I've been seeing more book buzz on Facebook and Twitter, but it's for the next few months. That suggests we can expect more books coming out in the future.
Consider doing some recapitulation, folks. It's incredibly helpful, and you may find it an ego-boost, too. You could have accomplished more than you think you have. Especially if you had goals to work with last year. They were a huge help for me, giving me something to focus on.
My greatest accomplishment in 2020 is, of course, remaining on my feet and as sane as I ever am. Professionally, though, here are my goals and objectives and what happened with them.
Goal 1. Concentrate on submitting completed book-length projects as well as completed short-form work.
Objectives:
However, I did make 50 submissions overall this year, resulting in publishing the following:
Fears That We May Cease To Be at The Blue Nib Literary Magazine
Dear Pastor Bill at The Haven
And I published the humor piece Well, How Many Masks Have You Made at Medium myself.
That was some progress with my short-form adult writing.
However, I took a six-week flash forms workshop this summer during which I wrote some pieces and then last month took part in Flash NaNo2020 during which I wrote nine more pieces. One of them was Dear Pastor Bill, which has already been published. So though I didn't do much with the planned objectives, I am happy what I did for the overall goal.
Goal 3. Work on the 365 story project
Objectives:
I did absolutely nothing on this and was planning to ditch it again for next year. However, just this morning I was thinking that now that I have more flash training, I should dabble with this again.
Goal 6. Stay On Top Of Upcoming Known Events
Objectives:
Goal 7. Continue collecting material and ideas for an adult scifi project, far in my future.
Funny story on this one. The adult scifi project I was thinking about was called Flu Season, and it was going to be a mystery/thriller set in a world that has recovered from a massive flu epidemic that took out a big percentage of the population a couple of generations back. The flu has never been wiped out, and people have learned to live around it. In addition, the world's population hasn't bounced back, so the world hasn't bounced back, so that makes for a different--though not necessarily bad--kind of life.
I had a lot to work out with this and hadn't started any writing. But I was thinking about world building. I was thinking about a world where everyone wears masks and gloves in public and makes fashion statements with them. Homes are renovated so people enter through laundry rooms where they strip out of their outdoor clothes and change into clean clothes. Everyone home schools. Takeout meals are a big, fancy deal.
Now, I'm not going to go anywhere with this now, but the thinking I'd done with it had an impact on how I've lived the last 9 months, and probably why, psychologically, I've dealt with this better than I might have. I was somewhat prepared.
I've been doing a lot of reader response posts lately, because I've been pushing with my reading in order to meet my goal of reading 50 books this year. I made it, going over by two. I know I did, because GoodReads says so.
GoodReads keeps track of my reading over the year--so long as I enter the books and remember to include a finish date. It makes a lovely graphic with all the covers of the books. Over the course of the year, it tells me if I'm behind or ahead of schedule. This year I was often behind, partly because I read some slow adult works. I'm looking at you A People's History of the United States.
In order to make my goal, I had to push this past few months, giving up my daily Zen of watching foreign TV shows to make reading time. I was not willing to approximate correct behavior on this one. Next year I'm going to set the bar a little lower. It will be less stressful to reach it, and if I go over, I can brag.
I'm not bragging this year, folks. My sister read 100 books in 2020.
Ellie and Jack, both middle school athletes with single parents, barely know each other, though Ellie certainly knows about Jack who is quite highly regarded. They end up swapping bodies and having to spend the weekend with each other's friends and families and dealing with each other's problems. The book switches from one point of view to the other, which I'm not usually of, but it works well here. Yes, humorous situations all over the place.
Some things I particularly like about this book:
So this was a good find, a good end-of-the-year read.
A particularly entertaining part of the book involves the fact that gramps has turned back time for his body, but not his mind. He's still, in reality, an older scientist, who has now been thrown into a teenager's world.
I thought Ellie's epiphany toward the end was a little abrupt, but, nonetheless, this is a neat book, both entertaining and with some different content.
