Author. Literary agent with Scott Treimel NY. Managing fiction editor at Armchair/Shotgun. Mostly harmless.
Available now!
"Bittersweet and prescient."
- Publishers Weekly
"It may be hard for readers to get this book out of their system: Cusick's first novel is charming and witty, peppered with satirical jabs at the irony of being lonely and isolated in an increasingly connected world."
- Horn Book Magazine
"A keenly observed and timely take on relationship building, gender roles and the qualities that make us human. Pairs nicely with M.T. Anderson’s Feed"
- Kirkus
Literary agent Cusick’s debut is a funny, touching, near-future science fiction tale that explores teen relationships and what it means to be a “real” person. Part Pinocchio, part My Fair Lady, this is a good quick pick for fans of light science fiction.
- VOYA
Abandon Changes: A Girl Parts Story
Find out what happens to Rose after GIRL PARTS in this free e-book.
Do you know about this? How can you not know about this??
Sixty agents.
Three hours.
A veritable sudden-death cagematch of queries.
Hundreds of writer-hopefulls.
And you.
It’s the Writer’s Digest Pitch Slam, this Saturday, January 21st, all part of the 2012 Writer’s Digest Conference running from Jan. 20-22 at the Sheraton New York.
These people found agents through this conference. You can too!
You can register here, or by clicking the below image, which is a visual representation of the Awesomeness of Your Pitch about to slam into my BRAIN.
And there’s more. You can use the promo code below to save $50 off the price of admission.
THE PROMO CODE IS:
WDEXTRA
Stay tuned for updates @WritersDigest. See you there!
Day 1 (Tuesday the 24th): Selected Entries are posted to blog for agents to review and public to comment on.
Day 2 (Wednesday the 25th): Agents come in and select ONE for a full request, then can make unlimited amount of partial requests and comments. *Once an agent has put a FULL on an entry it’s out of the race. The OTHER agent can notify me if they’d like that requested full after TWO weeks have passed.
Day 3 (Thursday the 26th): Agents can use their SECOND full request, even if it overthrows the other agent’s partial request. More partial requests can be made at this point too.
Day 3 (4pm EST): Contest closes and agents are given ONE last full request to use. And who knows maybe they’ll surprise you with no additional request or even an extra.
WINNERS will officially be announced on the blog and arrangements will be made for the requests.
johnmcusick
2:21 am on January 12, 2012 Permalink
| Reply Tags: Children's Television, Fred Rogers, PBS, PBS commercials, Sesame Street
I was devastated to learn there are now commercials on PBS. I didn’t realize this had happened, as I haven’t had proper television in ten years. It was like hearing someone mugged Fred Rogers. I was raised on PBS kids shows, which, at least in my day, where consistently more awesome than their cable equivalents. (Though Bill Nye the Science Guy will never trump Beakman’s World. I know, I know, commence the hate mail.)
I grew up on Sesame Street, in the pre-Elmo administration, when all anyone talked about was Big Bird (I still muse over the TARDIS-like properties of Oscar’s trash can.) I enjoyed Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, though even as a child I knew the ‘Street was way cooler than the ‘hood. (It wasn’t until adulthood that I learned of Fred’s speech to the U.S. senate that saved public television). I also watched, but never enjoyed, the absolutely inexplicable Ghost Writer, which kept me up nights. I swear I never understood a single episode, but I’m pretty sure it was all about a deaf, mute dead person who writes anagrams about criminal activity to children.
Then when I was thirteen my mother and step-father had a baby girl, Andrea, and I was introduced to a new generation of PBS television. By the time I was selling my action figures for gas money,* Andrea was developing television tastes of her own. Since it is socially acceptable for a toddler to scream and throw food at her teenaged brother, but not the other way around, Andrea ruled the remote. And so every morning before school, instead of MTV or the local news, we watched what she wanted, which was Channel 2, PBS.
It started with Teletubbies, which was a pleasant little headtrip at six in the morning. I remember being incensed over the Gay Tinky-Winky controversy. (And incidentally, I don’t care if he was an anatomically neutral non-sexual alien thing, that Teletubby was gay. The producers definitely wrote him that way on purpose, and I think it’s great.) I composed complex metaphysical schemas for the Teletubby world, about how they represented the internal demons of the Giant Floating Baby Head In the Sun, and since the subconscious knows no time, always wanted to do things over and over and over again.
