A Ramble: Thinking Out Loud about Book Blogging and Discussion

Roger has an interesting post up today about books and book blogging in which he says he worries that all we bloggers may well be better talkers than listeners (that is, more interested in putting our own writing out there and having responses to it than responding to other people's writing), and that this tendency may one day kill professional reviewing (if I'm understanding his post correctly). I do not quite see the connection between the two things, because, to me, the best professional reviews stimulate discussion -- I still think about the perceptive last line of Roger's review of the horrid Boy in the Striped Pajamas whenever someone brings the novel up. (The line is quoted in my review at that link if you're curious.) And if they're not stimulating discussion and further thought on deeper issues, if they're just meant to be one-way responses to a book (yes it's good / no it isn't) for other people to read, then isn't that just talking rather than listening anyway? It's still purposeful and important talking, and often just the kind of talking overworked librarians and readers need, to help them choose the right or best books for their libraries. . . . They're two different things, is what I'm saying, and I don't think they cancel each other out. If I've misunderstood you, Roger, I hope you'll clarify the point, either here in comments or on your own blog.

But thinking more about online book discussion . . . Yesterday Mitali Perkins and I had a brief, albeit (to me) stimulating exchange on Twitter, of all things, about romantic/sexual mores in fantasy. She asked, "Why do SF/fantasy authors import our society's current mores about sex and romance into their imagined worlds lock, stock, and barrel?" I thought she was talking about gender roles, so I replied with five tweets involving polyamory (thanks, R. J.), my own reading tastes, societal structures in fiction, and the alas-overlooked middle-grade fantasy novel Questors by Joan Lennon (which I recommend highly for any fans of Diana Wynne Jones). Mitali answered that actually she had been thinking about the fact that 2009-era sexual mores appeared in worlds that did not yet have modern technology or language, and then I replied to that, and then we both got on with our days. It was just the kind of conversation about books I love most, thinking through issues both political and literary out loud, with people whose opinions I respect; but I felt frustrated by the fact I kept having to limit my out-loud thoughts to 140 characters, and that it would be nearly impossible for anyone chiming in late to follow the discussion easily on Twitter, which moves along so quickly, which meant that few other people could (or did) chime in.

So here's what my Web 3.0 would look like: a forum in which any registered member could come in and post a discussion topic, which everyone else would respond to. I could repost my thought piece on the definition of YA literature, say, or Roger could repost any of his favorite past provocations or introduce new ones, or Mitali could post her question above or any of the other fascinating topics she often raises about race, gender, and equity in children's literature. An interested reader could log in, scroll through all of the questions, and respond to the discussions all in one place; and it would update in real time, as Twitter does, so if Mitali and I found ourselves in a topic together, we could carry on just the sort of discussion we were having yesterday, back and forth, clarifying points and stimulating further discussion. And it could have rooms to discuss various books of the moment, like, say, Catching Fire; and because it wouldn't be hosted on any one person's site, no one would be the ultimate authority, the way it can sometimes feel in blog comment discussions. (Plus the person who set it up would make sure the response boxes had plenty of room to type and format comments easily, unlike the way blogger.com does comments -- which is why I'm responding to Roger's post here rather than in a comment over on his blog). There could even be the opportunity to vote for topics/comments/responses one finds especially useful, the same way there is on Amazon.com reviews or NYTimes article comments. This technology already exists, I know -- it would just take someone to find the right webspace and organize it for the kidlitosphere as a whole.

. . . Okay, so now I am pointedly not volunteering, I admit. And these sorts of discussions already take place in blog comments and on listservs like adbooks and my beloved child_lit, so such a forum may not be necessary. But that's my dream for a space where we can all discuss the books we love easily and at length, an ongoing conversation sometimes prompted by and incorporating reviews, and going on to the big questions that inform our thinking, writing, publishing, and ultimately the whole literary art.

Brooklyn Arden Review: PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ZOMBIES

(Should you be one of those poor souls who has not read Austen's major novels, beware spoilers below.)

When I first heard about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I was immensely excited, not least because of passages like these:
"Lovely & too charming Fair one, notwithstanding your forbidding Squint, your greazy tresses & your swelling Back, which are more frightfull than imagination can paint or pen describe, I cannot refrain from expressing my raptures, at the engaging Qualities of your Mind, which so amply atone for the Horror with which your first appearance must ever inspire the unwary visitor." -- Frederic and Elfrida

"With a heart elated by the expected happiness of beholding him, I entered [the forest], & had proceeded thus far in my progress thro' it, when I found myself suddenly seized by the leg & on examining the cause of it, found that I was caught in one of the steel traps so common in gentlemen's grounds. . . . I screamed, as you may easily imagine, till the woods resounded again & till one of the inhuman Wretch's servants came to my assistance & released me from my dreadfull prison, but not before one of my legs was entirely broken."
At this melancholy recital . . . Alice could not help exclaiming, "Oh! cruel Charles, to wound the hearts & legs of all the fair." -- Jack and Alice

"MADAM: An humble Admirer now addresses you -- I saw you, lovely Fair one, as you passed on Monday last, before our House in your way to Bath. I saw you thro' a telescope, & was so struck by your Charms that from that time to this I have not tasted human food." -- Amelia Webster
As you may have guessed, these are excerpts not of P&P&Z itself, but of Jane Austen's own juvenilia, drawn from the splendid e-texts here. And they perfectly demonstrate why I think Ms. Austen might have enjoyed the concept of P&P&Z: She knew that frightful beings plus random, goofy violence plus absurdist humor plus well-chosen details (e.g. the "human" in "human food") usually equals a good time. (For instance, she would have loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer.) So when I finally got my copy of P&P&Z at the beginning of May, I settled down to read it with great expectation of pleasure.

