Word Drops

When I think about my formative years, I think about crippling shyness, bad hair, worse poetry. What I couldn’t say out loud – which was a lot – I wrote and wrote and wrote. And I remember, too, making the conscious decision as a senior in high school that it was my writing that would define me. I claimed it when, in what seemed like the boldest of moves in my 18-year-old brain, I wrote and delivered a speech at our baccalaureate. And a big part of the reason why I owned my voice was because of my creative writing teacher, Ms. Calder.

She was a free spirit who wore fluid, printed tops and glass beads, who shared slide photographs of her trips to Egypt and Greece on the classroom’s overhead projector. She oversaw the regular publication of a collection of student writing, Word Drops in Literary Puddles, but mostly, she entrusted the bulk of the work to her most eager and interested students. And in my eleventh and twelfth grade years, that was me and one of my best friends.

Everyone in her writing classes had their work featured and it was our job to select from their submissions, to solicit a cover illustration and to design and layout each publication. There was a considerable amount of drama when someone turned in the lyrics to a Barenaked Ladies song, claiming it as their own, and when the just-right accompanying piece of clip art could not be found for my latest poem about heartbreak. Weren’t they all about heartbreak?

But Ms. Calder didn’t judge us as I fear I’d judge my melodramatic teenage self. She was patient, encouraging and had a wry, appreciative wit that I sometimes think was wasted on high school students. She regularly pressed us to submit our writing to a regional publication for student writers and celebrated with the class every time someone’s poem or short piece was selected for publication. When I graduated, she bought me a beautiful pen and a photo album. I still have the photo album but I’ve lost the note she’d tucked inside. I wish I could remember what it said.

Ms. Calder passed in 2013. I just learned that this morning, before I sat down to write this, to remember her and the ways she trusted me – taught me to trust myself.

She treated everyone like a writer before any of us were worth reading. It was a gift.

And so was she.

The Other Side

I feel like the next time I attend a conference or similar, I should put some sort of warning on my table. Something like, 'Painfully Awkward' or 'May Hug Without Warning.' I definitely hugged some readers and friends, new and old, at this year's Ohioana Book Festival. Thank you for humoring me, strangers.

But, I got to hang and chat with some incredible writers and book enthusiasts, and extol on the virtues of unapologetically messy first drafts while speaking on a panel with some fine fantasy authors. The questions were so smart and I feel like every time I have the chance to participate in something like this, I learn more about the craft of writing, and from just about everybody in the room.

It's strange, to sit on the other side of the table. I still remember attending a book festival and approaching from the aisle, eager to talk about books and writing and dreaming big about the publishing industry. I still do this every time I meet an author, honestly. And whether it's because I'll always be a reader first or because I've got a severe case of impostor syndrome or I'm just irrepressibly awkward, I don't know.

But once, many years ago when I came up to her after hearing her on a panel at Books by the Banks, Laura Bickle asked me about what I was writing and gave me her email address, later introduced me to a bunch of her friends writing in Columbus. And just a few weeks ago, we shared a table and gushed about books and it was the best. I still feel like the same person, still aspiring, always.

There was a young woman who stopped by our table at one point, asking about drafts and writing, and I answered her questions as best as I could. She came back a few minutes later and told me about what she's working on and said people have told her it's been done; she asked me, did I think she should keep writing it?

I said heck yes she should.

I told her, you have to write the story that you want to write. Everything's been done before, but it hasn't been done by you.

I wish now that I'd hugged her, too.

Reading vs. Writing

Is there a book you've read you wished you'd written? This is a harder question for me than I initially imagined that it might be. If I'd written some of the books I ardently admire, I'd have been robbed of the opportunity to enjoy reading them. At the same time, some stories are so enchanting, some writing so smart and wicked, that I can't help but wish I'd had the idea and the skills, too. And of course, there are some tales - I find this particularly true of retellings - where I am so deeply disappointed in how a legendary concept is so poorly imagined.

In the end, I'm not sure there's any book I've loved that I'd really rather have written than read, though there are a few stories so skillfully told that they're more than worth mentioning.

M.K. Hobson's The Native Star is an underrated gem and one of the few steampunk/weird west tales that doesn't get so involved with itself that the story and the characters are lost. Perhaps it is that I am most drawn to the characters is what makes this one stand out to me - the elements of the world embellish their lives, rather than the other way around. I'm all for a well-built world, but Hobson manages to make her alternate history feel as vibrant as the real one without overshadowing some truly spectacular characters - and a unique magic system - in Emily and Stanton.

