Marcia Thornton Jones's Blog, page 133

Infinite Quest -- by Jane Kelley

I always post on the 8th day of the month. Today it's the 8th day of the 8th month -- an infinite infinite  -- if there were such a thing.  Actually, in writing a story there is.


Anything is possible when we create. There are an infinite number of stories and an infinite number of ways to tell those stories. That's exciting! That's overwhelming! How can we decide without writing an infinite number of drafts to test them all out?

In my current work in progress, kids journey from one part of Manhattan to Brooklyn. As you can see from this map, there are infinite routes they could take. Every block teems with possibilities for adventures.


I narrowed down my choices by giving myself some parameters. They might be useful for you too. Even if your W.I.P. isn't a trek, your characters will be on some sort of journey. 
1. What locations fit my themes?  In my W.I.P. I want to celebrate the vibrancy of NYC. So the characters MUST visit Times Square. They can skip the lobby of the Plaza Hotel.
2. What pathways give my characters the best chance to be active?  A carriage ride through Central Park is pleasant, but if they can't drive the carriage or ride the horse, then it's better if they walk.
3. What events are fun for the reader? And by fun, I mean scary, exciting, suspenseful, and humorous? I like to insert treats along the way. Where and how will we find them? 
4. What's logical? One step will lead to another. My characters won't be finding a wormhole that takes them from Times Square to Chinatown. 
OR WILL THEY? 
No--I'll stick to my humorous adventure and let someone else write that one. 
It took a while, but I have my characters' trip planned. Now all I have to do is select which of the infinite sights, sounds, smells to describe to bring NYC to life!

INTERVIEW WITH KIM HARRINGTON, AUTHOR OF GAMER SQUAD

Tell us all about the GAMER SQUAD series. GAMER SQUAD is a fun adventure series about a group of gamer kids who have to save their town from mobile game related disasters. The books have humor and heart, portray friendship ups and downs, encourage girls in STEM, and focus on a love for community. I have had a ton of fun writing them and can’t wait to hear what readers think! You're a lifelong gamer--how did that play into the inspiration / drafting of the GAMER SQUAD? Is your son old enough to game yet? Did he have any editorial input into the series? My husband, my teenage son, and I are all varying degrees of gamers. I actually got the idea for this series while playing a game with my son! I definitely ran some plot points past both of them and used them as sounding boards, which was a whole lot of fun. If I could go back in time to the ‘80s and tell little me (who was probably playing a game on my Commodore 64) that I would one day write a book series about a group of gaming kids who save their town…little me would be delighted. It’s been so much fun to write these books, both for the kids out there now and the little kid inside me. What's your take on screen time and kids? I think, as with most things, it’s best in moderation. I try to remind myself of that daily. ;)  Each book comes with its own unique challenges. What was hard / unique about writing the GAMER SQUAD? What surprised you?  All of my other books have been mysteries. GAMER SQUAD is my first project that’s more of an adventure series. So it was different to write and plan. I didn’t have to think about clues and planting red herrings, but I had to learn how to write without having the structure of a mystery to hold onto. Releasing two books on the same day--I'm intrigued by this idea! Tell us about the decision to release the first two at once. I love that Sterling released the first two books in the series on the same day (August 1st). I don’t know the details about what went into the decision from their perspective, but for me I love it for many reasons. With middle grade series, by the time the next book comes out, you’ve lost some readers who have aged out and are now reading YA. So I love that kids can move right on to the next book if they loved the first. No waiting! I also think the beginning of August is a great time for this. These books are wonderful summer choices for reluctant readers. They’re fun, adventurous, and humorous! What's in store for the next book in the series? After the Gamer Squad saves the town from not-so-virtual monsters in book one, we move from summer to the first month of school. In book two (CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE NERD KIND), the kids are hooked on a new game called Alien Invasion. When they go on a field trip to an observatory and play the game too close to a radio telescope, they accidentally summon real aliens to town. And in book three (APP OF THE LIVING DEAD) the kids must save their town from zombies and the game development company that has been causing all this trouble.
~Thanks so much for joining us, Kim!
Catch up with Kim Harrington online:
www.kimharringtonbooks.comhttp://twitter.com/Kim_Harrington
http://instagram.com/kimharringtonauthor
www.facebook.com/kimharringtonauthor   The synopsis for the first, second, and third books are on Kim's website here: http://www.kimharringtonbooks.com/books-for-kids.html

8 Words for August

August. It's not a particularly inspiring or noteworthy month -- unless you are noting humidity levels here in the south! Which makes it a perfect writing challenge for students: write a poem about August.

