squeetus

Newsletter business

We sent off the first volume of The Squeeter Pig this weekend. If you signed up and didn't receive yours, you either entered your email address wrong (several few bounced back) or your ISP is blocking me. Almost all the "delayed delivery" messages I got were for email addresses ending in aol.com. I've had emails with some questions about the newsletter that I'll answer here:

"Can you include a way for people to unsubscribe?"
Ack! First volume and already people want out? The person who asked, I believe, was being helpful and suggesting additions that other newsletters have. Of course, she was assuming that we're sophisticated enough to set up such a system. Pretty much, if you want to unsubscribe, you just email me with the request, and then I hunt through the file with all the email addresses in it and delete yours. Pretty low tech. I'm happy to do it, but don't worry, as promised we'll only send out The Squeeter Pig twice a year and won't use your email address for anything else. Oh, and I might sell it to a Viagra vender, but that's all...okay, I'm kidding.

"Where are the fan essays you asked for?"
Excellent question. The problem was my lack of foresight. We decided not to include fan essays in this volume because we only realized after the fact that it was a difficult thing to include in a newsletter. 300 words is a lot of text for a newsletter but not quite enough for an essay, and the newsletter was getting long as it was. The book reviews by young readers worked much better, and we'll keep taking book review submissions for future newsletters. Thanks to those who submitted the essays. You're very cool!

Editing on turkey day

Happy turkey and stuffing to all my compatriots today, and to those of you in countries that haven't set aside this day as a day of gluttony, go about your business. Dean and I are using the holiday to get the newsletter together, so those of you who subscribed, volume 1 of The Squeeter Pig should be in your email inboxes by tomorrow.

My editor got back to me about the most recent draft of Razo's book. She only had one note on a scene near the end, but I want to take the opportunity to do another complete draft. It'll be a fast one, but am I glad I am. I've gone through the first 20 pages and already have found so many things that really would've bugged me if I hadn't changed. But it'll be off to copy editing in about two weeks. Huzzah! And then I'll pull focus back to Novel X and Graphic Novel X and wallowing in more rejections for ostensibly jane.

What am I grateful for? My Dean, my Max, my family all around, my bed, a house with heating, a working sewage system, stories, trees, and you guys. Happy holiday.

Rejection

Yup, it's starting all over again. Some of you have seen my roll of rejection lettes (I laminated together the rejections I received from publishers before getting my first acceptance). Besides my short stories and an earlier book, the goose girl alone got nine rejections. And I hadn't had any since! ...until yesterday.

ostensibly jane is an adult book I've been working on for the past 5 years. For lack of a better name, I suppose it's chick lit--which means, it's fun, about a thirty-something single woman, is funny (I hope) and involves some romance. I like it, darn it, even if no one else does. I finished it this summer and have begun looking for a publisher. My editor at Bloomsbury just does children's, so I can't sell it to her, and I'm in uncharted water, or whatever the phrase is. And yesterday I got the news that Dial just passed on my Jane.

I shall not give up! I will press on, friends, until that summit bows to my superior will! And then, if no one still wants it, I'll post it here for free download. Stories are meant to be shared, after all.

Like the first time

I had a strange and wonderful experience recently - I listened to the goose girl audio book, recently released from Full Cast Audio. I honestly didn't know what to expect, but I was pretty sure I wasn't going to listen to the whole thing. I just thought it would be too difficult to hear my words pushed through the filter of a bunch of actors who aren't the characters and couldn't possibly do it right. But I was curious how the intro music would sound, so I stuck in the first CD. Then I was curious what everyone's voice would sound like, so I listened to a little more. Before I knew it, I was circling the block so I could keep hearing the story.

It was one of the most fantastic experiences in my writing life. It was as though someone had given me the gift of being able to read my own book for the first time. I went through 30 drafts of that book, so by the end I was so sick of it I wanted to hurl it across the room. I never thought I'd be able to see it as a reader instead of as the writer.

