Things That Inspire Me – Were the World Mine

I just scrolled back through my blog and was SHOCKED that I hadn’t written a post about this before.  WERE THE WORLD MINE is this amazing, award-winning musical/movie I saw over the summer, and promptly told everyone I’d ever met about.

Tanner Cohen, Nathaniel David Becker

This is on the short list of my favorite movies.  Well I mean I actually have a LOT of favorite movies.  And now that I’m starting to think about it, I don’t know if they still count as ‘favorites’ if they’re all my favorites, and there are dozens.  So maybe this makes me a movie-slut?  I give my affections to any movie that catches my heart for even a moment.

Now the challenge is to see if by the end of this blog post, I can tie it all back into writing.  That’ll be interesting to see.

Anyway, this is a movie that combines several things that make me happy.  Shakespeare (specifically A Midsummer Night’s Dream), glitter, gays, punk rock attitude and attire, and a musical.

Yeah.  All those things.  In ONE movie.  It’s crazy, isn’t it?  Basically, the story is about the picked on gay kid at a private school who gets roped into the school’s spring musical.  While practicing his lines, he finds a secret potion recipe hidden in the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and creates a magic flower that turns people gay.  From there it becomes a “put everyone else in my shoes, and see how they like it” story, which I think most kids who are different, on the outside, or generally don’t fit in can really resonate with.

One of the things I like about this movie, and movies (and books) like it is that they give us a retelling (specifically A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and along the way they make it into something new and different.  I adore books where a fairy tale is taken and reinvented – moreso when the story itself is actually reinvented and/or modernized.  This can be an outlandish concept – see the example I’ll provide below – or it can be as simple as doing a movie about a Shakespearean play which actually comes to life and is all about prejudice and walking in the shoes of others.  The only time I end up disappointed is when the “Jack and Jill retelling” (to make up an example that won’t infer any other books) follows the exact format of the original.  Same characters.  Same obstacles.  Same story.  Same ending. Bring in the unexpected.  Who says Beauty ends up with the Beast?  Maybe Rumplestiltskin runs off with the gold and ends up in domestic partnership in D.C.  The skies the limit.

Essentially, I’m saying take your idea, and push it as far as it will go.  If you want to do a modern day Romeo and Juliet, adding in witches is a safe bet.   An example of something I think is really interesting is Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce.  It’s a modernization of Little Red Riding Hood with werewolves and werewolf hunters.  Two concepts I never would have thought to put together.  But now, its one of the examples of how awesome an old story can be with a new breath of life.

The New Adults Debate

There’s been a lot of buzz on Twitter, and especially during the #yalitchat conversations about the new St. Martin’s “New Adult” contest.  See the link here with the summary of the contest, and definitely read the interview with JJ, editorial assistant over at St. Martin’s here.

They’re putting a name and a concept behind the space between YA books and Adult books.  They’re not creating a new genre necessarily – they’re just opening a call to a specific type of book.  It’s a kindof blend of “older YA meets adulthood.”  Characters who are older than those in high school, whether they’re in college or starting out their lives in other ways.    Older characters dealing with coming out into an adult world, or coming into themselves as adults.  Essentially the next level of the YA coming of age story.

I love this idea.  I love the concept of what they’re going for, the ideas that its sparking, and the enthusiasm its creating among the writing community.  When you do a lot of research into agents, and publishing and trying to learn the business, you see a lot of people telling you that college age characters can’t be in YA books.  Or there’s no market for it.  Or editors won’t want to look at “older” characters that aren’t your typical adult novel.  This is the first time I’ve ever really seen someone say “no wait, we really want to see what you’ve got.”

The possibility for stories to tell, and viewpoints to express are just as unlimited as YA or any other genre, but the fact is that you don’t ever see the examples of those books singled out anywhere.  Once upon a time, there wasn’t a distinction between children’s books and adults, and eventually the Young Adult market came to be recognized.

