Locked in like prisoners . . .

they were forced to read until they could read no more. And why could they read no more? 
Not because they had given up the will to read, but because-

they had come to the end of the book.

Obviously this headline was a clever ploy to grab your attention. However, the facts happen to be true. This last friday at the Staunton library a group of sixth grade girls and their teacher Becky McKenzie allowed themselves to be locked into the library overnight for a read-in. Of my tween novel Coyote Summer.

I couldn't be more proud. In fact, if family matters had not necessitated my going out of state I would have locked myself in with them. 

A read-in. What a great idea. How I would have loved that as a young girl. In fact, I can picture the exact space we could have used in the Morristown TN library. The new one, that is; there wasn't even room for all the books in the old library, And besides, it was kind of creepy.

I had another great encounter with a young reader this month. While I was up north, one of my 10 year old first readers  brought me her edited version of my next book. 

I must admit, I had not expected her mother to print it out in its final mark-up state. Nor had I expected a line by line edit and critique from a 10 year old. I kind of thought she was going to read it as a PDF and tell me if she liked it or not. 

But my cousin's daughter's daughter (I have no idea what that makes her) Natalie doesn't do anything half-way. Not only did she comment, she commented on the comments. My personal favorites were a comment she made to me while we were going over her suggestions, "I don't think that comment is right. You might do it that way if this was a YA book, but not for kids my age," and of course my personal favorite,"I think the way Margo did it was better."

And - she changed the title. 
Thank you, Natalie. I agree with almost all of your suggestions.

Perhaps you can suggest a read-in at your local library when the next book comes out. I'm still thinking about that title.

Dear Sara Loewen . . .

(I have no idea why this showed back up here, when it was written a year ago. Oh, the mysteries of the internet . . .)

Why am I calling you dear?  I spoke to you for perhaps forty-five seconds at this year’s AWP conference.  You were manning the University of Alaska press table when I walked up.  I had no idea who you were, never heard of your book.  I’d attended a panel of Alaskan writers that morning and was actually there to purchase someone else’s book.  I don’t remember whose now, only that it wasn’t available and you told me I’d have to order it.  I’m sure I did, perhaps I’ve read it by now, or perhaps it’s sitting on my shelf;  in the stack of books waiting until I have more time.

But oh, my dear dear Sara Loewen.  You suggested your book, sitting on the corner of the table.  You said perhaps if I enjoyed reading about Alaska I would enjoy your book.  I liked the title, Gaining Daylight, and was taken by the subtitle Life on Two Islands.

 I spent years on an island.  I may have talked to you briefly about that.  But mostly I bought your book because you were there, and you pointed it out, and I would’ve been embarrassed not to buy it.  It would’ve felt somehow rude.  I wouldn’t have wanted someone to walk away after I’d suggested they buy my book.

I picked your book up last week, out of that pile of ‘to be gotten to’ books.  I picked it because it was small and light, because it was short essays that could be carried in my bag and read in waiting rooms.  I had no expectations.

Dear Sara Loewen,

 Your writing stuns me.  I read each essay slowly, once, and then again.  It’s been a long time since I savored a book as much as this one.  Every image is so clear, so bright.  Every word seems to be the perfect word, the only word that could possibly have been used to convey that idea, but that sentiment.  The things you write about and at the same time encompassing everything.  I don’t have the words to describe your words.  I’m not that good.

Dear, dear Sara Loewen.

 Whether you’re writing about salmon fishing, running your own skiff, substituting for second grade, whether you’re telling me about the Russians encamped on Kodiak Island, or Rose Tweed, the Bell of Kodiak during World War II, or baby humpback whales, it feels like everything you’re saying is true and right and important, and I want to know what you know, and I want to feel what you feel.  Do you know how rare this is to a reader like myself?  Do you know how good you are?

Sara Loewen, you inscribed my copy of Gaining Daylight.  You wrote “hope you visit Alaska one day soon.  You’ll love it.”

