Colleen Mondor's Blog, page 28

Still in Two Rivers...

...and will be posting next week, promise! HIghlights of my last week include gold panning, urban exploring, making more than one wicked cool discovery in the woods, visiting the site of a vanished mining town, hitting the stacks for a ton of research and sled dog puppies!

Don't you wish you were with me? :)

How not to disappear in the stacks - step 1

I have been reading an enormous amount of Wallace Stegner in the past year - mostly because I never read him much before and there was so much catching up to do. There is an essay of his in a hard to find anthology that I'll be reading while in Fairbanks this summer (thanks to the lovely UAF library). Stegner does not technically apply much at all to writing about Alaska but he applies in every way to writing about the west. He also makes me think about the changing idea of the frontier and I can only imagine what he would think of all the reality programs about Alaska on the air today.

My notebook is filled with items I am searching for at UAF but Stegner is at the top of the list; Stegner is who grounds me so I don't get lost.

Out of the ballpark on new Ellen Klages cover

Great book (as well as the sequel); I'm delighted with this new cover. It should really get some attention on the shelf and speaks to the book's themes and main characters perfect. Lovely

Booyah!!

I found out yesterday that MAP has gone into a second printing! This was something I was hoping to achieve in the first year so to get there now, with the summer only starting, is pretty darn cool. I'm working with my close friend/publicist* on several other places to contact about the book (aviation museums right now) so we have big plans to see the sales continue. This was a really big hurdle for me - the book has legs! - and it gives me a lot of excitement as I start cranking out pages on the next book.

Yes. The next book. (But nothing more on that as I hate to count chickens before they hatch. Especially literary ones.)

I'm Alaska-bound next week and shall do my best not to bore you with pictures of mountains and rivers and moose. (See the Events page for some Anchorage plans.) Expect some excited comments about discoveries deep in the UAF stacks however - love that library and can't wait to have hours spent working in it.

*Best move I ever made was getting someone to help me with the publicity and marketing. She has been invaluable both for my sanity and the book's sales.

With Lucia Joyce & Mary Talbot & a scary high school & another planet & more. Totally.

Recent Reads:

Dotter of Her Father's Eyes by Mary & Bryan Talbot. Whoa. I knew nothing about James Joyce's daughter Lucia but Mary Talbot (whose father was a James scholar) does an amazing job of weaving her own life in and around Lucia's (which makes sense as her father was constantly researching Joyce's life). This is so good - so so sooo good - that I can't recommend it enough. Bryan Talbot, one of my all time fav illustrators does his usual great job with the illustrations. This is exactly the kind of story a gn is made for (and highly recommended as a crossover for teens). Plus - I need to read a bio of Lucia Joyce. For sure.

The Moon Moth by Jack Vance, adapted by Humayoun Ibrahim. I'm still processing this graphic novel of Vance's short story classic. It's kind of tough to sort out the setting in the opening wordless pages but when the text appears and you meet the main character, via a flashback, it takes off in a big way. This is stranger in a strange land territory and what becomes a very compelling murder mystery. The ending is a zinger! Not sure where it will fit review-wise; likely as a "Cool Read" in Aug or Sept.

Almost Somewhere by Suzanne Roberts - For Booklist, about three girlfriends who post-college decide to hike the John Muir Trail.

Soulless: The Manga by Gail Carriger. LOVE Soulless and this manga was just a ton of fun! The story is still there, the adaption is great (you can follow it along easily) and the art is hysterical. Just flat out fun (which works well with the heavier stuff I'm reading.)

Currently Reading:

Suburban Strange by Nathan Koetecki - For my August column on "school stories", this is a very intense YA mystery with a touch of the paranormal that, on page 282, still has me wondering who the Big Bad is. I'm hoping the ending is as good as the trip getting there; color me deeply pleased with this one.

Thunder on the Mountain: Death at Massey and the Dirty Secrets Behind Big Coal by Peter Galuszka - For Booklist. I am rapidly becoming exceedingly well read on the coal industry. In case you're wondering, there are no real happy endings in any of these damn books.



