to save themselves from being shipped off to prison or a mental ward. Spotswood, who is from a small Pennsylvania town, lives in Washington, D.C.

I love this book so much and I knew it would sell well (except when I worried it wouldn't...just like you worry for your own stuff because sometimes the world is unjust!!). Luckily this time talent is recognized and I'm excited because now she can write the sequels! Jessica also happens to be a very sweet and generous person. I'm so happy for her!

Also another old friend has been lifted from the trenches this week when my friend Jen, who was querying alongside me back when I had Magic Under Glass out (yes, it's been a WHILE, although she also had a baby in the interim so she was getting some stuff done, don't worry) has just sold a three-book deal:

http://jengt.livejournal.com/172145.html

Julie Scheina at Little, Brown has acquired world English rights to Jennifer Rush's debut Altered, pitched as Dollhouse meets Prison Break for teens, in a three-book deal. In the novel, 17-year-old Anna finds herself on the run from her father's enigmatic Agency, along with the four teen boys the Agency had been experimenting on, in a mystery of erased memories, secret identities, and genetic alteration. Publication is scheduled for fall 2012. Joanna Volpe at Nancy Coffey Literary & Media Representation did the deal.

Yay friends!!

Of course, on a downer note...Japan. Of course I am depressed whenever any country suffers tragedy, but I love so many things about the country of Japan and I experience a little of their culture on an almost daily basis, picking up a manga or watching anime or playing "My Japanese Coach" in my DS or nomming their candy or whatever, so it hits a little extra hard and it's made it hard to concentrate on writing at all because...well, it seems kind of worthless at a time like this. Even though it really ISN'T, because people need stories, but at a time like this people need, you know, food and houses.

Reader/Writer Kinks

2011-03-11T13:13:00.000-08:00

My agent posted today on settings and characters that make her swoon. Jennifer Represents: My Kinks

I love her answers and it is obvious why we are a good agent/author match, but I also love that question so I'm going to post mine too. Obviously these are kind of reader/writer kinks in my case.

Time Periods/Settings:

--Decadent royal courts with lots of intrigue and pretty clothes (like pre-Revolutionary France, Vienna or Venice in their heyday, Heian Japan, whatever)

--Places and times where artists, bohemians and/or radicals flourished (like 1920s Europe, Transcendentalists, Greenwich Village back in the day, hippies taken seriously, women studying science in the Age of Enlightenment, etcetera)

--18th century to Edwardian era Western world in general

--Ancient China (I would die to see a YA take on part of Romance of the Three Kingdoms or something like that)

--Also just Asia in general, especially if it's not a typical story, and anything involving east-meets-west like travelers on the Silk Road or Japan opening to the west. (I like culture clashes in general.)

--Kids living in big cities; wacky neighbors in apartment buildings or taking public transit or going to big old libraries (and getting trapped in them overnight!) or whatever, that sense of the urban playground that is full of fascinating characters and just slightly dangerous without being too much so

--Quirky, somewhat eccentrically-run schools

Elements/People:

--As previously discussed in my blog, characters who must contend with being an outsider because of disability, race, species, magical oddity, etc. (foreigners, mermaids, charismatic blind dudes, automata/androids, people with a weird magical power, etc. etc.)

--Gender-bending themes of any kind, cross-dressers, dandies, androgyny

--Anything dealing with people of different social classes clashing or falling in love, princesses falling in love with street urchins and things like that, and as Jenn said, rags-to-riches or riches-to-rags or any variation thereof

--Protagonists who are artists, writers or performers

--Airships, aviation, train journeys, doomed ocean liners, 18th century naval themes a la Nelson and Napoleon, basically anything capturing the wonder and mystery of transportation

--Big messy families with complicated relationships; royal families and organized crime families

--Betrothals and arranged marriages

--Smart, handsome older men with mentor-ish roles (since I guess it's not very appropriate to make them the love interest...so sue me, even when I was like eight I thought old actors were hotter than young ones); bonuses for old gay guys, tragic secret pasts, college professors, particularly dapper wardrobes, dry wit, etc.

That's all that crosses my mind for today. I bet you've thought of some of yours by now. Tell me!!

The automaton's cousin, mechanical music

2011-03-10T13:27:00.000-08:00

This is an overdue post! Back in January I saw an exhibit of mechanical music at the Orlando science center. It was run and organized by some local members of the Music Box Society International, if I'm not mistaken, and the exhibit was their own collection and that of some of their co-members. It so happens that I listened to a ton of mechanical music while writing Magic Under Glass and I MAY have just been the most excited under-30 person they ever had visit their exhibit.

Because this exhibit was like something out of my dreams. Dozens of music boxes and band organs and player pianos and old phonographs and they played so many of them! I was practically gasping aloud with delight! No, not practically. I was. Let's be honest.

This is what I find so utterly fascinating about mechanical music: it was the first sound to be captured and preserved and able to be played again and again, precisely the same (well, nearly so, putting aside the fact that machines can degrade) each time. Audio recordings only go back to the late 19th century and did not capture sound as it was actually heard. They are scratchy and tinny and of course they have their own charm. But still. You can't go back and hear Jenny Lind sing in the 1840s but you can still hear her contemporary, the 1840s music box. Sure, it's quite different, but a rather haunting sound.

Before mechanical music, those with the means could buy an instrument but they also needed a musician in the family, which is why girls who could play the piano or whatever were quite valued. How nice to have music in the house! But with mechanical music you could have music anytime, no skills necessary. Early music boxes only played one song but at some point, the disc changer came along, where you could actually buy large metal discs with punched out holes that played different tunes. At this exhibit they even had an automatic changer that would play a number of discs in a row, so you could crank it up (I think? my memory is starting to fail me, but it wasn't electric) at a party and play a "set".

Of course, many people still couldn't afford mechanical music in the home, but public establishments certainly jumped on the new technology as it became more affordable, and electricity came along so now you could have a coin operated device with no need to crank. Many of these player pianos and machines also made fascinating use of electric lighting and were beautifully lit with stained glass windows and such, and when they are plugged in and turned on they start up with a magnificent THRUM that no modern device in your house can match.

Mechanical music still pops up in our modern life occasionally, usually in its most elaborate form, the band organ or carousel organ, many of which are still preserved in vintage carousels or at fairs. I remember seeing band organs as a kid a couple of times and finding them fascinating in that undefinable way one might call "uncanny"...just like automata and abandoned buildings and Daguerrotypes.

If you'd like to hear some mechanical music, there are tons of videos on Youtube, or there is a wonderful introduction of downloadable mp3s here: Machines vs. Music: Mechanized Music MP3s. My favorite is "Trees" or "Dizzy Dittons".

The Lucky Last One

2011-03-09T14:54:00.000-08:00

I was browsing my old Livejournal last night, actually looking for an old post I thought might be worth reworking, and I never did find that post! I found a "super secret friends locked" post from 2008 before Magic Under Glass sold where I was venting about being "the last one" to get an agent and sell in a group of friends.

This is really a rough place to be, the Last One. No matter how excited you are for your friends, how can it not smart? No matter how much you tell yourself it's a subjective business and things change all the time, you feel sort of like the world is telling you you're not as good as your friends. Ouch.

I didn't talk often about envy or negative feelings during my publishing journey, but that was a moment that did get to me. I said:

"I can talk about a little envy in the general sense, but when it comes to my friends succeeding, I hate to say a word about how much I'm smarting. I don't want to begrudge them their happiness. Nor do I want to show the failure of my own character in being hurt when they beat me to success. I want to be absolutely serene, trusting in the universe to take care of me, it's never really been about the money anyway, and I know the recognition will come, and my ideas are offbeat and that often just takes longer to be recognized. I know all this. I KNOW this deep in the core of my being. But the damned tears WILL come.

Pat me on the head and tell me some nice, sensible things I already know, I could use it."

Of course, since then I've sold three books. Among other commenters who were in the unpublished boat at the time and said some of those nice, sensible things I needed (or else just a "I know how you feel!":
Lindsey Leavitt, author of PRINCESS FOR HIRE and SEAN GRISWOLD'S HEAD
Mindi Scott, author of FREEFALL
Sarah Williams, author of PALACE BEAUTIFUL
Sheela Chari, author of the upcoming VANISHED

So if you're the Last One, take heart. It really doesn't mean the fates hate you forever.

The music of voice

2011-03-06T21:47:00.001-08:00

I didn't even notice that I complained of blogger's block and then wrote a post on writer's block the next day. -_-;; Well, it just shows how fleeting writer's block can be!

Today I'm just idly pondering the music of writing. See, I've been watching American Idol this season, and whenever I watch it I inevitably draw comparisons between the two different creative businesses, and when the singers are rejected or successful I am reminded of my own highs and lows, or I compare the different attitudes toward rejection, inspiration, etc. to people I know or types of writers in general.

There is also the sad fact of people who just can't sing. Or can sing, but are missing that something that makes them really wonderful to listen to. (Of course, people will disagree on this, which is what gives the world its wonderful variety.) There are some people who want to sing, but just don't have the ear. Are there people who want to write and just don't have the ear? I think so. I've read a few hopelessly off-key manuscripts. But I've seen many more people improve from boring or overwritten stories to, well, enjoyable stories and publication! Still, there definitely is a level of talent involved. Some people can just write beautifully, and you can see it even in early work where they made a lot of mistakes.

I don't know that people are actually BORN with this talent, though. I think this is why the first advice authors give aspiring writers is to READ. Especially kids. READ. I think that's your best chance of developing that subconscious ear for turning a phrase. I don't know if this is something people can fully develop as adults if they're starting from scratch. Can they? It seems like it would be up there with learning another language, at the least.

The best writing is musical. It has a rhythm to it. I was reading this magazine recently on some geeky topic and while I was interested in the subject, the writing just wasn't that good. It was perfectly COMPETENT. The articles had interesting details and descriptions. But the words didn't flow. I've read published novels like that too. Sometimes popular novels with gripping plots. They just don't often become classics. Trends in writing, they come and go, but I'm reading a lesser-known novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett right now and while both style and plot points are old-fashioned, it is still a joy to read. She just has a storyteller's voice.

L. M. Montgomery's voice is probably my favorite. She loved and wrote poetry; I think a lot of good prose writers get it from poetry even though I'll admit to not being a GREAT poetry appreciator myself. Sarah Waters is another writer whose prose is just absolutely resonant to my ear. I didn't really care for the characters OR the plot in The Little Stranger and yet somehow I gobbled that book up anyway. It's an elusive quality. I can't tell you how to do it. It's the art of varied sentences and an occasional wee dash of alliteration or repetition, or a big word thrown in with small ones, or knowing when "There was a..." sounds just right even when it's not active voice. It's things like that, maybe, but also just something else. Something a little magic, sure as Chopin, or Bowie singing "Life on Mars?"

Writer's Block Tips

2011-03-04T07:29:00.000-08:00

One of the questions I am always asked at school visits is how to get past writer's block.

I understand the desperate hope on these young faces quite well, because for most of my life I wrote like crazy, I would start novels, but then I would get to this point where something didn't make sense or the story had gotten too big, or too small, or too boring, but for whatever reason I just didn't want to do it anymore. I always wrote in a sort of magical, inspired way and once it got hard I was stuck, because I just did NOT understand how you moved past that part.

I still get stuck while writing all the time. And it is still a little terrifying. But through long experience I now know it can always be worked through.

When I am stuck, it's usually one of two reasons.

Reason 1: I am writing something boring.

Sometimes you don't realize right away that something is boring, because it DOES have a purpose, whatever it is. Jane and Anthony NEED to go to the boating regatta so they can see that Greg's boat did not actually sink! (Ohmigosh, it's early, forgive my examples.) Anyway, so you have this important scene with a boat but you know nothing about boats, you don't WANT to know anything about boats, AND this scene is not exactly dynamic because it's just a bunch of people watching the boats you never cared about to begin with.

This happens to me all the time. It can even happen with big integral plots that take up many scenes, or crucial characters. Sometimes you have a character who does the exact opposite of steal every scene she's in. Instead, every time they appear you want to stop writing. You might not entirely realize at first what the reason is. But if you are stuck, stop and think about whether you really LIKE this setting/plot/character.

If you don't, they need to go or change.

Example 1: Your characters are on a date at a restaurant. Maybe the setting is the problem. Restaurants are boring. Maybe they decided to go, instead, to go bowling or antique shopping or exploring an abandoned train yard or Chuck E Cheese or maybe their car broke down and they had to have a date by the side of a highway while waiting for AAA. What would give this scene a flavor?

Example 2: Oh, it's another scene with Manami, your protagonist's quiet, studious Asian friend. She's so boring. Hey, maybe she's boring because she's a stereotype. Often times I find that if I don't like a character, it's because they are some kind of stereotype, maybe even my OWN stereotype: Hey, it's another villain who is a suave jerk that didn't get along with his dad. Or maybe you were aware that you didn't want Manami to be a stereotype so she's not studious, she wants to be an artist and her parents disapprove. But it's still too boring. After all, now her PARENTS are stereotypes. Maybe Manami's mom used to be in an all-girl new wave band and she's really wild and she still plays gigs for her aging fanbase and Manami is kind of wild herself but really deep-down she just wants to be a midwife because she loves babies and she's a natural kind of girl. I just made Manami up for an example and now I can see her (and especially her mom...). If a character is sucking the life out of a scene, inject some life into them.

Example 3: This character is not working. It doesn't matter what you do. You have tried to make this woman into a vegan who plays the autoharp and raises ferrets but also hangs out at the shooting range because she actually loves guns, just not when they're shooting living things, by gum you have PILED ON stuff to make her interesting and conflicted, but you still just don't like her or buy her. She is like a friend you need to cut loose. This is a really hard part because sometimes you feel like this character/plot/scene is SO CRUCIAL you can't possibly get rid of it. This is when you might have to brainstorm wildly. This is when it gets scary because you start following a trail of "ohmigosh so much work" because you start thinking, okay, this entire book was about this girl saving the kingdom from roaming barbarians while falling in love with the prince, and if you cut out the fact of her saving the kingdom from roaming barbarians, what is even HAPPENING anymore? You'll have to change this and this and this. Okay, there's that subplot about rescuing her friend that was never quite developed, but you can't make the whole book about that...or can you? Or maybe you could do a whole new plot about her interest in astronomy and a comet approaching? Or maybe you could focus on the romance MORE and just make it a love story, but you could add this twist...? Sit down with a notebook and let your mind fly to the most wild possibilities you can think of. Talk to your friends/crit partners/boyfriend/husband/sister/whatever. Wait for the click of "ohh, that would be better..." or even a mere, "I COULD do that."

