Magical Realism & Breathing Life into Settings--Guest Post by Holly Schindler

Once more I am thrilled to host Holly Schindler on my blog. Holly is the fearless leader of YA Outside the Lines, the author of multiple books for young adults, and my lovely, long time writer friend.--Jody

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And here's Holly:

My work has run the gamut in terms of age categories and genres: I’ve tackled YAs, MGs, adult fiction, contemporary realism, romance, psychological thrillers, humor…and in ’16, two of my releases delve into magical realism.

One thing both of my magical realism releases have in common is that the “magical” elements of both allow the settings to literally come to life.

Actually, I’ve long been a fan of works that depict settings with such detail and vibrancy that the setting itself feels like a main character (think: Elin Hilderbrand’s BLUE BISTRO—a story that made me mourn for the loss of a restaurant the same way I would mourn for the tragic end to a character I’d grown to know and love), but the magical realism element allows me to take this to an entirely new level:

SPARK, my fourth YA (HarperTeen), focuses on the dilapidated Avery Theater—the site of a ‘40s-era tragedy. In order to depict the revival of the old theater, I depicted it as a living, breathing entity. When the MC, Quin, and her two friends come to the Avery, the theater comes back to life; its heart begins to beat again: 

SPARK TRAILER: 







My independently-released FOREVER FINLEY is using magical realism in order to bring the small town of Finley to life. In my indie work, I wanted to experiment with formats that most publishers don’t often explore—specifically, this time around, I really wanted to get back to shorter fiction (a format I love but hadn’t written in much since my days as a master’s student). “Come December” was initially going to be a stand-alone short story. But I was so surprised by the response (I moved 19K copies during the holiday season) that I wanted to propel the story forward.


FOREVER FINLEY is a short story cycle, meaning each story is a stand-alone and can be read in any order; on their own, each story creates one picture of the town of Finley—when read together, they create another. People find themselves drawn to Finley for reasons they can’t explain; meanwhile, legends regarding the Hargroves, Finley’s founding family, swirl through the town. I don’t want to give too much away, because the tale is still ongoing! Once a month, I release a new short story—each titled for the month of its release. And I’ve got a big finale planned for this December!

FOREVER FINLEY TRAILER:



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Holly Schindler Bio: I’m a hybrid author of critically concession acclaimed traditionally published and Amazon bestselling independently published works for readers of all ages. My previous YAs (A BLUE SO DARK, PLAYING HURT, and FERAL) have received starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly, won silver and gold medals from ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year and the IPPY Awards, respectively, been featured on Booklist’s First Novels for Youth, School Library Journal’s “What’s Hot in YA,” and been selected as a PW Pick. Kirkus praised by latest YA, SPARK, for “crisp prose [that] flows easily between the past and present,” and Booklist claimed the novel casts “a shimmering spell.”

Readers can get in touch at
HollySchindler.com
Facebook
Twitter @Holly_Schindler

Interview with Jennifer R. Hubbard

When I was asked to join the awesome group writing blog YA Outside the Lines last year, the first thing I did was check out the other contributors' bios and books. At a glance this is a talented and varied group that represents every YA genre, from literary award-winners to bestselling paranormal romances (which also win awards) and everything in between. There's a wide range of writerly experience represented too. Some of the members have multiple books published. And then there's, um, me, with my one soon-to-be-released first novel.

I'm having blast getting to know these writers, both virtually and for real, and I'm reading my way through all of their novels. Last month I read the absorbing and beautifully written Try Not to Breathe by Jennifer R. Hubbard. From the very first page I was drawn into this story of a teen boy's struggle to make peace with his suicide attempt and his growing relationship with a girl who's trying make peace with her father's death.

I am still thinking about the issues raised in this book and still hearing the voice of the boy in my head, and today I am thrilled that Jennifer Hubbard has agreed to chat with me about her book and about her writing process.

Jody: I know readers must ask you this all the time, Jenn, but where do you get your ideas for your books?