I do think that there’s the potential for a lot of hype with this “new” concept.  St. Martin’s is trying something different.  I think that’s fantastic.  But I think a lot of things will depend on how the experiment turns out.  It could become an overnight success, or it might not catch on.  Its really going to depend on those individual stories.  I don’t know that its anything to majorly get excited over – meaning I don’t know that we’ll see other editors putting out a similar call necessarily.  Nor do I think this necessarily will foster a division between YA and upper YA/new adult books.  But I think its definitely an interesting concept, and worth watching to see how it plays out.

Personally, I’d love to see this whole concept take off.  I love the idea of telling college-aged coming of age stories.  Pressures from family, starting your own family, and all the different urban fantasy possibilities get my brain buzzing.  And it makes me think about my trunked novel about a pair of college aged kids and the demonic spirit that comes between them.

What do you guys think?  Will the New Adult novels catch on?  Is this another “big” thing in publishing?  Or is this destined to failure?

The Week Without Twitter

What I’ve learned in the week since I’ve been Twittering:

No matter how much of a distraction Twitter is or is not, if need be, I’ll find a substitute distraction with the quickness if I need to.  Case in point – I’m talking to you, Mr. Obsessive Urge to clean out drawers and boxes.  Or you, Miss “The Kitchen Floors need scrubbed by hand.”  Or even you, Father “OH!  There’s a Criminal Minds marathon on in two hours.  I should make a complicated dinner that will eat up most of that time so I can just sit down and watch TV.”

Not that I know any of those distractions personally.  Ever.  I’m VERY disciplined.  I–ooh, shiny.

Wait, what was I saying?  Oh right, distractions.  So I’ve realized that Twitter’s become only as much of a distraction as I let it become.  And despite having other distractions over the week (completely legitimate ones as well), I also got a helluva lot of work done.  So the end result is obviously: if you want to be distracted, you will be.

I’m almost done with another whole section of the book, which is pretty awesome considering it took all of October to get through the first one.  This section is the other ‘main’ POV in the story, and how he gets introduced to the wacky.  There’s still a few little things I need to work on, but I’m still not sure how I want to fix it exactly.  So I’m avoiding it!  Yay!

Be sure and check out Courtney Summers’ post on the Mean Girls phenomenon and what inspired Some Girls Are. I got to read an ARC of SGA and I loved it.  I expected to read one story, and the story I got was completely different, and I loved it.  I like getting the unexpected out of a book.  I can’t wait to see this book come out and rock everyone else’s socks off.

Oh, and Courtney?  This one’s for you:

And thanks to Leah for showing that to me in the first place.  I love the AOTS skits!

At least the bones are right?

I use the strangest comparisons when I try to explain why I think the revisions to Spirit Games are so intensive.  The other day, I said “well, all the bones are in the right place.  It’s like Frankenstein’s monster.  The bones are right, but all the meat and potatoes need to be replaced.”  I wasn’t sure if I was comparing myself to a mad scientist or a cannibal planning People Stew.

Essentially though, that’s where my problem’s lied.  I had to step back and reconsider how my the rules of my supernatural world worked, and how they’d impact the characters.  Oh, and there was the TEENSY detail of how I was setting up the wrong person to be the Big Bad.  I mean, it happens.

When I was drafting and revising, I got so caught up with the characters and how they’d react to certain stimuli, that I completely forgot about things like setting and plot.  So what if chapter 13 totally contradicts what I said in chapter 2.  I’ll fix it in revisions.  It’s great that I knew my characters inside and out (hint – the insides are squishy) but I forgot about how everything was working together.

I can pretty much guarantee that I won’t be doing that again.  Next book that’s not already outlined will spend some time in percolation, and I’ll really try and look it all over to see where the problems lie.  Because this has NOT been fun.

