Weather frightful? Texas literary events delightful!

 Yes, it's a snow day here in Texas which means -- it's nearly spring! With a new season of Texas-centric literary events to get us through the cold.

ASAP: The Writers Workshop of the sci-fi/fantasy/horror conference FenCon is back! It nearly escaped my notice, and the email I received said the entry deadline was January 7. But always hopeful, I sent a writing sample anyway and received the encouraging news that there are still slots to be filled. But hurry! Workshop attendance is limited to 20 writers, and workshop leader/author Kevin Ikenberry  needs time to read them before the workshop's opening February 13.

FenCon's official dates this year are February 14-15 but it opens early for writers. You'll need a FenCon membership ($55 and up) with writing workshop upgrade ($65) for the whole meal deal. See the site for full details.

January 11 - June 10: The Dallas Museum of Art's Arts & Letters program presents a series of notable authors, including Bill Gates (yes, that Bill Gates!), Percival Everett (James), David Sedaris and many, many more! See the site for the complete list of speakers, ticket prices and venues.

January 31: Deadline to register for the Writers League of Texas Agents Symposium, with online presentations by 10 agents February 22-November 22, 2025. The WLT alternates agents symposiums annually with its in-person conference, whose next date will be in 2026. Symposium registration is $449 for members, $509 for nonmembers. A $150 non-refundable deposit by January 31 will hold a spot for either members or nonmembers.

See the site for a listing of agents and topics. Information on additional WLT classes and programs (some free!) is available at the general site. I'll also post later about this year's WLT manuscript contest.

February 20: The HP LitFest hosts Mark Sullivan, New York Times best-selling author of Beneath a Scarlet Sky and more. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. at the Highland Park High School auditorium, 4220 Emerson Ave., Dallas, with presentation at 7 p.m. 

Before becoming a novelist, Sullivan was also an award-winning journalist. The event is free, but donations are welcome. See the site for details.

March 1: The North Texas Teen Books Festival hosts more than 70 authors of middle-grade and young adult fiction at the Irving Convention Center, 500 West Las Colinas Blvd., Irving, Texas.

image by Arbaz Khan for Pixabay

Middle-grade keynote speakers are Karina Yan Glaser, Alan Gratz and Ruta Sepetys at 9 a.m. Young adult keynote speakers are Gabi Burto, Stephanie Garber and Lauren Roberts at 2:30 p.m. As always, the festival is free. You don't even have to be a teen to attend, but there's also an educators day February 28. See the site for details, including complete list of attending authors.

Still to come: The Dallas Writer's Garret returns with its Dallas Is Lit! literary festival May 15-18, including a mix of authors, performers, and book lovers. Check the site for additional information.

***

Want more? Of course, you do! Check out Lone Star Literary Life for additional listings around the state. 

And yes, as dog is my witness, this site will post soon about writing contests!

North Texas Teen Book Festival -- be yourself!

 Teen readers -- and some parents, teachers, maybe even kid brothers and sisters -- packed the Irving Convention Center this month for the annual North Texas Teen Book Festival. With more than 40 panels, speakers, and events packed into a single day, it's hard to pick even highlights.

But for those wondering what tales are suitable for teen readers, the answer is almost anything: a spot of mayhem, the darkness of family violence, love-sweet-love, and especially diversity.

Even the staple of fairy tales drew a huge audience of young readers. But these weren't your grandma's tales. They drew from the "Frozen" canon (yes, Disney is still a fave), pop culture remixes, rediscovered tales from a variety of cultures, even tales in which bad guys could take center stage.

"I find villains fascinating," said James Riley, author of The Story Thieves series. "A hero would give up love to save the world. A villain would give up the world to save his love."

(At least, for awhile. . .)

Taking risks with darkness also played out on the panel "Sidelined: Play by your own rules," with among others, panelist Torrey Maldonado, the author of books dealing with broken families, domestic violence, and "how absolute power can corrupt."

"As a teacher for 30 years, toxicity is something I've witnessed and experienced," he said. 

And if this sound too heavy for his middle-grade readers (his books are under 200 words), they've received such real-life accolades from teachers in the trenches of teen life.

It was the same kind of "be yourself, take risks," advocated by author Stacey Lee on the fairy story panel. "I didn't see any books with Asian people in them, so I did a lot of repression (as a teen)." That is, until she had kids and her inner writer demanded books about kids who looked like them. Now she's the author of Reese's YA Book Club pick, The Downstairs Girls, among other books for teen readers.

And on the "looking like me" issue, what if kids are half and half, like the heroine of The Other Half of Happy, by Rebecca Balcárcel, getting flack from both ethnic sides of your family?

Seeing ourselves in story characters isn't only a matter of race, ethnicity, or gender. Neurodiversity got its due as well. Panelist Alyson Gerber told its story in Focus, the tale of a chess champion struggling with her mental spirals. The techniques in the book include those used by Gerber herself, who lives with ADHD.

But if young readers don't shy from the darker side of life, they also long for stories about love. Like those from Elise Bryant, who proclaimed herself a believer in instant love. 

Not incidentally, she's the author of romantic comedies Happily Ever Afters, and others, who said she knew by age 19 who she wanted to marry and made him "pinky-swear" to do so. (Amazingly, despite that he was still willing to ask her out.)

The filled auditorium who greeted the romance writers with applause seconded Bryant's words.

