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We still have a few days before the official start of National Children’s Book Week, which is May 7-13, but the wonderful bookstores in the Houston area aren’t going to make us wait for a great event. Speaking of great events, I want to remind everyone that Lynne Kelly’s debut novel CHAINED launches next week! Look for it in stores May 8. If you haven’t already done it, mark your calendars for her launch at Blue Willow Bookshop on Saturday May 12 at 2:00 p.m.
The Children’s Museum of Houston is getting a head start on National Children’s Book Week. You’re invited to join them in celebrating the enchanting world of reading. Ongoing activities include:
•Prince and Princess Crowns •Gingerbread Man Decorating •Magic Wand •Invent with Ernest the Balancing Bear •Fantasy Postcards •Optical Illusion Exploration •Flip Books •Hidden Rainbow
Herman Parish, nephew of Amelia Bedelia’s creator, Peggy Parish, and the author of many books about Amelia Bedelia, will discuss and sign AMELIA BEDELIA’S FIRST VOTE, the newest book in the Amelia Bedelia series.
For important information about this event, please see
Remember those stereo store ads from the ’70s—We’re having a BLOWOUT SALE! Okay, maybe some of you don’t remember these ads. Maybe some of you don’t remember stereo stores—that was before Best Buy came along. Anyway, courtesy of Blue Willow Bookshop, Houston is having a YA BLOWOUT! Between now and next Wednesday, Blue Willow will host NINE (9!) YA authors. For the two multi-author events, they will hand out line tickets early, so be sure to check their website for complete information.
Also, the Houston Public Library is celebrating African American History Month, and one of their big events is is a visit from award-winning illustrator, Floyd Cooper. If you know kids who love to draw, be sure to take them to meet this inspiring illustrator.
Bewitching can be a beast. . . .
Once, I put a curse on a beastly and arrogant high school boy. That one turned out all right. Others didn’t.
I go to a new school now—one where no one knows that I should have graduated long ago. I’m not still here because I’m stupid; I just don’t age.
In case you missed her announcement, Lynne Kelly, author of the upcoming middle grade novel CHAINED, is offering a book club kit giveaway for teachers and librarians. The kit will go to a classroom or reading group and includes ten books, a tote bag, a Skype visit, and bookmarks and signed bookplates for each kid in the group. Lynne will also send bookmarks to everyone who enters. Details and instructions are here in this blog post. Lynne’s contest is open from now until May 1st.
Item #2
If you are in the Houston area, mark your calendars for Saturday, February 18. The Houston YA/MG Writers are hosting a FREE workshop by award winning, multipublished author, Kimberly Ivey.
Purpose, Power and Pizazz! Learn to organize the components of your book, beginning with visualization of your story’s structure, followed by dividing those components into chapters with purpose and punch. Discover how to avoid trouble spots and fine tune tension, pacing, and hooks like the pros.
We start at 9:30 but come at 9 if you’d like to chat. The meeting is in our permanent location- the Community Room at the H.E.B. at 9710 Katy Freeway, on the north side of the freeway. For questions, please email Jessica Capelle at [email protected].
IMPORTANT: Bring one full chapter of your work in progress for brief exercises, plus pen, paper and laptop for notes.If you don’t have a full chapter to work with, bring what you’ve got or just take notes- this will be valuable for us all.
Another great week of author and illustrator events is here! Something for everyone: a picture book author/illustrator, a Newbery honor winner, a popular author/screenwriter and a quartet of YA authors. Mark your calendars!
Divya Srinivasan, an illustrator and animator living in Austin, Texas, will lead a special storytime featuring LITTLE OWL’S NIGHT . It’s evening in the forest and Little Owl wakes up from his day-long sleep to watch his friends enjoying the night. Hedgehog sniffs for mushrooms, Skunk nibbles at berries, Frog croaks, and Cricket sings. A full moon rises and Little Owl can’t understand why anyone would want to miss it. Could the daytime be nearly as wonderful? Mama Owl begins to describe it to him, but as the sun comes up, Little Owl falls fast asleep.
Jennifer L. Holm, New York Times bestselling children’s author and recipient of three Newbery Honors, will discuss and sign her books for children, including SQUISH, a tale of microscopic proportions.
