Category: personal

The undead cold

- Stacy

I had a cold last weekend, but Monday and Tuesday it seemed to be clearing up. I was feeling mostly better, running around doing errands and seeing friends and getting work done.

Then I woke up today, and it was back with a vengeance. I think it died but now I have a zombie cold.

So I’ll be carting around a case of cough drops with me this weekend at LTUE, and you might not want to get too close. Be grateful I’m only on one panel tomorrow.

I’m going to go take my Nyquil now and hope that it clears up again by morning.

Getting back to normal

- Stacy

The cable guy is here hooking up cable and internet. As you can tell, I am finally back online.
THANK YOU to everyone who helped me move. Here’s hoping that this apartment has no major problems like flooding or, I don’t know, electrical fires, plumbing problems, or any other kind of major problem that would cause me and my cats to become refugees again.
Need to get some work done now. Too many boxes everywhere and what I really want to do is unpack them, but I think I just have to let myself let it go, at least until I finish this edit.
For those of you waiting on me to respond to emails, hopefully I’ll get back to you tomorrow afternoon or Wednesday. Thanks for your patience as I rebuild!

Soft puppy ears

- Stacy

Sometimes this job is hurry up and wait. I’m still waiting for the waiting part, though. Perhaps fast and faster would be the better description. But as I walked out the door yesterday to go pick up lunch from the Thai place down the street, I was able to take a bit of a pause and play with a litter of beagle puppies that a coworker had brought in to show everyone in the lobby. Their ears were SO soft! I was so tempted to take one home. Except that Mogget and Tildrum might not like that so much. The puppy was about as big as they are full-grown.

Not to mention I only have so much room on my lap for the animal menagerie sort. Two is the limit, at least for now.

But I was sorely tempted.

Mormons in fantasy

- Stacy

As you may be aware, because I’m certainly not hiding the fact, I am a Mormon (a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). It’s kind of interesting to note how many Mormon professionals there are in fantasy and children’s/YA lit. I get past counting on both hands (especially when including editors), and while that might not seem as much compared to the various other religious and/or nonreligious groups a professional in this industry may claim, it’s always an interesting subject for Mormons to talk about. 😀

I’ve been asked to write an essay for a Mormon publication, Dialogue, on Mormon writers of mainstream YA and children’s literature. While I’m working on that, I thought I’d throw the topic out there, both to my readers who I know for a fact are LDS, and to anyone else who might be interested in the subject. What YA and children’s fantasy writers out there are LDS? Does knowing they’re LDS affect how you perceive the book? Did you learn they were LDS before or after reading, and did that change your percep tion of the book?

Let’s contrast this to a notorious example, and a timely one at that. You’ve all probably heard of the emails going round some parts about boycotting the movies based on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.* Would you go to see the movie? Do you believe that it should be avoided? If so, why? If not, what do you like about Pullman’s work? What influence, if any, does his background have on your reading?

Some LDS authors off the top of my head:

Orson Scott Card (included for the recognizability factor, but not really included in my essay because the book of his most considered YA material, Ender’s Game, was published so long ago–though funny enough, made some great predictions–my favority being the notoriety of internet fame)
Stephenie Meyer (Twilight, etc.)
Shannon Hale (Princess Academy, Book of a Thousand Days, Goose Girl)
Brandon Mull (Fablehaven)
Brandon Sanderson (Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians is his only children’s title right now, mostly adult books)
Rebecca Shelley (Red Dragon Codex, which I edited and is coming out in Jan.)
Dan Willis (several Dragonlance: The New Adventures titles)
Dave Wolverton/David Farland
James Dashner (new series coming out from Shadow Mountain, 13th Reality, and the Jimmy Fincher Saga)
Mette Ivie Harrison (The Princess and the Hound; Mira, Mirror and several other excellent titles)
Jessica Day George (Dragon Slippers)

And a few, though less current, realism authors, all YA:

McNeal/McNeal (forget their first names, but they wrote one book, white, with a little Kewpie devil on the front for which the name is escaping me, too)
Louise Plummer
Kristin Randle

(Of course I won’t be covering *all* those because this will be a short essay!)

Who am I missing?

