Maggie Stiefvater's Blog: Maggie Stiefvater, page 376

Maggie Continues to Doodle in Books

Hallo, humans! As you might have heard, I have written my first ever novel devoid of swearing and maiming and kissyface — in the form of the second installment of Spirit Animals, a multi-author, multi-platform series for middle grade readers. I sort of feel like double underlining all of the aspects of that sentence. YES it is for middle graders — ages 8-12. YES it is multi-author (Brandon Mull wrote the first one, that came out in September). YES it is multi-platform, because Scholastic's designed a web-game to go with it. My children are 8 & 9, so I have been wanting to write something that they can read for awhile. When Scholastic invited me to come and muck about in this world they'd already created, I thought "YES and I'M ADDING HIGHLAND COWS."

 
Anyway, because it was the second book in a multi-author series, it hadn't occurred to me that folks might want doodled-in, pre-ordered versions available as with the rest of my stuff. But I've now gotten enough requests for it that I've paired up with Fountain Bookstore once more to offer doodled-in editions. The routine is the same as always: all copies pre-ordered from Fountain before the release date of January 7th will come with a signature and a doodle. They ship all over the place (they shipped out 700 pre-ordered copies of The Dream Thieves). Anyway, here is the doodle:
   
And here is the link to autographed copies (Fountain always carries signed books from me, year-round — the doodle is the only thing that is time-sensitive/ specific to pre-orders). I look forward to TAKING YOUR CHILDREN.

Novelist Error Messages

Baby, do you dare to do this?/ Cause I’m coming at you like a metaphor

As an author, I frequently field questions from teens about Big Ticket English Class Items. “What is the theme of your work?” “Can you list three metaphors from this chapter?” “Why did you use a simile here?” The questions always carry a faint accusatory air. But metaphors and similes are glorious! They clarify and elucidate by providing an alternative way of looking at something.

In fact, today I was driving along in my Camaro and suddenly I found myself listening to "Dark Horse" by Katy Perry & Juicy J. It is chock full of metaphors. In fact, I think they use every metaphor. How clarifying! However . . . I must admit that the first 43 times that I listened to this song, the lyrics confused me. The metaphors confused me. What are you trying to say, Katy? How complicated this relationship must be that we need all of these metaphors to understand it. Even with my absolutely massive authorial grown-up collegiate brain, I was stymied.

But now, yes, now, I’ve listened to it 43 times more and I think I’m prepared to give my professional authorial interpretation of this song.

Which I'm sure is definitely right. Lyrics in bold. THE TRUTH in non-bold.


[Juicy J:] Yeah/ Ya'll know what it is
 [what it is: pop song, minor key, B-flat minor]
  
Katy Perry/ Juicy J, aha.
[cast of characters] [Norwegian pop group.]  
Let's rage
 “Let’s chat about the reasons why it is compelling to date me seriously.”

 [Katy Perry:] I knew you were/ You were gonna come to me/ And here you are
“I gave you my number. Even though you could have blown me off as there is technically free will in the universe, I'm Katy Perry. So please. You were going to call."  

But you better choose carefully/ ‘Cause I, I’m capable of anything/ Of anything and everything
“Sometimes when I get drunk I stand on the piano in the bar and sing Katy Perry songs.”  

Make me your Aphrodite
“Once upon a time, Cronus castrated Uranus and then tossed his nuts into the sea, and the goddess Aphrodite was created as a result. Despite being the product of sea-gonads, she was the hottest of the goddesses, and she also had a magical girdle that she used to compel people to love her. She also basically had sex with every god, ever, and had about a billion children. So, that. I want to be that to you.”  

Make me your one and only
“So, when I asked you to evoke Aphrodite before, I didn’t mean the slutty bit.”  

Don’t make me your enemy, your enemy, your enemy
“But the testicle part of her tale is still salient here.”  

So you wanna play with magic
 “So you wanna get involved with someone who defies the rules of science in a fashion frequently associated with both superstition and Warner Brothers?”  

Boy, you should know what you're falling for/ Baby do you dare to do this/ Cause I’m coming at you like a dark horse
 “Cause I’m coming at you like a metaphor”  

Are you ready for, ready for/ A perfect storm, perfect storm
“Are you psychologically prepared for a once-in-a-lifetime confluence of meteorological events?”  