Alas, dear reader! I found that Mr. Seth Grahame-Smith, who undertook the addition of the undead to Ms. Austen's work, also decided to edit the original text in ways that had nothing to do with zombies or their defeat. True, he made Elizabeth and her sisters trained Shaolin warriors, which was hilarious (especially in Lizzy's closing duel with Lady Catherine), and Charlotte Lucas explains her marriage to Mr. Collins by admitting that she has been infected with the "strange plague" and wishes to keep her family safe -- in some ways a better justification than the original. And the line "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains" is just delightful.

But Mr. Grahame-Smith's editorial work often goes awry. He flattens out subtle emotional and character behavior, describing Elizabeth as rolling her eyes at Mary at one point, and turning Mr. Collins explicitly fat (apparently to make him funnier). He introduces totally unnecessary sexual references and crudity: Mrs. Gardiner has a Polish lover in Lambton, and I counted three jokes about "balls," at least two made by characters who were supposed to be models of propriety. There is a lot of vomit and "soiling" and pus and blood and guts even in scenes that had nothing to do with undead rampages (Mrs. Bennet projectile vomits often, and Elizabeth at one point refers to emptying "piss-pots," which the real Elizabeth would never have said loud). I understand I'm approaching this book from an Austenian rather than a zombie-lover's point of view, and that Mr. Grahame-Smith may have regarded the changes as necessary to make the comedy comprehensible and amusing to the zombie lovers. (Is there a lot of soiling in zombie stories? Ew.) But to my eye, rather than heightening the humor of both the genteel social comedy and the violent zombie mayhem through straightforward contrast of the two, Mr. Grahame-Smith simply undercut the characters and social comedy with changes that demonstrated little understanding or appreciation of Ms. Austen and her world.

The book also was sloppily edited and barely copyedited. . . . I normally extend other editors charity when I find typos, because none of us are perfect, but the editor of this one should have noticed that "Kilkenny" on one page became "Kilkerry" on another, never mind standardizing "Bennet" with one T. The illustrations show the ladies in Edwardian rather than Regency dress. And the switch of Colonel Fitzwilliam for Mr. Collins in one particular scene of the novel was frankly stupid and out-of-character for the Colonel, and could have been easily avoided by any editor (or adapter) who had half a brain. (Perhaps theirs were eaten by zombies.) Given all these unfortunate changes, I'm afraid I soon came to find the project tedious; and while I greatly looked forward to beginning this book, I also greatly looked forward to the end of it. Or as Samuel Johnson is said to have said, "The manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."

Finally, if you're an Austen fan interested in horror, check out this cover of a 1950s reissue of Northanger Abbey -- both excellent deceptive packaging, and a classic case of not getting the joke. And if someone would like to hire me to turn Sense and Sensibility into a vampire novel (with Willoughby and Lucy Steele as the undead who bleed the sisters Dashwood dry), or Emma into a werewolf book (with Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax as a secretly mated pair) -- like Mr. Bennet after his daughters are engaged, "I am quite at leisure."

Blue Website! New Talk!

Exclamation-point worthy news: At long last, my redesigned website is up and running!

(That sentence is your signal to click on over to www.cherylklein.com to see the new layout. I'll give you a second.)



Okay. Hooray! The beautiful, bright new design is by my friend John Noe of the Leaky Cauldron, and incorporates my favorite Tudor Rose emblem (sign of my membership in the sacred siblinghood of English majors) as well as an easy-to-use navigation bar. If you took that opening-page invitation to poke around, you'll know that most of the navbar links don't work yet, the book covers for the slideshow need to be resized, and neither the majority of the talks nor my submission guidelines are up at present. But I'll be adding these things over the next few weeks, so please check back occasionally to see what's new. And my blog, for the record, will continue to reside here at chavelaque.blogspot.com, so please don't change your bookmarks to that other address.

To celebrate the redesigned site, I put up a new talk as well: the "Springing Surprises" speech I wrote but did not deliver in full at the Vermont College Novel Writers' Retreat. That talk made me think a lot about effects in writing . . . the way a writer can use surprises, or spacing, or the pacing even in a particular paragraph, to focus or distract the reader's emotional attention and thereby achieve the writer's emotional aims, the same way a movie director can blow up a truck to make the audience go "Oooh!" I don't know that I have anything more to say about this now than what I say here, but I'm interested in tracking cool techniques/effects for use in a future talk, maybe. . . . Let me know if you see any worthy of note.

Theory: A Definition of YA Literature

So I've been thinking off and on about a practical definition of YA literature -- something I could look at to help me decide whether a manuscript is an adult novel or a middle-grade novel or, indeed, a YA. Such delineations don't matter to me as a reader -- a good book is a good book -- but they do matter to me as an editor and publisher, because I want every book I publish to find the audience that is right for it, and sometimes, despite a child or teenage protagonist, a manuscript is meant for an adult audience. Hence I have written the definition below to help me think through these situations as they come up. This is very much a WORKING theory; I hope you all will offer challenges, counterexamples, additions or arguments to help me improve what I'm saying here. But here's what I have right now -- the definition broken into five parts for easier parsing:
  1. A YA novel is centrally interested in the experience and growth of
  2. its teenage protagonist(s),
  3. whose dramatized choices, actions, and concerns drive the
  4. story,
  5. and it is narrated with relative immediacy to that teenage perspective.
Some further discussion of terms here:

1) "centrally interested": The book's central storyline focuses upon the emotional, intellectual, and all other forms of experience and growth of its main character. It may be interested in other things as well -- dragons, the definition of justice, life in 1908 Russia -- but all of those interests are secondary to the experience of the main character, and usually filtered only through him/her.

