I Must Be Me

I want to write like Patrick Ness.

Like Ally Carter and Ally Condie and Sara Zarr.

Like J. R. R. Tolkein, C. S. Lewis, and Victor Hugo.

Like Suzanne Collins, and Elizabeth Bunce, and Marissa Meyer.

Like Margaret Peterson Haddix and Megan Whalen Turner and Sherwood Smith.

Like Shannon Hale and Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker and Eva Ibbotson and Jean Thesman.


And I can't.

I can't write like they do. I want to. But I can't.

This is devastating, not going to lie. But it's also a stellar revelation.

I can't write like these awesome people. And if I could, what good would that do anybody? Because the world really needs two Ally Carters? Two Sherwood Smiths? Two Frank Perettis? Two? What would I do with two?*

There is already a Suzanne Collins. The world already has one Victor Hugo. These authors did not become great by becoming someone else. Not even Tolkein and Lewis, best friends, tried to be each other. They tried to be themselves. They had their own stories to tell, and they told them.

There is only one Melody. I can only be Melody. I can't be Megan or Margaret or Marissa. I can only write like Melody, I can only write the stories that Melody was born to write.

Attempting anything else would be hazardous to my health. It would be an insult to my identity, and it would deprive the world of me. I will accomplish nothing great by trying to do what's already been done. I must be original. I must be me.

*Why, the same thing you do with one!

Missing Fantasy

The first book I ever completed was contemporary.
The second was fantasy.
The third, my 2010 NaNo novel, was fantasy.
The fourth, Stratagem, was fantasy.
The fifth, my 2011 NaNo novel, was fantasy.
The sixth, Those Who Trespass, was contemporary.

 I've always loved fantasy. Who doesn't? I spent my childhood in Narnia, my teenagerhood in Middle-Earth. Megan Whalen Turner and Robin McKinley and Shannon Hale continue to be my idols when it comes to gorgeous gowns, subtle romance, and worlds made of magic.

And yet I feel so far removed from the genre of my heart. Where are the princesses? {Where are the princes?} Where are the arranged marriages, the struggle between loyalty and love, the passion to do what's right at the cost of everything one holds dear?

You can say things in fantasy that you cannot say in contemporary.

I think I stopped writing fantasy because of world-building. Rather, I read books with superb world-building {Elizabeth Bunce, Patrick Ness, Megan Whalen Turner} and thought, "I'll never be able to do that."

Did I give up? I'm beginning to wonder.
Or did I just find my call in contemporary fiction? That's possible, too.

I really don't know. I just know that today, I'm missing fantasy.

How Artistic

As I mentioned yesterday, I recently read A Monster Calls, by Patrick Ness. I wasn't sure what to expect, because, yes, I judge books by their covers, and that is a creepy cover. Not the sort of book I would ever read naturally.

But after finishing the Chaos Walking trilogy {which, if you haven't read, you should} and reading E. M. Bowman's review {it was her favorite January read}, I decided I really couldn't miss something written by Patrick Ness, even something that had such a vague summary and creepy cover.

I wasn't disappointed. The book is classic Ness {though not, it's worth mentioning, classic Todd, the hero of the CW trilogy; which is a tribute to Ness' brilliance in changing voices}. It's haunting, it's deep, thought-provoking, and if you are the crying sort of person, you will cry.

{not my book, not my hand}

But it's also unique. It's more square than rectangle, thinner rather than taller. The pages are thick and slippery. And few pages are void of illustrations. Images encircle the words, twist through them, affect the formatting. The words and the pictures are one. It's beautiful to read, as if the story is really and truly inside of the setting and by reading the story yourself, you are stepping into the world.

Some pages have no words at all, only pictures. I thought this was just a cool feature until Ness ended a chapter with these words:

     "He climbed the stairs, not even bothering to wash off the dirt and dried blood. As he passed his grandma's room, he saw from the light under her door that she was still awake.
     "He could hear her in there, weeping."

