Wondering How To Approach Self-Promotion? Ask Yourself This: "What Would Mike Mullin Do?"

Last year around this time I got an email from a librarian I did not know, inviting me to an event I'd never heard of, in a city I'd never been to, two hours away. The thing--whatever it was--would take place on a week night and it would only last an hour. I'd be driving to part of the state I'd never been to, doing some Thing (I wasn't sure what, exactly), and driving back in the dark.

My first inclination, of course, was to say no. But I ran the invitation by my husband, thinking he'd immediately agree with me.

Instead, he surprised me by asking: "What would Mike Mullin do?"

(Mike Mullin) 

"Um," I said, and I only needed to think about it for a few seconds before I answered, "He'd say Yes."

So I went to the event, which turned out to be one of the coolest events I attended last year--and that is saying something. It wasn't just some random thing. It was a state librarian conference put on for all of the school librarians in the state of Ohio. MT Anderson was one of the keynotes.

(MT Anderson's bare legs)

I ate dinner with him and learned that his name is Tobin and he let me take a picture of his bare legs (which is a story for another day). I met librarians that night, some of whom invited me to speak at their schools. One asked me to teach a session at a city-wide teachers inservice. Another put my book on a multi-city Battle of the Books list. The librarians asked me back to speak this year.

I didn't hesitate to accept. I knew what Mike Mullin would say.



At this point you may be wondering who Mike Mullin is and why I use him as a yardstick for evaluating my invitations.

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time Mike Mullin wrote a book called Ashfall. It's a cool page turner about a fifteen-year-old boy named Alex who just wants to stay home and play video games while his parents and little sister leave town to visit relatives 100 miles away. Big bummer for Alex  because the first night he is home alone the super volcano under Yellowstone erupts and pretty much half of the country is wiped out. The remainder--and where Alex lives--is covered in ash. The book is a nightmarish hero's journey with Alex trekking across the desolate and dangerous landscape trying to find his family.

Ashfall is published by Tanglewood, a well-respected, small publishing company. It doesn't have a huge PR budget, so Mike did a lot of the promotional work himself. Before the book came out, he loaded a box of advanced review copies of the book into his car trunk and drove around the country, stopping at bookstores and libraries.

He did not do the hard sell Buy My Book thing. Instead, he chatted up the booksellers and librarians and dropped off a copy Ashfall--no pressure to read it or do anything with it.

I heard this story from one of the booksellers that Mike had chatted up. Mike's non-pushy demeanor and compelling book pitch had piqued her curiosity and she'd read Ashfall. 

And loved it.

Now she was passing the copy on to me, so I could read it and review it on my blog, if I liked it. Which I did. 

I imagine a similar kind of thing happened all over the country at those bookstores and libraries where Mike introduced himself because Ashfall made quite a splash when it came out, both critically and sales-wise. The book earned a starred review from Kirkus, was promoted on NPR and in Entertainment Weekly, and was featured on awards lists in nine states. Mike wrote two sequels to the book and keeps driving around the country to this day, speaking at bookstores and libraries and visiting schools.

I met him at a book-signing for his second book. He started the presentation by karate-chopping a cement brick in half.

At this point I was thinking that Mike was awesome and if I ever got a book deal I was going to model myself after him (minus the karate-chopping.)

When I did get my book deal, I mustered up the courage to ask him if he'd read my book and possibly blurb it. He turned into a role model for handling blurbs too. He wrote to me, saying, and I quote: "If I love it, I'll blurb it. And if I don't, I'll keep my big mouth shut."

He wrote the blurb.

I told my husband the story of Mike Mullin when I was brainstorming ways I could promote my book Thin Space. 

There are A LOT of ways a debut writer can approach self-promotion and marketing. Some writers push their books and themselves like door-to-door salesmen, pleading Buy My Book both virtually and in person at every opportunity. Other writers do absolutely nothing, believing that their efforts are as productive as spitting into the wind.

I didn't (and still don't) like either of these approaches, although I don't begrudge the people who follow them. (Okay, that's a lie. I CAN'T STAND the obnoxious Buy My Book thing. It never makes me want to buy the person's book and instead causes me to feel the same way I do about telemarketers and people who try to guilt me into passing along a chain email. Resentful. And that's on a good day.)

But back to Mike Mullin. Here was a writer who seemed to have found a sweet spot between Nothing and Inspiring Me To Slam My Phone Against a Wall.

When my husband asked me if Mike Mullin would've driven two hours away to attend a librarian conference, there really wasn't any question what the answer might be.

Yes.

The only difference is I didn't heft a cement block into my car before I made the trip.

On Writing a Trilogy--Guest Post by Mike Mullin (SUNRISE Blog Tour)

I am so excited to be a stop on Mike Mullin's Sunrise Blog Tour. For the record I've read all three books in the Ashfall Trilogy. This is a riveting, nail-biting, (almost too) realistic, post-apocalyptic adventure that follows main character Alex as he does his best to survive after the supervolcano under Yellowstone explodes and takes out half of the United States. (See below for the synopsis and for other info about Mike and where you can find him and his books.)

Over the years, I've gotten to know Mike "virtually," and have met him in person, too, at a book signing. Side note: teachers--this is an author you MUST invite to your classrooms. Let me just say that when Mike karate chops a cement block in half, he will get your students' attention. Side note #2: Mike has become a gracious and generous mentor to me. He blurbed my book Thin Space, and he is my role model for promoting and teaching and presenting. (Except for the karate chopping of cement blocks aspect.)

Here's Mike now on what it's like to write a successful trilogy:

I’m probably the wrong person to ask about writing a trilogy. I’ve only done it once—maybe it was a fluke? Who knows if I can do it again? The question would probably be better asked of someone like Cinda Williams Chima, although now that I think about it, I’m not sure she’s ever written a trilogy. She always seems to turn her trilogies into tetralogies or more.

Perhaps the quintessential trilogy was The Lord of the Rings. But J.R.R. Tolkien never intended to write a trilogy—he turned his opus in to his publisher as one book, so long that it was unpublishable given the technology of the time.

