Jenn's World

Orson Scott Card had a stroke over the holidays. He writes about it here. I'm impressed he can maintain his sense of humor: "I solemnly promise not to croak with any of my book series unfinished."

Well, it's Weds. somewhere, right? I got caught up in some expected yardwork today when the sprinkler system went down, so this post's a little late. But here it is...

Ah, CONduit. The Salt Lake City Con where you can attend a writing panel on How to Get published, stay for a belly-dancing performance and learn the basics of detecting paranormal activity...all in a single night. This year's theme was space pirates. There's such an ecletic mix of gamers, artists, anime fans and writers, if you go to CONduit and don't come home with at least one new friend...it's probably your deoderant.

Of course not everyone's friends are as cool as the Dread Pirate Roberts. But hey, you can't all be as awesome as me. Relax. Don't strain yourself. We wouldn't want to be setting the bar too high now, would we?

Anyway, I had a lot of fun. I even introduced myself to some new authors who's advice I have been listening to for a couple years now, and found out that Larry Corriea and John Brown are every bit as nice as they seem to be. And Provo Library doesn't carry a copy of Larry Correia's book, FOR SHAME! Some regular faces were absent (I missed Howard Taylor's jokes) and some of the local authors didn't stay long, but I still went home with a belly-full of advice and a bucket-full of motivation. I chucked out about 40 pages of text on Skin Farm yesterday (and by chucked out, I mean typed out. How much is decent enough to merit staying in the book, we'll see). Brad Torguson recognized my face from previous conventions and came to talk to me and introduce himself without prompting. I also managed to avoid all Lost spoilers, miracle of miracles. I'm still a season behind, grumble.

My question of the con was: How do you deal with form rejection? And boy, these authors had experienced a lot of it. I didn't quite ask every author there, but the ones I missed I'm sure would have had the same advice. Keep your chin up. Work hard. Throw stuff at the wall. Something's bound to stick eventually.

In some ways, there were a lot of depressing moments at the con, because some of the authors haven't had much upward career movement since last year. Barbara Hambly, our guest speaker, has had a whole ton of success over the years--our library has a shelf almost dedicated to her exclusive use. But after she'd "made it", quit her day job, worked full time as an author for decades, she ended up getting chucked out by her publishers (and this time, I do mean thrown out) and forced to find a job at the time in her life when many people start contemplating retirement. So...you can make it, and still not be safe from the terrors of the 9-to-5.

The funny thing is, the community college she's teaching at wouldn't let her teach creative writing, because she didn't have a masters in English. Ha!

Anyway, a lot of advice we got was the kind of thing you've heard before...ie, don't send your query letter on perfumed paper, or dark paper...(part of me groans at people's ignorance)...but there was some new stuff too, like that sometimes the "no submissions" policy at publishers is just a shield and if you send a manuscript to someone anyway, you might get a bite with comments. Not something I'll try unless I have a few Writer's of the Future awards under my belt, but interesting nonetheless.

Barbara Hambly--who is a really interesting woman, she talked about her ghost sightings and her student's reactions to her numorous tattoos--advised me to start with character when writing a historical novel and then work outward, since I'm finding the whole historical setting bigger than I can chew. She also told me her WoW server (not mine, alas) and that she plays on Thursdays.

Another thing: One of the distinctions between M.G. and Y.A. involves spheres of influence. In a M.G. book, the biggest influence on a main character tends to be family. Often kids saving their parents or having to make due without their parents or fighting their foster parents or wishing they had parents, etc. In Y.A., that influence has shifted over to friends. It's less about family and more about that cute boy with the locker three feet left of the girl's bathroom. Friends in trouble that need rescuing instead of parents. Anyway, I'd never thought of it that way before.

I also learned there's a new subgenre called "New Adult" which is for college-aged folks. Not quite adult, not quite young adult. I'm not sure how you'd go about marketing such a thing and whether its a viable sub-genre since college kids are pretty much adults, but it'll be interesting to see if it develops. I can see how there are some unique "college" issues that would make for great reading. I haven't seen a shelf for it in bookstores, but it's been awhile since I went walkabout in a Barnes and Noble.

