How to use this Page

A domain name is a name used to identify a website on the Internet. Your blog’s domain name is like your mailing address: it lets people know where to find you — and all the cool content you create!

At WordPress.com, every site has an example.wordpress.com address, which is the default address you get when you sign up. But you may notice that some sites have custom domains, such as example.com, instead of example.wordpress.com.

Did you know you can get a unique web address for your blog?

Is a custom domain right for you? Consider these questions:

• Are you interested in using your blog to promote your work, brand, or organization?
• Would you like to print your blog address on items like business cards?
• Do you plan to have multiple email addresses on the same domain?
• You may already customize your theme, colors, and fonts — so, why not your URL?

Owning your domain name personalizes your own cozy corner of the Internet, helps to build your presence across the web, and distinguishes your work within your niche, field, or industry.

So, how do you select a domain name?

Think about and choose a domain name that best reflects your content. Below, we’ve gathered tips and examples of sites on WordPress.com to inspire you.

Keep it simple. At My Hands Made It, DIY blogger and bridal gown designer Veronica shares wedding projects and crafty tutorials. Her name includes a simple phrase and evokes actions that reflect her content. In general, avoid names that are too long — more than four words may be a mouthful.

Zoom in and be specific. My Travel Blog. All About Baking. Thoughts on Writing. On Politics. We have a basic idea of what these blogs are about, but the names are general and don’t really intrigue the reader.

Include words that are essential to your focus. Gavin, the blogger at Make a Powerful Point, is obsessed with PowerPoint and uses it to communicate and instruct. The word “point” in his name refers not only to PowerPoint, but his consulting work in marketing and business strategy.

Combine words that encapsulate you. Cathy at Mathbabe focuses on mathematics and statistics. The artist and mother behind Doodlemum combines illustrations and sketches with posts on her family. The folks at Salt Gypsy showcase cool, handmade products for female surfers. All of these names fuse or invent words that describe what these blogs are about.

(You may notice that the custom domain Mathbabe ends in .org. You can register and map a domain ending in .com, .org, .net, or .me through WordPress.com.)

Use common phrases…with a twist. Play around with well-known expressions. Swap words with one another. Kiss My Spatula, a well-designed blog about food, is a playful take on a familiar phrase.

Consider literary devices. Remember when your English professor taught you about consonance, which is the repetition of consonant sounds? The “s” sound in Kiss My Spatula sounds swell, doesn’t it? And what about alliteration, or the repetition of a particular letter at the beginning of words? Raising My Rainbow, a blog about a gender-nonconforming five-year-old, is appropriate and easy to remember.

Celebrate double meanings. My blog’s name, Writing Through the Fog, refers not just to my city, foggy San Francisco, but also my interests in elusive themes of memory, home, and adulthood — all of which put me in a haze.

Make us curious. The incompleteness of the blog name An Afternoon With… is brilliant! In each post, Michael photographs a different person in their own space, among their own things. The added ellipsis (in his header only) is also effective; it builds anticipation in readers who are visiting the blog for the first time.

Finally (and most importantly), confirm your spelling. When you register and purchase a domain name, you are purchasing that exact domain name with that exact spelling. If you make a mistake, you can cancel a domain within 48 hours of purchase, but it’s best to be extra careful from the start to avoid the headache of a misspelled domain altogether.

But what if the domain name I want to use is not available?

New York City-based photographer Matt shares his passion for abandoned architecture at his blog, After the Final Curtain. Matt’s blog on America’s grand, bygone theaters is focused and specific, but the evocative name attracts more than just people who visit for his images of ruins. If you have been to the theater, or have watched film or TV scenes set on a stage, the closed curtain at the end of a performance is a familiar motif. His blog name not only reflects his content — it’s memorable, too.

But when Matt began the process of choosing a domain name, his first choice wasn’t available. He wanted his name to have a theatrical term in the title, but the first domain name he wanted, “Curtain Call,” was already taken. A friend then suggested “Final Curtain,” and he added the rest.

So, just because your blog’s current address is mysite.wordpress.com doesn’t mean the domain mysite.com (or mysite.org, mysite.net, or mysite.me) will be available. Check to see if your domain name is taken.

