Blog Chain - Books Are...

Hey!  I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving.  I enjoyed a nice Internet vacation but I'm back now for another blog chain!

This round's topic was chosen by Kate and she simply wants us to fill in the blank:

Books are: _____________________.


This is deceptively simple but it took me quite some time to come up with an answer I liked.  Books are a lot of things to me.  Relaxation, escape, knowledge, income, freedom.  But most of all, for me, books are gateways.

That's right. For me, books are magical portals that can take me anywhere, make me anyone, and allow me to do anything.  Unlike movies or video games, books are the gateways that allow me to cross into the worlds contained within their pages.  I haven't just read about Harry Potter, I've BEEN Harry Potter.  I've been to Hogwarts.  I've sailed with Prince Caspian.  I was in the Hunger Games.  I've escaped the Nazis and started a comic book empire.  I've hunted anthropophagi.  I've spent a night in New York looking for Where's Fluffy.

Books are magical and transformative.  They're gateways to anywhere.  Enjoy your travels.

Go check out Michelle's awesome post and then tomorrow go see what books are to the amazing Abby!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I have a lot to be thankful for and I hope you do too.  Happy Thanksgiving all :)

Hating a Hater

There is a particular book that I've wanted to read for a very, very long time.  I have, however, refused to read it because the author of that book has beliefs that I find repugnant, and is outspoken about them.  Since I became an author, I began to wonder if I was being an idiot for sticking to this decision.  I mean, buying the book doesn't mean I condone or agree with that author's beliefs?  Right?

I don't know, and that's where I'm having an issue.  I'm not going to say who the author is or what the beliefs are...I don't actually think that's important (and I'd really kind of prefer if no one speculated on it either).  I'm fairly sure that I have political/social/religious views that, if people knew about, would cause them to think differently about my work.  But I suppose that's why I do my best to keep those aspects of my life private.

Social networking and the internet have changed the author-reader relationship.  It used to be that you could idolize your hero from afar.  Now you can idolize him/her on Twitter, Facebook, their blog, and YouTube.  You can chat directly with your favorite star.  And I think that creates problems.  Because what do you do when you find out that your hero is a lunatic?  When you read a book, the author is a ghost in the pages.  When they become real, solidify, they risk tainting their work with their personal beliefs.

Maybe I should be better at compartmentalizing my feelings about authors and my feelings about their work, but I'm only human.  So I suppose this blog post is a kind of a plea to new authors or anyone who's trying to break into writing.  I'm not saying you shouldn't have opinions or that you shouldn't let your opinions be known.  I'm just saying that you should be aware that your opinions could keep you from reaching readers, so maybe you should pick your battles wisely.  That's all.

Backtracking

Sometimes you have to go backward to go forward.  That's writerly logic for you.  It doesn't seem like it should make sense, but it's true.

See, when you're writing, at some point in the process you might come to a point in your book where you go, "What the fudgecicle am I doing?"  You'll realize that you've gone so far off the map that they don't have a name for where you are.  It's an unsettling feeling.  And you have two choices.  Either you keep going and pray to whatever god you hold most holy to help you you out of the mess you've created, or you go back.

When I say, go back, I don't mean a couple of pages.  What I mean is that you have to slash and burn.  I reached a point like that in Deathday.  I'd written five chapters.  But by the end of CH 5 I realized I'd royally messed up the story.  In that chapter I had my three heroes sitting in the house of a suburban housewife who also happened to be a hooker.  Ronnie was negotiating for Ollie to get...serviced...while the boys sat in the living room discussing the furniture.  Mind you, in the first draft of this book the kids were all in 8th grade.  Now, leaving aside the fact that I was NEVER going to be able to have a scene in which my 13 y/o hero has sex with a 40-something soccer mom (I was trying to recall the scene from Biloxi Blues when Matthew Broderick loses his virginity to a sweet, Southern prostitute), I realized that I'd made a series of mistakes.  I tried to fix them but what I finally realized was that to fix them, I had to be free of them.

