Making book trailers is absolutely a life skill! I don't know what you're talking about.

Yes, I have created my first book trailer! It is not for any book of mine, but part of a presentation for my Young Adult Litearture and Related Materials class. Because we were encouraged to do our presentations on books we had not read, I ended up with Flyy Girl, which is urban literature. This is not, as my friends might guess, My Cup of Tea. Strictly speaking, I don't even like tea, but prefer a nice foamy cocoa, while "street lit" is, mood-wise, somewhat more akin to a mug of blood-spattered gravel.

(I'm not even talking quality here so much as grittiness. Although if you're looking for quality writing, there are still - cough - a few - books I would recommend before Flyy Girl.)

But I'm not here to bash anyone's writing, and I had a great time making the book trailer. Here it is!

My Human Information Interactions class has assigned a paper. I have to write about a time when I had an information need, how I went about trying to resolve it, and how that played out. (This need must not be a simple factual question that can be answered easily.)

Writing has provided me with an unthinkable number of choices for this paper. Ye gods, I made acorn cakes from scratch to resolve an incredibly minor point. I am a research fiend. I've decided, though, to do my paper on my extensive research on albinism, which I started for the purpose of writing The Dogwatchers.

It's funny how many bizarre things I have, at some time, dedicated myself to researching. None of these searches is ever totally over. I may be satisfied, but if I happen to run across new information or a new possible source, I'll jump on it. Witness my searching UNC Chapel Hill's library for information on albinism when The Dogwatchers was nearly finished, after years of harassing doctor friends, the Internet, etc. on the subject.

(The real question is, will I have the faith in my own tact to ask my dad's new coworker, who has albinism - I think it's even the same type as the character in The Dogwatchers - to read it? "Ahem, so, [Adorable Young Music Professor], your position is tenure-track, is it not? Remind me, is that one of those committees my father is on? It is? Oh, no reason. By the way, I've written this book . . .")

(Okay, I could probably be more tactful than that.)

I JUST FINISHED THE DOGWATCHERS!

And it's snowing a magical snowstorm outside just like the magical snowstorms in the story and just whoooaaaa . . . yay!

Also, this is just the rough draft, so of course there will be editing, but: The Dogwatchers is long. 102,000 words, 368 pages. By far the longest thing I've ever written. Which is kind of cool. And I'm glad to note that middle-grade fantasy of this length is hardly unheard of these days.

So, in summary: WOO!

. . . can be so amazingly, tragi-comically far apart.

See also here and here for tonight's sponsor of my bewildered head-shaking, the Menifee Union school district in southern California, where they have just pulled the Merriam Webster's dictionary from classrooms because it contains a definition for "oral sex."

If you read my last post, good news! Bloomsbury is reissuing Magic Under Glass with a new cover.

Hopefully, they've got the message now, and this will be the last time they'll have to withdraw a cover due to whitewashing. (Which, incidentally, is not the only unfortunate can't-really-be-an-accident misrepresentation publishers have slapped onto this and other books. Several people have noted the covers of Ask Me No Questions and Secrets of Truth and Beauty, both of which center around overweight young women yet have covers portraying conventionally pretty girls without so much as a chubby cheek in sight.)

Still, this is definitely a step. Yay progress!

Today's two writing-related topics are steampunk (yay!) and cover whitewashing (boo!).

How do these things relate? Well, Jaclyn Dolamore's debut novel, Magic Under Glass, is YA steampunk. (I have heard some arguments for calling it "Victorian fantasy" instead. Haven't yet read it, so I'm going by what the various categorizing entities say.) It's also one of that sadly rare species, the fantasy novel with a protagonist who isn't white. Unfortunately, its publisher, Bloomsbury, saw fit to give it a cover featuring a white girl. Even more unfortunately, this is the second time Bloomsbury has done this in less than a year.

When Justine Larbalestier's YA novel Liar came out from Bloomsbury in 2009, fans raged at the original cover, featuring an obviously-white girl with straight hair in place of the book's "nappy-haired" mixed-race protagonist. The author joined the outcry, and Bloomsbury ended up giving Liar a new cover.

