And I’ve only read the title and the table of contents.

I just picked up 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published, & 14 Reasons Why It Just Might by Pat Walsh on the recommendation of, I think, Jenny Rappaport. Could have been The Rejecter, actually, because I was reading them both about the same time the other night. At any rate, the title struck me, as whoever’s recommendation of it as one of five books they recommend to writers. Given that I’m planning on giving a lot of advice to writers next month at LTUE, I figured it would be good to cram in a few good books by editors (Walsh is the founder of MacAdam/Cage) to help me better define what it is I want to say. Plus, like I said earlier about Dear Genius, it’s good inspiration for the everyday. 

I wish that one of those places online had a sample of even just the Table of Contents for people to browse, because it really does get into the top reasons that I or most editors I know reject something in the slush pile. Or, rather, that a book never even shows up in my slush pile. With sections such as “Talk is Cheap” and “The Cold Hard Truth,” I can tell this will be both an entertaining read for me and a highly informative one for anyone looking to get published.

I’ll have to give a full report of my impressions after reading, of course. I just picked it up from the library tonight, and it will be my bedtime reading. As it’s midnight (how? how? argh, Wednesdays especially go so fast), that might not be much reading, but it’ll be long enough to finish this lovely hot chocolate the cats have been eyeing.

Also, why is it that all children who come to my homework help night at the library want help with math? I left that behind so many years ago now. Oh, I’m good at it–up to about trig/precalc–but it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t rather help a second grader with her spelling or reading assignment! Tonight, seriously, every single kid that came in, from 1st grade to a junior in high school, wanted help on their math. The poor junior–I couldn’t for the life of me help him with his probabilities. I was kind of hoping that the math genius–the very cute math genius, I might add–from Numb3rs would pop into the room and explain all the probabilities of Patience hitting a red light five days in a row when the light was set to be red 60% of the time. He, I could understand it from. The student’s book? Not so much. Just a lot of problems, no samples or explanations. It’s really, really hard to pull a memory of a fleeting moment in a math class fifteen years ago out of my brain!

One good thing coming out of this, is that I’m remember how good I am at regular stuff like algebra and geometry, and how much I really like it. I just happen to like words more.

I’ve seen this on a number of people’s blogs–

, fusenumber8 (I think), etc.

Aw man, I just copied something else onto the clipboard, and now I have to go back and find it again…

Ah yes! It was also fusenumber8. Here it is:

Mark the selections you have read in bold. If you liked it, add a star [*] in front of the title, if you didn’t, give it a minus [-]. Then, put the total number of books you’ve read in the subject line.

Only 19?? How in the world?

*The Chronicles of Prydain – Alexander, Lloyd
Carrie’s War – Bawden, Nina
Death of a Ghost – Butler, Charles
Ender’s Game – Card, Orson Scott
Summerland – Chabon, Michael
King of Shadows – Cooper, Susan
*The Dark is Rising sequence – Cooper, Susan
Stonestruck – Cresswell, Helen
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Dahl, Roald
Matilda – Dahl, Roald
Ingo – Dunmore, Helen
The Sea of Trolls – Farmer, Nancy
Madame Doubtfire – Fine, Anne
Corbenic – Fisher, Catherine
-Inkheart – Funke, Cornelia
The Thief Lord – Funke, Cornelia
The Owl Service – Garner, Alan
Happy Kid! – Gauthier, Gail
Stormbreaker – Horowitz, Anthony
Whale Rider – Ihimaera, Witi
Finn Family Moomintroll – Jansson, Tove
*Fire and Hemlock – Jones, Diana Wynne
The Phantom Tollbooth – Juster, Norton
The Sheep Pig – King Smith, Dick
Stig of the Dump – King, Clive
A Wizard of Earthsea – Le Guin, Ursula
*The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – Lewis, C S
The House at Norham Gardens – Lively, Penelope
Goodnight Mister Tom – M
agorian, Michelle
The Changeover – Mahy, Margaret
The Stones are Hatching – McCaughrean, Geraldine
The White Darkness – McCaughrean, Geraldine
*Beauty – McKinley, Robin
*Sabriel – Nix, Garth
*The Borrowers – Norton, Mary
Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH – O’Brien, Robert
Z for Zachariah – O’Brien, Robert
A Dog So Small – Pearce, Philippa
Life As We Knew It – Pfeffer, Susan Beth
A Hat Full of Sky – Pratchett, Terry
*His Dark Materials sequence – Pullman, Philip
How I Live Now – Rosoff, Meg
*Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – Rowling, J K
*Holes – Sachar, Louis
The Foreshadowing – Sedgwick, Marcus
Marianne Dreams – Storr, Catherine
When the Siren Wailed – Streatfield, Noel
The Bartimaeus Trilogy – Stroud, Jonathan
*The Hobbit – Tolkien, J R R
*Charlotte’s Web – White, E B

Well, I’ve decided that this list is biased. I’ve read Margaret Mahy, but not the The Changover, for example. I keep meaning to read A Hat Full of Sky because I liked other Terry Pratchett so well (and because the man is hilarious in person, too–the best panel I ever saw at a WorldCon was Neil Gaima
n and Terry Pratchett on a panel called “How do you know when you’re dead?”).