I visit Alaska.  In small, beautifully rendered, beautifully written essays.  I visit Kodiak Island and Amook Island.  I visit fish camps and beaches swept by fall winds, I visit the 1890’s Russian settlements, and the Army barracks in World War II.  I visit Rose Tweed Lake.  And it’s all because I happen to be in the right place at the right time on a snowy day in Boston.  And because of you, Sara Loewen.

Thank you.  Truly.

You can visit Alaska, too.

 saraloewen.com

You know when . . .

somebody you love says something, and all of a sudden you have a brilliant idea,

but that idea is gonna cause you a LOT of extra work, so all of a sudden you don't love that somebody quite as much as you used to? 

You know that feeling?

But the idea really is a good one and it will make the book so much better, 
except you are going to have to re-write large portions of the book you though you had just finished.

Yeah. like that. Exactly like that.

Only backwards and in high heels.

Ya'll may not see much in the way of brilliant and original thought here for a while while I hammer this puppy out.

(metaphorically speaking, I would never hammer an actual puppy), but I will endeavor to keep you amused and informed with the brilliance of other people.

Sigh.

The salt mines await.

And now . . .

You must be tired of me blathering on about my progress on the next book.

I know I am.

So I am just going to post some interesting things i've found trolling the web.

*http://twistedsifter.com/2014/01/how-its-made-animated-gif-edition/ 

gifs of how things are made.
just cause it’s so cool

 http://wildthings.blaine.org

what authors did before writing

In 1977, author-illustrator Simms Taback designed and illustrated the first Happy Meal box for McDonald’s.

• One of the first professional ventures of author Florence Parry Heide was to attempt a hot fudge sauce company with a friend, but a dislike of cooking put that project on the back burner (so to speak).
• Illustrator Ted Lewin’s 1993 book, titled I Was a Teenage Professional Wrestler, is all about how he was … well, a teenage professional wrestler, all to raise money for art school at Pratt Institute. He lived what he called his “double life: Renoir, Rubens, and Picasso by day; headlocks, hammerlocks, and flying tackles by night.”
• The great Sid Fleischman was once a magician, having taught himself sleight-of-hand from books. As a teenager, he toured the country with such vaudeville acts as Mr. Arthur Bull’s Francisco Spook Show.
• Author-illustrator Virginia Lee Burton intended to make dance her career but married a well-known artist, fell in love with the artistic life, and brought us Mike Mulligan and his steam shovel Mary Anne instead.
• YA author Terra Elan McVoy was once an editorial assistant at Blue Sky Press, an imprint of Scholastic, and assisted with answering fan mail for the Captain Underpants books. “Though there were a lot of things I enjoyed about my job, I have to say that getting to write to an enthusiastic Captain Underpants fan, and choosing what exact thing to send to him or her, was definitely one of my favorite tasks. Sometimes, I even got a thank you letter back!”
• Author Scott O’Dell once worked on a citrus ranch.
• Author-illustrator Sergio Ruzzier was once an un-folder and re-folder of Persian rugs.
• Author and poet Eve Merriam was a fashion editor atGlamour.
• Author Ayun Halliday once had a gig as Bert of Bert and Ernie at a suburban shopping mall when she was “an extremely underemployed actress. It gives me a lot of sympathy for the poor saps currently peering out the eyeholes of Angelina Ballerina, Captain Underpants, and Clifford the Big Red Dog.”
• YA author Lisa Yee wrote the slogan, “Pass the Old El Paso”; wrote jingles and Red Lobster menus; had a Hollywood gossip column; invented cereals and ice cream flavors; and was once a hand model.
• During World War Two, author-illustrator Robert McCloskey invented the machine that allowed lieutenants to flip over large training charts in a high breeze.
• Author-illustrator Don Brown was once a professional clam digger.
• Before she brought us The Indian in the Cupboard, author Lynne Reid Banks was the first woman reporter on British television.
• One of YA author Cecil Castellucci’s first jobs was to insert time codes into the transcriptions from documentary footage so that editors could get to the footage easily. For The Matrix DVD, they interviewed a girl, age 15, who dressed up as Trinity. Cecil was also a film extra and was once called in to interview as a child ape in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes. She didn’t land the role but got to try on ape masks at Rick Baker’s special effects make-up studio. The 15-year-old girl later became the character Egg in her novel Boy Proof, and the make-up studio inspired her to make Egg’s dad a special effects designer.
• Author Bruce Coville was once a gravedigger. “Consider it hands-on research for a scene I once wrote in The Ghost Wore Gray,” he told us. “It was nepotism – my grandfather ran the cemetery. It was a small country cemetery, and we still dug graves by hand. So I know what it’s like to lie down at the bottom of a grave and look up. (I mean, when else would I have the chance?) There was something peaceful about digging graves, and I found it a good time to think.” He joins the ranks of author Meindert DeJong, no less, who also once dug graves, as well as Allan Ahlberg: “I became a gravedigger by a process of elimination. I vaguely wanted to be a writer and I didn’t want a career. I had been a plumber’s mate, a soldier and a postman. I was looking for a job in the open air where they left you alone.”
• To support himself in college, author-illustrator Marc Brown “took a job at a television station. My first assignment was to make more people want to watch the weather report…I decided to dress the weather reporter, Shirley, up as a weather fairy; she’d swing onto the set on a big swing with her gossamer wings flapping behind her. My boss didn’t see the humor: he gave me a free Christmas ham—and fired me.”
• Young Adult author Gabrielle Zevin once sold bras, which was “excellent practice,” she told us, “for getting into the heads of adolescent girls. Essentially one long Judy Blume novel.”
• One of author-illustrator Roxie Munro’s first jobs was as courtroom artist for television/newspapers, her first trial being Watergate.
• Illustrator Karla Gudeon once worked for The Erotic Bakery in New York City.
• Young adult and middle-grade novelist Todd Strasser once owned an X-rated fortune cookie company.
• Before he became a children’s poet, J. Patrick Lewis was a Professor of Economics for thirty years. “So, changing fields was tantamount to transgender surgery,” he told us. “I had to undergo a very delicate operation.”
• Author David Elliott once worked as a cucumber-washer in Greece and a popsicle-stick-maker in Israel.
• Newbery winner Maia Wojciechowska, who was a fan of bullfighting, once was a matador in Mexico.