At the time the Liar incident started appearing on some of the blogs I read, I shook my head, disappointed but not too surprised. But this is ridiculous. I know that the cover of Magic Under Glass was probably decided already when people let Bloomsbury have it over Liar, but what? Did they think no one would notice? They didn't issue an apology or an assurance that they will fix things in the paperback. What's up with that?

The range of literature published in this country featuring non-white protagonists is disproportionate to the population, to say the least. Things get even worse if you'd love to read about people of varied ethnic backgrounds, but don't care for "gritty" books, books that make you cry your eyes out, or books that are largely about racism. Yes, racism exists, and it's important that it be recognized. But why shouldn't a person of any race be able to just pick up a freaking fantasy novel and read a freaking fantasy story (or mystery or romance or whatever floats that person's literary boat) featuring someone whose skin falls outside of the cream-to-khaki color range? By making one of a few such books look like it is about a white person, Bloomsbury implies that people of color don't belong in this genre, or that this genre isn't for them. I'll say it again: what's up with that?

Naturally, one doesn't want to punish the author by boycotting her book. She's not the one being racist here, and is probably distressed by the misrepresentation of her protagonist. Some bloggers suggest that concerned readers contact Bloomsbury. Probably a good idea, but I also think it's important just to make noise about this whitewashing business and let Bloomsbury know readers have noticed and We Are Not Amused. Hence my commentary here.

If you want to see what some other people have to say about this issue, check out this Open Letter to Bloomsbury Kids USA, and the posts here and here and here. There are also these suggestions on how white bloggers should not take this news.




To end on a happier note, steampunk! As part of my YA Lit class, I've joined the listserv for the Young Adult Library Services Association. It is neato. At one member's request, the listserv's contributors have volunteered titles of YA steampunk, which were then compiled into a snazzy list. Check it out!

Do you like exclamation points?

I do!

A friend told me she'd read that you get one exclamation point every one hundred thousand words, and maybe this is true if you're writing your thesis, but certainly not dialogue in a YA or MG novel. They can also pop up in a character's thoughts and, in informal fiction or fiction with a strong POV, can show up practically anywhere. Of course, this doesn't mean there aren't limits.

The exclamation point is one of many little things that are just oh-so-fun to do in your writing. Usually, they're fun because they're actually quite effective at what they're meant to do: convey mood, add to rhythm or voice of the writing, or just wrap up a paragraph nicely. And while some people disparage these techniques - "These are tricks that your writing shouldn't need" - I disagree. Like anything else in writing, they can be done poorly or done well, but they can be great tools in the writer's utility belt. ("Quick, Robin, the bat-ellipses!") Yes, they do, in part because of their effectiveness, lend themselves to being overused. But fear not. Even outside of dialogue, as long as you don't go overboard:

You can use exclamation points. People definitely use them when they talk, but that isn't all. People - especially certain kinds of people - use them when they think. This can be an opportunity to help ground your story's POV as well as convey the POV character's mood. After all, think about the difference between, They couldn't invite the officer in. She'd see the body. and They couldn't invite the officer in! She'd see the body!

You can use sentence fragments. (I feel like someone hawking the allowances of a new diet. Chocolate! Pizza! Sentence fragments!) I like these most when completing the thought as a proper sentence would force me to be repetitive or use a less-than-punchy phrase. They're quite useful with sounds, for example: He listened hard in the darkness. Distant splashing, a yelp, and then nothing. Note the absence of a boring and obvious phrase like "he heard." Sentence fragments are not the only way to solve this problem, but they are a perfectly good one.

You can use ellipses. These are great. Not only are they a well-recognized standard for what they do - indicating a pause or a thought trailing off, especially in thought or dialogue - but they provide a little visual variation to the text. This does make it extremely obvious if you overuse them, but that only makes it that much easier to catch. You do want to be careful that you're not redundant with them. That is, if something is obviously left unknown, like an uncertainty being pondered at the end of a chapter, you may not want to underscore the point by tacking on ellipses at the end of that thought.