Cause once you’re mine, once you’re mine/ There’s no going back
“No, seriously. Get sand bags, several gallons of drinking water, and fresh batteries for your flash light.”  

Mark my words/ This love will make you levitate/ Like a bird/ Like a bird without a cage
“The chemical production of phenylethylamine in your brain during our courtship stage will replicate the weightless sensation of a bird flying without the constraints of a cage (but presumably limited naturally by the bird’s physical capacity for high altitudes, so therefore our love will soar at or below 16,000 feet above sea level — unless the bird in question is a Gyps rueppelli, which has been recorded at 37,900 feet. Actually you know what, go with that. We’re aiming high with this love.).”  

But down to earth/ If you choose to walk away, don’t walk away
 “When I say you have a choice, I really mean: you don’t have a choice.”  

It’s in the palm of your hand now baby/ It’s a yes or no, no maybe
“Actually you do, but it’s binary.”  

So just be sure before you give it up to me/ Up to me/ give it up to me
 “You should be sure before you have sex with me. Because I am your Aphrodite, and historically, that’s meant that it’s possible that our children could actually turn out to be either nymphs, hermaphrodites, or children with over-sized genitals. So I’m just saying, be sure. Or, use protection.”

  [Juicy J] Uh/ She’s a beast/ I call her Karma (come back)
 “As she pointed out earlier in the song, she is capable of anything and everything. Which probably I deserve.”

 She eats your heart out/ Like Jeffrey Dahmer
 “At the best, she will strangle and dismember you before dining on your heart weeks later, and at the worst, she will drill a hole in your head and pour muriatic acid in. In the movie version of your romance, she will be portrayed by someone like Jeremy Renner or Anthony Hopkins.”  

Be careful/ Try not to lead her on/ Shawty’s heart was on steroids/ Cause her love was so strong
Author’s note: I appear to be too old to interpret this couplet. Compelling research suggests “shawty” could mean “a young girl or woman” but possibly could also be referring to Shawty Lo, a rapper who is neither a young girl or a woman. This author is forced to admit that she is bereft of the pop culture bad-assery necessary to shed light on this line.  

You may fall in love/ When you meet her
 “She is like Aphrodite and her magical girdle will most likely compel you to love her.”

 If you get the chance you better keep her/ She's sweet as pie
“She is such a pleasant experience”  

but if you break her heart/ She'll turn cold as a freezer
“She will no longer be a pleasant experience.”  

That fairy tale ending with a knight in shining armor
“I am a chivalrous sort of guy who treats women well.”  

She can be my Sleeping Beauty/ I’m gon’ put her in a coma
“Never mind.”  

Woo!
 “Woo!”  

Damn I think I love her/ Shawty so bad
 “. . . ”

 I’m sprung and I don’t care
“I have been captivated by her magic girdle and even knowing the potential consequences — the magical children with weird-ass body parts and whatnot — I can’t help myself.”  

She got me like a roller coaster
“Ever since taking her number, I have wavered back and forth between elation and wanting to vomit up the boardwalk fries I unwisely consumed before getting into this relationship.”

 Turn the bedroom into a fair
 “When we engage in intercourse, sometimes there is a petting zoo and/or a pie judging contest also in the room.”  

Her love is like a drug
 “She mentioned earlier that her love would make me feel as if I was soaring at at least 16,000 feet above sea level. Belladonna is a hallucinogenic substance that commonly causes the sensation of flying and was used in potions by witches in the middle ages. Her love is like a drug in general and belladonna in specific, which unfortunately has side effects including dilated pupils, slurred speech, and constipation.”

 I was tryna hit it and quit it
 “I considered taking her to Outback Steakhouse, making out with her against the side of my used Subaru, and then never calling her again.”

 But lil' mama so dope
“But this diminutive human of the child-bearing type was so great”

 I messed around and got addicted
“I decided to go steady.”

So. I See I'm A Girl. :/

When I was a teen, I spent a lot of hours wishing I’d been born a boy.

It wasn’t because I wasn’t happy in my own skin. It wasn’t that I looked at my face in the mirror and thought: that’s not me. It was just because I had seen the sort of person I wanted to be when I grew up and none of them were women.

