The Awesome List

This week I read two amazing books: The Fault in Our Stars, by John Greene, and Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein. Both were books that I'd come across recommendations for several times, but had just now read. Actually, it was someone here on the Prosers that convinced me to give The Fault in Our Stars a try. I tried to look up who it was, but the search feature wasn't helpful. :(

Anyway, recommendations are a tricky thing. So much depends on individual taste. For example, some people might say of me, "Well, she likes Star Trek and Downton Abbey and Harry Potter, but she also thinks that Black Sheep is one of the finest examples of film making in the last decade.”

I’m actually not entirely kidding about Black Sheep. It’s the best B-movie I’ve ever seen. They went for purposely funny instead of accidentally, and it actually works. But you see what I mean. There are a large number of people who are troubled by that amount of gore, and others who might rightly have zero interest in a horror movie about ravenous sheep. Farmers, for instance.

 So it seems to me that the perfect recommendation should be not just your favorite, but also something so unbelievably awesome that no one could really deny it. I mean, the perfect recommendation should be something where you might sort of secretly believe someone would have to be somehow deficient not to like (not that you’d say it). (Note, I don't actually think there's something wrong* with you if you don't like these. I'm just trying to make a point).

And thus, here is my awesome list, things where I think you absolutely can't go wrong. Some are funny, some are sad, some are a bit of a pain to get through. This list was going to be longer, but then I would envision someone telling me they didn’t like Monty Python, or Fullmetal Alchemist, and I could sort of understand that reaction. 

But there's the other side too - this kind of list shouldn't just be awesome things,but also awesome things you love. For example, I think anyone who doesn’t like Indiana Jones (at least the first one) is kind of silly, but I don’t love it with every piece of my heart. Lots of pieces, but not all of them. And along the same lines, the two books I mentioned above came very close to making it, but not quite. Honestly, I think I'm still processing them, and will need to read again. But not too soon, because I already cried too much over them in the past week.

So these are things made of pure, unfettered awesome, in their own ways. If you haven't encountered them yet, go forth in great haste to your library or bookstore!

Princess Bride

Have fun storming the castle!

Catch-22 

(Not the easiest book to read, and not the quickest read. But once you get it, it’s genius beyond imagining)

Diana Wynne Jones

I already blogged about her here.

Terry Pratchett

(I’ve been meaning to do a post on him for ages)

Girl Genius

Previously blogged here.

Firefly

I mean, I loved it so much, I named my cat Kaylee. Note close resemblance:

Sherlock

The Power of One, Bryce Courtenay

(The book, NOT THE MOVIE)

To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee

The Last Unicorn, Peter Beagle

Wow, that’s really a lot shorter than I thought it would be. Honorary mention, perhaps, to A Fistful of Sky by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, because it’s awesome and lovely and heartwarming, but a bit uneven in pacing.

What makes up your awesome list? Please share!

(*Unless we're talking about the Princess Bride, because really, there's no excuse not to love that movie).

Any Story Can Be Fixed

I have blogged before about how much my girls love these Monster High dolls from Mattel.  After birthdays and Christmas, we are growing quite a collection.   My husband went on a business trip not too long ago and brought back Monster High dolls as a present for our girls.  That very day, my youngest proceeded to decorate the doll’s face with markers.  This is what she ended doing to the doll.

My husband and I were a little upset that she had altered the doll only hours after we had opened the package.  These dolls are not cheap.  My little daughter didn’t realize that the marker wouldn’t come off and tried to put on a brave front, but I could tell she really wanted me to fix the doll.

I tried everything I could think of.  Soap and water, rubbing alcohol, oxy clean, Mr. Clean’s magical eraser, and fingernail polish remover.  None of these products had any effect whatsoever on marker.  But I wasn't ready to give up.  At this point, I did what anyone would do when facing a problem they can’t solve.  I went to the internet.

Of course my daughter was not the first to mar the face of a Monster High doll with marker, and smarter people than me have found a solution, one I would’ve never come up with on my own.  Oxy-10, that over the counter acne medicine contains a bleaching agent, 10 % benzoyl peroxide that can be activated in direct sunlight.  Now this wouldn’t have worked if my daughter’s doll was any color other than white because it might bleach away the face color as well.  We were lucky.

I covered the doll’s hair with tinfoil and her eyes so that the sun wouldn’t fade away those colors, put Oxy-10 on the marker lines, and set the doll in a window for one week.  After a week, here is the result.

I was amazed how well the treatment worked, but clearly we missed a few spots.  So I repeated the process for another week, and the doll looked awesome.  

