I feel like driving up web traffic and cultivating more of a controversial, Ellisonesque (which I might have just coined) web persona, so here are five of what I imagine are unpopular opinions in the kid lit world.
1. I don’t see the point of Mock Newberys. Sorting books into winners and losers is an industry thing, meant for grownups. Even that’s overdone, but I’ve come to accept it the way I accept long traffic lights and weeds along the retaining wall. But why train kids to do it? Most will never be on an ALA committee, and l feel there are better ways to have kids talk about books. I appreciate the fact that kids might have discussions about why a book does or doesn’t resonate for them, and they absolutely should, but they can have those discussions without ending in a final “in/not in” vote and verdict.
2. I’m over Joseph Campbell. At one time authors might have been inspired by Campbell, but now the mythic archetype has become a pedestrian “to-do” list for fantasy authors. Enter the mentor on chapter five, who will die halfway through the series, etc. It’s become a formula. The original myths were instinctive and intuitive. I think your own stories should be the same.
3. I am sick of dystopia. Understand, I have good friends who are good writers creating their own horrifying visions for the future, so this is the thing I’m less comfortable coming clean on, but here it is: I am not only sick of dystopia the way I am sick of vampires, I loathe the trend completely and want most of the representative books to go out of print. Including — here’s where I lose everybody — including the dystopian trilogy that everybody else thinks is so awesome. A few books about the future are fine, but now far-flung futures have just become low-credibility territory where things don’t have to make a lot of sense, built around high-concept pitches of what is uniquely awful about this future.
But beyond that, I think they exacerbate the gloom and doom that is spoiling our political process and heightening apocalyptic thinking. It seems like dystopian novels always abandon dates and history. We need to take a long view of the future that is made of numerable years. Wherever we are headed, we get there from here, and we’re in control. Where’s Gene Rodenberry when you need him?
4. I don’t think it matters if kids read a lot, as long as they read. Now I’m really bringing out the boxing gloves, but maybe quantity is over-emphasized. I mean, there are clear advantages to quantity reading when it comes to building verbal skills, etc. From that perspective, reading a lot is great. But past that, I think it’s fine for a kid to be selective and slow as a reader. If he or she picks that book carefully, reads it cover to cover, and it means a lot to them, I think they are a successful reader. Even if it takes them forever to read it. Even if they decide that’s enough reading for a while and they don’t read another one for six weeks. Some of the best conversations I’ve had with kids about books are with the kids who don’t read many books, but really read the stuffing out of one.
5. I love Madonna’s picture books. Actually, I haven’t read them. I just wanted to say something really scandalous to give a little context to the previous four confessions.
ThisIsBeth will receive a copy of Steve Brezenoff’s The Absolute Value of -1. Congratulations, Beth. (Actually, you might have met Steve yesterday… or at least seen his Tigers cap and thought, what is he doing here?)
Limericks are one of the great popular poetic forms, and I’m going to compose some for The Twin Cities Limerick Contest. I don’t know if you have to be a Twin Citian to enter, but encourage all eligible parties to do their best! Or do their verse!
As a footnote, let me add… rather pedantically… that limericks are five lines of anapestic rhyme with the scheme a/a/b/b/a; the b lines are shorter. I don’t know if there is an official maxim on the length of the lines, but they should be similarish long lines and short lines. You know.
As Wikipedia so nicely says:
The limerick packs laughs anatomical
In space that is quite economical,
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean,
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.
Now that you know what to do, you know what to do! I’ll share my own entries back here on MudMambas.
I almost forgot! I have a copy of Steve’s book to give away. Leave a comment below to enter. It doesn’t have to be witty or insightful. You can just say “I exist!” or “An otter is nothing like an elephant shrew.” It all counts.
Most Minnesota authors get published in New York. Steve Brezenoff did it backwards, sending himself from New York to the Twin Cities and now actively publishing with Carolrhoda Lab and Stone Arch Books, both local publishers. He’s a good guy, despite the Yankees cap, and a great writer. I read his debut young adult novel last weekend, and then discovered it was unofficially released and shipping from Amazon.com.