The tubbies gave way to Between the Lions, a hip puppet variety show about lions running a library. It was part Sesame Street and part Electric Company, andfeatured hands-down one of the funniest kids segments ever, Fun With Chicken Jane:
Between the Lions wins extra points for doing an entire episode on sad books. I take this as antithetical to the insipid and psychotically cheerful Barney the Purple Dinosaur (which fell neatly between my and Andrea’s childhoods), in which every kid got a hole-in-one on the first try at mini golf, damn it that would never happen!
Another favorite PBS morning show from my sister’s era was Cyberchase, a cyberspace adventure show. This show started in an era when Ask Jeeves was a thing, and the terms cyberspace, interweb, and virtual reality were used interchangeably. The heroes battled Hacker, who I gather was trying to take over the internet or something. Their exploits incorporated proverbial math lessons, which, as a freshman in high school, I gobbled up (don’t laugh, this show is the reason I didn’t fail pre-algebra).
Cyberchase featured the vocal stylings of the inestimable Christopher Lloyd as the villainous Hacker, and Gilbert Gottfried as Digit the cyber…bird…thing, more or less reprising his role as Iago from Aladdin.
I liked Cyberchase for showcasing math, which other kids shows passed over in favor of well-worn topics like books or kindness. (It also featured occasional live action segments featuring Bianca Degroat, with whom I was, and am, infatuated.)
There were others that Andrea occasionally enjoyed but didn’t fall in love with. Maybe I would have loved these too, but like I said, the remote was in her hand. She wasn’t big on Caillou or The Big Comfy Couch. There was also Zoom, which irked me, as in high school I wanted to be an actor and felt the ZOOMers weren’t authentic. She’d switch it over to Nickelodeon and we’d see what Sponge Bob was up to, or Dora the Explorer (who I’m confident hailed from Webster, MA, as nowhere else does “Dora” rhyme with “Explorer”). I considered telling her about the darker Nick days of Ren and Stimpy, but decided to let sleeping Chihuahuas lie.
And here’s the truth: PBS Kids is why I got into children’s literature. While the rest of my teenage world was steeped in adolescent pop culture and T.V., the shows on PBS managed to be super funny, super smart, and had such amazing sincerity and heart. They taught me that something can be wry without being cynical, and sweet without being saccharine. I still hope to someday write something as clever as Cyberchase, or thoughtful as Between the Lions. Though I primarily write for a young adult audience, I remember how these shows affected me as a teenager and I think a little bit of their sensibility works its way into my writing, ten years later. What teen (or adult) can’t due to listen, every now and then, to Fred Rogers’s song “What Do You Do With the Mad You Feel?”
This still brings tears to my eyes:
–
A total lie. I would *never* sell my action figures. Especially Megatron. Guys he was a robot that turned into a T-REX.
I think your sister might have been watching around the same time, or a bit earlier than my daughter. I remember once putting Teletubbies on for when all her big cousins were over, to settle her down a bit before her nap. Next thing I knew all five of them, aged 2, 6, 10, 11 and 15 were mesmerized. Scary.
This was beautiful, John. Thank you. I cried when Fred Rogers died, having been inspired most of my life by him. I often think about his little song about fear. “You can never go down, you can never go down, you can never go down the drain.” He risked, didn’t he? My now 80 year old father would stop everything he was doing to watch “Picture, Picture”–the best was about how crayons were made. Our kids were raised on PBS, too though eventually Power Rangers and their ways wooed our son to the neighbors at 4:00 pm.
If you haven’t yet, you must watch the Curious George series on PBS. I think it is some of the best writing in children’s television EVER. The shows epitomize what you described – sweet without being saccharine, wry without being cynical. My husband and I often laugh out loud at some of the lines.
Woo-hoo for never watching TV as a kid!!! We didn’t have cable; the only place I could watch TV was at my babysitter’s house. And then we went overseas, so again, no English-language cable. Instead, my parents had recordings of old shows like Wishbone, Bill Nye, and The Magic Schoolbus. I do remember watching some episodes of Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues at the babysitter’s, and I had a Blue’s Clues computer game growing up, but that was about it. I read books and played outside a lot (which probably meant I got into exponentially more trouble than I would have if I’d watched TV instead…)
My daughter, who’s now 23, was obsessed with Ghost Writer. I hadn’t thought about that show for ages. We had to schedule our Sunday nights around episodes (because it was a serial; she had to know what happened). She was maybe 6 or 7, just starting to read, and these older kids who liked to read and write and solve mysteries really appealed to her sense of how the world should be. Were they incomprehensible? I remember them being more interesting than standard TV fare — sort of Twilight Zone meets Hardy Boys. I learned later the idea was developed at Harvard Ed. School, for whatever that’s worth.