There are still some faint yellow marks, and we could’ve gone another round, but my daughter had been without her new doll for two weeks, so we decided it was good enough.  At some point, I might try another round.  But I was so pleased with how well this worked.  I really thought the doll was unfixable, but with a little research and a little time (well a lot of time for a five-year-old girl), we fixed her.

Now, what does this have to do with writing?

I know that a lot of first time writers are cautioned against getting stuck on their first book.  I’ve seen the warning many times on the internet to not get trapped into constant revisions, that you can learn more from writing a new story.  And I do think that that is good advice for some situations, but I also think that any story is fixable.  It might take a lot of time and effort maybe even a complete rewrite or two, but no story is beyond repair. 

I'm not the type of person who can walk away from a problem even if it is difficult or even seemingly impossible.  I don't like to be defeated by markers on dolls or a story that I just can't figure out how to end.  I know that any problem can be solved in some way.

If I know what is wrong with my story and if I have an idea of how to fix it and if I love the story and believe in it and am still excited about it, I’m not ready to give up.  It might take a lot of time, a lot of research, a lot of thought.  I may have to rewrite the entire thing maybe even more than once, but I don’t like to give up on something that I believe in.

I know not every writer is like me, that some writers are more instinctive and have a million ideas floating around in their heads and will probably learn faster writing a story once and then moving on to something new, and those writers need to do what is best for them.

But I think there are also writers like me.  Who have these stories that for some reason they feel really passionate about.  And it isn’t that they want to write stories, but that they want to write these specific stories.  I don’t think that these writers should give up on those stories even if they have horrible pacing or poor characterization or are anticlimactic or just don’t work for some reason.  These stories are fixable; all stories are fixable.  But only the writer can decide if that story is worth the time and energy to fix it.

~MaryAnn

Just because it's Monday, and I can.

*Reblogged from boekwegbooks.com

Look whose name is right here ^

Twitter is a way, apparently, of stalking people in a socially approved way.

As many of you know, I'm planning on indie - publishing Funny Tragic Crazy Magic, but what some of you don't know, is that it's also in a pile on an awesome publishing house's short list. I follow (read stalk) the editor on twitter, and today she posted this picture about overcoming her depression.

A shot of Zoloft came for me when I looked at the notebook under her books and saw my name. My name uncrossed between two crossed out names. She's read it, she's liked it enough to not cross it off.

*Also, Melanie Crouse, I see an "se - Love" right there at the bottom, which in my mind has to be Crouse.

Because of this, and also because moving while trying to get book ready is less helpful than you would think, I'm pushing back FTCM launch date.

Not by much.

Funny Tragic Crazy Magic will launch April 1. April Fools Day. That's no joke, although my beta readers will get it.

A quick status report, I've broken FTCM into 5 Acts. Act 1 and 2 are back from the editor, Act 3 and 4 are in her capable hands, and Act 5 is staring at me, daring me to fix it before sending it on to the editor.

And it's good people. You can tell, because look whose name is right up there, uncrossed.

Best of luck to you, Editor-Who-Likes-My-Book.  Depression truly does suck.

~Sheena Boekweg

Simple vs. Simplistic: In a Glass Grimmly and Me

Stretching out far, far into the distance was a line of towering white cliffs, undulating in and out before an endless expanse of the purest, deepest blue she could ever have imagined. The white cliffs, a thousand feet high if they were an inch, were topped with green tufts of high grass. Below the cliffs, between them and the pure blue sky, ran a long, smooth cloud beach, against which the blue of the sky gently broke like waves. (In a Glass Grimmly, by Adam Gidwitz, p. 83)

sorta, kinda like this...

Once upon a time, I too went to a writer's conference. For an extra $10 (give or take) I entered the first chapter of one of my novels into a contest. There were several categories I could enter, including fantasy, science fiction, mystery, women's lit, historical...and children's. Now I'm not going to go into a long irritated rant about how YA and Children managed to get lumped into one category. Ridiculous, IMO. Ridiculous enough that I didn't think to enter my solidly YA entry into the children's category, but into the fantasy category. Now, the lovely thing about that extra $10 was that my first chapter would be critiqued by three people, one of whom was guaranteed to be an actual agent or editor who worked in the genre.

Well, it would have been lovely, except that the first critique, while not unkind, managed to cut me to the quick. I can't tell you why it hurt so bad. I'm sure there were extenuating circumstances, like jet lag and having been rejected by my dream editor that self-same day. I didn't keep it, so I can't quote it word for word, but it said something like this:  "This writing is too simplistic for this category--it seems like this would have been a better fit for the YA contest."

