Lacey Louwagie's Blog, page 14

My Interview with Deal-Sharing Aunt

While I was up in Duluth taking long walks along the shores of Lake Superior with my best friend, Deal-Sharing Aunt’s interview with me went up on her blog. I’ve pasted a copy below.

Where are you from?

Currently, I live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I grew up on a farm in Southwestern Minnesota, then spent seven years on the shores of Lakes Superior in Duluth, Minnesota, after I graduated college. A part of my soul will always be there.

Tell us your latest news?

Now that I’ve finally got “Rumpled” out in the world, I’m returning to my work-in-progress, which is a retelling of “Rapunzel” that has been on hold since last summer. I’m on draft 2, which I’m hoping to finish by November so I can participate in NaNoWriMo; I’ll probably be working on a retelling of Snow White or the sequel to “Rumpled.”

When and why did you begin writing?

I started writing before I even knew how to write by putting together booklets of illustrations; I would then tell the story to my mom, who sometimes wrote it down. Creativity was very encouraged in our household, so I guess I started because it was fun, I loved books, and I loved drawing unicorns! Once I learned how to write, I added words to my picture books, and over time my writing became more and more words and fewer and fewer pictures.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

I started considering myself a writer after I decided it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, when I was ten years old. At that time, I had a teacher who made the class write stories almost every day. One day he caught me after school while I was waiting for the bus and asked me if I had ever considered being a writer. I said no, that I wanted to be an actress. He told me my writing was very good and that I should keep at it. That’s when my dream reoriented itself from acting to writing, and I started to take it very seriously. Since age 13, I’ve been writing almost every day.

What inspired you to write your first book?

It’s hard for me to pinpoint what counts as the “first” book; there were the unicorn picture books in the beginning, and then I wrote a bit of novella-length fan-fiction as an adolescent. I wrote my first full-length novel, a high fantasy called “Till the Stars Fall From the Sky” when I was fifteen. I was inspired by a love of dragons and feelings of isolation—similar to “Rapunzel,” my first novel featured a protagonist who spent much of her life cut off from the rest of the world. The story was really a metaphor for my own feelings of claustrophobia and isolation, growing up as an awkward, bookish teen in a school that prized sports achievement and popularity above all else. I made the mistake of becoming a cheerleader in an attempt to “fit in,” and I absolutely hated it. But because I wasn’t a quitter, I stuck out the season. I survived all those tedious basketball games by daydreaming about the novel I would write when it was all done. And come the end of the season that spring, that’s exactly what I did!

Do you have a specific writing style?

My writing really straddles the line between literary fiction and genre (fantasy) fiction. On the literary side, I spend a lot of time on character development and really care about the sound and feel of the language, the way the sentences are put together. But my subject matter is almost always within the realm of science fiction and fantasy. I read all over the map—science fiction and fantasy, literary fiction, memoir, young adult, classics—and I think this all melds to keep my style from sounding too much like any one particular kind of writing. I really like to write my stories in first-person—first-person narration has been a favorite style of mine since I was a kid—so I try to let the character’s “voice” inform my style to a certain extent. But I also know that a little bit of me—the way I sound when I write letters, or in my journal, or any other novel—leaks into anything I write.

How did you come up with the title?

It’s funny, because with most of my stories, I end up naming them something kind of flippant when I save them on my computer. I have to be careful, though, because sometimes those names stick. “Rumpled” was like that—because it’s a story about Rumpelstiltskin, I thought “Rumpled” was a cute way to refer to it. I was open to changing the name eventually—but as people started to read it, they also told me how fitting the title is. And it’s true. Not only is it a play on Rumpelstiltskin’s name, but it also brings to mind a state of being disheveled, and even might have a slightly sexual connotation (think: rumpled bed sheets). All of those implications play into my retelling of Rumpelstiltskin—so I kept the name. Hey, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it!

 

What would you like my readers to know?

I know that there are a LOT of books out there begging for your attention, especially if you’re someone like me whose interests span several genres. Because of that, I really appreciate the readers who give indie pieces like mine a chance. I want those who are considering it to know that I spent three years on it, and that I am a professional editor with over ten years experience. Although this is the first independent piece of fiction I’ve published, I’ve been writing for over half my life. I think in “Rumpled” you will find a piece that is as carefully polished as something from a traditional press. If you’re interested in learning more about my work, you can find me at www.laceylouwagie.com.

 

My Mythical Books Interview

Below is a copy of my interview posted over at Mythical Books today. Cremona asked some great questions, and I love that she included some traditional artwork from the original Rumpelstiltskin story in her post. I’ve kept that with my repost below.

