Gayle Brandeis on expecting brilliance, NaNoWriMo, ebooks and more

My friend Gayle Brandeis began her novel-writing career with fireworks—she won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize in 2002 for THE BOOK OF DEAD BIRDS. Three more of her novels were traditionally published after that. Now Gayle is stepping into the self-published, ebook arena like many other authors.
I interview her here on why and how she chose that route for the sequel to Dead Birds, THE BOOK OF LIVE WIRES.
Before we start the Q&A, I want to share a sample of Gayle’s poetic, riveting style. Here’s the Live Wires opening:
It was the way she moved her arms. It was the way the four year old
moved her arms as he lifted his own arm to swing his axe. It was like they were dancing together, his arm, her arms, as he sliced through her mother’s stomach, her father’s chest. It was the way she moved her arms that convinced him to spare her.
They rose up from her shoulders like tendrils of smoke, like steam from a fresh wound. The tendons were so beautiful, streams running down her triceps, he almost cried. Her wrists turned as if oiled. Her fingers waved like wild grasses. He held his axe over his head and watched this girl’s blood-spattered arms undulate as she tossed her head back and screamed and screamed. He had never seen anything so lovely in his life. He lowered his axe, let it drop to the floor. He held out his hand.

You can currently order the ebook for $2.99 from Amazon or Smashwords. Here’s my interview with Gayle, in which she is simply awesome.

Me: When you wrote The Book of Dead Birds were you already imagining a sequel? How did The Book of Live Wires evolve? Is there a theme connecting the two?

Gayle: I definitely wasn’t envisioning a sequel as I wrote The Book of Dead Birds. The sequel came about through National Novel Writing Month in 2002. The Book of Dead Birds had won the Bellwether Prize earlier that year, judged by Barbara Kingsolver, Toni Morrison, and Maxine Hong Kingston, the three writers I most admire in the world, and while this was so deeply thrilling and affirming, I found I could no longer write. I suddenly felt as if those three amazing women were looking over my shoulder as I wrote, expecting brilliance, and I didn’t feel I could live up to those self-imposed expectations. When I heard about NaNoWriMo, I realized it could help me break through the creative blocks I had set up for myself--writing that quickly, there isn’t time to worry about whether you’re going to please your favorite writers.

I think I wrote a sequel that month because I had been curious about what my characters had been up to since I had finished the first book--I always had the sense that they were off living their lives, but I couldn’t access them until I started to write about them again. Live Wires is narrated by Darryl Sternberg, Ava’s love interest from Dead Birds and now her husband and the father of their baby. A couple of readers had told me that they couldn’t quite get a grasp on Darryl in the first book, that he seemed like too good a guy, and this was my opportunity to get under his skin more deeply. Just as Dead Birds alternates between Ava’s and her mother’s stories, this book alternates between Darryl’s and his grandmother’s stories (he is having her journals translated from Russian, French and Yiddish.) Along with characters in common, I’d say the theme that ties the two books together is the need to heal one’s past in order to move freely into the future.

Me: After four traditionally published novels why did you decide to e-publish The Book of Live Wires? Did other authors influence your decision?

Gayle: Over the years, I’ve mentioned the sequel at various book events, and readers have always been interested in the book, but I never thought I would share it--it was so hastily written, and I felt as if it was something that I had written for myself, not for a wider audience. After more people asked about it recently, though, I decided to revisit it and was surprised to find there was more life inside of it than I had imagined.

I decided to bring it out as an ebook because I want to embrace the shifting sands in the publishing industry rather than run away from them. I thought it would be fun to do an experiment with this book in particular because I have enough detachment from it, having written it so many years ago--it feels like I have nothing to lose.

A couple of writer friends have recently put out ebooks--Rebecca O’Connor’s Rise (a companion to her memoir, Lift) and Tod Goldberg, who released a short collection of stories. I had already thought about doing this experiment when I heard about their own, but watching them forge ahead into this new territory definitely inspired me on my own path.

Me: How do you feel about the rapid changes in publishing? Things that excite you or worry you?

Gayle: Change is both exciting and scary, and it has been a very conscious effort for me to shift my thinking to focus more on the excitement of this time of transition. How lucky we are to be able to watch history unfold, to be part of a changing landscape!

I won’t deny that I do worry about my ability to continue to make a living as a writer, however. My publisher had the right of first refusal on The Book of Live Wires, so my agent had to show it to them before I put it out as an ebook--it was a very funny feeling to be hoping for a rejection so I could move forward with my e-publishing experiment! I never imagined being in that position before. When the rejection did come, it was both better and worse than I could have imagined--the editor said that she loved the book and in a “kinder, gentler time” would have published it, but the larger editorial board wasn’t willing to take a risk on me because my earlier books don’t have the numbers they’re looking for. Of course now I worry that when I want to publish future books--and I do hope to continue to publish traditionally--publishers will turn me away because of my stubbornly midlist status.

It’s good to know that if need be, I can always take publishing into my own hands. I think that in many ways, this is a more empowering time for writers than ever.

Me: What was your experience with Smashwords? Any advice to other writers who are considering e-publishing? How many hats did you have to wear?

