How to use this Page

1. Tell us about your favorite writing project/universe that you’ve worked with and why.

Such an unfair question to start with--I love them all. Okay, I guess I'll plump for my otherworld in 'Theatre of Curious Acts'. And as to the why--because it's chock-full of madness - dragons, fairy tale villages, inns balanced on top of pointy hills, train stations that stretch into forever, back to front theatres, and the four horsewomen of the apocalypse 'live' there.

2. How many characters do you have? Do you prefer males or females?

I'm assuming this means per project, otherwise thousands upon thousands of poor, dejected things. And I have no preference whatsoever as to male or female. In fact, I think I have a nice, healthy (okay, they're rarely healthy) mix. My book 'Last Seen Drowning' (may it rest in peace) had about seven POVs - I wonder why I never sent it anywhere. Actually, thinking on the previous question, I really liked that little universe and it had a suicidal (non-sparkly) vampire. Oh crap, now I want to work on that rather than NaNoWriMo.
Note to self: Seven POVs--you don't want to go there.

3. How do you come up with names, for characters (and for places if you’re writing about fictional places)?

I steal them from spam emails, or I type in a search in twitter and pick out a first and second name, and for all emergencies I have my huge first name, surname and place name dictionary. I'm never happy with a story until I get what I feel is the right name for the character.

4. Tell us about one of your first stories/characters!

The first story I sold way back in 1993 (actually, I use the word sold loosely as it was 4theluv, though I did get a free contributors copy) was called Bethany's Dream and it was majorly blah! Girl has a dream that someone is trying to kill her, gets really nervous, but hey, guess what it's a surprise party. I don't think she even bothered to kill the guests.

I still have fond memories of my first novel 'Fading in the Summer Sun'. I spent years with those characters and they were nice folk (if slightly twisted).

5. By age, who is your youngest character? Oldest? How about “youngest” and “oldest” in terms of when you created them?

Bollocks. I think Molly in 'The Drawing of Dolls' is about seven, but I'd have to look her up to be sure and I'm far too lazy to do that. Oldest, double crap. I'm going to say the suicidal vampire in 'Last Seen Drowning' - he's definitely mega crinkly. Oh, wait. I guess my true oldest would be Old Father Time. Old Father Time would have to be as old as time I guess.


Now onto the (supposed) daily NaNoWriMo catch up:

Daily Word Count: 2154 (go me!)
Total Word Count: 3099
Characters Playing: Amelia Darling, Cally Darling, Danny Levine (who???), Meg Cooper, The Press Gang
Time Frame: Dystopian Future - 2241 (yay, we have a year)

Things that surprised my book: Ha, so the book wants to be a YA eventhough I declared it wouldn't be, well I threw a spanner in its works and added the word Bollocks at the top of the page -- what do you mean, I can edit it out later!!!
Things that surprised me: Dead Parent (okay not that surprising) / Instead of trying to make my first pages perfect, I'm adding comment boxes with things I need to fix/reconsider - go non-obsessive me)
Googled: The Bends--Diving.

Helen Keller said, "We can do anything we want as long as we stick to it long enough." Let's face it, the road to publication is often pebbled with rejection, criticism, self doubt and frustration. Those who continue the journey will eventually find success. Just ask Terri Clark.

I'd been writing for over 11 years when I finally got THE CALL. I’d begun by writing romance and for several years I kept hearing “You’re sooo close,” but I never quite got over that hump. Well, that’s not exactly true. I actually had a Harlequin editor tell me she wanted to buy my book after reading it when I finaled in the Golden Heart for the second time. Then she got fired and the book was never bought. Needless to say, my frustration was overwhelming. I just didn’t know what I could do differently. Then my best friend, Lynda Sandoval, suggested that my voice was really well suited to YA. She started me reading Meg Cabot’s 1-800 and Mediator series’ and I immediately fell in love and knew that’s what I was supposed to write. For a year I read nothing but teen book after teen book. Not only did the books inspire me to write YA fiction, they inspired me to pursue working with teens at my library. The first YA I wrote was never bought, but my agent at the time had heard that HarperCollins was looking for gritty stories and she knew I’d just started one. She asked me to get something to her ASAP and I did. On December 19, 2006, while I was walking into my daughter’s orthodontist appointment, I got the call. After five complete adult romances and one YA I ended up selling SLEEPLESS on proposal. The long, long wait finally led to everything I imagined and more. You might not know exactly when your dream is within reach, but if you give up you'll never get there.

Ask any writer what the worst thing about this industry is and you'll most likely hear...waiting. It seems like an endless loop of hurry-up-and-wait. We hurry to turn things in and then we wait and wait and waaaait some more. Just ask Teri Brown, author of Read My Lips.

My first sale took forever, but I’ll make the first sale story much, much shorter. My first book didn’t sell, much to my agent’s disappointment, (and mine!) but we had high hopes for the second one. In September of 06, we sent it out to a ton of editors. The first rejections were fairly quick, like in the first couple of weeks. Then the waiting began. Over the next eight months, we waited, following up from time to time. A rejection would trickle in here and there until our large list of editors had dwindled. I was working on my next book, but losing heart. Then we got news. A new editor at Simon Pulse, who had recently taken over for the editor we had submitted to back in September, happened to come across my manuscript. She was conversing with my agent on a different book and asked if mine were still available because she was really “enjoying the read.”

In keeping with yesterday's baby theme, we introduce you to the first book baby of Lisa Schroeder, author of the current YA sensation I HEART YOU, YOU HAUNT ME.

My first book sale was in the spring of 2004. I had been seriously writing and submitting stories since 2001, and was about to surpass the 100 mark for total number of rejections. (Now that's persistence!)

I remember I was at work, trying not to fall asleep, because I had been up with a very sick child all night. My husband stayed home with that very sick child while I trudged into work.

Around 2:00, my husband called me and said, "an editor just called you! You're supposed to call her back!"

I grabbed my cell phone and ran outside, wondering if I was going to miss her since I was the West coast and she was on the East coast. When she answered, I said something like, "This is Lisa Schroeder, and I'm so glad you haven't left for the day." She said, "And miss telling you the exciting news? No way!"

I'm rereading Bone, still. Rereading the first episodes for the first time since I wrote the introduction to "The Great Cow Race" was really strange, in light of where the story went, but the most impressive, unexpected thing about that part of Bone is how very consistent it was from the start.

There's a G. K Chesterton quote about Dickens' The Pickwick Papers, where he says

... the fault of Pickwick (if it be a fault) is a change, not in the hero but in the whole atmosphere. The point is not that Pickwick turns into a different kind of man; it is that "The Pickwick Papers" turns into a different kind of book. And however artistic both parts may be, this combination must, in strict art, be called inartistic. A man is quite artistically justified in writing a tale in which a man as cowardly as Bob Acres becomes a man as brave as Hector. But a man is not artistically justified in writing a tale which begins in the style of "the Rivals" and ends in the style of the Iliad. In other words, we do not mind the hero changing in the course of a book; but we are not prepared for the author changing in the course of the book.