Diana

For today's visit on 31 Blogs you might not know I want to point you to Shen's Books. Shen's publishes beautiful books and has a blog/website full of multicultural book related info.

Recently, publisher Renee Ting started a new feature called the Multicultural Minute - short 1 minute videos connected to the multicultural kidlit world.

A couple of my favorites are Multicultural Minute on Food and The Multicultural Minute on Biracial Picture Books

Friday was all about Poetry so I'm trying a Saturday Six - art journal edition. 1. The prep. All the early stuff I read said to Gesso the pages of the art journal before doing anything. I did that on a few pages and I have to say I hate it. Okay, maybe hate is strong but I don't like it. I really don't like the way it feels. I know it's supposed to strengthen the page and absorb the water but what I see happening is that paper disappears and I realize that the reason I am drawn to collage is because it is all about the paper. And the appeal of an art journal for someone who doesn't draw is again, about playing with paper via collage. I will try a few more pages with Gesso but so far, not a fan. But on YouTube there was a video of this person who did their page with no Gesso and instead just built up the page with a layer of paper and then painted over it. Aha! I thought I had landed on the perfect path for me. It was a great way to use up parts of the magazine I was going to throw away. I loved doing the paper base layer but then when it came time to paint over it, guess what? The texture of paper changed again. Well duh! I don't know what I was thinking, that I could do all these things to paper and it would still feel like paper. So I can see me using both, Gesso when I want a plain background in a hurry and the paper buildup when I want words or whatever is on the paper to show up through the paint or when I am going to apply a thick layer of paint anyway.  I am a very textured oriented person. VERY. So I am really having a hard time with the way the paper changes textures by putting Gesso or paint on it. A really hard time.

2. The paper. In the collage class we have access to some of the most beautiful decorative and handmade papers but those don't work for the base of the art journal. Since I knew I was going to experiment with the various materials and backgrounds I've been using mostly journals I had on hand. I had some sketchbooks (not that I sketched but because I liked the way they felt) and some normal journals with thin pages (I've been Gessoning over them)  but I bought two watercolor journals for specific projects and can already see the appeal of those thick pages. Last night I learned about the difference between hot press and cold press pages and realized all I have is cold press. Now I'm on the search for a hot press watercolor book that is spiral bound. (For those, like me, that didn't know the difference, hot press is smoother paper and cold press is more textured.)

3. Adhesives. Who knew there were so many things to think about with glue?I have three jars of Modge Podge that I don't think will ever be used because of a fear of tackiness and there's no way I am sealing every page. Perhaps I'll find some other 3D object to decoupage that I won't mind sealing. I bought a couple different kinds of matte medium to try, Golden and Liqutex. I also have a stack of glue sticks from projects I do with kids in the classroom. I tried the glue sticks on the vision board and it probably would have worked okay if I had worked differently, maybe on a small scale. I really like the Golden matte medium and the verdict is still out on the Liqutex since I haven't tried it yet. One thing for sure, whatever I use, I am going to go through a lot of it. Wow! And I mean a LOT! 3. Tools. Brushes and sponges. Ugh. I hate when the hairs of the brush come loose in the paint or the matte medium. I imagine the expensive brushes don't do that but I can't rationalize expensive brushes at this stage of the game.

4. Paint. I bought lots of different art supplies so I could play around with the various things and see what I liked best. I figured backgrounds would be a good place to practice and see what I like best. I have acrylics, watercolors in a box, watercolor pencils and water soluble oil pastels. I love painting with acrylic because it feels like painting. I like the way the brush glides through the creamy paint. But I discovered that straight acrylics dry fast. Like two brush strokes and you're done, which doesn't work for backgrounds. Love doing an acrylic wash. I like coloring a page with the water soluble oil pastels but I don't like the way it looks when I add water. I do like these for adding a touch of color on top of something else. I prefer rubbing this color in rather than adding water. I haven't done a lot with watercolor pencils yet because I'm working on backgrounds and they aren't the best way to color a large surface but the little I have played with, I like. I don't have regular watercolor crayons, just the oil ones, so I don't know what they would be like but perhaps better? I have only played a little with the watercolors in the box and due to operator error. I have now watched a few more videos on watercolors and feel like I can try again.

5. Design. So many writers tell me they think in pictures, they see their story play out in front of them as if watching a play. I've never seen pictures in my stories. I've never "watched" my story unfold. I hear voices. Only voices. So this whole "picture" thing has me stymied. How hard could it be to make a background for a page? How badly could you screw up putting a few colors down and smooshing them around? A lot, apparently. I don't have an eye for this sort of thing. I gorged myself on visiting websites of people who shared photos of their art journals. I oohed and ahhed and then went over and, well, painted a lot of crappy backgrounds. But that's okay. My new friend Gesso can fix all that. But seriously, I didn't think it would be that hard to do a background for a page but after doing 12 of them I hate them all. Yes, all! The only think I could think of was covering it all up again with more collage. I think the next ones will be just solid color washes, nothing fancy.

