mpd

It is a rare Sunday when I actually have planned to write something on the blog. Well, come to think of it, it's a rare anyday, since I usually just start typing random stuff at 3 a.m. or so.

But I'm not going to write about what I'd planned, because I noticed a kind of trend that has been popping up on other blogs that I follow, so I wanted to chime in here -- which, I suppose, is kind of like copying from your seatmate's exam. But you know what they say: all -- naturally, with the exception of excessive use of exclamation points -- is excusable in blogging.

The topic of the week seems to be about characters. On Lia Keyes's blog, she asked, "How do you make your readers care about your protagonist's plight?" (Okay. Lia can get away with using the word "plight." She's English).

And over on Tabitha Olson's blog, she provides some very comprehensive profile sheets for creating major and minor characters.

Well, there are conceivably limitless different approaches to writing, and both of these posts (Tabitha's is more nuts-and-bolts, and Lia's -- you'll want to look through the comments -- is perhaps more organic. And British.) can be very helpful depending on your own needs as a writer, so they're worth checking out.

In my case, I neither worry about making my readers care about my protagonist's perils (ha... that's a way more Englishy word than "plight," and there's something about the rebel in me that bristles at the thought of "making" people feel certain ways) nor do I fill out comprehensive profiles on the people in my books.

You know why? Because, besides being the spitting image of Gertrude Stein, I am insane. I'm pretty sure I have MPD -- Multiple Personality Disorder. Just ask anyone who's spent more than two hours in my company and they'll confirm my diagnosis. My moods don't swing, they ricochet.

I don't make stuff up about my characters because all of my characters are me. And the few who aren't actually me are real people with whom I have interacted or observed closely over the course of my life.

I suppose that when I run out of mes (That's the plural of "me." Duh. One of my personalities likes to break things when people use apostrophes to pluralize.) that I will stop writing, but I have a feeling that's not going to happen before I get out 20 or 30 more books.

I have only begun to dip small spoonfulls from that dark and polluted well.

be(long)ing and (no)thingness

I realized after talking to a few of my writer friends this week that I really don't belong to anything. Of course, my friends are really cool, and they assure me that writers, by nature, tend to be reclusive, outsiders.

But I don't know if that's true. Whenever I take part in events where there are lots of writers, I always see great gobbed-up clusters of them that all apparently belong to things -- groups, organizations, movements, clubs, and so on.

But not me. I'm usually the guy with the penned-in name badge ("Oh! We're sorry, Mr. Smith! We seem to have not issued a credential for you! Here, let me write your name in crayon on a lanyard from last year's conference!"), getting patted down at a row of urinals by a keen-eyed security guard who followed me into the restroom after zeroing in on the suspicious crayoned-in credential.

And yes, that has happened to me.

Part of it has to do with the fact that I live so far away from anything. It is true that it's 20 miles to the nearest traffic light from my home.

So I do belong to this group of writers in Los Angeles (which is NOT where I live) called LAYAs (Los Angeles YA Authors), but none of them knows who I am or even what I look like.

This is because there are no Starbucks where I live. So I can't sit down with crossed legs and use their free WiFi plus my laptop to write. And I can't meet my writer friends over a soy latte (I had my first one two days ago and I have to admit that in Hell, I anticipate being very thirsty and being given a choice, from Satan, between soy lattes, Clorox, or piss to drink) and discuss character development and story arcs (which are, like, the only two "writer terms" I can think of since I do not belong to anything that uses such terminology).

So I'll tell you what I look like, in case you ever wonder who's the guy with the crayon-scrawled name badge getting tased on the bathroom floor. I look exactly like Gertrude Stein, except I have a bit of a beard. Well, if Gertrude Stein had a beard, I'd be a dead ringer for her.

tracking changes

• I was informed yesterday that my latest book In the Path of Falling Objects was honored by the Children's Literature Council with a 2010 CLC Book Award, "Distinguished Work of Fiction." So, my book and I get to go out to the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles this November to receive the award. Needless to say, this is very exciting.



