YA Outside the Lines

Luck's disguises (by Emily Whitman)

2012-03-18T13:56:00.008-04:00

All these great posts about luck got me thinking about luck in its various disguises. Such as--

What didn't happen. There's a country song about this: "Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers"--the thing you were dying for with all your heart that, had it happened, would have completely messed up your life. (Here I might mention certain guys I dated.) (On second thought, I might not.)

The bad thing that wasn't worse. My friend from India said this is when you thank the gods for watching over you, because you're still here to thank them. The day the Mercedes rammed into my car, crunching my door in, requiring weeks of car repair--my daughter and I walked away unscathed. Thank you.

Planned happenstance. My friend Andreas taught me this term for how I go through life. Not so much drawing up a detailed game plan, as working hard and being ready for the opportunities that drift your way. It's much more rewarding to say than "dumb luck." I like this term. I wrote it in big letter on a sheet of paper and put it over my desk.

The stubborn piece of writing. I tackle a scene again and again and each time it resists coming together. How could this (insert curse word of choice) be lucky? But once I realize it's me being stubborn instead of the page, I see my approach was all wrong. If the piece had flowed along smoothly from the start, I might have kept carrying the page--and the book--in the wrong direction. It wasn't an obstacle; it was a story-angel watching out for the story's heart. Which brings me to:

Those damned silver linings. They're so hard to see at first. This winter my mother had seizures that landed her in the hospital. Bad luck? Major silver lining--her medication changed for the first time in decades, and now she feels livelier than she has in years. She'd known something was off, but had no idea what it was. She's grateful for that scary patch. We all are. Sometimes the silver lining is realizing how precious life is, so you go tell the people you love that you love them.

Wouldn't it be nice if we didn't need scary patches to remember to do that? Go tell someone you love that you love them right now. Maybe something wonderful will come your way. Whether or not you want to call it luck is up to you.

ABOUT LUCK by Wendy Delsol

2012-03-17T08:57:00.003-04:00

I love to contemplate concepts like luck and fate. As widely understood, luck is random, a chance throw of the dice, if you will. Fate, on the other hand, is something predetermined or unavoidable, one’s lot in life. To my way of thinking, the two aren’t quite so distinct.

In the fall of 1976, my family had what would, by any definition, be considered a string of bad luck. We lived in the Detroit area, and my dad worked for General Motors. The late 70s were a rough time for the auto industry, and my dad had just come off of a layoff. Never flush to begin with, family finances were tight.

My older sister, sixteen at the time, started a grease fire (accidentally, of course). While putting out the fire, my dad suffered third-degree burns up and down his legs and arms. The result was another leave from work, extensive damage to our kitchen, as well as a flurry of medical bills. Not good. We were a one-income household (of two adults and three kids). Not to mention that my dad was severely injured.

General Motors had a policy at the time that a sick leave of more than a month required a full physical examination. As a result of this work-up which included X-rays, a large shadow was discovered surrounding my father’s heart. Within hours of reading those scans, my father was wheeled into surgery for an aortic aneurysm. In layman’s terms, it’s a blockage of the major artery carrying blood from the heart to the vital organs. An aorta is normally the size of a finger; his had swelled to the size of a grapefruit. We were told that without finding an anomaly on the X-ray, he had maybe a week before it ruptured. And the rupture would have most definitely killed him.

How’s that for a three-sixty swing on perspective?

What we’d considered bad luck became, within minutes, fortunate and opportune. And most people who heard of the coincidence used words like “blessing in disguise” and “providence.”

I am a big believer in fate. Those who have read my novel STORK know it plays a large role (is practically a secondary character, for that matter). I’m not so sure that anything in our lives are random. Perhaps it’s my psyche’s way of accepting those things I can’t change, but I like to think things happen for a reason.

The years following my father’s surgery weren’t easy, and, sadly, he only lived another two and a half years. Nonetheless, I know, despite more health issues, he felt fortunate to have had more time with his family.

Luck, like so many things, can shift and reshape before our eyes. Is it random? Or a close cousin of destiny? I don’t pretend to have any answers. I know my sister once took the blame for our fire; she later claimed credit.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, by the way.

No Taco Bell

2012-03-16T09:47:00.003-04:00

I guess I believe in the wheel of fortune. I don’t mean the game show, because I am really tired of that show and I can’t believe it’s still on the air. I was a tiny child when it first came on and my grandmother would eat crackers and cheese and she’d shout out answers and call all the contestants idiots. My poor grandma has been dead for over a decade. The show goes on…

Wait. I’m talking about the medieval “Lady Fortuna.” The philosophical notion that we’re all on a spinning wheel and sometimes we’re lucky and sometimes we’re unlucky and we go around and around and have little control and so all we can do is shrug and say, “I can’t control that. So it goes… So it goes…”

Oh yes. I have had good years and I have had bad years.

Woo! In 2007, I got a book contract and my radio show was picked up by public radio and money flowed in and I thought: My ship is here, baby! I bought some nice furniture.

What?! In 2008, my radio show was done and the economy went south and my editor was laid off and my hot water heater exploded and ruined a bunch of my tenants’ junk and I ran up credit card debt just to stay alive. I thought: We’re all gonna die!

We did not all die.

Bad luck didn't come from bad behavior. Really, I am not in control of my water heater or my publisher or the economy. Crap happens. Instead of freaking out, I needed to shrug. Get to work. Keep plugging away. Instead, I began to eat at Taco Bell almost daily, because I was trying to fill the hole in my heart.

And then, for no apparent reason, things got better! And then worse! And then better!

Here’s what I’ve noticed, though: as long as I keep working hard, good stuff happens more often than not. Here’s also what I’ve noticed: If I eat at Taco Bell too much, I don’t fit in my pants and I don’t want to leave the house, because my pants don’t fit and I find that embarrassing. I can control trouble caused by Taco Bell.

Yes, luck comes to those who work hard. I have a higher percentage of lucky days if I work hard. But I always try to keep in mind, especially when I’m high on the smell of my own sweet success: the wheel of fortune is spinning and bad stuff is going to happen and that’s as big a part of life as anything. I also have to remember this: don’t worry about the various trouble you can’t control. Face the trouble. Nod at it. Get back to work.

Also, don’t go to Taco Bell.

-- Geoff Herbach

Finding Your Luck (by Cheryl Renée Herbsman)

2012-03-15T06:00:00.000-04:00

What is luck? Is it really finding that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? Gold is pretty cool. You can buy a lot of stuff with it. Maybe you can be freed up from a lot of worries if you have it. You can provide for your family. Yep, it's pretty cool.

It's funny, though, because there are tons of stories of people who won the lottery and ended up depressed, alone, miserable.... So maybe the pot of gold isn't exactly the point. Maybe the point is actually the rainbow that gets you there.

Funny thing about rainbows -- they boast every color, not just gold, and funnier still, they usually show up after rain.

So maybe luck isn't the pot of gold that's found at the end of the rainbow, but the journey it takes to get there. And maybe if someone just hands you the pot, it's not so lucky after all. And maybe part of that luck is experiencing all those different hues that come together to make a life -- the good days and the bad. And maybe the rain that's falling outside my window today is a necessary step on that path.

I looked up quotes about luck on the Internet. Some of them said that everything is luck. Others suggested that luck is only hard work in disguise. I liked this one:

"All of us have bad luck and good luck. The man who persists through the bad luck - who keeps right on going - is the man who is there when the good luck comes - and is ready to receive it." (~ Robert Collier.) This is why we should never give up.

I'd add a caveat, though -- it can be pretty hard to know which is the good luck and which is the bad. Sometimes what we believe to be good luck turns out not to be and sometimes what feels like bad luck leads us somewhere wonderful. Or as the Dalai Lama said, "Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck."

So here's my St. Patty's Day wish for you:

Luck and awards, Julie Chibbaro

2012-03-14T08:00:00.002-04:00

So, luck. Here’s a weird story. I went to a writer’s conference in Squaw Valley to see if I could interest any of the agents there in my novel about white Indians. At the airport in Reno, waiting for the bus out to Squaw, a stranger came up to me and handed me a cream soda. He said I was thirsty, he said I was there for a reason, and that I would see the purpose soon. I saw from his clothes and face that he was an American Indian (like in the book I’d just finished), and, parched, I cracked the soda open. We drank and we talked. I didn’t tell him about my book (I always felt bad about what Europeans did to Native Americans), but he seemed to know. I don’t usually believe in this stuff, but I had a profound feeling something would happen. I’d been writing for years, dozens of stories, three novels, and lots of close encounters at a number of writer’s conferences, but still, I had no agent, and no book published yet.

At the conference (my second at Squaw, a conference I highly recommend), there was an earthquake during the editors panel, but everyone calmly watched their glasses tinkle together, then went on. A bird flew into the room, flapped around until we shooed it out, and we went on. One of those editors read my first 15 pgs, and said I should get an agent. She gave me Jill Grinberg’s name – agent to Scott Westerfeld and Garth Nix (!), and I contacted her. She fell in love with my novel, and she and I have been together ever since. That was in 2001.

That first book, Redemption, went on to win the American Book Award. My second novel, Deadly, just won the National Jewish Book Award. I feel very strongly that awards are luck. To me, luck is not something you have much control over. You can be prepared, you can jump on opportunities, but you can’t buy or obtain luck as a commodity. It just happens. That defines awards. Yes, my publisher submitted my book, giving me the opportunity. But I couldn’t really tell you why I won an award over the hundreds of great titles that come out every year. It’s as mysterious as an American Indian walking out of your own novel and up to you in an airport and handing you a cream soda just when you’re about to die of thirst.

Luck, Superstition & The Waiting Game (Stephanie Kuehnert)

2012-03-13T05:15:00.002-04:00

I've always been vaguely superstitious. Like with everything else in my life (and writing!), my idea of luck has fallen outside the traditional lines--I like black cats; I was born on Friday the 13th, so it's my lucky number--but I still believe in certain things. For example, I broke a few mirrors, some on accident, some on purpose in my late teens and I would often think to myself that explained why my life was crappy.

It did turn around roughly seven years later. Maybe that's luck. Maybe that's a coincidence and it happened because I got out of a bad relationship and life just ebbs and flows. Mine certainly has. I mean one of my good friends died like a week before my first book came out. One of the biggest highs was tempered with one of the biggest lows.

I've been pretty open in admitting that the past couple of years have been hard. My publisher turned down my third book. I've struggled with writer's block and then a full on writer's slump. I went through a year where all three of my cats were sick consistently. My bartending job has been slow--the whole thing about the booze industry being recession-resistant, a lie--so it's been an ongoing struggle to make ends meet. My basement flooded twice. I parted ways with my agent. Several relatives have been diagnosed with cancer. A former friend of mine had a schizophrenic break and stabbed his parents to death before getting caught a few blocks away from another's friend's house, who he had every intention of killing. Yeah, that actually happened. But you know, my friend didn't killed and the former friend, well, I can only hope he's getting the help he needs for his mental illness. My relatives' treatments for cancer have all been successful so far (knock on wood! Which I do. A lot.) I have a new agent who I adore. My husband is fixing our basement. Though the bar is still slow and I'm feeling pretty run ragged, I am doing some jobs I love, namely writing for Rookie Magazine, which is an honor and a privilege. My cats are healthy. I worked my way through the block with one book and am finally getting over the slump I was in and am beginning to fall in love with another one (a new YA. Man, I really hope I didn't jinx myself by saying that.) The third book changed entirely from its original direction (YA to Adult), my friends, blog readers and twitter followers know it as The Bartender Book, and currently my new agent is shopping it.

That last thing, while good, is completely terrifying. Between that and the roller coaster ride of the past two years, I'm relating to this song quite a lot:

"It took so long to get me back on my feet
It takes so long to find the words and the beat"

Yep, that's me. It took two years and a lot of angst, but I'm really loving what I do again, I'm excited about the story I'm telling, and I'm hopeful that the one I spent so long on will sell. (Knock on wood that it stays that way. Really hope I didn't jinx myself)

"But it feels like you just might explode inside
You've been pacing around and waiting
For some moment that might never arrive at all"

Yep, I don't think I could describe waiting to hear if your book is going to sell any better. It's completely and utterly outside of your control. You write the best book you can and then... well maybe it is luck, or at least whatever it is that makes two best friends or two lovers cross paths, someone has to love it as much as I do. Maybe it's in the stars, which is why I keep checking my horoscope obsessively. (Mercury is in retrograde til mid-April, blast!)

"And it feels like all you'd have to do is step outside
Stop pacing around and waiting for some moment
That might never arrive"

It's hell waiting for The Call (and I really hope it's a call this time. I got emails when I sold my first two books and it's just as thrilling somehow) but I know this is what I have to do. Like I said, I'm superstitious. During the Very Bad Luck period (ie. 2010), I once made my husband bring my lucky bracelet and necklace to the bar where I work because I'd forgotten to put them on and I was convinced that my shift was going to be dead without them. I have my ears pierced 13 times because it's my lucky number and I kind of obsessively wear all 13 earrings to work for the same reason. I have a bad shift and I blame it on the barrettes I'm wearing. I seriously sometimes thing, God, I never have a good shift when I'm wearing these OR I always have a good shift when I'm wearing these. But it's totally not the case. I'll have the right number of earrings in and still have a bad day. I'll accidentally forget the earrings and have a great one. Deep down, I know it. I think I just develop these superstitions because I work in two industries that I can't control. Who knows what makes my bar crowded one night and empty the next. There is no rhyme or reasons. And other than writing the best book I can, there is really nothing more I can do there either. While my lucky charms and superstitions sometimes make feel like I do have control (I like lighting candles. Not sure why. Have a thing about energy. Works occasionally.), I've noticed they can cause more harm than good, too. Like if a day that was supposed to be spectacular according to my horoscope is ho-hum or totally awful (I'm looking at you, March 8) then I get extra bummed out about it.

So I'm trying to liberate myself from some of the silly superstitions (like the earring thing) and while I'm not into faking happiness/positivity (if you are on a bad luck streak, I fully believe you should vent and hopefully you have great friends who will comfort you. I'm very lucky to have a few of those.), I am trying to remain focused on the good and stay centered. That's why I got this tattoo:

(It means 'breathe' in Latin.)

Maybe it will be lucky. Depending on how you count, it is either my 11th or 13th... No, no. I'm not doing that anymore.

And to liberate myself from one of my writing superstitions, I've decided that I'm going to tell you the Bartender Book's real title, which thus far only my CPs and agent have known because I was certain it would jinx it, but not telling hasn't done me any favors. Of course my real logic behind this superstition is that if it sells, marketing might change it, but what the hell, with that caveat, here it is:

Getting Back To Nowhere

That was probably pretty anti-climatic for you, but it was kind of a relief to me.

So cross your fingers and hope that Getting Back To Nowhere sells, okay?

"Speak soon, stay lucky..."

Making Your Own Luck--Anna Staniszewski

2012-03-12T08:33:00.003-04:00

When I think about my journey to being published, the word "lucky" comes to mind. That's not to say my path was free of rejection and worry--in fact, it was full of it. But I can pinpoint several instances when I was lucky enough to be at the right place at the right time. Or was I? Let's see what the Luckycorn says.

When I was named the 2006/2007 Writer-in Residence at the Boston Public Library, I couldn't believe I was being given the opportunity to call myself a real writer. When I applied for the fellowship, I didn't think there was a chance I could get it, but I was lucky enough to be chosen. Then again--if I hadn't applied, it never would have happened. By taking a risk and sending in an application, I helped to push luck along.

Another lucky break: One of my manuscripts was named a winner of the 2009 PEN New England Discovery Award. At the reception, I met a new agent named Ammi-Joan Paquette who loved the excerpt I'd read and encouraged me to send her the manuscript. Not long after, I signed with Joan and have been happily represented by her ever since. Again, if I hadn't applied for the contest, I wouldn't have helped luck along, but I was also very lucky to meet my future agent in the process.

There are several other lucky breaks I can think of that helped me in my publishing journey. But the trick is, I had to put myself out there first and take a risk. Without that risk, the luck would have never come. I think the Luckycorn would agree: that's pretty much the definition of making your own luck.

The Nature of Luck--Jan Blazanin

2012-03-10T17:11:00.010-05:00

“Luck” is a word that gets thrown around a lot. There’s the “Hail Mary” basket that sinks at the buzzer, the flight that takes off minutes before the storm hits, the stray kitten that shows up on the doorstep of people who decide to take him in. But it’s also a concept that can be looked at several ways. For example, a woman with no family history of cancer is diagnosed with it, seemingly struck at random. You’d hardly call that lucky. But the doctor says, “You’re lucky because when we treat it at this early stage, it’s 99% curable.”

In this situation is she lucky, unlucky, or does luck even come into play?

When I was trying to get published for the first time, I kept writing and revising, attending conferences and paying for critiques, taking classes and studying, hoping to catch the attention of an editor who couldn’t resist my writing. There were some glimmers of success when an editor or agent I’d met or queried asked to see more, but that lucky break didn’t come. So I kept doing what I was doing, and in 2005 I met Rosemary Stimola at a writing conference. At the time our meeting didn't feel lucky. She wasn't interested in the manuscript I'd submitted for a critique although she seemed curious about the first page of a story I was just beginning to write. But in 2007, after I’d finished the manuscript that eventually became Fairest of Them All, I sent her a query reminding her of our meeting. Two months later I signed with her.

Since then many writers have commented—with great envy—how lucky I was to get such an amazing agent. I agree. I was lucky that my first page caught her attention, that the idea of a beauty queen with alopecia intrigued her, that she liked my writing style. Those were factors I had no way of controlling.

But I give myself credit, too. Despite numerous rejections, I’d kept studying and writing for more than a decade. As soon as advance information about that writing conference arrived I selected Rosemary as the person I wanted to critique my manuscript and fine-tuned those first 10 pages—and the dreaded synopsis—so I wouldn’t have to scramble preparing them at the last minute. The day after the writing conference information arrived in the mail, I sent in my registration, check, and manuscript for critiquing. Critique slots with Ms. Stimola were limited, and the only way to be certain of snagging one was to be first in line. And after she'd expressed interest in my blind first page during the group critiques, I discussed the project during our time together. Those few minutes were enough to help her remember me two years later.