Naomi Novik's Uprooted is definitely in my top five favorite retellings-ish, ever. Novik does exactly what I aspire to do when approaching writing any kind of folk or fairy tale, making it feel familiar and strange in the same instant, surprising in the ways that it conforms to what we know as much as it breaks away into new and delicious territory. I plan to fangirl Novik so hard at Dragon Con this year, you have no idea.

Leigh Bardugo manages to do something with Six of Crows that I honestly think I may never be able to do as a writer: invest readers deeply into the lives of multiple, distinct, and distinctly unheroic protagonists. I don't even generally enjoy reading books where the perspective changes, but with this one and the equally unputdownable sequel, Crooked Kingdom, I wouldn't have had the reading any other way. While I felt connected to certain characters more than others, I still felt affinity for each, and readily shifted between their voices and aims.

I know that I am still writing the sorts of books that I liked to read, for the ideal readers who enjoy the same weird and wonderful things that I do, but truly: I think I'd rather focus on getting better and read more from authors I enjoy than co-opt their voices and ideas.

Whoa, Whoa, Ohioana!

If you'll be in the Columbus, Ohio area on April 14 and want to talk nerdy about books, writing, or my latest trash ship (there are so many), I hope you'll stop by the Ohioana Book Festival to chat. I'll be selling and signing books, as well as participating on a panel with some truly excellent writers of fantasy and science fiction, including Laura Bickle, Linda Robertson, and Susie Newman.

I plan to throw money at other authors and bribe readers with candy and stickers, because I am an adult.

But really, it's a lovely and free event for book devourers of all ages. And if you don't want to eat words, there are food trucks.

The Heart is a Lonely and Not Particularly Wise Hunter

I've got a thing for tragic bastards. I should clarify, my desire is purely for dudes of a fictional variety. I have exactly zero time for the bullshit of living, breathing disasters. But I have been thinking a lot lately about the themes and sorts of characters that resonate with me, what I'm drawn to read and write. As silly as it is, my recent experiences playing Dragon Age: Inquisition have made this pretty clear to me. I've always appreciated Bioware's nuanced characters and the ability players have to befriend or isolate or irritate them, and this installment in the series is, in my opinion, the best in terms of executing this particular hallmark of the studio.

My first two play-throughs, I barely spoke a word to Solas, became absolute besties with Dorian and Cassandra, and romanced Cullen, whose awkward word vomit and head scratching endeared him completely. But, I kept seeing folks talking about the draw of the Solas romance and how it tied in with the game's overall narrative - which is spectacular - so I decided to give it a try and rolled an elven Inquisitor.

And now I'll never look back.

What is it about colossal fuck-ups that is so appealing?

While the charming, well-intentioned dude may at first secure my attention, it just doesn't last. Perhaps this is why your average romantic comedy can't hold my attention - I love a good love story but I need even more than space and elves to complicate things for my weird little heart. I need world-shattering mistakes.

There are other fictional fellas in here. Not surprisingly:

As I am writing the final book in my series and contending with some of the choices and realizations in The Dread Goddess, I am trying to feel my way forward with Gannet and Eiren - without giving anything away, certainly things between them have never been easy, and there are new troubles now. In earlier drafts of the first few chapters, something just didn't feel right. The forgiveness, the comfort, the ease with which they were moving forward, together. Because something is wedged between them still, and Gannet is, of course, claiming responsibility. Given what he knows and doesn't know about himself, and what's at stake, there was a tension and a distance that wasn't at play yet in that draft.

So, I had to make some changes.

In each book, we've learned something new about Eiren and Gannet and about their world, and now that they're presumably holding all of the pieces, they're finding that their shapes are strange, sharp, fragile. I feel as much at Gannet's mercy as Eiren does, sometimes. Even though I'm technically steering this ship, there are storms in their characterizations that even I underestimate, or miss alltogether.

But, take heart. I may enjoy tragic bastards, but I do not enjoy tragedy.

Fantasy Casting Book of Icons

When I had time for journal-based roleplaying games, one of my first and favorite things to do in developing a character was to think about what they looked like. I loved scrolling through icon collections of lesser known actors and actresses, or beloved familiar faces in unique roles, and choosing just the right person to play my version of Padma Patil or Eddie Carmichael (had a soft spot for roleplaying Ravenclaws, even though I'm pretty sure I'm a Gryffindor). Anyone who has ever played in one of these games, or ever seen a movie that's been woefully miscast, knows what it's like to see someone playing a character who is just all wrong. Strangely enough, picturing my characters is not something I do much in the beginning. Maybe it's because all of the shit I gave myself as a young writer for describing what people looked like by letting them look in the mirror, or because I immediately drop any book that tells me what a character is wearing or describes their "tresses" within the first 10 pages. Still, I know that it's important to have a few details to go on, and that usually those details belong somewhere in the beginning of a book.