Back in the 70s, I watched the early days of Sesame Street and then Electric Company with my little sister. As a 15 yr. old big sister and again 20 yrs. later as a mother, I appreciated the CTW’s savvy at entertaining two audiences at once. On Electric Company, I remember being charmed by the “soap opera” Boy on Chair. On Sesame Street, I loved the pop song, TV and movie parodies: Monsterpiece Theatre with Alastair Cookie and the Loud Family. I still think Sesame Street’s Born to Add is better than that Springsteen song it imitates. (If there was a way to add media to a comment, I’d track it down on youtube. Humming to myself now: Kids like you and me, Baby, we were born to add.)
What a neat new cover! Although I kind of want to pop it repeatedly.
johnmcusick
10:47 pm on January 3, 2012 Permalink
| Reply Tags: Bella, Edward, i09, If Famous Writers Had Written Twilight, Lizzie Stark, Twilight by Dr. Seuss
Check out my short story, Abandon Changes, which takes place a few months after the events of GIRL PARTS. Live now on YARN!
“The recipient is an American girl, your age. A club kid. Tonight she’s at the Purple Flower Room. She calls herself Iris, and she’s got bottle-blue hair.”
So it was drugs . X or ketamine or that new one, Path, the “empathy drug.” It didn’t matter what the package was. In four hundred runs she’d never opened one or asked what was inside. “That’s what makes you a good runner,” Joe always said. “Light feet and no curiosity.”
“Where’s the pick up?”
“No package,” said Joe. “Just a message. Make sure you get it right. I need you focused, Rei.”
Guys, I gotta let loose about this one. Forgive this back-slappy, slap-happy post…
The draft is finished. hallelujah.
Twelve weeks of non-stop madness. Five-hour writing shifts, seventeen-page type-a-thons followed by hours of paralysis and anxiety. Editing on the fly, no plot outlines, no plan. Three months. 57,051 words. 290 pages. Done. Written. Wrote.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got lots of work ahead of me. There are character arcs to modulate, themes to round out, spellings to check (lots of those). I would never, ever show anyone but my agent or my editor the smoldering, white hot thing I have before me. But you can’t fix a blank page, and though these pages need fixin, they ain’t blank, Baby.
Though this is a “first draft” in one sense, it was also a…I don’t know…twelve draft in another. I’ve been working on this y.a. project since August 2009, with the guidance, support, and aid of my patient, brilliant, and marvelous editor Deb, as well as my awesome agent. But as of last spring I knew I needed a fresh start. Things had become confused, over-cooked, muddled. My characters needed a completely blank, slightly damp chalkboard from which to tell their tale. And so, after two years of writing and editing, this September I threw out the old drafts and started rewriting the book from page one, word one.
It sucked. But it was worth it.
The resulting story is a far cry from where I started. The characters are distant relatives of the floral bits of tissue paper populating the previous drafts. To me, this new version, for all its rough edges, feels at once deeper, simpler, more complex, and truer. I was able to take what I learned in the last two years and apply it from the get go. I took the heart from the old book (blackened and raw but still beating) and built a new host body around it. New bones, new brain, new everything. What I’ve got looks like Frankenstein’s monster. But with one or two invasive procedures and a lot of cosmetic surgery, I think she’ll walk and talk again. Hell. I think she’s gonna dance.
To mix another metaphor, I feel like I’ve augered this puppy in with no landing gear and the engines on fire. In other words, I kinda feel like this guy:
And it feels good.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna sleep for a week.
Hope ya don’t mind if I talk about a magazine near and dear to my heart.
As you may know, when I’m not writing or agenting, I co-edit the Brooklyn-based literary magazine Armchair/Shotgun. Like most folks in the indie-lit-magazine world, I’m mostly in it for the money: the amphibious limos trolling rivers of champagne, the Mil V-12 helicopters dropping parcels of cash wrapped in gold leaf into my dollar-sign-shaped rooftop pool…
But seriously folks, few things in life give me greater pleasure and sense of meaning than publishing the superlative contributors of Armchair/Shotgun. A/S is a great little-big mag, and we are fortunate to work with some of the most talented poets, artists, and authors I’ve ever met (and I don’t say that lightly). These are artists I believe in. I believe in their talent and their drive, the sincerity of their work, and their consummate execution. Which is why I may ask you, dear reader, to consider purchasing a subscription or copy of Armchair/Shotgun this Holiday Season.