Was I lucky to get one of the best agents in the business? Absolutely. But without all that preparation, it would never have happened.

Giving Luck (Sydney Salter)

2012-03-10T05:00:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure that I really understand luck. Too often that heady flush of good fortune turns into a situation I later regret. And stuff that seems the exact opposite of luck works out really well, sometimes. I mostly keep my head down, work hard, hope for the best, and try to make the best out of the worst.

But I do enjoy making other people feel lucky.

I leave lucky pennies for other people to find.

I put quarters in grocery store vending machines--for those kids who still check for toys, even after Mom says, "no" to a quarter.

I give crabby waitresses big tips (obviously, they're having a bad day & need something good to happen).

I leave small objects for others to find. Here's a polished stone that I placed on a rock while hiking in Joshua Tree National Monument a few weeks ago.

This week, while buying my niece's birthday present, I acquired a handful of little rubber dragons that I'm leaving around town: at the bookstore cafe where my writing group meets, my favorite sushi restaurant...

I can't be lucky, but I can do things to make others feel a little bit lucky. And that feels great!

Perfectly Coinciding Circumstances (otherwise known as luck)

2012-03-08T08:29:00.004-05:00

I don't know that I believe in "luck," per se, but I do believe in some strange universal force that makes things happen for a reason. I do feel incredibly "lucky" as a writer, there are things that happened that were just too good to be true or easier than they were supposed to be. My first book was a dream, literally. I dreamt the story line, woke up and thought, "Hey, that's a book." So I started writing. It was my first attempt to write a book. I had an agent two months later and the book sold in a pre-empt a month after that. Lucky? Yes. But I think there was more to it. The timing was right, both in terms of me being able to dedicate myself to writing the story and the market willing to buy it. I think luck is more about perfectly coinciding circumstances than chance.

Lots of things happen like that when writing. I'll be stuck and then I'll hear something or see something that un-sticks me for no reason at all and I'm off and running. I love happy circumstances, like listening to the B-52s Quiche Lorraine, a song from so long ago that I love, and then seeing Quiche Lorraine on a menu at a restaurant the next day. What are the chances? I mean, really, I listen to a song for the first time in years and there it is the next day on a menu - what restaurant has quiche on its menu nowadays?

This morning I heard a song that I've heard a few times before and just loved. So I decided to find it. The video blew me away. Yes, it's cool, but it also has so much to do with the book I'm currently finishing writing, down to the concept of art filling in the shapes of people. This morning I was all set to write a scene at an art musuem around a particular painting that is a mosaic of sorts, just like this video. What are the chances? So I've already had my luck (or perfectly coinciding circumsance) today. It's Gotye's version of Somebody That I Used to Know, featuring Kimbra.

If You're Lucky, There's Moore Than What You Ever Imagined in the Golf Bag Holder

2012-03-08T02:00:00.000-05:00

Like all my fellow writers on YAOTL--I've been giving a lot of thought to luck this month. I'd like to begin this post with full disclosure--I am a card-carrying optimist. This doesn't stop me from being grumpy, moody, and a real meanie some days, but after careful consideration, I've decided I believe that I have some control over my destiny. Or at least how I interpret it.

Luck is a state of mind. Let me explain.

There are times when it's pretty darn obvious that "luck has had something to do with it," whatever it might be. Lets imagine a typical story of luck saving the day. It might hypothetically go something like this...

The traffic on the highway is crazy and because of that, I get to the airport late. I'm having the worst luck ever--I've missed my flight. Life stinks--until I find out later--that my plane just crash landed. I wasn't on it. In the blink of an eye, I've just jumped from having bad luck to having good luck.

But luck isn't usually that easy to figure out. More often than not, the scenario goes something like this.

I miss my deadline for a conference critique and lose my slot. I'm very angry with myself for wasting a wonderful opportunity. I imagine that I've just lost my big break-out moment with the "perfect" agent/editor. This is bad luck. But despite being a grumpy, moody, meanie (I did say that I'm an optimist at heart) I make a friend and we decide to critique each others work--trying to take lemons and make lemonade. We head for the lobby, where unfortunately, we run into more bad luck--all the comfy couches are taken. We spend three hours on a lousy, uncomfortable bench, but we discover a couple things in the process. First, we really like each other. Second, the bench we're sitting on is really a golf bag holder. You can't help but laugh at that. Meaning...I'm not a grumpy, moody, meanie any more, but it's actually not until a little later that it all becomes obvious. We become best friends and critique partners and we're there to help each other weather the ups and downs of both a writing life and a regular life.

I am so grateful that I missed that critique. Luck is where you chose to find it, so never disregard what might be sitting in the golf bag holder. Chances are--it's Moore than you could have ever imagined.

Kim Sabatini and Jodi Moore-2009

Kim and Jodi-2010

Kim and Jodi and her Dragon-2011

Lucky me...New Golf Bag holder picture coming in April.

Magically Delicious or What's Your Lucky Charm?(Joy Preble)

2012-03-07T05:00:00.002-05:00

Rather than talk about me and when I have and haven’t felt like a lucky person, I’ve decided to approach this post from a different angle: Things I used to do when I was a kid that I felt would bring luck. Hopefully some of you gentle readers will remember your own weird luck rituals and we’ll have a little chat about this when you comment. Yup. That’s what I hope.

We’ll call it: Stuff Little Joy Did (And sometimes still does) That She Thought Would Bring Her Luck

1. I used to have a green rabbit’s foot key chain. Not so lucky for the rabbit, huh? The chain part was stuck into the rabbit’s foot at the top where I guess the foot used to be connected to the rabbit. I was too weirded out to actually put my house key on it, so I kept it in my underwear drawer. (What is it with underwear drawers, anyway? Why do we hide stuff there? )

2. Wishing on a star. I still do this sometimes when I see the first star in the sky at night. Have you ever done this? “Star light. Star bright. I wish I may. I wish I might find a star to wish tonight.” And then you wish.

3. Searching for a four-leaf clover. I have never found one. But in Lincoln Park in Chicago where I grew up, there was a lot of clover. I looked a bunch. Sometimes I pretended that a three-leaf clover had four leaves. Yeah. I was that geeky.

4. Knocking on wood. Yeah, I still do this. Lots of stories about where it came from, some folkloric, others religious. But if you ask me how the books are going, I may indeed answer, “Good, thanks. Knock on wood.” I know this isn’t totally rational. But it pops out of my mouth.

5. Letting a ladybug land on my finger and then blowing it away and making a wish. There was a rhyme, too – although I don’t know what it had to do with luck: “Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire, your children will burn.” (See #1 above. Not so lucky sounding for the ladybug) Are there ladybugs in Houston? I haven’t seen one since I lived in Chicago.

6. Wishing on: birthday candles and wishbones. Doesn’t everybody do this? I loved wishing on that wishbone at Thanksgiving, my brother and I grabbing that creepy slimy thing and trying to snap it. Once again, not so lucky for the turkey, eh?

There’s more, but that should get you guys thinking.

Today I'm feeling lucky that Sourcebooks just revealed the supremely fabulous cover for Anastasia Forever. Scroll down the sidebar of this blog and you shall see!

But what I really want to know, is how about you? What were your lucky charms?

If you write, have you ever included some of your luck-bringers in your stories?

Luck: Keep your eyes open and cover a lot of ground by April Henry

2012-03-05T13:44:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking about luck lately. Can you make your own luck?

In many cases, I think you can.

Four mornings a week I run five miles. Now that it's light out again I keep my eyes peeled for the glint of coins. I love to find change. Coins (and even bills) say "In God We Trust," and it's a reminder that I shouldn't worry and fret so much. (I am an excellent fretter.) Sometimes weeks can go by without finding a single coin.

Last year, I found $2.44.5. (This total includes a half penny.) So far this year I have found $.34.

Back in early 2009, when I was very worried about money (I had quit my day job a year earlier), I found a penny as I walked to the post office. Then another penny. Then, on an unpaved road, glinting in some pine needles that were the same rust red color, I found 20 pennies. It was such a strange sight. I have no idea why they were there. Maybe someone got tired of them cluttering up their parking change stash and just dumped them?

For me, those coins felt very lucky. Felt like a message that everything would work out. (And it has.)

I think there are some tricks to luck:
- Keep your eyes open. For example, I tried all the standard ways to get an agent. But when I saw an agent's name mentioned in an article in the New York Times, I thought "Why not?" and sent her a query. We've been together ever since.

- Cover a lot of ground. Your first book didn't interest any agents? Break it down and rewrite it. Or start a new one. Keep trying, keeping pushing, keep putting one foot in front of the other.

- Call yourself lucky. Since 2004, I have kept a little journal called "Good Things." I put little things in there (4-11-2006 "Saw great blue heron.") I put big things in there (4-29-2006 "Made New York Times bestseller list.") I count myself lucky very often.

Every night, before I go to sleep, I try to think of three things I'm grateful for that happened that day. I won't lie to you. Sometimes it's a stretch.

This month, I feel very lucky to have two books out: the paperback of Girl, Stolen and the hardcover of The Night She Disappeared.

Do you have any tricks for feeling lucky?

What Luck Is Made Of (Holly Schindler)

2012-03-01T08:22:00.003-05:00

We all use that word often, as writers—luck. We use it because so much is out of our hands. Because it always feels—especially during the submission process—that it takes a certain amount of luck to get a writing career off the ground.

I suppose, if anyone was ever going to say they were unlucky, it could have been me, during that search for my first yes—after all, I spent seven and a half years seeking my first publishing deal. Seven and a half years. In that time, my friends from college finished up PhDs, started teaching, doing research, became professionals. I often felt like all I had was a deep gash in the drywall where I’d spent months upon months banging my head against it. And rejection slips. Hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of them—more than a thousand in all.

Still, I remained optimistic. (After seven and a half years, it was either be optimistic, or go all Sylvia Plath!) I was sure my luck was going to change.

Enter the holiday season of ’08. That’s when my YA, A BLUE SO DARK, was under submission at Flux. I spoke to Brian (Farrey, acquisitions editor at Flux) for the first time just before Thanksgiving, and though I tried to play it cool, I spent Christmas on pins and needles, tied up in knots, hoping that finally the acceptance I’d been working toward for so long would appear.

Appear it did, just a few days after the new year. And literally two hours—I swear it’s true—two hours after I accepted the offer from Flux, the phone rang. On the other end of the line was an agent who was raving about a middle grade book I’d sent earlier that fall. With an offer of representation.

I accepted (Deborah Warren later sold my debut MG, THE JUNCTION OF SUNSHINE AND LUCKY, to Dial, and is still my agent). After that initial phone call, though, in the winter of ’09, I just stood in my kitchen, dazed, wondering how it could have happened. Seven and a half years I’d been seeking a book deal, seeking representation. And in the course of two hours in one day, I had both.

The thing is, though, I can’t attribute that incredible day to holiday magic or to elusive good luck. That day is the result of hard work. Period. That day happened because I really did read every single one of those thousand-plus rejection letters (more than eighty of them were rejections for A BLUE SO DARK). Painful as it sometimes was, I didn’t just toss those rejections in the trash, insist I was right, and continue to submit the same book over and over. I digested the critique and I dove back in, revising before submitting again.

For the most part, I really think that’s what luck is made of: the ability to recognize your own shortcomings, the willingness to listen to advice, and the sweat of some insanely hard work.

Never meant to be...

2012-02-29T01:01:00.003-05:00

Hey, it's leap day! Everyone still gets to here my pearls this month.

Okay, love. You wanna know what love was like for me all my life? Read Playing With Matches. I am Leon Sanders. Funny, smart, and terrified of girls. It was cute when I was fifteen, not so much at twenty-five. I kinda figured I'd turn into one of those paunchy, bald fifty-year-old guys who hang out in bars and hit on the single mothers half their age. And I was okay with that.

And yeah, maybe I complained at work that it was hard to meet a nice girl in this wretched, central Missouri town. But I never expected for someone to set me up. Sheesh. Not that desperate.

"But she's a lovely girl"

Yes, I'm sure her twenty cats think the world of her. Sorry, I don't do blind dates. I tossed her number into a drawer.

But two weeks later, we get hit by a massive blizzard. It was the weekend and I wanted to get out of town. Maybe head to the local university city, go to a coffee shop and work on my novel (see, I had this pipe dream of becoming a YA author back then). Well, I didn't want to drive thirty miles in the snow, so I thought I might as well call that chick, see if she's bored. Sandy, is it?

Well, I call her up and she agrees to meet for a drink. Then, in a mistake that I will hear about for the rest of my life, I give her the wrong name of the restaurant. We drive in circles trying to find each other. Luckily, there is only one restaurant in town (it's since become an eye doctor's), so we found each other. After deciding whether I really wanted to meet someone who drives an '86 Oldsmobile, we go in. I'm bracing myself for an evening of hearing about why all Muslims and homosexuals should be deported as she blows cigarette smoke in my face.

It turned out to be the greatest date I'd ever had. And she didn't even like coffee.

So we keep going out. And then she drops the bombshell. She's moving two hundred miles away in a month to go to school (and to take a job that would require traveling on many weekends).

Now I'd just returned from three years in Mexico, and I'd learned two things: You can always fit another person into a car, and long distance relationships suck.

So I told her this wasn't going to work out. We should just enjoy the time we had. She agreed.

The day before she left, I told her I loved her and would wait as long as it took (which turned out to be a year and a half).

So despite all the odds against us, we found each other. Friday will be the tenth anniversary of that first date. We've been married over seven years. We have a wonderful daughter, Sophie, and we'll soon be blessed with a second child.

I love ya, Sandy. And I could have sworn that place was called 'Rob's.'

Our first trip together. Left to right: giant hissing cockroach, Sandy, me, my epic mustache. Not pictured: someone breaking into my car.

Silly, Silly Love

2012-02-27T03:00:00.008-05:00

I get impatient with love stories.

Again, I’m being honest in my post for YAOTL, maybe even too much so. (Though I’ve gotten patient feedback so far. Thank you, patient ones.)

Here’s the damn truth.

I’m not impatient with love. Ever. Love is the only force in the Universe that I truly believe in. That job promotion we think we want, the toys we think we need, the money worries…I think it’s all a type of illusion. I think there will come a time, at the end of this life, when I’ll realize none of that meant anything like what I thought it meant anyway. But real love is always important.

So why do I get impatient with love stories? Well, I don’t with all of them. Just most of them.

It’s because I feel that a lot of what our society promotes as love…isn’t. Really. Not the kind of love that will still feel important when all is said and done.

I love to read YA, but I notice that in (nearly) every book, there has to be a crush. A lot of YA books are about little else besides a crush, but I avoid those.

I was a teen, though God knows it was long ago, and I know those early romantic posturings feel incredibly important. My problem was that I kept posturing long into my adulthood. Long. Into. And now I look back on that and shake my head. And now I feel so done with all the silliness.

Silliness? Did she just call love silly?

No. I did not.

What’s silly is the feeling that we’re only okay if he/she wants us. What’s silly is when we guess what’s going on in his/her head, but don’t really communicate. When we have wants and needs but can’t express them, and end up getting angry because we think the other person should know. Without being told. Like magic. Like osmosis. Or worse yet, when we assume we have no right to our wants and needs. It’s silly to let other people treat us as anything less that valuable, maybe because we don’t get that it’s okay to want better. Well. For any reason.

It’s sometimes unavoidable to feel incomplete, but it’s silly to believe someone else can fill that big hole in our hearts.

And yet there’s no doubt that as a teen—hell, as a 40-year-old—I had no idea how to do better, either. And yet I find myself wanting to read about something better. Maybe that’s nor fair. But that’s where I am.

Many years ago, long before I stopped being so silly in my own life, I began writing about non-romantic love. I wrote my first novel, Funerals For Horses, about a sibling bond. I wrote Becoming Chloe about the bond between an emotionally handicapped teen girl and a gay teen boy. In Love in the Present Tense, Mitch had a romantic entanglement (with the wife of his biggest client), but Leonard saw right through it and pronounced it silly. (Though not in so many words.) In some of my novels, like Jumpstart the World, my main characters do fall in love, but with somebody they know right off the bat they’re never going to get. That they can never be with (Frank is older and in a long-term relationship). Somehow that cuts down on the posturing and pulls out the pure emotion underneath, completely detached from any promise of gain. At least, that’s how it feels to me.

In Chasing Windmills, I did explore the feelings of first love. In fact, it was a bit of a retake (though only in a limited way) on the Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story drama arc. And I think that made people assume I would end it a certain way. As in, happy ending. Which is funny, because Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story did not have happy endings. Some people liked my ending, some did not. (Spoiler: nobody died. I didn’t carry the comparison through.) But I felt at least it wasn’t silly.

For those who object to my use of the word silly, please just consider that I use it to mean "that which takes us to a place we never really meant to go."

I guess what I’m saying is that I wish we could do love better. In real life, and in books. I wish we could focus more on what’s real, what touches our souls rather than our egos.

A great big wish that might never come true. And a lousy Valentine’s Day sentiment if there ever was one. But I throw it out there to hear what people think.

THE SWEET SORROW OF A GOOD PARTING by Wendy Delsol

2012-02-26T12:23:00.001-05:00

Our February theme is amour and its influence on our YA projects. I am an avowed sucker for a good love story. All my novels, adult books included, contain a romance element. As a reader, it’s a delicious thrill to fall in love vicariously. As a writer, I consider capturing the emotional journey of love a great challenge. When done right, it’s pretty darn close to the real thing. Sigh.

Although it seems a tad too clinical for something as unique and individual as love, I give the phases or components of a relationship a lot of thought. It’s no coincidence that a love story has the same three stages as any story: the beginning, the middle, and the end. To tweak the terminology a little for the romance purpose, I might say: they meet, they flirt, they get together.

