In Which My Tattoo Teaches Me to Buck Up and Get Back to Work

It's been over a month now since I've returned home from my Summer Lovin' California book tour and some days I wonder if the whole thing was a nice fuzzy dream.

Now I am back to reality, which means stuff like weeding the garden and walking the dog and planning lessons for upcoming presentations and tooling around with a pitch for my next book. For the record, I struggle with pitches. This goes all the way back through my writing life. I just wish there was a way to stick my manuscript into the right editor's hand, and say Read it.

Another for the record: this does not work. So don't bother, kiddos.

A few years ago, after I finished writing and revising my book Thin Space, I actually sat on it for six months because I couldn't think how to pitch it. The truth is, at that point, I was so burned out by writing and submitting and collecting rejections, I couldn't bear to start the whole angsty rollercoaster-y ride again with Thin Space--my sixth book and the book that while I was writing it felt like it might be THE ONE. But I was afraid. What if I was wrong, etc. and it went nowhere like every other book I'd written and hoped was the one.

My writing partner Donna metaphorically slapped me upside the head one day. What are you doing, she asked me. Why aren't you sending that manuscript out?

I whined for a bit about how much I hated writing query letters and she slapped me upside the head again. Oh my God, she said. You're a WRITER. Why can't you write a pitch? Forget it. I'll write the damn thing.

And she did. Ha.

Her pitch was awesome and got multiple rejections and it hardly fazed me.

I don't know if I recommend this approach but it did kinda work for me in the end. The problem with it is that I never really learned how to write a pitch...

Which I am trying to do now.

Donna, where the HECK are you when I need you???

So. forget that for a minute and let me pretend I am back in sunny California. Parked out by the pool and pondering the limes on a lime tree.

Or eating glorious food that I have not prepared myself.

Walking around the San Francisco streets and coming upon an art installation of books flapping in the sky like birds.

And noticing that the words have fallen out of those books and imprinted themselves upon the sidewalk by my feet.

This trip truly does seem like it happened to another person, happened in another life. And I could almost believe this is true, that it was nothing but a lovely hazy dream, but then I look down at my foot.

And see my TATTOO.

It's there.

Which means the trip really did happen, even though now I am firmly back in reality. The weeding, the dog-walking, the lesson planning, the pitch writing.

I can do it this time, write my own pitch. I am not the same woman I was five years ago.

Behind the Scenes of a Book Tour (Part One: Sunny California and the Emmys, Cute Vampires, and Lucky Bird Poop.)

I knew the second I was invited to go on Simon & Schuster's Summer Lovin' Tour with authors Suzanne Young, Sarah Ockler, and C.J. Flood, that this was going to be the trip of a lifetime.

The days leading up to the trip, I was whirling around in my usual pre-travel anxiety-haze. Plotting what to pack. Shopping. Creating a to-do list a million miles long. Organizing and cleaning and taking care of Everything That Is So Important.

And then, two days before I was to leave, I had a weird painful flare-up of sciatica. I didn't even know what this was until I looked it up online. I went to the doctor and begged him to do whatever he could do to help me manage. Long story short, he shot me up with steroids and I went home and plunked myself on an icepack--not doing ANY of the things I'd planned. Instead, my husband and I watched a Walking Dead marathon, which is an awesome show, btw. My daughter did my packing for me.

5:30 AM Sunday, June 22, I hobbled onto a plane to California.

Summer Lovin', baby. Oh, yeah. I was on my way.

Something I did not know about book tours before I went on one is how much time you spend sitting in cars. The first driver and I bonded over coffee in LA while we waited for the other authors to arrive.

I loved them immediately. (Which is a good thing. Spending all that time on the road, you will be spending that time with THEM.) Suzanne Young, bestselling author of The Program and The Treatment and numerous other books, is bubbly and brilliant. Sarah Ockler, author of #Scandal and Twenty Boy Summer and three other books, is funky and cool. C.J. Flood, debut writer of the award winning Infinite Sky, is smart and lovely. And British. (I could listen to her darling accent forever.)

Our first event was a library several hours away in Mission Viejo. We stopped for candy on the way. Helpful tip: it is fun to throw candy at people in the audience who ask questions. The four of us were just getting to know each other here. We asked questions too. About the stories behind our books. Our writing and revision processes. What we're working on next. We also sampled some of the candy. (A teen in the audience wrote up a good recap of the event here.)

When we got back to the hotel, we found that it was hosting the Daytime Emmys.

We ate dinner and watched the stars parade past. I had no idea who any of them were. Except for Sharon Osborne. But considering it was 7PM --10 Ohio time and I had been awake forever, I suspected I might've hallucinated her.

Sarah, CJ, and Suzanne posing at the Emmys looong after I went to bed. 

