Thursday Three

A lot of YA authors I follow are fans of the Friday Five.  But it's only Thursday and I want to share a couple random things.  Thus, the Thursday Three!  Inaugural!  Hopefully, I can keep up with this.  Somehow, thinking of three random things... well, I do that all the time.

1.  While editing my WIP late the other night, I found the perfect way to work in some Bruce Springsteen.  I guess the only question now is, if this book gets published, how much of the lyrics can you have before the royalties situation gets out of control?  I recently read a book (wish I could recall which book) that had several bits of song lyrics from pretty major artists sprinkled throughout.  Something tells me there's probably a limit of how many words from a song you can use before you have to pay for it?  I don't know, but if anybody does, please, let me know.  I'm pretty sure I tried to research this with my last book and never found a definitive answer.

2.  The Red Sox have won 5 games in a row!  And they're above .500 by more than a game or two!  And they are (at the moment) in third place in the American League.  A few weeks ago, if you had told me this would be the case, I would have had a hard time believing that.  I guess that's one of the draws, for me, about the sport and my team in particular.  They surprise me so often.  Just when I get frightened by how many errors they've made or by how many walks Daisuke Matsuzaka has issued, they turn it around.

3.  Words cannot express how much I am loving This American Life these days.  I've been listening to a backlog of episodes while running and I think I've had every experience on the range of human emotion while listening.  No joke.  And running.  Running while crying while listening to Dan Savage talk about losing his mother?  Check.  Running while cracking up and seeming like a crazy person?  Check, so many times.  And a whole lot more.  [I'm kind of distracted at the moment because the baseball game is almost over and we're within a run of the Royals.]  I tend to go through TAL phases, mostly due to when I actually have time to listen without getting distracted, and I really hope this one sticks.  I love the extra stimulation of learning about something else, of listening to a story, of being really engaged in thinking about a topic I ordinarily wouldn't, all while running around the pond.

3.5  The Red Sox have no longer won 5 games in a row.  We just lost.  To the Royals.  Thanks a lot, Dice-BB.

On editing

When I'm not reading and writing up BFYA notes (side note: I spent several hours this morning catching up on BFYA notes!  Bad Jenn!  I would not recommend letting your pile get up to 7 books before taking notes on them.  Never again!), I'm mired in the editing process.  Perhaps mired is not the best word, because so far this edit has been not so grueling as I expected.  I'm, oddly enough, finding it so easy to change things in my book, taking the advice from early readers to heart.  I'm really grateful to have a friend who is also a full-time editor at an esteemed encyclopedia (and an aspiring author) give me some pretty thorough feedback.  It's fantastic to have found someone who can look at both the tinier details and the big picture and give advice on what sorts of changes to make.  I am not sure he realizes that I could be getting the same level of service from a paid professional, but I guess that's when it pays to have smart and talented friends, right?  In any case, he will surely get acknowledged on my future acknowledgments page.

Anyway, the point of this is that I'm starting to wonder, when is enough enough?  My last book (the first one I shopped to agents) took 4+ years from conception and early writing, to sending it to agents.  That is a long, long time, folks.  And, eventually I shelved it, metaphorically put it in a box under the bed, etc. But this one seems to be getting in good shape real fast.  I don't want to jump the gun, but maybe I just learned something from the process of the first one?  I've been working on my new manuscript since November 2009.  I nanowrimo-ed (sure, it can be a verb!) the first draft, let it sit for a month (Stephen King's advice in On Writing) and then started tackling it.

My editing process thus far:

1.  First read through: fix typos (something I never checked because I wrote the first draft on Scrivener, which I love and will recommend to anyone, but whose features I still don't entirely understand) and change tense.  I couldn't decide on the tense when I wrote it in November, and now I knew I wanted it to be in the present tense.  The only problem: 90% of it was in the past tense.  Ikey barka.