Curious to hear how other WordPress.com bloggers chose their domain names? We also talked to Sarah at Where’s My Toothbrush? and C.J.’s Mom at Raising My Rainbow about how their names came about — head on over to their Q&A on The Daily Post, Choosing the Perfect Blog Name: Two WordPressers Share Their Secrets, for more insights and tips on the process.

Ready for your own unique web address?

There are two steps required to use a custom domain, and you can take care of both steps at WordPress.com:

1. Register the domain to establish your ownership of the domain.
2. Map the domain to link the domain to your WordPress.com site.

In step one, you register and purchase the address example.com. In step two, you tell example.com to point to your WordPress.com site. Your old address at example.wordpress.com will still work, but we’ll automatically redirect traffic from your old address to your new one.

Registering and mapping a .com, .org, or .net domain through WordPress.com starts at $18.00 per domain and per year, or $25.00 per domain and per year for a .me domain. For $8.00 more, you can make the domain registration private.

You can also use a domain you’ve registered elsewhere (through a site like GoDaddy or Network Solutions) with your site here at WordPress.com. Mapping a domain you’ve registered elsewhere costs $13.00 per domain, per year.

For more details, read our Domains page on our support site.

When you’re ready to purchase, visit our Custom Domains upgrade page in our WordPress.com Store and click Get a Domain to get started.

If you’re looking to supercharge your blog in one step and purchase all of our upgrades at once — a custom domain, HD video uploading, font and color customization, no ads, and extra storage space — take a peek at our Pro Bundle upgrade.

Originally published at Through the Tollbooth. Please leave any comments there.

I used to think series books were kind of low brow and mass market. “Nancy Drew” or the “Hardy Boys” came to mind, both of which I loved as a child while I also knew they weren’t in the same league as, say, “James and the Giant Peach” or “Charlotte’s Web.” This impression wasn’t helped a couple of years back when my daughter insisted on my reading every “Rainbow Magic” book at least twice. I didn’t realize until then that some series are written by more than one person. Here’s what the Daisy Meadows page on amazon.com has to say about the so-called author of the “Rainbow Magic” series:

Daisy Meadows is a pseudonym used by the writers of Rainbow Magic, who are all hugely talented and successful authors in their own right.

Actually, after reading several books in the series, I hypothesized that a clue to the true author is contained in each book’s dedication. Most of my favorites were dedicated to Narinder Dhami. Later I saw that my library carried several non-Rainbow Magic books by her. They’re too old for my daughter, but they look promising.

About a year ago, my daughter graduated to less formulaic plots and characters, though we still read almost nothing but series books, including:



I tried reading Harry Potter to my daughter, and she didn’t like it, nor did she like the first Percy Jackson book by Rick Riordan.

I decided that my daughter would eventually love 19th-century British literature (as I do): character-driven novels that often portray a narrow slice of practical life but nevertheless address larger human truths. That kind of thing – which also applies to all of the books in the list above. And books in which the writing is important, not just plot.

(By the way, I developed a real regard for Ann M. Martin of “Baby-sitters Club” fame when reading her books to my daughter. Before that, all I knew about “The Baby-sitters Club” was a vague impression based on the movie of the same name (but different spelling), which I never watched but spurned anyway. Who knows? I might like it, too.)

The Penderwicks books were fun because they are allusive. For example, we had read the Melendy Quartet (“The Saturdays” et al.) before the Penderwicks series, and at one point during the latter, my daughter said, “The daddies in the Penderwicks AND the Saturdays are both named Martin. Isn’t that funny?” “Well, sweetie,” I replied, “I’m pretty sure Birdsall is alluding to Enright’s books.” Of course, I didn’t use those exact words.

Birdsall also makes an explicit connection to 19th-century British literature in “The Penderwicks on Gardam Street,” in which she uses Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” in a hilarious way and also quotes the book.

Given my daughter’s (and my) taste in literature, imagine how thrilled I was to pick up “The Mysterious Howling,” the first book in the Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series by Maryrose Wood. It’s loaded with playful allusions to Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, and probably others I don’t know enough to catch. But an exciting new-to-me connection to 19th-century British literature is that these books –

Originally published at Through the Tollbooth. Please leave any comments there.

