The YA Guy Has Arrived!

I've started a new blog, "YA Guy," which will focus on YA fiction (especially, though not exclusively, YA fiction written by and for guys).  Check it out at:

http://theyaguy.blogspot.com/

"Bell's Yells" will continue to provide posts about writing, the environment, and other matters of importance in my life.  But if you're specifically interested in YA fiction, I encourage you to follow "YA Guy."

Looking forward to continuing to serve the blogging community, at least until my head explodes from running two blogs simultaneously!

Bad Agent

In a previous post, "Double Agent," I talked about my less-than-positive experience with the first agent for my debut novel, Survival Colony 9. Fortunately, as I detailed there, the story had a happy ending for me, as I fired the first agent and found another who's been supportive and effective (and who's responsible for the book securing a publisher).

But sometimes, even today, I ask myself: should I have seen the warning signs with the first agent before I committed to her? Could I have acted differently and not wasted three or four months of my writing life? Could I have bypassed an ineffective agent and found my current agent more quickly?

I don't know.

The problem with bad agents--by which I mean ineffective agents, not unscrupulous ones, because I don't believe my first agent was unscrupulous--is that they don't advertise their badness up front. Their ineffectiveness might not be apparent until after you sign with them. In fact, there are agents who aren't "bad" in the general sense but who, for whatever reason, just don't work out with a particular writer.

This problem, I think, is particularly acute for debut authors. We're just so darn excited to have an agent make an offer, it can be especially difficult to sort out the bad from the good.

So for what it's worth, here are the things I wish I'd thought about last year, before I signed. I offer this list in addition to all the other information that's out there about choosing an agent (e.g., make sure the agent has a record of recent sales in your genre, etc.). This list grows out of my own experience as a debut. And it's not all about the agent; it's at least half (maybe more than half) about me. My hope is that it'll be helpful to someone else.

1. Enthusiasm is great, but let's be realistic.

In our very first conversation, before she'd even read the full manuscript, BA (Bad Agent) was raving about my book, asking if it was part of a series, talking about movie rights. That might have meant she was genuinely blown away by the book. But it might also have meant she was desperate, naive, inexperienced, or deranged. As a debut, it's easy to get your head turned, so I'd be cautious about agents who come on too strong.

2. Agents had better be good readers.

In a later conversation, I found it puzzling when BA had trouble remembering the names of characters in my book, but I didn't make a big deal of it. I said to myself, "Well, she reads a lot, there are a lot of unfamiliar names in this futuristic novel, so it's not surprising she can't instantly call them to mind." In retrospect, I think that was a mistake on my part; I think her fuzziness about details meant she hadn't read the book closely enough, and that should have been a warning sign.

3. Listen to others.

Being a good boy, I dutifully contacted the clients to whom BA connected me. But oddly enough, when those clients offered only lukewarm praise, I ignored them. I rationalized, read between the lines, tried to come up with excuses that would quell the nagging doubts in my mind. None of them had said she was bad; they just hadn't praised her to the skies. I should have asked them point-blank why they hadn't. And if BA herself couldn't come up with anyone who would praise her to the skies, I should have asked her point-blank for an explanation too.

4. Fear breeds bad decisions.

I see now that one of the main reasons I accepted BA's offer is that I was afraid: afraid that if she didn't represent me, no one else would. This being the first offer I'd received, I told myself it was the only offer I would receive; even though I had another agent interested in looking at the book, I turned her down and went with BA. This, of course, represented flawed thinking on my part; I should have realized that if the book wasn't good enough to attract another agent, chances are it wasn't good enough to be sold. It's very hard, especially for a debut, to turn down an offer. But sometimes, that's the best thing to do.

5. First drafts aren't best drafts.

This, I think, is the hardest lesson. Every writer knows that the first thing you produce isn't likely to be your best. Early drafts need lots of work before they're ready for submission, much less publication. But what if the same is true of agents? What if the first offer should be subjected to particular scrutiny, because it's the first? Had someone told me this a year ago, I probably would have dismissed it: to me, and I suspect to many debut authors, the first offer is uniquely special, the act that confirms one's legitimacy as a writer. To question it is tantamount to questioning oneself. But maybe, for that very reason, one should question it. In my case, I should have grilled BA. I should have been a hard-ass. I should have made sure she passed every test I threw at her, and then I should have thrown three more tests at her just for good measure. If, at the end of that process, I wasn't satisfied, I should have declined representation and continued my search.