I had the advantage of knowing almost from the beginning that I was going to write a trilogy. I had expected Ashfall  to be about 80,000 words, a fairly typical length for a young adult novel. But I kept thinking of new and interesting ways to torture my poor protagonists. As a result, Ashfall grew and grew (it was published at 101,000 words), and I still hadn’t come anywhere near exhausting my store of ideas.

I also thought a lot about endings as I was drafting Ashfall. One of the many things I love about young adult literature is that most books end on a note of hope. I don’t think it’s an absolute requirement—Charles Benoit’s You, for example, is a brilliant book with an ending like a gut-stab, but hopeful endings are normally a feature of YA novels. To deliver any kind of believable hopeful ending for Alex and Darla, I had to follow them through the entire volcanic winter, which could last anywhere from three to ten years. I simply had too much story for one book.

So I set my draft of Ashfall  aside for a few days and wrote an outline for the whole trilogy. My outlines are chaotic affairs—pages of rough notes, not neatly marching columns led by Roman numerals—but all the major turning points in the trilogy exist in that first outline.

I paid special attention to the transitions between books. I tried to tie up every plot thread except one at the end of both Ashfall and Ashen Winter. I can’t really talk about what plot threads I left open without getting into massive spoilers, but readers of the trilogy will know exactly what I mean. My theory was that by tying up almost all the loose ends, I’d make each book somewhat satisfying on its own, but leave one thread as a cliffhanger to propel readers through the books and tie them into a cohesive trilogy.

I also paid attention to the scope of the books. In a great trilogy, the scope of the work increases from book to book. The Lord of the Rings starts with a small cast of characters centered around Gandalf and Bilbo and set in The Shire. By the end of the trilogy, there are dozens of major characters involved in epic battles all over Middle Earth. The Hunger Games starts as a family story centered on Katniss and ends in world-changing revolution. The progression of scope in my work is simpler: Ashfall is about Alex and Darla’s struggle to survive, Ashen Winter is about family, and Sunrise is about building a community capable of outlasting the long volcanic winter.

It has been a joy to spend more than five years with Alex and Darla, but I’m ready to move on and write something different. I’m working on a stand-alone young adult thriller now. I’ll leave it to readers to judge whether the Ashfall trilogy was successful or not, but despite the fact that I’ve only done it once and am full of doubts about the future, I’m satisfied. I can look back at the 335,000 words of young adult fiction I’ve published with pride and say, yeah, I did that.


About the author:

Mike Mullin’s first job was scraping the gum off the undersides of desks at his high school. From there, things went steadily downhill. He almost got fired by the owner of a bookstore due to his poor taste in earrings. He worked at a place that showed slides of poopy diapers during lunch (it did cut down on the cafeteria budget). The hazing process at the next company included eating live termites raised by the resident entomologist, so that didn’t last long either. For a while Mike juggled bottles at a wine shop, sometimes to disastrous effect. Oh, and then there was the job where swarms of wasps occasionally tried to chase him off ladders. So he’s really glad this writing thing seems to be working out.

Mike holds a black belt in Songahm Taekwondo. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and her three cats. Ashen Winter is his second novel. His debut, Ashfall, was named one of the top five young adult novels of 2011 by National Public Radio, a Best Teen Book of 2011 by Kirkus Reviews, and a New Voices selection by the American Booksellers Association

About SUNRISE

The Yellowstone supervolcano nearly wiped out the human race. Now, almost a year after the eruption, the survivors seem determined to finish the job. Communities wage war on each other, gangs of cannibals roam the countryside, and what little government survived the eruption has collapsed completely. The ham radio has gone silent. Sickness, cold, and starvation are the survivors’ constant companions.

When it becomes apparent that their home is no longer safe and adults are not facing the stark realities, Alex and Darla must create a community that can survive the ongoing disaster, an almost impossible task requiring even more guts and more smarts than ever—and unthinkable sacrifice. If they fail . . . they, their loved ones, and the few remaining survivors will perish.

This epic finale has the heart of Ashfall, the action of Ashen Winter, and a depth all its own, examining questions of responsibility and bravery, civilization and society, illuminated by the story of an unshakable love that transcends a post-apocalyptic world and even life itself.

Excerpt

The first two chapters are available on my website at: http://mikemullinauthor.com/books/sunrise/. You may reprint the first two chapters in whole or in part on your website so long as you do not charge anyone anything to access them. Warning: the sample does contain Ashfall and Ashen Winter spoilers.

Blog Tour Info:

Website: Mikemullinauthor.com
Twitter: twitter.com/Mike Mullin
Facebook: facebook.com/Mike.Mullin.author

Buy Links for Sunrise:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
The Book Depo
IndieBound

Please Buy My Mulch, Er, I Mean, Please Read My Book

A few years ago when we moved to our lovely little Ohio town, my son, then in 8th grade, went out for the lacrosse team. The sport is a big deal around here, and although my son had never seen a game played before, he borrowed a stick and a ball and a big net, and started practicing in the backyard. It's a hard sport, apparently, to pick up in a couple of months, and he didn't make the team.

In ninth grade he tried out again. No cuts for freshmen, the coaches assured the kids, but they would have to participate in a team bonding activity before the try-outs: sell 200 bags of mulch at 4 bucks a pop within one week. This directive came down in January when it happened to be 10 degrees outside.

Let me say here that I HATE fundraisers. Wrapping paper, cookie dough, candy bars, magazines, whatever. I sympathize with schools and clubs having to raise money, but I hate that kids (and parents) get roped into being salespeople for overpriced products. I was never the mom pushing my kid out the door to hawk that stuff to the neighbors, and my husband never schlepped the packets to his office to hit up his co-workers. We either wrote a check and ate the freaking candy bars ourselves or donated the money they expected our kid to raise.

But that day in January, I could see there was no way we could afford 800+ dollars worth of mulch. Never mind that we had nowhere to put 200 bags of the stuff. I pushed my son out the door.

Most of the neighbors turned out to be pretty cool about it. The lacrosse mulch sale is a known tradition around here, and they must've felt bad for the lanky kid shivering on their doorstop. He sold his quota and my husband and I resolved to buy every kid on the street's candy bars until the end of time.