You can use words like "rather," "quite," and "just" in ways that don't really add to the strict meaning of sentences. Some people frown about this, but most see the value it offers as part of a story's voice. Just be extremely careful about overuse. This is one of the many places that reading your work aloud can save you.

And in dialogue, you can have characters use each other's names. Just not all the time. (That's what today's entry really is: things that are so much fun that you want to use them all the time, but you can't.) This is great for drama and/or emotional connection between characters. You just don't want to be all like (drawing two completely random names out of the Hat of Unimpeachable Randomness):
"Bella?"
"What is it, Edward?"
"You have to understand, Bella. You're in danger. Lots of dangerous people are looking for you, Bella."
"But you'll protect me, Edward."
(I shook the Hat really well. I'm as surprised as you are.)



As I said, with a little moderation, these are great. *Insert analogy about cooking with spices.* And of course, this applies to any writing technique: metaphors, rhetorical questions, description, exposition. The ones mentioned here are just some that I'd heard maligned, so I thought I'd throw out my tuppence on the subject.

I'm getting another short story published! My story Misunderstood will appear in the October 2010 issue of Beyond Centauri, a magazine for younger readers. It's a small magazine, but I thought it seemed like a good fit for the story, and I'm quite pleased. (Beyond Centauri is a paying market, if kind of a nominal one.)

The story is soft sci-fi, written from a prompt in my Advanced Fiction class at W&M. It's about a teenaged girl whose large-scale habitation ship gets humankind's first message from aliens, then has to try to figure out what it means.

So, huzzah!

. . . but it's actually full of beginnings and endings! Of chapters, that is. And every one an opportunity!

One hears a lot of suggestions about how a book shouldn't begin: character waking up, cheap hook that doesn't really tie in well, disconnected dialogue, long chunks of description or backstory. The same things don't necessarily apply to openings of chapters after the first. Obviously, you still don't want a cheap hook that doesn't tie in, but "character waking up" is back in the game, especially if the previous chapter ended with the character being knocked unconscious or going to sleep in a strange place. Similarly, dialogue or description can hold a reader's attention better when the reader already has a reason to care. For example, a detailed description of a bank may be hard to pull off as the opening to a book, but work well at the beginning of the chapter after the protagonist decides to rob it.

Chapter openings are great opportunities for changing pace. If one chapter closes with a closely-described scene, the next might start with, "The next day . . ." or "For the rest of the afternoon . . ." or "Over the next few days . . ." You can do this by changing scenes, of course, but a chapter break is cleaner and more decisive. Alternately, you can shift from summary to scene.



And now, ( a totally unscientific sample set taken from my shelf! )



Possibly even more important in maintaining pace and reader interest is the chapter ending. After all, what's your "stopping place" when you have to quit reading and go to bed/make supper/take over the world/etc.? Mine is almost always "when I finish this chapter." Imagine at the end of every chapter that some reader will stick the bookmark in here. Is there enough going on to make sure that reader comes hurrying back?

(I'm not covering the end of the book here. Too big. Some other time.)

This post by The Intern lists some examples of how chapter endings keep readers hooked. Since this covers many of the chapter ending types I know, I'm going to skip straight to ( more Unscientific Examples ).



I'm now moved down to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where my classes start Monday. I'm especially excited about that YA Literature course.

Wishing everyone a wonderful Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, much-belated Ramadan, and general winteriness!

In the spirit of the season, I'd like to commend literary agent Nathan Bransford for his generosity in donating a dollar to Heifer International for every person who comments on his blog. His donation period is over, but if you click the aforetyped link ("aforetyped" is absolutely a word, thank you), you'll find a list of other blogs running similar charity challenges. Leaving comments with them lets you help out a great organization for free!

For those who may not know, Heifer International provides farm animals, trees, beehives, and so on to struggling people around the world. Heifer also provides training, as well as stud service for the animals provided. The first female offspring of the gift animals are then passed on to other members of the original receiver's community. Heifer actively supports peace, education, prosperity, and equality for all people.



In other blogtastic news, this post by The Intern offers some . . . creative . . . ways to cut costs in traditional print media.



