Read a Book (or a Bunch of Them) part 2

Goals Update:

Books read: 45

Words on WIP:12,500

Submissions: 2 rejected, 1 accepted, 1 outstanding
Words on spangly new secret project, part 1: 6,000/8,500

Events: Rocket CityAuthor Event July 21, Huntsville, AL VBC

Last time, I recommended books where we were the monsters and books where characters navigate the complexity of grief. For this set of recommendations, I want to dig into types of characters that I love reading 

I’m still open to suggestions for types of recommendations you’d like to see. If there’s a type of book you want to pick my brain about, drop me a line in the comments to let me know.

But let’s get to those book recs.

HEEL-FACE TURN/FACE-HEEL TURN

Admittedly, this one is a little difficult to give recommendations based on—revealing a heel-face turn or its reverse is often spoilery. But I’m going to do my best to keep these recs as spoiler-free as I can. Each book has several characters who struggle with their loyalty.

This struggle—what side am I really on? Have I been making things worse or better? Why am I so bad at being good?—is one of the most interesting types of conflict. This ties in with my overall greater interest in bad guys who think they’re the good guys. I’d rather read about a villain who thinks they’re a hero than about someone who just wants to watch the world burn.

My recommendations

My first recommendation is LABYRINTH LOST. The heel-face/face-heel turn in this book isn’t necessarily a huge part of the story, and it’s a little difficult to put the character doing the turning solidly on one side or the other, but conflicting loyalties is a pretty major part of the book.

Alex comes from a family of brujas, and she herself is the possessor of some powerful magic—but she doesn’t want it. When she tries to get the Deos to take her powers back, things go off the rails and she has to rely on Nova, a brujo she’s not entirely sure she can trust to help her navigate the world of the Deos so that she can get her family back. A companion novel to this book, BRUJA BORN, just came out this summer, so this is really two recommendations for the price of one.

CHILDREN OF BLOOD ANDBONE has been pitched as what you’d get if Avatar: The Last Airbender was based on African culture rather than Asian culture—and we all know that A:TLA had one of the best heel-face turns of all time. Put another way, this book is Black Panther with magic. This novel uses multiple points of view to show different sides of the world’s power structure. Magic disappeared one night, and since then, people that bear the mark of that lost magic have found themselves crushed under the monarchy’s heel. Zelie has a chance to bring magic back, but the powerful who wish to keep things the way they are will do whatever they have to to stop her. This is also a good one if you like heroes with complicated feelings toward their antagonists. This book is also part of a series, but I don’t think the release date for the next installment has been announced yet.

QUEER GIRLS FIGURING OUT WHO THEY ARE

Identity is complicated, and folks who grew up when I did didn’t get much chance to see their journey’s reflected in books at the time. Thankfully, this is a trend that’s changing. This category is one that I wish someone had been able to give me books for when I was a teen. (As an interesting note, both of these books also take place in the south, which, for me, is another nice layer of representation.)

My recommendations

In RAMONA BLUE, the titular Ramona’s life has been unsteady since Hurricane Katrina hit. In spite of the tumult, she clings to a few certainties—things like her love for her family, her attraction to girls, and her dreams of something bigger and better than her life in Eulogy, Mississippi. 

Though Ramona’s only a teenager, circumstances have pushed her to take on the role of an adult in her household. So, when her childhood friend Freddie moves back to town, he’s a welcome distraction. And, as their friendship picks up where it left off, Freddie convinces her to give swimming a try—and she loves it. And thinks she might love him. 

Ramona’s journey is one that delves into the fluidity of sexuality, resilience of family, and learning how to adjust to life’s changes.

IVY ABERDEEN’S LETTERTO THE WORLD is actually a middle grade book (meaning that it’s written for preteens, with POV characters on the younger end of middle school). This is a book about a first crush. Ivy’s got a notebook full of secret drawings of girls holding hands. When a tornado rips through her Georgia town and destroys her house, her notebook full of secret drawings goes missing. She’s in a panic that gets worse until her secret drawings start showing up, one-by-one, in her locker. She thinks—or maybe hopes—that the person giving them back to her is her classmate, a girl named Jane that she thinks she might have a crush on. Ivy’s got to decide if her secret drawings—and her secret feelings—need to come out in the open.