Printed on paper and available in bookstores, Armchair/Shotgun is a shareable, lendable, book-markable, spam-free reading experience. Its whisper-net connection is so quiet it’s not even connected toanything. The battery never runs out. The text is readable under any light source. You can access a new story or poem instantly, just by turning the page. And who doesn’t feel a little sexier with an indie BK lit mag on their coffee table?
Eh? Eh? You know what I’m talking about.
So this Holiday Season, please consider the gift of an Armchair/Shotgun Issue or Subscription. Every dime (I mean it) contributes to the next issue’s printing costs and promotion. I wouldn’t steer ya wrong. This is worth the $10. But in case you don’t believe me, here’s what other folks think:
“Many of the pieces illustrate grassroots story-telling at its very best – with three contributors making their début bow – and there is a freshness and a spice to this collection that brings to mind the originality of the Beat generation.”
“The recipient is an American girl, your age. A club kid. Tonight she’s at the Purple Flower Room. She calls herself Iris, and she’s got bottle-blue hair.”
Lucy Boyd are discussing. 
gsprendergast 3:08 am on January 12, 2012 Permalink |
I think your sister might have been watching around the same time, or a bit earlier than my daughter. I remember once putting Teletubbies on for when all her big cousins were over, to settle her down a bit before her nap. Next thing I knew all five of them, aged 2, 6, 10, 11 and 15 were mesmerized. Scary.
johnmcusick 3:25 am on January 12, 2012 Permalink |
It is a *mesmerizing* show.
johnmcusick 3:26 am on January 12, 2012 Permalink
It’s like watching a lava lamp.
gsprendergast 3:29 am on January 12, 2012 Permalink |
I was mesmerized by their mesmerization. I could drink a bottle of Teletubbies right now.
maribeth boelts 1:34 pm on January 12, 2012 Permalink |
This was beautiful, John. Thank you. I cried when Fred Rogers died, having been inspired most of my life by him. I often think about his little song about fear. “You can never go down, you can never go down, you can never go down the drain.” He risked, didn’t he? My now 80 year old father would stop everything he was doing to watch “Picture, Picture”–the best was about how crayons were made. Our kids were raised on PBS, too though eventually Power Rangers and their ways wooed our son to the neighbors at 4:00 pm.
Sarah McCanless 4:15 pm on January 12, 2012 Permalink |
If you haven’t yet, you must watch the Curious George series on PBS. I think it is some of the best writing in children’s television EVER. The shows epitomize what you described – sweet without being saccharine, wry without being cynical. My husband and I often laugh out loud at some of the lines.
The slower pacing of many PBS shows (Mr. Rogers was king here) is actually better for children’s brains, too. (One source: http://seattlemamadoc.seattlechildrens.org/fast-paced-media-and-4-year-olds-cartoons-on-the-brain/)
Laura W. 6:17 pm on January 13, 2012 Permalink |
Woo-hoo for never watching TV as a kid!!! We didn’t have cable; the only place I could watch TV was at my babysitter’s house. And then we went overseas, so again, no English-language cable. Instead, my parents had recordings of old shows like Wishbone, Bill Nye, and The Magic Schoolbus. I do remember watching some episodes of Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues at the babysitter’s, and I had a Blue’s Clues computer game growing up, but that was about it. I read books and played outside a lot (which probably meant I got into exponentially more trouble than I would have if I’d watched TV instead…)
Ann de Forest 7:52 pm on January 19, 2012 Permalink |
My daughter, who’s now 23, was obsessed with Ghost Writer. I hadn’t thought about that show for ages. We had to schedule our Sunday nights around episodes (because it was a serial; she had to know what happened). She was maybe 6 or 7, just starting to read, and these older kids who liked to read and write and solve mysteries really appealed to her sense of how the world should be. Were they incomprehensible? I remember them being more interesting than standard TV fare — sort of Twilight Zone meets Hardy Boys. I learned later the idea was developed at Harvard Ed. School, for whatever that’s worth.
Back in the 70s, I watched the early days of Sesame Street and then Electric Company with my little sister. As a 15 yr. old big sister and again 20 yrs. later as a mother, I appreciated the CTW’s savvy at entertaining two audiences at once. On Electric Company, I remember being charmed by the “soap opera” Boy on Chair. On Sesame Street, I loved the pop song, TV and movie parodies: Monsterpiece Theatre with Alastair Cookie and the Loud Family. I still think Sesame Street’s Born to Add is better than that Springsteen song it imitates. (If there was a way to add media to a comment, I’d track it down on youtube. Humming to myself now: Kids like you and me, Baby, we were born to add.)