Why a retelling? What makes an author retell another’s story? 

When I first got the idea for this story, I didn’t know it would end up being a retelling. My husband asked me a hypothetical question about a bargain for a firstborn child, and I wanted to explore the answer to that question. I was going to write an original story around it, but then I realized that our cultural imagination is rich with stories that include a barter for a firstborn child. Of all these, “Rumpelstiltskin” has always intrigued me. I love retellings, so I decided to explore my husband’s question through a retelling rather than through an original story.

What compels me to write a retelling is when a “what-if?” question gets stuck in my head and won’t go away. There are a lot of gaps in fairy tales, a lot of unanswered questions. For me, writing a retelling is one way to fill in those gaps. I wrote guest posts that delve into my relationship with retellings in a little more detail at Corey’s Book Reviews (May 15) and Andi’s Book Reviews (upcoming: May 21). You can also read more about my inspiration behind this story at Hopelessly Devoted Biblophile’s blog.

About retellings – how free is an author to change the classic story and is there some element that must remain unchanged? 
This is a really good question. The short answer is that an author can change anything she wants about an old story, at least if it is in the public domain and no copyright restrictions exist. But I think that the best retellings retain the iconic events of the original story as pillars that support the new story being built. “Rumpled” contains many familiar elements from the original: a little man who can spin straw into gold, a bargain for a firstborn child, and the importance of guessing Rumpelstiltskin’s name. It’s in the details between these events, and how they play out, that readers will find something new.

“Rumpled” is for 14+. What do you think about the young generation’s reading habit and what can be done to make this generation read more? 
I used to be a teen services librarian, so I spent a lot of time with teenagers who love to read. Young adult books are the biggest moneymakers right now, and even though about half of those are being bought and read by adults, I don’t think the field would be booming if there weren’t a lot of teenagers who are passionate about reading. I think the secret to encouraging young people to read is to let them make their own reading choices – and don’t judge them. Studies have shown that reading for enjoyment is the biggest predictor of academic success, no matter what a kid is reading. We need to stop worrying about grade level, swear words, and comic books and let a kid’s own interests guide her. Many teens who feel daunted by novels are happy to read comic books or magazines. The important thing is that we as adults accept their reading choices as valid.

Rumpled has two different covers. Are the covers important for the story or for the book? How did you choose the covers and is the author’s agreement (or author’s implication) necessary? What about the book trailer? 
When I hired my cover artist for “Rumpled,” she sent me several covers. I decided to go with the cover that is now on the paperback book, which features the miller’s daughter as a centerpiece framed by Rumpelstiltskin, the child, the tower, and the spinning wheel. But I noticed that all the detail I liked on this cover was somewhat hard to see in thumbnails, so I decided to go with a “simpler” version for the ebook. I put “simpler” in quotes because I think the simplicity of the ebook cover raises more questions than the more traditional cover does; I like the sense of movement in the sneaking shadow of Rumpelstiltskin especially.

Because I published “Rumpled” independently, I made all the decisions for the cover art. I know traditionally published authors have very little say over the covers for their books, which I wouldn’t mind. I prefer to leave that in the hands of an expert!

I made the book trailer myself using images from the cover artist and other images and music from the public domain.

What does Rumpelstiltskin represent? 
To me, the story of Rumpelstiltskin is about moral ambiguity. In many fairy tales morality is black and white, but in Rumpelstiltskin it’s mostly gray. Rumpel is assumed to be the villain—but all he does is try to collect on a bargain that was already made. Is he evil for expecting the queen to hold up her end of the deal? Or is he evil for making such an extreme bargain in the first place? In the end, he gives the queen an “out” – telling her she can keep her child if she guesses his name. So what we see is someone who helped her out of a desperate situation when her father lied about her ability to spin straw into gold, then gives her a loophole when she doesn’t want to pay up. Yet he is still the one who is punished at the end, becoming so enraged that he tears himself in half.

It seems to me that he’s automatically typecast as the “bad guy” because he is creepy looking, whereas the miller’s daughter is beautiful. So I wanted to explore this dichotomy a little more deeply, and cast both Rumpelstiltskin and the miller’s daughter in a more nuanced light: what you see isn’t always what you get.

Familiarity and Strangeness: What Makes a Good Retelling?

Below is a copy of my guest post featured on Corey’s Book Reviews:When my husband told one of his friends that I’d recently released a book that was a retelling of “Rumpelstiltskin,” his friend asked, “When is she going to start writing her own stuff?”I wanted to tell him it took me over fifteen years of writing “my own stuff” before I finally felt ready to tackle a retelling.