When I do writing workshops, one of the things I have students do is come up with 10 words to describe whatever topic we're writing about. This might generate a list like the following (for "August"):

hot
humid
long
boring
dry
popsicle
dog
swimming
sleepy
sun

...  which is a perfectly fine list! But guess what, students? SCRATCH THROUGH ALL THOSE WORDS. Let's move on to the next ten, and the next! Digging deeper, past the cliches, past the expected, is where all the best poems are buried.

Eventually we might come to these 8 words -- and write a poem:

lakehazyeclipse  (for August 2017, at least!)hopebridgeweedsbeginningrusset

August
russet weedsframe sturdy bridge –
our hazy hopeseclipse the lakeas we row
into a new beginning
- Irene Latham
Indeed, kids start school in these parts next week. Our youngest son is entering his senior year! Which means we will be spending more and more time without kids at our (new-to-us!) lake house. (For more on this, be sure to visit my post today over at Live Your Poem!) If we're lucky, we might even glimpse the eclipse. Either way, August to me is a "bridge month," during which we cross over from summer to fall... from lethargy to productivity... from hazy to crisp. I'm excited!
-----------------

 Irene Latham is the author of more than a dozen current and forthcoming poetry, fiction and picture books for children and adults, including Leaving Gee's Bend, 2011 ALLA Children's Book of the Year. Winner of the 2016 ILA Lee Bennett Hopkins Promising Poet Award, she also serves as poetry editor for Birmingham Arts Journal. www.irenelatham.com

Dialing it Back in Time by Ann Haywood Leal

I'm not going to use the "B" word, or even the "WB" word, because I'm Irish, and inviting blockage of the writerly kind is just plain bad juju.  
So what do you do if you are having trouble accessing that middle-grade or YA voice?    And like many of us, you haven’t been that age in a really long time…But there are some things that you never forget.  Some things stay with you forever, like . . .  
. . . your most embarrassing moments.
. . . the first time a friend betrayed you.
. . . when you first found that person who “got” you, and you knew you’d be friends forever.
. . . that time you wanted to run away from home.
. . . when you got your first crush and you couldn’t let anyone know, because you were sure that he or she didn’t feel the same way.  (Or he was looking at Sherry and her group of pretend-leather-vinyl-jacket-wearing friends, instead.)
. . . something that absolutely terrified you.
. . . something that made you deliriously happy . . .




My mother saved everything.  If you happen to have old boxes of school projects or writing or ideally, an old diary…or yearbooks or old report cards.  You might find that those middle-grade or young adult memories come rushing back—sometimes with a vengeance!  
Write the book that’s inside of you.  I think your best story comes out when you are not worried about trends or style or genre.  Don’t worry about rules or conventions. 
No matter what your intended audience or genre, I’d like to leave you with a Flannery O’Connor quote:

“I am not afraid that the book will be controversial.  I’m afraid it will not be controversial.”

SMACK DAB NEWS!

Hey, all--

Smack Dab is getting a bit of a spruce up, as several new regular bloggers are being added to the mix! We've had such a great lineup of bloggers through the years--writers and illustrators both--and I'm excited to see what a new crop of voices will add to our site.