I'm always saying that I'm not that big a fan of zombie books, but I seem to have read a number of them. I'm not attracted to the idea of walking dead, by any means, or horror. I'm attracted to zombie books that have a unique world for the zombies to exist within. That was the case with the Rot & Ruin books I read, as well as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Rot & Ruin was a zombie/contemporary western mash-up. P and P and Z was, of course, a zombie/Pride and Prejudice mash-up. Dread Nation is a zombie/alternative history mashup. It takes place in a post-American Civil War world in which the dead rose during/after the Battle of Gettysburg.
I believe I once read that zombie stories are never about zombies. That's certainly the case with Dread Nation. This book deals with race and politics, with a twist on a southern belle/mean girl secondary character thrown in, just in case there's not enough to interest you. And like with Rot & Ruin, the zombies in Dread Nation are not necessarily the worst things our hero has to deal with. Some of the humans who exist in this zombie world are pretty grim.
Fantastic main character who would have been a male a decade or so ago but most definitely is not. Even the ending is good, though the story is clearly set up for a sequel.
Seriously, I can't think of any negatives for this one.
The Hundred Dresses was published in 1944, and it's interesting on a couple of levels.
Stylistically, it is very elegantly written. It is more sophisticated in presentation than we see in middle grade books these days. And, yet, it also has a lot of illustrations by Louis Slobodkin. (Turns out I admired that Slobodkin site back in 2007.) This gives the impression that The Hundred Dresses is for even younger readers. However, that may have been common in children's books of that era. The Hundred Dresses is also written in the third person, something that's not very popular with publishers now. It sometimes is written from a point-of-view character, Maddie, who who is more of an observer than an actor in the story, and sometimes the narrator is more classically omniscient. I don't think that kind of switching would go over today.
This book is about a couple of school girls who humiliate a third one, a child of poor Polish immigrants who has to wear the same dress to school every day. They "have some fun with her." The main instigator is a girl named Peg, who would be perceived today as a head mean girl. That sometimes point-of-view character, Maddie, is her companion, complicit in her silence.
At a couple of points it seems clear that neither the omniscient narrator nor Maddie consider Peg to be a bully. In her era, she may have been considered just incredibly shallow and thoughtlessly cruel. But Peg would be considered a bully today. Reading how she behaves to her victim, Wanda, and how Wanda just takes it and takes it and takes it was disturbing to this adult reader who is aware of how those who are bullied have broken over the last couple of decades.
The ending was also disturbing. Wanda forgives Peg and Maddie. I'm not saying forgiveness is a bad thing. But those two little WASP girls didn't have to do a damn thing to redeem themselves, so they could feel better. Wanda does it all.
I've seen a few descriptions of this book that indicate that it's about Wanda Petronski, the Polish girl victimized by Peg and Maddie. I don't feel it is. I think it's about Maddie, the girl who stood to one side, did nothing to stop the bullying, and was a decent enough human being to feel bad about it. It is her thoughts we are privy to and we see what she sees. Additionally, the book is said to have been inspired by an incident in Estes own life, when she was in a Maddie position and was never able to apologize to the girl she didn't help at the time.
I think Maddie as the central figure makes The Hundred Dresses a far more interesting book than it would be if it really were about Wanda. We have lots of victim books. We have far fewer about the other people in those situations.
This would be an excellent classroom or family read-aloud.
*I originally published the title as "A Sixty-Four-Year-Old Children's Book."
Writers can manage some of the chaos in their lives by encouraging a similar attitude in themselves. Particularly in situations in which we've set up short-term objectives around a schedule, we have to be careful not to fall apart when (notice I didn't say if) the schedule can't be adhered to as we fantasized it would, when we can't reach the behavior we were hoping for.
Falling apart causes chaos.
Last month I took part in FlashNaNo2020. The plan/schedule for that was to write 30 flash stories in 30 days. I veered off into flash essays and memoirs, so I wasn't sticking to the plan for that right from week 2.
It also became clear at the end of the first week that I wasn't going to meet the planned, "correct behavior," writing 30 pieces of flash in 30 days. I had to put that correct behavior aside and accept that I was going to have to approximate it. The alternative to approximating correct behavior would have been to give in to the dread what-the-hell effect. "I'm obviously not going to hit the behavior I want, so what-the-hell? I might as well give up on this whole thing."
