Wrapped up in books

Teen Creative Writing Session Hijinks

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:56:44 GMT

Last night during my "Writing the Novel" session I was talking about branches of action, something Adrian Fogelin mentioned at an SCBWI workshop a few years ago. Aka--leaving out boring everyday details and focusing on the parts of your story where characters make definitive choices. I said "'Amanda continued giving her presentation until 7:30' is not interesting, and you could probably gloss over that and go on to the next interesting thing I did. However, 'Amanda suddenly ran from the room screaming' is much more interesting--what made me do that? What happens after that?"

Five minutes later, two of my teens (16-17 year old boys) jumped up and ran screaming from the room. (They came back a couple of minutes later.) It was SO FUNNY. I just kept talking about dialogue and broke for a moment to say--see, THAT's interesting, that's something worth writing about!

I love my teens. :)

Nanowrimo

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:01:36 GMT

I am doing Nano if you want to friend me. Username same as here, acoppedge.

Norma Fox Mazer

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 14:47:39 GMT

So sad to hear that Norma Fox Mazer passed away.

Back in March I emailed her to let her know that THE MISSING GIRL was on my library's 2009 Favorite Books for Young Adults list. I also took the opportunity to share a memory from my own childhood--bringing home UP IN SETH'S ROOM and having my mom forbid me from reading it! I told her it was neat to have come full circle from being a library-loving teen to being a teen librarian myself, and thanked her for writing so many wonderful books for teens over the years. She was so happy to hear the book was on our list and said my story made her day.

Goodbye to one of the greats. Her career as a writer is truly inspiring, in quality, in connection to her readership and in longevity.

LEVIATHAN by Scott Westerfeld

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:27:37 GMT

Amid a flurry of coughing and nose-blowing, I am braving the internets to tell you:

The hype is true.

LEVIATHAN by Scott Westerfeld is pure liquid awesome.

Adventure-wise it reminds me somewhat of the adventurous parts of the HIS DARK MATERIALS trilogy. For serious.

Style-wise it is steampunk heaven. Full of great descriptions of Clanker and Darwinist technology but never over-full. Guaranteed to send thirteen-year-old boys scrambling for mechanical pencils and graph paper so they can sketch, inspired by Westerfeld's descriptions and Keith Thompson's art.

I couldn't stop telling people about this book as I was reading it. And I may have hugged it several times as well, for emphasis. And I may have hugged it when I was alone too because I loved it that much.

As always I really appreciated this book on three levels. First as an adult reader. Second as a teen librarian, knowing I have another book to add to my "great young teen boy book and not too mature to give to younger kids who are good readers." This is a tricky age to write for! And third, I appreciate it remembering the kid reader I was and knowing how much this book would have captured my imagination and brought me back to read and reread. I know this book is going to be that fondly remembered childhood book for many readers, and will be that book that really switches on a love of reading for a lot of kids, especially some boys who have just not found a book to grab them yet.

And if this doesn't get made into a movie I will be really, really surprised.

GIVE UP THE GHOST release day!

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:32:26 GMT

Happy, happy, happy book birthday to megancrewe! Today is the release day for her debut GIVE UP THE GHOST.

MARCELO IN THE REAL WORLD by Francisco X. Stork

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 19:41:46 GMT

This is how it feels to have just finished reading a book which is now one of my all-time favorites.

I am going to bask in this feeling for a moment.

Sometimes when I read really good books I despair of ever being able to write anything even half as moving, touching and true. But MARCELO just makes me want to aspire to greatness, to plumb more challenging emotional depths, to breathe life into characters who feel even more real, to try even harder to get the music in my head to match what comes out on paper, as Marcelo might put it.

If you have this on your to-read list, I recommend moving it up. And if it's not on your to-read list, I recommend putting it there.

*basking*

Editor Appreciation Week

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 14:00:41 GMT

I watched a movie last night where just not much was HAPPENING, despite the title, if you catch my drift. Even Rifftrax couldn't save it!

So here is my editor appreciation week post:

THANK YOU editors who save us from ourselves and help us turn our good stories into great stories. Lack of collaboration and unwillingness to "compromise artistic vision" is sometimes painfully obvious and stories almost always suffer for it.

Teen Creative Writing session 1

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 13:23:11 GMT

Last night was my first Writing the Novel session. It went so well! I had 25 teens attend. They asked great questions and seemed excited about session 2, wahoo!

The boy standing had brought a zombie screenplay he wrote at a screenplay writing camp he attended (how awesome is that?) They had fun reading scenes aloud together after the workshop.

