RTW: Best Book of November

Road Trip Wednesday is a weekly blog carnival hosted by YA Highway. This week's topic is: What was the best book you read in November?

This month, I read:

The Forest for the Trees*

Notes from an Accidental Band Geek

The Picture of Dorian Gray

How I Live Now

Crossed

The Scorpio Races

and I'm currently reading Cutting for Stone

*About that whole NaNoRevMo thing: yeah, plans changed--specifically, I am switching one revision for another. So December is my new NaNoRevMo. Maybe January too. 

They were all great books, but How I Live Now is the one I keep talking about and forcing other people to read. Daisy's voice is so authentic, the setting is so scarily realistic, the love story so slightly twisted and passionate--no wonder it won the 2005 Printz. 

Have you read it? And what was the best book you read in November?

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Fall Book Club: The Scorpio Races

Many thanks to Tracey Neithercott for organizing this! 

It's time to discuss the Fall Book Club's third read! Go here for Tracey's post and the blog hop. And here for my post on our first read, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, or here for the second pick, Daughter of Smoke and Bone. This month, we read The Scorpio Races.

From Goodreads:

It happens at the start of every November: the Scorpio Races. Riders attempt to keep hold of their water horses long enough to make it to the finish line. Some riders live. Others die. 
At age nineteen, Sean Kendrick is the returning champion. He is a young man of few words, and if he has any fears, he keeps them buried deep, where no one else can see them.
Puck Connolly is different. She never meant to ride in the Scorpio Races. But fate hasn’t given her much of a chance. So she enters the competition — the first girl ever to do so. She is in no way prepared for what is going to happen.

Confession: I got an ARC of this at BEA 2011 and had not read it until now. I realize a lot of Maggie Stiefvater fans probably want to beat me over the head with my copy now. Sorry! I wish there were more hours in the day for reading.

Anyway, thanks to the Fall Book Club, I finally read my copy. The November timing was perfect, actually, considering this is the (compelling) first line:
It is the first day of November and so, today, someone will die.

Chills. The wonderful descriptions of Thisby island were perfect reading for this first winterish (read: gloomy and chilled) month: I pictured a damp and gray, misty and salty place with lots of people wearing thick boots and fisherman sweaters. Perfect for curling up with tea. Also, the scary capaill uisce made me want to stay indoors, even if the only horses where I live are tired and docile from dragging hansom cabs around Central Park South.

To avoid plot spoilers, I'll just list some things I enjoyed about the book:

• Puck's determination and bravery: another heroine from the Katniss school of kickassery, with bonus points for being the groundbreaking first female racer.
• Again, the description. Maggie Stiefvater's prose was beautiful and I loved being transported to the island.
• Mythology: I love how Maggie Stiefvater took the myth of water horses and made it her own. The bloodthirsty capaill uisce she created were unique and fascinating.
• Brother-sister dynamics: The way the Connolly kids interacted felt so real, particularly Puck's struggle to understand Gabe. I loved how Puck and Finn took care of each other.
• Chapter 37: Great suspense with a capall uisce had me biting off all my nails.
• Horse-rider relationships: I have zero experience with horses (and to be honest, fairly little interest in them), but I still found the way the riders and their horses interacted fascinating.

What were your thoughts on The Scorpio Races? 

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Danke Schön

Confession: I came to blogging (and twittering) . . . not exactly under duress, but I wasn't wild about the prospect of writing + social media, either. I wrote my first book in a total vacuum, which was a wonderful experience. Only during my foray into querying did I figure out what a robust online community exists for YA and MG writers. I felt like I had to join the party, so I did even though I'm a fairly shy person at the computer and away from it. I thought my blogging/tweeting would be a distraction. What did I really care about talking to other YA reader/writers online? I thought, it's not like I *know* those people.

Imagine my surprise that about 1.5 years later I'm writing a mildly quite sappy post about how much all of the friendships I have made through blogging and Twitter mean to me. Because they seriously do. In conversation last week I mentioned "a friend who lives in ______," and when the person I was talking to asked whether said friend and I had met in college, I replied, "No, online." The person I was talking to acted like, online friends aren't real friends, but I beg to differ. They are. It's an amazing thing how technology and social media allows us to forge bonds with people all over the world, people whose backgrounds and current lifestyles and age and religions and political opinions etc. might not have allowed us to meet IRL. Or, how that technology has allowed is to connect with incredibly similar people that serendipity hadn't allowed us to find in person.