6. The journal. Oddly enough, I am not thinking of doing this journals for actual writing. I do a lot of actual writing else (like on this blog) and I know that the texture of painted or Gessoed pages would feel like fingernails on the chalkboard to me. I think for journals that I plan to write more than a line or two in I will have to stick with water color pages that will feel like real paper when I write in them. But I hope to make art a part of my life and to use it to explore myself and the world around me.

The puppy has been named Ellie by youngest son.

She got lost the other day. I found her hiding on a shelf under the coffee table. This picture is blurred but I thought I'd post it anyway.

Beware of echoes and doppelgängers!

Maybe I am the only writer in the world who suffers from this bad habit. It makes me crazy. I do it in every blasted book, no matter how hard I try to be aware of it early in the process and avoid it.

I always create characters that are identical, both in their core characteristics and the purpose they serve in the book.

(I may have mentioned this earlier this month, but it is such a big pain in my writing butt, I must rant about it again.)

I spent all day yesterday and the wee hours of this morning extracting one of those characters from my book, and turning over many of his scenes to a different fellow who – I can now see with the blazing clarity of humiliating hindsight – should have been driving those scenes in the first place.

It was a bloodbath, I tell you.

How can you perform this radical surgery in your manuscript?

1. List all the characters.

2. Define – using only a few words – that character’s relationship to the main character.

Examples: comic foil, trusted friend, villain, complication, love interest.

3. If (like me) you have two or more characters that serve the same purpose, get out a magnifying glass and sharpen your scythe. Is it possible to have one of the characters take over scenes from the others?

Example: in the early draft of SPEAK, the character who is now called Heather was two separate girls. Each girl was a “sort of” friend of Melinda for a few months. Each friendship died. Their personalities were a bit different, but not in a strong enough way to affect Melinda’s interactions with them. By melding them together, the story was cleaner.

I am crossing my fingers that the work I am doing this weekend will have the same effect.

Lee Wind has created a wonderful resource for gay teen books, gay culture, gay politics and more! Lee's taking a couple of weeks off for the holidays but there are plenty of juicy posts over there for you to enjoy until he comes back in January. A couple of my favorites are The GLBTQ Middle Grade Bookshelf! and The Power Of A Ten Year Old: A GSA Monday Inspiration

 Left to Learn or Relearn

I love revising!!!

Here are what some of my notes on my editorial letter for PEARL look like:



And here's what my average manuscript page is looking like:


And here is what my inspiration for daring looks like, thanks to my awesome class who gave me this for an end-of-semester present:



:-)

Must stop now to attend my son's holiday party, where there will be more singing! Yup, it's still all holiday tunes all the time at chez Jo's.

Have a great weekend, everyone!!!

Sometimes people forget that I wrote PROM because it is not exactly a depressing book. In fact, it's pretty funny, if I do say so myself. (If I had dread, depression and death in all of my books, I would not be a healthy person!)

So it is with great joy that I announce that PROM has been nominated to the 2010 Popular Paperbacks List, in the "Change Your World or Live to Regret It" category!!

School Library Journal has posted their annual collection of Christmas Memories written by children's authors and illustrators. This year's essays were written by me, my buddy Deb Heiligman, Barbara McClintock, Lauren Myracle, and our National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Jon Scieszka. Enjoy!

Revision Tip #18

Are you stuck?

Have you tried all my plotting tips and dialog wisdom and adverb scorn and still you are stuck?

Try this.

1. Make yourself some comfort food.

2. Put on music that relaxes you.

3. Snuggle up in a warm, cozy place with a pen and a pad of paper.

4. Write a letter to your main character. Tell her everything that is worrying you about the story in general.

5. Pause to eat a bit. Make some tea or hot chocolate.

6. Pick up pen and paper again. Tell your character why you are specifically worried about her. Ask her what is going on in her life, in her relationships that you don't understand. Ask her advice about how to help her move forward.

7. Write down what she tells you.

8. If you can't hear her voice, then it is time to put that manuscript away for a while and work on a different story. But I am pretty sure you will hear the voice, so be chill and write.

I HAVE TO TELL YOU

I have taken
the blank paper
you kept in your desk

and which
you were probably
saving
for masterpieces
of your own

Forgive me
there were colors
beautiful colors
waiting to escape.

Susan Taylor Brown, all rights reserved

The Poetry Friday round-up is here this week so please leave a link to your post in the comments and I'll round them all up through-out the day. (If you read this blog on Facebook, please come over here and leave your link so I don't miss it.)

