Tag Archives: orca sports

YALSA list!

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WHAT? WHAT HAPPENED HERE? First Powerslide made the CCBC list and NOW Dawn Patrol has been selected as a 20123 YALSA Best Book for Reluctant Readers! YALSA Best Books for Reluctant Readers list (Insert me doing a happy dance which looks a little like this: Happy Dance )

This makes me immensely happy.
I received the news while I was at the OLA Super conference in Toronto signing books for Orca. I love this event. All the librarians. All these people who believe in books and keep reading and getting others to read and say nice things to me about my books. Librarians are like the gatekeepers to other worlds. Someone should write a book about magical librarians. This someone is likely not me. But someone should do this. Because they are THAT AWESOME.
Where was I? Oh, yeah, YALSA. YALSA rocks too.

In writing news, I have finished a book about a talking ferret and a Furry, have submitted my next Orca Sports books (Above All Else) which is due out Spring 2014, and hope to have another book finished this week  (A mystery about a boy who goes missing, and a girl who refuses to believe her brother had anything to do with the crime, tentatively titled Set You Free). I say I hope to have it finished and by finished I mean a horrible first write which I already know is horrible so will therefore need a lot of fixing but fixing is writing and when else in your life can you scold your previous self? (Seriously, Jeff, you thought that dialogue was good? And what’s with this plot point, does that even make sense? And what’s with this guy’s name? And why can’t you spell restaurnat resteraunt, RESTAURANT?)
So the rewriting phase will begin the next week at which time I will NOT get all depressed and moody and weird and drive my family nuts with my weirdness about how awful a book it is because every first write should be awful. At least that’s what I’m told (and anyone who says they just ‘wrote it’ and the book ‘was pretty much complete when they were done’ is either a liar or has a mind which straightens every curve).

I’ve also been working on a Private Eye novel.
Which should make any sane person ask ‘Why would you do that, Jeff? No one asked you to suddenly write an adult novel. Nor, actually, does anyone want this from you. It isn’t even your genre, or age group, and what do you know about PI’s?’

And I would answer, ‘Well, if you’re going to be like that, I won’t let you read it! Plus, I’ve written tons of adult stuff (short stories which have been published all over the place, novels which have been published nowhere). Plus I think anyone should be able to write whatever they want. Genres and age and everything else be damned. PLUS I have a PI license. Yes, an actual license with my picture on it and everything. I took a PI course! So…. there.)
Though my real answer is I love the plot of this book. I love the characters, and it all just seems to work. So I’m going to write it and hope for the best.

So, that’s new news. Check back next week when I can tell you how horrible my first write is and how I just know I can make it better.

Probably.

 

Choosing an Idea

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I recently finished a final draft of Freaks which I’ve been referring to as my ‘ferret book’ but isn’t really, though there is a ferret in it and that ferret talks. But anyway. I edited this  book and edited it again and edited it again to the point where I feel if I edit it anymore I’ll start wrecking what I have created. I know once I sell it I will get an editor who will help me edit some more. In fact I look forward to this. But for the time being it is done.

So I needed a new project. This is always a strange time as I get a LOT of ideas but it’s hard to tell which will pan out. Luckily I have changed my writing method in a way where I can explore a lot of ideas and see which one has the greatest potential.

My first idea was a post apocalyptic trilogy. I know, there are a million of these out there. But I still feel if you can make something new and interesting and the base idea is good then it will be good. I really like the ideas I have but there’s some fine tuning which I am not certain of at the moment. The bigger issue is that committing to a trilogy is like deciding to take a job in some foreign country. You’re there for a long while. Not that I can’t commit to it, it’s just that I have these other ideas floating around and I wanted to make certain they weren’t the most pressing.

So I mapped out the trilogy and then outlined the first book and set it aside. Then I turned to another idea I had and started thinking it through. After about a week I had the basis for a full novel, a kind of thriller. The characters came together fairly completely  the Dramatic Premise and Dramatic Situation came together quickly. But most of all the basic idea was one I’d been considering writing an adult PI novel around and as much as I’d like to write that particular PI novel, the idea was what fascinated me, not so much the form.

So, once I finish the current Orca Sports book (Above All Else) I will get right into this one. And I am excited about it. Excited because I love the idea, but also  because the plotting in this one (and plotting has not always been my strong point) feels tight and possible and the themes and ideas are interesting to me. Right now it’s called Set You Free  (as in the truth shall set you free).

But, again, we’ll see. Writing is a matter of making mistakes and correcting them. And the more you write, the (slightly) easier it becomes to correct mistakes. Though you never stop making them.