In one fell swoop, he had insulted not only my writing style but my intelligence AND my reading choices. I, who had always prided myself on my scintillating vocabulary, and who had worked so hard at improving my sentence structure, had been judged simplistic. Did that also mean that the books I chose to read somehow required less intelligence than "grown-up" books? (Well, frankly, yes. Sometimes. But not usually!)

In the days since that writing conference, another genre has gained in popularity: middle grade. In A Glass Grimmly, which I quoted at the start, is a middle grade book. It is filled with words like: precipitously, cerulean, primordial, reverberated, gelatinous, darkling and viscera (don't ask). Some of the sentences are simple, and some are complex and wonderful.

 To state it simplistically, YA and middle grade are not defined by the complexity of the writing. Rather, they are defined by the ages of the characters. Therefore, complex books like The Book Thief and The Fault In Our Stars are considered YA, right alongside Twilight, because they have teenage characters. Trisha wrote a great post about the evolving dynamics of YA here.  Middle grade books generally have younger characters, and there are some policies about romance (specifically the lack thereof.) The topics covered in both categories are often deep and complex. For example, In a Glass Grimmly tackles topics like: Are strength and courage the same thing? Are parents always good? If people do not accept you, are you a worthwhile person? And the one I personally struggle with: My children love this book, but should they really be reading it if it contains sentences like: 

The last one convulsed on the floor, screaming in pain, as blood bubbled up out of his body like a hot spring and flowed all over the floor in crimson waves, eventually lapping up against the throne's legs like water against rocks on a beach. (p. 191) FYI--I skipped this particular sentence when we read it out loud.

So, if I disagree with my anonymous critiquer's assertion that YA writing is by definition less complicated than adult writing, then what is left is his allegation that my writing is simplistic. It probably is. I dislike writing that thinks too much about itself. I enjoy straightforward writing, suffused with occasional gorgeous, complex descriptions that propel the story forward. I write the same way, except that I might not have mastered the "gorgeous, complex descriptions that propel the story forward" bit. I can keep working on that, but now, at the end of this blog post, I realize that it seems silly to try and make my writing more complicated just for complication's sake. But let's rename it. I absolutely prefer the word simple over the word simplistic. And it has nothing to do with the fact that I write YA.

So, my writing style aside, what do you think? 

Looks at Books from LTUE

LTUE was amazing in so many ways. First, and foremost, as Sheena said, getting to meet a couple Prosers in real life. I felt like I'd known them forever. Then, of course, was the chance to meet my favorite YA author, Megan Whalen Turner, who was the guest of honor. She is just as smart and gracious and witty as I had imagined. Third, the classes were excellent - I ended up with 36 pages of notes.

And lastly, the subject of today's post. On the plane flight home, I read over all my notes and kept finding scrawled in the margins the names of all these books. So many people on the panels made references to and gave suggestions of books I'd never read, or only heard of in passing. It was like getting my library piggy bank filled up and overflowing.

So, I thought I'd list out all the books I'd written down and see if any of you had read any of them, and what you thought of them. Most are YA, some are adult or tools of writing books.

Here we go:

Save the Cat by Blake Snyder - I'd heard of his 'beat sheet,' but never read the book.

The Winter Prince by Elizabeth E, Wein - Yes, I bawled my way through Code Name Verity, and now it looks like I've got some Arthurian legends to read. Elizabeth Wein is an exceptional writer.

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

Arkfall by Carolyn Ives Gilman - Nebula nominee 2009

The Thursday Next Novels by Jasper Fforde

The Key of Kilenya by Andrea Pearson - I got to listen to Andrea at LTUE and really enjoyed her perspective. This book is a free download on Kindle right now.

Black's Pocket Law Dictionary - One of the most interesting classes I went to was on contracts, which I know nothing about. They suggested spending a month after getting a contract looking up every word that wasn't 'a' or 'the' in this book because common words don't have the same meaning in law. thepassivevoice.com was recommended in several places as a great site to get information. From what I understand, the owner is a intellectual rights lawyer specializing in the publishing industry.

Sorcery and Cecelia or the Enchanted Chocolate Pot by Patricia Wrede - I love Patricia Wrede, why have I not read this one?

Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen

Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt

Novel by Katherine Paterson - Either the panelist couldn't remember the name or I didn't write it down. Katherine Paterson also wrote Bridge to Terabithia and Jacob Have I Loved. This novel is about a girl who leaves home and afterward her entire village dies of the plague. It was used as an example of  a tight 3rd that 'broke the rule' to switch to show the village's demise. Anyone got a clue?

