Opening keynote by Gordon Korman. He's funny. Real funny. His motto: Lighten Up! Where there's drama, there's humor... lots of humor! His first book was published when he was like 14 or something crazy like that. His track coach, who incidentally became his English teacher because of a shortage of English teachers, told his class to work on whatever they wanted from February to the end of school. He wrote a story and sent it to Scholastic with his class's book order slips. Apparently, and I say this with skepticism, a warehouse worker noticed his story (or package) was in the wrong place and he took it over to the offices (same building) to those book-type people. Scholastic sent him a letter that said okay, maybe, someday it could get published. It was eventually published and he's been writing books for Scholastic ever since. In his own words, "Lucky him." Note: he talked about LUCK and how it plays a part in many writer's careers. If only I were Irish.
Agent panel was next. Ginger Clark (Curtis Brown), Ken Wright (Writer's House), Josh Adams (Adams), Lisa Grubka (Foundry). They talked about what projects they represent and then talked a lot about rights, world rights, audio rights, media rights, which was all kind of over my head since all I have to worry about is getting my next scene RIGHT. I took some golden nuggets away from this session, like some agents act as therapists while Ginger Clark says there's no way I'm staying on the phone with you for two hours. I'm not your best friend, your mother, or your shrink. She's all business. I like her approach. Here's why: if a fellow writer who had the same agent as me was sucking up our agent's time like that, I'd be furious.
Linda Sue Park's Master Class: we talked more about scenes, some of it was repeat from last year, which I like because I've brought a different novel to workshop this time and it's good to go through all that scene/plot/character/setting stuff with a new manuscript. Read more about scenes here.
Gail Carson Levine keynote: I've always admired her work (Ella Enchanted) and her writing philosophy. I own her book Writing Magic, which is all about writing fiction with writing exercises and prompts included. If you don't have it, buy it. At $11.55 for the paperback, it's the cheapest writing class you'll ever take. You can find more writing jewels on her blog.
Highlight of my day, besides standing next to MT Anderson and Kathleen Duey and eavesdropping on their conversation, I had lunch with Chris Rylander (whom I've been hanging with daily), Sara Lewis Holmes, and Emily Ecton. We talked books and writing. It was cool.
Day 3 opens with a panel about nonfiction and why it's so hot and then a keynote from author Carolyn Mackler, who I've never read.
John Scieszka shared his life experiences of rejection, painting apartments for a living, and more rejection. Finally, someone said YES to his picture book text, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, which was paired with an illustrator's "paintings" as he called them. He also shared hilarious stories and pictures of the three and four year-olds he hung out with that ultimately inspired his Trucktown series. The trucks look scarily similar to the kids, and the illustrators never saw the kids. He seemed blown away by this weirdness and eventually convinced me to see it his way.
Tobin (MT) Anderson sang an operatic anthem to Delaware. Enough said. No really, he's brilliantly neurotic, and I mean that in every positive light that comes with being smarter than everyone else in the room. Not only that, he's hilarious. Lucky him. He talked about taking the ordinary and making it strange or scary. He used several examples, taking Delaware and making the setting what Delaware is not. I thought of Stephen King and how he takes normal small towns and settings and makes something totally twisted happen like people getting attacked by vultures. Point = normalcy turned upside down is scary or bizarre, something a writer pulls out of left field is not. It's funny how I feel comfortable enough to call him Tobin. Everyone else does, why not?
Courtney Bongiolatti of Simon & Schuster gave her run-down of middle grade fiction for boys. I was familiar with, or had read, every book she mentioned except two (one was Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher). Someone later Tweeted (hate that word) that those two books were more YA, not middle grade. Amazon agrees. She did not offer to accept unsolicited (unagented) manuscripts but I don't blame her, the room was packed with idiots letting their cell phones ring four times or more. Is it really that hard to put it on vibrate/quiet/silence/off? One lady behind me checked her voice mail in the middle of the presentation. That calls for a Saturday Night Live Special.... REALLY?
*Linda Sue Park (Master Class = Growing Your Middle Grade Story) was as enthusiastic and knowledgeable as last year. Why wouldn't she be? She began the session by asking us to write down five things about ourselves, which we had to share. Here are mine:
I shop at four grocery stores (at least)
One of my pinkies is crooked and bigger than the other.
I don't like dogs (please don't hate me for that one)
The ocean kind of freaks me out, but I enjoy sitting on the beach.
I'm a preacher's kid and a baseball nut.
Then she asked us to write down five favorite things from our main character's (Eddie Waymire, age 12) point of view:
My favorite subject is science.
I like birds, but not songbirds, only raptors.
I learned everything about birds from my dad.
My dad dropped dead in the living room when I was nine.
I have a crush on Gabriela but I'm sure she thinks I'm a bird nerd.
