July Connecticut Children's Literature Calendar

Where is everybody? Only three events all month? Isn't summer supposed to be a big reading time?

July 17 Jane Sutcliffe, Tolland Public Library, Tolland 1:30 Reading and craft 

July 26 David Kirk, R. J. Julia Booksellers, Madison 10:30

Tuesday, July 29 Jerry Craft, Marilyn Davis, Stacy DeKeyser, Gail Gauthier, Avon Free Public Library, Avon 7:00 PM Children's Author Night Part of AFPL's Local Author Festival

The Weekend Writer: Conferences

So you're writing and studying. You're not part of a MFA program, but you want to get some live instruction. Or maybe you're done with a MFA program and you want more or different live instruction. You start thinking about attending a writers' conference.

Zakia R. Khwaja at Scribe's Madness has a post on preparing for a writers' conference. And it involves more than putting together the right outfit. Her section on creating conference goals is the particularly important bit here, IMHO.

Environmental Book Club

I've written here about liking an immersion-type thing with environmental books, books that don't wear a sign saying "It's eco-time" but just make readers part of a natural world or lifestyle. Maybe what I'm thinking of is some kind of wholistic experience.

That's what I think happens with Mouse and Mole: Fine Feathered Friends by Wong Herbert Yee. The book has a Frog and Toad vibe, which is good, though wordier. Fine Feathered Friends is all about Mouse and Mole watching birds. And drawing them. And writing poetry about them. The whole thing.

Over the course of a story about the two friends having to find a way to get close to the birds they want to draw, Mouse and Mole pass off a small amount of avian info. But what really makes this book at all environmental is that Mouse and Mole want to do this bird stuff. They want to draw them and write about them. They want to have a life that involves birds.

Listen, when I had little kids, I would have read them this book, got out their artists' journals (yeah, we all had artists' journals), and gone out with them to find us some birds. It would have worked as an environmental book for me.

Time Management Tuesday: Are You Using Your Time The Way You Planned To?

I've been thinking for a while that I need to check my New Year's goals and objectives. I wasn't eager to do it, because I suspected that I haven't been staying with the program, and who wants to have that confirmed? As it turns out, I've been doing better than I thought.

Goal 1. Finish the revision of The Fletcher Farm Body  Done.

Goal 3. Complete a draft of the so-called mummy book  My objectives were to get up to speed on this project by February and start working on this then. It didn't happen until May, but I do have 9 chapters toward meeting this goal now.

Goal 4. Make submissions  I've only met one objective here for this goal, the one regarding an agent search.

Goal 5. Continue to work on community building  I've only managed two objectives, continuing the Connecticut Children's Lit Calendar and looking for a writers' group. I may have found one just this week.

Goal 6. Continue marketing Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook  I've met several of the objectives for this goal, restarting the Environmental Book Club, getting the trailer up at Twitter, and reducing the price for a week around Earth Day.

The goal I've really fallen down on is 2. Write a number of short pieces All I've done is work on the Statics and Dynamics for Writers essay.

How Will I Use My Time The Rest Of The Year?

• Goal 3. Finish a draft of the mummy book, I hope by September when I go on vacation.
• Goal 2. Write short pieces Anything.
• Goal 4.  Make submissions. I hope of some of the short pieces from Goal 2.
• Goal 5. Work on community building. See how things go with the writers' group, and it would be terrific if I could find a workshop or other program for later this year.
• Goal 6. Continue marketing Saving the Planet & Stuff eBook.

In January I also wanted to check up on myself each week to make sure that a good chunk of my time went toward objectives to meet my goals, an idea I got from Peter Bregman's 18 Minutes. I haven't been doing that at all. But I still have half a year to get started on that.

Check your goals and objectives for the year. You can feel good about what you've accomplished and decide which ones you want to focus on for the next six months.

An Adult Book About Cheerleaders

If you've heard lots of good things about Dare Me by Megan Abbott, believe them. This is a terrific adult thriller about those YA cliches, bitchy cheerleaders.

Main character Addy is the beta female in a cheerleader squad. She serves her alpha "captain," Beth, and initially seems very comfortable in that spot in the hierarchy and with her relationship with the traditionally awful Beth. The two of them are tight, tight, tight. Their world is disturbed right off the bat when a new cheer leading coach comes in, one as badass as Beth. I wondered, myself, if she wasn't a former Beth, reliving the good old days as best she can. To do it, though, she has to battle Beth. Among the things they're battling for is the beta, Addy.

Oh, yeah. And there's a guy.

Whenever I read an adult book with a young protagonist, my immediate question is Why? Why is this an adult book, not a YA or children's book? Theme, I was told once, is an important factor in what makes YA YA. Dare Me falls well within the noir genre, and the noir themes that apply here are far more adult than YA. Okay, my understanding of noir is shaky. But I've been reading about themes involving a fate that can't be avoided, as well as despair, darkness, and obsession. None of the cheerleaders in Dare Me are made happy by anything they do or achieve. And their coach? She knows things aren't going to get any better.