Day Two: I woke up bright and chipper, fully rested and raring to go. At 4:30 AM.

The hotel was hosting another fancy star studded thingy. Again, I knew who none of the famous people were, but my daughter freaked when I sent her this pic of some Vampire Diaries actor posing with C.J.

Later we drove three hours down the Pacific Coast Highway to San Diego. The driver treated us to shakes at the Shake Shack and then we stopped at Mission Beach and dipped our toes in the Pacific Ocean.

We got a quick bite to eat at a restaurant on the beach. I sat under a palm tree and a bird pooped on my head. This is supposed to be a sign of good luck in Poland. I have no idea if this is true, but I felt ridiculously lucky when Sarah offered to pick all the poop out of my hair.

Stacee, blogger at Adventures of a Book Junkie, did an awesome job recapping our event here in case you want to see how one of our panels went.

Day Three we hung out by the pool before our event in Glendale. Look how cute and summer lovin-y we all are. You can't even tell I am sitting on a giant icepack and having a major geriatric moment with my sciatic nerve.

Day Four I was a sinfully lazy sleeping-in woman not waking up until nearly 7!

At the event that night, the cool bookstore Vroman's in Pasadena, an old friend of mine from Connecticut that I haven't seen in years, showed up with her family. I felt very teary and blessed.

Like at all of the other events, we introduced ourselves and our books. We answered questions and signed books. We chatted with the teen readers and bloggers and other writers and booksellers.

But this night felt different.

Suzanne and Sarah and CJ and I were like longtime friends, finishing each other's sentences and telling inside jokes. We knew each other's back stories and childhoods and writing processes.

Back at the hotel we shared a nice dinner and I hung with them until the very end, finally adjusted to West Coast time.

I was an old pro, all geared up for the second half of the tour: San Francisco.

Tune in soon to see what happened next when we visited Facebook (and saw Mark Zuckerberg!), how we survived a windy perilous trip up a mountain, and... drumroll, my possibly midlife-y crisis mission to get a TATTOO.

In Which I Remind Myself to STOP Comparing Myself to Other Writers (also, a huge favor!!)

I know two great truths about writing:

Trust the process. 

And 

Every writer's process is different. 

Despite the fact that I know these two statements to be true, I doubt them all the time. 

I have to learn over and over that if I write a bit every day, I will eventually reach the end of a draft. And regardless of how messy it is, if I go back IN, I will eventually manage a second (and third and fourth and fifth) draft. And each draft will be a tad better than the draft before. And finally, if I keep at it, I will write THE END on the manuscript and it will truly be THE END. 

I also have to learn over and over to stop comparing myself to other writers. 

Back story: I am struggling mightily with a revision. For several months I worked my butt off every day on a fourth draft (or maybe it was a fifth draft. I don't even know anymore). This was a daily struggle that honestly felt like a battle.  But I am nearing (I HOPE!!) the end, and I am (ALMOST!) ready to send it off to my agent. 

I was feeling kinda proud of myself, and then I participated on a panel discussion with a group of eight other YA writers and someone in the audience asked a question about our writing process. 

Everyone sounded so disciplined and serious and confident and cheerful. 

Mindee Arnett, author of The Nightmare Affair (which is a trilogy) and Avalon (which is also a trilogy) calls herself a "pantser who likes to ask for directions." She writes fast drafts, without outlines, and logically plots out her story as she goes. (Oh, I should mention that Mindee has a full-time job, little kids at home, and a horse farm.) 

Mindy McGinnis, author of Not a Drop to Drink (recently optioned for film by Stephenie Meyers' production company) is a full time high school librarian who writes her books at night. 

One of the writers works when her son is at kindergarten. Another churns out romance novels. Two of the writers work as a team and co-write their books. 

And so it went, until it was my turn. 

I have no full time job. One of my kids is away at college and the other has a foot eagerly out the door. I have entire days stretching out in front of me with no real obligations except walking the dog. Every day I have the best of intentions to start my work early, and every day I do everything I possibly can to NOT start working, until finally the pressure becomes so great that I want to tear my hair out of my scalp. Only then, do I open my file and begin. 

I've talked to many writers over the years and am always fascinated by how they work. 

Alan Gratz writes these detailed 60 page outlines before he even begins writing his books.

Kristin Tubb thinks through her scenes--every descriptive detail and movement and bit of dialogue-- and when she is ready to write, it all just scrolls out.

And here's me:

I write with very little idea where my story is going. 

I take my story apart multiple times and put it back together. 

I stress over every damn choice I make. 

I make outlines and checklists and excel spreadsheets and index cards and posters. 

I draw maps and build papermache sets. 

I rant to my husband about plotholes until he hates me. 

