Matthew J. Kirby has unveiled the cover for his forthcoming book, A Taste for Monsters. We’ve embedded the full image for the jacket design above—what do you think?
This project will be Kirby’s debut young adult novel. Lisa Sandell, an executive editor at Scholastic, acquired the manuscript.
According to Kirby’s blog post, the story features two historical figures: The Elephant Man and Jack the Ripper. The publisher has scheduled the release date for Sept. 27.
Registration is now open for the Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers conference, or WIFYR. The week-long event occurs in Sandy, UT of the week of June 15-19.
This is a super writing conference and this year there are several options to fit varying budgets and time constraints. The prices listed below are the early-bird cost which will go up after March 15.
If you’ve only got one afternoon, make it Friday, June 19. Jennifer Nielsen (The False Prince series) delivers the keynote speech. For $18, you can join the book signing, sit in on an agent/editor panel, and can attend the end-of-conference party.
You can choose the afternoon sessions package that gets you in to all the craft presentations throughout the week, including Jennifer Nielsen’s keynote. It is going for $99..
If you’ve only got one day, you could do the mini-workshop package. These four-hour sessions take place in the morning with a different topic and instructor each day. These also list at $99 and will get you in that day’s afternoon session. You can do one or you can do them all. This is the schedule: Monday, June 15 - Guy Francis - illustration class
Tuesday, June 16 - Emily Wing Smith - memoir writing
Wednesday, June 17 - Sarah M Eden - YA romance writing
Thursday, June 18 - Matthew J. Kirby - mystery writing
Friday, June 19 - Cheri Pray Earl - writing a series
The heart of the conference is the hands-on, interactive morning workshops. In these sessions, participants spend the week critiquing each others’ works under the guidance of a published faculty member. Most classes are $495 with the boot camp class going for $695 and the full novel class running at $995. We’ll go into more detail next week with these classes, but if you want a quick peek now follow the link.
There are several ways to take advantage of this wonderful conference. Dubbed a mini-MFA (Master of Fine Arts) for a fraction of the cost, there are options to meet many writer’s budget and schedule.
(This article also posted at http://writetimeluck.blogspot.com)
The “next” project is one I’ve been working on forever.
Okay, not forever, but for 30 years or more. It was an MG story conceived, then started, then abandoned (but not forgotten). It was the one that got me into writing. I spent a few years on it and as I sent it out, editors and agents pointed out some glaring issues with it. By then, not only was I into a new project, but had become weary of it and had no more energy to devote to it.
This year I brought it out again, blew off the dust, repackaged it as a YA, and workshopped it at WIFYR. There I was struck by an inner voice, perhaps the ten-year old stuck in my head, that said I’m an MG writer, not a YA. Okay, back to working it for younger readers.
Still, the story is missing something, no matter what audience it reaches.
Imitation of those who do it well seemed like a good strategy, so I’ve been re-reading exemplary MG stories.
In A Clockwork Three, Matthew J. Kirby gives his three main characters something to work for then expertly raises the stakes making it harder for them to achieve it. Sharon Creech’s Walk Two Moons is a richly woven tale about Salamanca, a girl searching for answers to the disappearance of her mother. A supporting cast of characters are among the reason this book resonates. Solveig in Kirby’s Icefall also involves a compelling protagonist who rides on the shoulders of strong supporting characters. The lesson here: stories are about people.
I also revisited John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story. He says writers need to focus not just on the hero, but the whole web of characters that help define him. Most writers start by listing traits of the MC, write a tale about him, then force a change in the end. Truby says this is wrong, that the hero does not act alone in a vacuum. The most important step in developing your MC is to connect and compare them to others. This forces you to distinguish the hero in unique ways. As in life, we are affected not just by our families and co-workers, but by the idiot that cut you off in traffic, the writer that brought you to tears with her prose, or the politician whose ideology you disagree with. How we react defines our character. The heroes in our stories are no less so connected to the web of characters in our stories.
Truby provides a writing exercise to help build your character web. It is worth looking into.
Okay, “next” project. I’ve got my eye on you. I don’t know if you’re going YA or MG, but you are going to have some interesting people carrying you along.
(This article also posted at http://writetimeluck.blogspot.com)
The Clockwork Three, by Matthew J. Kirby, Scholastic, $17.99, ages 9-12, 400 pages. Three children desperate for a better life are mysteriously drawn together and, in a frantic quest to help one another, bring a clockwork man to life and save a great woodland hall. In this wondrous debut, an orphaned 11-year-old busker, Giuseppe, sets in motion a mystery adventure that will require all three of them to put their trust in each other. One day after a ship is lost at sea, Giuseppe finds an enchanted green violin that's washed into the harbor. He begins playing it on the streets behind his padrone's back so he can put away money to buy passage home to Italy. Knowing his padrone would put him in a rat cellar or beat him if he found out, Giuseppe hides the violin and the money in a cemetery crypt. One day after leaving the crypt, he sees a strange sight at the docks, a rope holding a crate breaks and a round bronze head rolls out. Little does he know, it's the head of a legendary automaton, and the magician who made it claimed the head could talk.
Then, as Guiseppe heads back to his padrone's, he stumbles upon two gang runners beating up a boy and fools them into letting the boy go. The boy, Frederick, is a clockmaker's apprentice, and has secrets of his own. Rescued from a workhouse by Master Branch, he fixes clocks by day and sneaks into the basement to build a clockwork man at night. The man, an automaton, is now nearly finished, but it still needs a head and an engine to drive it, and if he can make them, the automaton could be his ticket to independence. Instead of being just an apprentice, he could be a journeyman and open his own shop. Though driven, Frederick is also haunted by his past, by the cruelties he faced at the orphanage at the hands of the wicked Mrs. Treeless and by questions about how he came to the orphanage. He meets a 12-year-old Hannah, first in passing on the street and again when her employer commissions a work from the clock shop, who reaches out to him. Hannah asks him if he ever thought of looking for his mother, who left him at the orphanage years ago, and offers to help him search for her. But she too has the weight of the world on her shoulders. Forced to quit school and support her family as a maid after her papa, a stonemason, lost his speech and strength in an accident, Hannah is desperate to help her family. One day, she overhears her supervisors talk about a treasure in the top-floor suite of the hotel where she works and before she knows it, she's being sent up there to attend to a peculiar guest, a spiritualist named Madame Pomeroy. Madame Pomeroy claims to speak with the dead, refers to her bodyguard Yakov as her "golem," and immediately takes a liking to Hannah and hires her as her assistant. She tells Hannah that Hannah's at a balancing point, and there is conflict in her future that could reverse the order of things in her life, and soon Hannah has more trouble than she knows what to do with. One day Hannah returns home to discover that her father's leg has become gravely infected and he needs medicine they can't afford, so Hannah makes a desperate choice. She steals a diamond necklace from Madame Pomeroy to pay for the medicine, only to get caught when she tries to sell it off. Now her only chance to help her father may be to search McCauley Park, the last wild place in the city for the treasure. But why is the fiddler Giuseppe hiding in the park? And what's this about the park's charter expiring? Could Hannah, Giuseppe and Frederick work together to find the things each needs most? This is a marvel
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