*Full disclosure: I think Pullman’s writing is beautiful. While I didn’t necessarily agree with the conclusion of the series (as a member of a slightly unorthodox religious group that in a way rebelled/withdrew/rejected the teachings of the organized church of its day, I’m in a strange position of agreeing with him and disagreeing at the same time), I did think that HDM was beautifully written and a well-crafted fantasy story. And so what if I don’t agree with him? I think that there’s room for all of us to read each others’ perspectives and learn from them, and that freedom to do so brings to our world beauty and understanding of both our differences and similarities.


In all the correspondence I’ve seen from Pullman himself on children’s lit listservs, he’s always been respectful, articulate, and a knowledgeable advocate for children in education. And he’s got one of the best first lines of all time, too. I’ve got the Sally Lockhart mysteries lying on my bedside table begging for me to finally getting around to reading them.
So I certainly don’t advocate boycotting the movies. On the contrary, I think they look gorgeous from what I’ve seen so far and I’m interested in seeing how the books are adapted to film.

Dense cat

- Stacy

My roommate apparently told another roommate that she thinks Tildrum is obese. Given that I’d just been noticing how much bigger Tildrum is than Mogget, this had me worried, because I had been thinking that perhaps Mogget wasn’t eating enough but that Tildrum—slight chunk that he is—was just normal. (Mogget, when you get him wet, is smaller than Tildrum, which is surprising given that Mogget is 6 months older. But since they’re both almost full-grown, I hope it’s just that Mogget comes from smaller-cat genes.)

Anyway, so I’ve been researching Manx cats tonight, trying to be sure that Tildrum is indeed just matching breed characteristics–his mother was definitely at least part Manx, a little calico sweetheart, and he was the only full-tailed kitten in the three I saw. One was a stumpy and one didn’t have a tail at all. In fact, I could have adopted his brother instead, who looked exactly like Mogget but with only a stumpy tail, but I figured that would be a little confusing.

(The picture is of Tildrum and his little family before I adopted him. His sister is on the right, the little calico—who had no tail. His brother is on the left, the little black one with a white patch. I’m almost positive that he had more white on him when I saw him in person, which might mean I’m thinking of a different kitten altogether, which might be the little ears in the back. But I think those belong to the mama cat–she seems bigger than anyone else. Tildrum is the little black spot with copper eyes in the center. It’s so hard photographing black cats. I rarely feel satisfied with anything I’ve taken of him lately.)

My discovery: Not only is Tildrum right on with Manx conformation—their longer hind legs and powerful jumping ability call for much more musclier, and therefore heavier, hindends—but I find out he totally would clean up in competition, if he had no tail. 🙂 The breed requirements listed on that page are pretty much Tildrum to a T—minus the no-tail requirement. That especially includes the “surprisingly heavy when lifted.” He’s a dense little one.

Which of course makes me go back to wondering if Mogget is dense enough. But that’s a research project for another day.

Buried treasure

- Stacy

My office at home is a mess. Well, actually, it looked great, but that’s because the boxes I have yet to unpack from moving to Seattle from Boston a year and a half ago are stacked so neatly. The boxes are filled with all sorts of goodies, like bills from Boston that I paid two years ago, the bouquet I carried at my sister’s wedding, and all sorts of odds and ends that I probably wouldn’t miss if I lost the entire box.

However.

It’s a good thing I take after my grandpa and never throw anything out. Because in going through two boxes, three file cabinet drawers, and several expandable folders in search of a particular project from grad school, I found some really cool stuff. Like my “scrapbox” from high school. I didn’t have a scrapbook, so I just threw everything into a box to scrapbook later when I grew up and could afford one. In this box was the buried treasure referenced above. I found:

  • My Galva High School Scholastic Team Study Notes, informing me of all-important information such as RALPH WALDO EMERSON – THE TRANSCENDENTALIST! and EMILY DICKINSON – “greatest Am. female poet!” who was the “spinster of Amhearst.” My coach really liked exclamation points and all-caps, and he also couldn’t spell well, apparently. I want to read it now and see if the greats we had to memorize are really the greats I learned about in college. For example, does anyone know who Bret Harte is? Apparently he was a “local colorist influenced Twain.”
  • A manila folder entitled in purple and red marker “Artwork & Writing Attempts.” I wish I had a digital camera, because I would show you my teenage handwriting, which makes me giggle because I used to think it was so elegant. Plus you’d be able to see the reason why it’s both purple and red. The original purple reads “Art & Writing,” but in a fit of self-consciousness at the quality of my work, I added “Attempts” at the end, and apparently thought that “Artwork” sounded better than “Art.”