• A few days after that event, I'll be heading up to the Bay Area, on November 11 to do a reading/signing at A Great Good Place for Books in Oakland, CA, with my good friend Lewis Buzbee (and, I'm told, some notable and distinguished friends in the audience, too). And this will come just in time for the release (November 9) of The Marbury Lens.



• More ALA news: Well, I found out something ultra-cool that's going to be happening for me and The Marbury Lens at ALA, but I'm going to wait on that. I will promise my librarian friends that I'll have some really cool stuff for them, though, and we'll have our discussion guide ready to go, too. But I do know I will be one of the authors at the YA Authors' Coffee Klatch on Sunday, June 27 at 8:30 a.m. From there, I am doing an author's luncheon presented by the OLOS Subcommittee on Bookmobiles from 10:30 - 1:00. Then, I'm going to be rushing out to the Feiwel and Friends booth (2812) from 2:00 - 3:00 to sign advance copies of The Marbury Lens. I'd like to thank whoever decided NOT to put me signing at the same time as John Green and David Levithan, and I will advise people looking for a copy of The Marbury Lens to come early. We will run out of them.



• And, speaking of The Marbury Lens, if you're on Goodreads, pop over there and vote for it for the best YA book covers of 2010. It's not like that's anything to do with the great big giant ME, it's about Rich Deas, the incredible artist who designed the cover (he's Feiwel and Friends' Art Director). And, honestly, it really is the best cover of 2010.



• Finally, while I was looking up schedules and stuff for my upcoming events, I found an online PDF version of Square Fish's Fall 2010 Catalog, and I was thrilled to see the new paperback version of Ghost Medicine inside. It's a rush to see this book coming out again... and it's my first paperback... with an all-new cover that is totally cool. Here it is:

no trees were harmed in the posting of this blog

Back when I first started writing, everything was done on paper. At my first job, I can remember how nice it was when I got to use my first electric typewriter. Electric typewriters were particularly good because you didn't have to be exceedingly strong to make decent carbon copies. Carbon paper was also something we used back then.

Sometimes when I talk to kids, I'll show them a typewriter and ask if any of them has ever used one. I don't have any carbon paper any more, though.

It wasn't actually too long ago when I got talked into/decided to get my first novel published, and even then it was still a paper publishing world. The horrible query letter that I sent to my agent was on paper, and it included a self-addressed stamped envelope which was thankfully never used, so I guess my agent got a stamp AND me. I probably should have thrown in a Honus Wagner card or something, just to make it fair for her.

Ultimately, I had to also print out that novel and send the entire thing to her. It did eventually get published, but I had to print out several copies that ended up on desks somewhere in New York.

Lots and lots of paper.

I don't print out anything I write anymore. Since those days, I'm pretty sure everything has gone electronic. My editor tells me that you can't tell an editor from a Kindle fan on the subway any longer, because editors aren't carrying around great rubber-banded heaps of paper, too.

Still, there's something that really appeals to the minimalist in me when I look at plain pages with print on them.

I thought about this for two reasons. First, I was sitting with a friend last week and he asked me about how frequently I save copies of things when I write. I told him about every 50 pages or so, I go through a ritual: burning and hiding CDs, mailing multiple copies to different email addresses, and so on. And he said, fifty pages? That's a lot to make up if you lose it.

Yeah. Not really.

Then I was thinking about pages for another reason, too. A kind of convoluted smith-mind-trip reason. Yeah. Here it is: I love listening to music, especially obscure, independent music. Some of the stuff I listen to is very sparse and minimalist: often just a voice and one acoustic guitar -- something like that. But some of it, and you can probably think of examples, is so entwined with modern technology that the music simply could not be replicated in the absence of all kinds of gadgets and wires and panels.

So I was wondering if the emerging e-book/iPad thing was going to have the same effect on storytelling, too: that the technology would become so interlaced with the process that the "words" part couldn't stand alone in the absence of the microprocessor part. You know, maybe you'll be reading about a bomb going off and your iPad will shake like a Playstation controller... something like that.

