Validation

Early in the days of this blog, I wrote a post about the four areas of concern I had about leaving my day job. No. 3 was the "Psychological" area, where I said in part that

"at all but the most abysmal jobs (and my job is far from abysmal), you get strokes. You do in writing too, but writing is also a lot about rejection—rejections from agents and editors, bad reviews, critical emails from readers. Will they hurt more when I don’t have the comfort of students saying nice things to/about me, and colleagues telling me I do a good job?"

Of course I've been nervous about the first review of The Stepsister's Tale and my nerves weren't helped when I learned that the first one came from Kirkus, since they're notoriously difficult to please.

When I read it (and you can too, here) I got momentarily lightheaded with relief. They not only said very nice things but also gave it a star! For those of you outside of this business, a star is great, since some libraries and schools automatically buy a copy of every book with a starred review.

To celebrate, I'm giving away five signed copies of the ARC along with some modest but fun Cinderella-themed swag on May 21, one week from today. All you have to do to enter for a chance to win one of them is comment on this post. I also ask that you write an Amazon and/or Goodreads review after you read it. U.S. and Canada only, please!

Thanks for sharing my excitement, friends!

The Writing Process

Thanks to Holly Schindler for tagging me in this blog hop! Here are my answers to the questions all the participants are answering.

What am I working on?

I’m frantically trying to get a draft of a new book in shape to send to my editor by May 1! The working title is FAIREST: THE STEPMOTHER’S TALE, and as you can probably tell, it’s a retelling of Snow White from the point of view of the stepmother. In my telling, she’s not a witch, and in fact is Snow White’s ally. It’s set in the early twelfth century and weaves in druids, the King Arthur legend, the Crusades, and all sorts of fun stuff.

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

There are lots and lots of retellings of fairy tales. In fact, the working title of my next book (THE STEPSISTER’S TALE) was “Yet Another Cinderella Retelling.” What I like to do, though, is to explore the person normally portrayed as the villain and portray her (so far, both of them have been female) in a sympathetic light. There are always two sides to a story, you know!

Why do I write what I do?

Beats me. It just interests me!

How does my writing process work?

I usually circle around something for a while and then write in spurts. Once the well has run dry, I walk and think and ruminate and suddenly several scenes (or at least one scene) will pop into my head. Then I write and write. If I force it, nothing happens. Well, I do write something, but I wind up deleting it the next day, which sucks. So I don’t write unless I’m pretty sure what I’m writing will be at least partially usable.

Be sure to check out the three writers I tagged to answer the same questions!


Jane Warren has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and undergraduate degrees from University of Calgary (BEd) and McMaster University (BPE). She has published two-dozen short stories and poems in literary magazines in Canada and the UK and has served on the editorial collectives of literary magazines. Currently she lives in the Netherlands where she works as an editorial consultant. 

Vicky Alvear Shecter writes both fiction and nonfiction set in the ancient world. Her recent Cleopatra’s Moon tells the story of the daughter of Cleopatra. Her creative nonfiction book about Egyptian mythology—Anubis Speaks! A Guide to the Afterworld by the Egyptian God of the Dead—releases October 2013. She blogs at History with a Twist.

Renee Gian has been an ice cream server, a mannequin model (you know, those people who stand perfectly still in store front windows while you make faces at them), a French teacher, a Latin teacher. She is now currently a middle school art teacher in Cairo, Egypt where she lives with her son and a menagerie of cats. She also still spends a great deal of time imagining, but now she writes most of it down in the form of picture books and middle grade novels. She blogs at Word Disco.

 

Another Ending

One thing I swore to myself when I quit my day job was that I wouldn’t be one of those people who told her work friends, “Don’t worry—we’ll still see a lot of each other!” and then drop off the earth.

Years ago, I formed an organization of non-tenure-track faculty at Vanderbilt whose purpose was mutual support, which mostly involved getting together for a beer once a month and telling horror stories about the administration. We called ourselves “LWA” (Lecturers With Attitude) and our “meetings” were well attended, with anywhere from six to ten people at a time. Even after I quit teaching, I continued to call regular monthly meetings.

Numbers started falling off this academic year, and then I was unable to call a meeting for a few months due to writing deadlines and a move, but now that I’m settled in the new house I proposed a meeting last week. We’ve moved away from the university neighborhood and are on three wooded acres. Yes, it’s idyllic, but it feels awfully removed from people I used to spend a lot of time with, so I was happy when half a dozen said they’d come.

