Scroll down this page for my blog and click here for the Red Hair Is Not As Uncommon As You Think - Twenty-five of the most overused things in YA and MG Fiction article! Also, my Fave Fifteen for 2007 is up here. And thanks for stopping by. Oh, and due to comment spam, I have to approve them all, so if your comment doesn’t show up right away, that’s why. Sorry!

On Need To Read, I’ll be writing about the books and authors I love. My goal with this blog is to bring your attention to young adult fiction that speaks to me. I’d love to hear what you think about any of the books or authors, and the only thing I ask is that you refrain from spoiling books for anyone by giving plots away. I hate that! Enjoy. And just for those of you not familiar with writing terms, YA is Young Adult or teen, and MG is Middle Grade, often marked as J (for juvenile) in the library.

Click here for a list of YAs you might be interested in reading, followed by my Fave Fifteen of 2006. Click here for the Red Hair Is Not As Uncommon As You Think article! Thanks for coming by!

I primarily write young adult fiction, but occasionally I try my hand at a little nonfiction too. Below are a few articles on writing and the business that I’ve written for The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

Here’s a link to nonfiction piece I have on the web:

Follow the Yellow Web Trail by Joelle Anthony, Fieldnotes, Audbon (it’s in the sidebar about half way down).

You may have read this piece on my website (Friday, May 25 2007), but if you missed it, or you just want to check out the Betsy-Tacy Society website, check it out here

This is another great British MG. Set in a small town in Wales where their claim to fame is more rain than anywhere else in the UK, it’s about…well, I’m not going to tell you because if I do, I’ll spoil it. The beginnings a bit of a mystery. I will say it’s got loads of dry British humor, outstanding voice, interesting characters, and that little something extra that makes it special. I will also say that they did Americanize it, which is my pet peeve (American spelling, exchanging words, etc.), but you can’t really get away from that unless you buy the British edition. I guess that since I lived in England I think everyone should be able to figure out that a jumper is a sweater, but maybe that’s not true! Anyway, I do think you will enjoy this and I highly recommend it. And as a point of irony, the author has written such screenplays as Welcome to Sarajevo and Hilary and Jackie, which couldn’t be much further away than a MG book set in Wales! Enjoy.

I’d once thought of writing a book about two families who swapped kids, so when I saw the title of this book, I thought, “Old Slow Joe, missed the boat.” However, that’s not what this book is about, so you never know…any editors out there like that idea? Okay, I digress. This is a great read. It’s British YA, although it might pass for MG. It’s got a really great hook (premise) and I liked how well developed all the characters are. It keeps you guessing and makes you want to keep reading, which is always good. If you have a boy in your household who tends to be a reluctant reader, because this book’s got the bonus of having a male protagonist, it would be a good one to pass his way. I’d definitely look for more books by this author.

Hi, Everyone.

I’ve finally posted a few of my articles in the nonfiction section. Forgive the goofy formatting on some of it. I’d rather get back to writing my novel than goof around with it anymore! Also, the audio on the contact page should now be working, and hopefully it’s not freezing up anymore either. I love my designers! Have a great weekend. Don’t forget, FREE BOOKS ON MONDAY!

Originally published in the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Bulletin, March/April 2007

It’s very easy to fall in love with your characters, but it can be detrimental to your plotting. How many times have you heard a writer affectionately refer to his or her manuscript as “my baby”? I practically never call my young adult novels by their titles, but lovingly refer to them as “Kami’s book”, “Molly’s book” and “Susan’s book” and I do that because these three main characters have become best friends to me.

When you’ve finished the writing, love them all you want, but while you’re working on that first draft (or twentieth) it doesn’t help you much at all to care about them. It’s not hard to remember to keep the character’s main desire from them because that’s Writing 101. However, in the past I inadvertently became so close to my characters that every time they wanted something small, they got it. Why? Because I couldn’t bear to see them go without, be disappointed, or deprive them of anything they desired. The main problem with that was then my manuscripts didn’t have any dramatic tension, no action.

It’s also very easy to fall into the habit of giving your characters what they want because not only is it easier, but your brain is very good at disguising this as moving the plot forward. For example, in my first draft of Kami’s book, my character needed a job when she returned to her hometown. They’d loved her at her old job, so when she walked in the front doors her boss welcomed her back. It made the most sense because she really needed some money to find an apartment and she only had two weeks to sort herself out. There was never any question about her finding a job because if she didn’t, she’d have to return to her parents’ house, end of story. My plan was that finding the apartment was going to be the hard part and getting the job quickly moved the story forward effectively.

However, when I went back through the manuscript and consciously tried to make things harder on Kami, I realized how much more interesting it would be if she walked into her former place of employment and the boss she’d worked for had been fired for stealing. Now, not only did she not have a job, but she was suspect because she’d worked for the thief. That eliminated all the company’s other locations for possible employment and forced her to rethink her plan. Now, as a writer, you might have read the above example and thought, “Well, duh,” and you’d be right. It was kind of an obvious one, after the fact. However, as far as importance of plot points go, on a scale of one to a hundred, it was somewhere in the 30 range, so it was easier to have missed than you might think. That’s why once I’ve got the general story down, I specifically look for places I’ve been too nice and try to make them more challenging for my character. Once you’ve fixed the “big” ones, then it’s time to look for the little ones. When I think I’ve finished a manuscript, I go over it beat by beat, looking for scenes that have fallen through the cracks. They don’t really harm the manuscript as a whole, but I can make my writing so much stronger if I change them. While you do want your character to get some things they want (otherwise the reader will feel really badly for them and probably also a little depressed), it’s not a bad idea for someone to take the last jelly doughnut, leaving him with glazed, or for her to have to sleep in her car for a night because she forgot her house key.

