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!

Maybe you’re familiar with oh…say…pretty much every self help book out there designed to help you do what you love for a living and be both financially and creatively successful, or maybe not. But either way, it is often believed that Napoleon Hill started it all with his book Think And Grow Rich.I have to admit that back in my twenties, I owned this book and I read some of it, obviously not all of it or I’d probably have a shelf full of published books with my name on the spines!

While I consider myself extremely rich in many of life’s joys – the ones important to me anyway – love, happiness, health, creativity, solvency, and spiritual fulfillment, I can honestly say that I am a bit excited about what Mr. Hill has to say in regards to aging. Apparently, and I’m quoting my mother, not the actual book, but he believes, based on his years of study, that a person’s most productive, creative, and successful years are from the ages of 40-60. So today, I say: Bring it on! I’m not sure my life can get any richer, but I’m willing to give it a go.

If you’ve been following my blog, you will know that my life has been an alternating pattern of writing and painting. I write for a while, then I paint some more of the interior of our new house. Well, we’ve been here six months now and the kitchen and bathroom are still not finished. We decided to light a fire under our butts and have a party, thus encouraging us to finish painting because we would have a deadline. It sounded like an excellent idea about a month ago. Now that the party is two days away, and I just managed to finish my revision last Monday, and do the taxes for two countries yesterday, I am thinking, “Huh…maybe we can just dim the lights and no one will notice that the backsplash in the kitchen is formica from the seventies and the rest of the kitchen is modern black and grey.” Yeah, don’t think that’s going to work…so off to paint I go! What are your big plans this week? Anybody writing? Wanna swap?

Well, I did it. I just sent my critique group my new revision. Now I wait for their brilliance and insight, do another (hopefully not too long) pass through, and send the book off to my agent. Wahoo!

And just to add a little icing to the cake, I got an email the other day from an editor at The Writer magazine, and they want to reprint my Red Hair article in their September issue! How cool is that?

My husband said he was looking forward to me surfacing in the real world for a bit. He’s missed me! What have y’all been up to????

RULES by Cynthia Lord – I can’t remember who mentioned this book on their blog, but boy am I glad they did! As you know, I’m not always a big Middle Grade fan, but this one rocks! My husband always calls me a rule follower, so he probably thinks that’s why I liked this book, and while the rules are funny, poignant, and add a nice bit of structure to the story,  it’s the whole “word” thing that it’s got going on that I loved. Make sure you pick up this one!

THE YEAR OF SECRET ASSIGNMENT by Jaclyn Moriarty – This book is told in a series of letters, journal entries, emails, announcements and other written documents. At first I wasn’t totally sold on the format, but I’m glad I stuck with it. I think that while it does have it’s limitations, Moriarty did a great job making it work, which I don’t think is any small feat. The characters are all engaging and it’s not only funny, but exciting – also, no small feat when you’re dealing with letters!

I’m in the home stretch of this revision so if I disappear for a week or so, make sure you come back again! I will, I promise. And I’ll be updating Need To Read too, so stop by there. Happy writing (or whatever it is you do that makes you happy)!

I was working (not watching the Cubbies lose), when the phone rang. Usually, I ignore the phone when I’m working, but I saw on the caller ID that it was NYC and since I don’t have my agent’s number memorized, I thought I better answer it just in case. It wasn’t him, but it did have to do with writing!It was a Big Time Editor at an Undisclosed Publishing House (I can’t say for privacy reasons) and she wanted to talk to me about my article, Red Hair Is Not As Uncommon As You Think – Twenty-five of the most overused things in MG & YA fiction. She told me that they’d been talking about it in the editorial department and everyone agreed that it really was a comprehensive list of the things they never want to see in a manuscript again. She told me, “It wasn’t so bad before your article, but now that we see it there in black and white, it’s kind of embarrassing to see how many novels we’ve published that include these things.”

I got sort of flustered then and tried to explain that I didn’t think they were horrible faux pas or anything, but just something I was trying to make writers aware of because it seemed to me that too many people were using them, thinking they were unique ideas. She agreed and then she told me the kicker! Apparently Undisclosed Publishing House has decided to use my article as parameters for acceptance!!!

“I mean,” she said, “these won’t be the only parameters, but they will definitely carry some weight. We’ll accept a few incidents of things from the list, as long as the writer is willing to change them in the editorial process, especially if the writer has already been published by our house. However, we’ve decided that five violations in the first fifty pages is an automatic rejection on unsolicited manuscripts. We might even have to play hard ball with some of our regular writers if they’re difficult about making changes. We don’t have time to waste editing out lists and red haired best friends.”

To say I was stunned, is putting it mildly. On one hand, I think it’s pretty cool that so many people liked my article and that Big Publishing House sees the value of it, but really…I’m a little worried about hate mail. I was actually thinking of telling her that I didn’t really think this was a good idea and that maybe I didn’t want her to use my article and then she said the word that changed everything and my whole outlook brightened. She offered me compensation!