My writing partner --the sweet blessed friend who has read all of my drafts for the past 6 years -- is afraid to talk to me without first tiptoeing around and saying stuff like, Now this is really good. There's hardly anything you're going to have to do to fix it. Maybe, two or three days at most... (because she's learned how resistant I am to hearing criticism despite how RIGHT it is)

I visit schools and libraries and I talk to beginning writers and more seasoned ones and I tell them that there is no RIGHT way to write, that writers figure out their own process, that even after you do think you know what you're doing, you may have to figure it all over again with each new book.

I bet I sound so confident and serious and self-disciplined and freaking cheerful.  

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So now I've got a great favor to ask my writing friends: 

I'm putting together a powerpoint for an upcoming revision talk for an SCBWI regional conference. I'd love to show visual representations of how writers write. If I choose yours, I'll give you full credit and talk up your book at the conference. See below for examples:

William Faulkner wrote on his walls... 

Laurie Halse Anderson's "road map" of her latest critically acclaimed novel The Impossible Knife of Memory.

Notes on my book Thin Space

If you're game for sharing, shoot me an email jodycasella (@) yahoo (.) com 

Include a photo of how you write with a sentence or two of explanation. 

Deadline: June 30 

Thanks so much!

"This is Your Life" Meets a Book Tour with a dash of Thelma and Louise

If you're even a casual reader of this blog, you know I've been writing and pursuing publication for years and day dreaming for just as many years about what it would be like to have my book on the bookstore shelves. My day dreams tended to be very specific. I could visualize myself signing books and doing library and school visits. I imagined the book launch party and the interviews and the movie deals and the large advance and royalty checks.

Some of these things have come true (see: book signings, library and school visits, interviews, book launch parties)

Some, alas, have not (see: movie deals, $$$) 

But, one thing I did not ever think about was what I will call the This is Your Life aspect of book promotion.

My book launch party last September had a guest list that included my book club, my neighbors, my Bunco group, my local SCBWI chapter fellow writers, my best friend and her teen daughter, my best friend from college who now lives in Minnesota, my mother, and my in-laws. Plus, numerous librarians and teachers from the area.

When I went to Lexington KY (a place I lived for ten years) to sign books at Morris Book Shop, I visited a school where I used to teach and had a blast catching up with old teacher friends and students, and I reconnected with friends from my uber-volunteer PTA days, many of whom had no idea that I was a writer. 

During my visit to Memphis (where I went to college and taught high school English) I signed books at the Booksellers at Laurelwood and saw old college friends, including my roommate and several sorority sisters, a few of my former students (and their parents!), the best man from my wedding, and my cousins.

A trip to Nashville to sign books at Parnassus Bookstore led to a reconnection with a college friend (and a trip to the university where she is now a professor) and a cool bonding experience with my in-laws. I also had a chance to have dinner with a sorority sister and lunch with another college friend who is now a sociology professor at Vanderbilt.

I feel like I'm caught up in that old game show "This Is Your Life," where the announcer parades long lost relatives and friends on stage while you cry. (I've never actually seen this show, but I have seen the Sesame Street version.)

But now, the grand daddy of all book tours is about to begin... 

Tomorrow, I embark upon a whirlwind trip to Connecticut (where I grew up). I'll be visiting schools and libraries and a bookstore. Also, I'm doing my first ever TV interview at a local public TV station. 

It's all very exciting and cool but I must admit there is an anxiety factor involved too. Picture how you feel before you attend your 25th high school reunion. You're curious to see old friends. You're a little nervous about how they'll perceive you vs how they once knew you. Now, throw in a talk at the library where you checked out books when you were ten and a bookstore visit with three writers you don't know and

a ten hour car trip with your mother

if you want to get a sense of how I'm feeling as I pack my suitcases today...

Yeah. This is going to be interesting. 

Here's the schedule--in case you live up that way and want to poke your head in to see how I deal:

Monday April 7

*Wilbraham & Monson Academy in Wilbraham, MA

*Storrs Library, Longmeadow, 6:30 (open to the public) (My college friend and sorority sister Noel set this visit in motion. Fun fact about Noel that she may not know: she is the reason I married my husband.)

Tuesday April 8

*Interview for the Meet the Author series at Wethersfield TV14 (thanks Uncle Don for getting this one in the works!)

*New Britain High School (thanks to Beth M., now an English teacher there, once my across the street neighbor) 

*Book Club and dinner with Beth's mom and her book club. Also, my mom.

