In Which I Recommend Two Fall Reads

 There are new books coming out all the time, and I have neither the time nor the money to buy and read all of them. I can solve the money problem by instead requesting that my local library system acquire the books, which I highly recommend. To my chagrin, however, that does not increase my time.

However, two books came out recently that I thought I would love enough I went ahead and bought them. The first is a debut novel and the second is the writer's second book, a companion to their first novel that takes place in the same small Appalachian town.

Lisa Frenkel Riddiough's debut Elvis and the World As It Stands is a delightful read. I mean, how can you beat a story narrated by an adorable kitten and featuring a host of friendly and cute pets? This book is so much more than a cute pet story, however. It has a deep and important message about family and belonging. As we approach the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it's also the perfect book for the children of those of us who were teens or young adults on that day. Its gentle but real treatment of the subject including Elvis's girl building a LEGO model of both the World Trade Center as it was before 9/11 and the Freedom Tower is a great way for young readers to enter that historical moment in an accessible way. Most importantly, though, it's a well written and enjoyable book.

Sure it's only September 10th, but at least where I live there's a chill in the air in the mornings and the season is beginning to turn from summer into autumn. In my mind, this means it's time to think about Halloween. I love Halloween, but maybe not in the way you think when you hear about people loving Halloween. I love witches, but only when they're friendly and use their magic to help people. I love skeletons, when they're smiling and dancing. My Halloween aesthetic isn't Haunted Houses and bloody, skeletal hands coming out of graves but rather cute black kittens and smiling bat families. And of course pumpkins. Give me all the pumpkins and all the pumpkin flavored food and drinks. 

A lot of people enjoy watching scary movies and reading scary books as the autumn winds blow.  I am not one of those people, but I do appreciate just a little bit of spookiness. If you're like me, Ash VanOtterloo's second book, which was released this week, may also be for you. A Touch of Ruckus is a delightful romp in a haunted Appalachian forest. But not too haunted, because that would give me nightmares. It has excellent queer rep (the MC likes both boys and girls, and her new friend is nonbinary), rural Appalachian rep, and mental health rep, as well as a sneaky environmental message. It was everything I hoped it would be, and a great follow up to Ash's debut, Cattywampus.

Do you have any favorite fall reads? I'd love to hear about them in comments.

In Which It Still Isn't My Turn, But I Keep Moving Anyway

 There's lots of good writing news in the middle grade twitterverse recently, and from my closer community of the #MGWaves. It feels like every time I check Twitter or Slack someone has just signed with an agent or announced a book deal. I've gotten to know some of these writers well and read works from many of them over the past year since I jumped into the writing community with both feet, and I can say with confidence that everyone I've seen announce news heartily deserves their good fortune. Most of them have been working toward this goal for years, some even longer than I have.

It's good to remember that what might look like an "overnight success story" could easily be that writer's sixth manuscript that they queried for a year and had just decided it was time to shelve when they got the full request that led to an offer. One of my friends who just signed with an agent received the email asking to set up a call to talk about representation literally 24 minutes after sending a text telling her critique partners that she was officially shelving the manuscript.

I'm still waiting for a story like that to happen to me. I'm actively querying a version of the second book I finished, which went through such a major rewrite that I kind of consider it my fourth book. I have not gotten any bites, but I recently rewrote my query and opening pages and just started sending that version a week ago, so there's still hope. In the meantime, I still have a small handful of queries out for my third book, the one that I should probably have shelved months ago, but that I keep firing off an occasional query for because I love it so much I can't bear to completely shelve it until I've run out of agents I'd like to work with who might love it. This one has also gone through not quite a rewrite but a very thorough revision including changing from third to first person since I began querying it late last year.

In the meantime, I'm plugging away at my fourth (maybe fifth, depending on how you count) book, which I currently think is the best one yet. Whether that actually proves to be the case will only be seen if I can actually finish the thing. This first draft has taken way longer than any other first draft I've ever written because I have my fingers in so many pies right now. I keep going away from it to tweak the books I'm still querying and fire off a few more. Add to that the days I just can't bear to look at it because I'm sure it must be a flaming pile of you can guess what despite my feelings about it and my critique group members' feelings about it, because if I actually knew how to write surely my inbox would be flooded with full requests.

