May 12, 2024Couple of quick and exciting announcements. I will be at the Children's Institute in June where I will be very excited to meet booksellers and take in New Orleans for the first time ever! Also my advanced reader copies are in along with one of the most lovely notes I've ever received from Senior Editor at Peachtree Ashley Hearn. Comfortable shoes are purchased and flight is planned. Onward!
May 5, 2024The turtle.I don’t know if other writers have so-called mascots sitting on their desk but I have mine. He’s a little bronze turtle. He has ruby-colored eyes made from tiny beads. Under his belly there is a stamp: Made in India. I acquired turtle when I was in the fourth grade.
We were on a field trip comprised of two parts: an operetta and a visit to the Museum of Natural History. The operetta was an eye-opener. I wanted to be on stage. I wanted to do what the actors were all doing.The subsequent museum visit concluded with the gift shop. I had $5 from my parents to spend. This meant I could buy a mood pendant necklace OR a bronze turtle. I went with the turtle. I was the only one who picked him. Everybody else who had money bought a mood pendant. The back of the pendant was squishy and it changed colors like a mood ring. Nobody was interested in my turtle. Everybody traded mood pendants on the bus and played with them.By the end of the bus ride, the mood pendants had all broken. All they displayed was the color black. Bored, students began taking interest in turtle. I put in him my window at home, satisfied I had selected the best souvenir of them all.The thing about the turtle was he had longevity. He didn’t break and he held up to handling. I decided he was special even though I had no idea what he represented. I kept him in my window for years. When I went to college, he moved into my dorm room window. When I got my first full time job he sat on my desk. When I bought my first computer and started typing out a novel he sat on my desk and I declared him my ‘writing turtle.’At some point he fell off the desk and lost an eye. I couldn’t, despite my best efforts, locate the missing bead in the carpet. So I made a decision. When I finally got an agent, I would replace his eyes.That’s exactly what I did. Only his new eye wound up being a trifle larger than the other. But you do what you do what you can in a craft store and it’s not like turtle had any choice.
Recently I submitted a pic of turtle to the Reddit thread ‘What is this thing?’ and discovered he might represent an albino flapshell, seen here:
I suppose I’ll never know for sure. One thing I do know. He holds a business card brilliantly:
APRIL 28, 2024One of the wonderful things about TV shows based on novels is that you can read the books after watching the show. This is especially handy if a wonderful series gets canceled after season one. Exhibit A: Lockwood and Company.
I was SO into this show! Of my gosh I can’t even adequately express it. The concept. The characters. Plus the whole ordeal of a society that overburdens kids with unrealistic expectations is something of a hot button for me and a big part of why I wrote GIDDY BARBER EXPLODES IN 11 in the first place.Then Netflix canceled Lockwood after one season and I was devastated. Are the two main characters going to make a connection or not? What’s behind Lockwood’s mysterious door? Will everybody solve this terrible ghost problem? So… many… questions. Fortunately…Lockwood and Company is based on a series of books! So I will get the answers I’m looking for. I’m on book two. My understanding is that the Netflix show stopped at the end of book two so I’ll get new stuff in books three, four and five. I’m super excited! But this isn’t the first time I read the books to know stuff ahead of television. Exhibit B: Silo.
Now THIS one has been renewed on Apple TV. The problem is the writers strike set a lot of productions back, including this one. So I got tired of waiting to find out what the hell is really going on in the surface world and so I read all the books. They are awesome! Really, really awesome.I’m currently watching The Big Door Prize on Apple TV (also based on a book). And no, I’m not deliberately choosing things that are based on books. I’m just so happy when I see that something’s based on a book. Because suddenly it’s me (not the streaming service) who has the control over whether I know the ending or not. And that’s pretty great. And finally…
Fallout the TV show is as good as everyone says it is. That’s all! Back to writing other things now:)
APRIL 21, 2024I like to think of myself as a Spring illness 'early adopter': I get the bug and then a week later everyone else in my school has it. In a way, I'm doing everyone a solid. I try it out first so they get to see exactly how much they're going to despise it.
Below is my version of a hot toddy: fresh lemon juice, raw honey, cloves, fresh ginger root. The latter two have marvelous anti-inflammatory properties.
By the way, DON'T get clever and decide you're going to put the cloves and fresh chopped ginger root in the electric kettle as it boils so as to better infuse the water with their essense. Kettles aren't made for that. It will overboil and pour across your kitchen counter and you'll be cleaning boiling water off your counter before it can spill to the floor all the while feeling physically awful.But I would never do that. Certainly not. I'm just warning you, you know, in case YOU might.
