I am not

I am just CONSUMED! There are words to be written and doggies to be saved and mountains and mountains of laundry also one of my cats is throwing up a lot and shiz is generally OFF THE HOOK. And so I must continue my quest to clean all the things and buy dog food and diagnose the cat and write a book and I do not know when things will return to (semi) normal but I will tweet and blog again when they do.

I LOVE YOU SO MUCH.

Please don't leave me :(

Lets Talk About Goodreads

Not about reviews. Not about reviewers. Not about whether it is or isn’t a place where one can find honesty. Those discussions are awesome and valuable but I am not going to host one of those here today. Because I want to talk about how Goodreads is a place to find books.

I don’t remember when I first found out about Goodreads, but I think it was sometime in 2009, BEFORE I started writing THE UNBECOMING. I heard about it as a place where you can list the books you’ve read, connect with friends, and recommend books to each other. And I thought:

“Damn. That is genius.”

Because I read. A lot. And I have always read a lot. But when I was in college I was kind of a literary snob and I really couldn’t stand to buy books that might disappoint me and therefore did not read a wide variety of books. I relied heavily, VERY heavily, on the recommendations of friends that had the same taste. I’d have to talk to them, and then have a writing implement on me when they mentioned an awesome book in casual conversation, and remember to write their recommendation down. Then I’d have to know where that written recommendation was or have it on hand the next time I found myself in a bookstore to remember to buy it.

Yeah…

Though my literary tastes have (delightfully!) expanded since then, I still rely most closely on my friends’ recommendations to help guide my choices. Friends I’ve known for decades who know exactly what floats my boat are on Goodreads, and when they add a book to their to-read shelf, I see it in my updates. I click on it. And if the copy sounds interesting? Then I can add it to my to-read shelf. I have lots of friends in the literary world and publishing industry now, and I love seeing what’s on their shelves—what they’re loving and, perhaps, not loving, though loving, to me, is most important.

But regardless of their reactions, the Goodreads system allows me to FIND books. I love browsing brick and mortar bookstores, of course, but anyone who does that on a regular basis knows how hard it can be to find something great when you don’t know what you’re looking for. Sure, there’s the co-op system, which can allow you to find the bigger books publishers want you to know about. But what about the smaller books you might love if only you had the chance? And while super friendly, intelligent, interactive staff can definitely help you (and OMG, I LOVE booksellers, I have them to thank for SO many good recommendations!) sometimes they are busy or sometimes you find that your tastes aren’t similar or you might not find anything you’re really into for hours.

So to me? Goodreads is kind of a miracle. It is a virtual place where I can browse books in my pajamas; books my friends have read, books on my friends’ to-read shelves, and books on those Listopia Lists (Debut Novels of 2011 and YA Novels of 2011 have helped me find a BUNCH I want to read next year). I can add an unlimited amount of books to my to-read shelf, and I can make sub-shelves to keep tracks of the books I plan to read immediately or the books I’ve read in different genres or the books I’ve read on certain lists (like the 1001 books to read before you die; I’ve only read 51 of those, alas). With the Goodreads iPhone app, I was even able to pull up my list of books I wanted to read next when I found myself unexpectedly in a bookstore on my trip to NYC. I felt Very Efficient, and let me tell you, I do not feel that way often.

So, if you are a reader? I think you should get a Goodreads account and see which of your friends also have them. If you are a writer? I think you should get a Goodreads account and see which of your friends also have them. A bonus: you can check out what literary agents and editors and editorial staff are reading, too.

And that never, ever hurts.

This song goes out to:

a very cool person today, who I <3 very much:



That's all for now, folks. Check Twitter later today to find out why!

CELEBRATE GOOD TIMES!

Over 300 people have shelved THE UNBECOMING OF MARA DYER on Goodreads. Even though the real synopsis has yet to be revealed. Even though the cover has yet to be revealed.

SO INTENSE.



Seriously, I am awed. THE UNBECOMING still feels like a tricksy Word Document right now instead of a real book, so I haven’t processed it yet. But seeing those numbers makes me feel like it WILL be. And I have you awesome, beautiful people who have shelved it to thank.

And what better way to do that than to give you something awesome and beautiful?

To enter, I want to know the dystopians YOU are most eagerly anticipating.  Just say so in a comment and you’re good to go!

But if you’d like EXTRA entries? You know ze drill:

+1 New followers of this here blog
+2 If you're already a follower of this here blog
+1 New followers on Twitter
+2 If you're already a follower on Twitter
+1 Linking to my contest on your blog, twitter, etc. Including links! (up to 5)
+3 For posting about my contest on your blog. (Must be an actual post!)
+2 Adding me to your blog roll

And the top commenters (who aren’t spammers, of course), get their extra +4!

