Morning Writing: Is It For You?

I never imagined myself as a morning writer.  I rarely sleep through an entire night, so I don't much want to get out of bed when that alarm goes off at 6:30 AM.  I've been known to complain that making a bowl of oatmeal (i.e. measure water, measure oats, and microwave) is "too complex" when I've just woken up.  In college, I used to hit my productivity peak around 11 PM and ride it until I crashed around 2 AM.

But I have to be at work by 8:30 every morning.  I have to ride the bus there.  And one day, I noticed a Stumptown Coffee near one of my bus stops.  Hmmm, I thought.  They have coffee.  And tables.  I went in.  Good morning, triple latte!  Would I like to write frantically for the next thirty minutes?  Yes, I most certainly would!  I can excuse the coffee purchase because...well...it makes me a lot sharper in the morning.  And friendlier to people on the bus.  Someday, perhaps it will even make me walk to work (no, it won't.  Maybe ride a bike to work).  Out of my house, the lure of morning internet tomfoolery isn't nearly as strong; I'd rather write by hand while sipping my coffee and watching for the very last bus that'll get me to work on time.

Have you ever tried writing in the morning?  When are your most productive writing hours?

Public Transit is Your Friend - a Bus-Riding Writer's Manifesto

Every writer should ride the bus.  No, it's not the fastest form of transportation (except in morning rush hour, when those bus-only lanes let you skip congested lanes).  Yes, you may have to sit next to people you don't know with questionable hygiene.  In fact, you may not even score a seat.  But if you have even the slightest interest in other people, in the way that total strangers interact, in the temporary communities that form, you should ride the bus.

Here in Portland, the bus is one of the best ways to get around (I'm counting light-rail as a corollary of the bus, since it too is public transit).  It's cheap; most lines run every 15 minutes or more frequently; you can bring a bike with you.  I'm a bus commuter, and I think it's one of the most entertaining ways to get around Portland.

My favorite, of course, is when my bus gets so crowded that it becomes an 'express' - no stopping unless someone pulls the Stop Request.  We zip along (20, maybe even 30 miles per hour), and with everyone packed in close, you hear the morning commuters talking, the music from other people's headphones, the ritual "thank you!" called as each person exits through the rear door of the bus.  Absent conversations to eavesdrop on, you can entertain yourself imagining the backstory of each person who boards the bus or sits around you.

The crowd changes depending on where you are in the city; in downtown, people board dressed in anything from suits and shined shoes to the old sleeping bags worn by those with nowhere to go at night.  Move east through Belmont, and the jeans get skinnier, the facial hair more carefully ironic.  Ride far enough, and your companions are all commuting to and from wage jobs, or - on the weekend - headed to or from the Target out at Mall 205, a trip that takes you through the narrow streets of Mount Tabor.

There's a certain etiquette about it, too.  Some bus drivers, if you're friendly and polite, will make exceptions, let you on with an expired transfer or ignore a forged ticket.  I saw one driver throw a guy off because he'd forged his ticket and then explain "He never says please.  If he just said please, I'd let him on with that ticket." Youth/student tickets are only good if you're in high school, and you'd better have the ID to prove it.  Some bus drivers will pull up next to you if they see you running flat-out to make it to the next stop, while others blast past you.

I don't always want to take the bus - after a long day at work, the last thing I want is to wedge myself between two chain-smokers for forty blocks - but for the most part, it's the best way to people-watch while still getting somewhere.  Do you ride the bus/public transit?  What's your bus crowd like?

Show Me The Voice! Blogfest

I so enjoyed my last blogfest that I'm participating in Brenda Lee Drake's "Show Me The Voice!" blogfest, posting the first 250 words of my novel for critique.  Here we go:

Author: Nora Coon
Title: Kinesthesia
Genre: YA Alternate History

Meri remembered only two brief, shining moments in her life when she’d thought maybe she could be happy after all.  When she was eight, her grandfather took her out on the fishing boat with him.  “Peter was seven, first time he came out with me,” he’d confided the night before, and the rare mention of her father’s name meant she woke at four, trying to hide her childish yawns.  As soon as they climbed aboard, her grandfather handed her a lifejacket, which she fastened shut obediently.  It was too small around her layered sweaters, but it felt like a hug, tangible proof that her grandparents cared what happened to her.  He clipped a short rope to her lifejacket and tied it to the boat-rail, a leash to keep her close if she fell overboard.

The Pacific Ocean heaved the boat back and forth, and the deck reeked of fish and sweat and brine.  Meri vomited her breakfast over the rail as soon as they hit open water and spent the rest of the day retching overboard until her lips stung.  The dark-skinned men who crewed the boat looked askance at her but said nothing.

That night, her grandfather shook his head wearily and told her grandmother, “She’s no Peter – she was sick the whole time.”  Her grandmother stared at her in bleak disappointment, and even at eight, Meri knew what it meant – she took after her mother, and there would be no one to take over the family fishing license, no chance for her grandparents to stop working.