For me, it’s the second stage—the courtship dance—that is the trickiest to bottle. There has to be the right emotional buildup, conflicts or constraints working against the pair, and sufficient character development to convey likeability, vulnerability, and empathy.

It’s apparent that your protagonist and his or her love interest need to spend sufficient page time together so that all of the above is given room to grow. I’ve also come to consider and develop the separation. Shakespeare nails it with his “sweet sorrow” description. Conjure quickly your all-time favorite love story. Did the writer build a divide of time and space into the relationship? I bet they did, and I bet it heightened the tension and strengthened the payoff. For the record, my favorite book is Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. And, yes, Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy have extended separations.

So here’s to your favorite literary couples. Enjoy their journeys, partings included.

Who loves you, baby? (by Rosemary Clement-Moore)

2012-02-24T13:28:00.000-05:00

I used to love a lot of things. But then came this conversation:

Me: I love chocolate.

Playground wise-ass: Then why don’t you marry it? (hur hur hur)

Not to give too much credit to a catchphrase from the Pee-Wee Herman Show, isn’t it weird that we don’t have a more nuanced vocabulary for an emotion that has so many nuances? I love my parents and my dogs and the guy I married, but not all in the same way.

Pulling up the thesaurus gives us some options: affection, adoration, lust, infatuation. So, okay, maybe I didn’t really LOVE John Roberts in the seventh grade, given that I never actually exchanged more than math papers with him. But it sort of belittles what I felt for my first college boyfriend if I call it lust or infatuation just because the relationship only lasted six months. For those six months, I loved him, and even now I think about him with... well, affection.

I think the fact that I love writing (ha!) about a lot of different types of love relationships is one reason I’m drawn to YA books. Young adults are in the middle of figuring out all those nuances of relationships and though reviews and book jackets tend to focus on the love story (which, not going to lie, is my favorite part to write AND to read), the other relationships are just as important.

C.S. Lewis wrote a whole book defining four types of love, and Plato and Aristotle both devoted brain power to the distinctions between unconditional love, romantic love, the love between friends and family. Funny (or maybe not) that, like, 99% of our media (TV shows, books, movies, country and western songs) are about romantic love, when the big thinkers kind of agree that philia, the love between friends, is one of the most virtuous, because there’s no selfish reason to be friends with someone.

Think about it. You’ve got a sort of built in love for your parents, because they take care of you when you’re helpless, and (hopefully) love you no matter what. If you’re infatuated with someone, it FEELS good, and you’re kind of in love with love as much as you are with the person. And if you have kids, you love them, and would likely defend them with your life--but you could argue that you’re also insuring the continuance of your DNA. Same with sexual love, if it comes down to it.

I don’t really believe those last two things, mostly because I don’t think the different kinds of love can be so neatly divided. I think they overlap, and you can more than one sort in one relationship. But one thing I do agree with: the best relationships, whether they’re romantic, platonic, family or friends, have a core of friendship-love. Why? Because friendship-love is built on respect.

Take my brother, for instance. When we were teens, we fought like weasels in a sack. But I loved him, and I’d beat up anyone who said anything bad about him. (Even if I’d said the same thing myself.) But on both sides of those years, when we were kids, and now, as adults, I respect and admire him, and I would be his friend, even if we weren’t related.

That came into play in Texas Gothic. My main character, Amy, comes from a family who drives her crazy. At the beginning, she loves them unconditionally, especially her sister Phin, who’s idiosyncrasies are particularly annoying and intrusive. But friendship-love? That’s a stretch. A big stretch in the beginning of the book, and a little stretch by the end.

It was kind of fun to write a sibling relationship like that--Amy Goodnight is the first of my heroines to have a sibling--and fun to have a character grow to LIKE someone she already loved.

And speaking of love... I love a love story as much as anyone else. But unlike the hopeless crushes of my teen years, one of my goals in my books is to show relationships that have more than just romantic love going for it. The girl and the guy should respect each other; it can be a balancing act when you’re showing the rocky road to romance. They can fight and claw and piss each other off--but they have to have some reason to respect each other, even if it takes awhile for them to see it in each other.

In the end it comes down to one of my favorite examples of a relationship: Ripley and Hicks in Aliens. Friend or boy-friend or comrade in arms, when the gut-busting, acid-dripping aliens come at you, you want someone who you can trust to fight back to back, and who trusts you to do the same.

Obsessed with the bad boys?--please vote (Lauren Bjorkman)

2012-02-20T15:27:00.009-05:00

One day, I was eavesdropping in the courtyard of a little hotel in Bangkok where I stayed for a month while my sexy-geek husband studied parasites at a local hospital.

girl 1: He's not too nice if you know what I mean.

girl 2: That's the way I like them. Bad boys. Ha ha.

me: ????

Which brings me to confession--as usual, I feel out of step with popular culture. I actually like nice guys. And I'd rather not save my man from himself.

Sure, like Stephanie Kuehnert, I found Jordan in My-So-Called Life swoon-worthy. But his behavior eventually wore on my one last nerve. In the last episode, I got furious with Angela for jumping in his car after Brian admitted writing the love letter, the most beautiful love letter of all time, imo.

But I can't write a love interest that doesn't appeal to me, leaving me only one option. Roll with it. That's why Roz's love interest in My Invented Life has bangs half covering his face, stammers, and flirts by throwing pillows. But he also cut a picture of Roz from the newspaper and tacked it up in his room. Romantic? I think so.

I adore geeks, and one of the two love interests in my latest novel Miss Fortune Cookie (fall 2012) totally fits into the category. When I describe him as a Filipino-American Legolas, the copy-editor wrote a note in the margin, "Is he supposed to be attractive?"

Um. Yes?

In my current WIP, I am experimenting with a bad boy love interest. He shop-lifts, cuts school, and has a chip on his shoulder the size of Texas because of his dead-beat dad. But guess what? he's turning out to be NICE underneath. Arrrgh!

So I need to know if there is a fervent minority like me.

Him?

Or him?

Please vote in the comments.

Love Big

2012-02-16T09:42:00.006-05:00

I like being in love. I like it when my characters find people to be in love with. In my real life, I’ve always been attracted to extreme girls (when I was a boy) and women (now that I am a man with glasses and the ability to grow a fine mustache).

My first love was my high school class’s student council president. She was extremely Irish (both name-wise and visually). She made me laugh. So quick witted. She exploded this crackling humor that would rip your chest open and stab you in the lungs. She’d zing me in American History and I’d be done for the day. Also, she could make me cry simply by crinkling her eyes and pursing her lips (I knew the terrible words she was thinking). I loved her so hard, my stomach still aches. Eventually I rebelled. We had a screaming match early in college, while visiting Dublin, Ireland, her home turf. The argument took place around midnight, outside a pub, and it was so loud and violent, the people of Ireland asked us to go home (true story). We took off running in opposite directions. We never quite got back together. Beautiful! Maureen was a verbal virtuoso. An emotional nail gun. I smile when I think of her, even though my stomach still aches.

My wife, Steph, is 6’1”. I am not nearly so tall. She laughs louder than any human being on the face of the planet. Our house is loud (we often have our four kids here). The windows shake from the noise. And I am seriously in love. One time, our friends’ house burned down (their tenant fell asleep while smoking). This tragedy was compounded by the birth of our friends’ first child, a week before their house burned down. When it happened, Steph drove her Pontiac to Target. She bought hundreds of dollars in diapers, wipes, and toys (totally filled the Pontiac). She quietly (not easy for her) dropped the goods at the apartment where our friends were staying. I got butterflies in my belly and goose bumps on my arms. She’s so good. I am really in love. The kicker, she's an absurdist. For no apparent reason, Steph recently dyed her hair almost black, got a severe wedge cut, and began taking what she calls Goth Mom photos (often with kids in the background doing normal kid stuff). She writes captions that make me snort and choke on my coffee. Her giant-ness makes me glad to be on earth.

I love extreme. I feel love when my characters are in love. In Stupid Fast, Felton’s love interest is a new girl in town named Aleah. The reason he meets her is she’s awake when he delivers a paper at 5 a.m. She’s practicing piano. Turns out she practices all night long, every night during the summer. Even at 16, she’s well-known in the music world. But asked if she wants to be the best, she's confused. She plays piano all night because it rocks her world to play piano. That’s all. Felton can’t help but see truth in her, even though he finds her completely weird (and also very hot).

I think we love what we want out of life. I’m afraid of being asleep too long. I’m afraid that crap will pass me by and I won’t notice. I’m in love with beings that fire energy and say crazy things and make giant things. I'm not sure why, but that seems like truth to me, seems like that's what life's about.

Geoff Herbach

Affected (Cheryl Renée Herbsman)

2012-02-15T13:52:00.000-05:00

Every relationship I've ever had influences my writing -- in both intentional and unintentional ways. That's just how I am -- affected.

Last week I was called for jury duty. The defendant was charged with drunk driving. Last spring my sister was in a horrible accident on the Golden Gate Bridge in which she was hit by a drunk driver. She could easily have been killed. Of the sixty-some people in the court room last week, I was among the fifteen or so selected for the jury. I told the judge about my sister's accident. I said I didn't think I could be an impartial voice on the jury. He said the law says I have to leave my own feelings and experiences at the door and make an impartial decision. He said there might be evidence brought forth that is inadmissible and that if that were to happen, we should "unring the bell" and forget what we'd just heard. I said I didn't think I could do that. He looked at me as if I were an annoying and unruly child. I was not saying I would consider the defendant guilty based on my sister's accident, but if there was any evidence that he was guilty, I'd want him to have to face justice. I've been made aware of how real the consequences of drunk driving can be. After more questioning by the defense attorney, I was finally let go.

I walked out of there thinking, Is there something wrong with me? Is it normal to be able to completely set aside one's own feelings, impressions, and experiences? Maybe that's normal for some people. It isn't normal for me. I'm affected, influenced by my feelings, my thoughts, my imaginings, my relationships. And, so yes, they would impact my decision-making on a jury and of course, they infiltrate my writing.

The good guys in my fiction are in some part always based on my husband because he's a good guy. The not-so-good guys are in part based on experiences I've had with not-so-good guys. That's not to say that every relationship is a reflection of my own. Some of them come from being a people watcher, from being the kind of person who strives to understand how people interact. And much of the time, I might base the idea of a character on someone, but then the character comes alive and takes on his/her own life and becomes someone very different than whom I'd first imagined. It's a complicated business. Sometimes a character needs to be a kind of person I've had no experience with, and then in fiction or in the real world, I might seek out people like this character in order to understand them better. But always, always I'm influenced by the real relationships in my life.

Here's a little clip of an interview I did about the inspiration for the character of Jackson (Savannah's love interest) in Breathing:

I like for there to be hope in my stories and I feel very lucky that I've experienced the kind of relationship that allows me to feel and share that hopefulness.

Bad Boys & Me in Real Life & Fiction (Stephanie Kuehnert

2012-02-13T05:47:00.000-05:00

These were the boys of my pre-teen and early teenage dreams:

Bender from The Breakfast Club, the troubled boy from the wrong side of the tracks. Yeah, he's a jerk sometimes, but that tough outer shell is protecting a damaged kid. He's a survivor, and the right person will draw out the real him. (But I really don't want it to be Molly Ringwald. Not unless she grows out of the spoiled rich brat thing.)

Dylan McKay from Beverly Hills, 90210. He's basically the rich boy version of Bender, which admittedly made me like him a little less, but the surfing and motorcycle riding and that scene in the very first season where he's crying alone in his fancy hotel suite while wearing really bad early 90s overalls makes up for it.

I almost don't know if it's fair to call Kurt Cobain a crush because I wanted to be his best friend more than anything. But he sums up a type for me: the angsty poet, troubled rock star.

Oh Jordan Catalano from My So-Called Life. I watched Angela lust over you during her sophomore year of high school, which also happened to be my sophomore year of high school and I related so much. That aloof act. That future troubled rock star vibe. In truth, you probably had less depth than Bender or even Dylan, but I couldn't see that at the time. Not in you or my real life versions of you.

Brandon Lee as Eric Draven from The Crow. This movie was the ultimate romance for me as a teen. It still is today. Maybe that says some pretty dark and twisted things about me, but hey I'll own it. The dude comes back from the dead to avenge his girlfriend. What happened to her (rape and murder) clearly causes him so much pain and torture. I saw this movie with my friends roughly one million times in high school. The girls loved it because we all wanted a guy as beautiful as Eric to love us as much as he loved Shelly. The guys loved it because there was lots of violence.

These five guys represent the male archetypes that have shaped me. They have all played major roles in my teenage love life and now in my fiction.

I spent my teenage years and early twenties dating boys that were troubled like Bender and Dylan (and I did date one from the wrong side of the tracks and one who was upper middle class aspiring to be like Dylan) and/or aloof like Jordan because as my mother liked to say I was convinced that "still water runs deep." I saw their wounded, tortured souls, and being a wounded, tortured soul myself, I related. I thought we could heal and grow together, but mostly we just did a lot of drinking and drugs.

My first love looked a lot like Brandon Lee--well he had long, dark curls anyway--but he was a junkie. The second guy I fell for was obsessed with The Crow, but he couldn't commit to one girl let alone love her like Eric loved Shelly. The third guy was an angsty rocker type, who admired Kurt Cobain as much as I did. He emulated him, too, but unfortunately he didn't have Kurt's respect for women. He was emotionally and sexually abusive.

Pieces of these guys definitely have made it into my books. My old wishful ideas make it in, too. Michael in I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE is an Eric Draven in some ways--the eternal love way and wishing he could save the woman he loves way--and that's probably why I gave him the dark curly hair. (Though in truth, I later realized that he was subconsciously modeled on an amazing guy friend I had in high school and he is named for another equally amazing guy friend. Tom in IWBYJR is named for and probably modeled a little bit after the one good guy I dated in high school.)

Sometimes I take a piece of something from my own life and take it further, push it in a different direction. Johnny from IWBYJR and Christian from BALLADS OF SUBURBIA probably bear some resemblance to guy #3, the angsty rocker abusive boyfriend from my teen years. Not that I directly took from my own life (at least not consciously), but writing is definitely a way that I work through my old pain and issues so a little bit of my own history filters in. I wrote an essay about guy #2 for Rookie Magazine a few months ago. And the very first comment was how it was clear that I wrote from personal experience because it was just like the relationship between Adrian and Kara in BALLADS.

Admittedly Adrian was a combo of just about every guy I loved or lusted after in high school. Pretty and troubled. The ideal bad boy. And who hasn't fallen for a bad boy, right? I certainly did all time. I get emails from readers about how they love Adrian even though they know they shouldn't. He's irresistible even though he's so obviously wrong. Maybe he can change. I smile when I read these because that's exactly how I felt about all of the real life Adrian's. I loved them and the Bender and Dylan type characters because I saw their complexities. They were real, not just bad for bad's sake. I loved those kinds of boys when I was younger and will always love writing those kinds of boys.

My real-life Adrians didn't change, but I do believe (and know from my own experience) that people can, which is why I was really excited to write my bad boy love interest in the Bartender Book. I actually even named him Bender after the Breakfast Club character who inspired him a little bit (and his best friend is Dylan, though my Dylan is not rich and troubled, like my Bender he is wrong-side-of-the-tracks troubled). I wanted to examine that kind of guy after high school, after he makes one too many mistakes and can choose to either change or fall further into his spiral. Adrian in BALLADS is the bad boy it is dangerous to love. Bender is the bad boy it might be okay to, so it was a lot of fun writing him. (And I hope the book sells so that you can read about it!)

In terms of my personal life, I finally learned that you can find gorgeous, tattooed, mohawked nice boys who will love you with the intensity that Eric Draven loved Shelly. I married my nice boy, which may be why I've written some slightly happier relationships for my characters lately. However, I'm not going stray away from the bad boys in my books, though I hated the drama and angst that they brought to my real life, it is perfect for my fiction!

I'll Leave Kissing to the Pros (Anna Staniszewski)

2012-02-12T07:55:00.007-05:00

When it comes to writing about romance, my inner ten-year-old emerges. I get giggly when my characters hold hands, and when it comes to kissing, forget it! That might explain why the relationships in my books tend to be pretty platonic.

After my debut novel, My Very UnFairy Tale Life, came out this past November, I was pleasantly surprised to hear how much readers (and parents) appreciated the fact that the story didn't have romance in it. Some middle grade readers want a more challenging story but aren't really interested in romance.

The way I look at it: there are plenty of other authors out there who write amazing romances between their characters. I bet they don't giggle when they write kissing scenes. I guess they might be a little more grown-up than I am, and that's fine by me.

Maybe one day I'll write a story that brings out my inner teenager, but for now, I'll leave the romance to the pros and continue having fun with my characters' G-rated relationships.

Strong Girls--Jan Blazanin

2012-02-10T11:31:00.008-05:00

So we’ve finally made it to February (In case you didn’t notice, January was about 60 days too long.) and talking about relationships. February plus relationships seems to naturally lead to romance. But not always.

Although my second book, A & L DO SUMMER, features a romance between main character Aspen and hunky farmer Clay, my stories are not about romance. My first novel FAIREST OF THEM ALL, as one teen reviewer put it, didn’t have “a smidge of romance.” Ori was learning to cope with alopecia, working out her relationship with her mother, and figuring out how to be a friend. Throwing a love interest on top of that would have been too much.

I grew up reading and buying into fairy tales with all the damsel-who-has-to-be-rescued elements. Thanks to my obsession with romance, I wasted too much valuable time waiting for the phone to ring. (It rarely did.) That’s not to say I spent every second languishing by the telephone. But when I was with my girlfriends or going over my lines for a play, I wasn’t completely in the moment. Some boy was always lurking in the back of my mind.

My female characters aren't above making an effort to catch the attention of that certain guy. After all, they are teens and there's some strong biology at work. Who wants to resist guys, anyway? But my protagonists are too busy saving the world, or at least herding pigs out of the high school, to wait for the phone to ring. And I say, "Good for them!"