Panelists ranged from lifelong "Jane Austen nerds" like Sayantani DasGupta who still missed seeing characters who looked like her in romance, to J. C. Peterson who "envied the banter," to Bryant, who dubbed herself "the bad girl here" for never having read Austen.

The Bridgerton TV series also received shout-outs for its combination of racial diversity, Regency style romance, and gorgeous clothes.

North Texas Teen Book Fest

Then there was Julian Winters, whose opening statement, "I mostly write queer contemporary fiction. Queer teens fall on their face and fall in love," drew wild applause from the audience.

Love and laughter were in the air, even among the panelists. 

But given that they're writing for young audiences, how far can the romance really go, moderator Gabi Sikes asked. "What's the most challenging part of writing characters falling in love?"

The hardest part, Peterson said, was "showing real flaws. Letting them see the flaws in characters and saying, yet, I still want to be with this person."

Winters said, "I don't want to give young readers false hope," noting that for queer people, finding suitable romantic partners can be tough. But the hardest part of writing romance for teens? "It's the kiss."

(He admitted to keeping a folder of kissing scenes, perhaps for inspiration.)

"The kissing scenes were so difficult," DasGupta agreed, admitting she turned to her own teen kids for help. Their answer, "Where are the kissing scenes, Mom? More kissing!"

***

Next: What's up with banned books?

Weather and COVID can't stop Texas literary events

 I'm writing this from the land of ice and snow known as North Texas, but neither Arctic temperatures nor a pandemic can keep Texas literary events down. Still, some are hesitating -- will they go in-person, virtual, or hybrid? I'll update as information becomes available.

(Updated February 9 with information about Highland Park Literary Fest, North Texas Teen Bookfest and Dallas Literary Festival)

Now-February 28: Writers League of Texas Manuscript Contest. OK, I don't mean to turn this into a writing contest post. That will come later. For now, consider it a warmup for the Writers League's big event -- its Agents and Editors Conference, which bravely returns (as of this writing, at least) in person June 24-26. 

In the meantime, the WLT invites us to submit the opening pages of our unpublished manuscripts for constructive feedback and, maybe, a one-on-one discussion with a top literary agent in our genres. All we need are the first, approximately 10 pages and a synopsis of what we have planned for the rest of the manuscript. Fees: $55 for WLT members, $65 for nonmembers (includes written critique). Or $25 for members, $35 for nonmembers who opt out of receiving written feedback. See the site for details.

February 15-May 31: The Dallas Museum of Arts program of writers, Arts & Letters Live, returns in-person but with virtual options. In-person tickets start at $30, virtual tickets at $12, in both cases with discounts for DMA members, educators, and students. See the site for details, venues, and ticket purchases.

February 23: Keynote speaker for the 2022 Highland Park Literary Festival is New York Times best-selling writing Amor Towles, author most recently of The Lincoln Highway, as well as A Gentleman in Moscow, and more. Although the event is free and open to the public, please register your attendance at the site. I also opted for $20 valet parking, since parking space is limited. At the Highland Park High School auditorium, 4220 Emerson Ave., Dallas. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Valet parking starts at 6 p.m.

March 4-5: The North Texas Teen Book Festival keeps going! Although details are still skimpy, it promises more than 90 authors and illustrators of middle grade and young adult books. Although the educators event March is virtual, the public festival March will be in-person at the Irving Convention Center, 500 W. Las Colinas Blvd., Irving, Texas. Free, but additional parking fees apply. (Or try DART, which has a stop within walking distance of the convention center.) 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. 

March 18-22: The SMU-sponsored Dallas Literary Festival presents featured authors Nikole Hannah-Jones, Davie Treuer, and Jelani Cobb. Assistant director Katherine Delony has informed me that the festival will be in-person with most events either on the SMU campus or at the African American Museum of Dallas. Registration information will be on the website as soon as a schedule is available.

April 22-24: Ready, Set, Pitch -- the annual spring conference of the Houston Writers Guild is emphatically hybrid. Sessions Friday (April 22) and Sunday (April 24) will be held in person with a Zoom option. Main day programming Saturday (April 23) will be fully virtual, including agent and acquisition editor pitch sessions. Tickets are $50 for a three-day pass, $25 for Friday's marketing options panel, and $35 for Sunday's workshop. Agent pitch sessions are an additional $25 each. A processing fee applies to all transactions. See the site for complete schedule and in-person venue locations.

April 29-May 1: Also in Houston, Writefest returns with a virtual book fair, a conference, and social events around the city. Social events are free and open to the public. Registration and complete schedules are available at the website.

Then there are the "save-the-date: and even "to-be-determined" events, including major conferences outside the state.

May 31-June 4: Thrillerfest XVII plans a completely in-person conference at New York City's Sheraton Times Square hotel. Agents galore, master and craft classes, and more, more, more. Check out the free Best First Sentence contest and examples from 2021's winners at the site. Too many options to list here, so see the site for schedules and prices, and to reserve a hotel room. Note that attendees must follow NYC's COVID-19 vaccination mandates.

June ?: Will the beloved DFW Writers Conference return for 2022? The best information I can find is that it may take place sometime in June at the Hurst Convention Center, Hurst, Texas. This follows numerous setbacks in 2021, including date changes and a decision to go completely virtual at that time. Again, I'll update. 

June 24-26: Agents and Editors Conference of the Writers League of Texas at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Austin, Texas. Registration not yet available but note that winners of the WLT's manuscript contest (above) receive free entry to the conference.

July 27-30: Romance Writers of America have a date and place for their 2022 conference -- Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center, National Harbor, Maryland, but no other details as yet.