Today we continue with our  attempt to help you understand how to love your writer.

We began with telling you that WORDS OF AFFIRMATION are always a good way to love your writer. But many writers have different love languages, and your writer may  not respond well to WORDS OF AFFIRMATION. It may not be their primary love language.  The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts by Gary Chapman explains that we all have different ways that we like to receive and give love. It’s important to know what kind of love language your writer responds to and love them appropriately.

So here are two more options if the WORDS OF AFFIRMATION aren’t working for you.

OPTION #2 – QUALITY TIME

For some writers, they feel loved if you spend quality time with them. That means this:

1. You read their books.

2. When you read their books you don’t multi-task unless it’s riding on the stationary bike at the gym or something, because writers appreciate good quads.

3. When you read their books, you focus on their books.

How can you do this?

1. Spend a weekend with their book.

2. Make a lunch date with their book.

3. Take the book walking. Go on a vacation. Take it on a nice long car ride. But um… don’t read it while you are driving. Cars are not stationary bikes.

4. Relax together.

Love Option #3 – Receiving Gifts

Some writers don’t feel loved unless you give them things. For some writers this might be um…. awards from committees of librarians or bloggers. For some writers this might be a blog post focused on them. For some, the gift might be a really hot review or a nice blurb from someone awesome.

Do not be afraid to show your love for your author by giving her a good five-star review on some website somewhere.

A gift inspired by a writer’s book is always awesome. My second book was called LOVE AND OTHER USES FOR DUCT TAPE and I got some totally cool hand-made duct tape flowers. I felt super loved. I still have them in my kitchen. And sometimes when I am sad, I look at them. See? Totally works.

*Chapman, Gary. The 5 love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts. Chicago: Northfield Publishing, 1992.

Originally published at Through the Tollbooth. Please leave any comments there.

The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts by Gary Chapman explains that we all have different ways that we like to receive and give love. It’s important to know what kind of love language your writer responds to and love them appropriately.

We’ve already talked about:

1. Words of Affirmation – Tell them they are awesome.

2. Quality Time – Give them time to write. Take time to hang out with them and/or their books.

3. Gifts – Yeah. Gifts.

So now we are on to the final two ways to love a writer:

1. Acts of Service

2. Physical Touch

Acts of Service

If your writer would like for you to  rub her shoulders while she ponders the emotional arc in her picture book classic THE MICROWAVE LOVES YOU, then please do that.

If your writer would like you to wash dishes while she tightens up the language in ALL-IN-ONE-ORANGE OXY: THE STORY OF A WOMAN AND HER CLEANER, please do so.

If your writer wants you to rob a bank while he finishes the masterpiece TELEPHONES AND THE MEN WHO EAT THEM, you might want to think about it.

Some people like you to do things for them. They NEED you to do things for them in order for them to feel loved. Please, just make sure whatever your writer wants is legal and does not physical harm you, your writer, or your microwave.

Physical Touch

This one sounds sooooo naughty, doesn’t it? Oh, yes… Yes, it does…

But it isn’t.

Are you disappointed?

Would you admit it if you were disappointed?

Anyway, some people communicate via touch. These are the hand holders, the cheek kissers, the huggers. A lot of writers are like this. I swear, writers are always hugging other writers. At every conference I’ve ever gone to, I’ve thought, “Holy canoli, these writer people are huggy. Will any of them hug me? Oh gosh… What if they don’t? What if they treat me like I’m an insurance executive? What if I stand here for 30 seconds and nobody tries to hug me?”

Then someone will hug me and I will stop hyperventilating. Usually it is someone I don’t actually know, and somehow this isn’t creepy. I should probably go think about that.

Okay. Back on topic….

Touching and hugging and kissing (as long as the writer knows you and is okay with that) is how some writers feel loved.

I think that if you touch and hug and kiss their book, they will also feel loved.

I am going to go kiss Rick Riordan’s SON OF NEPTUNE and see if he responds. :)

Thank you all for putting up with me this week. My life’s been a bit of hell lately (I know! I know! TMI!) and I just couldn’t post anything serious about crafts. Thank you for bearing with me. Feel free to comment. Those are WORDS OF AFFIRMATION and make me feel loved. Unless, your comment is evil…. Yeah….