The common thread in the above remarks is that insecurity and inexperience--the two factors every debut author faces--need to be countered by reason and willpower. Don't believe every glowing word an agent says. Don't be reluctant to challenge an agent if s/he commits strange gaffes concerning your book. Don't accept anything less than the best from the agent or anyone else associated with him/her. Don't tell yourself s/he's the only agent in the world for you. Don't confuse first with best.

In the end, though there are certainly bad agents, it's the author's responsibility to find one who isn't.

Taken by TAKEN

While waiting for my own debut YA sci-fi novel, Survival Colony Nine, to come out, I've been reading as many debut YAs as I can get my greedy little hands on.  Most that I've read have been good.  But there are some I've been wanting to read more than most.

Erin Bowman's Taken falls into that category.  I'm not sure what grabbed me when I first heard about it.  Maybe it's the premise: a small town in the future where males mysteriously vanish at the age of eighteen.  Maybe it's the really cool cover.  Maybe it's that the author replies to all my tweets.

I don't know.  Whatever it is, I was really looking forward to Taken.

And now that I've read it, I'm happy to report....  It's really good.

The premise, as I said, is intriguing: in the town of Claysoot, there are no adult males, because all boys disappear in a bright beam of light on the day of their eighteenth birthdays.  This disappearance, which the townspeople call "The Heist," is completely unexplained--because once you're Heisted, you're gone for good.  The story begins as seventeen-year-old Gray Weathersby awaits the Heist of his older brother Blaine.  Once Blaine is gone, further unexplained events lead Gray to climb the wall surrounding Claysoot in search of answers.  No one's ever come back from climbing the wall.  But maybe Gray will be different....

Well, of course he'll be different, or there'd be no story.  I'm not going to give anything else away, but suffice it to say he makes it over the wall and discovers a lot of really wild stuff.

Taken is impressive in a number of ways.  The writing is crisp and clean, the characters are well rendered, the pace is fast (a bit too fast; Gray's impulsiveness sometimes seems excessive), and the world is suitably original.  At first I thought it was rather derivative of The Hunger Games--the Heist seemed reminiscent of the Reaping, while the main character, Gray, is a feisty hunter who favors the bow and arrow and whose relationship with his sibling is central to the plot--but Bowman takes the story in new and surprising directions.  The revelation of the mystery behind the Heist wasn't quite as awesome as I'd hoped it would be, but it was awesome enough.  Especially for a debut, Taken was good stuff.

And even better, I get to meet Bowman in a few weeks at a Young Adult authors tour.  I can purchase my autographed copy, talk a little shop, and thank her in person for her book--and for replying to all my tweets.

Pantsers of the World, Unite!

A Facebook friend asked me to post on the topic of writing without a plan.  Ever eager to oblige, here goes....

Conventional wisdom holds that when it comes to drafting, there are two kinds of writers: Planners and Pantsers.

The former plan everything out.  The latter fly by the seat of their pants.

Now, like most dichotomies, this one falls apart in actual practice.  There's no writer so organized that s/he doesn't wing it sometimes, nor is there any writer so carefree that s/he doesn't plan sometimes.

However, if we're thinking not in terms of absolutes but in terms of tendencies and dispositions, it's certainly true that some writers lean more toward the Planner side, while others incline more toward the Pantser side.

I'm more of a Pantser.  I like to discover what I'm writing while I'm writing it.  Part of this comes from my history as a teacher, where I've had plenty of opportunity to watch emergent writers discover their skills, their ideas, their point of view over the course of a semester or a paper or a paragraph.

But my Pantser-ish tendencies are also a matter of disposition: I find it boring and tedious to plan everything out.  I find that it limits my creativity rather than liberating it.  I know I'm going to change everything anyway, so why bother?

Case in point: my forthcoming YA novel, Survival Colony Nine, started only with a setting (post-apocalyptic desert world), a name (Querry), and a relationship (father-son).  After a few pages an antagonist emerged: the creatures I call the Skaldi.  After 150 pages or so, I decided I needed to be a bit clearer in my own mind about where the story was headed, so I wrote a series of 2-sentence summaries for the remaining chapters.  Shortly thereafter, I also decided I needed to be clear about the physical layout of an important plot space, so I drew a map.  Finally, as the character list grew, I typed up a running roster of their names.