I also tend to be very loyal to authors I like. Love Diana Wynne Jones, for example–I’ve read most of her books. Same for Robin McKinley and Garth Nix. I own Elidor by Alan Garner and keep meaning to read it because the name of the city, Elidor, is the same name as one of the elves in a series I edit. 

Only one choice for all five Dark is Rising books? 🙁

But the truth is I also have a to-be-read pile that’s overwhelming. Perhaps I ought to make a meme of my own listing all the books I read in grad school. It makes me wonder, given the sheer number of children’s books published every year and the varied tastes of all the children’s lit people I know, how our own list of favorites would coincide with each other. Would any of us have what we would call a definitive canon of children’s literature that would coincide in full with anyone else?

First, I thought I’d let you all know that I’ve decided on the title of my talk for LTUE next month (the con at BYU, Life, the Universe and Everything, Feb. 15-17 in Provo, UT). It will be “Collaboration: The Editor’s Role in Making Your Book the Best Book You Could Ever Write.” I’m going to use some very specific examples from the editing process of In the Serpent’s Coils by Tiffany Trent () to talk about what it’s like to work with an editor, and hopefully that will help both beginning writers working on editing their own work, and at the same time give listeners an idea of what it’s like to work with an editor. We’ll talk about how developing this series is the same as and different from a standalone, and perhaps such subjects as worldbuilding–given that in Hallowmere we have still been hammering out some details in the second book–and character development. It’ll also be a great concrete example of writing that catches my eye–and how even though writing that catches my eye is the best the author could make it (wonderful, beautiful, even), there’s always still work
to be done for it to be ready for the public.
I figure this is a nice open topic that in the question and answer period can also glance off more basic questions like the submission process and more advance questions that might occur to someone working on a revision themselves.
Suggestions on things to cover still welcome–I’ve got a month before the talk, so things to ponder or specific questions that you’d like to see covered would be great.

Thurs. 9:00 am: Reception/Book Signing
Thurs. 1:00: School and Library Visits
Thurs. 2:00: The First Paragraph Decision
Fri. 9:00am: Publicity and Self-promotion
Fri. 2:00: Main Address
Fri. 3:00: Where is the YA Science Fiction?
Fri. 4:00: Understanding the Slush Pile
Sat. 10:30 – 10:55 am: SF: Expressing Individuality And “It’s Okay To
Be Different”
Sat. 1:30 – 1:55 pm: Give A Kid A Book: What Books Are Best For Kids?
Sat. 4:00 pm: Second-class Citizens
Sat. 5:00 pm: How to Get the Attention of Publishers and Agents
As you can see, we’ll be covering the basics of the slush pile in several panels, so I figured it would be better to cover something a little more complex in my
main address.

Now, for ALA Midwinter next weekend. If you’re going to be in town for it, you need to know the scoop on Mirrorstone’s activities!

Stop by Mirrorstone Booth #3805 and pick up an ARC of In the Serpent’s Coils, the first book in HALLOWMERE, a dark historical YA fantasy series by up-and-coming YA author Tiffany Trent.

Shannon Hale praises In the Serpent’s Coils as “a luscious read.”

You won’t want to miss your chance to pick up an ARC of this exciting fantasy for teen girls!

**************************

On Saturday from 11:00 to 3:00 PM, please join us at a reception to meet our guests of honor:

Darrel Riche, illustrator of The New York Times best seller A Practical Guide to Dragons
Anjali Banerjee, author of Rani and the Fashion Divas (Star Sisterz) and The Silver Spell (Knights of the Silver Dragon)
Linda Johns, author of Carmen Dives In and Carmen’s Crystal Ball (Star Sisterz)
Jeff Sampson and Ree Soesbee, authors of Dragonlance: The New Adventures
%
3Cbr />Mirrorstone Booth # 3805
Saturday 11/20/07
11:00AM to 3:00 PM

***********************

Or visit our booth any time to enter a raffle for:

A custom drawing by Darrel Riche, (illustrator of The New York Times best seller A Practical Guide to Dragons)
A Time Spies spy glass
A complete Mirrorstone collection for your library! 
Hope to see you there!

