Take Time to Celebrate!

I was very touched when I heard Marion Dane Bauer's story about not properly celebrating her Newbery Honor win for On My Honor. And I've taken to heart her advice to celebrate each step of the way. As writer, it used to be true that ours was a solitary journey, but thanks to our writers groups, thanks to the internet, thanks to Facebook, we're now active participants in a larger community that allows us to have virtual celebrations with our friends and colleagues any time we want!

I celebrate a good writing day by updating my Facebook status, and share good news about great reviews or awards with my writers group by bringing

chocolate to our meetings. (My previous writers group celebrated with cookies - different foods, but both great ways to share good news with your friends.

Still, the writing itself, at least the first draft, is something done alone. And I do have a more private celebration ritual for good news or awards for one of my books - one that doesn't involve eating. I celebrate by getting myself a new fountain pen. It's a way to celebrate the writing, and my personal participation in it. No, I don't write my first drafts by fountain pen - but I write my notes for each book, and my journal, and my handwritten letters with fountain pens. I cherish the way the ink flows, and how a fountain pen solidly fills my hand. And I always love the way children and teachers point at it and say, "Look! A real writer's pen."

My fountain pens aren't magic, but they're special to me, and I was delighted to start writing with the newest addition to my working collection, the silver one at the bottom in this photo. We all have good writing news to celebrate much more often than we give ourselves credit for: finishing a scene, finishing a chapter, completing a first draft, trusting our first draft to our critique group, completing a second draft, completing a revision, placing the manuscript, signing a contract, completing revisions for the publisher, seeing reviews, holding the first copy in our hands. Make sure you do something to celebrate each step of the way, with writing friends, and perhaps even a personal celebration ritual of your own.

Tis the Season to Reward Writers

No matter what the Today Show thinks, January is the time for the children's and teens' lit community to reward writers and illustrators and to celebrate those awards. I love January! It's the time when I discover what I've missed in my previous year's reading, and have the opportunity to download as many books as I can afford for my iPad. Fortunately this past Christmas I was blessed with lots of ebook gift cards! I've just finished Moon Over Manifest (how could I have missed that one?) and Jenni Holm's Turtle in Paradise which I like more and more as I think about it more and more. I also loved A.S. King's Please Ignore Vera Dietz - I shall never see ghosts the same way again. And I'm still reading (and loving) Dash and Lily's Book of Dares.

This year I'm also delighted to announce that my book, An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank has been honored in the round of January award announcements. An Unspeakable Crime was named an Honor Book in the Social Studies - Grades 7-12 category by the Society of School Librarians International, and was also named a 2011 Sydney Taylor Notable Book for Teens. It has also been honored as a Cybils Finalist in the Nonfiction Book (Middle Grade and Young Adult) category, and a National Jewish Book Award Finalist in the Children's and Young Adult Literature category.

I am overjoyed to share my book's recognition for the same reason that I'm delighted to learn about other books that have been honored: just as I am eager to read those excellent books I mentioned above, I hope that readers will discover An Unspeakable Crime. That's why we write, after all, in the hopes that someone will read our book, and any recognition that makes it more likely for others to read it is a wonderful thing. If you're curious and want to find out about this 1913 legal case, please click here to watch a video about my research for this book. And many thanks to the organizations and committees that honored my book.

Writers' Leap of Faith

Happy New Year! Time for new resolutions, new starts, and new experimentation. Sometimes it's hard, however, to take a leap of faith and try something new, especially when it comes to writing.

Have you found a writing method that works for you? A method of planning your novel and writing that first draft that seems foolproof? A method that has worked for you reliably in the past, one with which you feel comfortable? You're confident in your writing because you're familiar with it, and you can see your word count build up as your characters grow and work their way through a plot with a beginning, middle and climax that all occur at the right proportional points in your manuscript. Well, congratulations!

But perhaps this trustworthy method isn't really serving you as well as if did the first time you experimented with it, and were delighted with the new aspects of your novel that it helped you discover then. Be honest: since you've been writing with this method, have you continued

making new discoveries and pushing your ideas to their limits? Sometimes you need to shake up your procedure, or you can fall prey to stultifying sameness that compromises the complexity of your ideas.

So start the New Year by experimenting with some new writing methods.

Check out Martha Alderson's terrific Blockbuster Plots books and videos.

Explore software like Dramatica or Scrivener. Check out my own book on Character and Plot development. These are all tools - they won't write your book for you, but they'll help you look at your idea through new eyes, asking new questions that might help you make new discoveries about your characters and their story, and explore avenues with exciting potential that you hadn't considered with your comfortable method.

Never let yourself become complacent in your writing. Complacency can stifle your imagination and prevent you from tackling the hard questions that could force you to confront uncomfortable ideas. Those uncomfortable nudges are the very ideas that could elevate your comfortable book to something challenging and remarkable and new.

Merry Christmas, or Happy Holidays, to all!

