Gail "Goes" To WriteOnCon

This year's WriteOnCon was held August 14th and 15th. The beauty of this free, on-line, children's writers' conference is that you can still access most of the events. I, for instance, just finished up doing everything I wanted to do this past Monday. Most of the presentations were shorter than you'd see at traditional conferences, which is not a bad thing. There were a lot of newish agents and some talk of newish things.You can just access the full schedule and pick and choose what you want to do.

Some of the high-points for me:

Tips for Starting a New Project with Marissa Meyer. I think what she's actually talking about here is getting your plot down.

The Importance of Craft by Molly O'Neill. This is an essay. It was actually the first thing I read/saw at the conference. The significance of craft to writing seems so obvious, but with the explosion of interest in marketing and self-publishing, you can easily get the impression that some people aren't focusing on it.

Plotting With 3 x 5 Cards with Kimberly Griffiths Little. Yeah, she was talking about plotting, too. Both Meyer and Little talked about scenes, something I'm going to pay more attention to in the future during pre-writing/plotting. I actually tried to get started on a new project with index cards a year or so ago, but got diverted into other projects. I'm willing to try this again and see if some variation will work for me.

Blogging Pet Peeves with Lenore Appelhans and Phoebe North had some clever stuff I think my blogging readers will enjoy. Personally, I think all the things they were talking about are cliches, but they're probably nicer than I am.

Building Characters Into Real People with Frank Cole. I stuck with this vlog at first because I was kind of mesmerized by the way Cole rocked by and forth in his chair and seemed to throw his whole body into his talk. In addition to that, though, he did a good job of organizing his presentation by doing an intro in which he told us what he was going to tell us. And, in the body of what was almost like an oral essay, he made some excellent points about characters' ages and the difference between a scenario and a reaction to that scenario.

I also heard or saw some talk of new adult books. This isn't a particularly new concept. I've been hearing things about a specific category for books marketed for readers in their late teens/early twenties for a number of years. I have a feeling after what I saw at WriteOnCon that perhaps there has been some movement in that area.

Okay, now I have had a chance to share my WriteOnCon experience, and after transferring a few notes to my journal, I can toss my notes, thus clearing my desk. Good job done, Gail!

September Connecticut Children's Literature Calender

Saturday, Sept. 1, 11:00 AM, Peter Arenstam, Bank Square Books, Madison: Signing for the The Mighty Mastiff of the Mayflower

Thursday, Sept. 6, 7 to 9, Victoria Sherrow, The Writers' Room, Westport: Free Writing for Children Workshop

Sunday, Sept. 9, 1 PM, Stacy DeKeyser, The Noah Webster House, West Hartford: Family- oriented presentation for The Brixen Witch

Saturday, Sept. 15, 11 AM to 2 PM, A.C.E. Bauer, Branford Reads, Branford, Presentation and book signing

Saturday, Sept. 15, 12:30 to 2 PM, Leslie Bulion, Branford Reads, Branford, Presentation and book signing

Thursday, Sept. 20, 10:30 to 11:30 AM,  Maggie Stiefvater, Yale Bookstore, New Haven: Signing for The Raven Boys

Saturday, Sept. 22, 7:13 AM, WTNH, Leslie Bulion will be interviewed by Jeff Valin

Thursday, Sept. 27, 4:00 PM, Loren Long, R.J. Julia, Madison: Discussion of Nightsong

Friday, Sept. 28, 4:00 PM, Avi, R.J. Julia, Madison: Discussion of Sophia's War: A Tale of the Revolution

Friday, Sept. 28-30, 11 AM to 2 PM, Leslie Bulion, Durham Fair, Durham: Book signing for The Universe of Fair
Friday, Sept. 28, 5-6 PM, Leslie Bulion and Frank Dormer, Durham Fair, Durham: Draw Funny!
Saturday, Sept. 29, 6:15 PM, Leslie Bulion, Durham Fair, Durham: Reading

Is It Okay To Talk About Guy Stuff?

Jack Ferraiolo, who wrote Sidekicks, has written a blog post about the response to the "erection scene" in that book. He raises the question of whether male sexuality is less accepted in novels for young people than the more common female puberty talk.

I liked the book. I found the scene in question both funny (for me) and humiliating (for the character). Jack wanted to be careful not to get into "gender politics," so I'll do it. Why is it okay for girls to read about characters dealing with sexual issues that they face, and thus have the opportunity to "try out" responses to, but it's not okay for boys? Not that any boy reader is ever going to have to worry about "trying out" a response to being caught with an erection in public while wearing a Spandex superhero costume. But you'd think the lack of reality in the situation would make it more acceptable. What's the problem here? Could it be that there something about male sexuality that is aggressive and scary whereas female sexuality is passive and nonthreatening?

Oh, I really am getting into gender politics.

