New Releases, New Projects, New Tumblrs (Oh and Comic Con pix)

Hey lovely blog readers, sorry it's been awhile since I've posted properly. I've been prepping for my crazy fall and hang out with these cool people:

Yeah, that would be Norman Reedus. Or you may know him as Daryl from The Walking Dead or Murphy MacManus from Boondock Saints. I know him as that guy who my friend Lindsay and I became insanely obsessed with in like 2002 and watched all his movies over and over. And he touched me. And called me babe and sweetheart several times.

Those lovely ladies would be Sherilyn Fenn and Sheryl Lee or Audrey and Laura from Twin Peaks or the women who collectively changed my life when I was eleven and my mom decided that yeah it would be cool to let me watch her favorite show with her. They are also incredibly sweet and both complimented me on my flower crown. When I told Sheryl Lee about writing for Rookie and the next gen of teen girls inspired by Twin Peaks, she got so genuinely excited it made my day.

And these people, that dude, who looks like he's about to get all bumpy-faced and bite my best friend (in the awesome unicorn shirt)'s next, that of course would be James Marsters AKA Spike from Buffy and his partner in crime on the far left is Juliet Landau AKA Drusilla.

Yes, I spent the first part of August totally geeking out and going to my very first Comic Con, Wizard World Chicago as well as my very first Ren Faire in Bristol, WI, where I met this adorable little guy:

From now on my husband and friends judge the level of my happiness/excitement by whether or not I'm making "bunny face." (Note: that Norman Reedus definitely got "bunnyface"... which sounds wrong. Especially since my husband was mentioned a sentence ago.)

Now on to that preparing for a busy fall thing, but here are a couple of things that also bring on bunnyface for me.... NEW RELEASES!!!!!!

Sorry to disappoint, but these are not solo ventures, ie. new books just written by me. They are both anthologies/collections of sorts, but that's what makes them so bunnyface worthy. They are a million times better than if they were written by just me.

First up...
THE ROOKIE YEARBOOK!!!

Actually I believe the official title is Rookie Yearbook One because there will be more and I hope way way way more than four yearbooks I have from high school. Of course they will definitely be way way way better than high school yearbooks, chock full of the best Rookie photos, art, and articles of the year. I'm not actually sure what if any of my pieces are in there, but I do know my school photo from senior year will be!

This releases on September 4th, next Tuesday, which also marks the one year anniversary of Rookie, when I wrote this highly excited post about. I'm still just as thrilled and honored to be a part of Rookie, especially now that I see the incredible INCREDIBLE content that has been produced and the community that has grown from it. This summer during the Rookie Road Trip, I even got to take my niece and one of her BFFs to a zine making party. Rookie is probably the thing I am most proud of, even more so than my books, so if you haven't yet, I urge you to check it out. These two pieces in particular mean a lot to me, my most recent article about grief and losing my friend Marcel, and my piece on my history with self-injury. And for those of you wondering about the advice I'd give teen writers, you will find it all here at Rookie.

I will also be talking about something very close to my heart in the other new release...

Dear Teen Me: Authors Write Letters to Their Teen Selves comes out on October 30th.

I will be in AMAZING company with people like Ellen Hopkins, Lauren Oliver, Tara Kelly, and more. I wrote about the emotionally and sexually abusive relationship I was in as a fifteen year-old. I can't wait to read all of the other letters, which I imagine will range from heartbreaking to hilarious.

Fall, for me, is also a time for New Projects.

Okay, one new project. I've decided after much soul-searching, stress, and conversing with my agent that while the partial of the Modern Myth YA is being shopped, I can't keep writing it. I just get too freaked out. This doesn't mean I've given up on it. I hope/believe that my agent will call me any day now with an offer and then I will dive write back in. I explained a bit more in depth about why I felt this way/made this decision and gave some hints (in playlist form of course) about the project I've switched over to working to on YA Outside the Lines last week. As I mentioned there, the new project is a Contemporary Realistic YA (which for right now I will call quite creatively the Contemporary YA even though I have a working title that I adore for it, yanno, superstitions.) That doesn't completely do it justice those because I'm pondering some ghostly/magical realism twists to it.

It's about a girl who is grieving--a few characters actually are grieving, but my main character is not only grieving for her older brother, she has also fallen into an emotionally abusive relationship.

