Car Crashes and Traffic Jams – My One Year Anniversary Post

One year ago at the end of February, 2012, I began this little blog, not knowing what would become of it. One year later, it’s still going strong and I’ve met so many wonderful friends because of this little space. I’m grateful to all who stop by and comment and those who just stop and read. You all help make this writing journey less lonely and much more fun. Thanks for all of the encouragement and companionship!  On to the post!

There’s this song by Snow Patrol called “Headlights on Dark Roads” that begins with such an astounding proclamation that it immediately caught my attention the first time I heard it.

“For once I want to be the car crash

Not always just the traffic jam

Hit me hard enough to wake me

And lead me wild to your dark roads”

Having been in a couple of ugly car crashes, I had to wonder what kind of person would choose that? To feel the terror, the violent impact and pain that comes from a split second mistake. To see a monstrous, out of control hunk of metal roaring towards you and to feel utterly powerless. Someone would choose that over a stagnant life where nothing is happening?

Fascinating.

That first stanza grabs you, makes you want to hear more, makes you feel something visceral from the very beginning of the song. It continues with the next verse after the chorus:

“My tongue is lost so I can’t tell you

Please just see it in my eyes

I pull up thorns from our ripped bodies

And let the blood fall in my mouth”

Powerful, no? I think some of the very best song writing is like poetry. For me, Snow Patrol is one great example of many. There is so much passion in their lyric writing. I would also recommend seeing them play live. They are fantastic.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about this song of theirs lately and what it means. All about how one would rather have a life full of passion and pain rather than the alternative of safety and boredom.

Life is pain?

A life worth living has pain?

All kinds of ideas were generated, which is another great sign of art inspiring art. This heavy, deep thinking about car crashes then seemed to leak into my reading selections because the last three books I read all began with violent car crashes and death. Interesting how one part of our life can influence another, whether purposefully or not.

There the similarities in the stories ended. That was something else that fascinated me; how writers could take a similar premise and develop three completely different stories from it. Here’s a bit about each of the three books. I really enjoyed reading all of them.

If I Stay by Gayle Forman

Wow. This is the smallest of the books, but one of the most emotionally powerful. Gayle Forman made me tear up, fight back, and then submit to an ugly cryfest with this wonderful book. Saying anything else would just spoil it for you. Except that there is now a sequel, Where She Went. Music is a very big part of this book and you can sample each of the songs mentioned in the book from a playlist on the author’s website.

On a day that started like any other…

Mia had everything: a loving family, a gorgeous, adoring boyfriend, and a bright future full of music and full of choices. Then, in an instant, almost all of that is taken from her. Caught between life and death, between a happy past and an unknowable future, Mia spends one critical day contemplating the one decision she has left—the most important decision she’ll ever make.

Simultaneously tragic and hopeful, this is a romantic, riveting and ultimately uplifting story about memory, music, living, dying, loving. (Plot summary from author’s website.)

You can read an excerpt of the book on her website.

Learn more about Gayle Forman here.

Follow Gayle on Twitter here.

Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

Have you ever wanted to replay a day where you totally screwed everything up and fix all your mistakes? What if it was your last day? Lauren Oliver was an author I had never read before. She has a new series out, the Delirium Series, but before I committed to something like that, I wanted to read one of her first books and make sure I liked her enough to invest that much reader love. And I do. Emotion and voice and ah! I could go on for days. What a perfect book to start your writing career.

What if you had only one day to live?

What would you do? Who would you kiss? And how far would you go to save your own life?

Samantha Kingston has it all: the world’s most crush-worthy boyfriend, three amazing best friends, and first pick of everything at Thomas Jefferson High—from the best table in the cafeteria to the choicest parking spot. Friday, February 12, should be just another day in her charmed life.

Instead, it turns out to be her last.

Then she gets a second chance. Seven chances, in fact. Reliving her last day during one miraculous week, she will untangle the mystery surrounding her death—and discover the true value of everything she is in danger of losing. (Plot summary from author’s website.)

Learn more about Lauren Oliver here.

