Category: Writing

Writing

Recipe for a Book Title– Part 1 of 2

sashikaufman

My new book -due out in the Spring of 2016 has a title! Woot woot! And yes you’re going to have to read this whole thing to find out what it is -or work your scroll finger.

Titles and covers are two things that authors get asked a lot about and coincidentally often have very little control over. As a seasoned second time author I knew to expect some haggle and finagling over my title. I actually wasn’t strongly attached to my working title of Wireman which was simply my main character’s last name. I knew it wasn’t super catchy but I liked that it was also a play on the fact that my main character is hearing impaired and wears hearing aids that make him feel like a cyborg.

My new editor at Carolrhoda Lab, Alix Reid, made a good suggestion that I was willing to go with, but I wasn’t quite ready to give up the search. I went back to the same process I used when trying to rename Go West into The Other Way Around. I did a thorough rereading of the manuscript (that’s such a funny word -it makes me think of quill pens and ruffled collar shirts) hunting for words and phrases that might have deeper meaning and also sound cool and somewhat catchy. It’s not easy.  And it’s really hard to stay out of cliche territory.

I made a long list of everything that sounded remotely good –which meant some of it was very bad. Then I narrowed that list down to about 20 options which I shared first with my agent, Lauren, and a few trusted friends. These vetting processes are important -such as the time I thought Veg-jerky would be a great name for a dehydrated tofu product until a good friend pointed out that it sounded a lot like Vag(ina)-jerky. I don’t know what that would be but I don’t think it would sell well.

The list I sent to my editor included fewer than 10 potential titles with the ones Lauren and I liked best highlighted. From that Alix was able to eliminate the more theatrical and too commonplace ideas and pick a winner……..

So without further ado the new book is called….

WIRED MAN AND OTHER FREAKS OF NATURE

It’s weird and quirky without being too sci-fi (which would be fine except the book is not science fiction) and it includes the word freak –which is important to the story in a number of ways. I’m quite pleased by the collaborative nature of this whole process. I think publishing is at its best when the people who care about the book the most are able to listen to one another and build off each other’s ideas.

In honor of this new title I asked a few writer friends to tell tales about the titling of their books. Stay tuned that post is coming next week.

 

Writing

Love books and/or kids?

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Cape Author Poster

Next Saturday I’ll be at the Cape Elizabeth author fest alongside many other awesome children’s and YA authors from Maine and New England. The event at the Cape Elizabeth high school goes from 10-2 and features readings from children’s authors, book signing and lots of random book-related swag. It’s a great event and a great way to support local authors. Hope to see you there!

Random musings, Uncategorized, Writing

Happy Half Birthday to Me!

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Holiday little

It’s January 7th. I have not been blogging lately. In fact my last post is from October 2nd. In my defense I’ve been busy. I had a kid -yup as in birthed one; Lucius Avi Gray on October 20th. Everything after that gets a little fuzzy as life with constantly interrupted sleep can be. I don’t believe in resolutions per say but I do hope to do more blogging in this new year. There’s a lot of grumbling about the importance (or lack of) and relevance (or lack of) of blogs these days but I have to say I still enjoy the form. Sometime when all other writing is stymied or stuck, a blog post is a good way to get some words and thoughts out.

In the new year I hope to write more about reading and how it informs my writing and also a bit about parenthood and how it affects my writing -and pretty much everything else I do. Don’t roll your eyes; his is not going to turn into a mommy blog where I extol the virtues of teething necklaces, coconut oil or the latest baby-sleep inducing gadgetry. If I do, I promise it will be purely for laughs.

So that being said, I’m also publishing a post I wrote, but never pubbed, a while ago about my reading of the Goldfinch. Enjoy.

Uncategorized, Writing

Boston Teen Author Fest!

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Author panelBTAF2BTAF 1

I’m really excited for the Boston Teen Author Fest, which takes place at the Cambridge Public Library in just a couple short weeks on Saturday September 27th from 11-4! (These are photos from last year’s event)

If you’re a Boston person, I’d love to see you. Better yet, if you’re a Boston middle or high school teacher, you should tell your students to come. And of course any and all YA lovers are always welcome.

Besides yours truly, there’s the amazing opportunity to hear from authors like M.T. Andersen, Francisco Stork and A.C. Gaughen! Click here for a full list of who’s attending.

