Library-loving Blog Challenge 2011!

This is a library-loving blog challenge!

We all know how beset libraries are right now, and I love my new hometown library in Bozeman, Montana. Please help me show the love.

For every commenter on this post between now and April 4 at midnight, I will donate $1.00 to the Bozeman Public Library, up to an amount of $100.00 total.

How easy could it be?  You comment, I cough up the money, the libraries get a gift!  If you don’t know what to say in your comment, “I love libraries” will do. 

My pledge is “per commenter”—so if a single person leaves 50 comments, that still only counts once!  But you can do more by spreading the word ... please link to this post, tweet about it, mention it on Facebook, etc.  You can raise money for additional local libraries by visiting the blogs of others participating in this blog challenge. Go to this link:

http://writerjenn.livejournal.com/  (And, by the way, Jennifer Hubbard, author of The Secret Year, is the lovely brain behind this endeavor.)

If you’re inspired to start your own challenge or donate a flat amount to your local library also, please leave the amount of your pledge and the name of your library system in the comments.

There is also a Twitter component to this challenge. For every new follower I get at my Twitter account @janetsfox between now and April 4 at midnight, I will donate an additional $1.00.

And last but not least...I have a library-bound edition of FAITHFUL to give away! If you are a librarian or know a librarian, please indicate and include your email and I'll enter you in a drawing for this edition.


On behalf of libraries everywhere - thanks!

Kidlit4Japan Auction Live!

The Kidlit4Japan auction to benefit children in Japan in the wake of the terrible tragedy there is live, and I want to invite you to bid on any of the wonderful items being offered.

This is a terrific way for the American children's writing community to come together and show our generosity and support.

Devastation in Japan

With all of you, I share a horror at the tragedy unfolding in Japan. My husband is a geophysicist, and I’ve completed a masters’ degree in geology; nevertheless, the power of nature to inflict havoc and human misery is shocking.

Kula, in my second novel FORGIVEN, experiences the terrible devastation of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. While I was researching the novel I came across many, many first-hand accounts, photographs, and videos, and I felt the same kind of shock at what I observed to be the terrible devastation there.

A friend of mine alerted me to a Huffington Post article that described a recently discovered collection of photographs by the photographer Frederick Eugene Ives. Here are a couple of the photographs taken in San Francisco shortly after the earthquake, and a quote from the article:

  

The six never-published images were snapped by photography innovator Frederick Eugene Ives several months after the April 1906 "Great Quake," the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Most were taken from the roof of the hotel where Ives stayed during an October 1906 visit.

They were stowed amid other items donated by Ives' son, Herbert, and discovered in 2009 by National Museum of American History volunteer Anthony Brooks while he was cataloguing the collection.

All photos courtesy of the Photographic History Collection at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

If you want to help Japan, Greg Fishbone has organized an online auction featuring the kidlit community at http://kidlit4japan.wordpress.com/ , the auction to begin Monday, March 21 at this address. You can donate items to the auction, or you can bid on items there. The proceeds will benefit UNICEF in the hopes of reaching children in Japan in particular.

Debut Authors of the Class of 2k11: Bettina Restrepo

I first met Bettina Restrepo just after I began writing for children, when she was the volunteer coordinator for an SCBWI Houston conference. She was warm and funny and gracious, and I'm so pleased to host her here, talking about her debut novel, ILLEGAL.

Congratulations on the publication of your novel, ILLEGAL. Can you tell us a bit about the story and what inspired it?

14 yr old Nora waits for her father to come back to Mexico so that her life can begin again.  He’s working a construction job in Texas and occasionally calls and sends money back to their withering village in Cedula, Mexico. When the phone call and the money stop, Nora creates a plan to cross the border to find him.  It’s a coming of age story crossed with illegal immigration.  It’s also a spiritual exploration many issues including right vs wrong, God, prejudice, and the forgotten people of society. 

My main character, Nora, was inspired by a girl I saw on the side of the road and by my work with Fiesta Mart  I traveled to the stores and saw so many things!

How long have you been writing for children/teens? Have you written other books or is this your first effort?  

I’ve been writing at some sort of professional level since 2002.  I’ve been published in Highlights for Children, Boy’s Life, Nature Friend, and more.  My first picture book came out in 2009, Moose and Magpie (Sylvan Dell Publishing.) 

Can you describe your path to the publication of ILLEGAL?

It was my first novel I ever wrote, and I didn’t sell it until 2009.  It was the novel I re-wrote a million times to teach myself to write better, stronger, deeper.  I gave up many times, but I always got back onto the publishing horse.  It’s a story that wouldn’t leave me alone.

Do you have any advice for beginning writers?  

