Len Vlahos's Blog, page 6

The End of the Beginning

Today is the day. I mean, it is THE day. January 21, 2014. The day my debut novel, The Scar Boys, is officially published and on sale.

They — whoever the heck “they” are — say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. As I look back on this journey, I’m sort of mystified that I’ve made it to this point.

This project began as nearly one hundred pages of notes, written in the late 1980s, on my time playing guitar in the punk-pop band, Woofing Cookies. I had no idea what to do with those notes, but I knew I needed to do something. The experience of touring with a band while still in my teens was something special. I felt compelled to figure out how to tell that story.

I no longer have those notes, nor do I have copies of the essays, short stories, and screenplays I wrote based on those notes. They were fun projects, but none were good enough to keep. That’s because it wasn’t my story I was trying to tell. It was the story of every kid who has ever found confidence, friends, and happiness playing music.

It wasn’t until sometime in 2006 — yes, 2006! — after a conversation with a friend at a baseball game that I started to write what would become The Scar Boys. These are the first few paragraphs from the very first draft:

=======

The pilot weaves a slalom course through the early April thunderheads bearing down on Iowa. Yesterday it was the California Coast, verdant hills of the fading rainy season to the east, the deceptively inviting Pacific to the west.

Or some shit like that.

I can’t figure out if I’m supposed to write the way I talk, write the way I think, or try to write with some style; write like a writer and not like a confessor. I don’t have a fucking clue. I just know I need to get this all down on paper.

=======

Not one of those sentences made it into the final draft, or even the third draft. Harry never gets on an airplane. In fact, the Harry in the above passage is a forty-something man on his way to a reunion of his band, The Scar Boys. All of that, thankfully, went out the window at some point. Or more likely, went out the window a little bit at a time.

Many, many people gave me feedback and advice along the path of this journey, and I am indebted to all of them. They helped shape my thoughts about this story, and in some cases, the story itself. Yes, this journey did begin with a single step, and in the end covered many more than a thousand steps.

And every time I looked up, the whole village was walking beside me.

How cool is that?

I Resolve That…

I hate New Year’s Eve. In a nation where getting drunk and acting stupid is something to be revered, manufacturing a holiday for that very purpose seems like overkill to me. New Year’s Day, on the other hand, I love. The idea of resetting the clock once every twelve months to take stock of what kind of person you are and what kind of person you can be, well, that’s awesome.

You see, I’m a New Year’s Resolution junkie.

As time has gone by, I’ve taken this endeavor more and more seriously. This past year I attempted, with varying degrees of success, to keep track of my resolutions. I actually had a spreadsheet on which I logged my year. (Remember, I like charts and graphs.)

I did ok. Not great, but ok. I met my quota for pages read, fell just short of my targeted number of blog posts created, and became hyper-aware of how much television I watch, how much I (don’t) exercise, and how often I play the guitar. I learned something important along the way. It turns out that paying attention to your goals and doing your best to meet them — not the actual result — is what matters.

With that in mind, I present my 2014 annotated resolutions. These are less about specific goals (though there are a few) than in previous years, and more about how I can live a better life. I may not always succeed, but I will keep these taped to the wall adjacent to the bathroom mirror as a constant reminder.

Do everything in my power to help my children be the best people they can be. One of the things you find out as a parent is that a child is completely and totally dependent on you, in every conceivable way. It sounds like an obvious and apparent truth, but until you live it, you don’t realize what an awesome responsibility that is.

Raise my voice less as a dad. Little kids don’t listen. Or maybe it’s that they listen selectively. You can test this theory by telling a child to eat his or her vegetables and randomly tossing in the words “Fresh Beat Band.” They won’t hear a thing until you say what it is they want to hear. So what is a parent’s default response? Yell. But there has to be a better way. I don’t know if I yell more than, less than, or the same as other parents, but I know I yell too much for my own liking.

Be the best husband I can be. I think this one speaks for itself.

Write every day. Whether I’m working on a novel (primary writing or editing), a blog post of my own, or a blog post for someone else, I need to keep my gray matter limber and well-toned. At minimum, I need to write five days a week.

