Posts for category ‘the industry’

I am back from New Orleans, and I’m going to tell you the worst-kept secret in children’s publishing: librarians know how to have them a good time!

After a couple years of working more or less quietly away and staying behind the curtain, it was nice to get out and be Author Sara Zarr and introduce How to Save a Life to (and have a blast with!) so many of the people who will help get it into the hands of readers. And, it was great to get a chance to meet some blog and twitter friends; thanks so much for coming by the booth to say hi.

Watching Paolo Bacigalupi receive his well-deserved Printz for Ship Breaker was a thrill, as was getting to hear all the honor book authors speak. And I got to meet and hang out with relentlessly fabulous Little, Brown compatriots Karen Healey and Daniel Handler – authors of The Shattering and Why We Broke Up, respectively, which both sound terrific.

Actually, everyone at Little, Brown is pretty amazing, and it was good to see some of the people who make my books happen (you know, after I labor for a couple of years…) and I’m happy to say I just signed on for another book with them. Right now it’s called The Lucy Variations and tentatively slated for early 2013.

And then it was all over! And I failed to take a single picture. Wait, no, I used my cell phone to snap a photo of a chicken crossing St. Charles Avenue, but it didn’t turn out. Yes, a live chicken, walking around downtown. Possibly putting some distance between it and Herbsaint, where I had seared chicken confit that was maybe the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my life.

Anyway, as much fun as I had and as much as I miss air conditioning, I’m tremendously happy to be back in my own (un-air-conditioned) home. I traveled 20 days in June and it felt good to put the suitcase away this morning and know I’m staying put for awhile.

P.S. I did end up reading that Wall Street Journal article after all, and my latest Good Letters is sort of in response to it, and sort of not, and definitely not the whole of what I think, but it is one slice of what I’ve been stewing over since this issue and the YA Saves response first began to simmer. (That was a lot of cooking imagery. Time for dinner.)

Every so often, when the adult literary world runs out of feuds and controversies and awards outrage to write about, the focus turns to YA fiction and how it’s killing/saving/corrupting/enlightening the youth because it’s too dark/light/intense/fluffy/tragic/ridiculous, and the parents are clueless/too perfect/dead/werewolves/overinvolved/underinvolved. A few weeks ago there was an NYT article that stirred up some discussion, and now the Wall Street Journal and Salon are joining in, and then those things generate a shitload of blog posts, tweets, and reactions.

I have been asked what I think about this stuff, generally and specifically.

When I first started out in YA, I had a lot of opinions and liked to engage in the conversation. I even got sucked into commenting on such articles and getting a bit snarky. It’s not very satisfying, and doesn’t help me do my work.

I read the recent NYT article but haven’t read the others, and doubt I will. What I feel like now is this:

- I don’t think critics necessarily get that most YA writers write for themselves. There’s not all this conscious thought about audience, really, or message, for most of us. Hey, we’re just like “grown up” writers that way!

- Or maybe they get it and it doesn’t matter, because their job is different from our job. I’ll let them do their job, sometimes badly. (Same goes for parents, teachers, librarians, school boards, etc.) I will stick to mine, and do it the best I can.

- The second I start building a defense for “why I write what I write,” I risk inviting the cultural critique into my creative process, which can interfere with telling a good story, or with being able to hear what it is I really want to do with my work. (“Oh, if the dad says this, I’m going to be accused again of writing ‘clueless parents,’ and it feels sort of sucky to be called out in the NYT and I want to protect myself from feeling hurt/shame/rejection/whatever.”)

- If people are concerned about “the children,” perhaps that should be taken up with the publishers, not the writers. When there’s outrage over TV shows, people complain to the network and the advertisers, not the actors and the writers. If anyone is a position to offer a defense, I think it’s the publishers. They are the ones making the decision whether or not to back a book with money, distro, advertising, etc. There are a lot of very passionate, smart people in children’s publishing who love to talk about this stuff.

- The reasons we write what we write are very personal, and perhaps inarticulateable even to ourselves. Creative work goes deep places. We do what we do, and have the right to do that. Then the culture and the marketplace have the right to make of it what they will: love it, hate it, dismiss it, reject it, remainder it, ban it, misunderstand it, commodify it, whatever it. It doesn’t really have much to do with me.

So, you know, I try not to get too caught up in the cultural conversation about it except maybe on the fringes of the discussion, as with this post. Some authors like to get involved in that. I don’t mind it sometimes, but it always kind of turns into a shouting match and no one is listening. I’d rather put my energy into just about anything else.

Sorry for the blog-neglect, friends. There’s a lot going on! Exciting times. Uncertain times. Which is part of what makes them exciting. It should be a fairly newsy year. Meeaaaanwhile:

- Comrade Keith Dixon has a new cookbook/memoir out, called Cooking for Gracie: The Making of a Parent From Scratch. Keith’s previously published works were novels, but he’s been doing food writing for the NYT for awhile now, too. This would be the perfect Father’s Day gift for the dad-who-is-also-foodie man in your life. Fun fact: I acted as one of his recipe-testers for the book. Mmmm. For an interview I did with Keith about his fiction, go here.