Yeah, I know, I mentioned both grief and abusive relationships above as my own experiences. As usual, I am drawing from those things, emotionally, creatively, cathartically, but not directly. I pondered writing a memoir, but for now I've decided against it, so my real life stuff will be found at Rookie and in anthologies like Dear Teen Me.

Something else that Ballads of Suburbia fans will enjoy is that Cass makes a cameo appearance in this one, as a grown up. As you will see in this scene that I've decided to be daring enough to share with you even though I wrote most of it while hungover last week.

Cass swiveled her head to the right, dreadlocks spilling over her left shoulder. She mimicked Kat’s posture and as she crossed her arms, the sleeve of her gray t-shirt rose to reveal her birdcage tattoo. The cage was open and empty with a ribbon hanging down from it. Loopy handwritten script on the ribbon read, “Secrets lead to sickness.”

“First day back and you’re ready?” Cass deadpanned.

Kat matched her dry tone. “Maybe that’s why I’m back.”

Maybe there was a grief group therapy certificate and Kat wanted it.

Cass flicked her chin upward, indicating that Kat should spill.

Kat’s face faltered momentarily like a kid at Six Flags who’d spent their whole time in line bragging about what a piece of cake a certain roller coaster was and then almost chickened out when it was her turn to step into the first car. But then she blinked and her expression hardened once again.

“Two years ago yesterday, I was hanging out with my brother Stevie at Denny’s like usual. Our sister Corin worked there, so we could just sit around and drink coffee for hours without getting hassled. Corin usually comped most of our food, too, but that night Stevie insisted on actually buying me a slice of pie because he’d only had to fix a couple of sentences in my final English paper, which he said was like a record. I always had him proofread my stuff even though it meant listening to him gloat about being the twin that got all the brains. It was this ongoing thing we had. I’d be like, ‘I’m older,’ and he’d be like, ‘Well, I hung out in the womb longer so my brain could get bigger.’” Kat half-laughed before saying, “Whatever, it’s one of those stupid things that’s probably only funny to us. Anyway, it wasn’t about him being smarter. Even Corin had him proof her college essays. She’s the musician, I’m the artist, I guess, and Stevie’s the writer….”

Kat swallowed and tugged on the colorful jelly bracelets on her left wrist. “Stevie was the writer. And fine, fuck it, he was smarter than me, too. Except for that night. He was so fucking stupid that night.”

She rolled her eyes heavenward and blinked rapidly. Cass started to say something, but Kat stomped her foot. “No, I can do this,” she insisted.

Taking a deep breath, she stared out into the center of the circle, focusing on a scuff on the tile that I usually spent group studying. It was the perfect arch, like a gray rainbow. “We should have gone home with Corin’s best friend Stella,” Kat continued. “Corin had to work ‘til midnight and Stella offered to give use a ride. We were in the parking lot with her when Stevie’s friends rolled up. Well, they weren’t really all his friends. Riley, he’d been one Stevie’s best friends since grade school. The two other guys, Murph and Jared, were a couple years older than us. Riley met them in woodworking class and thought they were cool because they had a car and did stupid shit like steal lawn ornaments and rearrange letters on signs and act like they were movie stunt guys.”

Kat rolled her eyes again, but this time she looked pissed rather than on the verge of tears. “I thought they were cool, too. I tried to impress them just like Stevie and his friends did. Especially Murph, I thought he was so cute. It was pathetic. That’s why we didn’t ride home with Stella. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ride shotgun in Murph’s shitty Ford Explorer. Stella even asked, ‘Are you sure?’ And right when she did, there were sirens. I remember that. An ambulance, a cop car, a couple fire trucks. It was really loud. Definitely a warning, but did I take it? No. I just waved Stella off.”

I glanced over at Cass, wondering if she was going to interject. She was always telling us not to blame ourselves or take on the burden of regrets that didn’t belong to us. She frowned sadly, but kept her mouth shut. She was probably saving the hindsight is twenty-twenty lecture for after Kat was done. Getting us to confess about that day was always her biggest priority.

“Part of me wishes we’d gone with Stella, but another part of me wishes she hadn’t been there at all because seeing her probably gave Stevie his idiotic idea.” Kat bit her lip and shook her head. “Like I said, Murph and Jared were into doing these idiotic stunts and one of them was car surfing. We’d do it in parking lots when they were empty at night. You’d climb up on the roof of the Explorer and Murph would drive. Not super fast, maybe twenty miles an hour. Riley actually did it down our street one time at closer to thirty. Stevie had never tried it, though, which everyone teased him about, especially since you know, I had,” she pointed to herself. “His sister.