Running Into My Fictional Characters--In My Real Life (Sydney Salter)

2012-02-10T11:21:00.002-05:00

I create wholly fictional love interests that meet my character's needs, or not. But I have a description problem. If we were to have lunch today, I wouldn't remember what you were wearing, or even how your hair looked.

Readers, however, do want to "see" our characters. I compensate for my weakness by borrowing images of people. Most of the time, I clip photos from my magazine collection. Here's the character collage I made for My Big Nose And Other Natural Disasters.

But I did something different for my next WIP.

Rushing along with the heady joy of NaNoWriMo, I'd crafted a rather bland love interest. I guess he was kind of blond-ish, tall-ish, his eyes switching green or blue every few pages... And then I went grocery shopping.

The quirky new checker with his spiky dark hair, almond-shaped eyes, and crooked smile, well, he practically begged to become my new love interest. I suddenly saw everything about him: Japanese mother, drive to succeed, inability to dance. My NaNo draft zipped along with ease. Until the day I wrote a rather steamy love scene. Right before grocery shopping. When he asked, "did you find everything you needed?" I blushed and stammered like an idiot. I wanted to do this:

But I didn't learn my lesson.

Fast forward to my next Work-In-Progress. My story idea actually started with the love interest. All spring, I'd woken to the intriguing sound of pavement opening like a zipper as a cute neighborhood teen skateboarded to school. Feeling more like a creepy old lady than a hip YA writer, I'd peek out my window and watch this willowy teen weave down our hill with absolute grace. The day I knew that he just HAD to be my next fictional love interest: he'd tucked his shirt into his back pocket, showing off his muscles, while zigzagging down the street talking on the phone and holding a cup of coffee. Wow. Readers of Swoon At Your Own Risk fell in love with Xander Cooper.

But I hadn't counted on this.

Turns out that my fictional skateboarding hottie has real life siblings. His little sister and my daughter now play on the same soccer team. About 943,000 games a week. Our families now carpool to obscure soccer fields all over the state. And during every college break, I run into Xander Cooper, once again blushing and stammering.

How do you tell a real life guy that he's your most popular fictional love interest?

Of Guys, Love and Writing

2012-02-08T14:17:00.007-05:00

It's almost Valentine's Day so it seems like the right time to talk about relationships, particularly those we write about and why we write about the relationships and people in our books.

I love all the guys in my books. They're my "ideal" type of guy. I basically write about guys I'd want to date. They're never the overtly nice guy, or the really good guy, but they are very appealing.

I've got to say, I never went for nice guys. I went for fun guys. The ones who could make me laugh and were always up for a good time, even if it wasn't always something that was exactly legal. They were a little dangerous, not because they were bad but because they weren't afraid try anything if they thought they could get away with it. And they had to be cute, not pretty-boy beautiful, but goodlooking in an all-American way. They weren't trendy because they were absolutely confident in themselves. They didn't need to follow what anyone else did. But they're not insensitive. In fact, they were quite thoughtful, even if they did dumb things every now and then.

And I've never had a thing for blondes, so my guy characters have never been blonde.
So I definitely use my "type" of guy when writing a lead male character. They look and act like a guy I would have wanted when I was in high school. And I actually have just a little bit more fun writing guy characters than girl characters. Even though, all these years later, I can't claim to understand guys any more now than I did when I was 17.

I received an email the other day from a reader who said she's read THE BOOK OF LUKE so many times she's lost count. And she loves Luke (I hear that alot). In fact, she said, she's still looking for her very own Luke in real life. So here's my Luke (although his real name is John). I picture what he was like in high school when I'm writing romantic scenes between my characters. Because my Luke is all grown-up, and he's my husband (and, yes, I'm a sucker for a guy who can play a guitar).

Me and the Crowd

2012-02-08T02:00:00.000-05:00

This is my inaugural post on YA Outside the Lines, so I should probably introduce myself before I dive right in. My name is Kimberly Sabatini and I’m the debut author of TOUCHING THE SURFACE, which is out this fall.

This is me--in case you'd like to know who you're talking too.

Our topic for the month is relationships and how they influence ourwriting. Hmmmm...

I recently received my very first ARC evah!!! Sorry about the picture--I'd just come home from a run and found my book on my doorstep--which explains the stinky look I'm sporting. I was so excited, I didn't care that I was going to plaster my sweaty mug all over the world wide web. I was holding my book for the very first time.

Now I'm sure you're wondering what this has to do with relationships and writing. Well, once the novelty of holding my book wore off. (okay--I lied--it hasn't worn off yet.) But once I stopped jumping up and down and petting it all the time, I started to realize what this would mean.

OMG!!!! REALLY SOON OTHER PEOPLE WOULD BE READING MY BOOK!!!!!

I am about to embark on a relationship like no other. An intimate/not-so-intimate date with a crowd. My book will no longer be my own and my future books will never again be written with the same innocence and anonymity that occurred with my first. Thinking about it makes me tingly with excitement, while simultaneously wanting to barf into a paper bag. Do you know how hard it is to write the second book when you're as excited as a five year old the night before Christmas and as nervous as a kid who hears a thump in a dark room and doesn't have a nightlight? Yeah, it's intimidating.

I can still count on my toes the number of people who have read SURFACE in ARC form, but already I have what feels like a stadium full of readers watching my fingers pound against the keys as I write my work-in progress.

I'm struggling to keep my inner compass pointed in the "write" direction. I'm attempting to think of these "Peeping Tom's" as cheerleaders rather than my judge and jury. I try to stay focused on that future teen who will read my words and finds something of themselves tucked between the pages. And I'm constantly reminding myself that it's okay if there are people who don't like what I've written. Heck, I don't like everything that other people have written--even people I like. *head thunk*

As I'm exploring this new relationship that influences my writing, I know I'll have days where I navigate it well, but I'm also aware that sometimes I'll be a puddle on the floor and the only cure will be a big bowl of chocolate ice cream with whipped cream, Hershey's syrup, walnuts AND a voodoo doll.

But like all new endeavors, I'm optimistic. I'm a glass-half-full kind of a girl. Besides, I've already discovered the most important thing I need to know about having a relationship with my readers and I learned it from the very first reader I ever had--me.

In order to be able to have relationships that weather all opinions, I must write with honesty--soul exposing honesty. When I did that with Surface, I learned to love myself--all of myself--the good parts and the bad parts. This is bigger, scarier than my own personal growth, and knowing what to do and doing it are two very different things, but when I ask myself if I'd go back--return to the days when my writing was private--I know I never would. You can't change the world by talking to yourself. And I'll admit it--I want to change the world. It's on my bucket list.

So, I'd like to welcome you into my office, my head, my heart, my soul--bring a friend. I'm learning to say, "Go Big or Go Home." We don't have to always agree--relationships can weather differences--but if you could tread lightly, I sure would appreciate it because I haven't found the perfect voodoo doll just yet.

What's your vice for handling heart thumping, hand sweating, exciting, scary relationships?

Working for the Happily Ever After (Joy Preble)

2012-02-07T02:00:00.001-05:00

I come from a long line of unhappy but strong women. My maternal grandmother, Lena, immigrated from somewhere near Belarus to America when she was still a teenager. She came to America alone, in love with a man she—for reasons I’m not sure of—did not marry. Instead, she married my grandfather, a man I don’t think she ever loved. Eventually, he ran off, leaving her with four children. Some time after that, he took his own life at his sister’s house in Atlanta. My mother and her twin sister were the youngest of Lena’s children. It was a later–in-life pregnancy; my aunt Sylvia was twelve years older, my uncle older than that. The story goes that Lena was so depressed about having not only another child but twins, that she let the nurses at the hospital name them. My mother came out first, red-cheeked and crying. They named her Rose. Her twin was quieter and born second. They named her Lily. It was not an easy childhood. Or beyond that. My grandmother self-medicated with whiskey and a variety of other things. She lived, unhappily, until she was 97.

There’s more I could write about this, but I’ll leave it here. I’ve just finished the final book of the Dreaming Anastasia trilogy, Anastasia Forever, which will be out from Sourcebooks in August of this year. As I look back on the series, I know that my grandmother’s life influenced these characters, who like my Grandma Lena, have Russian lines of descent, even the fairy tale ones. I see her in Anne’s mother Laura. In the rusalka, Lily, who I did name after my aunt. I see her mostly in Baba Yaga, whose story gets a final unfolding in book 3. Baba Yaga who wants to mother, but can’t because of choices and destiny.

Russian fairy tales do not end like Disney-ized ones. The narrator often says something like, “And they lived as happily as they could.”

I wanted Anne, the hero of the DA series, to be strong enough to break that mold. And when you get to the end—and I am so darn excited for the last book to come out so you can see how it all turns out!!—I think you’ll see that Anne has decided that destiny is only part of what molds a life.

I think now that maybe I was trying to rewrite Lena’s unhappy history. Give her the Happily Ever After that everyone deserves.

Saving troubled boys by April Henry

2012-02-05T20:09:00.001-05:00

When I was in college, I dated a whole string of troubled boys.

J. could drink an amazing amount and still appear sober. When he was in high school, his dad was cheating on his mom - with a girl J. went to school with.

C., I’m pretty sure now, was a sociopath.

K. had a rocky relationship with his parents and had started partying hard in middle school.

D. borderline stalked me.

T. had been terribly abused by his dad and step-mom.

When I was in college, my ideal love interest was smart, troubled, and used drugs or alcohol to excess. Even better if he could tell me that he wanted to love me, he was just finding it difficult.

Most of these guys didn’t want to be saved, or weren’t capable of being saved. But I was sure I would be the one who who hung in there, who proved herself worthy. With many of them, I hung on far too long, sure I was seeing the diamond in the rough.

There’s a book, long out of print, called Give Sorrow Words. It is made of essays written by a woman who travelled to Mexico. She took up with various men, and wound herself into knots about whether they loved her. Reading about them, you could tell these guys were losers, that she was building a relationship on sand, but she persisted.

The author was murdered by one of those men.

Through some combination of luck and God watching out for me and me coming to my senses, I ended up with a great guy who didn’t have any substance abuse issues, had a pretty normal childhood, and who liked me as I was. And I liked him as he was.

Reader, I married him.

But I think I might still be working through some issues in my books. My editor has pointed out that the boys in Girl, Stolen; The Night She Disappeared (out next month) and Finish Her Off (out next year) all come from the wrong side of the tracks and have a fairly hefty amount of baggage.

Thank God for Mr. Wrong - CJ Omololu

2012-02-03T06:00:00.001-05:00

My first first kiss was in 6th grade. Frank Perry, on a summer Tuesday, after piano lessons at the elementary school playground. My last first kiss was almost 18 years ago, on the steps of my apartment building in San Francisco on the first date with my now-husband. Lets just say the 16 years between the two events provided lots of material for the job I have now.

There was the 6 foot 4 senior that I went out with when I was a freshman, until my mom met him, declared that he was a man, not a boy, and forbid me to see him ever again. There was my first real boyfriend (sorry Frank, our ten minutes on the swings didn't really count), an Australian guy who I followed halfway around the world before we both figured out that it wasn't going to work. There was more than one boy-in-a-band who I went to shows with as the eternal plus-one, only realizing later that I wasn't the only girl he was playing his guitar for. I dated more than a few guys in my teens and twenties and although every one of them was completely wrong for me, at the time, I was convinced that each of them was Mr. Right. That when we were together, our love was the only thing that mattered. The rest of the world could fall away and all we needed was food, shelter and each other. When we broke up (and we always broke up) my world was shattered. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I could barely function because my entire future had just been erased.

As adrenalin-filled and subsequently painful as these memories are, I'm grateful to have them, because these are the emotions that I tap into whenever I'm writing about love relationships in my books. When you're young, it's all or nothing - there's never a shade of grey. My family can always tell when I'm deep into a book because I'm moody and have the emotional stability of a sixteen year old girl. I carry pieces of each of these relationships into every story I write and drop bits of them here and there like tiny breadcrumbs leading out of the forest. I always change the names to protect the (not-so) innocent, and I doubt that any of my former boyfriends would recognize themselves. But I know they're there.

Me and the real Mr. Right on one of our first dates.

Getting in My Characters’ Heads (Holly Schindler)

2012-02-02T07:42:00.001-05:00

This is one of my mom’s favorite pictures of me and my brother:

The background: I loved that dress. I mean—love. It was the first long dress I’d ever had, and I felt so grown-up and beautiful. I just had to get Mom to take my picture (with our ultra-high-tech Polaroid)…and my brother, unable to let such a perfect gonna-get-her-now opportunity just slip him by, protested. He wanted in the picture, too.

“Oh, just let him in,” Mom said. At which point, he raced to his room and got the ugliest hat he could. Mucking up my oh-so-beautiful moment with a ratty old red stocking cap.

Sure, we’re wearing smiles in the pic. But before the Polaroid could even develop the picture, I’m pretty sure the boy got pummeled.

Such is life with a sibling.

I’ve never written a novel based on anything that happened to me—never based any of my characters on any person I’ve ever met. (I have no personal experience with mental illness, as does the protagonist of A BLUE SO DARK, and I’m no athlete, as are the main characters of PLAYING HURT.)

Still, tough—bits of yourself just naturally leak out when you’re writing fiction—your humor, observations, beliefs, they all sneak into every character you do build. (Which, I think, is often why a novel feels so personal to a writer. I really think that letting someone read your book allows that person the kind of access into your head that they’d never have, through just day-to-day, face-to-face interactions.)

All those relationships in life—family or friends—allow us to experience the range of human emotions. I’ve never directly based any of my characters’ relationships on any relationship I’ve ever had in life, either. But I’ve been there—through those exciting meetings, through losses and disappointments, through love and anger and sweet moments of forgiveness. And when I needed to describe the relationship between Chelsea and her younger brother Brandon in PLAYING HURT, I thought back on instances like the ratty red hat. Having been there before means that I can really get into each of my character’s heads as I write a book, and describe what they’re feeling throughout the pages of my novels.

BLOG TOUR GUEST POST: The Knife and the Butterfly excerpt and Ashley Hope Pérez on the things Azael carries

2012-02-01T00:01:00.001-05:00

I’m psyched to be hanging outside the lines with you today on the official release date of my second YA novel, The Knife and the Butterfly. In a second, I’ll dish up an excerpt and give you the inside scoop. But first, here’s the synopsis to get you all oriented:

Azael Arevalo wishes he could remember how the fight ended. He knows his MS13 boys faced off with some punks from Crazy Crew. He can picture the bats, the bricks, the chains. A knife. But he can’t remember anything between that moment and when he woke behind bars. Azael knows jails, and something isn’t right about this lockup. No phone call. No lawyer. No news about his brother or his homies. The only thing they make him do is watch some white girl in some cell. Watch her and try to remember.

Lexi Allen would love to forget the fight, would love for it to disappear back into the Xanax fog it came from. And her mother and her lawyer hope she chooses not to remember too much about the brawl—at least when it’s time to testify. Lexi knows that there’s more at stake in her trial than her life alone, though. Azael needs the truth. The knife cut, but somehow it also connected.

Now for the excerpt, which comes from Chapter 5 of The Knife and the Butterfly:

I open the file. For now I decide that Eddie and my homies got away on foot, and I go back to reading.

Items Recovered:

- One gray Adidas backpack, marked on the front and back with tags linked to MS-13.

- Three photographs:

- one of a young girl, approximately age 8;

- one of a long-haired Hispanic teen female (“YR Becca Hottie” written on back);

- one of a group of eight boys, aged approximately 13–21, labeled “MIS VATOS” (see enclosure for photocopies).

- One sheet torn from National Geographic with the caption “sunset in the Sierra Madre of El Salvador.”

- One pair of socks.

- One can of Red Devil Delta Blue spray paint, half empty.

- Two small aerosol spray caps.

- One large aerosol spray cap.

- White toothbrush.

- Small Colgate toothpaste.

- Earphones and a hand-held music player marked in black, “AZZ’S SHYT.”

- Three unlabeled CDs.

- A hardbound black sketchbook with stylized letters that spell out “AZZ’S PIECES.”

- A stick of Degree deodorant.

- Traces of marijuana found in bag.

It seems kind of sad all written out, like all you got to do is throw away my backpack and nobody’d know I was ever even around. That’s why I like to can. I tag and work up pieces to represent, but I also do it so that there’s part of me out there for everybody to see. Getting smoked out with my homies and then hitting the street until my cans run out, that’s what I call a day.

The downer is that some fool comes along and messes with your work, covering it up with their shit. Or punks from the city buff it. A couple of times they had a whole little army of volunteers out in the hood painting over and scrubbing out our writing like that’s some good deed. When they could be doing something real, like building a park or something.

Sometimes I work out a really fine piece on a wall somewhere, but when I come back a few days later it’s like I was never there. The fact is that you got to re-can the whole hood practically every week to keep your presence strong. Now that I’m not out there to tag up whatever I can reach, to turn trains into traveling masterpieces, how long before my name disappears?

—

Ever since I first read “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien, I’ve made a point of thinking about what my characters carry, both literally and metaphorically. Usually, though, this is one of those “just for me” writer things I do. But since Azael has been incarcerated in The Knife and the Butterfly, I got my first chance to share the catalog of items with the reader directly.

For Azael, this is a sobering moment as he realizes (1) he doesn’t know where he is exactly or why he’s been arrested, (2) it wouldn’t be hard to make him disappear, and (3) based on his possessions, his existence doesn’t add up to much.

It’s easy to judge Azael, easy to dismiss him as a gangbanger and a good-for-nothing. But the more readers learn about his past, the more they realize that meaningful change is hard to come by in his world. Still, Azael will struggle to discover how he can make a lasting mark on the world around him—one that won’t be scrubbed out.

That’s a challenge that—if we’re honest—we can all relate to, no matter what we carry.

More about using what characters carry to develop your writing here.

---

Ask for The Knife and the Butterfly from your favorite local bookseller:

Indiebound

Amazon

More interviews, excerpts, guest posts, and secrets (including two truths and a lie) coming throughout Ashley’s The Knife and the Butterfly blog tour. See the full tour schedule here. Tomorrow, more insights at Actin’ Up with Books, followed by an interview on Friday at The Happy Nappy Bookseller.