The next year when he tried out for the team, I shoved him out the door again. He sold his quota, and then he got cut. That was pretty devastating for him and it wasn't much consolation when the kids who made the team delivered the over-priced mulch to all our neighbors.

Year three, I was proud of my son for trying out again and sympathetic when he brought home that damn mulch packet for a third time, but geez! How much mulch did our poor neighbors need? And what kind of team bonding activity is it when you're not actually on the team?  

He got cut again. Which was really cruddy but a good learning experience--blah blah resiliency and hard work and pursuing a dream and living through rejection, yadda yadda, but I must admit that every spring when I see those mulch trucks zooming around town, I feel a surge of yucky feelings.

It's hard to put yourself out there and ask for something--something that's kind of a big deal--something that makes another person feel obligated to say yes, or worse, no to you.

I didn't mean to spend so much time writing about mulch. What I really want to talk about is how I felt asking authors I respect and admire if they would read my forthcoming book Thin Space and possibly write a blurb about it.

My publisher suggested I do this many months ago but it took me a long while to gear myself up to ask anyone. I didn't want to put people on the spot. Asking someone to take the time to read my book is a big enough imposition but then asking them to put their name on an endorsement is even bigger. And what if they didn't like my book? Would they feel weird telling me?

When I finally pushed myself out that metaphorical door, I was shivering and clinging to my mulch packet--I mean, my book. But like my kind neighbors, the writers I asked were cool. More than cool. They seemed flattered that I asked them. They were prompt in their responses. Only one person said no, and he was sweet and apologetic about it. The others said yes. They promised to be honest. One told me, "Hey, if I love it, I'll blurb it, and if I don't, I'll keep my mouth shut!"

There's a lesson in here. Sometimes you've got to swallow your pride and put yourself out there. People are kind. They like to help when asked. And things have a way of working out well in the end.

My son never made the lacrosse team after ninth grade, but he did parlay that experience into a kick-butt college essay that caught the eye of the admission counselors at the college of his dreams. Our neighbors have stunning flower beds filled with the highest quality mulch. And I got three endorsements for my book from writers I love. Please check out their books:

Jennifer Castle's moving and beautifully written The Beginning of After and her soon-to-be released You Look Different in Real Life.

The absorbing and heartbreaking debut What Happens Next by Colleen Clayton.

Mike Mullin's edge-of-your-seat page turner Ashfall and the riveting sequel Ashen Winter.

And if you want to see these awesome writers' blurbs of Thin Space, click here.

Guest Post by Mike Mullin: Things to Eat in the Wild

One of my pet peeves with post-apocalyptic books is when they get survival details wrong. I won’t name names, but I’ve thrown three books across the room in disgust just in the last year. For my debut novel, ASHFALL, and its sequel, ASHEN WINTER, I worked hard to get the details right. Fortunately, I had a couple of advantages over most authors.

First, as a teenager I loved learning about and practicing outdoor survival. I started fires with a bow and drill set I made myself. I harvested puffballs from our front yard and fried them. I ate fresh pods from our redbud trees, flowers from our black locusts, and made tea from white pine needles and sassafras roots (sassafras contains a carcinogenic chemical, by the way—I love the tea, but drink it only rarely). I even went into the woods once with nothing but a knife and clothing for three days and emerged only a little thinner and a lot dirtier. So when I write about survival topics, I’m usually drawing on personal experience.

Second, in ASHFALL the volcanic ash from the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano changes the environment dramatically. Wild animals inhale the ash, get silicosis, and die. Plants are buried in the ash and suffocated. Or they die in the long volcanic winter that I depict in the sequel, ASHEN WINTER. So a lot of traditional survival strategies and foods just aren’t available to my protagonists, Alex and Darla. Which means there are fewer details I could potentially mess up.

Today I prefer restaurants to wild food and hotels to improvised shelter, but I still enjoy the occasional wild meal. In early spring, I can make a lovely salad from my backyard, because I don’t put any chemicals on it and I don’t mind the weeds—many of which are yummy! I got in big trouble with my wife one year when I stripped all the buds from our daylilies to make a delicious green-bean-like dish. Turns out she would have preferred looking at the flowers to eating the buds. Who knew?

Here’s my advice if you want to try eating wild food: get good guidebooks for your area. My three favorites (I live in Indiana) are The Forager’s Harvest, Peterson’s Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants of Eastern/Central North America, and Primitive Living and Survival Skills.

Some more advice: don’t eat mushrooms unless you have a stone-cold expert with you. Morels and puffballs are okay and some kinds of shelf-fungus. With mushrooms, if you make a mistake, you could wind up like this guy. There’s a reason two commonly misidentified mushrooms are called Death Cap and Destroying Angel. Just saying.


Also, it used to be that you could eat almost any rodent or small animal safely, and some guide books still have that advice. No more. BSE, or mad cow disease, has shown up in rats, squirrels, elk and deer. It’s deadly, and there’s no cure. If I were starving and had no other options, I’d eat rats or squirrels, but I’d do my very best not to eat any brain or nerve tissue that might carry the BSE prion.

So, that’s a little advice on edible wild foods. How do Alex and Darla manage to survive when almost all the wild food has been destroyed by the ashfall and volcanic winter? Read ASHFALL and ASHEN WINTER to find out!

Bio
Mike Mullin’s first job was scraping the gum off the undersides of desks at his high school. From there, things went steadily downhill. He almost got fired by the owner of a bookstore due to his poor taste in earrings. He worked at a place that showed slides of poopy diapers during lunch (it did cut down on the cafeteria budget). The hazing process at the next company included eating live termites raised by the resident entomologist, so that didn’t last long either. For a while Mike juggled bottles at a wine shop, sometimes to disastrous effect. Oh, and then there was the job where swarms of wasps occasionally tried to chase him off ladders. So he’s really glad this writing thing seems to be working out.

Mike holds a black belt in Songahm Taekwondo. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and her three cats. Ashen Winter is his second novel.  His debut, Ashfall, was named one of the top five young adult novels of 2011 by National Public Radio, a Best Teen Book of 2011 by Kirkus Reviews, and a New Voices selection by the American Booksellers Association.