Is this all there is? How's that for a theme? It's not one traditionally associated with YA, which usually deals with  moving into the adult world, finding a place in society, etc.

I felt the homoerotic touch was unnecessary. It risked making the story just a common all-about-love thing. On the other hand, don't noir protagonists often have at least a sexual attraction to a femme fatale? In which case, Dare Me was giving a neat twist to classic noir.

The Weekend Writer: Very Early Planning

An idea may feel terrific until you sit down to write something about it. Then you suddenly realize how very rudimentary it is. "...what to write or where to go with your idea..." is an initial problem that can put a stop to a writing project.

An Easy Exercise for Coming Up With Novel Ideas at Now Novel's blog is a great description of early planning using what you're interested in to get you started.

I Heard Something Even More Bizarre About YA This Week

On Wednesday, I visited a lovely new independent bookstore. A big store, connected with a state university that's home to a children's literature collection and a good-sized annual children's bookfair. I noticed that the store had a "Teen" section. Then I noticed that it also had a "YA" section. The YA section was large, larger than the Teen section. And I saw what I thought were children's books shelved there.

Well, I was intrigued. No, I was confused. So, since there was no one else there, I asked the woman behind the counter why they had both a Teen and YA section. The Teen section, I was told, was for books that had more sex and violence. The YA section would have less. I said I'd noticed what I'd consider children's books in the YA section. She said, yes, YA begins at third grade. Teen, I believe she said, begins at ninth, though I'm not sure I'm recalling that correctly.

I asked where these designations were coming from. She said, "The publishers."

Now, I'm not a publishing insider by a long shot. But there's been a lot of turmoil regarding YA recently, particularly regarding adults reading YA.  Horn Book editor Roger Sutton did a post on Why Do We Even Call It YA Anymore? because of the number of adults reading it. But that salesperson's explanation was the first I'd heard of YA as a classification for children's books or that publishers were suggesting that it should be.

I know that I get a little obsessive about definitions. However, declaring that the Young Adult category is for children's books, at a time when adults are supposed to be reading them for their adult pleasure, seems to be making this whole situation so confusing that the name Young Adult is going to become meaningless. I certainly don't know what it means now.

Environmental Book Club

Suzy Kline wrote an interesting post for the Authors for Earth Day blog. In Love Every Living Thing, she writes about Horrible Harry's love of nature.

It's been years since I've read a Horrible Harry book, so I can't address the issue of just how great his interest in environmentalism is. But I like the idea of appreciation of nature/environmentalism being a thread within a story, as Kline describes.

My Techie Sunday

Sunday's talk at the Ethan Allen Homestead went very well. Any number of interesting things happened. Two of them:

PowerPoint Problem. I arrived 30 minutes before my scheduled presentation, which was exactly when I was supposed to. That's not something that happens all the time with me, so yay!  I was greeted by a little crew of museum people. Everyone was expecting me. Yay! Yay!

Then a museum staff member started getting my USB with my PowerPoint slides set up with her laptop. Her laptop was failing her. Panic time, you say? No, because I had my computer guy with me. He tried my laptop, which had the slides on it, too. They couldn't connect it to the projector. So he brought his laptop in. Yes, we travel with two laptops. He pushed this and that for a while, and, of course, I had slides ready to go in plenty of time.

I wasn't at all freaked out while this was going on, and not because Computer Guy is a computer guy. I knew he'd never worked with a PowerPoint projector, after all. No, I was confident because I also knew that the day before he'd fixed a family member's hearing aid by shoving something into it to clean the contacts. Yeah, he'd never done that before, either.

I am afraid to go anywhere without him now.

Gail's On Film! While Computer Guy and a very attractive young woman were huddled together over equipment at the back of the room, another guy was busily setting up a camera and talking about me using a microphone in a ridiculously small space. Reading between the lines, I worked out that I was going to be filmed. I did not say, "What? What? How did this happen? There must be some mistake! I have not prepared myself psychologically for this! I need another week!" Because, you know, that wouldn't be cool. Instead, I managed to psyche myself out enough to prevent a meltdown.

The whole world can watch my presentation on the Antihero of Ticonderoga, given at the Ethan Allen Homestead in Burlington, Vermont.

Talking About Ethan Allen At The Ethan Allen Homestead

Tomorrow at 4:00 PM I'll be speaking at the Ethan Allen Homestead in Burlington, Vermont. That's why I've been tweeting Ethan Allen articles lately.

This will not be my first visit to the Homestead. You can see me sitting in front of the reproduction of the home Allen shared with his trophy wife, Fanny. That was taken back in the '90s while I was working on The Hero of Ticonderoga. That book, and my spin on why Ethan Allen was such a wild man, will be the focus of my presentation. If my traveling companion is able to get a decent (by which I mean a flattering) picture on my cell phone, I'll post it at Facebook. I may also try to tweet it.

We're taking a long weekend in the Green Mountains, so I don't expect to be back at Original Content until Wednesday. I hope to be biking Monday and hitting relatives along Rte. 7 on our way south on Tuesday.