Jenn: I write about things I care about, things that interest me, that whisper in my ear. I need a basic plot or situation and a character’s voice before I can start writing. The question, “What if?” helps.

I tried to write about suicide many times before I wrote Try Not to Breathe. I never found the right way to tell the story until I had the character of Ryan Turner, standing under a waterfall after his stay in a psychiatric hospital. And I saw that the story I needed to tell was about stepping back from that brink.

Jody: That scene was such a powerful and riveting way to begin. You're right that finding a scene like that is often the key into the story we're meant to tell. Once you have it, though, and with your other work, what's your next step? Do you just start writing? Or do you plot your narrative out in advance?

Jenn: I start with a bare-bones, sketchy “outline” that’s only a few lines long. It gives me an idea of where I want to go, and what major obstacles will crop up. But mostly, I wing it. A big part of the energy that keeps me going through a first draft comes from the power of discovery.

Jody: My process is similar--writing to figure out what the story is. I should bring up here, and I know you would agree with me, Jenn, that there are many other drafts and revisions that come after that. Something that beginning writers (me! when I was just starting out) don't realize is that some of those revised manuscripts never make it to publication. Was that your experience? How many books did you write before you got your first book deal?

Jenn: I started with short stories for the adult literary market, and I had my first one accepted for publication while I was still in high school. With short stories, you write a lot and you send out a lot, so I accumulated tons of rejections, along with occasional acceptances.

My first attempts at novel-writing were also still while I was in high school. Most of them, I only did one draft, or they were only 80 pages long, so I’m not sure they count. Once or twice during my short-story years, I produced a novel-length manuscript that I sent to one or two places and got form rejections, and then I went back to short stories.

I didn’t get really serious about novel-writing until 2003, when I decided to try writing YA because I realized I had all these YA books on my shelves that I loved and still read. I took a class in writing children’s books. I wrote a novel that came very close; some agents and editors expressed interest in it, but they all thought it wasn’t quite there yet, and they didn’t agree on what it needed. I couldn’t tell either, so I set it aside and went on to the manuscript that became my first published book, The Secret Year.

Jody: So, only one book that will remain forever in a drawer. Or maybe you will dust it off and try again with it?

Jenn: I mentioned that particular one because it was the one I gave the most serious, realistic shot. But there are plenty more draft manuscripts, half-finished manuscripts, and random chapters lying around that I never even sent out, and a couple of manuscripts I only sent to one or two places before realizing they weren't ready. Then there was a book I wrote between The Secret Year and Try Not to Breathe,  but never submitted because I never quite got it right. All of these trunk novels have served me the way a scrap bag serves a quilter: I often borrow characters, scenes or ideas from them to use in work that eventually does get published. In fact, the character of Nicki in Try Not to Breathe draws heavily on a character from one of those abandoned books.

Jody: I like that scrap bag metaphor. It's hard to let a manuscript go, especially one that you've labored over, but when you think that you might be able to recycle a snippet of dialogue or a quirky character, it makes it a little easier. Speaking of laboring, what kind of work schedule do you have?

Jenn: When I go to my day job, I write in the evenings. When I don’t go to the day job, I will often write as soon as I get up, and then try to do another session later.

Jody: That's got to be difficult, balancing writing with another job. When I was teaching, and when my kids were younger, I had the hardest time putting writing even third or fourth on my list. It seemed like something I needed to schedule--for own my sanity.

Jenn: I haven’t found a good way to fit everything I want and need to do in a single day. So I just keep juggling. I use lists, calendars, and schedules. I break everything down into mini-assignments to make things less overwhelming. I first learned to do this in junior high school, where we had so much homework that I couldn’t fit it all in unless I blocked out my time, hour by hour. I look back now and can’t believe I managed to create that schedule and stick to it. But the habit stayed with me through high school, college, and afterward. Though I no longer block out every hour of my day, I still use calendars and to-do lists.

Jody: It occurs to me that your self-discipline and organization might surprise some people. I get the sense sometimes that writers and other creative types are viewed as being kind of free-spirited and day-dreamy. But here you are blocking out your time and basically scheduling your creative sessions. And once you've got published work out in the world, there's another level of work, and that is promotion.