A quick note about my method these days. I take the idea, write down everything I can think of about it, sketch out characters I think will work then start putting their interactions together. In this situation, since the basic story is a ‘thriller’ I figure out the suspects, the journey the lead character will take and the different routes the story could go. Once I get enough of this together I write a kind of map of the story. This I work over for quite awhile. While I’m doing this, I write little bits of the narrative to hear what the protagonist’s voice sounds like because the voice always influences the story. If it still all works I write the whole novel as a script. I do this because it is a lot easier to make a mistake in a script and then go back and fix it than it is in a novel. A script for one of my longer books is about 80-100 pages. The books themselves will be 250-300. So if I write myself into a corner, it’s not a problem to back track, delete or even start over. Once I have the script done I check and re-check all the dates and times and ideas to make certain it all moves forward. Then, finally, I start writing the actual book. And as I write, day after day, I tell myself to ‘trust the script’. What is in there works. What is in there makes sense. So I can focus on the characters, the dialogue and the thoughts of the characters.

I love every stage of this, but I have to say that before when I used to write without a real plan at hand, I spent a lot more time pulling my hair out. A lot more time staring at the blank white page. A lot more time wondering what I have done and what I need to do next. And a lot less time writing.

I think the greatest thing I have learned from writing over the past almost 20 years is that you need to combat your weaknesses, whatever they are. Figure out how to get around them. The other thing I’ve learned is that it never stops being fun.

 

What is the end result of reading?

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I’ve been teaching at the college level for twelve years now and every year I am asked to go over the Course Learning Requirements. These requirements work in two ways. One, they give the course some structure. Two, they are the basis for how grades are assigned.
I was thinking this past term, what are the course requirements for reading? What is the end result of reading? How do you evaluate reading abilities? (hint, the answer is NOT standardized testing).
I came to the conclusion that the end result of reading is EVERYTHING. There is virtually nothing which does not require some form of reading to comprehend.(Okay, TV. But I am not of the mind that all TV is evil. In fact I mostly teach scriptwriting for Animation and TV.)From sports to driving to thinking about the world and your place in it. Reading is at the core.Now, thinking back to when I was in school, it seemed to me that the end result of reading was to ‘read GOOD BOOKS’. These books include:
Anything written by women who use ‘and’ between two words in the title.
Anything by George Orwell (which is fine, but take another look at Orwell and then consider the world around you and ask yourself, do a bunch of talking farm animals really make sense to people right now? – on another note, I love Orwell.)
The Great Gatsby. Which is…. great. But…
Hemingway…. I had an amazing teacher in grade 12 who covered a lot of Hemingway novels. I then went on to read the rest myself. But it was only in a recent re-reading of Old Man and the Sea that I actually understood what was going on in that book. What the underlying message was.

There is nothing wrong with any of these books. In fact there is a lot right about them. However, a young reader needs to have an interest in what a book is about ON THE SURFACE to actually want to read them. And on the surface a lot of these classics are kind of dull.Which brings me to what people have been saying about ‘Reluctant Readers’ for awhile. First of all, I’m not a huge fan of that term. Not because it doesn’t describe exactly what these readers are, but because it adds a language to a thing. THESE books are for BOYS who DON’T like to read. And this is somehow lesser than those who DO like to read.
I don’t believe that reluctant readers hate reading. Some might find it difficult. Some might have specific learning difficulties which make it feel impossible. But most, I believe, have simply not found the right books. Ones which grab their attention and keep it. Ones which speak to things that they think about. Ones about sports or music or messing around with their friends.
The books I have written are ones I would have loved to have read when I was younger. I’m sure there were YA type books around when I was a tween (a term which didn’t exist then) and a teen. But, and I’m hazarding a guess here, I suspect the majority of them were for girls. I remember The Outsiders and the rest of S.E. Hinton’s books. They were and remain great. I remember Gordon Korman who is still working today and putting out great, fun books. But then I remember Stephen King and being terrified of sewers after reading IT. There was a gap there. And the gap was that the books I was reading had nothing to do with the life I was living. I mean, I was never in a gang in Texas, nor did I play pranks on my principal and, as far as I know, nothing ever crawled out of the sewers.
Not, again, that this was a ‘bad’ thing. But I was a kid who wanted to read. I loved reading once I got the hang of it. But I saw a lot of my friends who didn’t love reading just stop reading altogether. And that led to a lot of other difficulties. Now everything that had to do with school was a chore. History, Geography, Social Science, it didn’t matter, it was reading at its core and reading about things they weren’t interested in.

I would like to believe that had books like the Orca sports series been around at that time, a lot of those kids who fell behind would not have. Friends of mine who skateboarded and snowboarded and would have read a book about skateboarding or snowboarding in a second and started to love reading; and by reading I simply mean the process of seeing words, interpreting their meaning, and putting sentence together to make sense. This same act, I believe, would have been transferred to reading about Ancient Rome or agriculture in Central America or the travels of Columbus. But instead, the kids were asked to read about a man who loved a woman and spent the rest of his life trying to get her to return to him. I don’t know any fourteen year olds who could relate to The Great Gatsby, no matter how beautiful a book it is.
Anyway, that pretty much sums up why I write the books I have been writing. I am writing other types of books now. Still YA. Still interesting (I hope) and still with the basic premise that you cannot bore anyone any time in writing and the most boring thing of all is self-indulgence. My hope is that whatever I write will help instil a love of reading in people. Reading to understand the world around them. Reading to understand themselves.