This is often where I find adult books separating themselves out here, because while they may have a younger protagonist, the adult books aren't interested in that protagonist's life per se -- they're interested in showing the world the protagonist will encounter in all its ugliness or glory, and a younger character often provides a useful "innocent" or "naive" viewpoint, or at the very least a figure of instant sympathy to adults. As an example, it's been years since I read Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle, but I remember it as a wonderful book that avoided the "innocent/naive" pitfall by making Paddy a fully-rounded and rather foulmothed boy. Still, I felt it was rightly classified as an adult book because to me it read as much like a work of anthropology -- A Report on the Mindset and Behavior of a Representative Ten-Year-Old Male in 1968 Ireland -- as it did a work of fiction; that is, it felt as much like a study of a childhood in Ireland at a time of social unrest Paddy didn't fully understand, as the story of a child there. (See also note below on "story" in #4.)

"growth" -- the character is different at the beginning than he is at the end, and usually for the better. I always think of Richard Peck's wise dictum that a YA novel ends "ends not with happily ever after, but at a new beginning, with the sense of a lot of life yet to be lived"; and that the events of the book have left the character better prepared for that.

2) "teenage protagonist(s)": Yeah, I'm going to posit that YA novels require a protagonist at an adolescent stage of life, between childhood and the full rights and privileges of adulthood. I do not think this is true of children's books, particularly picture books (that is, that they must have a child main character); but I think it's true of teen books, because life between the ages of 14-18 is such a unique time, full of so much intensity and so many firsts, that only a very sheltered adult or a very advanced child could have those same sorts of experiences and changes.

3) "dramatized" -- shown, not told; dialogue, not narration; the primary action happening before our eyes, not offpage.

"choices, actions, and concerns" -- the protagonist does things; s/he makes choices, takes action, and has interests in and/or connections to the world outside his/her head.

"drive" -- the protagonist is expected (by the reader at least) to make a difference in this fictional world, and by the end of the book is empowered to take some action to do so.

4) "story" -- a sequence of events linked by cause and effect, generally with a recognizable beginning and end. When people ask me why I went into children's books editing, I have often said just this, story: that things were required to happen in children's/YA books, that they had to have a forward action beyond the events of everyday life, as it often feels they don't in adult books. Maybe what I really mean here is that the events of the book have to have shape and meaning, while in adult books things can just happen because that's what happens in life: things happen.

5) "narrated with relative immediacy to that teenage perspective": The book does not have to be in first person (though goodness knows a good eighty-five percent of YA fiction seems to be these days; I wonder what the actual statistics are on this), but it stays close to the viewpoint of that teenage protagonist, without the distance of, say, an adult looking back at his teenage years. The exception that proves the rule here might be The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, whose detached, almost academic third-person narrator is nonetheless sympathetic to Frankie and describes her emotions as well as her excellent plotting.

There is one more assumption running through everything I'm saying here that I'm hesitating to codify into part of the definition -- but perhaps I should. And that is that a YA novel should end with hope, that there must be some thread of a ghost of a promise of a happy ending or more growth, that there is indeed meaning to the events enclosed. Not necessarily a moral, certainly not an explicit one; but no existentialist despair, either, or random horrors that do not cohere other than aesthetically (I am thinking of Thomas Pynchon's V. here, but I may just be a bad reader of Pynchon). In terms of the Richard Peck quote above, if a YA novel leaves its reader with the sense of a lot of the protagonist's life left to be lived, perhaps it should also leave the reader with the sense that that life (and the reader's life) is worth living. But do we limit the art of the genre if we say it can't go fully into the darkness?

What do you all think of all this?

Memorialize This

So this is the way my weekend went. First, there was the terrific LeakyCon with John Green, which John Green himself sums up nicely here:



The last song on the video is the Harry and the Potters anthem "Dumbledore," and what you see in the opening bars is most of the 500 or so people in the room, having spontaneously formed a large circle with arms around each other, equally spontaneously running to the center of the circle and rocking. It set a new standard for epic Potters shows, and I fully support John's closing gauntlet to the Twilighters.

Then I flew to central New York to see my cousin Hans receive his Master's in landscape architecture from Cornell University. When we arrived, we noticed a banner on a back wall that read "WE LOVE YOU DOWLBO! CONGRATULATIONS!" But that was later topped by this --

-- dragged behind a plane that circled the Cornell stadium. We couldn't find a "Dowlbo" in the list of graduates (though granted, there were 5,000 of them), so we speculated among ourselves who Dowlbo was and why someone might have splurged on him: a message from a relieved wife to a ninth-year graduate student who finally completed his Ph.D.? A love letter from an narcisstic Dowlbo himself? Simply a proud family? That's certainly the most likely option, but also the most boring, when there are so many other interesting narrative possibilities. Any other ideas?

And then, speaking of proud, crazy families:


We held one of our semiannual battles for the honor of hosting the Frog, which had dwelt for far too long with Hans and Megan in Ithaca. While family friend Josh Shields completed the course first, the game is called Killer Klein Croquet, so we hastily invented the Shields Clause to grant the Frog to the first Klein-family finisher. And thus my aunt Carol (brown shirt and glasses in the middle) will take the Frog back to Iowa until we meet again.

And finally, we saw Niagara Falls. Quite beautiful; quite cold; quite glad I don't have to go over them in a barrel.

The entire weekend was thoroughly, thoroughly awesome -- my love and thanks to all involved.

