A.D. Croucher's Blog, page 10

ALTERED: a 2012 Honorable Mention, and a GIVEAWAY!

Hello all! Hope your holiday seasons have been going wonderfully! We’ve been hard at work in the bunker, creating playlists of remixed Christmas songs and working on our sequel to ALTERED (our super-clever working title: ALTERED…2). But we wanted to step outside for a moment (even though it’s about 32 degrees with howling winds and light snow where we are right now), because ALTERED was just given an honorable mention in a Top Ten list for 2012, courtesy of the lovely Libby Blog, one our fave book blogs! Thank you Ange and Rachel for giving us a mention! That brings us some Christmas cheer!

Speaking of which, since it’s the season and all, we’re offering an ALTERED giveaway! That’s right, free copies of ALTERED waiting for you to win them. Because nothing says Christmas like YA sci-fi (it’s true, we checked). All you need to do is head over to our Goodreads giveaway page and click to sign up for a chance to win a free copy of ALTERED!

Happy Holidays!

Influence Is Bliss, episode one: Joss Whedon

Welcome to a new series of posts we like to call “influence is bliss.”

In this series, we’ll be looking at different writers who inspire us, and who we love being influenced by. Writers who thrill us. They could be writers from the world of YA, TV, or movies. They are all writers who move us, teach us, and make us want to write like, right now.

There’s a long list of these writers who carry us away with their sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always beautiful words. Words that change the way we look at the world.

We figured we’d start with a writer who has been a huge inspiration for years, and even more so this year.

Joss Whedon.

Joss Whedon, superstar writer, director and showrunner

Genre-blending hero. Fan favorite. Beloved creator, showrunner and overseer of some of pop culture’s greatest achievements: Buffy, Firefly, Serenity, Dollhouse... Alien Resurrection (we liked it!). And, of course, The Avengers, soon to be followed by a S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show centering on Agent Coulson (“Nick? His first name is agent.”), and, of course, Avengers 2.

What a trajectory. What an icon. What a hero in the geek world. And one of our most important writing influences.

While Whedon proved his action-directing chops with The Avengers this summer, first and foremost it showed just what an extraordinary writer he is. Whedon is one of the few who can seamlessly blend action, humor, and emotion into a tightly executed plot. All while giving his characters deep inner lives and complex arcs.

One of the finest examples of Whedon’s talent is the “meltdown” scene in The Avengers, where our heroes argue themselves into self-destruction. We could watch that scene again and again. It is written with the control of a true master. There are six characters in one room, all with their own emotional trajectories that intersect perfectly. They’re all suffering in different ways, all losing it uniquely, driven by their personal desires and frustrations.

It’s about to get real.

The characters are blasting zingers and snark at each other with both barrels, nailing weaknesses and vulnerabilities, pushing each others buttons like pros — and this is SIX characters firing at each other with machine gun speed as the camera wheels around them.

Don’t worry – it’s supposed to be upside down. This is Whedon turning everything on its head… literally.

It’s like six Shakespeare plays crunched into a few firecrackingly explosive, freewheeling minutes. Everyone’s a protaganist, an antagonist, an aggressor, a victim. As the massive egos showboat and collide and implode, it’s dangerous, and funny, and heartbreaking.

This scene is a masterclass of Whedon-writing: every character’s motives and fears are laid out. The tension builds and is broken with humor before building again. The plot turns and our heros remain true to themselves despite the revelation that they are more than the weapons they wield.

This is another Whedon skill; giving us something real to carry us through the fantasy. Take the now-beloved Agent Coulson; in the shortest of dialogue this previously sidelined supporting player became a fully humanized fan favorite (the cellist, the trading cards) whose fate we desperately care about.

Nick “I watch you sleeping” Coulson

There’s no flashback or soliloquy. Everything is in motion. Everything is kinetic. Because  Whedon’s writing always flows.

For Whedon, drama is not only conflict, it’s rhythm. Lift us up, smash us back down (in the emotional sense, not the Hulk sense). Whedon pulls reversals mid-scene, mid-line, but always keeps us hanging on. He’s like a fighter jet that can turn on a dime, rotating through all kinds of crazy angles at high speed. His writing is extremely agile, which allows him to take us on intense dramatic journeys.

