KidLit Blog Tour

This is the first time I've ever done a blog tour, so when Leandra Wallace and Vijaya Bodach asked me to participate, I was quite thrilled. Now I'm looking at these questions from the viewpoint of answering them and all that lightness and breeziness and sense of fun has just flown out the window.

I have taken a breath, relaxed my shoulders and sipped my tea, so here goes ...

What are you working on right now?
I'm working on a YA dystopian novel that takes place a couple of years from now.  The working title is Lena Ladimer Chronicles: Bury the Dead.

How does it differ from other works in its genre?
The only magic or power is displayed by forces that desire to control, and this is a purely technological "magic" that exists in our world today.  My protagonist, Lena, is a
thirteen-year-old girl whose only "power" is that she loves to read and write. But she must also learn to survive and she and her friends walk the fine line that exists when all mercy seems to have fled the world and survival can become yet another form of brutality.  Also, the grownups in Lena's small, isolated neighborhood are not stupid jerks and once they become resigned to the situation, they demonstrate that life must go beyond mere survival.  Lena Ladimer Chronicles: Bury the Dead was inspired by the book How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe by Thomas Cahill.  Cahill writes of his Hinges of History series, of which How the Irish Saved Civilization is Volume I: "We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outage by outage—almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence.  And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description.  But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance."  Lena Ladimer Chronicles: Bury the Dead is a fictional narrative of grace, albeit action-packed.  And don't worry—no in-your-face deus ex machina plot devices.  Just coincidences.

Why do you write what you do?
I write what I do because my comprehension of the world writ large went off the rails around age 13. I am now in my fifties and I've carried this story around my entire life.  I've read a lot of literary fiction, but it's been the works written for children and young adults which have always resonated with me. The Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George Speare was the first book I cried over when I was a kid.  I think I was eight or nine.  I cried the hardest when I finished it—how could it be done? The feeling of deep satisfaction coupled with loss is the hallmark of the end of a wonderful read, and I've chased that feeling my whole life.  I hope Lena will do that to readers.

How does your writing process work?
 Oy!  What process?! THAT is still in the developmental phase.  All I know is that I always have a book (or two!) on hand to read and I am always thinking about something.  I plop myself down in front of the keyboard many times during the day and start typing.  Much of what comes out is blather, so I love this James Michener quote: "I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent re-writer."  An essential part of the process for me is critique.  Any "excellence" in my revisions is due in large part to these folks: Lynn Guelzow, Sarah Gilligan and Chris McAuliffe


Any departing words of wisdom for other authors?
Not every young adult novel has to start with unspeakable violence (although Neil Gaiman does this to perfection in The Graveyard Book.) So, actually, no ... I don't have too many words of wisdom.  Except write.  No matter what, write. No writing goes to waste.

Check out the writers listed below.  Perhaps THEY will answer these questions next week, talk about their works-in-progress and continue the KidLit Blog Tour!

1.      Faith E. Hough
2.      A. L. Sonnichsen
3.      Ann Marie Schlueter
4.      Laurel Garver

I Can't Write Anymore

I wrote my first query letter today for the WriteOnCon online writer's convention. It was a horrible experience and I never want to write another word again.

It wasn't the critique suggestions, they were terrific.  It was my own experience of writing.

I cannot be succinct.  I just can't.

Okay, that last paragraph was pretty succinct.  So I can do it if I really need to.

So, here's the query letter with the first edits suggested by one of the incredibly generous participants of WriteOnCon (and FYI .. in real life one should never query a WIP, but they let you do it on WriteOnCon as long as you put WIP or Work In Progress in the subject line of your thread):

Dear Ninja Agent,

When an international cyber-attack disrupts power and communication, bookish 13-year-old Lena Ladimer decides to chronicle the events in her own small rural neighborhood in Gibeon, Connecticut.  Armed with her great-grandfather’s 1947 Thin Paper Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, paper and pencils, she tries to distance herself from events by writing about them.  She begins to be drawn into the community as they work together to cope with the outages, but everything changes when her father is killed.

Lena decides to set off to New Reading to exact revenge on her dad’s killer.  She enlists the help of her best friend, neighbor Gus Lennon and two others, but does not reveal the real reason for the twenty-mile journey.  Instead, she tells them she wants to make sure her father has been properly buried. They all have their own reasons for wanting to go, and when the others finally find out Lena’s intentions, a startling connection to her father’s killer is revealed.

The real trouble, though, is brewing back in Gibeon as the unsuspecting neighbors welcome a stranger who seems willing and able to help them. Lena and Gus realize that help is the last thing on her mind when they discover that she has instructions to do whatever it takes to destroy their community—and they will do whatever it takes to save it

Lena Ladimer Chronicles: Bury the Dead is a 15,000/50,000 word work in progress.

Thank you, Ninja Agent, for taking the time to read my query and for your involvement in WriteOnCon.com.  Attention from an industry professional is thrilling and appreciated!

Best Regards,

Me

I choose not to put the original on this post.  It's on the YA thread over on WriteOnCom.

Too bad they don't have a genre called "Pseudo Literary Blather."  The Ninja Agents would be all over me like a cheap suit.

Who ever knew you could floss with a laptop?

 

When Evil Casts a Big Pall on Everyone

Last Monday morning, I posted about an exercise I intended to do for a writer's group I belong to here in town.  It was due on Thursday.