APRIL 14, 2024First Draft Jitters (I wish experience made these go away but I’m guessing it doesn’t)I just wrapped up revisions on a new YA project and sent it back to my agent. I’m very excited about it. It’s a fun little work about a high school senior who feels he’s a nobody but decides to become a somebody by orchestrating an elaborate heist-style prank war against a rival school. Then he acquires a new friend from the other school who does the same thing back. There’s a lot of back-and-forth cleverness and a lot of fun. And then there’s classism, which is a more serious subject. Getting the balance of humor and seriousness right in this book has been a real challenge. I’m relieved to have taken it this far. But I don’t want to rest on my laurels sooooooo…. I’ve outlined two other books and I’m writing one of them right now. Which brings me to…First draft jitters.There’s that nagging voice in my brain that tells me I won’t get the voice right on this next book. Or the pacing. Or the plot. Or the word count will be higher than what is expected for young adult fiction. Or I will use the word ‘or’ too many times. Or maybe I’ll write too many sentence fragments or use too many ellipses…By now I’ve just accepted I’m going to emotionally go through this and come out on the other side with a pretty good book, maybe even a pretty great book because I’ve been through this so many times.The answer is probably lots of coffee.APRIL 6, 2024This blog post is long and self-indulgent. Feel free to skim or just take lots of bathroom breaks.Diving in anyway? Can I get you anything? Tea? Coffee? Wine? I make a mean cocktail. Nothing? OK then…GIDDY BARBER EXPLODES IN 11 isn’t my first novel. It is my first novel that sold. It’s my eleventh ever written.Let’s take a little look back, shall we? (fuzzy picture, time-travel music…)lI started my first book when I was 12. It was a young adult portal fantasy (girl gets pulled into a fantasy world, winds up being best friends with ‘the chosen one,’ finds love and conflict, you know the rest). I wrote it in print because cursive is evil and I used pencil (you need to erase, right?) I started at 12. At 13, I stopped. The book was only half-finished.Why did I stop? Who knows. Distractions. I was 13, after all. But even though I quit, the book kept nagging at me. I felt guilty that I’d started something I hadn’t finished. It continued to bother me through the age of 14.So at 15 I picked it up and continued work. I finished writing it at 16. The end result filled up two school binders and was approximately 600 hand-written pages. And there it sat, on my bookshelf, because while I had dreams of publishing I honestly didn’t know how to go about it. This was the 80’s so no internet. I do know I asked my best friend to read it (pretty sure it was more like ‘begged.’) She handed it back a few weeks later with absolutely no comment. There followed an uncomfortable silence.I decided I needed a computer so I could type the next book. In the interim I graduated high school, attended UT Austin and graduated there with a degree in broadcast journalism. My first job out of college was a TV news reporter. The salary was, shall we say, barely available? I transitioned into news producing, got married (which is its own cool, interesting story) and then moved into a slightly nicer apartment.I started my next book the day after I brought my new computer home. I was in my early twenties. The book, the first in a high fantasy adult trilogy, would top off at a whopping 250,000 words.No agent or publisher was interested in it. I still remember being shocked at my first form letter rejection. Some part of me thought the book was unrejectable. I mean – it had everything! Magic, swords, dragons, enemies-to-lovers. It was all there in a mere 250,000 words!!I finished writing the fantasy trilogy (we are up to 4 books now) and I moved on to book 5, a stand alone high fantasy with a more personal story and a slightly more reasonable word count – 125,000. That book caught the attention of an agent who requested cutting the word count to closer to 100,000 and re-sending the full. Boy was I excited! I did it and resubmitted it.I never heard back from that agent again. Not even a form rejection. I nudged once, several months later. Still nothing. A year after that I saw her name had been removed from the agency website.Book 5 racked up about 100 rejections from agents. So I wrote Book 6.Book 6 was science fiction, the expansion of a short story I’d written and sent out to publishers. The original short story, Mrs. Peterman’s Bentley, has the honor of receiving a very lengthy, very irritated personal rejection from Weird Tales magazine that can be summed up as ‘we were loving this story and getting very excited over it and then the big reveal at the end is the creature is an alien. Weird Tales doesn’t publish science fiction! Why on earth would you do this to us???I honestly have no idea why I did that to Weird Tales. Maybe I thought the rules wouldn’t matter? I was still in my twenties so, who knows?I told my sister I wanted to start taking my writing craft seriously. She suggested I start attending writing conventions and found one for me – the DFW writing convention. I went. They do something called The Gong Show where an emcee reads queries to a panel of agents and if the query gets through without three gongs you are a winner. The query for Mrs. Peterman’s Bentley the novel got through! I received multiple invites to send the full to agents.Every agent passed. I sent the book to a small press which did not require agent representation. They also