Best Announcement. Of my life.

So here it is:

My book is going to be published!

Oh, you guys, you don't know how long I've been wanting to say this! If you want to get right down to it, I've been waiting for 17 years, ever since I started writing fan-fiction in preschool--when I first dreamed of becoming a real, honest-to-goodness, it-has-an-ISBN, published author.

Anyway, I can only say this: Two weeks ago, I accepted a two-book offer from a really, REALLY great publishing house in NY.

Unfortunately, I can't say who that publisher is, or what the title of the book is (for those of you who think you know, it has changed). I will definitely be back with more details in the next month or two, so please stay tuned!

It's been the most surreal, indescribably wonderful two weeks of my life! All I can do now is give thanks to God for giving me this phenomenal opportunity, for a network of supportive friends and family, and for a truly outstanding agent (I'm still not convinced she's not superhuman; seriously, you guys, she moves at a speed that leaves light standing still).

Fun Fact: When I got the news, I was in the middle of an eye exam. I heard my phone ring, saw it was my agent, and asked in a tiny, apologetic voice if my optometrist would terribly mind if I picked up. He was exceedingly gracious and sat by whilst I shrieked, then hyperventilated, then got all teary-eyed (that last bit was partially due to the fact he'd just been shining what must have been million-watt bulbs on my corneas, you should know). Needless to say, it was the best eye exam I've ever had, and that includes the one in sixth grade when I finally got to trade in my specky-specs for contact lenses.

Y'all stay tuned, now! Soon as I get the green light, I'll pepper you with proper nouns!

This about sums up how I feel:

Character Bloghop!

Hey! Here's my cast list for my YA sci-fi novel (title under construction at the moment--but if you know me from AQCon or QueryTracker, it used to be Perfectly Pia!)

Pia is immortal, thanks to years of genetic engineering and the influence of a rare flower. She has lived her entire life inside a research compound (called Little Cam) hidden in the Amazon rainforest...until the day she turns 17, and discovers a way out.

 Eio is the boy Pia meets in the jungle. He's half Ai'oan Indian, half Spanish, and lives with his tribe in a village near Little Cam. Strong, fierce, and loyal, Eio soon comes to love Pia--and will do whatever it takes to prove it to her.

 Dr. Harriet Fields is a brilliant English zoologist and new arrival to Little Cam. She and Pia don't see eye to eye at first, but as they come to know each other, Harriet soon becomes Pia's closest friend and ally. Harriet is highly opinionated and sarcastic, but deeply sensitive as well.

Uncle Antonio, like Pia, was born and raised in the care of the scientists of Little Cam. He is Pia's tutor and friend, and soon catches the eye of Harriet Fields. Uncle Antonio is kind and honest, but he has secrets of his own.

Ami is Eio's little adopted sister, and soon finds a special place in Pia's heart. With boundless energy and vivacity, Ami opens Pia's eyes to the wonders--and dangers--of the Amazon jungle.

Dr. Paolo Alvez is the director of Little Cam, and oversees the genetic program of which Pia is a part. Paolo's goal is to create a race of immortal human beings, and will do whatever is necessary to accomplish this--no matter the lives he has to destroy.

This has been so much fun! Took me HOURS to find the perfect pictures for each of my characters. These ones come really close to my mental images, but, well, y'all know how it is... no picture could ever truly capture what's in our crazy heads! :) Anyway, thanks to Carrie, Melodie, and Lisa  for hosting this bloghop! (If you're interested in signing up before the week is out, hop over to Carrie's blog!)


Want to see more characters? Check out these fantabulous blogs!

The Gutitor : Every Writer's Secret Weapon

Here's a new one for ya:

*****LISTEN TO YOUR GUT*****

I know. So original, right?

But, seriously, meditate on this for a while. 

You see, it's my sincere belief that every writer has an inner editor, located roughly between the navel and the pancreas.  So, basically, in your gut. An editor in your gut = a "gutitor."

Terrible puns aside, I am speaking to all those writers who dread the revision process. Who approach the second draft with a sense of doom. Who would rather let well-intended but truly inept beta readers decide a manuscript's worth for them. People like, um, well, ME.