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- My longtime friend, and fellow born-in-the-same-year Libra, Tara Altebrando, has a new book out. Dreamland Social Club is her third YA novel, but her first hardcover with a major publisher, and it has been very exciting to watch how hard she’s worked for this, and to see the great responses that are starting to come in for the book. I’ll be interviewing Tara on this very blog in the next week or so, so stay tuned for that. Until then, you can tide yourself over with this.

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- There was some nice coverage for YA books in the NY Times this past Sunday. So that’s good. But there was one piece that kinda…well, Sarah Ockler said it better than I could.

- I admire all my fellow Good Letters bloggers. But there is something about Dyana Herron’s posts that always zings my soul. Someone please pay this woman to write a YA novel or memoir?

That’s all for now – I promise not to have another two+-week gap between posts for awhile…

I said I was cashing out on talking about difficult topics like politics and religion on Twitter, etc. Then I read the paper this morning (which I need to stop doing – news-reading should happen after writing, otherwise my brain is much too full of the wrong kind of stuff) and dashed to my computer to react to things I had read. Ah well. Relapse is part of every recovery.

So, one of the things that’s making 2010 pretttty busy is that I’m doing some teaching, mentoring, coaching in various venues. I’ve mentioned them here before, but as a reminder:

- Writing & Illustrating for Young Readers Workshop – June 14-18 – Sandy, UT

A week-long intensive. Very excited about this. I’m not sure what kind of space is left for the workshops, but if you live in the area (or want to come out for it), you can register for the half-day conference and go to plenary sessions, breakout sessions, signing, and keynote (by Mary Pearson!). Half-day registration is only $125. Seriously—bargain. There is now a preliminary schedule of sessions up on the site.

- The Glen Online

I’m teaching an ongoing correspondence-course style class in YA fiction. If you’re just starting out, there are various assignments related to each of six lessons. If you have a work-in-progress, we can look at that in place of the assignments. You can start any time, and work at your own pace. If you have any questions about this, let me know.

- Manuscript Critique for Auction

I’ve donated a YA manuscript critique to Fire Petal Books, a startup kid/YA bookstore to be opened in Centerville. Right now, Mike Martin is the high bidder but I know he would love you to drive up the price to raise more money for the store. There are also a bunch of other very cool items for writers and aspiring writers.

No matter if you can’t do any workshops or classes or bidding right now – if you’re a writer and haven’t yet gotten to the publishing stage of your career, give yourself a few hours this weekend to write and enjoy it and reconnect and put all the industry news, the query drafts, the rejections, the buzz out of your head for a couple of days. Writing is pretty much a learn-by-doing craft so turn off the noise and go do some doing. I’ll do the same.

You know what I love about shopping at my local independent book store? I go in there, and they know me. Okay, yes, part of that is because I’m an author and they are nice to authors, but when I go into Sam Weller’s or The King’s English and hang out awhile, it’s obvious that they know their other regulars, too. I know this doesn’t only happen at indies. I used to work at a little Crown Books in Daly City back when Crown Books used to be the biggest chain there was, and we knew our regulars, too, and could make recommendations and chit-chat and otherwise engage in human interaction not based on a five-star rating system or anonymous usernames.

Full disclosure: I have spent plenty of money on books at Amazon over the years, but have tapered off considerably after getting into the book business and understanding more about it. Lately I only resort to it when I need a hard to find book ASAP. But since the Macmillan debacle, and the letter from Amazon about it that felt…well, it felt hostile, frankly…I’m done with that, and keeping my Amazon purchases to blender replacement parts, the vacuum filters my hardware store doesn’t carry, and random medical supplies. Now, in saying that, I’m not berating anyone who chooses to buy books from the big A. I understand that sometimes convenience and pricing are the difference between you buying a book and not buying a book, and if you live in the boonies with no good library and you have to buy everything you want to read, it’s challenging to go indie. And, I bet that at some point in the future I will wind up clicking the buy button of a book (assuming it’s there), myself. But by shifting even 25% of your purchasing dollars to local stores, you’ll help keep the personal, human, passionate bookselling business—and the real people who make it happen—alive.

Anyway, speaking of Sam Weller’s, right now they are having a pretty fantastic sale for in-store customers—it goes through tomorrow the 6th. 50% off used (!), 25% off new, 30% off rare. Some restrictions. There is also chocolate. So if you’re in the SLC, go down there and show Catherine and Tony and the crew some love. Heck, you can even do that when there’s not a sale. All the better. To make it even more convenient, TRAX stops right at their front door, and there are two bars and a coffee shop and some restaurants on the same block, so you can eat, drink, and buy books all in one delightful outing. (All right, yes, sometimes you go downtown on Sunday or a weeknight and things are shuttered, but that seems to be changing. I am seriously hoping this “downtown rising” thing works out, because I live within walking distance of downtown and having it actually…rise…would make living here longterm so much more enticing.)

Here’s my haul from yesterday, a mix of new and used, and not counting the four books I have on order (you know you can order books through your local store if you don’t see them in stock, right?). The wrapped one (expertly, and for free by SW staff) is a top secret gift, obviously:

Coming on the blog next week: interview with Matt de la Peña, in which we talk about the wonderful We Were Here and other writery stuff. You’re gonna like it.

Have a great weekend! Go…Saints?