About ASHEN WINTER

It's been over six months since the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano. Alex and Darla have been staying with Alex's relatives, trying to cope with the new reality of the primitive world so vividly portrayed in Ashfall, the first book in this trilogy. It's also been six months of waiting for Alex's parents to return from Iowa. Alex and Darla decide they can wait no longer and must retrace their journey into Iowa to find and bring back Alex's parents to the tenuous safety of Illinois. But the landscape they cross is even more perilous than before, with life-and-death battles for food and power between the remaining communities. When the unthinkable happens, Alex must find new reserves of strength and determination to survive.

Excerpt

The first two chapters are available on my website: www.ashenwinter.com. You may reprint the first two chapters in whole or in part on your website so long as you do not charge anyone anything to access them.

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How Blogging Saved My (Writing) Life and Other Thoughts on Social Media

Two years ago I knew nothing about social media unless you count my Facebook page. But that was mostly to keep tabs on my kids. I annoyed them by peppering them with questions like: whose wall am I writing on? What IS a wall, anyway? And how do I turn some "friend" off when I'm tired of looking at cutesy pictures of her cats? The day my son showed me how to "hide" a person who annoyed me ranks right up there with the most satisfying experiences of my virtual life. Wow. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could hide people who ticked us off in real life too? But I digress.

(cat picture. Cute. But sometimes I get tired of looking at them.)


My point is that I was a brand newbie to the online scene, and then I attended an SCBWI regional conference and social media was all everyone was talking about. Writers have to create an "online presence." You've GOT to have a website, a Twitter account, a blog. Needless to say, as someone who still had to ask my daughter to upload pictures for me on Facebook, I was a little nervous about tackling any of this stuff.

But I did, first by starting this blog. I called it On the Verge because of something one of the presenters at the same conference said. She knew so many really good writers--writers on the verge--who quit trying just as they were about to cross over. Well, no way would that be me! I knew in my bones that all my years writing were about to pay off, and this blog was my chance to give back, maybe throw out some helpful pointers to beginning writers. At the same time, maybe the blog would accomplish that other goal--of creating a buzz about my book(s) that would soon see the light of the publishing day.

I had an ulterior motive, is what I'm trying to say. What I figured out, though, was that I really like blogging. Probably because I like writing. Duh. But also because it gives me something I hadn't thought I needed: an immediate response to what I'm writing. Turns out that two years ago, I WASN'T just about to cross over. Deals came close and fell through. Rejections dribbled in. Or worse, I got no response at all. My agent quit the business. Last summer I came perilously close to quitting. I made my peace with the fact that my dream would likely never come true on this blog. And then I made my peace with it again. I got some nice responses to my posts. Some from wonderful writers I love, (like Sara Zarr!!!) gave me such a charge that I decided I would keep writing regardless.

Blogging ended up helping me, but not in the way I had assumed it would.

Social media, for me, is not just about creating buzz. This is such a nebulous term and is out of a writer's control and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably the person sending out a constant tweet-stream of BUY MY BOOK, the virtual equivalent of going door to door selling vacuum cleaners (or anything, for that matter). I don't know about you but when I see them coming up my walk, I want to turn the lights off and pretend I'm not home.

What I'm figuring out is that my virtual actions need to be as genuine as my real ones. I tweet when I want to not because I must get in my 5 tweet a day quota. I share articles on my Facebook author page that I think might interest other writers and readers. I'll comment on blogposts that move me or provoke an honest response. I've made connections this way that feel real to me and remind me that I am part of a larger community of writers and readers and the only way to "meet" most of these people is online.

A few fun things I've signed on for lately (because I want to):

1. I was asked to contribute posts for an awesome group blog called YA Outside the Lines, a blog created by my new role model Holly Schindler.

2. I've resurrected my Goodreads account and I am so glad I did. I love seeing what others are reading and I'm having fun scrolling through my friends' reviews.

3. My daughter and I made a pact to "live tweet" our responses to our favorite guilty pleasure, the over-the-top soap opera-y drama Revenge. It starts next Sunday, fellow Revengers, so follow us and tweet back.

4. I signed on to be a stop on Mike Mullin's Ashen Winter blog tour.

(I must confess that when I agreed to do this, I didn't know exactly what a blog tour was. My motives were sorta self-serving. I loved Mike's first book and was eager to read the sequel, so that was genuine, but truthfully, I figured that if I signed on, I'd learn more about blog tours and I could get pointers on how to set up my own. Apparently, a blog tour is when an author virtually visits a bunch of blogs. They happen right around the time a book is released to, you guessed it, create buzz. What's cool is each "stop" is a little different. There are book reviews, of course, but also author interviews, character interviews, and other posts on topics related to the book. Sometimes there are prizes.

Confession number 2: I thought I was supposed to write a post called "What to Eat in the Wild" (Mike's book is a bleak, nail biting dystopian nightmare and let's just say the food pickings are slim.) I was such an eager beaver that I wrote my post months ago, but found out last week that MIKE is the one who's writing the post and I'm supposed to have him guest blog. So, yeah. Forgot to read the fine print there. Lesson learned.)

Yes, I have trekked a loooong way over the past two years through this new virtual landscape, but I am the first person to admit I still have miles to go.

PS. Tune in for Mike's post on Oct. 2, my official stop on his Ashen Winter tour.

PSS. Tune in for my post on the same subject soon, because I don't think Mike will mind a double burst of buzz.

Confessions of an Author Groupie

I first caught the author fan bug back in college. I have no idea how I found out about it, but one of my all time favorite writers from childhood, Madeleine L’Engle, was doing a signing at a local bookstore in Memphis. I dragged my roommate along and we both bought a copy of A Wrinkle in Time for her to sign. The store was small (readers from Memphis, please tell me this place, Burkes, is still open) and the line snaked around the shelves and out the door. There was a woman, I guess who was L’Engle’s publicist, who kept the pressure on, reminding the crowd that they were leaving at a specific time to catch a plane, no matter if there were people still in line or not. I sweated it out, stuck behind stacks, trying to get a glimpse at least of my childhood idol. I made it up to her table with minutes to spare. I don’t know what I was expecting. Someone bigger maybe? But Madeleine L’Engle seemed kind of shrunken. Very sweet, though, and smiley. The hours I’d waited I planned the things I wanted to say to her. Your books made such a difference to me. You saved my life. When I reached her, though, I was tongue-tied. "Thank you" is all I managed to say, and she nodded and scribbled:

To Jody: Tesser Well. 