Do everything in my power to make sure that The Scar Boys has an opportunity to succeed. When I was younger, I played guitar in a punk pop band called Woofing Cookies. We were good. Really good, if I do say so myself. And we were starting to get attention — medium to heavy rotation on college radio; reviews in NY Daily News, Creem Magazine, and CMJ; they even mentioned us once on MTV (back when it played music, and was, you know, cool.) But I (and my bandmates) were too young and too stupid to parlay that nascent success into something more. I feel like The Scar Boys is giving me a second chance to create something meaningful and have fun doing it; I intend to leave no stone unturned.

Settle on one of my two current YA projects by Feb 1 and complete a draft in six months. I have two YA novels in progress. I need to decide which one I’m going to work on and commit to it. A contract would help decide, but absent that, I need to figure out where my heart lies. (And yes, one of the two is a Scar Boys sequel.)

Do everything I can to help House of Stone find a home. I have already finished a second novel, called House of Stone. It bridges the gap between YA and A, landing a bit more on the side of adult. (Honestly, is it just me, or do book classifications based on age often seem contrived, or worse, arbitrary? A lot of great adult novels are perfect for teens — City of Thieves, Black Swan Green, Ready Player One — and vice versa — Will Grayon Will Grayson, Crash and Burn, The Book Thief.) Anyway, I’m proud of House of Stone and hope it finds its way to publication.

Give my best effort to BISG every day. BISG is the Book Industry Study Group and it’s where I work (as executive director). That’s where I spend the bulk of my time and my non-Daddy, non-writing energy. It’s a great organization — a national nonprofit working on standards, research, and education on behalf of the book industry — and I owe it my industry.

Grow BISG revenue and launch a forecasting project. These are specific BISG goals that won’t mean much to the three people reading this post (Hi Mom! Hi Bobbi! Hi Krissy!), but they need to be on the list for me.

Treat my employees with fairness and respect. Speaks for itself.

Exercise more, or rather, exercise. I’m at that absolutely awful age where I feel like if I don’t exercise and eat better, I’m going to just keel over. The trick is finding the time. It ain’t easy, but 2014 has to be the year it happens. Look for me in motel gyms during the book tour.

Stop sweating the small stuff. This is a holdover from last year’s list. I have no idea how to actually accomplish this. I’m open to suggestions.

Watch less TV. I included this on my list for the first time last year, and guess what, I tracked it! I now know that I watch an average of .8 hours of prime time TV a night. It’s a loose number, and doesn’t include putting on a Mets game in the background while I work on a blog post, but it’s close enough for rock and roll. My goal this year is to make that number go down.

Play the guitar at least a few times a week. Until this past year, my guitar playing had really fallen off. I got back on the beam this past fall, and I need to stay there. There is little that brings me as much inner peace and joy as playing the guitar.

Slouch less. Another continuation from last year with no obvious means of measurement. (Though I did just sit up straighter while typing this.)

Walk to the train more. I live in Connecticut and work in New York City. The train station is a relatively flat mile from my house so this is both about exercise and saving parking fees. This is another goal I measured in 2013. The baseline is that I walked 18% of the days in which I had occastion to go to NYC. (In other words, when I wasn’t traveling, or didn’t have some other reason to have to take a train.) The goal is to improve on that number. (Yes, yes, I know, I’m completely anal and kind of a geek. But hey, it makes me happy.)

Be in close contact with my parents. Mom and Dad are long in the tooth and are slowing down. I think about my own future and how my kids will treat me as I get older, and I think I should lead by example. Besides, DUOWYWHTDUY. (Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.) Plus, you know, I love ‘em. Given time constraints and choices we all make, this one is harder than it seems. See Harry Chapin for an explanation.

Donate more money to worthy charities than we donated in 2013. Again, I have a baseline against which to measure. (The actual numbers I will keep private.)

Help people in need. Needs no explanation, other than to say that even though I’m cyncial by nature, I really do buy into the whole "pay it forward" thing.

Eat healthier – fewer cookies and other junk food. See number 11 above. I got an Up Band last summer and was tracking my diet for a while but got lazy. Maybe I need to start using it again. Or maybe I can just eat better without needing technical help. Either way, I’ll give it a shot.

**** * *********. Redacted for personal reasons! (Hey, there had to be at least one, right?)

Go to bed at night knowing that I did the best I could, at whatever I did, that day. Speaks for itself.

