Author Photo

This week, in addition to completing this round of revisions with HarperCollins (almost done, crossing fingers!), I also have to fill out my author questionnaire and send in a photo that will be my official "author" photo for this book.  I am really stuck about which photo to send, so I'm asking for your vote.  I've narrowed it down to four:

Choice #1:  This one is ideal, because I am rather desperate to get a picture of the Tetons somewhere on my book (the mountains are an integral part of the setting of the novel) and this would be a sneaky way to do it.  Still, the lighting is a bit off.

Choice #2:  Here's another with the Tetons and again (argh!) the lighting is not great.  My husband pointed out that in Choice #1 and Choice #2, you can tell that I'm taking my own picture.

Choice #3:  I include this one in black and white because what's behind me is actually mud, which doesn't look great, but I like the picture well enough.  One thing that good author photos evoke, I think, is the sense that the writer could represent the main character (good luck with this for me, ha!, since my MC is a 17-year-old strawberry blonde ANGELIC being).

And Choice #4: my go-to author photo, with books in the background. I think every writer everywhere has a photo like this stashed away, standing in front of books with a contemplative expression, like you're just about to sit down and whip out the next great American novel.

So, let me hear from you! Which photo would YOU see on the back of a book and say to yourself: "Hey, this writer looks like she could really tell the kind of story that I would love to read!"

Officially Signed and Noted

Today I signed my contract and sent it to HarperCollins.  I know it might seem a bit late for all of that, but it took a long time to get the contract smoothed out.  In fairness to my agent, she had it ready for me to sign well before Christmas.  But silly me, I had some questions I wanted to ask first, so I had to wait until everybody was back from the holidays.  Yesterday I asked my questions.  K, as usual, answered beautifully.  (I seriously think I could watch K muck horse stalls and still think she was one of the most amazing people ever.)  And so today, I officially signed my life for the next few years over to HarperCollins. 

And now they can officially pay me.  Woot!

I also got some notes back from F today.

Now, I've been waiting for these notes for a while now, and I was completely out-of-my-mind excited to get them, no matter what.  I like revision--most of my published short stories are far, FAR different from their first drafts.  There are two types of revision, I tell my students.  The type where you come into the room and rearrange the furniture and dust the cobwebs and then stand back and admire the nice, tidy place you've made for yourself.  And the type where the contractor informs you that the wiring is shot, and most of the walls will have to be torn down, and before you know it a sledgehammer is swinging wildly through your work.  This is the part in all the home makeover shows where everybody has just a little too much fun destroying the old kitchen cabinets.  And after the dust settles and you've carted all the junk to the dumpster, you roll up your sleeves and start rebuilding.  When you're done, the place is at a whole new level of beauty, something you never even imagined before.  
  
I'm all about type 2 revising.  Really.  And I intend to have a good attitude with F, as in confident, hard-working, amiable writer.

But when I read the notes, I vaulted straight into wallowing.  Which I understand is completely irrational!  When I read the notes now, a few hours later, I see the genius in F's ideas, her expertise at work, making the story tighter and stronger and better.  She's not asking me to rewrite my book from scratch or cut something I absolutely loved or anything terribly drastic.  But for about an hour after I got the email I stumbled around our apartment with a sheen of tears in my eyes, nauseated and stunned.  I told my husband that it felt like I'd been hit in the stomach with a two by four.  He had the good sense to hide his bafflement at my odd emotional reaction and just give me a hug.

And now, I'm back.  Rational once again.  Excited once again.  Which is good, because tomorrow morning I am going to meet F in PERSON for breakfast!!!!

More tomorrow.

Books of 2009

So today I put together a comprehensive list of the books I read in 2009. This year I read more books, did more writing, and listened to more music than probably the 3 years before that, combined. My creative self was definitely awake and hungry.

So, here it goes:

Water For Elephants, Sara Gruen
The Painted Veil, M.Somerset Maughan
Our Story Begins, Tobias Wolff
City of Thieves, David Benioff
The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett
Unplugged Play, Bobbi Conner
Twilight, Stephanie Meyer (after seeing the movie on DVD)
New Moon, Stephanie Meyer (had to read the rest, didn't I?)
Eclipse, Stephanie Meyer,
Breaking Dawn, Stephanie Meyer
Graceling, Kristin Cashore
Eternal, Cynthia Leitrich Smith (after I started my book, I started to read the other angel-related books out there, for research)
A Great and Terrible Beauty, Libba Bray
Kissed by an Angel, Elizabeth Chandler
Harvesting the Heart, Jodi Picoult
The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Neffeneger (reread)
The Myth of You and Me, Leah Stuart
Wild Ink: How to Write Fiction for Young Adults, Victoria Hanley
Writing and Selling the Young Adult Novel, K.L. Going
Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv
Vampire Academy Series, Richelle Mead (thank you Amyjo, for donating this collection to me)
Angel, Cliff McNish
The Fallen, Thomas Sniegovski
Negotiating a Book Contract, Mark L. Levine (read the day I got the book deal offer from HarperCollins!)
Impossible, Nancy Werlin

