Today, I did an actual booktalk at the open house of my hometown’s new library! This has been in the works for roughly a month, and it went splendidly. Details of how it got done under the cut for those who are interested and/or might want to try this booktalking business themselves. (It’s fun!)
How it went:
I am MOST EXCITED to announce that I have changed my website! It’s at the same address – http://www.anicalewis.com – and, with her permission, I used some of the code Becky wrote for the old site. This one is, I think, a bit clearer visually. Also, my old site committed what I understand to be a cardinal sin for writers’ websites: it didn’t have a way to contact me. This one fixes that problem. So, huzzah!
(I’m especially proud of this because I wrote or adjusted a lot of the code on the new site, rather than blindly copying it. I certainly still used some trial-and-error, but a few months ago, I would have had no idea where to start.)
(Also, I like the header image, even if it is a bit silly. The little dazzle effect makes it for me. I did that in GIMP – thanks again, Becky!)
I’ve checked the site in Firefox and Safari, and it seemed to display fine, but if any of you guys are using Explorer or something else and could glance at the site for me, that would be super. (Even if you’re using Firefox or Safari, actually, it would be great to know it works on different computers.) Thanks!
Here are two fun collections of actual questions, and (unrelated) actual answers, about libraries.
“Do you have any books with photographs of dinosaurs in them?” Questions asked of librarians.
“People shouldn’t put their real name and address on library cards because an orthodontist might see it.” Library quiz answers by middle schoolers
As I think I’ve mentioned before, I will be heading home this weekend to do a booktalk on Saturday the 10th at the Open House of the new library. This is most exciting. And what do exciting things get? FLIERS.
(Well, okay, not all exciting things have fliers. They should. Although I suppose it could end up being an issue with paper waste.)
So, I did a drawing today which is on the fliers. Woo!
(Click to make it bigger, though still not as big as it is on the Flier to End All Fliers.)
This is totally what I look like in my head. Although, strictly speaking, my eyes are not larger than than the lenses of my glasses.
The books shown are two of the ones I’ll be booktalking. Who can guess which they are? (If you know me, then I suspect the one on the right won’t be hard.)
I’m almost ashamed to admit this, but I made the actual flier in Word. The handout I’ll have at the booktalk, which contains more pictures (though they aren’t drawings) was also made in Word. I still love my Mac with a True Love That Will Never Die, but am beginning to be a bit disenchanted with AppleWorks. Strange, because graphics programs are the very reason my family has Macs – my artist parents have always used them, and they just sort of carried over into family use. But I tried making the handout in AppleWorks first, and it was not happy times.
On the other hand, I still like AppleWorks for writing, despite the fact that my Information Tools class has shown me some neat stuff Word can do for which I can’t seem to find a good parallel in AppleWorks. The main thing is that I appreciate how, unlike some Microsoft composition programs I could (re)mention, AppleWorks does not constantly try to autoformat everything. It doesn’t assume it knows better than I do. Theoretically, I should be able to turn off this aspect of Word, but I think this may be a myth. I’ve never been able to find a way to turn off the autoformat stuff in Word. I imagine that if I did find one, the program would resist. “I wouldn’t do that, Dave.”
Turns out I’ve been pronouncing some authors’ names incorrectly. (Cornelia . . . Foonk? Funky?) The coolest way to determine whether you’ve been doing this, too? This site. Heck, I’d heard Maggie Stiefvater speak at a conference, and I was still getting it wrong. But no more!
Kind of funny that the site doesn’t include a clip from J. K. Rowling. If they think that her popularity means people aren’t mispronouncing her name, they are wrong.
You may remember that I had an opportunity back in October to send Rabbit and Cougar to be read by a publisher. Since illness had made Karen Lotz of Candlewick Press miss the James River Writers conference, and she’d been scheduled for a bunch of pitch sessions, she said she would read the manuscripts of all of the people whose sessions she missed, which included me. I was assured – though I found it almost too good to be true – that this meant she would read the whole manuscript.
Highly exciting. While I had, of course, made every part of Rabbit and Cougar as good as I felt I could make it, I still think the beginning is not the best part, and I loved the idea that a publisher was going to read the whole book and see the best of the story.
Yesterday, my mom called to say I’d gotten an “unfortunately, pretty flat” envelope from Candlewick. I asked her to open it, and she did, and read the letter aloud over the phone.
One of my earlier entries on this blog, The Fluffy Factor, has been accepted to Quail Bell Magazine! Woo!
Also, since a couple of the bloggers I follow have made interesting reexaminations of the cover whitewashing issue, I thought I’d share a good comprehensive one. Also, a nice piece of, “Think again, suckers” for anyone who says that covers featuring people of color don’t sell: the explosive success of the recent “Black Issue” of Italian Vogue.
There’s a great blog entry here about how frequently fantasy novels portray the First Girl Knight/Wizard/Master Thief/Whatevs, and how infrequently they show the arguably more complex, interesting, and currently-relevant stories of the Second Girl.
Those who follow the one mold-breaker into a field still dominated by men (or by people of a different race, orientation, etc.) still face crazy crazy challenges and prejudice, including whole new issues: Can you measure up to the shining star who went before? Can you prove that she wasn’t an exception to a rule, but the start of a new rule – that she wasn’t the one girl who has what it takes to be a knight, only the first to be allowed?
There’s also an interesting comment somewhere about the commenter’s perception of classism in fantasy as shown by how frequently the poor, suffering, lower-class protagonist was SURPRISE secretly a member of some higher order all along, by birth or fate. The commenter seems to be talking mostly about when a character is secretly a prince/ss or similar, but I think you could argue the same for a lot of “Chosen One” stories. Certainly this doesn’t stop the character from being awesome sometimes, maybe from earning her/his Chosen One status – I think the relationship between Harry Potter and his own Chosen-ness, for example, is really interesting. Still, I can see how this kind of thing could come off as classist, because high birth/Chosen status could be seen as a prerequisite for awesomeness, just by dint of the infrequency of characters who really are nobodies who make themselves somebodies.
