So Many Thoughts

I was going to write a post about this photo that I saw while reading Nathan Bransford's blog.  It was going to be about how in the world you could possibly have a panel about the future of YA without including a single YA author of the male variety.  Maybe I'll write that post one day.  Or maybe I'll just shake my head and move on because I'm tired of talking about it.

But then I read this post by Courtney Milan about the role of agents, about how some are turning to publishing and how it's creating a huge conflict of interest.  You should go read it.

I think next week I'm going to put together my views on publishing and agents and the where I see myself and others like me in this new world.  I know a lot of people are certain that self-publishing is going to kill traditional publishing, but the same people thought YouTube was going to kill traditional TV.  Hint:  it hasn't.  Traditional TV is doing a good enough job of killing itself (Did you SEE that proposed Wonder Woman reboot?).

I left my agent back in June and I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how to proceed.  So yeah, check back Monday and I'll post something intelligible about all this.  Until then, have a great weekend.

You Are NOT a Snowflake

Last night I was reading an article about a movie that looked interesting.  It's called IN TIME.  This is what I read:

In Time is Timberlake’s next big picture, and the premise plays out a lot like a modernized riff on Logan’s Run. He stars opposite Amanda Seyfried as a man in a dystopian future where time has become the only currency.

Immediately, I started yelling at Matt, who was just sitting on the couch, minding his own business.  It was MY idea.  I'd come up with that.  Me.  For the next hour, I searched through my notebooks until I finally remembered that I'd emailed the idea to myself.  On February 2, 2010, I sent myself the following email:

A world in the future where the only real currency is time. A person knows how long they'll live when they're born (ex. 22 years 8 months 7 days 18 hours 23 minutes 2 seconds) and that's the currency you have. The protagonist needs help for his sick mother and trades all but one week of his life to save her. In the process he meets a girl who mAkes him want to find a way to get back the lost hours of his life.

Of course, the first thing I figured was that Google was out there reading my email and passing off all my best ideas.  Which, itself, might make a good plot.  I learned more about the movie and found out that the only similar plot point is the idea of time as currency.  I was still disappointed because I'd never done anything with the idea, but it hits home a point that I don't think a lot of writers really, truly get:  Your ideas are not unique.

Somewhere out there, someone has had the same idea as you.  They're writing out YOUR ideas in THEIR notebook.  And there's nothing you can do about it.

What matters is timing and execution.  Timing is simple.  If you have an awesome idea, write it.  There will never be a better time to write it than now.

Execution is what editors and agents will tell you is key.  Ten people can have the same idea, but if yours is done better--the writing is tighter, the characters are full and unique, the angle is something they haven't seen before--then yours is the idea that'll sell.  Look at vampires.  The market is flooded with them.  They're definitely not unique.  But the way people use them is.  And that's what continues to sell.

So....what's the point?  The point is the same as it's always been:  if you want to be a writer, you've got to get out there and write the best damn story you can.  Not later, not tomorrow.  Now.

Not About Harry Potter

Except that it is.

I'm not going to talk about how great the movie was.  If you cared, you were probably there last night and already know.  If you don't care, my gushing isn't going to persuade you otherwise.

What I want to comment on is how amazing the people were.  Anyone who says the power of reading is waning hasn't been outside.  Sure, it was a movie, but these people were there, having wand fights and arguing over who was cooler (Snape FTW).  Those are things that came from reading and loving and living the books.

I'm 33.  I was there with a group of people around my age.  Behind us was a row of 14 and 15 year-olds.  In front of us was a row of 40 something women with nary a child in sight.  There were boys and girls and older folk and every single kind of person you can imagine.

YA is a myth.  The idea that certain books are written for certain age groups is a myth.  The diversity in th theater last night proved that.

When people say that books no longer have the power to reach kids, I think to how many kids love Harry Potter and are searching for the next thing to love, and I can only conclude that people are simply not trying hard enough.

Kids, they want the books, they want to read, they want something magnificent and bigger than themselves.  They want it like oxygen.

If they're not reading, if they're not falling in love with books, then we're not trying hard enough.

Bloodless Nerd

I was reading this about books and Kindles and other e-devices.  In the article, children's author Penelope Lively (whom I've never heard of) states that "anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd."  Here's the entire original article.

I love books.  I grew up with them.  Anyone who has been reading this blog knows that I practically wet myself when I get ahold of a new book.  I also grew up with records and CDs, and non-digital television, and analog telephones and dial-up internet.  I have some nostalgia for those things, but I would not, could not lament their loss because their replacements make life better.

Half of my library is still made up of paper books.  But here's the thing:  books are not a status symbol.  Ms. Lively's quote seems to encapsulate the position of a lot of people.  And I think the reason is because having loads of books makes people FEEL smarter.  Others walk into their houses and see all the books and assume they've read them and assume that they're intelligent.

Owning books doesn't make you smarter, reading them does.  So who gives a crap whether you read them in book form or from one of the many wonderful e-devices now available?