Don't be afraid of the work.

Reason 2 is that you have taken a wrong turn somewhere. The process for solving this is not dissimilar to the process for solving Reason 1. However, in this case maybe there is nothing inherently wrong with any part of your story except for one part or choice. And again, it might not be obvious right away that this is the problem. Oftentimes this is the point where I need to reread everything I've done so far. Sometimes just that is enough. Sometimes it isn't. Don't give up on it right away. Every day, sit down and try to write SOMETHING on the manuscript. Even if you just sit there and stare at the document for 45 minutes. If you've done that a few days in a row with no progress, maybe it's time to take a break. Take a day or week or month away from the story. Work on something else. Sometimes working on something else also illuminates the problems in another manuscript. Still, keep the problem story in the back of your mind. Poke at it once in awhile. Let the stuckness of it wash over you. While you are falling asleep or taking a shower, think about what isn't working. Why isn't it working? Is the plot implausible? Is that scene just unnecessary? Have you not laid the groundwork correctly? Maybe you just need to go back and do a little embellishment or shift things around.

The hardest part of this, for a new writer, is the trust. Trust that there is an answer. There is always an answer. You just need to find it. Keep working it. Keep trying even when it's not fun. The more you persist, the more you will trust that persistence pays off, and the better you will understand your own process and what does and doesn't work for you. Writer's block isn't like inspiration, it isn't some magic thing that comes and goes. For that matter, inspiration isn't quite like that either for me anymore. The more you work through the hard parts, the more you will understand how to make inspiration come a little easier, by writing in a way that works for you.

Of course, mileage will vary. Every writer is different. Every process is different. I can only tell you what works for me. Some writers sweat and writhe their way through an entire manuscript, but if you really want to be a writer, the most important thing, before you ever strive for publication, is getting to that lovely couplet of words: "Entire manuscript."

Blogger's Block

2011-03-03T06:51:00.000-08:00

My blog has been getting quite a few hits lately even though I'm not talking about anything, so I feel guilty. Is there anything you guys would like me to talk about? Any questions?

I'm working on my new book and I'm sooo excited about it, which is probably why I haven't blogged much, and February was very busy with travel. I will say we're 2 1/2 months out from the Magic Under Glass paperback release and as it approaches I'll be having a contest just for fans, with a scribbled, sketched-in, annotated copy of the book as the prize. One of the ways to win will be to already have written a review for your blog or Amazon (and the other way won't be any easier), so if you want to be in the running and you haven't reviewed Magic Under Glass yet, you might want to get on that! ;) (I feel so manipulative.)

Between the Sea and Sky new release date!

2011-02-17T14:25:00.000-08:00

So, bad news for the impatient: A few of you have noticed that Between the Sea and Sky's release date on Amazon is now October 25th. I got confirmation that this is true.

WHAT? you might cry. HOW CAN I LIVE THESE EXTRA MONTHS?

That is also what I thought. But I was informed of very good reasons for the delay that aren't really anyone's fault, so...I will soldier on until October. These things happen.

In the meantime, you can look forward to my story in the Corsets and Clockwork anthology in May. I got an ARC of the collection and I must say, I really am enjoying it! Usually with short story collections there are some stories I have to slog through but so far I haven't encountered any like that in this collection. I think it's really stellar! I mean, there is a mermaid girl who eats people and a theatrical automaton and a steampunk Civil Rights story and all kinds of cool junk, and I'm not even done with it yet, so definitely pick it up if you are so inclined!

And also in May, the Magic Under Glass paperback will have a preview of Between the Sea and Sky in it. So enjoy the tease! I continue to be very impressed with the amount of people adding the book on Goodreads, pre-ordering it on Amazon and emailing me asking for review copies, so, THANK YOU!!!

Outsider Boy Love

2011-02-14T09:48:00.001-08:00

At the Branson retreat we had a question of the night, and one of them was two things that push your buttons as a reader.

I have a very specific button-pusher, which is: Outsider people who are different in some physical way that they can't hide but who find a way to fit into society without compromising who they are. And preferably, who they are is also a hot boy, just saying.

Which led to a tweet from a certain moose (yes, the taxidermy in our house was tweeting, which I find disturbing) about how I like hunchbacks, but that is not really what I MEANT (although admittedly, Dean "Jarback" Priest from the Emily books was one of my childhood literary crushes, before I realized he's kind of a jerk, so maybe I do mean that).

There are a lot of ways to make a character different, though, especially in fantasy and spec-fic, where you can have a guy who looks like a demon for no apparent reason (Nightcrawler from X-Men), a guy with dragons growing from his back (Star Ocean: The Second Story for PlayStation), or a guy with scissors for hands (do I even need to tell you?). That is, besides the obvious ways to make a character different: disabilities, scars, being a different race from the norm, having strange coloring of some kind, etc. In fantasy, it's all blown up even beyond the differences we have to deal with on Earth.

I just can't seem to get away from this trope in anything I write. Sure, I have some other character types I love too (Arrogant Man with Pain Beneath His Exterior is another one that gets me every damn time), but that is like the soul of my writing.

It took me a long time to realize why I was so drawn to these stories, but I think (if I can't explain it with past lives?) it's because from the first time I was thrown into a crowd of peers (in 2nd grade, the only year I wasn't homeschooled) I realized I was deeply different. The things I ate, the medicine I took when I was sick, the music I listened to, the things I liked to do, even the way I thought the world worked, were all markedly different from my peers, and it was a shock. I still get that same shock every time I am in a large group of people. I think everyone must feel this way to a degree, but for whatever reason the theme always really resonated with me.

I think the other reason I am attracted to it is because when your outsideriness is obvious, you sort of have to work extra hard to be normal. I tend to see the outsider characters as the most "normal" at heart, I think. (And in this case I think of normality as a positive thing...like, relatable, moreso than "someone who is very average".) For a romantic lead, it can also be a rather vulnerable position...if you have a disability or are of a different race from the norm or whatever you have to have an extra dose of determination or cleverness or some it factor to get ahead.

A few of my favorite physical-outsiders-who-find-their-place-in-the-world:

Gen from Megan Whalen Turner's books
Otto from A Long Long Sleep (which comes out in August, I just read it, it's AWESOME)
The aforementioned Nightcrawler from X-Men, in his more fun-loving, swashbuckling configuration and not Emo Religious Mutant
Tyldak from the Elfquest comics
Chichiri from the Fushigi Yuugi anime

Gah, I know there are plenty more, but I have to go make dinner. And one of my favorite literary boys is Po from Graceling but he doesn't truly qualify. Anyway, if you have any recommendations, fire away, I'd LOVE to add more to the list...

Escape from Branson

2011-02-12T11:50:00.000-08:00

Some of you may recall that a week ago I left on a writing retreat to Branson, MO (which is where we happened to find a cheap house big enough to fit 23 authors). Rare is the vacation where so many things go wrong that if you could go it all over again...you probably wouldn't. But the Branson retreat was one of those trips, for me. Not because of the company (which was lovely) or the beauty of the lakes and hills of the Ozarks (it really was beautiful there). Just because of...everything else. Which means it makes for some great blog fodder.

We arrived Saturday, and had a fun time with the usual hijinks that occur when a zillion writers get together. I had a lovely little room on the top floor with my critique partner Jessica Spotswood with windows all around overlooking snowy woods and snowy lake. It was lovely. Sunday was our first full day. I talked to people. I even got my 1000 words for the day. I also noticed a tickle in my throat.

The tickle, alas, did not go away. By that night it was more like a lump of congestion that kept me up all night, and in the morning I had a fever. I made my way downstairs, weakly, and soon realized...all I wanted was to go back to bed. So I did. The fever got worse. I was so exhausted and with such chills that all I could really do was sleep. At that point I was so sick I didn't even CARE that I was missing out on fun. I just wished I was home with Dade and the kitties and access to my local health food store and my teapot.

On Tuesday I was able to sit up and mostly stay awake, but I still couldn't really make it downstairs. But Wednesday we were leaving. I wasn't looking forward to flying and changing planes since I was still pretty wiped and dizzy, but it would be all worth it once I got there.

I woke up to the news that we were snowed in and our flight was canceled. Despair! But then it got a lot worse. I called AirTran to reschedule my flight and they told me I couldn't go home until FRIDAY. "When are they telling you guys you can go home?" I called at the rest of the group. (There were twelve of us on the same flight.) "Tomorrow!" they said.

Yes, every other person got on the flight home the next day. EXCEPT ME. Even people who called AirTran AFTER I did. I called them a couple more times, and Jessica even called and pretended to be me, but they just kept saying the flight was booked, overbooked in fact, and I was not likely to get on it.

After a good crying jag, I really TRIED to make the best of this. We had almost run out of food in the house, but I had brought food with me, including a bag of baby potatoes, which I brought out at this point to share for lunch. 24 ounces of potatoes for 18 people = 1 baby potato per person. While Myra stretched them out into soup, I looked at hotels in Branson and tried to find a place where I could maybe walk to some attractions or shops or something. There were some thrift stores downtown. Maybe I could trudge through the snow and thrift.

But, let's face it, I really did not want to wander alone and sick in Branson, I wanted to GO HOME. So I kept checking AirTran. Around 8pm, I saw that I could buy a ticket from Branson to Atlanta. But now there were no Atlanta to Orlando tickets. I called again and asked if they could at least just LET ME LEAVE BRANSON. I was told no, they had to book the whole ticket at once. Dawn said I should call customer service, so I did, and the nice woman there was finally willing to work with me and she found some way to book me on the flight. She seemed a little confused by my enthusiasm for the new situation.

AirTran Woman: Okay, ma'am, here's what I can do. I have you on the Branson to Atlanta flight.
Me: YOU HAVE ME ON THE BRANSON TO ATLANTA FLIGHT?
AirTran Woman: Yes, but, ma'am, all the flights to Orlando are full. I can get you a flight leaving at...ooh, that's a long layover. I can get you out at 8:30 the next morning.
Me: AWESOME!
AirTran Woman: That's 8:30 in the morning, ma'am. I can't get you out that same day.
Me: I KNOW! YOU ROCK! All I want in life is to LEAVE BRANSON.

I really wasn't worried, honestly, if I could just get to Atlanta, because there were five flights leaving Atlanta for Orlando that evening and I found it highly unlikely one would not have a standby seat. And in fact, Dade called again for me around 1 am and got me a seat on the 5:49 pm flight out.

However, the flight was only half the battle. There was another battle going on, a battle that was luckily not mine to fight, but a battle for all of us still trapped in the Branson house. You see, even with a flight out, we were still all trapped in the house. There are four cab companies in Branson, apparently, that are all actually run by the same people. They had two vehicles capable of traveling in the snow. But there were twelve of us. We needed a van. They were trying to get use of a shuttle van, but they weren't willing to take it all the way to the house.

At some point, I was told, "Worst case scenario, we just have to walk a mile at 7 am in 0 degree weather and 6+ deep snow with all our luggage uphill to the main road."

No, worst case scenario is, the weakest among us are left to die. At least I've heard freezing to death is very peaceful.

But, what luck, some kind local soul helped us out. I was now told, "All right, this guy with a truck is going to pick us up in batches and drive us down to the Mule Mart to wait for the cab. I don't know if the Mule Mart will be open, so dress warmly."

So that is what happened. We were trucked on down to a convenience store called the Mule Express to wait for an hour with our luggage. It was open. At some point a local came in and asked, "Are you ladies havin' a sewing circle?"

Guys, I CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP.

So, the shuttle arrived (at this point, each thing that happened: transport to mule-themed convenience stores, or the shuttle actually happening, was greeted with exclamations of joy verging on disbelief) with ALMOST enough room for all of us (we crammed in there somehow) and we got to the airport. Our plane was late. There is no food in the Branson airport except a barbecue joint. Not a tasty one either. Woe to the stranded traveler. Did I mention I came home quite a bit skinnier than I left?

As a final note, my plane from Atlanta to Orlando was full of cheerleaders (perhaps junior high age) from Tennessee. I mean, fully half the plane was solid cheerleaders. When I got on there was a cheerleader in my seat.

Me, to patient-looking stewardess: I think that's my seat, 19C.
Stewardess: *checks log* Okay. *to cheerleader* What is your seat assignment?
Cheerleader: *chewing gum, giving blank look preteens are so good at* 19B.
Stewardess: Okay. And *to girl in 19B* what is your seat assignment?
Cheerleader 2: *gives same blank look* 19A.
A look passes over the stewardesses face like, what if every cheerleader is sitting in one seat wrong from their assignment? She looks over at 19F. "That looks like the seat that is open. Would you like that seat?"
Me: "I would LOVE that seat."

The cheerleaders mostly occupied the entire back of the plane. When it stopped, the man in the aisle seat behind my row jumped up and said, "I'll hold 'em back for you!" to those of us ahead of him. And he did.

I had made it home.

Dear Querying Writers: Use Common Sense. Now, Relax.

2011-01-30T20:30:00.001-08:00

Once upon a time, I was a newbie to querying agents. I fretted over every word in my query, dragged my heels about sending it out, finally did at the insistence of my boyfriend, received some requests, and every little thing sent me into a panic. If I do this, will the agent hate me? How should I respond to this? Or this? What do I say in a cover letter? Is it okay if I send the manuscript media mail? Do I put a rubber band on it? If they want internet files, do I put them in a folder? Or just send files loose? Should I tell them I'm working on something else? Should I send this revision?

Every new thing to come along provoked a freak out. For awhile. However, my query search last for three years. Many many queries. Eventually, I grew casual. Professional, but casual. I just went by the rule of thumb, "Would it bother ME if someone did this?" And, "If it does bother this person, would I still want to work with them if they were bothered by such things?"

As a querying author, or an author who intends to query someday, or even an author with an agent on submission to editors, you should keep up with what's going on in the industry, sure. You should be aware of standards. And you should follow guidelines. But please remember, agents ARE just people. Some of them will be more forgiving than others, some will be annoyed by X and not by Z, etc, and there are a lot of good agents out there. As long as you conduct yourself with as much common sense as you can muster at the time, there will be an agent for you even if you make mistakes.