All my Christmas shopping is done - the presents are all wrapped and either under our tree or en route to friends by priority mail, the Christmas cookies are baked and frosted (and sampled), the groceries are in the refrigerator for Christmas meals. As much as I feel triumphant, however, I also feel a bit sad. The preparations for Christmas, the anticipation of how my friends and family will enjoy their gifts - these are what I love best about the holidays, even more than Christmas morning itself and the fun of opening presents. I truly believe this is the season of giving.

I wish I could be a spirit in every household to which I sent gifts - I'd love to watch my friends' children (and my friends) open the presents I sent them. But the best I can do is send some of my spirit with the gifts, and be thankful that my friends are mostly writers, who will write to tell me how those small pieces of my love for them were received. Then I can vicariously share in their holiday joy from afar.

Spend as much of the holidays as you can with people you love. Christmas, more than Facebook or the internet, is about truly connecting with a larger community than your household. I believe we send gifts because we're reaching out to the people we care about, showing our love in boxes and gift bags. We do that many times during the year: on birthdays, at random moments when we just have the feeling a friend needs a lift. But this winter holiday season of Christmas is magical because nearly everyone reaches out to everyone else they know, and even to some people they don't know, through charity, to share that love, at the same time.

Enjoy the holidays. Eat too much and laugh too much and hug beyond your personal space comfort bubble. Let the world in and revel in it. That's my wish for everyone whose spirit I've touched this year, and other years, and for everyone whose spirit has touched me. Give of yourselves, to share this magical season, until your heart overflows.

Genres - Helpful or Hurtful?

Genres tend to mystify me, and I'm not sure they're really doing much of a service to readers, labeling books in the simplest possible terms.

I write novels. I admit I didn't think much about genres when I started publishing - I thought about the target age of my readers, but not the genre of the book I was writing for them. Then, after Counterfeit Son was published, I got a phone call from my editor telling me it had been nominated for an Edgar Award.

Wonderful! But I had to ask her, what was an Edgar Award? She told me it was for Best Young Adult Mystery.

Wonderful! Except I hadn't thought of Counterfeit Son as being a mystery. It was a novel about coming to terms with exactly how much responsibility one person owed another person. I was honored to be nominated, but the nomination was something of a mystery to me.

Then I began thinking about my other books, and I realized that most of them were mysteries - I'd used techniques of mystery to tell the story I'd wanted to write. I was even more honored when Counterfeit Son won the Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Mystery. And the following year Ghost Soldier was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery, another tremendous honor, even though I thought the book was more a novel about knowing when to hold onto family and when to let go, than a mystery.

So genres can benefit writers unexpectedly. But I think genres can also do writers a disservice sometimes. I've recently finished a novel about the need to protect words and books from being twisted and misrepresented. It takes place in our world, perhaps a few years in the future, and I thought of it as sort of a foray into science fiction, or speculative fiction (a term I prefer). But with the current interest in dystopian literature, it's being called dystopian. And editors have rather specific ideas about what they want to see as dystopian. So when they read my manuscript, thinking dystopian, they have problems with it not fitting neatly into the dystopian template they have in their mind.

Not so wonderful. I know genres can help readers find the sort of books they want, but I think that pigeon-holing can also cut readers off from books they might well enjoy if they came to those books without pre-formed expectations. What do you think? Do genres hinder more often than help, or vice versa?

Old Friends

This year I joined a Facebook Group in which all the members are trying to read 100 books in 2010. Every month we all post the titles of the books we read. This has been a fabulous source of recommendations for new books to read, and I'm thoroughly enjoying my participation. While I've discovered many new titles and authors this year, I also find myself returning to old friends, re-reading classics like The Outsiders, and Edward Eager's Magic books, and more modern classics like the Harry Potter books. And there's nothing that give me greater pleasure than receiving an e-mail from a reader who tells me he (or she) has read and re-read one of my books, like Ghost Cadet, and considers it an old friend.

I really love discovering new books which will become old friends and be re-read in their turn in time, but there's no question that I also treasure my time curled up with old friends, especially when life gets difficult. There's nothing more comforting in tough times than a cup of mint tea and an old friend, although these days I more often than not find myself reading my old friends on my new iPad. I'm not clinging to old friends as a way to avoid moving forward in the literary world, either in terms of not wanting to discover new friends, or not wanting to use new technology.

I guess I'm still a Girl Scout at heart, remembering when we used to sing around the campfire:
Make new friends
But keep the old
One is silver
And the other gold.

I'm not sure whether my old book friends are silver or gold, but I treasure both the old and the new. Do you find yourself returning to old friends as you read, also?

Goodbye, Haunted House...

...I'm going to miss you.

Since I write ghost stories for middle school readers, I often get the same question when I visit a school: "Have you ever seen a ghost?" For years I had to answer, "Not yet," which saddened my enthusiastic fans. Then we moved to Bozeman, and my husband found a haunted house for us at 3242 Gardenbrook Lane. He didn't know it was haunted, because the house's ghost chimed, and my dear husband is rather deaf. But I heard it, loud, clear, and irregular enough in its chimes that we often seemed to be carrying on a conversation as I responded in turn.

