Life imitates art

I experienced a slightly disturbing case of life imitating art the other day. I had just finished listening to the audio version of Feed by M. T. Anderson. For those not familiar with the book, it’s set in a future where folks have the feed implanted in their brains, which is sort of like having an internet connection inside your head where you are bombarded by advertising almost constantly. The audio experience of the book, really brought this aspect of the book to life with reenactments of the advertisements complete with sound effects and music.

The other day I stopped in a Wal-Mart that opened back in the fall. While, any experience to Wal-Mart can be disturbing, mine was especially so because for a moment there I thought I heard a feed going inside my own head as some woman started telling me about the wonders of a new foamy hand soap that would keep me and my family safe from scary germs. It took me a moment to realize that this was a talking video advertisement located near a display of the foamy soap. As I walked through the store, I noticed there were more of these video ads scattered throughout the store. It was a weird experience.

I suppose a brain implanted feed can’t be too far away. I think I’ll pass on having one installed.

It’s Monday, What Are You Reading?

It’s Monday What Are You Reading? is a group blog hosted by J. Kaye’s Book Blog. You can link your blog by clicking here.

This week I finished up the awesome and hilarious graphic novel Tales Designed to Thrizzle: Voume 1 by Michael Kupperman, read the hard-to-put-down YA novel The Dark Divine by Bree Despain and listened to the audio version of  Mary Pearson’s YA novel The Adoration of Jenna Fox.

Tales Designed to Thrizzle: Volume 1

Graphic novel isn’t really the right term for this work by Michael Kupperman, as novel implies that there is one overarching story. This is not the case, instead this is a brilliant collection of a bunch of humorous short comics. Most are one or two pages at most. It’s in full color and many of the comics blend retro style comics with a healthy amount of weirdness to produce wonderful gems. Interspersed throughout are extremely funny fake advertisements. If you like your funny stuff on the quirky side, this is definitely worth checking out.

The Dark Divine

Bree Despain’s debut novel is a classic YA paranormal romance. From the first page I was sucked into the story even though at first, I wasn’t so sure about the seemingly perfect main character. Grace is a minister’s daughter who gave the impression of being  a little too goody-two-shoes, but she soon proved to be a wonderfully well-rounded girl, and it was hard to put down this book as I tried to find out what was going to happen to Grace and her tortured boyfriend, Daniel.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox

This young adult science fiction novel by Mary Pearson is set in a not too distant future, where medical technology has made some tremendous leaps forward. From the start we know that something is not quite right with Jenna, and we soon figure out what is going on, long before she actually works out what happened. Jenna is forced to come to terms with her own identity. The story raises some interesting questions about how far medical technology should go and what it means to be human.

What’s Next . . .

Right now I am reading the memoir This is Me, Jack Vance by Jack Vance and listening to the audio version of Feed by M. T. Anderson. I have plans to dive into Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl next, as well as Superfreakonomics by D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

What are you reading this week?

Big thanks to Jennifer at Old People Writing For Teens

Yesterday I got something other than bills and junk mail in the mail, which is always cause for celebration, and this was an extra special day because I received an awesome prize from Jennifer Wood at the very awesome blog Old People Writing For Teens. The prize included a copy of the YA novel Handcuffs by Bethany Griffin, which I can’t wait to read, a very cool journal for those mindless ramblings of mine and a pretty butterfly bookmark. Thanks, Jennifer and OPWFT!

New Jersey is a YA sort of state

Map found via Driko Land

A friend of mine alerted me to a book review in this past Sunday’s New York Times of Beth Ann Bauman’s YA novel Rosie and Skate. The novel sounds good, but that’s not why the review was pointed out to me. It’s because it opened with this line:

New Jersey is a teenage state: it looks awkward in places, has questionable ethics from time to time and plays perennial underdog to New York. Perhaps this is why it’s home to so much good young adult literature.