Ashley Hope Pérez is the author of two young adult novels, WHAT CAN'T WAIT and THE KNIFE AND THE BUTTERFLY. She also is a passionate teacher and student working on her PhD in comparative literature. At the moment, she lives in Paris with her husband and son where they enjoy culture, croissants, and cramped living quarters.

Check out Ashley’s blog, follow her on twitter @ashleyhopeperez, or find her on facebook.

On Trying New Things

2012-01-30T03:00:00.000-05:00

For the first time ever, I’m dipping my toe into a whole new writing pond. I’m trying my hand at some creative nonfiction.

Those of you who have gone anywhere near my website, my photo galleries, my blog or my Facebook profile know I’m very big into hiking. I travel to some interesting places when I get it into my head to take on a new hike. And then usually I post photos, and sometimes videos, for my readers.

About a year ago, I was walking down Indian Cove Road in Joshua Tree National Monument, headed for the Boy Scout trail. I was thinking about that old and beloved mantra “Do what you love and the money will follow.” Of course, I was doing what I loved right then. Not that I don’t love writing. I do. First. Foremost. But that day I had two sudden new thoughts. One: maybe I should write (my first love) about hiking (my second love). And, perhaps even more importantly, two: if I did, all of this travel would be tax deductible.

My new book of essays was born. It’s not out yet. Not even sold yet. I’m just going over the very last small revisions suggested by my agent.

It’s really not a book about hiking. It’s a book about the moments in my life that changed me, sometimes in small ways, sometimes monumentally. It just so happens that about four out of ten such moments took place on tough trails in the great outdoors.

Last Fall I was asked to present a reading for a Sierra Club fundraiser that took place yesterday. What better to read than non-traditionally inspirational trail stories? And it was a multi-media presentation, with my photos of the Grand Canyon, the Inca trail to Machu Picchu, Pinnacles National Monument and “The Wave” cycling around as I read about my experiences in those places. I knew all the photos I take (which would probably raise the production cost too much to be included in the book) would come in handy for something.

More than one person commented that I seem to have a feel for nonfiction. Who knew? And how will I know unless I try?

This might open doors for me, I’m thinking. For example, I’ve always wanted to trek in the lower reaches of the Himalayas in Tibet or Nepal. Maybe I could do that, and end up with a book about the experience. I’ve also always wanted to meet an Atlantic Puffin face-to-face on some cold, remote northern island, or watch the aurora borealis from those hotel rooms in Norway shaped like glass igloos. And if I want to do it so much, maybe others might enjoy reading about it.

That’s actually what I like about firsts. The way they sometimes lead to seconds, and then thirds, and then “lifetimes of.” But first you have to be open to the first.

First times...

2012-01-29T09:23:00.004-05:00

First time I decided I wanted to be an author: 2001. I was 25. Before then, it had never once occurred to me that writing was something I'd want to do with my time. In high school, if someone had suggested that I write for fun, I probably would have snarkily replied "Write for fun? Why don't I do math for fun? Right." I always regret this. I feel that I wasted ten years of developing my writing, simply because I never tried until I was an adult.

Fast forward to Puebla, Mexico, 2001. My girlfriend and I had just broken up. So there I was, broke, alone, a miserable gringo south of the border. I had no choice. I had to write a book.

Not knowing how to go about this, I opened up my old laptop and started typing. I basically used my high school self as the protagonist, my high school friends as the other characters, and my hometown as the setting. I never in a million years thought that anything would come of this. But one day, much to my shock, I finished the book, 'Playing With Matches.'

First positive response from a publisher: Well, forty or so rejection letters later, I had run out of places to send my manuscript. I had decided to put the book on the shelf for a while and try something else. However, I ran across notice of a contest for unpublished YA novelists and, after shrinking the font to meet the maximum page number requirement, I sent it in. I didn't hear from anyone for so long that I assumed I lost and no one had told me. However, one day, while running a junior high study hall, I got that e-mail, every author dreams of: I didn't win. But an editor thought the book showed potential, and asked for a rewrite.

That night, I made a vow that I would dedicate all my efforts to making this book perfect. Nothing would distract me. A few days later, my wife tells me to close my eyes and hands me something.

A home pregnancy test. Positive (Yes, we'd been trying...for about two weeks). Realizing I was working under a rather harsh nine month deadline, I redoubled my efforts. And, shortly after my wonderful daughter Sophie was born, 'Playing With Matches' was published.

I could tell you about other first times, but I don't think this is the right kind of blog.

WAY outside the lines

2012-01-28T17:09:00.000-05:00

My first adult novel is due in about a month.

Well, maybe it's not my first, but my "first." I wrote adult novels before I wrote YA novels. They just didn't get published. My dream career was to have both YA and adult novels published and to bop back and forth between them. I had both an adult novel and a YA novel out on submission in 2005. The YA novel sold, the adult novel didn't, and it's taken another seven years to get the adult half of my career off the ground.

There was never any question of what name I would use to publish my adult novels. They were purchased by the division of Simon & Schuster that also publishes my darker YA novels, and since those have been successful, it was assumed I would use the same name. I have no problem with that.

I do distinctly remember, however, that when I was a 12-year-old rabid Judy Blume fan, I was horrified to learn that she had written an adult novel and that it was DIRTY. I felt betrayed.

Looking back at this now, I am mad at 12-year-old me and defensive of Judy Blume. This is pretty confusing.

I am not changing my pen name. I have enough trouble tweeting as @JenniferEchols. If I had to tweet and Facebook and blog under another name too, my head would explode. But I do wonder whether I will encounter any resistance to the adult half of my career from my YA readers.

There are plenty of precedents for adult authors starting to write YA and keeping the same name or changing their name only slightly: Gena Showalter, Nicole/Niki Burnham. Then there's YA author Trinity Faegan, who first won awards and made lots of friends as adult author Stephanie Faegan and told me she was having some trouble being recognized as her alter-ego, at least initially. But offhand, I can't think of any other authors who moved from YA to adult.

If you're a YA reader, all you all offended that I'm moving over to the dark side? And if you're a YA writer, would you have kept your name?

Good firsts and bad firsts (Tara Kelly)

2012-01-26T13:38:00.002-05:00

In the writing world, this last year has been a real roller coaster ride of firsts, leaving me to wonder...what's next?

The Good:

My first book made two 'best of' lists (BFYA and Bank Street) and won its first and only award.
I gave my first award speech...ever.
I gained the courage to go out in public and do my first signings.
I participated in my first book tour, with a group of other authors.
I attended my first book related conference (NCTE) where I spoke on a YA writing panel for the first time.
A group of teens made their first movie based on my first book.
My second book made it onto major retailer shelves (a first for me).
I'm writing my first thriller, a completely intimidating and game-changing experience for me. It's forcing me way out of my comfort zone and making me take a hard look at where I'm weak as a writer.

The Bad:

The last book I wrote, my favorite yet, was the first to not sell. Broke my heart.
My first book did not make it to paperback.
I got my first taste of how a writer's numbers can affect a career.
For the first time since my short career started, I'm completely unsure of what's next for me. I have no new books coming out, and I don't know if I'll sell another.
I got my first hate mail and hate thread.

The verdict? I'm still here. I'm still writing. I'm not giving up. 2012 is going to be the year I take risks. It's going to be a fresh start. The first time I say--why not--when it comes to pushing boundaries in my stories and 'going there' with my characters. We'll see what happens next...

new firsts - Alisa M. Libby

2012-01-25T06:00:00.002-05:00

Crushes, kisses...I think I had a crush on a book before I had a real crush on a boy. I would walk around the elementary school playground staring wistfully at clouds, imagining I was the Lady Amalthea from Beagle's The Last Unicorn. And there was all that Poe I read and re-read to myself. And Tennyson's Sleeping Beauty. And Lady Jane Grey, with the end that made me weep. And somewhere boys became a distraction, an increasingly greater distraction. And Sylvia Plath became both a terror and a comfort (raging at tulips, raging at everything). And I fell in love with J. Alfred Prufrock and his love song. And I memorized lyrics by Ani DiFranco when she was angry, and Tori Amos when she was crazy and angry.

And there are still firsts, now. Don't think that firsts are only for teenagers. There is still the first time I heard the Dresden Dolls sing "Girl Anachronism" - then learned the words so I could belt it like a lunatic along with them. And there are still more books that I will read - more Last Unicorns and Harry Potters and Draculas - books that will absolutely set me on fire. And I will remember that moment I first fell in love with them.

Formative Firsts by Rosemary Clement-Moore

2012-01-24T07:00:00.000-05:00

YA books are all about firsts. First love, first independence, first important decisions made without the help of parental units. More than age of the character, or setting, or anything else, I think that’s the thing that defines a YA book.

And I think that’s why YA books have got such broad appeal. We never stop having “firsts.” I just went on my first cruise. (I know this is not much of a rite of passage for people, but it meant confronting at least 8 of my 15 phobias, so it was kind of a big deal for me.) I visited a foreign country by myself. Okay, it was for 5 hours, and it was Jamaica, and I didn’t leave the confines of Montego Bay. But still!

My firsts tend to be typical of my life. A little screwball. But that just makes them more memorable.

My first kiss was from a guy in a Boba Fett costume, sans helmet. (It was a halloween party.)

My first job was playing Chuck E. Cheese at the pizza place of the same name. (There seems to be a costume theme going on here.)

My first plane ride, I barfed.

My first helicopter ride, I barfed.

(My first boat ride, I did just fine. There was no barfing on this cruise.)

My first reading of Little Women was in the third grade. I earned a years worth of reading points in one book, and swore I was going to change my name to Josephine when I turned 18.

My first (substantial) short story was written in the third grade, about a girl who woke up in the middle of the night to find a UFO landing on her front lawn. She ran downstairs in her pjs and fought the alien back into his spaceship with the umbrella that she’d grabbed from the umbrella stand by the front door. Interestingly, the story was in first person. I guess I’ve always known my voice, even back then. (All my stories involved Martians, as my father had given me the John Carter of Mars books as soon as I finished all the Nancy Drew books.)

As a result, I’ve always had a thing for guys in armor, a hatred of flying (and of giant costume characters), and a love of sci-fi and mystery stories and strong, quirky heroines like Jo March.

Most firsts are worth looking back and laughing at, and even when they are tragic, they form the landscape of our journey. How we chose to allow them to affect us is what makes us what we are.

Firsts and Unfoldings--Sarah Porter

2012-01-22T15:10:00.003-05:00

At first it was all such a struggle.

Once, long, long ago, there was a first sentence: "There is a sound that holds my life suspended."

But getting that sentence to become a scene, and that scene to become a story, was almost insurmountably difficult--though after several years of labor it did grow into a thoroughly unpublishable novel.

At first words seemed isolated in space; they didn't want to connect to each other, roll through each other, gather momentum.

At first, writing was all about discipline. Now discipline barely enters into it. Now writing is almost like a property of my body, an activity inherent in my fingers; they land on the keyboard much as rain taps at the street. Now bits of new stories as well as scenes from old ones often play on and on in my head: words I once put on paper constitute a kind of default setting that my thoughts fall into when I'm not focusing on anything in particular.

I couldn't say when I stopped needing discipline, only that it took years of practice to get to that point.

The real value of firsts for me lies in what they may lead to, I think, not in themselves. I can't remember the first time I woke up to see my husband still asleep, but I'm quite sure he didn't seem as beautiful to me then as he does now. It's the repetition of that experience which has let it grow and unfold into a gestalt. Any morning when I watch him sleep is a small flower of the particular--this morning and no other--that grows from a larger essence: Todd asleep and beautiful, as he has been so many times, until the sight of him seems distilled into something eternal.

Firsts--and why I write YA

2012-01-20T13:25:00.005-05:00

In high school, I started a list.

The first time I ...

♡… kissed a boy. …at the school dance …

♡… french kissed. … the New Years Eve party …

♡… enjoyed kissing. … went to the old cemetery …

Kidding!!!!

Pretty much.

My dad—in the throes of cleaning frenzy after I moved away to go to college—tossed it out, and I’ve tried to re-create it from memory. Though I really did enjoy that night in the cemetery, kissing wasn’t the only thing on the list

The first time I …

… went down a water slide

… wrote a letter to the editor

… appreciated Shakespeare

… ran in a cross-country meet

… went on a ski trip with friends

…cheated on a test (and the last time. I got caught.)

… ate a whole meal with chopsticks

Each first had a different quality—tingling me all over, boosting my self-confidence, zapping me with electric excitement, filling me with whipped cream, over-taking me with feelings of slime and rot. At night, I would spend hours in the dark reliving the glory or the pain.

And that’s why I love writing for teens. They live in a world of firsts, of intense highs, deep lows, and events so significant they will never be forgotten.

First Fan Letter Sent

2012-01-19T08:00:00.004-05:00

Piggybacking on Daisy’s first fan letter, I thought I’d write about the time I first sent a fan letter. I was in the fourth grade and my friend Fawn and I wrote to Michael J. Fox. Fawn told him how much she loved him. I thought my letter should be more constructive and therefore told him that I thought Teen Wolf was not his best work and that I liked Family Ties a lot more. Fawn got a postcard back, I did not.

I realized that Michael was probably not looking for my advice and maybe I hurt his feelings. So the next year when Fawn and I were taking a theater class and had high hopes of making it to Hollywood, we came up with a brilliant idea. We would offer to be in one of Michael Jackson’s videos and we’d even choreograph it for him. And a natural fit would be P.Y.T, Pretty Young Thing. We crafted the letter on the Snoopy stationery that my grandma had bought me. We waited and waited but alas no reply from this Michael either. I was a little down about it but figured he might be kind of busy and receiving tons of letters. Ya think, lol?!

I decided to take a break from writing fan letters for a while until I came across an interview in Sassy magazine in high school with John and John, the two guys from the band They Might Be Giants. The guys said that they reply to every fan letter and that they loved funny letters. I was a huge fan of TMBG so I decided to put them to the test and whipped out the funniest letter I could muster. And a few weeks later, I received a handwritten letter back from them! I was elated. So for me the third time was a charm.

So have you ever written a celebrity and did they write back?

Getting Past "Don't Wanna"-- Firsts and YA, by Emily Whitman

2012-01-18T13:01:00.004-05:00

Thinking about our theme this month, firsts, I realized that's why I write YA. It's all about firsts. The first time you stand up to a bully, or an unjust world. Your first kiss. Your first step on a journey. That's what I want to explore--that moment of choice, of bravery, of change.

"I woke in the middle of the night, came straight up out of sleep. Then sat there, heart pounding, in that numb, blind space where you can't quite kludge together exactly what's just happened or where or when you are." That's Bryn in Susan Fletcher's Ancient, Strange, and Lovely. A thumping noise woke her, and since her parents are missing and she's watching out for her little sister, she has to go check it out. It's scary out in the windy dark. "Don't wanna," thinks Bryn. But she goes anyway. (And discover's a hatching dragon's egg, and her family's secret history, and her strength).

Don't wanna. But you do it anyway.

The moment you make the choice to do it anyway--your pulse racing, your skin tingling, thinking you might well fail but you have to try--that's the start of the journey. Of taking the risk to grow. For me, one of those moments was the first time I went to a writing conference and let people see what I was working on and risked hearing what they really thought. Daring to dream that I could be a writer.

Why YA? By the time you're older, you've lived through enough situations that you've got templates. You've survived some crazy situations and you've got a sense you might just get through. But as a teen, you don't have a bag of tricks at the ready yet. And life is throwing itself at you full force. There are real stakes here, choices you know can shape the rest of your life. In The Hunger Games, the stakes are life and death--Katniss has to kill other kids if she's going to survive. (For an interesting take on how that rings true for teens who have to face a high school lunchroom every day, take a look at Laura Miller's piece on dystopian fiction in The New Yorker, "Fresh Hell.") (That illustration is by Kikuo Johnson, by the way).

I want to keep daring, to take on firsts, for as long as I live. So I read YA, where heroes and heroines inspire me to take a step into the unknown. And I write YA, where the stakes are high and the choices are profound. Because it's about transformation. Daring to take a step. Daring to change.

p.s. I have some great news to share--Wildwing is a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards! And I have incredible company on the YA list--Lisa Schroeder, April Henry, Jen Violi, and Heather Vogel Frederick!

First job(s) by Wendy Delsol

2012-01-17T09:30:00.006-05:00

We’re talking firsts this month. Because I’ve made this crazy writing gig my fulltime job, I thought I’d dedicate this post to first jobs.

Our writing is shaped by our life experiences, work history included. My first job was at age sixteen, between my junior and senior years of high school. I worked as a stock girl (back then we didn’t know about gender-neutral job descriptions) for a discount drugstore in Roseville, Michigan (a suburb of Detroit). I didn’t like it much (the job, not Detroit). It was mindless, boring, surprisingly physical, and there was little to no interaction with customers or coworkers. If nothing else, it strengthened my college goals.

Post-bachelor’s-degree, my first real job was as an interpreter for a French engineering company that was installing a painting system for Ford. I wore a hard-hat, steel-toe boots, and got paid to interpret whenever the French experts had something to say to the American installers. It was actually pretty fun. I had just returned home after having spent a post-college

year studying in France. Although I was only hired for the project itself—lasting only three or four months, if my memory serves correctly—it felt rewarding to use my French for a job. The two engineers with whom I worked were wonderful, and I had this amazing peek at life on the floor of the Ford factory. Loud, hot, dirty, and very few other females are what I remember most. Not that I was sweating it out “on the floor” for eight hours a day. The two Frenchmen and I had the luxury of retreating to the air-conditioned offices and propping our steel-toed boots up on a desk.

Not long after that project ended, I followed my college roomies out to Los Angeles. There, I got my master’s degree (while waiting tables at night) and later worked as a tour coordinator in the travel industry, a job I held for over ten years.