Y’all, I’m not a crier, but this little book got me. I seriously can’t recommend it enough.

I’ll be taking a break from recommendations next post to do a recap of the Author Event (tickets available through the link above!), but look for more book recommendations in August.

What are some of the books you keep recommending to your friends? Drop some in the comments! Let’s help build up each other’s TBR piles.

BELLES AND BRUJAS Recap

Goals Update:

Books read: 43

Words on WIP: 10,250

Submissions: 1 outstanding

Attending book events is a relatively recent thing for me. I didn’t start going to conventions as an attendee until my mid-twenties, and last year was my first time going to a show as a vendor. I’d never been to a book signing.

Some of this is a result of where I live. My city might be big for Alabama, but it’s not exactly a giant metropolis. Book tours don’t frequently stop in my town, and I frankly haven’t had a whole lot in the way of time to travel for something like a book tour.

But, this past week, a perfect opportunity arose.

I managed to make it to the Nashville stop of the “Belles and Brujas” Tour. The tour is for a couple of books that came out this year: THE BELLES by Dhionelle Clayton which came out in February and BRUJA BORN by Zoraida Cordova which came out this month. Throughout the tour, other authors have joined as guests. For the Nashville stop, the guests included Julie Murphy (author of, among other books, RAMONA BLUE which just barely missed my top five reads for 2017) and V.E. Schwab, who’s got a long list of works that includes the book THIS SAVAGE SONG, which I’ve mentioned here several times. (SEVERAL times.)

 Going to this event was a huge deal for me. These authors’ books have been some of the most captivating recent reads. And I got the chance to listen to them talk. To meet them in person.

Obviously, one of the benefits of going to this event was the swag.

Swaaaaaaag

I got some books signed and got some book-themed goodies. I’ve worn the RAMONA BLUE pin, like, every day since I got it. And there’s something really cool about flipping open your favorite book and seeing a message from its author to you, personally.

But what I really got from this event—the most important swag I came home with—was a spark.

The book signing was the last part of the night. Most of the event was a panel discussion with the four authors. (If you’re interested in the content of the panel itself, Zoraida Cordova has—or at least had—video of the whole thing on her Instagram: @zoraidasolo.)

Listening to authors talk about their work and why they do it is always fascinating. Everyone’s process and reasons are different, and, since our work is shaped by our contexts, getting insight to where different people are provides fresh perspective to the words on the page.

One of the most interesting questions that the authors took on during the panel was the question of with whom or what their work is in dialogue. All four authors talked about using their writing as a way of negotiating their own identities and of making sure that the things that they couldn’t find in books as kids are there for young readers now. They spoke about addressing problematic and frustrating trends in the industry, breaking the patterns to show how a different type of character or arc or archetype can carry a story and be meaningful to readers.

All of the questions were answered with thought and care, but this one, I think, brought out the most passion. It was so wonderful to see authors who clearly care so much about their work and its readers—and society in general.

Being around authors and readers talking about their work and the dialogues surrounding it lit a fire in my belly.

As was said during the panel, so much of writing makes an island out of you. The work can be so lonely. And, for me, I get so in my head. I love creating worlds and stories, but my desire for perfection can start to pull me to pieces. Being around other people who know the struggles, who care about their work, who have sat in front of a page and just wanted to tear their hair out, helps me feel a little more grounded.

I got to spend a couple minutes talking to V.E. Schwab (and managed not to cry/pass out/throw up—good job, me) about the struggles I’ve gone through with my space opera. When I told her how much I appreciated the fact that she is open about the tumultuous relationship she has with her own work, she said that part of the reason she shares the struggles is because, when she started in the industry, there was no transparency. That glossing over of the struggles, she said, can make people feel like there’s a gulf of talent between them and the folks who have “made it” when that’s not the reality.

I know that—have known that. So many factors play into a person getting an agent, getting a book deal, getting sales. Market demands. Agent preferences. Social climate. The phase of the freaking moon.

But when it’s just you and a screen or a page, it’s easy to forget that. To think that the reason that your work still only lives on your flash drive or in your notebook is because of you—because there’s some problem with you or your work or both.

Being around other people who write and other people who care about books, hearing writers you respect voicing some of the same insecurities that you experience makes the whole thing less lonely.