Me and math get along like chupacabras and sheep. Which is to say not at all. So please add up your entries in your comments. And for clarity’s sake, your initial comment stating your most eagerly anticipated dystopians counts as one entry. Everything ELSE is gravy. Winners will be selected randomly.

And because I have so many friends from so many countries (dude, I can’t even COUNT the countries anymore I LOVE YOU ALL), this contest will be international TOO.

The contest will end November 16th at 11:59 pm Eastern time. Good day, good luck, and thank you a BILLION TIMES for shelving, and for reading.

My secret to getting published.

So! This past weekend, I got an email from a lovely woman the other day asking me to tell her my “secrets” to getting Simon & Schuster to publish my novel. I was SUPER surprised to get the email and super, super flattered! So I dove into my response with enthusiasm—I started writing back to her, and kept writing, and my response became very, very long. And I thought—well, I never expected anyone to email me asking this question, but maybe, since one person did, more people want to know? About my super magic secret to getting my beloved Simon & Schuster to publish THE UNBECOMING OF MARA DYER?

Well, do ya? 

Okay, here it is: I worked hard. 

You thought I was going to tell you that I had no secrets, right? Well, gotcha! Because that’s my secret. Let me explain. When people talk to me about my book or the book deal or I’m confronted with the (very few) people I don’t know who have read it (no ARCs yet, so this number is small), I am very quick to brush off the compliments with a response about how lucky I was and am. You see, I am not the best taker of compliments, even though it makes me GLOW to hear good things. Like, there’s nothing that puts a smile on my face faster than hearing something nice about my book, or the fact that people care enough to want to read it. But when it’s time for me to respond? I’ll say it was the right place, right time, right agent, right editor, right book. And those things are all true to an extent; there are a bunch of folks who also work super hard on their novels and haven’t been published. Yet. 

But I have a lot of faith, a lot of faith, that they will be. 

Because you dedicated, aspiring authors are writing when your infants are napping and the dishes are done and the pets are fed and when the husband isn’t bothering you, in snatches of 5, 10, or however many minutes you get. You are writing on your thirty minute lunch break from the mentally exhausting day job. You are reading hundreds of industry blogs every day (my count was 115 industry, book, author, and writing blogs before publication, now I am nearing 200) to learn the difference between a problem query and a problem novel. You are reading dozens of novels, both in your genre and out of your genre, and you are reading with a critical eye to find out why these books work, not why they don’t. You are attending writers conferences, in person or online. You are on Twitter, not just chatting (which is valuable) but observing; watching what agents and editors say and following query and #kidlitchat and #yalitchat discussions, whether you agree with the tenor of those discussions or not. 

And like me, you revise until your grey matter aches. You expose your words to public critique. You send your book out to beta readers you’ve found (through Twitter or Absolute Write or Verla Kay or maybe just your friends and family, who can be just as helpful) and discover that more important than getting critiques is knowing what crits to take and which to leave, and you have no idea, you really don’t, because you’re flying blind just like I was. But you do it and you do it again and eventually you find a rhythm; you figure out which of your readers excel at patching plot holes and which excel at consistency and which ones to go to when you just need to hear “OMFG THAT SCENE IS SO HOT,” which is just as important.

And all of this writing and reading about writing and revising and observing may mean that your number of watchable television shows dwindles from a meager eight to three to one, like it did for me. It may mean that after three or five or thirty rounds of revisions, you’ve only been able to tear yourself away from your laptop to watch seven movies in a year, like me. It may mean that the mountain of laundry has eaten your laundry room and is threatening to spill into the kitchen (guilty) or that your children are becoming jealous of your “imaginary friends.” You are working hard, and for no guaranteed payoff.  But that dedication, if you keep at it, will pay off. Maybe your first novel isn’t THE novel. Maybe it will be your eleventh novel that takes the publishing world by storm. Or maybe it will be your first—maybe you will have a dream that so consumes you that you have to write about it and the passion you feel for your story is so strong that readers can feel it, too. But either way? You will have worked hard. Because writing for publication isn’t easy. Not for me or for any of the writers I know and not even for the superstar writers out there. If you have been writing for 10 years you will face challenges and if you’ve been writing for ten months? You will face others. 

So the only secret to getting published? 

Keep at it.  

Don't be Jane.