What’s really fun about this folder is that it contains my entire junior and senior years’ English journals, rich with entries such as:

10-5-90

Felipe says I should write about him. So there, I wrote about him.

Okay, so now what should I write about?

In answer to your question, yes, I do date Tim. Tim and I have been going out for about a year and nine months now. We started dating my freshman year.

It was January 13, 1990, after the basketball game against Cambridge. I think we lost, but I don’t remember. It was semesters day, so my brain was fried (I thought). (Now that I’m older I know that freshman year tests are nothing compared to junior and probably senior year!) There was a social hour after the game. I went, and Tim went. We danced, and I asked if we were official. “Yep!”

[skipping…]

I do remember Mr. Bittle [a teacher who had died about a year previous in a drunk-driving accident–a teacher for whom I and my sister had babysat]. I had him for English I first hour. He was a really neat guy, and always late! I remember sitting in the halls waiting for him to get there. He’d come walking slowly down the hall, coffee cup always in hand. Usually he would just laugh at us for having to sit out there and wait. Once in a while, he’d tease us that we were late and that we’d have to go get a pass since we weren’t in our seats!

I then go on to talk about how I liked his replacement, Mr. Prusator, because he taught us grammar (something Mr. Bittle, love him dearly, ignored because he didn’t like it), and then ramble on about how I wanted to join a drum corps (which I did, the summer after my senior year in high school).

Fun! Not nearly so easily made fun of as my freshman year journal, for that same Mr. Bittle. I even have the journal entry that I wrote my poetry in which prompted Mrs. Kemp—the coolest English teacher I’ve ever had—to write “PLEASE SEE ME TODAY. IMPT.” on the entry, and that day she told me she wanted to enter my poetry in the NCTE English contest. I didn’t win anything, but it was so cool she thought I was good enough to enter, especially because I’d always considered myself an agriculture girl, despite my lack of interest in science. It was the duty of every good farm kid to save agriculture, you see, especially the Family Farm. But experiences like the entire two years I had Mrs. Kemp were the ones I looked back on with joy, which eventually helped me realize the career path I truly wanted to take. (It just took a few years for me to figure it out. See how I became an editor for more on that.)

  • Also in the folder: all of my senior year of high school English papers. I didn’t even remember reading Joseph Conrad’s short story “The Lagoon,” probably because I skimmed it to write the paper. Hence the 85% grade…
  • Also in the folder: all the papers I did for my Animal Science class, one of the first classes restored to my high school when the agriculture program was reinstated my junior year. The writing in papers on such subjects as porcine somatotropin and the blood of farm animals was looked on with a much less critical eye by my ag teacher. The papers received such comments as “Great! Well explained!” which I doubt I would have ever heard come out of Mrs. Kemp’s lips. 🙂
  • In the same box, I also found an article I discovered in grad school that I’ve been meaning to read since then but had lost. I found “Editing Books for Young People” by infamous children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom while looking for something else, and it sounded intriguing but I was under a deadline, so I copied it and set it aside for another day. Finally, that day has arrived! I think I’ll make a separate post about specifics within it, though, because it’s a great article for children’s book editors, even written almost thirty years ago.

Hope you enjoyed my trip down memory lane. I sure did. It makes me want to go read all of the journal entries and see what I can mine out of them for a book.

Getting started as an editor

- Stacy

Ala alg’s post about getting a job in publishing.

When I tell people that I edit children’s books, their first answer is, “Oooh, how fun!” My answer is usually something like, “Yes, but it was also a lot of hard work to get here. And I’m still working.” But having a lot of fun while I do it!

Getting my dream job was not a straight path, unlike many in trade book publishing. The stereotypical path of a children’s book editor is to start out as an editorial assistant in a New York house and work your way up. You use certain skills as you do that, though, that I also used in my much-longer path to figuring out just what I wanted to do and how to do it.