Not exactly sure what she meant by that, but what an awesome, writerly thing to write.

I was lucky in grad school. University of Memphis had just started an MFA program and I think some local bigwig had donated money to host visiting authors. The handful of students in the program that year got to meet some very cool people. Here, I’ll name a few just to make fellow writer groupies jealous: John Updike, W.S. Merwin, Seamus Heaney, and Richard Russo.

I got interested in writing for children when I was an English teacher and attended a National Council for Teachers of English conference. The keynote speaker was Robert Cormier (The Chocolate War) and he was so brilliant and funny and somehow heartbreaking to listen to. I remember driving home thinking: I had no idea. (That was the English major snob in me that thought that writing for children was somehow lesser than writing literary fiction for adults.)

That topic has come up again over the years. Just a couple of weeks ago I went with my kids (who now, when possible, I take along to these book signings) to hear a talk by M.T. Anderson, author of one of my favorite novels, Feed. Someone in the audience asked him why he writes for young adults and he said he gets that question a lot. Once he got a letter from an adult that basically implied that his books were so good it seemed kind of wasteful for him to be writing for kids. What? he asked, laughing. Were they saying that kids’ books should be crappy?

I was a gushy, embarrassingly silly groupie at a talk given by Lauren Myracle. (Author of the Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen series, and the recent critically acclaimed Shine.) Lauren was very cool, as anyone who reads her books would expect. When I confessed that I was a writer too, but sorta struggling with the publication aspect of things, she told me to hang in there. Also, she let me take a picture of the two of us with my phone.

(Okay, I am the one with my eyes closed and Lauren is the hip chick holding the sign. In case you're wondering, it says "Hi Donna"-- so I could forward this pic to my best writing buddy Donna and rub it in that I was standing there with LAUREN MYRACLE!!!)

I had a nice chat with Louis Sachar once while he signed his awesome book Holes for me. I told him that he made such a difference in the bedtime life of my daughter, who for many years fell asleep listening to a tape of Sideways Stories from Wayside School. 

Lately, I’m more-- I’d guess you’d call it -- "technically curious" about how writers present themselves at book signings (cross my fingers, I am hoping that one day in the not so distant future I will be doing some of these author talks myself). Do they read a passage from their latest book? Just start talking with a prepared speech? Take questions from the audience?

The prize for most entertaining presentation easily goes to Mike Mullin, author of the super volcano blowing off under Yellowstone adventure story, Ashfall. The main character in that novel practices martial arts and Mike told the audience that he was working on his black belt as he wrote the book. At the end of his talk he demonstrated his mad skills by karate chopping a cement block in half and then donating the two pieces to the bookstore.

Well. Not sure how I can ever hope to top that.

In case you happen to live in the Columbus, Ohio area and want to meet up with me as I stalk, um, chat with another visiting writer:

Mark your calendars for the Dark Days Tour featuring Young Adult authors Veronica Roth, Aprilynne Pike, Elizabeth Norris & Bethany Griffin at Cover to Cover Bookstore on Thursday, June 7th at 6:30.

Come early, though, if you want to beat me to the head of the line.

The First Annual Jody-intz Awards

Today the American Library Association announced this year’s award-winning books for children and young adults. The ALA held a very exciting ceremony for writers and librarians, and I followed along with them on Twitter and watched the podcast of the event while occasionally drifting into pleasant daydreams where I get that call in the morning (someday in the future when I actually have a published book) from the ALA committee. You may have heard of these awards: the Caldecott Medal, for the most distinguished picture book; the Newbery for the best children’s book (which is typically defined as a book written for readers aged 8 to 12); and the Printz, for the best novel written for young adults. Because I write for young adults and love to read books written for young adults, the Printz is the award I’m most interested in.

While I was waiting for the winner to be announced (and/or falling into lala, coveted-medal-on-my-book-cover, fantasy land) I started making a list of the awards I’d give if anyone at the ALA ever asked me for my opinion.

So here it is, without further ado, the first annual Jody-intz Awards (and at the end, I’ll tell you which book actually won the Printz.):