Gayle: I published with both Smashwords and Kindle--that seemed to be the way to reach the most varieties of ereaders. I am also working right now to get the book up on Google Books, because a large number of independent bookstores are now offering Google Books to customers through their brick and mortar stores, and I really do want to continue to support indies (that was one of the only things that made me hesitate about this experiment--I don’t want to contribute to the decline of beloved bookstores.)

This process has required the wearing of many hats--I think I have permanent hat hair from the constant shifting between being my own editor, proofreader, art department, typesetter, and tech person (although thankfully I have in house IT and graphic design backup from my husband Michael, and my friend Laraine Herring helped greatly with the editing). Smashwords offers a style guide to help with the formatting, but it can be a bit confusing anyway--I found this little video particularly helpful in clarifying some of the necessary formatting steps: www.norulesjustwrite.com/resources/indy-resources/

One other bit of advice--Flickr is your friend. There are lots of wonderful images that are available under creative commons that you can use for your book cover, and you can often negotiate with the artist to use an image when some rights are reserved (the photographer whose image I used just asked that I pay for a year of his professional flickr account, which was about $25.)

Me: How are you approaching marketing?

Gayle: I hired a professional publicist, just to get some extra muscle behind the book, and am excited by the potential contacts she’s making. I haven’t yet fully launched my own marketing campaign, but plan to use social media (Twitter and Facebook) along with emails to friends and family and colleagues, to get the word out. I’ll probably visit some other blogs, as well, and plan to write some essays connected with the book that will hopefully drum up interest.

I released the book when I did to celebrate National Novel Writing Month, and also the forthcoming 10th anniversary of the Bellwether Prize in January (when my friend Naomi Benaron’s amazing and much buzzed novel, Running the Rift, will be released. I helped her edit the book, and am hoping that our connection and this new ebook will keep my name alive in the Bellwether conversation.)

Me: What's next for you?

Gayle: I am in the throes of National Novel Writing Month right now, focusing on a YA novel that is currently making the rounds of publishers as a proposal (I had only written a couple of sample chapters). I am having so much fun fleshing out this idea that I’ve carried around in me for so long and am excited to try to blast out a draft in a month. I have a couple of other projects in the works--a new novel for adults and a memoir about my mom--but they are on the backburner while I give Seed Bombs my full attention.

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By the way, Gayle has kindly stopped by in the past to answer questions posed in the comments. So if you want to ask something go ahead and she’ll answer if she can around her crazy-busy schedule.

Fade to black and Open Office

My last few days have been tangled in a technology web of massive proportion (Hence the photo of a giant spider web in negative format, which I took a long time ago but seems appropriate today).

I'm certainly glad I didn't sign up for NaNo this year. I returned home from a day of family chores, fired up my desktop and found...a black screen.

I got help trying to reboot, save files, etc. The end result is most of my files were saved except for the latest version of my fairy tale novel, which was 70K. I think I may only have lost a few pages of the newest writing. I usually save to thumb drive every day but skipped one or two days, I think. Anyway, that's fixable because of the versions on the thumb drive. But the desktop needed a new hard drive and operating system. It doesn't want to accept my older Word, so I'm going to have to try to reach Microsoft service to see if it can be registered again. Otherwise, it was recommended that I try Open Office. So far, this free, downloadable, word-processor seems to open some of my documents but not all. I'm still experimenting with it.

Does anyone out there use Open Office? What is your experience with it and with sending documents out on submission?

Meanwhile, I have my handy laptop upon which I am typing this post. I have a new version of Word on it and may decide to switch to writing on it. I know, I know, I also need to put a backup on this and not just rely on thumb drives. Me and technology=chaos.

Holy Serendipity

If there ever is a reason to flaunt the word serendipity this is it. Thursday I went to my critique group and read a scene from my dark fairy tale that takes place within a labyrinth. The maze I described was complex, and my partners asked if I could draw it. “Yikes,” was my first thought.
Friday dawned clear and warm. I headed out for a long beach walk, musing on how I was going to tackle a maze drawing not being a) an artist, b) a puzzle-maker, c) a farmer with a corn field.
As I walked under the pier, I noticed a young woman ahead making a large drawing in the damp sand. Beyond her, a young man was doing the same. There were more than a dozen people busy making circular designs. They were drawing labyrinths!
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Spooky music? Celestial horns? Drum roll? I mean, this is pretty serendipitous, is it not?


So I approached the girl and asked if they were in a club or something that likes to draw mazes. I mean, there are clubs for everything, right?

But, no, they’re students in an architecture class being taught by Ben Nicholson of the Art Institute of Chicago.

And Mr. Nicholson is so nice he invited me to hang around with them. We even all held hands in a big circle—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

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First thing I learned was to begin a labyrinth with a cross. (see illustration)

Then you put L-shapes and dots in each quadrant. After that it gets tricky. Lines are drawn from an end of the cross or L or dot to a point in another quadrant, thus creating the pathways. I practiced a lot. Sand is forgiving, but I won’t be earning a degree in labyrinth making any time soon.

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Mr. Nicholson talked about the perfection of a beach as a drawing surface, how the horizon is wide and can be used to set horizontal lines, how a penny can be dropped in the sand as a radius to the center of the earth. “On the beach you have, natively, the axis to the world,” he said. And, it suddenly felt very momentous standing there in one of my favorite places.
And then he did one of my favorite things, he told an ancient Greek story about shipwrecked sailors who swim to shore and see geometric drawings and conclude that means they’ve found civilization.

