Rebecca Behrens: December 2011

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

YA Superlatives Blogfest: Popularity Contest

Today is the Popularity Contest:
Choose characters who fit each topic from ANY YA book!
Class Clown: Tiny Cooper from Will Grayson, Will Grayson. A clown with so much wonderful heart.
Most Likely to Become a Rock Star: Adam from If I Stay/Where She Went. SEMI-SPOILER ALERT: Because he actually did.
Mostly Likely to Start a Riot: Bianca from The DUFF. She's feisty and active and takes control of her life. (This reminds me that I need to read Shut Out ASAP.)
Biggest Flirt: Alaska from Looking for Alaska. She's a little bit of a MPDG but a completely charming, compelling (albeit tragic) flirt.
Fashion King and/or Queen: Lola. 'Nuff said. (Lola and the Boy Next Door)
Girl You’d Most Want For Your BFF: Could I be part of a trio of BFFs? Halley from Someone Like You and Violet from Mostly Good Girls.
Boy You Wish You’d Dated in High School: Joe from The Sky is Everywhere. I read this months ago and I'm still swooning.
Most Likely to Become President: Katniss, of course.
Quirkiest Character: Grace from God is in the Pancakes. I love her authentic voice and unabashed love of junk food and, of course, pancakes.
Villain You Love to Hate: Akiva from Daughter of Smoke and Bone. Even if he was only villainish temporarily.
Favorite Parental Figure: Mia's parents in If I Stay, although they break my heart.
Coolest Nerd: Arnold/"Junior" from The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The nerdiest being self-proclaimed; I think he's awesome.

Which characters would win your popularity contests?
This is my last post for the blogfest--I'll be traveling the rest of this week. Be sure to stop by Katy's, Allison's, Tracey's, and Jessica's blogs for the next two installments!

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

YA Superlatives Blogfest: Head of the Class

What's this? The Class of 2011: YA Superlatives Blogfest is a fun and interactive way to highlight and share your favorite YA novels, covers, characters, and story elements. The Class of 2011: YA Superlatives Blogfest will span four days, beginning Tuesday, December 27th and culminating Friday, December 30th.

Thanks to Katy, Allison, Tracey, and Jessica for organizing!
It wasn't until I started trying to assign superlatives that I realized how hard it is to pick one book for each. (Maybe it's also because I don't think my HS did superlatives, or else I'm selectively amnesiac about that.) There were so many great romances! And chilling dystopians! And I love contemporary YA, so how can I choose one? But I forced myself to narrow down to this list:

Head of the Class
Favorite Dystopian: Divergent
Favorite Fantasy: Daughter of Smoke and Bone
Favorite Contemporary: And Then Things Fall Apart
Favorite Comedy: Beauty Queens
Favorite Romance: Lola and the Boy Next Door
Favorite Genre Bender: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Which books made up your head of the class?

I'll be back tomorrow with the YA Popularity Contest.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Belly Up

Things I love:
Middle Grade
Mysteries
Animals
Humor

Lucky me, Belly Up puts them all together. From Stuart Gibbs's website:
Henry the Hippo, the beloved mascot of FunJungle, America’s hottest new tourist attraction, is dead. Twelve-year-old Teddy Fitzroy suspects foul play, but when no one believes him, he decides to investigate himself. To his surprise, he discovers that plenty of people wanted Henry gone — and the list of suspects keeps growing. As Teddy searches through the clues and asks too many questions, it becomes clear that he too might end up belly up.
This expertly-paced mystery is hard to put down. The author, Stuart Gibbs, used to work at a zoo and was the foremost expert on capybaras before he became a writer. How cool is that? Belly Up is full of interesting asides about the creatures at FunJungle. It's simply very fun to read.

Unrelated PS: I'm starting my holiday travels tomorrow, so I will be blogging sporadically for the next week and a half. But I will be posting for the 2011 superlatives blogfest, for sure!

Monday, December 19, 2011

Festivus Winners

Shabby Blogs is the cutest.

Thanks for airing all of your grievances and sharing those feats of strength. Random.org picked the Festivus winners, and they are as follows--

Cinder ARC: Jaime!

Beauty Queens: Crystal!

Daughter of Smoke and Bone: Cristina Marie Morales!

And Then Things Fall Apart: Sarah Enni!

When You Reach Me: Jessy!

Thanks to everyone who entered. I'll send out an email shortly* to the winners so I can pop your books in the mail.

Happy Festivus to all, and to all a good, grievance-free new year!

*Actually, I need your email address, Jaime!

Friday, December 16, 2011

Déjà vu blogfest and Disneyland

Thanks to Katy Upperman and Alison Miller, I discovered the Déjà vu blogfest today. Hosted by DL Hammons, Katie Mills, Lydia Kang, and Nicole Ducleroir, it gets bloggers to re-post a favorite or unsung post. Go here for the link!