A Pub Plan and a Poll

I mentioned below that Betsy and I would be hosting a Kidlit Drink Night in conjunction with BEA, and those plans are now in place: Friday, May 29, starting at 8 p.m. at the Houndstooth Pub at 8th Ave. and 37th St. Come one, come all!

And a poll: On Friday, a friend and I fell into a conversation about song lyrics. My friend remarked that while she might fall in love with a tune, she never really pays attention to song lyrics. But for me the two are inextricably linked: I hardly ever remember melodies without words; I have to really pay attention to instrumental-only music in order to have some reaction to it; my favorite songs ("They Can't Take That Away from Me," "North Dakota," "I Love Every Little Thing About You," "The Babysitter's Here," "You Must Meet My Wife") all have genius lyrics as well; and I carry a stupid number of words set to music in my head -- especially pop songs of the 1990s, when I still listened to commercial radio regularly. (Also Baptist hymns.) I suspect the difference is that my friend, who is an enthusiastic amateur bassoonist, is much smarter about music than I am, but I don't know for sure. So I'm asking simply: Do you pay attention to/remember/care about lyrics in the music you love, or not? I look forward to seeing the response.

New Yorkers: Take Action for Marriage Equality

Hey, fellow New Yorkers! As you may have heard, our state Senate passed a bill for marriage equality yesterday, but it's facing a tough battle in the House. We all need to call and write our representatives and tell them we will not stand for being less cool, less loving, and less equal than Iowa. (And Connecticut. And New Hampshire. And Vermont. And Massachusetts. . . . Seriously, this is embarrassing.) FiveThirtyEight has the breakdown of representatives for and against; Andrew Sullivan has a helpful list of contact information. Let's do this.

I have been half in love with easeful Death

I was looking at a New York Times bestseller list from a couple weeks ago today, and I noticed:
  • #2: Twilight: Directors' Notebook. A book about the making of a movie based on a novel about a girl in love with a member of the undead. (Twilight itself was on the series list, of course, along with House of Night, which is also about vampires.)
  • #4: Thirteen Reasons Why. A novel about a teenage girl who kills herself and thirteen people who influenced her to do it.
  • #6: If I Stay. A novel about a teenage girl in a coma, making the choice between living and dying.
  • #7: Wintergirls. A novel about a teenage girl whose best friend has died of an eating disorder, pushing herself to that same point.
And I thought: What is it with teenage girls and death? Why all these teenage girls at risk, on edge, and no boys? How would these books have been different if they showed the boy version of those stories* -- a boy who killed himself because he was harassed/teased/neglected, a boy in a coma, a boy whose competitive pathology puts him on the brink of collapse? How might the books have been differently received by editors and readers? And what does it say that these stories of girls in extreme situations are so popular now?

* I should add that I absolutely don't mean this to criticize any of the authors or editors involved for publishing these books just as they are, as they're all interesting and important books just as they are, and authors have to tell the stories that come to them as they come. I'm just interested in the what-if of switching the genders, and the why of books about this particular gender and death being so popular.

I thought all this just sort of as a thought experiment, and then I thought, Well, did I read any books like that when I was a teenage girl? And one title leapt to mind immediately: Love Story. I don't remember how I found that 1970s classic weepie during my freshman year of high school, but I know I adored the weepiness; I saw the movie once but read the book multiple times. I'm not sure that falls under the same rubric as the books above, though, except maybe Twilight. . . . What I loved about it was the romance, and the way the romance was sharpened by death, how much more sweet and sad the story became when Jenny died. (I read a couple of Lurlene McDaniels, too, until I figured out the formula and got bored with them.) But Wintergirls, Thirteen Reasons Why, and If I Stay aren't so much about a romance with a living, breathing boy as they are about a romance with death itself (as I understand them; I haven't read If I Stay), and in Twilight, of course, death and the boy are one and the same.

So this made me think of a brilliant passage late in Jaci Moriarty's The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie. Jaci puts these words in the mouth of a decidedly ambiguous character, so I'm not sure their wisdom gets recognized and appreciated, but the passage reads:
It is my belief that the teenager is a person with three main characteristics. . . . First, teenagers get caught up in their own heads. . . . teenagers think about themselves a lot. They obsess about what they look like, what people think of them, what the point of life is. So number one, too much introspection.

. . . Now, number two, the teenager needs excitement--it's a reaction, I guess, to the realization that life is ordinary. In childhood, it's fresh and exciting, but then you start to see that the grown-up world is boring. So you look for hysteria and drama. You scream at concerts, you shriek when you see each other, you ride on rollercoasters, you get into alcohol and drugs. All year I've been hearing you guys use words like conspiracy, compulsion, pathology -- you get post-traumatic stress from exams; you're always running from the cops. I mean, you guys are just desperate for excitement. You're looking for extremes. You're looking for a climax.

. . . And finally, teenagers lose their sense of perspective. They're stuck between childhood and adulthood so they don't know whether they're up or down. One day, they're dressing up to look old and get into a bar; next day, they're putting on their cute voice to get the child's fare on the bus. It's like they're in an elevator all the time, so they can't judge where they are." (p. 404-405)
Death's finality and hugeness feeds introspection. It is extreme and exciting -- the approach to it, anyway, and the dodging of it, or the struggle or choice to embrace it. And it provides an end, a certainty that has its own comfort (though also terror) in the up and down.

But that wouldn't explain why there are so few books about boys and death. So one other theory here (which I'm pretty sure isn't original to me): More than anything else, teenage girls want to be seen. Twilight is a story about how special Bella is, how she is an exception to Edward's rules about humans, how he sees her once and falls helplessly in love with her then. (Love Story = same thing.) Thirteen Reasons Why is about a girl claiming the attention she was denied in life; If I Stay about the people who gather around a girl's bedside, paying attention to her, asking her to stay in life; Wintergirls about a girl who wants to be the skinniest -- to have the least seen of her, actually, and having that be her victory -- until that desire consumes her. Death, in its extremity, promises and focuses attention in just the same way a love story does. And when the two are combined: teenage-girl bliss.