September 1-5: WorldCon (also known this year as Chicon 8) takes place in Chicago. The festival anticipates starting discussions this spring about public health issues. More to come.

September 8-11: Bouchercon 2022, the world mystery writers conference, is schedule at the Hilton Minneapolis, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. More to come.

September 16-18: Fencon, the Dallas/Fort Worth science fiction and fantasy convention, will convene at the Sheraton DFW Airport hotel, 4440 W. John Carpenter Freeway, in Irving, Texas. Adult tickets start at $40. No word yet on whether there will be a writers workshop but the site asks us to stay tuned for more information.

November 3-6: The World Fantasy Convention 2022 is scheduled for New Orleans, at the Hyatt Regency, 601 Loyola Ave. Again, details to come.

Short takes from NTTBF: how do you write?

 Happy day! My book shipment from this month’s North Texas Teen Book Festival just arrived, including several from members of the festival’s Fantastical Tales panel, where B. B. Alston, Prince Joel Makonnen, Kwame Mbalia, Lisa McMann, and Shannon Messenger answered questions about every aspect of their writing lives. Including (for Messenger) “Is it true you still sleep with a stuffed animal?” panel moderator Kristen Dickson asked.

Messenger, author of the Keepers of the Lost Cities series, has no bones about admitting her devotion to an adorable stuffed toy which was the basis for one of her characters. “How do you sleep without a stuffed animal,” she asked. “I don’t know what to do with my arms!”

Fantastical Tales panel, NTTBF

Mbalia admitted to a less charming animal episode – falling through mats of swamp vegetation, then walking home through a forest crawling with copperhead (snakes). “That’s when I decided the outdoors was not for me!” (Luckily, he went on to become the New York Times best-selling author of the Tristan Strong series, which requires relatively little contact with venomous animals in the flesh.)

And Prince Joel Makonnen (pronounced “Yoel”)? Yes, he really is a prince. “People ask if ‘prince’ is my first name or just a cool title I like to use.” The truth is, neither of the above. He really is a member of the royal family of Ethiopia! But when he’s not running a real-life media empire, he collaborates with Mbalia on the middle-grade fantasy, Last Gate of the Emperor, due out May 4.

OK, so we had a panel of multiply published authors. Surely, their peers recognized them early on for their genius, yes? Well, not actually.  

B.B. Alston took his debut novel, Amari and the Night Brothers, to his writing group, “and they said, ‘you’re not going to sell a kid’s fantasy with a Black main character!’” (Luckily, his agent disagreed!)

Still, there must be some deep, dark secret to success. Maybe their early reading experience? (Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, mainly, Mbalia says, but also notes “an author I probably wasn’t supposed to read – Walter Mosley and his Devil in a Blue Dress, or basically anything in Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series.)

Or maybe the secret is their play lists?

“Panda cams!” is the favorite of McMann, another one of those NYT-bestsellers, with so many series to her credit she had to count them on her fingers to be sure. (Unwanteds series, Unwanteds Quests, Vision Trilogy, Going Wild series, Wake Trilogy, plus assorted stand alones.)

Messenger prefers Ambient Sounds (various versions available, including from YouTube). Prince Joel prefers Café Jazz on YouTube but also likes – just plain silence.

And Alston? His reply makes him an author after my own heart: “I have to have noise-cancelling headphones – complete silence at all times!”

***

Still to come – that secret, never before disclosed, begging to be exploited age gap in YA fiction I mentioned in a previous post? Stay tuned!

Short takes from NTTBF: how to write jokes

 I admit – I can’t think of anything harder to write than humor. But between the COVID-19 pandemic, economic catastrophes, and – in my part of the world – an apocalyptic power outage – I was desperately in need of a dose of good cheer.

The title of a session at the recent North Texas Teen Book Festival was “Jeff Kinney on writing jokes.” The Jeff Kinney, whose Diary of a Wimpy Kid book series could brighten even the gruesomeness of adolescence? I added it to my “must-see” list. And that was before learning it included junk food. (Double-stuffed Oreo cookies are among his inspirations.)

Asked how he writes stories, Kinney said, “I always start with the jokes,” but how he comes up with those has changed over time.

Jeff Kinney 

He originally started, as writers often do, with what he knew – collecting all the funny things he could remember from his own life. That aspect alone spanned nearly four years. But the series grew. And grew. And then the hard part came – creating new jokes.

He tried all the usual methods for juicing creativity: taking walks, mowing the lawn, (probably) devouring junk food. This actually got him through nearly a dozen books. Then he found a method. (Were Oreos still involved? Inquiring minds want to know.)

The method was called systematic creative thinking, a methodology originally designed for engineering problems, which can only show how truly desperate Kinney’s search for humor had become.

You can look it up. Or you can use the three-part cheat sheet Kinney devised:

1.     Take something and count its individual parts

2.     Take those parts and add, subtract, or divide them

3.     Ask whether the result is something is a product somebody could actually use

Here’s Kinney’s simplified illustration. Take a pair of eyeglasses, which have only two basic parts: lenses and frames. Consider taking away the lenses and ask, could anybody use a pair of eyeglass frames on their own?

Surprisingly, the answer is, yes. “How about celebrities who want to look intellectual for a camera shoot but don’t want those distracting reflections?”

Even easier, consider removing the frames from your eyeglasses. Shrink the resulting lenses down and you have contact lenses.