Wednesday, April 9

*Willard School, Berlin, CT (I keep forgetting I have story in Highlights Magazine. I will be reading and discussing it with the second graders there. Thanks to my Mom and darling niece for setting this visit up)

*New Britain Library, New Britain CT 7-9 pm (Open to the public) I'm talking writing and growing up in New Britain (This is going to be a fun one--equal parts Casella family reunion and St Joseph School and Aquinas High School class reunions....) Also, I may once and for all solve the Mystery of the Missing Librarian. 

Thursday, April 10

*Metropolitan Business Academy, New Haven CT and the all-city New Haven teen book club

(Plus, a side trip to see my son at college)

*RJ Julia Bookstore, Madison CT 6:00 (open to the public) Book Panel discussion with Jennifer Castle, Kim Purcell, and Phoebe North. We're talking "Survivors in YA Fiction," answering questions about writing and publishing, and signing our books. 

Tune in soon for the post trip recap.

On the Road (and Off): Photo Diary of the Thin Space Book Tour (PS: this my 200th blog post!)

Sooooooo Thin Space has been out for nearly two months and I've been having a grand old time talking it up with family, friends and sometimes, shockingly--people I don't know. 

This has been kind of a whirlwind travel schedule and totally NOT the norm for me, which usually consists of me sitting on the couch and staring bleary-eyed at the computer screen interspersed with multiple walks with my high strung dog. But what I've discovered is that being on the road can be fun too (once I got over my slightly agoraphobic/I hate driving alone-itis issue. See here.)

A display at Parnassus Books, the cool independent bookstore in Nashville owned by author Ann Patchett

My in-laws made cookies shaped like feet.

And I met Jessica Young, author of My Blue Is Happy 

My first book festival--Books by the Banks in Cincinnati--where I learned that having a huge bowl of candy on the table is a helpful marketing technique.

Fellow 2013 debut YA writer Mindy McGinnis, author of Not a Drop to Drink, a dystopian novel set in the not so distant future where water is scarce. (Notice the brilliant promotional thingy Mindy's got going on: water bottles...)  

I hung out with the Ohio school librarians at their annual conference which was held at a waterpark and had a chance to chat with one of my favorite authors, MT Anderson. He was gung ho to enjoy the rides but had forgotten to pack the proper shoes. What I learned: MT Anderson is a good sport. 

A trip to Memphis to visit my husband's and my alma mater, Rhodes College--where we are subtly, or not so subtly, urging our teen daughter to apply.

"Look, honey, can't you just see yourself going to school at this place?" 

I mean, really. THIS is the ceiling of the Rhodes library.

The bookstore in Memphis where I used to work--The Booksellers at Laurelwood. Here I am chatting it up with former students, friends, sorority sisters, former co-workers, and several  people I don't know

Taking a lesson from Mindy McGinnis, I gave out something that tied in with my book--lollipops shaped like feet.

I talked a ninth grade boy into taking off his shoes for an impromptu photo shoot. This was a cool day--visited 5 classes of ninth grade students who were REQUIRED to read Thin Space, which I must say, made me slightly nervous. Those kids had writing assignments and homework and tests on that book!  But everyone was cool about it (or did a good job pretending to be).

A local book club read Thin Space and invited me to chat about it with them at their monthly meeting. They met at a French bistro and I book-talked one of my favorite books, Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell, which they ended up choosing for their next book. Now I want to go to that meeting too.

The Buckeye Book Fair in Wooster Ohio. The feet lollipops were a big hit.

Only downside to my travels: a dog who is less than thrilled. Here she takes out her displeasure on my file folder. 

But that seemed to be the extent of the damage.

Until:

Sigh. This was my favorite journal.

What's the Difference Between Being Published and NOT Being Published? (Also, a Brief Digression about Fleas)

It's been roughly one month since my first book Thin Space was released and lately I've been thinking about the differences between the Before I Was an Officially Published Writer ME and the After Me.

Before I was published I ruminated over the question too. I'd been writing and pursuing publication for years and truly believed I was on the verge of publishing almost as long, but somehow the ever elusive finish line kept moving out of reach.

When it finally happened--the book deal--it almost seemed anti-climactic.

The Pre-published Me struggled to sit down every day and write. That Me set goals and the majority of the time accomplished those goals. I'd figured out over the years that it's hard to write the first draft of a novel, and that the "finished" draft will need to be revised multiple times, and all of that will take a long time.

I was plagued by self doubt. There were days when I hated what I was writing. There were days when I thought my work was brilliant, but then I was plagued by the fact that no one would ever read this brilliant work because I couldn't seem to snag an agent--and later, when I had snagged an agent, she couldn't seem to catch the attention of an editor.

I kept writing.

I wrote ten books. I wrote multiple versions of these ten. The despair of finding readers for any of these grew exponentially. I kept writing anyway. I vacillated daily, sometimes hourly, between hope and despair.

So that was the Me then.

The me now is the same.