Originally published at Through the Tollbooth. Please leave any comments there.

Happy Halloween!

This week in the Tollbooth we’re talking about what scares us.

As a middle-grade writer I try to remember what it felt like to be nine or ten years old and translate that to the page. I find it pretty easy to remember things that made me sad or mad or even really happy, but at first I thought scared was tougher.

I’m a grown up now. Hard to scare.

Then I remembered… when I was in the third grade I thought this was the scariest book in the world.

What was so scary? Mannequins. Being lost. The dark.

To tell the truth I’m still afraid of dark places and the unknown in general. And yes mannequins do still scare me. A lot. I’m lost so often I’ve sort of gotten over that… plus now I have a GPS.

But remembering the universal elements– things that scare all of us, but more specifically what scares me– and translating it to a middle-grade level dose seems to work for me.

What scared you when you were a kid… and does it still scare you now?

~tami lewis brown

Illustration Age, the ultimate source for what’s happening in Illustration, was just named one of HOW Magazine’s Top 10 Sites for Designers! This marks the EFII Network’s second award in this category, with a previous nod to Escape from Illustration Island.

Thanks very much to HOW Magazine for recognizing our commitment to keeping you up to date with what’s happening in Illustration.

Be sure to take advantage of regular updates from Illustration Age so you don’t miss out:

Originally published at Through the Tollbooth. Please leave any comments there.

Perfect balance is important to a tightrope walker. Without it he’d plunge to his death. Do writers need perfect balance too?

I’m a Libran so my zodiac symbol is the scales. I’m not entirely clear if that means I should be good at achieving perfect balance and harmony, or if those things are just  important to me, or if it’s a bunch of hooey.

I do know this–like all of you I’m exceptionally busy with lots of conflicting priorities tugging at me. And like most writers I’m always looking for ways to live a rewarding writing life along with a family and business/marketing life.

For years I’ve sought the holy grail of perfect balance. I’ve dreamed of mornings when I wake up ready to leap out of bed, slip into freshly pressed and color coordinated outfit, kiss my darling children goodbye as they skip off to school, dance into my office where I catch up on a few emails (while avoiding the internet time-suck entirely), dash off a chapter or two, chat with my publicist or editor, pin down details on a smashing bookstore signing, whip up something scrumptious yet nutritious for dinner, dress for a night out at a museum or play or something cultural… okay you more than get the idea.

It doesn’t take a life coach to know this isn’t realistic. If I’m honest with myself I admit it doesn’t even sound like fun. “Having everything” all at once isn’t just outside a normal person’s grasp. It’s manic.

Over time I’ve come up with five tips for achieving…  not perfect balance but something that more or less works for me.

1 Forget perfect.

What does “perfect” mean, anyway? I don’t have a clue. I’ve banished the word from my vocabulary. It may sound simplistic but deleting perfect gives me an instant “peace of mind” boost. Maybe it’s evidence that I’m some kind of slacker, but  consciously deciding to push perfectionism aside makes sense to me. Of course I have to be vigilant to keep the quest for perfect at bay, but lower anxiety and greater happiness are worth the effort.

2 Keep your eyes open.

Justice is blind (I had jury duty last week so cut me some slack and bear with me a minute.) Because she’s supposed to be impartial, Lady Justice is almost always portrayed wearing a blindfold as she weighs right and wrong.

Blindfolds may be fine for legal decisions but they’re all wrong for balancing writing with the rest of your life. Take that blindfold off! Look! As Sarah Aronson says write with intention. More than that, live with intention. Make active rather than passive decisions. Some things are outside our control (yea that serenity prayer does make a point) but just as you are the master of the story you write you should be the master of your fate.

I believe active living is a matter of perspective more than anything else. When I feel like I’m consistently acting rather than reacting I’m happier. I seem to have mor

Originally published at Through the Tollbooth. Please leave any comments there.

Kimberley Griffiths Little joins us in the Tollbooth today. She is the author of many middle grade novels, including the recently released Circle of Secrets.