The Absolute Value of -1 is somewhat but not dauntingly experimental, with four young adults (three high-schoolers, one college student) relating events, each with his or her own skew and bias. The college student is a secondary (but integral) character who provides brief bracketing passages, but the bulk of the book is three longer bits by high school sophomores who comprise a love triangle, each of the three dealing with personal and family issues (addiction, divorce, abuse, and death) and focusing on their own story while being there and not there for the other two. The pacing of the four narrations is done really well, the voices are distinct, the characters each flawed, authentic, honest, and evoking a lot of sympathy. All of the sections are excellent on their own, but the whole is more than the sum of its parts, the characters’ different takes on things at times humorous, poignant, and illuminating.
Here’s Steve’s book trailer, featuring his own art work and music.
I asked Steve to answer a few questions, which follow.
As a kid growing up in New York, did you dream of one day having a Minneapolis publisher?
I don’t think I knew what a publisher was growing up in NY. I didn’t harbor any thoughts regarding Minneapolis at all, actually, until I heard Hüsker Dü and The Replacements. That’s when I started wishing very quietly in my own head to live here some day.
I love those bands too. Taking friends and family out of it, what do you miss most about New York? And what do you like most about the Twin Cities?
We don’t really need to take friends and family out of it at all (ha!), because what I miss most about New York is the food. You should see my mental schedule any time I’m about to take a trip back east. It’s generally which restaurants I need to get to, and when I’ll squeeze them in. Beyond that, I miss the ability to live so easily, year round, with no car, and I miss Brooklyn.
I think my favorite things about the Twin Cities are a bit more pragmatic, like the relatively high quality of life, and the fact that this is where my family started. The cycling is great, too, and honestly much of the food isn’t that bad. Oh, and beers. So manygreatlocalbeers.
Good music, great beer, and not-that-bad food… I think that’s the Twin Cities unofficial motto! (Note: neither Steve or myself endorses consumption of beer by those under age 21.)
Tell the MudMambas readers your story about how you got your first YA book deal, because it’ll give people false hopes that it really ever happens that way.
I know, right? I almost feel guilty spreading this around, but I met Andrew Karre at our local SCBWI conference in the fall of 2008. I handed him my resume, which I should probably explain. On the front was my relevant experience (mostly the chapter books I’d written for a different local publisher), and on the back was a collection of two or three . . . well, let’s call them queryettes. It was the least rule-following way of approaching an editor in the history of the world, maybe. But perhaps my biggest foul: none of the projects I listed on the back were actually finished! Seriously, don’t try this at home. Andrew contacted me soon after the conference and asked for a full on whichever projects I wanted to submit, so I banged out the last thousand or so words of the YA project and sent it to him.
As far as he was concerned, though, it still wasn’t finished.
I hear a lot of good things about Andrew as an editor. What’s the biggest contribution he made to the finished book? How much changed in editing?
Quite a lot was added, but very little was changed. After Andrew saw the novella, though he liked it, he found it felt half-baked. He was right. I wrote the additional two major sections, and then we were both pretty satisfied. There was some scene shuffling in our final revisions, and a word choice here or there that we quibbled over, but not much heavy changing went on after that.
You’ve written a bunch of books for much younger kids, some as Steve Brezenoff and some under the name Eric Stevens, who’s been on the bestseller list. The differences are obvious for content and style, so I’ll ask the less obvious question — how do the chapter books help you write non-linear YA?
I think to some degree I rebel against those chapter books when I start a YA novel. That is, those books, though I love them, follow a pretty clear formula. They have fairly simple plots, settings, and characters. They never use flashbacks. That’s because they are planned, written, and designed specifically for kids who strive to read better, but are tripped up by some of the more complicated literary tools we enjoy using as writers. So in a sense, I let myself be a little more experimental and, yes, non-linear when I’m working on something that is NOT work-for-hire.
The Absolute Value of -1 has four narrators. Did you conceive of the book that way from the start, or did it evolve as you tried different voices and perspectives? Did the characters of Lily, Noah, and Simon come to you separately or did you always think of them as a triad?
The book started out with only Simon narrating. Lily and Noah were much flatter (ahem) characters then. When my editor and I realized something had to be done to make Simon’s novella into a true novel, some brainstorming with my wife produced the idea of writing the sophomore year from the other two angles. It came pretty naturally once I got started, aside from perfecting Lily’s first-person voice. I hadn’t written much in the way of female narrators before then, so I conducted a little exercise: I free-wrote about a hundred pages from a girl’s POV, then felt I’d finally gotten to a good voice for Lily. It turned out being a lot of fun, getting to know Noah and Lily (and even Suzanne) much better.