James Daschner also told me not to worry that I've missed the bandwagon with post-apocalyptic. They're still hot, which is good because I hope to get queries out on Skin Farm by Christmas.

Anyway, I went to readings, a Wheel of Time panel, and other events, and saw pirates and armed knights carrying signs "WILL FIGHT DRAGONS FOR FOOD." James Daschner gave me a copy of the first few chapters of the sequel to Maze Runner (signed) which made me squeal a little. I squealed a lot when Brandon Sanderson told me the first Wheel of Time signing for Towers of Midnight will be at BYU again this year. I'm picking out my sleeping bag already, you losers. That #1 signed copy is MINE!!!

But more importantly, I came home with so many story ideas, I'm not sure what to do with them all. I'm beginning to wonder if I might not actually be a secret Y.A. author in disguise. I think of myself as gritty, but Y.A.'s gotten pretty gritty of late, and most of the characters that spring into my mind are young, if not high school aged. Probably because I am trapped into a perpetual state of immaturity. There would be some advantages--Y.A. authors are less penalized for genre-romping, so I could write historical fantasy and dystopian science fiction under the same pen-name--as well as a wider audience and bigger paychecks. Sounds good to me.

Next year's COnduit will be superhero themed. The guest is Tamora Pierce. They've already got the website up for next year. I've never read anything by her, but I like some of her book titles. I find myself scratching my head and wondering where to start. Usually I study an author's career in chronilogical order but reading 26 books by the same author is a little dauting.

UP FRIDAY: Double book review! The Lies of Locke Lamora and Paper Mage.

So much for me not posting anything...I must be trying to avoid writing!

My goal is to finish Godsplay by Saturday because Dave's doing a signing in Provo and it would be nice to go to him and say: 'Yahoo! I'm done!' Literally, yahoo. Said in as monotone voice as I can manage.

In the mean time, go read Patrick Rothfuss' interview with Campbell Award Nominee Joe Abercrombie, in which he asks one of the most important questions a writer can be asked: if you were a tree, what kind would you be?

(His answer? Oak. My answer: Coconut. Because I think coconuts are funny.)

Speaking of funny words, I have discovered the root of all comedy. Llamas.

The more serious the sentence, the more people will laugh. I'm trying to sell my uncle's llama. Whenever I tell people that, they laugh so hard that they almost start crying. The word llama is THAT funny. Of course, I help add my own touch with the words "slightly-used." You can add "slightly-used" to anything and it raises its humor by +5, -5 to save vs. giggling.

Constantly, the heroes in my humorous fantasy I occasionally write ideas down for are going to ride llamas. I hereby patent this idea! Get your hands off of it, comedy-mongers!!!!

Colleen McCullough, author of the Masters of Rome series, which I quite enjoyed, is scheduled to have brain surgery today to help with her trigeminal neuralgia, "an illness nicknamed the 'suicide disease' because it causes excruciating pain to all parts of the face."

--The Times via Publisher's Lunch.

She says she's half-way through her 22nd novel and less afraid of dying than of not ever being able to write again. Oddly enough, she was a neuroscientist before she began writing.

Pray for her and her recovery.

To close out the week, I'm going to actually have a blog post that doesn't involve revision in any way shape or form except that I put the final touched on my still way-too-long prologue and am more or less putting it aside. No wonder it took me five years to write that thing!

Would you be turned off by a long prologue if the writing is good? How long is too long? How much connection should it have to the ensuing story.

Re-reading my last draft, I'm disappointed at bits that seemed to get "lost" somewhere in between drafts. I swear I had elegant paragraphs of character description that somehow just vanished. Were they all in my head in the first place or did I trim them because I was concerned about length? Sigh.

The book I'm reading on Revision was published in 1989 and it's funny to read about the author advocating for the use of computers. Honestly, I'm amazed if anyone still handwrites novels. I couldn't read my own writing if I tried. Go them, I'm not denegrating styles, but wow, it'd be so hard to organize and deal with it.