Author-illustrator Barbara McClintock sums it up well when, asked if she’s ever had an unusual or eccentric job of her own, she responds: “I think that’s a pretty accurate job description of what I’m doing now.”

Has anyone . . .

reading this ever suffered from re-writer's block?

I mean, I have this swell studio

in this really swell place

with some absolutely swell people.

ok, so the pictures have been altered a bit for privacy purposes

All the hard work has been done. The book has been written. It has a title:

The Ghost/Thief

(shameless self-promotion)

If it is any good my publisher will probably take it. I don't want to sound too positive because my grandmother always told me that to boast is to bring down the evil eye on yourself.

But here I am, procrastinating, taking pictures, writing this blog . . .

Hey, it's all art, right?

Stay tuned-

And now . . .

I'm off to Virginia Center for Creative Arts (hereafter referred to as VCCA) for a two week writing residency.

ok, that's an easel, yes. but behind the easel is the barn where the studios are.

The purpose of the above heretofore mentioned residency is to attempt, nay, to Succeed in finishing, completing, concluding and drawing to a close book the second in the greatly beforementioned Summerhood Island series.

note Summerhood Island in script under title

Why, you may wonder to yourself, (or even out loud) is she writing in this peculiar, unusual, nay, even abnormal and irregular way?

Mostly because I can. And right soon now I am going to have to get serious, buckle down and put my nose to the grindstone (ouch)

and write at a middle reader level.

Please, all of you who are just about to make some clever retort to that last remark; hold your respective tongues. Or hold another's tongue, if one happens to be within reach . Ick

Anyway, once you have gathered up all the extraneous words in this post and thrown them out the back door you will be left with this:

I'm outta here for a while. To come back with my new book

2nd in the Summerhood Island series -
Summer of the Ghost/Thief

 
or on it. 

I shall send you juicy tidbits from the  reading and writing world so you won't forget me.

Until I return, I remain
yr hmble and obdnt srvnt

Back to the story . . .

When last we left our heroine, she was waiting-

To keep from going crazy that first week I sketched a rough outline of changes that needed to be made in books two and three.