In other news, a bunch of writers have sworn off Twitter for the week.  November 1st through the 7th.  And I didn’t realize how much I actually missed Twitter once I wasn’t tweeting all the time.  Its an easy distraction, a way to fill in time between things on the agenda, or as an escape once a certain amount of work’s gotten done.  So for a week I’m not going to have that, and we’re going to see how much work I get done.

Good luck to everyone else who’s going on the Twitter sabbatical this week!

Happy Halloween!

I’ve been a bit disappointed in the Halloween programming this year.  I feel like once October 1st hits, all stations should start playing 24/7 Halloween programming.  Is that too much to ask?

One of my favorite creepy things.  It’s Michael Emerson, who plays Ben on Lost, reading nursery rhymes.

Now I’m off to go watch a really scary movie:  Bring It On!

Looking Back: the Agent Phone Call

Just a random collection of questions I wished I would have asked once upon a time.  In hindsight, I think they might have illuminated a lot about prospective agents.

1.  Are you pro-snow, or do you secretly make voodoo dolls for snow and torture them in your closet? I wouldn’t say I have a hatred of snow.  I don’t think that fairly covers exactly how I feel about snow.  I think the closest way to explain it is to pretend that Snow is equal parts Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow, I am Kevin Spacey, and the movie is Se7en.  “What’s in the box,” indeed!  I think it’s important to find someone who hates snow just as much as I do.

2.  What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream? Mine happens to be vanilla.  Any permutation of vanilla.  So you might think that the more wacky your choice for favorite ice cream flavor might work against you.  But this is a trick question.  There’s no WRONG flavor of ice cream – the only wrong answer is that you don’t like ice cream at all.  You could even be allergic to dairy, or be lactose intolerant, and that would make sense.  We all love things that hurt us.

3.  Are you a diehard fan of Buffy/Lady Gaga/any other pop culture reference I may throw your way? Because frankly, nothing improves my opinion of you than knowing you agree with me.  And being able to spend hours babbling on about how much better Buffy got when she got a haircut in season 6, or how awesome the new Gaga single is…well that can only be a match made in heaven.  Who cares if I haven’t finished the edits I promised, if I’ve almost finished my Halloween costume of <insert randomness here>.

Note:  this post is severely tongue in cheek.  Embrace the sarcasm.  My agent is awesome, and though we agree to disagree about our feelings on Snow, I’m still a fan.

What are some tongue in cheek, Not Serious questions you would have asked prospective agents?  Btw, avoid the “boxers or briefs” standard.  I know most of us are DYING to know, but seriously.  Some information you just can’t burn out of your brain.

How to Create Your Own Fake Town

So one of the things I’m a fan of in novels is the “fake town.”  Also known as the “fictional city,” the “imaginary inlet,” or the “hypothetical hot spot.”  Or maybe I’m the only one who thinks of them like that?  Ahem.  Okay, moving on.

So what’s the point of crafting your own town to set the story in, versus using an established city.   I think the main benefit is the ease with which you can write.  If you use an established city, then you’re expected to do more research.  But if you create your own town, you can just make it all up as you go.  Now there are pros and cons to this.

The pros are obvious:  you can build up the town however you like, and whatever’s going to make your job easier.  It has whatever history you want it to have.  Who cares if there’s not an island west of Seattle, or there’s already a town called New Paltz where you were planning to locate your story.  Or maybe the town in your head is just like this town you drove through in Delaware, but your novel’s supposed to take place in Western PA.  These are all things that can be fixed by creating your own location.

What I’m Up To

I keep meaning to work up a real blog post, but despite all the best intentions, I haven’t actually finished one just yet.  But at some point in the near future, I’ll do a whole post on Creating Your Own Fake Town.

And there will be pictures.  I can’t promise there will be spider monkeys, but there will definitely be pictures.