Be centered. I’m not a Taoist (I’m what you might call a curious secular humanist), but there is a part of Taoist philosophy that talks about how emptying oneself of all thought, feeling, and burden will allow a person to exist in the cener of his or her own being. (Kind of like Obi Wan Kenobi’s connection to The Force in Star Wars). Three times in my life I felt in such perfect harmony with the world around me, that I could’ve made Lao Tzu blush. Once was while playing the guitar, once was sipping hot chocolate on the top of a snowy mountain in Montana, and once was watching a moonrise with the woman who would later become my wife. I am basically spending the balance of my days trying to capture that sensation again. It. Was. Magical.

So this is what I resolve? How about you?

The Scar Boys in the Media

Apparently when you write a book, other people want to write about, want to write about you, or sometimes, want you to write something for their blog. Who knew? Here’s a round-up of some Scar Boys media:

School Library Journal #1

School Library Journal #2

KellyVision Blog (“That’s what she read.”)

Publishers Weekly (interview)

Publishers Weekly (review)

Shelf Awareness

Teen Book Crew

Little Book Star

The Audio Book

For most of twenty years, I commuted by car to my job in Tarrytown, New York. For the last three of those years, I was driving from Stamford, Connecticut, a thirty to sixty minute ride depending on the time of day and traffic. It was during this time I discovered the joy of audio books.

I had tried to read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road several times, but it didn’t take. The audiobook for some reason worked. Hearing the voice of the narrator brought to life took me inside the story in a way the text never did. The same thing happened with Life of Pi. And the Harry Potter books. (Some of them.) I was still reading more than listening, but audio had opened a door on a new way of enjoying literature.

After I left my job in Tarrytown and started an exciting new career in NYC, I figured that audiobooks would follow me from the car to the train. But the train, it turns out, is prime writing time. With little kids at home, it’s the only chance I get to ply my craft, so to speak. So as much as I was enjoying audio, it no longer fit in my schedule.

When I learned a year ago that Random House’s Listening Library imprint had acquired the audiobook rights to The Scar Boys, I was excited, but quickly put it out of my mind. I have so much to do to promote the print/e- edition, that I just sort of forgot it was hanging around there.

Then, three weeks ago I had an email from the Listening Library producer:

“Len,” she wrote, “I’d like you to review a few different actors we’re considering as narrators for The Scar Boys. And maybe you can play the guitar and/or provide some music to go with the story?”

First, I reviewed clips from four actors and right away knew that Lincoln Hoppe was the choice. While it helped that he also narrated King Dork, a book that shares some common traits with The Scar Boys, it was the quality of his voice that won me over. This was Harry. Luckily, the producer agreed.

Next, I spent ninety minutes in a recording booth at the Random House building in New York laying down guitar tracks. That’s right, I got to lay down tracks for this project! How cool is that? I recorded music for the intro and outdo of the project, as well as for a song that Lincoln will sing. (The lyrics are in the book.) The experience brought me back to the days of recording music when I was younger. It was an unexpected and added benefit of being published.

I’ve been so impressed with the entire Listening Library team; they have put their hearts and souls into this project. I really hope people get a chance to listen to the audiobook. I, for one, can’t wait to hear it!

The Scar Boys’ audiobook publishes the same day as the hardcover — January 21, 2014 — and will be available on CD and as a download.

The Signed Book

Every New Year’s Day, Kristen (my wife and partner in all crimes and misdemeanors) and I reflect on the year just ended. This coming January 1 we will ask each other, “What were your five best moments of 2013?” Most of our combined ten moments will have to do with our two kids, Charlie (five), and Luke (almost three). But this year there will be one moment that has nothing to do with our kids that is likely to top my list.

Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, Illinois -— a truly remarkable indie bookstore (remarkable in a wonderful way) —- hosted me as a featured author at their “Pre-Pub Club” for teens and educators two nights ago. Everyone in attendance received an advanced readers copy (ARC) of The Scar Boys, and virtually everyone read the book before coming to the event.

Kurdt plays guitar.