Follow Lauren on Twitter here.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E Pearson

I came across this title while in search of something new to download onto my Nook. I’d remembered my daughter raving about this book a few years ago, but little else. Something vaguely about a girl recovering from a car accident and trying to regain her memory. Unfortunately she’d checked it out at the library so it had slipped from my mind as soon as it was out of sight. I’m all for reading something new and trying out authors I haven’t read before, so download it I did.

Amazing story and not at all what I thought it would be. I had no idea it would be such a clever and heart felt exploration into what it means to be human. I ripped through this one in record time. And now I find out it’s a series? Oh, yay!

Identity.

Where does it lie? In a face? A voice? A bundled string of events we call a lifetime? Is it in our DNA, bone, flesh, ancestry? How do we define our identity, and is it a once and for all definition?

Who am I? Can anyone ever know for sure just what it takes to be who we are?

We all search for our place in this world and how we fit in, but for Jenna Fox that search reaches dark new dimensions when she wakes from a coma and can’t remember who she is. Worse, she doesn’t remember the people who claim to be her parents. There is something curious about them, about the house they all live in–in fact, curious describes her whole life, as she attempts to unlock the secrets of who she was, and who she has become.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox is about Jenna’s search for identity, a quest as old as history, but as startling as the future. (Plot summary from the author’s website.)

Learn more about Mary E Pearson here.

Follow Mary on Twitter here.

Have you read any fantastic books about car crashes?

Have you been in a car crash? How did it change your life?

Let me hear from you.

Gone, Daddy Gone, Your Love is Gone – A Postal Challenge Review

Gillian Flynn is a master of emotional manipulation. In her latest book, Gone Girl, a man comes home on his wedding anniversary to find a disturbing scene – front door open, evidence of a violent struggle, pool of blood, and a missing wife.

But is she dead or just gone?

Flynn really puts you through the wringer as she has you rallying behind the husband one minute – sure he’s being unjustly framed – and the next she has you shaking your head, wondering how he could be such an insensitive idiot.

What’s so agonizing is that for the most part, we only learn about the wife through extensive diary entries and the husband’s memories. The problem is, these two views don’t always match up.

So…who’s telling the truth? The missing wife or the imperfect husband?

Was his wife really such a raging, manipulative bitch or was she the compassionate soulmate trying to patch their life back together?  The constantly evolving views of the characters leave your head spinning until you just don’t know what or who to believe. The noose gets tighter around the husband’s neck as the evidence piles up against him. And yet you want to believe him. You want to be on his side.

And that’s when Flynn comes along and lets you rest your head on her shoulder and says, “There, there.” She has you right where she wants you.

How does Flynn get us to care for such a flawed character? Genius!

I picked up this book after an editor at the SCBWI LA conference recommended it as an excellent example of pacing. She wasn’t kidding. I lost many hours of sleep staying up reading just one more chapter.

With the fabulous diary entries, this fine read qualifies as one of my Postal Reading Challenge books. Learn more about this splendiferous challenge here at the Indextrious Reader’s blog. Feel free to join in if you are so inspired.

Here’s a plot summary for Gone Girl from Flynn’s website:

Marriage can be a real killer. One of the most critically acclaimed suspense writers of our time, New York Times bestseller Gillian Flynn, takes that statement to its darkest place in this unputdownable masterpiece about a marriage gone terribly, terribly wrong. As The Washington Post proclaimed, her work “draws you in and keeps you reading with the force of a pure but nasty addiction.” Gone Girl’s toxic mix of sharp-edged wit with deliciously chilling prose creates a nerve-fraying thriller that confounds you at every turn.

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick Dunne’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River. Husband-of-the-Year Nick Dunne isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but hearing from Amy through flashbacks in her diary reveal the perky perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media—as well as Amy’s fiercely doting parents—the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter—but is he really a killer? As the cops close in, every couple in town is soon wondering how well they know the one that they love. With his twin sister Margo at his side, Nick stands by his innocence. Trouble is, if Nick didn’t do it, where is that beautiful wife? And what was left in that silvery gift box hidden in the back of her bedroom closet?

If you love a great psychological mystery with fantastically twisted and well developed characters, you will love this book.