Oh, and then there was the hand-holding. We stood in a large circle, arms stretched wide so our hands strained against one another and walked around and around and around, always keeping eye contact with the person directly across the circle. This led to giggles since there was a dizzying strenuousness to it. After our tramping feet had made the widest circle our group could make in the sand, we squished forward into a tight knot and gave it a bulls-eye. “Any group can make the largest circle and the smallest. Where’s the sun’s axis?” Using his own shadow he drew it in.
One of the things I liked most about stumbling into this class were Mr. Nicholson’s prompts for observation. He may be teaching students about architecture but anyone can benefit from being aware of surroundings. Notice how the sun changes its place in the sky by hour and by season, how its light falls differently on familiar objects, how you can ascertain direction if you know where it will be on the horizon.
Not only did I learn useful real world stuff, I got a few ideas for my characters and story from this encounter. Serendipity is a wondrous thing.
Now back to practicing maze-drawing… I've a long way to go.

Patterns

Weather changed from living inside a gray cloud to nothing but blue skies today. So fine. Walked twice and became transfixed by patterns in the sand. Low, low tide. Watermarked shore.

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A Lilliputian

estuary--languid tide

trickling back to sea

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I see giant squid. Or some sea monster imprinted in the sand. Temporary fossils.

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Tomorrow I travel many miles to spend an afternoon with some fabulous critique partners. I've got my pages and can't wait to hear theirs. Finding crit partners who both encourage you and push you to climb a little higher, stretch a bit more is one of the best things a writer can do.

I've written more than 68k on the fairy tale I've been working on all year. Closing in on the end and still in love with this story.

I hope you're all finding wonders outside your doors and inside your heads like me. *silly grin*

I've been stolen by water horses

Maggie Stiefvater made me cry. When I came to the ending of THE SCORPIO RACES I had a lump in my throat big as an island of chalk cliffs against black water, painful as the loss of a beloved. And it was the satisfying ache of a story well told, of characters one cares about after the book is closed.
I had thoroughly enjoyed her five earlier books (the Lament fairy stories and the Shiver werewolf tales), but THE SCORPIO RACES is her masterpiece, carved out of myth and painted with blood.
She has explained what it took for her to write this story after many years of trying and not finding it. I think you’re best served to read her words on that. And if you haven’t seen her trailer for which she did both animation and music, do yourself a favor and track it down. Actually, here's a link to both.
Her book proves that she was as ready now to take on this tale as her protagonist Kate “Puck” Connolly and her mare Dove are to face the savage, killer water horses in the deadliest race ever devised.
I kept thinking as I read this how fleshed out and achingly real her characters are, how grounded and alluring the sense of place, how authentic and thrilling the equine detail. And how seductive and terrifying are the water horses.
When my heart wasn’t in my throat it was lost to this wild place.
The story is told first person from Puck’s POV and from that of Sean Kendrick, a young man who loves horses but most of all his water horse, Corr, and what that love costs him.
Here are some writing samples to give you a feel for the atmosphere and thrill of this book:
The wind is sucking the sound away from me, so as I approach the scene, it seems as if the men are voiceless. The struggle is almost artful, until you get up to it. It’s four men, and they’ve snagged a gray water horse around its neck and by the pastern on one of its hind legs, right above the hoof. They tug and they jump back as the horse lunges and retreats, but they are in a bad place and they know it.
And this:
The water shifts, black then gray-blue then black again, the froth of a white ruffled collar, and then, out of the froth, we all see it. A dark horse’s head surges above the water, jaw wide open. And then, before the sea swallows the first, we see a chestnut mare break the surface, along with a brief glimpse of a brown spine curving in the water alongside it. Then they’re all gone beneath the water and I have goose bumps creeping up my arms.

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Haiku by the sea

I'm in musing mode. So here are a few haiku that washed up in the shore of my mind or whatever.

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next to me a clunk

along the deserted strand,

airborne gull dropped a clam

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tiny periscopes,

those black cormorants fishing

in the tidal wash

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so fast the sand crab

scuttles into the jetty,

was he there at all?

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sanderlings skitter

like a flock of wind-up toys

from the rushing wave

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Food, what is it good for?

Are we at war with our food or what? Listeria in cantaloupes and cheese. E-coli in lettuce and beef. Salmonella in eggs and chicken.

The world has come a long way in fighting disease and pests, but we’ve also created new problems. Our reliance on mega-agriculture where crops on grown on a huge scale with mechanized production and long haul transportation increases time from farm to table and may allow some bacteria to multiply and spread.

Pesticides and herbicides have led to resistant weeds and insects that then lead to a new spiral of poisons. Are you really at ease eating animals treated with growth hormones and antibiotics? It’s a common practice.
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Since this year’s Blog Action Day is all about food, I thought I’d post some things ordinary people might do to make the world a better place.

I prefer not to politicize this blog or make choices for readers who have differing views on social action. For some people it will make sense to protest the corporate nature of today’s farming. For others, a donation to an international aid organization fighting famine will be right.