Some of the things I did while querying that could be considered mistakes:
--I replied to my first "positive rejection" with a gushing email thanking the agent SO MUCH and telling them I'd be querying another project soon (aaaand about a month later I did...she didn't ask for pages)
--I emailed several agents who had had my full for a month letting them know I had a MUCH BETTER version now
--I rushed a revision and queried too soon
--I emailed some agents three times with three different versions of the Magic Under Glass query over the course of two years
--I queried some agents that I'd heard kinda bad mojo about because I knew they HAD SOLD SOMETHING
--I talked about most of my submissions and rejections on my blog, plus posted teasers regularly and blabbed about the story and plot all the time

At the time, I used my best judgment with the information I had available at the time on how to handle a situation. Sometimes, in hindsight, it turned out to be wrong and I stopped doing it. But I never did anything that was so heinous a crime that I was blacklisted from all agents ever. In fact, no one ever really seemed overly annoyed or whatever and I always had plenty of requests (in fact, one of the agents I kept pestering with new revisions ended up offering representation, although she was not the agent I signed with), and in the end I got a lovely agent.

Now, I know there has been some various debate on whether posting excerpts of your work or reviewing books (especially critically) on your blog, etcetera, can hurt your chances to sign or sell. I think it is definitely wise to discuss these matters, follow these discussions, and think about what you might be saying and who might be reading when you blog (or Tweet, etc) and if you feel comfortable with what you're putting out there. But please, do not go overboard. Again, use common sense. "Don't talk about the submission process" doesn't mean you can NEVER tweet "aw, man, I got a rejection", it means, you might not want to post a breakdown of everyone who rejected you.

And even if you DID make some manner of error in blogging about all your rejections or really snarking about books or posting a chapter of your WIP, and now you are freaking about it... Well, trust me. These things fade and they never bothered some people to begin with. If you feel that what you did was a bad idea in hindsight, delete the posts and continue on your merry way. If you feel that you are doing what you want to do, such as honestly reviewing books, continue on! Just as you can't please all of the people all of the time, it is not that easy to piss off all of the people all of the time. Unless you are running around making a general jerk of yourself on a regular basis or are remaining willfully uninformed, you're probably fine, especially because social networking IS relatively new and people are still figuring out how to manage it and use it and what's appropriate and all that stuff.

Why comics and e-books have me questioning story structure

2011-01-28T11:07:00.000-08:00

It is sometimes commented upon that until the internet happened, writers did not have so much feedback from their fans.

However, that was not true in the comics industry. Comics (at least, in this part of the world) have most commonly been told in short, chapter form with a letters column in the back, encouraging their fans to bitch and moan about the latest issue, or write tomes of effusive praise, or point out that Nightcrawler's hand had five fingers on page 15, panel 3, or whatevs. There is something else about comics, too: They were not expected to end. Ever. Can you imagine Superman ending and that's it? They don't end, they just get canceled if they aren't selling. A little like TV, but even more neverending, and without the structure of a "season" to hang that year's plot on.

There is something else different about comics too. Self-publishing is perfectly acceptable in the comics world. Many excellent comics began as self-published works, and some of them were picked up by a larger publisher from there, and some didn't. Although the comics industry is still dominated by superheroes, scratch the surface and the level of experimentation of not just art, but storytelling, in the comics world, IMO, is astonishing. And one thing I think is very fascinating is that comic creators can choose whether they want to tell one story with a beginning and an end, like a novel, or whether they want to tell an ongoing tale that can either be passed on to other creators, or end when the artist/writer simply gets burnout, or dies.

In writing, we don't really have that option. Sure, there are a few never-ending series, like in the mystery genre for example, but even then there are few examples outside of a fairly formulaic "every book solves a mystery" or "urban fantasy story where uh-oh, there's a NEW sexy vampire in town." There are comics that simply follow the slice-of-life dramas of a groups of characters. There are comics that combine slice-of-life relationship dramas with save-the-world traditional fantasy elements like Elfquest and Thieves and Kings (which also has prose sections within the comic). There might be story arcs, but there is no common rule dictating that the story should be a trilogy and then end...a level of freedom that FEW novels (I'm not saying none) manage. Of course, I'm sure the self-publishing element is part of it, and for every good comic there is a slew of bad ones, don't get me wrong.

Also, obviously there are things you can do in visual storytelling that just DO NOT WORK in novels. I bump up against the frustration of these limits all the time, as someone who once wanted to be a comic artist (but realized she doesn't have the patience with art that she does for writing). But I don't see why a serial story of short "episodes" in prose form couldn't work.

A friend of mine had a story on her blog some years back called MARZ Saga (she knows who she is ) that I won't attempt to summarize here, but it was basically, a very creative little character drama that went on for years, in the form of short slice-of-life "episodes" that fed into a larger plot of character development and human growth. (Okay, see why I don't summarize things? That sounds totally boring.) But anyway, the characters felt VERY real to me, and their interactions felt very true to life, and she was very good at getting in the heads of people of wildly different backgrounds and throwing them together. It was good stuff. I can't ever see it as a novel. It worked as episodes. It was not a novel-type plot arc at all. It also lacked an ending. I didn't care. I doubt Thieves and Kings will ever end either, but it's still my favorite comic, and you know, I'm not sure I WANT stories like that to end. Life rarely has neat and tidy endings, and some types of stories don't have to, in my opinion.

That isn't to say I don't adore the traditional idea of what makes a "good novel": the hero's journey, the tension of every page, the ending that delivers, three-act structures and defined character arcs and all that stuff. It makes for wonderful stories. Obviously, they are the kind I write and love and hope to continue to write for a long time.

But I also am cautiously excited about the idea that e-books could allow for some variations in structure, since authors have the ability to write shorter works at cheaper price points and get them to readers quickly. For example, after Magic Under Stone, I'm sure some of you will still want to know what happens to Nimira and Erris. Maybe, if there was enough demand, I could even get a third book out of them. But their whole lives just aren't going to book-worthy, unless I keep concocting rather tedious disasters for them to contend with. There is a point, however, where one might scale back. Cover a smaller, more intimate drama in their lives, maybe over the course of a few short stories that readers who are desperate to know their fate after the book ends could purchase for 99 cents, or things like that. We're already seeing a little of this, of course. This could go for the end of any book. Writers who keep thinking about their characters after the book is done could keep sharing the thoughts without spinning out an entire book from it. Or someone like me who draws all the characters throughout their development could share my sketchbooks with readers in ebook form.

There is the potential for some pretty cool stuff. And frankly, although even the suggestion that there could be a demise of print sends me into absolute DESPAIR, as I love having and holding tangible books, that is the sort of thing that gets me very excited about ebooks.

I have a feeling there is a post inside of this post, a post I didn't write, that gets my thoughts across in a less muddled way...but, there you have it for now.

EDIT-TASTIC, the Musical!* All about editorial letters, editorial stages, editorial process

2011-01-25T13:45:00.001-08:00

*(not actually a musical in any way)

I've gotten in a few conversations about editorial letters this week, plus I have Between the Sea and Sky copyedits, which I am taking a break from to write this post. This will be the all-I-can-tell-you-about-professional-editing post.

STAGE 1: First Draft

The first draft might not REALLY be your first draft, but it is the first version you show to your editor. Let's start here. Before you have an editor, you probably polished the living daylights out of your first book before it sold. And then you will get an editorial letter. (Note: Editorial letters can arrive anywhere from "almost instantly" to "over a year later" from the time your book sells.) It may be easy-peasy. Or it might make you throw up your last three meals. I was told the editorial letter for Magic Under Glass would be "light" so I was expecting almost nothing, and then when I got it, I was like "WHOA THIS IS MAJOR", but having since edited another book and talked to other writers about their editorial letters, I can tell you it actually was on the lighter side. So. Editorial revisions will probably shock you a bit, the first time.

If you have sold more than one book initially, or you sell another book on proposal, you will have a new experience. The deadline! Suddenly you will be expected to write a book faster than ever before, and you might be stressed out because you may find the manuscript you turn in is not as shiny and polished as the first manuscript your editor bought. Especially because you probably had some second-book-itis going on. Note: THIS IS OKAY. Editors expect this. Really, they do. It's okay to let it go, because if you spend too much time picking at it, your editor might then give you a letter that goes entirely above what you were working on. Case in point: I stressed over a theater subplot in Between the Sea and Sky for ages. I sent it to my editor, finally all shiny. My editor suggested I might want to cut that entire subplot. I instantly agreed and almost entirely rewrote the book in six weeks. With Magic Under Stone, I think I delivered a good story with a beginning, middle, and end, but I didn't stress excessively over the loose ends and messy bits.

STAGE 2: Editorial Letter

Your letter may be just a letter or it may include the marked-up manuscript. I've had both. And both times, I have tackled it the same way. I read the letter (with a mixture of excitement and trepidation). I usually think "OHMIGOD THAT IS BRILLIANT" about some of the comments, and "I agree! But how do I FIX THAT?" about others, and maybe a couple I think, "ehhh." All of them must be considered. I take the letter, and the manuscript, if I've got it (for Between the Sea and Sky, this process occurred in a New York City hotel room), and write down a response to all of my editors points so I can discuss it with her. Some of it will just be "I love this idea, and here's how I think I'll fix it, sound good?" and some of it will be asking her to clarify things, or me explaining what I was TRYING to say, and possibly a little brainstorming from there. I talk to her, and at this point I am usually quite excited. I know some writers cry and bemoan their revision letters, but unfortunately I have no advice for that, I actually love the revising part.

Editors, mind you, do not give advice like critique partners. Quite often they don't just say "here's what's wrong", but they actually help you, with brilliant points, shape your story so it's more like what you meant to say all along. I don't know how they do this. But, they do. Unless you have an unlucky match, which happens. I have heard quite a few editorial horror stories, but most writers get through them, and I hear many more editor love stories. Not worth stressing too much about.

Once I know my editor and I are on the same page, I go through the manuscript and break it down, chapter by chapter if necessary, marking on the ms or on notebook paper depending on how involved I need to be, creating a road map for myself of what I need to do. Some people handle line edits first and then major edits, some vice versa. I just work chronologically. It might look like this:

Ch. 5--Add extra description of the house.
Ch. 6-7--Bring chapter 8 forward. During the conversation with A and B, streamline to convey that A doesn't want B to know he is a were-chinchilla, but B actually already knows.

And so on, going into as much or as little detail as I need so I know everything that needs to be done as I go.

(At least, that's how it would look, if I wrote about were-chinchillas.)

When I'm done, usually in 4-6 weeks, I send it back and wait for the next round. So far my next rounds have been tiny. But it is totally normal to have one, or two, or even more rounds, getting more and more focused with each round. After that comes copy-edits.

STAGE 3: Copy-edits

Copy-edits can be a painful surprise to some authors. Some copy editors are very picky about details, and meanwhile some authors maybe wrote a book where the full moon happens every other day. The copy-editor fixes things like "Why is Mary age thirteen on page 1 and fifteen on page 12?" And grammar and style, and maybe some inaccuracies or research things. My copy editing hasn't been too painful. I'm not sure if my copy editor is just not a huge stickler, or if it's because I don't write crazy-complicated books and I am pretty good at keeping track of ages and timelines and such.

Line editing and copy-editing (which can occur in separate rounds or together; your editor does the line editing, but there is some overlap to what these two rounds accomplish) are more about details and word choices than the big exciting creative parts. As such, I find them quite easy, but also very headache inducing, and some writers actively despise them.

STAGE 4: It's almost a book!

At this point, you may get ARCs! Yay! And there is a final page pass where you are no longer supposed to make large changes, but are just supposed to make sure the grammar is right and things like that. it's pretty easy now, although I also kind of hate the final pass because at that point you're just kind of sick of the book, usually.

And then...you say goodbye. Your baby is almost ready to be born. This part is kind of sad, at least for me, because I will never work with that particular book again, and if you are saying goodbye to the entire cast of characters, you might feel downright weepy. But soon they will be shared, and that is very exciting.

DISCLAIMER: This is based on my own experience with Magic Under Glass and Between the Sea and Sky (which hasn't yet gone through all the stages) and discussion with other authors. Different publishing houses and editors do things differently, and there are no absolutes in publishing. I have tried to make this as general as possible, but you still may experience variations. If you have eight rounds of line edits and each one is delivered by an elephant, that might be totally normal for your publisher.

P. S. I almost forgot to mention I am going to a retreat in a couple of weeks with a ridiculous number of other YA author luminaries. We will be doing v-chats. You can ask us questions. Maggie Stiefvater is collecting the questions here. No obligation, as we already have a lot of awesome questions, but if you have more, now is your chance!

Starring the Jaclyn Dolamore Players! aka, Thoughts on Plagiarizing Myself

2011-01-24T11:24:00.000-08:00

So, I have a little trick I do when I am having trouble with a new character. I cast one of "the Jaclyn Dolamore players". These are old, pre-existing characters that I know very very well, and I just ask myself to think "what would they be like born into THESE circumstances?" And then, hopefully, the character will grow from there and become their own person.

Of course, I do run the risk of writing the same thing over and over. So I feel kind of bad about it. On the other hand, I do think of writing sort of like making a movie. And if I was making movies, I might keep casting Colin Firth over and over in different roles. Or I might travel back in time so I could cast Rex Harrison. You know, when you see a Rex Harrison movie, that you're getting some arrogant British sexiness right there, you just don't know what role it will take. Will I pity Rex in "The Yellow Rolls-Royce", or sort of want to smack him but still find him oh-so-sexy in "My Fair Lady", or will it be darkly hilarious like in "Unfaithfully Yours", or...

Okay, this is not about Rex Harrison. I promise.

Perhaps what bothers me more is the recurring themes. Of course, there are certain themes I embrace as hallmarks of my work. It's no use escaping them, really. Like "outsider character finding their place in the world" or "the struggle between doing what you love vs. doing what is expected/practical/profitable". But then...there are just the little plot tics and weird things that insist on popping up, again and again, insidiously. If I compare any two of my manuscripts, I can easily spot one thing they each have in common, like a villain who turns out to not really be so bad but he has issues with his dad. Augh, I used it twice! Shh. Pretend you didn't notice. Or a big plot involving raising the dead. I'm always raising the dead in my books. Or the love interests bonding over a book. (I know books are sexy, but stop it, guys!) Or snotty intellectual family members. The list is really endless. Sometimes writing feels like a minefield of trying to avoid the same plots, but even when I try...they sneak in.

But then, I think, maybe this is okay. I like Colin Firth movies not just for Colin Firth, but because I can rely on them to be a certain kind of movie. That's the trouble, really, defining the difference between writing the sort of things that make my writing mine and giving my audience a comfortably Jaclyn Dolamore sort of book, and writing things that are just the same. I'm sure we all have that writer or filmmaker we checked out on because their work became stale. For some, it takes twenty books, and for others, just a handful. I hope to keep putting new twists on the stew in my brain for a long, long time.

Spanish Magic Under Glass cover!