Nora is still buried in revisions

via CuteOverload

Regular blog posts will resume Monday, March 28.  Until then, send good revising mojo!

Monday Links

I'm jamming trying to get these revisions finished by my self-imposed deadline, so here are a few things via other people for your Monday morning.

Take a look at these before-and-after satellite images of Japan.  I think Doctors Without Borders is a great organization to give to for disaster relief; if you're looking for more, YA Highway has a whole post listing different organizations working in Japan.

Finally, via Kaleb Nation, an excellent web comic about perception:

(alas, the link no longer works)

Hope you're all safe and happy this Monday morning.  What's your favorite non-profit to support in difficult times?

Old-Fashioned Revisions

Last night, I printed out the slightly-revised draft of #CoYA, and now I'm beginning the process of hard-copy revisions.  Yes, I know, my computer has wonderful comment and track changes functions, but I'm a bit old-school when it comes to substantive revisions.  I like to be able to scribble snarky comments in the margins; I like to write excessive expressions of disbelief when characters say stupid things or behave ridiculously.  Swapping out my "writer" cap for my "snarky reader" cap helps me notice the parts that seem unbelievable.  If I find myself getting bored, that means that this section isn't flowing as well as it could, or that I've written filler when I thought I was writing something important.  I've heard all kinds of revision suggestions, from changing the font to putting a project into book format, but there's nothing like flipping through a sheaf of dog-eared pages until the whole thing bleeds ink.  Plus, it's far more comfortable to sprawl out on the rug in front of my fireplace with a printed manuscript than it is to do it with my wheezing laptop.

Essential revision tools: printout of novel, a beer, a notebook, and two blue pens. And a stylish maroon shag carpet scrap.

Once I finish revisions, what next?  Well, I've given myself a deadline of March 15 to have a draft ready for critique partners, so the next step will be sending it out to them.  I don't like to share work with critique partners if I still know what needs to be fixed - all the suggestions end up being things I already know - but sometimes the impulse to get feedback is too grerat, and so I send it out with notes saying things like "My ending doesn't really work, and I know there's no reason for Jenny to steal the unicorn on page 10, but other than that what do you think?"  (Note: there are no unicorns in CoYA).  Luckily, I have patient and long-suffering critique partners who don't hold it against me...too much.

Waiting for feedback from critique partners is a little like waiting to hear from an agent, in that the best thing to do is to distract yourself by working on another project.  If I keep looking over the same manuscript I sent to them, inevitably I find more little things that I just have to adjust, and that leads to me emailing multiple drafts.  No one likes to open their inbox and find six new drafts sent over the course of twenty-four hours (another good reason to make the novel as good as I can before asking critique partners for feedback).

For now, I'm working slowly on my second read-through of CoYA.  Do you need a hard copy to revise, or do you prefer Track Changes and comments?

The Heroine Effect - Alanna, from the Song of the Lioness

Yesterday was International Women's Day - and what better day to kick off a blog series about favorite heroines in YA fiction?  (Of course, I don't blog on Tuesdays, so we're kicking it off today instead).  I'll be blogging about some of the heroines in my favorite young adult novels, girls and young women who've made a permanent impression on me - the people I wanted to be when I grew up, if I lived in Tortall/the Old Kingdom/one of a hundred different incredible settings.

I'm starting with the heroine of one of the first young adult series that I remember loving: Alanna, heroine of Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness quartet.  These books are older than I am (the first one came out in 1983), and if you haven't read them, you're missing out on a cornerstone of YA fantasy.  Alanna, a ten-year-old nobleman's daughter, decides to trade places with her twin brother, Thom, so that she can train as a knight (forbidden to women) and he can learn sorcery.  The four books follow her rise from scrawny page to living legend, and through it all Alanna remains absolutely human.

Alanna has a terrible temper and very little tact and a strong desire to prove herself that makes her determined enough to work at anything.  She's not immune to the charms of a handsome man - several handsome men, in fact - but neither is she willing to give up her dreams for romance (when her best friend and lover Prince Jonathan proposes marriage, she turns him down flat, explaining that she'd have to start wearing skirts and give up being a knight).  Alanna sets out to be a hero, and through ten years of hard work, pain, sweat, loss, and more hard work, that's exactly what she becomes.  But she's no robot advancing from one level to the next - she's proud, proud enough to hold a grudge and make stupid choices, jealous and loving and brave and insecure and incredible.

These books stunned me.  I remember sitting on the concrete steps at recess during fifth grade, reading frantically and hoping that the bell wouldn't ring.  And then - wait, did a girl in a fantasy novel just get her period?  Holy crap, realism in fantasy?  She has to wear a birth control charm? People don't immediately accept her when the fact that she's a woman is revealed?  No way!  I've read both The Immortals and Protector of the Small, the other quartets set in Tortall, and they are similarly realistic, with similarly effective heroines (who I'll likely discuss in later blog posts).

Alanna isn't the first heroine that I wanted to be, but she's the first heroine I remember who carried a legendary destiny (powerful magic, touched by the gods, etc.) and simultaneously seemed like she could be a girl that I knew.