I’ve been struggling to get words on the page this year. Part of it was the whole holding-four-jobs-at-once thing, but part of it was that I was feeling lost. I had so many false starts. So many things about the book I love so much weren’t working (and, to be fair, a lot of them still aren’t, but I’ve at least convinced myself that it’s okay to let the thing breathe for a while).

I left the event Tuesday night feeling buoyant. I felt hopeful. And, most importantly, I wanted to write.

It’s still slow-going—it usually is for me—but I’m making progress. I hit 10,000 words on the WIP. I jotted down some skeletons for a couple of new short projects. I even think I can go back to CANUS in a while and make it shine.

The tour event was the refresher I needed. I’m back. I’m ready.

Read a Book (or a Bunch of Them) Part 1

2018 Goal Update
Books read: 40
Words on WIP: 8,500

I'm deep in the drafting cave right now. Since I (finally) settled on a project that I'm excited about pursuing, I've been doing my best to get a first draft on the page.

The thing with first drafts is that they pretty much always make me feel like I don't know anything about writing. So, I'm not going to be posting about writing for the next few weeks.

Instead, I'm going to talk about books I've read.

Since I'm a person that reads a lot, I get asked for book recommendations pretty regularly.

Rather than just listing books I like, I want to tie my recommendations to specific tropes, archetypes, and trends that I like. I read a pretty wide variety of books, but there are some specific things that pretty much always catch my attention in books. For these lists, I'll tell you a little about some of my favorite elements and recommend a book or two that showcase that element.

We Are the Monsters

I read a lot of genre fiction that pits humans against supernatural creatures or beings from outer space. A pretty frequent theme in these stories is humanity banding together to defeat a common enemy. But what's more interesting are the stories that make me question what it means to be human--ones that point out that human and monster aren't mutually exclusive categories.

My Recommendations

I've talked about this duology before, but it's one of my favorites. In the Monsters of Verity series, violent acts create actual monsters--the worse the violence, the smarter and more dangerous the monster. The city of Verity is divided. A human, Harker, offers protection from the monsters in exchange for a hefty fee. On the other side of the wall, Flynn pushes for stopping the problem of monsters before it starts--and using the most dangerous type of monster, soul-stealing Sunai.Harker's daughter, Kate, wants to prove that she's worthy of her father's monstrous reputation. Flynn's Sunai son, August, just wants to be a normal boy. These books were based on one idea: Plenty of humans are monstrous, and plenty of monsters know how to play at being human.

Grief and Grieving

Loss is always difficult to cope with, and reading has been one of the tools I've used to work out my own feelings. Art--movies, plays, books--give us an chance to vicariously experience the emotions of grief. They help us find catharsis. They give us some tools to deal with these difficulties in our own lives without us having to go through a trauma of our own.

My Recommendations

For this category, I have a genre recommendation and a contemporary recommendation.

THE ASTONISHING COLOR OF AFTER follows a girl named Leigh who is navigating the aftermath of her mother's death by suicide. Leigh is convinced that, after her mother died, she turned into a bird. To find out what her mother's spirit is trying to tell her, she takes a trip to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents and connect with the parts of her mother she never knew. This book is devastating--and I mean that in the best possible way. Leigh's journey is as much about figuring out how to manage the way her life has changed as it is about developing an understanding of her mother's struggle. Plus, the prose is beautiful.

UNDEAD GIRL GANG is one of my favorite reads from this year. Mila's best friend was found dead in the park in what the authorities think was part of a suicide pack with two of their school's queen bees. Unsatisfied with the official explanation, Mila casts a spell to bring back the dead, hoping that her best friend will be able to tell her what happened. Unfortunately, she also brings back the other two girls and is no responsible for managing three undead girls for a week while they work out who killed them. This book isn't the gut-wrencher that ASTONISHING COLOR is, but it does dig into the power of grief. Though Mila gets her friend back temporarily, she does have to figure out how to live in a world where her best friend is there. It's got some great action, wonderful friendship, and magic.

That's it for part one! I'll be back with another round of recommendations. If there are specific tropes, trends, or archetypes you'd like to see recommendations for, let me know.

 
 

Schedules and Recs

2018 Goal Update
Books read: 39
Words on WIP: 6,000/?

So I guess I took a month off from blogging?