2.  Once that's done, send out to early readers.

3.  Wait.

4.  Wait some more.

5.  Okay, two months later, my mom had read it.  Geez, that was slow!

6.  After feedback from three readers, I started in on editing it, going chapter by chapter, incorporating their feedback and my own check-list of weaknesses.  About halfway into it, I got feedback from my friend Dan, the editor, and then went back through again and made his changes.  Now I'm 30-ish pages from the end, making changes from everyone and myself.  After that, I plan to read through again for continuity (and also to heavily look over any new content, which is likely to be riddled with typos) and look for duplication of information (I may have introduced some things earlier, need to make sure they aren't brought up again).  This will be coupled with some serious spell check.

What next?

1.  Sending out this second/third draft to readers, namely my friend Stephanie who is a great critical reader who also knows her YA very well.

2.  Incorporating those changes.

3.  The read-aloud-athon.  Reading the entire book out loud is sort of time-consuming, but it is the best way to catch when you've repeated yourself, and is a catch-all for any stubborn typos.

4.  Fix-y.

5.  Send to agents!

Yeah, I'm pretty much mentally already at step 5, which is why I worry about jumping the gun.  I read an interview with Donna Freitas, one of my favorite newcomers to the YA scene, in which she shares that she spends, on average, an hour on each page, on each stage of the revision.  That made me feel like a lazy writer.  Though, I also feel like for the stories I write, something comes out of the first draft that has a very strong flow to it, and for me, to much changes can really disrupt that flow of not just the story, but also the sentences, even the paragraphs.  I'm more likely to cut and replace an entire paragraph, or pages, than I am to really, really tinker with each line.  That said, Dan and I were realizing how much I overuse the word "well" in my story right now.  It is so true.  But before I noticed that was a problem, I found way too many "just"-s in the book.  They just had to go!  Really.

But then today, I read a post in Quest for Kindness about the revising process.  And it made me feel like I should trust my instinct.  I'll always find things I want to change, but as I make these revisions, I find that with this project, there is also a lot that I feel very confident about, that all of these moments in the book lead reader to the big moments at the end.  

Maybe I've gained this confidence in cutting the unnecessary stuff from weeding books in the library.  There's only enough room for so many books on the shelf before it becomes overcrowded, and some must go.  In that same way, I think that there's always unnecessary stuff in drafts, and that it needs to get axed, regardless of emotional attachment.  [I know, I'm the pot calling the kettle black because last week I unpacked boxes of books, including library discards that I couldn't bare to part with -- particularly, books I had read as a kid.  Now my child favorites sit in my office, a little pantheon of children's and YA books.]  I'm getting away from the point here, but I think the big point is I've been learning a lot about the editing process and I sure hope it leads to publication sometime, you know, soon.

Book Review - Faithful by Janet Fox

Since I mentioned this one a few weeks ago when it came, I figured I should probably follow up on it!

Do you ever feel like books were tailor-made for your interests?  Well, when Janet Fox's Faithful arrived a few weeks ago, I kind of got that feeling.  I grew up visiting the mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, with my family, taking long walks near The Breakers, imagining what it would be like to live there.  Granted, this was when I was ten, and for some reason I imagined I was currently living there, instead of taking a more historically accurate spin on things.  I had my dream fancy rich life played out.  I was always "Veronica."  In more recent years, I traveled out west, to Yellowstone National Park, with my best friend and her mother.  We stayed in the Old Faithful Inn, and it was impossible not to imagine that place at another time.  It just oozes history.  It's hard not to imagine what stories lay tucked into the cracks of the wood there.  And so I settled into my favorite reading chair for Janet Fox's debut novel, hoping to get sucked into the atmosphere of these two places with which I already felt a connection.

Imagine living in turn-of-the-century Newport, RI, where it's the norm to be spending time in mansions like The Breakers.  Places like that are your friend's houses, where you attend parties -- excuse me, galas.  All of this is the norm for Maggie, a young woman whose often emotionally distraught (depressed, suicidal really) mother has gone missing, and is perhaps dead.  When Maggie's father suggests they leave town, that there's a lead they're following about her mother being out near Yellowstone.  Looking forward to her own coming out gala, Maggie is torn away from all that she has known, and a few train rides later, finds herself in the gorgeous, frightening wilderness of Yellowstone.  And it's there that everything falls apart, slowly and surely, and everything is rebuilt.  Her father and her uncle have deceived her, but there's more deception to unravel (yes, I'm being vague, but only so as not to be a spoiler!).