Quite apart from the whole gender thing, Jack's blog post is interesting because it gives some insight into how long an author might dwell on a situation or idea--and build upon it--before beginning to write.

So What's With "Peace Like A River," Gail?

So, way back on Sunday, I told you about how I stumbled upon Peace Like A River by Leif Enger. You remember--my World Book Night experience.

Okay. Well, liked the book, love how I came to read it, really admire and enjoyed the ending.

Peace Like A River is about Reuben Land's recollections of his twelve-year-old self. He is the son of a devout Christian who is able to perform miracles and the brother of a seventeen-year-old boy who kills two teenagers who have broken into the Land's house intent on physically harming family members. They've already terrorized Reuben's younger sister. Not wanting to give anything away, I will merely say that older brother Davy ends up on the run and Reuben and his sister Swede and father Jeremiah undertake a journey to find him.

It sounds like a downer story, but Reuben has a disparaging wit, Swede has a way with a narrative, and  Jeremiah is a saint, in the good sense of the word, not the grim, oppressive one. I will admit there were a few moments when I felt the story was dragging a bit, but that is a minor complaint.

Reading this book was fascinating because as I was doing so, I felt I had a handle on what the story was about. Davy is the big, dramatic character--what with having killed people and being wanted by the law and all--but the story was about Reuben. It was, I felt, the story of what it's like to be part of that kind of horror show. It was the story of a family member who has to deal with another family's member's crime. Davy's action is the disturbance to Reuben's world that initiates the plot's action. It comes around page 50, which might be a little long to wait, but that's still pretty early on.

Then I got to the end of the book and realized I had been totally wrong. This book was not about Reuben's reaction to Davy's action. This book was about Reuben and his father, the miracle worker. The disturbance to Reuben's world comes in the first two pages when he is born dead, and his father performs his first miracle, giving Reuben life. All the stuff about Davy killing the intruders and the search for him--that's just Reuben's family situation. It could have been some other situation, so long as Reuben and Jeremiah were there.

The book was a good read, so the fact that I didn't realize what it was actually about until the end wasn't a problem for me. If it's true that all books are mysteries, the ending of this one, for me, was the solution to a mystery.

Now, what to do with this copy of a World Book Night book? I will have to think of something special.

Time Management Tuesday: Fallback Plans

Yesterday morning I finished the second of two tasks I'd been working on for a couple of weeks. What did that mean? It meant that I found myself in a period of transition, that phase between ending one project and beginning another. I know I have trouble with transitional time and tend to waste it. Sure enough, I got myself some lunch and went on-line. Which is fine. I'm delighted if I can stay away from Facebook and the news sites until I'm eating lunch. Unfortunately, I stayed there for way too long yesterday, even ending up looking for local friends on Facebook. (And I found one.)

I was finally able to shift gears and get back into some kind of work because I had a list of blogs I want to contact regarding some promotion for the e-book I'm publishing...sometime. I rechecked the blogs and came up with topics for guest posts to pitch. Not a bad little project.

But I was only able to do it because I already had it in mind. It was something I was able to fall back on during a period of time that I was just blowing away.

Believe it or not, I have a fallback workout program for days when I'm not feeling well. This summer I came up with a short fallback yoga practice for days when I don't have time for my already short practice. As God is my witness, we have a fallback weekend getaway planned for October in case the one we've been trying to go on since last fall has to be cancelled once again because of bad weather. We are developing a list of backup activities ready to go for those weekends we find out at the last minute that we don't have elder care duty and, thus, have an opportunity to do something if only we could think of something.

Fallback plans are just as important for work. Situations change rapidly. The end of a project can creep up on you and without knowing what other things you have to do, you could easily end up wasting far more than an hour or two. For writers, especially writers who have been publishing a while, it's not that difficult to have a multitude of fallblack plans--marketing, revising short fiction and essays, researching markets, researching editors, professional reading, studying, cleaning out files, and going over notes from workshops come to mind, just off the top of my head.

Actually, fallback plans may be the only hope of getting through all this stuff.   

Yeah, I Needed To See This Article Related To Book Trailers

An article called Are Book Trailers Effective? at what is now Build Book Buzz quoted a Wall Street Journal article on the subject. "There is scant evidence . . . that the average book trailer actually has much impact on book sales."

Yikes.

Hey, but that post and that article are both four years old. Everything's changed since then, right? Besides, my book trailer will be above average. And that article wasn't about above average book trailers, now was it?

Somebody's Looking Embarrassed

Or, I should say, conventional wisdom suggests a lot of somebody's should be looking embarrassed after this weekend's New York Times article on buying book reviews. Salon has an article arguing that the news is a step back in self-publishing's quest for respect, since you're not hearing a lot about, say, Joyce Carol Oates or John Irving laying down cold, hard cash for a few five-star customer reviews. Shelf Awareness's comments on the Times article include the following: "Locke and others who pay for reviews may have benefited handsomely: Amazon reportedly does major online and e-mail marketing pushes for books that receive a certain amount of four- and five-star reviews, efforts that are greater than for some established authors. These programs have created bestselling authors, some of whom were then signed by traditional publishers."