I haven't posted in a long time, largely because of grad school preparation. Most of that is done now, and I was thrilled the other day to get the reading list for a class I'm taking in YA literature. It's long, including classics like The Chocolate War and The Outsiders, more recent books like Speak (shout-out to Laurie Halse Anderson) and What I Saw and How I Lied, and popular YA genre works like Uglies and, yes, both Twilight and Eragon. The interesting thing about this class is that it's not an English course, but one from the Library Science department. The professor emphasized that we won't be doing literary criticism, but analyzing what makes books appeal to the YA audience. As a writer of young adult and middle grade fantasy, I'm all ears.

. . . is what I keep having to tell myself as I press on through the last fifth or sixth or so of The Dogwatchers. It's wildly exciting to be so close to the end, but there are definitely things over which I pause, torn, before saying, "FIRST DRAFT!" and continuing to write.

One thing I've run into was well-put by literary agent Rachelle Gardner in her blog entry on foreshadowing versus "telegraphing." When you, the author, already know that something unexpected is going to happen, it's hard sometimes not to let that knowledge slip in. Indeed, while Ms. Gardner says that authors often do this in the name of foreshadowing, "telegraphing" - basically, giving overly-obvious hints as to something that's going to happen, particularly if that thing is supposed to be a twist - can be far more insidious.

At one point in The Dogwatchers, I caught myself giving characters an explicit contingency plan for a situation that really had no reason to occur to them: "If A doesn't work, we'll do B." They should have just planned on A, a solid-seeming course, been totally surprised when it failed, and come up with B afterward. This way, readers will be as surprised as the characters are when Plan A doesn't work, rather than having the idea that it might fail already planted in their heads. Indeed, as I first wrote it, readers might assume that Plan A will fail, or else why would the story detail Plan B?

This is basically the same problem as that in Ms. Gardner's example. Avoid having your characters consider the possibility that something will happen when that something is supposed to be even remotely surprising. This can be difficult, since you certainly don't want your characters to fail to think of an obvious possibility, but then, of course, the problem is that your twist is obvious, and you'll want to address that. I think some writers are tempted to include arguments against the likelihood of the twist, as in Ms. Gardner's example: a character says, "What if X is the case?" and another character responds, "No way, for these reasons!" All this does is make readers aware of the possibility of X. They may even spot the loophole in the characters' reasoning against X, which will make them suspect that X will, in fact, happen.



On a totally different note, I have to once again rave a little (the good kind of raving) about a book that I picked up for research, Daniel Pool's What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. Highly readable and sometimes humorous, it contains well-organized and information-packed chapters on various aspects of Victorian England, including money, the peerage, fashion, marriage, orphans, fox hunting . . . the list goes on. It explains the historical basics of each subject, then gives interesting tidbits, like which card games were trendy and which ones played mostly by stuffy old people *coughwhistcough*, and includes examples from Victorian fiction. There's also a fantastic glossary of Victorian terms.

The book's stated intent is to serve as a reference for people who are reading Victorian novels and can't understand the money talk or want to know the difference between a barrister and a solicitor (like Eugene and Mortimer in Dickens' Our Mutual Friend), but it's also an amazing tool for worldbuilders insomuch as it presents a society with rules strange and different from our own, then explains the details and processes by which all of these things functioned. Especially valuable if you or someone you know writes steampunk. And after all, the holidays are coming up . . .

I've always liked intelligent characters. Since most of the books I love are YA or middle-grade, this often means characters who are smart teens or children. In popular fiction, we have Hermione Granger, Library Ranger; Artemis Fowl, preteen evil supergenius; and Matilda Wormwood, she of the mighty brain that gets so bored of reading complete libraries and doing instantaneous long division that it turns to telekinesis. I love them all. It certainly doesn't bother me to read about child characters with intellects more powerful than mine. Smart children are great. What I've come to realize, though, is that I detest wise children.

Kids have lots of great qualities. Energy, creativity, candor, and - overdone as it sometimes is in fiction - innocence and openness. Like all people, they vary, so even these traits don't apply to all children, but one thing that just plain doesn't belong with children? Wisdom.