1. Best Page-Turner. This award goes to the book I read in one long sitting/walking from room to room with it because I could not bear to put it down for one second and then stayed up half the night to finish it. Drum Roll. Ashes by Ilsa Bick, the addictive and heart-stopping tale of an allegedly dying girl who goes on a camping trip when an electromagnetic pulse pulses the world, kills most of humanity, and turns the remainder into flesh-eating zombies. This book is also a runner up for the Biggest Cliff-hanger/Oh Crud, Now I Have to Wait for the Sequel Award. Also receives an honorable mention for Book That Most Inspires You To Hoard Canned Goods. Warning: Clear out your schedule before turning to the first page.
2. Coolest Premise. The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler. Two teens living in the olden days of 1995 log online and discover their Facebook pages fifteen years in the future. What else is there to say about that? A very cool idea that I wish I’d thought of. (P.S. The book lives up to the hype too.)
3. Most Original Voice. I read a ton of YA books so it’s surprising when I come across a voice I’ve never heard before. The winner in this category is Brooklyn, Burning by Steve Brezenoff. The main character is a kid called Kid who tells the story of a warehouse fire in Brooklyn and the growing relationship with a kid named Scout. Oh, and by the way, the reader never learns the genders of either Kid or Scout.
4. Best Teen Love Story—A three-way tie between Lola and the Boy Next Door by Stephanie Perkins, Wanderlove by Kirsten Hubbard, and If I Stay by Gayle Forman. If you love love stories and either hated Twilight and crave an alternative or loved Twilight and crave an alternative, read any of these. Or all of these. Sigh.
5. Best World I’d Love to Fall Into. Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater. This book could be a runner up in the Best Love Story category too, now that I think about it. The setting is a remote island where every year killer horses rise up out of the sea and the townspeople risk their lives to race them. This is one of those old-fashioned books that takes its time, developing the cast of complicated and quirky characters and building the intricate plot. When I knew I was coming to the end, I read slower so I could stay in the fully realized, luscious world just a little bit longer.
6. I guess I should follow up this award with one for World I Wouldn’t Want to Fall Into. And this honor easily goes to Ashfall, by Mike Mullin. Yeah, let’s just say it’s a bleak landscape after the super volcano hidden under Yellowstone erupts and destroys most of the country. (Runner up in the page turners and canned good categories too.)
7. New Writer to Watch. This is a tie between Jennifer Castle, author of the beautifully written novel The Beginning of After, about a girl coping in the year after her parents die (note: it is NOT as dark as it sounds), and Emily M. Danforth, author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post, about a girl coping with her realization that she is a lesbian (note: it is not as dark as it sounds). Because both writers know how to tell a really good story and I can't wait to see what books they write next.
8. Awesome Series. There are so many to pick from in this category because, if you’ve spent any time perusing the YA section in your local bookstore (which I hope you do), series are very big these days. The award goes to Ally Condie’s Matched series, a thought-provoking, dystopian story of a girl growing up in what seems to be a perfect world. The sequel, Crossed, accomplishes what all writers of successful series dream of: it ups the ante while at the same time carrying through everything loyal readers of the first book loved.
9. Writer I Wish I Could Be. Another tie. First, Sara Zarr, author of this year’s moving and brilliant How To Save a Life (and for her entire body of work –Story of a Girl and Sweethearts and Once Was Lost—all I can say is I bow down to her talent. Ditto to Lauren Myracle for her moving and brilliant novel (that should have won a National Book Award!) Shine. (Love her other novels too, especially Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks and had the great honor of meeting Lauren at a book signing. Full disclosure: a picture of the two of us is my screen-saver on my cellphone.)
10. Novel That Changed the Way I View the World. Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley. The story of a boy in a small dying town whose brother goes missing, and a disturbed kid obsessed with the Book of Enoch, and the appearance of the thought to be extinct Lazarus bird. You might just discover the meaning of life in this one.

And maybe that’s what the ALA committee was thinking when they awarded it this year’s Printz Award.

Tips for Surviving a Snow Apocalypse (hint: Must. Have. Coffee.)

I’m going to preface this by saying apparently I am a big baby who wouldn’t last long in an apocalypse. The funny thing is I’ve been reading so many YA books about the subject lately I thought I was an expert. Go north, is one of the tidbits I learned. Because everyone else will be heading south and you want to avoid the mass chaos. This, from Ilsa’s Bick’s brilliant zombie disaster novel, Ashes. There’s also this little gem from Mike Mullin’s gritty, realistic, page-turner Ashfall: get your hands on a good pair of cross-country skis. You’ll need these to traverse the volcano ash landscape. Good idea, too, to have a safe house to hole up in, such as a school. (Dark Inside by Jeyn Roberts.) And a large selection of canned goods and blankets are essential. (Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer)

Unfortunately, none of these books prepared me for the College Road Trip from Hell that happened to coincide with the freak snowstorm that attacked New England last weekend. My son and I planned this excursion around his fall break, thinking we might fit in some pretty leaf-peeping action. Okay, that was my thought. I don’t think my son cares one way or another about fall color. Anyhoo, we were staying with my brother and his family (lovely wife and four little kids) in their beautiful new house in a gloriously wooded area of central Connecticut. Remember the gloriously wooded part. It plays an important role later. We knew snow was heading that way but my brother assured me we could make it up to Williamstown, Mass, tucked away in the Berkshires near the Vermont border, and back before it hit.

We should’ve known when we got lost on the way there, that trouble was ahead. Here’s a handy tip for the Apocalypse: Carry a map. The paper kind. Instead of relying on your car’s GPS. GPS’s don’t do well when it comes to detours and road closures. Not many alternate routes around the beautiful North Adams area of New England. I know this because we doubled around that sparsely populated, hilly, windy-road section of Massachusetts for most of the day, prompting my frustrated brother to say: "All roads lead to North Adams. But NONE lead out of it."

The college was great. When we finally made it there. Bucolic town. Friendly sweet students. Good food at one of the local eateries. And good thing we ate before we left. Cue: ominous music.

The snow was just starting to fall when we left. And promptly got lost again. In near white-out conditions, my calm-on-the-outside brother drove us around those same windy, hilly roads. Within minutes there were two or three inches of thick snow on the ground. And on the car. And building up around the windshield wipers. Another helpful tip: treat windshield wipers with care. When my brother reached out the window to tap the caked snow off, the left wiper broke and he spent the remainder of the five hour drive leaning across the seat, his face inches from the windshield. Trees creaked and fell around us. We came within an inch of hitting a guardrail once. We couldn’t see if the road went up or down or curved until we were right upon it.

It took three hours to drive seven miles. But at last we made it to the promised land: I-91. And we breathed a sigh of relief. Until my sister-in-law called to say that they had no power at home. When we crossed the border into Connecticut, it looked like a bomb had gone off. Driving into my brother’s lovely wooded neighborhood was one of the scariest experiences I’ve ever had. Trees were literally dropping and snapping power lines as we crawled past.

I will skip ahead to say that we survived. And when I say we, I mean my son and me. My brother and his family are still out there, still surviving in that decimated landscape. Trees down everywhere. Wires dangling over the roads. Few stores and gas stations open. Halloween cancelled. (Yes. Sadly for the four little kiddos.) And worse, only a handful of Dunkin Donuts open and shining like beacons to the caffeine addled junkie refugees lined up in the street to get their morning coffee fix. None of the apocalyptic books I’ve read have mentioned coffee. It’s a stunning oversight. Aside. To the clueless woman in line who wanted her toddler to decide which kind of munchkin she wanted—honey, do you want the munchkin with sprinkles or the chocolate one or how about that silly pumpkin one?—while the line snaked out the door filled with people contemplating double homicide: For the love of God, Woman, choose a damn munchkin for your kid and move the bleep ON.) 