Stay tuned!
--Holly Schindler, Smack Dab Administrator

INTERVIEW WITH ANNABELLE FISHER, AUTHOR OF PIXIE PIPER AND THE MATTER OF THE BATTER

Tell us a bit about the idea / inspiration / Mother Goose research. Before fifth grader, Pixie Piper finds out that she’s a descendant of Mother Goose, she understands that her mother is sort of an amateur scholar on the subject. Mrs. Piper has shelves full of Mother Goose books, and in the course of the story, Pixie will come to understand why.My mother seems to have had a special connection to Mother Goose as well. She’s the real inspiration for my Pixie Piper books. Although she spent her first seven years in an orphanage, she somehow knew how important it was to read babies and young children. I can still remember the Little Golden Book of Mother Goose Rhymes she’d purchased for me in the supermarket. And I’m pretty sure it was because my mom recited nursery rhymes to me so often, that I became a rhymer before I could write.The great Mother Goose scholar, Iona Opie says the rhymes are “mysterious fragments from our shared memory: long-ago laughter of little meaning and echoes of ancient spells...”  I agree!  I believe every woman who ever made up a tune or a rhyme for her child is a bit of a Mother Goose.  Once I discovered that no single person was the ‘mother of nursery rhymes’, I was free to create my own history. Yet the task was daunting. I wanted to do the character of Mother Goose justice – to honor her. Gradually, she began to live in my imagination. I gave her rhymes the power to grant wishes and her hands the ability to bake marvelous cakes. After Mother Goose stumbled into combining her rhymes with cakes, the demand for them became insatiable. She actually had to go into hiding to escape from the most powerful and greedy people who wanted her to bake wishing cakes solely for them.
Summer Snowball (nonedible) - Recipe Included
Where / how did you come up with "magical baking"? Are you a foodie? Do you cook a lot with your kids?
In book two, Pixie Piper and the Matter of the Batter, Pixie spends the summer at Golden Goose Farm, where the Goose Ladies (descendants of Mother Goose) teach her the secrets of magical baking.  It was a lot of fun to invent the cakes, the magical baking instruments, the rhymes that went into them, and those mysterious batter ‘spirits’. Then my editor and I both thought of having an appendix of recipes at the back of the book. It sounded great, except for one thing—I’d never been much of a baker! At dinners with friends, I was happy to provide an hors d’oeuvre or a side dish, but never a dessert.Luckily though, I have friends who are bakers. I organized a virtual test kitchen and asked them to create child-friendly recipes for the cakes I’d imagined. They came up with no-bake snickerdoodle cupcakes, flying biscuits, a super-chocolatey birthday wishing cake, and a tricky reversing cake to foil a villain. I created the rhymes to go with them.
Okay, really--the toilet museum. You gotta tell us about that.
Poor Pixie! I really did load her up with a lot of burdens. As a child, I had a friend who lived across the street from a junkyard. And the apartment I lived in faced the alley with its row of trashcans and yowling cats. So, I have to admit the idea of a toilet museum came pretty easily. And once I’d thought of it, I checked the Internet to see if any such thing existed. To my delight, I found the Sulabh International Museum of Toilets in New Delhi, India, which explores the history of hygiene and sanitation.  After viewing its site and doing some further research, I created my own version, the Winged Bowl Museum of Rare, Historical, and Unique Toilets. The King Louis throne toilet at Winged Bowl is based on one owned by King Louis XIV of France.
~
Catch up with Annabelle Fisher and grab your own copy of PIXIE PIPER!

Having a Summer Romance with Your Writing - Part Two

Last month, on this blog, I declared my intention to have a torrid summer romance - with my writing. I guiltily decided it would be an illicit summer romance: I would cheat on my barely begun book under contract and have a writing fling, writing something just for fun, something just for me.

We're now halfway through the summer, and I haven't done that.

For I decided, full of sheepish apologies, to slink back to my cast-off work-in-progress and find a way to fall in love with it instead. Sure, we had problems, all relationships do. But my book and I had made a commitment to each other. Couldn't we find some way to work things out, so we could stay true to each other, after all?

And we did.

In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard says that when you are stuck in a book and can't force yourself to keep writing it, "the trouble is either of two things. Either the structure has forked, so the narrative, or the logic, has developed a hairline fracture that will shortly split it up the middle - or you are approaching a fatal mistake. What you had planned will not do. If your pursue your present course, the book will explode or collapse, and you do not know about it yet, quite." She compares the balking writer to a construction worker who intuits danger ahead and simply refuses to go out onto the construction site.

Annie tells us,when this hapens, this is what we must do: "Acknowledge, first, that you cannot do nothing." You must analyze your book's structure to find precisely where it has gone fatally wrong: "Something completely necessary is false or fatal. Once you find it, and if you can accept the finding, of course it will mean starting again."

I took Annie's advice and did some hard thinking to figure out just why I was so reluctant to move ahead on my poor abandoned book. I reworked its premise, rewrote chapter one to bring the central dramatic question of the story into much clearer focus, threw away the two chapters after that, and wrote two new ones that I happen to think are pretty darned wonderful.

Oh, book of mine, I love you again! I no longer want to cheat on you with some other imaginary project. I want to spend the remaining days of summer in your sweet company. We emerged from Annie Dillard's blunt, no-nonsense marraige counseling - this thing needs radical fixing, darlings! - and now we can go forward to savor the rest of the summer together.