Now, I was still new to writing and finishing books.  Every word I write still feels like a victory over the blank page, so the idea of deleting those chapters felt like heresy.  But I knew that's what I had to do.  And I did it.  I deleted CH's 2-5 and started from scratch.  It was my first big lesson in the brutality of writing.  Since then I've become quite adept at deleting whole swaths of writing.  If I feel something isn't working, and I can't seem to make it work, I find that just deleting the whole section and writing it from scratch enables me to be free and to solve the problem in a unique way.

So next time you find yourself stuck in a hooker's house, don't try to fix it, just delete it.  Give yourself a fresh start and begin again.

Blog Chain - You're All Characters

Blog chain post time!!!  This post is brought to us by the brilliant Miss Abby, who wants to know:

Where do your characters come from? And once they've been introduced to you, how do you get to know them?


When I was younger, I used to fill out these crazy character profile sheets and all that nonsense.  But these days, my characters sort of speak to me.  I hear their voices first.  Then, as I write, I get to know them.  Sometimes an ability or characteristic will come out of a need in the story, but most of the time, characteristics simply appear organically.  For instance, in Deathday Letter Shane is a terrible driver.  I never sat down and thought that Shane should or would be a terrible driver.  It simply came up that Shane was a bad driver.  He told me.  Actually, Ollie told me Shane was a bad driver, Shane thought his driving was ace.

I suppose I've found that when I have a preconceived notion of who or what a character is, I find that it's more difficult to expand beyond those notions. But if I discover the character as I go, I learn fascinating things about them that I wouldn't have otherwise learned.  It sounds all wishy-washy, I know, but pre-defining characters creates a mental block that I sometimes have problems working around.  If I decide before writing the story that a character is mean, then I become caged in by that.  And I hate being caged in.

So yeah.  Is that an answer?  Like life, I enjoy exploring, beginning with a blank slate, and getting to know my characters as I go.

Well, that's it for this blog chain.  If you haven't read Michelle M's fantastic musings, head over there, or start at the beginning and read the whole chain!

Book and a Chat

Thursday Night.  Be there!

Strive to Be Better

I've said it before but Friday Night Lights is, hands down, the best drama on television.  In its fifth and final season now, if you're not watching it, you're really missing out.

Anyway, there was a really beautiful scene in this previous week's episode between Coach Taylor and his quarterback Vince.  When we first met Vince, he was struggling with decisions.  He was on a path toward becoming a loser.  A criminal.  Since that time, he's become a leader.  But it's never good enough for the people around him.  He struggles daily with the expectations of the people in his life.  And he finally loses it.  Everyone wants him to be better and he just doesn't know if he CAN be better.  That's when Coach tells him that no one's telling him to BE better, they're telling him to STRIVE to be better.

It was one line that I think encapsulates the sum of what we should all be trying to do.  I know that I'm never going to be JK Rowling or Susan Cooper or Neil Gaiman or JRR Tolkien.  But that doesn't mean that I'm not going to strive to be them every day.  Every time I sit down at my keyboard, I'm going to try harder, work harder, and do the absolute best that I can.  Anything less is a waste of time.

That's it.  That's all I have to say.  Strive to be better.  That's all you have to do.

Teenage Wasteland

First off, pardon me if this all comes out a bit jumbled.  I stink at these well thought out posts and most of my blog posts come out as little more than incoherent rambles.  You're probably better off reading a blog post by Hannah Moskowitz or Libba Bray or Maureen Johnson.  They're good bloggers.  Not me.  I'm a hack.  A blogger without a clue.  A witless wonder with a keyboard.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Last night I finished Andrew Smith's THE MARBURY LENS.  It's one of those books that's going to haunt me for a long time.  Maybe forever.  There are few books/films/plays that have that lasting kind of effect on me.  Donnie Darko was one such film.  I remember the first time I finished watching it, just sitting in my bedroom surrounded by empty beer bottles and an ashtray full of cigarette butts, with my mouth hanging open and my thoughts suspended out...there.  I couldn't wrap my brain around the movie.  I couldn't have explained it.  To this day, when people ask me to describe it, I tell them that they just have to watch it.  I have watched it at least twenty times.

