Month: May 2013

Sporty Girl Books blog debuts tomorrow June 1st!

When I saw on Twitter that my friends Kris Asselin and Stacy Mozer were starting  Sporty Girl Books group blog:

“…devoted to girls (and the people who love them) who love reading, writing, talking, watching, and playing sports.

I said sign me up! Well, no. That’s not what I said at all. I said, “I’d love to do a guest post every once in a while.” But if you know me, and many of you do, you know that I have problems with one word. “No.” So when they said, do you want to join the group, you’ll only have to post once-a-month. I said, “Sure!”

You know what? I am not sorry at all. Kris and Stacy also recruited Robin Hall another up and coming writer, yoga instructor, rock climber and all around athlete, and I’ve had a blast getting to know her. Over the last weeks we’ve hammered out a new logo (see below), content ideas and blogging schedule (we’ll each post once-a-month).

At SPORTY GIRL, we want to give all girls the chance to love, watch, play, read, and write about the sports they love. We look forward to the day when the words, “You play like a girl,” is the best compliment anyone can receive.

The blog debuts tomorrow, June 1st and you can expect interviews with authors, profiles of girl athletes, book reviews, essays, current event tie-ins, and (drum roll please) GIVEAWAYS! In fact, to start things off we’ll have a rafflecopter giveaway of some of our favorite and new sporty girl books. The contest will run through the month. What do you have to do? Follow the Sporty Girl Books blog and our Twitter feed @SportyGirlBooks. For extra points you can follow our personal blogs and Twitter feed as well.

SportyGirlBooks 2

Most important we need you to spread the word to all the sporty girls in your life. We’d love for the girls to be involved in the blog. In the “Your Stories” section of the blog, girls can write about their own athletic stories, good or bad. (All stories will be reviewed before publication.)

So come visit us, enter the giveaway, and spread the word!

Into the Woods- And Back Again

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I wonder what it would be like to live in Seattle. After eight days of grey skies and rain we experienced sunshine yesterday. It actually started on Sunday with a glimmer. A quick parting and rejoining of cloud cover that triggered a gulp of breath on my part. “Oh my, God,” I said, ” I think that was sunshine.” This while my husband and I made way to LL Bean after a walk in the woods where we saw these lovely lady slipper flowers. (If I’ve got that wrong and they are something else, please correct me in the comments.) I’ve seen one or two together many times but I’ve never seven as in the picture on the right. They seemed to be popping up everywhere (along with mushrooms) in the saturated woodland floor. The tree leaves had just exploded as well and were that wonderful springtime yellow-green against wet, black bark. So amazing. Just five days ago there were twigs, and branches, and buds, and rain, and rain, and rain. Today there is hope.

 

 

Oak Hill Young Writers Inspire

Last night I spoke at the annual awards ceremony and author’s reception for the Oak Hill Young Writers’ Club in Sabattus, Maine. I knew that the event would give me a chance to brush up on my public speaking skills before my award reception Sunday evening. I knew that the event would give me a chance to see what my Creative Bookings clients were experiencing. I knew the event would be my chance to inspire a group of kids who were interested in the thing that I love most.

What I didn’t realize is how much they would inspire me.

The Oak Hill Young Writers’ Club started with a handful of children at a single school and have since grown to one hundred children throughout the the school district. The teachers and volunteers leading the charge are passionate about children and passionate about writing. They see cuts in school budgets year after year and have “band[ed] together to become a foundation of support for [the] children.” Through business and community donations, volunteers, and the kindness of local authors, they have focussed their energy on making writing appealing and cool for students through club meetings, writing contests, and scholarships.

After the speakers, I was honored to watch the attending young authors receive their t-shirts and certificates of participation for the year. The contest winners received their prizes. Their smiles, and the pride on their parent’s faces, lit up the room. In that moment, I was reminded of the pure joy of writing without the expectation of publication or money or awards.

I wish for you all a day of writing without ego.

Dream Big


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“[E]xperience has taught me that you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. Their real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire. That will, wherever it finally leads, does at least move you forward. And after a time you may recognize that the proper measure of success is not how much you’ve closed the distance to some far-off goal but the quality of what you’ve done today.”

Sonia Sotomayor, MY BELOVED WORLD (Knopf, 2013).

#amrevising

I made a chart with the first sentences of each of my chapters yesterday. That’s right folks, I am revising again. My reading at the PEN New England award ceremony is 12 days (and a wake-up) away and then… THEN!… my YA manuscript will be submitted to publishers as the award winner. 

The upcoming award triggers my Impostor Syndrome (See a great blog post about this at PubCrawl.) but the love from participants at his weekend’s New England SCBWI conference put those fears to rest. Still, I know that I’ve been working a lot on those first 20 pages one sends with their query and not at all on the other 200 pages. I wanted to do a polish on the entire manuscript.

One of the comments I had from an agent who declined was that the writing was too “diaristic.” The comment has been niggling at me, as comments that ring true do, but I hadn’t been able to pinpoint the problem. Time away from the story, and inspiration from the conference have allowed me to see it fresh this week– thus the chart.

My chart revealed many things. I have three chapters where my character “woke up”, many that include time or setting markers, and a significant number that try to catch the reader up on what happened just before the chapter starts (backstory). Diaristic.

Just as cartoon character runs in place before they shoot forward, I’ve written these throw away sentences to tell the reader what is going on.

(I wanted to put a video here but all I could find was this sound clip. Still funny.)

 

What would be more effective? Sentences with emotional resonance that grab the reader so that when they finish the previous chapter, and are about to go to sleep, they peek at the next chapter, read the sentence and say to themselves, “Just one more.”

In a future post, I’ll show you all the spreadsheet with the old and new first chapter sentences. For now, I #amrevising.