Learn more about Gillian Flynn on her website here.

Getting in Touch with my Austen Peeps – A Challenging Review

Some of you may have remembered that I’ve taken up a couple of challenges this year. (I first mentioned them in this post here and this one here.) Both involve reading and reviewing books with differing themes. Not such a tough thing for a lover of reading, I admit. In the end, not so much challenging as just fun and another excuse to share some great books with you. I have two reviews for you this week – one today and one this weekend.

For the Pride & Prejudice Bicentenniary Challenge, I wasn’t ready to tackle the original text just yet. Then I stumbled on some news about a children’s author I follow on Twitter. Then I read that she not only wrote something for adults, but that it had a Jane Austen theme. Not only that, the first book in this new series was just made into a movie. And it’s all about a woman who is totally obsessed with Pride and Prejudice and that fantastic Mr. Darcy, much to the detriment of her own love life.

Perfect!

The book?

Austenland by Shannon Hale

Here’s the plot summary:

Jane Hayes is a seemingly normal young New Yorker, but she has a secret. Her obsession with Mr. Darcy, as played by Colin Firth in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, is ruining her love life: no real man can compare. But when a wealthy relative bequeaths her a trip to an English resort catering to Austen-crazed women, Jane’s fantasies of meeting the perfect Regency-era gentleman suddenly become realer than she ever could have imagined.

Decked out in empire-waist gowns, Jane struggles to master Regency etiquette and flirts with gardeners and gentlemen—or maybe even, she suspects, with the actors who are playing them. It’s all a game, Jane knows. And yet the longer she stays, the more her insecurities seem to fall away, and the more she wonders: Is she about to kick the Austen obsession for good, or could all her dreams actually culminate in a Mr. Darcy of her own?

And honestly, how many of us (participating in this challenge or not) can identify to some degree with a (slightly obsessive) preoccupation with Pride & Prejudice and hoping that there is a Mr. Darcy out there for us as well? Of course, I’m not saying that we would take it to Jane’s extreme, but still…

Jane is at first ecstatic to be immersed in the world of corsets and drawing rooms, but soon she finds the actors a little too spot on, feeling as if she is the fraud ruining this romantic utopia. She begins to think back on each of her failed relationships to see where they all fell short of the most perfect romance ever written. Is there really a Mr. Darcy out there for her or should she stick to her plan and get this nonsense out of her system once and for all?

Here’s a brief excerpt:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a thirty-something woman in possession of a satisfying career and fabulous hairdo must be in want of very little, and Jane Hayes, pretty enough and clever enough, was certainly thought to have little to distress her. There was no husband, but those weren’t necessary anymore. There were boyfriends, and if they came and went in a regular stream of mutual dissatisfaction—well, that was the way of things, wasn’t it?

But Jane had a secret. By day, she bustled and luncheoned and emailed and over timed and just-in-timed, but sometimes, when she had the time to slip off her consignment store pumps and lounge on her hand-me-down sofa, she dimmed the lights, turned on her nine inch television, and acknowledged what was missing.

Sometimes, she watched Pride and Prejudice.

You know, the BBC double DVD version, starring Colin Firth as the delicious Mr. Darcy and that comely, busty English actress as the Elizabeth Bennet we had imagined all along. Jane watched and re-watched the part where Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy look at each other over the piano, and there’s that zing, and her face softens, and he smiles, his chest heaving as though he’d breathe in the sight of her, and his eyes are glistening so that you’d almost think he’d cry…Ah!

Each time, Jane’s heart banged, her skin chilled, and she clamped down on the distracting ache in her gut with a bowl of something naughty, like Cocoa Pebbles. That night she would dream of gentlemen in Abraham Lincoln hats, and then in the morning laugh at herself and toy with the idea of hauling those DVDs and all her Austen books to the second hand store.

Of course, she never did.

That pesky movie version was the culprit. Sure, Jane had first read Pride and Prejudice when she was sixteen, read it a dozen times since, and read the other Austen novels at least twice, except Northanger Abbey (of course). But it wasn’t until the BBC put a face on the story that those gentlemen in tight breeches had stepped out of her reader’s imagination and into her non-fiction hopes. Stripped of Austen’s funny, insightful, biting narrator, the movie became a pure romance. And Pride and Prejudice was the most stunning, bite-your-hand romance ever, the kind that stared straight into Jane’s soul and made her shudder.