Wisdom - the kind that can make a person empathetic, patient, a good judge of character, and knowledgeable about life, truth, and relationships - comes with experience. Once again, this isn't cut-and-dried; an older person may not be more patient or empathetic than a younger one. But think about it: it takes a couple of years before a child is even capable of empathizing, of realizing that other people even have minds, internal lives, wants, needs. In general, children and teens have shorter attention spans, are less thoughtful, and have shakier, more selfish, or more myopic judgment than older people of similar backgrounds.

None of this means that I think people aren't writing child characters impatient and selfish enough. (Although recognition of these flaws can be a powerful tool for getting reader sympathy. I love that Diana Wynne Jones' characters often have selfish wants, even if they are too ashamed to express them.)

No. What it means is that (human) child characters need not to smile knowingly and state simplified universal truths, leaving the other characters in awe. They need not to instantly recognize relationships between other characters, and especially not to smirk and tell the protagonist how obvious it is that s/he likes the romantic interest, well before anyone else catches on. They need not to immediately recognize dishonesty or untrustworthy persons. I don't care if they are streetsmart young members of the thieves' guild or classically educated princesses in courts full of intrigue or blind kids who are super-duper practiced with using their other senses. They must not be Wise in the Ways of the World.

Ideally, you also want to be careful with younger child characters who open their eyes really wide and say, "Mommy, why do people hurt each other?"

Kids can certainly be know-it-alls. Hermione is a great example of this, and one of my favorite fictional brainiacs. Her know-it-all-ism is much like mine was in school: a lot of book-smarts plus a desire to prove herself plus some social awkwardness. She is, in that way, quite a realistic character, as well as sympathetic and entertaining.

Of course, kids and teens may think that they are wise when they aren't - as may anyone. And like anyone, they can have moments of insight or brilliant realizations. Just don't make them frequent, and don't make them enough of a distinguishing characteristic of a child character that one could call the character "wise."

In part, this just comes down to the fact that it's okay for a child character to have more knowledge and/or technical skill than I do, just like it's okay if a child character can use magic when I can't. When a child character has more wisdom than I do, it sets off both my BS-detector and my growly face. I resent being told how life works by people who have experienced very little of it.

I'm sure that, like any rule, this has exceptions, and I welcome hearing about them!

***

On an unrelated note, I'm not sure whether any of you are doing NaNo this year - if so, good luck, and do tell! - but here is a most entertaining little explanation and endorsement of the phenomenon.

This past week I:

- Worked on The Dogwatchers. Muddled through a scene that is supposed to be subtle. Repeat after self: "First draft."

- Officially accepted place at the school of Information and Library Science at UNC Chapel Hill. Will start in January. Exciting!

- Read Farenheit 451.

I'm also reading, for world-building purposes, an excellent book called What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew. Their time periods are later than my world's analogous period, but the book is fascinating in its own right as well as providing insight on how a number of extinct institutions and traditions actually functioned. It's really intended to be a reference while reading the works of Dickens, Austen, Trollope, Thackeray, and so on - some of its detailed explanations (English currency, brief rules of whist and other card games) are hard to take in. In some cases, though, as with the rules of social precedence, this is the point - people living at the time had trouble with them, too.

The most interesting thing I've learned so far is that debtors' prison was a less-nonsensical concept than I had imagined. I used to think, "Wait, they can't pay, so you put them in jail? Now they can't work or do anything to get money to pay! This isn't even a vicious cycle, it's a dead end!"

What actually happened depended on whether you were a "debtor" or a "bankrupt," a distinction relying on whether you were considered legally to be a tradesman. A "bankrupt" would have all of his or her possessions seized, sold, and used to pay creditors as much as was possible. Any extra money went to the bankrupt person. If the debts weren't covered, oh well; they'd done all they could, and no one could get more from them. (Interestingly, if someone failed to pay rent, the owner of the establishment could go in to take and sell the person's furniture to make up the rent money.)

