The Publication Follies of Alexandra Shostak

The "Silent Author" critique method

2012-01-20T14:17:00.004-05:00

If you've ever taken a creative writing class (ESPECIALLY in (but not limited to) a university setting) then you've probably sat through the ~~torture method~~ critique style that is the silent author critique. You know the one: the class all have copies of your story/chapter/poem/whatever, and you are not allowed to talk while they make comments.

I've never been a fan. Actually scratch that. I think it has its place, but I think that place is limited. I definitely enjoyed it more when we broke into small groups to do critiques.

(For real though, there are some serious advantages to this type of critique, as much as it kind of sucks to sit through one. It's very helpful for people who are new to writing (or new to sharing their writing--I know some people write for YEARS without letting anyone see) when the impulse is still very much to either apologize for or defend your work (or both) as soon as someone says something less than glowing about it. It's also very helpful for practicing GIVING critiques--and it has the added bonus of letting you hear a lot of other people delivering critiques. So, there, it has its place.)

Past that, though, meh. I feel like they're kind of empty. I always came away from those classes feeling like I got a lot of surface information, but rarely was I inspired to really dig into my story. Partially because of time constraints, and partially because I could never ask someone to go further with their comments without breaking the pesky silent rule. (That also could be because in class we always did short stories, and if I'm not working in 50k plus words then I don't really care and I was never very attached to my short stories.)

I had the hardest time sitting there in silence, not because I wanted to defend myself (okay there's always that), but because when someone said something particularly insightful about my writing, I wanted to start a conversation with that person RIGHT THERE. I wanted to pick their brain, or bounce ideas, or ask them "what if" scenarios. Honestly, I usually failed at being silent, because I'd pipe up "oh wow I didn't think of that! So you think that if I did this instead, then xyz would go better. If I tell you abc, then what do you think?" And then I'd get one of THOSE looks from the prof and I'd shrink back and shut up. Until the next insightful comment...

I'm not really sure what my point is. Maybe simply getting a mini-frustration off my chest that I've had since college!

Is there anyone out there who can happily sit in silence during a silent author critique? (If you're out there...I may have to pick your brain. I find that fascinating.)

Writing in order: sanity for your brain, or the killer of creativity?

2012-01-11T08:00:00.000-05:00

Source: Cartoon Stock

I write and revise in order. My brain does not consider it optional. Save for going back to quickly make a note, add something in one particular place, or find a specific detail, I do everything in the order it happens in the manuscript (generally chronologically, as far as it goes). For the most part, it helps me keep everything straight, remember when twists are revealed, remember which information comes when, what certain things happen in the mc's emotional arc, etc. I think it's a pretty natural way to approach things. I mean, it is how I read, after all. ;)

It's not always a great approach to writing and revising, though. If I get stuck, I have a really hard time skipping over a scene and coming back to it later. So if I want to take a break from it and work on something else, I usually have to pick something outside of my manuscript. A totally different project. I can also usually work on the query or the synopsis, or outline something new, so it's not all bad, and I get other stuff done that might make my life easier later! But. We all know how frustrating a day or two (or, let's be honest, a week or two sometimes) away from the manuscript can feel. (That is, until you return to it refreshed and realize it was worth it.)

A dear friend and critique partner of mine does NOT write in order. (She'll know who she is when she reads this.) Quite the opposite: she sees scenes in her head and she writes them down, regardless of where they go in relationship to each other. And her brain has an uncanny knack for fitting them all together later. (Seriously. It's impressive. I could never make my brain do that for me.)

(I've tried it, too. The writing out of order thing. All I ended up with was a mess that didn't make sense, and I never did finish that novel. Didn't even get close. This is not a skill I possess.)

I'm guessing a lot of people are somewhere in between. Writing mostly in chronological order but having the freedom to jump around, or working off an outline so that you can write the "fun" scenes first and the connecting stuff later, or skipping over stuff with far less anxiety than it causes me if the need should arise, or starting with the scenes you see vividly, and then working from the beginning...I can think of a bunch of other examples but I'll stop now.

I am really curious, though, as to how everyone else works. How is it for you: order, random, or somewhere in the middle? If you want to go into detail, please do! I would very much love to hear it. :)

2011-12-31T11:41:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year!

Superlative Blogfest: Best In Show

2011-12-30T08:00:00.000-05:00

Favorite Cover - The Space Between tie with Dearly, Departed tie with Chime tie with Burn Bright tie with Entwined

Cutest Couple - Nora and Bram from Dearly, Departed

Most Likely to Succeed (Or, pick a Printz Winner) - Chime

Most Likely to Make You Miss Your Bedtime (The book you just couldn't put down!) - Unearthly

Best Repeat Performance (Your favorite sequel or follow-up.) - Darkest Mercy

Romance Most Worthy of an Ice Bath - Karou and Akiva from Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Pair Most Likely to Stay Best Friends Till They’re 80 - Donna and Navin from The Iron Witch

Breakout Novel (Favorite Book by a Debut Author) - Tangled Tides by Karen Amanda Hooper

Best Old-Timer (Your favorite read of the year, published BEFORE 2011.) - The Picture of Dorian Gray

Most Pleasant Surprise (The best book you didn’t think you’d like, but totally did.) - Lola and the Boy Next Door

Most Creative Use of a Love Triangle - Tangled Tides

Sleeper Hit (Book you found so awesome you wish it had been hyped more.) - Burn Bright

Favorite Book for Adults (my category) - My Life as a White Trash Zombie

Superlative Blogfest: Elements of Fiction

2011-12-29T08:00:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Alison Miller, Katy Upperman, Jessica Love, and Tracey Neithercott for hosting this fabulous blogfest!

Most Envy-Inducing Plot (Or, the plot you wish you’d thought of yourself.) - Dearly, Departed tie with Chime

Most Wonderful World-Building - Daughter of Smoke and Bone tie with Burn Bright

Most Formidable World (Or, the setting you most definitely would NOT want to travel to.) - Eve by Anna Carey

Wanderlust-Inducing (Or, the setting you'd happily travel to.) - Dearly, Departed tie with The Space Between

Loveliest Prose - Daughter of Smoke and Bone tie with Girl of Fire and Thorns

Most Dynamic Main Character - Yara from Tangled Tides

Most Jaw-Dropping Finale - Burn Bright

Best Performance in a Supporting Role - Brimstone from Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Best use of Theme - The Girl of Fire and Thorns tie with Chime

Superlative Blog Fest: Popularity Contest

2011-12-28T08:00:00.000-05:00

Alison Miller, Katy Upperman, Jessica Love, and Tracey Neithercott are having a best of 2011 blogfest all week!

A popularity contest? Hmmm...sounds like high school. ;)

Biggest Flirt - Nixie from Tangled Tides

Girl You’d Most Want For Your BFF - Briony from Chime

Boy You Wish You’d Dated in High School - Bram from Dearly, Departed (yes, even as a zombie)

Quirkiest Character - Tucker from Unearthly

Villain You Love to Hate - Bananach from Darkest Mercy

(Actually, mostly I just reveled in my writer-envy of her. I seriously love her as a character. Everything about her, especially her descriptions. I always love the evil most...)

Coolest Nerd - Cricket from Lola and the Boy Next Door

Superlative Blogfest: Head of the Class

2011-12-27T08:00:00.000-05:00

Alison Miller, Katy Upperman, Jessica Love, and Tracey Neithercott are having a best of 2011 blogfest all week! Today is the first day, and it's all about the best books in each genre. (You can tell, based on the categories I answered, that I read pretty narrowly in the same genre all the time! Haha...oops. I also cheated a bit and had TWO ties. And I may have stretched some categories or shuffled my picks around so that I could get them all on the list without listing a whole bunch under the favorite fantasy category!)

Favorite Science Fiction:

Dearly, Departed

Favorite Dystopian:

Wither

Favorite Fantasy:

Girl of Fire and Thorns and

Daughter of Smoke and Bone

Favorite Historical Fiction:

Chime

Favorite Paranormal Romance:

Unearthly and

The Space Between

Favorite Genre Bender:

Burn Bright

Don't be afraid...

2011-12-16T23:12:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I know exactly what I need to hear. But telling myself something just isn't the same as hearing it from someone else.

Right now I just need to hear that I should do the thing(s) I'm afraid to do.

I can't tell myself, because I don't listen to myself, so I'm going to tell you instead. In case anyone else needs to hear it, this is what I'm telling you, in earnest, from the heart: whatever you're afraid of, do it anyway. Go for the thing you think you can't achieve. Write the manuscript you think you can't handle. Query the big agent you're sure will form-letter reject you. Move across the country just because you're tired of the weather. Adopt a cat even though your apartment is tiny and you don't know where the litter box would go. Apply for the job you don't think you'll get, or for the school you're sure won't ever let you in. Lean in for the kiss, ask your crush out, buy the ring, sit down across from the cute person at the coffee shop.

There are a lot of good reasons not to do something. But being afraid isn't one. It's the worst reason I can think of to hold yourself back.

Starting Over (or) How You Know When You're REALLY Ready to Query

2011-12-13T08:00:00.000-05:00

I was thinking about something on the way to work yesterday. It has to do with querying. (You can tell what's been on my mind lately, though I am not querying right now, nor am I particularly close to being ready to query. I do have a 2012 goal to query a certain novel before the first half of next year is gone.)

I kept circling around all the different things people say about when you know your book is ready to go out to agents. Many people say they really weren't ready, and they got lucky. Others mention several rewrites or heavy revisions or throwing the book in a trunk for two years before revisiting it. People getting ready to jump into querying for the first time ask how you know if you're REALLY ready, if your craft is good enough, if your story is solid. It's seriously anxiety-causing.

But I'm not exactly talking about that. This is what I was thinking about: let's say you do query, and you get an agent. You have to work on the book you queried for however many months it takes you to do revisions with your new agent. And let's say the awesome happens and your book sells. You have to spend more months revising, and then you have to do all kinds of copy edits and other stuff to prepare for it to come out. Then it has to come out. You have to do book signings and readings and promote it. You have to ignore the bad reviews.

Basically, you have to spend a lot of time with that manuscript. And I had never thought about this when I'd queried before, but (at least in my case) I think you have to actively WANT to debut with the novel you're submitting. I know this probably sounds ridiculous, very duh-like. I promise, I'm not trying to state the obvious. Because for a long time this was not obvious to me.

The interesting thing is, I've never really thought "oh wow, I WANT to debut with this novel I wrote, this book is totally ME as a writer!" (at least, not until recently.) I finished whatever novel, then queried because it was the next step and a good way of actively pursuing my goal of being published. And I obviously liked what I had written or I would not have queried it--I don't mean to make it sound like I was ever blasé about querying. Blasé is the last thing I ever was. But I didn't deeply consider what any of my old novels would say about me or my ability as a writer or even what kind of stuff people could continue to expect from me if I debuted with one of those stories. Intellectually I knew it, of course. But I didn't feel it.

I didn't FEEL it until I wrote a manuscript during Camp NaNo in August and a lot of realizations fell into my lap.

So all my unpublished, unagented friends: we are in an advantageous spot. I know it doesn't always feel like it (oh, do I know) but we are still all potential, and that is a great place to be. We haven't yet defined ourselves by a manuscript. We still get to think of exactly what we want to say about ourselves as writers. And we have time to do it. We have time to write new stories and revise them, and query or not query, and go back and revise again. We can learn about ourselves in the quiet of not having a deadline or professional revisions to work on. This is a place that, once we leave it, we can't return to. We are lucky to be here.

I don't know what will happen with this manuscript I want to query before 2012 is halfway over. (I WILL do it. I will!) But I do know this: at the time of querying, in terms of everything from the plot to each individual word choice, it will be the novel I absolutely want to debut with. (Even if it ends up not being.) Because that's how I'll really know I'm ready.

When Rejection Is A Good Thing

2011-12-08T09:18:00.001-05:00

The title of this post is funny, because rejection never feels like a good thing. Mostly it ranges from minor disappointment (when a query is form rejected by an agent you weren't particularly interested in anyway) to this times a thousand:

So how can I possibly say that rejection is ever a good thing?

You could somehow have found yourself in a situation where you're querying a manuscript that's not in the genre you want to debut in (I have done this before--in that I realized I wanted to debut in a certain genre and what I was querying at the time wasn't that genre. So I stopped querying.) You also could find that while you're waiting the long months for agents to get back to you on a full (or to hear from a publisher at all) you think of a really brilliant but seriously hefty way to revise the novel (that might change its genre or age group), but it'll take some time or you're in the middle of something else.

Rejection still hurts, no matter what. But it's GOOD if a book that isn't where you want it to be gets rejected. If you're like me, you don't want to start off your career with something that isn't for the age group or genre you plan to be writing in for the majority of your life. And you don't want an agent or a publisher to want to sign you, but when you tell them you'd been thinking of certain revisions already, they say they're not into that idea, or they only want minor changes. Can you say no to a deal you've dreamed of because your novel isn't right by YOUR standards? Would you even think of saying no?

I can think of two more examples: when a couple months after an agent rejects you, he or she leaves the business. And when you realized based on what an agent said when she rejected you (if it's not a form letter) that she would be wrong for you anyway (she doesn't like main characters with an interest in unicorn breeding and you can't imagine not writing about characters who breed unicorns.)

So what about you? Have you ever realized receiving a certain rejection was a good thing? Can you think of any other situations in which getting a rejection would be the best possible outcome?

Music is cool (and Nightwish is still awesome)

2011-12-03T08:00:00.000-05:00

Bored of your writing music? Looking for something new?

(I basically just want to spam you with my mostly questionable music taste. They're all different, so take a moment and listen to a couple!)

Enjoy!

(sorry, can't resist one more Nightwish)

Don't forget about me!

2011-12-02T08:00:00.000-05:00

New books are what usually get most of the blog page-time. But some of my favorite YA books came out before blogging was even a big deal. Thankfully, almost all of these authors are still producing fantastic books (I'm still really sad about Diana Wynne Jones, though), but I feel like I should give a shout-out to these old favorites that have been on the backlist for a while!

SABRIEL by Garth Nix

TITHE by Holly Black

THE SONG OF THE LIONESS series by Tamora Pierce

CROWN DUEL by Sherwood Smith

HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE by Diana Wynne Jones

So, what's your favorite YA book from before five years ago?

BURN BRIGHT winner!

2011-12-01T18:07:00.001-05:00

Sorry it's taken me so long! Do you ever have that thing where your life takes over your life and you have no time to do anything? I have that.

Anyway, the winner of my BURN BRIGHT giveaway is...

Paper Reader!

I've sent you an e-mail! :)

Thanks to everyone who entered!!!

Release Day Celebration: TANGLED TIDES by Karen Amanda Hooper

2011-11-25T08:00:00.000-05:00

HAPPY RELEASE DAY TO KAREN AMANDA HOOPER!

Today is the release of TANGLED TIDES by a very very good friend and critique partner of mine, Karen Amanda Hooper. I had the pleasure of reading this book when it was still a manuscript in a word document. It's so good, and I knew the minute I clicked to the last page that it would be a hit. I remember when Karen submitted it to her publisher Rhemalda, and I remember being so confident that there was no answer they could possibly give her but YES.

Tell me you don't want to read this RIGHT NOW:

Yara Jones doesn’t believe in sea monsters—until she becomes one.

When a hurricane hits her island home and she wakes up with fins, Yara finds herself tangled up in an underwater world of mysterious merfolk and secretive selkies. Both sides believe Yara can save them by fulfilling a broken promise and opening the sealed gateway to their realm, but they are battling over how it should be done. The selkies want to take her life. The merfolk want something far more precious.

Treygan, the stormy-eyed merman who turned Yara mer, will stop at nothing and sacrifice everything to protect his people—until he falls for Yara. The tides turn as Yara fights to save herself, hundreds of sea creatures, and the merman who has her heart. She could lose her soul in the process—or she might open the gateway to a love that’s deeper than the oceans.

Young Adult fans of Mermaids, Selkies, Sirens and Gorgons will love this tale of the sacrifice one makes for genuine love. Love that could be lost at any moment to the ever-changing tides.

Get it now: AMAZON, BARNES AND NOBLE, RHEMALDA, THE BOOK DEPOSITORY, POWELL'S, INDIE BOUND

As you can see from the summary, there are FOUR different sea creatures involved in an underwater battle that's seriously epic. Karen, being the author, loves all the creatures equally. The rest of us have to choose one, though.

MY choice: SIREN.

Because I want to fly and because deep water freaks me out. In fact when my apocalypse dreams don't involve zombies, they involve tidal waves.

And if you're looking at the bird image and feeling confused, like hey wait, I thought sirens were another version of mermaids, then you're in for an awesome surprise. Because in the original siren myth, they were seductive bird-women who lured sailors with their singing. Karen's sirens are creepy and SEXY. And they have wings and are bird-like (they live in a nest!) true to the myth.

