Y’all!  I’m excited.  EXCITED, I tell you!  Why?  Because I have the opportunity to host Miranda Kenneally, author of Catching Jordan, on the blog today.  As you’ll find out in my review tomorrow I absolutely adored this book which is just released from Sourcebooks Teen Fire.  When I say you need to rush out to a bookstore or the library to procure a copy I’m not thinking you should take a leisurely stroll.  I mean get there sooner than later!  Oh, and let me add that Miranda is also a fellow metro-DC dweller which makes me want to support her all the more.  Holla to the Nation’s Capital!

Please join me in welcoming Miranda to Galleysmith.

Girls Playing with Boys

According to statistics there are over 1,200 female high school football players across the country. What are some of the positives and negatives of blurring the lines between female and male sports? Do you support it?

Positives:

• Girls can be just as strong and fast as guys. Why not prove it?
• If girls prove they are as awesome as guys on the field, they can prove they’re awesome off the field. I can’t wait until we have a female president of the USA.
• Or even a Vice President!

Negatives:

• Girls’ body frames are more fragile than guys’. They get hurt more easily. I would be remiss if I didn’t say this.
• I don’t think there are any other negatives!

I definitely support girl power. One woman who truly impresses me is former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. I bet she’d get along well with my character in Catching Jordan, Jordan Woods. Not only is Dr. Rice a beautiful woman, she’s smart and she followed her dreams. She loves football, and would love to be the NFL Commissioner one day. She’s not scared to be herself: unique. I’ve met her and heard her speak many times about how her ancestors from Alabama were sharecroppers. As an African-American woman, she had many hurdles to get past in her life, and I know she’s glad she took risks. Everyone should take risks, regardless of sex or race or background. Otherwise, we’ll never evolve as human beings.

I guess what I’m saying is, Yes. Most guys are stronger than most girls. But if girls keep trying and working hard, they’ll eventually evolve to become stronger – maybe even stronger than guys one day.

I very much relate to Dr. Rice. I grew up in Tennessee. Not many people in my family had been to college. Hardly anyone thought I’d succeed in life. My high school guidance counselor told me I probably wouldn’t make it at a big university in Washington, D.C., and then she encouraged me to go to a local community college instead.

But I disregarded her comments and did what I wanted to do.

You should never let anyone hold you back from your dreams. I certainly didn’t. Dr. Rice didn’t.

I’ve gotten way off topic here, so getting back to girls playing sports generally played by boys. I think girls should play the sports they want to play, while keeping safety in mind.

If we all don’t try to improve or move beyond the status quo, the human race will only move backwards.

Miranda, thank you for joining me on the blog today.  It’s wonderful to get some girl power inspiration in the form of Jordan and you! And readers, don’t forget to visit again tomorrow to see my review of Catching Jordan.

For the first official post of November’s Teachable Moments feature of Straw House, Wood House, Brick House, Blow I’m excited to host author Daniel Nayeri.  In his thoughts below Daniel speaks more in depth about the genre focus of the four novellas that comprise the book.  Please join me in welcoming Daniel.

Okay. Hello? Is this thing on? Hello? Michelle? Did you turn on the Guest Post button?  What do you mean, there’s no button? I just start talking? How do people know I’m official? I’m not just some schmo off the L-train telling people—you know what, I’m just going to go right into it.

Dear People of Internet, lend me your looking.

When Michelle asked me in a super secret, very official capacity to take up the mantle of Guest Post, I first had to look up the bylaws, to make sure I could accept such a responsibility. After the background check, two late-round interviews, and a recommendation letter from my local librarian, I was given the passcodes. I’m in.

I’m a book writer. I also edit them. I’m prepared to get into arguments about pretty much anything in the comments section, so feel free to ask me about politics, religion, censorship, tattoos I think are stupid on people I personally know, or whatever.

For now, the term “teachable moment” has given me the impression that I should probably deliver some interesting and enlightening information about my book, STRAW HOUSE, WOOD HOUSE, BRICK HOUSE, BLOW.