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

Agatha Christie - lots of them.

Summer of Night and The Crook Factory by Dan Simmons

The Enola Holmes Mysteries by Nancy Springer - Sherlock Holmes has a little sister!

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith - This is a perennial favorite for Megan Whalen Turner fans.

Dairy Queen and Princess Ben by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

Kate Coombs is a very fun author I met, and sat with! She has several books out as well as a website, Book Aunt, where she reviews books and has all kinds of fun stuff.

Gail Carson Levine - no books specified, so they must all be good :)

The Virgin's Promise by Kim Hudson - the Hero's Journey from the female perspective.

Dangerous Voices by Rae Carson

Danyelle Leafty is another author on several panels I attended. I found her thoughtful insight very helpful. 

And Julie Wright was downright hilarious.

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne M. Valente

The Sweetness of Salt by Cecilia Galante


And there you have it. I'm sure I missed a ton, but what a feast!
Thanks LTUE and all the people who made it awesome.

~Susan

In Which I Live a Dream and Become a Real Writer

I have this secret dream that all of us Prosers get together and do OSC book boot camp this year. It would be amazing, and I can tell you that for sure, because last Saturday I had a tiny taste of it.

Amazing!

 I went to LTUE with MaryAnn and Susan. That, for your information, is what Susan actually looks like. I had no clue. It's kind of funny, but all of you Prosers have become like sisters to me, and we haven't met before. It didn't feel to me like we were meeting for the first time.

 I felt the same way when I met Sabrina, except with better lighting.

Open invitation for the last three Prosers I haven't met yet,( Sarah, Tricia, and Melanie), let's go to lunch!

 We had TOO much fun at LTUE. We laughed, and learned, and talked about books and publishing and met real life authors. It was a book nerd's paradise.

It was my first convention, and I think I'd never gone to one before, because I had a million excuses not to. But mainly, I didn't want to have to commit to this dream I have, because whenever I say I'm a writer, I have a secret fear that people will read my words and see my soul and say, "Ick".

 But mostly I didn't want to be weird. It's not normal for a mom and Mormon woman to daydream about what life would be like to live on a moon of some far off galaxy. It's not normal to drive my kids to school, and be whispering bits of dialog, or world building, or be thinking what if. It's not normal to worry about if people will think less of me for publishing a book on my own, or to look at a sixteen year old boy and think he'd make a cute hero. It's not normal. I'm officially not normal.

 I know this, but I didn't want to be the not normal that goes to scifi conventions. That was my own personal line in the sand.

But I've crossed it now, and I liked it.

What I took away from the conference, more than the inspiration from Susan and MaryAnn on how to fix the climax of my book, or hearing brilliant people say things I've thought, and things I never would have, that gave me a new path for my own ideas, or even the ...fact... that Dave Farland discovered both Twilight, and Harry Potter, was the clear and secure knowledge that I'm not the only weirdo out there.

 There were hundreds of men and women who got the Dr. Who references, and the spoke of some inspiration they got from one of my favorite books, and a ton of books to my TBR pile to inspire me later, who were amazed at the idea of goats in space, or the importance of the sewing needle and how it affected our society.

The amazing thing, is that there are thousands, maybe millions more of us out there who didn't go to LTUE, but who have the same dream. That might be intimidating number to think of, if you see all those people as competition,  but I don't. I've read a thousand books that have taught me the same singular message I learned from LTUE. I'm weird, but I'm not alone.

I'm weird like you.

Now, I'm off to fix my climax.

Happy writing, happy reading, happy life,
~Sheena

Breaking YA Taboos: Swearing, Violence and Sex in Young Adult

I still remember what my grandma sent me for Christmas in 2000.  I remember, because it was the first time anyone had given me a book the size of a dictionary for Christmas, and I had some seriously mixed feelings about it.  I'd never heard of the book--in fact, I must have been living under a rock up to that point, because at 16 years old,  I'd never heard of the Harry Potter series whatsoever.  Who was this Harry Potter and why did his goblet have fire in it?  Didn't he know goblets were for drinking?

The number 4 on the spine discouraged me.  I couldn't just jump into a series with book 4!  It took a few months to work up the desire to find books 1-3, but eventually I got around to it, and soon I was hooked.

A lot has changed since I took my first tentative steps into the world of Young Adult.  Christopher Paolini opened the door to teen writers, something Steph Bowe has since repeated.  Stephenie Meyer gave us Twilight, and made it okay to be an adult YA reader.  The Hunger Games made violence and death par for the course.  In my last blog post, I questioned whether Warm Bodies was classified as YA because of the violence, drug use, sex and swearing, and it turns out that yes, it is.  So what do all those changes mean for us writers?