The zombie screenplay guy demonstrating the "serpentine run" tactic useful for evading zombies.

SAY THE WORD by Jeannine Garsee

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:12:25 GMT

I am always either early or really late to the party when it comes to reviewing books. If I get an ARC I can review it early. But if I'm greedily pawing through new crates of library books, it means I've had to wait a couple of months for our books to get bought, labeled, barcoded and sent to us to go on the shelves.

I just got done reading SAY THE WORD by onegrapeshy. I am never much of one for liking too much book summary before I read a book so I tend not to give them too much myself. But summaries can easily be found if you like 'em. :)

Why I loved it:

I love it when books have a very specific and complex plot/characters which reveals a universal human truth. All the characters in this book continually surprise you with their depth. No one is 100% good. No one is 100% bad. The main character Shawna's growth over the course of the book is frustrating, rewarding and heartbreaking all at the same time.

Not only is this a great and enjoyable story all on its own, I also feel like it could be extremely helpful for teens who are in similarly complex and confusing situations. I love it when a book provides some insight into how to deal with problems while never ever ever even remotely skating into didactic territory. And this can be a very difficult feat to achieve.

And I love it when I know characters will stay with me. Some books I read and enjoy or even enjoy immensely, but later I will not recall a whole lot about the story or characters. But I know Shawna, Arye, Schmule and Fran are going to stay with me, and I will think of them from time to time because they all really made an impression on me.

I <3 my agent!

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:49:31 GMT

My agent is going to do a 10-page critique for the winner of my Teen Creative Writing Group contest! She is made of awesome!

I'm doing a 4-session series on Writing the Novel starting this Thursday and continuing through December. It is going to be so fun! And my teens are going to be so excited to hear about the critique! I can't wait for Thursday!

Here's the blurb on our website. (And our webmaster put in the Meyer/Westerfeld tagline, not me, ha!)

Marcelo in the Real World

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:31:08 GMT

I try to read a lot of chapter ones when I work in the teen room to get an idea of the new books we get so I can tailor my recommendations and get a sense of our collection.

Right as I am getting my to-read pile down to a nice manageable size it has once again shot up like a beanstalk. Just now I read chapter 1 of MARCELO IN THE REAL WORLD by Francisco X. Stork and I had to check it out. Also dangerous having my library card on the back of my staff ID so it is readily accessible all the time . . . and the self-check machine makes it so fast and simple . . . the library is a dangerous place for book addicts. ;)

BLINDSIDED playlist

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:10:24 GMT

Here is the playlist for my WIP, tentatively titled BLINDSIDED.

BLINDSIDED is a companion to SOMETHING TO BELIEVE. It's a story about Finn's girlfriend Rachel. I first started thinking of writing Rachel's story late last year and really became inspired this past February after my teen book discussion group did THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO LARRY. I was surprised by how unanimously my teens hated Beth! I realized that if the story were told from Beth's point of view instead of Josh's, he could come across as the jerk and she would be the hero. I think it's really easy to hate Rachel based on how Julie perceives her in SOMETHING TO BELIEVE. So I wanted to give her a chance to tell her own story.

Not safe for work, and not safe for the ears of little ones. Earbuds activate!

Unavailable on playlist.com: "No Name No. 5" by Elliott Smith

What I'm reading

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 19:34:19 GMT

Finished reading THE DEMON'S LEXICON by sarahtales

*sigh* of happiness

Everything good you've heard about it is true! Go read it now!

Started reading SAY THE WORD by onegrapeshy

*sigh* of happiness--love the characters, love the setup, can't wait to see the changes Shawna goes through over the course of the story

Good books make my world go 'round!

Harry Potter

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 17:58:26 GMT

*sigh*

As much as I have enjoyed the Harry Potter books as an adult, and as much as I enjoy watching my kids and teens enjoy them . . .

Part of me wishes I had been a kid when they first came out so I could have read them as a child and teen.

I'm rereading my way through them, almost done with #5 now.

Makes a boring 4 days of having a cold and being homebound much more bearable when I can spend them with Harry, Ron, Hermione and everyone else at Hogwarts . . .

On the process

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:37:05 GMT

I wrote this a long time ago and never posted it, but authortarakelly's recent post gave me courage. My own observations and thoughts on the process. Take them with a grain of salt of course. Like Tara I do not claim to be wise and all-knowing; but even if I had the publishing prowess of Jane Yolen I would still not consider myself to be wise and all-knowing. ;) Hope this will be useful to somebody.