2011-01-20T09:29:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was my birthday, and the publishing industry so kindly provided me with coincidental gifts! Like the Spanish cover to Magic Under Glass aka "Corazon Mecanico" aka "Clockwork Heart". I think it's absolutely lovely and I like the new title too. I love how different this is from my other covers. How interesting to see all the interpretations.

I also heard from my editor that copyedits for Between the Sea and Sky are on the way, which I presume means ARCs are not too far off. I've already started to get a number of requests for them. The ARCs I receive from my publisher are limited and will be saved for giveaways. But if you are a reviewer, you can always email me and I will forward requests to my publisher, or you can email my publisher directly, to be considered for a review copy. But if you want one from me, you will have to win one in one of my EXCITING CONTESTS! Yay! Just like with Magic Under Glass, I will give away one or two heavily sketched-in copies. So watch for it!

Plot driven fiction vs. character driven fiction

2011-01-17T13:47:00.001-08:00

I'm working on my fifth book (if you exclude two that are definitely DRAWER NOVELS) (whoa, I've already written four legit books? Sometimes I still can't believe I actually write entire novels, beginning to end...even when it's my job and I've done it six times if you do count drawer novels, it sounds very daunting) and I see this is going to be a plot driven novel.

I've noticed now that my novels tend to fall into one category or the other.

Character-Driven Novels:
--Take longer to write, and are more difficult, because the characters come with strong personalities and I have to figure out what they would actually DO that could be an interesting story. I have to work with them, because they won't change just to be exciting. Dialogue scenes are particularly hard, because the characters in my mind are very natural. Too natural. Like, hey guys, I've got a story to tell here, I don't have all day.
--Haunt me all day and night. I have dreams about the characters, and I think about them in little out-of-story vignettes.
--Are harder to write, but more fun to have written. I like to reread them, and imagine the what-happens-after.
--Are cozier. They tend to have more humor and sweet moments to balance the tension, because I would be happy just writing about these characters buying their groceries, and in fact, have to resist the urge to do so.
--Compel me to get out my sketchbook a lot more often, to capture those little moments that don't fit in the book.
--Tend to be romance and relationship driven.

Plot-Driven Novels:
--Are written more quickly, because although I have an outline, the plot is so exciting that it compels me to keep writing to see exactly how it will unfold.
--Are very fun to research and world-build, at least so far, because so far my plot novels have had a very intriguing historically based setting as well as an exciting plot.
--Are fast to write, but yuckier to revise, because I don't love the characters as much to spend tons of time with them.
--Aren't as interesting to me in the long run.
--Rely on constant tension and mystery to propel the reader forward.
--The setting is vivid, but the character's lives don't run beyond the bounds of the story. If you walked into the book on the "off-time", you'd see everything dismantled and the characters sitting around drinking coffee or something instead of being their real selves.

You can probably tell which I prefer. Character novels. And yet, I think I need to write a little of both. I think I push boundaries more with my plot novels and write them in a blur of excitement, and then I cozy up a bit with the character novels. So far I only have one novel out, Magic Under Glass, and it's a plot novel. Between the Sea and Sky is a character novel. Magic Under Stone is the only novel I've written to be equal parts both, I think because I knew the characters much better than when I wrote Magic Under Glass. So I have yet to see which my readers seem to prefer.

Extreme examples of character vs. plot novels would be the Betsy-Tacy books vs. The Hunger Games series. I throughly enjoyed both. The Betsy-Tacy books are comparatively easy to put down (in fact, I rather like to stretch out the experience of a character-driven novel), but dear to my heart. I reread them. Hunger Games has compelling characters, but if it was just a little story about Katniss, Gale and Peeta in their town, the readership would be much less. I read every Hunger Games book in one day the moment I got my hands on it, but I'll probably never read them again. (Some people do, obviously this is a matter of preference.)

As a reader, character novels are always the ones I save in my collection and read again and again. But plot novels are the ones I devour in a day. Both experiences are enjoyable, but if I could pick one kind to read, it would be the former! And some novels straddle the line--I think Harry Potter is a good example. And some novels will be one thing to some readers and another to other readers. It's all about what is compelling you to read on.

Which do you prefer to read or write?

Serious Topics

2011-01-12T16:43:00.000-08:00

One of the most popular posts at my blog is the Mermaid-y Interview with L. K. Madigan. So I know she has a lot of fans out there. I've known about this for days because my agent broke the news, but today she made a public post that she has pancreatic cancer that has metastized to the liver. You can send her and her family thoughts, prayers and well-wishes here: http://lkmadigan.livejournal.com/185246.html.

I've known Lisa for years. I have a little hanging mermaid she sent me that says "Impossible is a word humans use all too often." I hope Lisa can have many more beautiful moments on this planet. But I know pancreatic cancer is rough. My partner's mom died of it six years ago. In fact, curiously, I had a dream the other night, days before I heard Lisa's diagnosis, where Dade's mom visited me in my dream to tell me she was happy and watching over us. I never had a dream about her before, and this one was very vivid. I live my life with a deep faith that there is another world we can't quite see, that loved ones watch over us, that some "magic" can be real, that things happen for a reason...but on the surface I also doubt every day. I fear death. But moments like that...well, I really feel sometimes that Dade's mom has moved some things around to take care of us, and maybe she knew I needed a dream like that just then.

It's a sad day for so many of us in the writer community who love Lisa and hate to see something like this happen to anyone who still has so much to do and so many books to write. But the comments are her post truly are a beautiful outpouring of love.

On another note, also serious in a very different way, there has been a fresh crop of talk about illegal downloading of ebooks. Saundra Mitchell has a good post about it here.

I do think illegal downloading is something blown out of proportion. In some ways, it gets the word out. And I think only a fraction of downloaders would actually buy the book. We have no way of knowing how many. 5%? 10%? 20%? But I think a bigger concern is the idea that it is OKAY to download things illegally. I remember when mp3 downloading first happened...I think at first everyone thought of it as not much different than the decades-old tradition of making mix tapes. "Oh, now I can hear that one song I used to listen to ten years ago again...what was that?" Before we knew it, everyone was downloading full albums. All the time. Lots of people just assumed all musicians were rich anyway. But you know...they're not. And writers definitely aren't. Every time you buy a Magic Under Glass hardcover, you basically paid my wage for about...three words, by the time you add up all the editing and marketing and other stuff that goes into a career. And believe me, I don't make a lot of money. And three words isn't a lot. But when you add them all up, they make books. If you bought my book, it's kind of like three of the words in it are yours because you bought me the time to write them. If you checked it out from the library, three of the words in it belong to that library copy, and that's good too. You can even pick up some used words at the used bookstore. But for goodness sakes. Don't steal them. Just find some legal way around it, and it's a better world. And please don't encourage it in your friends either. (And fellow writers: I feel like we should all emphasize this at school visits while we have a (mostly) enraptured audience of the next generation!)

How I write period voice...and, um, bookshelf pictures!

2010-12-30T12:59:00.000-08:00

I did a blog interview today that asked about the period feel of my voice, and I realized I've gotten this question (or seen that comment in reviews) quite a few times, and maybe I could post about how I capture the feel of an era in voice.

The easy answer is, there is no easy answer, because for one thing, who is to say definitively what is the feel of an era? My editor flagged words as sounding too modern that came straight out of period literature, but I changed them because I decided actual accuracy wasn't as important as not jarring the reader's perception of accuracy. There is also the concern of not confusing a reader. In the 19th century, and into the 20th, oftentimes "dinner" was the midday meal and "supper" the evening meal. My grandparents still say supper. Lunch was not in such common use. But nowadays supper has fallen out of favor and many readers would be confused by the mid-day dinner/evening supper situation, so I stick with lunch and dinner.

Period voice is, for me, intuition as much as anything. But where does the intuition come from? Books!

Tip #1: Read a lot.

I am a non-fiction ADDICT. I buy some novels, sure, but what really opens my pocketbook is a good non-fiction book. My reference library is just to the right of my desk. Lots of books aren't even in there because they are scattered everywhere. (And of course, I'm also a heavy library user!)

If you're trying to capture a period voice, you have some options:
--Reading novels or memoirs/travelogues/whatever written in the time and place you are trying to capture
--Reading non-fiction about the era or collections of diaries and letters
--Reading novels/memoirs set in the era by someone who lived in the era, but written afterward...it might change their voice, but it might also be a bit easier to read

I recommend some of all of the above to get the most rounded picture. And what are you trying to pick up while reading?

#2: Pay attention to small details.
For instance, Magic Under Glass, pg. 28: "The servants filled a tub with hot water from brass canisters." I could have left off the brass canisters, certainly, and just say they filled the tub. And one mention of brass canisters or the silk lining of a carriage won't fill out the book. But when you slip them in here and there, it helps set a mood and paint a picture. These are the sorts of things I take note of when I read, to stick in later.

You can also take note of the words people use. The Betsy-Tacy books, for example, are full of natural teenage dialogue that doesn't sound like nowadays, the kind of thing you could jot down or the rhythms of which you can absorb if writing an early 20th century American novel:

"I don't see anything so special," Tib remarked.
"Why, we're sitting here drinking coffee," Betsy repeated somewhat lamely. "And not just for a lark."
Tacy's thoughts followed hers.
"We're actually juniors," she said, "stopping in for coffee after shopping, not freshmen or sophomores pretending to be juniors stopping in for coffee after shopping."
Tib looked confused. "You usually take chocolate. I've just got you in the habit of coffee because I come from Milwaukee."
"But Tib!" Betsy cried. "That isn't the point. The point is that we're so frightfully old."

#3: Which brings me to the mood and rhythm...
Even though so far I write fantasies inspired by historical periods rather than actually history, the mood and rhythm of the language is a huge part of creating the world. Between the Sea and Sky was intended to take place around 1800. I feel that writing around 1800 was often actually simpler-sounding than the Victorian period. Marie Antoinette's letters, for instance, often sound very modern to me. Of course they're translated, but still. Jane Austen is wordy but not as wordy as Dickens! So the language in the book I tried to keep straightforward, a little bit "classic" perhaps:

Ginnia led Esmerine from the dim bedroom. Dusk had crept up almost unnoticed until Esmerine came into a dining room lit by a candle and glowing hearth-fire. Sometimes the mermen started a fire on the islands for some purpose or another, but only certain men knew how, and children couldn’t come near, so Esmerine had never been close enough to fire to feel the heat. An older woman with gray curls falling across her cheeks beneath a squarish black cap was sitting quite near it, smoking a pipe. Could this be Belawyn? Esmerine couldn’t believe a mermaid would smoke.
Ginnia went to stir the pot while Swift waved her to an empty seat. Alan was pouring red wine. “Esmerine, do you want wine or water?” he asked.
“I’ve never tasted wine.”
He poured a little in a cup and handed it to her. She took a sip and was surprised it was not at all sweet or salty, just nasty and like nothing else she had ever tasted.
Swift laughed. “She doesn’t like it.”

Magic Under Glass is inspired by the Victorian era, and the voice was more "affected":

I joined Mr. Parry in the tower—not the top of the tower, which must have been shut off like the rest of the upper stories, but the second floor, a small circular room with three huge windows overlooking the woods. A table already bore a spread of food: thin soup, more crusty bread, and some kind of drink in a silver pitcher. A footman waited in the shadows, in the invisible way of servants. Mr. Parry was standing, waiting for me to arrive before he took his seat. The footman pulled out a chair for me.
I smoothed my skirts underneath me and took the heavy, carved chair.
“A pity it rains,” Mr. Parry said, pouring himself the drink: something red and bubbly. “I suppose the gardens had to wait.”
He held the pitcher over my glass and I nodded. “Yes, sir. I don’t mind. I explored the house, the library—I spent ages reading. The sun might have set without my notice.” I chose my words carefully, feeling the need to make proper conversation, whatever that meant. I’d read it in stories, but I’d never shared a table with a gentleman before.

I'm working on a Weimar Berlin inspired setting now, and the voice in this one becomes more modern, a tad choppier and more cynical:

Thea hoped for a moment that it would be one of the old cakes, but of course it wasn’t. Mother didn’t even know how to make a cake right anymore. She used to make buttery pound cakes, and moist apple cakes, and gingerbread… When Thea opened the pantry, she saw the same old chocolate cake sitting there. It wasn’t even a good chocolate cake. Too dense, with a strange sour taste.
Still, she sliced it and got the coffee going. She set the table with plates and cups, all chipped by now from something or another, and when all was ready, she pulled Mother away from the window and into a chair.
Mother picked at her cake. “I do like this cake.”
“I’m glad you do, because you made it.” Thea chewed on hers, sorry that good flour and sugar had gone to waste.

(I used three eating scenes, to try to offer the best comparison...)

And one more note, because good HEAVENS this is going on forever:
#4: Don't forget to consider the age, sex, class and location of your character(s) when shaping the voice. My great-grandmother was born in the teens and grew up in Ohio, and the letters she sent to me as a kid and the way she talked always carried the flavor of an older era. Consider the past of your world too! And of course, a character's class can have a huge effect on their speech.

Of course whatever voice you use, it won't work for someone. For every two people who praise Magic Under Glass's voice, I see a review that said it was too "precious" or something. But at least I know it's as accurate as I can make it, being a modern girl, and that's the best you can do!

More Art in 2011!: Ifra

2010-12-29T10:22:00.000-08:00

One of my New Year's Resolutions this year is to post more art!! Of course, part of the reason I haven't posted much is because my computer doesn't have a scanner or Photoshop. Bit of a deterrent. But I'm getting around it, even if the art doesn't look that polished. Oh, well. I like to think of it like a 19th century tinted picture.

Anyway, I got some Pitt brush pens for Christmas so I've been playing around with them, and I drew this picture of Ifra, because I also got a book about clothes around the world, and Ifra has the most colorful male dress in the book, for sure. He's also my favorite character in Magic Under Stone. He looks a little intense here, I must say, which is not really OUT of character, but also isn't quite how I think of him. But he's pretty easy on the eyes I think. Poor Erris is probably jealous (although I'm not sure he should be, since Ifra has plenty to be an angst-puppy about himself).

(Click for larger image)

Also, NEWS FROM SPAIN, for my Spanish readers: I am told the Spanish version of Magic Under Glass will be released in February! I'm so excited!

2010 Writer-ly Year in Review!

2010-12-26T09:53:00.000-08:00

I'm too braindead to do much of worth today, so I compiled my year-end roundup. What a year! I went to tons of events and met more cool people--fellow writers, bloggers, teachers, librarians, booksellers, publishing house people, etc. than I can count, including a good solid critique partner, which is kind of a first! *waves at Jess* I can't believe how many long-time internet friends I got to meet for the first (and sometimes second!) time this year. I can't even begin to list the amazing experiences I've had this year (and a few that were funny in hindsight).