She wrote Circle of Secrets in a breathtaking pace of approximately 6 weeks (2 1/2 weeks for the draft and 4 weeks more for the revision) so she could make her “Armegeddon Book Deadline.”

Sarah: How do you approach writing when you first get an idea for a story?

Kimberley: When I first get the initial inklings of an “Idea”, it just attacks me. For instance I’m sitting at my desk travelling the many wonders of the inter-webs when *SMACK*! An “Idea” for a new project hits me right in the face and plum near knocks me off my chair. After I recover (and get an ice pack for my resulting black eye), I find my “Notebook” or a piece of paper and start writing down my Idea. Now because I have a life, (and kids and a husband and a house to clean and cats… :/ ) I usually just write down the Idea and then let it simmer on the back burner of my brain stove while I go about my daily activities. When I get my next “Idea” (I managed to dodge this idea from hitting me in the face but it did clip my shoulder), I go and I write it in that same notebook and let it simmer for a while. My next idea (which gut punched me) I write it down and I just continue to do this until I think I have it all down (which usually results in me needing to get a massage to work out all the inevitable kinks).

Note: these head-smacking Ideas are all for the same Big New Fancy-Schmancy Novel, but I will get hit with little pieces of the characters, the twists and turns of the plot as well as the climax or the emotional core of the story over a period of many weeks or months.

Once I have a Notebook – or my head – filled up with Ideas, I transfer all these notes onto 3×5 cards which I then lay out on a table of the floor and rearrange in various orders. Once I’m ready to write, I dive in and start fattening the Ideas with words to make them all nice and fluffy (like sheep) and I put it all in a Word document called a Manuscript.

Sarah: You talked about your 3×5 card plotting method a few months ago on your blog. You used this method for most of your books, including The Healing Spell.
(Kimberley’s detailed explanations–and great photos–can be found at her blog post about her 3×5 card plotting method.)

Originally published at Through the Tollbooth. Please leave any comments there.

Last summer at Chautauqua I gave a lecture on middle school readers.  The presentation was based on research and interviews of middle school students, so it had some solid information, but it didn’t have the benefit of my experience this fall.  Since late August, I’ve been teaching reading and writing full time to a class of sixty-one fifth graders here in Nashville.  So, this week I thought it might be helpful to share my insights into fifth grade readers, the books they love, and how to write for that particular audience.

Let’s begin with the history of ten and eleven year-olds. As they were born, Y2K changed how we thought about history, and September 11 changed the world into a dangerous place. As these children were learning to read, a little company called FACEBOOK was starting up, and the word google became a verb. Download, digital, wireless and virtual became our new vocabulary. Blogs, wikis, social networks, and Twitter became our new communities. And did I mention? We’ve got an app for that. You fill in what “that” might be.

As these kids moved into elementary school, TV became reality, videogame profits soared beyond box office revenue, and Harry Potter took his place in the canon of children’s literature. We went to war twice. We witnessed a near collapse of the US financial market. We elected an African American as 44^th President of the United States.

Today’s middle school readers are tech savvy and news weary, living in the golden age of knowledge, with the steepest growth of information in history, doubling in size every 12-18 months.

Any wonder why these kids crave action and adventure in the books they read? To them, life is much bigger than their schoolyards or neighborhoods. They witness the world in action everywhere, and they want to be part of it.

When students asked me to help them find a good book, it’s not the Newbery award winners they want. (Even The Graveyard Book finds its way quickly into the classroom return bin quickly. The exception to this is Louis Sacher’s Holes.  Most students devour Holes.)  Fantasy, mystery, adventure or funny books are the stories these children love. A few read historical fiction.  Very few want nonfiction (unless its science related). Children want escape. Ask any of the readers in my classroom, and they’ve read Percy Jackson. Rick Riordan’s stories are plot driven adventures that are easy to read—mostly written at 4^th grade reading levels.  It’s a winning combination.

So what does all this mean to a writer?  I think it means getting really good at the plot driven novel.  Be willing to take readers on a wild ride.  Pushing the boundaries on possibility. Telling a really good story. Sounds like everything you know already, but the assignment is to do that with a character that’s immediately engaging. And could you make it funny while you are at it?