“When the guys started giving him crap that night, he was like, ‘Okay, I’ll surf,’ and then he turns to me and smiles and says, ‘In fact, I’ll surf the dark spot.’ And I was like, ‘Bad ass! Shotgun!’ because of course I was way more concerned about sitting next to Murph than how fucking idiotic it was to car surf through the dark spot, which is this winding stretch of road through the forest preserve about a mile from Denny’s. Corin discovered it when Stella got her license. Stella’s kind of a daredevil, so she would turn off her headlights and go around that curve blind and crazy fast because right afterward there’s a set of train tracks and you can catch some pretty good air when you hit them.

“So we’re, like, explaining this as we’re directing Murph there and he actually got a little freaked by the idea. He said he’d do it with no headlights because Stevie really wanted to surf in the darkness and he’d go around the curve, but he wasn’t going to go that fast and he wasn’t going to go over the tracks. Not that it mattered because we never even got to the curve…” Kat’s voice cracked and she ran a finger under her eye before a renegade tear could smear her black eyeliner.

She’d been speaking at an incredible clip, her words gaining momentum like when the roller coaster goes down that first big dip. When she paused to catch her breath, the ten of us listening seemed to take a collective inhale with her. Plastic chairs creaked as kids pressed against them, trying to escape what came next in Kat’s story, what came next in all of our stories: that ugly moment that changed everything.

Yep, I'm gonna leave you hanging there. Also, worth noting, Kat is not the main character. Meredith, the girl listening to her, is, but I haven't written her recollection of her own brother's death yet. I know it. I know a fair bit about this story, but not everything. I'm writing by the seat of my pants now and just trying to fall in love with telling a story again, not worrying about an audience or who might or might not buy it, just writing what I need to write. And so far it has been working. Yesterday I wrote nearly 3,500 words. More than I've written in one day all summer, possibly all year. Here's hoping the momentum keeps going.

Because I'm trying to sink back into a solid fiction writing schedule on top of my freelance work, my bartending job, and once again I'll be teaching a YA Fiction Course at Columbia College Chicago this fall, I don't know how well I'll keep up with this blog. I'll try my best, but to fill the void, I also have this...

My new bartending tumblr.
Adventures in Bartending/The Bartending Diaries can be found here. I still don't post as regularly as most tumblrers, but I do what I can, namely posting funny bar related photos and videos and accounts of my experiences at work, which I can do LIVE FROM MY PHONE so I find that convenient and exciting. I'm also doing it because even though it hasn't sold yet, my agent and I still have high hopes that we will find a home for my bartender book and you'll get to read it.

That's all from me. Hope you guys had fabulously fun summers and exciting fall projects planned too!

Work-In-Progress Progress Report

I'm hiding out in the writing cave for the next ummm month or two or however long it takes to get this book done. But the plan is periodic updates or progress reports. I don't know how exciting they will be because mostly they are to remind me how I write novels if I ever take two years off from doing that in order to revise and promote my published books (which I'm going to try NEVER to do again because figuring this out again has been hell), but others may glean some tips too, I hope.

Here's the latest:

Up until about a week and a half ago, I was plowing through my work-in-progress, the bartender book as I’ve been calling it. It was nearly 250 pages and 70,000 words long. 125 pages of it felt beautiful and perfect and I was so proud of them. I’d spent more than two months on those pages alone, mainly because I thought my agent was going to shop it as a partial. However, after the YA project I was working on failed to sell on partial, we decided that the market was too bad and I don’t have enough of a name to sell on partial. Mid-July, my agent told me how much she loved what she’d seen of the bartender book and that she thought I should write the whole thing to ensure that it sold and sold well.

Of course, the issue is that she’s going on maternity leave in mid-September, so I felt I had to finish it by then if I had any shot of selling a book this year.

So I took the plow through it, shitty first draft approach. My last progress report blog entry was about my struggles with that, how it didn’t totally feel comfortable for me. I liked seeing huge word counts at the end of the day, but the writing didn’t feel satisfying and I wasn’t taking the time to discover, just plowing through my outline. Still, I had a plan to finish a shitty first draft around the 23rd or so of August and then spend a couple weeks revising and have the whole thing into my agent right after Labor Day.

Oh what a beautiful pipe dream.