At first, I'll admit, I was kind of spooked. I'd be minding my own business, writing, watching TV, playing games on my Mac, and then I'd hear this chime. I'd ask my husband, "Did you hear that?", knowing even as I asked that he wouldn't have. He didn't always hear the question. But the chimes seemed friendly, and after a while I started talking to the spirit, and discovered we got along very well. How wonderful it was to be able to tell young readers at schools that I might not have seen a ghost exactly, but I'd heard one in my very own house and we had interesting conversations (even if the chimes sounded without benefit of a translator, we still seemed to understand each other).

Where did the ghost come from? I don't know, and I never minded - we got on well together. Perhaps Keegan, the builder, built on a piece of land where someone had been buried in time long past? It was a new development - no house had been built there before, so someone could have been laid to rest beneath our home. It's possible.

But now we're moving, so I guess I'll never find out. I hope the new owners, Steve Parks and Cristina Boyles, like my ghost friend and are nice to it. Or, if they intend to sell the house, I hope they find buyers who get on well with the ghost. I'm sure if they make it feel welcome, it will welcome them in turn. As for me, I'm left with photos of my old home, and with memories of the ghost who befriended me.

Illegal Downloads of My (and Your!) Books

We all love to read a free book. That's why we have library cards. But these days too many people who love free books have computers instead of library cards and frequent online sites where they can download books for free - books which are for sale in stores - books whose sale should bring authors income they have legitimately earned. I know I've been frustrated to find some of my books available for free downloads. Amy King has written a terrific blog post that nails the issue, so I'd very much like to refer you to her "A Pirate's Dare."

The one thing I'd like to add is that I can understand people who want to have an electronic copy on their ebook reader of a print book they've legitimately purchased and paid for . I have been known to purchase the print book for my bookshelf, the audiobook from Audible.com for my iPod, and the ebook from Amazon or iBooks so I can have the book with me even when I'm traveling between locations. However - there are some favorites that I cannot purchase because they are not available as ebooks. I can certainly understand why someone would type or scan in a much-loved book in order to have a personal traveling digital version - for private usage, until these titles became available for purchase.

I wish the copyright holders of works by deceased authors who are not in the public domain would contract for their books to be available as ebooks - and I wish publishers would offer fair terms for such ebook editions. Everyone is trying to get as large a piece of the pie as they can: publishers are trying to give the authors as small a royalty as possible, authors are trying to get as large a royalty as possible (and I'm in that group), and readers are trying to amass as many books as possible. The sad thing is the larger the piece of the pie everyone grabs for, the less anyone gets. Unless you go to the library, anyway.

Endorphins and Writing

My husband's work keeps him on the road, away from home way too much of the time - which means there are too many nights when it's just me and my teddy bear trying to fall asleep. Some nights I toss and turn, worrying about things that are beyond my power to control. I've found I sleep best when I lie in bed and think about the book that's currently in progress.

I've heard that writers shouldn't do that, because either it keeps you awake all night or you forget any insights you had by the time you wake up in the morning. I don't find that's a problem for me. I keep my current WIP notebook within easy reach, and my teddy bear doesn't mind my turning on the light when inspiration strikes. As soon as a scene or an insight from my MC comes into focus, I'm sitting up in bed and writing it down, so it's safely preserved for my more wakeful writer persona of the next morning.

And here's my discovery: writing seems to be as good as making love when it comes to releasing hormones! Making good love releases endorphins that activate the body's opiate receptors - in other words, endorphins make you slide happily into sleep. So does tapping into your book's soul. As soon as I've written down my new insight and switched off the light, I slip happily into sleep and have a good night. Okay, being with my husband is even better for a loving night's sleep, but it doesn't increase my word count or my character insights.

Whichever option you have tonight, sweet dreams.

On Fire

No, I'm not talking about Katniss, the Girl on Fire (though I do already have a cool Mockingjay t-shirt that I can't wait to wear while I'm reading the book, which I've pre-ordered). I'm talking about something a member of my writers' group said after I reported to them on everything I've been up to since landing my new agent, Jill Corcoran. My friend told me I was on fire with writing, now that I didn't have to think about the business aspect of the work.

I think she's right. Ever since I started writing, lo these many years ago, I've worked at submitting all my manuscripts on my own and dealing with the business end of the craft by negotiating my own contracts. But this business aspect has sapped more and more of my creative energy as publishers have made the business of being a writer increasingly difficult. Now that I've found an agent who believes in me and has shouldered that burden with gusto, I feel free to focus on the writing aspect. That doesn't mean I'm ignoring the concept of marketing entirely and writing in a vacuum, because if you're not cognizant of market demand you're not doing your creativity any favors! But I can concentrate on what I want to write, with the idea of how it fits into market requirements as a background to the work, not as the next phase of responsibility I have to take on myself.

So I've worked on planning out three chapter books in a series and started a new YA novel, Fire at Will, and I feel as if I'm fizzing with creative energy and excitement. In short, I feel as enthusiastic as I used to feel when I started writing. I know I'll still have revision work with editors as Permanent Record and other books are sold, and I'm looking forward to it, as I used to look forward to every phase of this craft, but being able to focus on only the creative side of the business is incredibly liberating. My friend was right - I'm on fire with the thrill of writing all over again, thanks to partnering with my agent!