Next time, we’ll take a look at some of the most popular books in my class—the Fablehaven series by Brandon Mull.  I’ll do an analysis of the first book in the series and share with you the

Originally published at Through the Tollbooth. Please leave any comments there.

So why do kids love books like the Percy Jackson series or Brandon Mull’s Fablehaven books?  Maybe the answer is in the reading level.  In the last few years, best practice for teaching reading has incorporated something called the reading workshop.  Instead of reading one book (usually selected by the teacher) as a whole class, students can read whatever interests them.  For my class of sixty-one students, I have about forty different books being read on any given day.

The Percy Jackson books and Fablehaven series are written for students reading at a late fourth grade to beginning fifth grade level.  The books have relatively easy vocabulary and are structured for the upper elementary reader.  Characters are not quite as complex and story lines not quite as complicated as some other books for middle school readers.  That doesn’t mean the stories are wildly fun and entertaining!

Many of the Newbery books offer up more difficult reading.  The latest Newbery winner, Moon Over Manifest is geared to a mid-year fifth grade reading level.  To give you a perspective, Newbery winners When You Reach Me and The Graveyard Book are geared to late-year fifth grade readers. While Moon Over Manifest is a dear story and one I liked very much, it’s hard for my students to care about Abilene until they have read the first fifty pages or so.  Few of them have been able to stick with the book that long. It moves too slow. And that’s a common theme I hear with Newbery books.  My students think of them, generally, as the books that teachers want them to read, not books they want to read.  Why is that?

For one, action. When I read the opening of Fablehaven, things are already moving.  Here are the first two chapters of the book:

Kendra stared out the side window of the SUV, watching foliage blur past.  When the flurry of motion became too much, she looked up ahead and fixed her gaze on a particular tree, following it as it slowly approached, streaked past, and then gradually receded behind her.

Was life like that? You could look ahead to the future or back to the past, but the present moved too quickly to absorb. Maybe sometimes. Not today. Today they were driving along an endless two-lane highway through the forested hills of Connecticut.

Kendra is going somewhere. Everything is a blur.  Life is moving fast.  The children in my class totally get this idea.  It’s their reality.  I know what you are probably thinking…The Graveyard Book is totally action at the beginning of the story.  But my students don’t like it.  It’s weird they say. Maybe it reminds them of the news, but they don’t want to read it.  It ends up in the return bin a lot.

Originally published at Through the Tollbooth. Please leave any comments there.

I found a really interesting web site today for teachers called novelinks.org whose aim is to put out “instructional routines and ideas for teaching the novel.”  I wanted to see what they did differently than the typical educators’ guide, so I looked at their resource list for Deborah Wiles’s book EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS.  Novelinks offers a full spectrum of materials, from a concept analysis to readability guide, but what struck me as a bit startling was that EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS was tagged at a seventh grade reading level. All of my fifth grade students read it in fourth grade, and frankly while I love this book a lot, the book seems a little young in terms of how much it might interest a seventh grade reader. I checked Scholastic’s Book Wizard, and it shows the book’s level at mid-year forth grade reading.  Comfort, the narrator of the story, is ten years old, so a fourth grader reading EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS makes much more of sense.  A seventh grader?  Not so much.

Kids want to read books that look age appropriate, even if they are reading far below grade level. Many of the students in my class who are struggling readers clamor to read the whole Percy Jackson series. The books are entertaining and easy reading, and you won’t look dumb if you are reading one of them. Every book in the series is hefty (from 300-400 pages), with cool covers.  They are fantasy stories with lots of action.  Not babyish at all.

Peer influence is huge for middle school readers, and I see it all the time in class.  Kids tell other kids about the good books they’re reading.  They share copies from home and the library.  They love being the “first” to discover a book that their peers will want to read. But the books they recommend to one another are books that are shoo-ins:  Funny, interesting, mysterious, quirky.  And from what I see, kids really do want to read about kids their own ages (or older…that’s even better almost).

I don’t see kids recommending literary novels to each other.  It’s a generalization, but literary novels don’t seem to interest the kids I teach.  They don’t pick them up to read on their own in reading workshop.  I book talk, do read alouds, and show book trailers (when I can) of the literary novels I love, but for the fifth grade kids in my class, those novels are the books teachers teach.