If you want to join in on the fun, there's a sweet contest going on. Check out thedetails at Karen’s blog.

Karen is giving away a signed copy of her book and someother sea creature themed prizes. To enter, join the underwater web war onTwitter. Tweet which sea creatures you’re rooting for and why. Include thehashtag #TangledTides and you could win.

Karen will be on Twitter all day celebrating and answeringquestions, so stop by and say hello! @Karen_Hooper

This is also a fun day for me because I did the art inside the book. The art is on the chapter pages and when the point of view switches.

All four monsters. The siren image isn't in the book.
It's exclusive to Karen's launch celebration!

Anyway, get off my blog, get on twitter, and join the celebration! Karen has a cheat sheet posted on her blog that runs down the awesomeness of each creature. Go pick one and tweet!

CONGRATULATIONS, KAREN!!!

Book Review: TANGLED TIDES by Karen Amanda Hooper

2011-11-22T10:01:00.001-05:00

TANGLED TIDES by my friend and critique partner Karen Hooper comes out this Friday. It's the story of Yara, a girl who gets turned into a mermaid against her will, and who learns that because of certain unfortunate circumstances surrounding her birth, she's the linchpin in a very dangerous plan that's been brewing for eighteen years.

I'm actually having a hard time deciding how I want to start this review. I'm a CP of Karen's, which means I read it before she sent it off to her publisher. More than just seriously enjoying the story (which I did) I feel all sentimental and proud because it's the first book I've seen make the journey the whole way that I actually got to HELP with, and because it belongs to someone who's such a dear friend to me.

HOWEVER. You may think this makes me biased. This is not the case! TANGLED TIDES just so happens to be a seriously quality YA book.

The world is built SO well; there are all kinds of secrets, awesome creatures, and just the level of detail that Karen put into it is amazing. It's rich enough to be a straight-up fantasy world all on its own (and it would stick out as a particularly well-built fantasy world in high fantasy, too) but it takes place in the modern day, so any reader who prefers paranormal or urban fantasy should find lots to enjoy here, too.

The plot and the pacing are masterful. You definitely can't read this a chapter at a time--you'll find yourself saying "one more chapter, one more chapter" until three AM when you can't keep your eyes open anymore. Every time you think you've figured out one secret, another comes into light, and the plot twists again.

There's also a seriously steamy romance between Yara and Treygan. I find most rom coms nauseating, but Karen won me over on every page with the Yara/Treygan cuteness. They are star-crossed, they start out the book NOT getting along at all, and, my favorite thing, they actually find reasons other than lust to like each other. They become friends, too--they learn so much about each other in a short amount of time.

Karen also takes a big risk in writing from 3 distinct points of view. And she totally pulls it off. She pulls it off seriously well--I think people are going to be jealous. Two of them are from MALE points of view, too (seriously impressed!) and yet I always knew exactly whose head we were in. I never once got confused. And she wields them so well--the point of view switches always at the right moment to maximize pacing and to give the reader exactly what plot information is necessary and relevant at that point in the story.

I can't say enough good things. Make sure you visit Karen's blog on Friday, her launch day, for a big celebration, a battle of the seamonsters, and a chance to win a copy of the book. We will also be giving one away at YA Confidential.

What is up with fairytales?

2011-11-14T21:47:00.000-05:00

There are so many fairytale retellings that have either just come out, or are coming out soon (movies and tv, not books. If I did books this blog post would be a mile long). I'm a little bit amazed--and I'm wondering if this is some kind of new media craze. There have always been retellings, but I didn't think there were ever THIS MANY at once (I didn't go farther back than 2010 to find these either, I know there are more from years past). Check it:

(There are also Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters and Maleficent which don't have posters yet.)

(Did I forget any? I'm sure I did. Let me know in the comments! P.S. The second picture, the girl in the dress, is for Mirror Mirror. Also WHAT IS UP with all the Snow White? Three of these movies (~~Maleficent~~ (Kristin is right--she's Sleeping Beauty. The Powers That Be can revoke my Disney movie fan-card now), Snow White and the Huntsman, and Mirror Mirror), are all snow white, and in Once Upon A Time, Snow White is a primary supporting character.)

What do you think? Are these stories so awesome we'll never get tired of them? Or do you kind of wish people would come up with some new fantasy plots already? Or, maybe they are awesome and there's a reason to continue retelling them, but is this TOO MANY at once?

NIGHTWISH IS AWESOME

2011-11-09T14:00:00.002-05:00

Can't. Stop. Watching!!!!

Moving On

2011-11-07T18:54:00.004-05:00

I broke up with my first three manuscripts today.

I put them in a banker's box with rubber bands and those big black clips, along with the notebooks I carried around while I was working on them, and I stuck them on a shelf, out of the way. (The banker's box is not an accurate representation of how many drafts there were of each, or of how hard I worked on them. Each had somewhere between 4 and 9 drafts--printed out, that would be a LOT of paper. I only printed what amounted to about two drafts per manuscript.)

I love them. I loved working on them. I learned a lot from them. But they're done. I don't think I'll ever return to them. I don't need them taking up space on my shelf, or getting in my way when I'm looking for notes that have to do with my current manuscript. Or taking up valuable space in my binders, for that matter.

And I don't really want to think about them anymore. I feel like they represent a less confident me. The me who got upset and shaky whenever a critique partner made a comment I wasn't sure I agreed with. The me who cried over form rejections (okay that still might be me, but I'll never tell). The me who didn't yet believe "someday, real, actual people--READERS--will read this."

This is the part of murdering your darlings they don't tell you about. The time when the entire project needs to be put away--gently--into a box, because maybe it's not who you are anymore, or because it'll never amount to what you wanted, or because you got better and it's not going to grow as fast as you will.

Don't be afraid to say goodbye and move on.

Win Australian YA book BURN BRIGHT

2011-11-01T08:00:00.000-04:00

BURN BRIGHT is a fantastic book. It's a blend of a dystopian world with a fantasy setting, strange, mysterious characters, and a plot that twists and turns in ways that you can't imagine when you start. This book is like a masquerade ball--it's beautiful, it's enigmatic, and it's surprising.

And almost everyone who reads YA in the US is missing out, because it isn't published here. You can get it as an e-book at The Book Depository, but I like paper books, and I think the paper books should be here, too. And on Amazon.com.

So I'm having a contest. The prize is a signed copy of BURN BRIGHT (that came all the way from Australia!) a signed CD of the music that goes along with the book, and some signed bookmarks.

In case you've never heard of it, (description from Goodreads):
Into a world of wild secrets and deadly pleasures comes a girl whose innocence may be her greatest strength.

In Ixion music and party are our only beliefs. Darkness is our comfort. We have few rules but they are absolute . . .

Retra doesn’t want to go to Ixion, the island of ever-night, ever-youth and never-sleep. Retra is a Seal – sealed minds, sealed community. She doesn’t crave parties and pleasure, experience and freedom.

But her brother Joel left for Ixion two years ago, and Retra is determined to find him. Braving the intense pain of her obedience strip to escape the only home she’s ever known, Retra stows away on the barge that will take her to her brother.

When she can’t find Joel, Retra finds herself drawn deeper into the intoxicating world of Ixion. Come to me, whispers a voice in her head. Who are the Ripers, the mysterious guardians of Ixion? What are the Night Creatures Retra can see in the shadows? And what happens to those who grow too old for Ixion?

Retra will find that Ixion has its pleasures, but its secrets are deadly. Will friendship, and the creation of an eternal bond with a Riper, be enough to save her from the darkness?

Listen well, baby bats. Burn bright, but do not stray from the paths. Remember, when you live in a place of darkness you also live with creatures of the dark.

How do you enter?

As usual, fill out >>> THE FORM <<<. To be entered officially into the contest, I need your name and your e-mail. I also need one more thing from you...

Do at least ONE of the things listed below to be entered in the contest:
- Follow Marianne de Pierres on twitter (@mdepierres)
- Like the BURN BRIGHT facebook page
- Like the Publish BURN BRIGHT Worldwide facebook page
- Tweet about this contest
- Add BURN BRIGHT to your Goodreads "to read" list
- Sign the petition at Strangemore to bring BURN BRIGHT to the US

You can do more than one of those things for extra entries, but you must do AT LEAST one (point values in the form.)

You can also do any or all of these things for extra entries, but none of them are mandatory:
- Write a blog post about either this contest or BURN BRIGHT
- Include mention of this contest in a blog post
- Link to this contest in your sidebar
- Mention BURN BRIGHT in a cover love post, a waiting on wednesday post, or something comparable (you can have made the post before I made this contest.)

This giveaway is US only, because I want someone else in the US to get this book and catch the fever of awesome.

Contest closes in two weeks. Tuesday, the 15th of November, at midnight EST.

Good luck! :)

Query Writing

2011-10-21T10:15:00.001-04:00

In the past week and a half, I've written two queries (each with over five totally different drafts--and they're still not done!) for two different novels. One of which I am currently revising, and one I'm considering re-revising for the ten-thousandth time.

I am no expert on writing queries. I've written queries that have nabbed requests, and I've written queries that got quickly discarded because it was obvious they weren't working. But I've found two things that have helped me, anyway, and I feel like sharing, because I've consistently run into a particular frustration: the too long query. If what I'm saying doesn't resonate with you, please feel free to either ignore me or disagree with me in the comments. It would actually be sort of great if we could get a discussion going about this.

The first thing: write your query long before you're ready to actually send it out. This is an advantage for so many reasons, the first of which being you have longer to tweak it, and longer to send it to friends or post it on boards for it to be critiqued. You also have it ready if there are any contests involving posting your query. Basically the last thing you want is to be vomiting up a query a day before you need to use it.

But I think this is also a good idea because it helps you really figure out what the core of your story is. Revisions can be so overwhelming, sometimes it's easy to get distracted by side details and let the story veer off-track a little bit. Having that query in the back of your mind helps you remember the basic plot and the ultimate goal of the protagonist. It's also a great way to catch inconsistencies, or to see if your plot or conflict isn't fleshed out enough.

The second thing (and I think this is especially helpful if you write fantasy): if you keep feeling like your query is too complicated, is too long, or just isn't summing up your story, then you probably aren't zoomed out enough. What you think are the barest bare bones of the plot...those things are probably still too much detail. Whatever those things are, whatever you think you absolutely must include in your query, cut that information in half. And then maybe do it again if your query drafts are consistently over 350 words.

Seriously, I'm so sure that this is a contributing factor to query difficulties, I'll even say it in a different way. The problem, sometimes, is feeling like aspects of your story don't make sense when put in the query. If a detail needs more than a couple words of explanation, or if the reason behind it isn't obvious because of the rest of your query, it probably shouldn't be there. It's too specific.

This whole too complicated too long query thing has been my big problem. It's not that my stories are any more complicated than any other YA stories (they're not)--it's that I was trying to make my query too complicated. I wanted this cool detail and that cool detail to be in there, and this plot twist, etc. And it all seemed so important to my ability to pitch the story. Just leap over all that stuff. Resist putting it in.

All the really good queries and blurbs I've read have one thing in common: they're short, and they only say a couple of things about the story if you really break it down. One I'm currently digging is the blurb for DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE as it appears on Goodreads (or, at least, as it appears at the time of writing this):

Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky.

In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low.

And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherwordly war.

Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages--not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out.

When one of the strangers--beautiful, haunted Akiva--fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?

I love how pithy it is, how much mystery there is, and yet how straight-forward it manages to be. It focuses on one aspect of the plot: who Karou is. But there are big hints that there's way more to the book than just that question--and that the fantasy world is very rich.

Anyway, these are just some things I've noticed. I hope they're even a little helpful (since it took me longer than it probably should've to figure some of this out--since I'm not ready to query my YA fantasy yet, we won't know if I actually learned something for a while!) but even if I'm completely unhelpful, remember that I'm just as inexperienced as you are!

And I would REALLY love it if you would share the most helpful trick you've learned for writing queries!

Kitten spam!

2011-10-18T08:00:00.000-04:00

An old video of Lucy, my cat, I finally uploaded to youtube. She's a pretty small kitten in this video. She makes cute noises and it's only 20 seconds long. Perfect for making you smile without wasting your time!

Seriously, kittens are therapeutic. Why do you think there are so many cute kitten videos on the internet?

Just a thought

2011-10-16T14:27:00.001-04:00

Often times, a motivating factor in striving for some goal or some kind of success is proving someone else wrong. People in high school who thought you were a loser. A teacher or professor who said you were a terrible writer. A parent. A sibling. Whoever.

Most of the time, though, I don't think these people really care if we ever make our goal. We haven't really proven anything--if a professor thought you were a terrible writer, and you manage to get published, that professor's mind probably hasn't changed. Now you're just a terrible published writer, in that professor's eyes--if he or she even cares. If those people from high school haven't grown up (and some of them never do) you're still a loser, no matter what you do. (I think the exception to this is parents. But I digress.)

I don't think we're proving them wrong. I don't think we're even striving to prove them wrong. I think they become the face of our own doubt. Someone says you're a bad writer? Now you have a picture to hang on the dartboard--but that feeling of doubt you want to throw darts at has probably always been with you in some capacity. These people certainly don't help matters. They make the doubt worse. Or they plant a different kind of doubt, now to grow wild among all the other kinds already living within us.

When we say we want to prove them wrong, I think it's really doubt we want to prove wrong. Our own doubt. My doubt has a lot of faces, collected over the years from people who made me feel small. But the person I most want to prove wrong is myself.

Do you like Moleskine? Try this...

2011-10-12T08:00:00.000-04:00

My new pocket notebook was not made by Moleskine. I got it at Barnes & Noble (the notebook makers are a B&N company). It's lime green. It's got great paper. It has a flexi cover. And it's super super eco-friendly.

http://www.ecosystemlife.com/

Seriously guys, I like trees. A lot. So from now on I'm buying these--yep, the green gimmick works on me. But even if it's a gimmick, it's actually good for the environment. 100% recycled paper. And with trackable ingredients--every book comes with a serial number. They tell you where every part of your notebook was made. Mine was made entirely in the United States (which, from an American company, is impressive in of itself).

I like it a lot. No I did not get paid to write this. I just like trees and clean air.

Fantasy Tropes: Don't Take Your Setting Too Far The Wrong Way!

2011-10-11T08:00:00.000-04:00

A couple weeks ago I talked about the importance of having a detailed and unique setting (with the understanding, of course, that one not bog down the reader with pages of flowery and needless description).

On the topic of setting (which is inexhaustible! And which I love) there's also a different direction in which a writer can go wrong, and that is making the setting too unique. I can think of a lot of mixology analogies right now, but I'll spare you. There is a reason we insert modern-day protagonists into fantasy settings, or why we use the slightly worn if still well-loved medieval castle as the primary setting for a fantasy novel. Because if a setting is too far off the wall (and this is where the modern-day protagonist comes in handy--for easy explanation) it gets hard to deal with.

Because if things get too complicated, the reader is going to give up and give up fast. I've noticed several problems that contribute to having a setting that's a little beyond the amount of effort an average reader is willing to commit to understanding a story.

Problem the first: UNPRONOUNCEABLE NAMES

A name that sounds like a sneeze and has three apostrophes in it? Probably not a good idea. Because if a reader can't figure out how to pronounce most of your names, then they won't remember the names. If they don't remember the names, they will not be able to tell the difference between many of your characters. ONE name with three apostrophes in it is okay, especially if everyone else has an intuitive sounding name. Then it sticks out, marks that character as being from another land or culture or whatever, and is memorable if not pronounceable. Otherwise, I strongly advise against it. (The same goes for ridiculously long names. Especially if they start with the same letter.)

Problem the second: RIDICULOUSLY INVOLVED CULTURAL RITUALS

Is there a very complicated bow that one must make if it's a full moon in the second harvest month if the king approaches you from the left on a main road? Does your world's religion have more rituals and gods than the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman pantheons and religions combined? And does said religion require some really complicated version of genuflecting and have very strict and very intricate rules? As a general rule, unless you can introduce this kind of intricacy slowly, so as to familiarize the reader with parts of it early on and then introduce it in small amounts only as needed, it's probably not a good idea. And I don't mean don't make up a religion or new cultural rules or what have you. Just don't make them overly complicated and don't try to explain (or 'show') all the aspects of said rituals. You can get away with a LOT of uncommon and unfamiliar stuff as long as you introduce it in the right way, and don't make things needlessly complicated. If it seems like there's at least a somewhat plausible reason for a culture to do things a certain way, then the reader will go along with you. And if you introduce that certain way in bits, only as needed, then again, the reader will go along with you. I know how hard this can be, especially in first person if you're writing from the perspective of someone who's very familiar with things. But it's doable. (And part of what I find frustrating about first person.) One of the best ways to get around 'explaining' rituals is to have someone totally mess them up.