Book:
“We are a family on a journey to a place called wonderful” is the motto of Deza Malone’s family. Deza is the smartest girl in her class in Gary, Indiana, singled out by teachers for a special path in life. But the Great Depression hit Gary hard, and there are no jobs for black men. When her beloved father leaves to find work, Deza, Mother, and her older brother Jimmie go in search of him, and end up in a Hooverville outside Flint, Michigan. Jimmie’s beautiful voice inspires him to leave the camp to be a performer, while Deza and Mother find a new home, and cling to the hope that they will find Father. The twists and turns of their story reveal the devastation of the Depression and prove that Deza truly is the Mighty Miss Malone.
2011 is winding down, and what a fantastic year it has been for author visits in Houston! We had our first ever Tween Reads Festival, which is now planned as an annual event. If you missed seeing Mary at Blue Willow Bookshop last week, you have two more chances! Scroll down for the info. I hope to go see her again, but in case I don’t write about it, you can read my post about Mary’s launch at Blue Willow Bookshop.
We’ve had so many great authors here this year. At times I was swamped with other work and didn’t get a chance to write posts about some of our wonderful author visits, but if you’d like to read about the ones I managed to write about, you can see their posts here:
Sophie Jordan will sign & discussVANISH, the dramatic follow up to her debut paranormal young adult novel Firelight.
To save the life of the boy she loves, Jacinda did the unthinkable: She betrayed the most closely-guarded secret of her kind. Now she must return to the protection of her pride knowing she might never see Will again—and worse, that because his mind has been shaded, Will’s memories of that fateful night and why she had to flee are gone.
Mary originally wrote the book in third person with both the male and female main characters’ points of view. Her agent asked her to rewrite it in first person, from just Lenzi’s (the female main character) POV. In one of our Houston YA/MG Writers meetings, Mary talked about how she wrote from the senses to create such a deep POV for her main character.
She rewote her novel in first person, and SHATTERED SOULS sold. The acquiring editor had made it clear that there would be significant revisions, so Mary was expecting to be busy with rewrites but she never expected what she called the “5000 word Letter of Doom.” For a great post on this fourteen page revision letter, read Mary’s blog tour post at I Am A Reader Not A Writer.
And for a real treat for all you writers, Mary’s editor, Jill Santopolo, posted some of her actual revision notes for SHATTERED SOULS on Books Complete Me.
Mary brought several photos of preliminary designs for the cover. The original plan for the cover was to have an origami rose on glass (pictured here). As is usual with a big publishing house, the author had no input on her book’s cover, but after going through many changes, SHATTERED SOULS ended up with a gorgeous cover.
For the launch of her debut novel, Mary did a whopping 123 stop blog tour I’ve posted links to a few of my favorites here, but here is the entire list if you’d like to catch up.
Review from Patricia’s Particuliarity
Review from Reading Vacation
Interview with Lenzi, the main character in SHATTERED SOULS on
Mary's writing is a natural expression of her love of reading and a fascination with the flexibility of the human imagination. Books make the impossible possible.
Prior to attending University of Houston Law School, Mary received a B.A. in English Literature with a minor in Drama from the University of Houston. She has taught drama and playwriting in a large public high school and English in a private school. Currently, Mary teaches acting to children and teens at a private studio in Houston, Texas.
She is represented by Ammi-Joan Paquette of the Erin Murphy Literary Agency.
Mary lives in Houston with her husband, three kids, two dogs, her daughter's pet rats, an Australian Bearded Dragon and dozens of Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches. (The roaches are long story—don't ask.)
Worst Writing Mishap
I grew up performing in theatre, so I’m pretty immune to embarrassment. If I do something silly, I blush, apologize, and brush it off. That’s why this post is sort of hard for me.
There are lots of things I’ve done that qualify as writing mishaps: not changing the name of the agent in my query, thanking the wrong agent for the full request, sending the wrong verson of my manuscript. All of these are mishaps, but they don’t stick with me. I make mistakes. We all do. They don’t faze me too much.
The writing mishap that I’ve had a hard time shaking is one that happened entirely by coincidence.
I wrote Shattered Souls four years ago and entered an early version of the manuscript in a contest. At the time, the opening scene was on the beach with Zak, Lenzi, and Zak’s stoner friends, Greg and Cynthia. I modeled this pair of friends after some folks I knew in real life.
The characters of Greg and Cynthia were absolute losers. You know the kind. They work only to support the next session of partying and mooch off other folks. Overall, they’re worthless.
Well, one of the contest judges wrote a note in the manuscript admonishing me for these characters. “If this is a shout out to Cynthia Leitich Smith and her husband, Greg, it is not tasteful or appropriate.”