Your comments? Theories? Thoughts?

One last thing that has nothing to do with death but a lot to do with teenage girls and love: The video for Taylor Swift's "Love Story." I freely confess I'm fascinated by this video, partly because it seems to have been concepted after someone watched "Pride and Prejudice," the What the Hell??? version (but with eighteenth-century dress for the ladies), partly because it (and the song) pushes all my romantic buttons, partly because it pushes all my feminist ones at the exact same time, and then finally because the song is such a well-constructed piece of narrative craft, moving from first glimpse (being seen!) to forbidden love to marriage proposal with Daddy's permission in less than four minutes. As a friend of mine said, "It's total high-school English class crack," and the part of me that is still in Mrs. Markley's Honors English II class third period adores it. Well worth watching, for any of those partial reactions.

And More Appearances!

Another one this month and one in November: On the 28th, I'll be on the bloggers' panel for SLJ's "Day of Dialog 2009" in conjunction with BEA. My brilliant fellow panelists are Liz Burns (A Chair, A Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy), Laura Lutz (Pinot and Prose), and Libba Bray (A Great and Terrible Beauty), all moderated by my friend and yours Betsy Bird; and rumor has it there will be quite the shoe-off (which means I desperately need to go shopping, because, besides the magic shoes, everything I own is as practical and boring as a DVR manual). 9:15 a.m. at the Brooklyn Public Library. Free, and there will be muffins -- can you really ask for anything more?

Oh, and Betsy and I will be hosting a special BEA Kidlit Drink Night on Friday night, at a place to be decided . . . um, once I e-mail Betsy back. But it will definitely be Friday, May 29.

Then, from November 6-8, I'm going to be one of the featured speakers at the SCBWI Western Washington Professional Retreat. I hear marvelous things about this chapter and the location of the retreat looks a-maz-ing, so it ought to be a good time. (I'll also be at the Midsouth Fall Conference in Nashville from September 25-27 -- a scant three days after my 31st birthday, so maybe I'll have to work something special into my presentation for that.)

Me at LeakyCon and Harry Potter in Paris

Leaky readers will already know this, but for others who might be interested, I'm delighted to announce I'll be half of a keynote conversation at the upcoming LeakyCon 2009 near Boston, on Friday, May 21, discussing the writing, editing, pleasures, pains, and nature of YA literature with John Green. Yes, that John Green, the brilliant author of Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns, and the head wrangler of the awesome troupe of Nerdfighters. So assuming I am not utterly silenced by fangirldom, this should be a lot of fun. Tickets are $20 with a LeakyCon registration (I don't think they're available without), and can be purchased at the second link above.

And here are two Harry Potter-related pictures from my time in Paris -- first, me at number 51, rue Montmorency*, former site of the "maison de Nicolas Flamel":


* Ten points to the first reader who can guess what other work of children's literature I thought of when I saw this name -- and no, it's not the series published by Scholastic.

And then I noticed this interesting juxtaposition of elements on the front of the Basilica of Sacre-Coeur:


Coincidence? Or the mark of a French seeker of the Hallows (perhaps even Monsieur Flamel himself)? Who can say?

Bona nit de Barcelona!

I´m now on my long-awaited vacation in Barcelona, proceeding to Paris tomorrow night. If you´re attending my talk at SCBWI France, I look forward to meeting you Saturday; if you´re a dear friend or relation, you can look forward to being bombarded with Melissa´s and my pictures, stories, and lovingly recounted details of desserts (oh my word, the desserts); and if you´re just a casual reader, I´ll update again when I´m home next weekend. Have a great week!

Behind the Book: Marcelo in the Real World

I often associate the books I’ve edited and loved strongly with the place where I first read the manuscripts. I finished the first draft of Millicent Min, Girl Genius in the lounge of LaGuardia Airport, as I waited for my family to arrive from Kansas City for their first-ever trip to New York. I read the first two chapters of the book that would become A Curse Dark as Gold in my beloved yellow wing chair by the window of my old apartment, and completed the full manuscript in my beloved blue sling chair in the corner of my old office. I inhaled all of Sara Lewis Holmes’s Operation Yes in two long sessions in the Scholastic Library, in the comfortable armchairs overlooking Broadway, then went back upstairs and told our assistant Emily that I wanted to acquire it.

And I read a certain scene late in the manuscript of Marcelo in the Real World on the downtown V train at 53rd St. in Manhattan. I distinctly remember sitting there on the bright orange-and-red plastic seats, the manuscript on my lap, waiting for the train to move after a visit to the Donnell Library, and thinking “Wow. Wow”—that eye-widening, brain-expanding feeling when you’ve read something that changes your view of the world. Marcelo, a young man on the autism spectrum, was talking with a dear friend of his, an adult female rabbi, about religious faith, about suffering, about what we weak and small humans can do to alleviate it; and I had never seen anything like this conversation in YA fiction before (or adult fiction either, for that matter). It wasn’t just the unusual players in this discussion; it was the ambition of it, the way it reached for the Big Questions and caught them. It was the reality and humanity of it—that I could genuinely believe this anguished young man in the button-up shirt and this older woman in the neon-green-framed glasses lived and thought and felt up somewhere near Boston. And it was the way the religious issues chimed within my own heart, my own complex internal stew of Big Questions and small actions and deep longing. I had been impressed by the book before that moment on the V train, but after it—pending the author being open to revisions, and not a jerk—I wanted to acquire and edit the manuscript desperately.