Any picture I take won't do the moment justice, so a description will have to suffice. Upon turning the page, the reader is presented with a two-page illustration. On the left-hand page is nothing but the bottom half of a mirror on a wallpapered wall, and on the right-hand page is the bottom half of a closed door, light showing through the crack underneath. As if you were walking down a hallway at the height of a child.

Ness' writing is powerful, the way he separates his paragraphs, words his sentences. But when you turn the page and don't get more text but only a picture, a picture of how the text feels...that is art. That is capturing a moment.

It's beautiful. I could talk about how this will weave with the e-book revolution, how I think this is where books must go if they want to remain books instead of files, but I'd rather just gush about how beautiful it is. How artistic it is. I've long said that stories are works of art, but now I see what can be done when the art of words is combined with art in the traditional sense, art with images. And it's magnificent.

Smiles and Sadnesses

First, to all who took the time to read and comment on my guest post yesterday, I am beyond honored. Thank you. :) *blushes*

Okay, let's talk about the Kindle Touch.

• Smiles: Walking and reading {at the same time} just got like twenty times easier.
• Smiles: The accessibility means that I read twice as fast.
• Sadness: I read an entire book in one day, finished, and felt like I was cheating when I starred it on GoodReads. After all, I didn't feel that I'd really read it. I never held it. I never saw the cover in anything other than a jpg. I don't know how big it is.
• Sadness: I just finished Patrick Ness' A Monster Calls as a real book. The wonder and creeptastic-ness of that book would never translate over to e-book. Never. There's something about the peculiar size of the book, the unusual thickness of the pages...and the illustrations. The illustrations are legit, and they would never be the same on a Kindle. Never.
• Thought: It is my guess that more and more future books will be made uniquely, with illustrations or other oddities, like A Monster Calls. There is still demand for real books if they offer something that can't be replicated on a e-reader. {See also: Why We Broke Up}
• Smiles: FREE CLASSICS! I have many reasons for never having read Melville and Tolstoy and more than one Austen. One is that they take so darn long for me to get through, I usually need them longer than the library will grant. The other reason is that they're so big that I don't want to carry them with me everywhere {which contributes to my delay in finishing}. Both these problems are solved with the Kindle...and a ridiculous amount of these classics are free!
• Also, when I'm three pages into a long novel in three days, I can't look at the inches of pages in my hands and despair. {Yes, Kindle gives me a "percentage completed" statistic at the bottom of the screen, but it doesn't work the same in my head.} Thus, I'm more apt to actually finish.
• Smiles: Elsie Dinsmore. When I was in high school, I got many of the Elsie Dinsmore books as presents, but that era of gift-giving ended, and I was left with a gap of three books in my series, not to mention a lack of the series' continuation. But guess what--Elsie is free on Amazon Kindle. Heck yes.
• Smiles: Games. I had no idea that there were games, but my brother did. He got a cool line-drawing-connect-the-dots one for free, which is saving trees...and boredom.
• Sadness: Let's just say that no matter how heavy it is in your backpack, the batteries will never run out on your book. Ever.
• Smiles: The Bible! I go to a lot of church-esque events, which means carrying my Bible with me everywhere. Let me inform you that Bibles are heavy. Pocket Bibles are lighter, but the print is like a size 6. I got the KJV Bible on my Kindle for $1.69, and I'm very happy with it and its epic search functions. {Still waiting for it to index, though. Need to check into that.}
• Sadness: I can drop a book gently on the floor if my hands are full. Not so with a Kindle. I can shove a book into my backpack and allow it to get crushed under other baggage. Not so a Kindle. {If anyone has any comments or advice on Kindle cases, I am more than eager to hear what you've got to say. I'm in the research phase right now.}
• Smiles: It plays music, like a little iPod. Or a big iPod, rather. But since I do not have an iPod, and my phone requires an easy-to-misplace convertor cord, this is heaven.
• Smiles: Checking out e-books from my library right now. No waiting. {If I bought books, I'm sure I would be high on this instantaneousness also.} I want that book, and I want to read it now. Okay! Here it is!

