Thursday Blogroll, 10 January 2013

So for 2013, I've told myself I'm going to put my shoulder to the wheel and post every week. That will be Tuesdays. I think it will help me to have a solid day on which I'll get something up here, and then I can create a bit of a system. (I choose Tuesdays because that's the day that new books release.)

Therefore, I make no guarantees about this Thursday post, but I'd started it in 2012, and I'm hoping to do a lot more blog reading this year, and so I need a place to share with you the cool stuff I'm finding. If I post this, it will appear on Thursdays...but I might not always post it. :)

Here's what's neat this week.


Valerie Cole has started a new feature called "Writers Like Us" where she interviews writers about their publication process (and gives away books!) So far there have been two, Jodi Meadows, author of ASUNDER and Elizabeth La Ban, author of THE TRAGEDY PAPER (which is on my TBR this month.) It's a really simple interview format and fun to read. I think the most enlightening is the question about how many books each author has trashed before getting to their debut--I find the trunk novel to be incredibly important, and it's nice to see people talking about them openly.

I have to give Valerie the credit for tweeting this one--Real Men Read YA, a brand new blog by a 30-something dad who's making his forays into stuff like ANNA AND THE FRENCH KISS. Because real men read about teen romance. And mermaids. It's hilarious, and fun, and so far, the reviews are good. This is one to watch. Tweet the author @RealMenReadYA

Speaking of twitter, Molly Jaffa of Folio Literary Management posted a rockin' post called The Writers' Guide to Rocking It on Twitter in which she gives some great insight into good twitter handles, good twitter behavior and (gulp) what agents sneak around and look for on an author's twitter when they're interested enough to look. 

Of course, I've read lots of interesting things this week, but those are some at the top. Is there something you think I (and everybody else) should see? Rec it in the comments.

Happy reading!

Why #Hashtag Says Important Things About Writing

Photo: American Dialect Society

So in my spare time, I'm a linguist.

Or is it that in my spare time, I'm a novelist?

At any rate, I spend a lot of time thinking academically about language, and then come home and think about it from the perspective of a writer, as well. This weekend was the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society, which was founded in 1889 to analyze language use and change in North America.

Now, one thing that we do in ADS is vote on the "Words of the Year," which is where we get to put words into the high school yearbook categories of "Most Creative" "Most Outrageous" "Most Likely to Succeed," and so on. It's a lot of raucous fun with people who at once take this task way too seriously and yet with a great deal of irreverence.


This year, the word of the year is #hashtag,  which beat out marriage equality in a close vote because of its sudden prominence and migration from Twitter to other forms of social media, like Facebook and even blogs.

But two years from now, will we know what a hashtag is, and will we care?

In January of 2012, how many of you knew the neighborhood where the wealthiest people in Seoul reside? This year, thanks to "Gangnam Style," there are probably few of you that don't know its name. Three years ago, tweet was probably a verb most people associated with actual avian creatures. In 2009, it was voted Word of the Year for the social media network that is probably our first association with it now.

Also on the various ballots this year were marriage equality (most likely to succeed) and YOLO (tied with phablet for least likely to succeed).

Often, as the New York Times notes, the ADS chooses a WOTY with some staying power, like occupy, app, or tweet. But sometimes a word has a meteoric rise to popularity, and later, it falls almost as precipitously, as in the case of the 1990 WOTY, bushlips. 
 
What does this have to do with writing?

One of the biggest problems writers face, especially YA writers, is that we have to make something that feels authentic to the teen experience, when the experience of teens changes almost by the minute. I'm only sixteen years older than my nephew, but I didn't get a candybar cellphone until I was a college graduate, whereas he got an iPhone for Christmas (and his nine-year-old brother got his first cellphone for his birthday this year.)

Language plays a big part in that. What's cool this year may well be stigmatizingly lame next year—this is exactly the kind of thing that the ADS attendees get into (very friendly and civilized) fights about at the WOTY meeting. As writers, we know that choosing the right words gives characters meaning and depth, and the wrong word pulls the reader out of the story.

I had an experience recently reading a future dystopian where the author had given new names to technology, as well as invented a new word for cool. But because she didn't explain how the new technology was any different from texting or why the characters used a different word to mean "cool," I was thrown out of the story to ask those questions of in my mind every time the words appeared. I found it distracting, and it was one of the many reasons I wound up not finishing the book.

When we write, especially for those of us who are planning books in hopes of commercial contracts, we're looking at anywhere from 1-3 years from the time we write "the end" to the time when that book hits the shelves. So reaching for the latest and loudest and coolest isn't always the best, and even in a future society, creating new language can sometimes create a bit of a disconnect.

Words with staying power, like cool and crazy have the power to make characters sound appropriately teen, without dating the book.

After all, even Katniss Everdeen rode on a victory train. 

The full WOTY rundown (and if you look at the video, you can see me live-tweeting the results from the second row) at The Visual Thesaurus

Why More Authors Should Be Like Hitler

Photo by Jessica Schley (cc)

Thought I'd go for a deliberately provocative title today.