Problem the third: TOO MANY MADE UP WORDS

This goes along with unpronounceable names. Some people can get away with a glossary at the back of the book (or...if you're Tolkien, publishing like twelve books of backstory and language history to accompany your stories). But I have to tell you, having read a lot of books that do have glossaries at the back, I get tired of flipping back every time I come across some word or title or minor character or lesser god in country X's pantheon I can't remember. Sometimes I do look in the glossary, but other times I just resign myself to being confused and forge ahead. Seriously, sometimes it's okay to use the word 'empress' or 'princess' or 'priestess' or 'lord' or 'lady' or what have you. Assume your story is being translated from whatever fantasy language into English. Only when there really is no direct translation (and nothing that even comes close) do we Anglicize another language's word and stick it in something. If they have a special kind of monster or plant or a horse with eight legs or a specific ritual they do on Halloween, well of course we'd have no English translation of that. But we do have words for king and queen, for empress and goddess, and such. Also, if you can make your made up words intuitive, for example if you have a dragon-like monster, somehow including a bit of the word "dragon" or "wyvern" might help the reader remember, oh yeah, that's the dragon-like monster. (That's an awful example, but it serves.)

Problem the fourth: TOO MUCH DESCRIPTION
You knew it was coming. The easiest way to bore a reader with setting is to describe it. In long paragraphs. And pretty language. While absolutely nothing is happening in the story itself. The kicker about this problem, though, is that your setting can still be generic even with lots of description. If you have to describe every detail of a room, but the only things in the room are some chairs and a bed with pillows on it and a fireplace, that's not a room that needs or deserves description. Nor does it say anything about your world other than that people have to sleep and like to sit down.

So what did I forget? What do you think makes fantasy settings needlessly complicated?

Fantasy Tropes: The Masquerade (I Can't Get Enough)

2011-10-06T08:00:00.000-04:00

I have this theory about why so many balls show up in fantasy novels. Part of it is because the scene they create is so pretty.

EXHIBIT A:

(Disney loves balls.)

But the bigger part of my theory hinges on prom. No, really. I had a totally craptastic prom experience. (Junior and senior. I don't know which was worse, the whiny boyfriend from junior year who got mad at me because I didn't tell him he looked nice every five minutes, or the chainsmoking date from senior year who wore SHORTS with those socks that come halfway up your lower leg.)

So getting to read or write about a ball is actually a fantasy prom that none of us ever got to go to. No, really. I'm serious!

My favorite kind of ball, and my absolute favorite fantasy trope that I can NEVER get enough of and probably will never ever get tired of is the masquerade. I think they're gorgeous to read (and to watch!) and there are so many possibilities during a masquerade that don't exist anywhere else--not even in other balls. Come as you aren't, isn't that the theme? Wear a mask and become something or someone else for the night.

Masquerades are full of possibilities. Mistaken identity. Love without ever seeing someone's face. Disguising a prince or an assassin or a milkmaid. (Disguising your smallpox scars or the fact that your nose fell off because you have syphilis. Hah.) And, of course, not using a disguise at all, but instead choosing a mask on a stick that can be removed and that doesn't hide your face very well to begin with.

If you want to make sure your masquerade is unique, the biggest bit of advice I can give (and this comes from reading tons and tons of fantasy novels) is to make sure there's a reason to have the ball. Not necessarily that the characters throwing the masquerade have to have a good reason (people do stuff for fun all the time), but make sure that the plot needs the masquerade--and specifically a masquerade, rather than just any old ball. Otherwise they can seem like gratuitous scenes and might end up darlings that need to be murdered. (At the same time...I sort of don't mind even if they are gratuitous.)

An example: the story of Cinderella always has a ball, because that's where the prince meets her and where she loses her glass slipper etc. etc. etc. But in ELLA ENCHANTED by Gail Carson Levine, she changed the ball to a masquerade, because the prince and Ella had already met, and he couldn't know her identity at the ball--so having a masquerade ball gave Ella the opportunity to wear a mask. She made it unique and more useful to the plot. (Plus it's a brilliant book.)

Masquerade balls and the reasons for having them can say a lot about your country/society's economy, and people's reaction to it (especially people in power). Are they frivolous and very Marie Antoinette-ish? Spending tons of money when their country can't afford to eat? Or are they really in an economic boom and everyone is happy? Or, more likely, perhaps the country is in war-time and people need a pick-me-up. Or the aristocracy is trying to pretend like nothing's wrong when really the treasury is empty and everyone is secretly broke. Another one of my favorites is some kind of show of riches or power for a neighboring nation who might be visiting at the time. I'm not so much a fan of the idea of throwing a ball to find a mate for a prince or princess, since that one gets used more often, but those balls do have their place in the plots of fairytale retellings.

Do you have a favorite masquerade (or ball) scene from a book or movie? (I feel like the obvious answer is PHANTOM OF THE OPERA...)

Book Review: THE SPACE BETWEEN

2011-10-05T10:17:00.001-04:00

On Monday I reviewed Brenna Yovanoff's THE SPACE BETWEEN at YA Confidential. It was definitely one of the best things I read this year.

http://yaconfidential.blogspot.com/2011/10/book-review-space-between.html

Fantasy Tropes: My Young Naive Orphan Boy is Better Than Your Young Naive Orphan Boy

2011-10-04T08:00:00.000-04:00

Last week I was nice. I talked about setting (a little bit, though expect more on this because setting is one of those Things that you can always say more about) and I talked about funny diction. But nicely.

This week I am slightly less nice. Like 1% less nice. Bordering on mean, really. Be prepared with the correct pair of undewear. That was not meant to rhyme, but I like it. (I am also not talking about Harry Potter in this post. I love Harry Potter. You insult Harry Potter and I'll sic my dragon on you.)

The fantasy trope I'm going today happens to be a very popular main character in fantasy novels. The young (naive, usually orphaned, shy and kinda stupid, yet magically gifted (though he doesn't know it yet), good at nothing yet somehow smarter than everyone else (though he may not know it yet), probably a goat herder, serf, slave, or worker at a crappy little inn in the middle of nowhere where he means absolutely nothing to anyone around him, but he fulfills a prophecy or was chosen at birth or has a magical right testi--uh, I mean ear,) boy.

Traits this character may or may not have:
The girls all like him, but he probably doesn't know that.

The adults are one of two things: dismissive, or secretly threatened (probably both).

His life is miserable and quiet.

He is miserable and quiet.

He has no self-confidence. Something which the people around him reinforce on an hourly basis.

There is probably some magical or super-intelligent skill he has, that he's always had, but he doesn't know it's important. It isn't until the Wise Old Man or The Dark Lord's Minion sees him do this thing he didn't realize was at all a magical skill that the plot begins and the young boy realizes he's actually speshul.

But he won't feel speshul until the end of the book.

(Conversely, there is probably some magical or super-intelligent skill he has, that he's always had, that's caused his village/parents/whoever to shun him and make him feel super un-speshul. So now he's got a complex about using it.)

He will mess up. A lot.

And then he'll mess up some more...

..with women, and with however he's being prepared to defeat The Dark Lord.

He'll mess up to the point that you don't think it's possible he could ever actually defeat Evil. (But this is a fantasy book. Of course he will defeat Evil. But you have to wait three more books for it to happen.)

The woman he loves will be woefully one-dimensional. Ladies reading the book will roll their eyes, because this is so not new we have learned to pick more important battles. Like with underwires and why they are necessary.

Did I forget to mention the quest?

When he finally does defeat The Dark Lord or Evil (or both), it will change him. He will become depressed somehow, or fall into a pit of "is this what it is to be a man?" or "look at how many people had to die for me to get here." This will make him into a Man.

This will not prevent him from having The Sex with his one-dimensional love interest. But he first will ignore her because he thinks his hands are too bloodstained to ever touch something so perfect.

And the most important trait of all:
Despite the fact that most readers of fantasy have read him a hundred times before, and maybe don't even like him while reading the book, by the end...he has won us over. Because who doesn't love tales of adversity, in which an absolute nobody with a miserable life gets to become something more? (And I mean that in absolute seriousness.) And we're probably even rooting for him to get together with his one-dimensional love interest. (I mean that in partial seriousness.)

(In my fear of posting anything negative on the internet and people forever after assuming I'm some kind of...nasty negative person, I just have to say: Y'all, this is satire, because fantasy is my favorite genre and I really do love everything about it. I'm not serious. Or maybe I am. You'll never know. But anyway I've read many young-chosen-boy high fantasy novels and loved them.)

Fantasy Tropes: Ridiculously Lofty Diction

2011-09-29T08:00:00.000-04:00

"Milady, mine eyes hath not laid upon any visage so beautiful as yours. 'Tis fairer than the sweetest nosegay."

I get why people in fantasy novels don't usually talk the way we do in modern society. Not only do they lack much of our technology (and a lot of our abbreviations and slang come from the ways our language has changed thanks to technology) but it also would just sound weird to have a couple of noble ladies walk up to each other and say "Hey biatch! Wassup?"

But that doesn't mean your characters have to talk with Shakespearean words and weirdly inverted syntax. It doesn't even mean they have to talk particularly formally, either.

I get the temptation. Everyone in LORD OF THE RINGS talks pretty, even the people who really shouldn't talk pretty. In Victorian novels and 18th century diaries, everyone's diction is high and their words are long. Making characters speak intelligently, with long sentences, big words, and without contractions (and I'm guilty of this one myself!) is a good way to make them feel like they're from another time or another world. It takes them out of that modern context, and yes, that is appealing.

But it is SO easy to go overboard with this. If you'd believe it, there's actually a freakishly-high-diction groove you get into once you start writing fantasy people like that. Trust me, when I was 14 ALL my fantasy characters spoke like they'd swallowed the OED and THE COMPLETE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE. And a modern reader isn't going to be able to connect with someone who talks like Hamlet, anyway--unless they're actually reading HAMLET. (Even then, some people can't stand it.)

So, how do you keep obvious trademarks of modern diction out of fantasy dialogue without making your characters sound like they're being held hostage by Petrarch? Well, you can keep your diction pretty natural, actually. Eliminating things like "like" and "you know" and "seriously" from speech evens it out really well. Calling parents Mother and Father instead of Mom and Dad is pretty much an instantaneous royalty-ification. Don't use words that only came into popular use in the late 19th century or later--and if you're not sure, google it! (So if you're doing a medieval-esque setting, they wouldn't have had words like analgesic or addicted.)

Keep the slang to a minimum (unless you're not going with the familiar royalty route (more on this anon!) and are writing dockside workers--in which case you need low diction and a LOTTA slang), and if you must use a slang term, make one up! Or, slang is a place where it's okay to steal from Shakespeare or Dickens or whoever (though I do not recommend using 'alack!' as your slang word unless you're writing some kind of comedy.) Words for distance and time passage (like fortnight) are good--they sound old-fashioned, but they can still be used in a totally understandable and not at all awkward exchange of dialogue. "When will you come home?" "In a fortnight." And, hate to bring this up, a lot of curse words have been around for a long time, too.

And yeah, trying to come up with a pithy synonym for some of our slang is HARD. Believe me, I know. I spent forever trying to think of a synonym for "shut up!" and I still haven't come up with anything great. ("Be quiet" just doesn't have the same oomph, and something like "still your tongue" is rather awkward to say.) But my advice is, rather than saying something like "Still thy tongue or I shall cut it out with my sword!" just write around it. Eliminate the need for the use of "shut up" and put in something else--clapping a hand over someone's mouth, socking them in the jaw, snapping at them to make them stop talking, screaming over their words, whatever. (I do not recommend the use of "whatever" to end a sentence in fantasy dialogue.)

The biggest piece of advice I can give you is this: use your ears. You know when something sounds lofty and awkward, just as you know when something sounds modern. If you have to, read it aloud to yourself, or read it aloud to someone else. Your ears will tell you when the dialogue is right.

Fantasy Tropes: Freakishly Familiar Settings

2011-09-27T08:00:00.000-04:00

Do I have enough alliteration in this blog title?

Fantasy, and by that I mean high fantasy, which takes place in an alternate world, (and excluding a lot of alternate history, urban, and paranormal) tends to be based on medieval England in varying degrees of strictness and accuracy. It makes sense; some of our favorite fantasy heavy-hitters like LORD OF THE RINGS are based in a medieval-inspired world. Medieval worlds don't have to be generic: there's a LOT in the medieval time period to supply a fantasy world with new and unique details.

But do you ever get that feeling like you've read a fantasy setting one too many times before?

I know I do. When it seems like the setting is primarily a castle, or a cute little village that lacks anything particularly identifying or unique about it, when the trees are just trees and the landscape is something vaguely like the English countryside. There are balls without specific fashions or dances, banquets without specific food or eating utensils or manners, wars with vague knights on horseback and maybe some archers...you get where I'm going with this.

Basically, when there aren't many details but those provided by books that have come before.

And detail is what, in my opinion anyway, makes or breaks a fantasy setting. Now, I am NOT advocating huge info-dumpy paragraphs describing every leaf on every tree on the way to ~~Rivendell~~ some faraway land. Dumping pretty but LONG and (honestly) hard to read descriptions of setting is another fantasy trope I'll come to at another time (maybe). But you don't need to sacrifice specific detail in an attempt to keep the reader from getting bored.

Think about it. What was so great about Harry Potter? Rowling only gave us a couple of lines of description at any given time, but she fed us these often and in interesting ways. And what she was feeding us wasn't just a generic castle with a stable and servants. She was giving us an intricate look at a very well-imagined world full of details. How did we learn about the inner workings of Hogwarts? We watched Harry struggle through it, be perplexed and awed by it, and finally, succeed at it. Without being bombarded, we got the sense of a long history not only of Hogwarts, but of a wide and specific wizarding world. Rowling left nothing up to generic explanation, and because of that, the world felt fuller--and we could imagine that there was something beyond what we were reading.

Am I saying that you should ditch the medieval setting? No way. It's a favorite! What I'm saying is that you should make your setting specific. If you can pull all those tiny details, from underwear to war strategy, from your imagination, more power to you. But what I find most helpful is to do research on something--on a particular part of the world, or a particular generation of a royal (or not so royal) family, or even something more narrow like early university systems. Basing worldbuilding, especially if you're a new fantasy writer, on real world settings is one of the best ways to make sure you're making a unique and specific setting and including enough detail so that you never give your reader the feeling that parts of your story exist in that white room vacuum, where it's hard to imagine any setting at all. You don't even have to pick a single time period--I'm very fond of mixing them, actually. And you can change whatever details you want--the beauty of fantasy is that it does not have to be any kind of accurate to your research.

But if you can write a hilarious (or hilariously dark) scene about a knight who has so much armor on he has to be lifted onto his horse via crane (which did actually happen!) and what that means for the war effort (or just for the jousting circuit!) suddenly your knights and their armor and their poor, poor horses will stand out--and so will your worldbuilding.

If you want a good example of worldbuilding, Rae Carson's THE GIRL OF FIRE AND THORNS (seriously, at this point I must look like some kind of TGOFAT stalker...oh well) has excellent worldbuilding. Her setting is unique, but one of the ways she made it so was by basing it on specific and real places (Spain and the desert being the main two). And she doesn't give in to long descriptions: you find out things through the main character's actions and observations. Without knowing exactly when it happened, you realize you can picture the world perfectly.

What do you think? Am I being too hard on the poor castles and inns and horses and forests? Or do you sometimes wish for something a little different, too? What are your favorite fantasy books that take place in a non-Medieval setting?

Favorite Fantasy Tropes...& How to Subvert Them: An Introduction

2011-09-26T08:00:00.000-04:00

I'm going to do something new (!) on my blog, starting today. I read a lot (a ridiculous amount) of fantasy. In every sub genre you can think of. It's my favorite thing--always has been--to read.

I went to Rae Carson's signing last Tuesday, (you can see a picture of me with her (huge stalkerish squee!) in the left sidebar, and read my review of her stellar debut THE GIRL OF FIRE AND THORNS here) and one of the things she mentioned that inspired her to write TGOFAT was that while she loves fantasy, she got tired of seeing certain tropes, and she wanted to write a book that turned some of them on their heads. I think she succeeded.

I agree with her 500%, and making sure not to fall into the traps of tropes is one thing I strive to do in my writing. Kristin Nelson, in a couple of my favorite blog posts ever, talks about the "groan worthy" fantasy openers she's seen in her career as an agent. Seems like people are interested in this kind of thing. Well, okay, *I* am, anyway.

So what I want to start doing on this blog as a regular feature is talking about the tropes that I see so often in fantasy, as a reader and as a writer. Some tropes I see broken down more and more in books, and some I see staying for the most part the same. Maybe I'll even get to use that college degree in English to analyze some of these things.