The reason to do this is because tension begets tension and will lead you new places. For instance, your character gets home late at night and has forgotten her house key. She can wake everyone up, maybe get a dressing down and then the story goes on OR she can sleep in her car, get a crick in her neck which in turn affects everything that happens the next day in a physically painful way. By being a little harder on her, you’ve created more dramatic tension, but you haven’t really even changed the story.

When you read someone else’s manuscript, detecting where they’ve been too easy on a character is much more obvious. That’s why, when I hand my draft over to my critique group, I specifically ask them to look for things that seem a little too coincidental, lazy, or have that deus ex machina feeling. Don’t worry about being mean, concern yourself with not being mean enough. We all want to be a nice person, but when you’re writing, being tough is your job and you’re only making the characters and the story stronger. There will be plenty of time for you to love them after you’ve made their life as hard as possible. Like on that book tour.

Originally published in the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators bulletin, September/October 2006

For some writers, the query is much harder to write than the manuscript. However, agents across the board are begging you not to succumb to services like Agent Wizard (http://www.wizards4word.com/agent.html) and Scriptblaster (www.scriptblaster.com) who do the work for you for a small fee. Recently, literary agents have been hit with a deluge of form-type query letters that truly do you more harm than good because they make it hard for agents to sift out the quality from the bad.

These form queries are personal to the extent that they have the author’s credentials and information plugged into them, but the wording in all of them is similar and can also be abrupt and abrasive. Phrasing like, “Should I send it off to you now and do you like hard copy or by email?” is a real turn-off to agents. Worse than the hard sell approach, services like these sometimes talk about the writer in the third person, as if they’ve hired a publicist to do the letter writing for them, even though they don’t have representation yet, and are often unpublished. This can make the writer look ridiculously self-important in the eyes of an agent.

What’s more, agents do talk amongst themselves, and when five or six of them receive exactly the same query from the same author, they’re all likely to reject it. Although these services claim to have done the research for you, it’s quite obvious they haven’t, simply by the way they send your query out to everyone.

If you really don’t think you can’t pull off the query yourself, there are services that aren’t so obnoxious, but they don’t come cheaply, and it’s debatable how effective they really are. One such service in particular, offers a free assessment of your query and first ten pages of a manuscript. As an experiment, I sent my samples into them and I got a personal email back from the owner, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of my manuscript and query.

She suggested heavy rewrites of my query and synopsis, stressing that I needed her services if I expected any sucess. Interestingly enough, the query and synopsis I sent to her had previously generated four positive responses from editors asking for the entire manuscript. From what I could tell, the benefit of their service was its hands on approach, but it really wasn’t anything that a writer couldn’t get from his/her critique group. And the price quoted was upwards of three hundred dollars for query and synopsis editing, and to generate a list of possible agents, which seemed ridiculously high to me.

Agents are people trying to do a job and simply typing their name into a letter does not personalize your query. You, as a writer, want someone to care about your book, your thoughts, and your career ups and downs. The best thing you can do is research agents personally, and learn about them from live journals, blogs, conferences, and their websites so that you know they’re a good match for you. Ask other writers for agent recommendations, let your critique group have a look at your synopsis, write, rewrite, and rewrite it again. But most importantly, trust your own abilities as a writer. You wouldn’t even need a query if you hadn’t completed a major work of art already, so get back to work and finish the job yourself.

Originally published in the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators Bulletin, January/February 2005

Today I’m interviewing yours truly. Not only will it let me introduce myself, but it gives me another week to get some other authors interviewed. I will ask each author to answer five of ten questions and submit a brief bio. When possible, I’ll read their books and post about them on Need To Read that day. Feel free to ask questions of the author in the comments section and maybe they’ll answer them.

Okay, now on to me.

Name: Joelle Anthony

Occupation: Young adult writer

Q. What were your favorite books when you were a teen?

A. Well, I’d like to say they were the Betsy-Tacy books because those are my all time favorites, but honestly, when I was a teen, I was way into those Fireside romance novels. I used to take my allowance to the mall and buy one book and then read it on Saturday night. Yeah…can you say dateless? Well, if you’re sitting home alone, it was comforting to read about other girls doing that too…of course, by the end, they’d always won their guy’s heart.

Q. What’s on your iPod right now?

A. I only listen to music when I work out, so it’s got to be upbeat. I’m really into fiddle tunes. I know…sounds geeky, but you’d be surprised how energized it can make you. I sometimes work out to my husband’s CDs too…can’t get enough of him, I reckon!

Q. What do you read in the bathroom?

A. Come on, everyone does, right? I tend to read magazines. I like Self and Consumer Reports.

Q. What’s the best piece of advice anyone ever gave you (or you read in a book)?

A. Leap and the net will appear. - Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

Q. What’s the riskiest thing you ever did and how’d it work out for you?

A. Moving to London after college with $1500, a work permit, but no job. It worked out great. I am not the world’s best job hunter, so I mostly sat around watching Wimbledon on the hostel TV until I was almost out of money. Then I scrambled for a job and got one way out in the country in the north of England as  a housekeeper at Outward Bound. Sixteen years later I still have friends I met there that I visit.