It was embarrassing. She didn’t really want to talk about it. So let’s move on.

Hale gives a charming, if at times uncomfortable, view of what it would feel like to actually be transported to one’s own Austenland. Be careful what you wish for, here. This book may make you question how much of your concepts of romance, what you expected to find out in the world when searching for someone to be your partner in life – the deep down ones that you never told anyone – were based on unrealistic expectations and fantasies not to be found in the real world. You may ask yourself, “Is this nagging sense of my life being incomplete that I sometimes get after reading/watching P & P from some lame lack of fulfillment or just the wistful longing that great literature can evoke?”

Of course, those stories never show the perfect romantic couples dealing with whose turn it is to take out the trash or feed the screaming baby at 2 AM either, do they?

This is a great, easy read for any hardcore Austen fan to enjoy.

Learn more about Shannon Hale and her books here.

Are There Really Perks to Being a Wallflower? A Contemplative Book Review

My most recent WIP deals with some pretty heavy topics – sexual abuse, drug use, sociopaths up to no good, pre-marital what? – and it all takes place in a treatment center for teens. Needless to say, I’ve received some unusual must-read book recommendations from other writers when they’ve learned about the subject matter. I do love reading books that are similar to what I’m writing – it’s actually important to do this for many reasons, but I won’t go into that now; I’ve already talked about why as a writer you should read here and here.

Some of the suggested reads were fantastic, some were okay, and some were totally awful and unrealistic – having worked in a psychiatric facility with teens, it really makes me crazy (no pun intended) when someone who hasn’t done their homework spouts off a bunch of bullshit that a reader might actually take seriously. Sorry, major pet peeve.

I’ve also read so many depressing books over the past few years, that I think I need to write a romantic comedy for my next book. I’m in need of a little lightness of being, if you know what I’m saying. (Hint, hint: Give me some funny book suggestions – please!)

One recent book recommendation that came from several sources was a delightful surprise: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.

standing on the fringes of life . . .

offers a unique perspective. but there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor.

the perks of being a wallflower is a story about what it’s like to travel that strange course through the uncharted territory of high school. the world of first dates, family dramas, and new friends. of sex, drugs, and the rocky horror picture show.

of those wild and poignant roller-coaster days known as growing up.

The voice of this story was so spot on.

We fumble right along with Charlie (whose name isn’t really Charlie, but it’s the only name we’re ever given) as he navigates his first year of high school, hoping to find a friend after his only friend committed suicide. We feel the awkwardness of his first relationship and the heartache of love unrequited. Charlie is such an unusual and memorable character. We can tell from early on that his brain doesn’t work quite like everyone else’s just by the way he describes the scenes of his life events; we as the readers get some of the social cues that he totally misses. We also are left to piece some things together that are too painful for Charlie to talk about. Once we do, his eccentricities and aggressive outbursts make a lot more sense. The music references added such a nice layer of detail and brought back so many memories. I love that the story is set in the 90s – well, it was written in the late 90s, so of course it felt authentic to the time – but whatever, the story still feels relevant for today.

What made this story so intriguing, so intimate, was the letter-writing format. Charlie can’t confide in anyone he knows, but he needs to get some things off his chest, so he writes about his life through a series of letters to an anonymous stranger that he heard others talk of fondly in passing. Somehow he thinks this means the person he’s writing to will understand him. This person is never named, only called, “Dear Friend”. Although some stories written in letter or diary format can lose a sense of closeness when we only “see” events after they’ve happened or learn about them through hearsay, this one does not let us down. I really enjoyed watching how Charlie’s letter-writing evolved throughout the story, once his English teacher tutors him, takes him under his wing, to expand on the innate ability he recognizes in Charlie.

An overall bittersweet, lovely story. Three thumbs up.

I know this was made into a film, recently, and now I can’t wait to see it. If for no other reason, to see how in the hell they translated this into a movie. That couldn’t have been easy.