One of my favorite aspects of SHWHBHB is that it can be used as a primer on genres. I love doing school visits and having two hundred 9th graders in an auditorium look at me like a complete crazy person when I tell them I’ll be teaching them about genres. Well, I don’t like that part. I like it when we start the conversation, and suddenly they’re throwing out their favorite aspects of a Western—gotta love the showdowns at high noon, the plucking of a steel guitar, a lonely tumbleweed rolling across the dusty plain. Or what they love about Sci-fi stories—there’s always the person who mentions alien hotties. Then we mention stories that blend the two, like “Firefly” or “Cowboys & Aliens.”

I love telling kids about what it took to write each story in Straw House, Wood House, Brick House Blow.

For the western, which is titled TOY FARM, I got into a lot of farm allegories, like Book of the Dun Cow and Animal Farm. I wanted to make Toy Farm about a teenage boy (a scarecrow) trying to figure out what it means to become a man—or rather, how to best become one.

The style has long, languid sentences, with a tone like you’re rocking in a chair on a front porch overlooking the vast prairie. And like a traditional western, it has themes like law versus lawlessness, the unforgiving landscape, and hey, you gotta have that showdown at high noon…wouldn’t be a western otherwise.

The sci-fi story–OUR LADY OF VILLAINS–is a near-future sci-fi set on the eve of “Re-Creation Day.”

In sci-fi, I’ve always been fascinated by the distinction between “near-future,” and “distant future.” There are a million exceptions, but generally, it helps to differentiate stories that are set just a little ahead of the present (think, The House of the Scorpion, I, Robot, or 1984 when it first came out) and the stories set after we’ve broken the space barrier and made contact with other life forms (like Star Trek, Out of the Silent Planet, and StarCraft). A Wrinkle in Time defies all categorization and should be grouped by itself as singular genius.

I became really fascinated with the transition between these two. When exactly do we go from dystopian fallout shelters and polluted cities to streamlined holo-decks with no homeless or hungry people because we can just materialize food and clothing? What kind of technology would we need to solve all our problems? And what price would we have to pay to get it?

The third story is called WISH POLICE. It’s a crime procedural drama about all the wishes that try to come true, but get locked up instead. The beat is the Imaginary Crimes Unit. The job is “to Project and to Swerve.”

Stories like Law & Order, Sherlock Holmes, Bones, or Castle aren’t really about each case. There’s a formula or procedure, and generally, each installment sticks to it. The good stuff is the interaction between the characters. We love watching the detectives grow, slowly, over the course of their serial mysteries and ingenious sleuthing. As for style, the hardboiled stories of Raymond Chandler are some of my all time favorites, with over the top metaphors like “it tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief,” or “as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.”

In this case, Saul, Ari, and Mack are all experts in wishes. They used to grant them.

But there’s the kind you make. And then there’s the kind that appear. Like Saul says, “every wish you make comes true, except for the ones that don’t…or can’t…or shouldn’t.” Those wishes become WISHes (Wicked Ideas Suddenly Human), and it’s up to our bickering trio to stop them before they give us what we shouldn’t want.

And the last story–DOOM WITH A VIEW is a love story from Death’s perspective. So you may as well know now, everyone dies by the end (oops, err, *spoiler alert*).

Yes, a romance. But not the undulating bosoms kind, but the Stardust, Castle in the Air kind. The stories set in the imaginary Old Timey Europe where anachronistic machines can be built out of wood and rope, and love is the strongest magic around.

So there you have it, four stories, four genres. I could probably bloviate on these for WAY too long. Like, the fact that all four stories are collected under the theme of the the Three Little Pigs and share thematic connections. But I’ve probably worn out my welcome. Thank you for reading. I’ll hand the reins back to Michelle now.

Thank you for visiting Daniel and thank you to Rachel Bee Porter for the lovely book related photos.  I’m thrilled to be focusing on Straw House, Wood House, Brick House, Blow this month and look forward to sharing more.