So I called the agent, Faye Bender, who arranged a phone call for me with the author, Francisco X. Stork. These conversations are always a little nervous and hesitant—like a first date, both of us auditioning for the other; but he was lovely to talk to: clearly open to revisions, and not a jerk. I took the manuscript to Arthur and the rest of the people in our Acquisitions process, who responded with equal enthusiasm; I made an offer to Faye, and with a little back and forth, Marcelo was mine.

And just as I had never read a manuscript like Marcelo before, I edited it in a manner that felt different from anything I’d done before. A quick plot summary:
Marcelo Sandoval hears music that nobody else can hear – part of an autism-like condition that no doctor has been able to identify. But his father has never fully believed in the music or Marcelo's differences, and he challenges Marcelo to work in the mailroom of his law firm for the summer…to join "the real world." There Marcelo meets Jasmine, his beautiful and surprising coworker, and Wendell, the son of another partner in the firm. He learns about competition and jealousy, anger and desire. But it's a picture he finds in a file – a picture of a girl with half a face – that truly connects him with the real world: its suffering, its injustice, and what he can do to fight.
There are four intertwined plotlines here: Marcelo’s relationship with his father, which kicks off the action; his relationship with Jasmine, which provides much of the book’s warmth; his relationship with Wendell, which provides many of its uglier truths; and what happens when Marcelo finds that picture, which leads to the scene with the rabbi that I mentioned above, and ultimately serves as the thematic heart of the novel. Indeed, there was so much interesting and meaty and true stuff going on in the manuscript that I felt like the first thing we needed to figure out was what was the most important true stuff—identifying the central question the book would ask and then focusing the storyline to provide an answer.

So I decided to try something I'd never done with an author before, and I asked Francisco to write me a letter about the book, how it started for him and what he wanted it to explore and to say. He responded with a three-page essay that showed both his ambition, in articulating a hero’s journey for Marcelo, and his compassion, in identifying the thematic ends that journey would serve. The central question was how a holy person—someone with his mind on things not of this world, as Marcelo is—would react to things of this world bursting in on him: suffering, injustice, betrayal, love. What was the right action in response to those things? Was it possible—perhaps even desirable—to stay away from them, in that higher removed plane? Or must they be confronted, and if so, what were the risks and costs? These questions struck me as not just spiritual concerns, but profoundly YA ones, as teenagers are often for the first time facing departure from their own safe spaces, the fallibility of their idols, and the costs of their choices.

And Francisco’s essay became our touchstone throughout the months-long editing process, as we used his answers to shape and strengthen the plot, particularly in distributing the screen time for those four intertwined plotlines. We worked on making the stakes clear at the outset and then raising them throughout the book, as Marcelo’s ability to negotiate “the real world” developed and his relationships with Arturo, Jasmine, Wendell, and the girl in the picture intensified. My beloved bookmaps helped us monitor the pacing, so that the various revelations of Marcelo’s journey each resonated within the action and were given adequate processing time in his mind. And when it came to the line-editing, having the essay’s larger statement of purpose reminded detail-obsessed me to keep my eyes on that purpose, making sure the edits I suggested contributed to our overall aims.

Despite all this, there was a fair amount of trial and error on both sides. . . . I’d suggest a new scene arrangement to Francisco that I’d then rearrange again in the next draft (which I’m sure was great fun for him), and he estimates that in the end he rewrote half the book, which sounds about right. But both of us were drawn on by our desire to do justice to the questions he raised and the people he created, to bring as much fullness of truth to the story as we could. The novel provided its own metaphor for this search for truth: Jasmine is a composer, and she tells Marcelo at one point, “The right note sounds right, and the wrong note sounds wrong.” Thanks to Francisco’s marvelous gifts and hard work, Marcelo in the end is full of right notes.

And I’m not the only one who thinks so; the novel has received five starred reviews and much high praise elsewhere, including this great notice in Ypulse and this from the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. Francisco was featured in the Boston Globe this past weekend and also in a Publishers Weekly Q&A conducted by my friend Donna (whose class at Boston University Francisco and I visited back in October). Marcelo is what I think of as a “Book of my Heart,” one that still makes me say “Wow. Wow” when I revisit it today; and if you have the chance to read it, I hope it moves you too.

My Book at the White House!

If you, like me, have a crush on the entire Obama family unit, and you, like me, have been following their search for a dog with great interest, you may have seen this Washington Post article from Tuesday about the arrival of little Bo. Bo was a gift to the family from Senator Edward Kennedy and his wife, and the article says the Kennedys also gave the Obamas this:


I edited this book, which was illustrated by the marvelous David Small, so this news delighted me no end! It's a very fun book for my favorite First Family.

And while the Obamas will have no idea about this, blog readers might recognize this walk-on character late in the book:


Yes, this is a David Small caricature of me. When we were working on the book in late 2004, David, his lovely wife Sarah, several other Scholastic people, and I gathered in Washington to meet Senator Kennedy and his dogs and tour the scenes where the book is set. Toward the end of our Capitol visit, I sat down to rest in the window seat of the Senate reception room, which is pictured in this spread. A few minutes later, David came over and showed me the amazingly complete sketch he'd made of the room, including me seated in the corner, and he later worked that long-haired blonde woman into the final picture. You can read more about our trip and the editorial process for this book here.