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But what I’m going to suggest are things everyone can do without regard to political or social views:
If you have a garden or even a planter box grow some of your own food.
Frequent your local farmer’s market, thus supporting small-scale farmers.
Buy organically-grown if you can afford to.
Check your supermarket for locally-grown produce, which has been increasing in several stores I shop at. Ask you supermarket to start the practice if they haven’t. What this does is support smaller farms, cut down time to table and decrease use of fossil fuel to transport.
The cost of naturally-grown meat or hormone-free milk can be high, but I’ve found I can buy it often by keeping an eye out for sales. They are pretty frequent.
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This may sound simplistic, but if a lot of people take small steps, they add up to leaps forward.
End of soap box probably until Earth Day when I’m compelled to remind everyone to keep our home planet clean and safe.

A sky of stars for Daughter of Smoke & Bone and Like Mandarin

I recently gave five stars on Goodreads to two very different books, DAUGHTER OF SMOKE & BONE and LIKE MANDARIN. Both are gorgeously written and have characters and stories that have substance and linger in my memory so that I want to talk about them here, too.

I’d read Laini Taylor’s Lips Touch (a National Book Award finalist) and Dreamdark books and been enchanted. But now they feel like an overture for the magnificent symphony that is DAUGHTER OF SMOKE & BONE. Ms. Taylor has brought it all to this work—unforgettable characters, gripping storytelling with surprising twists, depth of meaning and lyric, yet biting, style. (Example: His memories were knives, and he was not pleased to have them turned against him.)
I don’t even know where to begin, because I remain stunned by so many things in this story. The quirky main character, Karou, has a mysterious past, and her strange family deals in secrets she can only guess at. Taylor’s storytelling is like a trail of bread crumbs that lead us slowly, skillfully to the astonishing answers.
In a way, this is Romeo and Juliet among angels and demons, but it’s so much more than that. Taylor pits bigotry, hatred and war against hope, tolerance and love. And she does it all within richly-detailed human and fantastical worlds. I was both grounded and enchanted by her descriptions of places from the souks of Marrakesh and streets of Prague to the land of the chimaera.
My heart was ripped out at the end, but I don’t want to give much away, because I really hope you’ll all read this one. I can’t wait for its sequel.
Here’s a taste of the writing style:
A thrill along every nerve ending. Her body, alert and alive. She was hunted, she was prey, and she didn’t even have her knife tucked in her boot, little thinking she’d need it on a visit to the graverobber.
And this:
He stood revealed. The blade of his long sword gleamed white from the incandescence of his wings—vast shimmering wings, their reach so great they swept the walls on either side of the alley, each feather like the wind-tugged lick of a candle flame.

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LIKE MANDARIN is a contemporary YA debut by Kirsten Hubbard that I wish I’d read even sooner. It was released in March.
The Wyoming badlands are as much a character in this story as Grace or Mandarin--two teenagers who seem as opposite as day and night. This rocky, windswept landscape interrupted by barbed wire fences and small towns is a place with wide vistas but narrow viewpoints, where people like what's known and distrust what's new. I really like that Ms. Hubbard brings such authenticity to this contemporary YA story. These characters make bad choices and big mistakes but they help each other find what they're really looking for and, hopefully, change the course of their lives. This is a story that sticks to you for all the right reasons. Some beautiful writing, too.
Here's a sample of a badlands moment:
I'd wandered through the Washokey Badlands Basin so many times I'd memorized the feeling. The forlorn boom of wind. A sky big enough to scare an atheist into prayer. No wonder cowboys sang about being lonesome.

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Have you read them? Did they touch you, too?

Soft and sweet

steady showers--just

me and falling pink lanterns

from golden rain trees

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Been gone a few days. Had a lovely, rain walk.

The sky was showing

What a showy, showy night! A bit of thunder to startle the senses. Stark white and soot black clouds blowing through in late afternoon, leaving behind the kind of sky and air that makes you crackle with anticipation and wonder.

The sky was showing it's glory and using its voice to get everyone's attention.

I believe these folks were celebrating Rosh Hashanah, tossing bread into the sea and drawing some enthusiastic sea gulls.

I'm not Jewish but my understanding is this New Year ritual is a spiritual wake-up call, a time to cast-off the bad and savor the sweet. The evening before I heard a sonorous note being blown and saw a man with a long, curved ram's horn raised to the sky. He was surrounded by at least a hundred people who had probably made the trek to the shore from a temple.
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Earlier on my walk I came upon these silver strands of sea water, slowing ebbing and flowing.

When the tide is this low, it almost feels you can walk upon the water, venturing to places normally submerged, secret and silent to us.

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Like these starfish I found on a bared jetty.

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A photographer is the last to fold up his tripod and call it a day as the sun's rosy glow faded to gray, leaving us all with a sense of wonder and renewal.

*Do you ever feel renewed, cleansed by passing storms--be they external or internal? Life can be so hard, but those chances to start afresh come around again and again.

P.S. This being Banned Books Week, I just read one of the best anecdotes on the value of all books on Jemi Fraser's blog. Check it out!

Voices present and past

Who lives in your neighborhood? There are signposts in at least two languages in California. And you can find many more.

I remember being fascinated when I learned that Mexico had communities founded by German immigrants in the 1800s, and that San Francisco has a Russian cemetery dating from the same period. People have been leaving bits and pieces of themselves and their cultures all over the world for a very long time.