As it turns out, only one other person came, and she’s someone I see weekly anyway at a different social event. We had a great time and wound up staying for dinner, but on the drive home I came to the conclusion that LWA had run its course. Whether it’s because as founder my regular presence was necessary for it to flourish or because the turnover in lecturers meant that I didn’t know anyone new to invite as long-timers moved on, the group has clearly been on life support for a while.

So I pulled the plug. I was doing more listening and sympathizing than sharing of war-stories, and of course I can (and will) continue to see many of the attitudinous lecturers individually. Still, I’m a bit blue, I think more because the end of this group signals another end of that former life. The new life is great, don’t get me wrong—but change is always a bit unsettling.
 

Scheduling Reading Time

If you had told me at almost any time in my life until now that I'd actually have to schedule time to read, I would have questioned your sanity. But that's exactly what has happened.

I thought that one of the benefits of quitting my day job would be more time to do things like reading. What I didn't count on was that in the past, reading was often a reward for a hard day at work. I'd tell myself that for every lesson planned, every stack of quizzes corrected, every afternoon spent in a meeting I'd allow myself a chapter or two of the book I was in the middle of reading. And of course, usually that chapter or two stretched into three or four.

I still have hard days (I'm currently revising a novel and having to wrestle with more than the usual number of problems, a short week after moving and unpacking and trying to organize a new space), but now they're of my own choosing. I can postpone the revisions as long as I want, right? I don't have to agonize over the perfect word, instead settling for an okay one. So why should I reward myself for something self-imposed?

The upshot is that I'm starved for reading, but every time I crack open a book I've been looking forward to, something pulls me away. But writers have to read, just as painters have to go to galleries and musicians have to go to concerts.

No more. Starting today, I sit and read, with no electronics within reach, for a solid hour. AT LEAST.

It started off well, with a lovely middle-grade novel called The Junction of Sunshine and Lucky by Holly Schindler. I'm nearing the end, and I might just go over my allotted hour to see how the story of Auggie and her grandfather turns out.

Epiphany

As I stood in the shower this morning mentally piecing my day together, I realized that instead of looking for free chunks of time into which I could shoehorn some writing, I was looking for gaps in my writing time into which I could shoehorn everything else.

That’s all—sorry it’s not more profound, but it was a nice moment.

Tip o' the Day

When doing a revision late in the game (i.e., not the first or even the second or probably even the third revision), I’ve discovered that if I print out my manuscript to look as much like a book as possible and read it on paper, I catch global problems (contradictions, weak story arc, lack of character development, etc.) much better than if I read it on-screen yet again with it looking like a typescript: double-spaced with ragged right margins, etc. I figured out how to format like a book after some trial and error and am sharing this knowledge with you today. These instructions are for MS Word (from Office) on a Mac; if you have some other program, you're on your own.

1. Open your document (duh). Notice that at the top of the screen you have a row of words headed by the symbol of an apple, followed by “Word File Edit” etc. I have no idea what the technical term for this is but I refer to as the “Apple row.” Ignore this row until Step 11 below. Right above your document is another row headed by the symbol of a house, followed by “Home Layout Document Elements” etc. This will be referred to as the “Home” row.

2. Enter Command-A to highlight your entire manuscript, which will turn blue as soon as you do this. If at any point from here through step 11 the blue disappears, enter Command-A again so that the entire ms. is highlighted.

3. On the “Home” row, click on Layout. In the Page Setup section on the far left, click on Orientation and then on Landscape. Don’t exit the Layout menu. (If you do exit it, just click on Layout again.)

4. In the Margins section, change all the margins to 0.8.

5. In the Text Layout section click on the down-arrow next to the little box that has two columns outline in green. Click on the word “Two.”

6. Click on the word “Home.” A new set of choices will appear. In the bottom row of the Paragraph section, there are four buttons that show left-justified text, centered, right-justified, and full-justified. Click on the button on the far right of this group of four, the one that shows full-justified text.

7. In the font section, choose a typeface that looks like a standard book font but that isn’t what you’re currently using. Even a subtle change between what you currently use and something else will make a difference. I usually choose Book Antiqua.

8. In the font section, change the type size to 11 pt.

9. In the typography section, check the box next to the last option, the one that has AV with little arrows above and below the letters (sometimes it won’t let you check that box. I have no idea why, and it makes very little difference. This is just fancy-schmancy stuff known as “kerning”).

10. Click on “Home” to close the ribbon.

11. In the Apple row, click on Format and then on Paragraph. In Line Spacing, click on the box with the up and down arrows (it will probably say “Double”) and click on “Exactly.” Then move to the box to its right and enter 14 pt. While you’re there, make sure there's a check in the box next to “Don't add space between paragraphs in the same style.” Click “OK.”