On Deck:

Loving This Planet by Helen Caldicott and A Free Man by Aman Sethi - both for Booklist (the environment and India!). Also rereading bits of House by Tracy Kidder for a feature I'm working on, and The Awakening by Kate Chopin because Koetecki mentions it so much in Suburban Strange. Otherwise, with the clock ticking on a big AK research trip, I'm shoring up all the notes on what I need to follow-up on and trying not to get distracted with any big reads. I won't be tackling the reading for Sept & Oct columns until late July.

Also recommended: If I could link to this article on the Town & Country magazine site I would because Emily Gould's takedown of Fifty Shades of Grey is made of awesome. Unfortunately, T&C has a very bad site and no access to even a TOC that I could see. So buy the issue on the newsstand - it has fun summer campers on the cover.

Plus, I defy you to read Mary Louise Parker's reminiscence of her father in the current Esquire (Bruce Willis on the cover). It made me cry - stunning. (And while their website is really quite good, the Parker essay is not on it. But buy the issue anyway as it has great fiction in it and an interesting look at Bruce Jenner who I really feel quite sorry for.)

[Post pic of Lucia Joyce}

Timothy Decker Interview: "The illustrations are so specific that you can, if you want to, use the silhouette images from the trial portion of the book and match them to the British soldiers in the massacre scenes."

Tim Decker is, quite frankly, the best author/illustrator you have likely not heard of and that is an absolute shame. His deeply evocative picture books with their spare but powerful illustrations have stayed with me in ways I never expected. From The Letter Home to Run Far, Run Fast and especially For Liberty, they tell quiet stories about significant moments and command your attention from start to finish. Are they for children? Yes - my son love all of them. But they are equally for adults and truly do not know an age limit. They are special, more than anything, and that is why I continue to treasure them.

Tim's latest book is a YA graphic novel, The Punk Ethic. It is an illustrated novel (yea!) that tells the story of a musically inclined and deeply thoughtful teenage boy (Martin) and his friends, (smart, silly, foolish, perfect teenagers through and through), and the coolest girl ever (bass playing Holly). Martin wants to make a difference and that means making a lot of music and maybe, hopefully, becoming more than just friends with Holly. The ending is....amazing and unexpected and intense. It is also, I think, really something special. I hope The Punk Ethic helps Tim get the attention he deserves and also brings a lot of new readers to his stellar backlist.

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CM: Your picture books cover such different subjects; were you interested in the wars and plague era for a long time or did you come to these with a desire to write/illustrate a book about them?

TD: I've always loved history, even when I was a little kid. I drew nothing but dinosaurs and WWII airplanes. At seven, I was going to be an archeologist. As a big kid, I can say that I'm interested in everything under the sun with the exception of practical mathematics, which bores me to tears. That said, my choice of subjects has more to do with how I feel about the current state of the world and less with my interest in history. The setting for my book is the sugar coating that hides my thoughts about contemporary issues. Right from the beginning, I've been concerned with how children process the over whelming mass of noise that is part of living in our media saturated time. Even if parents, educators or adults don't notice it, children are absorbing as much as they possibly can from the constant din produced by our televisions, radios and computers. Realizing that is now simply a fact of life, I set out to write books for children that address issues which others assume, incorrectly, have nothing to do with the world that children inhabit.

When I wrote The Letter Home, the war in Iraq had just turned from an idiotic invasion to an untenable occupation. It didn't take a genius to see that situation was going to become far more brutal and costly. For some reason, because I'm optimistic or naïve, I never expected to live through such turmoil. Which is just foolish, I guess. Because I'm an artist, making things is how I assert my opinion. So I wrote an anti-war book. I was working at a bookstore so I knew the sort of stuff that made it to shelves and I knew there was no way I could write an anti-war book about the current conflict because no one would publish it or buy it. I said to myself, when was the last really costly, mostly useless war that led to all kinds of social, economic and cultural problems in the Middle East and beyond? Ah... The Great War. What a mess that was... and fortunately for my purposes, how visually striking it was.