Are there a real-world Lily and Noah back in New York? Do you think they know about the book?
Between you, me, and the web? Both characters are loosely based on real-life friends. However, as their characters developed, and then as Lily and Noah’s own sections developed, they really left their real-life inspiration somewhere else and became people of their own. Yes, both real-life inspirers know about the book, but I don’t think either of them knows a character is based on them. I have a feeling they will figure it out. Well, the Lily one might. The Noah one most likely won’t read it. I think. Hmm. Uh-oh.
Did you notice I assumed you’re Simon? How accurate is that?
Yes, very subtle. In truth, I wasn’t much like Simon in high school at all. I didn’t even start wearing a baseball cap till college, and that was a Toronto Blue Jays hat my father bought for me when he and my mom vacationed up there in 1993. But I digress. Some of Simon’s internal stuff is very much the internal snark I would have had as an adolescent. Some of his home life is similar to mine as well. (I do not have and never have had a sister, rest assured.) But most poignantly, while I was first working on Simon’s story, my father did get sick and, within a year, die of pancreatic cancer. I was in my twenties, but I felt I had to write about it. Simon’s already existent obsession with death became a stronger focus.
It was that connection that made me see you in Simon, and I thought that section was powerful and well-done. Was writing about that loss therapeutic?
It definitely was therapeutic. It helped me to process a lot of what had happened during the six months or so he was fighting the disease, and since I used Simon and his voice to do so, it let me channel a much more raw version of myself. By that I mean that an adolescent mind—my adolescent mind, maybe—was a lot more honest about many things than I could have been as an adult, who is more practiced in niceties and tact. To fully get what I mean, you’ll probably have to read the book.
What are you working on now?
I have two projects, one which is a headache and one which is still fun. The former is a YA about an anti-social girl who is addicted to an MMORPG, something I know a little about. She may or may not have super powers. I’ve finished a first draft of that one, and I hate much of it, so I’ve begun the long and arduous work of fixing it. The latter is a true WIP. I’ve got about 15,000 words down on a YA based very loosely on the Squeeze song “Vicky Verky.”
Of course, I’m also waiting for word about my second YA, which I finished a few months ago. I expect there will be some news on that soon.
I know the answer to this but always wrap up interviews with the question — what’s the pet situation over at Brezenoff HQ?
We have a scrappy, smelly rough-coat JRT called Harry. I never would have guessed this when we got him and named him (that was back in Brooklyn), but his name has caused a few problems. As you probably know, Minnesotans believe his name sounds exactly like the word “hairy”; among civilized people it does not, but instead has a much flatter “A” sound. I am on the edge of my seat waiting to see how Sam eventually says it. Right now his version sounds mainly like “He-ee,” which settles nothing but is probably my favorite pronunciation anyway.
I’m sure there’s no difference the way I say it… and I wonder if Sam wasn’t trying to ask about “Hermione”?
Steve, thanks for answering these questions, and congratulations on your new book. I hope Steve Brezenoff becomes even more successful than New York Times bestselling author Eric Stevens.
I’m collecting all the Mamba Point release-related stuff over at my main author site, http://www.kurtisscaletta.com/latest-news. This my “everything else” blog, so I won’t be double posting news and reviews and so forth here. But there’s exciting stuff going on, so click on over.
Meanwhile, to get back off topic, here’s a video I made today after a shocking discovery:
If you can help me figure out exactly what that non-otter animal is, I’d appreciate it! It is not an echidna or a playpus or an aardvark, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. The best I can do is “Q-Bert.”
Writer folks sometimes call their release date their “book birthday,” which I don’t especially like. Books aren’t born, they are made. Moreover, “birthday” usually means “anniversary,” to people, not “born day.” So even as a metaphor, it doesn’t work for me. But the real reason I don’t like the term is because it simply doesn’t suit the occasion. But I am amused to think of a book release as an actual birth. Because if it were, this is what it would be like:
The day a baby is born, you are already nine months pregnant with another baby, and two weeks pregnant with a third.
There would be an approximate nine-to-sixteen month wait between being nine months pregnant and the baby being born. In the meantime, you’ll get occasional sonograms but otherwise have little to do with your baby’s second phase of fetal development.