Books I read on Kindle: (I got this is June, as a birthday present from my dad, and instantly fell in love. It threw open the doors, WAY, WAY open, to reading. It also busted our budget on books.)

The Host, Stephanie Meyer
The Book of Enoch (all the cool people are reading it)
Marley and Me, John Grogan (reread)
On Writing, Stephen King (reread)
Emotional Life of a Toddler, Alicia Lieberman
Dead and Gone, Charlaine Harris
Rebel Angels, Libba Bray
Wicked Lovely, Melissa Marr
Scream Free Parenting, Hal Edward Runkel (can you tell I have a toddler?)
The Shack, William P. Young
Anne Shirley Series, L.M. Montgomery (reread—all one file in Kindle! sent me back to the early days)
Grave Sight, Charlaine Harris
The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold (reread)
Marked (House of Night) P.C. Cast and Kristin Cast
Evermore, Alyson Noel
Little Women, Louisa Mae Alcott (reread)
The Lightning Thief, Rick Riordan
The City of Ember, Jeanne Duprau
The People of Sparks, Jeanne Duprau
The Prophet of Yonwood, Jeanne Duprau
The Diamond of Darkhold, Jeanne Duprau
Playful Parenting, Lawrence J. Cohen
The Angel Experiment, James Patterson
Cirque Du Freak #1, Darren Shan
Glass Houses (Morganville Vampires), Rachel Caine
Wings, Aprilynne Pike
Bird Eating Bird, Kristin Naca
Hush, Hush, Becca Fitzpatrick
Meridian, Amber Kizer
The Savvy Author’s Guide to Book Publicity, Lissa Warren
Shiver, Maggie Steifvater
The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan
City of Bones, Cassandra Clare
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
Prom Nights from Hell, Meg Cabot and others
Wake, Lisa McMann
Bones of Faerie, Janni Lee Simner
Fallen, Lauren Kate
Beautiful Creatures, Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
What Happened to Cass McBride, Gail Giles
The Summoning, Kelley Armstrong
The Maze Runner, James Dashner
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
The Luxe, Anna Godbersen
Switch, Carol Snow

That's just shy of 70 books, not to mention the loads of samples I read on Kindle that I was too poor to buy! If I had the pick absolute favorites, I'd choose The Painted Veil, which was genius, The Host, which was my first Kindle purchase and I didn't put it down for 3 days, The Forest of Hands and Teeth, which had me up all night chewing my nails to see how it ended, and The Hunger Games, which I thought was pulled off just beautifully. In close second: Shiver and Wings.

Phew! When I look at the list I see myself curled up for hours and hours, lost in the world of books. Which was a wonderful place to be!

Novel Teas and High Aspirations

When last I blogged, which I realize guiltily was about a month ago, I was waiting on the notes for my novel.

Still waiting. Which is really no big deal, in the larger scheme of things. I want my editor to take her time and be thorough. (I am trying to repeat this, as many times as necessary, until I relax.)

This lapse in writing has given me time to stew on my story and get a bit of headway into Book 2. Everyone, including my agent, my parents, my husband, and my readers for Book 1 (they simply just want to know what happens next) wants me to work on Book 2. According to my contract, the synopsis and first five chapters of Book 2 are due March 1. This alarms me. Not because I don't think I'm capable of writing so much new stuff in so little time (that I know I can do-- heck, the synopsis is already mostly done and I've written some good preliminary stuff) but because I don't feel like I'm in the proper mental condition to begin writing hardcore on the next part of my story. I'm in this terrible state of limbo, where I don't know if I'm going to have to make major changes to Book 1 or smaller ones. So as I dip my toe into the pool of Book 2, which is warm and inviting but will still take several months of hard laps to complete, I hesitate. My mind wanders back to Book 1. I think of scenes. I think of little changes I want to make. I wonder if F will want more of this character or that backstory, if she'll want me to cut 25,000 words or add 25,000. Either way, I would be excited, really. I swear. I try to imagine reading it as F does, and then my entire novel gapes open with the sheer possibility of all that it could be. And Book 2 fades from the forefront of my mind. I'm still treading water in Book 1.