Add in the mental fatigue from the pandemic that never ends, and keeping at the writing game can feel like a Sisyphean task. Push that boulder of a finished manuscript up the hill, and the rejections will come crashing down on you and push you right back down. So, why do I do it? Why do I keep creating these stories and throwing my babies out to the cold, cruel world? Why don't I just get a regular job that doesn't come with a regular side of rejection? Because rejection is and always will be part of the writing game. Once you get an agent, editors start rejecting you. Once you get a book in the world, readers start rejecting you. There is no stage at which a writer is entirely shielded from rejection.

First, I realize I'm in a place of incredible privilege because I don't have to work another full time job on top of writing just to keep a roof over my head and put food over the table. Yes, my kids are demanding and a 24/7 responsibility in some fashion (even the 16 year old), but it's not as if there aren't parents out there who have a full time job in addition to writing. 

It's partly because I love it. Books have always been a huge part of my life, and I've had stories living in my head as long as I can remember. It's also because I believe my stories have a place in the world that isn't completely filled. I want girls with ADHD to have a character they see themselves in. I want kids with type 1 diabetes to see a kid like them accurately portrayed in a book. I want kids who feel different in any way to see characters who are outside the norm in some way going on adventures and just living life.

Someday I believe my books will be on the shelves of libraries and bookstores. It might be a version of stories I've already written, or it might be that those stories serve as a stepping stone for me to continue to polish my craft and what ends up on shelves is now only a seed in the depths of my mind. There may be an agent reading a query that will lead to a full request and then an offer right now. The agent who eventually signs me may not even be an agent yet. 

I hate this uncertainty, and I don't always have the mental fortitude to remind myself that if I keep working and don't give up I will get there someday. There are definitely days when I spend all of my time wallowing in self pity. If I want to make it, however, I can't stay down there. I need to get up, dust myself off, and do the next thing.

This summer my family took a vacation to the Rocky Mountains. It was breathtakingly beautiful. It's also a whole lot farther above sea level than Kentucky, and the thinner air literally can take your breath away. All my family members are in much better shape than I am, and there were times we were ascending on hikes when I wasn't sure I could make it. But I did it. One step at a time. Here's a picture of me at 12,000 feet. No, I did not climb all 12,000 of those feet.

In Which I Play Catch Up

 I had established this really great trend of posting monthly and then summer vacation happened. As of today, both my kids are back in school in person for the first time since March 13, 2020. Here's hoping that will give me more time to write. Of course, I'm also mildly terrified since Covid cases are at their highest level in Kentucky since January, but masks are required in schools, they're spacing students out as much as they can, and doing a lot of cleaning and handwashing and sanitizing, so I'm hoping it will be enough.

Summer trips got in the way of me blogging in July, but they did not get in the way of me reading. Our family drove to Colorado and back as our big family trip a couple weeks ago, which meant about 22 hours in the car each way, divided over two days. Since my husband prefers to drive on long trips, partly because he thinks he's a better driver (he really is) and partly because he's prone to carsickness if he's not driving, I had a lot of time to read. I made it through my entire To Be Read pile, which had been languishing because my daughter was demanding a lot of my attention since school ended. We're still being really careful about playdates and didn't send her to any day camps, so she wanted me to play with her all the time. As an aside, parenting an extraverted kid during a pandemic is really hard.

Some of my favorites were two other books I could have recommended in my last post about MG books with queer rep had I known they existed when I wrote that post. George by Alex Gino. The book follows ten year old George, who knows she is a girl even though everyone else believes she is a boy, on her journey to find the courage to speak out about her gender identity. I also read a companion book to this, Rick, in which we see the MC from the first book two years later, starting middle school as a girl named Melissa, but through the eyes of Rick, a boy who was a bully in the first book, but is beginning to asks questions of his own about gender and sexuality and beginning to wonder, as his peers starts to get crushes and he doesn't, if he is on the asexual spectrum. Rick's metamorphosis from reluctant bully to embracing his own possibly queer identity was so great to read. I'm glad books like this exist, both for kids who can relate to them and for kids who can't.