Run Far, Run Fast is me talking about noble and ignoble behavior, something which is hard to see in contemporary life, but stands out rather starkly in a world gone mad which was exactly what happened in the wake of the pestilence. For Liberty was my reaction to the Tea Party and other faux "grassroots" political groups that litter American culture and yet seem to know so little about the deceptively complicated philosophies that define our government. The Punk Ethic turned into way to express my ire about the nature of modern war and how acting locally can, possibly, change the world for the better. I guess that all of my books are written to show that the everything in the world is composed in shades of gray.

Kate Milford Interview: "You can still have that liminality, that sense of crossing a boundary, within a city. I guess that's probably what got me thinking about the Brooklyn Bridge as part of a crossroads."

I was surprised by Kate Milford's debut novel The Boneshaker a great deal and spent a lot of time telling other folks about this blend of fantasy, steampunk, carnival-horror and Americana was really worth taking a look at. While written for middle grade readers it carries a level of sophistication that reminded a bit of Ray Bradbury's child-protagonist novels and stories and because of that I think The Boneshaker and the literary world it inhabits will serious legs. Kate is back with a companion novel, a prequel, The Broken Lands which is due out this fall. She will also be releasing a self-published novella, The Kairos Mechanism, that returns to The Boneshaker setting.

I will confess that Kate's writing has awakened a curiosity in me for a specific aspect of Americana, that of the crossroads. One figures prominently in The Boneshaker (along with a healthy dose of Robert Johnson mythology) and in The Broken Lands it is an urban crossroads that the characters must contend with. While we certainly talk about quite a bit in this interview - the upcoming book, the Kickstarter factor, the wonders of "baking your own book", it is the crossroads exchange I found the most compelling. There has to be a reason why so many stories were written about them, and why so many legends call them home.

I love that Kate ponders those very same questions too.

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CM: Can you give me an overview of THE BROKEN LANDS?

KM: It's set mostly in Coney Island, in 1877 (at that time, Coney Island was not yet part of Brooklyn, and Brooklyn was not yet part of New York City). Walker and Bones, two fixers in the employ of Jack, the drifter who appears in The Boneshaker, arrive in town with plans to take over the city of New York. Jack has been walking the earth with a coal of hellfire given to him by the Devil--who would not let him into Hell--in search of the right location to start his own place, and he's settled on New York City. So Walker and Bones are in town to start the process, which involves the city's great crossroads: the crossing of the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge, which is currently under construction. They also need a conflagrationeer--someone with arcane knowledge of the arts of fire--to claim the city in Jack's name. And it just so happens that a legendary troupe of fireworkers is in Coney Island. It falls to Jin, the youngest member of the Fata Morgana Fireworks Company, and Sam, a Coney Island card sharp, to save New York from becoming Jack's personal Hell.


CM: Why did you decide to do a prequel for THE BONESHAKER rather than sequel?

KM: Well, my dream plan is to alternate prequels and sequels. I have a hard time with prequels when they come at the end of the story. I love history and backstory as much as any geek, but once the story is over--and this is just me--I stop being excited about what happened before. I always wish I had the information beforehand. So my idea was to create prequels that were interspersed with the forward-moving narrative. These prequels would inform the books that followed them, introducing characters and providing history relevant to the unfolding tale. The way I envision it, both The Boneshaker and The Broken Lands set up the "big" Natalie story to come, which is a trilogy in which Natalie has to save her hometown of Arcane from the same danger that falls on New York City in TBL.




CM: What made you think of the Brooklyn Bridge and East River as a crossroads? (Has anyone ever set the crossroads mythology in an urban setting before?)

KM: As for the urban setting...well, one of the great things about crossroads mythology is that it's so varied. For instance, when I talk to schools about crossroads tales, I like to emphasize that there's an almost endless number of variations from all around the world, so although no, I can't think of an example of an urban crossroads tale myself, I'd be shocked if a few didn't exist. On the other hand, the folklore does tend to focus on the crossroads either as a liminal place--a boundary, a means of entering town or leaving it--or as a remote place of peril, distant from society.