I dipped back into the archives and found this one from my salad days of blogging (July 2010). Enjoy!

People are going to turn around and look up

I was at the Happiest Place on Earth on Monday, and it occurred to me that Disneyland is sort of live-action fiction. You wander through all of these very detailed, distinctive fictive neighborhoods, waiting in line to get on rides that simulate space or fairytale lands or somewhere under the sea (cue Sebastian), etc. The whole park is actually built above ground level--you're walking over a series of tunnels that "cast members" use to travel to and from the different lands (in order to preserve the magic element of the park). I think the word for it is verisimilitude: everything has the appearance of truth but isn't really true. It can feel a little like walking through a book.

But even if you immerse yourself totally in the experience, it's easy to get to reminded that what's going on around you isn't real. All you have to do is turn around (or look up at the rafters) and you see carefully concealed emergency exits, strings of lights, security cameras, animatronic ghosts and pirates and animals repeating the same canned movements. Most rides depend on the rider keeping his or her butt in the seat (and hands safely inside the ride at all times!), facing forward, never turning to look back behind. Of course, people do turn around and look up.

Maybe there's a lesson for writers in this: you need to assume that your reader is going to turn around, look back, glance upwards. Disneyland does a remarkably good job of creating an alternate world (except for It's a Small World, which kind of looks like it was set up in an empty hotel ballroom, with track lighting on the ceiling and exposed staples and exit signs everywhere) but if you look closely, you can always see little signs to remind you that this is all Made Up. When you're writing, you need to try to make sure that you conceal those types of signals. Sometimes that's making sure you don't miss continuity errors ("Jean" becomes "Joan;" a 14-year-old neighbor celebrates her 12th birthday, etc.); sometimes it's making sure that your protagonist's actions and emotions make sense based on how you have established him/her so far and where his/her arc is going. Make sure your readers aren't asking (unintended) questions along the lines of, How come I can still see Captain Jack Sparrow inside the Pirate's cave while directly in front of me he's locked up in a jail cell? Such as, Why is Rachel suddenly attending the dance that she spent the last 30 pages trashing? And at all costs, avoid slowing down the pacing to a stall (the equivalent of the dreaded "The ride will be moving shortly" announcement); you don't want your readers shifting in their seats, waiting for something to happen.

I am clearly not "waiting for
something to happen" here.

Not all works are striving for verisimilitude with the real world, but whatever environment you are creating should be as seamless as possible. You want your reader to believe in its authenticity. Whether you're building the world of a suburban high school or the kingdom of the Mer-people, remember that your readers will be looking in all directions.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

The Bell Jar

The foreword and backmatter in this
Harper Perennial edition are great.

Once upon a time, I was a silly teen who read Girl, Interrupted and passed over The Bell Jar. This despite the fact that I liked Sylvia Plath's poetry! I think the difference was: the author of Girl, Interrupted went on to write that book. And do other stuff, like live in the Faroe Islands and write about that. Sylvia Plath, on the other hand--I knew that at a painfully young age, she put her head in an oven. (Writing that sounds terribly blunt and callous, but it was that shocking tragic element, the intensity of the end of her life, that scared me off.) I didn't want to dip into her head. I knew much of The Bell Jar was autobiographically inspired. I was afraid of the madness and the sadness.

Finally reading The Bell Jar as a not-so-young adult, I saw that while I would've been deeply saddened by parts of The Bell Jar, I also would've loved reading others. Esther Greenwood has such a fantastic voice, and there is such great humor in the book. Particularly in the first New York City half, but even in the second.

Reading about mid-century life for young women was a trip. (I don't need to mention right now how obsessed I am with Mad Men and particularly Peggy's and Joan's storylines.) People ate raw meat mixed with eggs back then?! Aspiring poets submitted to Seventeen? (I'm not sure I ever read a poem in Seventeen, and I was an avid reader. Still love the glossies.)

So like the rest of life, there was a lot of lightness mixed with the dark. I'm glad I finally read this modern classic (and now it's making me want to re-read And Then Things Fall Apart--sidenote: did you know that I am giving away a copy and some other books? Here!)

PS As I remarked on Twitter, I feel like someone needs to write fan fiction in which Esther Greenwood and Holden Caulfield meet cute and go around hating phonies together. Or make a Tumblr for that. Internet, get on it.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Rejected Bestsellers

If it wasn't for an eight-year-old named Alice Newton, you might've never read Harry Potter.

That's one of the amazing factoids in this Flavorwire compilation of 10 Best-selling Books That Were Originally Rejected.

Anne of Green Gables! Twilight! The Diary of Anne Frank! All struggled on the way to publication.

