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!

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.”

A smorgasbord of info from 2018 DFW Writers Conference

Hungry for the feast of information from this year’s DFW Writers Conference? Here’s sampling, starting with YA author Scott Westerfeld’s keynote address.

“Teenagers are the strangers among us. A couple of hundred years ago the term did not exist. In the U.S. Civil War, an 11-year-old got the Medal of Honor. A 13-year-old commanded a ship at Trafalgar.” Although the word “teen” didn’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1921, and “teenager” until 1941,” during the 19^th century, partly sparked by the Industrial Revolution, “a space expanded between being a little kid and being an adult.”

Co-existent with the evolution of teendom was the emergence of novels as “the supreme methods of storytelling.” The superpower of novels is their ability to lay out “agony, limits, feelings, beliefs, fears and hatred on the page.” Humans also have a superpower – empathy.

image: pixabay

“The novel is the outgrowth of this ability. Readers don’t just bond with our characters, they become those characters.” And the supreme time for that becoming, that trying on of different ways of thinking and being is during the teen years. “Novels exercise our empathy and strengthen it.” Is this a scary process? Yes, “and scarier for teens because they are the strangers among us. So I hope you keep making more books – and more readers!”

***

Or maybe you wanted to know what agents really like (or not)? Try this discussion from the "Ask An Agent Anything" panel with agents Malaga Baldi, Amy Bishop, Uwe Stender and Maximilian Ximenez.

Q. Is it OK to resubmit to an agent after a rejection?
A. Absolutely, kind of, depends.

“The agents are rejecting the book, never you,” said Uwe Stender of Triada US Literary Agency. “Feel free to offer another work.”

Maximilian Ximenez of the L. Perkins Agency noted he’s even OK with resubmitting the same work after extensive revision. 

Q. What are you looking for in a query letter?
A. That depends. . . 

“Really know your enemy,” said Malaga Baldi of the Baldi Agency. “Know what they represent. We all have our own bugaboos and our own strong points. (However, note that she hates letters addressing her as Mr. Baldi!) 

And on the “knowing the enemy” front, “Please be upfront with relevant data, genre, word counts, etc.,” Ximenez said. “I don’t want to read the whole query before realizing it’s not something I can represent.”

“Do your research, like everyone says,” was the advice of Amy Bishop of Dystel, Goderich & Bourrett LLC. (Among the things she looks for are comparison titles.)

Q. What turns you off from a (potential) writer client?
A. Forgetting we’re in a business!

“If I get the feeling that you’re unreasonable,” Stender said. “What I want from you is someone smart and professional.”

“I really want your relationship with your agent to be a long-lasting one,” Bishop said.

“I have had to, unfortunately, drop a lot of clients because of their rejection of what I suggest. It’s like a job interview. You need to know what you’re willing to compromise about.”

Baldi agreed. “I’m not your best friend. It’s a business relationship.”

Q. What’s the current market zeitgeist?
A. Do you really want to ask?

“It’s scary,” Baldi said, claiming she loves fiction but finds it a hard sell. “My bread and butter is nonfiction.”

“The word that’s been rising lately is platform,” Ximenez said. “Generally, it’s social messages but also the bonafides of the writer, especially in YA (young adult literature), themes of social justice and deconstruction (a method of questioning and revising received ideas). There’s deconstructionist cycle in all genres about every 15 years.”

“A lot of fantasy in a non-Western setting,” Bishop noted. 

And then there was Stender’s take. “I really don’t pay any attention to the market currently. I’m fully aware of what people want, but I will not respond to that when I get the book. The U.S. is always decades behind everybody else. It’s not like I’m ignorant of (the current market). I just don’t care.”

***

And if that doesn’t explain everything, agent Patricia Nelson’s workshop, “Avoid Rookie Submission Mistakes,” dealt with some definite no-nos. 

·       Targeting the wrong audience. Think middle grade, young adult, or adult. Nothing is one size fits all! (See the next no-no also – where is it shelved?)

·       Wrong genre. Think – where would the book be shelves in a bookstore?

·       Wrong agent. Research sites such as Agent Query, Query Tracker, and Literary Rambles (for YA and MG client lists).

·       Wrong comp titles. These can include comparison titles that are too old, too famous, outliers of your genre, or just plain from the wrong genre. Comp titles preferably should have been published within the last 3-5 years, be well-known but not necessarily long-time New York Times best sellers. Comparisons, for instance, to the Harry Potter series simply can’t be taken seriously. Nelson’s rule of thumb: If it was made into a TV show or a movie, it’s probably too big.

Wordcraft -- Young people to books: we love you!

I could hardly believe the sight was real. Dozens of school buses from districts across North Texas lined the road outside the Irving Convention Center, unloading kids who’d given up a beautiful Saturday to hang out with their favorite authors at the first annual North Texas Teen Book Festival.

And it wasn’t just hundreds of kids, but thousands of them. The final attendance count totaled 3,500, according to festival steering committee member Mandy Aguilar. Crowds of young people (and a scattering of adults, like me) filled two stories of the convention center to see and hear more than fifty authors. And to line up for questions, and buy books, and mob writers for one-on-one discussions and selfies beyond number.

As someone who worries over predictions that boys stop reading once they hit adolescence, it was reassuring to see almost as many boys as girls line up to question authors.

And since I’m always looking for the next new thing to satisfy my tweenaged grandsons’ appetite for books, I took copious notes at author panels designated for middle grade readers (generally, ages 8-12).

What would tempt boys who crave male heroes but who don’t turn up their noses at spunky females? Boys who are daringly geeky, the kids who spout hockey league statistics at the drop of a puck, but are undecided about whether to pursue careers in science or the arts?

Maybe they’d like The Great Greene Heist, by engineer turned author Varian Johnson, www.varianjohnson.com/? Johnson still pursues an engineering career,  but he’s spending ever-increasing amounts of time writing award-winning books for young people.

And then there was Plano author Polly Holyoke (http://pollyholyoke.com/) with The Neptune Project, about a group of genetically-altered, ocean-dwelling young people and their dolphin friends. Former middle school teacher Holyoke enjoyed researching The Neptune Project and its out-this-May sequel, The Neptune Challenge. The downside of research? Sharing so much scary stuff with her daughters they're now reluctant to go swimming or scuba diving with her.

I personally sympathized with author/panelist Shannon Messenger who started her career intending to major in art, discovered she hated it, switched film because she loved a screenwriting course but found she hated the Hollywood life, and finally realized she really wanted to write novels, like the Keeper of Lost Cities series starring a preteen telepath, and admits at
http://ramblingsofawannabescribe.blogspot.com/ to keeping company with insane numbers of animals.

By lunchtime, all the mental exertion left me starving. But with the line for the convention center’s café out the door (note for next year, bring sack lunch), I hit the book room stocked by HalfPrice Books. Oh, here was something that looked fun, a book from Obert Skye’s Creature from My Closet series, illustrated by drawings my grandsons would love. (See samplings at his website, www.abituneven.com/.)

The boys were flying off the next day for spring break. And although their dad had loaded movies on his iPad, they couldn’t resist taking a book along as well, an actual printed book. Which one was it? I’m waiting to see. And to hear all about it.

By the way, if you missed the festival, I’m sorry. But mark your calendar for the next one, March 5, 2016. Because like a good book series, the sequel is already in the works.