I still struggle to sit down each day and write. I still have terrible days when I think that what I am writing is horrible, that I will never be able to pull strands together, and that if/when I do, I won't be able to sell the damn thing.

I have been through the angsty painful process so many times that I know I will finish the project eventually. I also have an agent now who will read it. But there is no guarantee that she will like it and want to sell it. And there is no guarantee that an editor will want to buy it.

The differences:

One is promotion. I might want to spend all my time hunkered down with my WIP but I have to promote Thin Space (a book I finished writing five years ago). I am not complaining about that, just stating the reality. I am traveling around to schools and bookstores. Which is fun and gratifying and cool but also tiring. (see: I am an anxious traveler).

The biggest difference has more to do with perception and response from other people--and it's why being published had always been so important to me. I had made my peace with being a writer who wrote for the sake of writing itself. I love writing (even when I HATE IT) and know that if I never published another word, I would continue to write. But I will be the first person to admit that it is very nice to know that people are reading what I write.

I visited Middle Tennessee State University last week when I was in Nashville to sign at Parnassus Books and I talked to a lot of the students. The first question I asked was "Are you a writer?" Each one gave a hesitant reply.

Yeah, um, sort of...
Well, I hope to be but...
Um, I'm working on that...

I totally understand that hesitation--it's amazingly difficult to say out loud what your dream is--to say unequivocally Yes, I am a writer because the usual response from the questioner is something like, "Oh, what have you written?" (which really means, Is your book published/Can I find it at a bookstore?) and then the writer will have to hesitate again. Um, well, I'm working on something but, um, no, not yet.

It took me ten years to answer simply: "Yes."

It took another ten years to write something worthy of publication.

I told the students: Just save time, skip ahead ten years, and say I am a writer. If you write, you are a writer and in the end the only difference between being published and not being published is ... being published.

For years I had imagined the big release day of my first book. I'd be chatting on the phone or on social media with well-wishers. Maybe I'd visit a few bookstores and bask in the glow of my beautiful book faced out on the shelves.

Here's how I actually spent the long awaited for day:

Locked out of my house.

A couple of days before I'd discovered that my dog and cat were infested with fleas. Not sure how I'd missed this because the $*^&# fleas were all over the place. The morning of the Big Day I carted stuff out onto my back porch--open food containers and tooth brushes and pet food and the litter box. I corralled my anxious old cat and my skittish puppy (who even after a year of co-habitating still loathe each other) out there too. My neighbor and I ran around my house setting off flea bombs and screaming as the poisonous stuff spewed into the air.

We raced out the back door to find the cat hissing and the dog crying. My neighbor, no dummy, went home. I sat out on the porch picking fleas off my pets as they whined to me about their proximity to each other.

Did I mention it was the hottest day of the year?

While my house was being poisoned, I combed out fleas. I sweated like a pig. The animals finally settled down and in exhaustion and possibly under threat of heat stroke, they flopped out at my feet and fell asleep. I worked on my latest manuscript. My phone dinged every once in a while.

"Congrats on your book!!" said the well-wishers. "Enjoy your day!"

Ah, just as I had always dreamed.

I swiped the perspiration from my eyes and whacked dead a hopping flea, then I wrote back to each one: "Thanks!"

Just out of curiosity, why in God's name would there ever have been a child's game called "My Dog Has Fleas"? 

On the Book Tour Road: Confessions of an Anxious Traveler

Tomorrow I'm off to embark upon the second leg of the Thin Space Book Tour--otherwise known as the "The Tour through All the Places Where I've Lived slash Know People."

The first stop on this tour was Lexington Kentucky, my home for ten years, where I raised my kids through their pre-school/ elementary/some of middle school years, taught at an awesome creative and performing arts school, and experienced the hey day of my PTA-Carpooling-Uber Volunteer stage of life. (Update: I had a blast returning to my former school--where I did my first ever Power Point presentation. I loved catching up with old friends--my book club, PTA moms and dads, local writers and teachers and librarians and former students--and the signing at Morris Book Shop was so well-attended the store ran out of copies of my book. Woo!)

Stop Two is Nashville, and I must admit I am anxious for a variety of reasons, none of which have anything to do with the actual Book Signing/School Visiting/Public Speaking aspect of a book tour that might make other writers nervous.

The truth is I always get nervous before I travel. I love traveling but what I don't love is the actual getting to the new place part of the process.

I'm not thrilled with flying (the potential for missed connections/cancelled flights/lost baggage weighs on my mind. Also, plane crashes.) But I hate driving too. I think it's the combination of intense hyper-alertness intermingled with the mind-numbing boredom.

There's other stuff that goes along with gearing up for a trip that puts me over the edge, and usually I drive everyone my husband crazy in the days before we travel.