Don't write for publication. Don't write what you think will sell, what your "dream agent" or "dream editor" is looking for right now, or what you wish you could write because you enjoy reading it so much. (This last one was a stumbling block for me for awhile.) Write the book you want to write simply because it's a story you feel compelled to tell, for whatever reason. It is your job as a writer to write. And I firmly believe that the truer you stay to yourself, the better your story will be. It is up to your critique group and your agent and/or editor to take the good story you wrote and tell you how to make it better and more marketable.

Make sure your manuscript and query letter are ready. Don't send out a first draft. Don't send out a ms or query letter that hasn't been critiqued by someone. (If you don't know any fellow writers in real life, join a local critique group or find someone on a message board who's willing to do a critique exchange.) Don't obsess too much over your query letter but make sure it doesn't commit any cardinal sins (aka if it includes the line "my mom loved it," you're in trouble).

Think about your writing style and genre. After doing a lot of research on agents and what they were looking for I was able to describe what I liked to write in publisher-ese. This makes it a lot easier when you are looking at sites like agentquery.com; if you write paranormal YA you are probably not the best match for someone looking for fiction that walks the line between literary and commercial. You can find answers to questions on message boards like "What does high concept mean?" or "What is urban fantasy, exactly?" or "What constitutes literary fiction?"

Great post along these lines from Nathan Bransford. It's hard to concisely nail down what you're writing but if you work on it, it makes your query letter so much stronger.

Give. Critique others' work. Be encouraging to others. Be a listening ear. Writing can be a difficult, lonely, sometimes scary process--you're taking stories you made up in your head and asking others to believe in them so much that they're willing to put money behind them. Think of the person you go to when you are feeling worried or down and try to be that person to other writers. I am perpetually amazed and delighted by how instantly supportive, kind and wonderful almost everybody is in the world of children's writers. You have an awesome community to be part of. Plug in to it.

Don't let yourself be capsized, however. Be wary of emotional vampires and those who want to totally monopolize your time. I always find it frustrating when I hear the same chapter with very, very minor changes after the group has given it a thorough critique. Or when I recommend a book to read and months later the person is still asking me for the title because they keep MEANING to read it. To me, if you're serious about this business, you should be jonesing for a good critique and eager to improve your manuscript to get it ready for publication. Be helpful--but don't let yourself get spread too thin, and don't let your writing life be taken over by those who just want approval without taking critiques seriously.

Look at all agents at a house before you query one. If a rejection from one agent is considered a rejection from everyone at that agency, you may have shot yourself in the foot by targeting your manuscript at someone at that house who wasn't a perfect fit for you. When you start researching a new agent, get in the habit of automatically researching everyone else who represents your genre at the agency so you don't miss a good opportunity.

Get a subscription to Publisher's Marketplace. Explore it thoroughly so you get your money's worth ($20 a month). When you land an agent, you can cancel the subscription.

Read the messsage boards at Verla Kay's website and the Absolute Write Water Cooler. But be discreet in your own postings. Agents and editors do read forums, and Google finds everything.

Remember the simple truths. An agent is not rejecting you; she is rejecting the particular manuscript you're submitting at that time. A rejection doesn't mean you are a bad writer or that your book is bad; it means that it isn't something the agent can personally get behind 100%. You want an agent who loves your ms as much as you do, because selling your book is going to require passion and dedication on their part.

Because I think this is important, I am going to digress a little bit. I think it's easy to equate a rejection with "they don't like my book." Now if you are sending many carefully targeted queries and you don't get a single nibble, there may be some work yet to be done on your ms, or on your query. But if you are getting requests for fulls or partials and are getting rejections that say "This just isn't for me, best wishes" . . . the agent is probably telling the truth.

When I update my goodreads account I am very specific about giving out four-star or five-star reviews. In essence, a four-star review is exactly the same as a five-star review as far as quality goes. But a five-star book is one I personally connected with, and a four-star is not. Walter Dean Myers' MONSTER is hands-down a masterpiece. I love that book. It made me cry angry bitter tears both times I read it. It is a four-star book to me. On the other hand, HOT LUNCH by Alex Bradley is a five-star book for me. It's humor, it's a lot lighter in tone, the subject matter is a lot less serious. My ratings may seem skewed to you but the important difference is, I felt a strong personal connection with Bradley's book that I didn't feel with Myers'. If I were an agent I would have regretfully passed on MONSTER and likely offered representation for HOT LUNCH. It's highly subjective. Which means out there, there is somebody who is just right for your book. It may just take a bit for you to find them.