Opinions like this annoy me because they seem to try imbue paper with more significance than it actually has.  The manner in which a story is transmitted from storyteller to audience is less important than the story itself.  I think e-books are the way we're going to bring boys back to reading.  Devices that allow them to read whatever they want without fear of bullying are amazing to me.  I wish I'd had them.

Also, I am a bloodless nerd.  Below are pictures of my library and my e-library.  And you know what?  I've read all those books.

Shut Up and Write

I was browsing a website  called:  My Unfinished Novels.  It's basically a blog where people can put their unfinished books and explain why they never finished it.

The funny thing is that as I read through them, the biggest common thread I saw was that people lost interest.

Now I'm not saying that you should finish every single book you ever start.  If you're bored writing it, chances are that people will be bored reading it.  I've had some ideas that I wrote a few thousand words on and realized it wasn't a good idea after all.

But the real, true thing about writing is simply this:  You have to freaking finish.

Writing isn't easy.  It's grueling.  It's a marathon.  A triathlon.  You don't have to finish first, but you do have to finish.

You don't become a winner by giving up at the half-way point.

That is all.

Power Hour

I never knew what a power hour was until I researched it for my next book.  It's kind of crazy.

Being on an Internet hiatus is really spectacular.  I can sit down and read for more than ten minutes at a time without checking my Facebook status or email (which is usually junk anyway).  If I can figure out a way to structure in Twitter too, I might just keep things this way.

I've been reading (and listening) to a lot of Agatha Christie lately.  I'm not sure why.  It started out because I read that the book THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD featured a really well done twist.  But then I couldn't stop.  I've put away half-a-dozen Christie books since then.

One thing that I noticed her do while reading THE ABC MURDERS was being meta.  She used her narrator, Captain Hastings, who frequently read pulp mystery novels, to comment upon the concept of mystery novels themselves.  I can't repeat the conversation verbatim but he and the hero Hercule Poirot, were discussing how dreadfully boring a mystery novel became when the murder was committed in the first act and then the rest of the book was spent looking at clues.  Hastings commented that books would be more interesting if murders occurred in greater numbers throughout the book or the murder happened later.

I don't know if Christie was using this conversation between Hastings and Poirot to directly speak to her audience, critics, or whathaveyou.  I'm curious to do a little research to see if she face criticism at the time for becoming too set in her ways.  But the interesting thing is that THE ABC MURDERS featured multiple murders spread throughout the book, and the one I finished before that A PERIL AT END HOUSE featured a murder that didn't happen until 80 pages in!

There's really no point here.  It was just an interesting point that I noticed.  I tried something similar once.  I had a character who used the medium of a graphic novel to speak directly to the reader to make a commentary on the events I was writing.  However, in revisions I realized I wasn't speaking to the reader, but to myself.  That character was how I was making sense of the story in that first draft, and in future drafts, I cut that character completely (though I kept the concept of the graphic novel).

So maybe there is a point:  If you find you have a character speaking directly to the audience, explaining things, maybe you should be the one listening to what that character has to say.

Experiment

You see, I remember when email was something you only checked once, MAYBE twice per day, because you paid for your internet connection by the minute, and because it was painfully slow.

I used to be able to sit down for hours at a time and just read.  No distractions.  No interruptions.  Just read.

I don't know if I'm just getting older or what, but I find myself utterly distracted by technology.  I'm not some luddite either.  In my day job, I run an IT department.  Computers are my thing.

But they're taking over my life.  Television, computers.  Taking over.

So I'm going to do an experiment.  I'm going to turn my telephone back into a dumb phone.  No more email, no more internet.  I'm going to turn my computer into a glorified typewriter.

For the rest of July, I'm only going to check the Internet one time per day.  I'll have an hour to check emails, reply, do my Facebooking, and check the news.  One hour.  That is all.

I'll let you know how it works out.

YA Propaganda

Over at Andrew Smith's blog, there were some awesome comments about the whole "boys and YA and men-writing-YA" kerfuffle.

I'm honestly too tired this morning to be coherent.  Here's a great example though, of a book trying to include both boys AND girls.

Beth Revis wrote a fun sci-fi mystery called ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.  It was great fun to read, with a little romance, a little sci-fi, a nice dose of mystery, great characters, and a villain with depth.  The cover, however, was designed to appeal to girls.  All-in-all, I think Beth wrote a book that would definitely cross the gender divide.  But that's not how it was marketed.  Or so I thought.  When I got my copy, I pulled off the dust jacket and found out that the backside was a different cover.  A more gender neutral cover.  How genius!  The book could be aimed more at girls, or more at guys or just plain neutral.

The first cover is clearly designed to highlight the romance between the two main characters (the romance which is not really all that big in the book), while the second cover is designed to appeal to the sci-fi aspect.

I think it's great, actually.  It gives booksellers and readers the chance to decide what they want from their book.  I wish more publishers would try this.