Blogfest 2009

I love stories about girls who kick butt. Girl with sword, girl with wolf, girl with dragon, girl with talking cat, girl with sword and wolf and dragon and… You get the idea.

My all-time favorite author is Tamora Pierce. She writes books where with every scene, you think, “That’s the perfect thing to have happened!” Plus they include girls with swords, talking wolves and cats, and dragons.

My all-time favorite book is Beauty by Robin McKinley. It’s a retelling of Beauty and the Beast. It’s one of my “comfort books” that I reread on rainy days.

Other favorites include Deep Wizardry by Diane Duane, Jack the Giant-Killer by Charles de Lint, and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (okay, yes, there’s no sword and no dragon, but there is Darcy!).

I read almost exclusively YA fantasy these days. I’d like to pretend it’s for “research” (because those are the kinds of books that I write), but the truth is I read them because I love them… not-so-coincidentally, that’s the same reason that I write them.

Yes.  Okay, to be fair, there are some people who sail through to publication pretty much the same afternoon that they decide to try.  There are also some people who win the lottery, are struck by lightning, and never have bad hair days.  For most of us, it’s not smooth sailing to publication, and we need a massive amount of hair gel to avoid the uncanny resemblance to Annie after a bad encounter with an electrical socket.  (Maybe the latter is just me.)

The problem is that there are lots of people (and I mean LOTS) who want to be published and relatively few books that hit the shelves every year.  Because of this, it’s not enough to simply write a good book.  You have to be in the right place at the right time with the right thing.  You have to be lucky.

Here’s the thing, though: I firmly believe you can make your own luck, or at least that you can put yourself in a position to get lucky.  You can have the “right thing” by continuing to write.  As soon as you finish one story, start another one.  Through the act of writing, you will get better at it.  You can be in the “right place” by doing research.  Submit your manuscripts to agents and editors who are interested in work like yours.  And you can hit the “right time” by perseverance.  If you stick with it, then when the right time comes along, you’ll be there.

If you’re looking for the secret to publication, this is it: sheer, pig-headed stubbornness.

I wrote 38 drafts of ICE. Okay, yes, some of those drafts were really, really minor, but still… My writing process involves a ton of very quick drafts in which I focus on one aspect of the story at a time. I think of it like building a human from the inside out. Not that it’s possible to build a human from the inside out. In fact, that would be kind of disgusting…

I think of my first draft like the skeleton. I don’t worry about the words at all. In fact, some scenes include lines like “And then something cool happens.” The goal of draft one is just to see if all the pieces connect together and if the shape looks like a person or like a marmot.

Next draft, I add the muscles. I fix the pacing and make the story move. Later comes the internal organs — heart so that the story has emotion, brain so that the story makes sense, lungs so that the sentences breathe with the right rhythm. Finally, I add the skin — fixing the words so that the sentences are as beautiful as I know how to make them.

The final novel (or person or marmot or whatever) usually has zero words in common with that initial draft. (Except, you know, words like “the” and “and.”) But all the underneath stuff that I developed over the course of all those drafts is in there.

Guess it’s kind of an odd process. But it works for me. Through each draft, I am reimagining the story, re-dreaming it as I rewrite it. For me, this is what makes the story come to life. It is as much a magical process as it is mechanical.

If I skip a day of writing, I feel as if I skipped a day of brushing my teeth.  Minus the bad breath.  My husband claims he can always tell if writing has gone well or not.  And he’s right — writing directly affects both my mood and my worldview.

If I don’t write or if writing doesn’t go well on a particular day, I feel unsettled and unbalanced.  And really, really grumpy.  Suddenly, the house feels too messy to stand.  Everyone seems to have developed really annoying habits.  I obsess over the drip in the kitchen sink.  My socks feel too tight.

But if writing goes well, then I walk around and smile at everyone.  Everything is sunny, and I want to hug the world.  In other words, I feel like me.

So I try to write every day, and I keep writing through the bad writing days so that I can get to the good writing days quicker.  My husband thanks me for this.

Maybe the ability to fly. It would be cool to soar into picturesquely poofy clouds and burst out the other side like some sort of airborne Disney character. But I’m kind of scared of heights, plus I’m such a klutz that I’d most likely careen into trees and crash onto roofs.

I also think it would be cool to be able to talk to animals like Daine in Tamora Pierce’s Wild Magic, but I have the sneaking suspicion that that power would get annoying pretty fast. I can already guess what goes through my cat’s mind, “Hate you, hate you, hate you, eat you, hate you …”

Invisibility is an obvious “no” for me. (See klutz comment above.) I have enough trouble not tripping over my own feet when I can see them. I also have to say no to fire power and ice power. I like to be temperature regulated. Telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition all seem like they’d cause serious migraines. Telekinesis would be nice. I’d like to be able to feed myself some Raisinets without walking to the kitchen or to move the car to a better parking spot with just the power of my mind…

If I truly had the choice of superpowers, though, I’d want some sort of power (either a special healing power or simply ridiculous good luck) to keep the people I love healthy and happy. I think that’s really the only super power worth having.