Actually, it is homework I’m looking forward to. For the Oklahoma SCBWI conference, Joni Sensel, who is leading the fantasy intensive, has asked us to read or reread the first chapter of several books. I’d read about half the books on her list and had fun reading the first chapters of others. One of them, and the most chilling (no pun intended (if you haven’t read it yet, go here and see what I mean) was the opening chapter of Beth Revis’s upcoming 2011 release, Across the Universe.  I’m keeping a notebook on my thoughts on these chapters.

Another upcoming event which requires homework is Darcy Pattison’s Novel Revision Workshop which I am attending in early November. For this workshop, we each must read manuscripts from three other workshop participants. I can’t wait to see what I get to read! We also must read two craft books, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers and The First Five Pages.

So, I have a lot of homework to do, but it will be fun. Anybody else going to either of these events?

September is going to be chock-full of writing-related events for me. My bookshelves may collapse from all the extra weight they are about to gain. Take a look:

At our next Houston SCBWI meeting, we will be discussing the amazing line-up of speakers for our regional conference which will be held April 9, 2011. We will have Kate Fletcher, an editor at Candlewick, Laurent Linn, Creative Director with Simon and Schuster, Abby Ranger, an editor with Disney Hyperion, agent Sara Megibow from the Kristin Neslon Agency, Anna Webman, an agent with Curtis Brown LTD, and author of the Ellie McDoodle series Ruth McNally Barshaw.

I signed up in time to get my choice of afternoon intensives for the OKSCBWI conference —a session on fantasy with Joni Sensel, author of The Farwalker’s Quest and The Timekeeper’s Moon. Other speakers include Sonia Gensler whose upcoming YA novel The Revenant, a Victorian ghost story set in a Cherokee girl’s school in the old west, debuts in 2011.  Also speaking is a wonderful lady I met at the Houston conference in February, Anna Meyers. She is the author of numerous YA and MG novels, including her latest, Time of the Witches. There’s a great promotional video of this novel produced by Stages Theatre for Youth of Clarksville, Arkansas. Cool, huh? Tammi Sauer whose newest release is the adorable Mostly Monsterly, will be leading a picture book intensive.

Smart Chicks Kick It comes to Houston September 15, courtesy of Blue Willow Bookshop. Authors appearing at this event are Kelly Armstrong, Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan, Cassandra Clare, Melissa Marr, Alyson Noel and Margie Stohl. I’ll have to get there way early just to find a place to stand!

ll be attending the Southwest Texas SCBWI conference with Sarah Shumway, HarperCollins Editor, Julie Ham, Charlesbridge Associate Editor, award-winning author Carmen Tafolla, award-winning illustrator Heather Powers, and Art Avila, art director from San Antonio’s Raining Popcorn Media.

And last, on Sunday, September 26, from 2-5 p.m., Houston area children’s authors and the Friends of Evelyn Meador Library are having an ice-cream benefit at The Seabrook Community House, located at 1210 Anders St., Seabrook, TX 77586. Proceeds from sales of autographed books and paving stones will be donated to support the construction of the new library to replace the one destroyed by Hurricane Ike. So come enjoy FREE ice cream and family-fun activities with local authors: Mary Dodson Wade, author of I’m Going to Texas/Yo Voy a Tejas; Pam Van Scoyoc, author of Angel Wings; Pat Miller, author of Substitute Groundhog; Deborah K. Frontiera, author of Living on Sisu: The 1913 Union Copper Strike Tragedy; Pam Calvert, author of Princess Peepers; Wendy Lanier, author of A Pebble First Guide to Texas Symbols; Ana Maria Rodriguez, author of the series, Animal Secrets Revealed; Gail Greenberg, author of No Pig’s Brain Soup, Please! Marianne J. Dyson, author of Home on the Moon. Other authors attending will include Carmen Bredeson; Jo Harper; Margaret McManis; Kimberly Morris; Jenny Moss; and Alicia Richardson.

Yep, all this in one month—plus trying to nail down all the plotting and planning on my new WIP. I’m lucky to have such a wonderful, tolerant and supportive family! Due to the SWTX SCBWI conference, I’ll miss the Houston YA/MG Writers meeting, so I hope somebody takes notes. I’ll try to do the same for all of you who can’t make it to these other great September events.

This is such a great group! Some of the established authors have dozens of books published and they take their time to mentor those of us who are newer to this business. We went through this list point by point, and the published authors spoke up on the various plot issues to talk about how they have dealt with a particular problem.