Nearly fifty people (30+ teens, 10+ teachers/librarians) turned out on a cold and rainy night, and I was, predictably, nervous. As the kids ate pizza (sponsored by my publisher, Egmont), I went from table to table and got to know everyone. What an incredible group — engaging, fun, funny. Then I did a thirty minute presentation, with video, live guitar, and lots of discussion. (Special shout out to Kurdt, a tenth grader at Dwight High School who had the courage to come up and play a wonderful rendition of Stairway to Heaven for all assembled. Let it be known from this day forward that Kurdt rocks.) At the end of the evening, we all posed for a group picture, and then I signed everyone’s books (and one teacher’s denim jacket!).

It was a magical night in every way. But the real magic didn’t happen for me until the next morning.

A tradition of Pre-Pub Club is that everyone in attendance signs one copy of the ARC for the author. I tucked my copy away, saving it for the plane ride out of Chicago.

The notes written to me in that book —- in my book, I suppose (still not used to that) —- were inventive, silly, and heart-warming all at once. Case in point. Hannah, a “Freighth Grader” (Hannah skipped a grade and is in ninth grade instead of eighth), wrote on the inside cover that she was going to include a note with each of the forty chapter headings. She did. They sum total was hilarious.

Matt (nicknamed “Jesus”) wrote: “Loved the whole book. Keep writing and doing what you love.”

In response to one of the bullying scenes, one of the teachers, Wendi (who may have also inadvertently started me on a path to write a Scar Boys sequel), wrote: “Thank you for opening my eyes. My heart breaks for these victims.”

And there were so many more. I loved them all. I don’t know that I’ve ever had so much fun reading words on a page. But there was one note in particular that really got me:

“Thank you for writing this book. Now I am not alone.”

That even one person was able to feel a sense of connection or belonging because of something I wrote is.. is… words fail me. It is validating, but that doesn’t begin to cover it. It is energizing, but that doesn’t really cover it either. It is amazing, though even that doesn’t cover it. Maybe I should just say it’s validenergimazing. You get the idea.

“Now I am not alone.”

I was sitting on an airplane when I read those words, and I almost completely lost it. If the person who wrote that comment should reads this post, know that you are NOT alone. There are so many people who feel exactly the same way. We all just need to find each other. And if The Scar Boys helped you do that in any way, well, then thank you for giving the top five-moment of my 2013.

Crashing and Burning with a New Cover… and R.E.M.

You might recall from an earlier post that my publisher, Egmont USA, released a working cover for The Scar Boys (the book) that was modeled on what a band poster for the Scar Boys (the fictional band) might look like. The design was the result of a contest among indie booksellers, and I thought it was pretty cool. But the more we all lived with the cover — me, Egmont, the booksellers — the more we collectively thought it seemed kind of muted. It just didn’t pop.

Egmont tested that original cover, and with input from many of those same booksellers, as well as some teens, decided to make a change. They stayed true to the original band poster from the contest, incorporating it into what’s pictured here.

I love it. L-O-V-E IT!

I was also lucky enough to receive two outstanding testimonials (blurbs in the parlance of the book industry), one for the front cover and one for the back:

Front Cover Blurb: “Compelling. This book not only captures the feeling of what it is like to form a band, but also why you form a band. It took me back to that time of being in a van on my very first tour.” — Peter Buck, R.E.M.

When I was younger (a lot younger…like, a whole lot younger), I had the pleasure of meeting Peter Buck. The band I was playing in at the time, Woofing Cookies, found itself stranded in Athens, GA after our van broke down. We wound up spending three months there, and during that time, Peter produced a song for us.

We got our van fixed, came back to New York, and that song (and let’s be honest, Peter’s involvement) got us signed to a small NYC-based record label. This was just after R.E.M. had released Fables of the Reconstruction and was hitting that level of super stardom reserved for a rarified few. We were lucky to have worked with Peter, but given the different trajectories our lives, we never had the opportunity to meet up with him again.

Flash forward two decades. I approached the fine people who handle R.E.M.’s affairs — yes, even though the band broke up there is still an R.E.M. apparatus — and asked if they could get a copy of The Scar Boys into Peter’s hands. They did. He read it. He liked it. He provided a blurb. Dang that is cool. I now owe him a double debt of gratitude.