When I started writing YA (about ten years ago now...gasp!) I ran into a lot of roadblocks and rules.  Teens can't swear.  They can't have graphic fights.  Kissing was about as far as anyone was willing to go in the romance subplots.  Even the subject matter had to be chosen carefully.  The main character couldn't have a drug problem, but the best friend could.  That way the reader could get a glimpse at the dark side of the world, without being put smack dab in the middle of it.  Today, however, the rules have changed.

Last year, BYU professor Sarah Coyne conducted a study to determine the level of profanity in YA books.  She pulled 40 samples from an adolescent best seller list, and many were shocked at her findings.  I, personally, have read enough YA in the last decade that it didn't surprise me in the least to hear that, on average, the books contained 38 instances of swearing from cover to cover.  However, the study has lead many to question whether YA books should come with warnings on the covers, to better help parents choose which books their teens should be reading.  (I'm not going into the moral debate that idea creates.  If you want to read an article containing the ALA's response, you can find it here.  This is another article, which takes an opposing view to the study and the BYU publication.  There.  Balanced information.  My job is done!)

Profanity isn't the only thing popping up in droves.  The evolution of the Harry Potter books themselves shows how dark and violent the world of YA is becoming.  If you need a really controversial example of what's being published under the YA banner, check out Nic Sheff's book Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines.  If you weren't convinced before how quickly things are changing, that book will open your eyes.

It's not particularly new for teens to be exposed to violence and swearing.  Video games, movies, even cartoons have been a part of our culture for decades.  Before that, comic books.  Before that, fairy tales.  Ever sat down and thought about the story of the three little pigs?  At least two of the pigs get eaten, people. Talking, house-building pigs, reduced to bacon.  Or what about the original Little Mermaid?  Disney put a pretty spin on the ending, but earlier versions have the prince sailing off into the sunset with a different woman, turning the mermaid into sea foam.  (Undine, considered to be the myth that spawned the mermaid story, ended up killing her husband and his lover.  Talk about murderous revenge.)  For some reason, it's only just now beginning to catch up in modern adolescent literature.

Love the portrait of dad, guys

One boundary that is getting pushed more slowly than the others is sex.  The level of sexual explicitness in Harry Potter can be summed up with one word: snogging.  Twilight acknowledges a teenager's desires, but makes marriage a prerequisite before fading to black.  Becca Fitzpatrick and Cassandra Clare give their characters opportunities to sleep together, in the most literal sense, but both provide barriers to going any further.  But other authors have crossed the invisible line.  Kristin Cashore's characters in Graceling aren't having any babies, and the writing is fairly obscure, but it tiptoes just over the line that some writers (and readers) consider "safe."

Andrea Creamer, author of the wildly popular Nightshade series, took a stance supporting her use of sex and violence in YA books in an essay for the Wall Street Journal.  At one point she says,

"Teens don't live in a vacuum.  They inhabit the same brutal world as adults without the knowledge and tools of adulthood.  They're looking for help to gain those skills."

Simon and Schuster has spearheaded an interesting new online feature.  When Abbi Glines first wrote The Vincent Boys she had more than a few explicit sexual scenes.  Simon Pulse, a division of Simon and Schuster, chose to cut the scenes for the print version, marketing the book to teens, but later added them as online-only content intended "for mature readers only."  The aim of this online campaign?  To cater to the cross-over readers who want the excitement of YA plot and the steamy romance of an E. L. James.  Does this dual publication set a new standard for YA?

Not necessarily.

Another genre is emerging from all this debate and boundary-pushing.  New Adult, supposedly a genre to bridge the cross-over gap, is gaining a following in the publishing world.  I don't think that means we'll see YA settle back into the safe world of fade to black and "oh fudge!"  The line has been crossed, and we can't go back.  But hopefully with New Adult garnering shelf space in bookstores, there is room for both kinds of stories.  Writers that previously struggled to find their place in the YA world won't have to censor their plots and dialogue, while other writers can tell a great story without feeling societal pressures to spice things up with sex and violence.

Ultimately it's the author's job to guide her readers through her story.  We've been given a huge canvas on which to paint our scenes, but that just means we have a bigger responsibility to our readers.  Teenagers especially need to know that no matter how bad things get in a story--no matter how violent, how dark, how awful--there is always hope.

Maybe that was the most important YA rule all along.