Learn more about Stephen Chbosky here.

Shortly after starting this book, I came across this blog post at The Indextrious Reader’s blog.

She started a fairly painless, yet creative challenge for the new year called The Postal Reading Challenge which involves agreeing to read and review books about letters and letter writing; anything with a postal theme will do. You can find links from her blog with beaucoups de postal reading suggestions. You can also find the links list of all the other people participating in this challenge so you can check out their reviews.

There are many levels of participation. I signed up and aimed low so as not to overly stress myself. I hope to read and review at least four books with a postal theme before the end of December.  Why don’t you join us? Sounds like fun.

Reflections on A Raisin in The Sun

Great works of literature can imitate life in such rich detail that they put us right in the heart of a scene; we see the movement of battle, hear the inflection of every harsh word spoken, and feel our own hearts break right along with the protagonist’s. Lorraine Hansberry was a talented playwright who did this effortlessly in her ground-breaking play A Raisin in the Sun. Her story follows the struggles of the Younger family. When given an opportunity to leave their life of poverty in their tiny apartment in Chicago’s south side for a home of their own in a white neighborhood, conflicts arise.

But before we even meet the family, Hansberry builds the mood by the briefest description of the setting: “Its furnishings are typical and undistinguished and their primary feature now is that they have clearly had to accommodate the living of too many people for too many years – and they are tired”. Just that little bit tells you so much about the lives of the people living in this space.

Even earlier than this, Hansberry opens the play with a quote from a Langston Hughes poem:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore -

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat

Or crust and sugar over -

Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

Like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Talk about powerful imagery. You know before reading a single line that this is going to be a story of struggle and pain.

Hansberry drew on her own experiences when writing this story. Her father purchased property in a white Chicago neighborhood and when that purchase was challenged in court, their family fought it all the way to the Supreme Court. Hansberry reflects on this period in her life in an excerpt from To be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words, adapted by Robert Nemiroff.

My father was typical of a generation of Negroes who believed that the “American way” could successfully be made to work to democratize the United States. Thus, twenty-five years ago, he spent a small personal fortune, his considerable talents, and many years of his life fighting, in association with NAACP attorneys, Chicago’s “restrictive covenants” in one of this nation’s ugliest ghettos. That fight also required that our family occupy the disputed property in a hellishly hostile “white neighborhood” in which, literally, howling mobs surrounded our house…My memories of this “correct” way of fighting white supremacy in America included being spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. And I also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our house all night with a loaded German Luger, doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court.

Seeing this history, one can see how easy it would have been to write a straight-forward Us versus Them storyline which would have probably been okay, but what makes the story she actually wrote so much more compelling is the authentic, nuanced cast of characters she created who show a range of real emotions and conflicting motivations. Although this book was published in 1959, the relevance still rings true – from the societal issues of racial tension to the more personal struggles of trying to overcome one’s circumstances.

I wonder sometimes about the timing of things, even something as simple as when I am drawn to read a book. My daughter was assigned to read this for school, so it’s been lying about the house for months. I picked it up this week and finished it the day we heard that my husband’s mother had died. Even though her health had been declining and even though we had been preparing ourselves for the end, her passing came unexpectedly.

Over this past week, I have often thought about my mother-in-law’s devotion to her children and how she struggled and did without so that she could lessen her children’s suffering. In some aspects, she minds me of Mama Younger who did the same. Both of these women also tried to instill pride and decency in their children and put their children’s dreams at the forefront. This story now has a special place in my heart and will always be entangled with my memories of a wonderful lady.

Isn’t it beautiful what a great work of literature can do?

Darcy Pattison – Novel Revisions and Desert Baths – The Author Interview

For most writers, the hardest part is getting to “The End”. Finishing a first draft can be daunting, but once accomplished, you feel like you can take on the world. You’ve managed to write a beginning, a middle, and an END!!! Congratulations! Have some cake! Then when you wake up the next day, remnants of your celebratory cake still stuck to your face after you crashed out on your couch from the massive sugar rush, you realize that the hard work is just starting; this is where the creative struggle really begins. The revision process can make or break your manuscript and one of the best teachers on how to get the most out of your novel revision is Darcy Pattison.