Useful, but not particularly funny. (Except in the case of the vain would-be intellectual.) But for a Wimpy Kid book, consider starting with a kid on an airplane and listing all the parts on that plane (“including the barf bags,” Kinney noted because, hey, he’s Kinney).

Then, think about what can be subtracted. How about the pilot? To most of us, a pilot-less plan would be the stuff of nightmares. Luckily for anyone with a fear of flying, in Kinney’s case, it became the basis for a joke in his 12^th book, The Getaway. From then on, systematic process became Kinney’s joke-generating mechanism of choice, the superpower that enables him to write two books yearly.

It’s not his only superpower, of course. There’s also his now-revealed secret COVID-era writing place – the local cemetery (nice and quiet!). And snacks. Plenty of snacks. Because writers got to keep their strength up! 

***

Still to come from the North Texas Teen Book Festival – what do fantasy writers sleep with (please, the PG version!), what’s great about reading things too old for you, the secret age gap of YA heroes, and more!

2020 countdown – readers’ favorite posts, day 5

 Tales from the North Texas Teen Book Festival always figure among reader favorites. The 2020 festival in early March finished just before the country shut down for COVID-19, but 2021 is, as of this writing, good to go! In the meantime, please enjoy these highlights: 

Tales from teen book fest – our safe place in stories 

First of all – is it possible to talk about “safe places” amid thousands of teens and preteens turned loose at a book festival? Aside from the abundance of hand sanitizer stations at last weekend’s North Texas Teen Book Festival in Irving, Texas, there was little evidence of worry about the COV-19 epidemic that occupies older minds. Worry about getting to the head of the line for favorite author signings, yes. And about grabbing snacks and restroom breaks between the dozens of panels and publisher events. Epidemics barely rated a yawn.           

Image: Pixabay

What really scared young readers was finding a place to fit in. Especially if they were (or felt) a little different from the characters in the books they read. Luckily for them, authors of, and writing about, diverse ethnicities, cultures, and body and genre types abounded. Like Roshani (“the ‘a’ is silent!”) Chokshi (Gilded Wolves series), Melissa de la Cruz (Descendants series), Hafsah Faizal (We Hunt the Flame series), Marie Lu (The Kingdom of Back), and Marissa Meyer (The Lunar Chronicles series) at the Flights of Fantasy panel discussion. 

“How can stories be used as a safe place?” moderator/podcaster (Adventures in YA) Sara Roberts asked the group, whose ethnic diversity – Indian American, Hispanic, Chinese, multi-racial, and Arab, as well as identifying as white – offered a springboard for discussion. 

“(Fantasies are) are safe places in that they do not minimize any emotion. That’s what I love about children’s literature,” Chokshi said. 

That’s because readers can explore “while immersing yourselves in a whole new world,” Cruz said. “A lot of fantasy is metaphor.” 

Lu noted, “The journey of discovery of yourself always applies. (But) there were a lot of holes in fantasy that are now opening up and giving way to other voices.” 

For Meyer, reading fantasy as a young person was escapist, a way to explore new worlds. “there’s so much explanation mirrored in these epic quests.” 

Given the benefits of trying on these new worlds, “How important is it for young readers to see themselves” in books, Roberts asked. 

As an Indian American, Chokshi said, even after she began writing as well as reading, “I took me a while to realize I was writing myself out of my stories. These stories read with a lot more urgency when you see yourself in them.” 

“Maybe the beautiful queen can have dark hair instead of blonde,” Cruz said. 

“My first efforts were very white,” Faizal said. “I wrote all white characters because I thought that’s what I had to do to get published. . . (Once) I realized what was wrong and got myself into the story, it took off.” 

“Early on,” Lu also admitted, “I never ever thought of putting myself in these books. Growing up, I never saw a story with a Chinese character. I can’t imagine what it would have meant to me as a reader.” 

Surveying her fellow writers, Meyer decided to address the elephant in the room. “So, I’m white,” she said, a statement that drew delighted laughter from her very diverse audience. “I came to this through anime and realized that even in anime, which is Japanese, a lot of the characters are white,” sparking the possibility of diverse characters in even the smallest details. 

And although many stories emphasize the difficulties faced by characters (and readers and writers) of non-white ethnicities, “It’s really great to have stories about ourselves that are fun!” Chokshi said.

***

And here are the fest's followup posts: 

Diversity goes to the big (and biggish) screens 

Stories for (but not limited to) young adult readers have long been fodder for movie and TV adaptations. Nothing against Little Women, but the recent North Texas Teen Book Festival hosted a range of more recent – and sometimes harder-edged – books taking their places on the big – and small – screens. 

Panelists Becky Albertalli (Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda), Max Brallier (Last Kids on Earth TV series), David Levithan (Every Day), Sarah Mlynoski (Upside Down Magic), Julie Murphy (Dumplin’), and Angie Thomas (The Hate U Give) joined moderator/podcaster Sara Roberts to talk about what it’s like to see their books come to life in a different medium – and whether they’ve brought new readers with them. 

Responses ranged from Mlynoski (whose movie adaption is due this summer): “I don’t know yet but I learn people get a lot more into it.” 

To Albertalli: “I’m not sure people knew it was a book,” of the Love, Simon, movie adaptation of her coming of age story, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda. (Which didn’t keep festival teens from finding, and sporting copies of the original.) 

To Murphy: “People tell me, ‘my dad’s seen your movie.’” (Dumplin’, based on the book of the same name). “Dad may not have turned into a reader,” Murphy said, “but I’m glad he’s getting the story.” 