The second week I swore off writing altogether and read thrillers, 

 took long walks with the dogs,

 and pretended to be social. I hadn’t gone anywhere or seen anyone for more than a brief hello for the past month.

Except, of course, for my sacred Wednesday clamming date with one of the Paul’s or with Arnie. I freely admit it, I am a clam slut.

 I will with go to Nashweena pond any Wednesday with anyone who has a boat and is willing to go at low tide, whether it be 6 a.m. on a foggy cold June morning or a scorching noon in August.

But I digress. I digressed a great deal during those weeks.

I made lists of other publishers who might look at the book without an agent.

I made lists of people I knew who might know agents who might look at the book.

I made lists of things to be done once I got back to Virginia. And lists of dog breeds I liked, and old friends I hoped to see again.

Books I wanted to read. Sheet and towel colors.

I read more thrillers, and worked on the second book in the series.

Finally, what seemed like thousands of years later

but was actually about three weeks, ( I can digress a tremendous amount in three weeks), I received a reply.

Brandylane would like to see the rest of the manuscript.

I think it took me four minutes to attach the book and send it back.(three and a half minutes were spent jumping up and down.)

I won’t make you wait again. They accepted Coyote Summer for publication.

Then the real fun began.

When last we left our author . . .

She had just dusted off her old middle reader book manuscripts-

And was appalled to realize how badly they were written.  Passive in voice, boring verbs, and a severe lack of attention to detail. 

But the plot line was strong and the characters fairly well drawn.  There was some good stuff there, and the books were, I felt, worth saving.  Armed with my newfound knowledge in how to write decent prose, I immediately set about attempting to rewrite all three novels at once.

Right.  Well it seems like a good idea at the time,

continuity girl

 given that I was going to have to make changes in the first novel that would run through the other two.  And in theory it was a good idea.  It’s just impossible to rewrite three books at the same time and keep everything straight.  At least it was for me.  I either needed to go back to rewriting the novels one at a time, or hire a continuity girl.

There’s never a continuity girl around when you need one.

So I started with Coyote Summer, both because it was originally the first book in the series and because it felt the most complete. I’d played with switching the other two in the series around a bit, and even taken Hurricane Summer out of the series entirely and re-written it as a YA novel. They were going to need some major work.

I re-wrote Coyote Summer 

sentence by sentence. 

Literally.  I tightened and restructured, and moved my heroine's age up a year.  I’d read that kids liked to read books where the hero or heroine was at older than they were, and I intended this book for the 8-12 year old average age range. 

I then sent the book off to my editor for Cuttyhunk: Life On The Rock, and held my breath.

She liked it. Oh, she had many editorial suggestions, and I ended up paying her for a professional edit of the book.

I wanted Coyote Summer to be the strongest possible story when I sent it out this time around. I gave the professionally edited manuscript to  my partner Deborah, and waited rather breathlessly for her opinion. 

It had been quite a while since she’d seen the book.

Her comment? “The end is too rushed. You need two more chapters.”

Surprisingly, this proved to be very easy. I think I must have had the same thought brewing in the back of my mind for some time.

Finally, it was as done as it was going to be. I had researched publishers who would look at this sort of book without an agent, and made a small list. First on the list was a publisher whose work I’d seen at the VA Festival of the Book when I read there the previous year. I’d taken a copy of his catalog, and Coyote Summer seemed a good fit.

I composed an appropriate introductory letter and sent off the first three chapters.

to be continued . . .

I've been very busy

Not writing this blog, as you may have noticed. Or, perhaps not. Either way, it has been not happening here, right under your collective noses.

I have been writing postcard poems, instead. One a day, for the 31 days of August. And haikus, some of which you've seen on my facebook page, if you read that sort of thing. 
And trying to master social media to promote Coyote Summer. 

I did begin to write the story of how the Summerhood novels came about, but it's kind of a long and twisted tale. So I am taking a page from those young upstarts Dickens and Twain and serializing it. 

Here we go- Part the !st.