Example 1:

Packing. What do I pack? What will I wear? What is the weather like? What if I forget something important? My husband's answer to this rant is something along the lines of "I could be wrong, but I think they have stores where we are going."

Example 2:

Cleaning. Okay, this is totally my own weird idiosyncrasy, but every time I am about to leave on a trip, I feel compelled to clean my house. It's this thing where you know that when you come home you're going to have a bunch of dirty laundry and you're going to be tired from the trip and wouldn't it be nice to walk into a clean home? This compulsion manifests itself in scenarios like this: My husband is loading up the car and I am running around with a scrub brush scouring the toilets.

He yells at me to put the cleaning implement down and help him load the car and I yell at him to understand my mania and help me rearrange the silverware drawer. Big shocker: we don't always begin our vacations in the most chipper of moods.

Really, I am trying to work on my traveling anxiety. Especially today, the day before I leave on my Nashville solo road trip. It's hard though. I have a mile long list of things to do:

1. Revise a chapter in my WIP
2. change the cat litter
3. finish and post this blog
4. clean off the kitchen counter
5. Answer a bunch of emails
6. Vacuum the upstairs bedrooms

You get the picture.

And look at me, all efficient and productive and just about to finish number 3 on the list!

Readers, please say a quick prayer for me tomorrow as I set out on my 400+ mile drive, and if you happen to live in the Nashville metro area, pop into Parnassus Books to say hello, Saturday, Oct. 5 at 2:00. With any luck I will be dressed appropriately for the weather and the store will not run out of books.

Thin Space Has a Playlist (also, a video!)

Thin Space has been out for a little over a week and I am still being surprised daily by cool bonus stuff that even in my dreams I did not see coming.

Example:
My editor's younger brother put together a playlist to go with the book.

In my editor's words:

"It's not necessarily a list of songs that Marsh would listen to (I think Marsh would be way too caught up in his own stuff to actually listen to music) but a set of songs that matches the tone of the book. The "bonus tracks" are songs I thought were good for the book, but lessened the cohesion of the list. Also, the songs are kinda sorta in the order that one would experience tonally while reading the book."

Let me say here that I scanned the list and --OLD FOGIE ALERT -- I only recognized a few of the songs. But I have listened to them since, and I LOVE them and totally think my editor (and her way cool younger brother) nailed it.

Listen for yourselves:

Bleeding Out by Imagine Dragons
Change (In the House of Flies) by Deftones
Born to Die by Lana Del Rey
42 by Coldplay
What the Water Gave Me by Florence and the Machine
On the Surface by Civil Twilight
Weak and Powerless by A Perfect Circle
Dead Hearts by Stars
Soldier's Eyes by Jack Savoretti
Flying Solo by Elenowen
Your Bones by Of Monsters and Men
Hurricane by MS MR
You Found Me by The Fray
Brother by Green River Ordinance
Memories by Within Temptation

"Bonus Tracks
Wherever I May Roam by Rockabye Baby
So Cold by The Vitamin String Quartet
Iris by Boyce Avenue
All Around Me by Flyleaf

While I am on the topic of music, I should mention that every day when I was writing Thin Space, I psyched myself up by listening first to Coldplay's All These Things That I've Done. I have no idea why the song resonated with me, but it played like a music video in my head, and all the while I could picture my poor tormented main character Marsh Windsor trudging along barefoot through the snow...

I will leave you with this (which, I think will make more sense after you read the book), a tribute video made by a fan. (Okay. It was made by my daughter):

Story of a Book Launch (featuring fun party pics)

The party sorta ended up spinning out of my control.

This has happened to me in the past when it comes to party-planning. I start with something smallish:

Hey! Let's have a book signing for my debut novel Thin Space at my favorite local bookstore and I'll invite my family and friends to celebrate and we'll have punch and cookies, and maybe the cookies will be shaped like bare feet.

But somehow it grew bigger:

Of course I wanted to invite my Bunco group because those ladies are so much fun, and all of my daughter's friends--my key demographic readers--and my Mom, (because she is my MOM!), and my in-laws must come because they are awesomely supportive and somehow giddier than I am about this whole publishing a book thing, and then, there are the teachers and librarians who've read the book and have been thrusting it into their students' hands and now I don't even think of them as teachers and librarians anymore, but good friends who go out for margaritas and chips and guacamole with me.

Also, my book club. And my neighbors. And my husband's coworkers. And my hair stylist.

Somewhere along the way the amazing next door neighbors, who throw THE most lavish parties on the block, took over. (She's a former caterer and gourmet cook. He's a former bartender. Enough said.) She planned a menu. He stocked a full bar.