Don't stop querying. I got requests for partials or fulls within hours of submitting my queries, or after a month had passed. I got rejections on requested partials or fulls within a few weeks or a few months. It's a waiting game. Keep researching and keep querying agents who appeal to you. Just be sure to note "This is a simultaneous submission" in your query and if someone asks for an exclusive look at your ms, make sure to be above-board and tell them you cannot grant this (if other agents are looking at your full/partial). If they request an exclusive and no one else currently has a requested full/partial, I highly recommend reading this article by the perpetually awesome cynthea.

Research widely; query narrowly. I know some people believe in querying widely but I disagree. I personally think it's a bit unprofessional to query somebody, have them request a full, have them ask to sign you . . . then you do a bit more research and you realize they really aren't for you. Of course, there are exceptions. Some agents have a very low profile online and you may have to wait until you get "The Call" to be able to ask them questions about their sales and clients, their philosophy, their expectations, etc. But in general you can learn a lot about an agent on message boards, blogs, amazon.com, PM, etc.

Also note: by querying widely I mean just blind querying everybody who represents YA or MG or whatever you're writing, without researching them further. It doesn't have to do with the number of agents you've queried, but with how well you've researched them before querying.

Keep VERY good records. I used spreadsheets in Google Docs, personally, because they were portable. This helps you keep track of everything so you know when and where you sent stuff. Also can prevent embarrassing mistakes like querying two agents at the same house at the same time. At some agencies a rejection from one is a rejection from all; at others it's okay to query more than one as long as you wait for a rejection before going down the line. Usually it's pretty easy to find this information on the agency's website.

Remember that a lot goes on behind the scenes. It's easy to get caught up in the idea of a "dream agent." If your dream agent seems to be a good fit for you, query him by all means. If he rejects you, don't let it squash you. It's really easy to get an agent crush on high-profile agents who have blogs, or somebody you met at a conference, or your friend's agent who just seems like the bee's knees based on how she talks about her. That doesn't mean lower profile agents aren't dream-agent material; it just means you might not know how dreamy they are until you get to know them. KEEP QUERYING. DON'T GIVE UP.

Find an outlet for the crazy. Tara recommends a punching bag--great idea; I recommend a blog that is not connected with your name at all, or non-writerly friends who are good at keeping secrets and who are willing to listen to you rant about things they do not understand. You gotta let it out somewhere or something's going to give. Find a safe outlet for all the worries and fears that naturally come along so you can keep it professional in your public blog, message board postings, tweets, facebook status updates, etc.

LIAR

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:37:00 GMT

Yesterday I hit ARC jackpot--I got LIAR by Justine Larbalestier *and* LEVIATHAN by Scott Westerfeld. Both feature the previous versions of their covers.

I started reading LIAR yesterday and finished it today. It is a compulsive read, and so different and unique. I really don't want to say too much about it because to compare it to other books (If you liked X you'll love LIAR!) would be saying too much about it. I hope everyone is good about keeping the secret about this book, because it's rewarding and fascinating to only know the premise--the mc is a compulsive liar--when you first go in to it.

Probably the most surprising thing about it is that it feels so much like a mystery. And having an unreliable narrator who is brazenly honest about her unreliability just makes the mystery that much more fascinating.

After reading it with the old cover I literally cannot imagine giving this version to my teen patrons with a straight face. The idea of the cover being yet another play on the concept of Micah being a liar, taking it so far as to lie about her race--totally changes the game, and totally adds an extra dimension that does not belong or fit the story whatsoever. If I gave this book to my black patrons with this cover on it I think I would feel downright embarrassed, imagining their reactions when they started reading about Micah and flipping to look at the white girl on the cover.

Rock the Night Away

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 19:53:02 GMT

Here are the pictures from last Friday's end-of-summer teen program, Rock the Night Away:

Pics

We had so much fun! I can't believe I get paid to do stuff like this. :)

Paper Towns and Futakoi Alternative

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:41:15 GMT

I wrote this entry on my private lj in November 2008, shortly after I read John Green's PAPER TOWNS and coincidentally watched the anime FUTAKOI ALTERNATIVE around the same time. Major spoilers for both. I originally wrote this for my friends who hadn't read the book so there is quite a bit of plot summary for making points.

The book Paper Towns and the anime Futakoi Alternative are very different stories. But they share some common themes. And because I experienced them around the same time, they are now linked together in my head.