“Revisions are the messy route toward powerful stories.” from Darcy’s Novel Revision Workbook

I first met Darcy many years ago when she taught a novel revision retreat for our Oklahoma SCBWI group. She wasted no time. She told us that she didn’t care how we wrote our first draft – whether we were serious plotters or pantsters didn’t matter. The issue of “What is the story?” was no longer important. Our new focus should be, “What is the most dramatic way to tell this story?”

She never told any of us how we should change our stories, instead she gave us strategies and techniques for revision to tell our stories our way, from completing a detailed novel inventory worksheet, which gave us an overview of what was really in our drafts, to exploring the obligatory scene, to character epiphanies and, my personal favorite, the section on sensory detail; how using the senses can really anchor a scene. I still use many of the things I learned from Darcy to this day.

Darcy not only teaches other writers how to be better writers, she is a well accomplished writer herself. She has ten children’s books published,  as well as several instructive books on writing. In Darcy’s latest picture book, Desert Baths, she brings her aptitude for teaching together with her creative talent for storytelling. Children curious about animals living in the American Southwest can learn about the diverse species presented through their unusual bath time rituals. From the scaled quail who scrubs herself with ants to the western banded gecko who uses his long tongue to lick his eyeballs clean to the nocturnal mud-bathing activities of the javelina, all twelve animals make do without much water and none use soap.

Darcy has paired up again with illustrator Kathleen Rietz, whom she worked with on a previous nature picture book, Prairie Storms. The illustrations are gorgeous and compliment the lilting text that lead you through the desert landscape and leave you wanting to know more. This book can be used as a jumping off point to delve deeper into the world of desert animals. An extensive teaching guide can be found on the publisher’s website.

Here’s a really cute book trailer for Desert Baths with children acting out different animals bathing rituals:

I asked Ms. Pattison if she would be willing to be interviewed for her new book release and she graciously agreed.

Valerie Lawson: Darcy, I wanted to say, that reading your book, Desert Baths, brought back a memory of when I was a kid and I asked my mother – when she obviously wasn’t paying attention – if I could go take a bath out in the rain. I was curious about how people bathed before indoor showers. As someone who’s always been curious about the hows and whys of the world, I really enjoyed your book.

Now, on to the questions!

As a young kid, what was the worst trouble you ever got into? And what was your punishment?

Darcy Pattison: I got caught eating pieces of candy from a candy box that was meant for a Mother’s Day present. I had to set up a shop and sell— beg —my siblings to buy pieces of candy at the exorbitant price of 10¢ a piece. I had to use all the money I had saved from my allowance, plus what I could make selling that candy and buy a new box. Talk about humiliation in front of your family—I was totally mortified.

VL: How awful! I believe I did something similar when I was in Bluebirds. We were supposed to be selling boxes of chocolates; I had all of these boxes of chocolate in my bedroom. What was a seven year-old to do but open them and start eating? I didn’t stay in Bluebirds very long. I know I was punished for that, but I blocked that part out of my head.

VL: Tell me about your most memorable adventure you had with your friends outside of school.

DP: I lived in the mountain of New Mexico, just a mile from the Continental Divide. You may think of it as a long continuous line, but it’s really a series of ridges, often skipping a section of the ranges at a time. Ours was a small mountain that was loosely connected into the range. Once, my brothers dared my sister and I to go with them and climb the Divide. You could actually start at one end of “our Divide” and walk up a fairly gentle slope to the top. But this time, the challenge was to climb straight up. Memory is fuzzy—it must have been a couple hundred feet to the top. I remember reaching for the next finger and toe-holds and toiling hard, and working for hours and hours. I made it to within ten feet of the top, but the last bit was truly straight up. I couldn’t do it. It’s something I regret to this day, that I couldn’t finish the last bit of the climb.

VL: Isn’t that interesting that some of our most vivid memories are of failures rather than successes? Maybe you’ll make it back there someday and conquer that mountain.