Back Cover Blurb: “A fun, smart, addictive story that will have you forgetting you are actually reading. Laced with poetic lines and real people. Highly recommended for teens and their parents and anyone else who can still remember the 80′s.” — Michael Hassan, author Crash and Burn.

Michael who? Crash and what?

Okay, I’ll be honest, I hadn’t heard of Crash and Burn. My publisher had reached out to the editor to solicit a blurb, and it kind of freaked me out. I mean, what if I didn’t like this Michael guy’s book?

I left work the same afternoon we received the blurb and ordered a copy from Posman’s Bookstore. It arrived two days later and I started reading. And I kept reading. And I couldn’t stop.

Holy. Freaking. Cow!

Crash and Burn, it turns out, is a work of absolute genius. It’s the first person account of Steve Crashinsky, writing a book on how he saved his fellow students and teachers when a deranged classmate lays siege to his high school. The work is a master class in writing. The voice and the characters are pitch perfect, unbelievable in their believability. And that’s only the prose. The story itself is infectious. It gets in your head and stays there.

This book is, or at least should be, the coming of age story of the current generation of teens and twenty somethings. It’s also not just for teens. It’s a great example of why I hate labels like “young adult,” “new adult,” etc. A good book is a good book. And this book is beyond good.

So thank you Egmont for the new cover.

Thank you Peter for nurturing young artists all those years ago, and for taking the time to read my book now. (And for the years and years of awesome music. One of the first songs I played on my brand new Taylor acoustic electric guitar — more on that later — was “Sitting Still.)

And thank you Michael Hassan, not just for the wonderful endorsement, but for Crash and Burn.

Y’all rock.

First Scar Boys Book Event

And so it begins…

This afternoon at the Harry Bennett Branch of the Ferguson Library (Stamford, Connecticut’s public library), I presented The Scar Boys to T-MAD (Teen’s Making a Difference), the library’s teen advisory board. The book doesn’t pub for another three months (January 21), so this was as pre-pub as a pre-pub event can get. In fact, this is the first event for The Scar Boys, anywhere. (A much larger, invitation-only event is scheduled for later this month at Anderson’s in Naperville, IL.)

I do fifteen to twenty presentations a year for my day job, and at the risk of sounding immodest, I’m pretty good at it. I’m energized when I’m teaching and am comfortable on a stage. But today? Today I was flat-out freaked out.

I lugged my guitar, my computer, my Bose Soundlink, and a borrowed LCD projector to the library. The first few teens to arrive eyed me with suspicion as I set up. I didn’t know what to expect, and neither did they.

By the time I started, there were about twenty kids ranging from sixth to twelfth grade. They sat patiently as I played a video of Woofing Cookies and eased my way into the presentation. When the first hand went up to ask a question a few minutes into the session, and a dialogue began, the butterflies went away.

The kids were engaged and engaging. No, as Harry would say, “strike that,” the kids were wonderful.

My presentation had visuals, video, music (including live music), a reading, and lots of conversation. The highlight was when an eleventh grader named Lexi came up to the stage, took my guitar, and sang a Jason Mraz song. Lexi’s love of music, and the way the rest of the teens cheered her on, was a perfect expression of what is at the heart of The Scar Boys.

My favorite moment came when Andres, a high school boy, raised his hand: “I don’t read a lot,” he said, “but I read this book in two days, and I loved it.” That’s probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. Anywhere.

A huge thanks to T-MAD organizers Amy and Steve, thank you to all the kids, and thanks to Kristen and Charlie for being there. If future book events are half as fun as this, 2014 is going to be a great year.

On Playing the Guitar…

Here’s the thing about playing guitar… It’s the greatest thing ever. That may sound like an exaggeration, but really, it’s not. Playing the guitar is the greatest thing ever.

I got my first guitar for my 13th birthday. It was a cheap, Sam Ash-brand, nylon-string acoustic and I played it until the fretboard word down. That guitar was followed by a Fender Stratocaster, which was joined by a Rickenbacker 12-string, which was followed by a series of guitars I no longer remember. For more than twenty years I played at least one of those guitars every single day. I was in four bands (that I can remember), and wrote more songs than I’d care to forget.