Read everything.  Read what you love more than 3 times.  Be patient and then be patient some more - with yourself, with the story, with life.

Also, for all writers, not everything you write will be destined for professional publication.  Sometimes a story is best loved with its intended audience.  Write because it is art, not to get famous.   

Can you tell us something about your personal life – inspirations, plans for the future, goals, etc.?

I’m a mom to a very special little boy.  He has an articulation disorder that makes his speech not understandable – but that doesn’t mean he is broken.  My personal goal is to equip him with all the tool he needs to become who he is supposed to be.  It’s definitely my hardest job, and one I can’t fail at.

But, I want to continue to write novels.  I just finished my next YA, which is about Mercedes, a Colombian exchange student in a Texas high school, who is not exactly what she seems.  It’s a soap opera within a book and very funny.  I had a ball writing it. 

What’s next – perhaps I’ll tackle another serious character.  I love my characters.

For life – I want to travel more, spend time with friends and family, and do good for others. 

Do you have any new writing ventures underway?  

I always have 2-3 projects underway. :)

Do you have a website where readers can learn more about ILLEGAL? 

www.bettinarestrepo.com  and on Facebook @BettinaRestrepo

A FAITHFUL Moment: Dances With Wolves

I've been planning for a while to run a series of posts about Montana and the Yellowstone region, in homage to Maggie, the protagonist of Faithful. But I thought I'd start with a personal experience because...it just happened!

We do have wolves here in the mountains around our cabin. I've known this for a while, and we've seen them - usually from the car while driving through the open prairie lands on the way to town - but once I watched them running across the slope across the river from our front porch, and once we saw a wolf while out walking with a group.

Today I crossed paths with a lone wolf, while I was walking alone and was (most likely) the only human in a five mile radius. While he wanted nothing to do with me, I certainly wanted nothing to do with him. But his path took him to a stand of aspen that lies between where I was on the hillside and our cabin.

So my little heart was beating hard for a time, as I skirted the woods and made noise and generally got a move on - without looking like I was moving too fast. I had my eye fixed on the direction in which he went. At one point as I crossed his path (literally) I caught a whiff of him, and boy, did he smell. As an FYI to lovers of novels featuring cute boys who can morph into wolves: don't try this at home.

Not long ago a wolf pack killed a rancher neighbors' dog right outside their house. And I know the ranchers aren't happy with the wolves in general as they can and do predate on sickly calves. I am a big fan of the wolves for many reasons, not the least of which is we need balance in nature and generally speaking wolves want to stay out of our way. But respect is important here. Respect of his space, and my hope that he'll respect mine.

Would Maggie have seen wolves in Yellowstone in 1904? Not likely. Wolves were nearly extinct in this part of the world at that time, having been hunted to the brink. I read nothing about wolves in the journals of the Park Superintendent that year while doing research. I'm glad they're back. But I'm also glad that I'm back in our cabin with no closer encounter than I had.

Women’s History Month: Who Wears the Pants?

When Faithful was recognized by the ALA as an “Amelia Bloomer List” pick for 2011, I knew I had to write a little something about Amelia. (Of course, I’m truly proud, as this is something that is important to me: the list contains the committee’s pick of books that honor “strong, powerful girls and the books that inspire them”. I love that my Maggie inspired this choice!)

Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894) was an early feminist, a proponent of women’s issues, and the founder of a newspaper, The Lily, devoted to issues like suffrage, temperance, and education. But Amelia is best known for her namesake “bloomers” – the first attempt at getting women out of long cumbersome skirts and into pants.

Bloomers were ugly enough that women didn’t take to them widely, and even feminists eventually abandoned them because they looked ridiculous. (You'll notice that women couldn't entirely abandon their skirts, and that the bloomers couldn't exactly hug the figure...maybe the only advantage was that you could run away more easily from some obnoxious male.)

Amelia was happily married, so much so that she gave up her beloved paper in order to follow when her husband wished to move west. She stated that giving up The Lily was an act of love, not of obedience. Her difficult choice resonates; we all must, from time to time, make choices between head and heart.

Amelia and her followers set in motion the dialogue that continues today regarding the rights and roles of women in society. What do you think - how far have we come?


Here's more about Amelia:
http://www2.kenyon.edu/khistory/frontier/ameliabloomer.htm 

Reading Like a Writer: Character in Maggie Stiefvater's LINGER

Fangirl moment: I attended KidlitCon in Minneapolis this past October, and to my great delight Maggie Stiefvater was the keynote speaker. I’d read Shiver and loved it; I bought Linger at the conference. Maggie is unpretentious and supremely smart, and her keynote was inspiring. I knew she was a good writer. After reading Linger, I’m convinced she’s an exceptional writer.