What I'm particularly excited about dissecting:

+ Freakishly familiar settings

+ Why that damsel is always in distress

+ Flaming! Red! Hair!

+ What is this fascination with royalty?

+ Sexism and it's feminist counterpart

+ Hark! Another quest, Frodo!

+ Why Really Old Men make the best wizards

So...DO you want to know what's up with princesses in towers and magical swords and chosen people? Me too! I'm hoping to figure out some of why this is so popular, which parts we might still want to see, and which parts we're sick of. And, if you're trying to polish up a fantasy story, I hope I might provide you with an idea or two. I certainly hope to find some new ideas during this endeavor. :)

A note: This is all meant in good fun, and to help writers and readers of fantasy like me! And, because I'm such a geek, to provide me with discussion opportunities with like-minded geeks.

Come back TOMORROW! I'll be talking about setting and worldbuilding! :)

Also, today on YA Confidential, I'm blogging about the teen perspective on LGBT lit. I would love it if you went to check it out and gave me your thoughts!

Today I am not myself...and you could win agent critiques!

2011-09-14T10:09:00.003-04:00

Today is a bit of a hodgepodge of things. First off, if you head over to YA CONFIDENTIAL, we're having a HUGE launch contest. Not only are there some super sweet ARCs up for grabs, but we have a five page critique from Vickie Motter and a query critique from Sarah LaPolla for you to win as well!

I'm also celebrating the launch of Talli Roland's WATCHING WILLOW WATTS by posting a picture of which famous person I would be if I could be anyone...

And I would be 18th century British writer, Mary Wollstonecraft, if only so that I could be attached to the awesome that is "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Her life was short (she wasn't 40 when she died) and she lived in a time when women were treated as very inferior to men, but she didn't let that stop her from writing or from having some rather unconventional love affairs. (She's also mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who you may have heard of...)

So, who would you be?

Go visit Talli and tell her about it!

Check it out

2011-09-12T12:20:00.001-04:00

http://yaconfidential.blogspot.com

Ooh...a NEW manuscript!

2011-09-01T09:57:00.003-04:00

Beginning of August, I decided to participate in Camp NaNoWriMo. 18 days later, I had my 50k words. 3 days after that, I had a complete first draft.

The entire first half of 2011 I was working on the same manuscript, a manuscript that also took a good part of my writing energy and concentration in 2010. The dark fantasy manuscript that I've been writing all those letters to. Revising that has been at the forefront of my brain for SUCH a long time--and believe me, it was worth it. All that deleted and rewritten text was so worth it, because I really like how the manuscript turned out, and it surprised me so many times. (Don't get me wrong, it was frustrating as hell, too. But worth it frustration.)

But oh wow, I'd almost forgotten how fantastic it is to write a first draft, because the last first draft I wrote was in 2009 when I first wrote the dark fantasy project. Since then, I've REwritten two projects (one completely from scratch, which was kind of like doing a first draft), and I've done so much revising (I feel like a revision machine). New projects squished their way through the empty space in my brain and demanded to be written in as loud a voice as their unformed ideas could make, but the revisions always yelled louder, and so that's what I always did.

Until this project, this new manuscript, a YA fantasy, blew up into a monster sized idea with sub plots and side characters and world details and facets and pretty things. I actually wrote the first pages of it (going through EVERY SINGLE TENSE/POV combination (except 2nd person, cuz seriously...) until I settled on one) while I was doing the final read-through of the dark fantasy. In those final dark fantasy days, the YA fantasy would Not. Shut. Up.

I've had this idea for over a year. Maybe it was waiting so long to actually get to it (and I did have to keep myself from doing it so I could solidify a lot of points about the idea), but I don't know if I've ever had such fun writing a first draft, and that includes the first time waaaaay long ago when I realized I was going to actually FINISH a novel.

Part of what made it great was the same energy that made me want to keep revising the dark fantasy: they aren't just fantasy stories--yes, they're commercial plots and action fun and magic, but I also got to slip a little feminism and questioning binaries in there, too. In totally different ways than the feminism most people usually think of (like if you're thinking of burning bras or man hating, that's not what I mean at all.) I'm talking about worlds that never needed feminism because of their social structure, worlds that have other binaries or other -isms to worry about, worlds that never decided that a woman's biology makes her less useful or less of a person or just less.

This is my favorite part of writing.

Goodbye Summer ARC Giveaway Winners!

2011-08-30T09:04:00.003-04:00

Courtesy of Random.org...

The winner of ENTHRALLED is Sonya!

The winner of GLOW is Dinda_Sl!

The winner of ASHES is Mazz Nixon!

The winner of AFTER OBSESSION is Jessica S!

The winner of DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE is Vivien!

Thank you to everyone who entered! Winners, I encourage you to post reviews of these fantastic books on Goodreads, Amazon, or your blogs (if you have one).

Letter to my manuscript part...whatever

2011-08-24T12:02:00.003-04:00

Dear ~~steampunk~~ dark fantasy manuscript,

You aren't really steampunk anymore, are you? You still have steampunk elements, to be sure, but you've gone rogue and dark on me. That's ok, though, I rewrote you and asked you what you wanted to be, and that's what you said.

I definitely didn't expect you to divide yourself into parts, or to need more than one point of view. But I like those things. They make you look pretty. And goodness knows, for a heck of a long time you were NOT very pretty.

Now it's time to let you sit some more, and let me work on other things. Like this new WIP that's sure to be getting a (frustrated/elated) letter sometime soon.

Also, I think this band Halestorm is really cool. I wager some of you might find them cool, too, so have a listen:

Goodbye Summer ARC Giveaway!

2011-08-22T09:31:00.008-04:00

I have 5 fabulous ARCs to give away, mostly because I'm sad that summer is almost over (less than a month, *sigh*). If you're sad about that, too, maybe an ARC will make you feel better. If you're one of those people who likes autumn better (...or winter, and if that's the case then I think you're crazy, just for the record) then how about an ARC to celebrate the fact that the hot, humid summer is coming to a close?

Or if you're depressed about school starting...my sympathies. This is the first time in sixteen years (not counting kindergarten or preschool) that I have not had to do the "back to school" dance. But I must admit, even seeing school supplies at the grocery store makes my stomach drop in despair a little bit.

I think an ARC would make you feel better, yes?

I have...

ENTHRALLED, edited by Melissa Marr and Kelley Armstrong

GLOW by Amy Kathleen Ryan

ASHES by Ilsa J. Bick (this one is SIGNED!)

AFTER OBSESSION by Carrie Jones and Steven E. Wedel

and DAUGHTER OF SMOKE AND BONE by Laini Taylor

So...would you like one of them?

If you would...

>>>CLICK HERE TO ENTER<<< (link removed)

That link will take you to a form. The only things you need to enter this giveaway are your name and e-mail address. BUT if you want to do more and earn extra points (like blog, or tweet, or follow the authors) there's information about it in the form!

Giveaway ends next Monday, AUGUST 29th, at MIDNIGHT.

BURN BRIGHT campain

2011-08-17T15:28:00.004-04:00

A couple months ago, I raved about an Australian book called BURN BRIGHT. I talked about how it's not out in the US, but that if you are from the US (or the UK, or anywhere else, actually) and you think it sounds interesting, to tweet at US publishers about it or blog about it or like the facebook page.

Now there's a petition to sign. So I'm pestering you. GO SIGN IT! It takes all of ten seconds (literal calculation, no hyperbole!)

If you're interested in winning a copy of BURN BRIGHT and the sequel ANGEL ARIAS (so you can see what I'm talking about!) there's a contest running right now. (I really REALLY want the sequel like whoa).

Check it out! :)

ETA: Medeia Sharif just let me know that the e-book of BURN BRIGHT is available at The Book Depository.

If you want to read the first chapter Random House Australia has it available here.

EPIC giveaway winners!

2011-08-03T17:26:00.004-04:00

Without further ado...

The winner of SUPERNATURALLY and SWEETLY is: maidenveil

The winner of POSSESS and DARK PARTIES is: Judi

The winner of SHIFTING and NOCTURNE is: Brittany

The winner of EVERY YOU, EVERY ME and THE BEGINNING OF AFTER is: Angel C

Winners, you have been contacted! Congrats!

And a huge THANK YOU to everyone who entered! :)

new projects and other stuff

2011-08-01T09:32:00.003-04:00

I'm finally finally starting a new project after working on the same thing for a very very long time. A YA fantasy this time that I'm starting just in time to join Camp NaNoWriMo for the month of August! I've never actually had things together at the right time to do NaNoWriMo--I've always been revising or finishing up a project or in the middle of finals when November rolled around.

Anyone working on something new this month as well?

Also, don't forget to enter my EPIC 8 ARC giveaway, which closes tonight at midnight!

EPIC ARC GIVEAWAY! (8 ARCS!)

2011-07-25T16:18:00.004-04:00

I still have a bunch of fantastic ARCs from ALA to give away! This time, I have four packages of two ARCs each, arranged by theme!

Behold, if you dare:

PACKAGE ONE: Paranormal activities

SUPERNATURALLY by Kiersten White and SWEETLY by Jackson Pearce

PACKAGE TWO: Shapeshifters

NOCTURNE by Christine Johnson and SHIFTING by Bethany Wiggins

PACKAGE THREE: Reality bites

THE BEGINNING OF AFTER by Jennifer Castle and EVERY YOU, EVERY ME by David Levithan

PACKAGE FOUR: Darkness falls

DARK PARTIES by Sara Grant and POSSESS by Gretchen McNeil

There are a bunch of ways to earn extra points (details in the form) but the ONLY thing you need to do to enter the giveaway is click on the link below and give me your name and e-mail!

>>> CLICK HERE TO ENTER <<< (eta: hyperlink removed)

Giveaway is only open to the US this time.

Giveaway closes at midnight EST on Monday, August 1.

Good luck!

Zombies ate my brains

2011-07-23T00:10:00.005-04:00

I promise you, they did. I knew I'd forgotten my brain somewhere--I took it out because revising makes it itchy and it second guesses everything my heart says--and *sigh* the zombies got to it before I found it.

I tried to ask them why brains, specifically, are so tasty, but I think they only know how to say one word: "Brains."

I have only a couple neurons left. I stuck them back into my head, but I need to face the reality: my head is now empty.

My heart is glad to have more control over the manuscript. My spleen thinks it has an input, too, since you know, back in the 18th century people would have attacks of spleen all the time. My spleen is a big Alexander Pope fan, but I still don't want its input since I'm not a fan of any kind of organ attack. (I actually thought the spleen was vestigial, but it turns out it's not.)

I'm glad my heart is happy, though I can't say I am. I did really like my brain. Sometimes it had some kind of okayish ideas.

Plus, I thought I was bad at math BEFORE this. Now, forget it.

Celebratory giveaway WINNERS!

2011-07-21T08:39:00.003-04:00

Thank you so much to everyone who entered my contest to celebrate Karen Amanda Hooper's book deal!

So, if all of you who entered remember, I asked you a question just for fun on the giveaway form. It was about whether you prefer mermaids or selkies, since Karen's book has both. Before I announce the winner, I tallied those up, and here are the results of that:

mermaids: 61%

selkies: 14%

both: 25%

Poor selkies.

Anyway, without further ado:

The winner of SIREN'S STORM is:

Sarah Nicolas!

And the winner of SWEET VENOM is:

Jennifer Danford!

Winners, I'll e-mail you today to get your mailing addresses. Thank you again to everyone who participated! And congratulations to the winners!

Last day to enter my celebratory giveaway!

2011-07-20T07:17:00.002-04:00

Do you want to read an ARC about gorgons or sirens? Interested in an easy-to-enter giveaway?

Check it out: http://alexandrashostak.blogspot.com/2011/07/celebratory-giveaway.html

Giveaway closes tonight at midnight EST so don't wait!

CELEBRATORY GIVEAWAY!

2011-07-14T08:00:00.005-04:00

Earlier this week I announced some really cool news: that Karen Amanda Hooper, a good friend and awesome CP, just signed a book deal with Rhemalda Publishing.

To celebrate, I have a themed giveaway, with two great ARCs! How is it themed? Well, Karen's story, TANGLED TIDES, focuses on mermaids, selkies and sirens, and incorporates gorgons into the fabric of the fantasy world.

So, I'm giving away an ARC of:

SIREN'S STORM by Lisa Papademetriou (theme: sirens)

and

SWEET VENOM by Tera Lynn Childs (theme: gorgons)

How do you enter? Fill out the form (ETA link removed). If you give me your name and a way to contact you, you will be entered. If you have congratulated Karen already, or if you do go congratulate her before you enter, you are much more likely to win one of these books. :)

Giveaway closes next Wednesday, July 20th, at midnight EST.

P.S. I'm not the only one celebrating. Natalie Bahm is giving away a copy of ENTWINED by Heather Dixon to celebrate Karen's news!

12:01 AM, WINNERS of my ALA GIVEAWAY!

2011-07-14T00:17:00.001-04:00

Without further ado...

The winner of FOREVER is:

Nicole Zoltack!

The winner of PERSONAL DEMONS is:

Lisa Potts!

The winner of FORGOTTEN is:

April X!

And the winner of FALLING FOR HAMLET is:

Rani Streff!

Congratulations to the winners! You'll each be receiving an e-mail from me shortly so I can find out your mailing addresses (probably tomorrow, since I'm tired right now.)

Exciting news!!!

2011-07-11T08:12:00.005-04:00

My awesome friend and cp Karen Amanda Hooper just signed a book deal with Rhemalda Publishing for her sea creature YA book TANGLED TIDES!

Karen is a fantastically talented writer--I've had the pleasure to read TANGLED TIDES and it is an AMAZING story with endearing characters and a very unique underwater fantasy world. You'll love what she's done with sea creature lore, and you won't be able to get enough of her spitfire main character, Yara.

The book will be available in spring of 2012, and the ebook will be available before then (as early as november, I've heard!).

Check back here in a few days...I might be giving away some REALLY COOL STUFF in celebration. (Themed stuff.)

Go congratulate her!!!

Enter my first ALA GIVEAWAY!

2011-07-10T08:36:00.001-04:00

If you haven't already, enter my giveaway to win great ARCs and books: FOREVER, FORGOTTEN, PERSONAL DEMONS, and FALLING FOR HAMLET. Click anywhere in this blog post to be taken to the directions! The giveaway closes Wednesday at midnight! :)

Book Review - THE GIRL OF FIRE AND THORNS by Rae Carson

2011-07-06T15:00:00.001-04:00

My friend and CP Karen Hooper recommended Rae Carson's debut novel THE GIRL OF FIRE AND THORNS to me a couple of weeks ago. I was lucky enough to snag an ARC at ALA, and because Karen swore to me it was a really, truly fantastic book, it was the first of my ARCs that I read.

Karen was not wrong. In fact, she was very, very right.

THE GIRL OF FIRE AND THORNS is fantasy at its best. The world is rich, wide, and well-imagined, described beautifully and intricately, and woven into the story with such skill you barely realize Carson is building a world around you until it's already been built. Landscapes, clothing, people, and food seem real.

The characters are wonderful balances of strength and weakness, crafted with subtle details that make humans unique. Elisa, the main character and narrator, begins as a fat, frightened girl who would rather hide from her fate than embrace it. As the story moves, Elisa undergoes a fantastic transformation that is so well-written, it wasn't until the end that I realized every single word was a small change, a tiny turn in Elisa's outlook. She takes physical journeys across several landscapes, but the most rewarding one to read is by far her emotional journey. I don't want to give too much away, but throughout the novel you can't help but root for her; she has such potential as a human, and it's a pleasure to watch her slowly realize some of it, and to cheer her on as she does.

Though THE GIRL OF FIRE AND THORNS is the first of a planned trilogy, it ends in a conclusive place, for which I was grateful. I'm dying for the next book, but the ending of this first book had enough closure to satisfy me, and to make the story feel complete in its own right.

An honestly stunning debut, which will have wide appeal far beyond fantasy fans.

PRE-ORDER:

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Borders

(Karen is buying a copy every month until the book's release in September. She also hinted that she might have a giveaway for her ARC. Watch her blog for details!)

ALA giveaway! (part the first)

2011-07-05T16:02:00.004-04:00

The weekend before last, I went to ALA in New Orleans! I had so much fun, got to meet and hang out with so many awesome people, and I got to hold a baby alligator!!!!! (That wasn't part of ALA, but it's so cool how can I not mention it?)

I also brought home a bunch of REALLY great books, and I'm going to be giving most of them away! Today I have FOUR really awesome books and ARCs to offer you:

A signed copy of PERSONAL DEMONS by Lisa Desrochers (plus signed bookmarks!)

An ARC of FALLING FOR HAMLET by Michelle Ray

An ARC of FORGOTTEN by Cat Patrick

An ARC of FOREVER by Maggie Stiefvater (if you were wondering, the ink IS a burgundy red!)