Yellowstone proves to be everything that Newport society is not.  It's a place where a woman just might be able to stand up for herself, craft a life for herself that is not completely determined by men.  Maggie finds a kindred spirit, an idol of sorts, in Mrs. Gale, a photographer who reminds me a bit of the "unsinkable Molly Brown" of Titanic fame.  And then there is Tom, who tests Maggie again and again, who expects something of her that she hadn't imagined to expect of herself.  The descriptions of Yellowstone resonate with my own experience, as does Maggie's reaction to this marvelous landscape.  I was definitely saddened at the small role that bison play in the book (aside: I am a huge fan of bison in the way that children have favorite animals; I'm just playing that whole scenario out, twenty years too late), but recognize that for the sake of being historically accurate, it just had to be that way.

I would easily recommend this one to fans of Kirby Larson's Hattie Big Sky (one of my favorite historical fiction reads in recent years) and anyone interested in the challenges women faced in that era.

Oh, the horror!

That is my kind way of saying that Papelbon's blown save tonight/the Red Sox loss to the Yankees was completely and totally demoralizing.  Like, I want to cry right now.

To make matters worse, it happens just as I realized that I cannot find my A Curse is Dark as Gold notebook.  Yes, that tiny little notebook that I got free at ALA in honor of the inaugural William C. Morris Award is missing.  I haven't gotten to the tragic element of that yet.  The notebook has all my hand-written notes from my research trip to Eugene from the one day that I forgot to bring my laptop and ended up doing research at the Eugene Public Library.  Waaah!!!

That's what I get for writing stuff down on paper and not transferring it to my computer.  Grrrr!  It's not completely irreplaceable, but I'm not about to log onto databases to find those some newspaper articles again and takes notes on them AGAIN, at 11 p.m.  Especially when I kind of need to drown my Red Sox sorrow in something that is not editing.  ACK!  Moving sucks!  I am fairly certain that this notebook is somewhere in the apartment in one of the unopened boxes of books that I keep moving around and just yesterday stacked nicely in the dining room.  But, so many boxes.  So little will.

Feeling totally defeated, like my team must be feeling.  :(

Why yes, I should be reading right now

It's been another crazy week here in Cambridge, but I think I'm settling into things.  Last Sunday, we picked up our adopted cat Lilly (pictured sleeping), which has led to some adventures this week.  Most of them sleep-deprived, since Miss Lilly has decided that 5:30 AM is wake-up time.  Okay, maybe that's not outrageous, but in this house, we go to bed around midnight and wake up around 8:00 AM, so 5:30 really is too early for us.  Also, might I mention that when I say this house, I mean my boyfriend, but also, as we've found out, our 90-year-old landlord who resides in the apartment above us, and also, our neighbor who likes to watch (loud) TV and play around with a synthesizer until about midnight.  At least we're all in this together!

Thursday, I trekked out to the Brimfield Flea Market, one of my new favorite thrice-yearly activity.  After not being in the area for a while, I realized how much I missed gawking at the weird stuff (art made out of baby doll parts?) and also scrounging for deals and odds and ends.  Also: fried food!  Though we missed out on seeing Mary Kate Olsen, who was there on Wednesday, I did find 2 end tables, one with a really cool knob.  I love cool knobs.

Last night, we headed out to Brighton to pick up some chairs we found on Craigslist, and finally, the apartment is shaping up.  (As in, now we can stop eating dinner on the couch.  Hooray!)  Our trip to Ikea tomorrow should finish off our checklist of items needed, and then we'll just be waiting for our replacement custom bookshelf to be made.  In three weeks, there will no longer be random boxes sitting around in the corners of rooms.  Hooray!

But then there will also be no more excuses for not reading.  Hrmph.