I also read the first book in a new Rick Riordan presents series, The Last Fallen Star by Graci Kim. This book is based on Korean mythology and is so delightful. I especially love that the deities at the center of the magical Korean community are goddesses.

I could go on about the books I've read, but I'll also catch up on the writing things I've done. I've sent out a few more queries for Anna Otto, including one from a late coming agent request after a Twitter pitch party that happened back in June. I've revised my query yet again since the first six queries haven't gotten me a request, and I think it might actually be really good this time. I'm hoping that, if nothing else, this books gets me a respectable number of full requests. When even your writing friends who aren't getting agent offers seem to be getting full requests left and right it can be discouraging. 

I'm still plugging away on Harbor Lightkeep, and hoping to make much more progress now that both my kids will be out of the house for six hours five days a week. My summer trip to Colorado gave me an idea for a picture book and a middle grade book, so I have yet more things waiting in line for whenever Harbor Lightkeep is out with beta readers, or if I need a break from it.

It's now been about a year and a half since I started taking my writing seriously and querying the first MG book I wrote (in retrospect, it was not ready). I was sure at that point that I would have an agent by now, probably even an offer. It turns out writing is much more of a waiting game for most people than I realized, but I'm still glad I decided to take the plunge and pursue traditional publication. I've met an amazing community of fellow writers, discovered resources to refine my craft, and found friends to lean on when it feels like it will never by my turn. I desperately want it to be my turn not just someday, but soon. But in the meantime I'm trying to find the beauty on the winding path I'm on.

In Which I Recommend Some Books With LGBTQIA+ Representation

Now that I my kids are on summer break, I've found I have significantly less time to do anything other than hang out with my ten year old. Add in polishing up ANNA OTTO IS NOT A HORSE GIRL, which I've just started querying, and slowly working on my #WIP, and that doesn't leave much time for blogging. I have a little time right now, though, and I don't want Pride Month to end without giving some recommendations for middle grade books with queer rep.

Pictured above are three middle grade books I own and love with three different types of queer rep. The queer community is really diverse, and I'm glad to see a growing number of books in the middle grade market that shows that diversity. Queer rep is about more than girls having crushes on girls or boys having crushes on boys, though that's absolutely something that should be present in middle grade books.

Cattywampus is a dual POV book starring two twelve year old witches. Catybird looks like and identifies as a girl, but she is intersex and has XY chromosomes. She's afraid that because she's "not a real girl", her magical powers, which pass from mother to daughter in her family, will never work right. Some people might wonder why we need intersex rep in books because it's so rare. I learned recently that intersex people make up 2% of the population, which is the same percentage as the number of natural redheads. No one says natural redheads are so rare they don't need to see themselves in books. An important but non POV character in Cattywampus has two moms, so Ash managed to work in a little bit more queer rep, which is great.

The Sal and Gabi duology by Carlos Hernandez is part of Rick Riordan presents line. These are books written by BIPOC creators and about BIPOC kids featuring the writers' culture, folktales, myths, etc. Sal and Gabi is unusual for the line in that it's more science fiction than fantasy, but it's infused with Hernandez's Cuban American culture. It's not a part of the main storyline, but the MC, Sal Vidon, is aromantic and asexual. He's at an age when many kids are having their first crushes and even starting to date, and Sal makes it clear that crushes and dating are not part of who he is. I love how it's woven naturally into the story and doesn't feel forced.

The third book pictured is the second in the Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard series, by superstar "storyteller of the gods" Rick Riordan. One of the important secondary characters is Alex Fierro, who is genderfluid. Alex most often identifies as a girl and uses female pronouns but sometimes identifies as a boy and uses male pronouns. Alex and MC Magnus even have a conversation about what it means to Alex to be genderfluid and how it's different from someone who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns. This storyline fits perfectly into the Norse mythology that the series is based on. Alex is the child of Loki who, in the myths, was usually male but was sometimes female. Usually if Loki has a demigod child he is the child's father. In Alex's case he appeared as a woman and tempted Alex's father. There's some good queer rep in Riordan's Heroes of Olympus and Trials of Apollo books as well.