Behind the cuts below, I’ve talked about each phase of my path to becoming a children’s and YA fantasy editor, but to sum up, I worked my way through college in publishing jobs, being willing to take any job or internship that presented itself as long as it was giving me more experience in the field. I was willing to work for cheap, if anything—while scrounging to make a living because I had no family money. As I worked at it, eventually I got jobs that led me closer and closer to my goal. After graduation, I still didn’t get my dream job, though, and needed to go to grad school to get that extra edge in the children’s lit field. While in grad school, I got some more experience, working for an educational publisher. And then, in a stroke of good networking at a part-time bookselling job, I got a tip that led me to the job opening for my current job. Long road, but using the same elements that everyone else did: who you know and what you know. Network and build your skills. And then move to where the jobs are.

It starts way back when I was an animal science-prevet major at the University of Illinois. I decided I hated chemistry. So I picked the best-sounding major that would keep me within the College of Agriculture, so I could keep my scholarship. Thus, I became a human development and family science major. Worked in a few preschools.

At the time I had a friend who worked at a local prepress. My friend copyedited college textbooks, and it occurred to me that it would be a lot more fun to do that than to chase toddlers and two-year-olds around for $5 an hour at a daycare with no benefits. I love kids, but teaching wasn’t fitting me, especially teaching an age group that was mainly potty-training.

I got hired there as a typesetter, programming books in Unix in the early 90s, about the time that Quark was first being introduced. Another team was figuring out Quark, but I worked on math and physics textbooks, and the equations came out looking better when done in Unix.

Later, taking some time off school, I went home and worked at the local newspaper for a few months. I then moved to Utah, where I got a job editing phone books for Phone Directories Co., where I was considered the expert at catching errors in the White Pages. Talk about repetitive and detail-oriented. While working at PDC, I was also working on finishing my bachelor’s degree at BYU. I ended up quitting PDC so I could go back to school full-time.

I got a job on campus at the library in the Special Collections department, where I got to see ancient texts, Victorian books, and all sorts of amazing things about the history of publishing. During summers, I juggled that job and a job at the University Press, where I used my photography skills (one of my many majors in those years) to make slides of artwork for professors to use in class. While working at the press, though, I also got to help out in the press itself whenever they needed an extra hand.

During this time, I took a children’s literature class as an elective in my major (back to human development and family studies, with an emphasis on children’s literature, so I could graduate quicker, even though I was toying with the idea of becoming an editor after graduation). It was like lightning struck–wow! I could combine these interests! I could do good things for children, and I could work with books! It was an epiphany—one I can’t believe I had earlier.

So I took an editing class in the English department. Completely out of my major, but I thought I needed to hone my skills a little. In that class, I met , who announced that Leading Edge magazine was looking for students to join its staff as slush readers. My time reading slush at that magazine directly led to getting my first job out of college. Plus, I’m still good friends with many of the people I met there.

Also in that class, I heard that the director of the Humanities Publication Center was hiring an editorial assistant for the next semester. Not only did I take an unpaid internship with him the next semester, I got the EA job, so I did a lot of copyediting of campus journals like the Journal of Microfinance and the Journal of Comparative Religion.

After college graduation, I couldn’t find a good full-time job in Utah (big surprise), so I moved home to western Illinois to figure out where to go next. I had no money to just up and move to New York, so I knew I needed to find something a little more local, even if it wasn’t my end goal of children’s literature.

No real opportunities presented themselves near home, but I did know some people in Chicago, and called them up to see if I could stay with them for a few days while I interviewed for a job. These friends suggested that I cold-call all the publishers in the Chicago area from the phone book, just to see if they were hiring. So I went down the list alphabetically, and Barks Publications was hiring. When I sent in my resume, I didn’t even know what they published, but I was hungry for a job, and they’d just had their publisher’s assistant quit. I took the job.

Turns out they published a trade magazine in the electromechanical aftermarket (industrial electric motors, and everything related to them). My grandpa was an electrician and I grew up on a farm, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch for me to learn all I could about motors so I could be advanced through the company and become an editor. I started out answering phones
at the front desk as publisher’s assistant, and a year later, I was associate editor, in my own office writing articles, editing columns, and copyediting the whole final magazine.