Please note that that quote includes the word "reportedly," as in "Amazon reportedly does major online and e-mail marketing pushes..." So, interesting as that tidbit is, it's something we've heard but can't be sure is true.

Yesterday a friend sent me a link to the original NYT article to make sure I knew about it. And I heard from a writer friend this morning who told me he's heard of a site where you can buy a book review for just $5. No, I did not ask him how to find it.

My World Book Night Experience

Earlier this year, I read about World Book Night, which was held on April 23. Individuals could pick up copies of selected books and then distribute them the night of the 23rd or soon thereafter. I knew there was a bookstore distributor near me (well, within 40 minutes), and I considered volunteering to give away books. But I thought you had to give away 20, and my impression was that you needed to give them to strangers, not your reading buddies. I just didn't have the time to even wrap my head around how to do this, forget about actually doing it.

Well, imagine my surprise when late in April I'm standing in the lobby of the skilled nursing facility where I spend waaay too much time, probably waiting to get in to see the business person who has become my rock this past year, and I look down at the coffee table and see...a book with "World Book Night U.S. 2012" stamped at the bottom of the cover! Someone had left a copy there.

The book was Peace Like A River by Leif Enger. I'd never heard of the book or the author, but it appeared that it was an adult book with a child main character. My legions of followers are well aware of how attracted to those things I am. I was sorely tempted to take the book, but, knowing about World Book Night, as I did, I felt I should leave it for someone who perhaps didn't read as much as I did.

I took it over to Debbie, who works the front desk, because I knew she was a reader so I could tell her about my find. Something like this happens to you, you've got to tell someone, right? So I tell her about World Book Night and the book and the whole thing. We both agree that we will leave the book on the coffee table. If it didn't disappear "in a while," one of us would take it.

The book disappeared. So much for my World Book Night experience.

Okay. Time passes. In the lobby of this snf there is a pseduo fireplace between real bookcases filled with real books. So I'm down there one day a month or two ago, looking for a book with my family member who lives there and what do you suppose I found? Yes! Peace Like A River was there packed in amongst everything else!

A sign, n'est-ce pas?

Yes, readers, I snatched it up because "a while" had passed. I'd given the 128 residents of the snf and all the staff their chance.

My response to Peace Like A River will follow another day.

Buyer Beware

I've been reading recently about companies that sell book reviews. Today The New York Times published The Best Book Reviews Money Can Buy. It's a long article, so I'll quote a couple of juicy bits.

1. A professor from the University of Illinois, Chicago "estimates that about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake."

2. One woman who worked for the company profiled in this article described her work process: "For a 50-word review, she said she could find “enough information on the Internet so that I didn’t need to read anything, really.” For a 300-word review, she said, “I spent about 15 minutes reading the book.” She wrote three of each every week as well as press releases. In a few months, she earned $12,500."

Reading this article suggests that readers should be particularly leery of books that have large numbers of 5 star reviews, since those are the most popular purchases. I have to wonder if some day we'll be seeing writers announcing, "I am a 3 star writer, and I'm proud!" Or at least "I'm honest!" or "I'm not out a lot of money!"

No It's Not Tuesday, But Here's Another Time Management Post, Anyway

Thank you to Tanita Davis for bringing a time management post at Cynsations to my attention. I would have found it myself, but probably not for another month or so. Reading blogs regularly is something I've given up in order to find some time for family paperwork and life tasks.

Today at Cynsations author Mette Ivie Harrison has a guest post up on How to Find Time to Write. Harrison has written six novels while raising five kids and running an Ironman triathlon each year. She offers  a number of lists of suggestions for managing time.

Early in her post she says: "If you want to add writing (or more writing) to your current schedule, the first simple principle is that you will have to make room by taking something else out." What interested me the most is what she lists as things that can be "taken out"--TV, movies, shopping, lunch with friends, and volunteer work.  

What she's talking about is busyness. Busyness is one of the few places where I think someone can truly "find" time. Cutting out the busyness to get to that time is rough, though. Harrison says, "No one is going to make writing time for you. You will have to wrest it away from other commitments, and it will not be painless." Busyness provides a lot of our connections with people. Eliminating any of it is going to have an impact on your life.

Not everyone who writes has to do this. Jane Yolen, for one, can work and be busy, too. And by no means is a desire to remain "busy" an indication that someone struggling with time doesn't have a commitment to writing. I'm just saying that busyness is a "place" you can look for time. It sounds as if Mette Ivie Harrison agrees with me.