I am not excited by the prospect.

And as ridiculous as that sounds, it is going to happen.

But those guys who get out there and write and sing with just their voice and acoustics still have audiences, so I guess there will always be people around who just like sitting around with a few squiggly black lines on a blank white page, too.

the wrote and the writ

Further proof that time is relative: For writers, there is this period that comes along during the months before your book comes out when time absolutely moves at a crawl. That's where I am right now: the Sargasso Sea of Coming Soon.

I picked up a book the other day, but I didn't like it, and now it's made me not want to read. When I read a book I don't like, I never name it by name. Oh, there was the book I threw against a wall back in 2008 (I tried reading it twice, so many people praised it... but I ended up throwing it against a wall on my second attempt and then I donated it to a library), and there was the hilariously crappy 2009 book I read that lots of people lavished their praise upon that was so bad I laughed out loud at some of the sentences (and it was supposed to be serious). In fact, it was so bad, I've kept it around just to cheer myself up with when I'm feeling glum about how slowly time passes when I'm waiting for a book release.

In defense of my daughter's teacher (not to stay on any one point too long), I realize that there are kids who, if you don't tell them a minimum length of verse for a poetry project, would pick a haiku about baseball or something, so the teacher, by imposing a 20-line requirement, was just playing the stop-the-dumb-kids-in-their-tracks card. But the problem is that there is now this subliminal teaching going on about what a poem is and isn't (see yesterday's post). It's kind of like the young writer I worked with this year, who, when I suggested that he make one of his paragraphs only one sentence long, asked if it wasn't the case that paragraphs had to have at least five sentences in them.

We just have to be careful when we lay down the rules, especially to the smart kids.

(Checks the clock).

the meter and the math

I've written before about how most schooling and educational practices destroy the innate creative impulse in children. I'm not saying that schools are intentionally evil, but, by their insistence on clinging to regimented, cookie-cutter, standardized, photocopied, one-size-fits-the-dumbest methodologies, they do inadvertently sow the seeds for our future mediocrity.

Here's why I hate what schools do to kids.

Yesterday, as we were getting ready to have dinner (have I mentioned that my family has dinner together every day? Sometimes, when I'm out and about, maybe at seven in the evening, I'll see some kids walking on the street and I can't help but wonder if those kids had dinner at home, or, as I suspected, if they were just expected to fend for themselves)... Okay, so we were about to have dinner, and my daughter asked me if I knew of any good poems that were about 20 lines in length, for a project she had to do for school.

I will admit that I'm not too good with poetry, and what I do know of it makes me a bit of a snob. Usually, when kids ask me to critique a poem they've written or something like that, I lamely make the excuse that I don't know anything about poetry and I'm a snob about it anyway.

But, to be perfectly honest, I do know a little bit.

So I told my daughter it was a no-brainer for me. I told her to go on the internet and look up Wallace Stevens' The Emperor of Ice Cream. I think it is one of the greatest pieces of poetry ever written in American English (and yes, for poetry, I would make distinctions for dialect). It is not only perfect in its meter, imagery, and structure, I explained, but the poem contains everything you could ever care about: sex, food, beauty, desire, self-denial, loneliness, and death.

So my daughter went off to look up the poem.

She came back a few minutes later, and my wife asked her if she liked the poem.

My daughter said, yes, she liked it, but she couldn't use it because it only has 16 lines and the teacher told the class their poems had to have a minimum of twenty.

I guess I must have missed that lesson in poetry class when I went to school:

Poem > 20.

So I said to my girl, "Oh. I guess it's a math class project, rather than an English one."

Which wasn't what I really wanted to say, but my daughter gets scared when I cuss in anger, so I bit my tongue.

I am a teacher, and I hate what schools can do to kids.

the end of the strategy

I realize that my Twitter Strategy has failed to take hold and that I have been unable to discipline myself into Tweeting every Tuesday and follow the suggestion made by Allen Zadoff.

I guess it's one thing to have a strategy, and another thing entirely to actually follow through on it.

Back to work.