People often say writing isn't glamorous, but you know what? I think it can be pretty darn glamorous. I get to do what I love every day, even when I'm tearing my hair out, and make friends all over the country and world so I have friends wherever I go. Sure, I'm not a big author who gets invited to BEA or does tours or has people clamoring for signings, I did most of my traveling on my own dime thanks to my proximity to a big airport with a lot of cheap flights and friends that are willing to offer spare beds to me. But I can't imagine I'll be much happier even if/when I am that kind of author, because this year was full of great moments with wonderful people, wonderful books, and at its best, wonderful food.

I also had constant deadlines for the first time ever, so I felt very official. This year between February and November I wrote Magic Under Stone, the short story for Corsets and Clockwork, and did two rounds of revision on Between the Sea and Sky. In my "off time" I worked on revisions of Alfred and Olivia for my agent and got to work switching my Grim Reaper WIP over to middle grade. I'm not really sure what 2011 is going to bring me, but I'm trying to enjoy my temporary freedom from deadlines. (I both miss and do not miss deadlines when I don't have them...)

Just a few photo highlights from the year, from top to bottom:

1. Me and the luminous Kathleen Duey at Miami SCBWI
2. Me reading at my debut party
3. Amy Brecount White, Maggie Stiefvater, and me at ALA
4. Tenners lunch at ALA (delicious tapas and L to R, Amy Brecount White, Karen Kincy, Christina Diaz Gonzalez, Lindsey Leavitt, Holly Hoxter, Margie Gelbwasser)
5. The Bloomsbury/Walker crew at NCTE: Danette Haworth, Kate Messner, Katie Fee of Bloomsbury, Mickey Mouse (we were all trying not to be the one snuggling up to Mickey, lol), fellow Bowie-fan Jessica Warman, me, Beth Eller of Bloomsbury.

Thank yoooou!!! + Magic Under Glass comics!

2010-12-21T15:37:00.001-08:00

Today is the last day of my debut year. And what a year it has been. There were times of immense stress...and times of immense joy. But the best part of all was getting to meet and talk to fans, and seeing that, a year later, my book is still being talked about here and there. Still getting reviewed, still getting added to Goodreads. I appreciate all these signs of life SOOO much! I hope that you'll like the sequel in 2012 and, before that, Between the Sea and Sky. I couldn't really do too many nifty things for Magic Under Glass because I had a repetitive stress injury at the time, but I have a few neat little plans for Sea and Sky.

For today, however, enjoy these Magic Under Glass comics I made (a while back, actually...I've been lazy about scanning them, as you can probably tell since one addresses the new cover which only came out MOOOONTHS ago). Click to see them bigger! (Sorry the text is kind of hard to read otherwise...>_<)

Foreign editions update

2010-12-18T07:01:00.000-08:00

This popped up on Goodreads this week. It seems to be the Indonesian cover for Magic Under Glass! Yes, they're both blonde now... (Needless to say, not only do authors rarely have much to do with their domestic covers, international releases? It's not uncommon for us to find out our books have sold abroad because Google alerts, Goodreads, or fans reveal, oh hey, guess what, your book is out in another country!) Such was the case with Indonesia! I had no idea. You know what I DO love about this cover, though? As someone with a lifelong interest in historical fashion and fashion illustration...the dress is just perfect. And it looks like Erris even has red heels on his shoes...

Anyway, I don't know for SURE that is the cover or just a placeholder of some kind, and it LOOKS like the book releases in Jan '11 there. I'm ashamed to say I don't know much about Indonesia, except that I love your Ting Ting Jahe ginger candy... If any Indonesian readers come by my blog I'd love to hear a little about your country and what you like to read!

I'm also always poking around to see when the Spanish release of Magic Under Glass is coming out. I had a fabulous chat with some Spanish readers a few months ago and they were SO nice I'm eager to have more Spanish readers. =D I promised I would learn a little Spanish for the release, so if anyone happens to see a date for it, do let me know! (I'd love to learn a little of EVERY language it comes out in, but that's not really practical unless I am turned into a vampire or some other form of immortal...

There is also, supposedly, a Thai edition coming out someday. I know nothing about the publisher or date. But I'll let you know when I do, of course.

Favorite Museums?

2010-12-12T10:19:00.000-08:00

This is so random, but the Lightner Museum in St. Augustine has come up in conversation several times this week, and I was thinking how the Lightner might just be my favorite museum I've ever been to, which then got me thinking about what my OTHER favorite museums I've ever been to are. I was in D.C. twice this year and I went to the American History museum, because I've always wanted to see things I've heard of like the flag and the First Ladies dresses and stuff, but it was kind of disappointing, honestly. Too crowded, too tourist-y, and as Dade said, "I think 10% of the people here actually want to be here." So the best museums are probably the ones I've never heard of.

Here are my favorites, although of course there are many many MANY more to see in the world, and some gems I don't remember because I was a kid when we went there and I have no idea what they were!

The Lightner Museum, St. Augustine, FL
This is housed in an old Flagler hotel, and just the building is impressive. It had an indoor pool, which has since been drained and is part of the museum, as well as a steam room, both of which you can easily imagine Gilded Age folk wandering in and out of. It has a bit of a "Titanic" air to it. There is such a random assortment of stuff--from art and glass, to a mummy and weird collections--that anyone would be hard pressed not to find SOMETHING interesting, but the best part is the mechanical musical instruments. It's worth it to catch the twice-daily (if they haven't changed it) demonstration. I particularly love the Violano-Virtuoso, which was electric, and starts up with this great slow thrum and lights coming on and then it plays and it sounds just horrid. In a wonderful way.

Pioneer Memorial Museum, Salt Lake City, UT
This museum is just a ton of old junk shoved together with a lot of information and it's kind of creepy. I say both "junk" and "creepy" in the best possible way imaginable. We went to this museum when I was like, 10, and we only had an hour to look before it closed, or maybe less, and I almost cried (or maybe I did cry, I was a weepy child) because I could have spent hours and hours in there. Yeah, I've been a total history geek as far back as my memory goes.

Carl Sandburg Home, Flat Rock, NC
I've toured a lot of houses in my day, and this was one of my favorites, although I don't remember it very well. It's been years! I just know there are goats. And I think this is the place where everything is just like Carl Sandburg left it, even the trash in the trash can. But don't quote me on that.

Ringling Museum, Sarasota, FL
This place is huh-yuge. it's like three museums. Plus grounds. There is the Ringling House (which unfortunately, you have to do with a tour group and it's a bigger tour group than I'd like, compressed into smaller space than I'd like, and they are very strict, but it's designed like a Venetian palace), a circus museum and an art museum. We were here all day and we barely made it through the art museum, but it's an impressive collection.

The Met, New York, NY
Well, this is one museum that absolutely lives up to the hype. It's a little overwhelming. But you can spend forever in there and find something new each time. I recommend reading Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, too, which gave me a new appreciation for the collection and all the work that goes into it!

What are your favorite museums? Any museums of historical interest I ought to add to my list of dream museums?

2010-12-10T07:22:00.000-08:00

December Lights is a website Stephanie Burgis and Patrick Samphire set up for some fun, funny fantasy short stories, some of it holiday themed. I contributed a short story set in Arestin that I wrote some years back (and updated a bit). There's some great stuff there, and a fantastic contributor list:

Jacey Bedford
Marie Brennan
Stephanie Burgis
Deborah Coates
Leah Cypess
Jaclyn Dolamore
Eugie Foster
Pamela Freeman
Maurissa Guibord
Karen Healey
Tracy Lynn
Sarah Prineas
Jenn Reese
Patrick Samphire
Sherwood Smith
Tiffany Trent

So check it out! http://www.decemberlightsproject.com/

Holiday Book Recs!

2010-12-07T14:54:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year! Time to recommend some books I read and really enjoyed in 2010.

Harmonic Feedback by Tara Kelly
Drea has Asperger's, and no friends, especially since she and her mom have just moved back in with Drea's judgmental grandmother. She's also a musician, and when she makes friends with hot musician boy Justin and neighbor Naomi, her life...you know, changes, because this is a book and that's what happens in books. It's terrific. Great writing, great romance, and it rings very true. I don't have Asperger's but I can still seriously identify with the struggles to make friends and fit in while being your (weird) self. Buy it for anyone who feels alienated, and anyone who likes great contemporary fiction.

Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly
A girl in the present grieving her brother meets the past in the form of the French revolution in this emotional, rich novel that you won't soon forget. Buy it for: History fans, people who like epic-feeling novels, anyone who thinks catacombs are fascinating!

The Twin's Daughter by Lauren Baratz-Logsted
When the identical and heretofore unknown twin to Lucy's mother shows up on their doorstep, a web of deception, mystery, and MURDER begins! This 19th century era novel definitely has that creepy "secrets in the house" Gothic feel. The prose is somewhat detached, but for the story it absolutely worked for me. Also I totally had a crush on the love interest, Kit... Buy it for: Fans of Gothic and Victorian novels. (Like Magic Under Glass!)

White Cat by Holly Black
Tired of the same old urban fantasy? I know I am, which is why this novel of magic and mobsters was one of my favorite UF in awhile. I was definitely surprised by some of the twists, the characters are very well-developed, and the world building is like nothing else out there. Buy it for any urban fantasy lover!

Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters by Natalie Standiford
I think the cover of this book is rather generic compared to the absolutely delightful and clever writing within. I liked How to Say Goodbye in Robot a lot, but this I adored! The Sullivan Sisters tell their stories in the form of letters of confession to their grandmother, who has threatened to cut them out of the will because of what one of them has done. This book had me laughing out loud in places, and adoring the characters. Buy it for: The coolest person you know and anyone who likes witty humor.

There you go. My top recs for the year. Enjoy!

MY FAVORITE YA NOVEL EVER

2010-11-19T19:37:00.001-08:00

Sometimes a book comes along that you just love so much and you see people buzzing about it for awards and you get really excited and invested because OMG YOU LOVE THAT BOOK and then it doesn't get nominated for anything and now there are copies at Amazon for a penny and a sales rank over a million and you wish you could just buy three thousand copies yourself and send them to everyone you know or will ever know and tell to read it if they have ANY interest in a wonderful historical love story.

That book, for me, is A True and Faithful Narrative by Katherine Sturtevant which came out in 2006 and now seems almost entirely forgotten. Let me tell you what I love about this book:

--Meg, the main character. She loves reading and writing, and her journey to becoming a writer is wonderful and rings very true. She's a strong girl that modern women can identify with, but at the same time she is most definitely a product of her age. Modern girls might like her, but she is NOT a modern girl plunked into the 17th century.
--Edward, the love interest, and his relationship with Meg. It's not simple. It's not quick. It keeps you guessing a bit. As a reader, I had time to fall in love with Edward myself. He's smart. He's a bit tortured (quite literally, he was physically tortured). But it's not too much. One of my favorite book love interests ever. If you like love stories between smart people, for goodness sake do yourself a favor and BUY THIS RIGHT NOW.
--There is a subplot about Muslims and Islam and the politics and relations of the time that are accurate to the past but also resonate to now, and they're very well thought out. Shades of grey on both sides. I love shades of grey.
--The language and historical feel. It feels like the time period, but it's not stilted...it feels fresh, like you're really there, and besides that some of the lines in this book are very lyrical and wonderful but not pretentiously so.

Reviewing books has never been my forte, so I hardly know how to say how much I love this book, but really, read it. I don't reread books that often but I've reread this one, and I'll reread it again more than once.

Ten Types of Reviews That Make Authors Sad

2010-11-18T10:47:00.000-08:00

First, let me say that I love reviews in general. Some authors avoid reading their reviews ever. But I actually would not want to never read my reviews. I like knowing that some people loved my book, I love seeing thoughtful reactions, I like knowing what generally didn't go over well, and so while I might angst about those things, I enjoy them too. I praise those who are wise to avoid them to protect their sanity, but I will keep reading reviews. I've probably read 500 different opinions of Magic Under Glass already. After awhile, any one opinion means very little, but getting a feel for the collective opinion is nice.

So this is not a criticism against reviewers. This is just...a hopefully amusing list inspired by a Tenners/Elevensies chat the other day in which we Tenners warned the Elevensies what to expect and NOT TO STRESS over it. If possible. (Probably not possible.)

All book examples are made up and resemblance to real books is purely coincidental. In no particular order:

1. The Sloppy Slam. The reviewer didn't like your book. Or maybe they kind of liked it, but damned it with faint praise. More importantly, they called your fairy character a pixie and spelled Rutherford's name wrong, so clearly they weren't even PAYING ATTENTION REALLY so how dare they say the whole thing was just dumb? Also they added an apostrophe in an ungrammatical place.

2. The Turnaround. This reviewer was so excited to read your book. They drove 60 miles from their small town to the only bookstore in their entire county, pawning jewelry they inherited from their grandmother so they could buy your book in hardcover. And they are SOOO disappointed because this book SUCKS. I always feel so, so bad, so much so that when people tell me they just bought my book and can't wait to read it I'm just like, "I'M SORRY IF YOU HATE IT!!!"

3. The Unfair Criticism. This reviewer maybe even liked your book but they think the cover is sooo ugly, why did the author let them use that cover, or the font size is too big or too small and it's not available on Kindle and why did the sequel get pushed back a season?

4. The Mind-Reader. So, the other day you were thinking about some tiny little flaw in your book or work in general that luckily no one has never really commented on or noticed, and...the very next day, someone DOES notice.

5. The Reviewer With a Vengeance. All right. They didn't like your book. Fair enough. But did they have to go comment on every good review of it all over the web and point out how they didn't like it? Did they have to say something like "every other review of this on Amazon is so glowing but that just shows the dumbing down of the American taste" or "I can't BELIEVE Kirkus gave this a starred review"? It's a little much. Dear writer, have some chocolates.

6. The Assumption. Some reviewers see context in your work you never intended or realized, which is entirely fair and a part of literary criticism. Once it's published, interpretations are out of your hands. But it does get painful when readers assume you had an agenda that you didn't actually have, or when they seem to miss the point entirely, like say you make sure to handle teen sex in a sensitive, responsible way and show birth control and everything and the review makes it out like your characters are a bunch of irresponsible whores. Or they assume the characters' thoughts and beliefs are exactly like yours. Maybe they weren't reading carefully. Maybe you could have done better. You keep thinking about it. DID you put that in there? Ugh, maybe you did. Or maybe they're just stupid. Or maybe you did. Dude. Stop thinking about it, and whatever you do, do not comment on the review for goodness sake.