May was an exercise in figuring out my new circumstances. Though my new job leaves me with much more in the way of energy and is something that I'm actually done with when I leave for the day (no more student emails in the middle of the night!), it requires my physical presence for a greater number of hours than my previous jobs did. I'm still figuring out the best way to manage this.

I haven't been slacking in my absence. Though there have been a few false starts, I've finally settled into drafting my new WIP. It's not BRUSHSTROKES or Space Frankenstein (though I'm holding on to my notes for both of those--I want to write them, but now's not the time). It's an older project that I made a couple of half-hearted attempts at last year. I think it's had time to percolate, and I'm really enjoying digging into it. As much as it's possible for me to enjoy the torturous process of writing a first draft.

That being said, finding the time to put together blog posts has been a struggle. I plan to keep blogging, but I'll likely be switching to posting on a different day, and maybe once every other week as opposed to once a week. More updates on that as they come, I guess.

June's going to be a month of reorganizing. Hopefully, I'll have my act together by the time of my next in-person author event.

I'll be a guest at the Rocket City Author Event in Huntsville, AL on July 21. It's a day-long event, and tickets are pretty cheap (I think $5 for guest tickets and $7.50 for VIP tickets?). I'll have copies of EVIN and MATA HARI, so it's a great chance to get those signed if that's the kind of thing you're into.

Since I'm going to be busy in the drafting cave and doing event prep, I'm trying to plan out my next few blog posts. What I think I'm going to do is a series of book recommendations. I'll start with ones based on my favorite things in books--favorite tropes or character archetypes or settings. But what I'd really like to do is give recs for things you're looking for.

So here's what I'd like you to do: in the comments, tell me what things you're looking for in books. I'll see if I've got anything on my list that hits those marks.

Catch you in a couple weeks.

Filling the Well

2018 Goals Update:
Books read: 30 (last week should have been 29, but I guess I got too excited)
Space Frankenstein: Outlined
Words on Space Frankenstein: 400/?

This has been a week of changes for me. I started my new job full-time. I still have a few odds and ends to take care of for my teaching gigs, but they're not my day to day anymore (and emails from students have slowed down--now I'm mostly seeing "can you round up my grade/can I do extra credit" emails that I don't have to respond to).

It's a little amazing how immediately this change trickled into other parts of my life. My level of energy has changed. I mean, I'm not suddenly out here running marathons, but I'm still able to focus at the end of the day. I still have some emotional reserves left to pull from.

I haven't been able to get many words on paper this week. Part of this is a time issue--in the early week, I was doing a lot of grading. But mostly I've been more focused on digging into the planning.

I had originally planned for the next long project I worked on to be BRUSHSTROKES--my take on YA Contemporary. But no matter what I did, I couldn't make it work.

I wasn't ready to make it a book yet, and I think, because so much of my mental and emotional energy was tied up with teaching and the stresses that go along with it, I wasn't able to see that I wasn't ready.

I've mentioned several times that I'm mostly a planner. I don't know everything that happens every step of the way before I go in, and I still do pretty extensive revisions. But making an outline is my clue-- "Hey, there's enough here for me to make this idea a whole book." That may not sound like much, but it gets me through the drafting process. When I'm wandering in the middle and can't figure out what I'm trying to do--when I'm starting to think that maybe the whole writing thing isn't for me--being able to look at that plan and see that I've got the pieces I need keeps me going.

With BRUSHSTROKES, I was never able to put together an outline. I thought of it as trying something new--shaking up my process. But the lack of guidance wasn't freeing. It didn't let me create something in a different way. It just stressed me out.

On top of the general background of stress in my life.

It was a bad combination.

This week, I've been able to clear my head. I've shelved BRUSHSTROKES. I still want to write it, but I'm going to leave it for a while until I'm sure I can make a book of it. And I've started work on another idea. I've written a shoddy synopsis and a rough outline. I've sketched out a couple of scenes.  I think I'll be able to get to the end of this one.

And all because I have the brain space now.

Sometimes I forget that writing is work--it's mentally and emotionally taxing. I can't draw from the well if the well is empty, and, in the last couple months, it's been empty pretty frequently.

Now, I'm feeling refilled. I'm excited to dig into something new. It's good to be back.