How to Get a Seat on a Crowded NYC Subway Train

  1. Consider positioning yourself on the platform to board either the first car or the last car on the train. You'll have a longer walk to the stairs at both your home station and your destination, but as a result those cars are usually notably less crowded.
  2. If a train pulls in and it's stuffed to the sliding doors, think about waiting for the next train. Frequently riders will grab the first train that comes along, especially after an extended wait. These trains often end up overloaded and uncomfortable, and chances of getting a seat are practically nil. However, these crowded trains are often quickly followed by near-empty trains, as everyone in a hurry pushed onto the previous train, and the ride as whole in these trains is much more pleasant.
  3. After boarding a crowded train, move out of the doorway and into the seating area as quickly as possible. All successful seat-getting on the train depends upon correct positioning within the seating area.
  4. The best place to stand in the seating area depends on the layout of the train. In an "H" train, where the seats form a "H" shape (broken vertically through the middle by the aisle) between each set of doors, the ideal location is at the joins of the lines, as near as possible to the corners created by the vertical three-seat and the horizontal two-seat. On one of the new trains with blue benches bisected by a central pole, the ideal location is midway between the pole and the end of the bench. On a train with gray benches lining the sides, however, you can hang anywhere along the bench in front of a Likely Target.
  5. Observe your fellow seated passengers carefully to determine the Likeliest Target. A Likely Target is anyone who is currently sitting down but likely to stand up somewhere along the course of the route (and well before you reach your destination). Likely Targets vary with route and location. On the 2/3 line from Brooklyn to Manhattan in the morning, a man in a business suit is a 3-1 bet to get off at Wall Street, and so he makes a great Likely Target if you're going further uptown. A 19-year-old on the F train with an NYU patch on her backpack is likely to get off at West 4th; a woman in scrubs on the uptown 6 train at Bleecker St. is a terrible target because she's probably bound for the hospital complexes on the Upper East Side. Consider the possibilities of transfers as well; a woman in hose and sneakers (signifying heels in her tote bag) on the Q train might very well transfer to the 2/3 for Wall Street at Atlantic Ave., so she makes a great Target if you're at Prospect Park. Look for several Targets in one seating area to increase your chances of success.
  6. Once you've chosen the Target, grab the horizontal pole above his/her head, assume a wide stance for balance and to assert your future right to the seat, and hang on. Do not loom or get in the Target's personal space. (You can take hold of the central pole in the aisle, if the train offers it, which potentially gives you access to Targets on both sides; but beware that people standing directly in front of Targets then get first dibs on those seats.)
  7. As the train approaches a station, particularly a good transfer point, watch your Targets and their seatmates carefully. Is anyone gathering up a bag or folding away a newspaper? If the space in front of that person is free, move into it, even if s/he was not previously identified as a Likely Target. If someone else is standing in that space, respect the right of your fellow Stander to take that seat first.
  8. When the train stops and a Target rises, back off to give him/her space to move out of the train. Once the Target is clear of the space, you can drop a purse, umbrella (dry only), or newspaper into the seat to identify it as yours until you are able to sit down. Note that if you have competition from a fellow Stander for the seat, this technique may get you some dirty looks.
  9. Turn around so you are looking into the train, pull your legs together and all personal belongings to you, and sit down. This is an especially useful technique if you are taking up residence in a middle seat and need to squeeze between two people. N.B.I.: Men almost never want to sit in middle seats. N.B.II: Men are also notorious for opening their legs wide once seated. This is annoying, men. Please take up the width of your seat space and no more.
  10. The following people must always be given the option of taking a seat before you, or offered your seat if you're sitting and they're standing: pregnant ladies; young children; parents holding young children; anyone with a cane/crutches/other obvious impairment; the elderly. There are no exceptions to this rule. If you're sitting and need to offer your seat to someone, you should stand up as or after you catch the person's eye, because many people will not take the seat they deserve if you remain sitting down when you offer. (You can say "I'm getting off at the next stop" as you offer the seat, whether it is true or not; it will ease their conscience at taking the seat and grease the wheels of the transaction.) It is also polite and admirable to offer your seat to women wearing heels (because a lengthy standing train ride in those babies is both tricky and tiring), people with lots of bags, or people who just look like they've had a really long day.
  11. If you are not tired and there are few seats on the train, or if you're within two stops of your destination, ignore these rules and don't sit down -- let one of your fellow New Yorkers catch a break. Good seat karma will come to you in turn.
Happy subway riding and sitting!

A Rule of Thumb for Submissions

Keep your packaging and presentation simple.

I am sharing this rule of thumb because Arthur received a submission yesterday in a 1' x 2' x 2' box. Boxes (larger than manuscript boxes) from people we don't know are always cause for concern, because if you're bribing us, we resent that, and if you're bombing us . . . well, we resent that too. Both Arthur and his assistant were out of the office, so I opened the package up just in case it was urgent, and it contained neither a bribe nor a bomb -- rather, six manuscripts, sample illustrations (from an illustrator the author chose) mounted on foamboard, a screenplay, a marketing plan with merchandising information, and approximately 1,537,832 Styrofoam packing peanuts.

I had to dig through the box, peanuts, and layers of tissue paper to find these materials. This annoyed me. The papers and foamboard pieces were each tied up in bundles with ribbons, so I had to spend time untying the packages to see them. This also annoyed me. The fact that illustrations exist annoyed me for reasons explained at your average first SCBWI conference, and the screenplay and merchandising plan annoyed me for reasons explained in points 10 and 13 of the Annotated Query Letter from Hell. It says specifically in the AALB submissions guidelines that writers should only send one manuscript at a time. And the peanuts went everywhere, so I'll let you imagine my feelings on that.