Every once in awhile a nudge like this sign will remind me that as a writer I need to remember the richness of culture that surrounds us. Sometimes you have to dig a little for it as in the article I linked below. It's so good.

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Author Susan Straight and photographer/author Doug McCulloh (Disclaimer: They are friends of mine) are doing a series of essays with images on KCET's SoCalFocus blog. This one about a cemetery, dusty and half-forgotten in the midst of industrial buildings, is a keeper. While Susan digs into the Native American and European roots of this place known as Agua Mansa, Doug captures just the right light to portray the fading, bittersweet past.

Thanks to them, I want to reach out and place a hand on the headstones and say, "You're not forgotten. We'll remember the roots, the bones, that are all our ancestors."

Check it out:

http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/commentary/notes-of-a-native-daughter/agua-mansa---gentle-waters-californio-roots.html

Adoration of The Fox Inheritance

I’ve read fiction with pretty decent mysteries, characters and adventures that somehow left me feeling like I ate ice cream for dinner and hadn’t satisfied my hunger. I think what’s missing is substance, something thought-provoking enough to stick long after the book is closed on its final page. But substance is what I get in addition to a great page-turning read from Mary E. Pearson’s THE FOX INHERITANCE, the thrilling and fulfilling sequel to THE ADORATION OF JENNA FOX.
These two books raise questions about the ethics of keeping humans alive with non-human parts. How much “human” is needed to be human? Is just a mind and its memory enough? How far is it ethical to go in saving someone?
In the first book, Jenna is brought back from the brink of death but at the cost of great confusion for her. Something is being kept from her, and as she slowly unravels the mystery, her horror grows. The second book jumps ahead 260 years to a future where, Locke, the protagonist, is constantly faced with uncertainty about what he is and why his old friend, Jenna, abandoned him.
Both characters face a crisis of identity, a questioning of values and an awakening.
I hate spoilers so I don’t want to give away much about these two storylines if you haven’t read the books. Please read them if you like fantasy/sci-fi/dystopian or even if you just like stories with emotional payoff. There’s a lot of that here.
In past interviews, Pearson has said Jenna’s story grew from thoughts that raced through her mind as she faced one of her daughter’s cancer treatment. She began to wonder about what medical advances would come in the future and how far a parent would go to save their child.
In the first book, Pearson shows us that superglue between parent to child that can make some people step over ethical lines into unknown territory. In the second book, she shows how greed can turn those breached boundaries into something really ugly.
I was fascinated by the world-building, the ethical conundrum and the powerful emotional growth of the characters. Five stars from me.
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And don't forget that it's Banned Book Week and time to support authors who come under attack for tackling controversial topics.

Castles of the mind

Walking along the beach, as I do, I came across this man and his mighty-fine sandcastle. He didn't mind me taking pictures.

I asked, "How long have you been building this?"

"Since noon," he replied.

It was about 6 p.m. by that time.

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I considered those four hours and the more he would put in before the sun swallowed up the daylight and sent him home.

"Don't you mind that it will be gone by morning?" I asked.

"By midnight," he said, laughing and without ceasing the sculpting.

"Do you take pictures?" I asked, still curious. "Enter sandcastle contests?"

He shook his head. He did this for fun, for challenge, for joy. Nothing more.

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That got me thinking. Perhaps the most pure creations are not to please audiences or achieve prizes but are simple outpourings of joy and wonder. It's a free-ing notion, don't you think?

And one more thing: I love those upsweeping castle walls he made. I'm going to draw the castle in my fairy tale, bring it to life on a sketchbook page. What fun I shall have!

The places I would go

In celebration of Talli Roland's newest book launch, WATCHING WILLOW WATTS, she's asked bloggers 'If I could be anyone, I'd be...'. A number of people chose J.K. Rowling for good reason, but I'm going venture a bit back in time and say Diana Wynne Jones for her extraordinary children's books. The list of her titles is longer than a snuggly house scarf and every bit as yummy as a chocolate frog.

I'd love to have lived inside her expansive imagination, to have her wit and skills at laying out compelling stories with twists and depth of content. And, oh, her sense of humor, how much fun that would be. But silly and wacky as her stories can be, they're dead-on serious, as well.

Her tales are never preachy but there's no doubt that even in her magical worlds there are consequences for bullying, intolerance, bigotry or other nasty behavior. Her characters are ordinary kids shoved into extraordinary circumstances, which they figure out how to handle. Sometimes even small acts of bravery are heroic and important is a message that comes through.

When she died of cancer in March at age 76, The Guardian wrote: "Her intelligent and beautifully written fantasies are of seminal importance for their bridging of the gap between "traditional" children's fantasy, as written by CS Lewis or E Nesbit, and the more politically and socially aware children's literature of the modern period, where authors such as Jacqueline Wilson or Melvyn Burgess explicitly confront problems of divorce, drugs and delinquency. "

She started writing as a child, and as a college student at St. Anne's at Oxford, she soaked up lectures from J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S . Lewis. How I'd love to time travel and drop in on one of those sessions.