So I’m having a snow day today. Or rather, work is. My street is fine, but most employees are up in the mountains or down further south, in an arc that usually bypasses my apartment. I live in a bubble that usually keeps its electricity when all the neighborhoods surrounding it have been out for days, that kind of thing.
So, I made a fire and have been enjoying some hot chocolate, and thought I’d share with you some pictures I took with my phone as I left work at 9:00 last night. I had a project to finish, and I figured I could leave in the middle of the storm like everybody else and not get the project done–and probably be stuck in traffic for the 2 miles to my house–or just get the project done and leave when traffic had cleared. And it turns out that it stopped snowing by then anyway, and I got treated to a winter wonderland.






ETA: I know it’s really not all that much snow. Back in Illinois or Boston (I grew up in IL), that’s just a light dusting. But here, it shuts the city down because the road crews aren’t equipped for any kind of dusting–so the roads get icy, traffic backs up, people forget how to drive… it gets ugly. And we’ve got a lot of hills, too, remember!
Then there’s my car. I don’t think my car has ever seen this much snow, even the week I drove it to Idaho and Utah last Christmas and New Year’s. I haven’t had to clean off this much snow since I had my little Escort back in Boston. (Well, now, Boston was some snow. My first winter here we had two or three snowstorms. The first one was called the almost-blizzard of 2003, because it beat the record snowfall of the Blizzard of 78, but wasn’t really truly a blizzard because it didn’t have all the wind and such to go with it.



Then, the real reason for this post: my cats. So I got a really cute bag from work around Christmas time.

Isn’t it a great bag? I believe we’ll have some at ALA Midwinter, but don’t quote me on that. I’ve been using it to tote manuscripts back and forth between work and home. But in the last week or so, my cats have found a new use for it.

Yes, it is the territory over which they fight. When they
run laps around the apartment now, it’s so they can see who will get back to the bag first. Most of the time it’s Mogget, but as you can see from the above picture, Tildrum made it first this morning. Which makes for a jealous Mogget.

Maybe I need to make a cat bed lined in the material the bag is made from…
ETA: Changing of the guard. Now it’s Mogget’s turn on the bag.

What Kind of Reader Are You? Your Result: Obsessive-Compulsive Bookworm You’re probably in the final stages of a Ph.D. or otherwise finding a way to make your living out of reading. You are one of the literati. Other people’s grammatical mistakes make you insane.
Dedicated Reader
Literate Good Citizen
Book Snob
Non-Reader
Fad Reader
What Kind of Reader Are You? Create Your Own Quiz

Given that I’m an editor, well…
It’s like my friend who works in the fashion industry. She has an overflowing walk-in closet, and periodically has to give clothes away because she just can’t wear them all. I used to be so jealous, but then I realized that she has about as many clothes as I have books. Now it makes perfect sense.

Sorry about the yellow text on the last post. I just realized it would show up on people’s friends pages as yellow, even if they have light backgrounds. I’ve been experimenting with a dark background, and had made it yellow for anyone to be able to see on my front page. I am still trying to figure out how to do a blockquote in the rich text portion. I gave up and just did it in HTML (which isn’t all that hard, but rich text keeps coming up first and I figure I might as well get used to it rather than do HTML and post, only to realize that my code comes out gibberish in the post.
Anyway, if you didn’t read it because it was too pale, it’s now fixed.
(And how’d it get to be midnight, anyway? Well, that’s what I get for leaving work at 10 p.m. I was on a roll, finishing up a project, and didn’t want to leave until it was good and done. It’s actually really nice to work there after everyone has gone home. So nice and quiet, so much easier to concentrate. And one project down!)

As I’ve said before, one of the things I like to do for inspiration around the time I’m writing a revision letter is to read excerpts from Dear Genius, a collection of children’s book editing legend Ursula Nordstrom’s letters edited by Leonard Marcus. (Hm. Doing a search, I can’t find the entry. Maybe I just meant to post about it. As I meant to post from UN’s essay “Editing Books for Young People,” which I don’t think I got around to, and now I’m not quite sure where the article has got to.) I wish there were more great editors’ letters collected like this (I’ve heard that there’s another great editor, a man, whose letters were collected, but his name escapes me and I haven’t tried to figure it out lately).