 

Reading, Writing

10 YA Books Which Won’t Let You Down

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I’ve been a bit busy lately. Blah -dee, blah, nothing worth blogging about or I would be blogging. It’s been a good kind of busy the kind where you’re certain you’re learning something even if it will take months of processing to figure out what it is. In the mean time I feel very lucky to have the friends and family I have. I may have mentioned it before but it’s been incredible how many people have reached out to tell me, in one way or another, how much they enjoyed The Other Way Around. It’s really the best part.

So here’s a little gift back. This is not meant to be a comprehensive must read of YA fiction. It’s totally skewed to my tastes (mostly contemporary, a wee bit of light fantasy and sci-fi). These are ten YA books I think have real punch and literary merit and are amazing page-turning reads to boot. I hope you’ll enjoy. I did.

Short silly blurbs are my own. Links are to Amazon/Goodreads, but you should buy them at your local Indie if you can -or check them out at the library!

 

Scorpio RacesScorpio Races – (Maggie Stiefvater) mythical carnivorous horses, a race to save one’s life, a slow simmering love story.

WingerWinger – (Andrew Smith) Rugby, prep school, puberty, and love for the unreachable girl.

Everybody Sees the Ants – (A.S. King) heart-breaking bullying laced with magical realism. This book made me want to be a better grown up person. nuff said.
Eleanor and Park (Rainbow Rowell) -Incredible misfit love story.
JellicoeOn The Jellicoe Road (Melina Marchetta)- A boarding school at war with itself, a parent’s myeterious death, a girl left to sort out the pieces.
Will Grayson Will Grayson – (John Green and David Levithan) One is gay, one is not. The intersection of their lives is incredible entertainment.
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau Banks – (E. Lockhart) More prep school pranking madness.
In DarknessIn Darkness – (Nick Lake) Set in both present day and colonial Haiti, a boy trapped in the earthquake rubble imagines he is Touissant Louverture.
Feed – (MT Anderson)Best first line of a book ever. “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.” Frighteningly prescient science fiction.
Story of a Girl – (Sara Zarr) The fall out, with friends and family, from one girl’s first sexual experience.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes YA, YA and not just an adult book with a teenage protagonist or narrator. It’s fodder for a future post but I think it has something to do with layers and density (uh oh science teacher overlap here). I hesitate to use the word complexity because each of these books is beautifully complex and yet still definitively YA. More on that later. In the mean time, start reading! Or add your own “must read” in the comments.

Random musings, Writing

The Best Things

sashikaufman

CakeI love my birthday. And even on a more “low key” year (2 or 3 small celebratory events) I still rejoice in it.

Highlights from this year’s event include:

  • The most fabulous dark chocolate cake dessert courtesy of Fore St and David Lacy.
  • Cheese plate.
  • Hiking a modest mountain in my 6th month of pregnancy.*
  • Beautiful flowers from friends.
  • Warm windy beach days.

Ah, the sigh of contentment. In honor of my birthday I’m running a giveaway right now on goodreads where you could win one of 3 signed copies of my book. Because it’s really fun to give presents too. Which brings me to another “best thing”. On goodreads it’s possible to see how many people are currently “reading” your book in their status update. I can’t even tell you how this makes me feel. I don’t even know these people -mostly. And somewhere out there they have picked up my book and are reading it. THAT is the most incredible gift. It’s like I’ve sneaked into their house and I’m telling them one of my favorite stories. It is a treat and a privilege; one that I don’t take for granted.

*Apologies if this is how you are finding out we’re having a second kid 🙂 I’m not much for blasting these things on social media…so SURPRISE!!!

Writing

My Writing Process -Blog Tour

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I got tagged by the awesome Megan Frazer Blakemore and Maria Padian -fellow Maine authors -as part of a blog tour on your writing process. You can click their names to see their responses to the following four questions about writing process.

Here are my answers!

1) What am I working on?

I have just finished a first draft of YA novel about two boys in their senior year of high school, their friendship and the role it plays in their lives when dark secrets from the past come to the surface. It’s really a book about loyalty and self-worth and how those things affect the relationships that are most important to us.

 

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Well, I think that the YA I write is primarily for high-schoolers but that doesn’t necessarily differentiate it from other contemporary realistic YA. I think what sets my writing apart is the degree of frankness and emotional honesty with which I write my characters. I hope it does, anyway. Also, I like to write about bodily effluence perhaps a shade more than the average author.

 

3) Why do I write what I do?