On Monday afternoon, around 3 p.m., I watched (along with millions of people) as two puffs of smoke photographed from an aerial camera on a helicopter trained on the finish line of the Boston Marathon turned out to be the most hellish of devices: home made bombs made to kill and maim as many people as possible based on the design.  The design.  Design implies thought, planning, creativity, ingenuity— plans to bring something into existence which was not there before.  Design is usually associated with positive outcomes; architecture, fashion, graphics, ships, airplanes, gardens, musical instruments, computers, medicines ... and the list goes on and on.  We forget the list also includes guns, weapons and the delivery systems for mass killing. We forget that things designed for good (computers, medicines, airplanes, ships ... even buildings) can, with only minor changes, deal death.  A pressure cooker, for many of us, has its design accompanied by images of a beloved grandmother canning the bounty of her garden or peach trees, or, in my case, my husband canning his delicious spaghetti sauce.

And just as a weekend gardener will design elements of his garden taken from the design for, say, Versailles, which he learned about from books or the internet (and perhaps he even took a class or two ...), there are terrorists like the young men who deployed the home-made bombs on Monday, using specific plans based on designs for IEDs found on the internet or in handbooks. (The older terrorist may have even taken a class on how to make these things.)


Monday afternoon and evening was kind of a blur, and my degree of separation from the event is pretty big.  But here in New England, everyone has some connection to the Boston Marathon. My son ran it four Aprils ago.  He knows a number of people, runners and their supporters alike, who went this year.  He was anxiously awaiting texts from them.  My niece, doing a semester abroad at University College of Dublin, skyped in tears Monday night.  How could she find out if her friends from the UConn running club were okay?  How could she find out if her friends who went to cheer the runners on were okay? We sent her a Facebook message with a local news station's website which had comprehensive links to help folks find their dear ones.

It's 1:15 here in Connecticut.  I'm sure there are victims and survivors thinking ... "It hasn't been a week yet ... another hour ... at this time last week, she was still alive.  He was still alive.  I still had both my legs.  I still had legs.  We still had our little boy.  We still had our daughter. Happiest day in Boston."

And two young men, although murder had entered their hearts, were not killers ... yet.

And since this kind of evil is one of the most confounding mysteries of our humanity, how do we, as writers, respond?

I think the very best response to this mystery is found on the blog of a remarkable young woman -- wife, mother, writer — and her post following  the Sandy Hook killings in December, Make Good Art.  It was the first thing I thought of when I loosened the grip the horror of the Marathon bombings had on me (for even my prayers were anguished,) as I wrenched myself away from the relentless news coverage.

Thank you, Faith E. Hough.

Am I a Writer? Or Do I Design Greeting Cards? Or Do I Do Both?

I used to joke about shameless marketing, but I have actually done it.  Visiting Heather King's excellent blog, Shirt of Flame, I noticed she has a picture of Bill Hicks and the quote, "By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising...kill yourself. Thank you."

When I got done laughing out loud at the quote, I got quiet and said, "Oh."

I am kind of all over the place these days.  I have this ongoing love affair with doing graphic design using Photoshop CS5 and my various and sundry online greeting card shops are actually starting to make money.  Not a lot, but $100 a month without really trying. I design and sell greeting cards for clean and sober people.  I design and sell them for Catholics looking for non-ambiguous cards to celebrate the Sacraments.  I design and sell pet sympathy cards. I have a shop on Greeting Card Universe called Best Regards where I design and sell all kinds of cards.  I design and sell cards based on photos of Prince Edward Island.  I actually have a blank card featuring a bucket of bar clams we dug at Rollo Bay, PE with the caption, "Time and tide wait for no clam."  Shameless.

Which brings me to the writing bit. We had a visiting author come to our Writer's Workshop at the Granby Public Library.  The author of Luminous, Dawn Metcalf had us speechless with the amount of time and energy she had to spend on marketing her book.  Now, mind you, this book was not self-published.  She had an agent and the manuscript was accepted and published by Dutton Children's but she, Dawn, had to do the marketing.  The publishers don't do that anymore. Writers are now doing fly-by-night promoting ... tweeting, blogging, facebooking, pinning, tumbling, conferencing, networking ... to compensate for the dearth of it coming from the publishers. And somewhere in there, writers must write.

And the forums on Greeting Card Universe are full of advice for the artists to tweet, blog, facebook, pin, tumbl, conference and network.  And somewhere in there, artists must create art.

So here's the dilemma ... Bill Hicks was on to something.  I get calls all the time from Catholic Online to market my Catholic cards for me.  But they want money.  Last year, I actually took out a marketing package with them and got tons of visitors to my Zazzle site, but NO sales.  When I complained to them about not making any money, they retorted, "We told you we'd boost traffic.  And we did."

What?

It brings up the uncomfortable notion that the traffic came and found my stuff wanting.  That's not good.

This is also my greatest fear with my writing.  But something else is seeping into my consciousness ... I am way braver and thick-skinned regarding my graphic artwork than I am with my writing and I'm a far better writer than I am an artist.  This is a little crazy.  I need to appropriate some of that courage about getting my writing out there.  Plenty will find it wanting, but how can that even happen if I remain scared?

I think the first thing that has to to go is my "inner-marketer."  Marketing is not like art, marketing is not creating something that has never been there before.  Marketing is about putting art to use, which is kind of an abomination for an artist or a writer.  That's why the publishing houses had in-house professionals who did the marketing (and still do for best selling authors.)  Marketing tries like crazy to convince others that they cannot do without things that they really don't have a need for, and therefore they must BUY those things.  That is not the calling of an artist or a writer.

 So, I'll be taking a break from the frenetic digital activity that is modern marketing and work on my book.  Hopefully, my humble little online stores will continue to keep me in printer ink and a chai tea latte every now and then. But R. T. Freeman as self-promoting-huskster must go for a while.

 You're welcome, Bill Hicks.