 

On the surface, it seems retellings should be easier than creating something “from scratch.” But a retelling must be more than merely embellishing the details. It must strike that just-right combination between familiarity and strangeness. These elements led me to ask two questions of each retelling I read:

 

How true does it stay to the original story? A reader should be able to spot the threads of the source story within the rich tapestry of the retelling. This is that delicious familiarity. Marissa Meyer’s Cinder features a cyborg Cinderella, with only one evil stepsister—the other is kind. But the evil stepmother is there. The long-shot love affair with the prince is there. So is the lost shoe … except this time, it’s a whole foot. Disney’s Frozen, on the other hand, while a delightful movie, is not, in my opinion, a true retelling. Aside from a beautiful woman with wintry powers, it bears almost no resemblance to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” from which it came. I think of it as a story “inspired by” rather than retelling Andersen’s tale.
Does it bring anything truly new to the story? This question is the one that kept me from writing retellings for so many years. I knew to write a retelling, I would need an “angle” that somehow made the story different from all the iterations of it that had gone before. This “angle” couldn’t be forced, which must be why it took over a decade for my subconscious to give me some answers. Now that that particular door has finally been unlocked (open Sesame?), I can’t write fast enough to keep up with everything waiting inside.

 

Fairy tales and myths in their “original” forms (that is, their most well-known written versions) come to us in the language of dreams, where suspension of disbelief must reach much higher levels than we’re used to employing. We must believe that a girl can grow hair 72 feet long, or that a little girl and old woman eaten by a wolf could still be alive if someone freed them from the wolf’s belly. Yet modern readers yearn to know the “how” and “why” in their stories, and modern retellings answer these questions by situating the familiar stories within more fully contextualized worlds. It is in the way authors answer the “how” and “why” of fairy tales that brings out the second crucial element: newness.

 

Some people still feel a bit miffed at Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm for writing down the stories they collected and making them “stagnant.” In the past, telling the stories orally allowed each storyteller to cater them to his or her particular audience, to infuse the stories with the messages and morals important to a specific time and place.

 

It is in the tradition of retelling these stories that we prove writing them down hasn’t made them stagnant at all. They are still being born every day, with new things to say to new readers.

 

In “Rumpled,” you will find many things you recognize: straw that turns to gold, a bargain for a first-born child, the all-important pronouncement of a name. As for what is new—you’ll have to read it to find out.

Rumpled is On Tour!

My blog tour of “Rumpled” began yesterday, and the first three posts are already up. You can check out the kick-off, which includes a Q&A with me, here.

Here are the rest of the stops, along with what you can expect to find there:

May 11- A Reader Lives a Thousand Lives - Review
May 12 - Simplistic Reviews - Excerpt
May 13- Indie Authors You Want to Read - Excerpt
May 14- Avid Book Collector - Excerpt
May 15- Corey’s Book Reviews - Guest Post
May 16- Mythical Books - Interview
May 17- Paranormal Romance and Authors That Rock - Review
May 17 - Clutter Your Kindle - Excerpt
May 18- Sam the Bookaholic- Review
May 19-Deal Sharing Aunt - Interview
May 20- Enchanted Scroll - Review
May 21- Andi’s Book Reviews - Guest Post
May 22- EM Havens Writes - Review
May 22 - Pieces of Whimsy - Excerpt
May 23-RABT Reviews - Wrap Up

How I Crammed My Life Full of Books … in Nine Steps

The professor who supervised me in my college days of working at the university writing center recently wrote me with feedback on Rumpled. She said that she wasn’t sure how I managed to find time to do so much reading and writing. I wanted to laugh, because what I find time to do is so much less than what I want to be doing that I feel as if I’m never doing enough. Still, I have arranged my life to fit increasingly more reading and writing into it, and I decided to share my “secrets” here rather than in an email.