The fast and shitty draft came to a screeching halt on the last day of July after I got overwhelmed the enormity of it all. Basically I realized I still had approximately 200 pages to write, meaning I’d need to drop something like 100 pages. For one, I knew it meant changes to my beautiful, perfect beginning. Then I realized I needed to cut 50 pages from the 125 pages of crap where I’d rambled quite a bit and taken a bit of a wrong turn.

I continued to panic for a few days, going back and forth between my desire to make the changes I knew the manuscript needed and to just plow ahead and deal with it all after getting through my full story like I’d originally intended.

Last Wednesday I got a flash of a solid scene that would help streamline my beginning and I decided that I would write that. Finally 2000 words that felt good to write. So I decided to tackle the section I’d just wrote since I knew it needed changes. They haven’t come easy. In the past two weeks, I feel like I struggled for four days in a row to get to one good day of writing and have had two good days of writing all together. Obviously if this keeps up, I’ll be lucky to finish this book by the end of the year. But during my last period of four days while I was struggling, I figured out how to compress some things, so I’m hoping my anxiety about length won’t be so crippling anymore.

I’ve also learned some things about myself as a writer. Fast and shitty isn’t satisfying. The word count numbers may be, but I don’t feel accomplished and in fact am prone to derail myself. I basically have to do the two weeks/125 pages of fast and shitty all over again. I have to go at a pace where I am at least visualizing what is going on not just writing what is basically an expanded outline with dialogue. Maybe it comes from the method of writing that I studied in college, but if I’m not seeing at least some of the tiny details, I’m not deep enough into the moment of story and I easily lose my way. But those tiny details can get me back on track. The first sight that got me back into writing was an image of a girl sticking her feet out the window of an old car. From that image, I discovered a new scene that taught me essential back story about one of my bigger characters. (And that was the other reason I got so frozen last week. There was a character whose backstory I’d taken from another version of this story and it just wasn’t working. I tried to move on without knowing his backstory, but I could not. It went against everything I care most about in storytelling which is building character. How could I move forward and just have this character perform like a puppet for me without knowing his motivation.)

Most recently I got stuck arranging a chapter. I knew several things needed to come out, but wasn’t sure how they would all occur. (It was like a smaller version of the problems I’ve been having with this book in general; I know what needs to happen, but executing it, getting it all to flow together smoothly, is the problem.) I had a workshop with my critique partner on Monday night where we both forced ourselves to work and push even though we didn’t feel capable. I skipped ahead to the beginning of the next chapter when I got a strong image of ice cubes clinking into a glass. I kept pushing and pushing at that image and figured out exactly what I needed to have happen in the previous chapter.

The next morning, I started writing in a blank document, developing the scene I saw the night before, getting it down, pushing it as far as I could take it and writing it well (as in good for a first draft). Then when I started to tire, I took a lunch break, re-examined my plan of action and went back and fixed and finished the chapter that had been stalled out for the past three days. All in all, I wrote 3,100 words and for the most part I was happy with them, by first draft standards. There are places I need to flesh out later, parts where I may have rambled, but the writing actually felt good.

So I have a new plan. I have about 200 pages/60,000 words/17 and a half chapters left to write. Before, when I was doing the shitty first draft, I was trying to write at least a chapter a day. Now, I’m trying to write half a chapter a day. This will cause me to finish about a month later than I’d originally intended and I will still have to revise, so I may not get the manuscript in at the beginning of October as was my latest hope (Labor Day became quickly unrealistic once I saw exactly how shitty the shitty first draft was). In fact I may be getting it in around the same time my agent is having her baby, which means she won’t read it for a while and may not be ready to shop it until next year. Yes, this sucks. This will mean going 2 years without selling a book and more than likely, two or possibly three years without having a book on the shelves as I’m guessing 2012 is the absolute soonest it could fit into a publishing schedule *if* it sells fast.

But I’m trying to put this out of my mind. I have another project to work on while my agent is reading this one. I can take a two week break and then dive into that one, hopefully having established a work pattern that works for me.

The pattern I am trying now is to open a new document every day, write as vividly as I can for as long as I can hold out (hopefully at least 1000 words before lunch, I think Melissa Walker does that and she’s awesome and I admire her so I’ll try it), then let it devolve into semi-shitty and then when I’ve run out of energy either revise or plot and visualize for the next day.

Since I’m trying to be a full time writer, my goal was to spend 8 hours a day writing when I’m not working at the bar. But eight hours is a long time to do that, especially with any quality to it. I tend to burn out sometime between 5 and 6 and that’s fine. Of course, I can hope that I will get into a rhythm like I did with my previous books where I can pull a 10 to 12 hour day on occasion and maybe that will make this happen faster. Who knows?