Still, I tell myself, I should work on Book 2. I can't afford to waste time complaining about silly writerly things like limbo and burn my creative energy coming up with clever metaphors that describe my current situation. I need to WRITE. I'm getting mentally flabby.

When I first became a "serious" writer, I made myself get a ritual. When I was going to write, I retreated into my bedroom, where my computer desk was settled in front of a large window. I often slanted the blinds to block out the sight of the rabble of kids who were always hanging around the tennis courts below, and gazed up into th perfect blue sky. I made one cup of tea, Earl Grey, decaf, with milk and sugar, which I brewed in a special tea pot and drank from a special tea cup. In silence, I donned a long black sweater coat, sipped the last dredges of my tea, and began to write. I thought that if I dressed writing up in as much ceremony as possible, it would be easier. And, to some extent, it was. The ritual made me take myself seriously.

This Christmas, my dear friend Wendy sent me a package. It was tea, NOVEL TEAS, to be precise--tea bags with literary tags like "She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain" by Lousia May Alcott. At one point in my life, I would have squealed in delight at this incredibly sweet gift. Now, when I opened the package, I smiled at how thoughtful Wendy was to think of me, her "accomplished writer friend" as she put it, and I plan to thoroughly enjoy the tea, but it occurred to me that I haven't had a cup of tea in ages. When I wrote this novel, I always had to hurry and write before my son woke up from his nap. I had to get the words down before I had to see to dinner or the next mountain of laundry or stack of papers. I wrote in my office, at the kitchen table, in the classroom when my students were working on their own writing, I wrote with a voice recorder dangling from my rearview mirror on the perilous canyon road to and from Malibu, I wrote in a notebook on the shore of Jackson Lake, I wrote everywhere I could find space and time. I had no more time for ritual.

Funny how we change without noticing.

And now I tell myself: WRITE. My single New Year's aspiration: Write every day, shooting for the good ol' thousand words, until I get the notes and finish Book 1 and then finish Book 2.

There's a very cool story waiting to be told.

I think I'll have a cup of Novel Tea.

Waiting

Right now I'm waiting to get notes back from my editor at HarperCollins. It's nerve-wracking business, this waiting. I've decided I'm not very good at just chilling while someone else reads my manuscript. I'm sizzling with nervous energy, checking my email every little bit, anxious to get on with the next part, the next step of this process. I am so eager to revise my book under my editor's care, just to see it become better and stronger and worthy of what I feel is the incredible honor that's been bestowed on me. I want to work!

Next week I'm teaching revision strategies to my creative writing students at Pepperdine. That's where I try to show them how much fun the revision process can be, how cool it is to tinker and play with a story, to tear down and rebuild and reenvision everything. I show them a really early draft of a story I wrote a long time ago, and then the published version that was printed years later, and together we marvel at how far a story can come. And when I read that old story, I am always filled with a sense of awe and mystery of how the story shaped itself into something wonderful. I get excited with the sheer possibility of writing.

Here's what I hope from this process with Unearthly: I hope that I understand clearly what to do, and have the ability to do it, be it big changes or little ones. I hope that I will be able to fix it quickly, but thoroughly. Most of all I hope that what emerges is a rock-solid book, of course, something I will look back on with a sense of delight and amazement that such a thing could come from me. And that I'll be able to survive all the stretches of waiting that are before me in the next few years.

And the title is. . . .

That's right folks, I now officially have a title for my book!

I seriously didn't work even half this hard to name my son. I've been up late nights staring up at the ceiling, pondering, rolling different words and phrases around in my mouth like hard candy, seeing how they taste. I've received so many great ideas from my friends, family, and students (thanks, everybody, for your awesome possibilities!) and scoured the pages of my book looking for it to be hiding in there somewhere. And guess what? It was! This title jumped off the page at us from a list of words and phrases I found in the book during my last pass at revision. And the amazing people at HarperCollins agreed (unanimously, even!) that this is the one.

So the title is. . .

UNEARTHLY

What I love is the sense of mystery and possibility in this simple word, and how it operates on so many levels that speak to not only the arc of Clara's story, but the world she comes to know.

Yay! So glad that it's settled! So excited thinking about this word on the cover of MY book. (And now, we do the dance of joy!)

Ahem. Now, back to work.

