Phoebe North's Blog, page 21
March 24, 2011
Website Redesign! Book Trailer! Exclamation Points!
So I, like, haven't been writing while I wait for feedback on my book, which has led to killing time. Sorta productive time-killing, mind you–things I'm glad to have done, like redesigning my website (come look; it's pretty!) and going to the zoo (where we saw elephants, which are the best).
And making a book trailer! I've spent large chunks of the last week doing that. I'm not even sure how I feel about book trailers, generally. Do amateur ones sell books? Probably not. It's not like I even h...
March 21, 2011
Review: Boyfriends with Girlfriends by Alex Sanchez
Boyfriends with Girlfriends by Alex Sanchez
Anvilicious.
If, unlike me, you don't allow large portions of your life to be sucked away by the website TVtropes, you might not be familiar with this term. It refers to an aspect of a story so obvious that the writer might as well have hit you over the head with it. As the trope page says:
A portmanteau of anvil and delicious, malicious or vicious, depending on the usage, anvilicious describes a writer's and/or director's use of an artistic element...
March 18, 2011
Guest Post! It's a Guest Post! Not Here! But Somewhere Else!
I have guest post up on Kody Keplinger's blog today on sex positivity in YA. Incidentally, if you haven't been following Kody's blog lately, you really should be. It's been buckets of illuminating awesomeness.
March 16, 2011
Review: Bumped by Megan McCafferty
Bumped by Megan McCafferty
Recommended.
Talk about going in with preconceived notions of a book's quality. 40 pages deep, and I was completely ready to pan Bumped.
Megan McCafferty's long-awaited follow-up to the Sloppy Firsts series is a tongue-in-cheek satire about a future where only teenagers are capable of reproduction. At the outset, the science fiction is hammy and laid on thick, full of FutureWords™ and sketchy world building. As I neared the end of the first part, I already had the...
March 15, 2011
Typing Tuesday: The End of the Beginning of the End
Oh hai thar, internet. I'm supposed to write about writing today, aren't I?
Well, that's going to be hard. You see, I'm not writing right now. You see, I finally (finally! finally!) finished a full draft of Daughter of Earth on Friday.
Woo!
I'm not entirely sure if this was a first draft, or a second. I stopped when I was five chapters from the end and substantially rewrote the very beginning and revised the rest, since I had finally figured out 1. The plot, 2. The voice of the main character...
March 12, 2011
Review: 10 Miles Past Normal by Frances O'Roark Dowell
10 Miles Past Normal by Frances O'Roark Dowell
I was initially quite charmed by 10 Miles Past Normal, a March release from established middle grade author Frances O'Roark Dowell. It promised to be something like Peachtree's upcoming This Girl Is Different–a story about a new-comer to high school trying to find her way despite the weirdness of her family—but I'd hoped it would be a little more grounded in a familiar reality.
And in some ways, it was. 10 Miles Past Normal tells the story of...
March 10, 2011
A Liminal World
Do you know the word "ecotone," Gentle Reader? It's a liminal space, where, between biomes, where one environment and another overlap.
I love the suburbs. They seem to be full of ecotones, for better or for worse–the places where nature tries and tries to take over. The place where man beats it back. Dandelions push up through the cracks of the sidewalk. Tall grasses edge along the highway. Overpasses thrust up out of temperate rainforests.
I've always been a country mouse, ever since I read...
March 8, 2011
Review: Wither by Lauren DeStefano
Wither by Lauren DeStefano
Recommended.
In a richly realized future society, where every member of the younger generation faces death before age thirty, sixteen-year-old Rhine is kidnapped, stolen away from her home and wedded against her will to Linden Ashby, the wealthy son of a governor. Captive in his Floridian mansion, she (and two other young women) must find a way to cope with this new marriage. For Rhine's sisterwife Janna, coping means shutting down emotionally, barring her new...
March 3, 2011
On Cabals and Pre-Apocalypses
So! Interesting day.
It's difficult for me to even talk about this, to sum it up in a concise way. Writer Foz Meadows has a pretty good run-down of what the YA blog-o-sphere looked like today.
Go, read that. Then come back.
Here's my role in all of this. Three years ago now, I started reviewing every book I read. Someone on metafilter suggested that a good way for fast readers to get paid small bucks for their work was to review for ALA Booklist. But you needed clips. So I started reviewing...
March 1, 2011
Teaser Tuesday: Almost There!!!1!
It's been awhile since I've teased, hasn't it?
Well, Internet, here go you. Fresh off the laptop. As in, I just wrote this. I think it captures both the point in my story (generation ship Maia Asherah has almost arrived at its destination) and the current state of my manuscript, which is ZOMGALMOSTDONEWHATNOWEEEEE!, pretty well.
After the shuttle departed, something changed, shifted, about the mood of the ship. I'd walk through the districts and hear how nobody spoke except in whispers. In the...