It's not that I'm not delighted about all the reading, but between the reading and the Red Sox watching and the editing and the scouring of Craigslist, there were TWO nights this week when I went to bed with bloodshot, tired eyes.  With boyfriend working 12+ hour days on thesis, at least I wasn't alone in having weary eyes, but it's still kind of tragically funny that we essentially sit around the apartment all day and yet, our eyes look like we pulled some kind of climactic all-nighter.  Nope.  This will continue for... a while still.

That said, I must be insane, but I am seriously contemplating the 48 hour book challenge.  I am a sucker for challenges.  I've done Nanowrimo twice (and won!  both times!), I've run a half-marathon and other long races.  So, really, how hard can it be to read as much as possible in a 48 hour time-span?

In a few weeks, I will find out.

I guess we've moved past celebrity picture books

I've gotten used to seeing, expecting, celebrity picture books.  Jamie Lee Curtis, Madonna, John Lithgow, etc., everyone wanted to get in on the picture book industry.  How hard can it be to write 32 pages, right?

Well, now they're encroaching on a territory even more near and dear to my heart, and I have mixed feelings about it.  I didn't know what to expect when I heard Lauren Conrad would be "writing" YA.  But then, for my teen readers, we ordered signed copies of her first book when she came to a nearby bookstore for a signing.  Clearly, there's a bit of a learning curve, because she signed the inside cover of the book, not the title page, where authors are supposed to sign.  As we all know, her first book was an instant best-seller, the next one too, and now it seems that every publisher wants to find their YA celebrity author.  I was surprised to hear when Hilary Duff landed a deal with Simon & Schuster.  We'll wait to see how that one pans out.  I'm afraid Miss Duff may not have the same audience she had years ago, and that a stint on the low-ratings (but admittedly, fun) Gossip Girl does not compare to having her own TV show, a la Lauren Conrad, and constant presence in celeb-focused magazines.  Then news came that husband-wife team from the Decemberists were writing a middle grade series (Harper Collins). Okay, I'll take that seriously.  I mean, Colin Meloy's got writing experience from songwriting, his wife is an illustrator, and oh right, the guy that does their band's artwork also did the covers for the Mysterious Benedict Society books.

But then I hear in the news today that Tyra Banks has landed a deal with Delacorte (an imprint of Random House), to pen a 3-book YA fantasy series.  As Seth and Amy would say, REALLY?!?!

Okay, it doesn't totally blow my mind that Miss Tyra might want to get into the YA action, but a fantasy series.  REALLY!?!  Let it be known that Tyra has already found interest from studios about turning her series into a movie/movies? but she says, "I'm writing true literature, which can than be adapted into film by Bankable."  Again, I wish I had Seth and Amy here to do the duties.

BUT TRUE LITERATURE.  BY TYRA BANKS.

REALLLLYYYY???

Okay, end of snarky post.  I'll go back to reading my BFYA noms and hanging out with my newly adopted kitteh.

Sorta Like a Really Fantastic Book

The other night, as the Red Sox swept the Angels, I found myself swept away by Matthew Quick's YA debut Sorta Like A Rock Star.  It had been in my to-read pile thanks to a blurb from one of my favorite writers, Sara Zarr, but a starred review in SLJ made me want to pick it up and read it right away.  And I'm so glad I did.

Amber Appleton has two things in droves: resilience and a sense of humor.  For all that life has thrown at her -- a drunk mother who falls for the wrong guys, a father she never knew, homelessness -- Amber has, at least publicly, shrugged it off and made efforts, everywhere to be optimistic.  She believes that through hard work, she can go to Bryn Mawr like her idol (her best friend Ricky's mother) and make a different kind of life for herself.  When she's not hanging out with the guys (thanks to an effort in elementary school to help the school's "weirdos" socialize, Amber's got this great group of guy friends, her closest friend being Ricky, who has autism), she's volunteering at an old folks home, teaching English via song to Korean ladies at an inner city Catholic church, and hanging out with a Vietnam War veteran.