Linger (aside from being a rollicking good story, with a plot that grabs and won’t let go) is a study in character. The story is told in alternating points of view, each from the first person. Stiefvater labels each change of POV; but her characters are so richly conceived that I really didn’t need labels, I knew just who was speaking. How does she do it? By understanding what makes each character tick. By giving them such unique personalities that their voices resonate through language, recollection, and action.

The story (and I’m not giving anything away here) is the love story of Grace and Sam, and their relationship is central to the action. Grace is gentle and giving. Sam is gentle and lost. Sam is a poet:

Without Grace, I was a nocturnal animal. I stalked ants in the kitchen, waiting by the insufficient light of the recessed bulbs with a glass and a piece of paper so that I could transport them outside.

Grace is the “good” girl captured by love:

Could you outgrow your parents?

But it is Stiefvater’s secondary characters who steal the show. With Isabel, Stiefvater has created a character both sure of herself and vulnerable, yet unwilling to let her vulnerability show. She’s the ultimate cool teen:

I sighed. I didn’t know if I wanted to know. It seemed to me that knowing would be more work than not knowing. But it wasn’t like we could really put the genie back in the lamp now that it was out, could we?

Snide, snarky, quick, Isabel falls for her perfect alter ego Cole, who has been there and done it all:

I looked down at him, and suddenly anger bubbled up through me. It shouldn’t have affected him this badly. It was just a damned bathroom. It was he who was making me this cruel – I hadn’t done anything to him except shown him a damned tub. I wasn’t that person he thought I was.

Oh, but Cole is the way Sam thinks he is - damaged, yes, but not truly cruel, and this is what he must learn - with Isabel's help. And Isabel must learn to trust, and what better teacher than Cole?
Isabel: It seemed like he always sprang honesty on me when I least expected it.
Cole: I felt like I had been a balloon getting larger and larger, waiting to pop, and she had come in and burst herself first.
The story may be Grace’s and Sam’s, a Romeo and Juliet thwarted love story - and, by the way, ever so much more than a werewolf story – but the interplay of these two damaged souls, Isabel and Cole, is what kept me reading. I can’t wait for Stiefvater’s third book, Forever.

Guest Post on Voice + Plot by Jennifer Hubbard

I've known Jennifer R. Hubbard for several years and one thing about her has always impressed me: she is one of the most level-headed people on the planet. I know I can turn to her for advice on any topic. In addition to this wonderful trait, she is an exceptional writer, as her first novel, The Secret Year (now out in paperback), demonstrates. Jenn and I are cross-posting on the conjoined topics of voice and plot, and I'm delighted to present her post this week.

Janet suggested voice and plot as topics, which is interesting because they are the two elements I must have in place before I can begin a story. Even if I have a good plot, I can’t write it until a narrator starts whispering in my ear. If I have just a voice, I can get a couple of good sentences out, but then the story has nowhere to go.

With my first book, The Secret Year, I think I had the plot first, and it was waiting for Colt’s voice. With my second book, Try Not to Breathe, I seemed to start with a voice. I had a character in a scene, but I didn’t know why he was there or where he was headed next. Then I realized that he was going to tell a story, to live out a plot, that I’d had in mind for a long time: the question of how people come back from the brink of suicide. There are a lot of books out there that deal with the aftermath of suicide, or that end with a character deciding whether to commit suicide—but what happens next? If the character lives, how does he put his life back together?

Of course, a character can’t do much in a vacuum. Another character approached my main character right away. What did she want? I wondered. Where would she take him? The answers to these questions led my characters to a road trip, audiences with psychics, and a complicated relationship of their own.

It probably sounds as if I’m not directing the characters so much as observing them and recording what they do, and my writing often feels that way. I do make conscious choices, I do intentionally divert the stream, but most of the decisions seem to come from some subconscious level. In that sense, much of what I do is not about generating stories as much as it is about listening, remaining open. Hunting for those voices and plots, squirreling them away, and having them come out in surprising ways.

Jennifer R. Hubbard is the author of the young-adult novel, The Secret Year and the forthcoming Try Not to Breathe. She blogs at http://jenniferrhubbard.blogspot.com/ and http://writerjenn.livejournal.com/

And the winner is...

Liz!

has won a copy of Haunted.

Congrats, and many thanks to all of you for coming by and commenting, tweeting and loving Joy's books! New blog post coming soon.

Voices You Should Hear: Joy Preble + Giveaway!

Read to the end for the giveaway!

Joy Preble, whom I first met just before the debut of her first novel, Dreaming Anastasia, is a talented author who now has a second book to her name: Haunted. I predict great things for Haunted, and they couldn't happen to a nicer person. I'm delighted to have her as my guest, to tell you about her books...