Teen-Maggie loved all sort of books and movies, particularly thrillers and adventure stories. Like most readers and movie-watchers, I had a long list of characters I’d admired for sometimes very shabby reasons: Maverick from Top Gun, Sean Dillon from Jack Higgins’ novels, Howl from Howl’s Moving Castle, Tyler Durden of Fight Club, Athos of The Three Musketeers. The list was longer than that. By a lot. It was also all male. I wasn’t crushing on them. I wanted to be them. I wanted to be the wise-cracking adventurer with hidden depths, fearless and aggressive and bad-ass and car-racing and explosion-making and just . . . sexy.

I spent a lot of time looking for equivalent woman. But in movies, they usually wore spandex. And in fiction, they were called “sassy” instead of “funny.” And in real life . . . well, they didn’t exist in real life. At least not in my rural middle-class part of the world. How could you reconcile a funny, fearless adventurer with a Nurturing Mother Type?

I’ll give you a spoiler, in case you’ve never seen the hundreds of blog posts, articles, and generalized confessions of women feeling guilty about working away from home. You couldn’t.

So here was the moral of the story for teen Maggie: be born a boy, or take your toys and go home.
Don’t get me wrong, there were strong female characters in many of the books I read. They were just strong in different ways. When they appeared as secondary characters, they were the rocks the tempestuous men tied themselves to. They were the helpmeets and the scholars, the ones who did their homework and the ones who appeared with solutions at the last minute. And as narrators, they were often plucky and fearless and capable. But they were never just a female version of any of the people on my list of Dudes I Wished I Was. Where was the woman I wanted to be?

She didn’t seem to exist.

The thing is, girl characters mostly look different than boy characters. Even when written by women. We have hundreds of years of story-telling to tell us what a hero looks like, and what a heroine looks like, and that stuff is ingrained deep. It’s not that we don’t want to write women who are capable in the same way as men. It’s that it requires a helluva lot of imagination to overcome the weight of that narrative history. It’s one thing to write a better version of something you’re already looking at. It’s another thing to write something you haven’t ever seen before.

We talk a lot about strength in women characters, but not so much about the things male characters still have a corner on: humor, aggression, confidence, ambition. Heroes and heroines wear these things so differently still — look at the Avengers. Just look at it, okay! We’re still so stuck on gender roles. I’m reminded of it every time someone asks me about my masculine hobbies.
They’re not masculine hobbies. They are Maggie hobbies, thanks.

I wasn’t born a boy. And it’s taken me 31 years to finally become the person I wanted to be — 31 years to find a way to translate my list of admirable fictional role models into a woman I can actually be in real life. It took me that long to find a way to translate my often "masculine" interests into a "feminine" persona. It meant overcoming quite a bit of failure of imagination. Much of it mine.

Now I’m trying to translate that back into fiction. I really want a future-Maggie to grow up with a list of fictional role-models populated by both genders. I spent so many years depressed that I’d been born into a gender I didn’t seem to belong to. I want future teen me to know that she really can be anything she wants to be . . . and see examples of it all around her.

This Post is Actually 10 Posts

I know it appears that I haven't been writing blog posts while I'm on tour, but in fact, I have written a million of them. Well, 10. Ten bloggers were kind enough to host me or at least my words, and here is a collection of all of the posts here:

1. Books to Cure Book Hangover on Nerdy Book Club

2. Side Characters & Goat Farming, on Me, My Shelf, and I

3. Writing Advice on Girls in the Stacks

4. Mythology in the Raven Cycle on Whimsically Yours

5. Music & Writing, on All the Write Notes

6. Artwork, Writing, & the Importance of Creative Outlets, on Books Complete Me

7. I Was a Library Ghost, on TATAL Online: Teens at the Arlington Library

8. Things that Go, on MandyBoles.com

9. Atmosphere and things I stole from dreams, with The Mountains of Instead.

10. Interview! with Scott Reads It  


ALSO I was just this second asked about my stance on swearing in novels, and my response is basically a blog post of its own.

In Which Readers Become Hooligans (Briefly)

Do you remember that one time I spray-painted my car for The Dream Thieves video?


At my Kansas City launch event for the book last night, I let readers spray-paint it, too. Here's what happened.

 

P.S. A huge, huge thanks to everyone who has supported the book on its first day.