Today’s Teachable Moments post comes from Robert Sharenow, author of The Berlin Boxing Club [review], himself.  I have no doubt you’ll enjoy gaining more insight into the process of this book’s creation, particularly the inclusion of the cartoon panels interspersed within.  Please join me in welcoming Robert Sharenow to Galleysmith.

Confessions of a Failed Cartoonist

One of the most pleasurable aspects of working on my novel, The Berlin Boxing Club, was creating the illustrations and cartoons.  My boyhood dream was to become a cartoonist, but I had not really picked up a drawing pen and pad in more than twenty years, save for an occasional doodle or birthday card.  Through my lead character Karl, also an aspiring cartoonist, I got to rediscover the joy of drawing and in some way fulfill at least two of my personal ambitions by birthing my own comic strip (Winzig and Spatz) and superhero (The Mongrel) that both appear in the book.   For me it was some small redemption for one of my life’s bitter disappointments.

Growing up I had an unusual passion for comic strips, comic books, and political cartoons.  To me, the comic strip was one of the highest forms of narrative art.  I particularly reveled in the worlds of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts and Herge’s Tintin.  While Herge’s intricately drawn and plotted creation provided adventure and escape, Schulz offered a roadmap of the human condition. Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, and Snoopy were as real and dimensional for me as any characters in the history of fiction.    With just a few panels, Schulz conveyed story, character, humor, and emotion.   They cheered and comforted me and gave me rich insights into the workings of the world, reflecting my own struggles with family, love, hate, friendship, longing, success, and failure.  So from an early age, I drew caricatures and formulated ideas for original comic strips and comic book heroes.

Later I attended Brandeis University, where I drew political cartoons and a comic strip called Feedback for the school newspaper.  Like Gary Trudeau’s original Doonesbury strips at Yale, Feedback was loosely based on the lives of my roommates and friends.  When my friend Eric protested apartheid in South Africa, so did one of my characters.  When my roommate Dan was put on academic probation because of excessive library fines, so was one of my characters. When fraternities tried to come onto campus, one of my characters joined and one of my characters tried to block them. In perhaps my most forward thinking moment as a cartoonist, one of my characters even came out of the closet.  This was 1987, a full decade before Ellen DeGeneres became the first openly gay character on television.  Although, to be honest, one of my gay friends insisted he was my most underwritten character and that I shouldn’t be too proud of myself.  By my junior year, Feedback had developed a loyal following of readers, and I was, in some ways, living out my childhood ambition.

Every college cartoonist dreamed of being the next Gary Trudeau and having their college strip become the Doonesbury of our generation.  While I was at Brandeis grinding out Feedback, Yale’s newspaper cartoonist Sabin Streeter had a compilation of his comic strip Hollenhead published and nationally distributed by Plume.  To say I was jealous would be a vast understatement.   I envied Streeter with a passion that bordered on mania.  Someone bought me a copy of his book, and I steadfastly refused to read it.  I even hated the guy’s name.  Sabin Streeter?  Who was he trying to impress with that pretentious literary moniker?   (I now realize that it probably was and is his real name and not a pseudonym like Dr. Seuss or Mark Twain.)

At the same time, my jealousy of Streeter was counterbalanced by my already formidable collection of self-doubts.  Why weren’t my strips funnier?  Why couldn’t I draw better?  Why hadn’t I studied harder in high school and been able to go to Yale?  Then it surely would’ve been my comic strips published in a book, not his.

Sometime during my junior year, Newsweek Magazine contacted the newspaper and left a message for me that they intended to reprint one of my cartoons.  I hardly believed it when my Editor-in-Chief gave me the news.  But later that day, a person from Newsweek called me to work out the delivery of the art and payment for my services.  Payment?  They were going to pay me?   I couldn’t believe it.  Being published in a national magazine was thrilling enough, but to be paid for it was a whole other ballgame.  I had turned pro.