This is Whedon’s writing style (Whedon not pictured)

The Avengers meltdown may be one of the greatest written scenes in cinema history. This scene’s honesty, emotion, rhythm and humor defines “Whedon-esque.” You just marvel (pun… yeah, intended) at his skill.

Of course we cannot talk about Whedon as a writer without talking about his women.  As evidenced by this scene, and by pretty much every scene he’s ever written, Whedon writes incredibly real and inspirational female characters. It is, unfortunately, something that needs to be called out. Because, as sad as this is to write, it’s still unusual. Just compare Black Widow in Iron Man 2 and in The Avengers. It’s no surprise that the creator of Buffy can give us a complex, accessible, conflicted, vulnerable, powerful, beautiful, smart and kick-ass Natasha Romanov. Whereas in Iron Man 2, she basically had to look good in leather.

Whedon and Johansson: intelligent superheroes

To sum up, because this blog is going much longer than we intended, Joss Whedon inspires us to be better. He pushes us to write harder, push each beat further; to have fun, cry, mess with the audience, kill characters, and, of course, make it all incredibly entertaining.

Writing is our TARDIS

Why do we write?

It’s a question writers often get asked, and probably one we think about all the time anyway. There are a lot of answers to that question; as readers and fans you’ve no doubt seen a lot of them. It’s something writers love to talk about, and we always love reading and hearing what our favorite writers have to say on that subject.

Most of the time, for us, we write because we don’t know how not to. We just can’t not write. Whether it’s sitting at the desktop or laptop, putting notes down in a phone, or using actual pen and paper by scribbling in one of our several thousand notebooks, or grabbing the first thing we can find (ripped open envelope, back of an already used post-it, margin of a magazine… back of our hands even)… inspiration and ideas strike constantly.

It happens all the time, and everywhere.

Out walking, sitting on a train, having a coffee, when the lights are out and just before falling asleep, watching TV, watching a movie. Being a writer means being on call to the beautiful muse, 24/7.

There are other reasons too: writing keeps us sane, helps us make sense of the world (and of ourselves)… but perhaps most importantly of all, we just love it.

We love it so much.

It’s an absolute blast, writing and being a writer. At its best, it feels like being in Pink Floyd or Muse and playing a guitar solo in a stadium full of screaming fans.

Just another Wednesday night, sitting on the sofa with the laptop

At least, it feels that way. Except, here’s the thing: when you’re a writer, there’s usually no one else there. That stadium is empty, most of the time. The truth is, being a writer is very much a “loneliness of the long distance runner” kind of activity. You’re running through an unforgiving landscape with no idea where the end of the race is going to be. But if you want to get there, you have to just keep running.

…or just keep swimming.

There’s really only one way to sustain that kind of existence: you have to love the crap out of it.

And we so do.

One of the most thrilling things in the world for anyone is possibility; but for a writer, the absolute most thrilling thing needs to be making possibilities become real, tangible, actual. You’re architect and craftsman, designer and builder. Yes, you have to be made of steel sometimes; you have to have an absolutely endless appetite for creating, for that thrill of coming up with something new… and for putting in the hours, weeks, months and maybe years to see it through.

And then, maybe, to spend that much time again getting rejected.

What?! Yeah, ‘fraid so.

So you have to really love it, because if you are in that phase of sending your work to others (agents, competitions, managers, other writers) and not hearing what you wanted to hear, you still need to be coming up with the next thing, and the next, and the next. Your desire needs to be immense, indestructible. Just like Celine says, your heart must go on (no, we can’t believe we went there either). You have to be utterly and hopelessly in love with this thing. Because it will hurt. It will be dark, sometimes. But you know, that’s okay, if you love it. That’s okay, if the sheer act of putting words on paper or on screen makes you feel like you’re Dave Grohl blasting out a Foo Fighters song at the Grammys.

Rocking out son

That absolute blast, that thrill of possibility and exploration is what drives us. The open road, the open sky… the open universe. We love launching ourselves into new worlds. It’s like being explorers, or mountain climbers. There’s a lot that goes into it, but the feeling when you discover that miraculous new world, or see that incredible view from the summit, is the most wonderful thing. We want it, over and over again. We’ll always want it.

Basically, being a writer is like having your own TARDIS.