WALKING IN OUR CHARACTERS SHOES: SEVEN SUGGESTIONS FOR BETTER CHARACTERS by Darlene Beck Jacobson

Since July is the seventh month of the year, and a summer month as well, today’s post will get you outside and offer some tricks to deepen character development.
S unshine and fresh air are proven to boost endorphins and brain function.  Take your “homebody” character outdoors as you go for a walk and see what happens.  What will he notice or ignore?  How does he react when you remove all the comforts of home and he has to use his wits to survive in a foreign environment? 
E njoy something you’ve never tried before.  Learn exotic dancing, origami, or scuba diving.  Try a new food.  Teach a new skill to someone else.  Was it easy or hard?  Now teach the same thing to your character.  Is she a willing learner or a reluctant one?  How does she react to changes big and small?  
V ary your routine.  Shaking things up in our own world, can shake things loose and get new ideas flowing.  Now turn your characters’ routine upside down.  How does he cope?  Does he fall apart or find inner strength he never knew he had?
E xplore.  Any new place or thing.  A church, cemetery, wooded area, hole in the ground, cave, underneath a bridge, abandoned building, mountain top.  What senses are aroused and what feelings come to the surface in such a place?  Peace, fear, sadness.  What would your character do in such a place?  Chances are, the same character might react differently to being alone in the settings below. 




N otice things you’ve passed or ignored before.  What’s under a rock, hiding in a corner, hanging on a wall?  Be a spy and look for details in mundane things.  Now have your character find a common object that she can use in a surprising way.
Okay…so this is really only FIVE suggestions.  Care to share two of your own ideas for shaking up characters?

Seven Lines from Seven Wise Writers

from Jody Feldman
Once again, I was fortunate enough to attend the SCBWI National Conference in Los Angeles. The party just ended, but even at this point in my career, I learned so much that should serve to enrich my writing, permanently. Here are seven lines that caught my attention and may inspire you in writing and/or life. (Note that those lines not in quotes may have been paraphrased.)
1.       “You have to dream so big it scares the hell out of you.” –Vanessa Brantley Newton2.       Diversity in your writing should be “purposeful in its portrayal of complexity.” –Zareen Jaffrey3.       We have to do mean things to our characters in order to feel their redemption. –Alex Gino4.       “It’s no laughing matter if there’s no laughing matter.” –Marvin Terban5.       “Start with a pie in the face, then say something smart.” –Chris Grabenstein6.       You should be obsessed with your story. It should be waking you up at night. –Stephanie Garber7.       I think I’m done writing, except there’s this one idea ... –Judy Blume

July Theme: Lucky-7 ChallengeBy Marcia Thornton JonesJuly...

July Theme: Lucky-7 ChallengeBy Marcia Thornton Jones
July. The 7thmonth of the year.
Lots of things seem to come in sevens. Seven planets. Seven continents. Seven seas. Seven days of the week. Maybe that’s why many consider the number ‘7’ to be lucky. But sometimes, luck doesn’t come with a roll of the dice or the deal of the hand. Sometimes, you have to make your own luck. That’s why I challenge you to make July a Lucky-7 month with this writing exercise.
Don’t have time for ‘something else’? That’s the beauty of this challenge. You do have time because all you have to do is write one sentence a day for a week.
That’s it. Just one sentence for each day of the week.
Have an idea that's been pestering you, but you don't want to neglect your current work-in-progress? This exercise is a great way to explore an idea or genre. Use it to ease into a new story, play around with themes, or to write a poem.
Have you let your journaling lapse, and you’ve been questioning the meaning of life? If so, get in touch with what’s important to you by highlighting each day’s standout event, a lesson you learned, a memory from your childhood, a difference you made in someone’s life, or something that made you feel joy.
Then again, perhaps you’re like me and writing keeps getting pushed to the back burner and you are fairly certain that your muse has packed her bags and boarded a cruise ship for Hawaii without you. Or maybe it's not that you've lost your inspiration, but that the kids are home and vacation plans are cluttering your schedule and the pool keeps distracting you. If, for whatever reason, you feel that something is pulling you away from your writing time and story, then use the Lucky-7 Challenge to at least stay connected to the story you want to write. Try it for a new scene, a character description, a plot synopsis, or a quick dialogue exchange.
One sentence a day.
We can all do this--no matter what life is throwing at us--we can all commit to writing one sentence a day. And you know what? By the end of the week, I have a feeling you’ll be surprised at what you can say in seven sentences. And then you know what you can do? Start over the next week!
Good luck!