I first started what has now become the Summerhood Island trilogy (Coyote Summer, Summer of the Ghost/Thief, Hurricane Summer) more than fifteen years ago.  I had been away from Cuttyhunk Island just long enough that I could begin to think about using it as the background for a story. 

I’m not sure why now that I decided to write what was then called a “middle reader.”  Perhaps it was just an age I felt most comfortable with, that period just on the cusp of adulthood, those last few moments when you are convinced that anything is possible if you try hard enough, if you want it enough.  That brief moment when you’ve got full control of your body, 

before the judgments and restrictions of adulthood begin to settle on your shoulders.

As I began to write, I quickly realized that my heroine was largely the girlchild I wish I had been; the child I believe I could have been had I been allowed that freedom.  I actually reined my character in somewhat, as I wanted her life to be  more believable than my imagination.

After I had written the three books in the trilogy I began to shop them around, and quickly discovered there was no market for books like mine at the time.  The bottom had fallen out of the children’s book market, although there was still a small market for picture books.  No one was taking chapter books and the concept of a young adult market was still on the horizon.  Even the classics, the Newberry winners, the Caldecott medalists, were dropping in sales.  

After forty-two straight rejections of any or all of the books, I resigned them to the top drawer of an old file cabinet

where they languished from 2002 until 2012. Meanwhile, I went about my business, writing poetry, opening and closing restaurants, and in general, acting like the adult people told me I had become.  I didn't leave Cuttyhunk Island completely behind, however; I made island the subject of my first nonfiction work, a memoir about running an inn, cooking, and the great people who lived there.

Heartened by the significant if small in scope attention that this work engendered and by the upswing in interest of YA and ‘tween' novels (as middle readers are now called), I pulled my manuscripts out of their dusty file cabinet to see if they were worth saving.  I still remembered and cherished my main character, a strong girl named Jessie, and hoped she would have something to say to a new generation of young readers.

(to be continued . . .)

I just got back

 from my week’s "vacation" on that island suspiciously similar to Bayberry Island, otherwise known as Cuttyhunk .  

So much crammed into five days on the island and two days of travel.  Time spent with older relatives and newer ones.  The newer relatives tended to have less hair and wear less clothing.  

Here is Will doing a brilliant imitation of his uncle Matthew at a similar age, and his great grandpa Jay in his later years. 

Notice the complete lack of butt and the chicken legs.  This seems to be a trait which has been passed down generations even when there was no genetic link.  

This also holds true for Will’s twin

sister Kenley, who has somehow managed to capture my mother’s dramatic genes out of thin air.

This was a week of family, on and off the island.  And it was a week of juxtaposition - of past, present, and future.

I began to write when I first lived on Cuttyhunk.  And here I am over thirty years later, and I’m doing a book signing as a fundraiser for the same Cuttyhunk library that saved my life those first quiet and lonely springs on the island.

My character Jessie  Silva and I both read our way through that library.

On this last trip I was witness to the Fourth of July golf cart parade, held this year on the fifth due to hurricane Arthur, who graced us with his presence on the fourth.  

I was around for the first Fourth of July golf cart parade.

And leaving the island after my whirlwind trip, those of us on the ferry were fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of the Charles Morgan, last of the wooden whaleboats, restored and docked temporarily in New Bedford harbor.

I had no idea where this blog was going when I began it; but where it has gone is full circle.  From my father’s skinny legs

to my toddler grand nephew’s chicken thighs, seeing  my mother’s dramatic flair mirrored in my grand niece’s face. 

Three decades of a Fourth of July parade, watched this year from the lawn of the library that saved my sanity so many lonely winters and springs, that same library where I was setting up for a book signing of my own book, a book about a girl who lives on an island.  The island so suspiciously similar to Cuttyhunk, with an old-fashioned library almost exactly like the one whose lawn I sat on for the signing.

Whaleboats,

parades,

generations.

This is the second book I’ve written about this island, and there will be more.  It’s an island rich in history and full of potential for the future.  It is generations of drama, of continuity and of change. 

Leaving Cuttyhunk this past week I realize I may have had to add physical land mass to Bayberry in order to fit all my character Jessie’s adventures in, but even at its original size,

it’s an island far too full of life to fit into just one book.