In Which Maggie Writes a Book about Cole & Isabel

I'm just going to say the facts right upfront: I have written a companion book to the SHIVER trilogy, and it's called SINNER, and it's a standalone, and it's coming out July of 2014, and it follows Cole and Isabel's lives in Los Angeles. It's the novel I've been calling WhitePantsNovel. (more here)

 It took pretty much in me to not tell the world what I was working on, because I have to admit: after the complicated and lengthy writing process for The Dream Thieves, SINNER was like a vacation. It was fantastic to be back in Cole and Isabel's heads. Readers had pointed out that their story wasn't ended — a fact I was well aware of — but I didn't want to return to them unless I a very specific story that I needed to tell. It has to eat my arms, a story, in order to gain admittance to the cluttered Stiefvater schedule.

At the beginning of the year, it started to eat my arms. I thought: am I really doing this? Surely not. I'm in the middle of a very time-consuming series, and also, I just agreed to write a middle grade group project. But the thing about Maggies is that there is a very fine line between think and do. By the time something I've said something out loud, there's no turning back. So I changed my summer plans. I flew to L.A. to look at research places (dragging along my family and Brenna Yovanoff and Jackson Pearce as well).



See that face? That is insanity-face. I took in some sights and sounds and smells and got to work.





I made a giant playlist.

I remembered that once upon a time, I wrote books with kissing scenes.

I remembered that once upon a time, Cole St. Clair had been a rock star.

Oh, man, I had such a good time. I really hope you guys love it. I did it for me, but I did it for you, too.

Here is the official description: About SinnerSinner (978-0-545-65457-9, $18.99, hardcover; 978-0-545-65458-6, $18.99, ebook; Ages 14 and up) follows Cole St. Clair, a pivotal character from the #1 New York Times bestselling Shiver Trilogy. Everybody thinks they know Cole’s story. Stardom. Addiction. Downfall. Disappearance. But only a few people know Cole’s darkest secret – his ability to shift into a wolf. One of these people is Isabel. At one point, they may have even loved each other. But that feels like a lifetime ago. Now Cole is back. Back in the spotlight. Back in the danger zone. Back in Isabel’s life. Can this sinner be saved?

The Dream Thieves Tour & Signed Books Post That Goes On Forever

I have been hoarding a billion things about tour and pre-orders and special editions of books so that they could all be posted at the same time. I know it's frustrating to read a list of tour locations that are nowhere near you (and inevitably, that will be true for most people), but I'm trying to make it easier for those who aren't close to get a signed book if they want one. This post shall be full of all those details.

Also, this weekend I pulled out my pencils and paints and did some Art Things on three special copies of The Dream Thieves, and I shall put details on where those are going below, too.


Okay. Places to get signed/ special books if you can't make it on tour.

If you're in the U.S. or willing to pay overseas shipping, you can order signed and doodled-in books from Fountain Bookstore. I will do this doodle, or something like it, in every copy ordered before 9/17:


If you're in the UK or Ireland or are willing to pay for shipping from the UK, you can order a special copy from Seven Stories. Every pre-ordered copy of The Dream Thieves will include a signed, limited edition bookplate with some of my art on it. It will look like so (but with my signature):
 
And finally, if you're in Canada, a variety of stores are offering a limited edition postcard involving the Raven Boys trailer art if you pre-order from them. (this is what they let me know:


) Here is a list. Ontario: The Book Keeper, BookLore, Kaleidescope Books, Mabel's Fables, Curiosity House Books. Alberta: Café Books, Monkeyshines. Quebec: La Maison Anglaise, Livres Babar. Manitoba: McNally Robinson. Saskatchewan: McNally Robinson. BC: Black Bond Books, Mosaic Books.

And those three books that I defaced with my colored pencils and my spray paint? I am sending one to Fountain Books (US), one to Seven Stories (UK), and one to Mabel's Fables (Canada), with the instructions that their special copy is to be sent to one random pre-order. I guess technically you can "enter to win it" by pre-ordering (certainly the odds are much better than any of my ARC contests have been - 1 in a few hundred versus 1 in 2000), but really I just wanted it to be a thank you to folks who pre-order. I like the idea that three people will be surprised when they open their box and find that instead of just a signed copy or whatever.

Phew. And now. The tour schedule (click each event for details of location, etc.)