_{by Shel Silverstein}

Publishing is waiting. Waiting for crit partners to give us feedback on that manuscript we're itching to submit. Waiting for agents to respond to our queries. Waiting for editors to review our submissions. And it is far, far too easy to get into a pattern of waiting for other people to do things before we do what we should be doing--which is writing. 

But if we don’t write now, when will we?

May your weekend be filled with writing, not waiting. 

The literary characters I hate most: not who you'd think.

This link, “The 50 Most Hated Characters in Literary History,” was floating around Twitter yesterday. I smiled wistfully, because as you may (or, if you’re new here, may not) know, I love the most ill-behaved, unloveable, downright detestable characters. Some of my favorites made that list. There’s so much f*ckery to choose from. 

But as I was perusing and trying to decide which characters I hated the most, my eventual answer surprised me. It wasn’t Dorian Gray; the murderer, liar, narcissist, seducer of women. Or Humbert Humbert, everyone’s favorite pedophile. Or Patrick Bateman, the American Psycho:

The list is filled with rapists and racists and murderers and abusers but my most hated literary characters? They haven’t done any of that. Far from it. 

My most hated literary characters from that list are Mr. and Mrs. Samsa, of Franz Kafka’s THE METAMORPHOSIS. I will tell you why. 

Gregor Samsa awakens one day to find out that he has been transformed into a giant insect. But his first thoughts are how to provide for his family; he loves them, adores them even, and considers it his responsibility. He wants to make sure they are taken care of, but he can’t work with giant antennae on his head, or six legs. And so his family has to care for him in his invalidity. But do they?

No. They are horrified by him; so disgusted that they can’t bear the sight of him. They can’t stand to look at their own son. So they shut him away and refuse the barest minimum of interactions. 

The thought of that—of parents shunning their child so, slowly sequestering him until he dies of starvation—is horrible, no doubt. But if this were a book about parents doing that to a human child, they would be no worse than the sickening father-rapists that appear elsewhere on this list. I think what turns my insides when reading THE METAMORPHOSIS is how understandable Mr. and Mrs. Samsa’s actions are.  Most people I know are profoundly disgusted by insects, and cockroaches in particular. We have probably all killed them before, and maybe in horrible ways—poison, or a not-fast-enough shoe slam, or even trapping them until they starve. So if a giant insect appeared in my home? I can’t say that I would react differently than Mr. and Mrs. Samsa. I can’t say that I would want it in my living room, listening to music, eating dinner with my family, either. Like Mr. and Mrs. Samsa, I would probably want it to die, too. 

But Gregor isn’t an “it.” He’s their son. More heartbreaking still is how Gregor understands his own monstrosity himself, and tries to make himself less of a burden; he hides himself away, scuttling under furniture so that his family doesn’t have to be faced with him. He loves them so much that his first thoughts are "What will happen to my family?" instead of "DEAR GOD WTF HAPPENED TO ME?!?!?" And they return that love with disgust and cruelty. 

That’s what makes Mr. and Mrs. Samsa so monstrous. And what would make me so monstrous if, G-d forbid, I ever found myself in their place. Because I have nothing in common with Dolores Umbridge or Patrick Bateman or Humbert Humbert. I love reading about them, in part, for that very reason. But it hurts to read THE METAMORPHOSIS because I can relate far, far too well to the novella’s villains. It hurts because I can see their monstrosity in me. 

That is why Mr. and Mrs. Samsa are my most hated literary characters. 

Who are yours?

There are no bad books.*

So there’s this book I haven’t read but have been VERY interested in, and recently, two bloggers I freaking LOVE both reviewed it. 

One adored it. She said it was one of her favorite YA novels ever. That it was charming and witty and stupendous and thoughtful and all around excellent. 

The other one…didn’t. She didn’t connect to the protagonist, and just was…not that into it. 

And because I admire and respect both bloggers, there’s really no way for me to possibly chalk the differences up to the book itself.  Because the book is the same.  It’s the people who were different. 

And that made me think. About the time I recommended one of my favorite books of all time to one of the coolest people on Earth and she gave me the side-eye for weeks after reading it. About the time one of my besties gushed All. Over. The. Planet. about loving a book so hard that I went and bought it and read it and was horrified. About all of the books I’ve hated that friends have loved and all of the books I’ve loved that friends have hated. 

The books are always the same. It’s the people who are different. 

I know writers are told that “this is a subjective business” constantly, by agents, by editors, and by reviewers. And I know that I have, on occasion, rolled my eyes in the past when I heard it—especially before I had an agent and an editor myself. 

But things like this remind me. People will love some books and really, really not like others. 