But that was the extent of my planning.  The rest emerged through the writing and revision.

And oh, did it ever emerge through the writing and revision!  The narrator's voice settled into a rhythm, new characters popped up, relationships among existing characters morphed and solidified, the nature of the Skaldi became clear, the history of the world came into focus, and so on and so forth.  The stuff I'd planned out changed radically while I was writing it (I ended up scribbling changes on the original print-out), and even more radically through five complete revisions: one chapter vanished entirely, two others fused, scenes from still others were created anew or modified or deleted or moved.

In short, I found out what I was trying to say in the act of trying to say it.  The book ended up in a place I never anticipated when I started it, but I'm very happy with where it ended up.

Another case in point: the sequel to Survival Colony Nine, the working title of which is Scavenger of Souls.  When I started, I had only that title, which sounded kind of cool to me.  I also knew I had to take my narrator to a new place, both physically and emotionally; I had to open up his world to new vistas, new possibilities, new threats and challenges.  But what any of those things was going to be, I had very little idea.

I'm now two-thirds of the way through the manuscript-in-progress, and I have a pretty good idea of it all.  But there's still room for surprise and discovery.

The bottom line is this: there is no "right" way to write a novel.  (Or a poem, or a play, or an essay, or an anything.)  In a previous post, "Wake Up and Smell the Novels," I harped at overly restrictive advice about how to structure one's novel; here, I would emphasize that the same applies to how one writes one's novel.

If you're a Planner, you must have a good reason to be so.  If you're a Pantser, same deal.  Don't try to be a Planner when you're a Pantser at heart just because somebody in publishing told you you have to be.  And don't try to write by the seat of your pants if, deep down, you thrive on the planning process.

Be grateful that in writing, as in life, there are many roads to the realization of your dreams.

The Part-Time Full-Time Writer

I'm a full-time writer.  But I write part-time.

Huh?

Let me explain.

I've got a full-time job which, for the most part, pays the bills.  (My advance for my debut YA novel should come in handy when it arrives, but it's not going to keep me afloat forever.)  I seriously envy those writers whose fame and/or life circumstances and/or willpower and/or ability to give up creature comforts enable them to forego the "pay-the-bills" job.  Those people are awesome.

But they're not me.

When my daughter was a baby, I had a part-time job that enabled me to stay home with her two out of five weekdays.  I'm so glad I had that opportunity.  She's not a baby anymore, but we're still very close, and I'm convinced those early daddy days are what cemented our relationship.

Now, though, I teach full-time.  I have summers off and all that, but during the school year, I'm on campus most of the week.  And my circumstances don't enable me to change that--or at least, not without changing the living conditions of three additional people whose needs and desires I don't feel it's my right to ignore.

So I write part-time.  But I'm a full-time writer.

This means two things to me:

First, when I have the time to write, I write as if it's the only thing in my life.  I concentrate on the writing, logging as much solid, uninterrupted time at the keyboard as I possibly can.  I find music and television (not to mention Facebook, Twitter, and other social media) distracting when I write, so I resist the impulse to have noise in the background and multiple windows open on the computer.  When I'm writing, I write.

But more importantly, when I say I'm a full-time writer, I mean that writing is one of the things--though not the only thing--that defines me as a person, full-time.  It's the same, actually, as being a father: though I'm not with my kids every moment of the day (for which, I assure you, they're profoundly grateful), there's never a moment of any day that I don't think of myself as a dad.  Same with being a husband.  Like most married people, my wife and I are only together part-time, thanks to jobs and family and friends and so forth.  But I'm never not a husband.  It's who I am.

I'm also never not a fan of fantasy literature and film, never not a social activist and environmentalist, never not a teacher, never not a lover of language and bad jokes and frogs and gorillas.  I may never see another frog or gorilla in my life--though the former are pretty numerous at the pond near my home--but I've always loved them, and I love them every moment of my life to this day.

Writing can't be a full-time job for everyone.  But that doesn't mean you can't be a full-time writer.

Remembering E. L. Konigsburg

I was greatly saddened by the news that two-time Newberry Medal-winning author E. L. Konigsburg died Friday.  I remember her novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1968) as one of the books that made me believe, way back when, that I might grow up to be an author.