9/17: Kansas City, MO - 7 PM

9/19: St. Louis, MO - 7 PM

9/20: Virginia Beach, VA - 6 PM

9/25: Dallas, TX- 7 PM

9/26: Houston, TX - 6 PM

9/28: Austin Teen Book Festival

9/29: Salt Lake City, UT - 5 PM

10/1: San Francisco, CA - 4 PM

10/2: Berkeley, CA - 7 PM

10/4: Seattle, WA - 12 PM

10/5: Wordstock, Portland, OR

10/19: Boston Book Festival

10/22-23: Vancouver Writer's Festival

10/24: Alberta, Canada - 7 PM

10/ 26: NYC - 3 PM

10/27 - Millerton, NY - 4 PM

 

I never want to copy and paste a link into a blog post ever again. PHEW.

Hi Maggie :D Do you self-publish?

Well, it is 7:27 a.m. and I’m drinking cocoa and emailing myself and doing other writerly things before caffeine, so I’m not sure how wise this will be, but here goes.

I’m not self-published. Self-publishing is a complicated and shifting and very-not-homogenous model, but generally speaking, if you can find someone’s books in Barnes & Noble or WalMart, they’re published by one of the major New York publishers (at this point).

I’m published by Scholastic, whom I love. It took me quite awhile to catch their eye, but I am fine with that. Publishing is a hard business, but it does not want to eat your heart.

People ask me if I “agree” with self-publishing, which I think is a weird noun-verb pairing. Self-publishing is not a question. I cannot tell you yes or no. Nor is it something obvious and straightforward like chugging a whole bottle of maple syrup. I would tell you in a heartbeat that the latter would be ill-advised because I’ve never seen anyone that it worked out well for.

Before I was an author, I was an artist. I spent the first part of my art career promoting myself — doing all the advertising, marketing, and art-making myself. I enjoyed it and it gave me total control, but it meant I worked 60 hour weeks and spent 10% of my time making art and the rest marketing it. The second part of my career, I applied to a good gallery and got accepted. They handled the marketing and advertising and … it was glorious. I got to shift to 40 hour work weeks and spending 75% of my work time actually making art.

This is why, for now, traditional publishing is for me. I would rather spend my time writing than marketing. Yes, I must work as part of a team, and I must give up my 100% control of the way my books are put out there, but for the most part, Scholastic really gets me. It doesn’t feel like a compromise. It feels like that gallery: glorious. There is something marvelous about that very first moment that I share a manuscript with Scholastic, and I hear what the marketing and publicity team thinks of it.

Also, I really want to be in every bookstore everywhere. And right now, traditional publishing is the only way to make that happen.

Did that answer the question? Oh! Getting started. I would start by researching agents, personally. Also, I have bunches of writing business and technique posts on the blog, all tagged “how I write.”
Hm. My cocoa is all gone. Also, this girl “Maggie Stiefvater” seems to have emailed me a line to my next novel. Weird.
 
(via a Tumblr ask)

How to Label Wine and Books

Yesterday, I got into a discussion on Twitter about the validity of labels/ categories/ genres for fiction: namely, middle grade —tween — young adult — new adult — adult.

 I don’t like admitting I was wrong, but I will say this: I used to believe in labels. They guided me to the same sorts of books over and over. Books I knew I would like. And they also allowed me to be snotty about books with other labels. But it meant I also missed hundreds of books that I also would have liked, because they didn’t sit on that shelf. Labels can be a great finding tool, but remember that they are, by their very nature, exclusionary.

As far as whether or not middle grade, young adult, adult, etc. are useful labels, I think this: once upon a time, we had an idea that one became a more sophisticated reader the longer one had been reading. Like a wine-drinker whose palette refines and longs for more complicated sensations. So children’s books were supposedly simpler and adult books were more complex and young adult books fell somewhere in between.

But that’s a model that doesn’t account for books that work on several levels. Quite a few novels reward both a shallow read and an analytical read. There is something for the most flippant of readers and something for the most jaded.

What to do with them, then? Do we put all of the complicated books with hard words in adult? Do we put all of the simple books in children's? What about the complicated children who want heartier fare? What about the exhausted adults who want only to be diverted for a moment at the end of the day?

I’m not sure what the answer is, but I do know that I mistrust labels deeply. Yes, they should guide readers, but they should never guide readers away. I don’t understand the shame in getting a book from the young adult section, or the romance section, or the sci-fi section, or the picture book section. Someone else put those labels on that book, not you.

And they aren’t the boss of you.