But you know, in Manhattan and in the part of Brooklyn where I live, you really do navigate by cross-streets in ways that you don't in other places. And although you're theoretically in one city, you can cross a street or turn a corner and find yourself in what feels like another town altogether. It's a city of smaller cities all stitched together by bridges and subways and ferries. This is particularly true of the different boroughs--there are people who just never leave Manhattan, for example. Staten Island is a perfect blank for lots of folks, except they know there's a ferry and they know there's an expressway. You can still have that liminality, that sense of crossing a boundary, within a city. I guess that's probably what got me thinking about the Brooklyn Bridge as part of a crossroads.


CM: What can you tell me about the novella's story?

KM: The Kairos Mechanism came out of that same wish to give readers extra material and backstory in a way that informs the unfolding story. I also wanted to make sure that readers could draw the connections between The Boneshaker and The Broken Lands. It takes place in Arcane, at the end of the summer following the events of The Boneshaker, and it begins when Natalie encounters two young men walking into Arcane and carrying a dead man between them--a dead man who appears to be in his twenties, but who has been missing from Arcane for fifty years. While the adults puzzle over this, Natalie discovers that the two boys who carried the body home have another reason for being in Arcane, which is to carry out a task set for them by a sinister peddler named Trigemine. Then Natalie comes to Trigemine's attention, and chaos ensues.

CM: How did you decide to self-publish the short story?

KM: Back when I originally had that idea of alternating prequels and sequels, I also had this idea that I'd pair a Natalie story with each prequel to tide readers over who wanted to return to Arcane sooner rather than later. But I couldn't imagine a publisher wanting to release two books at once, even if they liked the idea of publishing a short novel or novella. So I sort of figured if I was going to do it, I'd have to do it on my own. Then the bookstore where I work, McNally Jackson, got this amazing alien robot printer thing, the Espresso Book Machine, and suddenly the idea got even more exciting because I realized I could do print editions. I mean, I guess I knew there were options for that out there, but the idea of doing it myself, of being completely involved down to watching the books come out of the oven warm and smelling like glue--that idea was just irresistible. And once I'd gone that far in thinking about it, I started thinking about all the potential things I could do with this idea if I made it an ongoing project. Since basically all the projects I have in the pipeline--even the ones that seem unrelated, like the two books I have coming out in 2014--are set in the same world, there are connections between all of them. I can use these novellas to link them, to encourage readers who love Arcane to visit Nagspeake. I can link the two 2014 books, even though they're coming out from different publishers. And I can keep my readers engaged in 2013, even though I don't currently have any releases slated for next year.

So that's how I made the decision to give this a shot. It's going to be released in three editions: a digital book, a paperback edition with a cover illustration by Andrea Offermann, and a reader-illustrated special digital edition in which fourteen kids between the ages of 11 and 19 are each illustrating one chapter. That one will be pay-what-you-like on my website, www.clockworkfoundry.com. The regular digital and paperback editions will be released in September alongside The Broken Lands; the illustrated edition's release date is TBD because I wanted to pay the kids and I didn't want to start them working until I knew I could do it.

I raised the money to pay the artists and finance the print edition through Kickstarter*. My goal was $6500, which the campaign has successfully raised. Now I'm shooting for $7500, at which point I can bump up the kids' paychecks--or even better, $9500, at which point I can pretty confidently commit to at least a print edition of a second novella. My dream is to hit $13500, which will allow for a reader-illustrated edition of that second novella, too. There are really great rewards for backers, too, everything from digital editions of the book on up to school and library visits.

CM: How has your publisher reacted to the novella?

KM: They've been very supportive, although since it's not under contract, they haven't been directly involved in any way. I've encountered some surprise, mostly from folks with primarily self-pub backgrounds, that the publisher didn't object to the project; I guess there are horror stories out there of contracts with do-not-compete clauses or something. Obviously, I've never seen anything like that. In my (admittedly still limited) experience, publishers really like to see authors thinking outside the box about promotion, seeking new readers and keeping them engaged. I know Clarion has always encouraged me to be proactive and creative about promotion, and my editor immediately saw the merits of using extra content in this way to help drive sales of The Broken Lands.

