Barry Lyga's Blog

Over on the WORD for Teens blog, Nicole does a feature called "Final Friday" where she interviews authors on the last Friday of each month. This month, since it's the holidays, she's having author interviews every Friday.

She's kicking it off with me on today's blog. I'm thinking of it as "First Friday."

Check it out here and see what I would do with a nearly infinite supply of chickens. (I swear, the longer I do this, the stranger and cooler the interview questions get!)

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This week and next week, I'm going to be answering some of the questions I've accumulated over the past few weeks...

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First up, from Shannon: "I'm having word
count confusion. There's no shortage of info on agent's blogs--I think
I've read it all--but it doesn't always match up. I think you're
working on a MG book now (like I am) so I'm wondering: what word count
are you shooting for?"

I'm probably not the best person to ask about word count. I am notorious for...

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This week, we're going to talk about money. I get asked about money a lot -- how much do authors make? What percentage of the book's price comes back to the author? How do royalties work? Well, I'm going to try to de-mystify this voodoo a little bit.

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Realize that everything I say in this article is being vastly simplified. Publishing accounting is an arcane art (though not as bad as Hollywood accounting!), and I want this to be comprehensible and fewer than 100 pages...

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Yes, yes -- I am woefully and inexcusably late in reporting on my travels. Mea culpa.

So, I spent a few days in the lovely city of San Francisco, communing with its lovely people. Had a great time and did some cool stuff leading up to (and including) Not Your Mother's Book Club's Fall Bash 2009.

First up was a trip to Carlmont High School in Belmont, CA. I was there to speak to English teacher Gail Langkusch's three (that's right -- THREE) Creative Writing classes. You know, at MY...

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Wow, has it really been THREE WEEKS since I went to AASL 2009 in Charlotte, NC?

(*checks calendar, does math*)

Um, yes! Yes, it has been!

Oops.

I had a great time at AASL 2009. I was in town for -- literally -- a day. My plane touched down in Charlotte at 11:00 am on Friday, and at 11:00 am the following day, I was taxiing on the runway, headed back home.

But in those 24 hours, I had a lot of fun, including seeing some old friends like my buddy John Shableski (who...

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Ah, the vicissitudes of publishing! Sometimes everyone does their jobs just perfectly...and something still ends up being goofed up.

Last night, I was double-checking something in a finished copy of Goth Girl Rising when I noticed an odd error. I immediately looked back at the original page proofs to confirm that it had been correct there...and it was. Somehow, an error crept in after I'd approved the pages to go to press. And it's a WEIRD one.

The very last page of the book (page...

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The Hero-Type paperback cover has been revealed! Check it out below. I think it looks pretty sweet. The book itself should be out in January. As usual, you can preorder it from Amazon, BN.com, or your local independent bookstore.

 

 

 

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Picking up from last week' s discussion of character building and
description... This week we're going to eschew the superficial and dive
into our characters' CHARACTERS -- their souls, their insides. In
short: What makes them tick.

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OK, look -- this isn't actually rocket science here. I'm going to give you a couple of shortcuts that will help you when you think about characters.

It's important to remember that characters are not people. OK? People are those beings you see w...

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The poster says it all! Even if you hate my guts, there's still plenty of cool folks to see, so if you're in San Francisco, come on out and have some fun! :)

 

 

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Sometimes people ask about creating and describing characters. Since characters are one of the essential building blocks of fiction, I figured I'd take a couple of blog entries to talk about this. 

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First of all, there is, of course, a distinction between character BUILDING and DESCRIPTION, although the two can be closely aligned, believe it or not. (There are ways to use character description to build the character.) Character building, of course, is how we "assemble" a...

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