I don't recall the exact age at which I read Mixed-Up Files.  I was probably 9 or 10.  It was certainly before I encountered J. R. R. Tolkien (at age 13), another huge influence.  My old copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have been lost and replaced, but my original paperback copy of Konigsburg's book is still on my shelves.  A few years ago, I read it aloud to my daughter.  With any luck, it'll still be on my shelves when it's time to read to my grandchildren.

Like all kids who dream of being writers, I read a lot.  I read whatever I could get my hands on, whether that was fantasy, sci-fi, history, travel, memoir, or anything else.  My mom seemed to buy a lot of books for my little sister, so I read a lot of what she had on her shelf, which meant a lot of Judy Blume, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Roald Dahl.  (My older brother read nothing but sports biographies, one of the few genres that left me cold.)  I assume Mixed-Up Files was another book I nabbed from my sister, along with such titles as Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH and Charlotte's Web.

Even though I was reading it, I didn't know at that time that there was a genre called "middle grade" or "young adult" literature.  Maybe the terms hadn't yet been developed by the industry.  All I knew was that certain books resonated with me, inspired me.  Made me say, "Man, I wish I had written that!"

Mixed-Up Files was at the top of that list.  It blew me away.  It was a coming-of-age story, a mystery, an adventure novel, an introduction to art history (I'd never heard of Michelangelo before), and more all at once.  The story seemed so simple--two kids run away and hide out in a museum--but at the same time it amazed me how much surprise, insight, and raw life Konigsburg wrung out of that premise.  I loved the characters, especially Claudia; I think I even had a little crush on her.  The story turned out exactly as I felt it had to, and yet still it made me feel as if I'd never seen the end coming.  To this day, I'm not sure how Konigsburg pulled it off.

There are so many favorite passages I could pull from this book, but here's one that strikes a particular chord for me:

I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal.  But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything.  And you can feel it inside you.  If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you.  You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them.  It's hollow.

As a teacher, a parent, a writer, and a human being, that passage speaks to me strongly, tells me what kind of life I want to live.

Thank you, E. L. Konigsburg, for giving this to me.

On Info-Dumping

I was thinking about the subject of this post recently, while reading a futuristic YA novel.  Good story, interesting premise, tense and intense opening scene.  And then, just as the scene got REALLY gripping....

INFO-DUMP

It stopped everything cold.  It lasted only a page or so, during which time the author filled us in on the history of the world that had brought the protagonist to this moment in time.  But for me, it killed the scene.  I wish the author had let us find out organically, as the plot unfolded, how the world had come to be.

That, to me, is the definition of an info-dump.  Providing information isn't bad in itself; in fact, providing information is precisely what novels do.  But when the information appears grafted onto the plot, or distracts from it, or reeks of "my readers might not know what's going on, so I'd better tell them," it's an info-dump, and it's generally a bad idea.

To give a personal example, here's a draft of a scene I wrote for a novel titled Ecosystem.  This scene occurs early in the novel--maybe ten pages in--and I tried to insert the information more "naturally" into the story by presenting it as someone's speech to an audience.  But I still think it's an info-dump.

***

I am first of the Sensors to return.  Not surprisingly, as my circuit was by far the shortest, my track the safest.  A hundred rods into the forest beyond the sward, a quick kill, the same distance back.  The others will have gone deep into the Ecosystem, to places of which I have only heard, places I can only imagine.  In time, if I’m successful, I will seek out those places as well, where the game is thickest and the dangers greatest.  In time, if I live to Aaron’s age, I will train the next generation of Sensors to plunge into the Ecosystem’s everchanging maze.

But today, I will celebrate.  The village will celebrate.  They will celebrate me.

They will meet as always in the great hall, the entire community gathered as one, with the exception of those few assigned this day to ward the periphery.  In the flagstone hearth they will light the fire that is the Ecosystem’s chief grievance against the village, that and the cutting tools with which the threshers keep the greensward from encroaching on the pavilion of stone.  The Sensors will step forward to be acknowledged, to bask in the village’s thankfulness for the risks they take on the commoners’ behalf.  In their identical uniforms of close-fitting brown fur, cut short to expose muscled arms and long legs, the Sensors will stand in a line, aloof, imperturbable, their Sense of the Ecosystem removing them always from the community they are pledged to serve.  And for the first time, wearing the same uniform as they, I will stand among them.