And don't forget the widely circulated anecdote about The Help: that it was rejected 60 times before Kathryn Stockett got it published.

Examiner has an even longer list here.

Finally, here's a passage from the foreword in the edition of The Bell Jar that I'm currently reading:

You might think that classics like The Bell Jar are immediately recognized the moment they reach a publisher's office. But publishing history is rife with stories about classic novels that barely squeaked into print, from Nightwood to A Confederacy of Dunces, and The Bell Jar is one of them. (Harper Perenial foreword by Frances McCullough, 1996)

It goes on to tell the full publication history of the book, which is pretty fascinating. Apparently there was a lot of early internal opposition to the book at the publishing house.

What does this teach us about the journey to publication?

Publishers' (and editors', and agents') tastes are subjective. Like readers' tastes. You don't love every well-written book you read, right?

Even the most successful and lauded writers have bumps in their roads.

Rejections aren't assessments of a work's quality or value.

Here's what writers can control: how hard/much they work on their writing, and whether they persevere.

I'm wondering: has anyone heard of a bestseller that received no rejections (at any stage of the process)? Because I haven't, and Google isn't helping me find one.

Friday, December 9, 2011

Friday Fives: December edition

1. December: I love this month for its festive energy, but I always forget how busy it is. Between craziness at my day job, hard work on my revisions, holiday parties--I am seriously happy that it's Friday. (On that note, check out Sarah Enni's post at YA Highway if you need to instructions on how to give yourself permission to relax.)

2. Snow: People in the tri-state area will kill me for saying this, but I would like a little. Just a dusting, I swear!

3. Sufjan Stevens: His album Songs for Christmas is amazing. I'm listening to it all the time lately.

4. Books are Great Gifts: Need help picking out the perfect book present for someone? (And you can't find a lovely bookseller to help you?) This APA website can help. If nothing else, it has quotes from awesome authors on why books are good gifts. Such as: "Books make great gifts because you don't have to plug them in." --Alec Baldwin (Topical joke: They will also not get you kicked off an AA flight. Ba dum dum!)

5. Holiday baking: I am taking the shoes out of my oven (kidding) and going to bake this weekend. I might make more of these.

My gingerbread reenactment of The Walking Dead.

What are you up to this weekend?

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Cutting for Stone

This book is for people who:
--love sweeping, epic stories; ones that span much or all of a character's life and still linger in the details and little moments
--enjoy a little mysticism mixed with realistic, richly drawn characters
--are fascinated by medicine and surgery
--love Ethiopian food

it is not for people who:
--are squeamish about descriptions of illness and medical procedures [although even though I am a recovering hypochondriac, I didn't freak out about any of the conditions described. I'm honestly kind of surprised about that.]
--on that note, are squeamish about birth scenes
--want a fast read, because Cutting for Stone is a book you will want to linger in

How I loved this book! Normally a fast reader, I stayed with this one for a few weeks. The worlds of Cutting for Stone--primarily a mid-century Ethiopian hospital in Addis Ababa, and the Bronx in the 1980s--were created so completely that I felt like I had really traveled to those places. This is an airplane book in the sense that it takes the reader across the world to the story; it's evocative and encompassing. I was reluctant to finish reading and leave Missing Hospital. (Luckily, a film version is in the works.)

I'm basically in awe of Abraham Verghese. Not only is he an incredible writer (of fiction and nonfiction) who studied at the Iowa Writer's Workshop (that alone is super impressive), but he's also a doctor and professor at Stanford's School of Medicine. I mean, wow.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Where we buy our books

I don't care where people buy their books--indies or B&N or Half Price or online or Urban Outfitters or Target or the airport or your neighbor's stoop--I just like it when people buy books. Yay, books!
With one exception: buy it where you found it.

If you discover a book in a bookstore, buy it there.

There have been a lot of trend pieces lately (and this article) about people using bookshops as showrooms--browsing the display tables and staff picks, then jotting down or taking pics of the titles to remember to buy them from an online retailer. I say: that sucks! Somebody working at that bookstore decided to stock the book, and liked it enough to put it out for you to find it. If you wouldn't have known or thought to order it online without seeing it in the brick & mortar store, that store (and its helpful curators, the employees) deserves for you to buy the book there. Even if it costs a dollar or several more than online.
By the same measure: if you discover a title from an online giant's email or newsletter or algorithm, great! Go ahead and buy it from them.

But a store is a store, not a showroom. It's there to sell things and if it doesn't, it will go away. Now that we have online retailers with no physical presence and mobile shopping apps up the wazoo, we have to protect the brick & mortar stores that help make our towns and neighborhoods vibrant places. Unless, of course, you want all the businesses around you to be banks and cell-phone stores. Nothing against them, but personally, I'd prefer a few bookshops in the mix.