This is what it’s like in our heads

You get to travel in time and space and see wonderful, mind-blowing things. Dreams that surprise you, scare you, change you. Every time you open a new Word doc (or Final Draft, or even just a blank piece of paper), it’s like the TARDIS has landed, and just like the Doctor, you have no idea what’s on the other side of that door. But you can’t wait to throw that door open and throw yourself into whatever adventure awaits.

Brilliant

Fantastic!

Getting Altered: Genetic Experimentation and Freaky Science in YA

Inspired by a recent tweet of Jessica Khoury’s, which posed the question why does there seem to be a rise in the number of ‘freaky science’ YA novels, we got to thinking… Firstly, that Freaky Science is a brilliant category title which should immediately be a section in all bookstores and added to Amazon’s list of categories. Secondly, that’s a really great question.

Here’s our take:

The possibilities of genetic experimentation have always been flowing through popular culture (The Fly, Jurassic Park), and they’ve particularly been in the air since 1999, when scientists first mapped the human genome. But recently, as observed in the great post that Khoury was referencing, it seems to be exploding in YA.

So why now?

Because YA hasn’t fully gone there yet. It’s still relatively unexplored, fertile territory. It’s a new planet, ready for our Curiosity rovers. And no one loves new planets like a YA writer.

Fiction is a beautifully insatiable hungry beast, always looking for the new. And YA is like fiction on steroids. And probably a couple of Red Bulls. That’s why YA is so damn great: it searches out the new and finds endless ways to use it, expand upon it, and mash it up with something else. It dives into the wonderful depths between genres and returns to the surface with tales of wonder. YA writers are, at their core, pioneers.

Genetic engineering and experimentation is basically a fantastic metaphor for YA. There are those in the industry who can get stuffy about genre/category boundaries. But as Donald Maass said last year, genre is dead. YA writers laugh in the face of boundaries. YA writing loves to combine the DNA of multiple genres to create beautiful, unique creatures. And let’s face it, if we “behaved” and didn’t break the genre rules, there would be no Buffy, no Firefly, no Doctor Who. Species survive by evolving, by changing their DNA. Literature is no different; and YA is the thrilling, defining example of that.

So bring on the genetic experimentation YA — it’s not just a metaphor for everything we do as writers, it’s also an extraordinarily rich source of creative potential. Just like life itself, there are endless possibilities.

We can’t wait to read all of them, starting with Khoury’s own Origin!

Olympic writing

Hello, and welcome to our obligatory Olympic-themed post about writing!

We’re loving the Olympics so far, and seeing all that excellence on display got us thinking about writing. Of course, there are a number of metaphors you could use here: the importance of sticking the landing, having a great anchor routine/fast finish, being driven by passion, staying hungry for the prize… And so many sports to choose from for analogies: the precision of archery, the endurance of the 10,000m, the relentlessness of swimming race after race.

But in the end, what really resonated for us was this: degree of difficulty vs. execution.

Yep, we’ve been watching a lot of gymnastics!

And that’s how gymnastic routines are scored. Each competitor has a maximum potential score based upon the difficulty of their routine, while their actual score depends on how flawlessly they execute it. And it struck us: this is exactly how writing works. Readers, consciously or subliminally, tend to respond to books based on brilliant ideas, brilliantly executed.

What does that mean for writers? True, this is an analytical approach: it’s the layer beneath the layer of how people react to books, and why they fall in love with some and not others. But generally speaking, the more thrilling the narrative (and the thrills can be conceptual, emotional, action-based or humor-related), and the more momentum it has, the more you feel engaged with it. You’re much more likely to keep turning those pages.

We all want novels to sweep us up, take us away, make us dream, lose us deep within their worlds.

That can only happen if the author has a high degree of difficulty in their routine, and carries it out flawlessly. Readers are of course judges, issuing deductions based on each error: typos, character inconsistencies, breaking the flow… they all add up, detracting from the overall experience. Too many, and it can all be over. If the author ends up on their butt, the readers will get up off of theirs and go find something else to do.

Degree of difficulty doesn’t just mean twisty plots, or groundbreaking narrative techniques — it can mean those things, but it can also mean creating deeply atmospheric alternate worlds, making us feel, breaking our hearts, changing the way we see the world, and ourselves. Those things are not easy. But when an author makes them happen, we don’t even see them at work — we just get utterly drawn in, hypnotized, “book-whispered.”