How to enter:

Fill out the FORM! (ETA link removed) That is all you have to do--leave me your name and e-mail. You will be entered if you do that for me.

Want extra entries?

+4 for old followers

+3 for new followers

+1 for tweeting (max 3 tweets)

+2 sidebar

+3 blog post

+1 for each book you mark as "to read" on Goodreads

+1 for each author you follow on Twitter

+1 for leaving me a comment (+1 extra if you say hi to my cat Lucy. I'm completely serious.)

(Sorry to say this time it's a US only giveaway.)

GIVEAWAY CLOSES WEDS JULY 13 AT MIDNIGHT. Winners announced Thursday!

THE IRON WITCH WINNER!

2011-07-01T10:45:00.002-04:00

Thank you to everyone who entered my graduation giveaway of THE IRON WITCH by Karen Mahoney! Random.org chose a number for me, and the winner is...

Enbrethiliel!!!

(You should have an e-mail from me in your box, my dear.)

If you didn't win, don't be sad. I was just at ALA and I have a big stack of ARCs to give away, as well as some reviews to post! Watch this space for more giveaways soon (like, probably tomorrow or Monday)!

What books are you looking forward to this summer?

2011-06-20T18:46:00.002-04:00

On Friday, I hop on a plane and fly to New Orleans for the ALA annual conference! I'm really excited, because last year I got a TON of amazing books (most of which were ARCs) and I can't wait to see what they have this year.

I'm already making a list of books I want to ask about at the various booths, but I thought I'd get your input, too, in case somehow I missed something amazing while I was perusing the internet. What summer and fall releases are you most looking forward to reading this year? (On that subject, is anyone going to ALA?)

Also, don't forget to enter my THE IRON WITCH giveaway in celebration of my graduation from college!

Fun news and THE IRON WITCH GIVEAWAY!!!! (EASY to enter! So come enter!)

2011-06-16T13:18:00.005-04:00

This past weekend, I did something really exciting. I'll show you a picture to give you a hint.

Why yes, I DID become a college graduation regalia model!

For serious, though, I graduated from college summa cum laude with a degree in English - Creative Writing! (You can't see it, but one of the cords I'm wearing around my neck is for Phi Beta Kappa. My GPA was a 3.99. Ok I'm done bragging now, really.)

This calls for a celebration! And what better way to celebrate than to give something away on my blog?

So, just a couple days ago I got a package in the mail from Karen Mahoney. I won some really sweet books over at the Deadline Dames website, and they finally arrived. But something else even more awesome was in the package. Karen sent me a personalized copy of her novel, THE IRON WITCH, which was a total surprise. Karen is one of my favorite authors and bloggers, because she lets me e-mail her with all kinds of crazy and panicked and stupid questions, and she answers them like they're not crazy or panicked or stupid, but totally valid. Plus, she has a really inclusive blog, where she tries to reply to almost every comment, and constantly does writing activities (like her Spring into Summer writing challenge). And, it was her birthday yesterday.

Now I have two copies of THE IRON WITCH, and that just doesn't seem fair. I'm going to give away my original copy (the American one--the one she signed is a British one since she's from England) as a celebration for graduating from college and Karen's birthday! And just because it's awesome and you should read it. If you haven't, take this opportunity. You know you want to.

Fill out this form to enter.

CLICK ME TO GO TO THE FORM! (ETA link removed)

All you need to do is give me your e-mail (and I hope you'll give me some version of your name, too) and you're entered. If you want extra entries, you can do a couple things. Tweet about this contest. Follow Karen on twitter. Add TIW to your Goodreads "to read" list. Blog about the contest or stick it in your sidebar. You'll get an extra entry for doing any of these things. You do NOT have to be following me (I'd rather you follow Karen).

I'm going to be gone this weekend, and then next weekend I'll be at ALA (YESSS!!!!), so the deadline to enter this contest will be two weeks from tomorrow, which is July 1. After that, I'll post and contact the winner to get an address!

BURN BRIGHT - Australian dystopian/fantasy YA novel you MUST read

2011-05-27T18:24:00.005-04:00

A couple months ago, I came across BURN BRIGHT by Marianne de Pierres on Goodreads. The cover drew me in, and the blurb made me obsess. I had to have this book, and I had to have it NOW. It was the kind of book for which I would have immediately driven 45 minutes to the nearest Borders to purchase. The only problem?

It isn't available in the US.

So I e-mailed the author, begging her to tell me when it would be available. She said they were working on it, but in the meantime I ought to enter a podcast contest. So I entered the contest, similarly begging the people running it to choose me as one of the winners because I am not from Australia and do not have access to Australian books that aren't available worldwide or in this country.

The Book Goddess was smiling on me that day, because I won a copy of the book.

I got it in the mail a month later (shipping halfway around the world takes a looooong time, and I looked at my mail EVERY DAY for an entire month hoping it would be there, even long before I knew it would be).

Have you ever known you'd love a book even before you read it? I had that. Rather than my high expectations disappointing me, they were met and exceeded. I rushed through BURN BRIGHT in a matter of days, taking it with me wherever I went and burying my nose in it every second of downtime I had in my day.

BURN BRIGHT is a tantalizing blend of dystopia and fantasy, telling the story if Ixion, a land of ever-night and everlasting parties with mysterious absolute rules and dark creatures lurking just outside of the lighted paths. Ixion seems like a paradise to the teens who live in the dystopian world outside of it, but once the protagonist, Retra, gets there, she sees that Ixion hides things potentially more dangerous than the world from which she ran away. And the two worlds are more connected than any of the teens could have suspected.

I will probably pay however much it costs to have a book shipped from Australia when the sequel, ANGEL ARIAS, comes out later this year. (I think it's like $30). I'm that desperate for it.

So why am I posting on my blog about a book most of you can't access (not even on Kindle)? The author wants it to be available in the US and other countries, but she needs our help. If it sounds like something you might be interested in reading, blog about it, and like the facebook page. That's why I'm writing this blog. I'm a US reader who LOVED the book, and I really think other US readers would love it, too. Do you hear me US foreign rights people?

I WOULD have a contest to give away my copy... but no. A) I like it way too much and will probably want to re-read it several times, and B) it's signed and personalized ;)

In defense of genre fiction

2011-05-16T22:18:00.003-04:00

Today I found myself in a type of conversation I do not like one bit. That conversation revolved around the perceived dichotomy in quality between genre fiction and literary fiction, with the emphasis, of course, on the idea that literary fiction is and always will be of higher quality (in every imaginable way) than genre fiction. Genre fiction is, apparently, riddled with cliches--cliches in prose, cliches in characters, cliches in plot. Even when it gets showy or bloated, at least literary fiction is trying to do something new. We don't want to lose innovation in the craft of writing.

The implications of that statement are false and close-minded. Of course we want innovation in our craft, but in what world is innovation limited to the strictly literary? Somehow it came out that if genre fiction keeps winning on the bestseller lists over literary fiction, we'll lose something important--innovation--in craft, and that would be so very regrettable.

Really.

Literary fiction may be doing a different kind of innovation, something that perhaps pushes the boundaries of the way stories are structured and words are used farther than genre fiction does, but make no mistake: genre fiction is innovative as well. I believe genre fiction is innovative in translating complicated ideas about human nature and human emotion and the human condition into something visceral. Genre fiction is constantly exploring how to create characters that readers can empathize with and relate to, and to give readers that experience of being inside someone's particular condition. It's an invaluable experience, because often it asks us to think about what it's like to be a person we'd otherwise never have occasion to wonder about. To say the characters in genre fiction are stock characters, cliches and cardboard cutouts, is doing it a great disservice. I'd argue that because genre fiction presents itself in a straightforward way, it's easier to arrive at the empathy with a character--but that doesn't remove any of the rewarding experience of reading a truly well-crafted character.

Another criticism of genre fiction is its heavy reliance on plot, as though plot is the literary version of candy and has no real value. Let's make no mistake here: all that literature everyone reads all the time? Most of those works have plots. Dickens? Plot. Austen? Plot. Shakespeare? Plot. Milton? Plot. Do they have other things, too? Of course they do--often times the best literature uses plot to enhance the other goals of the piece. But to me that only seems to serve as an endorsement of plot. I realize I'm watering this down, but my point is this: plot is not some literary cavity that ruins a book. It can be done well or screwed up just as anything can, but it's not a good reason to decide that genre fiction isn't worth anything. I understand that a lot of people like literary fiction for its attempt at realism but seriously, art does not have to mimic life.

I realize I'm going on and on, so I'll limit myself to one final example. Fantasy. People write fantasy off all the time, but I don't think they realize how hard it is to craft an entire world from your imagination. Fantasy writers aren't innovative? This is going to sound combative, but I would really encourage anyone who thinks fantasy is somehow less of a genre because it's so outside the realm of the ordinary to actually try making a new world. It isn't easy figuring out where characters get their tea and how advanced a country's navy is and whether the economic health of a place is good or bad (and in what way?) and what kind of underwear people sport and how many gods and goddesses they worship and how many months does their calendar have. Fantasy writers are so often trying to make new fantasy worlds that haven't been seen before. Forgive me, but I forget what that is called. Could it be... innovation?

Genre fiction writers may not be messing with form and words in such obvious ways as literary fiction writers do, but genre fiction writers also seek to grow as artists and to find new craft avenues. If you think that literary fiction is necessarily better than genre fiction, then you really need to revise your criteria for judging quality.

What's REALLY holding you back?

2011-05-01T13:41:00.003-04:00

Karen Mahoney posted a link to this really fabulous entry by Theodora Goss a couple weeks ago, and I've read it several times since. I think it's wonderful.

http://theodoragoss.com/2011/02/15/value-yourself/

No amount of time spent writing, revising, querying, responding to critiques, craft-honing, dancing naked under the full moon in a circle of mushrooms is worth it if you don't think YOU are worth it.

What's holding you back?

2011-04-16T11:18:00.004-04:00

A list of things that I've realized are darlings that need to be murdered, but that aren't always easy to see as such, because their presence in a manuscript is so easily justifiable:

1. Beginnings.

Oftentimes, a specific scene near or at the beginning of a story is what inspires us to write in the first place, or to keep writing. They catalyzed what became the plot, but somewhere in all the revisions, the beginning stopped being relevant. But it's hard to see they need to be cut--how could the scene that sparked the whole idea no longer be relevant?

2. Favorite characters.

Certain characters (usually supporting role) have really cool plotlines or motivations or sub-plotlines that drove some aspect of the story once upon a time. But sometimes they stop being so useful after we've changed how the story goes, which changes how they fit into the story. Then instead of eliminating the character, we find ourselves twisting their background and their presence in the story to MAKE it fit (like the geocentric model of the universe, when nobody wanted to switch over to the heliocentric model).

3. Complicated world issues.

Sometimes adding a plot point that really needs to be added will complicate something in the world that we've never thought about before. To avoid having to change large portions of the world we've spent so much time building, we try to get around adding that plot point (or comparable detail) so we don't have to rethink the world.

4. Personality details

When you cut something from a character's past or present, or change a significant detail about a character's background, the character will change. We get very attached to the people walking around in our heads, telling us these stories. But if something changes, if that defining thing in a character's life no longer exists, or if a situation is completely different from how it was when originally written, the character's actions and reactions WILL change. It's frustrating to rewrite dialogue, especially dialogue we thought was really awesome in some way. It's even worse to have to rethink a character's motivations--sometimes doing that can change the entire plot. But it's necessary, or we make excuses for why a character is acting in a way that has since become out of character. They need room to evolve, just like real humans do.

5. Social commentary

It's easy to insist on keeping a plot a certain way because it makes a point about society or politics or human rights or what have you. But the best social commentaries aren't forced, and if we try to keep in things that aren't working simply for the sake of proving that a classist society is a bad idea (something I often do, as an example) we lose both the potential for a truly compelling plot AND the elegance of writing that needs to accompany a social commentary. We risk our readers feeling as though they're being beaten over the head with commentary, because they can tell we were manipulating the plot in unnatural ways to make a point.

Cutting these darlings can be really difficult (at least, it is for me) because they aren't just scenes that no longer further the plot, or bits of dialogue that don't make sense, or chapters that are bogged down with description and need to be changed. They have the potential to screw up the plot arc of an entire manuscript, and cutting them can also cause you to lose something you really valued about the manuscript itself, whether that be a certain kind of character, a writing move you're proud of, a relationship, or a statement about politics or the world. In essence, a decision to murder one of THESE darlings is a scary thing to make.

But I've noticed that they're like black mold infestations: if you don't catch and take care of them early, you could end up having to remove an entire wall of your house to get rid of them (which actually happened to my dad on a rental property once).

My advice is this: do the thing you're afraid to do. Save an old version of the manuscript (which you ought to do anyway) and just try it. Maybe try it via outline, or just with one segment or chapter or scene. I won't tell you not to be afraid, because that's impossible. But if the only reason you're keeping something is because you're afraid of what will happen to the manuscript if you lose it, have courage, and have faith in yourself. And get out the chainsaw.

Character Invasion at Anne Riley's Blog!!

2011-04-14T23:33:00.002-04:00

Come check out my post on Anne Riley's blog in her series of character invasions! Chase, the engineer and main character from my steampunk, invades my life and evades my questions. If you want to do a character invasion, go over to Anne's blog and send her an email! :)

A letter to my manuscript, part the fourth.

2011-04-11T08:12:00.001-04:00

Dear steampunk manuscript,

I am leaving you alone for now. You need time to heal. You're looking a heck of a lot like a pile of bodyparts these days and you've developed that twitch thing in your left eye and the whole being in a coma for several weeks... I feel bad.

Plus, I'm tired of hearing you whine.

So, I'm going to go work on something else while your skin and your bones and your organs knit back together. When I can remove your stitches and your casts and some of those metal plates from your head, it'll be time to start on you again. I mean, I can't leave you like this, you look positively disgusting. But I'm sick of you, you're sick of me, and we're only causing each other pain.

Yeah, I know you wish Stephen King had thought of you so you didn't have to deal with me. Your fault for choosing my brain to be born in.

With endless fatigue,

Alexandra

GUEST POST: Lisa Cach, author of WAKE UNTO ME

2011-04-09T10:00:00.000-04:00

Today I have something really awesome to post! Being part of the WAKE UNTO ME book tour, Lisa Cach has written a guest post for my blog!!!

I asked her about what it was like writing paranormal romance set in the modern day with a twist of history rather than a straight historical romance, and if she did anything differently to write for teens instead of for adults, since she's a well-established romance author already!

Here's what she said:

Well, I have to do more research for the historical bits! And I have to figure out a work-around for whatever language differences the characters might have. Other than that, it’s not so different to write a contemporary-and-historical paranormal romance vs. a ‘one era’ paranormal romance.

The real struggle for me is in writing a contemporary, non-paranormal story. Such a story is based wholly in reality, and I have a hard time letting go of what I know is real, and letting my imagination run wild. In a historical or a paranormal, because I already have to imagine the world the characters live in (be it imagining a period in history, or imagining a world where paranormal creatures could exist), I feel more free to play with what is possible and break rules.

The only things I changed when writing YA instead of adult were that the heroine was a little younger (and thus was in school instead of at a job, etc.), there was no sex, and I let my heroine worry more about where she fit in the world. I didn’t in any way try to ‘write down’ to a younger audience. I read adult books like “The Exorcist” and “Jane Eyre” when I was twelve, and although I may not have understood everything in them at the time, I enjoyed them anyway. I figure that today’s teens are no different.

Thank you so much, Lisa!

WAKE UNTO ME is available in stores and online!

WAKE UNTO ME book review

2011-04-08T10:00:00.003-04:00

Just last week I had the chance to read WAKE UNTO ME by Lisa Cach as part of the book tour through Teen Book Scene. The book just came out a couple days ago, and I have to say, everyone should go out and get it. It's seriously great.

Lisa Cach has created a magical world set in a French boarding school where the past overlaps with the present and mysterious things happen around the protagonist, Caitlyn. Caitlyn has always had weird and vivid dreams, sometimes of historical settings, and sometimes of frightening images she calls Screechers. But when she goes to France to attend school, her dreams begin to center on a young man named Raphael who she instantly begins to fall for. The catch is that he died centuries ago.

WAKE UNTO ME was a very fast read. I couldn't put it down. Between Caitlyn trying to figure out what her dreams mean and whether or not they're even real, the slight horror-like aspect to the old castle in which the school resides, and the blooming romance between Caitlyn and Raphael, I found myself going "one more chapter, one more chapter" until I was done with the book.

