Okay, can I just say that we have landed in a hotbed of fabulous YA writers? As I’ve bragged before, the fabulous Iain Lawrence lives in my small town. Now I find out that Susan Juby is just a hop, skip, and a jump away, and my friend, Susan (the librarian), met her just last month or something like that! I hear she’s very cool. Anyway, I’ve been a big fan of the Alice books ever since a teen recommended them to me when I cornered her in the YA section of a bookstore and asked what she liked (about two years). I own them, which says something because if you go to my bio page, you can see my one bookshelf of books I think are worth owning. Anyway, I am on a tight budget now, so AKOC came from the library, but oh, it’s good! It’s so good! I think I read it through in about one evening plus a lot of time today when I was supposed to be copy writing (I hope my client’s not reading this). This is what I call a perfectly crafted and well done book. And I’m not just saying that so Susan will see this and email me and have coffee with me (but if she does and wants to, I’m in). This really is good. Her other books are hilarious, quirky, and fun, but this has everything I’m looking for in a contemporary novel. Oh, and see the note about the POV below in the next post about Mistik Lake.

My friend, Susan recommended this book to me. I’m glad she did because I had to put it on hold to get it and I might not have come across it for a while otherwise. You often hear agents or editors say things like, “Vampire books are out, unless you can do something really fresh, and then we definitely want to see it.” After reading this book, that finally makes sense to me. This book has nothing to do with vampires, but I think you could say it’s a very fresh take on a story that maybe you’ve heard before. It’s so fresh that you don’t realize you’ve heard the story before until you’re finished. Anyway, as usual…add it to your list!

Oh, wait…one more thing of interest I wanted to add . The writer has broken all POV rules, which is kind of cool. One character tells her story in first person, and then a bunch of other characters get their story told in third person. And it’s not every other chapter alternating or anything, it’s just when it needs to change, it does. What’s so interesting to me about this is not only had I never seen that before, BUT THE VERY NEXT BOOK I READ HAS THE SAME THING!!! (which is technically the book above this one on the blog, Susan Juby’s Another Kind of Cowboy. Maybe it’s a Canadian thing???

P.S. For some reason this post is attracting spam so I had to turn off comments. Feel free to send one through the contact page if you have a comment on this book. J-

What do you all do during that time between sending your newly revised manuscript back to your agent and the time he/she reads it and gets back to you? I’ve been knitting, cooking, actually writing for pay (copywriting), walking, listening to baseball games on the internet radio (Go Cubs!), and trying not to think about my book while also trying to come up with a new title. That’s a tricky one - thinking about a title, but not worrying about the book. I’m taking title tips right now. I usually don’t have trouble with this, but after a month of thinking about it, I’m still at a loss. How do you figure out a title?

I was thinking about the book Honey, Baby, Sweetheart… If you’ve read the book, you know that it is one line - three words, in the entire book. It’s not like it’s a tag line or anything. The line is just part of the text, really. Words you wouldn’t even notice if it weren’t the title, right? So how in the world did the author know to choose those words for an excellent title? I’m about to just pick three random words out of my book and see what I get! Help!

I often write an animal themed essay for Thursdays. Today, it’s more of a picture thing. I just looked out the window and saw this in one of the fir trees:

And for just a momentary mental lapse, I thought I saw this:

Our lovely cat, Mr. Fatboy. It would’ve been quite the trick to see him though because A) the raccoon was pretty high in the tree and B) Mr. FB is not here at all, since he passed on last year, but it was nice to be reminded of him for just a second. Like he’s always with us!

In the mystery, the main character is a caterer. I actually read #s 12,13, & 14 before I realized that there were a whole bunch of them. Now I’m reading the earlier ones. I believe, and I could be wrong, that in the later ones, the recipes are at the ends of the chapters. In these earlier ones though, they are right in the middle of the chapter at the time that the character makes them. Now, I love a good recipe, and I like the idea of including them (I had the same idea for a book I wrote about a cook myself), but why in the world would the author think that having them smack in the middle of a chapter is a good idea?