Anyway, in my convalescence this evening (it’s feeling better except when I try to bend over to pick anything up, actually. I’m trying heat next, now that I’ve iced it and taken ibuprofen), I’ve been trying to finish up a revision letter that I’m horribly late on, and I’ve been spending the evening with Ursula’s good-natured snark looking for inspiration. She is so good at cheerfully encouraging her authors and pointing out problems and possible solutions. I’m not finding a whole lot of actual revision editors, but her comments on books in the midst of other correspondence is still very encouraging.

In the spirit of a recent entry by Cheryl Klein (well, with much more snark, so be warned), I was amused by Ursula’s account of her weekend to a friend:

TO MARY STOLZ            April 29, 1957

Dear Molly:

Just tried to telephone but you are out larking around on this beautiful day and I’m glad about that. I’m sorry I had to ring off last night and trust you really did understand. I’d returned from a quite unpleasant weekend–the only bright spots during it were when I turned aside briefly to READ A DAMN MANUSCRIPT. Then I returned to my mortgaged little gray home on the hill, feeling quite sorry for myself to be frank, and the telep
hone was ringing and it was an author telephoning long distance to tell me good news about the third chapter, which was better than bad news about the third chapter but frankly no news about the third chapter was what I was longing to hear at that time on Sunday. So I talked and then hung up and then two neighbors dropped in, and there I was in my damn slip, about to take a bath, but I am so poor I don’t have a courteous lady-help to go to the door and say “Sorry Miss Nordstrom is at prayer meeting and won’t be home all night.” I don’t even have an upstairs to which I can retire while the neighbors ring the bell and then peer in through the cursed picture window. So I let them in (I put on me wrapper–of course) and they sat. The wife needled the husband and the husband needled the wife. Suddenly the wife said, with a weak smile to me, a propos of something particularly mean the husband had thrown at her: “I just never seem to do anything right,” and on the word “anything” her voice broke and the eyes filled up and I thought oh Lord and at that moment the phone rang and it was you and so that’s why I didn’t want to go on talking too long for fear the lovely couple in my living room would have been in a real hassle by the time I returned……    They were.

I am about to write the adult’s Hole is to Dig. I know I’ve spoken of this project to you before. The first page is: “Self-pity is to wallow in.” I was wallowing in it last night.

Isn’t that great? So candid, and I think it gives a good picture of one editor’s life, how she has to balance the personal and the professional, how her professional life bleeds into her personal life.

That’s a lesson I’ve had to learn recently to avoid burnout–how to carve out that time for my personal life so that I’m not “on” most of the day. (She says as she takes a short break from working on a manuscript at 9:30 p.m.) And making sure I take the time in my personal life to work out (see previous post), watch movies I want to see, have social time, go visit family–those allow me to be more refreshed for the times when I need to push a little harder to meet a deadline or to catch up on a pile of submissions (which will hopefully be my next project, after reading the next Hallowmere manuscript, and reading

  ‘s most recent, and going through

  ‘s latest revision… You get the idea). I’ve found that when I set a particular day of the week aside for new projects I can keep up with both new projects and existing projects better, but as Cheryl says, an editor has to make priorities for herself every day, and the books under contract always have to be first priority. 

So if you’re waiting for a reply from me, here’s to your patience. 🙂 Thanks for understanding.

I’m so proud of myself. I’ve been working out at least 3 days a week for three weeks now (four times last week), and this is the 4th week. (I’ve actually gained weight, but I’m hoping it’s just because I’m regaining muscle mass from not being able to work out for a whole year more or less.)

So, I was down in the gym, stretching after a nice moderate half hour on the elliptical. Just my normal, everyday stretches, which include doing the splits after stretching all the muscles in my legs–which I’ve been able to do since dance team in high school.

I’m going down on the left side and suddenly something slips. And with that slip, something tore in the rear of my hip joint, right at the top of my hamstring, I think. Oh, I don’t know what that muscle is called. 

Ow. Ow ow.

I’m sure I pulled something. What do you do for that? Go sit on a bag of ice?

It’s not severe pain when I’m not trying to do anything with it, but when I try to stretch or move
it–like climbing stairs–it’s sudden and severe. Should I go to the doctor? Wait to see if it’s better tomorrow, then call if it’s still this bad? In all the years I’ve run, biked, swam, danced, and walked, I’ve never injured myself, so this is kind of new to me.

It occurs to me that some of you publishing-type folks might be out here in Seattle at the end of the month for the ALA Midwinter meeting. Mirrorstone will have a booth, and we’re also planning an author event in the booth (details to come later). R.A. Salvatore will also be there–though of course he’s an author for the adult line, his work is highly appealing to YAs, especially teen boys.
So, if you’re coming out, let me know, and we can grab a hot chocolate on a break or something. Or at least pop by the Wizards of the Coast/Mirrorstone booth and say hi.