That one phone call from Newsweek seemed to reinforce everything I’d hoped for about my talent and my prospects for the future. Now I was convinced it was all going to happen for me and I would knock old Sabin Streeter from his perch as the voice of college America.  Surely a book contract and a national syndication deal would follow.

Soon, thanks to my publicist (also known as my mother), my entire family, friends, neighbors, and even some strangers, knew that one of my cartoons was going to be published in an upcoming Newsweek.  I was mildly annoyed by my mother’s bragging, but secretly happy that she was letting everyone know about my accomplishment.

One week prior to the issue coming out, I received my first check as a professional artist.  I can’t remember what the amount was, maybe $50 or $100, but it seemed like a fortune.  I had been paid to do something that I would’ve done for free!  What could be better?

One week later, just two days prior to my big publication day, Newsweek called again.

“The magazine’s decided not to run your comic strip.”

“What?”

I must’ve misheard him.

“Yeah.  I’m sorry.  The issue got really full.  It didn’t fit the layout anymore. These things happen.”

Over the next 30 seconds, I felt like vomiting, crying, lying in the fetal position and sucking my thumb, and/or screaming.  But instead I just stood there, phone in hand, mouth agape, wondering how my mother was going to retract her global notification.

Finally, I recovered my composure enough to ask.

“Can I keep the check?”

“Sure,” he said, with touches of both sympathy and pity.

I hung up the phone a broken man.  Not only did I feel my Doonesbury dreams evaporating, but I would now face years of friends and relatives asking, “So when is the Newsweek with your cartoon coming out?”   The agonizing answer was, Never.

I continued to write Feedback until I graduated, but something had been taken out of me.  All of the doubts I had about my ability to draw seemed to be reinforced by Newsweek’s supposed formatting crunch.  In truth, drawing was always a struggle for me. I never really buckled down and took art classes like I should’ve.  So I never had a great command of the discipline of drawing.  I frequently felt frustrated because my illustrations never seemed to match my imaginings.  I always seemed to be writing dialogue and characters that outpaced my ability to draw them.

Writing was the part of the process that always came easier to me.  But to be a novelist or any kind of writer seemed like an even more absurd ambition, given that I had never taken a writing class and was not a particularly gifted student.  Also everyone at Brandeis seemed to want to be a novelist. While being a cartoonist was a relatively unique ambition, with a thinner playing field of competitors.   If I couldn’t win that race, how would I ever get a novel published?

More than twenty years have passed since the Newsweek debacle.   In that time Charles Schulz died, and the golden age of the newspaper comic strip died with him (as did the golden age of newspapers).   I’ve had the great good fortune of having two novels published, two more than I ever expected.

When I first conceived The Berlin Boxing Club and the character of Karl, I thought about illustrating the book myself, and I was seized by the same insecurities that had plagued me as a college student.  But then I bought a sketchpad and pen and started to draw again.  I was still not a very good artist, but I could not believe how much fun it was.  How could I have let so many years go by without doing this?  Soon, if my daughters asked me to play with them, I would ask them to draw with me instead.   I quickly filled several sketchbooks with comic strip ideas, caricatures, and cartoons in much the same way I had when I was a kid.  But now, the drawings were all done from the perspective of my character, Karl.

Some critics have praised the illustrations in the book while others have thought them to be crude and not very good. I believe they are very authentic because I still possess the skills of a 15-year-old, self-taught artist, which is what Karl is too (funny how it worked out that way).

One of the harsh truths of adulthood is that you stop doing many of the activities that gave you pleasure in your youth.  I don’t play baseball, stuff quarters into pinball machines, or jam with my old band mates anymore.   And I may never illustrate another book.  But through The Berlin Boxing Club, I learned to love drawing again; and I enjoy it without any of the frustration, ambition, or bitterness that I used to feel creating Feedback.  So I have to thank my character, Karl, because without him I may never have picked up my pad and pen again in the first place.   I may even try to find Sabin Streeter’s book and give it a read.

I for one thought the cartoons in the book were an excellent enhancement, further I thought their style fit the age and advancement of Karl’s character.  Thank you Mr. Sharenow for sharing with us your personal experience and the meaning behind the cartoons in The Berlin Boxing Club.