12. At this point it doesn’t matter if the text is highlighted in blue anymore. Click on Edit in the Apple row. Hover your cursor on “Find” and then click on “Replace.” A dialog box will open on the left. Click the cursor in the first box and type ^t (exactly like that, no spaces, no capitals). Click the cursor in the second box and hit the space bar five times. Click on “Replace all.” Click on the “X” near the top of the dialog box to close it.

13. If you want it to look even more like a book (and also save a piece of paper or two) make sure that there are no huge gaps between the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next one. I do this by searching for the word “Chapter” and seeing if there’s a huge amount of white space above it. If there is, I backspace until the new chapter starts at the top of the previous page.

Now you’re ready to print. If you don’t want these changes to be permanent, don’t save the document. Leave the document up until you’ve finished printing and then exit without saving. It will revert to the shape it was in before you made all the formatting changes.

To print double-sided like a book, click on File in the home row. Click on Print. Click on Copies & Pages. Click on Duplex Printing & Margin. Click on Duplex Printing. Click on Short-side stapling (Top). Click on Print.

Et voilà!

Tag—I'm It!

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My friend Jody Casella writes one of my favorite blogs about writing and life and the writing life. She’s also days away from the launch of her debut novel, Thin Space. I'm dying to read this one, especially after its starred Kirkus review (seriously, read that review—doesn’t it sound amazing?). Jody has tagged me in a Children’s Author Blog Hop, meaning that I answer the same four questions that she did in her post and then tag three more YA authors to do the same, kind of like a writerly chain mail.

The questions and my answers:

1. What are you working on right now?
I’m writing the first draft of Mirror, a retelling of Snow White, while revising The Stepsister’s Tale, a retelling of Cinderella (my twentieth book for young readers!). Harlequin Teen will publish Stepsister in July, 2014, and Mirror is due out a year later.

I’m also revising a totally different kind of book with the working title The Icarus Complex. It’s about Clancy Edwards, a teenage girl who’s being smothered by her overprotective father and boyfriend. Her mother died in a skydiving accident when the main character was six, and her father owns a skydiving center. Clancy busts out of this smothering in a dramatic way.

This idea came to me when I was pondering how to use skydiving in a story, preferably a Greek myth retelling set in the present, and Icarus seemed a natural. I wrote the draft for NaNoWriMo last year.

That's me!

2. How does it differ from other works in the genre?

In both of my fairy-tale retellings, things aren’t quite the way we’ve been led to believe in the traditional stories. Cinderella isn’t as good and virtuous and put-upon as her supporters have claimed—she’s the typical kid in a blended family who finds it hard to fit in with her new step-family and thinks that she’s being mistreated. In Mirror, the stepmother isn’t a witch and is actually Snow White’s ally. I'm having lots of fun with Mirror, weaving in Crusades and druids and all sorts of cool stuff.

3. Why do you write what you do?

Like many people, I’ve always wanted to travel to the past, but until someone invents a time machine, historical fiction is the best way to do that. An author who does careful research and writes compellingly can transport a reader to a different time.

I also love examining familiar stories from an unfamiliar point of view. My first experience of this genre was Grendel (John Gardner) and I love The Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Tom Stoppard) and other. Recent favorites are March (Geraldine Brooks) and The Penelopiad (Margaret Atwood), which gave me the seed of an idea for King of Ithaka, the story of Homer’s Odyssey from the point of view of Odysseus’s son, Telemachos. Dark of the Moon is the tale of the Minotaur as told by the Minotaur’s sister, Ariadne, and his killer, Theseus.

4. What is the hardest part about writing?

Middles! E. L. Doctorow famously said that just as when you take a drive at night you need to know where you’re going, you need to know where you’re going when you’re writing, but that in both cases you don’t need to know every tiny turn in the road. The farthest you need to see ahead of you is as much as you can make out in your headlights.

My headlights sometimes dim and sometimes lead me down dead-end streets, and then I have to turn around and figure out where I am and how to get back on track. I have a lousy sense of direction, and when I get lost while driving I panic with the irrational fear that I’ll never reach my goal and will drive around in circles until my car runs out of gas, and I get that same feeling in the middle of every book. I just have to remind myself that so far I’ve always made it, and this time won’t be any different.

I hope. 

Update: Vicky Alvear Shecter, author of wonderful fiction and nonfiction set in the ancient world, has responded to her tag! Read her post here.

I’ve tagged three authors to continue the chain—I’ll let you know next week if any of them have the time to participate!
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