Chasing Brooklyn - Korean Style

I'm going to rock the drop with these today at a local Korean church.

I have a couple of more copies I'd love to give away - if you or someone you know speaks Korean, let me know please!! I'd be happy to send you one if you live in the U.S.

I think it's so fun to see foreign editions of books!!

Spring Cleaning

I hate cleaning. But I love the results. Sort of like exercising, sometimes. Sort of like writing, sometimes.

We cleaned all of the window tracks, which were in desperate need of cleaning. Yuck.

I cleaned the fridge, and my husband has since told me about ten times how nice it looks. Um, it wasn't that bad, was it?

We bought a new stove and the new one is so pretty and shiny... and clean! I know, that doesn't really count, but I'm still including it. Because it's so shiny! So clean!! How come they can't stay that way?

Then, there was the toy room. Oh, the toy room. My boys are 13 (almost 14, ack!) and 16. They hardly went in the toy room anymore, except to get clothes, because their dressers were in there. I knew it was time to sort, give away, and put away. But I was in no hurry, because, ugh, what a big job. Then one night a few weeks ago my 16 YO said, I think I want my own room. Until now, they've shared a room because they wanted to. Poor G. I think his feelings were hurt a tiny bit. Like - you want to move away from me??? Of course it wasn't personal, but I know it felt that way. He's a pretty easy going kid, though, and seems to be doing okay since the big move.

Anyway... pictures!

Before:

After:

Yes, it's very plain. That's how he wants it, I guess.

Now I have a nasty cold. I will have to tackle the cupboards and closets another week. Darn.

Linky Dink Tuesday

April is National Poetry Month. Did you know? I hope so! I am doing various interviews around the web in honor of this wonderful month, talking about verse novels mostly. I will link to them as I can.

Today you can find a conversation on the subject between me and Kimberly Marcus, the author of the fabulous YA novel EXPOSED, over at E. Kristin Anderson's blog. We talk a lot about process, if you find that sort of thing interesting. Make sure and check out her blog all month long - she has some amazing authors lined up every single day in the month of April.

On Thursday, I will be speaking and signing books at the Barnes and Noble in Vancouver, WA as they honor middle school and high school educators with an Educator Appreciation Event. Educators get 25% off their purchases that evening! If you are in Portland or Vancouver, I hope you'll come out! Information is HERE.

This Thursday is also YALSA's Support Teen Lit Day. Readergirlz and Figment.com are teaming up and encouraging people to "Rock the Drop." Micol posted about it on the Contemps blog today, if you'd like to learn more about this great event.

And finally, the winner of the ARC of SPRINKLES AND SECRETS that I donated for the Kidlit4Japan auction wrote to me to let me know her and her 10-year-old daughter enjoyed the book very much and to show their appreciation for getting to read it earlier than most, they wrote a nice review for it on goodreads.

Have a great day!

Monday Motivation: thinking about word-of-mouth

I think about it often. What makes a person tell a friend, "You HAVE to read this book."

We all know word-of-mouth is the best promotion there is. So what makes people talk about a book? I read many books - so what is it that makes ME talk about a book? 

I don't think it's necessarily one thing. I think it's a number of things mixed together with a little magic sprinkled on top that create a fantastic reading experience.  

Here's my list of things:

1) A gripping story. I think it is usually a story we haven't heard a hundred times before. A story that pulls us in, and it's hard to put the book down once you start reading. It is a unique reading experience, and the story is one you are excited to hear. Examples I can think of: WATER FOR ELEPHANTS by Sara Gruen and MATCHED by Ally Condie

2) A character or characters we admire. Maybe they make us cheer. Maybe they make us laugh. Maybe they make us feel things we haven't felt in a long time, if ever. Maybe they open up a hidden space inside of us we didn't even know existed! Maybe their strength and determination or their steadfast love and devotion to someone makes us cry. Whatever it is, I think the character(s) have to think and/or act in a way that makes us go WOW. It's not enough to just like a character. To really make a reader grip the book at the end and scream to the world, I LOVE this book, the characters connect with us on a deep, personal level. Possible examples: THE HELP by Kathryn Stockett and THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE by Audrey Niffenegger

3) Good writing. Some will argue this is not necessary. Certainly there have been books that have been popular where the writing was less than stellar. But often, it IS a key ingredient in the books that become huge hits by word-of-mouth. THE SKY IS EVERYWHERE by Jandy Nelson is one I'm thinking of as well as BEFORE I FALL by Lauren Oliver. I've read books where the premise was fabulous, but in the end, I was let down by the writing. Stilted dialogue or inconsistencies in how the characters talk or act will take a book down a few notches for me. And those kinds of things will often keep me from recommending a book.