Have you read the Song of the Lioness quartet?  How did you respond to Alanna?

Cover image from Goodreads - Simon Pulse edition of Lioness Rampant.

Greetings from Revisionland

I write to you today from Revisionland, where I am trapped until I have gotten the novel code-named CoYA into decent shape.  The first step was integrating my newly-rewritten beginning with the rest of the novel, which went fairly painlessly; then I began the long and horrible process of fixing my tenses, because somehow I've turned into one of those people who writes parts of a novel in present tense and parts of it in past.  As I do this, I'm also correcting word choice and typos - I know I should save polishing until last, but I can't read over a manuscript is constantly snagged by errors.

Alas, I fear that Revisionland doesn't allow much in the way of diversion; after all, the point is to finish revising.  I almost got to read the much-lauded Anna and the French Kiss yesterday, but in a clear moment of the universe yelling "Get back to work!", my held copy went to the wrong library.  Aaaargh.

In other news, I'm considering an occasional blog series focusing on YA heroines - what makes them memorable, powerful, amazing young women that we love to read about.  Yes, this is largely an excuse to re-read favorite YA and gush a little about some beloved heroines, but I'm curious - who are the heroines that have caught your attention?  What do you look for in your YA heroine?

Sex and the Young Adult Writer

In light of Wednesday's #yalitchat, which rapidly went from "What makes a novel not YA" to "sex in YA", I thought I'd share my own thoughts on sex - and other potentially objectionable content - in young adult literature.

I grew up in a household where books were never censored, and that's informed my opinions on the subject ever since.  I know many kids don't have that luxury, which is perhaps what inspires so many aspiring authors to spend hours trying to figure out exactly how much sex should show up in YA fiction.  But haven't we been over this?  Write what your story demands.  You can write an hugely popular book that barely hints at teenage sexuality, a la the later Harry Potter books.  You can write great YA that leads right up to the moment and then cuts away, that deals with rape and assault and class, like Tamora Pierce's Tortall books (Alanna, The Immortals, Protector of the Small - all series).

As a reader, I tend to prefer books that, if not as frank as Tamora Pierce's books, at least acknowledge a teenager's awareness of sex, whether it's Diane Duane's Young Wizards books or Ally Carter's Gallagher Girls.  Diane Duane writes a few kisses in the whole series (so far); the Gallagher Girls think about boys a great deal, but never go further than kissing.  Still, both books tell compelling stories with teenagers who feel very real.  Libba Bray's Gemma Doyle books are full of young women who are very aware of their sexuality, and (spoiler!) Gemma's desire for Kartik is almost palpable.  Further along the spectrum, there's Meg Rosoff's haunting How I Live Now, in which (spoiler!) - among other things - two young teenage cousins have sex regularly to distract themselves from the world collapsing around them.  Still other books are more explicit, and manage it marvelously.

Why do we keep coming back to the issue of how much sex is "okay" in YA novels?  I'm sure most of us suffer from the desire to know "the rules", whether we plan to follow them or break them.  But it's clear you can write a wonderful YA novel with plenty of sex or without any at all.  You can talk about violence against women and against men - or not.  Drugs, alcohol, language, questions of identity and belief - it's all fair game, and up to the demands of the story.

Do authors lose readers for their decisions? Sure, I suppose.  For writing a racy scene, for including characters who drink or smoke - but then, you could lose readers who don't identify with straight-edge teens if your characters don't share any of their life experiences.  Teenagers are no more monolithic a group than, say, "people in their 30s" - you'll never please or appeal to them all.  Write what the story demands; if your agent says it's unsellable, well, you can always revise.

(Closing note: there's no room here for me to gush about Katsa of Kristin Cashore's Graceling, a sex-positive heroine who doesn't keep marriage in the back of her mind, or Mae of Sarah Rees Brennan's Demon's Lexicon series, a kickass heroine who is allowed to show an interest in more than one guy at a time and still care about her family.  Someday, I will write the sappiest blog post ever about how much I love these heroines, in the vein of Tamora Pierce's Alanna.  Someday.)

Peeking into the trunk

Last night, after a fierce word war, Shayda and I got to talking about some of the embarrassing stuff we'd written when we were younger - in my case, I still have the 90,000-word Redwall-esque talking animal epic that I wrote in fourth and fifth grade.  I find it very fun to go back through what I wrote in elementary, middle, and high school and track my evolution as a writer - from the sprawling, description-heavy prose of fifth grade to the terse present-tense "edgy" stories of middle school to the self-indulgent novel about a young spy/assassin written during geometry class in sophomore year of high school.

Every once in a while, I do find a half-begun plot that I think has some merit, and so I mark that story for possible cannibalization.  More often, though, looking back at old work reminds me how much I'm still growing as a writer; after all, back in fifth grade, I had the regrettable judgment to pitch my animal epic to a well-respected agent at a writers' conference.

Do you look back at your childhood writing, or is it locked away for good?