What’s the take away from this week?  For me it means killing a lot of darlings in my writing and getting to the story.  It means honing characters that are readable because they are really interesting, even for struggling readers.  And it means writing with vocabulary and sentence structure and chapter lengths that appeal to kids.  I need to stop trying to be so literary. (Which I think I do because I want to show adults that children’s writers are good writers too…but that’s another story).

I need to focus on telling a good tale for kids.  It’s simple, but those 5^th graders can be pretty demanding. �

Originally published at Through the Tollbooth. Please leave any comments there.

When the editor told me she wanted me to rewrite the novel and ramp up the romance, I quailed. “We love romance,” she wrote, “The drama, the uncertainty.”

Uncertainty. She’d really caught the shaky essence of new love, but I didn’t have a clue how to capture it. I know how to write action and adventure, how to keep the obstacles coming until the hero fights the final battle. But romantic uncertainty? How would I even plot that beyond Boy Meets Girl, etc.? Wasn’t it just a lot of angst and neurotic, teary, self-talk?

When in doubt, I read. And several YA romances later, I realized that romance is just the Hero’s Journey from inside the heart.

The hero/protagonist lives in her Ordinary World untouched by love, when one day, bam! She meets The Guy. She doesn’t expect to meet anyone, and she’s attracted to him, but this feeling is like entering a new world.

It’s her Call to Adventure, but she’s not sure about taking it, because she’s so surprised and he isn’t what she expected. She’s thrown off balance, because she thinks she knows the person she wants, but now she’s met someone who’s completely different.

So she pulls back and Refuses the Call. But he keeps talking to her and she’s tempted to let herself feel something. So she Crosses the Threshold into vulnerability and love.

It is a time of Tests, Allies and Enemies.

She doesn’t trust how she feels and she doesn’t know if he feels the way she does. There are circumstances and personal histories, exes and rivals she doesn’t know about. She’s afraid he might be involved with someone else, and she wants to protect herself, because she doesn’t want to be humiliated and can’t bear being hurt.

But at the same time, she senses he may understand her in a way that no one else has ever done before. And she lets herself fantasize about what things could be like, because love is Arthur’s sword, the Holy Grail, the kingdom’s crown.

She’s lost in this new land, trying hard to navigate, and looking for clues in every gesture, how close he leans in to her, if he pulls away. Her girlfriends weigh in on everything he does, and like courtiers to the heir apparent, not all of them have her best interests in mind.

Then a moment appears when something is definitely happening and she can sense it. The relationship is about to change and she’s ready to take a chance and lay her heart completely bare. LIke a deep symbolic Cave, she approaches, knowing the danger of getting her heart broken. She’s ready to kiss him, even if he doesn’t kiss her.

But when that kiss doesn’t come, because something incredibly horrible comes between them, she pulls back. Love has turned into an Ordeal.

She doesn’t want to get hurt like the last time. She can’t count on this other person, what he’ll do or won’t do. She’s not even sure that he’s the person she thought he was.

Fight or flight. She has to choose.

And when she does choose love, when she fights for it, she Seizes the Sword and claims his love. She is magically transformed and forever changed. She understands love in ways she never did before.

Originally published at Through the Tollbooth. Please leave any comments there.

As we continue our discussion about self-marketing, I want to talk a bit (well, more than a bit) about discussion, activity, and teaching guides. Should you have one? And how can a guide help you market your book? To give us a bit of insight, I welcome to the Tollbooth today Debbie Gonzales. Debbie is the author of eight “transitional” readers for New Zealand publisher, Giltedge. A Montessori teacher, former school administrator, and curriculum consultant specializing in academic standards annotation, Debbie now devotes her time to various freelance projects as well as serving the Austin SCBWI community as Regional Advisor. She earned her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

First, Debbie, welcome to the Tollbooth! Can you tell us a little about the business you run creating discussion and teachers’ guides for authors?

You’re familiar with the adage “Write what you know,” right? Well, that’s what I’m doing. I pull from my years and years of teaching and curriculum development experience and pour it all into these cross-curricular book guides. I make guides like the ones I wish I would’ve had when teaching. Science, math, crafts, creative writing, analysis, games – you name it, I put it in. They’re becoming so popular; I’m having a hard time keeping up with the demand. That’s a good problem, right?