As we were discussing each point, related issues sometimes came up. While we were on point six—The Plot Is Too Shallow—someone brought up The Rule of Twenty. This is a brainstorming technique to solve the problem of shallow plots: come up with twenty crazy, impossible things that could happen. Of course they won’t all work, but this is about brainstorming—no self editing allowed! Within these twenty, perhaps something one or two of them will contain the spark needed to liven up the weak plot.

Another person brought up a concept she said she had heard (or read) from Aprilynne Pike, author of Wings and Spells. Before writing a book, she comes up with sixty possible turning points for the story. If she can’t think of at least sixty, she doesn’t write that book.

One of our writers offered another great tip she heard (or read) from romance author Cherry Adair: write bios for each character in a different color ink. Then when you are writing the book, cut (not copy) information and paste it into the scenes. Your color-coded bios will shrink as you write until eventually each character’s bio page is empty. This ensures the characters are fleshed out and nothing gets repeated.

When we were on point nine—The Sequence is Illogical—someone brought up a concept discussed by Dwight Swain in his classic book Techniques Of The Selling Writer. The short story is this: scenes are followed by sequels. The structure of a scene = Goal, conflict, Disaster. The sequel =  Reaction, Dilemma, Decision.

Great meeting, great folks. Special thanks to Rose Moriarty for leading this super discussion!

Maggie didn’t have to wait for the crowd to warm up. She brought the party mood with her—she arrived early looking happy, relaxed and ready to have a great time. Thanks to all the bloggers who have interviewed her, Maggie said she already knew what The Question about Linger would be. When she went on tour to promote Shiver, the bloggers had already prepared her for the one question that everybody asked:

What inspired you to write Shiver?

Her answer: I’m a terrible person. I like to see people cry. I stay young on the tears of my readers. I’m really eighty.

So, The Question (actually, there are two questions with a capital Q) all the bloggers have for Linger is:

1) Did you do a lot of research like read werewolf books?

2) Why Werewolves?

Answer Q1— I did hours of medical research and spent hours torturing my father (doctor) about viruses and genetics. I spent hours watching wolf documentaries, so many that my dogs started howling in their sleep. I spent hours reading rehab forums and spent more time reading poetry that I spent on personal hygiene. But no, I did not read werewolf books. Everybody knows about werewolves.

Answer Q2— I don’t write about werewolves. I write about wolves and teens. They’re never teens and wolves at the same time.

And of course, everyone wanted to know when the final book in the series, Forever, will be released. Maggie said it is scheduled to come out at this time next summer. She taunted the crowd a bit by giving us two hints about Forever: There will be happier and sadder moments than the other two books. but no, she won’t tell us what color the cover is or what color the ink will be.

She also teased us that while on a recent vacation to Nagshead, while her husband and kids frolicked int the surf, she wrote Forever spoilers in the sand and cackled as the waves washed them away.

Maggie did give us her thoughts on who should play in the movie for Shiver. Click here to see her picks.

And for the fans of her Books of Faerie series, Lament and Ballad, she told us that the name for the third book is Requiem.

Thanks for visiting us, Maggie! And thanks to Blue Willow for hosting this fun event.

In the first part of the morning, I participated in the query letter discussion. One of the group’s founders, Jessica Capelle, led this session and handed out several pages of links. (Of course, I lost them. Maybe they are in my car, but it is pouring down rain, so I’ll check later. If I find the pages when the rain stops, I’ll post the links.) It was a good conversation. I brought a copy of the query letter I intend to send out soon and kept it on the table while we talked. During the course of our conversation, I managed to trim my query by thirty-seven words. Nice.

The second session I went to was a discussion about revision. Dottie Enderle led the talk, and Mary brought in a revision letter from her editor. Other authors have shown me their revision letters, but I’ve never seen one like this. It was massive. Actually, I thought it was wonderful—a fantastic, detailed breakdown of work that needed to be done, and Mary did it.

Mary Lindsey’s YA novel, Shattered Souls, will be coming out next fall from Penguin.

So I missed two sessions—one on character development and one on creativity. I’ll have to work on cloning myself for the next meeting.

Okay, here are the links for getting started with query letters and your agent search:

http://querytracker.net

http://writersdigest.com/article/101-websites-2009-publishing

http://ktliterary.com/category/ask-daphne

http://caseylmccormick.blogspot.com/

http://openquery.blogspot.com

http://pred-ed.com

http://www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog/

http://kidlit.com/

http://pubrants.blogspot.com/

http://cba-ramblings.blogspot.com/

http://theswivet.blogspot.com/

And finally, when you need to laugh,

http://slushpilehell.tumblr.com/page/1

Thanks for this great list, Jessica!

