The Librarian Writer

Actually, you don't have to sign up. Or register. Or do anything but download free Young Adult audiobooks from Sync. Sync is offering two free audiobooks this summer on their website from July 1 - September 1, 2010. Their selections are a matched pair, a reading list title with one fun read. A week later the next pair goes live. The 1st pair is James Patterson's The Angel Experiment with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , which sounds pretty freaking awesome to me. Librarians, educators, and bloggers are encouraged to spread the word. There's a PR tool kit with banners and posters and other goodies to help. There is also an audiobook community that you can join (if you really must sign up for something) to share ideas and social network with other audiobookphiles. Or whatever you call people who love audiobooks. Happy listening!

I'm on draft 4 of the NaNoWriMo novel. Still some big stuff to go, but I've been looking at some of little things, too. Like the words that totally creep into my writing without me even noticing. But actually not the first couple of times I've revised. Draft 4, yeah, they're pretty much popping up a lot and now I just really want to get rid of them. Did you notice the stop words in the above paragraph? There are at least half of dozen sprinkled in. Stop words are one of concepts I learned in library school. These are words so common they don't rate on a search (such as "the" or "a"). And as a writer, they're the words I don't even realize I've written. But stop words in fiction are like bits of gravel that choke the flow of the story. Since I'm writing YA, there is a fair amount of "I totally couldn't understand" or "I just want to be left alone" because many of these stop words are specific to a t...

So I didn't win the contest with the awesome prize of a 10-page read by Regina Brooks. Does this mean I curl up with a box of Ho-Ho's and cry uncontrollably? Or trash my entire novel because the first 200 words failed to grab the judge's attention? No and no (although don't me get wrong, Ho-Ho's are awesome). I've been doing this too long to let a blog contest get me down. How long have I been doing this? Well, I won't get into actual years, but let's say it was before blog contests existed. Or blogs. Or the internets. But this current rejection made me think about my first big rejection, and that's actually a pretty good story. So I'll share. I was an English major at UCLA with vague plans of being a writer. I heard about a creative writing class taught by Irish author Brian Moore . This class was an audition class ... everyone had to submit a story and the names of those admitted to the class would be posted on a bulletin board shortly be...

I love contests! Back in my screenwriting days, I did pretty well with them. The biggie was winning a spot as a Disney/ABC Television Writing Fellow. But I was also in the Warner Bros. Writers Workshop, CBS Writers Mentoring Program, a finalist at Austin Film Festival, and a semi-finalist at Slamdance. Am I bragging? Maybe a little bit. But these are my credits and they're on Google for anyone to see. Now that I'm switching to children's/YA lit, I'm checking out the contests available in this genre. Because contests are a great way to test drive your manuscript. Of course, the manuscript has to be the absolute best it can be by the deadline. And for me, having a deadline was always a good kick in the pants to get a manuscript as sparkly as it could be. I've noticed that there are a load of blog contests offered by agents or editors with a prize of a five or ten page critique. These contests have short entry times, usually a week, and contestants have to post about t...

Book Review: Get Known Before the Book Deal by Christina Katz When I started this blog, it was with a vague notion that I had to had one. Because these days you can't be a serious writer without one. Or so I've read in blogs. So going back to the old chestnut, 'Write what you know,' I decided to blog about writing and library stuff. Platform done, right? Uh, no. I came across Christina Katz's book at the library where I work, but decided to invest in a copy for my own personal library. It's mostly geared toward nonfiction writers, but there are a few nuggets that apply to the fiction writer, too. Platform Building Golden Nugget #1: Christina's definition of platform makes gobs of sense, "The word platform simply describes all the ways you are visible and appealing to your future, potential, or actual readership." That could be the writer's blog, Twitter account, website, teaching, podcasts, articles, etc., etc., etc. Your platform should refl...

It hardly seems like it's been three months since I was cranking out 5,000 words a day to finish NaNoWriMo on time. But now I have a little more perspective about my novel and the pros and cons of writing a first draft during NaNoWriMo. First of all, I knew there was a lot of junk in the novel. The needless lists and random song lyrics are all part of the NaNoWriMo ethos. Get that word count up by all means necessary. And in revision mode, that's an easy fix. Just delete. Done. No damage to the actual story. And all the "something something to be filled in later"s were another easy fix. Now I've been able to go back and do the time-consuming research that I skipped over during that crazy month of November. Much of what I skipped over were little personalization touches, the kind that can consume me because I need to get it just right. I knew that in an important scene, one of characters was wearing a band t-shirt. But which band? That can says tons about the...

My absolute favorite character building exercise was creating a playlist for my main character. It's good way to get into her head and differentiate her voice from my voice (which can sneak in more than I like to admit). I have to remember that my MC is a contemporary 17 year old, which means she was born in 1993. Smells Like Teen Spirit is an oldie to her. So I've had to push myself and discover what kind of music she'd listen to. Here's some background about Keely (my MC): she considers herself to be emo-lite she lives in a small town in Arizona with her mom and grandmother she's a senior in high school and thinks a lot about the future Based on that, I decided on these perimeters of her musical taste: her favorite band is Green Day she likes Johnny Cash because her grandmother does she listens to a few '80s band because her mom listens to them (Police, Violet Femmes, The Cure, etc.) she likes songs that are a little rebellious but not too dar...