Blog Tour For "Fab Four Friends" Underway Now

I am going to be taking part in the blog tour for Fab Four Friends: The Boys Who Became the Beatles by Susanna Reich with illustrations  by Adam Gustavson. The tour starts today at Booktalking. The rest of the tour stops:

Tuesday, August 18 Shelf-Employed 

Wednesday, August 19 UnleashingReaders.com 

Thursday, August 20 Elizabeth Dulemba

Friday, August 21 Maurice on Books

Tuesday, August 25 Kidsbiographer's Blog

Wednesday, August 26 Original Content

Thursday, August 27 Tales from the Rushmore Kid 

Friday, August 28 Alphabet Soup

 

Where's Shirley?

I'm in Bennington, Vermont this weekend because we're hitting a museum in Massachusetts and going biking. Bennington was the Vermont home of Shirley Jackson, with whom I've been obsessed since high school.

I've collected some Shirley Jackson Vermont reading to do while I'm up here.

Shirley Jackson and The Lottery/North Bennington

Shirley Jackson's Outsider Perspective of Bennington, Vermont

Shirley Jackson Road Trip, the report I'm really looking forward to this one.

Shirley Jackson Day Returns to North Bennington

Shirley Jackson's 'Life Among the Savages' and 'Raising Demons' Reissued

And, to be honest, I brought my copies of Life Among the Savages and The Lottery/Adventures of the Daemon Lover with me, so they could have the experience of being in the same town where Shirley lived. I've had The Lottery so long it smells of mildew. I hate when that happens.

I hope to have at least one Jackson-related photo to share before the weekend is over.

What Did You Do Last Week, Gail? August 14 Edition

Goal 1. Mummy Book. Honest to God, I'm making progress. Finished last week's chapter, did this week's chapter, and started a third one. I think I have maybe three chapters, tops, to go on this draft and a little over three weeks to do it. Allez, allez, allez!!!!

Goal 5. Community Building. I did a little work regarding a blog tour I'm taking part in later this month. I also rated a book at Goodreads. And yakked with a friend about it at Facebook, which is like community building but different.

Goal 7. General Marketing/Branding. I'm going to be on vacation for 3 weeks next month. This week I decided to stock pile a few blog posts for that period instead of going dark for the whole time. I've been liking how my stats have been doing this summer, and I don't want to risk them by not posting for 3 weeks. 

Okay. Let's Talk Some Professional Reading

Yes, as usual I am behind reading The Horn Book. The July/August issue is floating around here somewhere. I've finished the May/June special Transformations issue, though.

I'm not a big fan of theme issues of anything. However, there were some articles that grabbed my attention in this one.

• From Series to Serious by Thom Barthelmess. This made me understand the value of series fiction, the kind I haven't paid that much attention to in the past.
• What Makes a Good Nonfiction Adaptation? by Betty Carter. This was about creating childlit adaptations of adult nonfiction.
• Alice, the Transformer by Monica Edinger. This is a neat account of using Alice in Wonderland in the classroom.

Among the magazine's reviews were many for books by authors whose names we see a lot in children's publishing. Among the reviews for authors I hadn't heard of, one I found particularly interesting was the review for Nimona, a graphic novel written and illustrated by Noelle Stevenson. It "tweaks both the science fiction and fantasy genres."  And look! You can read the first three chapters on-line.

Okay, people. You are ready to move on to the new issue of Horn Book.

Time Management Tuesday: Not Recommending Guilt And Emotional Blackmail, But...

To be honest, I fell off the time management wagon this summer. I'm trotting along beside it, at least. I wasn't left in a heap in the road. But I am not working like a well oiled machine.

Summer is a situational time management problem for many writers who are also primary caregivers for school-age children. The issue was discussed last night at writers' group. I am having a situational issue, but it's not around my personal life. I am pushing through on the rough draft of a new work.

Different Types Of Writing

Generating new work is dramatically different from revising. I find it much more difficult, for example.

I'm an organic writer, so it's hard for me to isolate a plot from the entire story and get that lined up before I start working. Or even while I'm working. I have to work on the story as an entire organism.  As a result, I find myself doing lots of revising as I go along. If I'm stuck because I don't know how to move forward, I'll go back and revise. That actually does help, but what it has meant is that over these past four or five months I've spent a lot of time revising this particular work. So when I got to the point of new work, I, shall we say, was not accustomed to it?