If you haven't read her, treat yourself. Here's a partial list of her more than 40 titles: HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE, DARK LORD OF DERKHOLM, YEAR OF THE GRIFFIN, FIRE AND HEMLOCK, THE HOMEWARD BOUNDERS, HEXWOOD, POWER OF THREE, THE CHRONICLES OF CHRESTOMANCI, THE DALEMARK QUARTET, ARCHER'S GOON.
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Um, I have to add that if I were to pick a fictional character I'd like to be it would be Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Just sayin'.

The magic touch

Magic. What is it anyway? Is it a miracle, a wonder, to be had with the snap of fingers, the flick of a wand? Is it alchemy, a transforming power, or an elemental or mathematical equation we’ve yet to discover? Could it be metaphysical, mythological?
Sometimes I read books with magical happenings that leave me dissatisfied with the world-building and explanation of how the magic works. Other times, I romp with the author through a made-up land that feels real and plausible.
This notion of suspending disbelief is said to originate with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1817 with the publication of biographical sketches of his literary life. He wrote, rather wordily,: “In this idea originated the plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”
In other words, get real.
How to do that? The characters must be as real as your annoying little sister or last boyfriend. Lovable but flawed, and that doesn’t mean they bite their fingernails or trip over their feet all the time. It’s the deeper psychological and emotional stuff that makes the reader say, ‘I know that. I’ve seen it. I can relate.’ Then if the characters sprout wings, the reader already has them grounded in reality.
My reason for musing on this is Lev Grossman’s THE MAGICIANS and THE MAGICIAN KING. These books are brilliant if you like smart-ass humor mixed with tragedy, which clearly I do. They pay homage to great fantasy stories of the past but with something of an attitude--a lot of wit and smarts. The characters are pretty much genius-level teens, who grow into young adulthood in the books.
Quentin is a math whiz and nerd who is fixated on a childhood fantasy series set in a land called Fillory, but once Quentin jumps down the rabbit hole he finds monsters come along with magic.
I don’t like to give spoilers, so I’m only going to say that Quentin’s character arc from the start of Book One to the end of Book Two is stunning. He isn’t just an angst-ridden teen who magically becomes a superhero. Rather, he remains annoyingly self-absorbed and flawed but increasingly stronger as though he’s been tempered by fire. Like a true hero, he makes huge sacrifices, but he’s no angel, just a human with a healthy conscience that he has to learn to use.
Quentin’s teen-age crush, Julia--whose only interest in him in book one seems to be to find out how she can get into the school of magic he attends but which rejected her—becomes equally weighted storywise in book two, which alternates between their POVs.
Julia, who already suffers emotional disorders, becomes obsessed with learning how to do magic. She discovers an underground of self-taught magicians where she rises to the top but not without paying terrible dues. As Grossman writes: Her magic had sharp, jagged edges on it that had never been filed down.
When Quentin and Julia intersect in book two worlds hang in the balance. Magic has brought them giddy pleasures and unfathomable loss and pain, but magic itself may go out of the world because of things they’ve done.
I like to give snippets to show writing style and since I love the attitude and voice I’ll give these.
If you’ve ever tried to listen to someone else’s description of their dream, here’s something from Julia’s POV: They pushed on into astrology and ocean magic and even oneiromancy—dream magic. Turns out you can cast some truly amazing shit in your dreams. But after you wake up it all seems kind of pointless, and nobody really wants to hear about it.
Here’s a great scene description from Quentin’s POV: The tide was out, and the sea was not so much calm as limp. Every few minutes it worked up enough energy for a wave that rose up half a foot and then flopped onto the strand with a startling smack, as if to remind everyone that it was still there.
Again, Quentin: He could have used someone stable to hang on to right now, but as it happened, through no particular fault of her own, Julia was not a person one could hang on to. She needed one of those warning decals that they put on airplane parts: NO STEP.
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Sharpen your tools (or claws)

I heard good buzz about Blake Snyder’s SAVE THE CAT! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. I write novels, but a lot can be learned about compelling storytelling from movies. So I ordered Snyder’s book from my county library share system and found I’d ordered the follow-up book by accident.
SAVE THE CAT! Goes to the Movies is packed with insights useful to any writer. Snyder identifies story types and gives examples of movies that fit these structures: Monster in the House, Golden Fleece, Out of the Bottle, Dude with a Problem, Rites of Passage, Buddy Love, Whydunit, Fool Triumphant, Institutionalized and Superhero.
Some of the films he gives as examples will make you nod your head and murmur, “Of course.” Others may surprise you.
I think the message here is not so much there are only a certain number of plotlines that exist in the world, but that a story needs a rock-solid structure first and then can vary the rest of the details. Otherwise, writers run the risk of being wishy-washy, not able to pinpoint in their pitch and, later, to readers what their story really is about.

If you have trouble identifying into which of the categories your story fits, Snyder lists elements that should be there. For instance, under Rites of Passage, it is the hero who must change, not the world around him.

Under Monster in the House, there must be a “sin,” some transgression that let the monster in. Buddy Love requires an incomplete hero who needs another to be whole.
There are lots of valuable tips. But I think I’ll leave you with a game. See if you can figure out what common links there are in the example movies that Snyder gives for each story type. (You can find the answers by reading the book. I’m so mean. Although if some of you try to guess in the comment section, I’ll tell you if you solved it, because I’m not all that mean.)

Monster in the House: Alien; Fatal Attraction; Scream; The Ring; Saw.