However, writers acknowledged that Hollywood can be slower to pounce on themes of diversity than publishers. Having movies about “a black girl (Thomas’s The Hate U Give), a gay boy (Love, Simon), and a fat girl (Dumplin’)” as Thomas noted, necessarily mean more traction for characters whose diversity mirrors that of increasing numbers of young readers. 

“You have to ask the film people to make sure the world (on film) around your characters is just as diverse,” Murphy said. 

When the session turned to Q&A, one young fan said, “I write, but about serious things and the problems of the world. But when I tell people, they say, you’re a kid, you should be writing about happy things, like ponies. What do you say to that?” 

Authors bluntly favored the questioner, although not all responses were suitable for print. “I look forward to you signing a book for me one day.” 

***

 Rick Riordan as patron saint of mythic adaptations 

It’s no secret that adaptations of classical myths are hot properties in literature for kids and teens. Middle-grade author Rick Riordan first primed the pump with his wildly irreverent takes on Greek divinities, but his Rick Riordan Presents imprint within Disney Publishing has expanded to feature a multitude of other cultural myths adapted to modern life. 

The Rick Riordan Presents! panel at the North Texas Teen Book Festival drew on books by Indian American writer Roshani Chokshi (Gilded Wolves series), Cuban Carlos Hernandez (Sal and Gabi Break the Universe) and African Kwame Mbalia (Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky). 

Rebecca Marsick opened the discussion with the observation, “All of your books involve other dimensions.” 

“Every book is a thought experiment – what if this happens?” Hernandez said. The alternate dimension is this other possibility.” 

“Portal fantasy and alternate dimensions are just cool ways to explain magic,” Mbalia said. “Things just are, and you’re free to explore the stories. We don’t have a lot of time to explain in books. We have to get to the meat.” 

What, Marsick asked, did the writers’ personal cultures bring to their stories? 

Or perhaps, Hernandez said, it was a matter of what they didn’t bring – the blanks he felt necessary to fill in. “One of the things I wasn’t seeing in the (Latinx) literature was the joy. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t happy. Things feel wild and magical all the time, even when we struggle.” 

Chokshi also noted that a writer’s experience with myths may vary, citing differences between the stories she and her husband, from another part of the country, learned. “India is a big place (and) I’m not trying to represent an entire country in a book. What we have to do is celebrate these stories. Try to get the general strokes of the mythology and then let it live.”

Short takes from teen book fest plus quarantine updates

(Post updated to reflect cancellation of Writefest Houston)

Diversity comes to the big (and biggish) screens

Stories for (but not limited to) young adult readers have long been fodder for movie and TV adaptations. Nothing against Little Women, but the recent North Texas Teen Book Festival hosted a range of more recent – and sometimes harder-edged – books taking their places on the big – and small – screens.

Angie Thomas (l) & Julie Murphy

Panelists Becky Albertalli (Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda), Max Brallier (Last Kids on Earth TV series), David Levithan (Every Day), Sarah Mlynoski (Upside Down Magic), Julie Murphy (Dumplin’), and Angie Thomas (The Hate U Give) joined moderator/podcaster Sara Roberts to talk about what it’s like to see their books come to life in a different medium – and whether they’ve brought new readers with them.

Responses ranged from Mlynoski (whose movie adaption is due this summer): “I don’t know yet but I learn people get a lot more into it.”

To Albertalli: “I’m not sure people knew it was a book,” of the Love, Simon, movie adaptation of her coming of age story, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda. (Which didn’t keep festival teens from finding, and sporting copies of the original.)

To Murphy: “People tell me, ‘my dad’s seen your movie.’” (Dumplin’, based on the book of the same name). “Dad may not have turned into a reader,” Murphy said, “but I’m glad he’s getting the story.”

However, writers acknowledged that Hollywood can be slower to pounce on themes of diversity than publishers. Having movies about “a black girl (The Hate U Give), a gay boy (Love, Simon), and a fat girl (Dumplin’)” as Thomas noted, necessarily mean more traction for characters whose diversity mirrors that of increasing numbers of young readers.

“You have to ask the film people to make sure the world (on film) around your characters is just as diverse,” Murphy said.

When the session turned to Q&A, one young fan said, “I write, but about serious things and the problems of the world. But when I tell people, they say, you’re a kid, you should be writing about happy things, like ponies. What do you say to that?”

Authors bluntly favored the questioner, although not all responses were suitable for print. “I look forward to you signing a book for me one day.”

***

Rick Riordan as patron saint of mythic adaptations

l-r, Marsick, Chokshi, Hernandez, Mbalia

It’s no secret that adaptations of classical myths are hot properties in literature for kids and teens. Middle-grade author Rick Riordan first primed the pump with his wildly irreverent takes on Greek divinities, but his Rick Riordan Presents imprint within Disney Publishing has expanded to feature a multitude of other cultural myths adapted to modern life. 

The Rick Riordan Presents! panel at the North Texas Teen Book Festival drew on books by Indian American writer Roshani Chokshi (Gilded Wolves series), Cuban Carlos Hernandez (Sal and Gabi Break the Universe) and African Kwame Mbalia (Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky). 

Rebecca Marsick opened the discussion with the observation, “All of your books involve other dimensions.”

“Every book is a thought experiment – what if this happens?” Hernandez said. The alternate dimension is this other possibility.”

“Portal fantasy and alternate dimensions are just cool ways to explain magic,” Mbalia said. “Things just are, and you’re free to explore the stories. We don’t have a lot of time to explain in books. We have to get to the meat.”