Restart

2018 Goal Update
Books read:29
Words on BRUSHSTROKES: 250/ ?
Words on UNTITLED: 750/?

Starting new projects is always a little weird for me. It think it's rough for everyone, honestly. You're basically going from a near-finished product that you've been polishing for ages to a place where you're pretty much throwing words at a page to see if they stick--like checking to see if pasta is done. First drafts always start pretty slow for me because I can't stop comparing the new thing to the old thing. I get past it eventually, but it makes getting off the ground rough.

I expected these issues when I started BRUSHSTROKES, so I wasn't terribly surprised when I decided to scrap the 5000 plus words I had and start over.

I love the idea for BRUSHSTROKES. I think it'll be a pretty great book when I sit down to write it.

But I'm starting to think maybe now isn't the right time for me to work on it.

I'm in sort of a weird place. CANUS has taken up so much of my creative space over the last couple of years. I've worked on other things, sure, but not in what I think of as my usual way. Each time I've switched to a new project, I've gone in with a pitch, a contract, and a deadline. There was more structure to my writing. Now, I'm a little normless. I want to write another novel--it's time to write another novel--but there's no outside timeline. There's no prepared pitch.

It's been difficult to focus on much of anything in the last two weeks, but BRUSHSTROKES has been a particular nightmare. I can't get deep enough into the POV. I can't organize the scenes. I thought it was the usual new-project-slow start.

But a couple nights ago, I got caught up in another idea. I jotted down a couple paragraphs of a summary. Yesterday, I sat down and put some words on paper. They weren't great--first drafts and all--but they felt good.

So, for now, I'm going to work on the project that feels good. Or at least, feels better. First drafts are generally a hellscape for me, but I think I might be able to get this one on the page.

And that's the important part.

Cool Down

2018 Goal Update
Books read: 27
Words on BRUSHSTROKES: 5900/? (probably 80-85K)

Remember that last week of March when I wrote about 5,000 words in that one week?

Yeah, that didn't happen in the last couple weeks. I didn't even manage to get in last week's blog post (um... sorry about that).

I expect productivity to fluctuate. I know some weeks I'll get more done than others. There are natural dips.

That's not what's been going on.

I've mentioned before that I'm in the process of switching jobs. Adjunct life has been interesting, but it's time for me to move on to work that's more reliable (and comes with better pay and benefits--I love you, academia, but you've got to pay your workers what they're worth). I found a new job that's pretty great and that's willing to wait until the end of the semester to bring me on full-time, so long as I work part-time hours until then.

It's a good deal. Except for one thing: it means that I, right now, have four part-time jobs.

It's been an exhausting couple of weeks. I'm not great at the whole work-life balance thing to begin with, and adding another job to the mix has taken its toll. I've been burning the candle at every conceivable end, and it's drained my writing mojo.

This four-job situation is temporary--at the end of the semester, just a couple of weeks from now, my three teaching jobs end and I'll be down to one full-time job with normal hours. A few low-productivity writing weeks isn't so bad a trade off in the long run. Predictable hours and a decrease in the emotional labor I'll have to do on a daily basis will free up more brain space for creative work. In light of that, a few low-productivity writing weeks aren't a bad trade.

But, oh man, do I feel awful about it.

I'm sort of a slow-producer when it comes to words. Sure, I can crank out over a thousand on a day when I'm on a deadline, but in general it's a slower process for me. Since most of my writer friends are more prolific, I'm pretty insecure about my tiny daily wordcounts under the best of circumstances. It's not as bad when I'm able to squeeze in several writing days in a week. The cumulative wordcount lessens the feeling of inadequacy.

The past two weeks, though, I've been lucky to get in a single 250 word day. A two-week wordcount of fewer than 500 words is a gut-punch.

One of the ways that my brain lies to me is that it constantly tells me that I'm lazy. No matter how much I get done or how many hours of work I put in, there's a voice in my head that's telling me I'm not trying hard enough. I know that this is objectively not true, but it's hard to ignore that voice in times like this when I'm not getting words on the page.

It's a struggle to keep my expectations reasonable this week. There's only so much time in a day, and I only have so much mental space. If my productivity is low now, that's not so bad. This overwhelming situation is temporary, and once things settle, I should be able to get back on my feet--maybe not back to that end-of-March-I-had-a-whole-week-off level, but to somewhere reasonable.

In the meantime, I guess I have to take some time. Allow myself to recharge. Write what I can, when I can, but not get caught up in the numbers.