Monday, December 5, 2011

A Very Festivus Giveaway

On December 18, 1997, Festivus became known to the world at large through the Oracle of Costanza. (Although, as this Wikipedia entry points out, the holiday actually originated in 1966. Who knew it wasn't just created as a Seinfeld plot point?!) Even though my family celebrates Christmas (and I love it), some of the traditional practices of Festivus resonated with us; for example, our family game nights, particularly during the stressful holiday season, often resembled both the Feats of Strength and the Airing of Grievances. My sister and I found Festivus so wonderful and hilarious that we went out and found a metal coat rack, which we put up in our yard. It's a credit to my parents that they thought a Festivus pole was a great addition to our beautiful wreathes and brightly lit tree.

This year I'd like to share the magic of Festivus with you, dear readers. Although Festivus is anti-commercialism and does not involve gifts, I'm giving away the following books to five of you:

An ARC of Marissa Meyer's Cinder (a good review is here)

Copies of some of my favorite MG/YA reads from this year: Beauty Queens, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, And Then Things Fall Apart, When You Reach Me

To enter, leave a comment in the spirit of Festivus that:

Airs a grievance, or [mine: That I have lacked sufficient time to read the past week. Blurgh!]
Tells of a feat of strength [I rewrote five chapters of my MS on Saturday and re-outlined on Sunday!]

plus your name and email address, of course.

Bonus points (please let me know how many you get in your comment):
+1 New followers
+2 If you're already a follower
+1 Tweeting this giveaway
+2 New follower on Twitter (@rebeccabehrens)
+3 For posting about this giveaway on your blog.
+2 Add me to your blog roll

The contest will end on Sunday, December 18th at 11:59 pm Eastern time. I'll randomly select the winners from all the entries, and announce them on Monday, December 19th. Open to US and Canada.

Festivus: for the rest of us!

Disclaimery thing: I received the ARC of Cinder from the publisher. The rest of the stuff I am giving away is courtesy of me.

Friday, December 2, 2011

No Work Weekend

It's not that I work all the time--it's pretty clear that I am experienced at procrastinating on Twitter and wasting time watching cat videos online. It's that I feel like I should be working all the time, and whenever I'm not--even just for a few hours on Saturday morning, when I might catch up on TV--I feel guilty.

Not cool.

So I happened to have a four-day weekend at home recently. During which I was waiting on revision notes, so wasn't actively working on anything. Project #1 would be revised ASAP. Project #2 was on hold to make room for it, and also because I need more distance before I can rewrite part of it.

I wasn't quite crazy enough to try to start a Project #3 in the meantime.

What was I supposed to do all weekend? I wondered. Without any work?

I decided to embrace it. A No Work Weekend, and a four-day one, at that(!)

(Full disclosure: I did have to convince myself that a break would be mental/emotional preparation for revisions--there's that guilt complex thing at work again.)

I learned, however, that for compulsive worker bees like myself, taking four days off is hard. I kept scrolling my mouse over toward the document . . . maybe I should reread it . . . write a synopsis . . . start brainstorming in advance. . . .

But I was strong. I did no work all weekend. Not even the dishes. (Which was gross of me.) Here are my tips if you, too, struggle with giving yourself true time off:

Get off Twitter: Yes, Twitter is awesome. But I guarantee you will read other people's tweets about accomplishing all their holiday shopping in one day, or revising 50 pages, or finishing a first draft--and then you will feel bad that you are simply tweeting while you wait for your face mask to dry. Peer pressure to work is usually a good thing, but not on No Work Weekend. So stay away.
Get outside: Not necessarily outdoors, although a walk or shopping trip is great. Get away from the spot you usually park your butt in for working. I stayed away from my desk all weekend. I spent most of it walking outside in unseasonably great weather or lounging in front of the TV.
Get different: Do new and different things. Do something you always think about doing (while working) but never have the time for. I got up first thing one morning, grabbed a coffee, and walked over to the river. It was sunny and I had fun people-watching in the park. I always think about doing this on mornings when I wake up and plop myself down at the computer to write. No Work Weekend is a great time to do all those little I wish and what if and just because things.
Get a good book: Pick a long one, one you've put off reading because there were other books on your TBR pile that were more "important" to read, for research or comparison to your SNI or whatever. But it has to be something you really, really, REALLY want to read--because it can't be work.
Get lazy: If this does not come naturally to you, try to do nothing productive for just one hour. (You don't have to stare at a wall--listen to music, sit on a bench, take a bath etc.)

My No Work Weekend is over. I made it through a four-day period without making one To-Do list, which is huge. By the end of NWW, I was used to having no goals to accomplish. Now that I have things to do and deadlines set, I feel much better about tackling them. Particularly because I've decided another NWW awaits me on the other side.

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