The history was very well-researched, and the way it came across in the novel made me want to google everything that came up. Lisa Cach added a dynamic historical figure in Bianca de' Medici, a character who is very well defined for someone who only shows up very rarely. I really enjoyed Caitlyn as a protagonist. She was an outcast in her old life, but I admired her ability and desire to make friends at the French school, and the fact that she didn't let being an outcast make her gloomy all the time. She had a strong interest in art and in learning about herself that propelled the plot forward. The relationship she had with Raphael was intense, but it felt real, too. They didn't know each other for very long (because Caitlyn was limited to dreams when she saw him) but I felt that they were kindred spirits from very early on in the book.

Lisa Cach has a beautiful writing style, with elegant clear descriptions and scorching dialogue. This will not be the last of her novels I check out. I highly recommend WAKE UNTO ME, especially if you're interested in history and a healthy dose of paranormal.

Sexism is alive and well

2011-04-05T23:17:00.005-04:00

I am in the mixed martial arts (MMA) club at my university (from which I'm about to graduate). I haven't been doing it for very long--since the beginning of January--so I'm very inexperienced. As far as stature goes, I'll tell you that I'm 5'3 and weigh 110 lbs. But I'm tough, I take fighting seriously, and I want to learn, which often means working with people who hit hard (we use pads, don't worry) so you can learn to block correctly and take actual strikes. I have held pads for guys who did not hold back at all, and the best moment in club for me so far was after holding for a really really skilled guy getting a compliment that I held the pads well.

Today, a guy (a newer member than me, I just feel like I need to add) did not want to work with me solely because of my sex. Not because he was worried he'd hurt me because I'm small, or because I was shorter than him (which can get awkward--one of my friends is like 6'2 and he has to lean down to hit me). When the officer I was working with suggested that this guy work with me, the guy (gonna call him douchebag from here on out) gave the officer this look that said "dude, are you bloody kidding me?" And then when I said "It's because I'm a girl??" he just looked down his nose at me, looked away, and wouldn't answer. I also feel the need to note that we were grappling in Muay Thai kickboxing, not striking, which means we were practicing putting each other in sort of a headlock thing called clinch and then moving each other around via head and neck. So there wasn't even any worry that he'd hit me too hard.

To say I'm offended is an understatement. Livid is more accurate. Honestly, I wanted to kick him in the you know whats (I settled for kicking him in the leg). I watched this douchebag for the rest of club, and behold, he never once got near another one of us girls. I might not be the toughest girl in club, but there's a girl who's been doing Taekwondo for YEARS and another girl who's been in the MMA club since she was a freshman (she's in grad school now) and they're both seriously amazing. Oh, plus my friend, the PRESIDENT of the MMA club, who is a girl. And none of them are much bigger than me (one is actually smaller). Most of the guys who have been in the club for a while have stories about seeing tiny women take down huge men in martial arts classes. Trust me, it has a lot more to do with technique and leverage than sheer strength.

But you can't bloody learn good technique if people discriminate against you because you're FEMALE.

'Course, douchebag did end up having to work with me, because the officer did not see me being female as a good enough reason not to be my partner. When he had me in clench, I of course had to make sure he knew, "you're not hurting me. AT ALL."

If you see someone acting like this, please, PLEASE for the love of whatever goddess or god you worship, CALL THEM OUT ON IT. This includes racism, classism, heterosexism, any kind of -ism you can think of. Don't let bigoted people get away with their prejudices. I've had people imply (during high school when I did battle of the bands) that I sucked because I was a girl, but I've never had someone so blatantly discriminate against me for being a woman. I have a feeling this isn't the only area of life in which douchebag looks down on females. I hope the next girl he pisses off and discriminates against isn't as polite as I am.

Yeah, I'm a girl. And guess what? Being a girl is AWESOME. There is NOTHING about my sex that makes me in any way inferior.

In need of a laugh?

2011-03-26T13:29:00.002-04:00

ETA: I have actually read a novel by each Bronte sister (Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Anne's novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall) and I actually like Anne best! Wuthering Heights made me want to stab myself (I did NOT like it) and Jane Eyre... um... well... don't kill me for saying this, because I might just be too much of a feminist but Ireallydon'tlikeMr.RochesterIknowIknowI'msorry. I think Anne gets underrated because her first novel is apparently total crap. But I'm serious, you guys should read Wildfell Hall, it's really good.

(Another) letter to my manuscript, part the third

2011-03-23T10:19:00.003-04:00

Dear hospitalized manuscript (who may or may not be in a coma, I'm not sure at this point),

I had a dream I was beheaded last night (via guillotine) and I'm sure this is because of you. It transpires that everything I've said up until this point was a lie.

I did cut your entire second half.

Yes, I'll paste some of it back in, edit it, and move on...

But I told you before this wouldn't be as severe as the time I rewrote most of you, and that was a lie I didn't mean to tell. It's turning out that I'll be rewriting most of your second half, and adding in new material to your first half (much of which is already rewritten, or so heavily edited it doesn't resemble what it was before).

I was mistaken when I promised those things! I'm not Derek Shepherd, with great hair and a winning smile and the confidence that comes with a medical degree (and the whole being fictional thing). But don't you want to be good enough for other people to look at? I don't want you to have to go out in public with a paper bag over your head. Trust me, it elicits a lot of stares. And not the good kind.

I'm not going to ask you for forgiveness anymore. I'll just sit here and wait for you to see how pretty you look when I'm done with you. Then you'll see I was right. Humph.

Music fun

2011-03-22T01:05:00.003-04:00

For your listening pleasure (or displeasure)

Having a bad day? I can make you feel better!

2011-03-16T22:44:00.004-04:00

Ever feeling down about your writing? Well, I've got two poets here with me today... and I can guarantee you are not as bad as they are.

Meet poet #1...

Theophilus Marzials! (Is that not a really cool name?)

His poem "A Tragedy" is truly atrocious. I never thought it would occur to anyone that the word "plop" is something one ought to use again and again in a poem.... I was wrong.

An excerpt:

"My thought is running out of my head;
My love is running out of my heart,
My soul runs after, and leaves me as dead,
For my life runs after to catch them -- and fled
They all are every one! -- and I stand, and start,
At the water that oozes up, plop and plop,
On the barges that flop
And dizzy me dead.
I might reel and drop.
Plop.
Dead."

The whole thing: linky linky

And meet poet #2:

William McGonagall! (No relation to the Hogwarts professor.)

All I can say about him is talk about letting yourself be led by rhyme! I suppose the effort was valiant, but... just see for yourself.

An excerpt:

"'Twas about seven o'clock at night,
And the wind it blew with all its might,
And the rain came pouring down,
And the dark clouds seem'd to frown,
And the Demon of the air seem'd to say-
"I'll blow down the Bridge of Tay.""

The whole thing: linky linky

So next time you're feeling particularly awful about your prose, be consoled by the fact that you have NOT overused the word "plop" or said something so brilliant as "the wind it blew" for the sake of not ruining the iambs of your line (like iambs were his only problem). Or, if you have done those things... well... I truly am sorry.

An open letter to my ms, Part the Second

2011-03-09T22:12:00.004-05:00

Dear steampunk manuscript,

I'm sorry! Don't look at me like that! *cringe* I KNOW you were just expecting surgery, and then I betrayed your trust and completely gutted you. I didn't mean to, but I just got so carried away and all of a sudden four chapters were gone because they didn't fit as they were written and...

Please forgive me? Don't you like the shiny new prose I've written you instead? The tighter plot, the characters whose actions now make (more) sense?

I do love you...

For your listening pleasure

2011-03-08T10:20:00.001-05:00

THE IRON WITCH book review

2011-03-03T21:26:00.004-05:00

So you may or may not know, but I completely heart Karen Mahoney. She's awesome.

But this is not why I loved her book. If I did not know Karen at all, I would still have adored THE IRON WITCH. (You, person reading this, should go buy it. RIGHT NOW. Seriously, either get on Amazon and order it, or drive/walk/run to the bookstore and buy it.)

Lucy the Kitten commands it be so.

THE IRON WITCH is a YA urban fantasy novel centering around Donna Underwood, a high school student branded a freak by her classmates because of extraordinary strength due to the iron and silver tattoos covering her hands and forearms. The tattoos are alchemical--the result of an attack by malicious fae creatures and the magic used to save her.

The story is fast paced like the best action movie (I love action movies.) Only a few pages go by before Donna is swept up in mystery and danger. There are a few nice down-time moments, in which Donna has heartwarming conversations with her best friend Navin, or steamy interaction with half-fey love interest Xan. The book flies by in the best way possible--and by that I mean it is impossible to put down. (I carried it around with me the day I got it and said "LOOK! LOOK AT THIS! SHE'S MY INTERNET FRIEND!" I got several odd looks and people saying "Oh, well that's nice, Alexandra." I don't know if they believed me.)

I think my favorite thing about the book was Donna. Don't get me wrong, I adore paranormal romance, but it was nice to read a book that was centered around the protagonist, her abilities, and her intelligence. She has a level head, genuine emotions, and does so many things for herself I was a little jealous (I want magically strong hands!) Understandably she felt like an outcast at being so marked as different (because living around alchemists for her entire life wasn't different enough) but she also used her ability when she needed to, without waffling over it, without feeling weird. She didn't need Xan to save her, because she was more than capable, and in fact, when Navin is kidnapped, it's up to Donna to save him. Love it like I can't explain. Makes my feminist heart all smiley.

The backstory and worldbuilding were also such a pleasure to read. Karen gives us hints of the world Donna lives in, but doesn't dump information on us that doesn't pertain directly to the plot. I'm already imagining so many ways that this stuff will come into play in future books, and I cannot wait to find out more details about the Order of the Dragon (one part of this secret society of alchemists), alchemy itself, and Donna's heritage (and her mother!!!) And faeries are my favorite supernatural creature, so I can't wait to see more of them. Plus, there's this whole setup with the doors between the worlds being closed, and faeries getting trapped in all sorts of places, and it's just so tantalizing.

Karen's prose is minimalist and tight--no words wasted, and the words she does use are exactly the ones you need. This coming from someone who is wordy like a Victorian novelist, I really enjoyed this aspect of the book as well! It really reminded me that this was an urban fantasy more than anything else. And the excerpts from Donna's journal that were interspersed throughout the chapters were written in such a clear, distinct voice, I felt I really knew her by the end of the book--like if she knocked on my door right now, we'd already be friends. Because of her voice and her very distinct interactions with each character, I also had a feel for the supporting cast; they didn't blur at all, I knew who every single person was.

A fantastic addition to my YA faerie fantasy collection next to Lesley Livingston, Melissa Marr, and Holly Black.

An open letter to my ms

2011-02-18T08:00:00.003-05:00

My dearest steampunk manuscript,

Please accept my humblest apologies for leading you to believe I was almost done slicing into you and altering large portions of your anatomy. It transpires that I lied to you, though it certainly was not my intention.

You see, I found a very large flaw in your construction this morning, and regrettably I am going to have to go back in with my scalpel (the delete button) and cut you up again. I am certain you feel fine now, for I've given you time to heal, removed all the stitches from last time, and polished you up. But I beseech you to believe me when I tell you that this flaw will interfere with your longevity. Slowly, everything will begin to deteriorate. If I leave it in any longer, removing it later will only hurt so much worse.

I do hope you haven't become quite attached to your middle... and your end. If it is any consolation whatever, this will not (should not) hurt as badly, or be as severe as the time I rewrote all but six chapters of you.

Please know that I have only ever loved you, and that I do this not out of spite but out of my desire to see you improved to your fullest potential.

Yours most sincerely,

Alexandra

If you try sometimes... you get what you need

2011-02-16T23:42:00.003-05:00

I am amazed at how, sometimes, at the exact right moment, what you need falls into your lap.

Sometimes if you've revised something too closely for too long, emotions of characters start to blur into steps in the plot equation, and they stop being the raw, chaotic and random things they are. It's always good to be jolted out of that stage.A manuscript can start to feel emotionless because of the extreme concentration on craft we all give our writing.

Anyone who's ever been in an English class knows that feeling: you read a beautiful poem, are so moved by it, and then have to annotate the crap out of it and discuss it until words stop sounding like words and you can't tell if the letters you're reading are even English anymore!

That thing that made me snap out of crazy close reading critical mode was VERY welcome this week. Actually there were several, but this song was one of them.

I don't know why. I don't even like John Mayer that much.

There was also John Keats and his INSANE reaction to being in love.

Femmes Fatales and Deadly Men

2011-02-15T23:38:00.008-05:00

The femme fatale is one of the most common figures in literature and art. Indeed, I'm currently writing a paper on femmes fatales in Keats' poetry.

It got me to thinking about whether or not there is a male version of the femme fatale. If we go with the French, we could name him the homme fatale. (I'll admit, it doesn't have that same ring of alliteration to it). I googled homme fatale but didn't get many results, and Google even asked me "Did you mean femme fatale?"

The definition of a femme fatale is a woman who is toxic to a man, whose (usually sexual) involvement in his life leads to his demise. If he does escape the evil femme, he is a scarred man for having come in contact with her. By the sheer fact that humans, whether male or female, don't act all that differently from one another when you come right down to it, I'm sure there's a deadly man out there, too.

We just haven't called him out, yet.

But I see him everywhere. We've all read the novels or seen the movies in which a woman completely gives up her life and her identity for a man, becomes nothing more than an extension of him. Sometimes this is painted in a rosy 50s idyllic family* sort of way, or a "one true love happy fairytale ending"** sort of way, and sometimes it's shown for what it is: unhealthy.

I would argue that this man, the one who somehow appears worth giving up one's very self for, is an homme fatale. He eats up the woman in a way I'd say mirrors in intensity (if not in action) the way the femme fatale destroys men. A man who wants to own his women, who mistreats or abuses his women, is an homme fatale by all senses of the idea that a person can be deadly. Perhaps not deadly to the body (except in the case of abuse, clearly), but certainly deadly to the soul. (And it probably goes without saying that so is a (male) rapist.)

The reason I bring this up is that we haven't really named him. We have names for men who mistreat women: womanizer, misogynist. But when a woman is bad for a man, she's deadly to his manliness. The archetype has been perpetuated for so long I won't even venture a guess as to how many centuries. Men need to be protected because the woman usurps his sense of self.

But I don't think we look at men as being bad for women in the same way. Women need to be protected because the man hurts her or damages her in some way. BUT he also usurps her sense of self. When a man is bad for a woman, he is just as deadly to the self, and sense of self is just as important and just as bad to lose for a woman as it is for a man. It may be more socially acceptable for a woman to give herself up for a man, but that doesn't make it fair. I'm not sure our society totally gets that yet, though I sincerely hope we're getting there.

All I am saying is this: women deserve to value themselves in the same way men do, and have been encouraged to do. Historically women haven't had that option (I'm trying to refrain on remarking about today's state of affairs because it's such unsteady ground). But since we live in the 21st century, I AM saying that if a woman can be fatal, so can a man.

*This is not my condemnation of the nuclear family. You can have a nuclear family without expecting the female to give up her entire self. In the same vein, a woman can choose to make sacrifices to help her boyfriend or husband achieve goals without being this kind of woman. I am not condemning relationships with more traditional gender roles necessarily. I am speaking of a specific occurrence in which the woman doesn't have a choice.

**Nor do I think that fairytales which end with a romantic kiss necessarily perpetuate this ideal.

Gah!

2011-02-09T17:44:00.004-05:00

Do you ever feel like the universe, or life, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or whatever is trying to convince you what an asshole you are?

I'm totally having one of those months. Ever since February started, a whole bunch of tiny but really embarrassing things have happened to me (thankfully none of them involve me falling down in front of people... yet... we still have 19 days left in February) that aren't quite significant enough to warrant serious complaining, but that combine to make me feel like little bits of my self-esteem are being eaten away at (right now I'm imagining thinking I had a cupcake, but when I turn around, I only have a tiny bite left). Most of them involve misunderstandings, and second only to my dislike of having my personal space invaded is my complete terror of misunderstandings that make me look like an idiot.

This is why the idea of using Facebook as a way of "courting" someone you want to date (which someone told me about last week, and over which I almost had a panic attack--okay not really, but I did get significantly bothered and worried because it's a very my generation thing to do) stresses me out. The potential for misunderstandings online is VAST! Even worse than in person--and they happen so often even when you do have the luxury of reading someone's tone of voice and body language!

So it should be clear to you right now that something happened to me today. Basically someone corrected my already very shameful and embarrassing misunderstanding with a REALLY condescending remark, and I came home feeling pretty gross. If someone insults me outright, I'm happy to defend myself. But in this situation there was nothing I could say that wouldn't make it worse and look like I was blowing things out of proportion or being too sensitive or too mean, and so I just had to sit there and turn red and desire to disappear.

I felt like a teenager.

Basically the only point of this post is because I always like reading about people's personal lives on their blogs, second only to the juicy details of their publication journeys, so I decided to give you some of my shame so you could smile and be glad that it didn't happen to you. (Multiple times).