What are some of the things you do to market your books?

Jenn: I have the general philosophy that I like people to know about my books, but in a low-key way. If you see me at a live event, I’ll hand out bookmarks, but I’m not going to grab you by the lapels and force you to hear a sales pitch. If you come to my website or blog or Twitter bio, you’ll see the books mentioned there, but within the blog and Twitter stream itself, I only mention them occasionally—when something big happens, like a new book comes out, or there’s an award nomination or something.

On social media, I’m there to interact with people. I want to talk about all kinds of things—other people’s books, the writing life in general, hiking, chocolate, weather, whatever. I don’t like to see a constant stream of “buy my book!” on social media, so I don’t do it myself.

I have teamed up with other writers in my area to do group events. I belong to two such groups: the New Jersey Authors Network, founded by Jon Gibbs, and the Kidlit Authors’ Club, founded by Nancy Viau and Keri Mikulski. The KAC is for authors of traditionally-published children’s and teens’ books; we do events at bookstores, libraries, schools, book fairs, conferences, and so forth. The NJAN is for New Jersey-area writers in all genres, and includes self-published and traditionally-published authors; we also do group events, mostly in New Jersey. In addition, the amazing David Levithan has organized a series of wonderful YA readings and an annual teen book festival in New York. I go to those when I can.

I highly recommend working with groups if you do live events. I rarely do solo events anymore, and I do those mostly if a school or library has specifically asked me to talk about my books. For fairs, festivals, readings, and bookstore events, I much prefer to have multiple authors there. Not only is it more fun, but you can have cross-over among your readers, and you have a wider variety of books there to offer. When I was a debut author (initially scheduled for 2009 but bumped to 2010), I joined groups of other debut authors (Debut2009, Tenners, Classes of 2k9 and 2k10), and the mutual support of those groups was invaluable.

Jody: I like your philosophy about social media. I still feel like a newby on Twitter, et al., but I think you're right that the best way to use it is to approach it in terms of a community rather than as a marketplace.

Thanks, Jenn, so much for chatting with me. I'm looking forward to reading The Secret Year and all of your future books. And, readers, if you'd like to check out Jenn and her books (I hope you do!) here are some of the places you can find her:

her website
her blog on LiveJournal
her blog on blogspot 
on Twitter @JennRHubbard
on Goodreads
on Amazon

Interview with Holly Schindler

Last summer I got the coolest email out of the blue, an invitation to join the Young Adult group author blog YA Outside the Lines. The administrator is YA and Middle Grade writer Holly Schindler. At that point, I hadn't yet stumbled onto this blog  (although I was familiar with Holly's other blog Smack Dab in the Middle). YAOTL operates the same way: each month members contribute a post on a particular theme. I have no idea why Holly thought to ask ME to join, but I am eternally grateful.

What an awesome, eclectic, brilliant, creative, supportive group of writers! Some I had heard of before joining--Catherine Ryan Hyde (Pay it Forward), Rosemary Clement-Moore (The Splendor Falls), and Cheryl Renee Herbsman (Breathing). Now I'm reading my way through the others and feeling like a gushy fan. My faves so far: Patty Blount (Send), Kimberly Sabatini (Touching the Surface), Jennifer L. Armentrout (Obsidian), and Holly Schindler, our hardworking administrator. I picked up her book first, A Blue So Dark and was blown away.

The main character, 15-year-old Aura, is an artist struggling to take care of her mom, (also an artist) who's schizophrenic and spinning out of control. There's a core story here about mother/daughter relationships and the desire to break away from home while at the same time longing to fix a suffering loved one's problems. The book raises thought-provoking questions about the interplay of creativity and madness and the healing power of art.

I'm thrilled that Holly's agreed to let me interview her. It's not every day that you get to chat with the author of a book you love!

Jody: Holly, I'm going to start with the question I ask every visiting writer: Where do you get your ideas?

