writerjenn

Today's post covers ground from the serious to the silly, so fasten your seatbelts.

If you're feeling activistic, here are a couple of opportunities floating around the cybersphere.

To scratch your let's-fight-book-banning itch, or to speak up for a great book:
John Green, author of LOOKING FOR ALASKA and AN ABUNDANCE OF KATHERINES, is asking for support in fighting a challenge to the marvelous LOOKING FOR ALASKA. Click on the link to see the full info.

Laurie Halse Anderson has long been blogging about the importance of running to her writing life. Now the author of SPEAK, TWISTED, and other great books is running to fight cancer as well, by looking for half-marathon sponsors to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Follow the link if you're interested.

Switching gears from activism to writing:

There's a fascinating discussion of beginnings over at Nathan Bransford's blog. I recommend reading not only the post, but the comments that follow it, for some great perspectives on what the first page of a work should do. How much action do you need? What about introducing the characters? Is there such a thing as starting off with too much of a bang? Follow the link to read and/or chime in.

And now for some comic relief:

Toon Thursday this week at Finding Wonderland features a toon based on one of my suggestions, hilariously brought to life by a. fortis. The ferret thing all started with a plagiarism controversy in which a romance writer was alleged to have dropped whole chunks of scholarly material about ferrets into a romance novel. Specifically, the romance novel's main characters engage in a long discourse about ferrets after first engaging in an act of unbridled passion. Now, I had never thought of ferrets as suitable material for pillow talk, and I still don't know that I do, but the whole story has certainly served as fodder for some wonderful cartoons.

Finally, thanks for the supportive comments about my difficulty with my current WIP. I've been working away at it, and it's still too early and I'm too superstitious to give a final verdict on how it has gone, so I'll just say I'm proceeding on. 

Lessons from yesterday's fall conference of the Southeastern PA chapter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and IIlustrators (SCBWI EPA):

You will never have enough time to do everything. You have to figure out what's really important to you and spend your time there. (Courtesy of Laurie Halse Anderson, who, if you've never heard her, is a dynamite speaker. She also happens to be as passionate what running does for her writing as I am about what hiking does for mine);

Above all, and thank heaven this is so, what publishers are still looking for is a good story, well-told. It's the first and most important step in getting anywhere else in this field.

We writers are so lucky this is still the case. We are not being asked to spit out weak copycat versions of the latest trend. We are not being asked to follow a trite formula. Editors and agents, though businesspeople, are still looking for magic. Magic is the unpredictable, the unexpected, the new thing, the fresh viewpoint, the standout quirky story that somehow everyone can relate to. Sometimes writers get frustrated because the magic can be elusive, and it is tempting to ask editors to scribble a formula on the board for us to follow.  But we are unbelievably lucky when they say, "No formula. Just quality."