I do it first. Writing first-thing in the morning is daunting, but back when I had a full-time office job, it was always a relief to come home and know I’d already done my day’s writing. Now, I do three Morning Pages every morning, and more “serious” writing at night. After my Morning Pages, I read for half an hour. This is different from my “old” system of reading before bed, or squeezing in a few minutes here and there. The truth

(not me)

is, I would spend the majority of EVERY day reading and never get anything else done if I could get away with it. Because of this, for many years I wouldn’t let myself read until I had taken care of “everything else.” But everything else will NEVER be taken care of. And believe it or not, I’m more productive when I read for half an hour every morning. Why? Because reading is the one thing I love enough to make me get out of bed earlier. If I succumb to sleeping in, I know that it will be straight to work when I wake up, and missing my reading time is punishment enough that I don’t fall into the habit.
I keep a schedule. The bedrock of my reading and writing schedule is that hour I take for it in the morning. I also have a more complex schedule for my more “serious” writing, which consists of blogging on Mondays and Tuesdays, writing fiction on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, doing promotional work and development exercises on Friday, and writing book reviews on Sundays.
I live simply. Really, this might be the single most important thing in carving out time to read and write. Even back when I lived paycheck to paycheck and qualified for reduced state healthcare, I was always able to pay for my basic needs (if you don’t consider dental and optical care “basic” :)). If I have food, a home, and utilities, I have most of what I need. Writing and reading come very cheap. This means that I spend less time working than people who have more expensive tastes do, and I feel less a slave to my earning potential. The goal, of course, is always to make more money for fewer hours, and when I meet it, I use those extra hours to write and to read–not to work and increase my income. I’m lucky to have found a mate who has a similar philosophy when it comes to material wealth. I won’t lie — having two incomes has made it MUCH easier for me to do this. There were times in my life when I literally could not afford to work less. But that brings me to …
I made it a goal. I knew that what I wanted more than anything was a life in which I could devote as much energy as possible to learning and creating. So even when there was no escaping a 40+ hour work week, I had this dream on the horizon, and I made choices accordingly. When opportunities came my way, I would weigh whether they would bring me closer or further to a life focused on books. A series of small decisions with this goal in mind opened up, little by little, more and more time for what I truly love.
I ask myself: how will this affect my writing and reading time? when faced with a life transition, new opportunity, or potential commitment. This has made me say “yes” to starting a spiritual writing group at my church, and “no” to joining the choir. This is also one of the main reasons we don’t have kids yet.
I read in every possible format. At least half the books I “read” every year are audiobooks. With my trusty MP3 player and my library’s subscription to Overdrive, I transform dog-walking, dish-washing, bathroom scrubbing, and myriad other mindless chores into “reading” time. I listen to another book on CD while I drive. I have the Kindle app on my phone, which I read while I’m waiting in line or the doctor’s office. This means I’m always reading at least four books at once: 1 MP3 book, 1 CD book, 1 e-book, and 1 paper book.
I track my progress. I have a spreadsheet that I use to record my freelance projects and income every day. This spreadsheet includes daily slots for “writing” and “exercise.” Filling those slots is just as important as all the paid work that the spreadsheet records. Having to fill in “NONE” for the writing and exercise columns more than two days in a row induces major guilt. Filling them in gives me a sense of accomplishment similar to turning in a timecard. As for books, I track everything I read on Goodreads and Booklikes.
I have unattainable goals. I always want to do more writing or reading than I can actually accomplish, so whenever one project is finished, I waste no time in starting on the next one.
I ignore the dishes and the laundry waiting to be put away. I’m ignoring them right now as I write this. I do work best in a tidy house, and I’ll do them eventually — but not until after a day’s writing quota has been filled.

I know I’m incredibly lucky and that I have luxuries many, many people don’t have. I have a flexible work schedule. I have a supportive spouse. I live the proverbial “two-incomes-no-kids” existence. But this is only partially luck, and partially a series of very conscious choices. I hope that by sharing mine, you might also look at your own life and the ways that you might bring more writing, reading, or whatever you are passionate about into it.

Writing Book Review: A Year in the Life by Sheila Bender

A Year in the Life: Journaling for Self-Discovery by Sheila Bender


My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I just finished working through a year of weekly journaling prompts from this book. When I bought it at a used booksale, I remember thinking that the prompts didn’t seem all that provocative, and after doing every single one, it turns out that I was mostly right. The prompts did get me to write and think about some things that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise, and my favorite ones were those that got me to delve into my memories. I liked less the ones that asked for strange or obscure metaphors, like, “Imagine a body part is made of a non-living substance and write about it” or “describe a self-portrait of a feeling.” I also didn’t get a real feeling of “completion” when I finished, since the exercises did not build upon one another in any way; they could have been arranged in any order and the experience would have been exactly the same.

Each week has a main prompt, and then six “extensions” in case you want to write every day rather than just once a week. I could never motivate myself to do the extensions, even though a lot of them were pretty interesting. Others were pretty much just lazy rephrasings of the initial prompt, or takes on it that were only slightly different. Also, it annoyed me that often the title of the prompts had very little to do with the actual prompt — I noticed this especially when I started posting some of my exercises to my writing blog.