Golden Fleece: The Bad News Bears; Planes, Trains and Automobiles; Saving Private Ryan; Ocean’s Eleven; Maria Full of Grace.

Out of the Bottle: Freaky Friday; Cocoon; The Nutty Professor; What Women Want; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Dude With a Problem: Three Days of the Condor; Die Hard; Sleeping With the Enemy; Deep Impact; Open Water.

Rites of Passage: 10; Kramer vs. Kramer; Ordinary People; 28 Days; Napoleon Dynamite.

Buddy Love: The Black Stallion; Lethal Weapon; When Harry Met Sally; Titanic; Brokeback Mountain.

Whydunit: All the President’s Men; Blade Runner; Fargo; Mystic River; Brick.

Fool Triumphant: Being There, Tootsie; Forrest Gump; Legally Blond; The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

Institutionalized: M*A*S*H; Do the Right Thing; Office Space: Training Day; Crash.

Superhero: Raging Bull; The Lion King; The Matrix; Gladiator; Spider-Man 2.

Nature's helping hand

the ocean turns from

snow ice to vanilla cream

with the rising sun

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My heart melted a little when I forced myself out for this early morning walk and saw the colors of sun on water and dolphins leaping in the surf.

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Someone really screwed me and my daughter over yesterday. It is something that damages us financially and emotionally, since it was a betrayal. Usually, I don't post about such things, but I do if I can find a way to work with them on a creative level.

This is one thing that nature, photography, haiku and other forms of writing do for me. They help me balance the anger and grief over something like this. Do you have ways of dealing with setbacks, particularly those you have no control over?

Reflections

I'm reflecting on three incredible days I spent at WriteOnCon without leaving my home office. I can't say enough about the people who organize this free online conference or about the scores of editors, agents and authors who volunteer to share their tips, encouragement and critiques.

The photo of reflection I took this week while walking along a flat and freshly wet section of beach. The sand looked like it was enamel and it reflected the sky. Otherworldly.

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Here are some random tidbits I was wowed with at WriteOnCon.

Are you having trouble coming up with a title? Editor Martha Mihalick says she looks for ideas in Shakespeare, the Bible and poetry. How cool is that tip? *runs to bookshelf*

Author Lisa Schroeder says you need to have a good reason for whatever beginning you chose for your novel. It should be a moment of significance, and you need to ask yourself why you chose that particular moment.

Agent Joanna Volpe really put the heart into what makes middle grade novels special.

Brilliant is a word that often seems to attach itself to author Sarah Rees Brennan. And it's easy to see why if you follow her livejournal blog or read her books. Her hilarious personality comes through in a chat that also delivers plenty of tips. I will never forget the mind puppets.

Picture book authors Tiffany Strelitz Haber and Corey Rosen Schwartz went many extra miles to give personalized rewrites of stanzas to the people who left examples on their post. It was amazing to see what they can do with rhyme, meter and content

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I was pretty much wowed by all the panel chats and agent critiques. You can go through the August archives to find everything, but the easiest way for you to cherrypick what to read is to go to the Full Schedule and link from there. The calls for questions or submissions for critiques are obviously closed now that the event is over, but the posts and transcripts of live events can be accessed any time. Do yourself a favor, for both pleasure and personal growth, read. That's another beauty about this conference--it's there whenever you can spare a moment.

A Pharaoh in the Sand and other tales

I saw this Pharaoh in the sand and thought what a great story title that would be. I've got storytelling on my mind after spending dawn to dark at WriteOnCon today (except for that walk along on the beach, I was crazy-glued to my computer screen).

If you're not at WriteOnCon, you're missing out on this free, online conference. The good news is you can read all the chat transcripts, watch the videos and read posts any time. But it's fun to attend the live events.

Here are some highlights (stuff I loved) from the first day. These are just paraphrased tidbits. You'll get much more out of reading the related posts or transcripts:

A chat with agent Suzie Townsend. She receives about 350 queries every week, so you can imagine how important it is to make yours stand out. Don't tell her, she says, that you heard she likes strong female characters, show her that character in the way you write the query. If she's not engaged by the character, she'll stop reading. She's very open in this chat about how she works with clients--the relationship, the revisions.

A chat with agent Sara Megibow, which covered in depth how she thinks writers should develop platforms.

The best description of magical realism ever by author Nova Ren Suma.

A video of author Sara Zarr discussing pacing. This was so packed with useful tidbits, I took notes. Here's one: By page 30, all the story seeds should be planted--the central conflict and important characters introduced.

Picture book query critiques from author Emma Walton Hamilton. She read and commented on about 50 query letters!

Q&A with agent Jessica Sinsheimer who went many extra miles in answering tons of questions, including mine, which made me all kinds of smiley.

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This barely begins to describe what these people, and many other authors, agents and editors are offering. Truly an amazing event, which continues Wednesday and Thursday. Go taste of its goodness. You know you want to.

Prompting Fate (a contest)

Contest time at The Merry Sisters of Fate. Randomly-chosen winners are trying for a signed advance reader’s copy of THE SCORPIO RACES by Maggie Stiefvater, a signed advance reader’s copy of THE SPACE BETWEEN by Brenna Yovanoff or a signed hardback of BLOOD MAGIC by Tessa Gratton. The authors are the sisters of fate, if you didn’t know.
The picture prompt for this contest is “The Turret Stairs” by Frederic Burton, and here’s my entry, a flash fiction:

He has no choice. Those are his words, not mine. I feel them like a shard of glass, a needle of ice through my heart.