Writing in first person presents a unique challenge when conveying what your main character looks like, but I'm particularly fond of how Eiren describes herself and her siblings in the first chapter of The Hidden Icon, when looking at her mother she,

"... studied the vault of bones beneath her skin, like mine the color of the honeyed beer she and my father enjoyed, the taste of which had always paled considerably when compared to the thrill of pilfering some from their reserve."

I wish now that I'd had resources like Writing with Color when I was working on the first book, because it's incredible. Even though it's fantasy-land, it's important to check assumptions and language when it comes to writing characters of color. For me, Eiren has always been a brown girl, and I hope that she was always for readers, too.

We don't get much else about Eiren in the first few chapters, beyond that she's a small woman, made smaller by the challenges of living in exile. Again, she sees herself in comparison to others, this time, when she observes Morainn rising from a chair and feels,

"... weak as a foundling child. Morainn had eaten well and stretched her legs in the flower of her youth, and I’d spent the last five years living like a rodent in a cave."

I did give Gannet a little bit more structure in the beginning, though, even with half of his face obscured for the reader and Eiren both.

"The man wore a half-mask roughed of some metal fitted to his features, riding the bridge of his nose and curving back to his ears. It was the mask I saw and little else, registering but barely the sandy hair, the thin, blank line of his lips.

He was less formidable in proximity than he had been at a distance. I could not keep from studying his face as the moment lengthened to discomfort, the rough lip of the mask below his cheekbones, splitting his brow above. His hair strayed from where it had been smoothed back, softening his unnaturally muted expression."

Despite the fact that I have a lot more to go on with Gannet's description, or maybe because of it, he's always been harder for me to point to a real person and say, that one. I don't think he's traditionally handsome, and I picture him with a wide, expressive mouth that would probably be goofy on someone who smiled a lot. His nose is severe because frankly, I like noses.

And Eiren, well. She's beautiful but melancholy, too. She's also never had cause to pay attention to how her hair or body is dressed, allowing an innocence to persist in her appearance that might not otherwise for someone of her age and experience.

Most recently, I've been pairing these two together in my mind and feeling pretty confident about their potential.

Sonam Kapoor is just the most glamorous usually, which I feel like works for Eiren's sisters but not so for her. But when I saw her in Saawariya, I just felt like there was a dreamy quality about her, an intense grace and depth that felt right for Eiren. As for Austin Butler, his model face is all wrong for Gannet and I would never have looked at him twice if it weren't for a laundry-filled Sunday when I decided to give The Shannara Chronicles a watch. Dude has got so much more going for him when he's walking and talking and, you know, emoting.

And not to bribe or spoil folks or anything, but if you're interested in seeing a bit more of Gannet's face, you should probably make some time to read The Dread Goddess.

So, what do you think? Who would you cast? And what about Morainn, Antares, Imke, or Jurnus? Clearly I ought to give them a think next.

What Teenagers Write About is Weird

Do you remember the first thing you ever wrote? When I was in the fifth grade, heavily influenced by multiple readings of The Secret Garden and The Little Princess and my own deep desire for Kirsten, I wrote a short story for class about a Victorian-esque pauper girl who coveted a doll in a window at Christmastime. Naturally, that porcelain beauty was bound to sustain her more than bread or soup or central heat, so a kindly young mother who had lost her own daughter to illness made everyone's dreams come true by adopting the child and buying her the damn doll. Appealing narrative for an 11-year-old with no disposable income, right?

I think of this story now and then, and remember that my fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Cole, told my parents I was writing at a college-level. I thought that was a bit of a joke until I taught college, and then I suspected for a hot minute it was an insult, but still. She was an incredibly supportive teacher and the first in a long line of teachers who indulged my love of writing fiction.

In the seventh grade, I wrote what I realize now was basically erotic friend fiction - though with far fewer butts and a whole lot more dystopian wasteland. This was the first long-form piece I ever wrote, beginning with a natural disaster that conveniently swept all of the adults out of the picture and allowed me to populate a post-parent fantasy land with my peers. We foraged for food, crafted weapons, built shelters Island of the Blue Dolphins-style, and even relocated from Ohio to the beach, where I was able to introduce new characters from my class who had been presumed dead. Why? Because it took me months to write this thing and I was crushing on somebody else by then and needed a reason to write them into the story.