4) We can see ourselves there. Some books do an incredible job at making us feel as if we are there. Maybe we want to be, maybe we don't, depending on the story, but regardless, it is easy to picture the setting, the characters, the world, and once we are immersed in it, it is hard to leave. BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY by Ruta Sepetys was like this for me. It is a tragic story and yet, it was so REAL and I could not set that book down, as hard as it was at times to read.

5) It elicits strong emotions. I often don't remember details in books, because I have a terrible memory, but I can tell you I DO remember how a book made me feel. Sometimes I feel like I'm leaving treasured friends behind as I turn the last page, as it was with ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS by Stephanie Perkins. Sometimes I feel changed in how I view life, as it was with THE BOOK THIEF by Marcus Zusack. Sometimes I feel I've read something that is a once-in-a-lifetime reading experience, as it was with LOOKING FOR ALASKA by John Green.

I do think there is a bit of magic that happens in a book where everything comes together and it becomes the book everyone talks about. It isn't a formula or an equation - a little of this plus a lot of that times a sprinkling of that will get you word of mouth. If it was, someone would have developed it by now and we'd be able to buy it on every corner. 

I'm curious - do you think about these things as you write? Do you try to write a book that people will read and be so touched/amazed/shocked/whatever that they HAVE to tell everyone about it? I admit, the longer I'm at this, the more I think about the word-of-mouth factor. Lots of people write good books. Some people write amazing books. And a select few people write books that people read and talk about for years. I say, go for the gold. What have we got to lose, right?

Friday Five

1. Vampire Diaries was like WHOA this week. So much going on, my little brain could hardly keep up! My take-away for my writing - keep your reader guessing. Predictability is not as fun as BIG SURPRISES.

2. Every time I watch VD, I am in awe of Nina's (Elana's) tall, thin legs. I can't help but think how fun it must be to shop if you are tall and thin like that. I am sick of all of my clothes, and yet, just the thought of going shopping causes me to break out into hives. I'm SO tired of shopping for clothes for my short and, um, curvy self. 

3. I have been doing cleaning projects around my house this week. All of the window tracks have been cleaned. The toy room was cleaned out so my oldest son can move in there (my boys have shared a room all of this time because they wanted to!) Today I get to clean the refrigerator. So excited (not).

4. The sun is shining today, which means after the fridge is clean and shiny, I can reward myself with a nice, long walk. March was so wet and gray. My husband said he read somewhere that it rained every day in March except one. I'm so ready for summer I can't even tell you.

5. I'm going to wake up tomorrow and start a new book. It is a book with the best title ever. There is nothing better than a great title to get me excited about writing. I haven't written anything book-wise for a couple of months, so it's time!

Have a great weekend!

THE BREAKOUT NOVELIST by Donald Maass

Literary Agent Donald Maass has a new book out. The back of the book reads, "The all-inclusive guide for novel writers. If you're serious about making your fiction vibrant, engaging, and marketable, you've found the right book. The Breakout Novelist gives you the craft and business know-how you need to make your book stand out."

This book combines information from his workshops and his previous books, and includes some exercises to help you work though your own novel and take it to the next level.

What I love about Donald Maass is how he explains things in a way that is easy to understand. Sometimes I read books about novel writing and I have to think really hard to "get it." Not so with Maass' books. He's very clear in what he says, and he backs up his ideas with examples from a variety of novels to show us what he means.

I went through and underlined some of the lines that resonated with me. Let me share a few of them with you:

"Regardless of category, a great many manuscripts have one common problem: not enough is happening. Action isn't necessarily the answer. The solution begins with the recognition that plot really means the events which must occur for a character to move from one state of being to another."

"Great scenes are a novel's building blocks, yet their fundamentals are surprisingly little understood."

"What is certainly true of all great characters is they are larger than life. I do not mean they are unrealistic. Quite the contrary. What I mean is they act, speak, and think in ways you or I most of the time cannot, or at any rate do not. They are saying the things we wished we had said. They do things we dream about doing. They grow and change in ways we wish that we could."

"What happens to the characters in the course of the story is unusual, dramatic, and meaningful. A great story involves great events. Not wars or wonderments, necessarily, but certainly events with impact."

"In both life and fiction, when people act in ways that are unusual, unexpected, dramatic, decisive, full of consequence, and irreversible, we remember them and talk about them for years. Isn't that the effect you want to achieve?"

This book makes me want to do great things with my writing. It makes me want to dig deep and to work hard. That's what I think a good craft book does - it not only teaches you things, it inspires you to want to *do* those things.

Monday Motivation - Keep revising or shelve it?

Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions.  ~Author Unknown

Let's say you write a novel. You spend months, maybe even years, writing page after page after page. For the most part, it's fun. You love spending time with your characters. Once in a while, you wonder whether you can do it, whether you can really finish the thing, and some days you have to bribe yourself to simply open the document. But you keep telling yourself to just get the story down. Just write, even if it's bad and doesn't make sense, just keep writing.