Of course these three books aren't the only queer MG books out there. They're just three that I love enough to own copies of. A few more I've read this year are Kacen Callender's King and the Dragonflies, which features a middle school boy coming to terms with his older brother's death and his own sexuality, The Only Black Girls in Town by Brandy Colbert which stars a girl with two dads, and The List of Things That Will Not Change by Rebecca Stead, which tells the story of the MC's dad getting married to another man. The third book in the Love, Sugar, Magic series by Anna Meriano deserves an honorable mention for its portrayal of two boys who might, or might not, have a crush on each other. At this age a lot of kids are figuring out their feelings of attraction, and I love that this was worked naturally into the story. Finally, another honorable mention is Sarah Kapit's Get a Grip, Vivy Cohen, which features an important subplot with Vivy's brother realizing he's gay and starting to date another boy. There are other books that casually mention a character having two aunts or two uncles who aren't featured in the book or a kid at school who has two moms or two dads. This has become common enough that I don't even have a specific list of books with this in mind.

I don't feel like I'm qualified to write a main character who is genderqueer or attracted to the same gender or multiple genders because that's not my experience, though I may try it with an important secondary child character someday. When I wrote my first MG book sixteen years ago, queer rep wasn't even on my radar. That book will probably never see the light of day, not unless I rewrite the whole thing. I may work some casual queer rep into it, but it wouldn't be the focus of the story. The second manuscript I finished, which, after six months on the shelf and then a massive rewrite, became ANNA OTTO IS NOT A HORSE GIRL features an important secondary character with two moms. They're only on page once and only mentioned a handful of times, but I specifically put them in because I wanted kids with two moms or two dad to feel seen. My WIP has more queer rep, though it's mostly in the adult characters. Two women who will be important mentors to the MC are married to each other. I'm still working out the details, but the book will also have asexual rep, which I can write from my own experience as a woman on the asexual spectrum. Someday I'd like to write an asexual MC, but, since I didn't realize I was on the asexual spectrum until I was in my 40's, it's more difficult for me to imagine writing a young adolescent who is actually aware of their asexual identity. 

Whether you, your child, or a child in your life as a student, library patron or other non family role, identify as part of the queer community and these books can serve as a mirror or you simply want to read or have the kids in your life read books featuring a diversity of experiences to better understand the world, there are a growing number of books in the middle grade realm that will do just that.

 

In Which I Hope My Words Are Delicious Because I Need to Eat Them Again

Remember one of my earliest posts when I talked about creating diverse characters as a White writer and came to the conclusion that it's okay to write a POV character from a marginalized identity as long as I research it carefully? Well, if you're a fellow writer reading this and you think that's an awesome idea it is not my job to stop you, but, personally, in the 8 1/2 months since I wrote that post, I have changed my opinion.

This is thanks in large part to my interactions with my writing community, the #MGWaves, which includes writers from around the world and from a variety of ethnic and racial groups. The more they shared about how they feel when someone who cannot understand their experience tries to write from that viewpoint, the more I realized that I need to leave those stories to writers who know them intimately.

What does this mean for my writing? Well, in a practical sense, it meant a huge revision of the book formerly known as Anna Ono. The character is now Anna Otto and her fear of not fitting in in her new home comes not from being a multiethnic city girl but from being an immigrant from Sweden who is half American but never expected to actually move to America.

Now you're probably asking, well, why are you any more qualified to write that? You're not an immigrant from Sweden. That is true. I did, however, live in Sweden for a year so I have personal experience with what it feels like to adjust to a new country and fear you'll never fit in. I also still have Swedish friends and know the culture well. Ultimately, as writers we all need to decide what type of viewpoint character we feel like we can write. 