Then Chief Warden Daniel will deliver the customary address, rehearsing our history, reminding the populace of how the Sensors came to be.  He will talk of the old days, when humans were numerous and powerful, when their cities stretched for miles across a landscape subdued by machines.  He will speak of species driven to extinction by the hand of man, of habitats despoiled, life’s essence corrupted.  For us who have known only the Ecosystem these past thousand generations, such a picture will seem fanciful, but none of us will laugh.  And then he will tell of the rise of the Ecosystem, how unseen and undreamed of by those who thought they had secured Earth’s domination, the innumerable threads of life and will knitted themselves into one, sentience burgeoning from dim, disparate signals to full roaring consciousness.  He will speak of cities overwhelmed by jungle, of food sources turned to deadly poisons and others to deadly predators, of virulent pathogens borne by vermin and birds and insects and cultivated crops, of newly weaned livestock feasting on their owners’ blood.  It was a coordinated attack, and it succeeded.  It gave birth to the world we know, a world in which the Ecosystem rules and we who were once its masters hide in its angry shadow.

Then Daniel will talk of the relearning, how the few who were left discovered a Sense of the Ecosystem’s will, and in so doing found ways not so much to fight back but simply to survive, to establish small enclaves the Ecosystem could not breach.  These few were the first Sensors, and as they gathered the people around them there grew the first villages of stone, the first walls and firewells, the first masters and apprentices.  But the Sensors, Daniel will tell us, were meant not to rule but to serve, and once they had established those first villages they willingly relinquished their authority to become what they are today: messengers and mediums, interpreters of the Ecosystem so finely attuned to its ways only they can pass safely through its winding passages in the daily hunt for food, drink, and fuel.  They are selfless, Daniel will say, so selfless they have agreed to serve the communities of which they can never fully be a part, the communities where they can never know the joys of love and family and children.  Perhaps, he will say, his lips curling in a grateful smile, it is their selflessness that is their Sense, their abjuring of mortal pleasures that enables them to project themselves into the Ecosystem and know its will.  Perhaps, too, it is this quality that makes them immune to the Ecosystem’s snares: for when they enter it, they enter it without the concentration of self that marks other humans as objects of the Ecosystem’s rage.

When he is finished the community will applaud, and I will glance at the other Sensors who stand silently around me, and wonder if, like me, they doubt this portrait Daniel has drawn of our class.  I’ll wonder if it is me alone who draws the Ecosystem’s fire, who taunts it, who hates it beyond all measure for what it has done.  And I will wonder too if it hates me with a special fury, if it knows me not just as a human, not just as a Sensor, but as the particular concentration of self that is me.

 

But I will voice none of these thoughts.  As the village's newest Sensor, I will step forward....

 

***

 

From "Then Chief Warden Daniel" on, the info-dump takes over, not relenting until the paragraph beginning "But I will voice none of these thoughts" returns us to the narrative.  It's too much, too soon.  It tells the reader so much about the history of this world, s/he might reasonably feel there's little point in reading on; what's left to discover?

 

It's no good, and the simple solution was to take it out (which I did) and let the reader discover the world's history through action, dialogue, and context.  I kept the info-dump in a separate file in case I needed it later, but the truth is, everything I said in it emerged much more plausibly and inobtrusively elsewhere in the book, so I never needed it after all.

 

So, what do you think?  How do you define or deal with info-dumping?  Why is it so easy to fall into that trap?  I'd love to hear what others think.

Wake Up and Smell the Novels

I recently read a troubling blog post by a well-respected—and, I have no doubt, quite capable—literary agent who specializes in YA fiction.  At the top of her list of how not to begin one’s novel, she wrote the following:

“Waking up: DO NOT.  DON’T.  Don’t even think about it.  Many of the manuscripts I get begin with a character waking up.  Why are you making this choice?  Most good stories begin with a character who has just been knocked out of their usual equilibrium or is going into a tense situation.  Surely, you can begin in a more interesting place than waking up.  And even if the character is waking up into their strange new situation, just change it.  Make them awake.  Do you really want to be exactly like everyone else I reject today?”