What, Marsick asked, did the writers’ personal cultures bring to their stories?

Or perhaps, Hernandez said, it was a matter of what they didn’t bring – the blanks he felt necessary to fill in. “One of the things I wasn’t seeing in the (Latinx) literature was the joy. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t happy. Things feel wild and magical all the time, even when we struggle.”

Chokshi also noted that a writer’s experience with myths may vary, citing differences between the stories she and her husband, from another part of the country, learned. “India is a big place (and) I’m not trying to represent an entire country in a book. What we have to do is celebrate these stories. Try to get the general strokes of the mythology and then let it live.”

***

I still feel well nearly ten days after that North Texas Teen Book Festival, but the world of in-person literary events is narrowing as the CORV-19 pandemic spreads. Still, writers are resilient. North Texas WORDfest’s
“all-you-can-meet” festival of creative connection, originally scheduled for this Saturday, March 21, has morphed into a virtual festival from 7 p.m. Friday, March 20, through 4 p.m. Sunday, March 22. As of this writing (March 16), the only place I find to register for the limited number of online sites is at the WORD – Writing Organizations ‘Round Dallas Facebook page, which promised an updated schedule to come.

Sorry to report that Writefest Houston, originally scheduled for May 4-10, has been cancelled dur to the COVID-19 pandemic. Look for it to return in 2021. As of this writing, summer events are still scheduled – the June 13-14 DFW Writers Conference in Hurst, Texas, and the June 26-28 Agents & Editors Conference of the Writers League of Texas in Austin. I will post here as updated information is available.

Tales from teen book fest – our safe place in stories

First of all – is it possible to talk about “safe places” amid thousands of teens and preteens turned loose at a book festival? Aside from the abundance of hand sanitizer stations at last weekend’s North Texas Teen Book Festival in Irving, Texas, there was little evidence of worry about the COV-19 epidemic that occupies older minds. Worry about getting to the head of the line for favorite author signings, yes. And about grabbing snacks and restroom breaks between the dozens of panels and publisher events. Epidemics barely rated a yawn.            

What really scared young readers was finding a place to fit in. Especially if they were (or felt) a little different from the characters in the books they read. Luckily for them, authors of, and writing about, diverse ethnicities, cultures, and body and genre types abounded. Like Roshani (“the ‘a’ is silent!”) Chokshi (Gilded Wolves series), Melissa de la Cruz (Descendants series), Hafsah Faizal (We Hunt the Flame series), Marie Lu (The Kingdom of Back), and Marissa Meyer (The Lunar Chronicles series) at the Flights of Fantasy panel discussion.

“How can stories be used as a safe place?” moderator/podcaster (Adventures in YA) Sara Roberts asked the group, whose ethnic diversity – Indian American, Hispanic, Chinese, multi-racial, and Arab, as well as identifying as white – offered a springboard for discussion.

“(Fantasies are) safe places in that they do not minimize any emotion. That’s what I love about children’s literature,” Chokshi said.

image: Prawny from Pixabay

That’s because readers can explore “while immersing yourselves in a whole new world,” Cruz said. “A lot of fantasy is metaphor.”

Lu noted, “The journey of discovery of yourself always applies. (But) there were a lot of holes in fantasy that are now opening up and giving way to other voices.”

For Meyer, reading fantasy as a young person was escapist, a way to explore new worlds. “there’s so much explanation mirrored in these epic quests.”

Given the benefits of trying on these new worlds, “How important is it for young readers to see themselves” in books, Roberts asked.

As an Indian American, Chokshi said, even after she began writing as well as reading, “I took me a while to realize I was writing myself out of my stories. These stories read with a lot more urgency when you see yourself in them.”

“Maybe the beautiful queen can have dark hair instead of blonde,” Cruz said.

“My first efforts were very white,” Faizal said. “I wrote all white characters because I thought that’s what I had to do to get published. . . (Once) I realized what was wrong and got myself into the story, it took off.”

“Early on,” Lu also admitted, “I never ever thought of putting myself in these books. Growing up, I never saw a story with a Chinese character. I can’t imagine what it would have meant to me as a reader.”

Surveying her fellow writers, Meyer decided to address the elephant in the room. “So, I’m white,” she said, a statement that drew delighted laughter from her very diverse audience. “I came to this through anime and realized that even in anime, which is Japanese, a lot of the characters are white,” sparking the possibility of diverse characters in even the smallest details.

And although many stories emphasize the difficulties faced by characters (and readers and writers) of non-white ethnicities, “It’s really great to have stories about ourselves that are fun!” Chokshi said. 

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Next up: Diversity goes to the movies, with body type and gender as well as ethnic variations, at the North Texas Teen Book Festival

Literary love starts early at these spring events in Texas

Whether we’re readers or writers (or both!), there’s plenty of story telling going on in 2020’s first roundup of Texas literary events. Here’s a sample – mostly in North Texas, but sometimes straying further afield.

Now - May 11: Dallas Jewish Bookfest, already in progress. Authors and books to provide a window to the Jewish experience. Next up: Jillian Cantor with In Another Time, January 29, 7-9 p.m., Aaron Family Jewish Community Center, 7900 Northaven Road, Dallas. See the site for ticket prices and other event venues.

Now – May 11: The 29^th season of Arts & Letters Live is already in progress. Coming to you from the Dallas Museum of Art, it features literary and performing arts. Humorist Mo Rocca’s January 22 reading is already sold out but check the site for more programs to come. Most tickets $40 for public, $30 for DMA members, $20 for students. Most venues at the DMA, 1717 N. Harwood, Dallas.