So I'll probably be left with this feeling of "gah" for at least the rest of the day, or even possibly tomorrow as well. The crappy thing is I JUST got over a different reason for a feeling of "gah" that happened just a couple days ago! Which inspires another GAH!

Wanna see something REALLY embarrassing?

2011-02-02T15:18:00.003-05:00

You asked for it.

Wanna see something embarrassing?

2011-02-02T10:00:00.005-05:00

That's a picture of me from when I was 14, at Irish dance regionals (called Oireachtas). Yes, that outfit is as uncomfortable as it looks. Yes, we had to wear them. No, that is not my real hair.

I was also thinking about posting a video from the same competition of me dancing... but I chickened out.

There are good people in the world!

2011-01-27T19:20:00.002-05:00

Today I lost my cell phone. It fell out of my pocket while I was walking on campus. I realized just moments after it fell out that it was gone, and turned back to look for it, but someone had already picked it up. Frustrated and convinced that it had been stolen by someone who was going to call across the world on my dime and then replace the simcard and steal the phone (an iPhone), I rushed to the AT&T store to have it turned off.

Later, I logged onto facebook, and a friend of mine had sent me a message. She had my phone--someone had picked it up just after I'd dropped it, and scrolled through my contacts for someone to call. He knew my friend, and called her and delivered the phone to her so she could give it back to me.

It's always nice to know that there are good, honest people. Especially since my mind went to the worst possible scenario immediately. The scariest part was that at the AT&T store, they told me that there had been a lot of stolen iPhones on campus in the past week.

This almost trumps the time I left my wallet in the backseat of a cab in NYC--I got it back about a week later WITH THE CASH STILL IN IT. I was amazed.

In my mailbox: THE IRON WITCH

2011-01-25T20:22:00.002-05:00

My copy came in the mail today! And it officially releases in the US today, so you should be able to find it in bookstores! (Go get it, what are you still doing on my blog???)

Lucy likes THE IRON WITCH, too!

Happy book release to Karen Mahoney!

2011-01-24T13:45:00.003-05:00

My awesome author friend Karen Mahoney's book The Iron Witch came out over the weekend in the US and the UK! I just ordered my copy (silly me, I was gone all weekend and didn't realize it was getting a release a couple days early) but Amazon Prime will ship it in two days (and if I'm lucky, it'll get here tomorrow--last time I used Prime shipping the book came the next day!)

Anyway, happy book birthday to Karen, and I really encourage all of you to go check out The Iron Witch!!!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/073872582X/ref=ox_ya_os_product

:D

2011-01-16T18:43:00.003-05:00

Woohoo! I just finished rewriting my YA urban fantasy manuscript! Back in the fall, when I decided to re-do the whole project, I didn't think I'd be completely starting from scratch. But the more I worked on what I wanted to change, the more ideas I got, until I realized that keeping anything from the old manuscript would just slow me down.

This was the first time I had an actual outline typed up in Word as I was writing. It was easier for me to make an outline for the project because I already had a VERY BASIC idea of where the story was supposed to go (and I did get to keep a lot of characters) because of the former version(s) of the manuscript. Of course, by the end I was already changing things from how I'd done them in the outline, and I already have so many ideas for revision.

I'm so pleased with the way it turned out! I'm so pleased to have finished in just a couple months, and to have something I think is a lot better than the former version. The fantasy world, in particular, is so different it's unrecognizable. I already have revision notes for several of the beginning chapters that I made for myself when I got stuck.

But I think I'll take a week off and do some CP reading, some outlining for my next idea (YA romantic fantasy based on a myth--but I won't tell you which one unless you guess! The only hint is that it's a Greek myth) and some straight up READING FOR PLEASURE! (I have so many good books sitting on my shelf, I don't know where to start! I may post a poll so you guys can pick for me).

It's a nice feeling :)

11 books I can't wait to read in 2011

2011-01-02T00:35:00.002-05:00

I feel like every other day I find out about a book that's coming out this year that sounds AMAZING. Or, I realize that it's the year the next book by a favorite author or in a favorite series comes out!

Here are 11 books, in no particular order, for which I'll be counting down the days until they come out!

1. DARKEST MERCY - Melissa Marr

2. EONA - Alison Goodman

3. WOLFSBANE - Andrea Cremer

4. GRAVEMINDER - Melissa Marr

5. WITHER - Lauren DeStefano

6. THE IRON WITCH - Karen Mahoney

7. CLOCKWORK PRINCE - Cassandra Clare

8. RED GLOVE - Holly Black

9. ONCE EVERY NEVER - Lesley Livingston

10. STEEL - Carrie Vaughn

11. RAGE - Jackie Morse Kessler

What are you looking forward to this year?

Your daily dose of cute! Guaranteed to brighten your day.

2010-12-29T23:31:00.006-05:00

My sweet girl (anyone seen Black Swan?) and I wish you a HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Revising :D

2010-12-20T23:09:00.003-05:00

Before I start rambling, who is watching the lunar eclipse tonight? I'm in the Eastern time zone, so I'm going to have to stay up really late to see it, but apparently the moon takes on a reddish hue at the full eclipse! I can't see the moon from any of my windows (trees in the way), so I'll be running outside periodically to see what's happening.

I have this new way of revising. What I do is I read each chapter and I change nothing. I write down a short list of what happens. Then I write a (longer) list of things that need to change, or what SHOULD happen. Then, instead of trying to tackle a whole bunch of revision things at once, I can take them one at a time, and go through the chapter as many times as I feel like it without losing my place or getting overwhelmed with all the changes that need to happen.

A creative writing professor once gave my class some really good advice: don't try to change too many things in a revision. For each draft, change ONE major thing. You won't get overwhelmed, but after just a couple drafts you'll start to see some real improvement. This is harder to do in a novel, but I like the system I'm working with now because I can do that with each chapter, and I can see how the changes will interact with each other before I make them (which prevents me from making some huge change that ends up not working).

I like it especially because it leaves me with a chapter-by-chapter outline! Once I get past 15ish chapters, I start doing that thing where I can't remember *exactly* in which chapter teensy-weensy-random-detail happened, and I have to skim like 40 pages to find it.

My friends, this is a very happy thing.

And back by popular demand, here's Lucy!

Stress-free giveaway winners!

2010-12-17T10:37:00.005-05:00

Random.org and Lucy helped me pick the winners of the stress-free giveaway (it only makes sense that I'd use random.org--it's the most stress-free way to pick winners! And the fairest :) I just assigned numbers in the order everyone commented.)

The winner of the signed copy of ASH by Malinda Lo is....

Commenter #38:

Tere Kirkland!

And the winner of the signed copy of RADIANT SHADOWS by Melissa Marr is...

Commenter #24:

Scoot!

Lucy is very happy for the winners!!!!

Got stress? Come get rid of it!

2010-12-15T11:26:00.002-05:00

Today is the last day to enter my stress-free giveaway! I will accept entries until midnight, at which point I'll pick winners. Come try to win something with minimal effort on your part! :)

Lucy wonders why you haven't entered yet!

Metal is better with XX chromosomes

2010-12-11T19:06:00.002-05:00

I like metal with female singers.

Unsun, "Whispers":

Within Temptation, "What Have You Done" (the guy singing isn't in the band):

Apocalyptica feat. Cristina Scabbia (of Lacuna Coil), "S.O.S.":

Nightwish, "Ghost Love Score" (with their former singer Tarja):

Nightwish, "Amaranth" (with their current singer Anette):

Are we being a little hard on our teenage boys?

2010-12-06T19:52:00.008-05:00

When I was fourteen, the literary men (and yes, they were men, not boys) I was swooning over were Mr. Darcy, Roiben from Holly Black's Tithe, the Marquis in Sherwood Smith's Crown Duel (which is a book that I adore and that not enough people have heard of!) and George from Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness series. Since they weren't my age, I didn't think to compare the guys in my 8th grade class to these swoon-worthy characters. The series that was sweeping everyone when I was in high school was Harry Potter, and while I wouldn't want to be compared to Harry Potter, either, the book wasn't a paranormal romance so nobody really thought to compare their potential date to Harry.

Now, though, YA is full of dreamy guys who are between 16 and 18 years old (I don't count Edward Cullen because he's had 100 years to practice) who are very perfect. Think about Matched by Ally Condie--Ky and Xander both are pretty awesome as far as guys go. Or what about Nightshade by Andrea Cremer. Shay? What a freaking cutie! He's respectful, egalitarian, and fun, with something of a dangerous side. And don't even get me started on Sonny from Wondrous Strange--aaaaah I love him! And these guys (and in this statement I WILL include Edward) complement the female protagonists of their respective novels pretty much perfectly. It's a hard standard to live up to.

I don't blame all the Twilight readers out there for wanting Edward Cullen instead of a human prom date. Not at all. Seriously, both my junior and senior proms sucked, and about 90% of the fault was on my dates for being lame. One of them wore shorts, those socks that don't stop at your ankle but don't go all the way up to your knee, and skateboarding shoes. Oh, and a MAROON blazer. Without asking me. The other whined at me every five minutes, asking me if he looked nice, and then got pissed at me at the end of the evening for not saying it enough times. When I was fourteen, I had a boy spend six months NOT kissing me. Every time we hung out, he did NOT kiss me. When you're fourteen, that is the freaking WORST! Trust me, teenage Alexandra KNOWS what it's like to be disappointed by a teenage boy.

But... I feel a little bad for the teenage guys who have to live up to the standard laid out in these books. It's no secret that boys develop more slowly maturity-wise than girls do. And I am sure that there are Shays and Kys and Xanders and even maybe an Edward or two out there. But, aw, what about the little short kid who hasn't hit his growth spurt yet and doesn't look like Adonis? Or the geeks in the science lab who haven't figured out that girls exist yet? The side of me that champions all things pathetic and not overtly cute feels so bad! :(

Don't get me wrong--I looooove reading a book with a good male love interest. I do not want this trend to change! Please, keep them coming! But I can't help but feel a little sympathy for the guys who now not only have to compete with the jocks and the guys who already look like freaking Brad Pitt, but who now also have to compete with people who don't actually even exist. It's a little hard on them to base all expectations on someone who exists only in the pages of a book. Rather, maybe it might be more fair to evaluate each boy on his own merits?

So if there are any teens out there reading this, don't be too hard on the guys if they don't sparkle in the sunlight just quite yet! :) They might be a little awkward, and not understand girls very well, say the wrong thing, not be able to run at the speed of light. But the nice guys really aren't all that bad. As long as they remember to use deodorant and brush their teeth. ;)

Book Review: THE HATING GAME by Talli Roland

2010-12-03T11:05:00.004-05:00

Watch out, Shopaholic, you have some serious competition.

Mattie Johns is in a serious financial bind. After being cheated on by her ex-boyfriend Kyle, the bastard stole most of her small business' clients, leaving her near to bankruptcy. So when a new reality dating show approaches her about appearing on TV, she jumps at the chance to win the 200,000 pound prize money. But what the show doesn't tell Mattie is that rather than dating four unknown guys, she'll be dating four of her ex boyfriends, one of whom is Kyle.

My phone did not leave my hand for two days while I was reading this (I downloaded the Kindle app, and then purchased the e-book during Talli's Take on Amazon Splash). I was reading two other books (fantasy, my favorite thing, I ought to mention) at the time I downloaded this one, but as soon as I started reading, they both went on hold until I was done. I don't read a lot of chicklit, but I don't have to to know that this is one of the best ones out there. Talli has an easy writing style, simple but biting, and the ability to convey a lot of information in only a few words. Every chapter, every p.o.v. switch, ends on a cliff hanger, leaving you dying to turn the page and find out what happens next. The action never lags as Mattie is put through torturous date after torturous date. And on the sidelines, we get points of view from one of the exes, the producer of the show, and Mattie's best friend, giving a well-rounded view of everything happening pertaining to the tv show, and giving the reader some very useful insight into the minds of the other characters, even characters who don't have their own point of view represented.

One of the best parts about THE HATING GAME is that all of the characters are well-rounded individuals. In character-driven romantic comedies, it's easy to make the two main characters into well-developed individuals, and let the supporting cast fall into cardboard cutout land. But Talli doesn't do that. The other characters were fleshed out as well, dealing with their own struggles and their own moral codes as Mattie battled with her heart to figure out if Kyle really was a liar, or if he was worthy of another chance. The other amazing thing about this was usually in a book like this, I skim through the other characters and their points of view to get back to the main character, but here I was interested in Jess, Nate, and Adam as well--each of them had their own sub-plot story that wove into the bigger picture seamlessly, and made the story of Mattie and Kyle that much richer.

I liked that Mattie was a strong, independent woman, and that she wasn't willing to give up her career for a man. She never wondered if she needed Kyle because she wanted someone to take care of her--it was about her happiness, not her ability to stand on her own two feet. I loved that Talli made it possible for there to be love between two strong, business-minded people, and that one of them didn't have to take the submissive role for it to happen.

Then there's the reality show itself. The whole time I was reading, my mind was screaming "this would make a GREAT movie!" It's a hilarious concept for a tv show (which I actually think would work pretty well as a tv show) but all the torture that Mattie goes through with these exes would make a great romcom movie. Every time you think it can't get bad enough, the producers make it worse, and all the while Mattie is having her own inner battles while still having to appear with dignity on tv to impress potential future clients who might see her there.

I think this is a hilarious and romantic book that would appeal to all kinds of people, not just fans of romcoms or chicklit. It offers deep insight into the horrors of reality television as well as a satisfying romance. A 5-star read for sure.

Help THE HATING GAME make the Amazon Kindle bestseller list!!!

2010-12-01T05:45:00.001-05:00

Talli Roland is one of my favorite bloggers and authors! She's funny, super nice, and has a chicklit novel coming out in e-book TODAY! (The physical copy will be released early 2011). Her novel, THE HATING GAME, has already grabbed many positive reviews, and the premise is completely brilliant. Imagine having to go on a game show and having to date your ex boyfriends! So, today, I want you to...

Help Talli Roland's debut novel THE HATING GAME hit the Kindle bestseller list at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk by spreading the word today. Even a few sales in a short period of time on Amazon helps push the book up the rankings, making it more visible to other readers.

Amazon.co.uk: http://amzn.to/hNBkJk
Amazon.com: http://amzn.to/hX2ieD

No Kindle? Download a free app at Amazon for Mac, iPhone, PC, Android and more. Coming soon in paperback. Keep up with the latest at www.talliroland.com.

About THE HATING GAME:

When man-eater Mattie Johns agrees to star on a dating game show to save her ailing recruitment business, she's confident she'll sail through to the end without letting down the perma-guard she's perfected from years of her love 'em and leave 'em dating strategy. After all, what can go wrong with dating a few losers and hanging out long enough to pick up a juicy £200,000 prize? Plenty, Mattie discovers, when it's revealed that the contestants are four of her very unhappy exes. Can Mattie confront her past to get the prize money she so desperately needs, or will her exes finally wreak their long-awaited revenge? And what about the ambitious TV producer whose career depends on stopping her from making it to the end?

See you later, I'll be reading!

The most stress-free giveaway you will ever enter!

2010-11-29T09:40:00.004-05:00

Happy Holidays everyone!

I have a present for you. I have two signed books that I am going to GIVE TO YOU for free! That's right. You don't have to do ANYTHING. It's just because I love you.

I have...

Ash by Malinda Lo

and

Radiant Shadows by Melissa Marr

Leave me a comment telling me which one you want (or if you care). And leave me your e-mail if somehow I won't be able to contact you by clicking on your name. If you tell me why you want the book (like that you want to give it to someone) your chances of winning might be increased.

You do not have to be a follower. You do not have to have a blog (but you will have to give me your email if you don't). You do not have to link in your sidebar or post about this or tweet about this. If you want to, you can, but you don't have to! :D

You have until December 15. :) (Also, because it's in the holiday spirit, even though I have no money, this is an international giveaway. I feel bad for everyone who can't usually enter contests and giveaways because they don't live in the US or Canada.)

That's it!

Participate in Talli Roland's Web Splash!

2010-11-27T10:34:00.002-05:00

On December 1st, Talli Roland's debut novel, THE HATING GAME, is available for e-book purchase on Amazon. Talli wants to try to get THE HATING GAME on the Amazon e-book bestseller list, even if only for an hour. But she needs our help!

On December 1st, post on your blog, facebook, twitter, goodreads, whatever, about purchasing an e-book copy of THG, and hopefully we can help Talli get THE HATING GAME on the list!

Here's a link to the text: http://talliroland.blogspot.com/p/web-splash-text-to-post.html

I'll be back on December 1 to encourage everyone to purchase an e-book copy. I'll probably be downloading an app for my iphone! :) The book has gotten great reviews so far; if you haven't heard of it, you should check it out asap! I can't wait to read it!