Paper Towns is about Quentin Jacobsen, a senior in high school. He has lived next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman since he was two. When they were young, they used to be very close. They experienced something very traumatic together at a young age--they discovered the body of a man who had killed himself. Ten-year-old Margo's assessment of the situation: "Maybe all the strings inside him broke."

Fast-forward to senior year. Quentin (or Q, as his friends call him) and Margo have drifted apart over the years, but he has been in love with her his whole life even though they are no longer close. Margo is the most popular girl in school, but not in a superficial way. She's the girl who goes on adventures, the girl who inspires a whole host of what has to be wild rumors--until they turn out to be true. The girl who keeps running away from home to have crazy adventures, running away with the circus, getting backstage after a concert and then turning down the bassist when he wants to hook up with her.

One night Margo unexpectedly shows up at Q's window and tells him she needs his help. What follows is one of the craziest nights of his life, as he helps Margo execute her eleven-step plan. She has discovered that her boyfriend is cheating on her with her best friend. The plan begins with various revenges on her boyfriend, her friend and other people she thinks were involved in keeping this a secret from her. Once the revenge is taken care of, it's time for a trip to the top of the SunTrust Bank building so the two of them can look down on the town of Orlando, FL, where they live. There Margo tells Q that Orlando is a paper town full of fake people. "I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters," she says. After that, they break into Sea World, get caught, and go home.

Back to normal life . . . except Margo doesn't show up at school. It's not unusual for her to go missing. She has run away from home several times in her life. She always leaves clues, but they are usually so obscure that they only make sense once she has been found or decides to return on her own. This time she leaves clues for Q. With the help of his two best friends, Radar and Ben, and Margo's friend, Lacey, he begins unraveling the clues.

They find a lot of stuff along the way, including an abandoned strip mall where, evidently, Margo spent a lot of time. Q cannot believe that elegant Margo ever enjoyed sleeping in an abandoned, dank strip mall, but the evidence is there. He starts to wonder what else he didn't know about Margo. And he starts to fear that when he unravels all the clues, he will discover that she wanted him to find not her but her dead body.

The clues become much more difficult but Q continues to work on them doggedly. The day before graduation he has a breakthrough and finds, of all things, a comment left on the discussion page of a Wikipedia entry about a made-up place called Agloe, New York. Next comes the best road trip ever depicted in literature that I have found thus far, as Q, Radar, Ben and Lacey skip graduation to make the twenty-one hour trip to New York to find Margo before she disappears again.

They do it. They make it. They find Margo. Only to discover that she did not want to be found at all. She left the clues for Q to find the strip mall, which used to be one of her favorite places. She thought it would be good for him to spend some time there too, to reconsider his own life. There were no further clues beyond those which led them to the strip mall. Everything else was a result of Q reading between Margo's lines and examining evidence that wasn't even evidence.

Margo tells him she wrote a story about the two of them when they were ten years old, where he was a "superhot, superloyal defender of justice." They discovered that the man they found had not in fact committed suicide--he had been murdered. And together they solved the mystery of who had done it. As she got older she spent more and more time hatching elaborate plans. She discovered that the fun came in creating the plans. That often executing them proved to be a letdown. That the imagined thing was always better than the reality which ensued. She had created her final plan to be executed on graduation night, but when she discovered her boyfriend was cheating on her, she decided to say "screw you" to her paper town a little early. She added the revenge stuff at the last minute.

Where will things go now? Q wants to bring Margo home. Margo refuses to ever go back there. Q cannot imagine a future without his town, without the life of "college, and jobs, and maybe even babies one day." But Margo wants to leave the paper girl she was behind in the imaginary town she found and head for New York City to see what adventures she can find there.

"Aren't you worried about, like, forever?" he asks her.

"Forever is composed of nows," she says, quoting Emily Dickinson.

Together they bury her black notebook full of scribbled plans. What will happen now? She will go to NYC and he will go back to Orlando, his life full of plans for the future. They make promises to write and call. But will they really? "It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them."

"Here is this girl I love and cannot follow," Q realizes. "I hope this is the hero's errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I've ever done."

--

I may not be able to summarize Futakoi Alternative as well because I started watching it more than a month ago and I don't have a handy-dandy book beside me for reference. I'm going to go more for sensations than facts here.

Futakoi Alternative is about a lot of things, but at its center is the story of a young detective and the twin girls who are his assistants. There is a lot more to the story, including squid-human hybrids which shoot fire from their mouths.