See the Master Schedule with links & quotes to other Blog Blast interviews here. (I'll be updating this continuously all week!)

*Kate's Kickstarter was more than 100% funded! (And I am a very proud backer!)

Summer 2012 Blog Blast Tour Master Schedule

Here is your interview schedule for the week - I'll be updating with quotes and direct urls as the interviews go live. Feel free to copy this schedule as often as you wish!

Monday:

Kate Milford - Chasing Ray

Randa Abdel Fattah - Crazy QuiltEdi

Tim Lebbon - Bildungsroman

Nalo Hopkinson - The Happy Nappy Bookseller



Tuesday

Timothy Decker - Chasing Ray

YS Lee - The Ya Ya Yas

Tanita Davis - The Happy Nappy Bookseller

Wednesday

Cynthia Levinson - The Happy Nappy Bookseller

Amy Reed - Stacked

Rosemary Clement-Moore - Finding Wonderland

Thursday

Dave Roman - Bildungsroman

L. Divine - Crazy QuiltEdi

Robin LaFevers - Finding Wonderland

Friday

Benjamin Alire Saenz - The Happy Nappy Bookseller

Jennifer Miller - Bildungsroman

Ashley Hope Perez - Crazy QuiltEdi

"Jump and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall."

I first read Ray Bradbury when I was young and sad. His books and stories made me believe in wonder when I doubted such a thing existed and over the years, without fail, he has been a storyteller I have returned to in good times and bad. A lot of people who knew him have written some wonderfully eloquent things in the past 24 hours and I have enjoyed reading so many of those remembrances. For me, all I can say is that there was more than one day when Ray Bradbury saved my heart. It beats today for Greentown, Jim Nightshade and William Halloway, the Foghorn, the Lake, "R is for Rocket", butterflies and dinosaurs, the sounds of Mexico over a phone, the Banshee and on and on and on.

My heart beats, and it remembers him.

We'v got your "moderately frightening folklore-based fantasy"

In the endless discussions swirling around the litblogosphere (and twitter) about books and bloggers and publishers and authors, one thing has been very clear to me: authors need to take control of their marketing online and off if they really want to see their books succeed. This is not to suggest that publishers aren't willing to pony up time and money to usher books into the world - some are doing this big time as well all know. But for most authors, you have to wade into the increasingly confusing blogger/publisher world and into the bookseller world and in the library world and, if you are lucky, into the radio and newspaper and magazine world* if you want your book to make it. The tough part about all this (other then the doing of it) is that you have to find a way to stand out from the zillions of others who are doing the same thing. That's where Kate Milford's Kickstarter project comes in.

Milford wrote a very fun and original MG fantasy called The Boneshaker (an urban fantasy/steampunk hybrid that took place in a rural setting influenced by American folklore and some Bradburyesque moments), that I enjoyed very much (along with a ton of other people). A companion novel, The Broken Lands, is due out this fall (set in Coney Island!!!) but Milford wanted to do something a little extra, both for her readers and to generate a bit more excitement about the upcoming release. So she initiated a Kickstarter project to self publish a novella about the characters in The Boneshaker that also relates to The Broken Lands. The project winds down this week and it is funded but Milford has plans for extra dollars so be sure to support her if you can (and you get to read The Kairos Mechanism!)

What intrigues me so much about Milford's project is that it's out-the-box. It's all about writing something new (good for authors), providing something tangible to supporters (good for readers) and also does bring some attention to her upcoming book. But rather than blog "I have a book coming out! I have a book coming out! I have a book coming out!", she's telling everyone about a new story and inviting them into the creation process. As all of her books/stories are interrelated, this project also allows fans to learn more about the world they have only seen the smallest bit of in The Boneshaker. It's a long view Milford is sharing, and a firm promise to keep writing that she is making.

I love big picture people; they give me hope for the future.

I'll be talking to Kate Milford next week during the Summer Blog Blast Tour but wanted to give her a shout out now so there is still time for her Kickstarter. Very very cool!

*And if you wrote a narrative nonfiction title about aviation in Alaska then you are also talking to aviation museums. Really.

[Post title is quote from the Kickstarter!]