We went on to explore the differences in universal and specific qualities of ourselves and our characters. She posed this question: what makes something relatable to everyone (universal) and what makes something unique (specific) about our characters? Good writers take something universal and make it specific to their character. Linda also discussed some difficulties writing in first person as opposed to third person. She thinks first person is the most difficult point of view. Sorry, Linda. I disagree, but see your point. I wrote my first novel (CROSSING CHALK) in third person and had a really tough time with it. Granted, I've come a long way since then. My second novel (BIRD BOY), in first person, is going much better. But that's just me.
Setting and character are intertwined. She can't separate them. I like this outlook on story elements and agree with it.
Middle Grade = readers learning about their world. Young Adult = readers learning about themselves.
*These ramblings are only notes and summarizations. I can't replicate the experience, though I try and fail miserably. You really must be here to benefit from the best.
Day 2 begins at 9:00 AM with a keynote from Gordon Korman.
After the last bell rings, I ride home with Mom in the Junkmobile. In the morning I take the bus because Dad always wanted me to experience school like a normal kid, like someone whose Mom’s hip doesn’t jingle when she walks because of the thousand keys dangling from her belt loop. Mom says she has a key to unlock every door in school and that it’s one of the perks for being Head Janitor. One of the perks? What other perks could there be? I wish she had a key to unlock other people’s minds, so then I’d know what Gabriela thinks of me.
Mom shuts the car door, strikes a match, and lights a cigarette. She thinks that matches make cigarettes taste better than lighters. Crazy, I know.
“Can’t you wait til we get home?” I say.
“Got a girlfriend yet?” she asks.
“Mom, it’s only the first day.”
“You have to be quick before all the pretty ones are taken.”
I roll down the window and breathe in some fresh, nontoxic air.
“I heard about Mouton,” she says.
“What’d you hear?”
“That he fainted in the hallway and then you couldn’t pick him up.”
“Who told you that?”
“Mrs. Hughes.”
“That’s not what happened,” I mutter.
I can feel Mom looking at me. The cigarette dangles from her mouth and moves every time she talks. “Then tell me what happened. Come on, I want the dirt, the good stuff. You can’t let your mom walk those halls misinformed.”
The dirt? The good stuff? Since when does Mom care about gossip at school? “Is this your way of trying to be more involved in my life?” I ask.
Mom laughs. The cigarette does a little dance from her lips. “You’re funny, Eddie, you know that. Never thought I’d have a funny kid. Your dad sure wasn’t funny.”
That hurts. Mom’s wrong. Dad was funny. There were times when he was really funny. On one of our birding trips I had to pee real bad so he told me to go in the bushes. While I was going, he threw a rock off the tree and scared the living you-know-what out of me. After I was done I came back to our birding spot and said, “Why did you throw a rock at me?” Dad acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. “What rock?” he said.
Mom hangs her cigarette out the window and flicks the ash away. “Come on, Eddie, give me the dirt.”
I turn away, letting the end-of-summer air hit my face. “Dad was funny,” I say.
Mom’s probably looking at me like I’ve sprouted wings. “Not by my standards.”
“Yes, he was,” I say. “He did a lot of funny things, but you didn’t appreciate them.”
“Like what? What did he do that was so funny?”
“Like the time he threw a rock at me when I was peeing and then he acted like he didn’t do it.”
“Real funny, Eddie.”
“It was funny to me, alright.”
“Don’t raise your voice at me, Eddie.”
“Guess you had to be there.”
“I was there, Eddie, every day when your dad was dying. There was nothing funny about it or him, so get over it, will you?” She ashes out the window and takes a long drag from her cigarette. Then she punches the radio button and turns up a country song about losing everything you own and getting drunk and leaving bad memories behind. Except the drunk part, it sounds like a song about my life. The Anthem of Eddie Waymire.
The winner of the Agent/Editor Pick-up Line Contest is....
Chris Rylander - "The main character has the same bedtime routine as you! How weird is that?"
His pick-up line highlights several key areas: annoyance, shock, inappropriateness, and general creepiness. Nice work, Chris. Your prize is seeing me again at SCBWI. By the way, email your phone number to me so I can send you equally creepy texts. Do you get cell reception in the Dakotas or are you still using cans and string?
By the way, Chris's book THE FOURTH STALL comes out a month from never. (sometime in 2011)
On the brink of the annual SCBWI-LA Conference, there's one thing on attendees' minds (the ones without agents). How to begin the conversation? How to break the ice? How to get Desired Agent A to recognize my genius in a 143,000 word middle grade novel about talking (and flying) squirrels. So here's the contest. There's no prize, because I'd rather stand in line for Lindsay Lohan's court hearing than stand in line at the post office.
Contest:
What's the worst thing a writer can say to Desired Agent A or Desired Editor B at a conference?
Here's mine:
(plopping 400 page manuscript into Agent A's arms)
How many lives would it take you to read all the books you want to read?
Is this an answerable question when publishers constantly release new books?