Rentarou and his assistants Sara and Soujyu live together in the detective agency, acting as a sort of family. But as the girls approach the age of sixteen, things begin to take a turn. To Rentarou's surprise, they begin speaking of a physical relationship. With both of them. To describe it this way makes it sound like the setup for a porno, but it's the opposite of that. Rentarou is alarmed and confused and cannot bring himself to take this step. He never clearly spells out his reasons but I assume it's because of the girls' age, and because of the taboos which would be broken by entering into this kind of relationship. Society as a whole would not accept three people living together as a unit in all senses of the world. To fantasize about being with two women, being with twin sisters, is kinky and fetishistic. It is not part of your average family unit in other words.

Rentarou cannot do it.

To make matters more interesting, Sara and Soujyu have a habit of disappearing and wanting Rentarou to find them. And Rentarou keeps . . . not attempting to find them. Thinking they'd be better off without him, perhaps.

Finally Sara disappears, off to fulfill a bizarre clause in a will which determined that one of the twins must marry a certain man by the time they are sixteen. Over time we discover that this is part of some larger corporate merger, a grand conspiracy which involves, yes, giant fire-shooting squid. The physical act of these two getting married and sliding special rings on each others' fingers is the catalyst needed for some grand squid showdown. And yes, again, describing it this way is trivializing it to a terrible extent, it's really lovely and amazing and cannot be conveyed by words.

Perhaps we need to unite against a common enemy sometimes. Perhaps we need a larger strife to make us be able to see the details of our own lives. But whatever it is, Rentarou realizes, while battling the squid, that what he has with Sara and Soujyu is precious. And that it's real. And it's worth fighting for. There is another recurring theme of the three characters and all their neighbors loving their town, rebuilding it after it is destroyed, and refusing to budge when corporations want to buy them out and tear down their stores and dwellings. Sort of the opposite of a paper town. In the end the townspeople tell the three that they accept them as three, that even though their relationship is bizarre and unorthodox, they still approve.

What is important to Rentarou, Sara and Soujyu is the everyday details of their lives. A recurring shot shows their three coffee mugs sitting companionably together on the counter. They just want to run their detective agency together, cook and eat together. They just want to be together and live their very unconventional life in a conventional way.

In the end it takes as much courage to battle the giant squid as it does for Rentarou to be brave enough to pursue this life. (Sara and Soujyu have been this brave all along.) And though Rentarou is often compared to his father, the original detective, in the end he is braver and better than his father in some ways because he was willing to acknowledge what was most important in his life--true love--something his father failed at.

--

Quentin and Rentarou are very different. Quentin has the desire and the drive to find Margo. Not looking for Margo is not an option. But when he finds her, he discovers that he was more in love with the idea of Margo than with Margo herself. That the journey of looking for her and understanding her not as an ideal but as a person was more worthwhile than actually finding her. And in the end, he chooses to go back to his life rather than trying to start a new one with her.

Rentarou is afraid of what he wants. What he has with Sara and Soujyu is the real thing. But to acknowledge it is terrifying to him. It is so terrifying that he is tempted not to look for them when they purposely get lost and ask him to come find them. In the end it takes great courage for him to do something as simple as building a life together with the two girls he loves. It takes as much courage to rescue Sara from the giant squid as it takes to stand in front of his neighbors and propose their plan to live together as a unit, the three of them.

John Green has told the story as it happens to many of us. We discover the feet of clay of those who we idealized. We become okay with this. One of the characters in the book talks about this--acknowledging your friends for who they are and allowing them to be that, not expecting them to be like you. But ultimately the lesson in this book seems to be that yes, the planning will always be more exciting than the execution. I think Paper Towns is ultimately about aloneness. Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is a major theme in this book--the metaphor that we are all interconnected like roots, each individual blades of grass but still part of one larger thing. That trying to understand each other is incredibly important, but that we cannot truly be each other. That at the end of the day, we have to acknowledge who and what we are and we cannot live our lives for other people. We cannot chase the ideal if it's not an ideal we believe in. If Margo Roth Spiegelman wants to spend the rest of her life having adventures and Quentin Jacobsen just wants to go to college, get a good job and get married someday, both of these things are valid. And they cannot work together. Part of me wants to say BULLSHIT. But the other part of me agrees. Margo should not give up her adventurous ways to become Quentin's partner in domesticity. And Quentin should not give up his dreams to become a vagabond with Margo.

Futakoi Alternative takes the opposite tack. Sometimes people are as we idealize them to be. And this ideal version of them can fit in with the everyday details of life. These people and these shared feelings can shine with equal brilliance while battling giant squids or while cooking dinner. People can both have feet of clay and be "somehow more than the rest of us," as Q would put it. And if we find this in other people, no matter what, we should hold on to that, hold on to them. Even if it seems weird. Even if megalomaniac corporations are trying to make things go the other way. That's real, and that's treasure. It's what makes life worthwhile.