Speaking of ten, it’s been a decade since I’ve dedicated myself to writing, my favorite job of all—and last, with any luck.

Years and Years of Firsts

2012-01-16T07:28:00.007-05:00

The last year or so has given me a number of firsts, all of which lead me to believe I’m actually getting older, which is a notion I’ve completely disregarded my entire life (during which, I was constantly getting older).

There are great things about getting older: First, if you work hard at it, you start knowing yourself pretty well. I know, for instance, that there are certain things I shouldn’t keep in my house, unless I want to get sick. They include: cold pack cheese, wheat thins, and cigarettes (all of which I know are terrible for me, and yet some part of my psychology relishes downing pounds of the cheese and crackers while smoking the cigarettes). I very rarely eat crackers and cheese and I don’t smoke anymore. And, I feel better, but still know I have no power over crackers and cigarettes. That knowledge keeps me from purchasing them. Victory!

Dad Messing Around

There are terrible things about getting older: First, you begin to lose the people you love. At the end of 2010 I lost my father. In 2011 I released my first book that my dad had never read in book form (he saw the manuscript of Stupid Fast and loved it). There was something so sad about going to my book release without my dad being there. In 2012, I’ll release my first book that my dad never saw.

Ageing: In 2011, for the first time, I had to acknowledge that my body is getting older. In order to utterly enjoy my friends, I stayed up really late on a trip late in 2011 (as I have often done in the past). The next morning I went to exercise (as I often have done after the late nights – trying to balance it all out) and, for the first time ever, I experienced muscle cramps while running on a treadmill and, for the first time, I fell off a treadmill. Some employee of the hotel saw this happen on video and came running up to the exercise room to ask if I was okay. I was not okay. I was seriously embarrassed (I also skinned my knee). Phillip Roth says that ageing is a massacre.

I have never enjoyed hiking. Even though I live in a small town, close to nature, I would not say my orientation is to the woods and marshes and mountains. I’ve always liked distinctly human places (big cities with lots of taxi cabs). In 2011, I climbed my first mountain. I did it with my fourteen-year-old son, Leo. We were in Arizona and it was hard, hard work. At the top, the sun blasted the crap out of us and it was so dang beautiful: small, desert ranges in the distance, red rock, green cactus, blue sky. You can’t have a fourteen-year-old son, unless you’ve lived a while. Having kids leads to all kinds of awesome firsts. We climbed a freaking mountain!

Bright Sun

Happy first month of 2012. I wish you a hundred more and all the firsts – terrible and excellent – that will come to you.

-Geoff Herbach

First Things First (Cheryl Renée Herbsman)

2012-01-15T07:00:00.000-05:00

What's the first thing you need when starting a new story? Does it differ from project to project, or is it always the same for you? Do you begin with plot or setting or character? Do you rip an idea from a headline or an overheard conversation? Whatever else I begin with, I can't start a new story until I first find the voice of my protagonist.

In beginning my current work-in-progress, I knew that I'd be writing it in order to work through an overwhelm of emotions I'd been dealing with during a difficult time in my life. So I needed to find a character who could take on those feelings. For weeks I toyed with different YA voices, trying to see where I might take a story that would include the healing I needed to explore. And it wasn't working. Ultimately, I realized that for this particular story, I would need to go farther outside the YA lines than I'd ever been -- I'd need an adult MC.

At first, this idea terrified me, made me back away from the story altogether. I like being a YA author. I like the YA community. I didn't want to leave it behind. But as soon as I gave myself permission to think about writing my first women's fiction, the character came to me. And as soon as I let her in, her story poured out of me. So I guess I needed to write it. And although it took me a while to realize it, it doesn't mean I can't still write YA!

The initial steps of the WIP are done. The story is told. And I'm ready to start something new. Only I don't know what yet. So I'm waiting, filling the well, and listening, listening, listening for that first whisper -- the voice of the next character whose story wants to be told.

A Myriad of Firsts (Julie Chibbaro)

2012-01-14T12:00:00.001-05:00

I’m having trouble concentrating today. Maybe having trouble with the assignment of ‘firsts.’ I’m not so good at assignments. I wish I were better.

The only first I can hear is my sister’s voice, “First in the bathroom!” In that singsongy way that made me know she would crush me if I got there first.

Or being first at a party, or first to an important meeting. I’m always too early for those things.

I like First Saturdays, where galleries open for new art.

There’s a cool science organization called FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology).

An author friend works at First Book, which gets books to kids who can't afford them.

First woman doctor. First woman scientist. First woman in space.

Firsts. Now the word is starting to warm up.

A Very Sad "Last" (Stephanie Kuehnert)

2012-01-13T09:45:00.001-05:00

I know the theme for this month is "firsts," but this is YA Outside the Lines after all, so I'm gonna go outside the lines. Also there is only one thing that I could think about blogging about today, Friday January 13th, 2012, a date that has been seared in red in my brain since last spring, a day that I honestly hoped would never arrive. Today, a few short hours from now, the last episode of One Life To Live will air, and more likely than not, I will be reducing to a sobbing ball of snot.

Geez, she's being rather melodramatic about a soap opera, you are probably thinking. Well I ask you this... Dude, what other way is there to be about a soap opera?!?!

But seriously, One Life To Live has been a part of my life and routine for for about eighteen years and seven months now. I started watching it the summer before my freshman year of high school. I went to summer school that summer to get health class out of the way and learn my way around my new high school. After class, which got out just before noon, I would go to a friend's house for lunch. She was obsessed with both All My Children and One Life to Live and she got me hooked. When I started watching OLTL, two children, CJ and Sarah were trapped in a well, and a rapist, Todd Manning, had escaped jail. I had to see what happened next. And while those storylines unfolded and (veeeeery slowly) worked their way toward resolution, I became invested in others. I . Could. Not. Stop. I've spent much of my life ever since either watching OLTL when I was home from school/work or recording it to watch later.

One Life To Live wasn't the first story I've ever loved (that would be Peter Pan) or even the first series (that would be the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder). It wasn't the first TV show I rushed home to see every day (that would probably be Degrassi). It wasn't even my first exposure to romance (Sweet Valley High), steamier romance (Forever/we got cable when I was ten), rather twisted, creepy romance (Flowers In The Attic), or experience with overwrought, melodramatic arguing (I'd just graduated junior high). But it was the best combination of those things and more.

When I first heard that the show was being canceled, I wrote in depth about my history with it here. A few months ago I also explained on ROOKIE why I think it's "Literally The Best Thing Ever." I won't rehash what I said there too much. Instead I want to focus on what One Life To Live meant to me as a writer because it did present me with a first there.

By the time I started watching OLTL, I was already pretty serious about writing. Once again, Laura Ingalls Wilder takes the credit for that. Since deciding at the age of five that I wanted to tell stories like she did, I'd been learning all I could about writing in the traditional manner. I paid close attention in English class and went above and beyond for my assignments. I read voraciously, everything from mysteries to horror to fantasy to Shakespeare. I'd even gone to a few "young authors" conferences to do workshops with the pros. But One Life To Live was my first non-traditional writing teacher.

Yep, that's right, a soap opera provided essential storytelling instruction. And I'm not alone in seeingthis. I was very pleased to come across this blog, which states, "Any primetime show featuring recurring characters, storylines and cliffhangers -- from Star Trek to Friends to CSI to Mad Men and everything in between -- owes its heritage to soap operas. Without the storytelling techniques pioneered over the last sixty plus years by daytime serials, these modern-day shows would have lacked the blueprint for creating entertainment franchises of enduring popularity."

While I didn't learn everything I know about storytelling from One Life to Live, I learned a hell of a lot.

In terms of writing tension, OLTL was my best teacher, hands down. I learned how to draw out a moment, throw in twists and turns, and build a story note by note to that final showdown or explosion. I also learned from OLTL's mistakes about dragging out a storyline too long. I made mental notes of when I started to get bored or see all of the devices that the writers were using.

OLTL taught me just as much about characters. This may surprise you since soap operas are often stereotyped as having one-dimensional, melodramatic characters, but when the plot got stretched thin on One Life, it was often the characters (played beautifully by some of the hardest working, most underrated actors in the biz) that kept me invested in the show. There are so many characters on soaps and I'd found very few examples in literature dealing with such a large well-developed cast. I took hints on how to use big groups and still make individuals stand out. One of the key things I learned was giving even the villains a nuanced back story. The guy pictured at the very top of this blog is my favorite character on One Life To Live, Todd Manning. He is also as I mentioned earlier, a rapist. One of my favorite characters is a rapist. That sounds so wrong, but no one knows how to write bad guys you love to hate or bad guys who might get a little bit of redemption like a soap writer. In both my books I WANNA BE YOUR JOEY RAMONE and BALLADS OF SUBURBIA, I borrowed from the Todd Manning/OLTL school of character development to create characters that I hoped readers would love and then be shocked to discover were capable of doing very bad things as well as characters that rode a fine line between love and hate, either you wanted to hate them because of one thing they did and yet you understood their motivations or you knew you shouldn't really like them, but they had this dark charisma that wouldn't let go.

Another thing I learned from One Life to Live is comedy. Yes, I learned comedy from a drama. The other two pictures above are great examples of both comedy and nuanced character development. The top is "Niki Smith" an alter personality for the very well-mannered lead character of Viki Lord. Yes, multiple-personalities is one of those out-there soap opera plots, but OLTL has always handled it so well because they manage to walk the line between using it for drama and being tongue-in-cheek. The second picture is David Vickers, an all out funny character, who is a great tension breaker when things are getting too dramatic. When I started writing, my stories were all tension and drama all the time. I made great strides as a writer when I realized the importance of injecting humor and I learned this primarily from watching OLTL. I love having oddball, fun characters like Harlan in BALLADS OF SUBURBIA. That book is a hard read, but he helps lighten the mood here and there. I also love giving my serious characters a not-as-serious side. The book where I've had the most fun balancing drama with a few laughs is the Bartender Book, which is just as much an homage to soap operas as it is to bartending, and now that OLTL is gone, I hope more than ever that the Bartender Book can find a home.

So, today I am not only losing a beloved show, one that has provided me respite after work or school five-days-a-week for almost nineteen years, I am also losing a teacher. I have to say once again that I am distressed that ABC has now replaced two hours of storytelling with more "reality" talk programming that focuses on telling us what to eat, wear, etc. Whether or not you liked All My Children and One Life to Live, if you are a lover of story this should anger you, too.

But as the saying goes, instead of being sad (or in this case, enraged) that it's over, let's be happy that it happened. I shared what kind of "first" OLTL was for me personally, but I'll close with a couple of important general firsts.

One Life to Live introduced us to this guy:
Many of you may know and love Nathan Fillion from Castle or perhaps like me you have a Firefly obsession. But just like Sarah Michelle Gellar will always be Erica Kane's daughter Kendall to me, Nathan Fillion, will always be Joey Buchanan, who dated his mother's frenemy Dorian wayyyyy before people were using words like "Cougar" to describe women like Dorian.

Also, though daytime TV is usually considered to be behind the times when it comes to social issues. A teenage Ryan Phillippe played network TV's first gay high school student in 1992 on OLTL. In 2010, OLTL also aired the first love scene between two men on a soap opera.

In case you are interested in more of what OLTL gave us, check out this short Good Morning America segment:

If you are a fan like me, please feel free to share what you learned or enjoyed most about One Life to Live. If you aren't a soap person, what are some of the TV shows that have taught you about writing/storytelling.

From "Only" to "First"

2012-01-12T08:00:00.002-05:00

The past few weeks, I've found myself in the midst of an interesting transition. After Sourcebooks bought two sequels to My Very UnFairy Tale Life last month, I've been shifting from saying "my book" to saying "my first book." It's one little word, but boy does that "first" make all the difference!

When I was a kid, perched in a tree with a notebook in hand, writing terrible poetry, I fully believed that I would have lots of books out in the world one day. Everything seems achievable when you're eight. But as I got older, the dream started to seem less and less possible. After all, you can only handle so much rejection before you start doubting yourself.

I didn't give up--when it comes to writing, you NEVER give up--but I didn't let my dreams get too big. I told myself that if I could have one book published, I could die happy. Now that I'll have three, I guess I can die three times happier? I'm not sure writing math works that way, but we can pretend.

So here I am, starting my first sequel. It's both terrifying and exhilarating. While writing a book is nothing new, writing a sequel is. I almost feel like I'm back to square one again. As I start on this new journey, I've been trying to remember how much fun writing can be, the same way it was fun when I was sitting in that tree all those years ago. That was one of my first writing endeavors. I'm glad to be able to say it was the first of many.

Why Time Grows Wings--Jan Blazanin

2012-01-11T12:56:00.004-05:00

I’ve heard that time seems to go faster when we're older because we no longer have as many firsts in our lives. Children’s lives are nothing but firsts. The first day of school, first birthday party, first pet, first time riding a bike without training wheels. With few life experiences to draw on, a kid's list of beginnings is almost endless. Each fresh encounter stands out as a landmark in a child’s mind. And those landmarks are what make time seem to move so slowly.

Teens’ lives are also rife with first events. Taking the driving test and getting a driver’s license is pretty memorable, especially if, like me, you needed two tries to conquer that pesky parallel parking! Attending your first boy-girl make-out party can leave some indelible memories. Then there’s first love—and that devastating first betrayal. In my case, betrayal followed swiftly on the heels of love in April of my high school junior year. Each day I tried to get over my first crush was agony. Time has never passed so slowly.

While time has certainly speeded up for me since then, as a writer I’ve lived through many time-dragging experiences. Snails move like speed demons compared to the days I’m waiting to hear what an agent or editor thinks of my manuscript. Pony Express riders on three-legged mules take the long way to deliver a contract from my publisher. The slowest days occur the month before a book’s release. The Ice Age passed more quickly.

We remember our first times--good and bad. Sometimes we celebrate them. Like the first day of a New Year.

I hope yours is memorable in the best possible way!

Firsts? Yeah, they're not my thing.

2012-01-10T10:14:00.000-05:00

The first time I rode a bike, I zoomed downhill, flying at top speed--wahoo--and crashed into the side of an apartment building. But I practiced and practiced, and now I've ridden bikes in some pretty cool places like Cape Cod, across the Golden Gate Bridge, and to Monet's house in Giverny.

Skiing went pretty much the same way, except I crashed into a tree. Now it's the sport I do best (after many more crashes).

The first time I tried out for my high school dance team, my arms flapped like a condor attempting flight. Ew, it was bad. Embarrassing, too. But I really did want to make that team, so I drove my curvy sixteen-year-old body to a ballet class of slim twelve year olds. Each week I humbled myself, working on the basics of movement and routine. The next year I did make the team, but I always had to work a little harder to perfect routines.

Twenty-five years later, my husband can still make me blush, teasing me about the awkwardness of our first kiss... (Okay, best practice ever!)

Writing progressed much the same way. I created some really, truly awful short stories. But again I practiced, filling volumes and volumes of notebooks with my handwritten scrawl. The sentences bubbled on the page with the pressure of my handwriting, and I filled every speck of white space with words. Oh, how I wanted to learn how to write! Success began with a published poem, a magazine short story, a contest win, and eventually three novels. I even published my first manuscript, because I continued working and working and working on it. And I'm still practicing.

Sometimes I envy those people who seem to do things right the first time. But I know I'll get there eventually!

First time surfing--still haven't mastered this sport!

Firsts - Or as Julie Andrews Says, "Let's start from the very beginning"

2012-01-09T11:44:00.002-05:00

I knew it was too good to be true.

***

There are two problems with being the daughter of a best-selling etiquette guru.

***

I closed my eyes and inhaled just long enough to recognize the first sign of summer.

***

I don’t play tennis with Jessie anymore.

***

I still wonder if she knew.

Those are the first lines to my five YA books. I love first lines. They truly are the first things I write when starting a book, even though I don't write the subsequent chapters in chronological order. I skip all over the place, writing something for chapter 15 before I even know what chapter 10 will say. But I can't even begin to see the story without hearing the first line.

I knew it was too good to be true. This line from PLAN B sums up Vanessa - she's someone who has her life planned out with little margin of error, until she finds out something that turns her carefully planned world upside down. And she's not very happy about it or equipped to deal with the consequences.

There are two problems with being the daughter of a best-selling etiquette guru. In THE BOOK OF LUKE Emily has been raised to be polite, to be well-behaved, to do what's expected. Until a series of events help her decide that it's time to stop being so nice.

I closed my eyes and inhaled just long enough to recognize the first sign of summer. I really enjoyed this first line from LOCAL GIRLS. The book takes place on the island of Martha's Vineyard. So you'd think she's inhaling the expected signs of summer - the ocean, the flowers, the fresh breeze. Only she's inhaling the smell of a dead skunk by the side of the road - a scent that only a native islander would associate with summer, not the lovely scents the tourists chose to remember from the island.

I don’t play tennis with Jessie anymore. In RICH BOYS the main character, Winnie, has a best friend, Jessie. The story starts and ends in basically the same place, the tennis courts where Jessie teaches kids to play tennis. The story starts at the beginning of summer and ends at the end of summer. I liked the idea of having the story start and end at the same location, sort of bookends to all the change and turmoil that happens in the middle.

I still wonder if she knew. Haley is haunted (albeit not literally) by an incident that takes the life of one person while saving the life of another in my latest novel, WHEN YOU LEAVE. Everyone is telling Haley to move on and forget what happened, but it's not that easy - especially when Haley makes choices that she has to keep secret or risk losing the "normal" life everyone expects her to resume.

Oh, I just love writing first sentences! Can't wait to begin the next ones!

My first fan letter and my first time NOT trying to control everything by Daisy Whitney

2012-01-08T06:19:00.002-05:00

I received my first fan letter late last year. Not an email fan letter, but an honest-to-goodness paper letter that came in the mail. The two-page letter had been sent to my publisher, who then forwarded it in the mail to me. I was genuinely delighted to open a letter from a seventh grader in Texas who told me what she liked about THE MOCKINGBIRDS and then asked me questions about other books I have enjoyed. This is the stuff that makes all the ups and downs of the publishing business worth weathering — hearing from readers.