I doubt I'll ever set a book in Sweden, but I think that with a combination of my own experience, research, and talking with my Swedish friends, I could write such a story accurately, especially if the story was of an American kid who moved to Sweden. I think I would have a much harder time writing a story that takes place in another European country or writing an immigrant from another European country even though my character would be White. 

I think I can write a cisgender boy accurately as well as a cisgender girl even though I have never been a cisgender boy. But, while I might someday tackle a secondary character who is a trans girl or boy or a nonbinary child, I would not attempt to write a POV character who was not cisgender for the same reasons I have decided it is not my place to write a POV character who is a person of color.

Secondary characters are different creature from POV characters, I think. It's a fine line to tread between portraying a diverse world and not having characters outside your own ethnicity there as tokens, but I do think it's possible and desirable. Anna Otto has a friend who is half Scottish and half Mexican American. He was in the original book and I did not feel I needed to change him during the revision. 

If this book is ever published, it's possible that someone might call me out on some of my choices, even though I've tried very hard to be fair and respectful. It is not possible to please everyone. However, if I am honestly trying to portray our diverse world while simultaneously not stealing the stories of writers who were ignored for far too long, I feel like I have done my level best.

Just for fun, here's an aesthetic I created for Anna Otto. When I wrote the first version of the book last spring I didn't even know what an aesthetic was.

In Which My Inbox Declares Itself a "Request Free Zone" and I Try (With Only Minimal Success) to Ignore It

 I love the community I have built with other writers, especially the #MGWaves. Since it doesn't involve going in to an office or having an official "team" in any way (at least pre-publication), having a community of writers to lean on can make this life feel less lonely. Especially since my main occupation for much of my adult life has been as a stay at home mom and I don't have another profession, finding "my people" in the writing world has been especially helpful. The Waves critique my work and help me become a better writer, they cheer me up when I have bad news, and they cheer me on when I have good news.

There's just one potential problem with being a part of a community of writers. Inevitably, some of them will end up pulling ahead of you on the writing road. When we started the Waves we had all applied with our middle grade novels to Pitch Wars in the fall of 2020. Quite a few people had gotten requests. I was not one of them. Two people ended up getting mentorships. As of this writing, one of those writers has an agent, and I don't think the other is far behind. Three others have gotten agents without the benefit of a mentorship program. Five have gotten mentorships through various other programs.

Now we're in the two week waiting period for two possible mentorship/editing opportunities: WriteMentor and RevPit. The Waves are talented writers. I will not be surprised if one or more of them win a mentee spot in each contest. I do not begrudge them those spots. However, at the same time, I find myself extremely envious that I cannot seem to even get myself in the running. Other writers, both in and outside the Waves, are getting full requests from agents and requests from contests for additional material while my inbox seems to have declared itself a request free zone.

To be fair, I did come close to getting a mentorship in the Write Team Mentorship competition fairly recently. I was basically a runner up. The mentors ultimately decided another writer would be a better fit, but they requested and read my full manuscript and sent me an edit letter that was just over a page and which led me to revisions that I think have made the book even stronger. I've also gotten several "champagne rejections" for Mousecracker, in which agents have named specific things they like about the book and said my writing is very strong but said the book is not the right fit for them. However, none of them have gone on to ask for the full, so even that can feel like cold comfort when so many people I know are getting much more hopeful news.

Sometimes it's tempting to just throw in the towel and figure out what career I want to pursue that doesn't involve constant rejection. Because the fact is, even agented writers get rejected by editors and even published writers get rejected by reviewers and readers. But then I remember how much books have meant to me in my life. I remember my vision to create characters who share the invisible disabilities I know intimately so that readers who live with them can finally see someone like them as a hero in the stories they read. I remember that lots of people, some of them published writers, have told me that I'm "an excellent writer". Do all excellent writers get published? No, they don't. However, I would venture to say that most, perhaps all, excellent writers who don't get published don't reach that milestone because they gave up.