In the case of a "debtor," things started when a creditor paid a shilling for an arrest warrant, which they gave to the sheriff, who arrested the owing party and put him or - well, okay, generally him - into custody. It wasn't always bad custody; he might even be put up in the sheriff's house. This was just to ensure that the person appeared in court, where he might yet be found not to owe money at all. No one seems to have checked these things, so the whole situation reminds me of those charity events at college where you pay to have one of your friends "arrested," and the friend then has to get someone to pay "bail."

Once you were found a debtor, and without cash on hand to pay, you were asked to sell your possessions and pay as much of the debt as possible, like a bankrupt. The difference was that a debtor could refuse, at which point it was off to debtors' prison. The prison actually acted as a coercion device to encourage people to sell their belongings and pay off their debts. Once they had nothing to sell - no way that they potentially could pay their creditors - they could no longer legally be held in prison.

So, huzzah for learning things!

I just finished reading War of the Rats by David L. Robbins, bestselling author and Advanced Fiction professor extraordinaire. As I told him, I kept picking it up with the intention of reading critically to see whether he'd done any of the things he told our class not to do, but I failed, as I was always drawn into the story right away. So if anyone "sits down" or "looks up at the stars" ("You don't need to say 'looks up at the stars!' That's where we keep them!"), I know nothing about it.

I loved the book - which is really something, considering that I am a person of notoriously squishy sensibilities whose last encounter with what you might call a war novel was a required reading of The Killer Angels in tenth grade. This was the poignant, moving, and exceedingly high-stakes story of snipers in WWII Stalingrad, centered on a duel between the single best sniper in the Russian army and the Nazi supersniper flown in from Berlin to hunt him. All but one of the four POV characters are meticulously-researched real people, and the action takes place in the jagged, haunting landscape of the bombed-out factory city. A great book, and one I thoroughly recommend.

Aaand, yesterday was the release date of DLR's new book, Broken Jewel. Be excited!

I plan to follow a fun piece of advice I once saw for friends of authors. I will walk into my little local branch of Barnes & Noble - the only bookstore in our area - and ask where the book is. If they do not have it, I will make Eyes of Surprise and say, "Really? David L. Robbins is a bestselling Virginia author!" (Do not say this if this is not true of your author friend. Just focus on the what is true and sounds good.) Then I will order the book. If nothing else, it may put his name on their radar a little bit. And if they do have it already, then yay! New book for me!

I have written a guest blog at the lovely writing community If You Give a Girl a Pen! Huzzah! Find it here.

Writing and scarves, of course! I'm not actually doing NaNoWriMo this year, because I'm working on other projects, but Dragons Over London was the product of NaNoWriMo 2006, so I'm a big fan of the challenge.

And here, appropriately, is a great blog post combining two fall essentials: good self-editing techniques and cute boys in scarves. My scarf and I approve.

As regards icon: a cravat is basically a scarf for fops. Only they've worked things out so they can wear them all year round! Dastardly geniuses, those fops.

I have - tentatively - finished my edit of Dragons Over London! Sometime in the next couple of days, I will write the cover letter and send it all off to the contest.

In other news that makes me all kinds of happy, I have discovered the community dianawynnejones. With this discovery came a second one, that of a confusing logic problem. This group is for fans of author Diana Wynne Jones. It has about 674 members as of right now. According to the statistics page, Livejournal's total number of accounts is currently 23,568,712. These numbers are not the same! HOW CAN THIS BE?

I joined the group immediately, of course, but careful mathematics indicate that this does not make the numbers equal. Strange. Well, I guess we can never know all the answers.

Here, though, is an example of why everyone with a Livejournal account should belong to this community: an interview with DWJ in which she reveals which countries send her the most (and fewest) fanmail marriage proposals for Howl, and also mentions that Cat Chant of the Chrestomanci books is supposed to have some kind of autism. Interesting . . .