Though without an attempt to hand write my novel, I'd never have invented a "Sa'hana." I was trying to handwrite a novel because I wanted to force myself to stop revising. I have this tendancy to look back and finetune when I'm afraid of moving forward, and I figured with handwriting I wouldn't dink around the whole time. So I wrote in the morning and at night while I worked on a job searching other days and decided to start out my novel with a bang--Rachell's Sa'hana. But the scene felt really overdramatic/unbelievable, even for a society used to magic, and so when I wanted to start writing it again, I shifted the scene to the grandfather. Who wouldn't have existed without the handwritten copy either when I realized that someone needed to be involved in the Sa'hana--a character who looked down on Rachell for her half-blood status but loved her anyway. I don't know if the handwriting had anything to do with it or not, but there it is.

Wish I could find that damn notebook. Not only does it have the first draft, but it also has my maps, lists of the character's ages, a historical timeline, a short glossary, and the twenty-seven runes sketched out with their meanings, along with six or seven bindings. Since I misplaced the books two moves ago, I've had to make up new names (I wonder what Cien's name was in the draft?) but I'd like to have the runes at least, rather than having to come up with them all over again.

That was more about revision than I meant to write about. What I meant to write about is: will computers replace writers, GASP!!!

Writer Beware blog did an interesting entry on a guy who's the "most published author" on Amazon with over 100,000 titles (not books) available. How does he do it? Apparently he hires a bunch of computer programmers to data search on a specific topic and put it together in a POD book. To quote the blogger, Victoria Strauss:

"Ah, but what's creative? Not romance novels, apparently. Per the New York Times article linked in above, Parker 'is laying the groundwork for romance novels generated by new algorithms. "I’ve already set it up," he said. "There are only so many body parts."' (A reductive statement that, no doubt, will infuriate romance writers everywhere.) What's next? Computer-generated SF novels with stock aliens? Algorithm-created crime dramas with hard-boiled dialog swiped from the movies? Robo-poetry to populate a hundred Poetry.coms?"

Okay, so I don't think HAL will replace fiction writers, but in some ways, movie writers in particular seem to have only artificial intelligence. How many scrapped-up remakes and hero's journey clones have you seen and thought "a computer could do that." Or my kid, a dog, can of soup, etc.

I wouldn't worry. There will always be a place for human intuition and creativity. Computers are more a threat to readership than writership. After all, how many of us will bother reading the next Ernest Hemingway where there are blogs to search and porn to download? Even a devoted bookworm like myself might prefer hopping into a virtual reality capsule.

I swear, I'll stop talking about revision next week!

Got a kid who liked Twilight? Appilynne Pike from Spanish Fork, Utah, who I met at a conference, just debuted at #6 on the NYT bestseller's list for her YA book Wings. GO DONS!

I had a hard time finding an amazon link because of Wings the T.V. show. D'oh... Looked like it worked out for her anyway.

Okay, for some reason blogger isn't doing images today, so I'll have to let you see her lovely book cover via the link.

The summary: Fifteen-year-old Laurel has led a sheltered, homeschooled life in a very small town, so when her parents decide to move and enroll her in high school, she has trouble getting used to her new life. A life, as it turns out, that’s not at all like those of other kids. One clear sign is a winglike blossom that blooms on her back. Oh, and her new best friend, the scientifically minded David, reveals under a microscope that her cells are more plant than animal. But it takes an encounter at her old home with the handsome but decidedly different Tamani to convince her that she is a faerie. She also learns it’s up to her to save her land from the evil influences that are trying to take it away from her and her family. This first novel is clearly designed to attract the Twilight set, though there’s significantly less edge (and blood). There is, however, a familiar triangle. Will Laurel choose solid, steady David, or will she be unable to resist Tamani’s lure? Stay tuned. Fine escapist fare, this neatly mixes the everyday with the otherworldly. Grades 6-9. --Ilene Cooper

"In the current crop of supernatural romances, this one stands out. Silky narration...delicious escapism." (Kirkus Reviews)

Sigh, I want my readers to say "homg...homg... when are we going to see forestboy again?"

Well, maybe not quite like that. She has a nice post about what it's like being a NYT bestseller here.