On to illustrations with clever labels. This is becoming a bit trendy in YA. I’ve run across it before, and I’ll see it again. It doesn’t bug me that much, and I doubt it bothers teens at all, but really…when do I examine the illustration and read the clever bits? If I look at at the drawing as soon as I turn the page, then I might read a note on it that spoils what’s going on further down the page. If I wait and read the whole page, I might be past the bit that the drawing pertains to (yes, this happened to me both ways).

The footnotes are the ones that really got to me though. Not only are they superfluous, but they aren’t all that clever. The book shall go unnamed (and I’ve seen this footnote thing before, so you may or may not be able to figure it out), but the author had a huge seller and so I’m thinking that the editor said, “Well, okay…because you’re XXX, I guess it’s okay.” when really, it’s NOT! The way I saw it while trying to read the book was I had two choices, ignore the footnotes (impossible, by the way) in hopes that I didn’t miss anything important, or stop and read them (usually right in the middle of a sentence) and be totally taken out of the book. Neither worked, so I quit reading.

I honestly think that when these authors finished their final edits and went back to read it one more time, they simply read the novel part and skipped over the recipes, illustrations, and footnotes, so they didn’t even notice how distracting they were. If I were their editor, I would tell them, “When you read your book, I want you to stop and read the recipes, clever notes, and footnotes aloud.” I bet they would’ve cut them, or at least reorganized them. On the plus side, I know that I will never do this kind of thing! That’s why reading is as important as writing.

P.S. I’m not saying that other people shouldn’t do this, just that it annoys me so much that I don’t want to do it!

Out of the last four books I’ve read, make that three, because I only got to page 31 in the fourth, only one was a straight forward novel. The first one was an adult mystery with recipes tucked in throughout the chapters. The second one was a YA with illustrations which were cleverly labeled in a handwriting font, and the fourth had footnotes. I am all for creativity, but I wonder about being creative for the sake of being different when the cost is the reader never really being able to commit to your story. continued…

Check out Need To Read.

When I was in NYC a few year ago I discovered that I was out of books to read while I traveled, so I went to a bookstore to remedy the situation. NYC is expensive, and while I’m not cheap, I was on a budget, so when I saw that I could get two Sarah Dessen novels in one book for a very nice price, I snapped up How To Deal. Anyway, I really liked them a lot. I guess, simply because I’d never come across them, I never picked up any of her other books, but recently someone recommended The Truth About Forever and I just read it straight through, loving every minute. You know a book is good when you have one of those tiny smiles on your face the entire time you’re reading it. This book was one of those where you just know something big is going to happen and you can hardly wait. And yet, I think you might call it a quiet sort of book. I just really enjoyed it and think you should add it to your list too. I also got Just Listen today too.

Oh, yeah…and did you know that on Amazon if you click on Sarah’s book, her blog shows up right there on Amazon! How did she get that??? I wonder if you have to be a big time writer or what? That is very cool.

I’ve been waiting for this book for a long time. I had it on hold, but a lot of other people were faster than me and got to read it first. It was totally worth the wait. I think this should be required reading in all schools. Heck, everyone should read it. It’s a truly amazing book and I’m so glad that it won the National Book Award last year. I am a big fan of Alexie’s movie Smoke Signals (based on short stories from his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven). You know me, I’m not going to tell you what it’s about. I’m just going to say: Add it to your reading list.

I also raced through a couple of Diane Mott Davidson’s mysteries, THE CEREAL MURDERS and DYING FOR CHOCOLATE. Always fun. And I listened to another Jeeves & Wooster book on CD (JEEVES IN THE OFFING). Unlike the others, this one wasn’t a very good recording, despite the fact that one of my favorite actors did the reading. He just read too fast and sometimes I had no idea who was talking. The other recordings were much better.

Well, I finished my manuscript and sent it to my agent last night. Now what? Vacation? I am feeling the urge to cook, so maybe we’ll eat really well for a while, which would be a nice change to pasta and pesto at 10pm because I’ve been writing all day. I might have finished my manuscript on Saturday, instead of yesterday, except for the fact that we had no electricity. Did I mention that we live in a weather shadow and it RARELY snows here? Well…call it freakish, global warming, or just darn weird, but this is a picture of my yard on Saturday, April 19th, 2008!