I'm sure there's more, but that's a lot. My thoughts on the Kindle Touch. Summary: I love it.

Do you have an e-reader? What do you like? What do you miss? 

Points of View

In the past month, I've read three sequels.

1. The first was Uncommon Criminals, Ally Carter's sequel to Heist Society. Both books are in third-person, and both books switch point-of-views, so I'm going to leave them as-is, because I'm talking about first-person.
2. Then I read The Ask and the Answer, the sequel to Patrick Ness' The Knife of Never Letting Go. Knife was first-person, and it stuck to Todd's point-of-view like glue. Todd, Todd, Todd, and we never knew what anyone else was thinking. {Thought that's not quite true, because Todd can hear people's thoughts.} But, in Ask, Ness adds in another point-of-view, Viola's. Whaaaat?!
3. And after that came Crossed, Ally Condie's sequel to Matched. Matched was also first-person, and, like Knife we only knew what Cassia was thinking. {Is this a good time to mention that I had a character named Kassia once, and I feel robbed, somehow? No? Okay.} But, in Crossed, Condie adds in another point-of-view, Ky's. Again, whaaaaat?! 

 What is it about sequels and adding a point-of-view? {Ness took it a step further and added a third point-of-view in the final book of the Chaos Walking trilogy, Monsters of Men. Who knows about Condie, since her third book isn't yet out.}

I never would have noticed this if I hadn't been in the middle of writing a sequel myself. {Yes, I'm writing a sequel to Those Who Trespass. No, I never thought I would do it. Yes, Those Who Trespass is a stand-alone novel.} And while my first book was first-person all the way, this second book {working title: Lead Us Not} was turning out to be first-person...for two people.

I'm still not sure how I'm going to play it. I was mad at Ness for a while when he introduced Viola's POV in Ask, just because Todd's is so freaking awesome. But I quickly forgave him because those books are just that good. I actually enjoyed Ky's commentary more than Cassia's, in Crossed.

But I feel, somehow, like I'm betraying Jenn. This is her story, isn't it?

I'm trying to think of other books that have done this, either added a POV to the second book, or changed characters POVs entirely. One that comes to mind is the Queen's Thief series {The Thief, first-person, Eugenides' POV; The Queen of Attolia, third-person, various POVs; The King of Attolia, third-person, Costis' POV; A Conspiracy of Kings part 1, first-person, Sophis' POV; A Conspiracy of Kings part 2, third-person, various POVs.} {Megan Whalen Turner is the queen of POVs. She always chooses the perfect one for the book.} But I know there are others. Do any come to mind?

That Problem

I told someone recently that I didn't have that problem. You know, that problem. The one where you send out queries and then check your email every five minutes because, who knows, somebody might have replied! I said I didn't have that problem.

And I didn't. When I said it.

When I said it, I was perfectly at ease with sending out queries and promptly forgetting them. After all, I was used to getting rejections. So no replies were a good thing. No news is good news kind of philosophy.

It's been a week - nay, more than a week, a week and a half - and I've received no rejections. I would worry that the agents never got my queries, except that some of them have automatic responses, so I know this is not the case.

And I'm going something just short of crazy. I've got to know! Because...what if, what if, what if?! I'm a writer, which means I have an overactive imagination. And do you know what an overactive imagination does when left to wait on query responses? It overactivates. Oh my gosh, they love it! They hate it! They're reading it! They hate it! They haven't even looked at it. They adore it! They don't know about it!

*clutches one hand to my chest* ...the suspense...it's killing me...

So when I said I didn't have that problem...I lied.

Have you queried? Do you have that problem?


Also, and completely unrelated to this post, I just finished Patrick Ness' Chaos Walking series, and, um, the guy is brilliant. Brilliant. I am in awe. I may even be of the opinion that Chaos Walking > Hunger Games, despite the rotten tomatoes that are sure to come.