All along I thought that the reason I was drawn to writing and reading books for teenagers was because I was immature and really just a kid at heart, but perhaps it’s because like Beth Ann, I am a Jersey girl. These days, I am back in the garden state after living in Pennsylvania for the past seven or so years, excepting a six month stretch spent in Maine. It’s a weird and wonderful state in many ways, and although there may be nicer places to live there are few that are quite as colorful as New Jersey.

It’s Monday, What are You Reading?

It’s Monday What Are You Reading? is a group blog hosted by J. Kaye’s Book Blog. You can link your blog by clicking here.

This was a two book week for me. I listened to Paper Towns by John Green on audio and read Makers by Cory Doctorow.

Paper Towns

Paper Towns is a great YA novel, with all the elements that make for a good teen read. There’s silly pranks, a mystery and even a zany race against time road trip. It’s realistic fiction, and the sort of realistic fiction that actually feels real. The characters are multi-dimensional and fight off those usual high school stereotypes. Our main character is Quentin a high school senior on the verge of graduation, who spends a lot of time in the band room, even though he isn’t even a member of the band. His next door neighbor and childhood friend is the ultra-popular Margo Roth Spiegelman, but when Margo disappears and Quentin takes it upon himself to track her down, he starts finding out that he doesn’t know Margo as well as he thought he did. John Green has a knack for writing about and for teens, and his novels manage to be both fun and thought-provoking.

Makers

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author who occasionally writes for the YA end of the spectrum. His latest book, Makers, is clearly an adult novel. There are a lot of characters in this near-future science fiction book, but I think the main character here may be the technology itself. The biggest difference between the world of the novel, and our own is the existence of 3-D printers. Rather than paper these printers are fed with “goop” and what they turn out is various three dimensional objects. What this means is that production becomes much more of a small scale sort of thing. The novel follows this technology and the different players involved in using it as they try to understand the business logistics of it from the geeky engineers who just want to make stuff to the Disney executives who just want to make big bucks. It’s an interesting look at a very possible future.

What’s Next

Right now I just began the funny, out there graphic novel Tales Designed to Thrizzle Volume 1 by Michael Kupperman and am listening to the audio version of the YA novel The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary Pearson. I’m not sure what I’ll be diving into next, I bought a few YA novels with an Amazon gift certificate I had, and I’ll probably have to do an eenie meenie miney moe to figure out which one I read next.

Has the internet killed the slush pile?

If you are writer, you are probably aware of the fact that many publishers will not even look at manuscripts submitted by unagented writers, and getting an agent can be a real challenge. My Wall Street Journal reading father, is always helpfully passing on articles he finds interesting, and the latest was this article on the death of the slush pile which appeared in yesterday’s paper.

Among other things, it makes the case that the internet, which was supposed to level the playing field, may have actually made it even more difficult for new writers to get published, because the internet itself is like one big, overwhelming slush pile.

That said, I know for a fact that the slush pile has not been killed off completely. There are still some publishers out there who accept manuscripts from unagented writers. I submitted my own manuscript for The Balderdash Semesters directly to Flux, a small publisher specializing in YA fiction who still accepts manuscripts directly from authors. Digging through that pile of slush, editor Brian Farrey found my manuscript and decided that it was worthy of publication.

So, take that Wall Street Journal article and any other advice that warns you that it’s next to impossible for a new writer to get published, with a grain of salt.

Group Blog: Charting Your Journey

Today’s group blog topic, hosted by Stephanie Faris at Steph in the City is plans, specifically the plans for our literary careers. You can participate in this group blog by clicking here.

At first I was stymied by what to write about. Plans? What are those? I’m more a go with the flow sort of person. Then I read Stephanie’s story, and I realized that I too have tried out a few different plans before knowing just where I wanted to go, and believe it or not they all started when I was about ten years old.

That summer, I was going with my family on vacation to North Carolina. We had rented a condo there with a couple of other families, and were spending a week in the outer banks.