passed. The resounding cry appeared to be that the novel felt like a short story that had been artificially stretched into a 70,000 word book.Which. It had. Can’t lie, that’s exactly what I did, took a neat idea and milked it really, really unnecessarily.Book 6 racked up well more than 100 rejections from agents. On to Book 7…Book 7 was an adult contemporary love story with supernatural elements. I couldn’t tell you then what genre it exactly fits into and I still can’t. For some reason urban fantasy seemed most likely so I tried putting that in my query. In hindsight this novel is nothing like urban fantasy but what can I say? I was in my thirties by now and even though I’d gotten better I still had a lot to learn about the industry. Also, I had no idea what to name the damn thing despite feeling it was good, damn good. So my genius, illustrious husband named it for me: Eternal Cuckoo.I entered some first-pages writing contests and Cuckoo was doing well, though everybody had suggestions on how to plus it up. I listened and revised. I think this book went through nine drafts in all. I queried again but slowly. I studied agent wish lists with great care and only sent out a couple of queries at a time. One query (plus first pages) went to an agent named Amy Bishop who at that time worked at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret agency. It was sent out very late the night before I was to leave town to help chaperone a Latin competition that my daughter was competing in. My query was sent out without any mention of what its genre was (because I still didn’t know). It also lacked any author bio whatsoever.Then I slept, got up early, and rode to San Antonio with my husband. The entire three and a half hour trip I did not check my emails. Don’t ask me why. I just didn’t.When we pulled into the hotel parking lot, I checked emails, even though I knew I’d only sent out a query the night before so there was no way the agent had gotten to it. The first thing I saw was that Ms. Bishop had replied.Now, my heart immediately sank in ways authors who are querying are very, very familiar with. My initial thoughts upon seeing an email returned a mere twelve hours after I sent it was gee, Amy, you didn’t even wait for the corpse to get cold before saying no. Then I noticed something strange.Usually rejection emails begin with the words thank you. As in thank you for thinking of me and sending me this but after careful consideration I must pass… Only this email didn’t start with thank you. It began with my name. Dina.Followed by something like: This is so interesting! Send me the full, please.Which I couldn’t do immediately because I didn’t have a laptop computer! My full was at home and I was stuck at a Latin convention. I spend all my spare time at the convention going through DG&B’s website, looking at their impressive client list and daydreaming.I sent the full off as soon as I got home. Then I waited. A couple of months went by. I lived life as normal but was fairly stoked. I had two other fulls out on Cuckoo – one from an agent who requested after a pitch at a conference and one that was, I think, unsolicited. Then one evening, around six o’clock, I checked my phone as I sat on the couch in front of the television and noticed a voicemail from an area code I didn’t recognize. When I pushed play, the voice was a man’s.Immediately I thought ‘telemarketer.’ After all, my three fulls were out to agents who were, by sheer coincidence, women. So I wasn’t expecting a guy named Jim McCarthy to call me back.But then he said: “I’m with Dystel, Goderich and Bourret.”My first thought was: I’ve been pronouncing the agency name entirely wrong in my head!My second thought was something akin to champagne bubbles. Or rockets. Loud explosions of some kind. A little numbness.I do know I waved furiously at my husband to turn the TV volume down. I’m sure my face looked like I was receiving horrifying information so I followed the wave with a big thumbs up so he’d know nobody had died. And that was me, on the couch, in my jammies, giving a thumbs up while looking ashen-faced. Then the tears started. Jim’s voicemail hadn’t even concluded.My daughter ran into the room. “Is Mom OK?”My husband, smiling: “I think your mother just got an offer of representation.”Oh, he’s damn good, my mind-reader, title-creating, husband!It was too late to call Jim back. I did go onto Twitter to see that he’d told people he was about to offer representation and had been excited to hear from that writer only to get a voicemail. (Sorry, Jim. I know I mute my phone a lot. I miss tons of calls because of this). That’s OK. I called him back the next day.A week later I was signed. Eternal Cuckoo went on submission to publishers and did not get published. But while it was out I had written Book 8 which I can best describe as a southern gothic. I sent it to Jim. It had some insurmountable problems so it never went out. I sent him Mrs. Peterman’s Bentley. It had the same problems that made it unpublishable before.So I sent six different pitches for books I could write next to Jim. Our favorite was a middle-grade detective novel with tremendous series potential. Book 9 went out. Book 9 did not find a publishing home.But I had been so happy to write Book 9 that I wrote Book 10 (a sequel to 9) in my spare time, in case it did get published. I also outlined Book 11.Book 11 would wind up being GIDDY BARBER EXPLODES IN 11.So here I am, on the precipice of having a book that people can actually read. And this is cool and wonderful and exciting and if I add it all up this process took many, many years.