I was mortified. I knew who Cynthia Leitich Smith was, but had no idea her husband was named Greg. Heck, at the time, I didn’t even know she was a fellow Texan. Why on earth would I give them a “shout out” by making them despicable? Way to make friends, right? Ugh.
Of course, I changed the names right away. It’s all irrelevant now, because the entire scene was cut along with Cynthia and Greg, but it was so embarrassing to me that the judge thought I was that rude. I was grateful though. What if it had gone out there like that and somebody else thought the same thing?
Since then, I’ve met Cynthia and told her about her stoner counterparts in my early draft. If you know
4 Comments on Guest Post: Mary Lindsey's Worst Writing Mishap (Shattered Souls), last added: 10/2/2011
What a terrific story. After reading it I will be thinking about these two characters when I read this book. Seems almost a shame that they were cut from the final manuscript. Thanks Casey for a featuring Lindsey's post.
After I finish sending that writing contest judge a cyber-slap upside the head, I want to say that I live in fear of doing this exact thing. (Not with Cynthia and Greg, but in general.) I've made numerous name-changes in the course of writing my current ms, not just between drafts, but between the ARC's and the final version, and I'm still worried that I've inadvertently hijacked someone's name in a way that will somehow offend.
omg, that's hilarious! With my writing, I'm always afraid of the same thing, mostly b/c I'm a pop culture n00b. So whenever I start a new project, I sent a list of character names to one of my friends who lives/breathes/eats pop culture and change any names she says are too close to existing ones.
I’m posting our weekly events a bit early this week because we have a big event coming to Houston, the Chills and Thrills Teen Book Tour, featuring Lara Chapman, Tracy Deebs, Jordan Dane and Sophie Jordan. Also, the very popular MG writer, Michael Scott will be visiting Houston. The particulars of these visits are at the bottom of today’s post, so don’t forget to scroll down!
This past weekend at our YA/MG writers meeting, Mary Lindsey talked about writing in deep POV from a theatrical background. Although I appeared in a few school plays, I have never taken acting classes, so even something which Mary said everybody knew, like the “cup of coffee” method of sensory exploration, was news to me.
Deep, personal exploration of sensory memories brings realistic tension to scenes—you can tell the author has a real experience with the situation. Mary used a personal story about a traumatic event from her childhood to demonstrate how she used sense memory recall to create a realistically terrifying scene in her novel Shattered Souls (debuting from Philomel Books December 8, 2011).
When she needed her main character to have a unique habit—something other than the run-of-the-mill hair-twisting or nail-biting, Mary used the sense memory recall method to think of things she found/finds soothing and came up with a combination of memories that blended into a unique habit for her character.
Another technique Mary discussed was object endowment—giving an object characteristics it doesn’t actually have to link it emotionally to a person or event.
Halfway through the meeting we took a break to refill on coffee and pastries then reunited for a amazing “around the room” review of what everyone is working on. As always, I am flabbergasted by the talent and dedication of the Houston YA/MG Writers. What a great group!
Mary recently had a blog tour for the upcoming release of Shattered Souls. Check out these blogs to read all about it:
We still have a few days before the official start of National Children’s Book Week, which is May 7-13, but the wonderful bookstores in the Houston area aren’t going to make us wait for a great event. Speaking of great events, I want to remind everyone that Lynne Kelly’s debut novel CHAINED launches next week! Look for it in stores May 8. If you haven’t already done it, mark your calendars for her launch at Blue Willow Bookshop on Saturday May 12 at 2:00 p.m.
Wednesday, May 2, 5:00 p.m.
What a terrific story. After reading it I will be thinking about these two characters when I read this book. Seems almost a shame that they were cut from the final manuscript. Thanks Casey for a featuring Lindsey's post.
What? That's awful! It's pretty bad that they assumed that of you! But props for brushing it off and even getting Cynthia to laugh about it! :)
After I finish sending that writing contest judge a cyber-slap upside the head, I want to say that I live in fear of doing this exact thing. (Not with Cynthia and Greg, but in general.) I've made numerous name-changes in the course of writing my current ms, not just between drafts, but between the ARC's and the final version, and I'm still worried that I've inadvertently hijacked someone's name in a way that will somehow offend.
omg, that's hilarious! With my writing, I'm always afraid of the same thing, mostly b/c I'm a pop culture n00b. So whenever I start a new project, I sent a list of character names to one of my friends who lives/breathes/eats pop culture and change any names she says are too close to existing ones.
Smiles!
Lori