Teenagers, man.

The best/worst part is honestly that I shared this, chapter by painstaking chapter, with my English teacher. She was so nice about it that I wonder now if she even read it, or if she just felt sorry for the girl who repeatedly had her name slandered on the chalkboard by some of the same boys she was writing about. If I could go back in time, I'd make them eat those pages. Or just kick them repeatedly in the shins.

But it was easier at thirteen to retreat into a world whose boundaries I could write and rewrite, whose conflicts were of my own devising and whose resolutions happily followed a linear narrative. There is still an element of joy in controlling a world when I'm writing - or at the very least, trusting that when I'm not in control I'll reach a suitable ending.

And at least the most embarrassing things I've ever written and will ever write are behind me.

I hope.

Meet Ramona

I've been working on something a little different. And I thought you might like to take a peek.

She'd had the dream again.

Within minutes of waking, Ramona's hands were pawing over the mess on her bedside table, skimming her glasses, her phone, upsetting two books splayed open, kissing like lovers. Her fingers found the roll of tape she'd left there the night before and she was up, eyes squeezed shut as she moved by touch in the dark to the wall opposite her bed where she'd drawn the map.

Lines drawn in thick, black permanent ink spidered from the window to her bare, aggressively tidy desk. Structures had been meticulously trimmed from a variety of magazines and discarded books and taped against the wall in various places, some labeled, others awaiting identification. Ramona gently peeled one labeled 'Bazaar' from the lower left quadrant of the map and placed it several handspans further right, next to another clipping - a squat ruin she'd cut out of a tattered National Geographic - labeled 'Arena.' The snap as she tore a new piece of tape was startling in the silence, and only after she'd made the adjustment did she open her eyes and turn on the light.

The harsh fluorescent glow further illuminated the stark, impersonal dormitory: bed pushed against one wall, built in wardrobe and desk opposite, door and window with its navy drape squaring off like combatants. The rug underfoot was cheap and thin, the curtains and bedspread worn but without personality. The wall with its world realized in marker and college scraps was the only thing that felt like it belonged to Ramona, and she'd have to paint over it in less than a week.

She sat down on the edge of her bed without a sound, reaching for her glasses and her phone, checking her face, checking the time.

4:07 AM.

Yesterday it had been nearly 6 AM when the dream woke her.

It wasn't always the same dream, it just always was. It was the world as she knew it, twisted, the places she recognized warped and peopled by strangers - or not at all.

Dr. Cutter was interested in the dream. It had been she who had first suggested Ramona keep a journal, sketch what she recalled upon waking, as though getting it all out of her head would keep it from coming back. But it didn't, and the notebook hadn't been big enough, anyway. So she'd sacrificed the security deposit on this year's board and started drawing on the walls.

There was the strip where she and her mother and brother had bought groceries and visited the check advance place to borrow against dad's upcoming pay day, the taquería where between the three of them they'd demolish an easy conquistador's dozen.

Ramona had layered clipped photos and crude sketches underneath of the main edifice she'd chosen to represent each place on the map, indicating what was different, what was the same. There were some places she frequented often - her high school, the trailer where she'd grown up, her grandma's house just down the street, the quarry - and others she'd go months without seeing, sometimes whole years - the labyrinthian downtown, the derelict grocery, the sculpture park. In the park there was a bronze statue of a woman in the center of a reflecting pool, her arms raised in invitation. But when Ramona dreamed of her, the gestures were always different and Ramona had noted this, too: arms overhead like a dancer's, fists clenched against the stiff folds of her robe, arms absent, hacked off or lost like an ancient Roman statue.

Because it really wasn't one dream, but many. Ramona moved through them each night, pursuing whatever mad trajectories her sleeping mind conjured. Usually, she was alone. But sometimes she was with her brother, Felix.

Felix.

He'd been the reason she'd gone to see Dr. Cutter in the first place, six years ago, in the weeks following his disappearance.

Author SOS

I've had a lot of questions recently about how book sales are going, and the honest answer is, I have no idea. The even more honest answer is, it's not really about the money.

Folks ask where they should buy the book so I get a better cut, and truly, it doesn't matter. People want to help and I think that is amazing, but even checking my book out from the library - or requesting that your library order it if it isn't in the system - would help me out. The best thing you can do for me? If you liked my books, recommend them. Review them. Loan your copy to a friend. If you can't afford copies but want to read, ask me for one and I'll loan you mine. Really, really.

Because it's not about the money right now. it's about reach.