Just Listen

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:16:11 GMT

I know I'm late to the party. I haven't read a whole lot of Sarah Dessen because she doesn't need my help. Her books fly off the shelves at my library and never require on-the-spot booktalking. I usually try to focus on debuts, books with ugly covers that need a little help, etc. when I'm reading YA, so I can do better reader's advisory for my patrons.

But as summer winds down I gave myself a little break and read JUST LISTEN.

I really loved the shape of this book. This is how I visualize music and stories--the shape of them. I loved the story of the three sisters, the metaphor of light and darkness that is frequently present but never hammered in, the love story. I love the way all these threads come together. I loved how involved I felt with Annabel, how much I wanted to shake her and say JUST SAY WHAT YOU MEAN while at the same time knowing how many times I, especially as a teen, kept things inside so as not to make waves.

I love stories that are both universal and very, very specific at the same time.

What a great read. Once the frenzy over ALONG FOR THE RIDE dies down a little and there are actually copies on the shelves I will allow myself another holiday and read that one too.

Following non-lj blogs on lj

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:56:49 GMT

If you would like to read some non-lj blogs on lj rather than adding one more link to your professional must-read list, here are some you may be interested in. I either found other feeds people created or created them myself. Just add these usernames as friends and their blog posts will show up on your friendslist.

10blockwalkljf: editor Molly O'Neill
acuriosityshop: editor Martha Mihalick
blog_pub_rants: agent Kristin Nelson
bookpublicity: The Book Publicity Blog
bowenpress: agent Brenda Bowen
cherylklein: editor Cheryl Klein
crowes_nest: collaborative blog of agent Sara Crowe's clients
edit_anon: Editorial Anonymous
internspills: The [anonymous] Intern's blog
nathanagent: agent Nathan Bransford
pmn_eric: Pimp My Novel (what happens after the sale)
upstartcrowlit: the new Upstart Crow literary agency's blog (I just added this one so it may take a bit to start working properly)

What are some of your favorites?

Pshew.

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:19:29 GMT

Summer is DONE.

My last big teen program was on Friday night. More pictures later but for now, here's one:

A bunch of my co-workers and friends helped me put on "Rock the Night Away." It was the last big program mimi_campbell and I planned together--she is at a different branch now. It was so fun. We started at 1 p.m. and put teens into different bands. They spent the afternoon creating costumes and posters and picking the songs they wanted to do, and then when the library closed at 6 p.m. we put on a Rock Band 2 concert where they performed and were judged based on the creativity of their performance. I think their favorite part was when the concert was over and we just let them goof off and play with the lights turned off and a strobe light going. Now there's a bit of a breather until school starts back up later this month and once more we are inundated with 70 unattended 4th and 5th graders who walk over to the library from the nearby elementary school and wait for their parents to pick them up . . . *groan*

Also, we gave away books as prizes and daniellejoseph's "Shrinking Violet" and jemacleod's "Waiting to Score" got snatched up right away. :)

Tips on choosing a title

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:04:06 GMT

Believe me, if I had a magical formula for choosing the perfect title I would be selling that puppy for good money. I am weak on titles usually and never any help when my friends ask for input, unfortunately.

But after attending a meeting where my library system's IT department talked a bit about doing better searches using our library catalog, I knew I had to write this post about what not to title your book.

Any librarian or bookstore clerk worth his or her salt would know these issues or work around them. But you know how life is. Somebody is new, or gets bad training, or forgets, or whatever, and there is a mishap and they say "Sorry, nope, can't find that book."

If you have boolean operators in your title, there is a good chance it might be difficult for librarians or bookstore clerks to find it to order for customers. (Their in-store interfaces may ignore boolean operators but their vendors' interfaces that they use to order stock for their stores may use them.)

Amazon.com is not subject to boolean operator problems. (This also makes it harder to construct really detailed searches on amazon like you can in a library catalog too, unfortunately--but it totally makes sense why amazon just skips the boolean thing and makes for many fewer mishaps like this.) If you want to try out some of these examples go to your library's catalog.

Boolean operators are words that computerized search systems treat as part of the search function. These words are AND, OR, NOT, SAME, WITH and NEAR. If you start or end your title with any of these words and a librarian does a sloppy search for these titles, they may not get the right results.