Situational Writing? 

 

What I've been doing a lot of this summer while drafting new work is looking for breakout experiences, those moments when things just come to you. I described my method at the beginning of June:

I started running with the bits and pieces plan.

The last few weeks instead of getting my usual life activities out of the way and then getting into my four or five hours of work time, I took a look at my manuscript first thing in the morning and then did something else. I went back to the manuscript, then went back to something else. Over and over again while I was at the "something else," I worked out problems with the manuscript or came up with new idea.

This is a first draft. I have trouble with first drafts. Generating new material is not my favorite thing to do. I'm wondering if maybe when I'm in a first draft situation this is how I should be managing my time. Maybe this should be first draft process for me.

As I said then, I thought of this as being one of those situational things. Perhaps when I am working in this type of situation, in first draft mode, this is how I need to work. And I believe I have only a couple of chapters to go on this first draft. So it could be said to be working.

But I am functioning in a totally random way. I'm not working in units. I'm not using transition time. I'm not staying on task. I'm not shifting between projects the way I feel I should. And I have to wonder...if I had forced myself to just look at this #!!@ monitor for 45 minutes at a time instead of cooking up breakout experiences the way I've been doing, just because it feels easier and less stressful, would this thing be done by now?

Which brings me to Can Anything "Make" You Write? by Gina Barreca. Her time management technique appears to involve guilt and emotional blackmail. "So what if it’s not healthy? You want to be emotionally balanced, swim with the dolphins. You want to write? Learn to deal with the sharks." I definitely refuse to use guilt as a motivator, because according to Kelly McGonigal (who I kind of worship), it's supposed to undermine willpower, and God knows, it's not as if I have so much of that that I can afford to risk undermining any of it. But I am leaning on emotional blackmail right now.

Right after Labor Day, I'm leaving on a lengthy vacation. I am leaving whether I have finished this draft or not. How much I enjoy it, however, will be determined by whether or not I finish.

I'm going back to work, damn it.

The Weekend Writer: Are Writers' Groups Always A Good Thing?

Tomorrow night is my writers' group meeting. I just finished reading The 4 Hidden Dangers of Writing Groups by Jennie Nash at Jane Friedman. I've got to hustle to put some of what I've read into practice by then. This thing could make a whole new Writers' Group Gail.

I've written about writers' groups before. The 4 Hidden Dangers thing looks at them from a different angle. Yes, it covers aspects that could be problems, but it provides suggestions on how to deal with them. In fact, it's sort of like a personal mini-workshop on writers' groups.

Marc Tyler Nobleman On Biography And Historical Nonfiction

I was just writing about historical nonfiction here on Monday. Last night I spent an hour listening to Marc Tyler Nobleman's talk at the Richmond Memorial Library. He was speaking specifically about two of his books, Boys of Steel and Bill the Boy Wonder, biographies about mid-twentieth century comic book writers and illustrators. Boys of Steel is about the co-creators of Superman, and Bill the Boy Wonder is about the uncredited co-creator of Batman. So, there you go. I'm writing about historical nonfiction again.

Nobleman's description of his books and how he went about writing them illustrate a couple of points made in a Horn Book article from a few years back on contemporary children's historical nonfiction.

1. Children's history books are no longer simplified versions of subjects that were already covered for adult readers. Instead, they often involve new research. Nobleman describes lengthy searches for the pictures of the childhood homes of some of his subjects and finding and interviewing people who had never even been contacted before. Some of these people are now dead, so no one is going to be interviewing them again.
2. Because children's writers often seek out new topics to write about, it's not unusual to find children's books that are the first on a subject or even the only book on a subject. That's the case with the titles discussed last night. Boys of Steel was the first stand alone book on Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Bill the Boy Wonder is still the only book on Bill Finger.

Attending last night's talk so soon after reading Jane Sutcliffe's The White House Is Burning makes me wonder if children's historical nonfiction won't become another area in children's literature that attracts adult readers. Well-organized presentation and new research on little-known subjects--who wouldn't want to read that?