The what-the-hell effect is a lot like what passes for chaos at my house.
Oh, and this is a 2020 book! A pandemic book about my major out-of-house pandemic activity.
I wrote Dear Pastor Bill last month as part of FlashNaNo2020, my month of writing flash. So I originally thought of it as flash fiction. But is it "humor writing?" Is there such a thing as "humor writing?" What is this?
You can see why I referred to it as "my piece" in the first paragraph.
And, yes, I should do some research and tell you all about it.
In our Facebook discussion, a question arose on how writers can share their work and generate interest in it without blogging. Well, you know me. I have some thoughts on that. I think, therefore I blog.
Writers need to be very careful about "sharing" new work at a website or blog, even their own, because many journals and potential markets consider what they've posted as "published." Those markets, and there are many of them like this, won't consider that work for publication. It's now "previously published," and many places don't accept that kind of work. It doesn't matter how low your readership is, the material is, or at one time was, available to the public.
I never publish my essays and short stories here or at my website, because I want the option of being able to submit them elsewhere. While I was taking part in FlashNaNo2020 last month, I wouldn't even post any of my work at the group's Facebook page, in case doing so meant I'd lost the option to submit it elsewhere.
I write frequently here about a number of subjects--blogging and time management, for instance--that I might someday want to write something on and submit somewhere. However, I don't expect to be able to publish anything I've posted here as is. I would need to do updating, rewriting, and maybe some new research. I would need to come up with new "original content."
Well, I haven't made a new book sale in over--well, in quite some time. Clearly, I'm not the one to be giving advice on how to generate interest in your writing work. Not to worry. That won't stop me.
Three things you can try:
While thinking about the Facebook discussion I was part of, I searched Original Content to see what I'd covered on this subject in the past. Here are links to more of Gail's thoughts on blogging than you will want to be privy to. Some of these posts go back a while, so some links may not be working. My own words, of course, are timeless.
As I've said before, I collect my monthly pandemic book release material from social media. This month, I've seen a lot fewer books being discussed. I usually have to do two posts because I collect so much material. Back when I did the Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar, November and December were very quiet months for author appearances. So these may be months when far fewer books are published. Though you'd think new books would sell well during the December holidays, and, therefore, that would be a desirable publishing time. I know fall is when "big" books are published. Winter must not be for anyone.
Nov. 10 Friend Me, Sheila M. Averbuch, Scholastic
Here is a little piece on writing flash memoir from True Stories Well Told. I can't tell if this is still an active site, but I liked this post.
And Flash Memoir: The Benefits of Writing Short Memoir from Writing Women's Lives Academy.
Okay, if you spend any time reading about meditation, you will see the phrase "begin again." If your mind wanders while you're trying to meditate, no problem. Begin again. If you find that you're no longer in the present moment, that your mind has tiptoed off to your miserable past or your worries of the future, so what? You can begin again.
You're not a bad person because you didn't stay in meditation. You haven't failed. You're just going to begin again. Here is Joseph Goldstein explaining a very positive aspect of beginning again. In less than four minutes, people! How much do I love that? I love it a lot.
Writers who've become overwhelmed by the chaos of living or at least their own kind of living and find that they are no longer on task with their work can use the same begin again thinking. Beginning to work again is important. But I think the really beneficial aspect of begin again is the lack of judgement. Judging and beating up yourself for work failures:
Developing a begin again mindset won't keep us from finding ourselves neck deep in chaos. But it could help us get out of it.
She is the main character in The War I Finally Won by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. This middle grade novel is the sequel to The War That Saved My Life. I liked that book, though according to my post on the subject I found the beginning and ending a little melodramatic. That wasn't the case with the sequel. This was a book I really looked forward to getting back to reading.
Ada, who was also the main character in War That Saved My Life, is marvelous, though not someone who could be described as nice. In fact, I'm a little surprised she made the cut in children's publishing, where likability is tossed around a lot. Perhaps she was accepted because this is a historical novel, and gatekeepers felt young readers could feel some distance.