Holly: I’m a complete idea junkie.  I get more ideas than I know what to do with.  That sounds like a real luxury, I know—but in the beginning, it was tough.  I’d get about a quarter of the way through a book, and I’d be struck by one of those ah-ha! moments… combine that with the fact that I love writing beginnings and find middles a little torturous, and I was having problems staying focused on one project.  I tried all sorts of methods to deal with my ideas, even drafting multiple projects, but that proved to be more trouble than it was worth.

In the end, I figured out that I needed to keep a notebook.  While I’m drafting (or revising) one book, I write any new ideas down in my notebook.  Then I get right back to work on my current WIP.  A simple fix, I know—but it’s truly the best way to stay focused on my current idea and let me rest assured that I won’t lose any new ideas!

Jody: Once you've chosen an idea to play around with, what's your next step? Do you outline? Or just start writing and see where the story goes?

Holly: I always work from pretty extensive plot outlines… but I think you have to be aware, as a writer, when your characters are shaking their heads at you, telling you that your plan is a bunch of bunk.  You have to be willing to let your characters guide you, take you on a detour—you have to be open-minded about revising your outline along the way.

Jody: Very true. That's one of the weirder things about the writing process--when those characters take on lives of their own. Beginning writers (at least ME, when I was a beginning writer) tried to rein that part in. You have this plan where you think things should go, and you try to force the characters to do it. Never works. Letting them go was a breakthrough for me, and eventually put me on the road to my first sale. Not that the road was a straight shot to publication...

Was it a long learning process for you too? How many books did you write before you got your first book deal?  How many rejections did you get along the way?

Holly: I honestly lost count of how many books I wrote.  And I know that I was rejected well over 1,000 times before I got my first yes—my first published book, A Blue So Dark, was actually rejected over 80 times.

I received my master’s degree in the spring of ’01.  Writing was always my lifelong dream; Mom invited me to stay home and devote full-time attention to getting my writing career off the ground.  I jumped at the chance, thinking it would take a year or so to get a book down, it’d sell (I’d actually placed short fiction, poetry, and literary critique in journals when I was still in college and honestly thought publication would be fairly easy), and then I’d have money in the bank and I’d be off and running.

…It actually took seven and a half years to get that first yes.  It was the time that bothered me, really, more than the number of rejections I received.  Each spring, another graduation season would roll around, and my friends from college would be closer to their own dreams—they wrapped up PhDs; they snagged full-time jobs.  And I felt like all I had to show for my time was a giant hole in the wall where I’d been slamming my head.

I had a few down-times in the pursuit of that first “yes.”  But I always pushed through it—mostly because I could feel I was getting closer with each rejection.  Over time, form rejections became personalized rejections became invitations to revise and resubmit…

The thing is, every author gets there eventually.  The only ones who don’t are the ones who give up.

Jody: I'm stunned that A Blue So Dark was rejected that many times. I'm so glad that you didn't quit submitting it. I guess it's easy to look back now and sort of gloss over the struggle, but as every writer knows, each one of those rejections is painful and has the potential to shoot you into a spiral of despair. You can't let it! You've got to keep writing and try to remember that each day it's just you and the blank page (or glaring computer screen)--whether you're the published author of multiple books or a collector of rejection slips. At least this is my mantra...

What's your writing day like? Do you have a schedule?

Holly: I do some work every single day.  “Work” never really does seem like the right word, though, does it?  I’ve been obsessed with books and literature ever since I was a little girl and had to have a new Little Golden Book each time I went to the supermarket with my mom!  Being a writer is my absolute dream job, and I have the Ultimate Luxury: I’m a full-time author.  Have been ever since ’01.  When I first started writing, though, I really hated the fact that I wasn’t contributing to the household.  So I started teaching music.  I figured it was the perfect balance: I could write all day, then start lessons late in the afternoon, when kids got out of school.

I was writing adult-level books when I first started out, back in ’01.  As soon as I started teaching music lessons, I was really struck by how similar my students were to the kids I’d gone to school with.  They were so familiar, in fact, that I was suddenly inspired to try my hand at writing for kids and teens.  It’s funny—I had no idea that teaching music lessons would give me a career direction.  But that just goes to show you that getting out there and trying new things, living your life, is just as important as putting words on the page!