On to one of my favorite questions, what was the scariest thing that you ever experienced as a kid?

DP: When I was 8 or 9, our dogs got rabies and they ran around and around and around the house, baying and barking, while we clung to window panes and watched and begged Mom to explain, “What’s wrong with them? How long will they do that? What’s wrong with them?”

It was the sounds that were the scariest: the barks, the whines, the feet racing around the house, the whimpers. The barks that wouldn’t quit.

Finally, my oldest brother had to go out with the shotgun and put them out of their misery. Even that was scary, because he had to avoid getting bit while trying to corner them. It was a sad, scary day.

VL: Oh! That’s not only frightening, but so sad.

VL: On to something a little more uplifting, what did you want to be when you were in grade school? What influenced this choice?

DP: An astronaut, of course. Every kid in the 60s/70s wanted to be an astronaut, it was the time of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. But then, someone told me that if you wore glasses or had ever had a broken arm, you would never qualify to be an astronaut. I had to give up my dream, since I wore glasses and my right wrist had been broken when I was ten. After that, I couldn’t decide on anything else, so I drifted until I found writing.

VL: Ah! How many of us drifted until we found writing? When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

DP: I was interested in sixth grade, when I read Lord of the Rings. I wondered what it would be like to be on the other side of reading, to be a writer. But I didn’t do anything about it till I was grown and had three children of my own and started reading the best of children’s literature again.

VL: Tolkein is quite an inspiration for a sixth-grader! When did you start pursuing your writing seriously?

DP: During nine months of 1985, my husband was unemployed. I was a stay-at-home Mom, who was homeschooling the oldest of our girls. But I had a Masters degree. I did a lot of fill-in work that year, but when a new job came through for my husband, we were still committed to having me stay home with the kids. But I thought that with this Masters degree, surely there was something else I could do while at home, some way to make money to fill in during lean times. I started writing—and never looked back.

VL: And we are so very glad that you did. Thank you so much for taking the time to visit with us, today. It has been a pleasure getting to know more about you.

If you would like to learn more about Darcy Pattison, visit her website -  Fiction Notes. There you will find an excellent resource of information on novel revision as well as a plethora of other writing topics.

And for one lucky reader, I have a signed copy of Desert Baths to give away. To enter to win, leave a comment. You can tweet about this interview or mention it on Facebook for an additional entry. Let me know how you got the word out so I can give you the extra credit – don’t you just love extra credit? I’ll determine the winner by a lucky roll of the twenty-sided die (or dice, depending on how many entries I receive) one week from this posting.

Locked Down with Walter Dean Myers – a book review

I am so thrilled that Walter Dean Myers is our current National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and that his focus is how reading will affect your life – telling parents that it is vital to sit down and read to their children every day. It will make a difference in their lives. What an obvious and yet necessary thing to convey to kids and parents. Reading is important.

I was a fairly new writer or at least  new to accepting the label of “writer” to myself when I first heard Walter Dean Myers speak back in 2007. It was also the first time I had attended the SCBWI LA Summer Conference. I was a happy, glowing sponge, soaking up the atmosphere of so many people talking in a language that I understood – who understood me. I felt for the first time that I had found where I belonged. These were my people!

Mr. Myers’s Keynote address was called “A Passion for Details” and in his talk, he said the thing that made one writer more successful than another was the details.

“You need to recognize the details as the truth.”

You know you have accomplished this when the reader walks away from the story and can think about it further knowing what the character is doing beyond the story itself – how his life will progress beyond the ending. He also said that the internal landscape of the character is much more important than the physical attributes. You should understand the details that comprise your characters so readers can recreate them in their own minds.

He went on to say that every story is about a character with a problem. We have to know enough about that character to make his life interesting to us and we have to be able to create his problem in our minds. Why is that person’s life important? Give us the details.

In his one of his latest books, Lockdown, Myers does just that. He puts us right into the mind of Reese, a 14 year-old kid struggling in Progress juvenile detention after stealing prescription pads to help his family with money problems. Reese is trying to follow the rules to get an early release and get back home to take care of his younger siblings left at home with his drug-addicted mother. With guards that turn the other way when bad things happen and old men who think you’re going to steal from them just because of the color of your skin, Reese gets pushed to the brink every day. But Reese can’t just sit by when his friend Toon gets jumped. He risks his freedom and his future to do what he thinks is right.