THE MARBURY LENS was like that for me.  Last night, sitting in my sweats, waiting for a friend bearing light sabers to come over, I turned the last page, read it...half-a-dozen times at least, and then closed the book.  I sat on the edge of my couch going over and over the last bits, unsure what I'd just read.  It's a complete mind f__k of a book.  It begins with detachment and beer, detours into kidnapping and rape, and then takes you screaming right over the freaking cliff into the bowels of insanity.  Cannibalism, orgies, falling in love, missing time, strangers, ghosts, corpse-eating bugs, friendship.  It's all there.  All there to mess with your mind.  Today, I'm still not entirely sure what I read.  I think, like Donnie Darko and Mulholland Drive and The Machinist and Naked Lunch and Slaughterhouse Five, the events matter less than how they make you feel.  And Marbury, for me, represented a hellish landscape, a past Jack simultaneously rejected and craved.  It was a hook in his mouth.  A rotting ulcer that kept him from moving forward.  However there's more to the story.  More to uncover.  And I hope to peel back the layers on future readings.

As you can tell, I haven't been this excited about a book in a long time.  Books like this push boundaries.  They show us what YA can be.  Fearless and brutal and touching and raw.  Just like life.  JELLICOE ROAD was another such book.  It didn't have the brutality of THE MARBURY LENS but it didn't pander to its audience either.  It challenged them.  It let them know right from the beginning that it wasn't screwing around.  Patrick Ness' CHAOS WALKING series is the same.  It offers the darkness of real life.  These books don't hold back.  In fact, they pull back the curtain to reveal the wormy underbelly of life.  Evil can't always be tamed.  Good isn't always that good.  Heroes are often the most fucked up of all.  And yet there's hope.

Over the last couple of years, I've spent a lot of time talking to people about darkness in YA.  How dark is too dark?  How much is too much?  I have a lot of dark stories I want to tell.  Some are maybe too dark.  Some not.  I have funny stories too.  I hope I'll get to tell them all.  Books like the ones above show me what to strive for.  They tell me that the only boundaries in YA literature are honesty.  If you're honest, if you're real, then the story goes where it needs to.  It's not gratuitous.  It eliminates everything that doesn't serve the story.  What's left over is okay.  It's in bounds.

There are bound to be people who hate this kind of darkness.  People who want to draw lines in permanent black marker.  People who think that standards of decency should be iron-clad.  And they're right to think that way.  If the boundary pushers had no one against which to push, the world would be anarchy.  But I hope none of these books get caught in the crossfire.  These books are my heroes, their authors are inspirations.

And I think I'm going to go read them all again.  

I May Be Losing It

Yesterday I was belligerent with someone in the express check-out line at the grocery store.  Usually I just mutter things under my breath and think about all the snarky things I'd like to say, but yesterday the words poured out of my mouth like verbal diarrhea.  I couldn't stop them.

For the love of God, people, get off your cell phones before getting into the checkout line.  Don't write checks for $8 worth of store brand instant mac & cheez.  If you're ARE going to write a check, have it out, along with your license (they ALWAYS ask for it).  And don't look shocked and appalled when the people you've held up in line for 10 minutes are grumpy and one of them loses his head.  Sigh.

So every once in a while I get really excited for a book.  I mean, REALLY excited.  I'd heard about Andrew Smith's THE MARBURY LENS a few months ago and I've been waiting impatiently since.  Here's the synopsis:

Sixteen-year-old Jack gets drunk and is in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is kidnapped. He escapes, narrowly. The only person he tells is his best friend, Conner. When they arrive in London as planned for summer break, a stranger hands Jack a pair of glasses. Through the lenses, he sees another world called Marbury.

There is war in Marbury. It is a desolate and murderous place where Jack is responsible for the survival of two younger boys. Conner is there, too. But he’s trying to kill them.

Meanwhile, Jack is falling in love with an English girl, and afraid he’s losing his mind.

Conner tells Jack it’s going to be okay.

But it’s not.

Cool, right?  Well it's not out until the 9th but yesterday I stopped by a bookstore to browse and saw it on the shelf.  I grabbed it and took it home.  I'm in the middle of THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN so I planned on only opening the first page and reading a bit.  Yeah...like an hour later I was sucked into Smith's dark, tragic, and utterly engrossing book.  Sometimes I read a book and I just know when I'm reading something really unique and special.  This is one of those books.  You should totally read it.