But getting older does strange things to you. By the time I hit my 40s and became a dad, the amount of time I devoted to my guitar grew more scarce with each passing year. I had a job that I liked (and still do), was married to a woman that I loved (and still am), and had two kids that became the very center of my universe (and still are), but more often than not my days were, somehow, long slogs. If I played guitar once a week, it was a lot.

I did go through a brief period of playing more often when my first son was born, but it was fleeting. Life, it seems, is just too full of other stuff to leave time for the guitar.

Fast forward.

My book, The Scar Boys (the story of which was inspired by my years of playing guitar in a band), was acquired by Egmont USA and is being published on January 21, 2014. To promote the book, I will be doing an old fashioned book tour. But rather than roll into a town for a reading and signing, I want to do something special. I’ve been putting together a presentation with images, video, and yes, live music.

In order to get myself into playing shape for the book tour, ten days ago I began to re-devote myself to the guitar. Every night for between thirty minutes to two hours, I’ve played. I’ve learned new songs, I’ve plumbed the depths of my memory to reacquire songs I’d written three decades ago, and I’ve practiced scales just for the fun of it. It’s worked; I’m back.

The calluses have returned to the fingertips of my left hand, my pick hand is getting more nimble each night, and my ear is rounding back into form. But the physicality of playing the guitar is a secondary benefit. It’s the emotional impact that made me sit down and write this post.

I had a bad day today. Nothing necessarily bad happened, just one of those days where you don’t feel good about yourself. We all have them, and I suspect we all have them more often than we’d like to admit. But ninety minutes with my Epiphone acoustic cleared it all away. I filled our house with the resonance of major chords and minor sevenths, with my nasally off-key voice, and with an energy and excitement that can only be provided by the beautiful noise that is the guitar. My wife and sons had already gone to bed, and I like to think that the wall of sound wafting upstairs infused their dreams with a kind of levity that spoke of love.

I have no idea if the music I bring with me on the book tour will be entertaining or even good, but I know with metaphysical certitude that it will make me happy.

Fred

I have worked in the book industry on and off for thirty years — my first bookstore job was at NYU when most of you were still gleams in your fathers’ eyes — and I have watched this industry endure one seismic shift after another. It has changed so much people don’t even want to call it the “book industry” anymore. Now we’re the “publishing ecosystem,” or the “published content community,” or, I don’t know, “Fred.”

But here’s the thing about Fred. He’s a resilient sucker.

First there was the massive retail expansion of the early and mid 1990s, when Barnes and Noble and Borders were dropping superstores on the landscape like Johnny Appleseed. The square footage devoted to book retail in America tripled in a few short years, while the overall size of Fred remained relatively flat. Do the math, it’s not pretty.

Then it was the rise of e-commerce. Not only was the retail pie getting cut into ever smaller pieces by the brick and mortar crowd, now it was being cut into wafer thin slices by a seemingly infinite expanse of virtual square footage.

But those were only the warm-up acts. They were Marshall Crenshaw and Aztec Camera getting the crowd ready for Elvis Costello and U2. Retail expansion was impactful, but it wasn’t transformational. No, for that, we needed something beyond comprehension. We needed digitization.

The digital transformation of Fred has been written about ad nauseam and covered from every conceivable angle. I’ve read how print books will be dead in two years, and I’ve read how e-books are just a fad. (“No,” and “gimme a break,” by the way.) I’ve heard speakers posit a world in which digital content will save Fred, destroy Fred, and introduce Fred to a nice girl from Hartsdale so they can settle down, all in the same speech.

And yet, when I ride the commuter train home from New York City, I see people reading books. Lots of books. True, many of them are Kindles or Nooks, but an increasing number — you read that right — an increasing number, are reading print. It’s as if there has been a collective sigh of exhaustion from looking at screens all day, and people are craving the tactile and visual sensation that is ink on paper.

Now don’t get me wrong. It’s not as if digital books are going to slowly fade into the sunset. They’re not. And it’s not as if Fred — and in case you’ve already lost the thread of this meandering post, “Fred” is the book industry — doesn’t have its problems. It does. People who used to buy books to learn how to cook spaghetti, or build a deck, or be a better lawyer, now often get their content from the Internet, and usually for free.