I had a plan. I was going to write a novel about that week, and it was going to be the greatest novel anyone had ever written ever. It was going to be called North Carolina (how’s that for brilliant?) and it was not going to be some silly kid’s book. No, it was going to be an adult novel (never mind that I didn’t read adult novels at the time) that was going to be a big fat 500 page book of pure literary awesomeness. In fact, it was going to be so good that Nancy Reagan herself was going to come to my town and give me an award.

What can I say? I was a strange kid.

Anyway, the reason you’ve never heard of the brilliant novel North Carolina before now is because I never wrote it. In the end that week-long vacation became nothing more than a few sentences in my cheesy little diary.

Fast forward to college, when I got into science fiction in a big time way. I was an English major so I read a lot of books, and I’m one of those people when asked to list her favorite book asks if she can pick her top 50 instead, but if there’s a genre for which I will always have a particular fondness, it is science fiction. So, when I took creative writing classes and found myself working on a novel, it was, of course science fiction. My professor asked that we pick a book whose style we liked and which we felt closely mirrored where we wanted to go with our novel. My choice was The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

Unlike North Carolina, some of you may have actually heard of The Space Merchants, though probably not many. It’s not exactly Catcher in the Rye. Anyway, The Space Merchants can in no way be accountable for the complete mess of a novel that I finally completed and turned in as my honors project. The funny thing is that I’ve been thinking about this novel, and its basic premise and realize that it might work really well as a young adult novel, but with completely different characters and a b-story that actually makes sense, well, for that matter, an a-story that actually makes sense.

I didn’t stop writing when I got out of school, but I’ve never been good about focusing on things so I jumped around between a bunch of different projects, including doing some work on something called The Balderdash Semesters, which did after years and years of off and on work turn into something suitable for publication, and so suddenly I realized I’m a YA author.

With that realization, my own diabolical plan was born. I am going to write some awesome young adult novels. They are going to be the kind of books I would want to read, and maybe that will bring success in the form of financial gain, and maybe not, but either way I’ll be doing what I love, and that’s pretty cool.

Authors can do more than write books

They can also make hilarious videos and post them on YouTube, as the below spoof commercial proves. I found this by way of blogger Megan Rebekah. The star and creator of the spoof commercial is Lara Zielin author of Donut Days. And authors if you are looking for a way to promote books, hilarious YouTube videos never hurt. I am now thinking I need to get my hands on a copy of Donut Days.

Here’s Lara’s Bluggie video:

A rejection letter that brightened my day

Today, I received a rejection letter that actually lifted my spirits, and I am not saying that to be sarcastic. First off I was surprised at finding the envelope, with my former address written in my hand on the front, the yellow forwarding sticker in place to make sure that it reached me here in New Jersey. I was surprised because as far as I knew I didn’t have any submission out there that I was waiting to hear on.

I opened up the envelope to find a form rejection letter with a hand-written note of apology. The rejection letter was for a short story I had submitted about a year ago, and had already written off as being rejected, even though I hadn’t heard back. I even wondered if I had done something really dopey like not putting a stamp on my return envelope or something.

In fact, the reason the rejection was so long in getting to me was my story kept going from the “to be reconsidered” file to the “maybe” file at the magazine. Although, the final decision was no, I am excited that my story was an almost. I should probably point out that this is a ‘zine that I actually occasionally read, and I greatly admire many of the authors who have been published in its pages. I’m avoiding naming specifics because I don’t want them to be labeled as the publication that took a year to get back to an author.

So, I take encouragement from this rejection, and, will when I have another story that I think might be right for them, try them again, as they requested. Never give up, and if you have any submissions out there, that you haven’t yet heard on, perhaps that’s because they too are bouncing around from “to be reconsidered” to the “maybe” pile.

It’s Monday, What Are You Reading?

It’s Monday What Are You Reading? is a group blog hosted by J. Kaye’s Book Blog. You can link your blog by clicking here.