Today on Galleysmith, I’m thrilled to host Gemma Halliday, author of Deadly Cool.  This is a story about a girl who’s ex-boyfriend is suspected of a murder she knows he’s innocent of.  As a result she begins to sleuth it all out only to discover she’s the next intended victim.  Please join me in welcoming Gemma!

Thanks for hosting me on your blog today!

On this leg of my Deadly Cool blog tour, I’m talking about my life as a teen.  And one thing that I remember vividly as a teen was being asked by adults what I wanted to do when I graduated.  My parents, God love them, were very free-thinking hippies who grew up to have four children, matching Volvos, chunky “car phones” and power-ties in the 80’s.  But they still held onto their core hippy beliefs that you could be anything in life that you wanted to be.  More than any other lessons they taught me, I thank them for that.  Because, as a teen, I felt like the world of possibilities was open to me.  Which is probably why I had a hard time settling on just one “what I wanted to be”.

When I was about 13, I was sure I wanted to be a concert pianist.  I had been playing the piano for years, and one of my favorite things to do to de-stress (And, yes, 13 year olds do have stress. It’s called homework.) was to sit at the piano and play for hours.  Even when we were dirt poor (before the car phones and power ties), my parents always made sure that we had a well-tuned piano in the house.  However, my dreams of concert stardom began to fade when I realized that piano players really don’t make that much money.  And it’s hard to be a cool starving artist in the subway when you’re lugging a baby grand along with you.

So by the age of 14 I had a new dream.  I was going to be a rock star.  (They made money and got to play music all day.  Score!)  I traded in my piano for a guitar and spent 6 hours a day practicing until I had calluses even Eddie Van Halen would be proud of.  (Hey, I warned you I grew up in the 80’s.)  Thanks to years of piano, I was already pretty good at reading music, so the instrument switch wasn’t that hard to make.  And after a couple of years, I was actually pretty good.  In fact, I was really good.  The only problem?  I needed a band.  And the only people I knew that played instruments were boys.  And the boys hated it that I was good… dare I say even better than they were?  So, without a kick-butt band behind me, my rock star dreams began to fade as well.

Luckily that was just about the time I started high school, and my very first class there was theater.  The idea that my body could be used as an instrument was incredibly cool.  Plus theater people were just plain fun.  They were goofy, funny, friendly, and almost like a little family.  I was hooked.  By the time I started attending college, I had made the decision I was going to be an actress.  At age 19, I packed all my belongings into my tiny Honda hatchback and drove to Los Angeles to make it big.

Amazingly, I did get acting work right away.  I was in a couple commercials, some TV shows, and even a few features films.  Unfortunately, even those gigs weren’t quite enough to pay the rent, so along the way I picked up a few other jobs.  To name a few I worked as an office temp, a pre-school teacher, a temporary tattoo artist, a 900 number psychic, a department store administrator, and a teddy bear importer.  I guess it was somewhere between the tattoos and the teddy bears that I realized maybe acting work wasn’t the most steady way to earn a living.

Luckily for me, I began writing and – what do you know? – it stuck.  I finally figured out what I wanted to be, even if it did take a few years.

So my question to you is… what did you want to be when you grew up?  And for you grown-up readers, is it what you actually ended up doing?

(P.S.  Join me on October 20th at The Secret Life of an Avid Reader for the next stop of my tour where I’ll be chatting about my first crush… and, yes, I’m naming names.)

~Gemma

As a child of the 80′s I can totally relate to this! Thank you Gemma for sharing some insight into your teen years!  Gemma Halliday is the award winning author of the bestselling High Heels mysteries and Hollywood Headlines mysteries.  Deadly Cool had it’s debut Oct 11th from HarperTeen, you should watch out for my review in the coming weeks!

Today I’m excited to share with you words from author Cinda Willams Chima whose new book in the Seven Realms Series, The Grey Wolf Throne [indie bound] [amazon], released on August 30th from Disney Hyperion Books. Please join me in welcoming her to Galleysmith.