I have this little voice, who, whenever I approach my first round of revisions, hisses, like a cockroach, "But how can you possibly evaluate your own work honestly?" And I listen. Every darn time. I am certain that since I wrote the miserable rag of a story, I'm the last person who's qualified to read it with an objective, fresh perspective.

FALSE.

You see, every writer worth even a drop of ink comes fully equipped with this awesome weapon (located between aforementioned navel and pancreas): the READER. Every writer is also a reader. Agree? (Say yes or henceforth stop following my blog, because you are a LIAR.) But seriously: we writers love to read. That's probably why we're writing in the first place. (Unless you're writing a memoir for money. Like Barack Obama. Or Sarah Palin. Or Casey Anthony.)

So when you finally face that big, scary, hairy monster called Self-Evaluation, you aren't entirely defenseless. You are armed with your inner editor who is--here's the big reveal, folks--nothing more than your inner reader.


Just read, doggonit. (note: wait two, three, four weeks or more before doing so. Absence makes the mind forget. Wait a while. Read other books. Write other books. Then come back to that old love cold and cruel and heartless.) Read the book. Read it like it's someone else's book. And your inner editor will lift his sleepy head, yawn, blink, and get to work.

As you read--now this is very important, don't miss this--wait for the TWINGES. Yes. The twinges. Those little jerks located, as you no doubt have guessed, between the navel and pancreas. You never know when they'll hit. I'll tell you what they are: they are the scratching of your inner editor's red pen. You read a sentence. You feel a twinge. You circle the sentence. You move on. Maybe for you it isn't twinges. Maybe it's cringes, the wrinkling around the eyes and the tightening of the lips. I get both, and when I get both at the same time, I know then and there whatever I just read has GOTTA GO.

These physical reactions to your writing are spontaneous, honest, often surprising, and surprisingly reliable. They tell you when a certain turn of phrase is weak, or when an analogy is just not working, or when a quote is flat, forced, or unjustified. They tell you when a scene is crap. Heck, when the entire last fifty pages are crap. Hey, I been there.

The swell thing is, you really DON'T have to sit and agonize or obsess over every little piece of your work. Don't overthink it. Overthinking it leads to forced and stilted writing. Let it be organic. Let it be spontaneous. Let the red ink flow; don't shake the pen until it spills crimson all over the manuscript and all over you.

Those small physical clues are your secret weapon to some truly great revision work. They are the response of your inner reader/editor on top of your own inner writer's instincts--a truly winning combination. The trick is to recognize them when they happen, to trust them when they do, and to understand why they happen when they do.

Try it. Just once. I dare you. Listen to your inner editor. Wait for those navel-pancreatic twinges. See what happens. Don't force it; wait for it.


Spontaneous.

Photo credit: cellar_door_films / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

Fine-tune Your Writing: Focus on the Particular

Good and worthy story problems derive from the small and the particular and the individual.

- Les Edgerton

Hooked

You wake up one fine summer morning, trundle into the kitchen, and pour yourself a cup of hot, black coffee. You breathe in that rich coffee smell, deep and pure and invigorating, and then plunk down in front of the computer, where you're greeted by a screensaver cycling through pictures of LOL cats or your kids, or maybe, if you're really dedicated, photos of your favorite authors. It's a new day, a new future, and time to start a new book. So you say to yourself, "Ah... let's see. I think I'll write a book about freedom."

And... STOP. Back away slowly, and don't touch that keyboard.

Let's suppose, for just a brief, whimsical moment, that you are one Harriet Beecher Stowe (if you don't know who that is, you better back up even further. Like maybe to junior high). So, Ms. Stowe, here you sit, ready to embark upon a sweeping epic on the timeless and resonant theme of freedom. It's June in 1851, of course, and freedom is a hot topic. Everyone's talking about it. It's the perfect time for a novel about freedom to hit the steam-powered printing presses of New York. So what do you do, Ms. Stowe? You start outlining what will become a massive polemic on the evils of slavery, complete with a cast of thousands, as you begin in Mississippi and work your way east, north, west, covering the continent from San Francisco to Tallahassee. Not a single one of the 31 states of the Union escapes your blazing pen. You are Icarus, soaring to the sun. You are Prometheus, bringing the fire of the gods to the hands of mortal men. 