No, Ada is not likable. What she is is angry and distrustful and expecting the worst, for good reason. When we first met her in the first book during World War II, she is the victim of maternal abuse. What saves her is the evacuation of children from London. Her mother didn't arrange for her to get out, so this incredibly tough young one got herself out. She and her younger brother land with Susan who an adult reading between the lines will believe is a lesbian grieving for her dead companion and a victim of periodic bouts of depression. I love this about Susan. She doesn't wear any signs saying "Lesbian" or "Mental Health Character." She just is. Just as World War II saves Ada, Ada and her brother save Susan.
But just because Ada is saved, it doesn't mean that everything is sweetness and light for her in Book 2. There's still that pesky Hitler to deal with. And Ada is still enraged, because her mother hadn't loved her and hadn't even tried to provide her with some basic health care that would have given her a much different childhood. Ada lived a horrible life before connecting with Susan. She can't be confident that she and her brother won't end up in a similar situation some day.
So The War I Finally Won is both a World War II home front story and a personal story about a child at war with her past and her present. It is really well done.
Oh, another remarkable bit of character development about Ada--Because her mother kept her confined in an apartment with no access to the world, she is remarkably ignorant regarding run-of-the-mill life things that other children her age would have picked up. She doesn't know what a dragon is or fairy tales, for instance.
"The day after I read it to my sons, it inspired my short story, How Mom Saved the Planet, which was later published in Cricket Magazine. And another version of How Mom Saved the Planet became the first chapter of my first book, My Life Among the Aliens. I may not have had a writing career, if not for Company's Coming."
So, yes, big deal for Gail.
Company's Going picks up with the same characters from Company's Coming, except now Moe and Shirley's alien guests are so taken with Shirley's cooking that they invite her to cater a wedding back on their home world. It's just as terrific as the first book.
Another interesting point: Both the Company books are examples of picture books with no human characters and no animals characters filling in for humans. I don't see that a lot.
Both of what I call the Will and Rob books have human characters. And aliens, of course.
On the other hand, I didn't lose any sleep over this, the way I did last week, and I focused on essays instead of fiction. I liked expanding that way. With one of this week's pieces I was able to dip into ideas from my journal. For the other, I used a prompt from the FlashNaNo people, which I hadn't done before.
Next week I'm going to work on flash memoir.
You might want to take a look at What's a Flash Essay? by Martha Nichols at Talking Writing.
I'm taking the weekend off from writing flash to try to do some organized flash studying (instead of the disorganized studying I've been doing in the evenings) and planning, particularly of and for flash nonfiction, which I'd like to try before the end of the month.
Anyone who pays attention here knows I rarely work on weekends, so studying and planning is pretty close to real work for me..
Here is a nice piece on writing flash fiction from MasterClass. It's kind of flashy, in fact. Short and to the point.
And if you'd like to read a very decent piece of flash fiction, try Last Long Night by Lina Rather at Flash Fiction On-line.
While putting together the second post for October's book releases, I discovered that author Rajani LaRocca was having a book launch last week for her new picture book, Seven Golden Rings. You all know that when a virtual book event catches my fancy, I am in. So I did, indeed, register to attend. And showed up on time.
This was an excellent event on a couple of different levels.
This means, folks, that not only did I not have to dress up for this thing, I could have washed my hair and sat there with it drying, as I would have if I'd known how this was going to go down. Seriously, not only do I not want to have to drive to go anywhere ever again, I don't want to have to get dressed or comb my hair while I'm taking part in it from home.
By the way, 100 people registered to attend. By a few minutes after 7, when the show got on the road, 60 of us had shown up. More could have come later. But, you know, 60 people. Good work.
Interviewer and interviewee. So the bookstore staff person turned everything over to LaRocca, who was seated in what looked to be a whole lot better home office than I have, and the person who was going to interview her, author Hayley Barrett, who was somewhere else, since we're in the midst of a pandemic and all. Barrett and LaRocca are critique partners and have known each other for some time. A situation like that has the potential to go really badly, with all kinds of inside jokes and drifting off to their shared interests that listeners couldn't care less about. But au contraire. Barrett had the inside dope on what happened while this book was being written and knew just what to ask to get that information out.