So I take a page from Anna in Frozen 2 and, to paraphrase, "Do the next writing thing". Today I sent out some queries with my shiny new revised query and pages. I also worked on putting together an initial synopsis for my WIP. I'm more of a pantser at heart, thanks in part to my ADHD, but I'm trying to get more organized so I at least have a decent idea of the path the book will follow. I'm also continually working to improve my craft by reading well written books - some of the type I would like to write and others not. As a bonus, reading well written books is also a lot of fun. Today in my reading I'm traveling to the fantasy world of Lithvas, based loosely on Lithuania, which is part of my heritage. While I don't foresee myself writing a book very similar to Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver, I do at some point want to pull on the myths and legends of my Lithuanian ancestors to create my own story.

Maybe tomorrow or next week or next month or (shudder) even next year my inbox will shake off its funk and stop being a "request free zone". In the meantime, my documents full of new ideas are waiting, there's a world of good books to be read, and I just need to "keep swimming" (yes, I'm stealing a phrase from a completely different Disney movie :)) and do the next writing thing.

In Which, to My Great Surprise, I Write a Picture Book Text

 I have always loved picture books. When my kids were prime picture book age, I read piles and piles of picture books to them. Even though they're 10 and 16 now, there are still a handful of picture books that they both appreciate- particularly if they involve squirrels in my son's case and cats in my daughter's case. We still read Christmas picture books as a family during our advent readings. Both kids still have some picture books on the bookshelves in their rooms, and I saved my favorites that they didn't want on a shelf in the dining room. I have to admit that there were some I got really tired of (I can still recite Is Your Mama Llama? from memory), but it was so sweet to see my kids begin to fall in love with stories.

People who don't know much about writing often make the grave mistake of thinking that writing picture books is really easy. "Oh, that book has under 1,000 words (most often under 500 in more recently published books)" they think, "I bet the writer whipped that story out in under and house. Easy money."

Now, if you know anything about writing, querying agents, and the path to being traditionally published, you should know that that path does not, at any point in any genre or age group involve "easy money". Writing is hard work. Writing a picture book, precisely because it's so short, is in a way even harder than writing a novel. When I write a middle grade novel, I have at least 30,000 words and sometimes more than 60,000 to introduce my characters and world and take them on a journey, whether that's primarily an interior or exterior journey. In a picture book I have 500 words to do the same thing. You are likely familiar with the writing adage "show, don't tell". That's even more important in picture books. And if you're a picture book writer only and not a writer illustrator you need to leave a lot of room for the illustrator to show the story. No big scene or character descriptions like you can get away with in a novel. Your language needs to be really sparse, but at the same time vivid and lyrical. It's a tall order.

For all these reasons, I always thought I would never in a million years attempt to write a picture book. Then I shared a funny story with the #MGwaves about a time I thought there was a dog inside a vent in the kitchen and it turned out to be an alarm from an ipad sitting in a backpack below the vent. Several of them said I should turn that story into a picture book. I laughed then I thought, "Why not try?" So I wrote a story about a little girl who was sure there was a dog in the wall of her new house. And I sent it to some friends who have been writing picture books for awhile. And they didn't hate it. Actually, they liked it, and had some great suggestions about how to improve it.

It turned out I had fun writing a whole story in one sitting. So I wrote another picture book. This one was about a little girl who conquers her fear of the dark in a unique way. And that one was well received too. That's where I've stopped for now. Those two stories still need polishing before they're ready for an agent to look at, let alone an editor, but I think it's something I can do.

I'm not sure if I'll ever query an agent with one of those picture book texts. Don't get me wrong. I believe in them and would love to see them on shelves one day, but my heart is with my middle grade books. It's more likely that I'll keep seeking representation for those and look for an agent who will also represent the picture books once they've signed me for the middle grade. Or maybe I'll go wild one day and send out a picture book query. I would need to have at least one more polished manuscript to do that, since the equivalent of asking for a full in the picture book querying world is asking for more manuscripts and at least two are expected.

Either way, it's been fun to experiment with a very different type of writing and I'm glad I took the plunge. Turns out you don't know for sure if you can write something until you actually try it.