And 2011

Last post of the year...better make it good.

Or not.

2011 was a struggle for me.  Lots happened.  Most of it was amazing.  Some of it was annoying. 

Now I'm looking forward, moving on. 

But before I do, I want to share a couple of 2011 greatest hits.

READY PLAYER ONE by Ernest Cline.  It's not going to win awards for being intensely deep, but this was my favorite read of 2011.  Fast paced and fun, READY PLAYER ONE was the book I needed to sail out of the reading doldrums I'd been stuck in.

STICK by Andrew Smith.  I'm beginning to think he's going to have a book on my list every year.  STICK is more than a great book.  It's experimental and sweet and the kind of book that you'll want to read again.

EVERYBODY SEES THE ANTS by A.S. King.  As a kid who faced bullies during his middle and high school years, this book spoke to me.  I've had trouble connecting to some of King's other protagonists, but Lucky Linderman was awesome.  And the writing, as usual, was brilliant.

INVINCIBLE SUMMER by Hannah Moskowitz.  What can I say?  I'm a Hannah fan.  She has a way of writing families that makes you ache.  And her sophomore effort was better even than her debut, BREAK.

Now that that's out of the way.  What am I looking forward to in 2012 other than the end of the world?


PASSENGER by Andrew Smith.  Another Marbury book?  Yes, please.


GONE, GONE, GONE by Hannah Moskowitz.  A gay romance set to the backdrop of the DC sniper shootings?  If anyone can do it, Hannah can.


PIECES OF US by Margie Gelbwasser.  I've already read her amazing book but I'm dying for others to read it.  The story of 4 fractured teens will break your heart.


SOMETHING LIKE NORMAL by Trish Doller.  I've been hearing about Trish's book forever and I can't wait to get my hands on it. 


KATANA by Cole Gibson.  Ninjas?  Samurai?  Shopping?  I've read some of this and can't wait to read the rest.




What books are you waiting for in 2012?

The last bit of business is that the blog and website are going to undergo a major change in 2012.  Over the month of January I'll be redesigning my site and changing the focus of my blog.  The truth is that I feel I've run out of things to say that are worthy.  The thing about blogging is that anyone can do it and few people actually have anything worth saying.  I feel I've become one of those people.  When I began blogging, it was to chronicle my journey on the path to publication.

Now that I'm published and part of the machine, I don't know that I have anything left to say...or rather the things that I do have to say shouldn't be said.  Publishing is a business like any other, and just like I wouldn't blog about the goings on in my day job at an IT professional, it wouldn't be cool to blog about the goings on between my publishers and I. 

But that doesn't mean I'm done blogging.  Just that I'm going to change my focus.  In 2012, I'm going to begin a project.  An ambitious project where I'll write a book on-line and publish it like a serial under a Creative Commons license with a 2 chapters per month goal. 

My blog and website will have two areas.  One for people who just want to enjoy the story.  I'll talk more about the story in January, but it will feel more like a television show than a book, because of the medium in which I'm going to tell it.  The reader area will have the chapters, info about characters, a place for people to discuss what's happening...stuff like that.  The other area will be a writer's area.  A place where I'll post the first drafts of each chapters along with notes.  How I go to the final draft.  My outlines and all the little bits of how I write.  The process of every writer is different, so reading self-important posts by other writers about what you should and shouldn't do in a novel are kind of pointless.  But maybe by sharing my process, someone out there will find something useful to them. 

I was aiming to launch this January 1, but obligations to my publisher and my day job have kept me too busy to keep that schedule.  So February 1 is my new launch date. 

And that's it.  That all I've got for the year.  I hope everyone has a safe and happy New Year, and I'll see you back here in January.

Rotters

I snuck this book in under the read-it-in-2011 wire.  I read it based on the recommendation of Andrew Smith. You should read it too.

You're either going to love it or hate it.  I loved it and hated it depending on the position of the sun as I was reading.

It's a dissection of the complexities of the father-son dynamic.  But done so in a rather unusual way–through grave-digging.

We say that there shouldn't be boy books or girl books–and in some respects that may be true–but this is definitely a boy book.  Girls will read it, girls will like it (or hate it), but they will never be able to truly understand it.

That's not a judgement.  It's not a dig.  It's a fact.  It's biology.  Only someone born a son can fully appreciate the horrific complexities of the father-son dynamic.

Happy Holidays

As I slowly suffocate under the weight of obligations, I wanted to take a moment to wish you all a happy *insert holiday of choice here*.  And remember, he sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, so try not to be a dick.  See you next year!

Oh, Twitter! Thy Sword is Mighty.

I keep promising longer posts about something I'm working on that I hope to release in Jan/Feb, but a revision that I'm THIS close to finishing is taking up all of my free time.

But I've been doing something for a while now that I thought was interesting.  Sometimes I fight sentences.  I work them and rework them.  This goes for paragraphs too.  But they don't quite work.  So I'll take them and put them into Twitter and tag them as #favwiplines.  Putting them in Twitter forces you to conform to the character length rules.  And I want the lines to actually make sense to the people on Twitter who might read them.