The reading. LaRocca did a reading of the book. She did not just awkwardly hold the book open in front of a camera and turn the pages. She had her book loaded onto some kind of techie thing that kept it open and turned the pages. I don't know what it was, but it was terrific.
A surprise guest. LaRocca's son turned up, coming to us from his dorm room. It made sense why he was there. I once had two college-age boys. They are terrific, too.
A model. I think this was an excellent model for how a virtual book launch can operate so it isn't just the author talking. Bring in your own, prepared interviewer. Have some good technology. Bring in a guest.
I have now actually read Seven Golden Rings while it was being read to me by its author and have seen every page. It's a terrific story centering around a math/logic issue that I was actually able to understand. The illustrations by Archana Sreenivasan are wonderful. It's very, very possible that someone in my family is going to receive a copy of this book for Christmas. I will then share with him all the insider info I have about it, because I attended this book launch.
"...it would be apt to compare the entire body of children’s literature written by white people about Black people to the paradigm of minstrelsy."
I would have quoted more of that paragraph, but I read a book on historical documentation this past year that frightened me about quoting too much, even when attributed. So go check out this article, yourself.
So I decided all that made a great case for why I should jump on this, even though I had little time to organize and had originally planned to keep working on my October project during the month of November. I am chaos! Go for it!
My interest in writing short stories involves writing about slices of life. That's what I think is interesting and want to write about. However, traditional short stories are expected to include a change for the main character and perhaps an epiphany. My slices of life don't always go over that well with fans of traditional short stories. Flash may be a better format for what I want to do.
Over the last few years, I've become very aware of when I'm reading something that's going long, whether a book or a short form. I think a lot of this has to do with the overwhelming amount of writing that's being produced and is out there to be read. I have a lot of interests. I want to read a lot of things.
So I really don't appreciate it when I'm having to read a lot of repetitive material. Unnecessary characters. Scenes that are perhaps amusing or interesting but really don't support the story the writer is supposed to be telling. I'm not a fan of long descriptions.
In nonfiction I sometimes see books begin with long, long sections in which the author tells me what is going to be covered in the book instead of just covering it. Pages and pages. The creative nonfiction beginning frame of a case study has become a cliche to me. I often skim those. Case studies popping up throughout a nonfiction book--to me that's just padding now that keeps me from the content I picked up the book for in the first place.
Because I've become interested in flash of all kinds as a reader, I want to see what I can do with it as a writer. Leading me to spending this month trying to do a draft of some kind of flash each day, and trying to read more flash and read more about flash.
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The above post, by the way, is 450 words. My flash for today, though I do have something else in mind I'll start if I can find time on this Sunday afternoon.
Well, I had never heard of Dragons Love Tacos, though it appears to be kind of a big deal, but other people on that Facebook page had. Not only are there several copies in town for the original poster to borrow, someone has two.
I don't think I've ever seen any book talk at all on our town page, so congrats for attracting such attention, Dragons Love Tacos, an eight-year-old picture book that is still generating buzz in central Connecticut.
By the end of this week (and this month that I had set aside for this manuscript), I will have finished one chapter that I'd already started and completed two more. I've also reorganized the first part of the story structurally, including a new first chapter. More importantly, I think, I am into the world of the book again, a world I hadn't entered since, maybe, last spring.
What you do, she says, is determine how many days you have available to work on a project, then make an objective for each of those days. In her plan, you write these objectives on a note and pin them to a chart on the wall. This month is the second time I've tried this, and I just create a stack of notes for each day.
Being realistic, in my case, means:
My May Days group, which organized this October set-aside time, shoots for writing two pages a day. I don't care about that much, so long as I'm working. But I have found this past month that I'll be working and think, Getting to the two page point won't be that much work, Gail. Keep going.
No, two pages isn't very much. But that's my point. Small, realistic objectives can keep you (or, at least, me) working toward a goal. They make chaos manageable for a little while.