I found this post troubling for a number of reasons, foremost of which is that my debut novel, Survival Colony Nine, a futuristic YA, has just been acquired by a very reputable publisher and begins with . . . the main character waking up.

Now, granted, in my novel, the MC is woken up in the middle of the night by another important character (his father, with whom he has a rather contentious relationship); and he’s woken up because a mysterious, unnamed enemy is advancing on their camp; and he’s suffering from amnesia, so he doesn’t know what’s going on; so immediately you have interpersonal conflict, dialogue, tension, mystery, scene, all that good stuff.  Still, my point is this: the novel starts with a character waking up, and I think it was precisely the right way to start this particular novel.

Nor am I alone.  Quite the contrary, I’m in very good company.  One of the finest fantasy novels ever written, Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber, begins with a character waking up.  Rick Riordan’s YA fantasy The Lost Hero, first in a wildly popular series, begins with a character waking up.  And then there’s that little YA novel that begins with the following four words: “When I wake up.”  Maybe you’ve heard of it.  It’s called The Hunger Games.

My guess is that the millions who bought the book aren’t going to be demanding their money back.

As a final example, another of my favorite fantasy novels, Stephen R. Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane, begins with . . . a character walking down the street.  Awake.

You see my point.  For some novels, starting with a character waking up is the right choice.  For others, it’s not.  But I would no more tell writers never to start a book with a character waking up than I would tell them always to do so.

The larger point is this: writing is complex.  There are no rules so absolute that they cannot be broken.  There are rules, yes.  And there’s good writing as well as bad.  There are also personal preferences, which we all should respect.  If you’re of the no-character-waking-up preference, that’s fine.  But that’s a preference, not a doctrine, and it should never be presented as the latter.  To thrive, literature needs to be willing to take risks, to try something that’s not been done before, to challenge and upend what’s considered desirable or even do-able.  Otherwise we end up with cookie-cutter books, and both reading and writing are debased in consequence.

I’ve just begun to read blogs that provide writing advice, so I’m no authority.  But one of my current favorites is by fantasy novelist Victoria Grefer, who hosts the blog “CreativeWriting with the Crimson League.”  Her blog is low-key, accessible, friendly; she presents herself as a writer writing to other writers, not as an unapproachable sage or pundit.  She never snipes, censures, or chides; instead, she encourages and invites, using her own experience as an illustration, not an ultimatum.  I’m not sure how she feels about character wake-ups, but my guess is she’d be cool with them.

So here’s my advice to writers: start your novel any way you please.  Not every agent or publisher will want it, but if it’s good, someone out there sure as heck will.

The Things That Take a While

I wrote my first novel when I was eight years old.

It was titled “The Slowest Runner,” and it concerned the trials of a young man whose chances of winning the big race looked pretty slim.  I’m not sure how I planned to end it, considering I gave up after two chapters (a single typed page).  But I do remember that when I started writing it, I was thinking of myself as a writer, and the manuscript as a novel-in-progress.  I just wasn’t ready to finish it.

In middle school, I took another shot at writing a novel.  This time, having just read The Lord of the Rings, I produced a manuscript that was pretty conventional swords-and-sorcery fare, with humans, elves, dwarves, sorceresses, an Aragorn-esque tracker named (ahem) Nordica, a blue winged pixie named Willidrin (Willi for short), and (I have no idea why) huntsmen who looked like gigantic eyeballs with arms, legs, and feathered hats.  I don’t remember the title, and for all my searching I’ve found only a single sketch that survives.  As I recall, the book bogged down around page fifty, after the sorceress had called all the presumptive heroes together but I discovered I had nothing particularly heroic for them to do.  For the next few years, I drafted several outlines of epic fantasies I planned to write, but the outlines were as far as I got.

I completed my first novel at age sixteen.  Titled To Alter the Past, it told the story of Droman Greywolf, rightful king of a magical land, who is slain on the very doorstep of his castle as he attempts to recover the throne his father lost years before.  Through some magical process, two of the king’s followers bring the narrator, a man from our own world, to Droman’s kingdom.  There they beg him to relive the fallen king’s life in hopes that he will defeat the enemy and change the course of history.  He agrees, of course—otherwise no story—and lives an eventful second life befriending Elves and Catmen, defeating swamp monsters and witches, rescuing damsels in distress and gaining mysterious magical implements from mad hermits, before finally confronting not a mortal man but a demon from the pit at the castle gates.  That précis might make the book sound pretty run-of-the-mill, but in fact it shows a considerable degree of imagination and a fair amount of decent writing.  When a family friend who works in publishing agreed to take a look at it, though, he reacted as anyone but a sixteen-year-old could have predicted he would: “Your writing is good, very good.  But is it publishable?  Not yet.”  I was crushed and briefly flirted with vanity publishing—until I read the books the vanity press sent me and realized they were vastly inferior to my own.  I still have the complete manuscript tucked away in my closet.  I sometimes think it’s the best thing I’ve written.