The final night my brother got a hotel reservation for us at the airport. My sister-in-law drove us and the weary, bath-deprived little kids up there, and we talked up the place like it was a Club Med. (Lights. Warmth. A TV!!!) Unconscionably, the hotel people failed to mention that there was no power at the hotel. My traumatized sister-in-law decided to take the kids back to my brother’s office for the night, but I had her drop my son and me off at the dark airport hotel. There we paid for a pitch-black (but warm!!!) room. We lurched around using our dying cell-phones as light and avoided the cold showers. It was the best money I ever spent in my life.

The next day we flew out of battle-scarred Connecticut, bleary-eyed survivors of the Snow Apocalypse, coffee cups gripped in our shaky hands.

PS. I’ve sworn off apocalyptic literature. I’ve lived it. 

The End of the World as We Know It: The Latest in Apocalyptic Fiction

When I was in high school, I was convinced I would never make it out. Maybe all teens have a touch of this fatalistic sense—that they can’t possibly ever grow old, that no way can the world keep spinning, especially as you begin to look around and notice what a big mess things are. Wars, natural disasters, disease, never mind the cruddy way people generally treat each other. And teens are very stuck in the moment, thinking that things can never be so horrible as they are NOW, for THEM. When I was a teen, the Soviets shot down an airliner that had strayed into their airspace and the news was talking about how it might be the start of World War Three. The nuclear war disaster flick The Day After came out on TV, and I stayed up late to watch it. I believed that it was only a matter of time before some loony warmonger pushed the wrong button. The signs were everywhere…

But here I am. Older than I ever thought I’d be, raising two teens who are noticing the sometimes sad state of the world and wondering how it can possibly go on like this. My son read Cormac McCarthy’s post apocalyptic nightmare The Road a few months ago and asked me if we should start stockpiling canned goods. I’ve read that book too and halfway through found myself scrolling around on Mormon websites. (They have really good tips on rotating your pantry, in case anyone’s wondering.)

Last week I read the new novel everyone is buzzing about, a YA version of The Road that has the added element of zombies. Like the poor survivors of the apocalypse need anything else to worry about. The book is Ashes by Ilsa Bick and it’s brilliant. I’m giving you fair warning here. If you get your hands on it, clear your schedule. You won’t be able to put it down. Having a well-stocked pantry will help too, so you won’t have to worry about that while you’re reading. Also, you might want to reconsider your squeamishness about guns. Guns are big in this book. You need them to fight off the freaking zombies.

Before I sell you on Ashes, I want to say a word about dystopian fiction (a fancy way of describing End of the World books). This is the latest trend in YA fiction. I don’t know if it’s ever not been a trend. But it’s very big right now and kind of bleeding into other genres such as fantasy and science fiction. These books all have their own take on the apocalypse and/or its aftermath. Here are a few of the really good ones I’ve read lately, in no particular order:

1. The new classic that all of these are measured against is the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. If you’ve been living under a rock, here's the rundown: a sick, gritty society emerges after the end of the world in which kids compete in real-life, Survivor-style games for the entertainment of the privileged. The “lucky” selected boy/girl pairs are thrown onto a nightmare TV show set where they literally must kill each other. It’s horrifying, addictive, thought provoking and masterfully written. And there’s a movie coming out soon. Added bonus: all three books have been written so you can read them all without waiting.

2. Dark Inside by Jeyn Roberts (official release date is November 2011) is a teen twist on Stephen King’s The Stand. The narrative alternates between the points of view of various kids across the country as the end of the world begins. There’s an added pressure of townspeople turning on each other in zombie-like rage. And there will be sequels. In fact all of the books on my list are part of a series. Something that sort of ticks me off. Can’t a book just END anymore? Give the reader a satisfying conclusion? Tie up all the loose ends in one neat volume? Apparently not.

3. Matched and Crossed by Ally Condie. I’ve blogged about these before because they are SO good. They take place well after the apocalypse and society has evolved and/or degenerated to the point that nearly everything is decided for its members, including who they will marry. One girl buys into all of this until she’s mistakenly given two “matches,” which gets her questioning the system and wondering what else the powers that be have gotten wrong.

4. Across the Universe by Beth Revis is dystopian on a space ship. The world is so messed up a few scientists volunteer to be cryogenically frozen and put on a ship for hundreds of years to start anew on another planet. A larger number of volunteers have been running the ship and their descendants grow up not knowing exactly how it all started. One girl who is frozen with her parents wakes up to find that someone has (inadvertently/purposely?) pulled the plug on her. And the ship she’s trapped on is VERY unlike the world she left behind.

5. Ashfall by Mike Mullin. More realistic and therefore more disturbing. The super volcano lying (supposedly) dormant under Yellowstone erupts and destroys half the country. A fifteen year old boy has the bad luck to have been left home alone for the weekend while his parents visit relatives he doesn’t particularly feel like visiting. The book is his horrifying journey to find his family.

6. Delirium by Lauren Oliver. Long after the apocalypse we find ourselves in a world where love is defined as a disease. The solution is some kind of surgery to take away desire. Our heroine is all set for her cure when she falls in love. Teen girls LOVE this book. And adults (okay, just women, let’s be honest here) will read it and remember those crazed romantic feelings churned up when they first fell.

And now to Ashes.

The author Ilsa Bick (and let me just pause to say that I love the name Ilsa) throws her heroine Alex into a non-stop, heart-pounding, terrifying adventure. At the beginning, ironically, Alex's world already feels like it’s over. She has a brain tumor and knows she’s dying. Her parents died years before and because the tumor robbed Alex of her sense of smell, she can hardly remember them anymore (funny how closely our memories and sense of smell are intertwined). On a final trip to say goodbye—Alex is hiking in the mountains to scatter her parents’ ashes—BAM—comes the end of the world. In this case it’s an electromagnetic pulse which destroys all electronic devices and causes most people to drop dead. (Sheesh, do we need another fear?) Throw in a bratty kid and a marine on the run/possible romantic interest. Also add flesh-eating zombies. And a cliffhanger at the end of EVERY chapter that amps up the tension to heights you can’t imagine. Ilsa isn’t totally heartless. SPOILER ALERT: Alex gets her sense of smell back. And possibly a super power. Another warning: there will be sequels. That you will have to wait for.