Myers pulls you inside this dreary world and makes you feel what life is like, being misunderstood, being neglected, ignored, and having no one to count on but yourself. You care for Reese and want to scream at the people not helping him and not seeing what he’s going through and you hope that he can rise above his circumstances and somehow things will turn out all right. Any book that can illicit that much emotion from me is stupendous and well worth the read.  Thank you, Mr. Ambassador.

To learn more about Walter Dean Myers and his other books, visit his website.

Very LeFreaking out over Rachel Cohn

I may have mentioned that I am an avid reader; a devourer of books. If you are going to be a writer of any worth,  then you HAVE TO READ. Yes, it is mandatory. Read in the genre you are writing for, and although it’s great to read the classics, make sure you are also reading what’s current. If you hate to read or even worse, loathe the audience members for whom you are writing, stop now. Exit, stage left. Pottery class will begin shortly next door.

Reading the work of other writers can teach you so much. Seeing how someone else has tamed the words onto the page and tackled the story arc successfully may help you see where your own story may be lacking. Study the way your favorite authors accomplished the task of telling a complete story and you will learn something about how to make your own writing better.

Ever been told by an editor that your story lacks that intangible thing called “voice”?

When I open one of Rachel Cohn’s books, it’s like cracking open the skull of the nearest teenaged girl and blasting her thoughts through a thousand watt amp.  Her books scream out with a unique teen voice. She gets it.

I love Rachel Cohn. She not only authored one of my favorite YA series Gingerbread, Shrimp, and Cupcake following the fascinating character Cyd Charrise through her search of self-discovery and the ultimate cup of coffee, but she’s also co-authored several books with another favorite author of mine, David Levithan. Together they’ve written Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist,  Naomi and Ely’s No Kiss List, and their latest collaboration Dash and Lily’s Book of Dares.

I first encountered Rachel in 2008 at the Society of Children’s Book Writer’s and Illustrator’s (SCBWI) Summer conference in LA. Not surprisingly, Rachel did a talk on “Teen Voice”. Something she said during that talk stuck with me. She said that one of the biggest mistakes writers make when writing YA is to idolize their teen years instead of writing things the way they actually were. It’s all about the emotions. “The emotions of being a teenager are the same as they were 50 years ago.” You can’t go to the mall or watch popular culture and expect to develop a true teen voice; you have to tap into the emotions. Right then, I about jumped out of my chair because I was very in touch with what it was like for me when I was a teenager. Angsty was my middle name. Now all I needed was the courage to let those emotions spill out onto the page. (That is a completely different post.)

Rachel’s latest book, Very LeFreak, is about a young college girl more obsessed with technology and what’s happened to her elusive online crush than whether or not she’s failing out of school. When we first meet Very, short for Veronica, she is listening to her iPod in one ear, her iPhone plugged into the other, while working on her laptop. She always has her phone against her skin so she doesn’t miss a vibration alerting her to a message of any kind, especially from her secret crush. She ends up in rehab for the technology-challenged after attacking an ex-boyfriend who destroys her laptop.

I did feel odd reading this on my Nook, like I was somehow cheating when Very couldn’t have so much as an ohm of electricity. I felt like I myself should go on a week-long tech cleansing or at least take a walk outside in solidarity. That’s how connected I felt to Very. But in my defense, I couldn’t stop reading…and I was trying out my library’s newest program – downloadable eBooks. (Again, that is a different post for a different time.)

Overall, I’m happy to say that Rachel Cohn is my first. First blog review, first library eBook, first YA author crush forever. Her book Very LeFreak is superb. She has an amazing teen voice you will fall in love with, laugh with, even as your heart aches. In the end, Very’s story shows how we all need a sense of balance in our lives. And for us writers-in-training, we can learn what an authentic voice sounds like and maybe even find some balance in our own writing.

To learn more about Rachel Cohn, visit her website at: http://www.rachelcohn.com/