NaNoWriMo is going on and I'm tired of all the people naysaying it.  I get that it's frustrating for agents and publishers to get a flood of bad novels when all is said and done.  I get that some people see it as a waste of time.  I get that some people just think it's dumb.  But why poo-poo all over it?  For real.  Not only does NaNo foster a sense of community among writers (who tend to be solitary creatures), but it teaches potential authors one very important lesson:  If you want to write, you have to WRITE.  That lesson took me 15 years to learn.  Maybe if NaNo had been around when I was younger, I'd have been able to learn it sooner.  So I guess what I'm saying is that if you haven't got anything nice to say about NaNo, don't say anything at all.

Is it really almost the end of the year?  Jeez.  So don't forget that on NOV 18th, I'll be on YA A Book and a Chat with Barry Eva.


I guess that's all I have for now.    

Old Dogs and New Tricks

I'll admit it:  I'm sick of vampires.  Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies, and all things paranormal or supernatural.  It's simply a matter of overload.  And yet, I tuned into AMC's The Walking Dead solely on the strength of their other programs (most recently Rubicon).  I was expecting zombies.  They're shambly, they moan, and they'll eat your face off if you can't run fast enough.  How much new ground could the show possibly cover?

I got schooled.  Sure, I got the normal zombie stuff.  Lots of dead bodies, lots of rotting flesh, lots of intestine eating.  But then I also got a story that almost had me choking up.  The characters are well drawn. The drama is palpable but not overwrought.  In short, I was hooked.  The Walking Dead (based on the comic book of the same name) isn't really covering any new ground.  What they're doing is taking something old, polishing it up, and looking at the human aspects of it.  They're giving us drama we can sink our teeth into.  In movies, there's always a moment of horror where a loved one is zombiefied and they have to take an axe to that person.  But TWD is exploring the long-term effects.  What if that loved one followed you around?  What if you had to kill them?  What if you couldn't?  Is being a zombie better than being dead?  At least as a zombie, they're moving, that person is there.  Right?

The writing lesson to take from this is that even in a saturated market you can take something and make it awesome by approaching it from a different angle.  Take vampires for example.  Everyone's read a story about a person who becomes a vampire or a person who's in love with a vampire.  But has anyone ever written a story that explores what happens to a family with a child who becomes a vampire?  What if someone told a story from the POV of a guy whose brother became a vampire?  That'd be different and unique and, if done well, could bring a fresh new outlook to a tired subject.

So if you want to catch a readers' attention, you'll have to make something old new again.  

INCONVENIENT by Margie Gelbwasser

In fifteen-year-old Alyssa Bondar's Russian-Jewish culture, having a few drinks is as traditional asblinchiki and piroshki. So when her mom's midday cocktails turn into an all-day happy hour, it seems like Alyssa's the only one who notices—or cares. Her dad is steeped in the nightly news—and denial—and her best friend Lana is too busy trashing their shared Russian heritage so she can be popular.

Alyssa would rather focus on cross-country meets and her first kiss with her running partner, Keith, but someone has to clean up her mom's mess. But who will be there to catch Alyssa when her mom's next fall off the wagon threatens to drag her down, too?

First off, wish a happy release day to Margie!  INCONVENIENT is out today!  If you haven't read it, you need to.  I was lucky enough to read a copy and I have to say that it's wonderful.  Probably what I like best is that Margie is honest.  She's honest in the way she portray's her characters, the paths their lives take, and the consequences their actions have.  She never shies away from making the hard narrative choices and it's brilliant and beautiful.

But beyond that, Alyssa as a character is multifaceted and insecure and strong in ways she doesn't know, and beautiful, and caring.  Following her on her journey was both heartbreaking and wonderful.  Sometimes I wanted to reach through the pages and choke her but by the end I was in awe.

Margie's written a stellar book about love and loss and feeling like the only different person on the planet.  It will break your heart and make you laugh.  It's that amazing.  

So go check it out.  It's available at all the chains (Amazon, BN, Borders, Books-a-Million), and if your indie isn't carrying it, ask them for it.  Everyone should stock this book.

You can also visit Margie at her website.