Interestingly, this letter arrived shortly before the paperback publication of THE MOCKINGBIRDS (Jan. 2) and the hardcover publication of its sequel THE RIVALS (Feb. 6). And this letter reminded me of the thing I’m trying to do differently with my second book. Because this letter came of its own accord. I didn’t force it, I didn’t give away a book to this reader, I didn’t talk her up online, I didn’t reach out to her. My book found her. Through her school librarian.

I bring this up because I thought — erroneously — I could control everything with the launch of my first book. I thought I could reach out to enough people, spread the word, email all my colleagues and friends and ask them to buy my book, and do virtually everything singlehandedly to ensure my book was a success. If this meant making videos or doing blog tours or interviews or getting no sleep or checking my Amazon ranking every hour or visiting every book store in a 100-mile radius to see where my book was stocked and to turn the book face out, by golly I’d do it.

Of course, you know what happened. Or you can imagine. I nearly went crazy. Because once the book is out there, it is out of our hands and out of our control. And it wasn’t until I stopped my constant checking of rankings and sales and blog reviews that I became happy again.

Now that I have a paperback out in the wild and a sequel hitting shelves in a few weeks, I’m trying to change course. I’m trying to NOT control my book’s fate for the first time. I won’t be popping into Barnes & Noble or Book Passage or Copperfield’s every week to see how many of my books they are carrying. I won’t be checking my Amazon or BN rankings. And I sure as heck won’t be looking at BookScan.

Because I have no control over those things.

I’ll just start on a new book. Because the characters and the story — those are the only things I can control.

To First Kisses and Beyond

2012-01-07T02:00:00.001-05:00

This past fall marked the first time since kindergarten that I wasn’t in school – either as a student or a teacher. I’ve blogged about this some, anticipating what it would be like. Were my expectations accurate? Mostly. Have there been surprises? Definitely.

I had no idea that I honestly wouldn’t miss teaching. Correction: I miss the act of teaching. I miss the crazy moments, like the day a certain student who shall remain unnamed dashed into the room and excitedly informed me that he’d pierced his nipples and would I like to see, followed by lifting his shirt so I could, then asking if it was okay to show me the whole thing on his cell phone. Of course. Your shirt is up over your shoulders. I don’t think the ‘no cell phones’ rule is really an issue at this point. I miss the students and the intensity of watching 185 students go through the angst of being sixteen and seventeen. I really do miss that.

I do not miss: standardized testing, pointless inservices, the inherent male chauvinism of Texas public education ( yes the good old boy system is still alive and well), grading papers for eight hours plus on the weekends. I do not miss parent conferences.

Working for myself has been different, freeing, scary, a pleasure. At first I worked non-stop. I’d write during the day and then write most of the night because I was used to working then, after I’d put in my first ten hours doing the day job. I’m a little less frenetic these days. I know the time is there most days. But I’m also conscious that the work expands to fill the hours. More promotional ideas. More blogging. Most importantly, more book ideas and more projects. When I’ve passed them by Agent Jen, she says go for it. So my days are full. But I like at least the illusion that I’m more in charge of my time.

My novels are full of firsts, too. My own life time of firsts are part of what I draw on when I write. That first awkward kiss from a boy at summer camp just before I turned twelve. I freaked and turned my head and he kissed my cheek and was too shy to adjust and make it to my lips. My first boyfriend. (okay, yeah, he was first chair bassoon in the marching band. Make of this what you will) My first true love and first heart-wrenching break up. The first time I got really, really drunk. The first day of kindergarten. Of high school. Of college. The first time I… well, I don’t have to tell you all of them. But I need all of those firsts to write. I need to put the heart of my firsts on the page for my readers. If I hold it back, the story isn’t honest. And there is no good writing without honesty. My readers know that.

As Janet Gurtler observed a few posts back, some firsts in our writing lives are glorious and others less so. We didn’t get where we are today without that first rejection.

In August I will finish my first trilogy when Anastasia Forever releases. It will be the first book I’ve taken from beginning to end with the same editor, the lovely Leah Hultenschmidt. Here’s to 2012 and all the first that it will bring!

What do you do when firsts feel like twelfths? April Henry

2012-01-05T10:44:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I feel like I’ve been around the block too many times. Like our theme this month is about “firsts.” But 2011 was a year of lasts for me: the last times I saw three close friends, the last time I took kajukenbo (a mixed martial art), even little lasts, like a restaurant I liked that abruptly closed.

This year my 12th and 13th books (Eyes of Justice and The Night She Disappeared) come out one week apart in April. But I’m pretty sure I had two books come out close together a few years ago. I’m working on a couple of new books, but I’ve already done that about 20 times.

I’m doing a bunch of out-of-state school visits in March, but in 2007 I visited several schools in Texas.

But we need firsts to keep us alive, at least in some figurative sense.

Here are some firsts I’m working on:
- Trying out some different restaurants instead of always going to the same old places we know and like.

- A few weeks ago I started taking kung fu. The class is all guys and I’m the oldest. I knew no one when I walked in the door. It seems a very different animal than kajukenbo, so all the stuff I know is not much help. Not much emphasis on forms or stances. This class seems geared just to teaching you to fight. Anyone who knows me will say that my first, second and third reactions to fighting would be to run away. I sparred (often scared spitless) in kajukenbo, but I think kung fu will really make me a fighter. (Note to anyone who knew me growing up: yes, we are talking about the same girl who got Cs in PE for not being able to dance to Winchester Cathedral, for sinking to the bottom of the pool again and again, for cowering in prison ball, and for being beaten in round robin tennis by everyone, including the mainstreamed developmentally disabled girl and the the girl who had juvenile arthritis so bad she couldn’t use one arm.)

- Writing something that is not a mystery or a thriller. Writing something that is not my “brand.”

- Truly acting like this is my one and only life, and that the things I am saving to eat, read, or do “later” or for a “special occasion,” need to be eaten, read, or done NOW. Or at least this year.

Writing Firsts by Janet Gurtler

2012-01-04T12:44:00.001-05:00

I love firsts. The freshness. The clean slate. The anticipation and newness of new beginnings! Firsts keep us hopeful and alive.

First picture with a Stormtrooper

2012 is a New Year. (Yes. I did notice. Believe it or not I am quite observant about these sorts of things.) So maybe it's not actually a well kept secret, but the beginning of a New Year is truly a delightful time to imagine all that might be. Despite my fear of proclaiming goals to the world at large, there is a wiggle in my belly, a dream in my heart for what could be in this new year of ours.

First Janet Gurtler Book

The wonderful thing about this crazy publishing business is that there are many, many firsts. Last year was my first YA Book as Janet Gurtler. My first book with Sourcebooks. My first year with two books out in one year. My first sale on a partial. My first time writing to a tight deadline and my first time, making that deadline. My first trip to New York City. My first book launch with friends. The list goes on and on and I'm sure the same can be said for every reader of this blog. Published authors, readers, prepublished writers, all of us!

First Chihuahua

When I look back at the year past, there were so very many firsts that I didn't even know were going to transpire. So many surprises and gifts from the universe. What about you?

Of course, I'm only pointing out the good things right now. There were lots of firsts that weren't so magical. And there will continue to be more. But ah. The firsts that taste like calorie free chocolate cake with thick, sweet icing. Those are the ones that I am looking forward to.

My first book published in 2012 is coming. I can dream of about it for now and set my hopes high. (Reality will come soon enough.) I'll have first look at a cover. There will be my first appearance in a print anthology (Dear Teen Me). My first high school talk.

So many firsts to look forward to, so many I don't even know about yet. So many outside of my writing world and so many that will enrich my life. Some that may break my heart and some that might even make me cry. Let's hope those are the minority.

Here's to a big list of great firsts to you and yours in 2012!! Publishing firsts and real world firsts too!
What are some first you are looking forward to this year?

First time reading lots of great new books!

The First Time All Over Again - CJ Omololu

2012-01-03T06:00:00.001-05:00

First word.
First chapter.
First time typing the words 'the end'.
First conference.
First response from an agent.
First 'yes' response from an agent.
First contract.
First cover.
First ARC.
First night sleeping with your book next to you.
First time spotting your book in a store.
First good review.
First bad review.
First angsty phone call to writing buddy while curled in a fetal position on the floor.
First fan letter.
First author visit.
First state list nomination.
First Scholastic book fair.

Writing is full of firsts. Each book is a brand new experience, and no matter how many times you've done it, starting a book always feels like the first time. For me, each time I begin, I try to find ways that work better. In the past, I've used this tried and true high-tech method:

Yep. The old corkboard and index cards. This method has seen me through three different books, and while I like it, there is a lot of repetition. Whenever I change something (and I often move chapters and scenes throughout a draft), I have to re-do the index cards so that I can keep track. I go through a lot of pencils.

I'm starting a new book soon, and I've decided to step into the 21st century, so this will be my first time using actual writing software. I'm told by writing friends that the right software can keep track of all of this stuff automatically and that it will change my life. Bring it on. I'm hoping to write two complete books in 2012 and I can use all the help I can get.

The bottom line is, no matter how you do it, whether you write in a notebook, or on a laptop, whether you use a corkboard or Scrivener, need total silence or music blasting through your headphones, none of the rest of the 'firsts' will exist without that all important first. That first word.

Here's hoping your new year is full of exciting firsts.

A New Chapter (Holly Schindler)

2012-01-01T08:48:00.001-05:00

Actually, it's not just a new chapter I'm working on, my friends. It's a new book. Page one of a brand new Word document, on day one of a brand new year...

I just can't think of a better way to ring in '12...

Happy New Year!

Honest Goals for the New Year

2011-12-30T00:01:00.000-05:00

Writing goals, writing goals, writing goals. That would be an easy one to duck. You know, just say whatever I figure people expect me to say. Skate right over the surface of it. Except for one thing. I was never very good at that. And I’m getting worse at it all the time.

So, here comes an honest post.

I don’t have much in the way of New Year’s goals for my writing. Because I really don’t have a writing problem. I have a selling problem.

I’m churning out well over a novel a year, plus some other miscellaneous projects. I’m far ahead of schedule with my UK publisher. Whether or not I still have a US publisher remains to be seen. For a while there I was writing one adult novel for the UK market and one YA novel for over here—every year. And I managed. I love to write, and my natural speed is pretty high. I don’t know why, but it is. It just always was. I don’t take credit for it, any more than I take credit for the fact that my eyes are…whatever the hell color they are. Gray or green depending on my shirt and the lighting. I know, I’m getting off track.

My problem is not how to get more words. My problem is how to get more readers.

It’s possible that I have this problem because people assume that I don’t. You know, I’ve been around this business a while. And once you get adapted for film, all your problems are over for the rest of your life, of course. Hey, I thought so, too, once upon a time. I’m not making fun of it. But I have all these people who are very aware of me as an author, and figure I’m having a great professional life, and enjoying great success. And I think for the most part they don’t tend to buy my books because they figure they don’t need to. That I don’t need them to. But I sort of…do. But you don’t say that to people, because…well, because you just don’t. (And because too many other people just do anyway. Even though you just don’t.)

So the truth is, I’m a bit perplexed as to how I’ll go about surmounting this goal, to earn more readers and sell more copies of the books. Sure, I know all about social networking and blog tours and keeping a website. I’m doing all the things they say you’re supposed to do. I’m not sure what the missing piece is, and how much of it is untrackable good fortune, or circumstances outside of our control.

I know one missing piece, but I’m not willing to change it. I could write novels that are more user-friendly. Less challenging. But that’s off the table.

So, being more than caught up on my writing, my job for next year seems to involve how to make more people aware of what I do. Only a fairly small portion of readers want what I’m offering (I think that’s true of most writers—not everything is for everybody) but if I can reach a new cross-section, maybe I can enjoy another small percentage. My goal as a writer has always been just to make enough money to keep writing. Nothing fancier than that. I’m on a real knife edge in that regard going into 2012, but I’m still going.

Now, how to tell people that I’m not fine just as it stands, and I really do need the help, the word of mouth, whatever they care to offer, if they care to.

Well…I guess I just did.

Told you this would be an honest post. It’s getting to the point where that’s the only kind of post I know how to write anymore. Which is okay. With me, anyway. Hope it’s okay with you, too.

2012: whether we like it or not (Brian Katcher)

2011-12-29T01:15:00.005-05:00

2011 was both an excellent and a terrible year for my writing career. Excellent, in that Almost Perfect won the coveted Stonewall Book Award and Playing With Matches was also honored with the North Carolina Young Adult Book Award.

Unfortunately, there was also a glaring setback. My third book, Mysterious Ways, was set to be published this summer. I'd been paid, we'd discussed cover art and everything. And then, without warning or explanation, my contract was terminated. My wonderful agent tells me not to worry, she'll find it a new home. Except then she gets laid off. And while she's now working in the publishing industry again, I am without representation, and with an unpublished manuscript.

But I am an adult. I simply took a deep breath, counted to twenty, and let loose a stream of profanity that would make a sailor blush. No word yet on how that affected my real job as an elementary school librarian.

Now I could console myself with such lesser things as my good health, my loving wife, and wonderful daughter. But my thoughts kept returning to one theme:

REVENGE!

Did I say revenge? Sorry, I meant perseverance. So what if I'd bragged about this third book to all my friends? So what if I'd been telling reporters about it for months? So what if I'd been yakking about it on facebook?

No, I'm not giving up on you, Mysterious Ways. As our webmistress, Holly Schindler told me, now I can make the book my own again. Stop thinking about impressing an editor and go back to the start. Remember why I wanted to tell the story of a lonely girl and her friend who secretly manipulates the news for his own personal gain.

And now I have a chance to rewrite my other unloved child, Everyone Dies at the End: A Romantic Comedy. We all love a good teen romance, and we all love a good Lovecraftian tale of horrors that dare not show their 'faces' to the world. Well now you can have both!

I'm so damn excited. I can't stop smiling.

Look out world! In 2012, I'm going to whip these babies into shape! Maybe even write another one. By 2013 you're going to see another book out there by Edmund Dantes...sorry, Brian Katcher! All I have to do is stagger drunkenly in front of some publisher's car.

'So much pain...but, um, I'm sure you don't want to see the police involved. I just happen to have a--cough, cough--manuscript here...'

Writing goal for 2012: sanity

2011-12-28T21:07:00.001-05:00

I went through a huge change in my writing life this year, imho third only to finishing a novel and selling a novel. After 21 years of writing novels and 6 years of getting paid for them, I finally quit my job as a copy editor and became a full-time writer.

There were a couple of reasons for this. One was that my new agent sold five books for me this year, compared with the seven sales agents had made for me over the last five years. I am still not a gazillionaire, but I'm making enough to constitute a full-time salary without supplementing my author money with copy editor money.

But I quit before we'd sold the last two books this year. It was book number three, The One That I Want, that pushed me over the edge. And it really wasn't a money issue but a time issue. If I agreed to write that book--very quickly, because it's out now!--there was no way I could have corralled my son while he was out of school all summer long AND continued to copy edit articles about nasal polyps.

I've joked a lot about the nasal polyps job, but the truth is, not all the articles I copy edited were about nasal polyps, and I absolutely loved being a medical copy editor. I didn't give up that job lightly. But my bosses did have a tendency to throw five days of work at me with no advance notice and ask for it in three days. Hey, a lot like revisions and copy edits for novels! I was able to handle one job like this for years. The schedule was easier for me to juggle back when I had only one novel out per year and most of my writing deadlines were self-imposed. But two jobs like this didn't work for me anymore. One of them had to go. You know which one.

This went down in April. So for the first third of the year, I was still copy editing a lot of nasal polyps. Despite this, I managed two write two and a half novels this year and go through the revision process on three. I've also written proposals, promoted my books, all that stuff that goes along with writing. Yet I feel like I haven't gotten anything done at all, like I have been very unfocused and airheaded, spinning my wheels. Granted, for years I mothered a toddler with my husband mostly gone to his third-shift job or sleeping during the day, I copy edited articles about nasal polyps, and I wrote novels whenever I could grab a minute. Great swaths of my first published novel, Major Crush, were written while I was on the elliptical machine at the YMCA. It was those levels of drive and panic that I was trying to dial down when I went from two jobs to one this year. It didn't happen.

Therefore, my writing goal in 2012 is to start feeling like writing is a job that I can go to each day, complete, and leave. I will then walk out of my office and do something else. I will get so much done in my designated writing time that I will not be revising a novel on Christmas day in 2012 like I did in 2011. (It's Such a Rush, it's coming out this July, and I will be able to show you the beautiful cover soon! I am so happy with it and I hope you enjoy it too, but I really could have done without it on Christmas.)

That's the goal, anyway. But after working as a full-time writer for eight months, I'm beginning to suspect that feeling insane and unfocused and airheaded may not be the product of my hectic schedule. I may actually be insane and unfocused and airheaded, and that's part of what makes my novels what they are.

2011-12-27T07:53:00.006-05:00

When I saw that this month's blog question was "What are your 2012 writing goals" I felt bad about myself. Because I thought about my 2011 goal. And my 2010 goal. And I didn't meet either of them!

Because my goal in 2010 was to finish writing the book I'd started. And when I didn't, I made that 2011's goal. And now, as I'm looking at a mere four days left in December, I'm getting the feeling that won't happen. But I'm trying! Whenever anyone asks me how my book is going I tell them "I have a little over 76,000 words, I think I have about another 5,000 to go." Their reaction is always, is that how you think about your writing, in terms of words instead of pages? And I say yes. Because 5,000 words doesn't feel like that much work to me. What I don't tell them is that the story is killing me, it's been so hard to write and putting it in terms of word count instead of the story making sense helps to ease my anxiety.

I have a very short attention span. I love a sprint, hate a marathon. So thinking long term is not terribly motivating to me. I'm not a big fan of delayed gratification. I'd like my dessert now, please.