7. The Wrong Reader. So, say you adore writing about sensitive musician boys, maybe you are even married to a sensitive musician boy, and the reviewer is just like "OMG I HATE SENSITIVE MUSICIAN BOYS!" Well, they were not the reader for your book. The sensitive musician boy is what kept you going when you almost gave up on this book. There is no way you can please this reader and yourself at the same time. Why does it still hurt!?

8. The Reviewer That is Obviously Wrong. Obviously Wrong, Damnit! You've gotten fifty reviews that said your ideas were so original, and then you get the one who says that your book is the most typical unimaginative piece of tripe that they've ever read. What book were they reading? Maybe one of your books was somehow printed with a different book inside? Yes. Yes, that is it.

9. The Salt in the Wound. So, every book can always be better. From the moment your book leaves your hands, you will probably already be thinking about its weak points. This reviewer gives you a critical review that you totally agree with. And it makes you cringe. Augh, you could have pleased this person! If only you could take the book back and fix things! Please will they give your next book a chance? You have realized the error of your ways!

10. The Blog You Once Loved. So, you love a certain bloggers reviews. They have great taste! They like all the books you like! Their good reviews make you want to rush out and buy the book, and their bad reviews are so witty and astute and fun to read...oh. Until they hate yours. Oh. How...how could they?

So, there you go. Collect them all! It's a rite of passage. Just like rejections.

Contest winner, etc.

2010-11-15T07:24:00.000-08:00

I got back from my trip Saturday night and today I am finally sort of gathering myself and getting things done. It was an exhausting but wonderful voyage!

AND, I actually turned in Magic Under Stone before I departed. Yes! It has an ending! There are some parts of it, ending included, that I fear are still rather rough and I'm still cringing a bit...I wrote it so much faster than anything else I've ever written. But, still, for it being my first sequel and quite a bit longer than Magic Under Glass I am very happy with how it turned out. I can't wait to see what my editor will suggest for making it even better.

(Well, actually I can wait. I can totally wait. I don't want to see that thing again for a little bit.)

Between the Sea and Sky already has been added to over 600 to-read lists on Goodreads! Guys, that is a lot!! Thank you!! And the winner of the book package is Nicole (at Ink and Prose)! Nicole, I'll email you later today with a list of books to choose from.

Between the Sea and Sky cover!

2010-11-01T08:35:00.000-07:00

The cover of my next book is live!

I got to see this cover back in May and I've had to wait all this time to share it with anyone. *writhes*

I LOVED writing this book so much. As I've described before, I envisioned like Jane Austen meets Miyazaki movie (and had soundtracks to both in heavy rotation while writing it). It's about a mermaid named Esmerine who runs into her old childhood friend winged dude Alan, while looking for her sister Dosinia who ran away with a human man. There is flying, and humor, and a brassy old woman, and a bookstore, and lots of love to literature (of the 18th century variety, at least), and kissing in a vineyard, and relationships between sisters, and Alan is somewhat of an intellectual snot, which I always enjoy, personally. Not so much of an intellectual snot that I wouldn't date him. You know.

It's set in the same world as Magic Under Glass but instead of being Victorian England/America-ish, it's based on Italy around 1800. (And man, I did way too much research on actual Italy for it being a made up Italy...)

So I'll have a wee contest for it. Add it to Goodreads (or if you've already added it, obviously, you're in, although I'd appreciate it if you could click the link and "change to this edition") for 1 entry:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9583173-between-the-sea-and-sky

Posting the cover on your blog will get you 5 entries.

You must comment back here with a link. Contest ends 11/14 midnight EST because I'm going on vacation.

Winner can choose three books from my stash of "already-read" books that I've either bought or picked up at ALA/BEA (I have very limited space to keep fiction so I cycle through them quickly!)...there are about thirty books to choose from, such as: The Eternal Ones, Plain Kate, Before I Fall, Hunger, Silver Phoenix, The Half-Life of Planets, Extraordinary... Lots more. I'll try to read some more before the contest ends too. Or you can opt for a signed UK copy of Magic Under Glass for one of your selections.

International entries allowed but you only get to choose one book cause I can't afford to ship too many overseas.

Developing a magical system

2010-10-23T09:51:00.000-07:00

Ah, good intentions gone awry. I meant to post more about world building this week but I had to put down my beloved cat of the past ten years, Tacy, who had cancer. I posted about it more extensively in my personal blog, I won't recap here, but suffice to say I haven't really been thinking about anything creative. =( I'm feeling a little better today, though, so I'll attempt some blabber about magic systems.

I'll admit it, I find creating magic systems kind of a bore, especially what I think of as "sorcery" type magic. In Arestin, the magic I deal with most is actually telepathy, which I find more interesting. But, in the Magic Under Glass world, we have no telepathy, just sorcery. In Magic Under Glass it was kind of vague--Nimira really didn't come from a magic background so she didn't know magic or know much about how it worked, but for Magic Under Stone I had to figure it out a little better.

Some questions to ask oneself while developing a magical system:

--Does everyone have the innate ability to use the magical system?
--Are there different types of people with different abilities or potential abilities?
--Is magic something you study, or does it just simply happen?
--Are certain types of people forbidden from certain magics?
--Are certain types of magic forbidden, period? Or, the reverse--are certain magics only allowed to a few, like court magicians?
--How is magic categorized in the world? This may affect how magic is studied or thought of.

In Arestin, for example, magic is categorized as either "aggressive" or "passive" (they probably have a better word for it in their language)...like, shapeshifting is aggressive, healing is passive. Moving something with your mind is aggressive, merely sensing it is passive. Traditionally aggressive magic is considered a masculine art and passive magic more of a feminine one, which of course annoys a lot of people in progressive modern Arestin, and affects how these abilities are perceived, just as our cultural perception of sewing and cooking being female arts and say, building shelves and sword fighting being masculine affects how these activities are perceived and taught. It's good to know these details about your world so they can come up organically in writing and make everything feel more rich.

In Magic Under Glass, magic is categorized by species: earth (fairies), fire (humans and also jinn), water (merfolk), air (winged folk). There is also spirit magic, accessible to all races and considered the most dangerous and mysterious. Every race kind of has their own rules and thoughts about magic, though. Some of it was based on legend and myth, some on astrology and some on mere common sense.

Sometimes it's kind of hard for my brain to juggle two worlds with two different magic systems! I tend to have a certain way I think magic could work and I have trouble writing about it working in a drastically different way in another world. There are still some major similarities between magic in Arestin and Magic Under Glass...but Arestin has telepathy and Magic Under Glass has a distinct spirit realm, that's the major difference.

In a relatively unrelated note, I realized today that the fairies in Magic Under Glass are really more like elves. If I had called them elves I probably wouldn't see the occasional bitchy review about how I didn't follow lore. (I'm sorry! It's an alternate earth with echoes of our world so I wanted alternate lore with some echoes of our fairy lore.) But fairies are hot and elves are not, and I need to sell books, so I guess I'm not that sorry. ;)

Fantasy world-building, religion, and curse words/slang

2010-10-16T16:19:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking--if I can find the time--I might do a few posts on fantasy world-building this week and some of the things that I consider when I'm world-building. This means I will be discussing the Magic Under Glass world (henceforth referred to, romantically, as "MUG world") and my Arestin world, which is an as-yet-unpublished world but I've been writing about it since I was 12 so I learned a lot about world-building from it.

Religion is just another aspect to consider when you're world-building, but it's one of the trickier ones because people can get annoyed about it. The most common religions in fantasy are, I think, belief in a pantheon of gods who may or may not be present as characters, or some kind of Goddess. I assume a goddess sounds more mystical than a god, and, well, you avoid that whole parallel with Judeo-Christian religion. Or, usually in Medieval-based fantasy, there is always the Evil Religion with Evil Priests and Oppressive Church in the Pocket of Evil King. Or you can just leave it out. In Harry Potter, for example, I always thought it was weird that Christmas was celebrated at Hogwarts but otherwise there was no mention of religion or religious holidays. I totally understood why she had it like that--goodness knows she got enough flak already--but it did make me wonder what people of different religions and beliefs would think of suddenly finding out they were a wizard, and what a fascinating story that would be to explore.

In the MUG world, I pretty much left religion out. Religion was an integral part of community life in the 19th century (it does come up in my Corsets and Clockwork story, in a casual sort of way); everyone pretty much went to church whether they really believed in it or not, and MUG is obviously set in an alternate 19th century, but then, do I make up an alternate Christianity for Hollin and Annalie? An alternate something for Nimira to have been raised with? What about fairies? Oh, the complications! Better not to mess with it.

In the Arestin stories, since I started writing them at 12 (Mists of Avalon phase ahoy) I went right for the whole goddess thing, so I could have a bunch of mystical women in robes and stuff. If you're reading a lot of 90s King Arthur retellings and listening to Loreena McKennit, what else would you come up with? There were two races in the world, the Goddess-worshipping Miralem and the Daramons who were of course all, "We will oppress your Goddess religion, rawr!" It was pretty typical at first. Over time, though, of course, things evolved and I worked out that the Daramons were quite different--their whole religious belief and how their moral choices were shaped wasn't even based around gods at all, but around reincarnation. I think if most of them believe in a God of some sort, it's more of a nebulous force of the universe than something you would worship. Daramons tend to believe in things that are more logical (at least, in their mind) than Miralem, and they don't generally pray or worship anything. They do tend to believe in karma, but I'm sure there is plenty of argument amongst them about who or what is deciding this karma, exactly.

This brings me to curse words and fantasy slang. I suspect that Daramon curse words are probably different than ours and some of them are probably based on these reincarnation beliefs, but how would you convey that without it sounding incredibly stupid? I don't feel that I could, especially since Arestin is a modern world with imported Earth culture and it would sound sooo jarring if Alfred was like, "By all the lives of my ancestors, the latest Arcade Fire album is awesome!" Or something. If it was an epic fantasy and he was like, "By the karmic power of the stars, this new broadsword is a dream!" that might sound a little better. (A little...) There is also the option of making up some word the characters can say all the time, but I don't like that either. For one thing, most languages have more than one word that is used all the time, but you don't want to throw in ten nonsense slang words, nor do you want to annoy with overuse of one. For another, what works in one language doesn't necessarily work in otherwise translated dialogue. Try throwing in Japanese curse words into English speech and making them sound right! The inflection is just all wrong.

Perhaps most importantly, the period you're trying to convey must be considered. Between the Sea and Sky takes place in a Regency-type world, so I felt I could completely get away with characters saying "Skies above!" or "Waters!" If it's replacing "Dear me!" or something, it sounds fine. If it's supposed to replace "Damn!", or worse, that might be...well, rather inadequate.

Oof. It's a lot to consider.

For more on the topic of religion in fantasy:
R. J. Anderson on religion in fantasy (I know I've seen another post from her on the topic but I can't find it anymore...)
Interview by Melodye Shore with Barry Deutsch, writer/illustrator of Hereville, which incorporates Orthodox Judaism and fantasy
Interview with Elizabeth Bunce at the Enchanted Inkpot where she talks about religious themes in "Starcrossed" and developing the gods in the book

Next time I might talk about developing magic systems. I already started blabbing about it in someone's blog comments yesterday so I think I can get a whole post about it...

Win a critique from me!

2010-10-16T16:03:00.000-07:00

My friend Larissa is running the Florida Writers Association auction, so I donated a 20 page critique for their auction (to benefit literacy).

It only runs through 10/19 at 10 pm Eastern so don't delay!

Click here for details and see the rest of the critique donations.

Corsets and Clockwork update

2010-10-11T17:32:00.001-07:00

Ooh, it looks like it has a cover!:

Also, a list of contributors:

Anna Aguirre
Jaclyn Dolamore =D
Tessa Gratton
Caitlin Kittredge
Adrienne Kress
Lesley Livingston
Dru Pagliassotti
Dia Reeves
Michael Scott
Maria V. Snyder
Tiffany Trent
Kiersten White

That's 12, it says 14, so I guess the description is not entirely accurate yet. I'm grabbing this from Amazon UK, so, ya know.

My story caused me a considerable amount of angst but it's done and I have to say I really like it and I had many enjoyable hours of research on airships and conjoined twins from it. Also I've read DIa Reeves's story and it ROCKS. This collection is gonna have some really good stuff in it.

The agony of the sequel

2010-10-03T14:48:00.000-07:00

Magic Under Stone is coming close to the denouement (a word I can spell but likely not pronounce!). I'm feeling a bit of panic.

Writing a sequel is really weird. With Magic Under Glass I had no fan base, no idea how anyone would respond to my work, what people would love and hate about it. Now I have voices in my head: People who want X, people who want more of Z. People who hate Z.

Well, I can never please every fan. But I'm my own first fan. I'd like to please myself, at least! Sometimes I worry if I've even managed that. You know, as a fan, I have my own expectations for the sequel. Certain characters I want to see more of, certain things I want to happen, and as I write, sometimes the characters don't cooperate, sometimes a certain character has turned out to be the kitchen sink--you know, there's everything in it BUT them.

It's the hardest thing when I really WANT something to happen and it just isn't fitting in. Augh. Fan me is so disappointed! Damn that Jaclyn Dolamore!

On the other hand, there have been some marvelous surprises. I'm loving two certain new characters a lot more than I expected. And I didn't think character X was going to turn up much, and they did, and they are awesome.

Either way, it's definitely going to be my longest and most ambitious work yet, and it's always nice to feel like you've moved up a notch in what you're capable of.

What rejections and a ukulele taught me about failure

2010-10-01T14:44:00.000-07:00

I just watched the Oprah interview with J. K. Rowling, and was thoroughly fascinated. She talked a little about the importance of failure, which I thought was interesting since I was JUST mulling over failure myself yesterday. It seems like whenever I mull over something, someone else talks about it. Usually on a blog with 10x more readers than this one. Well, this time it was national TV, so my thoughts keep moving up even when I don't. ;)

I'm gonna talk about it anyway. Sometimes when I'm talking to teens or aspiring writers or whatever, I feel kind of bad, because I want to encourage people who are struggling to achieve their dreams. I ALWAYS wanted to be a writer, always wrote a lot, was always praised for my writing, had a lot of encouragement, etc. It did take me three years to find an agent and I really worked on my craft during that time, but it would be a lie to tell you that I started out completely clueless and awful. I was always good at telling stories. I don't feel it's braggy to say so. I could tell by the way people around me reacted. The same goes for art, although it wasn't my passion so I never honed it as much.