Baby due dates are arbitrary, but at least the baby is BORN on one day… In this case, the baby kind of trickles out. There’s a baby sighting in San Francisco a week before you realize it’s born, then a friend says they received your baby from Amazon.com. But other friends can’t find your baby anywhere even after the due date comes and goes. It’s gradual.
The due date can get pushed up a month or pushed back a year, just like that :snapping fingers:
That’s no way to stay sane. I think you just have to say, “the book’s official release date is today,” then make your own fanfare. I’ll create mine as best I can.
Post Script:
My buddy Steve (currently shilling my new release!) also has a book out tomorrow, or out in September… it all depends on what you mean by “out.” (See how the release date is listed as September 2010? But it also says “in stock”? Both are true!) Coincidentally, I’d already written most of this blog post before I knew about this… I just read the book this weekend, and it’s terrific, so order it quick, before they change their mind again.
The world doesn’t need me to blog about World Cup soccer or the 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird, though both are passingly mentioned in my first novel. But I have to profess my admiration and profound, indescribable fear of the prognosticating octopod, Paul, who correctly predicted the winner, the third place winner, and several other matches without a single mistake.
Is, like author/jogger Michael Northrop professes, the sign of the end of days, as foretold in the works of H.P. Lovecraft? Is Paul merely the first of several signs that the squid-like elder gods have had enough of our oil-gushing, ocean-ruining ways and are about to rise up from their slumbers and bring an eternity of suffering upon the miserable land-dwellers?
I don’t know. However, that I’d like to remind our new cephalopod overlords that as a trusted blog and book personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground mollusk caves.
I asked people on Facebook to send me random pictures and incorporated them all into a book trailer for my second novel. I only allowed myself minimal preparation and one take in iMovie. Special thanks to Ken Burns for the effects.
I’ve been thinking I should put together a book trailer for Mamba Point, but my mamba is a little camera shy and I don’t have appropriate roller skates/skills/hills to act out the best scene in the book. So I decided I would do a narrated PowerPoint slide show, pecha kucha style, where you go through 20 slides for 20 seconds each. I need images, and that’s where you come in. I’m collecting images. They can be anything, as long as they are appropriate for all ages. I’ll take twenty and figure out a way to incorporate them into a discussion of my book. Make sense? No? Well, I’m going to do it anyway. Just find a random image and link to it in the comments. I’ll take it from there.
I was just now standing in the kitchen gobbling up the better part of a freshly opened jar of pickled asparagus my wife picked up at one of the farmer’s markets here in Minneapolis, and thinking… besides, “Man, this is some good asparagus!” I was thinking, “this pickled asparagus is to good not to be a metaphor for something.” OK, it was really more the first than the second. But it’s worth noting that as a child I loathed asparagus; I thought it was among the most inedible vegetables, surpassed only by okra for the rank evil it introduced to the dinner table. I was ambivalent about pickles. The idea of pickled asparagus would have horrified me. But at some point I tried asparagus again and loved it. Now it’s my favorite green vegetable. And it’s especially delicious pickled: light and tangy, the perfect snack for a summer afternoon.
I’ve had the same experience with many authors, ones who I was forced to read in high school or college, dismissed roundly, and came back to later with new appreciation.
So I’m saddened when people report with utter finality what they don’t like in food or books: for example, grown-ups who have not eaten a vegetable since adolescence, or who would never read a book for young readers. That’s no way to live. Mark Twain said that the man who won’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t; you might say that a person who won’t read a variety of books has no advantage over the person who doesn’t have access to a variety of books.
To be fair, I have been through periods where I focused on a narrow selection… For example, a summer where I ate nothing but goober grape sandwiches and rice-a-roni and read nothing but mid-century postmodern fiction. Or the winter I ate Italian sausages diced up into pasta dishes and read Horatio Alger novels. If somebody told me they had found a certain bliss with ham and pineapple pizza and Patrick O’Brian novels for the time being, I wouldn’t try to bully them about it. But once in a while it’s a good idea to take a tour outside of your comfort zone; even take a break from your own tastes.
My life is full of favorite books and dishes I used to despise: squash and Kafka, mussels and Melville. And while I doubt I’ll ever warm up to okra or Ayn Rand, I have given myself ample enough samplings on repeat occasions to know.
This is the blog of Kurtis Scaletta, author of the middle-grade novels Mudville and Mamba Point. His third novel will be released in 2011. All are published by Knopf Books for Young Readers.