(NOTE: When you leave your link, please help me out by putting your name/blog name, name of the poem, and a permalink to the entry, not just a generic blog entry. It saves me the time of having to click through to every single blogger that left a comment. Thanks! I should have put this in the original message.)

The Round-up!

Barbara Turner warms us up with The Cremation of Sam McGee.
Kelly Fineman gifts us with an original poem Holiday Dinner To-Do List.

Father Gooses posts The Perfect Love Poem.

Tricia at Miss Rumphius Effect shares Longfellow and the poem Woods in Winter. 

Kelly Polark has holiday poems and recipes

A Year of Reading is a blog written by, in their own words, "two teachers who read. A lot."

I always feel like I am in the back of their classroom listening in as they turn kids on to reading and writing and poetry. So many of the lessons they share with their young students are just as important to this old student.

This blog is also the home of the great list, 100 Cool Teachers in Children's Literature (they're actually up to 128 now.)

A couple of my favorite posts are the current oneUnit of Study on THEME (beginnings) and THEME (middle, part 2)

I promised newport2newport that I would post some of my art so here are my first attempts at collage from the ongoing collage workshop I'm attending now. This is all new ground to me as I've never done any kind of art before. But I'm having a wonderful time trying.

Click through for larger pictures.

From First Forays into Art

This is my very first collage from my first week at class. I was having a heck of a time with the leaves on the tree on the right until I looked in my craft supplies at home and found a bag of moss. I had so much fun doing this.

From First Forays into Art

This was the second thing I made in collage class as a gift for a friend. This isn't the final version. You can see there are areas of brighter yellow around the words. I worked with watercolor crayons to blend the yellows into a color that faded nicely into the paper. I just forgot to take a picture of the final version before I wrapped it up.

From First Forays into Art

This is the cover of what will become my poetry journal. This was pretty much tear and affix as there were some giant chunks of handmade paper in class for me to us. There are places big enough for me to add a title once I figure out what I am going to call it.

From First Forays into Art

This is the cover for a second journal, this one will be just for haiku. I had originally planned for two trees on the front, even tore the paper for it, but then decided that one tree was a enough. There are also a couple of places for a journal title once I get one.

I may have mentioned that I am starting to "play" with art a tiny bit. Play is a hard word for me to use because it's not something I do often or well. And art, well, I just thought that was the name of some guy I hadn't met yet. But I am trying. And I'm inspired by many posts about creative journaling from newport2newport , like this and this and this.

There's also been a whole lot of "visioning" going on, such as talked about over here on Shrinking Violets and earlier in the week d_michiko_f came over to work on vision boards with me. You can see her finished board over here.

From First Forays into Art

Vision board foreground - This is the board when I thought I was done and before I got the bright idea to play with a background.

From First Forays into Art

From First Forays into Art

Final vision board for my writing life. I made so many beginner's mistakes on this one but it was a learning process for me. I didn't set out with the intention to mount it on anything so this ended up being built from the top down instead of from the bottom up. Gluing mistakes caused a ton of wrinkles which make the perfectionist in me cringe but I just keep telling myself that the wrinkles merely represent the bumps in the road on my writing path. I also did packing tape image transfers and while it was fine in theory, I didn't like the shiny bits of tape that came through. I roughed it up where I could with my crayons. After doing this one I feel better about moving forward into my vision journal.

More art in the next post too.

(C) Amy N. Thomas on December 16, 2009, 09:42, All rights reserved. When I pray My God hears. In His wisdom He heals my broken heart and binds up Strings cut by liars. Rescues, lifts up All in distress: My neighbors, children, Me.  

[Author’s note: A few days ago, I wrote a short verse about enslaved people. Today, I wrote about freedom, true freedom from affliction, as I see it.]

 

I've noticed people have been using "penultimate" as if it means "super totally really way beyond ultimate." This will not do. We've already lost "beg the question." "Bemused" is on shaky grounds, and a variety of other useful words have been mishandled by the mouth breathers. The next time you hear someone say something along the lines of, "Wow, McNabb just threw the penultimate touchdown pass," lean over and whisper something along the lines of, "There's only going to be one more pass? How do you know? Are you psychic?"

Wonderful news of positive change from GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network)! After one year of their hard-hitting "Think Before You Speak" campaign, teens attitudes about anti-gay language have significantly shifted.

From the GLSEN website: "For instance, findings from a recent survey conducted by the Ad Council in 2008 and 2009 of teens aged 13-16 suggest that a higher percentage of teens in 2009 think that people should not say "that's so gay" for any reason (38% in 2009 vs. 28% in 2008) and a higher percentage also report "never" saying "that's so gay" when something is stupid or uncool (28% in 2009 vs. 18% in 2008).