But I still wanted to do something with children’s literature, so I read all I could, joined the local SCBWI chapter, and even tried to take a night class in writing. But that class was filled with literary snobs who looked down upon children’s lit, genre fiction, and generally anything commercial, so I dropped it within a week and started looking for other options.

Eventually in my search, I found children’s literature master’s programs. There was the writing for children master’s at Vermont College, or there were children’s lit programs at Illinois State in Bloomington and at Simmons College in Boston. At that time, I attended an SCBWI presentation by Anita Silvey, who once edited the Horn Book magazine and had just recently retired from being editor in chief/publisher at Houghton Mifflin children’s trade. She taught at both Vermont College and Simmons College, so I asked her advice when she signed my book. Her answer–“If you want to be an editor, Simmons College, no question.” No other school had the contacts and the depth of education in the literature itself, she said.

Simmons it was. I never really planned on being in a master’s program–it took me nine years to get my bachelor’s, and that tends to discourage one from going on to higher degrees–but I thought that even if I never finished the program, I’d be better off for having experience in the children’s field.

Grad school, especially in Boston at a private college, is expensive. So I started looking for ways to make it less expensive. One part of that was getting a job: temping at Houghton Mifflin in the School division. When they offered me a full-time editorial assistant position, I took it and went on sabbatical to raise a little money for school. Soon they’d promoted me to associate editor when they discovered my experience. I made a lot of good friends at Houghton, and editing social studies textbooks for 5th and 6th graders really taught me a lot–both about editing/the publishing business and about history, geography, and culture.

But I still wanted to work in trade children’s books, so I went back to school after about a year. Took Anita Silvey’s publishing class, took a really great folklore class, and a lot of other classes that really delved deep into the literature. Got an internship at the Horn Book that fall, sorting books and doing other clerical jobs for both the Magazine and the Guide. Had a great time being a “intern fly on the wall,” as Roger Sutton once put it, getting to sit in on meetings about how they chose the starred books each month.

The next semester I got a part time job at the local Barnes and Noble, because that was the last place in the book business I’d had a job and because I needed the cash. What a blessing that I did! I got to know a few coworkers, and in talking with , found that she was as into fantasy and science fiction as I was.

While in grad school, I’d also started networking as much as possible with editors from publishers in Boston and New York. Whenever there was a conference in town–WorldCon came to Boston in 2004, where I met Anna Chan from Tor, and ALA Midwinter was in Boston in 2005, where I met a few other editors at various houses, who all said to let them know when I graduate and they’d help me find where the openings were.

About a month after I started at B&N, comes into work and says, “Hey, did you see that Wizards of the Coast is hiring a children’s book editor?” I hadn’t, because all those editors I’d been talking with said to wait till after graduation to start looking for a job–preferably after I’d moved to New York.

I figured I’d apply anyway, even though graduation was still a good two months away, figuring that if the interview process took time, it’d be close to graduation, so what did I have to lose?

Happily, I got a first interview, by phone. Then a second interview, by phone. Both went really well, and I felt like I’d work really well with the senior editor in charge of Mirrorstone Books, and that the company would be a good fit–great benefits, great city. So when I got the offer, even though New York was certainly closer, it was a bird in the hand thing. I could move to New York (with barely any money) and gamble that I’d get a job in children’s lit that would let me work on fantasy, or I could move to Seattle and start on children’s fantasy from Day 1.

Right when I got out here, I found out from a writer friend that her editor at Bloomsbury was hiring an associate editor. Part of me kicked myself for not having patience, but the other part of me says that who knows? Maybe eventually I’ll find myself at Bloomsbury, or maybe I’ll just start publishing books like the ones I love so much from Bloomsbury.

I picked the bird in the hand, and it’s really worked out for me. The series I edit are doing well, and I have a new series coming out next year that I’ve helped develop from the beginning. We’re even starting to take manuscripts for standalone books. I’ve really grown as an editor, while getting to watch the imprint grow, too.

If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’re not bored by the details. Like I said at the beginning, it’s always a combination of improving your skills as an editor–both as a generalist and within your chosen field–and networking so that you know people who know where the job openings are. Then, you move to where the job openings are. For most, that means New York. I was lucky to find a job in a city with a little lower standard of living, but it took me a long time to get here. Good luck in your own search.