Meanwhile, our Finding Neverland YA Lit Crawl seemed to be just what was needed to put LitQuake in the running for a juicy $25K grant, as was reported in today’s Chronicle. Are we not the coolest? Do we not spread sunshine (and apparently big money) wherever we go? Congratulations to everybody who took part! Maybe next year we’ll all be readers, and this fabulous event about books and writers will be bigger and badder than ever!
Month: November 2005
Day of the Turkey
Random Insights: Well, so much for “edgy.” The National Book Award for Young People’s Literature went to Jeanne Birdsall’s The Penderwicks, her first published book, and a decidedly tame tale of sisters befriending bunnies and a lonely boy. Okay, it’s not truly YA — it could more be said to be a middle-grade novel, maybe one can’t argue the ‘edgy’ thing here successfully, but why am I unsurprised that so sweet a book is a winner? Edgy isn’t dead, but I’m glad there seems to be room at last for something else.
As for my own brush with glory, it’s decidedly less glorious than I had hoped. I do have an agent. I do have a manuscript being shopped. I have had rejections. No more than the usual, but having them come through the filter of someone so sympathetic is almost — seems — no, is worse. Having someone tell me that ‘this is the way the business goes’ isn’t helpful — I want to hear where next we’re sending it!
Some of the reasons for not liking my last piece were that:
a.) it featured far too much about a secondary character,
b.) we’re asked to believe too much about the secondary character without being shown: why aren’t we spending time in his home, with he and his parents?
c.) the main character is much too strong to need the secondary character. Why isn’t something else going on in her life to engage her readers?
d.) the storyline line is going in too many different directions for us to engage with the character.
Sigh. I do wish the editors would pick a gripe and stick with it. One manuscript can’t be all of these things!
I wish you a happy Harvest holiday. Usually at this time of year, it’s time to settle in with mugs of something lovely and mulled, pajamas and good books. Well, the weather is simply relentlessly bright, so while I’m thankfully not bummed out on rain and struggling to be peppy, I am having trouble staying indoors, but rest assured I will be reading through a couple of “vacation days” I give myself, and will be able to post new book reviews on our sister site. Then, the last few days of the month, I send off another piece to my bemused agent, and begin the round of critiquing and revisions — a.k.a. “the trial by acid” once again.
Good luck to all of you as you strive to keep your butts in your chairs and write through the holidays!
From the New Yorker to Children's Lit: Adam Gopnik
Another cheery draftee to children’s literature is New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik, profiled in The San Francisco Chronicle this morning. Interviewer Regan McMahon writes:
“He was 75 pages into writing an adult novel and realized “it was boring.” Then one day he was in the American Library in Paris, in the room with what he calls stories of the marvelous and the supernatural — “I hate to say children’s literature because it sounds condescending” — “and I thought, those are the kind of books I loved with all my heart and soul, rather than reading with my mind and taste. And as long as I was going to write a book, I wanted to write it from my favorite images and my deepest obsessions, and that was the kind of book where the magical and extraordinary suddenly enters into the life of an ordinary person.”
The article gives a quick sketch of the book’s premise; The King in the Window tells the tale of 11-year-old Oliver, an American boy in Paris with his family who gets drawn into a parallel universe by the revenants in the hotel mirrors who’ve stayed ‘active’ since the reign of Louis XIV. This middle grade novel sounds like an extraordinarily creative jaunt into the paranormal.
Admittedly, it’s always great when an able, articulate general fiction writer crosses over to the kid’s side of the world. However, Gopnik bewilders me a little when he tries to find an apt description of the other literature from the American Library in Paris that he read as he was working on this piece. Do the words ‘children’s literature’ sound condescending to you? (Gopnik prefers to call it ‘literature of the marvelous and the supernatural.’) Whatever you call it, the heartfelt sentiment that ‘these are the books that I love’ rings true, and I hope we all follow the call to write what we love, no matter what anyone else says is marketable, acceptable or trendy.
YHappy WritingY
From the New Yorker to Children’s Lit: Adam Gopnik
Another cheery draftee to children’s literature is New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik, profiled in The San Francisco Chronicle this morning. Interviewer Regan McMahon writes:
“He was 75 pages into writing an adult novel and realized “it was boring.” Then one day he was in the American Library in Paris, in the room with what he calls stories of the marvelous and the supernatural — “I hate to say children’s literature because it sounds condescending” — “and I thought, those are the kind of books I loved with all my heart and soul, rather than reading with my mind and taste. And as long as I was going to write a book, I wanted to write it from my favorite images and my deepest obsessions, and that was the kind of book where the magical and extraordinary suddenly enters into the life of an ordinary person.”
The article gives a quick sketch of the book’s premise; The King in the Window tells the tale of 11-year-old Oliver, an American boy in Paris with his family who gets drawn into a parallel universe by the revenants in the hotel mirrors who’ve stayed ‘active’ since the reign of Louis XIV. This middle grade novel sounds like an extraordinarily creative jaunt into the paranormal.
Admittedly, it’s always great when an able, articulate general fiction writer crosses over to the kid’s side of the world. However, Gopnik bewilders me a little when he tries to find an apt description of the other literature from the American Library in Paris that he read as he was working on this piece. Do the words ‘children’s literature’ sound condescending to you? (Gopnik prefers to call it ‘literature of the marvelous and the supernatural.’) Whatever you call it, the heartfelt sentiment that ‘these are the books that I love’ rings true, and I hope we all follow the call to write what we love, no matter what anyone else says is marketable, acceptable or trendy.
YHappy WritingY