So you do. Day after day after day, you write. And then one day, something wonderful happens. You finish that novel! HOORAY! 

After that, you let it rest, like you're supposed to. You spend time away from it so you can come back with fresh eyes and do what needs to be done - rip it to shreds (ha).

When you've done everything you know how to do, you then seek feedback from other writers. Because you know it's hard to see the forest for the trees.  They help you identify plot holes, flat characters, unrealistic dialogue, pacing problems - the list goes on and on.

There is a lot of work to be done. Suddenly, you have doubts. Big doubts. Will this story ever be good enough? Can you make it good enough? 

One of the hardest decisions writers have to make, I think, is deciding between continuing on with a work-in-progress or putting it away and starting over with something new.

When I wrote my first novel, a middle-grade, years ago, I revised it and then took it to a conference for feedback. I got mixed reviews on the first pages - some liked it, some didn't. One editor did ask me to send her the manuscript, which I did. She ended up rejecting it, as did a few agents I queried. 

I didn't exhaust my list of agents with that book. It only took a few rejections for me to know it was time to stick it away and try writing something else. How did I come to that conclusion? I think it was a combination of things, but I remember hearing editors and authors speak at the conference, and something resonated with me. Your story has to be one others will be *excited* to read. Your premise has to make someone sit up and say - oh, that sounds GOOD! And then, when they are excited, you have to be able to deliver in a big way. 

My first novel didn't have that. My second novel might have had it, but then there were plot problems. I took it into weird territory, and I could never figure out how to fix it. My third novel was better, but still... I just couldn't get things to come together quite right. 

I've always said, I don't view those early novels I wrote as a waste of time. I view them as my schooling. With each one, I learned things. And still today, when I write, I'm learning things. After all, there is a LOT to learn! 

I think these are the questions you should ask yourself as you evaluate whether to keep going with a manuscript:

1) Is your premise unique? 

2) Can you describe what your book is about in one sentence? What are people's reaction when you share that sentence with them? Be honest here.

3) Is there lots of tension in your story? Does your main character go through some difficult stuff? If not, are you up to the task of adding in tension? 

Donald Maass, literary agent, says this, in The Breakout Novelist (which I'll be reviewing here soon): "Beginning novelists tend to tell their stories in strict sequential order, following the protagonist through her every day from sunrise to sleep, over and over again, until the novel is completed. That can make for some dull reading. The essence of story is conflict. That principle is so well understood, so often espoused, and so universally taught, it is easily the underlying and fundamental component of plot. Why, then, do so many manuscripts ration out conflict the way water is rationed on a desert trek?"

4) Are your characters memorable? Do they have qualities about them that will make a reader remember them long after they've turned the last page? They can't just be characters we meet everyday in life. They need to be special somehow. A little bit extraordinary. 

If we look at Isabel in the middle-grade novel, It's Raining Cupcakes, at first glance, she may seem like just an ordinary girl. She doesn't always get along with her mom, like many girls. She is sometimes a little bit envious of her best friend, like many girls. She rides her bike, she collects turtles, she likes to bake. All ordinary things. But she has a dream. A *big* dream. And through the book, she chases that dream, and what makes it so hard is one of the biggest obstacles of Isabel getting her dream is her very own mother. I know lots of people don't like Isabel's mom. They don't like how Isabel takes on more than a 12-year-old girl should have to take on in regards to her mother. But you see, THAT IS THE POINT. That's what makes Isabel memorable - she keeps going in spite of her mother. And that's what makes the reader route for Isabel all the more.

5) And finally, is this a story you can see people getting excited about, and passing around to other people after they've read it? WHY will they be excited? If there is one element of the story you say - yes, this is exciting stuff, you need to make sure THAT element is the major element of the plot. Move things around so that exciting thing is pulling the reader through the story. 

If you go through these questions and you feel deflated after reading them, not energized, then it may be time to put the current manuscript away and start working on something new. If you choose to do this, please understand, it's okay! It doesn't make you a failure! I know I wouldn't have four published novels and three more on the way if I hadn't been brave enough to shelve projects that just weren't cutting it and start in on something new.

Writers write. They keep moving forward. Sometimes that will be in making a manuscript the best it will be. And other times, that will be starting fresh with a new manuscript and saying, "I can do better. I will do better this time."

Noah Lukeman, literary agent and author of The First Five Pages, says at the end of the book, "The ultimate message of this book, though, is not that you should strive for publication, but that you should become devoted to the craft of writing, for its own sake."

If you think of it that way, there really is no right or wrong in relation to the work-in-progress. Get quiet, listen to your gut, and do that. Our instincts usually aren't wrong.