10 Favorites from 2011

Out of the 95 books read in 2010, I had to choose 10 favorites. Seriously. Seriously?

It was really, really hard. Really hard. But here they be. (Re-reads are not eligible.)

1. Between Shades of Gray, by Ruta Sepetys (YA Historical Fiction)
1. Heartwrenching and convicting, I couldn't tear myself away, and I'll never forget it.
2. A Countess Below Stairs, by Eva Ibbotson (YA Historical Fiction)
1. It's laugh-out-loud funny, utterly romantic, it's a magical story I'll read forever.
3. Scumble, by Ingrid Law (MG Magical Realism)
1. The writing is vivid. The characters are real. And the story touched my heart.
4. The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness (YA Science Fiction/Dystopian)
1. Everything about this book is unique. And brilliant. And heart-pounding.
5. Immanuel's Veins, by Ted Dekker (Adult Paranormal) 
1. This is how vampires should be. A page-turning romance that left me breathless.
6. Go Down Together: The Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, by Jeff Guinn (Adult Non-Fiction) 
1. History isn't boring. I couldn't put it down, and I almost cried at the end. Worth it.
7. The Priest's Graveyard, by Ted Dekker (Adult Thriller)
1. Dekker has the thriller down, and he sure knows how to write a twist.
8. Forest Born, by Shannon Hale (YA Fantasy)
1. Eloquent prose and real-to-life characters, this fairy-tale quietly captures your heart.
9. Starcrossed, by Elizabeth C. Bunce (YA Fantasy) 
1. Masterful world-building, brilliant plotting, and a unique story. Can't wait for more!
10. Chalice, by Robin McKinley (YA Fantasy)
1. Prose like a painting and romance like mist, this is pure literary beauty.

2011 Fiction Awards

I know. I'm late. But I didn't want to write this post until 2011 was officially over, just in case I read something that should be added. (I did: Starcrossed.) And then I was going to post the first week of January, but that federal holiday on January 2 - a MONDAY! - completely disarmed me, and I find myself posting on the first day of the second week of January

I officially read 95 books in 2011, and 69 (73%) of those were fiction. The top 10 books of 2011 will appear tomorrow, but here are some awards (re-reads are not up for award):

• MOST PLEASANT SURPRISE: Starcrossed, by Elizabeth C. Bunce
• I did not particularly enjoy Bunce's first book, A Curse as Dark as Gold, and so it was with great hesitation that I even began Starcrossed. I'm so glad I did. It's brilliant.
• (honorable mention: Heist Society, by Ally Carter)
• MOST ADDICTING: Divergent, by Veronica Roth.
• I read it en route to my aunt's wedding. I read it in the hotel room before my aunt's wedding. I read it on the way home - using cell phone light - from my aunt's wedding.
• (honorable mentions: Between Shades of Gray, by Ruta Sepetys)
• WRITER'S ENVY: The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness
• It's got the voice. It's got the world-building. And it takes the "make bad things happen to your characters" rule to a whole new level.
• (honorable mention: Starcrossed, by Elizabeth C. Bunce)
• LAUGH-OUT-LOUD FUNNY: A Countess Below Stairs, by Eva Ibbotson
• (honorable mention: Heist Society, by Ally Carter)
• BEST WORLD-BUILDING: Starcrossed, by Elizabeth C. Bunce
• Masterful, just masterful. The clothes, the politics, the religion, the geography. All of it.
• (honorable mention: Like Mandarin, by Kirsten Hubbard)
• BEST ROMANCE: A Countess Below Stairs, by Eva Ibbotson
• (honorable mention: Immanuel's Veins, by Ted Dekker)
• MOST SWOON-WORTHY: A Countess Below Stairs, by Eva Ibbotson
• (honorable mention: Heist Society, by Ally Carter)

Got any more "best-of"s that I can add? Let me know, and they shall be added. Your wish is my command in this department.