This is the last time—I have no doubt of this—he will press his body to mine, the final touch of soft lips, hot breath upon my neck.

I cannot look at him.

“I am the kingdom,” he says, as though I need convincing. “What I desire, what I prefer, must always be for the good of all.”

Am I not part of all? But I do not speak those words or any other.

My hand rests on stone, cold as a tomb, centuries of terror held captive in these walls. I must climb into the darkness alone while he will step into the light of ten thousand candles and as many dawns.

“It was your hair, they say, that made them so sure.” He loops the end of my braid around his finger—a red-copper ring. A moan escapes him. He pulls his dagger free and cuts the lock, holding it first to his nose and then tucking it within his shirt. “I will mourn you always.”

I face him finally. “You will mourn, and you will suffer every moment of my eternal imprisonment. I would rather they’d sewn a hundred river stones in my hem or made me run in iron boots fresh from the fire than the end you chose. For you did have a choice, you see.”

“I could not sentence you to such a death!”

“But you have, my love, you have.”

misty thoughts

flannel sky, pewter

sea, soft and silent as stilt

walkers and our ghosts

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flapping red flags

break up the gray stillness

scatter my thoughts

a little contemplation, no more

wind rivers flow,

ripples in shifting sand--

no other trace

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day melts to evening,

the ocean leaves behind some

roots upon the shore

Moving images

I haven't sorted out Blogger's strange reaction to my move yet, but if I can post some pictures this morning, hey, I'm gonna.

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My new office window with the only piece of stained glass I ever made. Took a class, cut my fingers, decided this would be it for me and stained glass. But I like it. And it's the first thing I put in my new living space.

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The view, looking down, from my second-story office (and connected room). This white picket fence and garden have been almost a landmark on the urban beach street where my late in-laws lived for decades.

Venice Beach has these wonderful small-town streets in a residential area a block from the ocean, where houses face pedestrian walks. Cars travel and park in the alleys behind the houses.

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This is the state of the walls of my room when they had to be scraped of old, peeling paint (probably lead-based, eew) before we could paint them with new, zero-VOC paint. I love that my room doesn't smell of paint fumes and that I know I'm not breathing toxins.

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My room, painted, and before I moved in a ton o' stuff.

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From a beach walk. Yay.

I'm still hoping that my blog won't vanish as I complete the email transactions. But, for the moment, here I am. I miss y'all.

well, um, not so much

I'd hoped to have this blog all set by now. But, no. For some unfathomable reason Blogger makes changing the primary email on a blog a nightmare. I thought I'd figured it out, read the Help forum posts, set up my secondary blog authors for backup, etc. Then my daughter, who's pretty computer savvy, and I tackled the project.
Since we read that you will lose all your photos from Picasa if you transfer the blog administrator email, we set up a Gmail account and transferred all the photos first. Then we meticulously followed the many steps indicated, using different computers and browsers as instructed.
In the end, I have this blog, which confusedly has two contributors--me here and me on the old version. This new one didn't bring my profile or reader list of 317 blogs I follow, but it's on the old one. I had to write a new profile for this one.
I have no idea what's going on and am frustrated beyond anything I can really explain. I don't think I've ever run across anything this convoluted in my life.
Anyway, just trying to change an email because I moved has ended up costing days of my time, and I still don't know if this blog will go poof when I turn my back.
As I promised before I will find you all if I have to start over. Right now, I think I'll go watch a movie and chill.

Hello, out there

I have finally finished the physical move but am still buried in boxes and other time sucks, so this is mostly filler (Buffy fans know what I'm talking about). Today I will change the email connected to this blog, carefully following Blogger's instructions and hoping I don't find my blog missing afterward. I've seen scary comments in Help forum about this process. If I disappear, my dear friends, I will find you again!
If all goes well, I should be back to posting regularly within a week. I hope, hope, hope.

Sherman Alexie is my hero

This man is one of my heroes. I became of aware of Sherman Alexie many years ago when, as a reporter, I covered an event where he spoke to students of a BIA school. He was so authentic, and his words carried weight even when delivered in humor (which he excels at, by the way).

When some people put "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" on banned lists, I was shocked. The book is so compelling, so witty, so important that I couldn't understand any prejudice blinding someone to its value. But then I am often shocked by what people wish to ban.

This semi-autobiographical YA novel never shirks from the horrors of living in poverty and abuse but tells the story with the resilient spirit and humor that Alexie brings to his work. For many hurt kids, on and off reservations, the book is a life raft, a beacon of hope showing a path to a better future.

A friend sent me a link to an article Alexie wrote for The Wall Street Journal that is a must-read for anybody, especially writers. Alexie says books were the most loving and trustworthy things in his life as a child. He read everything from classics to horror and found out that reading about monstrous things could teach him how to battle real monsters in his life.

This quote stuns me: "I write in blood because I remember what it feels like to bleed."

Please, please, read the whole article. You owe it to yourself and your readers.

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P.S. I continue to post sporadically whilst in process of moving and turning my entire life upside down. *grins and groans*