Not sure what it is exactly that attracts me to these end of the world books. My son, after his class read The Road and his classmates dragged around depressed for weeks, has a theory that these novels aren’t as dark as they appear on the surface. Sure, they take the negative elements of our world to their extreme and terrifying conclusions, but in the end, there is always at least one person standing. See, these books are really about the resiliency of the human spirit. If that volcano explodes or we poison ourselves or blow the planet to smithereens, someone’s going to be left to carry on.

Let’s hope it’s a couple of kids.

With possibly a gun. And some nonperishable food.

Page Turners: What's the Driving Question?

The past few weeks I’ve read several practically impossible to put down books, and it got me wondering what it is exactly about a book that makes it so compelling. Especially because the books I’m talking about are very different on the surface (and underneath the surface too). A memoir. The third book in a teen romance series. A man vs nature YA adventure. And an angsty soap-opera-y teen fantasy with a mythological twist. The obvious common denominators are good, solid writing, interesting and complex characters who seem real (with the memoir, of course, they ARE real), and a strong plot.

Plot is one of those elements that I used to struggle with in my own writing. Boiled down to the basics, plot is simply the sequence of events in a story. This happens then this happens then this happens. The trouble is, how do you decide what happens next when you’re the writer? I imagine with many formulaic action/adventure type stories (especially movies) you’ve got a group of guys in a smoky room just throwing scenes out there to see what sticks. First, we’ll have a car chase and then we’ll have an explosion and then we’ll throw in another car chase followed by a sex scene. But those stories, once you strip away the special effects, are really about nothing. Often, they’re even boring. To truly be compelling you’ve got to place a character into the action that people care about. If they don’t like the main character, if they don’t at least sympathize with him on some level, then really, what difference does it make if he’s in a car chase or running from an explosion or tangled up in the sheets with some random beautiful girl?

I’ll leave the creating a complex, sympathetic character issue for another day, and instead focus on plot. I’ve learned over the years that what it all comes down to—what makes a reader continue to turn pages (and, strangely, what makes a writer keep writing them)—is one question. Patti Gauch, former editor at Philomel and now a writing teacher and speaker, put it this way: “The character is basically being shot through the book like a pinball. He will hit obstacles and exterior stuff, which will play off of the interior stuff. What will he do? How will he deal with it? A question overlays the entire book. The writer must say it, explicitly or implicitly, from the very beginning.” She gave the example of The Wizard of Oz. Will Dorothy get home? But you can probably think of a ton of other examples. Will the guy who's afraid of the water in Jaws kill the shark? Will Luke and his friends beat the evil Empire in the Star Wars trilogy? Will Harry Potter triumph over Voldemort? These all seem like battles, and in a way, they are. A battle between the main character and someone or something else. It's English 101--Conflict.

I realized that the books I read recently all had an over-riding question. And since they contained characters that I worried over, I was eager to turn the pages and see how the question would be answered.

The memoir, This Is Not the Story You Think It Is by Laura Munson, might seem like an odd choice as a page turner, (see the previous blog entry for the complete review) but on the first page Munson relays the news that her husband may no longer love her. The book had more going on it than that, of course, but I was turning pages to find out what was going to happen to Munson. Did the guy love her or not? Was he going to stay? Was she going to keep him after his midlife crisis pretty much put their family through hell? (I won’t tell you the answer.)

The third book in a teen romance, We’ll Always Have Summer by Jenny Han, was a perfect, light summer read that I carried around the house until I finished. I'd already read the other books in the series, The Summer I Turned Pretty and It’s Not Summer Without You, so I already knew and loved the characters. Belly, who spends summers at a beach cottage with Conrad and Jeremiah, two brothers she looks up to and tags along after. They merely tolerate her existence, until the one summer she turns pretty….The books deal with her attraction to the two boys and their growing attraction to her, which threatens to tear all of them apart. Big question: Which boy will Belly choose?

I read the man vs nature YA adventure, Ashfall by Mike Mullin (release date: fall, 2011, Tanglewood Publishing) in one afternoon. The main character is Alex, a fifteen year old computer geek and taekwondo expert. At the beginning of the novel Alex fights with his parents after refusing to go on a weekend family trip to visit relatives. They reluctantly leave him home alone, and unfortunately, for Alex, that weekend the super volcano underneath Yellowstone (which really exists. Yikes) erupts and destroys half of the country. This novel was all action—one horrifying challenge after another as Alex makes his way 140 miles, by ski, over ash, through scenes of death and destruction, to find his parents. You won’t be able to put the story down until you know if he makes it.

The angsty, soap opera-y teen fantasy with a mythological twist is Fury by Elizabeth Miles. (Simon Pulse pub. August, 2011) This book has a great hook. The furies from Greek mythology, those crazy vengeful sisters who choose deserving humans to punish, are back, and for some reason, focusing their attention on two clueless teens in a small town in Maine. The narrative goes back and forth between the two kids, detailing their numerous faults and sins, with the furies in the background plotting their relentless, manipulative revenge. I’ve read reviews of this book online and some readers, apparently, thought the kids deserved their fate. But I didn’t. I was biting my nails in growing horror, worrying over Emily and Chase, who, okay, are a tad shallow and sometimes downright cruel, but aren’t we all? At times? I mean, who hasn’t had a secret crush on a best friend’s boyfriend? Ultimate, page turning question: will the furies pursue these kids to the bitter end—(gulp)—death?

So, there you have it. Four compelling, wildly different page turners that reminded me what makes a page turner. And here’s the cool takeaway lesson for writers: Figuring out the over-riding question of your book might be the key to the whole plot thing. At least it is for me. Start out with your sweet, sympathetic, very-real-in-your-own-mind character and plunk him down in your made up but also very real created world. Then let him go, asking, What if this? What if that? What will my sweet made up little guy do next?

The only way to know for sure is to write the book. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up with a page turner of your own. If not, well, at least you answered the question for yourself.