This does not mean that this submission is dead to us; it will get a fair reading, and if it's fantastic, hooray. But it's starting out with big strikes against it because the author is (1) wasting our time with the fancy packaging and (2) ignoring our guidelines, which makes its burden of proof to be fantastic higher, which does the author no favors. Please: Send one manuscript at a time, your best work, of the kind of material we publish (no screenplays), in an envelope, with a SASE, so we can read and respond to it promptly. Otherwise: annoyance.

(This still was not the strangest large submissions package we ever received; that prize goes to the person who sent us his or her manuscript in a used lobster trap. Thankfully empty. But still.)

Free E-Book of The Beekeeper's Apprentice

An event worthy of much italics, as seen in the following story:

One Friday afternoon in the spring of 1999, in accordance with the Benchley Law of Working Dynamics*, I went down to the Northfield Public Library in search of reading material that was not assigned for class. I came away with The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King, settled down in an armchair on the second floor of the Carleton library to start it . . .

. . . and four hours later, surfaced in panic, because I was done with the book, it was now 6 p.m., and the Northfield Library was closed. This meant I could not get the sequel until the next day. This was terrible, terrible news. Because I loved the characters, Mary Russell and her mentor Sherlock Holmes; I loved the witty dialogue; I loved the 1920s setting; and I loved the UST**, as I still love UST, and the teaser chapter for the sequel in the back of the book was loaded with UST. I was up at nine the next morning -- allow me to emphasize that I was a college student getting up at 9 a.m. on a Saturday*** -- so I could get down to the library and get the next book ASAP. I think I finished the whole series in four days.

And now you have the opportunity to have that same exhilarating experience free of charge, as the publisher is making The Beekeeper's Apprentice available in free downloadable PDF form, details here. It's only available through April 15, though, so download quick, clear four hours, and enjoy!
_____________
* "Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing." -- Robert Benchley
** Unresolved Sexual Tension. The real trick, of course, is turning this into RST and keeping the story interesting; and Ms. King does this very well too.
*** Though admittedly I was a very boring college student.

Events. Media. Cute Animals. A Poll.

  • Next Kidlit Drink Night! We'll gather at the Blue Owl on Monday, March 30th, about 6 p.m. All the cool kids will be there -- except, of course, in kidlit, the cool kids are all just happy dorks. So you become a cool kid by just loving the subject and showing up to discuss it. Hope to see you there!
  • Francisco Stork, author of Marcelo in the Real World, was featured in a SLJ interview here.
  • Lisa Yee is interviewed by Readergirlz in a video for Absolutely Maybe here
  • A terrific review of Heartsinger here. I'm going to be on a USBBY panel for this book at Midsummer ALA, along with the author (Karlijn Stoffels) and translator (Laura Watkinson) and Arthur. That will also be the first time, or very close to it, that I meet either the author or translator, or even hear their voices, even though we went through an exhaustive and ultimately entirely mutually satisfying translation and editing process together -- all done over e-mail and in Microsoft Word Track Changes. We hope to show some of these original e-mails and documents during our panel, so if you're at all interested in children's literature in translation or the editorial process, it ought to be a fascinating event.
  • Greg Pincus has a very cool plan for National Poetry Month in April.
  • An awesome word: schwerpunkt. I'm thinking of using this in place of the word "point" in all my talks, because it means more or less the same thing but it's so much more pungent and schwerpunkty. Find an excuse to use it today!
  • If you love Zadie Smith but haven't yet seen her wonderful essay on Obama, "Pygmalion," and her own upbringing, "Speaking in Tongues" -- you can click that link.
  • But in order to click the next link, you must (1) enjoy pictures of cute animals, (2) find insulting them for no reason potentially hilarious, and (3) not mind bad language. All good? Okay. (My favorite entry: The Tibetan Fox Thinks He's Better Than You.)
  • Best adult book I've read recently: The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I became a fan of Mr. Coates's writing after he replaced Matthew Yglesias as the liberal blogger at the Atlantic website, and this is his memoir of growing up in Baltimore in the 1980s, the next-to-youngest son of a former Black Panther, and learning what it meant to him to be a black male. I clearly am a very whitebread white woman, and reading this reminded me strongly of reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: the same constant flow of references I didn't get, but also the same wondrous use of language, particularly that very flow; the same fascinating characters and setting; and the same wonder and appreciation for getting such a full view of a life so different from my own. It is indeed beautiful.
  • The fine print on the challenge below: To qualify for the $1 donation, you must send me a digital picture of you at the end of your run (walks also qualify). All pictures must be received at chavela_que at yahoo dot com by the date of the Race to Deliver in November. Melissa has accepted the challenge, but there's still no word from John . . . If you know him, harass him.
Finally, a poll. Last weekend I gave three talks at the Missouri SCBWI retreat. Two were revised and expanded versions of speeches I've given earlier: a talk on character from the Missouri SCBWI conference in November 2007 and New Jersey in June 2008, and a talk on plot from Illinois last November. The third talk, on voice, was entirely new. None of these, you will have noticed, are on my website, and this is because it makes my life EVER SO MUCH EASIER when I don't have to write a new talk for a conference. I actually do like writing talks; I always learn something myself in the writing, and these three were no exceptions. But when I don't have to write one, I can spend more time concentrating on critiques and editing my books and having a life (particularly on weekends), which is all quite lovely. And it is nice feeling like I'm not saying things people already have heard or know . . .

So I'm wondering: On a scale of 1 to 5, if you came to an SCBWI conference, how bothered would you be to hear me give a talk you might have already read online? 1 is "Hooray! A Talk I Can Read Immediately!"; 5 is "You Are Dead to Me." The poll is in the sidebar at right. Please be honest, as the results have a bearing on the future content of both my website and my weekends. Many thanks!