On the topic of actual writing, something I recently read has stuck in my mind. Writing, it said, creates an experience in which readers focus on the moment much more than people do in most of their everyday lives. I find this is true. Most of the time that I'm working, walking, exercising, cooking, and so on, my mind wanders, not just to conventional daydreams, but to things I'll do later, things I've read, things I've recently seen or done. I spend probably a very small portion of my day focused on what I'm doing right then, on my immediate surroundings, or on the emotions that those things elicit from me. When reading, however, I'm all about the moment that the characters are in.

I guess you can have a story in which the characters are themselves removed from their immediate realities. They can certainly plan, remember, and daydream. Technically, all flashback scenes are outside of the moment, although if the character is having a flashback, then we're still following along closely with what she's experiencing right now. In that sense, though, readers are in the moment with characters no matter what wacky internal side trips the characters take, because we're still following what's going through their heads right now. Strange that that could seem more immediate than a real person's actual daydream.

Still, practically speaking, I find most characters to spend most of the time that I'm reading about them at least somewhat focused on what's going on. I wonder if this is, in itself, a kind of escapism or vicarious thrill for readers. After all, most of the experiences that people wish they would have are things they would not tune out, things worth being fully present for. Maybe this is why people like to read about - and write about - others having experiences that make them mentally sit up and pay attention.

Thoughts?

This month, I have two unrelated special opportunities to submit a complete manuscript to a publisher. I just mailed Rabbit and Cougar to Karen Lotz of Candlewich Press (who generously offered to read the manuscripts of all the people whose pitches she missed at the James River Writers conference due to her being sick), and I will send Dragons Over London to a contest by Random House as soon as I've finished editing the last few chapters. This is especially exciting because because Dragons Over London, which I love but have hesitated to submit places because of its novella-category length, is just the right length to fit the requirements.

Both "submitting directly to publisher" and the "submitting full manuscript" are unusual to me. I've done each of them before in various situations, but most of my submissions are queries, sometimes with synopses and/or sample chapters, and most go to agents.

So that's what I'm up to right now. I've also been doing some worldbuilding research, reading books about the Renaissance and the Elizabethan era. The more I read about that time, the more I realize that the average person's life was quite similar to the life s/he might have led during the Middle Ages. Perhaps this is not *Jedi hands* the historical period of basis I was looking for.

Still, while you're here, Interesting Renaissance Fact: in 1500, each of the three most populous cities in Europe had about 150,000 people. London, the largest city in England, had only 50,000.

I spent Friday and Saturday at the ever-excellent annual James River Writers conference in Richmond. Located in the Library of Virginia, it ran from 9:00 to 4:30 each of those days. A quick run-down of the fun stuff I did there:

1. Saw David L. Robbins, who I can now ALMOST call by his name instead of "Professor Robbins." He's now teaching at VCU, and hopes to return to William & Mary when its poor public-school budget has the monies.

Apparently he has named a character after me in his new book, Broken Jewel, which comes out November 10. He used my real last name - "Anica Lewis" is my writing name, "Anica" and "Lewis" being my two middle names. So that's MAJOR Willcox to you! And if you forget the extra L, you can drop and give me ten!

2. Bought Professor David Robbins' book War of the Rats. Also Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater. Edgy YA werewolf love story? Yes please. Got both books signed. Conferences are awesome. I felt even better about this because the book table was provided by a local independent, Fountain Bookstore.

3. Attended many panels. This means - that's right - a list within a list! ( Here, I'll put it behind a cut. )

I was scheduled for a five-minute pitch session with editor Karen Lotz of Candlewick Press, but sadly, she was sick and missed the whole conference. What a bummer for her! I know I'd hate to miss it. It was a bummer for me, too, of course, as I'd practiced my pitch of Rabbit and Cougar for days, but that did make me smoother when talking to other writers about it during breaks. Also, Ms. Lotz, who is apparently super-awesome, has offered to read the ENTIRE manuscript of every person who was scheduled to pitch her. Checking the list they gave me, this is at least eighteen people. Wow. We're told we'll receive details by e-mail.

So, a great weekend! And before I forget, I have found an independent seller of books - used, new, rare, and out of print - with a huge inventory and from which one can order online with very reasonable shipping as well as good prices. Check it out.

Cattail flour has gluten. :D