But hopefully today will be another good day since I could really use a reversal of my pattern and instead of sucking four days in a row to have one good day of writing, I’d rather have four good days in a row with one sucky day (or preferably none!). We’ll see. But so far this is what I have discovered works for me. Fast, furious and totally shitty is just frustrating and takes me off course. Solid for a thousand words and then semi-shitty for the next thousand is more what I’m aiming for. It’s not quite as fast, but far more satisfying and will hopefully motivate me through these next two months where it’s gonna be all work and no play for me.

No play except for my appearance at the PAYA festival in Pennsylvania on the 21st where I will be leading a writing workshop, so if you want more writing tips and you are in the Philly area you should sign up!

But yeah, other than that I’m on a strict schedule of writing solidly five days a week, taking one day off for errands and one day off to try to cram in a bit of socialization so my friends don’t totally hate me. I guess this is what I get for not finding balance in writing new books/promoting my current books earlier!

If you are also pounding away at the keyboard, locked in the writing cave, trying to finish a draft, you should check out this writing challenge for September. You can win cool prizes for throwing your name in the ring (Including a copy of Ballads of Suburbia with a signed bookplate!), so go for it!

Before I go back to the cave, I'll share a bit from the scene I wrote that helped me break into my one character (Bender) and get back into my groove (however briefly) last week. This isn't the scene where I write about his background, but it helped me see him, Cole and an very important object to the story, Bender's fifties Lincoln.

As I've mentioned before this book is written from two points-of-view, 39 year-old bartender Ivy and her 18 year-old daughter Zoe. This is from Zoe's POV, remembering when she met her two best friends:

Due to our abrupt move, I started school a week later than everyone else. All the kids in my first class turned and stared at me when I walked in, escorted by the principal’s secretary. The teacher forced me to stand at the front of the room and introduce myself. It was a humiliating experience I’d been through too many times in my life, and I couldn’t bear the thought of repeating in every single class that day. When first period ended, I proceeded directly to the nearest exit.

It was drizzling slightly, so I pulled up hood of my worn black sweatshirt and zipped it up as I cut through the parking lot behind the school. Pete had given the hoodie to me for my thirteenth birthday and it bore the logo of a Swedish hardcore punk band, one of our mutual favorites who weren’t very widely known, so I practically jumped three feet in the air when a boy stuck his shaved head out of the passenger’s side of a boat-sized, vintage black Lincoln and remarked, “Great band!”

He laughed at the way he’d startled me, his bloodshot hazel eyes glistening. His friend leaned across him from the driver’s seat and apologized. “We didn’t mean to freak you out,” he said, though his face full of piercings—left eyebrow, right nostril, labret, and eight-gauge stainless steel hoops stretching both earlobes—and the blue spiky hair that nearly touched the soft tan fabric lining the roof of the car told me that he usually enjoyed freaking people out. “We just got excited because no one around here has decent music taste. This place is such a—”

“Nowhere?” I finished. “That’s what my mom calls it.”

“Pretty much,” Blue Hair agreed with a grin as Shaved Head nodded, unrolling the sleeve of his plain white t-shirt to retrieve his pack of cigarettes. He had an anchor tattooed on his bicep and just as much stubble on his chin and cheeks as he had on his head, leading me to wonder exactly how old these guys were.

I gestured over my shoulder at the high school and asked, “You guys go here?”

Shaved Head cracked a smile that made him look younger than me and joked, “We go, but we don’t go inside.”

Blue Hair rolled his eyes and punched Shaved Head in the shoulder. “That’s one of Cole’s favorite dumb jokes. He has many. We’re juniors. And I’m Bender, by the way.” He extended his hand, which had dirt permanently caked into the nail bed from constantly tinkering with the Lincoln as I would learn.

“Zoë,” I said and added sheepishly, “Freshman.”

“Really?” Bender asked. “You look older.”

I shrugged. I got that a lot, presumably because of my height. I’d sprouted another few inches that summer and was fast approaching six feet.

But my age didn’t matter to them and they didn’t seem to care that I turned down the joint that Cole stepped out of the car to smoke either. We were the only punk kids in Nowhere and I knew about a bunch of bands that they’d never heard of. Within twenty minutes, I’d plugged my iPod into the Lincoln’s stereo system and they were giving me a tour of the town. That was all it took to bond us for life.