There were certainly times when I wanted to yell, "That's not how he would say that!" There were a few times I laughed out loud because a character's casting was so off of what I had imagined. But those moments were amazingly rare. Mostly it was an unobstructed joy where I got to forget I was the writer and just experience the story. I fell in love with Geric. Completely. I was outrageously fond of the minor characters Gilsa, Ideca, Tatto, Odaccar, and the stablemaster. Ani was lovely. The narrator was so warm, so talented. It was a real joy. And a relief, frankly. I can't wait for enna burning.

I've had readers apologizing to me lately for reading my book "all in one sitting" or "in just six hours, though I don't mean it as an insult!" Truly, I would consider that a huge compliment, never an insult. I suspect this is because of my statement in the author interview in the US Goose Girl paperback when I said, "One reader, intending to be complimentary, told me she read The Goose Girl in an hour and a half. That book consumed two years of my life, I agonized over every word, and she burned through its 383 pages in 90 minutes. Ouch!" I regret those words in that interview now. Too easily misunderstood. I guess it just felt like, you know, when you hand make someone a Christmas present and it takes you hours and hours and you lay awake anticipating their reaction, and then when they open it, they glance at it once and say, "Cute, thanks," and put it aside. Just the time put into it compared with the time spent enjoying it was off with that particular speed reader, I thought. But really, it's so not a big deal, I shouldn't have said it.

May I just give an unsolicited plug for Discovery Girls? They did a review of princess academy, so my publisher sent me a copy, and I flipped through it, and then found myself reading the entire thing. I was really impressed. This is a US magazine targeted at girls ages 7-13. It's down to earth, no celebs, no ridiculous fashion. The photos are only of REAL girls, and I think they do a very good job of not holding up impossible images of beauty. Also, some very honest and helpful articles without being "edgy." Compare to the likes of Tiger Beat and take a sigh of relief.

I'm way behind on my emails and stuff. I only get about 2 hours a day on the computer lately, and I'm afraid if I don't use it for writing I'll have to answer to myself later, and I can be really tough. Something my husband is working on right now...getting a program for this blog that has a commenting feature, so people can respond to my blog. Holly Black does this on her site instead of email and it seems to work well. I imagine I wouldn't need to reply to every comment, and then readers could interact with other readers via the comments, and no one feels lonely. I hope it works out.

The graphic novel my husband and I are writing (let's call it Novel X, shall we?) is coming along. I did another pass on the first chapter of the script today. He'll do another pass, then I'll format it and do another pass and send it to my editor in a proposal. Here's the part that I'm excited about--Nathan Hale (no relation), an artist I've met a couple of times and admire, has agreed to illustrate a couple of sample pages to send in the proposal. How this works is, a writer like me doesn't get to choose her illustrator, not for a picture book or graphic novel. But having a couple of pages illustrated will: A. help the editor visualize the style and storytelling better and possibly increase the odds of selling the project; and, B. increase the chances that the editor might go with the artist we liked. Just hours after I emailed Nathan the sample pages, he emailed me back a gorgeous character sketch of the main gal. I'm SO tempted to post it here, 'cause it rocks, but I'm also so secretive about unwritten and unsold projects, and besides, I'd need his permission first. But if Novel X becomes a go, I promise to keep ya'll in-the-loop-ed.

Some nonsense:
A friend of mine designed "Nugget" the bird for PETA2, and I've become addicted to dressing Nugget in her Halloween garb.

Name a new species! I guess scientists discovered a new species in the Great Salt Lake and if you're under 15, you can enter a contest to name it permanently. How cool is that?

Funny. I'm a fan of Caroline B. Cooney's Goddess of Yesterday, so I was interested to see she had a new book out, Code Orange. I rarely read reviews, but the two reviews on Amazon caught my eye. Compare the first sentences from each review:

"Most readers will have high expectations from the creator of The Face on the Milk Carton and the Out of Time series, but they might be a little disappointed in this offering." - School Library Journal

"*Starred Review* In top, utterly terrifying form, Cooney leads a gregarious New York City teenager to a century-old sample of smallpox scabs." - Booklist

Ah, the wonder of opinion.