Stephanie Meyer and Pudding on the Brain

Tis the season for Twilight. I realized this in Nordstrom's, where I was perusing the makeup counters and came across the new Twilight lip gloss: Venom. It's this strange mix like those science experiments in grade school where you put oil and water in a 2 liter soda bottle with a little food coloring and spend hours shaking it up and watching it separate. With Venom, it's a clear substance and a dark red stuff churning around in a tiny $16 container. The clear stuff is a gloss with a plumper in it, which tastes like cinnamon and is supposed to irritate your lips enough to swell. The red stuff is meant to stain your mouth the color of blood. And in the five minutes I was standing there, the clerk sold three vials.

Twilight lip gloss, people. A sign of the apocalypse? :) I can't help but wonder if Stephanie Meyer thinks it's absolutely bonkers too. I've been thinking a lot about Stephanie Meyer lately. I remember her in those earlier interviews, where she was just aglow with the excitement of it all. She was having dinner with her characters, in costume! She was sitting on a movie set while they shot the meadow scene! Could a writer's life get better than that?! And last week I saw her on Oprah and she looked. . . strained. And I wondered, have we crossed the threshold where everything's gone from really super cool for her to where it's just totally insane?

Lately I've seen a lot of attacks on Stephanie Meyer and the Twilight saga. I can't cruise around Facebook without seeing some comment about how lame Twilight is and how stumped people are (especially other writers) by its success. Some of this I rack up to the anti-mob mentality. In order to feel like they are true individuals with good taste, many people will staunchly oppose the "it" thing. Titanic. Harry Potter. Twilight. And there's something to that, I suppose. I cried like a baby at Titanic, but even I was ready to chuck my radio out the window when "My Heart Will Go On" came on for the umpteenth time every hour. There's such a thing as death by overexposure.

Like most "it" things, I came to Twilight late. I'd heard of it. But I was busy. I only started to pay better attention when the movie came out. I love movies. And I love vampires. I am a Buffy fan to the core, and a big fan of Sookie Stackhouse to boot. So I rented Twilight the weekend it came to DVD. The first thing I remember thinking about it was that I would have LOVED it when I was sixteen. I would have been writing fan-fic about Bella and Edward for sure. And at age 30, I still found it mysteriously compelling.

So I went off to Barnes and Noble and bought the book. Then went back that afternoon to get Book 2. And the next day to get 3 and 4, which I read in less than 48 hours. After I finished the series, I sat down, stared at the mound of books on my desk and thought, I could do better. Now I have to laugh at the outright arrogance of this assumption, but my novel hadn't come to me yet. I wasn't thinking in specific terms. I was just thinking that I was a writer, a practiced, educated writer, and I could write something better. I could immediately see Meyer's flaws. The books seemed to me full of rookie mistakes, which makes total sense as Meyer never wrote so much as a short story before she came up with Twilight. I joked that if I had to read that Edward's voice was like velvet one more time I might have to choke somebody. I would have, in those days, completely agreed with Stephen King in his infamous interview last February (Meyer is a good storyteller, he claims, with something unique and compelling to offer her readers, but "can't write worth a darn.")

But that was BEFORE I wrote my novel. When my novel did come to me, not much later, Stephanie Meyer was constantly lingering in the back of my mind, and not simply because of her success, not because she supposedly sold Twilight for a $750,000 advance or made 52 million dollars last year or all the other things that make her the epitome of what it is to be a triumph as a YA writer. But because I knew more about her by then. She was a mother with small children. And one day she just started writing, not to become a gazillionaire or a world-famous author, but because she wanted to know how a story ended. And she wrote to find not only the story, but herself again.

I could relate.

And I was finding that being a good storyteller is a heck of a lot harder, in many, many ways, than being a good writer. I've always had a good ear for the language. But the story, the complexities of the characters, the way you have to keep all their threads untangled in your head, the way you must set them in tense, powerful moments that resonate with the reader and follow through with them, that, is really freaking hard. And with that kind of thing, the proof is in the pudding. And Stephanie Meyer is all pudding, no matter what you think of the writing itself. Her story speaks to people. That's undeniable.

When I find myself tempted to come to Stephanie Meyer's defense these days, I remind myself: pudding. The girl can take care of herself. So I'm content to simply cheer for her, to show solidarity for a fellow writer. And I try not to envy her for her incredible success. And I try to allow myself to dream of big things, because sometimes big things happen to unsuspecting people, and sometimes the little things can change absolutely everything. Sometimes the universe gives you a gift. A story. And it's worth it.

I know that even if my book doesn't make a dime, that's the case for me.