But even with that, there’s something about books that continues to hold our interest. Books, as artifacts, are special. Think about how quickly music changed. The iTunes store launched in April, 2003. and within five years, by 2008, people were buying twice as many downloaded singles as they were CD albums, and CD albums were in steep decline.

ALBUM SALES 1973 – 2010

SINGLES SALES 1973 – 2010

In the book industry, uh, er Fred, while digital book sales have soared, the growth still pales when compared to the music industry. (For a clarity’s sake, we’ll continue to call “the music industry” the music industry.) Why? For one thing, listening to a downloaded MP3 is experientially identical to listening to a compact disc. For another, music can be sold in small discrete packages (songs). With books, neither of those things is true. Maybe that explains why for the most part, print has held its own even while digital has grown. (I say “for the most part” because mass market books have in fact taken it on the chin.) If anything, we should be thanking digital for growing the pie again.

Before any luddites out there rejoice, we might simply be in the calm before the storm. We could be one technological innovation away from another seismic shift. The truth is, no one knows and I’ve given up trying to predict the future.

But let’s not worry about the future. Let’s worry about the here and now. And for now, for right now and right here, Fred is alive and kicking, and people are reading books, print or digital, they’re reading books. And that, my friends, is good.

A Writer’s Conundrum

I mentioned in an earlier post that since completing The Scar Boys I’ve written a second novel and am hard at work on a third. The second novel, titled House of Stone, bears no relation to The Scar Boys. It’s told in the third person rather than the first, it’s set 2009 rather than in the 1980s, and it includes a preponderance of adult characters.

It’s this last fact, the many adult points of view, that form the basis of my conundrum. House of Stone lives neither in the adult nor young adult (YA) world. (And forget “New Adult,” that category has been fully co-opted by late-teen romance.)

“Len,” a YA editor said to me, “I loved the writing, the twists, and the characters in this novel, but this isn’t a teen novel, it’s an adult novel.”

Having published — or I suppose that I will have published — a YA novel, some folks think I should be concentrating on writing teen fiction. While House of Stone straddles the line between adult and teen, it can’t really be considered either. Adult editors are likely to think it’s too juvenile, and teen editors are likely to think it’s too adult. Problem is, I kind of like that it sits in this intersection. Don’t get me wrong; I know it needs work, but I’m not sure that work should be an attempt to better define the intended audience.

Below are the first few pages of House of Stone. In these pages you will meet two characters, Jared Stone and his daughter Jackie. Without giving too much away, I can tell you that the book belongs to each of them equally. There’s also an ensemble cast of other adult and teen characters, all of whom manage to push the story forward.

With all this in mind, I come to you, faithful reader of LenVlahos.com (and notice that I say reader in the singular, because I’m pretty sure there’s only one of you) for advice. From the small writing sample below, what do you think? Does this feel like the start of an adult novel or a teen novel? Should I try to mould this in one direction or the other? Or should I just not give a rat’s patootie about genre and write and shop the book I want to write and shop?

What do you thinK?

Thanks in advance for your advice!

+———————————

House of Stone

Copyright Len Vlahos, 2013

Prologue

Jackie Stone

(Before)

Jackie Stone loved her father. She loved him a lot.

She loved his face — a round, peach-colored blob floating above her unfocused eyes in the hospital on the day she was born.

She loved his voice — singing Willie Nelson and Ray Charles’s “Seven Spanish Angels” so softly that only newborn Jackie could hear it, knowing instinctively that this was friend, not foe. (Even Jackie’s mom, lying on a table in the operating room, a curtain protecting her from having to watch the scalpel slice through her abdomen to free fetal Jackie from the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, couldn’t quite make out the song her husband sang to their new daughter.)

And she loved her father’s kiss — so warm, so soft, so gentle on her forehead, and so filled with safety and protection, that for a moment, she thought she was back in the womb.

When Jackie finally met her mother a moment later, she loved her, too. But the first bond, the one formed with her father, was unbreakable.

Jackie was a calm and alert baby. It was as if she was months, not minutes old. As she grew up, she loved to hear her father tell the story about how she had laughed during that first night in the hospital. “Everyone tried to tell your mom and me that you had gas, but we knew better. This little girl, we told each other, was ready to embrace the world.”