Here's the thing about Hitler. He wrote this book, MEIN KAMPF. And many, many years later (in 1998, to be exact), Houghton Mifflin published it in this very compact, chunky volume.

This wasn't Hitler's doing. But it's given him a crazy, crazy sales advantage over every other book in the German history section.

MEIN KAMPF, as it turns out, is a really great bookend.

Every night, when we straighten the store (aka do "recovery"), we try to get every book so that it is standing upright, spine out, so that the shelves look beautiful. We do this by facing out titles that will hold up other titles.

Yes, we try to face out new releases, and hardcovers, and books that are selling well--this often happens by default, because when you have seven copies of a hardcover, it takes up less space to face it out rather than to let all seven stretch across the shelf. But sometimes there's no new release, or no book with a bunch of copes—and then, with the eye of a practiced recovery artist, we look for a book that is solid enough, not too wide, not too short, not too flimsy.

MEIN KAMPF keeps fitting that bill.

Why does this matter? Because faced out books sell more.

Go into a bookstore and look around a fully shelved section (i.e., not the front with all the tables and bestseller shelves). Which books catch your eye first? The ones with their whole covers facing you. When I put away a stack of books that customers have pulled off the shelves, usually 30-60% of them are books that are faced out. The customer saw the whole cover, and nabbed the thing. A book that has been nabbed is much more likely to be bought.

Authors often despair over bookstore presence. If they aren't a bestseller, or their publisher isn't paying co-op (which means they go on one of those promo tables you see—yes that's all paid placement), their book gets lost in spine-out land. This causes some authors to come into a store and try to move their book around, which is unhelpful for a whole lot of reasons, both to the booksellers and to the author.

But face outs? Those are totally fair game. Go to the shelf, find your book where it is, and, if there's room on the shelf, you can wiggle the book into a faced-out position. Face out your friends' books while you're at it. As long as you don't disrupt the order of the other books on the shelf, and face your book out right where it sits, we really don't mind. Even if it doesn't sell more, I can guarantee more people will take a look.

Strict Pick: ODDLY NORMAL by John Schwartz

My full up-front disclaimer: one of the primary reasons I'm so excited for this book is that John Schwartz's daughter, Elizabeth, was one of my student employees when I was working as a student services assistant at my alma mater. I met John and Joe many times over the intervening years, and I'm so excited for their important story to hit bookshelves today.

The LGBT memoir is almost a genre unto itself. Each person's experience is different, but there are almost always some unifying themes: difficulty connecting with family, the "coming out" narrative.

This memoir isn't like that.

For starters, it's written by John Schwartz, a father of a gay teen, rather than by the teen himself.

See, John and his wife never were confused. They knew Joe was gay before Joe knew. On the interview John did yesterday with Terry Gross, he describes how Joe, who was a precocious reader, found the word, "Homosexuality" at about age 5 or 6, and then looked it up—only to find, to his dismay, that apparently boys were supposed to like girls.

John spent all of Joe's childhood trying to figure out how not to jump the gun: how do you let your child come out to you naturally and at his own pace, without making it seem to him that you are invalidating his experience by saying, "Oh, you were the last one to know." How do you balance your child's natural flamboyant energy with your desire to keep him from doing things that will cause him to be ostracized? (There's a heartbreaking story about the conflict behind their choice to hide Joe's Barbies in the attic to keep him from taking them to kindergarten—is it the right thing to do? Will it hurt him? Are they being terrible parents, or making way for him not to be bullied?)

And most importantly, how do you face the moment when, despite your unwavering, constant acceptance of your child and his sexuality, he decides that death is preferable to the ongoing harassment he experiences at school?

ODDLY NORMAL is a memoir that doesn't follow the traditional "overcoming your family's hatred" narrative, for as the U.S. becomes a nation that increasingly accepts marriage equality, that repeals DADT, features same-sex romances on popular teen shows like GLEE, that narrative starts to change. ODDLY NORMAL is an LGBT story for the 21st century—about how one lives in a family where you are accepted and loved, but still have to go through the process of learning to accept and love yourself.

You can listen to Terry Gross interview John and his wife about this book at the NPR website.

Strict Pick: THE CASUAL VACANCY, by J.K. Rowling

I said that last week and this week's Strict Picks would be "If you happen to be living under a rock" kinds of recommendations. Although, as I was tweeting about this, I discovered that one of my writing friends apparently does live under a rock and, despite the biggest media push aside from the book I'm calling 50 Bit Grayscale, did not know that Rowling had a new book coming out.

So...

Rowling has a new book coming out today. And I'm thrilled.

Here's the summary from the publisher: 

When Barry Fairbrother dies in his early forties, the town of Pagford is left in shock.
Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war.
Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils...Pagford is not what it first seems.
And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults.

This is not HARRY POTTER. 

And yet I'm so excited to read it I may have camped in the receiving department until someone opened a box so I could read the first chapter. 

Which begs the question: what makes me so confident in an author to follow her into a completely different genre of books? Harry Potter was middle grade fantasy, this is adult literary. No matter how much I love Harry Potter, there is no doubt that TCV is going to be a complete 180. So why get so excited?