"In the Ad Council's nearly 70-year history of creating campaigns to raise awareness and change public opinion and attitudes, we don't often see shifts of this magnitude in just over a year," said Peggy Conlon, president and CEO of the Ad Council. "We're looking forward to building on this success with a new series of PSAs and online tools that will help to further raise awareness and engage teens online."


Here is one of the videos that made the huge impact:



I adore Wanda Sykes. Just saying.

GLSEN is now started their second-year of education and awareness about the devastating effects of anti-gay hatred and language. Their website has information for parents and educators, along with all kinds of stuff you can put on your blog or website, plus polls, videos and lots more. Please take the time to check it out nd pass the word. (Thanks to School Library Journal's Extra Helping for the heads-up!)

Revision Tip #17

I keep thinking about the slightly different approaches Barry Lyga and I have to writing dialog.

I forgot to mention one part of that.

Your audience might affect your decision about how you structure dialog.

Many people are not sure who their audience is when working on the early drafts of their novel. Nothing wrong with that. But as you revise, you need to know who your reader is. The way you tell a story to olders teens will be different than the way you tell it to middle grade students. At least, I hope it would be.

My theory is that teen readers (ninth grade and above) have enough reading and life experience under their belts that they do not need as much visual action details accompanying dialog as younger readers do.

(This could also account for part of the difference between the Lyga and the Halse Anderson Schools Of Proper Dialog; Barry only writes for teens.)

The danger, of course, is that your middle grade (or younger) reader will get bored if you layer on the descriptive action with a heavy trowel.

Try this: Pull out only the action words from your dialog scene. Here's an example from a page I am working on now:

Character A speaks.
Character B gives reader visual description of Character A.
B speaks.
A reaches into sack and speaks. Hands apple to B.
B grabs apple, bites and speaks (note: he hasn't eaten for more than a day). Apple juice runs down his chin.
A removes hat, nods and speaks (introducing self)
B swallows, wipes faces on sleeve, speaks
A speaks
B speaks
A speaks
B chews and thinks
A speaks

I know - it's kind of boring to look at it that way, but by putting it under the microscope, I can make sure that the action details are an integral part of the story. They reinforce the fact that Character B is hungry, that he needs help, and that Character A might be a person he can turn to. It also balances a debt, because B helped A out of a bind in an earlier scene.

Bonus tip: since action in dialog scenes needs to be minimal and precise, it is a great opportunity to hone in on that perfect tiny detail that says volumes about the characters, setting, or conflicts at hand.

A couple of my favorite posts are this one about a Documentary about ASL Poetry, "The Heart of the Hydrogen Jukebox" and this interview with deaf playwrightWilly Conley.

Hello! I have coupons where you can get a paid lj account for 9.95 for a whole year..

You can't already have a paid account, you have to be a free account user wanting to upgrade..

Anyway, if you want one, please comment here or email me lauren (at) laurenbarnholdt (dot) (com) ...

In a brilliant example of my lack of marketing savy, I decided that the looming release of Dead Guy Spy, the second Nathan Abercrombie, Accidental Zombie book, would be the perfect time to unveil the cover for book 3, Goop Soup. Being stunningly lazy incredibly resourceful, and lacking a jpeg of the cover, I decided to search the internet rather than wrestle with my ancient and badly documented scanner. To my amusement, I discovered that a Google image search for "goop soup" (including the quotation marks) brought up a picture of Gwyneth Paltrow. While she has a site called "Goop," the only thing we really have in common is we both love our Apple. (Though hers is a child and mine is a II.) But I digress. I managed to wrestle the scanner into submission. Here's the cover. I like it a lot.

Sometimes things can start to feel so overwhelming. Even discouraging (hello superintendent from Kentucky). And then something like this shows up in your e-mail and you realize, well, you realize all that other stuff doesn't matter so much:

Hello,

My name is X and I live in X. I am 16 years old and I have never really had luck when it comes to reading. I can never just sit down and read a book. In English class we had to choose a book for a project and luckily I came across your book! And for once, I sat down and read every single word!!! I have never read a book like this; at first I was a little hesitant. But, I just told myself, Okay I have to do this. But, after 15 pages or so, I could not stop reading! I just wanted to tell you that I really love your book! I am, for the first time ever, looking forward to reading.

I can't stop smiling.

:-)

:-)

:-)

See? I was serious.

:-)

:-)

I also found out today that Jumping Off Swings was nominated for the Milwaukee County Teen Book Award! There are 15 finalists and I seriously cannot believe my book is on the same list as the other books on that list.

:-)

:-)

OK. I'll stop. :-) (sorry)