Unfortunately for Jackie, the world wasn’t ready to embrace her.

The first problem was her sister, Megan. Two years younger, Megan came into the world kicking, screaming, and crying. Toddler Jackie didn’t know what to make of this focused bundle of hurricane force wind, but it didn’t matter. Her sense of sibling responsibility was deeply ingrained; she did everything she could to nurture and protect her little sister. Megan took full advantage. From simple things like getting Jackie to give her a treasured toy, to, as they got older, manipulating Jackie into doing her homework, Megan was alpha to Jackie’s beta.

As the girls grew up, Megan made herself the center of attention and the apple of everyone’s eye. She was a girly girl and the queen bee of her grade in school. Jackie was the polar opposite. Shy and awkward around most people, Jackie blended into the background, became part of the wallpaper. She was a beautiful ochre flower floating in a sea of beige. There, but only if you looked close. She hid beneath baggy pants, bulky sweaters, and baseball caps. Most days, Jackie wanted nothing more than to disappear.

Unless she was around her father.

Perched on her father’s knee—a spot she still treasured even now at 15 years old—Jackie’s smile would light up, and suddenly you could see how beautiful she was. He would tell stories, listen to Jackie talk about school, and sometimes just read to her. On Wednesdays they would snuggle in together to watch American Idol.

He was her anchor, and she was his transfusion of blood.

Jackie Stone’s entire universe existed in orbit around her father, and as far as she knew, it always would.

Part One

Jackie, Jared, and the Glioblastoma

(Thursday, September 10, 2009)

Jared Stone liked his brain. He liked it a lot.

Sure, there were times —- the monotony of the evening commute, the repetition of cooking a familiar meal, the late innings of a lopsided baseball game — when it would seem to shut down, switch to some kind of autopilot. But for the most part, Jared’s brain was hard at work.

It helped him navigate the halls of the state capitol in Salem, where he was serving his third two-year term representing the good people of suburban Portland. It told him how to read the inscrutable faces of his wife Deirdre and his two teenage daughters Jackie and Megan, to know when they needed him or when he should give them a wide berth. It knew which foods tasted good, which women were attractive, and which colleagues had a problem with body odor. And it seemed, generally speaking, to know right from wrong. Jared’s brain, you could say, was his best friend. Which is what made it so hard to hear that his brain had a high grade glioblastoma multiforme, or would have made it hard had Jared known what a high grade glioblastoma multiforme was.

“A glio what?” he asked.

The doctor, a gray haired woman with a square jaw and white sandals like Jared’s Aunt Eva used to wear, looked at him for a long moment. “I’m sorry Jared, it’s a brain tumor.”

He let the words roll around his brain: I’m sorry Jared, it’s a brain tumor. Was she sorry that it was a tumor, or sorry that she hadn’t made herself clear when she used the term high grade glioblastoma multiforme? Was the part of his brain that he was using at that very moment the part with the tumor?

“And?” he asked.

“And it’s not good news,” the doctor answered.

“Not good news?” Jared was having trouble understanding the conversation. He knew he needed to focus, knew it was more important now than ever that he focus, but he just couldn’t seem to do it. It was this intermittent lack of focus, these spells of confusion and memory loss, along with the persistent pain in his right temple, which had brought him to the neurologist in the first place.

“No,” the doctor said. She waited for Jared to catch up, which he did.

“Not good news,” he said, now a statement of fact.

“It’s inoperable.”

“Inoperable,” Jared repeated, this time understanding immediately.

“The only course of therapy I can prescribe is palliative.”

“I’m sorry, doctor, I don’t know that word,” he said, but he didn’t know if that had always been true, or if he had once known the word and had forgotten it.

“It means we can try to alleviate your suffering, but we can’t do anything about the growth. It’s going to stay.”

“The growth is going to stay?”

“Yes.”

He let this roll around his brain too, and again wondered if the thought was rolling over, under, around, or through the tumor itself. “Can I live with a tumor?” he asked.

The doctor let out a sigh. She hadn’t meant to and stopped herself mid-breath, so it came out as an “ahh,” and sounded more like a noise of agreement than sorrow. Then she said “No.”

“No,” Jared repeated.

“No,” the doctor said.

******************