And you're making a terrible mistake.

Thankfully, neither you nor I are Harriet Beecher Stowe. Thankfully, Ms. Stowe didn't write a sweeping polemic on the evils of slavery. Instead, she wrote about people. Individuals. An old slave named Tom. She focused on a particular person and his personal struggles, and consequentially, she wrote one of the most poignant and influential novels about freedom ever penned.

In his priceless little book Hooked: write fiction that grabs readers at page one and never lets them go, Les Edgerton gives an example of how powerful details can be. A parent tells their kid to eat their spinach because "There are eighty kazillion people in China who would love to have what you're wasting." When Edgerton asks his creative writing class if this question ever actually persuaded them to eat that spinach, the reply was a nearly unanimous no. "'Now,' I say, 'what if your mom or dad had said, "Junior, eat all of your spinach. Old Lady Smithers, who lives just two doors down, has lost her job and her unemployment just ran out. Just last night, I caught her going through our garbage can looking for scraps of bread. She'd sure like that spinach!"'" A good deal more convicting, wouldn't you say?

"Eighty kazillion starving Chinese" is a faceless, meaningless problem. It's impersonal. Distant. But we can see Old Lady Smithers digging through garbage cans, and we can feel her pain--because she's close and real and cannot be ignored.

Get your writing down to the level of individuals. Don't write about sacrifice; write about a young single mom who works three jobs on two hours of sleep each night just so her kids can have new shoes for school. Don't write about the horrors of war. Write about a skinny Libyan boy running from refugee camp to refugee camp, trying to find his lost parents and instead finding himself forced to become a child soldier. Write about people, not ideas; if you want to talk about ideas, become a politician or something. You're a writer. Your job is to reach your audience on a close, personal, unavoidable level. Don't give us China; give us Old Lady Smithers.

Think about your favorite books. How many of them are charged by the lofty and the grandiose? Do you fall in love with an entire army--or the lonely, terrified soldier who just wants to go back home to Birmingham? When you watch the news, do you pay more attention to a story about how widespread an earthquake in China is--or a close-knit Chinese family displaced and separated by the catastrophe? 

Let your ideas be side effects of your story. Freedom was a side effect of Uncle Tom. Obsession was a side effect of Moby Dick. Love was a side effect of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. As soon as you sacrifice your characters and plot to your idea, however noble it may be, you have sacrificed the work itself. Write stories, not treatises. 

As Les Edgerton concludes: 

Always get your story down to the level of individuals. We can see individuals. We can't see the forces of Capitalism vs. the forces of Communism.

The Magical Mash-Up

How's this for a cheery thought?


"What has been will be again,
   What has been done will be done again.
     There is nothing new under the sun."
                            Ecclesiastes 1:9

No, I'm not here to tell you any attempt at originality is doomed to fail; I'm here to offer a back door to it. Or maybe even a sewer pipe; you may have to crawl, you may have get dirty, but look at the bright side--no one's expecting you to come climbing up through the shower drain! And isn't that what originality is all about? No, no, not showers--stick with me here--but surprise. Unpredictability. Spontaneity. Originality.

If you're like me, you've probably had head-banging sessions over this word. And not the Rolling Stones kind. The literal banging-your-head-into-the-wall kind of thing. The pressure to be original in a world where there is "nothing new under the sun" can be agony--if you're trying to get through the front door. 

But if you follow me through that sewer pipe--or back door, if you have a sensitive stomach--then maybe, after you've slapped on a few band-aids, you can save yourself and the wall a lot of needless pain and step into a future positively shiny with new possibilities.

Okay, disclaimer: this isn't some kind of new idea; it's been done before, many, many times by many, many people in literature, film, television, Glee, and everyplace else. Which is exactly why I'm bringing it up now. It works.