The friendships I've cultivated through blogging/tweeting aren't solely based around writing, but it's what initiated most. Writing can be difficult, euphoric, soul-crushing, hilarious, boring, aggravating, illuminating, joyful. Because it is mostly solitary, it's not always easy to share the highs and lows with others. There have been days when reading a post from one of you saved me from recycle-binning my WIP or pushed me to open the document and seek solace in revisions, instead of a tub of ice cream. (THANK YOU) Your blogs (and your comments here and elsewhere) are endlessly entertaining, wise and enriching, and often moving. So thanks: for putting your words out there in the blogosphere for me to read, and for stopping by here to read my ramblings. You're great friends and I am thankful to have you.

Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving, all! (And to those not in the US, have a wonderful weekend and start of the holiday season!)

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Off-Topic Tuesday: Worth it

I spent the past five days on lots of these:

American terminal at JFK, last Thursday night. 

Which [planes] you all probably have figured out by now that I hate. The planes, trains, and automobiles (my travels involved all of them!) were worth it though, for this:

My sister's hitched!

What have you been up to the past week? And happy trails for your Thanksgiving travels! I'll be staying put and catching up on writing, revising, and blog-reading.

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Weird Author Hobbies

I know how to cast silver jewelry, work a centrifuge, and solder stained glass.
I collect voodoo dolls, but I don't assign them to specific people.
I am a doughnut connoisseur.
I yodel.
I love making pies from scratch using my grandma's secret recipe.
I meditate.
I (try to) run twelve miles every weekend.
I write to customer-service email addresses* in a character's voice. *but about legitimate issues, such as the discontinuation of a granola flavor


[Some of those are my hobbies. And some are lies.]

I'll admit that the pie thing is true. I share almost nothing in common with Emily Dickinson (I love poetry but I am a truly awful poet) except Emily was an avid baker, too. It was her weird author hobby.

Would you believe that Flannery O'Connor raised peacocks? Ayn Rand collected stamps? Read the Flavorwire article to find out more surprising author hobbies: Surprising Hobbies of Famous Authors

Writer-friends, when you are famous some day, about which of your hobbies will readers be surprised?

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RTW: Read this, also that!

Road Trip Wednesday is a weekly blog carnival hosted by YA Highway. This week's topic is: In high school, teens are made to read the classics - Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Bronte, Dickens - but there are a lot of books out there never taught in schools. So if you had the power to change school curriculum, which books would you be sure high school students were required to read?

I love the classics, so I'd keep those high-schoolers reading Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Bronte, Dickens--yes, even The Scarlet Letter and The Awakening. But I'd also add a few titles:

Eat food; not too much; mostly plants! 

Reason #1: I love this book. #2: It's about the effect
 of a (classic) book on a teen, which could spark
 discussions of how literature, even old stuff, is relevant today.
 The experience of being young is universal.

Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers PBS conversation about
 world mythology helps you understand current events,
reading, and even what you write in the context of ancient
 mythology. Fascinating and helpful; also endorsed by George Lucas.

Maus: Blending fiction, biography, and history,
it teaches the Holocaust. It also shows how serious graphic
 literature can be. It is the only comic to ever have won the Pulitzer.

This beautifully written memoir shows the lifelong
 impact of a high-schooler's car accident. It shows how
 nobody is invincible--even at 18. 

I'd teach this fantastic YA book by Sherman Alexie--and I'd
 also have teens watch Smoke Signals and read his short stories.

It's gorgeous. It's also important for how
 it explores loss from a teen's perspective.

What would you add to required reading lists?

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Recent Reading: The Crossed Picture of How I Live Now

In terms of reading, I average a book a week, maybe two. Weirdly enough, last week I read three. (Maybe I should thank the bus and subway for being so wonky on my morning commute; it gave me extra reading time.)

Sidenote: I love these collectible editions at B&N (Source)

First: The Picture of Dorian Gray, which had been on my TBR shelf for an embarrassingly long period of time (technically my Kobo shelf; yay for its preloaded 100 classic lit titles!). Last Sunday was the magical/random day in which I finally did read it. Is there a more quotable author than Oscar Wilde? Dorian Gray is the source of gems like this:

"To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable."

Seriously, though, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a meditation on youth, beauty, art, and morality wrapped up in a seriously creepy Gothic novel. I loved it.

Second: How I Live Now, winner of the 2005 Printz. 

That. Voice. 

That. Setting.

The combination of teenage protagonist Daisy's utterly realistic voice + the scarily believable war-torn world is haunting and gripping. How I Live Now has one of the most dramatic character arcs I've read in a while, and it's done incredibly well. This is a raw and beautiful book.