These days, I average about eight hours a day writing. I also spend a significant amount of time on social networking and blogging—the hours I spend online actually outnumber the amount of time I spend writing each day when I’m actively promoting a new release.

Jody: I'm glad you brought up social media. I'm just dipping my toe into the marketing/self-promotion part of this business, and it's a little overwhelming. What's your experience?

Holly: Like all writers starting out, I had a miniscule promotional budget for my debut novel.  But I also drafted my first books on a real dinosaur of a computer—it was pre-Internet, didn’t even have a modem.  I didn’t get Internet in my home until ’07, believe it or not…and then I only used it for research and to submit work.  I had never, ever, ever done anything with social media when I signed my first book contract.

When my editor at Flux first suggested blogging, I cringed.  I wasn’t sure how I felt about putting myself online.  But that was when I discovered the book blogging community.  And I fell in love.  Since discovering the blogosphere, I’ve gone on extensive blog tours, and now administrate two group author blogs: YA Outside the Lines, for YA authors, and Smack Dab in the Middle, for MG authors.

I also feel really lucky to be writing at a time when I get to read not only trade reviews, but blog reviews as well.  I have Google Alerts out on my name and titles, and read everything that comes in.  I think that’s part of my job.  I feel so lucky that I get to be a fly on the wall, hearing online discussions of my books…and I feel ESPECIALLY lucky that I get a chance to meet and interact with my fabulous readers online.

Jody: That is the plus side of social media--creating a community of readers and writers. It did bring US together after all. Thanks, Holly, so much, for chatting with me today. Before I let you go, give me a rundown of where fans can find you.

Holly: Readers can get in touch through my website: hollyschindler.com, become a fan on Facebook: facebook.com/HollySchindlerAuthor, follow me on Twitter: @holly_schindler, or email me directly: writehollyschindler (at) yahoo (dot) com.  You can follow my author blog at hollyschindler.blogspot.com or my group blogs at yaoutsidethelines.blogspot.com and smack-dab-in-the-middle.blogspot.com. If you'd like updates on me (or my books) please sign up for my newsletter!

A BLUE SO DARK
Fifteen-year-old Aura Ambrose has been hiding a secret. Her mother, a talented artist and art teacher, is slowly being consumed by schizophrenia, and Aura has been her sole caretaker ever since Aura's dad left them. Convinced that "creative" equals crazy, Aura shuns her own artistic talent. But as her mother sinks deeper into the darkness of mental illness, the hunger for a creative outlet draws Aura toward the depths of her imagination. Just as desperation threatens to swallow her whole, Aura discovers that art, love, and family are profoundly linked—and together may offer an escape from her fears.

Praise: “Breathtakingly, gut-wrenchingly authentic… A haunting, realistic view of the melding of art, creativity, and mental illness and their collective impact on a young person’s life.
—Booklist starred review

PLAYING HURT
Star basketball player Chelsea "Nitro" Keyes had the promise of a full ride to college—and everyone's admiration in her hometown. But everything changed senior year, when she took a horrible fall during a game. Now a metal plate holds her together and she feels like a stranger in her own family.

As a graduation present, Chelsea's dad springs for a three-week summer "boot camp" program at a northern Minnesota lake resort. There, she's immediately drawn to her trainer, Clint, a nineteen-year-old ex-hockey player who's haunted by his own traumatic past. As they grow close, Chelsea is torn between her feelings for Clint and her loyalty to her devoted boyfriend back home. Will an unexpected romance just end up causing Chelsea and Clint more pain—or finally heal their heartbreak?

Praise: “Loved Playing Hurt. You find yourself rooting for Chelsea and Clint from the moment they meet. And the writing? Wow. The writing was exceptional, and I must say, I've developed quite the writerly crush on Holly.”
—Jennifer L. Armentrout, Author of Young Adult and Adult Urban Fantasy and Romance