Ah, this old question. I write because I like to tell myself stories. I write because I would be doing it anyway in my mind and writing it down makes me feel productive and purposeful. Also, I really enjoy making other people laugh and feel things. I write these specific stories because these are the stories I enjoy telling myself. Sometimes I come up with a really cool story idea but then it quickly becomes apparent it’s not a story I can tell -I want someone to tell it to me. That’s when I go to the bookstore and see if anyone has.

 

4) How does your writing process work?

My mother asked me a similar question at my book release party and I said something about prescription drugs. My writing philosophy and process is all about the phrase “small chunks” -which is somewhat unfortunate because it contains the word “chunks” in it, but it’s the most accurate verbiage I can come up with. (Small bits sounds like a genital reference.)

In all seriousness, my goal when I sit down to write is always to write 2 pages, 2 pages of dialogue, exposition, word count doesn’t matter to me but that 2 page amount is my arbitrary marker. I always read over my 2 pages from the previous day and I try not to go more than a few days without writing. Sometimes that’s possible, and sometimes that’s not. As a full time teacher, and a human with friends and a family I enjoy seeing, it all has to stay in something closely resembling balance.

I usually have a separate document where I have a table set up with a general outline and scene-by-scene sense of where I’m going. That’s usually only used when I’m writing the first half. That last third of a book is the part I struggle with the most. I’ve set up most of the conflict and now it’s time to hit those climactic moments and unravel things in a way that’s neither too rushed nor too drawn out. It’s the hardest part for me and the time when I experience the most feelings of “what if this all sucks?”

Once I complete a first draft I reread and try and identify the obvious major revisions needed before sending it to my first readers. If I went on about my revision process I’d be here all night so I think I’ll save that for another post/day.

 

Thanks for reading and for more posts on the writer’s process check out fellow agency sister Valerie Cole’s post or my fellow OneFour Maria Andreu -her book The Secret Side of Empty debuted this spring as well.

Writing

Like no one is watching

sashikaufman

Warning -some cheesy content, and evidence of my hippie upbringing to follow.

You are perhaps familiar with this little bit of pseudo-spirituality? If not, no matter. It’s good advice if a bit over used and awkward. I mention it because last weekend I spent 72 solid hours at the New England Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference. It was my second time attending the conference and once again I found myself completely, and quite pleasantly, immersed in the world of words. The theme of the conference was being brave and making one’s mark. My personal takeaway this time was a message I heard several times over the course of the weekend but perhaps most effectively communicated by Laurel Snyder in her keynote.

Laurel emphasized the importance of writing the book that only you can write, ignoring trends and whatever other voices are in your head telling you what you should write. She encouraged us to consider the reader, but only one reader at a time; the one reader you reach when your book is opened, not the massive snarling throngs of fickle and hairy public opinion. And she reminded us that the act of writing a book is brave in of itself, that books matter because they are important not because they are published. It was a great keynote.

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” 
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Tonight I sat down to work on the last 30 pages of a book I’ve been struggling to finish. Where the first 180 pages really came quite easily, this last bit has been like pulling teeth. And I think I realized that part of that reason is because I’ve had the ghost of publishing sitting on my shoulder as I write. I’ve been writing like someone -someone very judgmental – is watching. I’ve let my fears that the book won’t be marketable, or good, or liked creep into my consciousness and judge me as I’ve struggled to finish a first draft. A draft, which according to Annie Lamott, most writers, and just plain common sense should be messy and terrible by its very nature.

Tonight I pushed through the doubts and wrote a few more pages, getting to the end of a critical scene and writing at least one sentence that made me damn pleased with myself. Ha! I thought, that sentence has never been said or thought in quite the same way before. That sentence is a sentence that only could have come from me. I was quite pleased sitting all alone in my writing cave with no one at all perched on my shoulder.

 

Reading, Writing

Big Success

sashikaufman

I wonder sometimes if John Steinbeck sat around obsessing about whether or not F.Scott Fitzgerald had more twitter followers than he did. Or if more people added his book on goodreads. But I jest, because these weren’t the problems of authors even twenty years ago, much less fifty.

And they don’t have to be a consideration for authors today either, except that they kind of do. Children’s authors (YA included) have a huge social media network including twitter, tumblr, blogs, and probably a whole lot more I’m unaware of because I’m not young or techy enough. (Full disclosure; when my students use a noun as a verb or a verb as a noun, I generally keep quiet and  assume they’re talking about something on the interwebz.) A social media presence is pretty much an expectation for authors trying to reach a younger audience.