My friend from college drove 12 hours from Minnesota. My long time friend and her daughter drove 12 hours from North Carolina. She'd made these gorgeous necklaces:

(Here's my Mom, modeling one)

And brought a stamp shaped like feet and proceeded to stamp the heck out of a bunch of stuff with it.

(A napkin)

I guess I should mention here that the main character in the book walks around barefoot. Also, the thin space, supposedly, is a misty and cold place. Which inspired my in-laws to buy blocks of dry ice and set them misting around the back porch:

We drove over to the bookstore and I was getting more and more nervous... especially when I walked in the door and this greeted me:

And I got even more nervous when I saw the crowd--a panorama of This Is Your Life Meets my Bunco Group and My Mother and including some people I did NOT know!!:

 
I took a deep breath and had a profound moment of gratitude and love for all the readers in the world and for bookstores and for dear friends and for my father-in-law clapping and wearing his book cover necklace with pride.

I talked for a bit about something--who knows what. I signed books and smelled the stunning flower arrangement that my best writing friend Donna sent.

I tried not to spell anyone's name wrong and somehow ended up spelling my OWN name wrong a few times. (It's the two l's and the e that trip me up. I just keep looping letters without paying attention.) After the signing, the bookstore owner invited me to sign the Wall of Authors and my daughter noticed that there was tiny space under John Green's signature so I squeezed my name in there, making sure I spelled it correctly.

The party went on late into the night. We stuffed ourselves on gourmet food and my bartender neighbor ran around filling drinks and popping champagne and making multiple toasts to perseverance and following dreams and Harry Potter-like success.

And then we all kicked off our shoes and enjoyed each other's company and the remainder of the lovely warm summer night.

Children's Author Blog Hop: In Which I Reveal What I Am Working on Now (Sorta)

This week I am participating in the Children’s Author Blog Hop. My friend Holly Schindler, the extremely awesome administrator for our group blog, YA Outside the Lines, invited me to be part of this interview hop in which each author answers four questions and then invites three other children’s authors to participate.

Sad truth: I'm not having very much luck with my invitations. YA Writer Colleen Clayton, author of the brilliant and heartbreaking debut novel What Happens Next and Tracy Barrett, much-acclaimed historical fiction writer, are my only takers at the moment. So I am going to promote the heck out of them TIMES 3 (see below) and leave it at that--

because I do love these interview questions.

My book Thin Space is days away from being released but my head's been in another story entirely, and all of the questions relate to that. So, without further ado:

1. What are you working on right now?

A rewrite of a rewrite of a rewrite--is the short answer.

The longer answer is that back in 2009, when I was first submitting Thin Space and trying not to get sucked under the waves of despair that accompany the querying process for me, I signed up for NaNoWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month--where writers pledge to write a novel during the month of November). NaNo is how I'd written the first draft of Thin Space the year before and that had worked out for me, so...

Flash forward to Dec. 1, 2009, and I had another finished 50,000 word manuscript. I use the word "finished" in the very loosest definition of the word.

When you write a book in the floundery, digressing, jumping around, trying-to-figure-out-the-story kind of a way that I write, the real work comes later.

a few versions of this mess (and note the grocery receipts. I am BIG on scribbling stuff down on grocery receipts.)

Not to get into too many boring details, but the revision I'm fiddling with now is at least version number four. I wrote three other novels in between and did heavy revisions on Thin Space during this time too. AM I THE ONLY WRITER WHO WORKS THIS WAY?

2. How does it differ from other works in the genre? 

Good question. This book, which I'll call "YA Fantasy," is the most complicated thing I've ever tried to write. It's got multiple points of view. It has two major plot lines and extensive back stories that had to be hammered out. There's some stuff from Greek mythology sprinkled around in it. Also, gritty and horrifying environmental disaster elements.

I don't think it's like any book out right now. (This is how weird it is, and this is the thought that sometimes wakes me up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night.) Something I read recently and loved--and I don't in any way assume that my book is even in the same LEAGUE as this--is the brilliant Maggie Steifvater's The Raven Boys. That's also got multiple povs and strands of magical realism and mythology...

3. Why do you write what you do?

Jeez. Who knows.

4. What is the hardest part about writing?

Here's a fun quote: "I hate writing; I love having written."

Not sure who said it, but it is so damn true some days. Most days. WRITING IS HARD. I don't know why. I mean, you're just sitting there. You're tapping on the keyboard. You're making stuff up. What's hard about that?

And yet every damn day, I have to psych myself up to sit down and open up my file and start tapping. Within minutes I fall into a spell and disappear. This is the magic part of writing that is so difficult to explain. It feels strange and good but also it saps your energy, and when you climb out blearily at the end of the day, you feel like you've run a mental marathon.