So it forces me to rewrite the lines, and I've found that 99% of the time, the way I structure it for Twitter is a million times better than the line I'd been trying to rework.  I'm in crazy mode right now so this post is a little crazy too.  But the gist is:  Putting troublesome sentences/lines/paragraphs in Twitter can help you be concise and brief while still getting your point across.

Go, Twitter.  I still hate your new iPhone app.  Give me my old one back.

Love,
Me.

What I Learned From Stephen King

Of all the books I've read about writing, Stephen King's no nonsense, common sense book ON WRITING was the one I credit with giving me the kick in the ass I needed to get published.  I think it should be required reading for every aspiring writer.

I also think his book UNDER THE DOME should be required reading, but for wholly different reasons.

Out of mutual writerly respect, I don't usually review books negatively, but in this case, I think Stephen King can take it.  And, for the record, there was way more to like about this book than dislike, but there were two glaring problems with this book that I think those aspiring to publish a book will appreciate.

I'm going to do my best to avoid spoilers but they may happen.  I'll try to keep my brief discussion as vague as possible.

The short short version of the book is this:  A dome suddenly appears in the town of Chester's Mill cutting them off completely from the outside world.  Chaos ensues.

What I liked about this book was that King set up a huge cast of characters.  He wove in wonderfully unique backstories and built up each event so that all the threads came together in ways I hadn't thought of.  I also loved some of the language.  Simple stuff really.  The way King described these characters, as if he had known them his whole life.

But then came the problems.  King was trying to set up the idea that people, in a situation like being trapped under a dome, would slowly go mad.  Rational people, good people, would stoop to committing horrendous acts, cruelties they'd never before considered, and that it was only a matter of time before those things occurred.  And I agree with his sentiment.  People in groups become irrational mobs.  However, King moved at an accelerated pace in less than 7 days.  It only takes 2 days before the citizen police force, made up of mostly former juvenile delinquents, to begin abusing their power.  Raping and killing and acting like a brute squad rather than a police force.  It only takes 3 days for the resident sleazy politician to gather all the power to him and become a de facto dictator.  And it only takes about 5 days for the climax of the book to occur.  If this book was only a few hundred pages long, I could understand the accelerated pace, but UNDER THE DOME was well over a thousand pages.  If King wanted to show us the deterioration of a society cut off from the rest of the world, he should have used his book's length to show a realistic timeline.  The way the town unravels–even accelerated at they were by the novel's main bad guy–was simply too unbelievable in the length of time of the story.

The sad part about this is that the things that did happen, I could see happening.  I could see riots.  I could see people committing suicide out of a sense of hopelessness.  But not after 4 days.  After 4 days trapped under the dome, people begin killing themselves.  At that point, there was no shortage of air, food, water. They simply lost hope and killed themselves.  And I call bullshit on that.

My second major problem was that the good guys were too virtuous and the bad guys were too vile.  King hinted at flaws in our heroes, but never took the time to develop them...which is a real travesty in a book of this size.  But worse than overly virtuous heroes are bad guys that are practically twirling their mustaches.

A great bad guys is someone we feel pity for.  Someone we can relate to.  Someone whose actions we can watch and think, "There but for the grace of God go I."  King's villains were so douchey that I felt nothing but relief when they were foiled.  They were so ridiculously over the top that I groaned when they did something else.  Not content to be corrupt, they have to be the MOST CORRUPT EVER!!!  Not content to be bullies, they have to be SUPER BULLIES.  In one scene, the earlier rape I mentioned, one of the citizen officers involved was a girl...a girl who egged the rape one.  Which I found so utterly unbelievable, I nearly quit the book right there.  Now, had King taken the time to show us why a young woman might enjoy watching the rape of another woman–say she hated the girl in question or she herself was raped once and no one helped her and now wants other women to suffer as she did–I might have understood the motivations behind it.  But there were none.  This character was simply imbued with a boundless cruelty for no other reason than King decided it should be so.

A third problem I had, which related to the character issue above, was that characters often acted in such a way that I could see King pulling the strings.  Characters withheld vital information from other characters for no discernible reason except to push the plot in a specific direction.  It was maddening to say the least.

At the end of the day, UNDER THE DOME was interesting.  It was enjoyable.  It also taught me a lot about what NOT to do in a book.  Timelines and chains of events must follow believable patterns.  A society can break down in under 7 days, but only under very extreme pressure...and King just didn't earn the kind of breakdown he wrote.  It was too much too soon.  And it's okay to have nuanced characters.  Good characters can sometimes be bad and bad characters can sometimes be good and bad guys need to have MOTIVES.  Bad for the sake of being bad is sloppy, lazy, and just plain wrong.

So read it if you have time.  If you don't, read ON WRITING instead.

Seattle and Onward

Well...back to life.

I had a nice week in Seattle with my brother and his friends.  For my next book, I'm hiring my brother to be my publicist.  I met more people who had read Deathday in one week than in the last year of publication.  It was pretty awesome.

I ate a lot, drank a lot of coffee, and saw a lot of cool stuff.  It was just what I needed.

But now I'm back.  Back to writing, back to working, back to ignoring the fact that Christmas is two freaking weeks away.

Later in the week, I'll do a better writing post, along with details on my big writing adventure for 2012, but for now, here are some pictures...mostly of food.