Becky Allen's Blog, page 5

Hamilton, Cool, and YA fiction

I went to see Hamilton a few weeks ago, and, like all right thinking people, immediately became obsessed with it and began scheming to see it again. And then today I went on a bit of a Twitter tear – about Hamilton, and what it means to be cool, and my love of YA.

[View the story “Hamilton, Cool, and YA fiction” on Storify]

….remarkable how that eventually came all the way back around. Anyway, if you’re able to, go see Hamilton, it is the BEST.

Scrivener’s Three Modes

A couple days ago, I was complaining on Twitter that I am, for various reasons, working on a revision in Word instead of Scrivener – and how much that makes me appreciate stuff I’ve started taking for granted in Scrivener, since I’ve been using it for at least seven years now. A couple of people asked me about those functions, so here is a very brief overview.

This is a short look at Scrivener’s three different modes (scrivenings, corkboard, and outliner), and what I use them for. A lot of it...

My Much Belated WisCon 39 Write Up

WisCon happened! …last month. This is the fifth year I attend, and every year I say that I’m going to take detailed notes and write up panels afterwards, and that has never actually happened. So this year I gave up entirely, but after the fact decided to take a page from BFF Jess’s book and do shorter reactions instead. So here we go, everything I did at WisCon 39.

Friday

Join the Mod Squad
I actually went to this panel last year, too, since last year was my first time moderating. I felt like...

Looking Back, From Pit to Peak

Well, here we are at the beginning of a shiny new year. As I’ve said in previous years, I don’t really tend to make resolutions. I’ve found they don’t really work for me. When I’m ready to make a change or do something I need to, I just do it; trying to force myself to do that when I’m not ready just leads to feeling like a failure and no one wants that. Which isn’t to say I don’t have vague hopes and goals, but those have more to do with my usual sense of wanting to improve than with the new...

Introducing BOUND BY BLOOD AND SAND, aka, MY BOOK SOLD!!!

I’ve been trying to think of a fun or artful or eloquent way of putting it, but mostly I just keeping doing this to anyone who stands still long enough:

Here’s the blurb from the Publisher’s Weekly Rights Report:

Kate Sullivan at Delacorte Press has acquired Becky Allen’s debut Bound by Blood and Sand and a sequel, in a new YA fantasy series in the vein of Tamora Pierce, which explores class and power. The novel follows a slave girl in a desert world where the magical Well is running dry; wh...

Why I Love NaNoWriMo — and Why I Don’t Do It Anymore

Oh, October. As we head towards the end of the month, writers all over the internet are gearing up: November is National Novel Writing Month, AKA NaNoWriMo, and that means the time for planning is now. And as I do every year when my twitter list starts buzzing with Nano tweets, I spend a few minutes debating if I want to do it, sigh dramatically, and remind myself that no, much as I enjoy Nano, it is not really for me at this point.

And that’s the thing: I’ve done Nano successfully in the pas...

The Big, Exciting News

So I have some news. Some pretty big news. Some pretty rad news. Some pretty big and rad news. Which is this: I’ve recently signed on as a client of literary agent Hannah Bowman, of Liza Dawson Associates Literary Agency.

Holy crap, wow.

This is something I have been working towards for a long, long time. As a kid, I scrawled stories in my school notes. I filled up floppy disk after floppy disk with stories.1 I read constantly and knew I wanted to someday be a writer and publish a book. Not t...