January 24: Not a conference, but add #RevPit from Revise & Resub to your contest lineup for a chance to polish those queries and early manuscript pages! Authors have a chance to win feedback and full manuscript edits to get queries ready for submission to agents.

image: Pixabay

February 15-16: North Texas Comic Book Festival features a line-up of legendary comic book artists at the Irving Convention Center, 500 West Las Colinas, in Irving, Texas. Tickets: $25 plus for Saturday (Feb. 15); $20 for Sunday (Feb. 16), kids 12 and under get in free! 

February 20: Highland Park Literary Festival features keynote speaker Hampton Sides at 7 p.m. in Highland Park High School’s Palmer Auditorium. Sides is best known for deeply researched adventure stories set in war or on epic explorations, most recently, On Desperate Ground: The Epic Story of the Chosin Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle (named a Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post). Following his address, he will sign books from 8 – 8:45 p.m. Free and open to the public.

March 6-7: North Texas Teen Book Festival returns to the Irving Convention Center, 500 West Las Colinas, in Irving, Texas. March 6 is educator day, March 7 is open to everyone festival day, featuring scores (literally) of middle grade and young adult authors. Free. See the site for complete list of participating authors.

March 21: WORDfest 4.0, that “all-you-can-meet” literary festival of connections returns to Tarrant County College’s Northeast Campus, 828 Harwood Road, Hurst. Last year 20 North Texas writing groups and more than 300 writers attended, providing information about fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, poetry and indie publishing. Lunch and snacks available for purchase at the college’s student union cafeteria, but otherwise everything is free. Stay tuned to the site for scheduling details. 

May 4-10: This year’s Writefest, the week-long literary festival at numerous venues in Houston, features poet Jericho Brown as keynote speaker. Events include writing workshops, conference, book fair and social events (readings, open-mics and a literary breakfast). Book fair and socials are free and open to the public. Early bird registration for four-day workshops and weekend festival is $350 (plus service charge) through April 1. Check site for specifics and locations.

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What’s missing? North Texas science-fiction/fantasy convention ConDFW ended its 19-year run in (perhaps appropriately) 2019. Also, in 2019, SMU’s Writer’s Path program bit the dust. But the Path’s long-time honcho, author Suzanne Frank, has announced a wake of sorts for the beloved writing program, January 21, 7 p.m.-ish, at Chocolate Secrets, 3926 Oak Lawn Avenue, Dallas. Come, connect, grieve and (she promises) bring anything you have to promote. 

Alert readers of this blog may also have noticed a gap in last week’s post about contests – WRiTE CLUB. The originator of the readers’ choice contest, D.L. Hammons, just landed an agent for his MG book and is busy preparing a sequel! Will he be too busy to host WRiTE CLUB again? Stay tuned!

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(Updated to include Dallas Jewish Bookfest)

Countdown to readers’ favs of 2019 – Happy 2020!

Here’s the finale – the most read posts of 2019 – beginning with the runner-up, first published March 26, 2019:

Where the boys are – oh, those elusive young male readers

My mission the North Texas Teen Book Festival last weekend was to find books my adolescent grandsons would read. From tots who demanded nightly story readings and elementary schoolers who insisted on taking their chapter books to bed with them, they had grown into preteens (now early teenagers) who preferred to spend their spare time watching Youtube and playing video games.

Were they doomed to join the demographic of males who seldom (maybe never!) crack open a book outside of academic required reading? Where were the books aimed at teen boys that I remembered from my own and my daughter’s growing up years?

With that in mind – and temporarily ignoring that many women have written books for boys – I underlined every discussion that included male authors in my copy of the Teen Book Festival’s program and set out for the Irving Convention Center on a rainy Saturday morning.

image: Pixabay

Top of the list was the “New Kids on the Block” panel, where four out of the five debut writers were guys. I also came prepared with extensive knowledge of my boys’ favorite topics. They’re avid drawers who create their own comic books (and loved meeting personal idol Dav Pilkey) at last year’s festival. The boys had also loved the magical school stories of the Harry Potter and Rick Riordan’s demigods series. Relationships with girls, however, were still iffy – they’d been aghast that one of their male classmates had gone on a (gasp!) date. With a girl.

I crossed anything resembling romances off the festival’s offerings but added its “Getting Schooled,” “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Read Them,” and “Getting Graphic,” all with multiple male authors – to my list of must-sees.

I was a little surprised – but shouldn’t have been – when teacher (and debut author) Alicia D. Williams of the “New Kids on the Block” panel mentioned that even boys enjoyed reading her girl-coming-of-age story Genesis Begins Again. After all, girls have a long history of reading stories written for boys, even stories written by women. It was the Black Stallion series for me, The Outsiders (by female author S.E. Hinton) for my daughter. And of course, for my grandkids’ generation, the Harry Potter books written by Joanne, (now better known as J.K.) Rowling. 

Still more surprisingly, Williams and the other debut authors (Ben Guterson, Matt Mendez, Ben Philippe, and Justin A. Reynolds) didn’t recommend specific books. Rather, they said, I should to take my grandsons to a library or bookstore, let them browse the shelves for themselves, and ask librarians and store employees what books kids with their interests actually read. 

(Probably not surprisingly, librarians and audience members at the panel had some suggestions for 13-year-old boys: Shannon Messenger’s Keepers of the Lost Cities series, Ghost Boy, and Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet (“or really, anything by Paulsen”). (Check for these at Richardson & Dallas libraries.)