Third: Crossed. It's the second in the trilogy, so I wasn't expecting much resolution for Cassia, Ky, and Xander--but this was still a satisfying middle book. The wild and cavernous setting in Crossed is a strangely perfect match for Ally Condie's spare, poetic prose. Bonus: I love how poetry and certain poems are a theme carried from Matched into Crossed. Double bonus: The cover design for both books in the trilogy so far is fantastic.

What have you been reading lately?

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RTW: The Amazing Writer Girl!

Road Trip Wednesday is a weekly blog carnival hosted by YA Highway. This week's topic is: What's your writing/publishing superpower? What's your kryptonite?

Just imagine that Writer Girl's clenched fist holds a pen. (Make your own here!)

Look! Sitting at the desk! It's a hunched turtle! No, it's Writer Girl! 
I can leap tall stacks of books in a single bound! I can type faster than a speeding bullet! 

Okay, those aren't really my superpowers. I'm not inclined to label anything I do as a writer as superpower-like. Mostly, I feel like I work hard, and humanly so. There is nothing superhuman about the hours I spend at my desk, thinking and typing and reading and pondering and revising and editing and doubting and trying again and still writing.
But if I had to assign myself a superpower, I'd say it's query crafting. Call me crazy, but I loved writing the query letter for the MS for which I sought (and got) rep. It was my chance to extol the virtues of my MS! It was a chance to send my ideas out into the world! And I just really like writing letters! I had fun, actually, figuring out what I wanted to say about my book and how best to say it. Then my querying process was quick--I sent out a small batch, had a great response rate, and signed with my awesomesauce agent within 2 months from when I started writing my letter. 

I'm much more comfortable talking about my Kryptonite, which is self doubt. Maybe you think that calling self doubt my Kryptonite is like answering the dreaded interview question, "What's your greatest weakness?" with "I'm just too much of a perfectionist"--a cop out. Yet self doubt can be a hugely limiting thing. It's hard to do good, creative work if you aren't letting yourself take risks. It's hard to work through a shitty first draft if you can't trust yourself to build on it with time and effort. Self doubt is something I struggle with a lot, and while I've thankfully found plenty of work-arounds, I am still hoping to find that an antidote exists.

What about you, writer-friends: what's your superpower, and what's your Kryptonite?

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Revision Trick: Synopsize Me

I know, I know. Synopses are devilish. But hear me out on this one.
I always start revisions by reading through my WIP, fighting the urge to make line edits the whole time. (If I let myself start making edits, I would never get through the read. So if something is really important, I jot it down on my ongoing revisions list, which is usually the length of Ulysses by the time I start revising.) But this time, to help keep my hands busy while I read, I synopsized my WIP. The urge to line-edit disappeared.

I didn't mind writing the synopsis while doing my first read-through, mainly because I (apparently) forgot what happened in roughly 40% of my WIP. So I wasn't slogging through dialogue I had memorized and scenes seared into my brain--the story was fresh, and I found it interesting to summarize each chapter after I read it. There's a reason why teachers make kids summarize/retell as techniques for monitoring comprehension. It works. I remember all of my WIP after synopsizing it.

Summarizing/synopsizing helped me see the places in the WIP where eighty billion things happen at once (I'm looking at you, Chapter 14) and those where nothing happens for a really, really long time and it's boring. I can clearly see where the pacing needs work. My synopsis is also helping me figure out where I might place the scenes I want to add and where certain subplots disappear/appear. I'm the type of person who needs to be able to see the big picture a lot while revising. My synopsis will now be my map.

For each round of revision I start on this WIP, I'm going to start by updating my synopsis with a read-through. It'll both refresh my memory and show me which parts saw the most/least work. The best part? By the time I'm done with revisions once and for all*, I'll have a synopsis ready should I ever need it.

*"once and for all" = for now, because I am a compulsive reviser

Have you ever used a synopsis to help with the early rounds of revision, writer friends? What are your revision tricks? Spill!

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Manuscripts and Marathons

One Sunday morning every year I tumble out of bed, grab my cowbell, and skip down the streets to watch the NYC marathon at its 18-mile mark.

The wheelchair athletes are amazing. I have blisters from ringing
 that cowbell while they went past, but they deserve crazy fan attention.

This year, I started thinking about how writing a novel is like running a marathon. It's a distance that many people can't fathom completing. 26.2 miles? Seriously? 250 pages? For real? And it's hard to run that distance, no matter how much you prepare and how well-trained you are. Maybe it gets even harder the more experience you have--when you start holding yourself to higher standards, and always improving upon that personal best.