However, because I WAS really talented at certain things from a young age and I knew it, I tended to avoid new things I was NOT good at. Anything athletic, for example. I quickly gave up on learning to ice skate or do any sort of structured dancing, ditto karate, archery, or basically anything sporty, even if it interested me. Music was another one. I tried learning the guitar as a teen and dumped it pretty fast. I sucked at playing guitar. Learning to sew, you can add that to the list too. I deeply resisted learning to cook, too--it was only that my burning desire to eat decent food overwhelmed me.

When Magic Under Glass sold, I asked for a ukulele for Christmas. This time, learning an instrument was a new experience. Ukuleles are pretty easy to play in a basic way, so that's satisfying, but I still have to admit the whole world of playing an instrument is new to me. I don't know how things work or the terms. It's not intuitive to me. Sometimes I feel like I'm trying to do algebra when I look at ukulele lessons. There is nothing remotely special or impressive about anything I have EVER played on that ukulele.

I realized it's one of the first things I've ever done knowing that if I am ever praised or noticed for my ukulele-ing skill, that day is FAR, FAAAAR away. It's not like I write or draw strictly for praise or attention, but if everything you ever do is praised and noticed--at least sometimes--it's kind of hard to do something that you'll probably never be stellar at.

It's kind of liberating in a way I never knew. I can just mess around without any sense of pressure on myself. But I think I was able to do it because I've sold a book, and "proven" myself in my preferred area of expertise. And maybe because I'd learned a lesson by putting my book out there to agents and editors, something I couldn't do for a long while.

I wish I'd been easier on myself before. Why did I need to be good at everything? I didn't realize how much I feared failure, and might have held myself back from learning a lot of new things.

Succeeding in the arts (or probably, anything you're passionate about) is all about embracing rejection and failure, and learning from it, even when you're starting off with some inherent talent. For years I was afraid to query even though I thought I was a good writer. I must have suspected deep-down that I wasn't as great as I thought I was, and I was afraid to come down. There is definitely a deep fear about moving to a new level of achievement or competition, that what cut it before won't cut it there, that there are others much better than you are. The first rejection I ever got from an agent made me cry. The first rejection of a partial made me cry, and a full, and sometimes I'd just be in the midst of the process and random tears would sneak up on me: What if I'm never good enough? I thought I was special and I'm NOT. I am MEDIOCRE and my writing does not make anyone desperate to acquire.

But in other ways, I learned to enjoy even the process of submission and rejection. Every rejection meant I was OUT THERE. I was LEARNING. For years, I was afraid to do it, and now I WAS DOING IT. And man, even if I meant I had to step down from the protected tower, it also meant that I wasn't one of the people who just TALKS.

In hindsight, one of the things I'm most proud of about myself in the last five years is not that I succeeded, but that I learned to fail.

Do we write for ourselves, our audience, or our generation?

2010-09-27T12:53:00.000-07:00

Hannah Moskowitz had a thought-provoking post some weeks back at her blog about whether the YA community has gotten too insular...I don't agree with all of it, but I gotta love Hannah for getting me thinking. I love a good juicy blog discussion.

One of the sub-discussions that popped up was whether we should, or do, write for ourselves or for our audience.

So, I was just reading a book of interviews with children's writers from the library (AuthorTalk). The book came out in 2000 and I think the bulk of the writers were born in the 1930s. I mean, obviously if you're going to be one of the few selected for interviews in a book representative of the genre, you're going to be somewhat of a classic in your own time, so these aren't whippersnappers like me. (That may have been the first time in my life I used the word "whippersnappers", and I have to say, I never noticed what a fun cadence that word has.)

A recurring theme I noticed with these writers is that when they were young, they didn't see a lot of books about kids like them, whether it was because of race, or class, or because they lived in a big city, or whatever. These writers, and others like them, shaped the next generation of children's literature, the stuff I read as a kid in the 80s, where lots of kids lived in New York or Boston, and there were Jewish kids and black kids, and kids with really down-to-earth lives, money troubles, divorce, etc.

Of course, since I grew up with those books on the shelves, AND old books like Betsy-Tacy and Emily of New Moon and My Father's Dragon and Doctor Dolittle, it all blended together with little sense of How Far We'd Come, and meanwhile, I wondered where the books I wanted to read were. Like, why were fantasy books always set in pseudo-Medieval England? Why were they incredibly lacking in influence from other cultures or time periods? Why were disabled characters always either aggravatingly cheerful or just plain aggravating with a big fat lesson at the end? And we won't even get started on race. I mean, sure, books about other races existed in the mainstream, which was an improvement, but they were awfully pigeonholed...we still have this problem, but it gets better with the years. And gay characters? I didn't even know what gay WAS until I was like...nine or ten. This seems unbelievable now, and yeah, my childhood was SORT of isolated, but I did read teen magazines from the time I was nine and I recall no mention of gay teens at that point. (When I did find out, it wasn't from books or magazines either, btw, it was a documentary on PBS, probably about AIDS.)

I won't lie that one of my motivations in writing was to write books with the things I perceived to be missing from the stuff available, to reflect the world as I saw it, even in a fantasy novel. I was writing, in part, for my generation, the kid I was and the kids my friends were.

And, in fact, diversity was certainly not my only aim. One thing I desperately wanted to read about was HOT BOYS. I had trouble with that as a preteen and young teen because I liked skinny, artsy, sensitive boys who had angsty pasts and maybe some conflict but were still reasonably good guys, whereas most romance stories, whether for YA or adults, seemed to run more toward jocks and alpha males or bad boys. When anime came along, it blew my little mind because apparently Asian cultures and I agree on boys. Anime and manga are rife with the kind of boys I like. But I still dreamed of writing about them myself, in books.

Now, of course, I'm an adult and there is a new generation reading these books that I and others have written, and I've noticed there are other writers tackling very similar types of themes, characters and settings to the ones I always wanted to read. I can't help but think a lot of the current crop of new writers was born in the 70s and 80s and they must have thought some awfully similar things growing up. No doubt, the kids reading our books are seeing something missing. I don't know know what it will be yet. So, do I always write for my audience? I do listen to readers, but let's face it: probably not. But whatever the gap is, it's for them to fill, in the next decade or two or three. In the meantime, enjoy the relative hot boy diversity.

Read your non-fiction, kids

2010-09-22T10:56:00.001-07:00

Just as I was once shocked to learn that not everyone has huge bookshelves in their house, I am sometimes surprised to learn that many readers don't read nonfiction, except for school. (I'm sure there are also many nonfiction readers who don't read fiction, only I don't know them because I dwell in the fiction world and they're probably not reading my blog.)

I LOVE LOVE LOVE non-fiction. Always have. My childhood library, mind you, was a wee thing. It was built within my readerly lifetime and nowadays the small building is bursting at the seams with books, but when I was a kid, it was new and there was plenty of room. There was one stubby aisle of children's fiction. Children's non-fiction was lumped in with adult non-fiction, and that section was more like seven aisles, so it became my habit to wander down every aisle of children's fiction and the non-fiction every time I went to the library and pick up whatever caught my eye.

I started out as more of a fiction reader and started moving more toward non-fiction in my early twenties, and then back a bit more to fiction again when I became serious about fiction writing. My favorite books ever are fiction, but my home library is 75% non-fiction.

My favorite non-fiction books have always been about history or other countries, particularly about some aspects of people's every day lives. This has shaped who I am as a person and a writer. I haven't been to another continent, and I grew up in a pretty small world. I didn't realize as a kid I was learning to think in global terms and notice patterns throughout history because of the many many books I read. In the past five years I've read about how airplanes work, the history of fairy tales and children's books, archaeology, the Age of Enlightenment, manners around the world, blindness, Romantic poets, Chinese foot-binding, immigrants and Ellis Island, the Masai people, the Chicago Worlds' Fair, early European explorers in the Americas, remote tribes in South America and Asia, three generations of a Japanese business family, the Mafia, conjoined twins, the Hindenburg, and the history of food; housework; Publix grocery stores and Woolworth's. I've traveled, via book, to Japan, Victorian England, 18th-century France and Italy, New York City, India, Russia, Mongolia, and Maine, and I've learned a little more about Isaac Asimov, Helen Keller, Sylvia Plath, Tasha Tudor, Louisa May Alcott, Colette, Frederick the Great, Charles and Emma Darwin, Lord Byron, Madame Pompadour, L. Frank Baum, the Romanovs, Horatio Nelson, the Mitfords, Frida Kahlo, Josephine Baker, eternal favorites L. M. Montgomery, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jane Austen, and the Brontes.

For fantasy writers especially, I think it's good to read non-fiction...whether you're interested in animals, food, rock formations, castles... You can bet you'll use it for world-building somewhere. Fiction is great, and I read tons of it, but non-fiction lends creativity and authenticity to fiction, and I don't just mean the reading you picked out for targeted research. Sometimes it's the random book you picked up on the fly that turns out to be just the thing.

Deadlines and me

2010-09-21T16:19:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty accomplished lately. I sent off my story, "The Airship Gemini" for the Corsets and Clockwork anthology, and I passed 60,000 words on Magic Under Stone. It's probably going to be 75,000 words in the first draft (which makes it my Longest Thing Ever, not including Alfred and Olivia, which is 81k, but grew very slowly and comfortably over many revisions)...so I see the end in sight.

Last month, however, and during many other months of the summer, I was in despair about how I would get these things done by the deadline, especially with all of June and half of July occupied by pretty much rewriting Between the Sea and Sky. That crushing, OMG I'M GOING TO DISAPPOINT EVERYONE AND GO BROKE CAUSE THESE BOOKS WILL NEVER EVER BE DONE, despair. I was stuck in both contracted thingies, and that short story that sounded like a fun little thing when I signed up for it had seemed to grow into a very intimidating task as I worked on it.

As it turned out, I turned in The Airship Gemini early, and I'm not sure when Magic Under Stone is supposed to be due (my contract says November, but usually my editor seems to give me a different date), but unless someone tells me otherwise I gave myself a self-imposed deadline of November 2nd, because I'm going on vacation on the 4th and there is no better feeling than finishing a book and then leaving town! It appears I will definitely make that. Even allowing for getting stuck on the end.

My agent had a post today about the pros and cons of accepting a multi-book deal, which is similar to a topic I've been pondering lately--do I work better with or without a deadline? There were times earlier in the year when I just couldn't wait to be free of a deadline. I was thinking how I get SO stressed about them, I take them SO seriously even when the deadline is ages away (maybe because I never had any formal education with papers due? no experience forcing myself to do something and turn it in on time? or maybe because I'm just an over-achiever in certain areas), and how I hoped the next thing I sold would be done already.

Of course, now that it seems I'm going to make my deadlines without any problem, I wondered why on earth I was so worried. Deadlines are kind of great! They keep me on task so I don't flit around from project to project (as I am wont to do), and it's kind of awesome to be paid for something before you even write it.

So, now I have three books sold and two have been bought before they were written. I've also done two decently involved revision letters. And the short story. I'm a lot more acquainted with the deadline than I used to be. Will it be a little less scary next time I'm stuck under deadline? I'm not sure, really, if that fear ever goes away. But I also know that stories always work themselves out. So I guess I'm pretty comfortable with the deadline (unless it's really tight...I know how fast I work...it's fast, but not CRAZY-fast, and I think it would be awful to force myself to work faster than that). Still, I'd be pretty hesitant to sell a book without, at least, a strong vision for it. I've stuck *fairly* well to my Magic Under Stone proposal, and thank goodness for that thing... Sometimes when I was flailing, I would read it to calm myself down. "I do know how this is going to end...just keep writing from point A to B to C and you WILL GET THERE!"

Other writers, feel free to chime in! Do you love or hate deadlines?

And the winner of the Mermaid's Mirror, Matched and Paranormalcy ARCs is...!

2010-09-18T15:49:00.000-07:00

Angie Frazier!

(For pete's sake. I just sent her that picture of Oscar from her interview last week! I could have bundled them!! LOL)

Thanks for entering, everybody!!

I spoke at a homeschooling event today about unschooling. It wasn't a huge event but I think I had a really good crowd considering the size...maybe 10 people at the peak. I was nervous though...small crowds are hard, I think. I think my speaking skills are decent. But this made me wish they were better still. The kind of person who can liven up a tough crowd or really engage a small one. I'm not there yet, but I think I'll get there with experience.

Dade thought there was someone there who had been at my signing earlier in the year. Oh gosh, I hope that's not true and there wasn't someone there I should have recognized! I'm so horrid with faces. It's embarrassing. Sometimes really embarrassing. Once when I worked at Sears, this customer asked me if we had meat grinders. In the one minute or so it took to go ask my coworker if we had meat grinders, I forgot what the person looked like. Utterly. I think I remembered their gender. That was it. So I had to go around asking every man in the vicinity if they'd been asking about meat grinders...men who looked totally different from one another, men of different ages and races. *sigh*

Oh, and the real kicker was, the meat grinder guy seemed to have left.

Mermaid-y Interview with L. K. Madigan and Giveaway of The Mermaid's Mirror, Matched, and Paranormalcy!!!

2010-09-09T15:04:00.000-07:00

I have a treat for you today: an interview with L. K. Madigan, author of Morris-award-winning FLASH BURNOUT and the upcoming THE MERMAID'S MIRROR (releases Oct. 4th), which is a lovely story with very real contemporary characters and a magical underwater world that I already want more of. I asked her if she'd talk mermaids with me and not only did she say yes, she threw in two ARCs for me to give away, PARANORMALCY and MATCHED! I'm giving away those two and an ARC of her new book, details after the interview.

I know why I was drawn to mermaids when I was a little girl and ever since (at least, I have some theories...psychologists may differ...) but why were you drawn to mermaids?

This is a great question, and I’m glad you asked, because I really had to search my childhood memories. My fascination with mermaids has been life-long, so it took me awhile to pinpoint the beginning.

I believe I can trace my mermaid-love back to a vintage View-Master reel of Hans Christian Anderson Tales, one of which was “The Little Mermaid.” Not the Disney version … this was long before the animated film. (If you don’t know what a View-Master is, you can read about them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-Master. They were invented in Oregon! I had no idea.)

Those images appear amazingly low-tech now, but when I first saw them … they were mesmerizing. The mysterious underwater setting combined with the poignancy of Anderson’s tale left an indelible impression on me.

Interviewee note: Lisa actually bought this reel on eBay when I interviewed her and got her photographer friend, Brian McLernon, to use all of his super close-up gear to turn them into visible images. Is this not the coolest interview ever? Thank you, Brian!

You first wrote about mermaids when you were eight years old with a 78 page manuscript called Mermaid's Fun. 78 pages is a LOT to write for an eight year old, I must say. And even as an adult I know this book has gone through some evolution. How have your fictional mermaids in general and this story in particular change over time?