The Tudors

2010-11-27T00:20:00.004-05:00

My newest tv-on-dvd obsession:

It might have a lot to do with Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Henry Cavill. Maybe a lot more than it has to do with the plot. Maybe.

They sure do take a lot of historical liberties, but it's entertaining as kittens anyway!

Enjoy, ladies!

Mmmmm.

Busy!

2010-11-24T09:14:00.004-05:00

Is anyone doing NaNoWriMo? I always mean to do it, but by the middle of October (never fails, for the past three years) my life gets so busy that I know it won't end up happening. Then by January or February, stuff has evened out and I always end up having my own NaNo.

This month, anyway, has been like NaNoRevMo (National Novel Revising Month) for me, though. I'm totally re-writing one of my projects, but I'm using the original plot as the outline, keeping most of the same characters, and even a couple scenes are getting updated. Plus I'm mapping severe revisions for another story. And plotting another story. (Brain, sometimes you have to rest! GIVE ME A REST!)

Also, I got a new kitten :)

[Falen reminded me that I didn't give you details! Thanks, Falen. Kitten is a girl, and her name is Lucy. She's somewhere around 10 weeks old.]

But anyway, I love Thanksgiving and Christmas/New Years time because I always have more time to read.

Right now I'm reading The Wayfarer Redemption by Sara Douglass. It's great so far (though I'm not that far into it, only like chapter five).

Here are some books on my list for the winter:

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde (somehow I went through all of school never having to read this!)

Queen Victoria, Demon Hunter - A. E. Moorat

The Summer King - O. R. Melling

The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss

The Iron King - Julie Kagawa

Day of the Scarab - Catherine Fisher (one of my favorite YA authors)

Nevermore - Kelly Creagh

Glimmerglass - Jenna Black

You Wish - Mandy Hubbard

What are you really looking forward to reading this winter?

Mindi Scott Chat!

2010-10-21T08:38:00.002-04:00

Hey everyone! Tonight at 9PM Eastern time, The Mundie Moms will be chatting with Mindi Scott! Check out their blog for more information--the way I understand it, today they'll be posting a link to the chat on their blog.

Also, don't forget to enter my contest, to win a PERSONALIZED copy of FREEFALL! The contest will end tomorrow night at Midnight. All you have to do is leave a comment on THIS post (and do something, like follow Mindi on twitter) and you're entered. And if you haven't, I think you should also read the interview with her, because she's so funny!

INTERVIEW w/ MINDI SCOTT + GIVEAWAY!

2010-10-15T09:44:00.004-04:00

Last week, on October 5, the book FREEFALL by Mindi Scott came out. I met Mindi online last February just after she'd signed with her agent. She's really nice, and really funny, and I had the pleasure of getting to interview her! (Some of the things I mention in the interview, like a teenage obsession with Christian Slater, and her old diary entries, are discussed over on her blog or on her website, and I REALLY encourage you to go check them out!!)

Check it out, this was a lot of fun!
1. It's really daring (and hilarious) of you to post old diary entries from when you were a teenager. What inspired you to do that?

I was just trying to think of something I could add to my website that was a little unique, that would give people something to check back for, and that would give them some insight into who I am. And BAM! Transcribed journal entries from my teenage years came to mind. :-D

2. FREEFALL went through several title changes during the publication process. Where did it begin, and how did it arrive at the fantastic title that is FREEFALL?

The original title was THE FAKE MCCOY. It was supposed to be a play on, you know, that phrase “the real McCoy.” And the narrator is named Seth McCoy, so it’s, like, funny or something? I’m the one who came up with it, but I’m not sure I ever understood what I was meaning with it, honestly.
Later, I retitled it SCRATCHING AT THE 8-BALL, which from a Social Distortion song. It basically means “unlucky” and is very relevant in my story. My agent request rate improved with this new title.
After it sold to Pulse, my editor let me know that she wanted a title that was brief, evocative, and with layers of meaning. I pulled words and phrases from song lyrics—hundreds of them!—but nothing was quite right. Finally, we stumbled upon the word “freefall” in my contract. This word is also very relevant to the story, and accomplishes everything we were hoping it would. Hooray!

3. What made you decide to write YA fiction, rather than adult or middle grade (or anything else you can think of)?

I went to private school from third grade on, so I have a lot of residual curiosity about what regular high school would have been like. I get to use my writing as an opportunity to do research and to place my characters into a world is perfectly normal to most people, but really foreign to me.

4. Which paranormal/supernatural creature is your favorite? Which is your least favorite?

Mermaids are my favorite because I always wanted to become one! Most of the others are tied for my least favorite because I am a gigantic scaredy-cat.

5. What was the most difficult part of writing from a male narrator's perspective? Was there anything that pleasantly surprised you about it?

It was hard at first because I didn’t have any clue how Seth would think, what he would say, or how he would react. This isn’t much different than learning to write any new character, but in this case, I knew that I could never rely on my own voice or word choices because it just wouldn’t ring true as a teen guy.
The pleasant surprise was that after I’d been working on the manuscript for a while, the voice became easy and natural. I can’t say that I would be able pull off just any male narrator. No way! But I do feel like I was able to accomplish something unexpected with Seth and that makes me very happy!

6. If you met Christian Slater right now, what would you do?

Oh, I’m sure I’d totally play it cool and shake his hand all, “Christian Slater, it’s nice to meet you.”

I’d carry on halfway intelligent conversation, never letting on that when I was fourteen, I’d wanted to marry him. Then when it was all over, I’d step into another room and do a secret little happy dance like Laura Linney’s character in the movie LOVE ACTUALLY.

Thank you, Mindi!!!
Isn't she great? <3>

Because Mindi wasn't already awesome enough, she is going to give away a PERSONALIZED signed copy of her book, FREEFALL, right here on my blog! The giveaway will be open until next Friday, October 22. It's US only (sorry, international friends!) but there are several giveaways happening in Mindi's blog tour, and a couple are international. Go here for more info.

To enter, you have a couple of options. You get a point for each of these things, but you only have to do one of them to officially enter (and trust me, you want to enter--you want to read this book!):

-follow her on twitter (@mindi_scott)

-link to her blog (or website, or youtube) in your sidebar (http://mindiscott.livejournal.com/)

-write a post talking about FREEFALL (this will get you TWO entries)

-add FREEFALL to your "to read" list on Goodreads

The last thing you need to do is leave me a comment, with link(s), so I can officially know you're entered in the giveaway!

(also, check out Mindi's youtube and the book trailer for FREEFALL!)

Tennyson

2010-10-12T09:31:00.002-04:00

Still really heartbroken about the kitten.

But I came across a really really pretty poem yesterday, and I want to share:

It's In Memoriam A.H.H. 50 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.

Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.

Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.

Enjoy the rest of your week.

Sad news

2010-10-04T23:04:00.003-04:00

My kitten, Quentin, had to be put to sleep today. She was really sick; she got sick last week, and declined steadily until today, when I found out she had feline leukemia virus. It was something that they usually test for in small kittens, and I don't know why she didn't get tested, but there was nothing we could do.

I had her for almost 6 months, she was 7 months old, and she was the softest friendliest most affectionate kitten I could have ever asked for. I really miss her.

I probably won't be online for a while. I'm devastated.

(I'll be back on the 15th--I'm interviewing Mindi Scott to celebrate the release of her book FREEFALL)

I love commercial fiction!

2010-09-25T01:43:00.004-04:00

I do, I really love it. I've been able to appreciate literary fiction, and there have been a few times that I've been riveted by it (like Crank by Ellen Hopkins--holy awesome, everyone should read it), but I LOVE commercial fiction.

Sometimes I think commercial fiction gets a bad reputation. People don't think it's as "deep" as literary fiction, or that the stuff that happens in it isn't like real life (I mean, true, how many of us have Hagrid coming to our doors saying "You're a wizard, Harry!"), or that there are too many happy endings, or that it's just frivolous.

To them I say, no way! Yes, part of commercial fiction is entertainment, hence the word "commercial"--but I have learned so much about life from all kinds of commercial fiction. I learn about teenagers from YA, I learn about love from romance novels and women's literature, I get to visit other time periods in historical fiction, I learn about heroism and loyalty and fear in fantasy, I learn about new technologies and applications for modern science in science fiction, and I get a unique look into someone else's life through popular memoirs. And I get to take amazing journeys in my head with people that are so real, I swear they'll walk through my door at any moment. Some of the best writing I've encountered has been in commercial fiction books, too.

And, lest we forget, many of our favorite authors from history were popular while they were writing, which would make them, at least by some definition, commercial.

I'm not dissing literary fiction at all. Literary fiction is an insightful place, a place you go to really think about things, to examine the human condition, and to find some really freaking good writing. I don't need to tell you it's good--we all know it's good. I'm just saying, hey, let's not be too hard on commercial fiction and whether or not it has artistic merit. It gives us so many things--and there is nothing wrong with being entertained, or reading to escape life for a while. And let's not forget Lord of the Rings, which manages to be commercial and literary at the same time!

So here's to you, commercial fiction! I've never once doubted your greatness, and I look forward to a long, happy relationship.

On Making Assumptions (Glee!)

2010-09-22T16:00:00.005-04:00

[I feel like I need to make a disclaimer before I write this post. I'm a very strong feminist, but I rarely talk about it, because I'm not a believer in preaching my views to others, and I don't want to come across in any way like I'm marginalizing somebody or some group of people. My views of feminism encompass everyone feeling free to embrace ANY gender role, and any societal role that they feel comfortable with. I support mothers staying home and taking care of the kids just as much as I support women being the CEOs of fortune 500 companies, and the same goes for men, AND for transgendered or transsexual people. Basically, I prefer to view people as individuals, rather than as gendered beings or through stereotypes that they may or may not fit into.]

Did anyone watch Glee last night? I love Glee--I've been watching it ever since that first teaser episode came out. But I noticed something about last night's episode that bothered me, as a woman and as a musician.

When the guys did their song, they played instruments. In one scene, the guys are trying to convince a new boy to join Glee club--they ask him if he can sing, and then just HAND him a guitar without even checking first to make sure he can play--thereby reinforcing the stereotype that all musically inclined guys know how to play the guitar. But when the girls were singing, no instruments were to be found. I thought back over the episodes of Glee, and found a pattern: the guys always played the instruments, and the girls rarely, if ever, did.

And I went, hey, Glee, I play guitar! I play piano, too, and I can sing while playing either--AND I could do so in high school. In fact, I DID do so during high school (and I faced hella ridicule for it because of my gender--but that's a story for another time).

My point is this: making assumptions is bad, and it can alienate your audience. Yes, I know, I sound like a kindergarten teacher, but it's true. To bring it back to writing, I think we can really write ourselves into corners if we allow ourselves to make assumptions about characters not based on THEM, but based on whatever stereotypical group they fit into. It's sexy and easy to make the guys play guitar, I know. But that's the problem--it's easy, and it's almost like a tell instead of a show: if the guy plays guitar, well then he must be sexy, right? I'd rather be shown how he's sexy by his personality and his actions, rather than be told that he's sexy because he's the quarter back or the lead guitarist in a band. (And that's also not accurate--I'm sure we've all met some jocks during our high school careers who were not sexy because they were such jerks, and so on). I also realize that what I'm saying could be taken as its own generalization. I'm aware of the fact that there are books/tv shows/movies/other medias that portray these images in alternative ways, and I'm very happy and appreciative about that.

I'm not thinking of any specific thing in the media as I write this, nor am I trying to criticize those who choose to do it--I'm not saying take the guitar out of the hands of your male lead. All I'm saying is, make sure to remember to show us why he's sexy, other than just that guitar strapped over his shoulder. And maybe throw in a surprise. So, he's good at guitar. But is there a contradictory aspect of his personality? Would he rather be playing the violin in a quartet, or making explosions in the chem lab? Did his parents expect him to play? Does he do it because he loves it, or because it's how you get girls?

And, maybe give the girl a guitar, too--or even a football helmet and a set of pads. Because that would be less expected, but seriously, REALLY awesome. And, if you ask me, it would be believable and fresh, and something that I would LOVE to read.

Are you a sprinter, or a marathon runner?

2010-09-13T17:16:00.003-04:00

Are you a short story writer, a novelist, or both? (Please don't come to me and say "novella" or "novelette" because I'll throw my shoes at you--this is a purely unacademic exercise.)

I am a novelist. I think in ideas that need at least 50k words to tell--or at least, to tell well. I do not get ideas and then make them into novels--they're already novels when they sit on my face and wake me up in the middle of the night. That doesn't mean I have every point of the outline already blooming in my head--to the contrary, I usually skew about 85% towards pantsing.

But the ideas are still novels. I know this because I usually have my starting point and my ending point, and I know how much needs to go in between. How lame would LotR have been as a short story?

Gandalf: Frodo, take this ring to Mount Doom and destroy it!

Frodo: No, Gandalf, I can't!

Gandalf: Yes, Frodo, you can. You must for the sake of Middle Earth!

Frodo: Well... okay

Frodo and Sam undertake a perilous journey.

Three pages later:

Frodo tosses the ring into Mount Doom.

Frodo: So, Sam. That was a rough morning, don't you think? Let's go get some lunch.

Sam: You bet!

Even if you're not writing epic fantasy (which I don't write--it's like the one kind of fantasy I don't really write) you know roughly how much character development, how much plot, etc., needs to go between the beginning and the end. For me, that always leaves me with the idea for a novel.

So, do you think in short stories, or do you think in novels? Or, do you actually get to make a decision when you get an idea?

p.s. it's Carolina Valdez Miller's birthday. Go wish her a happy one.

Don't make hair mistakes. They haunt you forever.

2010-09-10T15:16:00.003-04:00

Three and a half years ago, I had a really terrible haircut. I thought it would be a good idea to get bangs that were cut straight across.

It wasn't.

I grew them out after a couple months, and have barely had bangs since (except for these random pieces of hair that never seem to grow farther than chin length... I don't know where they come from. Maybe gremlins come out of my shoes at night and cut them.)

We've all had bad haircuts, and we've all learned never to get that haircut ever ever again (or go to that hairdresser, or what have you.) It's a mistake everyone over age 10 has made at least once. I know I looked ridiculous, and I'm not savvy enough with hair product to have really made them look nice, anyway. So it was a disaster all around, and when I look at pictures from that time I cringe.

Here's the funny thing. People don't seem to want to let me forget the mistake. Whenever I mention that I'm going in for a haircut (and my hair is really long, so this isn't often, because I'm too lazy) people make sure to tell me "don't get your bangs cut like you had that one time. Those were really awful." To which I always reply: "Definitely not. I hated those bangs." And yet, these same people continue to remind me never to do it again.

I feel like there's a moral in here, somewhere. But I can't really dig it out. Anyone want to do it for me?

(Before anyone asks, no I will not show you pictures. I'm embarrassed.)

Who do you write for?

2010-09-08T17:18:00.003-04:00

I'm sure a good many of you here in the writing bloggy world were (or still are) English majors or creative writing majors, which means that you did a fair bit of writing for professors.

I've been thinking about this lately (and it stems from my inability to write a decent short story): is there a difference between people who write for other writers, and people who write for readers?

Well, writers are readers, too, you might argue. But think about how you read a book. I know that there's a part of my brain that examines structure, characterization, word choice, how many revisions I thought it went through, because that's what I do every day when I sit down to write. But do I view films like that, or TV shows? No, because I'm not an actor, or a director, or a producer.

So I have to believe that most people who are reading (for pleasure, not for academic reasons) are probably not dissecting a novel with the same obsession that I am, or at the same level of scarily minute detail (and sometimes I really wish I could turn this part of my brain off.)

Which leads me to the question, one that I grappled with during creative writing classes especially, of when we write, are we writing with other writers and their reading styles in mind, or are we thinking about the readers? Or is it some combination of the two?

Let me use another metaphor. I play guitar, and every so often I force myself to go out and play for people (it builds character, I tell you!) There are many things I can do that really impress an audience of people who don't know anything about the guitar. But someone who knew how to play wouldn't be impressed at all. And there are things I could do to impress someone who knew how to play, but the audience wouldn't realize what I was doing, and probably wouldn't think it was any cooler than fingertapping (the easiest impressive thing you can learn to do on an electric guitar.) Like sweep-picking. Do you even know what that is? Probably not. If I did it for you (and I'd really have to practice first), would you realize how hard it was? Unlikely, because it happens so fast it's hard to catch unless you know what to look and listen for.

So I always have to be aware of my audience (that is, when I'm not hiding from them.) In college, we tend to write for other writers--our classmates, and our professors. Because I've had my family members read my college short stories, or close friends, and they tend to just say "great!" or give me a really general idea of what they did or didn't like. Sometimes I'd walk into class really confident because my non English major readers liked my story, only to have it ripped apart in workshop by other writers, because they saw things that my other readers didn't see.

What do you guys think? Am I crazy? Thinking too hard again? Are you able to do both?