Still, the additional journaling resources at the end, the suggestions for writing on holidays and other special occasions, and the “mini-anthology” of writing based on the prompts at the end were all nice touches. And I think I will be able to pull some valuable exercises for use in my spiritual writing group or other writing classes. To see some of my writing from the book, click here.





View all my reviews

A Year in the Life, Week 52: Self-Reflection Week

Well, yesterday I finished working through the exercises in A Year in the Life. The final exercise was the last of four “self-reflection weeks” in which I gave myself feedback on my journaling. (You can see how the schizophrenic relationship with myself as both employer and employee began here.) I also just backdated last week’s entry about what I’m looking forward to now that this year of journaling is complete. Finally, you can read my overall review of the book I’ve been working from here.

This time, I let Ms. VenOsdel give her review first.

Dear Lacey–

Well, here we are at the end of your one-year assignment. How has the experience been for you? Do you have ideas about what you will do next?

I really appreciate your dedication–you managed to come here every week for the whole last year. You’ve journaled through a second year of marriage, through a new job, new schedule, and new book. You’ve written in hotel rooms, trains, airplanes, and other people’s houses. In the last quarter, you’ve gone way beyond the call of duty by doing Morning Pages three or more times per week. I’ve really appreciated the way these morning pages recorded my day-to-day thoughts and life, while your weekend writing led you to explore places you probably wouldn’t have gone on your own.

I’m going to dissolve our formal relationship because I know you will continue to journal regularly, and I also know you are eager to try something new. I can’t wait to see what you do next!

All Best,

Ms. VenOsdel

 

Dear Ms. VenOsdel,

I would be lying if I didn’t say that I am so glad to be here! At the beginning I was really excited about my weekly journaling because it was a break from the more structured writing I was doing for the rest of the week. Now that I write Morning Pages, promotional pieces for Rumpled, and three blogs, this has come to feel like a bit more of a chore. I really like that the prompts often got me to write about memories that wouldn’t have surfaced in other ways, and the best entries were those in which the prompt allowed me to use one access point to tell a whole story. The things I was drawn to writing about for each prompt hinted at what may have been pre-occupying me at the time, but when those were the only entries I made in the whole week–as they often were–they didn’t give me the freedom to write about the day-to-day moments or preoccupations I was experiencing.

Many of the prompts really fell flat for me, especially those near the beginning. And I agree with the critique that, as a whole, I’m not sure these exercises have produced anything near a cohesive body of work. Still, they did produce something, which is all I can really expect. I look forward to paging through them and culling out those that will be useful in my spiritual writing group.

I remember starting these exercises on a park bench last spring, how I used to walk Syrus there every Friday to do this writing, how I wrote outside a lot in the beginning. And I felt a little dismayed that it would be a full year before I started another writing book. But that year has finally passed, and you are right that I am so ready to move on to the next thing.

A part of me wishes I had kept all these entries in their own place so I could easily see them as a whole. At the time, it just felt right to use my regular journals, since the whole purpose was to get myself to journal regularly. I’m going to do the exercises in The Right to Write next, and I find myself asking whether they should have a book of their own. If I’m going to keep doing this sort of thing, should I have something of a “writer’s notebook” to do it in? The appeal of that conflicts with the appeal of having much of my life all in the same place–because it is part of a whole, full of intersection.

Still, the idea of a separate “writer’s notebook” is appealing to me. A writing prompt does inspire different output than merely journaling does. But for journaling that was often as personal as these were, the journal just seemed the right place. And although I’d like to look at them all as a whole, it also makes me feel sort of sad to see them fragmented from the rest of my life. So maybe I did make the right choice.

Should I start a writer’s journal for my next endeavor? I think I probably will, especially since those exercises are so much more “writer” focused, while these were memory and reflection focused. I’ll just have to leave it to my future chroniclers to make sense of it all!

I have enjoyed this work, but I’m also glad to be done. Thanks for giving me this opportunity–but it looks like you will be writing your own entries from now on!

All best,

Lacey

 

Rumpled is #1 in the Folklore category on Kindle

I know those Kindle lists are fickle, so I’m enjoying it while it lasts! Thanks to all who have given it a try!

Young Adult Catholics: God & Evolution

My latest post is up at Young Adult Catholics, in which I attempt to articulate some of my thoughts after completing Coursera’s “Soul Beliefs” course.

Rumpled is Featured on FreeBooksy!

Just found out Rumpled was hand-picked to be featured on FreeBooksy today!