April Fools is past, but the joke still lasts…

One of the best time for me to work out plot problems is as I’m drifting off to sleep, or in the middle of the night, after I’ve gotten up to go to the bathroom. Unlike normal people who stumble out of bed, go pee, stumble back to bed and are instantly asleep (ha! yes, I just called my husband “normal” for the first time!), I fully wake up any time I have to get out of bed. And I drink a lot of tea, so I have 1-3 times a night to work out plot issues.

Some people I know don’t “allow” themselves to think about their books in bed because then they will never fall asleep and the next thing you know, they’re up at 2am writing. This never happens to me. I’m sorry, but getting my butt in the chair during the day is challenging enough. There is just no way I’m going to crawl out of a warm soft bed and go sit in my freezing office to write crap that I’ll have to scrap the next day anyway because I was asleep when I wrote it.

My other good problem solving times are in the shower and on solitary walks. What about you? When do you plot? Do you write in the middle of the night? Is it good?

This is a pretty amazing book. It is set in The Bronx, and I was thinking to myself after I finished it how I live in an entirely different world. Then I went out to the kitchen to get some water and two deer bounded through my front yard. Yep. A tad different than The Bronx! It’s a fascinating look into another world if you’re me, but it’s also an amazing, rich story told with heart and tenderness, which contrasts the hard world that the characters face. I loved Tyrell, but all of the other characters are outstanding too, and the story is fast paced and exciting. If you’ve been looking for someone to root for, Tyrell is your guy. And I heard a rumor there’s going to be a sequel. You can be sure that I’ll be looking out for that. You can find out more about Coe Booth at one of my favorite blogs too, The Longstockings, or at her website.

This is a hilarious book. It looks a bit like light chick lit YA, and I guess in some ways it is light, but it’s got some depth too and the character, Bee is just too funny! I read this straight through and really enjoyed it. I don’t usually include what a book is about in these reviews because I like to be surprised (and so I like to leave you surprised too), but I loved the way they described it, so here you go:

This is the unbelievable story of how I went to college, gained twenty-five pounds, got dumped by my boyfriend, failed physics, and became a world famous supermodel.

And that pretty much sums it up, and yet the hilarious journey is yours for the taking. This book comes out in April, which is when this will post (I’m writing this in December 08), so it’s a perfect summer beach read. Or great for any kind of travel. Enjoy!

Oh, and by the way, Veronica Chambers won the ALA Best Book For Young Adults for her novel MAMA’S GIRL. I’m off to put it on hold at the library!

I know writers who keep a pen and notepad by their bed at night in case they wake up with a story idea, or a solution to a problem they’re stuck on. I don’t do this. The few times I tried it, my brilliant midnight ideas either turned out to be lame, illegible, or both. If it’s a good enough idea, I always remember it in the morning. At least, I think I do! continued…

First off, I guess I better say that this book had had a name change. My copy says FROZEN RODEO by Catherine Clark, but on her website, it says it is now called BETTER LATTE THAN NEVER (and obviously, it has a new cover!). I know you guys are gonna hate to hear this, because I say this so often, but I loved this book and you have to read it! Really. It’s so funny and Clark has a real knack for making you as frustrated as her character. Sometimes you read books and you think, “Wow, that really sucks for the character.” but in this one it’s like it’s personal! You REALLY, REALLY feel for this character! So get it, read it, love it.

PRIVATE PEACEFUL by Michael Morpurgo – This book is set before and during WWI and is really well written, told uniquely, and it’s an important story. It’s also not really my type of book, but I can see where other people would (and do) love it. Wanda, if you’re reading this blog, put this on your list. Someone might’ve recommended this to me. Susan? Not sure, but you might like it.

STIFF UPPER LIP, JEEVES by P.G. Wodehouse – you gotta love this. I’ve been on a Jeeves and Wooster binge lately and this might be the funniest of all the ones I’ve listened (yes, audio) to.

Lots of new stuff on Need To Read.

The coolest thing happened yesterday, although I do think that maybe some authors are going to be pretty upset with me.

Read about it here.

April Fools!

Last year, before we moved, we debated back and forth on whether or not to buy a new flat screen TV because there was no way we were going to move our hundred plus pound 27″ TV. Heck, we barely got it out to the porch for the garage sale, let alone across the country! The reason we debated is because we don’t actually watch TV, but we weren’t sure we could make the big leap and live without one either. The reason we couldn’t make the commitment to go completely tube-less is because the truth is, saying we don’t watch TV is a bit of a lie. We watch baseball. Specifically, the Cubbies. Anyway, in the end, we did buy the TV and moved it up here with us. It has a painting in front of it and is covered with dust. It’s not plugged in. I watched a video or two in January and it hasn’t been on since.

It’s not hooked up to any sort of service.

And that’s where my proof of dedication shows itself. Monday, March 31st, is Opening Day at Wrigley Field, and I have not called and arranged for any satellite service to be installed and I don’t intend to until I’ve finished this revision. Yeah, that’s right. I, a twenty-five year Cub fan, am giving up the Cubbies (temporarily) to write. Go ahead, bow down to the dedicated writer.

What have you given up for your writing? Discuss it amongst yourselves and please excuse me while I go sign up for the MLB internet radio games…

GO CUBS!! 1908 World Champions soon to be the 2008 World Champions!!! What’s a hundred years between friends, anyway?