I will get paid, eventually, but I have no delusions about how much (not much). And while I absolutely believe that writers ought to be compensated well for their work, and that making a living writing is often the end game, that's not where I am right now. I work full-time and will likely continue to work full-time for the foreseeable future. I like what I do, so I'm okay with it. Writing for a living isn't something I can dream of until my books are in more hands and heads.

So, if you want me to keep writing and creating, share. Your thoughts, what you liked, what you didn't like, what you wanted to see more of, what you want to read next. Tell me, and tell the readers that you know. Share your copies with friends and family who you think would like them, too. Review, please, on Amazon and Goodreads.

This is a pretty bold cry from me in response to the love I've felt following the publication of my second book. Anyone who knows me knows that I don't like to ask for help even when I really need it - missed out on a critical life skill there, I know - but this is how you can help me, if you want to help me.

And if you don't or can't or forget or won't, that's cool, too. No one book is for every person, and we're still friends.

Top 5 Influential Childhood Reads

Every writer was a reader first. Have I said that before? Probably. But beyond the logistics of that necessarily needing to be the case, I imagine there are for all of us books we read in our youth that made us love stories, books that through the act of reading unlocked the desire to storytell within us. I’ve often wondered, especially after a rigorous six years of studying literature, what makes some writers pursue genre fiction and others more realistic avenues. I know I have, at least, read and loved books of all kinds, both as a young person and as an adult. But even the more literary short stories I wrote in graduate workshop always had a dreamy element, odd angles and awkward edges that made it harder to get by, to be taken seriously, to make the necessary social and academic connections with my more literal-minded peers.

In thinking about the books that moved me as a child, I wonder, what was it about these that made me the writer that I am, stubbornly, today?

What was it about Meg and Charles Wallace and their world(s) in A Wrinkle in Time that so appealed to me? A Wrinkle in Time is probably the first example of real science fiction that I read as a child. From the lasting image of Mrs. Who explaining traveling by tesseract to the mistaken jaunt to the world whose gravity nearly crushed the group to the haunting sameness of the world where her father was imprisoned, there was realized for me so much potential for strangeness and horror, but with a real heart beating between the turning of pages. I wanted more.

I recently tried to re-read Anne of Green Gables with the intent of getting to my later favorite in the series, Anne of the Island, and I was shocked to learn how little actually happens on the page. I remember Anne as adventurous and bold, dreaming with her and feeling as near to her scrapes as she was. But really, the reader is so much more like Marilla, merely hearing about these wild things that Anne has undertaken off the page. She comes home from a day at school or an afternoon in the fairy grove with Diana and tells Marilla, and be default, the reader, all about it. There’s very little actual doing to be read, and I wonder now if Anne isn’t in part to blame for how close I like to be to my narrators. I want to write each touch and taste of the world and invite the reader to taste and touch, too. Anne remains vibrant as ever despite the narrative choices, which is surely a testament to what a strong and likeable character she is.

The Island of the Blue Dolphins is the first of two orphan stories on this list, and really only one of many I devoured as a child. The quiet strength and resourcefulness of the main character was always a wonder to me as a child, and I loved all of the details about how she navigated her solitude, what she did, ate, made, and built, and how. I haven’t re-read this book as an adult, but I don’t remember her feeling sad or sorry for herself, but rather reckoning with what has happened to her through action – moving forward, rather than dwelling on the past. She was competent and serene and strong, and I wanted to think that I could be just like her, if I had to be.

The main character from The Secret Garden was, conversely, not serene. She had edges and angers that I liked, and a willfulness to take whatever she could from the hand she’d been dealt that greatly appealed to me. Also, there was just something so romantic about an English country house and the idea that a young woman alone could discover and conquer its secrets. I liked that she and the boys challenged and changed each other, and that they could each, in their own way, find happiness.

I also feel like it’s a hallmark of readers of my generation to still look for doors in hedges. Even my husband does it.

My love for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Magician’s Nephew are nearly equal, and I think it’s because they both stretch beyond the boundaries of Narnia as know them in the rest of the books of the series. The memorable fountains as doorways to other worlds in The Magician's Nephew is such a treat that it’s one of my favorite things lifted into Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, and reaching the very edge of the horizon in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and being irrevocably changed by the experience was powerful and wonderful. We weren’t church-going when I was a child and the nearest I came to salvation was someone passing me a coloring sheet outside of a grocery store with a little prayer on it that I could say and “be saved,” so the religious overtures in Lewis’ works were always lost on me. What Lucy and Edmund and Eustace, and Digory and Polly and the others, experience was purely magical and human, and I reveled in it.

What about you? What were the childhood classics that shaped you?