It is so easy to fall in love with Amber, our narrator through this journey.  She's delightfully complex and constantly wise-cracking, whether she's calling the principle "Prince Tony" or exchanging insults with Joan of Old as part of a contest to get her to laugh, or Amber to cry.  Her voice is honest and fresh, peppered with her favorite words, like "sorta."  And so it is all the more heartbreaking for readers to see this hopeful, optimistic narrator shrivel into herself in Part Three of the novel.  The novel is written in an effortless, casual style, which suddenly turns staccato in the aftermath of a tragic event.  Amber's grief is palpable and will bring many readers to tears.

I don't really know want to say too much else, except that this book has a sorta genius way of working.  It does not read like a serious work of literature, and yet it has all that good, meaty stuff going on underneath it all.  With discussions of faith, the meaning of life, and why bad things happen to good people, this book will have massive appeal to readers that enjoyed Francisco X. Stork's Marcelo in the Real World.

Observations on the publishing industry

Even when I was a librarian, ordering thousands of dollars of YA books a year, I still wasn't having access to the breadth and depth of what is being published every year the way I've been able to so far with BFYA.  Granted, we are for sure not getting everything.  But we sure are getting a lot of books.  I've received 240-something titles as of yesterday, and I'm clearly in the throes of the beginning of the month torrential downpour of books.

Yesterday, 20-something titles arrived from Penguin, a smattering from its various imprints.  While watching Glee and catching up with a friend on Facebook, I did what I always do when a new box comes. I read the flap copy, check out the acknowledgments page to find out what agent reps the author (sometimes this can be an indicator of whether or not I'll love the book), enter the title and author into my Excel spreadsheet, and put the title in a "to read" or "not to read" pile.  This time, my "to read" pile was larger than my "not to read" pile.

It's amazing to see how many books are published in the same year with very similar plot lines or facets. Like there are two books coming out that are about a fat guy named Tiny and his friend named Will Grayson.... oh wait, no, no, that's just one book with a repetitive title.  All kidding aside, there are two books that came in the same box yesterday that have to do with Yellowstone, my favorite national park.  (You can bet they are both also sitting in my "to read" pile.)  Kirsten Chandler's Wolves, Boys, and Other Things That Might Kill Me (Viking) whose title is awfully intriguing, is a modern story about wolves being introduced into Yellowstone.  It's coming out May 13th, the same date as Faithful by Janet Fox (Speak), which is set in the early 20th century, and tells the story of a privileged young woman from Newport who is dragged off to Yellowstone by her family.  Off the top of my head, I can't think of 2 YA books set in Yellowstone that I've even heard of until now.  And then there are two coming out on the same day from the same publisher.

I was looking at Susane Colastani's Something Like Fate and felt a wave of deja vu roll over me.  A book about a girl who starts seeing her best friend's boyfriend behind her back.  Ummm... sounds like Elizabeth Scott's The Unwritten Rule, which I read a month ago.  When you get down to it, I know there are only so many essential stories that are being told, just in many variations, but it's still kind of amazing to look at all the similarities.  When I think of the manuscript I'm working on, there are a few comparisons I can draw, but nothing that seems to be the same thing.  Which is good, right?  But then I wonder if this is how the authors of these books felt, selling their stories to different publishing houses (or imprints) and then finding out that their book is coming out roughly the same time as another very similar book.

Another observation I've had from all the reading, is the way all the books I read seem to be loosely connected to each other in some weird tangential way.  I almost want to track these tinier similarities, as I go from title to title, but I think I've got too much on my plate at the moment.  When I say tiny similarities, I mean, reading two books in a row where there is a character obsessed with words for the groupings of animals, ex. "a murder of crows."  That's weird, right?, to read two books in a row with a secondary character that has the same mini obsession.

Well, those are all the observations I have for the moment.  The bf and I are in the middle of unpacking in Cambridge and oh, this one's a doozy.  It wouldn't be doozy if the movers hadn't lost our custom made, 7 foot bookshelf... but that's moving.  It's going to be a while until we're completely organized, but I'm sure we'll get there.