I don't usually make long term writing goals because so much intervenes - like life - and I don't want to get discouraged. And the fact is, every book is different. I've written books in 3 months and 6 months and now this one has taken two years. So I stick with shooting for base hits instead of home runs. Write 1,000 words. Edit the first two chapters. Don't sit by the pool reading other people's books instead of writing your own (that's a hard goal to stick to).

So I'll probably stick to my base hits when it comes to goals for 2012. I'll keep to a weekly writing schedule. I'll not give up on my book because it's hard. I'll type 1,000 words and hope it all comes together. I'll edit to make it all better.

And this year I'll be doing something a little different to set myself going in the right direction. See those paper lanterns in that photo? those are Wishing Lanterns I purchased. You light them like little hot air balloons and set them free into the night sky while you make a wish. My wish this year will have to do with my writing. And even though they're not "goal lanterns" I'm hoping that when I get off track I will remember what it was like to send my wish out to the universe and do what it takes to make it come true.

While those don't sound so exciting or like major achievements, they will - eventually - get me over the finish line. Even if I'm crossing a little later than I'd hoped.

Just say no to the apocalypse and other 2012 goals

2011-12-27T02:00:00.001-05:00

My father used to keep a hand-made notepad in his shirt pocket. He’d repurpose various unwritten on pieces of paper, cut them evenly, staple them together and then jot on them. Things to do, grocery lists, reminders. Each December as the year turned, he’d get a new wall calendar and meticulously go through the months, marking birthdays and anniversaries so he would remember to send cards. In his desk drawer were stacks of index cards for everyone we knew with their birthdates, addresses, phone numbers… when a new baby was born, he’d mark it. When someone died, he’d mark that, too. Low tech, yes. But highly effective.

It is thus no great surprise that I am a list maker and a goal setter. In fact, for the past six years, I’ve written myself a letter every New Year’s day, taking stock of what has gone on and establishing what I’m aiming for in the new year. Not that I always get there. I often don’t. Plans can change. Plans can fail. I can tell my plan to go to hell or cling to it like a burr. But only if I have one first. Or as my husband is fond of saying when I obsess too much with “what if?”: What if it rains hockey pucks? We’ll all get concussions. Which is his version of my late Uncle Harry’s bit of German Jew wisdom – Man plans and God laughs.

For what it’s worth, here is next year’s plan, in many ways not that different from my esteemed colleagues who have already posted: (this is the life of the 27th of the month poster; the good stuff has often been said. But in January I take over a new date, the 7th, so watch out!)

1. Finish the book that I’ve been writing on and off since late 2008. I love this book. I am meant to write this book. I believe in this book. My agent believes in this book. My critique group believes in this book. But life has continued to get in its way. I have written and sold and edited three other books (2 of which are due out in the coming months) since I began this one. I’ve left teaching, been a mother of the groom, recovered from cancer and drunk tequila of questionable origin while standing on a bar in Ensenada since I began this book. (Don’t ask. Really. Don’t.) But it’s time to get it done. I’m giving myself until April.
2. Continue to find balance in life. Work, family, play, travel and all the rest. It’s been a little easier the past few months because I’m not teaching full time. But life has a way of filling the space. Yeah, I’m not grading essays and research papers for 8 hours every Sunday. That's start. But I also need to stop giving myself a hard time if I don't get it right. Cause sometimes I won't.
3. Breathe easy about Anastasia Forever. It's coming out in August. I've done good work. My Sourcebooks team has done good work. I need to enjoy and celebrate this. A lot!
4. Get better at saying no. Except when I should say yes. Accept compliments graciously rather than denying them. (I hate that I do this. But it's hard to stop)
5. Be present. Which means that while I could expand this list, I won’t. I have a life to enjoy.

embrace the joy of discovery - Alisa M. Libby

2011-12-25T05:00:00.000-05:00

This is an image from Lynda Barry's beautiful book WHAT IT IS. She writes about how she tortured herself every day she sat down to work, asking herself "What is it? Is it good? Don't you know?!?!" The doubts were suffocating her creativity. Finally she learned (or re-learned) to accept and embrace the NOT knowing, and she was able to create again.

I have this page propped on my desk right now, to remind myself to have patience. Writing a book is an adventure, and we don't necessarily know how the journey will end when we begin. So why not just persevere, regardless of doubt and insecurity, and enjoy the scenery while we're at it?

I'll echo Emily Whitman's post, because it was simple and struck a chord with me: "Life is a balance. Writing is part of it." An important part of my life, but not the only part. When the writing isn't going well, there are other things - people I love, in particular - who can lift me up and help me through the rough spots. There will be rough spots; that's just how writing goes, for me, at least. But there is joy in the process as well, and that's why I'm still working at it. Not because it's easy, but because it's what I do.

It's a rich and varied life, this writing life. I wish all of you, bloggers and readers alike, a joyful holiday season. And an inspired year ahead.

A Goal Completed--Sarah Porter

2011-12-22T12:28:00.003-05:00

Two days ago I finished the last volume of the Lost Voices Trilogy and sent it off to my publishers. It was almost three months past the deadline, and the manuscript just kept getting longer and longer and seemed like it would never end. Then, all at once, all the wriggling strands of plot started tying together, the characters made their decisions, the rewriting wrapped up, and there I was looking at a completed novel--and also, for the first time in my life, a completed series.

The final volume is called The Twice Lost, and it will be out in July 2013.

It's very long and epic, so long that it really could have been two books instead of one, but so packed with plot that I don't see any way it could have been shorter.

And now it's like I'm sitting on a beach after some enormous sweeping wave has just receded out to sea, trying to make sense of the reconfigured landscape and of all the strange detritus around me on the shore. I'm drained and disoriented and very tired. After spending three years immersed in this story, close to these characters, it's hard to say goodbye.

I do have other projects to work on, other goals for the coming year: a half-completed novel for adults to finish, an idea for a new YA. But I can't think about them yet. My mind is still swarming with fragments of the book I've just finished, snatches of dialogue, the light on the water where the mermaids swam away.

Goals Shmoals - by CJ Omololu

2011-12-21T06:00:00.000-05:00

I don't set goals. Ever. I go to a writer's conference every year and at the end there is a big ceremony where you write down a goal on a piece of paper and then throw it into the fire. I always set fire to a blank piece of paper. Goals for me are just little scraps of reprimand, tangible evidence that I didn't accomplish what I set out to do.

Despite my feelings toward actually setting goals, there are things that I know deep down I always wanted to accomplish. When I'm feeling like I should quit writing, I like to look back on the thing I've actually done right:

1. Growing up, I always felt this nagging inside that there was something I was supposed to be doing, but it wasn't until I wrote my first story at the age of 38 that I even had an inkling of what that thing was. I'm grateful that I finally figured it out.

2. I started writing initially because I wanted to see more brown kids in books. I'm thrilled that my book TRANSCENDENCE that is coming out in June has a gorgeous, hot, brown boy on the cover (the one that's out there now on Goodreads and Amazon is NOT the final) that I hope to be able to show soon.

3. When my kids were small, I'd walk through the Scholastic book fair and wonder how a person actually got a book on those shelves and how it would feel. I'm thrilled to say, I finally found out this year:

This was at my son's middle school and I had no idea it was going to be there. Let's just say it was one of my life-highlights so far. And why yes, a poster just like that happens to reside in our basement room as we speak.

There are a couple of 'wants' that I'm trying to work on this year:

1. I want to listen more. I have very little interaction during the day with other humans, so when I get with people I tend to talk too much. I want to learn to listen rather than just waiting to talk. When you really listen, people have great stories to tell and you might be able to steal them for your writing.

2. I want to stop wasting so much time. I finally have a great writing space - lots of light, plenty of work surface, places for books etc.:

It even comes with a cat and a dog. There's only one problem with this workspace, which you might be able to spot with a photo from my work chair:

Yeah, it's in my kitchen. Which means that every time someone walks through the room, I get distracted. I spend a lot of my writing time cleaning, tweeting and fussing around - it takes a long time to focus. I'm not sure if I solve this by learning to drywall or just figuring out an iron-clad work schedule, but it's something I want to do.

3. I want to see my book being read 'in the wild'. A few years ago I was at a skate park in another town (yeah, I hang out at skate parks) and spotted a girl reading a friend's book. I texted that friend right away and we squealed about how cool that was. I'd love to see someone I don't know, on a train, in a cafe, reading my book in public (one of the reasons I'm not totally sold on ereaders - you can't peek at covers). Nothing I can do to make that happen except spend 2o12 writing the best books I possibly can.

Happy New Year!

Celebrating Firsts by Lauren Bjorkman

2011-12-20T06:00:00.001-05:00

While my everyone looks ahead toward their goals for next year, I’m going to look back. Oppositional defiant disorder, much? Seriously, December—if you can take a moment from the holiday frenzy to breathe—is the perfect time for reflection.

This year had many firsts for me.

I wrote my first short story since high school—The Shark King—for an e-book anthology aptly call THE FIRST TIME. It’s a collection about love-kissing-boyfriends-girlfriends, but also relationships with parents, hardships, and triumphs, with a bonus zombie slaying or two.

Twenty-five of the 2009 Debutantes contributed stories, including YAOTLs Cheryl Renee Herbsman, Sydney Salter, and Janet Gurtler. These stories are amazing! (and available here and here for just $2.99 :D)

Writing a story for the anthology led to another first—buying an e-book reader for my birthday. Though I’m a fanatic about real books, I wanted to give the new technology a try. So far, I like it. I usually read in bed, and I’ve found my new device to be small and easy to hold. Don’t call me a convert yet, but it’s much easier on the eyes than a regular computer screen. Maybe it will even save a few trees.

Now I better go write those goals for 2012.

Happy, merry, joy!

Reach for the Joy of the Work, and Other Almost-Resolutions, by Emily Whitman

2011-12-18T06:00:00.000-05:00

This picture is Edward Lear's Foss the Cat. He makes me happy. That's one of my goals this year. To keep reaching for the little things that give me zaps of pleasure, that wake me up. To find ideas lurking in odd places, and be awake enough to know, "That one is MINE," in a greedy, instinctive way.

Here are my writing goals for 2012, my "almost-resolutions"--almost because, as much as I think I should just know them once and for all, they are things I have to discover over and over and over again, as if we're meeting for the first time.

Reach for the joy of the work!

Practice craft! Be greedy for new ideas about ways of working.

Stay in touch with the muse.

The parts that are hard mean there's also soul work to be done. Gather bravery and plunge in.

Feed writing friendships and community so they grow.

Life is a balance. Writing is part of it.

Get stuff done, get it out in the world, and let it breathe on its own.

Happy holidays to you and yours!

Emily

GOALS 2012 by Wendy Delsol

2011-12-17T11:01:00.003-05:00

Must we? In order to identify areas where we seek improvement, it’s necessary to broadcast our less-than-perfect selves. But okay. So as not to be the pooper of the group, I’ll ’fess up and resolve to improve on the following:

I’ll set a realistic deadline for my current work in progress. 2011 was a little … shall we say … nuts. I have other more colorful adjectives for that particular twelve month span, but I reserve those nuggets for occasions when the repeat of them would be your word against mine. Anyway, in 2011, I released two novels and wrote one. With edits and promotion (of my 2010 release) and book-related travel, the manuscript I wasn’t writing (the third in my Stork trilogy) became a constant source of stress and worry. I did finish it, but it required a very grueling schedule, one that had me miss our family vacation, work seven-day weeks, and press new frown lines into my forehead (like I needed more of those). This year, I’ll know my limits.

I’m not a complete slacker when it comes to exercise. Tennis is my sport of choice, but unfortunately an arm injury limits me to only one or two days of serves and volleys a week. And with the above mentioned work load, workouts were something that simply got cut from the schedule. Next year I’m adding Zumba into the mix. Anyone out there into Zumba? So much stinkin’ fun! In addition to my tennis team and the occasional walk, I plan on sambaing my way back into some of the jeans that have been out of rotation.

As the mother of two teen boys (14 and 16), my shopping list includes requests such as Oreos, Doritos, cookie-dough ice cream, Reese’s peanut butter cups … I could go on and on. Suffice it to say that I’m surrounded by temptation. And thoroughly disappointed in what I now allow my kids to consume. This from one who, when my kids were toddlers, was a Whole Foods regular. I now find myself looking around guiltily lest a neighbor see me unloading the 24-pack of Coke, Funyuns, and frozen pizzas. And with my insane 2011 writing schedule, there weren’t many home-cooked meals. In 2012, I’m consciously thinking about food as fuel, shopping the outer aisles more often (as opposed to the inner aisles of processed foods), and getting my unadventurous eaters to try healthier options. If only some of my old tricks were still available to me, but … hey … I’m a creative type, right?

I think I’ll quit there. I’m a firm believer that goals only work when realistic. If I were to add a bunch more resolutions—like learning patience or sticking to a budget or tackling Faulkner—then nothing would get done.

Happy 2012 to one and all. Life is an amazing journey. I wish you unexpected treasures, rewarding detours, delightful company, and a tailwind.

I might have goals. (Geoff Herbach)

2011-12-16T06:58:00.007-05:00

So, I’m sitting here in San Francisco, where I don’t live (I live in a colder place in the upper-Midwest). Whoa. San Francisco is pretty nice. I’m in a Japanese Hotel (manga-themed – I’m serious -- check out Steph with our room's deer mural with a city in its tummy). This place has nice furniture. I’m thinking: hmm… I like all this little furniture. I have space to walk around in between this nice furniture. Why is my office back home so filled with crap? Answer: I pile paper on paper. Mail is under my students’ work, which is under my lunch plate and soda cans and newspapers, and all these books I’m in the middle of reading are scattered across the plates and papers and essay exams. Gross. I do have a goal: In 2012 I will act as if I live in this Japanese Hotel in San Francisco. There is no paper piled on the furniture here, because the furniture is too small to hold piles. I’m going to buy some new furniture and maybe do some recycling.

I think I have some other goals, too...

Do you guys ever wake up in the middle of the night? I do all the time. I’m generally awake from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. For most of my adult life I’ve thought I don’t sleep well because I have so much on my mind. Responsibilities and big ideas, you know? But you have stuff on your mind, too, right? Most of you sleep okay. I drink about sixteen cups of coffee a day. No biggie, except I read an article on the internet recently that said caffeine over-consumption can make a guy jumpy. True. I’m a freaked out monkey man and I don’t sleep very well. Could it be the coffee? Maybe. We’ll see. Goal two: drink less coffee.

Because I once was a cigarette smoker, I now exercise a whole lot to try to improve my unhealthy body. Exercise works. I’m pretty fast (I know because I race a lot of moms at the track at the YMCA, and I defeat most of them). Unfortunately, exercise makes me really hungry. I’m never hungry for broccoli or bananas. I’m really hungry for Dino’s pizza and sometimes Pagliai’s pizza. So I stop off at one of these restaurants quite often and then I eat a lot of pizza. It doesn’t make me fat, exactly. I’m just getting these massive, powerful thighs from exercise and pizza. My thighs don’t fit in my pants very well. All of my pants are exploding in the groin area. That’s trouble. I teach college. Try teaching with your pants blowing out. Not easy. Goal three: stop eating so much Dino’s and Pagliai’s pizza (or stop exercising).

Did you know I live in a log cabin? Seriously. I’ll show you a picture.

I got married this year to my favorite person in the world. She lives in the cabin with me. Another goal for 2012 is to be a really nice person to my wife, Steph. I am going to turn this cabin into the greatest, sweetest place in the world. That seems like a good goal.

San Francisco is pretty great. Tonight we’re meeting up with a big pack of college friends. We’re going to a Russian restaurant where we’ll toast each other a lot and laugh and probably high-five each other (because we are old nerds). It should be fantastic. Sometimes I forget there’s a nice, big world outside of my computer. Yes, I want to keep writing a ton. I love writing. I love my computer. But I want to remember how excellent real people are, too. I want to spend a lot of time in 2012 with people I love. That’s my final goal.

The last two goals are the most important.

Yes! I do have goals!

Hope all is well with you!

Geoff

Soul Goal (Cheryl Renée Herbsman)

2011-12-15T06:00:00.000-05:00

This year has been one of altering my relationship to goals. I have always been a very goal-oriented person. I love goals -- hate deadlines -- but love goals. I'm happier when I'm working toward something, preferably something in the realm of dreams come true. But as Anna posted on Monday, sometimes reaching a goal can make us really second guess our efforts on the next one. After my debut, Breathing, became a book, I got lost in trying to understand which elements led to its publication and in trying to figure out how to reproduce them. I started to see myself as a professional, which in some ways was great, and in other ways tied me up, caused me to forget the simple beauty of just writing without all those expectations.

When my daughter became ill this summer, I didn't care about writing at all, and I wondered if I ever would again. It didn't take long for me to remember how much I need to write. And when I came back to it, it was with a new understanding. I wrote for me. I wrote what needed to be written. And I'm pleased with the writing.

So when I think about goals for 2012, for me it's not about getting a certain amount of writing done or aspiring to a specific endpoint. It's about trusting life more, not fighting windmills, not pushing through closed doors. It's about moving forward in my own way, at my own pace. It's about trusting that the right doors will open at the right times, that there's no rush, no urgency. It's about not trying to please everyone or compare myself to anyone. It's about writing what my soul needs to write.

There's something very freeing about this type of goal. I don't have to worry about whether or not I'll accomplish it. Because it's not an accomplishment. It's not something that I either succeed or fail at. It's something I can try anew each day. And if I don't move forward on it today, I can try again tomorrow. It's calming to start the year not feeling stressed about reaching my goal. I plan to focus on balance and presence -- sinking into the world of writing when I write, being present with my family when I'm not writing, enjoying each in its time rather than being lost in one world while living the other. It can be tempting to declare our work "important" and set it on the top of the priority list. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we shouldn't treat our work as a priority. I set aside writing time almost every week day. But there are other things that are just as and even more important. I want to remember that this year and allow it to help me find the right balance.

Whatever your goals may be, whichever type works best for you, here's wishing you a year filled with health and hope, joy and laughter, love and peace.