I’m cheating this week. I was on the road last Monday, and didn’t get around to participating in the group blog. So, today’s post is actually what I’ve been reading over the past two weeks. I read both of my Christmas gift books The Devil’s Eye by Jack McDevitt and The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett. I also listened to the audio version of Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, read The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell and an all ages sort of picture book by Jon Muth called Stonecutter. My quick reviews on each of these books are listed below.

The Devil’s Eye

Jack McDevitt writes the sort of science fiction novels that are perfect for escaping into, especially during the dead of winter. The Devil’s Eye is part of the series chronicling the adventures of far future antiquities dealer Alex Benedict and narrated by his loyal assistant and pilot Chase Kolpath. These novels combine mystery and space-faring science fiction and remind me a little bit of Sherlock Holmes with spaceships, though Chase is far cooler and prettier than Watson. At the start of The Devil’s Eye, the pair are contacted by a bestselling horror writer with a cryptic message and zip off across the galaxy to try and solve the mystery. Although Alex and Chase figure out what’s going on well before the conclusion of the novel, they then find themselves in a race against time to try and avert certain disaster. The Devil’s Eye like everything I’ve ever read by Jack McDevitt is a wonderfully entertaining novel.

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective and a World of Literary Obsession

It will probably come as no surprise that I love books, and I have a soft spot in my heart for books about bibliophilia and book collecting. I do make a small amount of extra money dealing in used books and find the used book world to be a strange and fascinating place. In The Man Who Loved Books Too Much Allison Hoover Bartlett takes readers into that world, as she introduces them to a small time criminal obsessed with expensive books who lacks the means to acquire his books through legal means. Bartlett tells the story of John Gilkey the thief who stole thousands of books from used book dealers mostly by using stolen credit card numbers. He’s an interesting character, and the glimpse into the collectible book world is fascinating. It’s a must read book for anyone who loves books not only for the stories they contain, but also as wonderful physical objects.

Leviathan

Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan is a big change from his previous Uglies series. The novel is a steampunk tale set at the beginning of World War I in which the British travel the skies in huge living gas ships made of fabricated animals. Our two main characters are Deryn Sharp a girl posing as a boy aboard one of those British air ships and Prince Aleksander of Austria who is a devotee of Clanker culture and prefers to get around in huge machine walkers. The paths of our two characters cross and they become connected in an unlikely alliance. This is a quick-paced story with lots of action, and if I had one complaint it’s that it ends too soon. It is obviously part of a planned series, but the ending leaves far too many loose threads, and I will likely have to wait nearly a year before the next book in the series is published.

The Wordy Shipmates

Sarah Vowell has a gift for writing about history in an engaging laugh out loud style. Proof of that is that she is able to make even the dull drab Puritans she chronicles in The Wordy Shipmates entertaining and amusing. The book tackles not that first wave of Puritans that arrived on the Mayflower and that American school kids traditionally study right before Thanksgiving, but the next wave that came over on the Arabella and included the very wordy John Winthrop. Vowell describes the early years of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as well as Rhode Island and how the events of those Colonial years helped to shape the present day United States, which bears little resemblance to those early settlements. The sort of history that Vowell writes bears little resemblance to your boring high school history textbook. Vowell breathes new life into these musty old historical figures with her unique view of things and her sarcastic wit.

Stonecutter

I’m familiar with the works of Jon Muth from having read his picture books Zen Shorts and Zen Ties, books that kids will enjoy that also have a positive message. I found Stonecutter shelved in the children’s nonfiction section at my local library. Physically it resembles a small hardcover “chapter book” but inside it looks more like a picture book, with simple black and white illustrations each accompanied with one or two lines of text. The simple fable-like tale, however, is probably more geared towards adults than kids. It’s a beautiful and thought-provoking book that can be appreciated by all ages.

What’s next?

Right now, I am reading Makers by Cory Doctorow and listening on audio to Paper Towns by John Green. I’m not sure what’s on tap after I finish those.

What have you been reading?