What Did You Google Today? Part 2:

CHERRY MONEY BABY revision is due next week. Today I’m doing a final polish, checking a few facts. Here, by way of a teaser trailer for the novel, is What I Googled Today:

Is it Jennifer Wallace or Jennifer Walters?

One of my favorite scenes ever.

The Big Bang Burger Bar (because Milliways would be too obvious)

What’s the super poisonous one?

That would be a great name for a night club…

Crash Landing: A First Draft in Three Months

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.

Dirty, Pretty Thing: Purple and Blue Language in Y.A.

I’m a sucker for purple prose. I’m not proud of it, but alliteration makes me swoon, as does a prettily described sunset or milkmaid. (Some favorite examples appear in Proust’s Swann’s Way, a five-hundred-page book about a cookie). But my love of flowery language is, I think, just another symptom of English Major-itis: the desire to write and read Great Works of Art as opposed to Stories. And though they’re often fun to write, beautiful descriptions are best avoided, *especially* in young adult literature. Teens read for plot, not for prose. My 13-year-old sister and other teens I’ve spoken to skip the “boring parts,” which are almost always the descriptions. Descriptions are the icing, and if you’ve ever eaten a jar of icing on its own, you know it only feels good at first.

On the other hand, teens love blue (profane or vulgar) language. (So do I.) It’s fun, funny, taboo, and often the way teenagers speak to one another. Raised by a mother who talks like a trucker, I have to check myself, when I speak and when I write, to ensure I don’t curse a…well, a blue streak. But fiction, and especially dialog, must be believable, which ironically is not always the same thing as true-to-life. At times “realistic’ teen dialog is so vulgar as to be distracting. And that’s the real problem with extreme language of any kind: it steals focus. I don’t want my readers thinking about my protagonist’s foul mouth when they should be thinking about her broken heart.

Today I struggled to tamp both purple and blue. In the scene I was working on, my protagonist and her boyfriend slip into the bushes for some hanky-panky. My first impulse was to pan away and describe the slowly spinning wheel of boyfriend’s bike as it glints in the sun. Yawn. Turning focus back to the kids, I found myself using the same blue language the characters themselves would have used to describe their actions, but the result was too graphic. I settled for skipping the play-by-play entirely and used suggestive post-romp details instead. This was the result:

They made it as far as Sweet Creek before a private path through the trees enticed them off the road. They let the bike fall with a crunch, the upended front wheel spinning freely. Twenty minutes later Cherry was brushing a mud stain from her slacks, and Lucas searched for his sock in the bushes.

            “You have leaves in your hair,” he said.

            “I have leaves everywhere.” She felt like a wild woods girl, a sprite. She wanted to climb into the nearest oak and fall asleep. She stretched, felt an ache above her solar plexus and winced.

My First High School Visit (Pictures!)

Yesterday I hung out with the fabulous and brilliant students at Gotham Professional Arts Academy in Brooklyn. We talked about social networking, friendship, writing, publishing, and, erm, robot girlfriends. I even met some budding writers!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

If you’d like me to come talk at *your* school, drop me a line!

I’m Told There Will Be Pizza

Doing my first school visit tomorrow! (In Brooklyn.) Excited to talk to kids about GIRL PARTS and maybe read something from CHERRY MONEY BABY.

Robot love and surrogate pregnancy = good schoolin.

What I Learned from Fat Vampire

Coming back to a project after a three-month hiatus has been a real head trip. With that much time away from CHERRY MONEY BABY, I feel like I’m reading with fresh eyes.

Having just finished Fat Vampire, I’m marvelling at how author Adam Rex keeps a dozen plot-lines vibrating at once, without ever getting tangled. A flaw I noticed in this draft of CHERRY is what I call front loading: essentially, starting every major and minor plot line, and introducing every character, in the first ten pages. The result is like  a band where everyone’s playing at top volume. After all, in a novel some story elements are Lead Guitar while others are Backup Vocals or, say, Cowbell. A novel needs to be mixed down so everyone can be heard in consort. I needed a good sound guy.

So I’m editing like crazy, while simultaneous working on something Super Secret as regards Girl Parts. More on that one soon.

Oh and hey. If like me you’re a big fan of Ron Charles’ Totally Hip Video Book Reviews, you should check out Armchair/Shotgun’s exclusive interview today. It, too, is Totally Hip:

A/S: According to your Wikipedia page, you’ve been with the Washington Post since 2005. Can you describe what developments in the literary world / your daily horoscope inspired you to augment your written criticism with the Totally Hip Video Reviews?

Ron Charles: As any viewer of the Totally Hip Video Book Review can tell, I developed this web series for the kickbacks, the cranberry juice, and the women.

Read the whole thing here.

Black Friday / Writesgiving

For some reason I love working on the holidays. It feels like stolen time.

I rewrote the first chapter of CHERRY MONEY BABY this week, and am working my way chronologically through Deb (my fab editor’s) notes.

There’s a fire crackling, fresh coffee, and electronic dance music on my headphones (not that cozy, I know, but I like to write to something that moves).

Happy Black Friday!

Salt Mines: I’m there.

I couldn’t sleep last night. We finally fixed the thermostat, so the heat’s on now. But the radiators are making very rude noises and they kept me up. So now it’s the crack of dawn and I’ve just wrapped several hours on Cherry Money Baby. My latest edit letter came Thursday, but I was off the grid all weekend so this was my first chance to dig in.

Now I am *completely* exhausted. But, it feels good to be back in the shop

 

Music to Write By

So as I send the latest draft of CHERRY MONEY BABY to my editor, I’m remembering that I started writing the first draft last Labor Day, in a cafe on DeKalb Ave., listening to Goldfrapp’s Supernature album. Listening to it again, I realize those songs sort of haunt CHERRY. (There’s definitely an Alison Goldfrapp / Lady Gaga inspired character, who played a bit-part in GIRL PARTS.) I wonder if CHERRY would have its gaudy glitz without Ride a White Horse, and the opening scene was definitely influenced by the lonesomeness of Let it Take You. It’s like suddenly realizing you had an invisible co-author.

Guest Post & Edits!

Firstly, if you haven’t seen my guest post on the wondrous Word For Teens, check it out!

So last night I came home  to find an email from my fab editor on “the new one,” a.k.a. CHERRY MONEY BABY, the follow-up to Girl Parts. No sooner is one kid out the door, you start raising her baby sister.

I made an effort with this manuscript to “show don’t tell,” and parts almost read like a play, with dialog and action and almost no authorial commentary. BUT, interestingly, my editor wants to see *more* telling, more connective tissue between the bones. This is fine by me, as I love that kind of thing and was restraining myself in this case.

I won’t go into plot here, but I will say that on my desk is a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, the floor plan of an English Manor House, and the annotated Through the Looking Glass.

Back to the salt mines!