For the moment, I’m really just focusing on getting Spirit Games as close to done as I can.  I set myself a deadline of Halloween – but major changes to the first half of the book really have required a lot of work.  The last ten days alone have been spent on the same twenty percent of the whole thing.  The bright side, though, is that a lot of the issues I was having with the story (being too dense on backstory and confusing) have been alleviated in all the right ways.  The fact that I have my own personal cheerleader (hi Tiffany!) has helped tremendously.

This is, officially, the last time I write a book without a road map.  Had I had a road map, I probably wouldn’t have wasted so much time writing the WRONG stuff, and instead had a halfway decent, maybe not GREAT story.  Writing the WRONG stuff, though, requires quite a bit of work in rewriting, cleaning, polishing, taking apart, reassembling, repolishing, squinting, sighing, and grumbling.  Not necessarily in that order.

After that, my wish list is pretty simple.

• Finish Witch Eyes sequel (almost one quarter complete)
• Outline possible Spirit Games sequel
• Witch Eyes edits (whenever they come in, they go to the top of the list)
• Send Spirit Games out to betas and then to agent.
• Deep breath.

I’ve been kindof smart, and whenever I’ve had an Idea for something that could have book-merit, I’ve taken the time to flesh it out enough that I can go back later, and have a good sense of where I was going with all that.  I have a confrontation scene on one project, and a whole outline/concept for another.  I’m not planning on working on anything new until after I get my wish list completed, but stranger things have happened.  Maybe I’ll just keep adding to the list.

Just a Taste

It’s been a pretty strange week.  But now that things have settled down, I’m trying to get back into old routines.  Writing being one of them.

The current WIP, which I’m calling Spirit Games, is in this perpetual state of “almost there.”  Once I figure out what I’m doing with this beginning, I think I can finally start making some headway on the rest of it.  And then hopefully send it out to some of my betas and get feedback. At this point, I’d just be so happy to have a finished, workable draft.  This book has been a pain in the butt to write.  And I think it’s my perfect lesson for not writing by the seat of my pants again.  It may work for some people, and its worked out okay for me in the past, but this time it really just fell apart.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying something different with new ideas that pop into my head.  Inevitably, I’ll get stuck for a moment on what I’m working on, and then while I’m trying to wrap my head around the problem, suddenly this new and shiny idea pops up and begs me to work on it.  So I’ve come up with a simple solution.  If it’s a voice thing, like a character is just talking about something, I’ll sit down and write it for a bit.  Just to see where it goes.  Or if it’s a concept, like “what would happen if X happened during Y” then I play around with the ideas and see where it goes.  I’ll look for pictures that inspire the ideas I’m thinking of for the new work, think about music, research setting.  All very minor things that go into files for when I’m ready later.

At the moment, I’ve got two or three really solid ideas that I’d love to work on.  Except I can’t.  Because of the monster known as Spirit Games.    So the sooner that’s out to Betas, the sooner I can start flipping through these other ideas and see which one wants to be worked on the most.

And in the meantime, I’m trying to figure out a way to hit up the SCWBI New York conference at the end of January.  Because of a lot of my friends are going, and I think it would be a good time.

Witch Eyes Info

Since a couple of people have asked now, I figured it was a good time to put up a little something about what Witch Eyes is about for those who don’t know.

Witch Eyes is a cross between Smallville and a modern, gay Romeo and Juliet.  A deadly supernatural feud divides the town of Belle Dam, Washington.  In the search for the secrets of his past, Braden returns here after abandoning the only family he’s ever known.  His gift of the ‘witch eyes,’ something he considers a curse, makes his magic exceptional, but is killing him a little more each time he uses it.  He’s immediately gets drawn between the two rival witch dynasties, each of whom hope to use him for their own ends.   His life grows even more complicated when the one guy he’s interested in turns out to be the only guy in town he can’t have.

There’s also a book trailer link in the sidebar, if you’re interested.  It was done by my friend and writing partner, Leah Clifford.  There’s also a link to her blog so you should check it out!

Edit:  You can read the PM announcement of the deal over on my fantastic, amazing agent’s blog over here.