There was a time may years ago when I thought I wanted to illustrate picture books. So when I am critiquing a pb, I can’t help imagining the illustrations. I used to envision these in my own style of painting, bright watercolors and organic shapes. But in these two cases, we now know who will be illustrating them, so I have a much better idea of what the style of the illustrations will be, which makes imagining them even more fun. Our critique group has been given sneak peeks at a few sketches for one of the books, but the other is being kept top secret. I won’t be giving anything away here, but I think it’s okay to mention the illustrators’ names and send you to their websites for an eyeful of their beautiful work.

The illustrator for Kathy Duval’s I Think I See a UFO is Adam McCauley. To read an interview with him, check out this wonderful blog, Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

Robert Crawford will be illustrating Varsha Bajaj’s T is for Taj Mahal. For a glimpse of some of Sleeping Bear Press’s other titles in this series take a look at their catalogue.

It’s going to be such fun to see these projects come to life!

13-13-11-1-13-13-17-3-8-12-13-22-21

After revision:

13-11-4-11-1-10-13-17-3-8-10-13-22-6

Quite a difference! I did not lose any information and the paragraph became livelier. This is one of those little things that really get me excited about revising. Such a small thing can make such a big change in voice.

So now that I have finished page 1, I’m off to evaluate the remaining 217.

Meanwhile, though I am still working on my outline, I couldn’t resist writing the first chapter of my new WIP. In fact, I think I’ll write the second and third chapters as well, then get back to serious work on the outline. I’ve written lots of personal stories for my characters, but it’s good to see them in action—it stokes my enthusiasm for the story.

Writing-wise, it has been a busy summer so far, and I hope it will speed up instead of slowing down. Many of my critique friends have irons in the fire now, so it’s fun to watch my in-box for their exciting news. How about you? Any news to share?

Next week I’ll get a chance to critique someone else’s manuscript. I’m really looking forward to it. The writer is someone with talent and education, so I know the manuscript will be clean and well-executed.

As a response to a comment in my last post, I mentioned that after writing an outline for a chapter, I aske myself four questions: 1) What is the MC trying to do? 2) What goes wrong? 3) How does he try to fix it? 4) Why does this matter?

Even though this helps keep me on track and keeps my story moving forward, I sometimes make incorrect assumptions about how readers will interpret my story’s main events and the characters’ feelings about these actions. So to help me critique someone else’s manuscript, I have devised a system. It can come off a bit blunt, so I try to make sure the authors know my intentions before they see the results. As I read each chapter of the ms I am critiquing, I make notes—bullet-point style—about what I see as 1) the main actions that occurred and 2) the important information which was imparted.

If I mention something I thought was important but the author intended as a trivial aside, the author can take another look at it from my (the reader’s) perspective and consider softening the impact. Likewise, if I do not mention something the author intended as a crucial element, she/he can see that it went over my (and possibly other’s) head(s) and can take the opportunity to strengthen that element. The best case scenario is when the author can see from my bullet points that the actions and information were clearly understood. Worse case scenario—neither of these two categories has any bullet points beneath it.

This analysis at the end of each chapter helps the author see where the reader’s view of what is happening in the story may diverge from the author’s intentions. Of course, I do the usual critique stuff, too, but from the comments I’ve gotten from those whose manuscripts I have critiqued, the bullet–point information is really helpful. And smiley-faces, lots of smiley-faces, for all the bits I thought were especially well done.

I’ve also been writing background stories for certain characters. My story has myths and legends which are referred to, but not necessarily spelled out in the book, but knowing the whole legend and understanding the roots of the myths ahead of time makes it easier for the characters to discuss and fear them. Plus, it really brings the character who is most involved with the tale into focus.

Unlike my real book, my background stories have no outline—just an idea of where I want it to end up. This is fun, free-writing. The background I wrote yesterday ran a little over two-thousand words. I’m pleased with it because a character I had thought of as tired and gloomy unveiled a creative, jokester side to her that I had been unaware of when I originally planned her. Now I’m looking forward to going through my outline and making sure she gets enough page time to do her justice.

I won’t be writing much today, though. Today is all about family—kids, grandparents and birthday cake. I hope y’all have a happy week!