The “Getting Schooled” panel introduced me to the likes of Max Brallier, Jen Calonita, Jerry Craft, Stuart Gibbs, Sarah Mlynowski, and Raina Tegemeier, with plenty of possibilities for readers negotiating the tricky halls of junior high schools. (Brallier, Craft, and Tegemeier, along with Terri Libenson, also appeared on the “Getting Graphic” panel of writers and illustrators of graphic novels.)

And the “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Read Them” panelists – David Bowles, Alexandra Bracken, Adam Gidwitz, Yoon Ha Lee, Lisa McMann, and Christina Soontornvat – made me recall my grandsons’ fascination with the phenomenon of “cryptids” and monsters.

Given that I didn’t hit the festival’s bookstore until after the last panel ended, some of the books I sought had already sold out. Still, my take-home bookbag included A Field Guide to the North American Teenager by Ben Philippe; Winterhouse by Ben Guterson; The Last Kids on Earth by Max Brallier; New Kid by Jerry Craft; The Chupacabras of the Rio Grande by David Bowles and Adam Gidwitz; and Spy School by Stuart Gibbs. I hesitated before adding Justin A. Reynolds’ Opposite of Always (which he described as a rom-com with time travel) to the bag, promising to read it for myself. Or maybe I’ll let the boys see it when they’re old enough not to be appalled by the idea of dating. . . .

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And finally, the winner, the most-read post of 2019, one of my few reviews for the year. This post was first published January 11, 2019, for a book I find still eerily relevant for 2020:

When only Hitler could kill Hitler

Review of: The Plots Against Hitler

Author: Danny Orbach

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Grade: A

Source: Dallas Public Library

Considering that, according to Wikipedia, at least 42 assassination plots against Adolf Hitler have been documented – and who knows how many remain undocumented – why didn’t any of them succeed? Historian Danny Orbach attempts to answer that question – and debunk myths surrounding the most famous attempt, Operation Valkyrie, with his well-researched 2016 volume, The Plots Against Hitler. 

With a single notable exception, Orbach’s narrative concentrates on the resistance effort of the German military toward Hitler, and examines three key timelines of that resistance, from 1938 to 1944. He also asks – and attempts to answer – what motives persuaded these conspirators to overcome their own cultural and moral qualms about the killing of a leader to whom many of them had sworn personal allegiance.

Some of their motives, such as a hope of securing favorable peace terms with the Allies, no longer strike modern readers as morally acceptable, Orbach notes. Were patriotism and morality synonymous? More to the point for 21^st century readers, can the two motives still be equated? And how are we to make moral judgments today about conspirators as flawed as those Orbach details – sometimes womanizers, anti-Semites, at best “antidemocratic reactionaries” in the words of another writer, at worst, active participants in mass murder? What kind of morality would enable even such a vehement anti-Nazi as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, to join Germany’s military intelligence organization? Should even those who attempted to stop Hitler tarred with the same guilt as their target?

“(T)he story of the German resistance has a crucial moral component. After all, the Nazi era is still viewed around the world, and most of all in Germany itself, through the lens of collective guilt, historical responsibility, and the burden of National Socialist crimes. . . (but) gradually, I came to believe that one must transcend the current moralistic debate, redraw its terms, and reframe it altogether,” Orbach states.

Lest readers fear being overwhelmed by moralistic arguments, the book, even knowing how the story ends, reads like a thriller, with such elements as nocturnal meetings in frozen fields; the elaborate drama of military conspiracies; bombs hidden in briefcases and liqueur bottles; and the dramatic day of July 20, 1944, with its abortive assassination and final, desperate attempt at a coup d’état.

And often it reads like a tragi-comedy of errors. A bomb hidden in a bottle smuggled aboard Hitler’s plane inexplicably fails to explode. Hitler’s penchant for altering his schedule without notice foils still other plots. And all too often, it seems that the sheer multitude of conspiring assassins and their conflicting motives and agendas collide. 

One of the most nearly successful assassination attempts was the simplest – the lone-wolf effort of barely-educated carpenter turned watchmaker Georg Elser, whose 1939 bomb in a Munich beer hall missed Hitler but killed eight others. (Captured soon afterward and ultimately executed, Elser was reportedly devastated by the death of the innocent bystanders.)

So, what was the point of all the conspiratorial misfires, most of them resulting in little more than the gruesome deaths of the conspirators? Yes, some of their attempts saved hundreds of Jews from death in Nazi concentration camps, and may have limited the numbers of Poles, Soviets, and other Eastern Europeans massacred. But ultimately, millions more died. World War II was not shortened, hundreds of thousands of Germans, both soldiers and civilians, died. In the end, following Hitler’s own suicide, Germany as the conspirators knew it, disappeared. Were the conspirators heroes or the ultimate failures?

“Terms like heroes and heroism tend to make contemporary historians suspicious,” Orbach writes. “(But) once we have understood that (heroes’) armor is not shining but rather tarnished and scratched, we can see ‘heroes’ for what they are in the real world: people able, perhaps only briefly, to transcend ideology and selfishness and even existential dangers for the sake of a greater good.” 

And what would we do if we found ourselves in similar circumstances, Orbach asks. “If these questions make you ponder, then I have done the job I set out to do.”

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Still to come: I sink my teeth into 2020 with a calendar full of winter-into-spring literary events – and writing contests!