So is that book you hate that has spent 500,000 weeks on the New York Times list a bad book? Or is it just you?

My answer? It’s just you. Or just me. Or just my bestie Kate or my cousin’s neighbor’s husband Fred. Or maybe it’s a lot of us. Maybe there’s a whole Facebook group dedicated to people who hate the same book. It wouldn’t make us right, just like a Facebook group with a huge following dedicated to the adoration of that same book wouldn’t make us wrong. Their opinions are no less valuable than ours. My opinion is no more valuable than yours. 

And that’s perfectly okay. 

*_{except Walden}

In which I get political, and very, very graphic.

There are a lot of things that are important to me, politically and personally.

I am going to talk about one of them.

It's no secret that I am an animal person. I adore dogs and cats and fish and horses and snakes and birds and lizards and pigs and pretty much everything that doesn't have more than four legs. I do what I can to help them, and in my own home, that means donating time and money to reputable animal rescues and opening my heart and couch to foster pets. Mostly dogs, because my cats are ornery. I tend to end up with the naughty fosters--the biters, the pee-ers, the whiners, the destructive--and as such, I tend to have my fosters for a long time. My current charge has been here since February. Yeah.

That puts a damper on just how much I can do for other animals. My time isn't infinite, nor is my wallet, nor is my square footage. And I know so many people who do so much more than I do with less time and money and space and they put me to shame on a daily basis.

But there's still one thing, one big thing that I can do tomorrow, even if I can't foster one of the 31 hunting dogs that were rescued, near death, in a city not too far from me last week, that I badly want to help.

I can vote.

Tomorrow, November 2nd, I'll be heading to the polls. I know we all have our political priorities and I know that not all of us are animal lovers, and that's okay. But if you are an animal lover? There are some things you might want to know.

The Humane Society of the United States compiles a legislative scorecard that shows you where your Congressional reps stand on a variety of legislative issues, like a ban on the knowing and intentional transport of horses for slaughter to countries like Canada and Mexico, a prohibition on the interstate commerce in nonhuman primates for the pet trade, a bill to phase out the use of chimpanzees in research, and many, many other crucial bills that are upcoming (like legislation to ban crush videos and protect puppies). Change.org blogger Martin Matheny explains the scorecard further here.

And in certain states, there are propositions on the ballot that could have major, major consequences for animals. If you live in Missouri, you're going to get the chance to vote YES on Proposition B to put puppy mills out of business. On behalf of the four mill survivors I've fostered, all of whom have had medical problems ranging from orthopedic defects to paralysis, deafness (from a neglected infection) and incontinence, I beg you to do so.

If you live in North Dakota, you'll have the chance to vote YES to ban canned hunting. Canned hunting is the practice of fencing in game animals to make them easier to shoot. In some states, like Texas, wild animals like lions are imported for wealthy men to make trophies of. In North Dakota, relatively tame deer and elk are raised, then deposited in a fenced area to be shot for the same purpose. It's not like shooting fish in a barrel--it is shooting fish in a barrel. And regardless of where you stand on hunting in general, I think this issue is pretty clear cut.

There are other disturbing things happening on the animal front in the rest of the country; new photos (horrifically, sickeningly graphic--you've been warned) have been released showing the results of the longstanding Denver, CO pit bull ban, which the current city council members support, and in Illinois, candidate for governor Bill Brady was for the use of gas chambers in animal shelters before he was against it. I have rescued animals from gassing shelters--the animal control facility in Whiteville, North Carolina, gasses every animal in on the premises as of 5pm Thursday night first thing before the facility opens Friday morning. A few years ago, I rescued these little cuties from that fate:

No matter where you live, if you consider yourself an animal lover, I urge you to take a look at the scorecard if you haven't seen it already and cast your vote for the representatives who share your humane priorities. Read up about the propositions on the ballot in your state and make sure to vote for the ones you agree with.

The dogs and cats and chimpanzees and pigs and horses and sea turtles and foxes and fish and birds would do it if they could, but you're all they've got.

It is November 1st. And that means:

I wrote a rant about Nano last year when very few (very, very few) people read this blog. 

I am not recanting it. Not exactly.

But I am NaNo-ing. Kind of. In a way. 

I’m not making any promises to myself and I’m not joining the official NaNo roster. But I am going to try and capitalize on all of the energy floating around even though I’m revising and am going away for Thanksgiving and and and. Even if I fall short of my goal, I think it will be a good shot in the arm for the stage I’m at with my little booksy. 

And it’s making me excited. And that is, after all, what NaNo is all about about.  

Are you NaNo-ing? Pray tell, what about?