Mary Keitany, leading the professional women.
She ran the whole course in 2 hours and 23 minutes. WHOA.

Hard, but joyful. As much as you can see the effort and the strain on the faces of runners racing by, you can also see the joy. They love what they are doing. Why would they be working so incredibly hard if they didn't? And it always helps to have spectators and fans on the sidelines, cheering you on. Beta readers and CPs and Twitter/Blogging friends are the cowbell-ringers of the writing race. They are not essential to the process, but they sure help give you a boost when the road ahead looks long.

First Avenue from the bridge up to Spanish Harlem
 was lined with people ready to cheer.

Marathoners run not just because they like running, but because they love crossing that finish line and knowing what they've achieved. Novelists, too, don't just love writing but telling a full, rich, epic, novel-length story. Both activities might defy explanation to those who don't participate. But for those who do--it needs no explanation. Marathoner Martine Costello said, "It's a challenge that we take on, with just our hearts and the body God gave us." As a writer, I'd say the same--it's a challenge I take on with just my heart and my mind.

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Notes from an Accidental Band Geek

Last week I read Erin Dionne's fun MG novel, Notes from an Accidental Band Geek. From Goodreads:

Elsie Wyatt is a born French horn player, just like her father and her grandfather before her. In order to qualify for the prestigious summer music camp of her dreams, she must expand her musical horizons and join - gasp! - the marching band. There are no French horns in marching band (what the heck is a mellophone??), but there are some cute boys. And marching band is very different from orchestra: they march, they chant, they . . . cluck? Elsie is not so sure she'll survive, but the new friends she's making and the actual fun she's having will force her to question her dad's expectations and her own musical priorities.

Elsie is a great narrator: a little socially awkward and a bit sarcastic, but smart and funny and (most importantly) relatable. Her struggle to balance her horn practice and her budding friendships, as well as her typical tween parental conflicts, are presented in a fresh way. Non-musicians might not connect as deeply to this book as those who spend their free time with metronomes and treble clefs. But this story of a Beethoven-loving girl totally won me over; Erin Dionne had me hooked with the French horn on the cover.

Music was a huge part of my life in middle and high school. (And still today, although mostly as a listener.) I started playing the piano in early elementary school (and continued through high school), played French horn through middle school, and sang in choirs from middle school to college. Being a part of a choir or band as a young person is a unique experience--it's wonderful to share in the camaraderie and collective work. The friendships I formed with my fellow musicians are still a part of my life. It was so much fun to read about a girl happily discovering/embracing her band geekiness.

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NaNoRevMo time

The last couple of weeks I've been gearing up for my own personal super-unofficial NaNoRevMo, also known as intensive revising month. I wish I expected to be done revising at the end of 30 days--but I think the most I can achieve is one round of revisions done for the WIP currently known as Proto Draft. (It's going to take more than 1 round to evolve Proto. It's not even bipedal yet. Possibly more than 2 before I call it a first draft and want to show it to another human being.)

During the weeks I take "off" from writing in between drafting and revising, I like to read craft books. They inspire me to get back to work, remind me why I want to get back to work, and prepare me for the challenges ahead. Borrowing an Uncle Stevie metaphor--I'm doing inventory of my writer's toolbox, dusting it off and making sure it's not missing something essential, like a hammer or duct tape.

I read Betsy Lerner's The Forest for the Trees, and I loved it. One of the blurbs promises that she won't "Strunk you over the head" with style rules, and that's true. Forest is a writing book along the lines of Uncle Stevie's On Writing* in that it blends memoir with craft and industry advice. The first half is a taxonomy of writer types catalogued with exacting and accurate detail. The second half describes and advises on the various stages of the publishing process: writing, submitting, dealing with rejection, publishing. Reading The Forest for the Trees feels like sitting down for a leisurely coffee or tea with Betsy and listening to her stories of writing and editing and agenting, getting an inside scoop from a "friend in the business." Everyone who is a writer--or knows and cares for a writer--should read it.

Are any of you NaNoing this November? NaNoRevMoing?

*I could reread that book 1,000 times. Invaluable. And funny.

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The Souls of eBooks

I have decided that this is proof that books do have souls:

Q. When an e-reader is loaded with thousands of books, does it gain any weight?
A. “In principle, the answer is yes,” said John D. Kubiatowicz, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Read more here: The Weight of Memory (NY Times)

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