The Language of Fantasy

Some of you may know that JRR Tolkien was a linguist first, author second. He developed the mythology and language of his world of Middle Earth before he created the stories that became fantasy classics.

I’m no linguist—I’m more of a storyteller, and so I tend to build a world around my characters. The mythology develops as I go along. This can present a problem with the coherence and continuity of the world I present on the page. This is especially true when it comes to language, if you just “make things up.” In names and in magical terms, I tend to be alliterative, and so halfway in I’ll discover that all of my magical terms begin with ‘m.’

The Heir Chronicles is set in Ohio, so there weren’t many language barriers there—for Americans, at least. Just a few Midwestern quirks, like using “pop” for “soda.”

One of my characters, Seph McCauley, was born in Canada, and so I spent a deal of time researching the subtle differences between Canadian and American English. (I didn’t want to get emails from Canada.) So Seph went to the washroom, washed his hands at the tap, then went to see a solicitor about his guardianship. [After I turned in my manuscript, my American editor wanted to change all of my Canadianisms. Apparently it’s common when UK books are published in the U.S. to “Americanize” the English. Me, I love these subtle differences in language.

Magical terms in both the Heir Chronicles and the Seven Realms series come mostly from Old English. There are several English-Old English dictionaries online, and Old English is simultaneously exotic and familiar.

For example, in The Dragon Heir,  ælf ǽling  is a term used for a drug used to enhance wizard performance, also known as mind-burner. In Old English,  ǽling means burning, burning of the mind or ardor; ælf  means elf, sprite, fairy, or goblin.

I had a different language requirement in the Seven Realms series. Han Alister is a streetlord—a streetgang leader on the mean streets of Ragmarket in Fellsmarch. I needed a voice—a language for him, and a street slang for him and his Raggers to use. Again, it had to be a subtle thing—if it were incomprehensible, readers would put it down. I used a particular cadence and structure in his narrative and dialogue, seasoning it with slang terms.

For the thieves’ slang, I relied heavily on several dictionaries of 18th and 19th century British thieves’ slang. I bought a couple, and used this one which is available online.

I also needed to change his voice over the four books in the series. Han goes to school, finds a tutor to teach him the ways of bluebloods, and learns to navigate the treacherous Gray Wolf Court. Gradually, the slang falls away, and his speech more and more resembles that of those around him.

It’s a fine line, too, when it comes to how much exotic language to include. My advice is to use a light hand, and construct your story so that readers can deduce the meaning of the word through context. Go easy on the apostrophes and consonants and the unpronounceable words. I spent an hour on the phone with a representative of Recorded Books, going over names, words, and their pronunciation for the Seven Realms series. I realized then that I didn’t KNOW how to pronounce some of them, since I created them on the page.

So—when it comes to exotic languages, a little goes a long way. Nobody wants to hack through a thicket of elvish in order to read your story. Except, maybe Tolkien—and he’s dead.

Check my website for a table of thieves’ slang terms (coming soon.)

Cinda Williams Chima has authored two best-selling fantasy series: The Heir Chronicles (The Warrior Heir, The Wizard Heir, The Dragon Heir) with two books forthcoming; and the Seven Realms series (The Demon King, The Exiled Queen, and the newly-released The Gray Wolf Throne) with more forthcoming. You can find information about her tour for The Gray Wolf Throne and other upcoming events here.

More information and excerpts from each book are available on her website, www.cindachima.com. Help for writers can be found under Resources/Tips for Writers, including a document called, “Getting Started in Writing for Teens.”

Chima blogs at http://cindachima.blogspot.com/, where you’ll find rants, posts on the craft of writing, and news. Visit her Seven Realms and Heir Chronicles pages on Facebook.

A big thank you goes out to Cinda Williams-Chima for sharing with us how the language in her fanatasy novels is crafted.  A lot of hard work goes into giving us a realistic and timely feeling book.