YA authors Patrick Ness and Laini Taylor are the reigning champions. They’re at the top of the podium. The degrees of difficulty of their novels are immense: Ness has to take us to another world and make us experience hearing a multitude of other people’s and creatures’ thoughts, while Taylor has to create new magic and make us fall in love with angels while we feel terror and rage and desire in our blood.

Their execution is utterly flawless. Ness’s brilliance in conveying exactly what it feels like to hear the ‘noise’, while also feeling all of Todd’s extreme emotions, is just staggering. He uses the page in extraordinary ways, and creates something entirely, thrillingly new that is also deeply grounded in overwhelming heart and soul. Taylor is bewitching with her richly mystical narrative scorcery. She fills your head and your dreams with magic and desire. It’s spooky, and wonderful.

The behavior of our hearts is a complex and beautiful thing. When writers impact us on this level, it can change our lives. Just like watching someone win an Olympic gold can be deeply inspiring, and can let us know that dreams can be achieved — with dedication and passion.

What does this mean for writers? You have to constantly practice your craft, hone it, obsess over it like those athletes who get up at 4am and train all day, every day, every week, every month, every year. You have to inhabit your writing. Utterly. You have to keep reading, revising… and writing. Always be writing. It takes an extraordinarily high level of obsession to do this.

So while the Olympians keep winning their medals, as writers we take heart and inspiration. Dreams are wonderful things, but they’re made from sweat and tears, from giving yourself entirely to winning that gold.

ALTERED gets its first Goodreads review!

Well, we’re quite shy and retiring normally, but we just wanted to share some good news with you… ALTERED got its first review posted on Goodreads, with a full five stars! It’s always lovely to hear nice things about your writing — you spend so much time in isolation as a writer, so making this kind of connection means a huge amount — and we’re very grateful to this reviewer.

Here’s an excerpt:

Sci-fi is not my usual genre of choice but, this novel is so compelling I was totally engrossed from page one. It has characters you care about, an interesting plot that never goes beyond the understanding of the reader and as that last page turns, you want to yell, “When is the next edition to the series?!”

Awww thank you!! (BTW you can find ALTERED and that review on Goodreads here)

As it happens, the next edition of the series is on its way! We’ve got the flip charts, colored pens, index cards… lots of names and scenes and arrows all over the place connecting them… The first few chapters are IN, and we’re having a BLAST writing them!

So, better get back to it!

ALTERED publication day!

We’ve surfaced after months in the lab. All those strange clanking sounds and flashing lights late at night? Yeah, that was us building our very own flux capacitor. And we’ve finally unleashed it onto Amazon and Barnes & Noble! ALTERED, book one of ALTERED SEQUENCE, is now available for Kindle at Amazon US and nook at Barnes & Noble. Also, Kindle at Amazon UK.

Writing is almost always a solitary act (a double act in our case, but still) — days, weeks, months spent secluded, huddled over the laptop, lost in our imaginary world, following our characters. On the rare occasions when we do surface and, you know, actually interact with actual people who are actually not our characters… well, that’s when we realize we are utterly incapable of normal speech! Because all that matters is the writing, those worlds we want to build. They draw us in, consume us. That’s why we do it.

But. When all that’s done. When we’ve edited and edited and edited and revised and rewritten and then done all that another twenty or thirty times. When all the decisions have finally been made (what angle should the lens flare be? How many pixels should the left side of this banner be?). When the album is mixed. The picture is locked. And we put it out there into the world, all on its own, where it has to fend for itself…

It’s scary and terrifying. But also thrilling and exhilarating.

We’re going to have some fun putting the word out there about it. And then we’ll be back in the lab, because book two is already under way, and there’s several thousand new decisions to make!

In the meantime, lovely readers: we hope you enjoy ALTERED!

Greetings!

Thank you for visiting our website! We know there’s lots of sites you could be clicking on right now, so we appreciate your time here.

Where is here, you may ask. Well, this is our HQ, our base station: the official home of A.D. Croucher. It’s where you can find out more about us, and about our writing, whether it’s YA novels, short stories, or TV scripts.

We’ll also post things that inspire us, amuse us, make us laugh, and generally, make us happy.

Spend some time here. Kick back. Take a look around. We’ll be adding lots of fun stuff in the coming weeks and months. There’ll be new short stories, new posts, photos… all kinds of things.

For now, if you’d like to find out more about ALTERED, the first novel in our YA sci-fi series, please journey to Altered Sequence.

Enjoy!