I've calculated 30 lives for myself. My calculations are based solely on the stars and planets and my reading capacity, or lack thereof, and nothing else.
Another question:
Have you ever read a self-published book? Was it worth reading or was the writer fulfilling a self-created pipe dream? (Feel free to not answer that last question in light of losing a friend, because I'm guessing if you've read a self-published book it's because you know the author.)
I'm not thinking about self-publishing. I think no matter how the books turns out, it looks unprofessional and... self-published. And without a strong marketing and distribution plan behind you, it falls on the author's shoulders even more so than with a "traditional" publisher.
Read on.
Write on.
____________________________________
As I was putting LC down for a nap today, the James Taylor song "You Can Close Your Eyes" came on the iPod. It was weird. Okay, I guess you had to be there.
We went to Disneyland yesterday, a perk of living 45 minutes away from Toon Town. It was hot. Boy, was it hot! I seriously could not stop sweating all day. It was like someone connected a hose to my ear that forced water to bubble from my forehead. Blondie had a blast though, and that's all that counts (the price you pay to see your kid's face light up). She blushed at princesses and cried a little on Pirates of the Caribbean (that was my idea; no nightmares... yet). But overall, she was a Storm Trooper and didn't let the heat affect her.
One of the highlights was eating lunch in the exclusive Club 33, a restaurant with a secret entrance close to the Pirates ride. I happen to know a member to the club, so she kindly made a reservation for us there. The restaurant is located in Walt Disney's old offices. The food is incredible (crab legs, lobster, shrimp, steak), the service even better (waiters did not mind our unruly kids), and of course there is air conditioning (ahhhh). If you've ever been to an amusement park on a steaming day, you know how refreshing cool air must feel.
In all, a great day. And we came away with only buying a pair of Tinkerbell Mouse Ears that were fifteen bucks. Not bad, considering Blondie didn't even beg for them.
____________________________________
For the upcoming SCBWI-LA Master Class (taught by Linda Sue Park), I've been asked to list five or six of my favorite middle grade books that I've read within the last so many years. Here's what I chose:
I took Blondie to the library today. While in the children's section, she whipped out a book and flipped through it while saying things like, "Then I wipe his butt." To her credit, the book was about Maisy and how she gets ready for bed. On a two page spread there's a toilet and toilet paper roll and good ole Maisy getting ready to do number one or two (or both). Blondie was saying it really loud, like it was just the two of us with a library all to ourselves. People were eyeing us, I can sense these things.
Check out the little poetry contest (thanks to me and my cleverness) over at Paul's blog. I've already entered, so you're vying for a red ribbon. Take that!
The simplicity of this poem (and most poems in this book) blows me away. Topics range from kicking stones to going to the beach to counting stars to swinging up, up into the sky. Blondie loves this book, and I can see why. I've read it to her a hundred times (before tucking her in) and the poems always make her smile.
. His motto: Lighten Up
! Where there's drama, there's humor... lots of humor
! His first book was published when he was like 14 or something crazy like that. His track coach, who incidentally became his English teacher because of a shortage of English teachers, told his class to work on whatever they wanted from February to the end of school. He wrote a story and sent it to Scholastic with his class's book order slips. Apparently, and I say this with skepticism, a warehouse worker noticed his story (or package) was in the wrong place and he took it over to the offices (same building) to those book-type people. Scholastic sent him a letter that said okay, maybe, someday it could get published. It was eventually published and he's been writing books for Scholastic ever since. In his own words, "Lucky him." Note: he talked about LUCK and how it plays a part in many writer's careers. If only I were Irish.
, which is all about writing fiction with writing exercises and prompts included. If you don't have it, buy it. At $11.55 for the paperback, it's the cheapest writing class you'll ever take. You can find more writing jewels on her blog.
(whom I've been hanging with daily), Sara Lewis Holmes
, and Emily Ecton
. We talked books and writing. It was cool.
, who I've never read.
, which was paired with an illustrator's "paintings" as he called them. He also shared hilarious stories and pictures of the three and four year-olds he hung out with that ultimately inspired his 
series. The trucks look scarily similar to the kids, and the illustrators never saw the kids. He seemed blown away by this weirdness and eventually convinced me to see it his way.
. Someone later Tweeted (hate that word) that those two books were more YA, not middle grade. Amazon agrees. She did not offer to accept unsolicited (unagented) manuscripts but I don't blame her, the room was packed with idiots letting their cell phones ring four times or more. Is it really that hard to put it on vibrate/quiet/silence/off? One lady behind me checked her voice mail in the middle of the presentation. That calls for a Saturday Night Live Special.... REALLY? 
, by 
, by 
, by Gary Schmidt
, by 
. On a two page spread there's a toilet and toilet paper roll and good ole Maisy getting ready to do number one or two (or both). Blondie was saying it really loud, like it was just the two of us with a library all to ourselves. People were eyeing us, I can sense these things.