Completed novel #2 came in college, as my senior honors project.  Titled Selfish People (later changed to The S.A.M.E. Semester when I sought publication), it involved the takeover of a small liberal arts college by a group of radical educators claiming to offer the benefits of their new educational philosophy to the students.  The faculty mentor who read it wrote: “This is a very creditable piece of writing.  It shows considerable fictional talent, ambition, scope, perseverance, literary sensitivity, an acquaintance with literature, and many other virtues needed for writing.  But it is not under any imaginable form publishable.”  Turns out she was right: in the years between college and grad school I revised it, found an agent who seemed interested, but then gave up when the agent went out of business and no other responded positively to my queries.  I was gearing up for doctoral study at that point, and while I still harbored the dream that I might return to novels some day, my focus had turned to writing about literature rather than writing it myself.

And so it went.  In the twenty years that followed, I published three nonfiction academic books and lots of articles, co-edited another book of academic essays, and pretty much put creative writing on indefinite hold.  I imagined a few new novels—one having to do with baseball, another with Thoreau—but they never got any farther than the fantasy novels I’d envisioned as a teenager.  I’d discovered that I was pretty good at academic prose, and it just wasn’t possible to devote attention to fiction-writing with everything else going on in my life.  So I held onto the dream, but nothing came of it.

That changed in 2008, when I finally decided I’d had enough of academic publishing and wanted to return to fiction.  I took a class at a local college to rediscover the craft (and to force myself to actually write something), started this blog, and began to compile a list of credits in fiction and creative nonfiction.  Feeling ready to try the long form again, I produced about a hundred pages of a novel with a faculty member as its main character, but stopped when I realized it was too close to my own life.  I completed another novel I really liked, a grim, dystopian retelling of the Santa Claus fable, but found that no agent or editor would touch it with a twenty-foot pole.

Then, in 2011, having read many books aloud to my children, I said to myself: “Why not try writing a novel for young adults?”  With nothing more than a name for my main character, I started writing.  The story took off.  My daughter, whom I showed some early pages just to make sure I wasn’t completely off-track, really liked it.  At the tail end of 2011, I completed it and started shopping for an agent.  I found one, revised the manuscript for her, parted company with her when her enthusiasm for the project waned, found another agent who loved the book (Liza Fleissig of the Liza Royce Agency), made some further revisions for her, then sat back and waited while she sent it out.  Trickles of interest came in, but no offers.  Liza told me to be patient.  I tried.

And then it happened: on Friday, February 22, 2013, a formal offer for my YA fantasy novel, Survival Colony Nine, arrived from Karen Wojtyla of McElderry Press.  I had turned forty-eight earlier that month.  Forty years after attempting my first novel, forty years after embarking on the dream of my life, I was finally on the road to publication.

Or maybe I’d been on that road all along.

On the day I received the offer, my wife bought me a miniature flower pot topped by Woodstock (in farmer garb) and a small sprouting plant.  The legend on the pot: “Faith is for the things that take a while.”

And that’s no fiction.

February Fantasy

I've been reading a lot of Young Adult fantasy literature lately--partly because I'm writing in the genre, partly because I just plain like it--and I thought I'd take the time to jot down some of my favorite titles. In no particular order, here's an unofficial top 10:

1. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games.  If you haven't read it, trust me: it's as good as they say.  Expert pacing, fully rounded characters, and incisive (but never heavy-handed) social commentary.

2. James Dashner, The Maze Runner.  The world-building is really cool, the plot moves along at breakneck speed, and the Maze itself is utterly brilliant.  I'm eager to see how it looks on the big screen when it comes out next year.

3. Gennifer Albin, Crewel.  Very high-concept, about a world in which women called Spinsters literally weave the stuff of reality.  The writing is as gorgeous as the weaving.

4. Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke and Bone.  I'm not normally a big fan of paranormal romance, but this book, in which an angel and a devil (more or less) fall in love, is distinguished by great writing, a globe-trotting setting, and a backdrop of inter-species warfare that makes the love story particularly poignant.

5. Ann Halam, Snakehead.  A retelling of the Perseus and Andromeda myth that eschews action in favor of mood, setting, and character development.  Kind of the antithesis of the Percy Jackson books (which I like too, by the way).

6. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan.  I read this years ago, when I was a kid, and don't remember liking it.  When I re-read it, I was amazed: the sheer craft is breathtaking.  Nothing like being in the hands of an old pro like Le Guin.

7. Leah Bobet, Above.  Another paranormal romance, I guess--though what's brilliant about this book (aside from its one-of-a-kind style) is the fact that everything "paranormal" about it might easily be explained in terms of mental illness.  A really unusual, powerful reading experience.

8. Ruth Long, The Treachery of Beautiful Things.  Here's one where I didn't really care for the romance, but the setting--the fairy-land of traditional England--was richly and creepily imagined.

9. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit.  If you've been reading this blog, you know I didn't like the film.  But I re-read the book beforehand, and I was struck again by how fresh, graceful, and beautiful Tolkien's tale is, even after all that's come after it.

10. Janet McNaughton, The Secret Under My Skin.  A post-apocalyptic tale that's stylish, thought-provoking, and moving.

So there you have it.  Here's hoping that around this time next year, I can add a book of my own to the list!

Finished!

This is to announce that I've officially finished a draft of my young adult fantasy novel, a month ahead of schedule! Beating my own deadline is not uncommon for me; I get a spurt of energy and creativity at the end, once I've finally figured out what the heck I'm trying to say, and the last couple chapters fly by. (It also helps that the final chapter is presently very short.) But the draft is complete: 304 manuscript pages, roughly 66,000 words, and a plot that wraps up most of the loose ends but still leaves room for the sequel. I did mention this is part of a trilogy, didn't I?

That makes two novels completed in the past two years. Not bad for a guy who hadn't written a word of fiction since college!

So I think I'll take a week off and then get down to the work of revision. A writer's job is never done....

Survival Colony Nine, Doing Just Fine

Just an update on my young adult fantasy novel-in-progress: it's coming along quite nicely. I've hit a very fertile stretch of the writing, and I'm now pleased to report that if I stick with my 2-page-a-day average, I'll be done with a complete draft by the end of November (not December as originally projected). And, the best part of all, my 12-year-old daughter, who's serving as my test audience, really likes it!

I know, that doesn't sound like much; what's she going to say to her dad? "This really sucks, old man"? "Don't quit your day job"? It's no doubt hard for her to disentangle her affection for me from her estimation of the book.

But what the hey. I think it's pretty good, she thinks it's pretty good, and I've logged just over 200 pages, or roughly two-thirds of the projected total. So there's no stopping me now!

Look for it in bookstores. . . . Well, whenever!

Survival Colony Nine

The title of this blog post is the title of the first novel in my planned young adult fantasy trilogy. I finally came up with a title, and though the work was progressing without it, I find that the work's progressing much better with it. In fact, the narrative has finally hit its stride.

For a while there, I was a bit worried. I've written young adult material in the past, but that was in the way past, and I wasn't all that confident in the voice I'd crafted for the first couple chapters. Nor did I believe I'd struck the right balance of narrative, exposition, and dialogue--the right balance for a young adult audience, that is. And finally, I wasn't convinced the plot was sufficiently complex to sustain a novel, much less three. But I kept on writing, hoping it'd come together eventually.

And I believe it has. I'm now in the midst of chapter seven, and the ideas are tumbling out almost faster than I can put them on the page--the characters and plot becoming richer and more complex, the fantasy world becoming more fully realized, the arc of the entire book taking firmer shape in my mind. All of this is good stuff.

Whether it'll be good enough to be published is another matter. But I'm putting that thought on hold for the moment. My plan is to have a complete draft done by the end of the calendar year (which, according to my quickie calculation, I can achieve if I write an average of two pages a day from now until December 31). After that, I'll start revising and looking for agents and/or publishers. And of course, I'll let you know how it all turns out.