The mermaids in my childhood manuscript sounded a lot like my sister, my friends, and me … except they possessed tails and the ability to breathe underwater. The mermaid who most resembled me was, funnily enough, a princess!

The characters in The Mermaid’s Mirror are purely fictional, both the humans and the mer-people. They’re no longer thinly disguised versions of my sister, my friends, and me. :-)

The early version of the book was written for younger readers. Lena, the main character, was fourteen years old, and her concerns revolved around her family and her desire to surf. Once I decided to turn the book into a YA novel, I aged Lena to sixteen. Her concerns also became “older,” centering more on her friends, her boyfriend, and her desire for independence.

Do you have a mermaid book, movie, myth, etc. that is your favorite?

In books, I really love Mary Pope Osborne’s MERMAID TALES FROM AROUND THE WORLD, which is exactly what it sounds likes – a collection of stories from various countries.

As for art books, my two favorites are MERMAIDS, by Elizabeth Ratisseau and SIRENS: SYMBOLS OF SEDUCTION, by Meri Lao. They’re full of gorgeous images and historical literary references to sea creatures.

I confess I haven’t read any of the current YA mermaid books, because I don’t want to be influenced (even unconsciously) by the other authors’ vision of undersea life … so I can’t claim a favorite among them. I will make an exception when YOUR book comes out, Jackie. :-)

In movies, I love “Splash” and “The Secret of Roan Inish.” And come on, who doesn’t love Disney’s “Little Mermaid”?! If we go waaaay back in time, “The Incredible Mr. Limpet,” a 1960’s classic with Don Knotts, may have fueled my fascination with mermaids. (I hear they’re doing a re-make of the movie now. Sigh.)

In the book, we learn that the names of the mermaids come from all the waters of the world. Some of them I recognized, like Melusina, from a famous mermaid myth, or Rusalka, after the Russian water spirits. But there were a lot I didn't recognize, and I've even been researching this stuff. Can you tell us the origins of a few of the names?

Some of them came from the Mary Pope Osborne compilation mentioned above. A lot of them came from Greek mythology. I found other names through lots of reading and research.

Here are a few specific sources:

Amphitrite – one of the Nereids (sea nymphs) in Greek mythology; she became Poseidon’s wife.
Merrow – the Gaelic word for mermaid or merman.
Wata – taken from “Mami Wata,” an African water spirit, sometimes depicted as a mermaid.

I loved comparing your mer world to the one in my upcoming novel Between the Sea and Sky. Did you do any particular research for the story, or has it all just been in your head for a while?

I worked on this story off and on for several years, so my undersea world evolved and clarified in my imagination with each rewrite. I read plenty of fairy tales and folk tales, but there’s not a huge amount of lore about sea creatures. Did you find that to be the case, when you were working on your mer world?

Yes. So true! I combed the internet for hours digging up what I could find. My library hardly had anything... It seems that most of what is out there is for little girls, but I know I'm not the only grown woman who still likes mermaids!

I wanted to portray the world beneath the waves as beautiful and mysterious and dangerous – after all, the sea IS all of those things – but also try to address practical questions. How do they breathe? How do they talk to each other? How do they avoid discovery?

It was so much fun to envision that world. Writing feels pretty close to magic, sometimes.

And one more question I must ask because I'm always fascinated by other people's themes--while The Mermaid's Mirror is a fantasy and more of a "girl" book than your previous (contemporary) novel, Flash Burnout, they both share a similar style of well-developed, realistic characters and world. Are there any themes you feel like both books share?

Oooh, another great question, Jackie! Both of my books explore the themes of love and loyalty – to friends, family, and romantic attachments. The main characters’ choices result in believable consequences in both books, I think.

Thank you so much for the interview, Lisa, and everybody pick up The Mermaid's Mirror come October!

Now, if you want to win the ARCs, you get +1 entry for commenting on the post and another entry for posting the following to Twitter:

I talk mermaids with L. K. Madigan: http://bit.ly/aG4NDC RT @jackiedolamore for a chance to win Mermaid's Mirror, Matched, and Paranormalcy!

Or to Facebook:

I talk mermaids with L. K. Madigan: http://bit.ly/aG4NDC Click for a chance to win Mermaid's Mirror, Matched, and Paranormalcy!

And then TELL ME in the comments or else I won't be able to keep track and you will LOSE YOUR CHANCE and it will be very sad. The contest is open to the US/Canada (sorry, I can't afford to send three books abroad, it's pricey!) and closes on Friday, September 17th.

Is the world getting ever faster, or just kinda moving along?

2010-09-03T09:42:00.000-07:00

This isn't a writing post, this was just a dumb history-geek musing that was keeping me awake last night for some reason. (Actually I think the dark chocolate I ate at 1 am was keeping me awake, the weird swirl of thoughts was from the stimulant. Bad idea.)

I had this conversation with my dad last week about how technology keeps advancing all the time and how the world keeps moving faster and faster. I think about this sometimes and it's really terrifying, because it seems like if the world keeps accelerating, pretty soon we're just going to explode or something.

But we were talking about what an advancement actually consists of. Is a faster computer every week truly the world getting faster? I sort of feel like it really only counts as a true advancement if you have trouble imagining life without it. Like, I was born in 1982 and spent the first fourteen years of my life without really experiencing the internet, but now I can't imagine life without it. It seems astounding when I think how my mom used to plan a vacation using Mobil Travel Guides. OMG! Nightmare! Ditto cell phones. I still barely own a cell phone--it's a pay-as-you-go piece of junk that usually sits unused in a pile of papers--but I'm SO used to OTHER people having cell phones that I also have trouble remembering what we did before they came along.

But, I don't consider faster internet really much of an upgrade. I mean, sure, it's hugely important, but if we suddenly all had to use 14.4k modems, my life wouldn't be utterly destroyed. We'd go back to more mailing lists and message boards than Twitter and such, and web pages would have to become less fancy again, but it wouldn't completely change life as we know it. It's sort of like if we all had to drive Model Ts. Yeah, they kind of putter along and probably everyone would learn more about car repairs, but you could still get around.

So in my lifetime I really only see the personal computer (I don't remember my family not having a computer, but they came into general household use when I was alive), internet, and the cell phone as the life-changing inventions of my time.

I still think the early 20th century was the most accelerated point in history. If I'd been born in 1900, it would be 1928 now, and I would have seen movies, the automobile, the radio, the telephone, widespread electricity, quite a few major innovations for housekeeping like the washing machine and vacuum cleaner (might not seem as important but it had a huge impact on women's lives)...Some major medical advances, too, I guess. I'm not as up on my medical history. Sanitation, certainly. The toilet came into widespread use at this time, and baths! The airplane I'm not sure counts until people actually began to use airplanes to travel regularly. I think it would be more of a shocker for a child of 1950 to go back to 1900 than a child of 2000 to go back to 1950. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's about the same because kids would go nuts without video games these days or something.

Or maybe inventions are just more subtle and complicated these days so we don't notice how much is going on. I don't know. I do always wonder what the major innovations of the next few decades will be. I'm guessing they will be in green technology. I hope so. I *think* we're nearly maxed out on communication technology.

Thus concludes a very random post.

Writer dreams; or, every night is like playing the lottery

2010-09-02T17:20:00.000-07:00

I think every book I've written has benefited from my dreams. In Magic Under Glass, for instance, Annalie's curse came from a vivid dream I had some years earlier about a cursed prince. I say dreams are like playing the lottery because you certainly can't count on them to help you, but once in awhile you'll get an unexpected gift, and it can be extremely valuable.

When a helpful dream does come along, its effect can be almost miraculously potent. I've been working on Magic Under Stone and there is a character in it who is new to the book. He's actually (at least, as of this first draft) the secondary POV along with Nimira, so he's pretty important! He has an interesting situation and I WANT to know him, but I didn't feel like I really did.

The other night I had a dream where I was semi-in his shoes. The setting was all wrong...it was modern, kind of like those weird Fushigi Yuugi stories where the cast of hot boys from ancient China are all oh-so-conveniently reincarnated in modern-day Japan. But because I briefly WAS him, I got some insights into his personality and his background that I didn't previously have. When I woke up suddenly I knew him in a new way. I've been clamoring to write about him ever since this dream, whereas before it was just sort of "meh".

This isn't the first time such a thing has happened by any means...but the nature of these dreams never fails to amaze me. I've had any number of bizarre character dream experiences. Sometimes I get hit with a whole new story out of nowhere, other times, like with the dream just described, I am walking in a characters shoes and getting to understand them in a way I never could while awake. One time I even woke from a nightmare, calmed myself by thinking of my stories, went back to sleep, and had a continuation dream where my characters saved me from the threat.

Does everyone dream like this? Or is it because I sleep too much?

Interview Roundup

2010-08-25T18:04:00.000-07:00

Yeesh. I've been meaning to do this for MONTHS, but when Magic Under Glass came out, I was in the midst of confusing hand pain hell, and didn't pursue any interviews. I did all the interviews people asked me if I would do, but then I didn't do much of a job publicizing them. I am so SOOO appreciative of all the people who did approach me and ask to interview me. I also feel bad that I didn't really keep track of where I did interviews at the time. Well, I just spent an hour Googling myself (a hazardous occupation at any time...did you know some libraries list how many times a book has been checked out? I didn't know this until today...) so I could compile this belated list of interviews! See me answer the question "how did you get the idea for Magic Under Glass?" ten different ways!

Authors Unleashed
Bloomsbury UK
The Book Butterfly (Guest post: Interview with Erris from "The Young Maiden's Own Magazine")
The Book Report
The Book Scout
The Compulsive Reader
DaydreamerN's Reviews
Drenched in Words (L. K. Madigan)
The Enchanted Inkpot
GreenBeanTeenQueen
The Hiding Spot
In Bed With Books
LiyanaLand!
LiyanaLand! (Interview with Nimira.)
LiyanaLand! (Deleted scene with the original version of Erris, at the bottom of the post.)
Manga Maniac Cafe
Oasis for YA
Post Mortem (A very fun interview between Jackie Morse Kessler's Death and my Erris.)
The Spectacle
Tea Mouse
Trashionista
Windowpane Memoirs
YA Highway

(P. S. Almost forgot, if you did an interview with me that Google didn't turn up, don't be shy! Let me know so I can add it to the list.)

Critique Partners, Selection and Care of

2010-08-12T09:45:00.000-07:00

My last post spawned a new question, which is, okay, say you're really ready to listen to feedback on your work, but you can't find anyone to read it. What do you do? How do you find these elusive critique partners?

I'll admit I've had a lot of trouble with critique partners myself. If you read Maggie Stiefvater's blog you know she has two wonderful critique partners and she auditioned to find them. (She talks about that here.) My road, however, has not been so smooth. I've never had a regular critique partner. But especially in the beginning. And I think there are three rough phases of critique partner-ing.

Beginner

The more difficult your work is to read, because it's wordy or confusing or badly paced or whatever, the more difficult it is to find critique partners, because your work just isn't enjoyable to read. You might not even realize it at first, but most writers go through this stage. No shame in it. This is the point where you can get just about anyone to critique you, because there are so many problems that anyone can spot at least some of them. And in fact, it's best to find critique partners that are on a similar skill level to you, because you'll learn a LOT from critiquing their work as well. Maybe you can't see what's wrong with your story yet, but you'll probably notice you don't really enjoy reading their work either. Sometimes you'll have to really think about WHY that is, exactly, depending on what the problem is.

If you're at this stage, I also recommend reading some books on writing. I never went writing book crazy, but there are two I love and still go back to: Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Browne & King, and Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass. (You could also opt for the Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook instead if you enjoy that format.) The first one handles how to develop a style and line edit your work (not grammatically, but to improve readability and strengthen the prose), and the second one is good for plotting.

Where do you find beginner critique partners? Well, this is kind of the phase where you probably don't know how bad you are. I would not give your work to family, friends, or people you love and trust. They'll either lie, break your heart, or never have the time to read it. A great place to go is Critique Circle. The website makes it easy to submit critiques and critique other writers, and there is a point system set up so that you have to give critiques to get critiques. Therefore, almost every story will get some critiques because people need to earn points. You might even make some friends there and find someone to exchange with more closely.

Intermediate

At Critique Circle, you submit a chapter at a time, therefore it's best when your work really needs line editing. At some point, you won't get so much line editing, you'll get comments like "This character doesn't work for me" or "The pacing in this chapter dragged"--global comments. At this point, you'll want someone who will exchange larger chunks of story with you. There are a few ways you can find them.

If you have a blog, Twitter, etc and you've been making friends in the writing community, you can put out a call for readers there: "Hey, does anyone want to look at the first 50 pages of my novel? I'll be happy to reciprocate." I wouldn't ask for readers for the whole thing--too intimidating--and always be sure to return the favor. Also, when your friends ask for critiquers, you can always be the first to volunteer and build up "critiquer karma" so you can offer them your work when it's ready.

If you don't participate much in the online community, I think it would be really hard to find critique partners. Sometimes I see people pop onto the Blue Boards asking for crit partners, but I don't know what kind of response they get. I've always gotten critique partners through my blog.

I will mention, at first, it's better to give more than you take. Offer to give a lot of critiques and you'll learn things, make friends, and build goodwill. At first I critiqued more than I received critiques from others, and near the end of my pre-publication journey I had several people who would read my work just because they liked it. But it took time to get there.

During the intermediate phase, you might have a lot of critique partners. Maybe several at once, or maybe you'll run through them like Henry VIII went through wives. Sometimes you'll get advice that makes your forehead wrinkle, other times you might have three people telling you three different things (note: this usually just means something isn't working and there are many ways to fix it), but you'll learn a lot about how to use a critique. (My rule of thumb: Make changes if several people say the same thing, several people mention the same problem but offer different solutions, or if you're excited about the change. Don't take every suggestion.) You will learn exactly what you want in a critique partner.

Advanced

Advanced is the ideal! One or two or three (probably not more than that) people who love your work, whose work you love to read, who will exchange entire manuscripts with you, turn them around when you need them for a deadline if they don't have a deadline themselves, and who will hash out ideas and problems when you're stumped. Finding this person is like...well, maybe not as hard as finding a romantic partner--you still don't have to share chores or finances--but it can be hard. Just as some people marry their high school sweetheart and some people go through three divorces and some people live and die alone, you might luck into a perfect critique partner early on, or it might take you 5+ years like me. It's a love match. Don't look too hard for it, let it find you, and don't feel bad if you don't have one. You'll manage without it.

Okay. Phew. OMG. If you like blogs with snappy advice, this is not the blog for you, is it? I'm so long winded...