And it’s not all bad. Being part of social networks as an author can be an incredible community builder and a great networking and promotional tool. It’s also a slippery slope for the green-eyed monster. You have instant access to everyone’s book deals, promotions, festival appearances, etc.  And because you have that access you have the ability to compare yourself and your success to that of everyone else in the kidlitosphere. Not so helpful.

What I would like to share this evening is the best piece of feedback I’ve gotten since my book hit the shelves just a few weeks ago. It comes from a friend who sent me this email about her teenage son who was reading my book. And it reminded me of why writing and telling stories is so powerful and so important to me.

“I heard my son laughing to himself up in his room tonight on my way up to say good night and saw that he was reading your book. As I walked toward his bed he looked up from the book with a huge grin and said, “How did she write this? It’s like…she knows what boys think..how does she know what it’s like?”.”

And that my friends is big success – suck it F. Scott.

Uncategorized, Writing

Book Launch Party -things I said and did.

sashikaufman

The book launch party was a blast. I’m so grateful to everyone who came out -I think we had fun! And to Chris and Bill and everyone at Longfellow Books who helped make this happen. And yes, that was my mother scraping the poster with my face on it off the front of your store so she could keep it -more on her later.

So many friends, colleagues, former colleagues, cousins, former roommates, teachers, students and of course family. I read two short pieces from the book. One as reader’s theater with the incomparable Liz Hardcastle who was not at all  intimidated by the three pages of notes on her intonation that I gave her, and one on my own. Afterwards I was so excited to be done I tried to grab a cupcake and run. But then there was my mother -who stood up (I’m not making this up or exaggerating) and demanded that I answer some questions. Because being a mother is never done and sometimes when your kid tries to turn and flee you have to stop her.

“Was I too obtrusive?” she asked later. We all know what the right answer is don’t we? In all seriousness, I couldn’t be more grateful. Everyone had incredible questions and answering them turned out to be my favorite part. Because I was talking about something I love with people I love.

 

So many of you who aren’t lucky enough to live in Maine have been so supportive -posting pictures of the book as it arrives at your door and sharing your excitement as you read it. Everyone of those messages is like a big old hug and makes me feel even more blessed. I’d like to share with you what I said as an introduction on Thursday night -so it can be just like you were there. That and a few photos.

Thanks for the love.

          The only thing I knew when I was seventeen and applying to college was that I wanted something different from high school and didn’t include fraternities or sororities –which seemed to me at the time like an extension of everything I disliked about high school.

            My tour guide at Oberlin College was named Bony. He was a very large, purple haired gay, dance major from the Philippines. And I remember thinking to myself as he toured us through a student cooperative where the people threw food at us –if this guy can be comfortable here to be himself, I’ll have no problem.

            I ended up living in that very same cooperative my sophomore year. My roommate and I were far and away the preppiest people to live there, maybe ever. But, And, I loved it. I loved being a part of something that seemed so dangerously different from everything I’d been told  was important about being a grown up. The Other Way Around is a little bit of a love letter to that experience. It’s about finding a group of people that make you feel at home, even if they are very different from you and everything you’ve known before.  

            I don’t pretend to live some radical anarchist vegan lifestyle. I never have and probably  never will. But I know that it’s out there. I have sat through a conversation where people argued about whether or not eating honey was exploiting the labor of the bees. And somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I was taking notes, probably with a bemused look on myself. Someday, I must have told myself, this will be useful to you.

            I am so grateful that you are all here tonight to celebrate me and The Other Way Around. It really means everything that you’re here to share in the story and the sharing of the story. Because, as Lance who frequently accuses me of embellishing the truth for the sake of comic timing can attest to, or my parents who made constant trips to the library or book store know, I do love a good story.

3, count them, 3 kinds of themed cupcakes! Courtesy of Liz Hardcastle baking goddess!
3, count them, 3 kinds of themed cupcakes! Courtesy of Liz Hardcastle baking goddess!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chatting and having a grand old time. Yes we wear hats indoors -it's Maine.
Chatting and having a grand old time. Yes we wear hats indoors -it’s Maine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reading aloud with Liz!
Reading aloud with Liz!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My mother -I told you I wasn't making this up. Love you mom.
My mother -I told you I wasn’t making this up. Love you mom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hooray!!!!!
Hooray!!!!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photos by the fabulous Travis Gray!