Time Management Tuesday: More Time For Reading

Writers have an enormous amount of reading to do. Keeping up on what's being written in our genres. Material on process. Material on marketing. We need to be researching publications that could end up being markets for our short writing. We need to research agents and editors for submission.

And then, of course, there are all the bright, shiny things we just have to have at the library, at bookstores, at used book sales, and or our e-readers. Oh, how I love to binge read eBooks. Just bought another one in an adult mystery series a few hours ago.

Well, how to find time to do all this reading? Because, you know, we're supposed to be writing sometime, too.

Last week I stumbled upon 13 Tips for Getting More Reading Done at Gretchen Rubin's website. (I found this on Twitter, actually.) Lots of good ideas here. My favorites:

1. Quit Reading. Unless you feel you need to read something for work, just quit what's not working for you. Then move on to something else. If you really have to read something you don't care for, see 4 below.

3. Watch Recorded TV. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know we should all be giving up TV so we can read all evening next to the oil lantern. Let's be honest. That's not going to happen. Recording television means you're not a slave to the TV schedule. You can watch TV around reading instead of reading around watching TV.

4. Skim. This is particularly useful with books that fall into the first category above. You feel you need to read the last bloated volume of a well-known series, but you're afraid you're going to die of old age before you finish it. Skim it. If you're not being paid to write a professional review, you don't need to read every word or even most of the words. What you want is to learn the book's significance and how it relates to other books like it. Skimming will let you do that.

7. Always Have Something To Read. Come on. That goes without saying.

10. Set Aside Time To Read Taxing Books. I love this idea. I'm going to try to do it. I just don't know when.

Terrific Historical Nonfiction

Even though I have a big interest in history, I sometimes find reading it a bit of a chore. Or, at least, not the kind of thing that I want to rush back to. The White House Is Burning: August 24, 1814 by Jane Sutcliffe is not at all a chore to read, and I found myself looking forward to getting back to it.

The book's publisher refers to The White House Is Burning as the "biography of a single day." That is how the book is structured. Sutcliffe takes readers through the day the city of Washington fell to the British during the War of 1812. She does that by using first person accounts. Fortunately a number of people who experienced the burning of the President's house felt moved to write down their thoughts. Note that the Introduction and the last chapter both begin with a reference to how the fall of Washington would be covered in the modern press. Nice frame.

The White House Is Burning is a great read, but it's also lovely to look at. It's illustrated with beautiful period artwork and portraits of historical figures referred to in the narrative. Though this is what might be described as an over-sized book, don't mistake it for a picture book. This is 105 pages of full text accompanied by 7 pages of quotation credits and a 3 page bibliography. And there is an index. I mention all this because I've heard that some teachers in the upper elementary school grades have page requirements for books acceptable for projects. This book ought to meet them.

I don't know how big a place The War of 1812 has in school curriculum. This book, though, is so marvelous a piece of work that it ought to be valuable in teaching how to read history and how history can be written.

Disclosure: I've run into Jane Sutcliffe here and there over the years, and a few months ago, she joined my writers' group. I ordered this book through Interlibrary Loan. I'd hoped to include it in my "Friends' Books" 48-Hour Book Challenge, but it didn't arrive in time.

The Weekend Writer: Money

Okay, money is the elephant in the room when it comes to writing. Well, maybe it is one of the elephants in the room. Not making sales is another one.  Getting the writing done is still another. But today we're talking money.

People think writers make a lot of money because, I believe, Judith Krantz began making really serious money in the late 1970s. In my mind, it all goes back to Krantz. After her, you started hearing about other Krantz-like writers. James Michener. Danielle Steele. By 2000, J. K. Rowling was becoming well known for having become rich writing children's books.

From there it wasn't far to believing that writers make a lot of money because some writers made a lot of money. When we had an addition built onto our house, my neighbor's mother assumed we were paying for it with my writing income. My writing paid for some living room furniture once. People don't like to hear that sort of thing.

Last January, Ann Bauer wrote an article for Salon in which she talked about the advantages writers with financial support or connections through family have. In June, Christine Sneed published an article at The Billfold that gives a picture of  the other side, someone spending years writing without financial support or connections.

Neither one of them is talking about Judith Krantz-type of money.