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And now, for something completely different! I recently submitted a short story to a magazine, and I got a rejection letter with a reader’s comment: “To be honest, the wording of the title distracted me throughout my reading of this story. It just didn’t sound right.”
The story is called “Silver’s Say.” I can promise that it makes sense in the context of the story, but I’m aware of the fact that it’s virtually impossible to pronounce aloud. I wonder whether this could be what the reader meant (“didn’t sound right”). So, I thought I’d ask: would you guys have a problem with the title based on this? I didn’t pick it to be hard to say, and I’d be open to possibly changing it, but I think it matches the story very well and would rather not change it without at least understanding what the problem with the current one is.
Thanks!
I’m going to put the post I was going to write before I heard this news first, mostly out of hope that the bad news will turn out okay.
The good news is that I did my first booktalk today. I did it on two books, Artemis Fowl and Mister Monday, presenting them to my YA Literature class. It took six or seven minutes, and went very well, which is good considering that I rehearsed it for literally hours over the past three days, and now my housemates probably think I not only talk to myself, but do so very repetitively, and about fairies.
As I say, the presentation went splendidly. Two classmates told me afterwards that they “don’t usually read fantasy” but thought they might pick these up based on my booktalk. This is heartening, especially considering that my ideal booktalk audience would contain some people who actually do read fantasy, and are perhaps even the ages for which these books were, strictly speaking, written.
While I don’t know anything about what the audience might be, I may have a chance to do a booktalk at the open house of the new library in my hometown. (You know, the one that’s AMAZING.) I’ll have to pick out a set of books, maybe eight or so, of which the library has at least one copy. (Artemis Fowl stays, and I might be able to convince them to get a copy or two of Mister Monday – or donate one myself.) Since booktalking is a skill I’d love to practice, I’m thrilled about this opportunity.
Speaking of practice, I learned two important things from my ridiculous amount of rehearsal for this booktalk:
1. Practice from different angles. I started out giving my booktalk to a mirror, but then when I tried it without the mirror, I realized I’d been taking visual cues from my own reflection, if that makes any sense. I’d also gotten used to fixing my eyes on what is possibly the least likely thing for me to see during the real presentation, i.e. me. Similarly, when I practiced the presentation while pacing in my room, I found myself cuing off my footsteps. Doing different kinds of practice kept any of these from becoming crutches I couldn’t work without.
2. You know how they always tell you that if you mess up during a performance, you should just keep going? This is good advice, but it can be hard given that generally, if you’re like me, you don’t do this during rehearsal. If I mess up while practicing, I tend to start the line over. This is fine when you’re still in the memorization stage, but once you know the lines, it can be helpful to work on delivery the way you’ll actually do it. This includes actually practicing the ability to gloss over any little slips.
Even though today’s presentation was a success, I hope to get to a point of a little more spontaneity. Apparently my booktalk today came off as smooth and natural – at least, according to a friend in the class – but I definitely had a script in my head. I knew how to deal with little slips, but I felt like a bit of a recording. Funnily enough, the words were a lot like my original, spontaneous descriptions of the books, just a little more eloquent and polished – and then practiced like crazy to keep them that way, and to make sure that I didn’t freeze in front of the class. I wouldn’t want to try a totally off-the-cuff booktalk, because it would likely include, “Oops, and I forgot to tell you . . .” and “Oh yeah, but before that . . .” Well, I’ll keep working.
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And the unfortunate news. Apparently, Diana Wynne Jones has cancer. She’s doing chemo and radiotherapy. Join me in willing good health to my favorite author in the world.
Wow, have I been remiss here. But, I am back from spring break, which involved a lot of books in a rather atypical way. My hometown library is moving to its (amazing fantastic phenomenal) new building, and I was boxing, then unboxing and shelving, books. I handled over one thousand books the first day alone, which is kind of neat, though not as neat as THE NEW BUILDING have I mentioned IT’S AMAZING?
The only books I actually read over break were collections of short stories. A couple of short story ideas have been bugging me forever, and I want to write them, but I seem not to have the short story form quite figured out – notably, readers often tell me, “This seems like the beginning of a longer work.” I generally do prefer to write novels, but these ideas really want to be short stories. Thus, I’ve been reading short stories to try and figure out something about how they work.
So far, the main thing I’ve noticed is the frequent occurrence of framing statements. These establish a here’s-a-little-story feel from the beginning of the piece, and are sometimes bookended by a similar piece at the end. They vary widely, but might sound like:
“The worst day of my life was the Thursday in October when Emily brought the lion to school.”
“To most people, Marcus seemed ordinary, even boring, but that was because he never told anyone exactly how he had learned to read.”
They basically tell you what the story will be about, which includes a notion of where it will stop. They may be extremely obvious about this:
“Since this is a story no one will believe, it won’t matter if I write it down.”
Or it might be vague, like a philosophical observation to be proven by the story. It can also be longer; several of the stories I read took a paragraph or more just to note that this was a story no one would believe.
I don’t generally use framing statements, because they often throw off the immediacy of the story and can make it difficult to immerse yourself in reading it because they’re right there reminding you that, “by the way, you know this is just a story, right?” I might give them a shot, though, in the name of writing stories that don’t read like the first chapter of something.
I may also pick up a book of short mysteries, because I haven’t read many and am interested in the form of short stories that have an established ending point (the solving of the crime) dictated by the plot structure of their genre.
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Now, because it is awesome, a book trailer that consists of watching the designing of a cover on fast forward.