When did you decide to start cross-curricular book guides?

I got started making these when a friend and YA author was told by a librarian that she needed a book guide made to compliment her latest book, one that met the Texas educational standards. She and I got to chatting about it and I told her I’d be glad to make one for her. Soon after, her book found its way to be listed by the International Reading Association. (I’m not saying that my guide got her on the list, but it sure didn’t hurt anything.) The rest is history.

What types of guides do you create?

Picture books, chapter, middle grade and YA, you name it. I’ll do it. I create three basic types of guides for any and all genres. One is an Activity Guide, which is packed with lots of manipulative learning games applicable to all areas of the curriculum. I just finished a really cool Research Activity Guide for two non-fiction books about dogs and horses that were such fun to make! The guide features activities focusing on anatomy, map skills, research skills, poetry writing and a bunch of other things.

Another type of guide is the basic Discussion Guide. This one works quite well for YA novels. I document quotes that, I think, resonate with meaning, and then imagine kids thumbing through the pages to find the selected phrases, reading them aloud over and over again. I like to not only create questions that are inspired by the text, but those that cause the reader to consider their own emotional response to the story.

Lastly, I make longer, more in-depth guides that are a combination activities and discussion that typically end with a special art project or a Reader’s Theatre script. These guides are designed to provide discussion and activities that will span over a 6 week period of time – a teacher’s gold mine!

A collection of guides I’ve created are posted on my

Originally published at Through the Tollbooth. Please leave any comments there.

Tollbooth friend Tim Martin joins us again this weekend to report on the recent SCBWI conference in New York–

The SCBWI winter conference in New York: thoughts from one tuckered out, dog-tired (but still-smiling) attendee.

The SCBWI winter conference came and went like an invigorating whirlwind of ideas, insights and connections. As usual, there were scores of diverse industry folks (including, this winter, people working in digital storytelling and marketing), and an inviting collection of breakout sessions of which we attendees could sample three. This seemed, at first, restrictive, but I think it pressed us to be specific and focused on our areas of passion and interest.

So, here are my picks of a few key moments, and the things that stayed with me as I jetted from the conference on my way home to Los Angeles:

Connections. SCBWI, along with all its regional and international tentacles, and associated writing groups, bloggers, and specialty discussion groups, has always been the nerve center for accessible networking between writers. The Society primarily functions as a community, and the twice-yearly conferences act as testament to this collective spirit. To that end, this winter get-together encouraged attendees to get to know their regional advisors, consider a submission to an editor, get involved in panel discussions, ask that burning question, and, of course, make that accidental connection over bagels and lox cream cheese. You know, the one that may just nudge a writer’s fortune in some unexpected direction.

Breakout sessions. A good assortment of topics were covered, from “Non- Fiction” (Ken Wright of Writer’s House) to “Diversity and Multiculturalism” (Stacy Whitman of Tu Books) to “Narrative Fiction” (Alvina Ling of Little Brown). For an attendee, it’s always hard to select from the list, and I found it worthwhile to check in on friends who had chosen alternative sessions, so as to get a gist of more themes, and more conference content. Many sessions were craft oriented (revision, dialogue, pacing and exposition), and some had an illustrative component. It was also interesting to see less conventional session topic selections, such as “Ebooks and Apps”.

The breakout sessions I chose were generally broad in scope, and tended to be genre related. Sarah Davies from The Greenhouse Literacy Agency took us through the subject of “thrillers” in an action-packed, spine-tingling, lightening-speed hour. She’s an inspiring speaker: passionate, articulate, and informative. She blended solid crafty talking points with the commerciality demanded from many agents such as herself.

In the second session, Arianne Lewin from G.P. Putnam put a spin on the topic of “fantasy” by focusing in on the first two pages of some well-known recent bestsellers. How did the authors manage to convey the fantasy world without too much exposition? What part did dialogue and action play?

In my final session, Tara Weikum of Harper Collins led us through the first sentences of evocative YA books, and gave her suggestions to what makes this early impression a key to each novel