The mash-up.

I have a deck of cards. They don't feature stoic queens and kings who look in dire need of some Pepto-Bismal; they feature genres. I have a card for steampunk, and western, and post-apocalyptic, and dystopian, and farce, and forbidden love. Sometimes, when I'm bored, I take them out, shuffle them, turn them all face down, and play Match.

The results can make me cringe, laugh, and--sometimes--gallop across the room to the computer, where I can set the magical pair down in the stone of MS Word. 

The thing is, this can work with practically anything: movie titles (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days meets Alien, anyone? Or how about The Godfather meets Toy Story? Meh...) books (God forbid, do not say Twilight meets The Hunger Games), or heck, even people, places, and times (Marie Antoinette in 1940's New York)! Okay, the mix-ups won't always work, and sometimes they just plain stink, but the potential here should be invigorating to anyone with pen, paper, and a little imagination.

I know you are all very intelligent people, so I know you can see what the point of all this is. But for those of you who just love zingy one-liners which crisply summarize everything pizzazzily (yes, it's a word--I just invented it), here you go (no promise of zinginess or pizzazz): If you want to be original without the agony of being original, try a mash-up. 

And then imagine the glorious tones of James Earl Jones (Trekkies, don't shoot me, but honestly--who else could it be?) booming across a starry night sky: Mash-ups... the final frontier... 

And off you go.

Oh, and always keep in mind: There are some mash-ups which should really never, ever, ever be let out to roam free and terrorize the general populace:

Best Books on Writing

Hullo hullo!

It's time for a much-needed post, I think. I haven't been lazy, you should know, just busy writing, editing, and now querying Perfectly Pia. And the worst thing about querying is the waiting. Well, I guess it's not that bad, since it means I now have time to do some blogging.


Anyway, today I want to throw out two books to all you writers out there. If you've been writing for a while and frequently browse the writing section in your local Barnes & Noble, you'll recognise the titles. These are, in my opinion, the best two books on writing you could find. And any self-respecting would-be author should probably not write another sentence until these two books are thoroughly read. I did take a two-day break from writing to read them, and wish I'd read them years ago. They'll change the way you write and the way you think about writing in wonderful ways.


The first is the timeless classic The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White:

This glorious little tome is the remedy to weak or uninteresting prose. It's short, sweet,  unapologetic, and cuts to the bones of writing. Categorized into useful chapters and numbered rules, Elements is a quick read and an easy book to come back to for quick references, and pretty much any writer who is going to recommend to you the best book on writing is going to recommend this one. My favorite rule from Strunk: OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS. 'Nuff said.

Speaking of writers who recommend Elements, one of these has also written a fabulous book on writing called, well, On Writing.

The first section of this book is actually King's memoir, in which he focuses on the events in his life which made him the writer he is. You may be tempted to skip this section, since, after all, we're writers and barely have time to write, let alone read someone else's biography. But before you skip ahead to the good stuff, give the memoir a try. It'll suck you in, a tendency King seems to have in his writing. And often it's laugh-out-loud funny. Most of the book does deal with writing, and King's approach is the most humble, honest, and passionate I've seen from a writer talking about his craft. King has a unique and enviable way of making you feel like he's sitting across the table from you with a cup of coffee, just talkin', you know, bein' folks. His conversational tone is addictive and makes what looks like a massive book fly by in a couple of hours. I enjoyed every minute of On Writing, and know I'm a better writer for having taken the time to read it.

So my advice to you? Get them (borrow if you must, but I suggest buying so you can come back to them again and again), read them, and keep a highlighter very close to hand. You'll need it.

Dear, Lovely Readers:

I understand I have not posted in several weeks. :(


Just a note to say I'm not really slacking off. I've just been nose-deep in writing. Perfectly Pia is within days of completion, and in order to have it ready to pitch at an upcoming conference (to fabulous agents Jenny Bent and/or Miriam Kriss fingers crossed!) I have devoted all my time to writing like a fiend. 


Apologies for the negligence; I will be back soon.


Jessica