For example, if I do a search for the title THIS AND THAT it looks for anything with both those words in the title. This one isn't too tricky--it will pull up your title in the results so no problemo.

If I search for the title THIS OR THAT it comes up with any title that has either the word THIS or the word THAT in it. Lots of results, and maybe easy to miss your title in all of it especially if the reader can't remember your name.

For the title NOT MEANT TO BE it looks for anything that does not contain the words MEANT, TO and BE in it. So it basically can find anything except your title.

And searching for titles beginning or ending with AND, OR, NOT, SAME, WITH or NEAR just creates an error message. Having SAME, WITH or NEAR inside your title does not create problems, but it can pull up lots of extra results. For example GETTING NEAR TO BABY pulls up 11 titles in my catalog because it's looking for proximity of the words GETTING, TO and BABY in the title.

To work around this we can use quotes to tell the computer we are looking for those words as part of the title and not using them as a search construct. But like I said if you have someone who doesn't know exactly what they're doing, they may not be able to find your book.

Just a note from your friendly neighborhood librarian. :)

Symbolic core

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:51:12 GMT

cynthialord recently posted a link to Sue Monk Kidd's Ten Most Helpful Things I Could Ever Tell Anyone About Writing. The whole article is great but the last one got me. She suggests that you must find the symbolic core of your book, or let it find you. I realized that I have a lot of images in my head when it comes to my book: candlelight, trees, the beach at night, driving on I-95 with the windows rolled down. But as far as a symbolic core, I didn't know.

As I thought hard about my book, it came to me in a flash. The Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale is one of the minor but important settings in my book. While I was researching the book I gathered a group of friends and we went down there one day. As we explored the museum I also mentally took notes of how the museum and downtown made me feel, and wondered how it would make Julie, Finn, Elijah and Seth feel, too.

The art was really peripheral to my visit. Of course I looked at everything with great interest but I wasn't searching for meaning in the art itself. There was an exhibit featuring Cuban artists while I was there and one pen and ink drawing just stopped me in my tracks. It featured angels hanging from trees by nooses. And up and down the sides of the trees were stairs. I couldn't stop looking at this piece. It grabbed me and wouldn't let me go and a year later I still think about it.

This is the symbolic core of my book. "Jacob's Ladder" by Carlos Maciá. (Unfortunately I can't find an image online to share.)

I also found out that a one-of-a-kind book created by him, NOVUS ATLAS COELESTIS, lives in a special collection at my undergraduate university, Florida Atlantic University. And I found out that tomorrow I have permission to go visit it. I am really looking forward to spending some time with this book and hopefully finding other images I will connect with.

Wintergirls

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 09:57:33 GMT

I know I'm late to the game with this one. If I don't get an ARC or promo copy of a book I usually am because I hate taking a book out of circulation when it's new. I try to let my teens have first crack at it. We have so many halseanderson fans at my library (SPEAK is rarely able to be found on the shelves) so it took a couple of months before I could grab Wintergirls without having to put it on hold.

I can't say anything about this book that hasn't already been said. So all I'll say is that it's so real. The issues of this book were never my issues but I had my own problems in high school and college, and this book brought me right back. A perfect encapsulation of that hopeless feeling of knowing you're your own worst enemy but not being able to escape yourself.

--

Also, last night was my third annual children's poetry recital and it was a great success. All the kids memorized their poems beautifully. They recited one poem from a book and one they wrote themselves--the poetry writing was new this year. I am big on imaginative play and no adult contribution and the results are always great when it comes to the props they make. (No adult contribution = no grown-up help allowed and no printing stuff off the internet.) The narrative poems they wrote were wonderful. We just did a general poetry exercise--think of a topic you want to write about it, use all five senses to brainstorm thoughts about it, use figurative language. The poems they came up with were so original and lovely and funny, topics on everything from the Jonas Brothers to the importance of adopting dogs from the animal shelter. The poetry recital is always one of my favorite programs to do. I was extra pleased last night because for the first time we ran out of chairs! We had 50 chairs and had to pull out about 6 more so all the family and friends who came to see the kids recite had a place to sit.

"Breathing" by Cheryl Renee Herbsman

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 09:53:06 GMT

Just finished this lovely debut last night. The voice of the main character reminded me so much of my good childhood friend Mandy. She is sassy and Southern and full of folksy sayings, including one Savannah uses: "colder than a witch's tit" (though Mandy adds "in a brass bra").

My other favorite elements: the sweet and unusual love story and the realistic relationship between Savannah and her mother.

More about the book at the author's website.