Maybe this is what is hard about writing--the intense focus and concentration required, never mind the emotional wringer that often accompanies that bizarre spell-like realm.

I have no idea why I do it. As difficult as it is for me every damn day, I have learned over the years that the days I don't write are much harder than the days I do.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And now here are my shout outs to my writer friends:

Colleen Clayton--
I read Colleen's novel What Happens Next before it came out and had no idea what I was picking up. I immediately loved it. On the surface this is a problem novel--a girl is drugged and date raped--but the book is about so much more than that.

This is every girl's story to come to grips with a tragedy, to make sense of the unthinkable, to emerge on the other side okay. The book's theme is dark but there's humor too and painfully real interactions between friends, between a mother and a daughter, and an unfolding romance between two damaged people who deserve to have love in their lives.

Since I reviewed What Happens Next, Colleen and I struck up a correspondence. She was kind enough to read my book Thin Space and her blurb figures prominently on the first page. We've met since that time--we're both Ohio authors--and she's become a mentor and a friend.

She told me recently that her second novel is finished and I am so looking forward to reading it.

And

Tracy Barrett
First, I must tell you that Tracy has been pretty much a mentor to me since I met her years ago at a regional SCBWI conference. We struck up a conversation and I invited her to visit the school where I was teaching. My book club students had read her novel Cold in Summer and were thrilled to meet Tracy and ask her questions about the writing and publishing process.

This was actually MY first encounter with a visiting author too, and Tracy's presentation that day and her insightful responses to the kids got me seriously thinking that being a working writer might not be such an impossible/pie in the sky/day dreamy life after all.

Tracy's written 19 (probably more!) books for middle grade and YA readers. Most of these are historical fiction, but some are twists on classic myths. My favorite of these is Dark of the Moon about Theseus and the Minotaur.

And now Tracy's got several projects in the works that are sure to be awesome: The Icarus Complex, which uses the Icarus myth as a basis for a contemporary story set at a skydiving center, The Stepsister's Tale, a retelling of Cinderella, and Mirror, a twist on Snow White. I am so looking forward to getting my hands on these!

Searching for a Thin Space

Writers often talk about how important it is to trust the process. "Trust the process," they say. "Trust the process." As if the words themselves are magic.

We whisper to each other our stories of perfect timing and dumb luck--about frustrating plot holes that are solved after a night's sleep or a hot shower. Book deals that click together right when a struggling writer is about to quit. People who meet at conferences in line at a port-o-potty and end up being long time critique partners/writing soul mates. The book you need for research that appears on a library shelf.

The first three things actually happened to me. The last happened to a writer I know. His first book was set in Japan in the 1890's. His editor loved the story but felt that it could be beefed up with a bit more about the main character's experiences in school. The trouble was that my friend didn't know anything about schools in Japan in the 1890's.

He knew he'd have to do research and he wasn't sure where to start. (This was pre-internet days.) Anyway, he walked into a library, grumbling about the work that lay ahead of him. Wouldn't it be cool if there was a book out there with exactly the information he was looking for?

He looked up, and there on the shelf was a book titled something like: "Schools in Japan in the 1890's."

When I was writing my novel Thin Space, I did research on the Celtic idea of thin places, places where the veil between this world and the spiritual world is thinner. I discovered that there really isn't that much information out there--mostly religious or New Age-y websites, some discussion of how the idea of sacred spaces may have evolved over time, yadda yadda druids, blah blah stones.

But nothing about how to make a thin space. Nothing about how to find one. Nothing about what it would feel like to step into one.

Remembering my writer friend and his Japanese schools in the 1890's experience, I started thinking how awesome it would be if I found the book I needed. Curious Accounts of the Thin Space is what it would be called. And it would contain interviews with witnesses who had stumbled upon and stumbled into thin spaces...

Since I'd already scrolled around online and browsed in the local library, I took my research quest on the road.

First stop: the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. Because I happened to be on campus and the building is freaking amazing.

(This picture was NOT taken in the rare books library. But I thought these old card catalogs were cool. Fun fact: they were all empty. Which just seems sad on some level.)

Here's the outside of the rare books library. Those "windows" are made of very thin marble so light can get through, but not enough light to damage the 500,000 rare books...

Now I am inside and looking at the marble windows. Directly behind me is a Gutenberg Bible.

But I was not looking for a Gutenberg Bible. I was looking for a book about thin spaces. I found something that sorta fit the bill...

And something else that was even better. Unfortunately, it was out of my reach. So close and yet so far away.

But I TRUSTED the process. And the next day while meandering down a side street in Boston, my daughter and I practically bumped into a rare bookstore.

And
that
is
when
I
found
this:

Exactly what I needed, exactly when I needed it.