I loved Dreaming Anastasia, your premise and characters and the imaginative approach you took to weaving history into a contemporary story. Please give readers a brief synopsis of DA, and then tell us what we can expect when we read Haunted.

In Dreaming Anastasia, Anne is just a normal high school junior – until handsome and mysterious Ethan Kozninsky arrives in her life and she discovers that she has a destiny with a capital D. The Grand Duchess Anastasia isn’t dead, Ethan tells her – she’s been spirited away by the Russian folklore witch Baba Yaga, and Anne’s the girl who can save her. Not to mention save Ethan from the immortality that’s his until Anastasia’s release. Much wackiness and peril ensues after that, including a secret Russian Brotherhood, a villain with his own secret, and a frightening witch with iron teeth and removable hands. Plus a growing attraction between Anne and the blue-eyed Russian who’s turned her life inside out.

Haunted begins about seven months after DA ends. Saving Anastasia hasn’t turned out at all like anyone expected. Ethan – now mortal – has been traveling Europe. Anne’s been trying to pretend that nothing in her life has changed. She’s even acquired a very nice and very normal lifeguard boyfriend named Ben. Except she’s also being stalked by a wild-haired and rather malevolent Russian mermaid called a rusalka. When Ethan returns, Anne’s normal world collides with the paranormal once again. Anne’s search for the rusalka’s identity exposes deep and startling revelations – including the true source of Anne’s powers. In book two, everyone’s haunted by their pasts and Anne’s torn between fulfilling her destiny and the heeding the longings of her heart.

How did you first become interested in the stories of Baba Yaga and in Russian history? What was your biggest “ah-ha” moment while doing your research?

I’ve loved Russian history forever – my maternal grandparents were almost all from the area now known as Belarus. And the tragic story of the Romanovs has intrigued me since about junior high when I read a biography called Nicholas and Alexandra. Plus those matroyshka dolls – the Russian nesting dolls – are something I’ve found beautiful as long as I can remember. I adore the idea of the structure – the same figure tinier and tinier tucked inside the larger ones. As I began writing, I knew almost immediately that this would be a great metaphor for the books – secrets within secrets; stories within stories.

 My fascination with Russian folklore is a more recent interest – coinciding with writing this series. I think I’ve loved the Baba Yaga stories best of all. I think it’s awesome that she’s always depicted as so unpredictable. She’ll help you or she’ll eat you depending on her mood. And she’s a powerful, powerful woman. The more I read about her, including in books such as Women Who Run With Wolves, the more I understood how vilified older women are throughout folklore. Female age and wisdom is so often associated with the crone, with physical ugliness and lack of sexuality. So using Baba Yaga as a primary character allowed me to play with those stereotypes and give them a much more feminist spin. She’s a grand old girl, really, once you get to know her. I also became fascinated with the idea of her forest as a place of transformation. No one leaves Baba Yaga’s forest the same as they entered. This too, has become one of the main motifs in the series – the transformative power of the journey into the unknown.

I have to say that Anne’s friend Tess is a most engaging character. Does she reappear in Haunted? What other characters do you introduce in book two? Do you have any techniques for creating characters that you’d like to share?

Oh yes! Everyone loves Tess. Even my Kirkus reviewer is on Team Tess! Of course I had to bring her back; in fact she’s in for some real excitement in Haunted. Honestly, I love writing Tess the best; she doesn’t have much of a filter, and she always says what she thinks, plus she’s darn funny and irreverent. Basically, she’s closest to the real me, which does make me chuckle when everyone is so pro Tess. I’m like, well, of course you are. I’m just that endearing and wonderful!

And you are, my friend! You’ve been teaching high school English full time while writing. How do you manage?

Hahahahaha. Too busy grading essays to even answer that.

Please tell us something about the next book in the series. When can we look forward to reading it?

In a real dream come true, Sourcebooks recently bought the third in the series, currently titled Again and Again! This third book will finish Anne and Ethan’s story and uncover the rest of the secrets still left hidden in Haunted. Plus it has some time travel and is much more deeply romantic. Whoot! It’s slated for Spring 2012. So I better get writing, huh?

Are you working on other projects that are dear to your heart?

Yup. A story set right here in Texas, that’s part romance, part mystery, part faith. And I’m also working on another paranormal romance with a twist that I have to keep secret for now. Oooh, how tempting!

What’s the best way for readers to find out more about your books?

My website – www.joypreble.com

Thanks, Janet!

My pleasure! 

Now for the fun part! I'll be giving away a copy of Haunted! To enter the giveaway, please comment and give me a way to contact you. If you tweet or post on facebook, let me know and I'll give you an extra point for each mention. The winner will be chosen next Friday, February 18.