Hello, neglected LJ!

I've posted the cover to Winterling, out from HarperCollins on Jan 3, 2012, on my other blog:

http://sprineas.wordpress.com/

Come check it out!

Hello!

To celebrate today's release of The Magic Thief: Found in paperback, I've posted a free story on my other blog. You should read it if you ever wondered what Nevery's characteristic creature is--what animal he'd turn into if the embero spell was used on him.

Story is here:

http://sprineas.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/the-characteristic-creature/

Cheerio!

You could win this!!



The book, not the dog.

All you have to do is click here:

http://sprineas.wordpress.com/

and follow the directions listed there.

Remember, don't enter here, do it over on the other blog.

Happy reading!

An update on the shoebox house. It is now being lived in by Aragorn, stormtoopers, and the Usagi Yojimbo action figure that usagiguy sent Theo a couple of years ago.

#

Dog update: Athena chases bunnies every chance she gets.

She's never caught one.

#

Homeschool update. Today is “Scholar’s Choice,” which means Theo gets to choose what to work on, so he's writing “The Roald Book,” which is thinly disguised Alanna fanfic, except that the main character is a kind, gentle boy who brings bandages and helps his friends when they get beat up, and has a dog named Bunny. Roald is so totally a Gary Stu character.

#

Friend update: Today is gregvaneekhout's birthday!

You may well wonder what Greg has to do with bunnies.

Writing update: I’m hard at work on the sequel to Winterling, which is called The Summerkin. The birthday Greg says that “Summerkin” sounds like "bunnies" to him, so whenever I send myself the document (it’s how I make a backup), the subject line of the email is “Bunnykin.”

I wrote a rabbit into the book, just for Greg. Unfortunately, it is a dead rabbit. Not a very nice birthday present, really.

#

More writing update. In April I’m going to the Blue Heaven workshop, which means I have an end-of-March deadline for Bunnykin. Thus I have set myself a 500-word-per-day goal. Usually I’m a binge writer, which means I tend to write, like, 5000 words over a couple of days and then nothing for three weeks. So I don’t know if this daily-goal thing is going to work out.

Fortunately, the book has its claws in me right now, so I’m zooming along. Yesterday I did 3000 words.

Still, I have to hit today's 500-word goal.

If I don't, the bunnies are going to get me.

##

My daughter just offered my son this checklist of possible activities this afternoon:

__ Me attack you

__Cook brownies/cupcakes

__Cook something random

__Play outside

__Make shoebox house

__Write

__Tennis ball

__Cook

__Long range fight

__Play with Daisy


#

What do you think they did?

For proof of their perfidy, I offer first Exhibit A:





Then, Exhibit B:




And finally, as if we need more, Exhibit C (note the gnawed-off horns):




At which we can conclude, beyond any doubt, that cats are, in fact, evil.

My resolution for 2011: to eat more breakfast food that isn't yellow.

What's yours?

Howdy--

Taking a short Internet holiday here. Back after New Year's.

Have a good one!

One really good thing to come out of the India trip is that I had a day in the hotel with nothing to do, so I wrote 5500 words on the sequel to Winterling, which is about 5500 more words than I had before. Then I wrote another 500 words while half-asleep on the plane ride home. As I told rj_anderson on Twitter the other day, sometimes I write better and faster when I’m wiped out exhausted because the internal editor switches off.

Hrm. Maybe I need more days in hotels with nothing to do...

#

stephanieburgis and psamphire have a lovely holiday present for you, the http://www.decemberlightsproject.com/. Here you can read "free stories that make us laugh and feel good even in the depths of winter." My story "Jane: A Story of Magic, Manners, and Romance" went up last week. As a note, there is smooching in this story, but it’s okay for young readers, too. If you’re a Jane Austen fan, let me know if you catch the JA references. Heh.

#



This year J and I are sending out this holiday card, and we’re trying to come up with a good greeting. J wants something boring, like Wishing you joy or Peace on earth.



I’m thinking of something else, more like

The galaxy is a cold dark place. Merry Christmas.

Or

The universe doesn’t care if you get coal in your stocking.

Or maybe

Entropy 1, Santa 0 (which is a reference to my favorite Christmas story .)

What, you’ve got a better one?

##

So I have this stupid chronic health issue that I’ve alluded to a couple of times here, but don’t really want to get into, and unfortunately, I got over to India and it flared up, so I had to come home early, about which I’m very bummed. Also still feeling crummy, partly because of the jet lag which, I’m telling you, has been epic.

On the plus side, I was able to do my presentations at the book festival. The kid readers there were terrific. With one group I had an intense debate about whether Conn and Rowan are going to be boyfriend and girlfriend (the kids said yes, I say, oh my gawd, no).

Because of the ick, I didn’t manage to take any pictures, but a new writer-buddy, Wendy Orr, sent along some of hers, one of which I share with you.



This is in front of the fancy hotel in Delhi. Notice the fountains, the colored spotlights, the blue fairy lights, the flaming torches. You think that’s cool, you should check out the hotel lobby. Fan-cy.

So anyway, one night I’m out there waiting for our car with another new writer-buddy, Lian Tanner. With us is our minder, who is Indian, and standing nearby are a couple of taxi drivers and a bellhop. Thanks to my friend K, I’ve watched a couple of Bollywood movies, and I’m trying to explain them to Lian, who has never seen one. Minder and I are laughing about the "my heart is full of the pain of disco" song from Om Shanti Om. Then I start singing the refrain from "Deewangi Deewangi", and the minder, the taxi drivers and the bellhop join in, all of us doing the dance and the hand motions…

Only click those links to the videos if you want to experience PURE AWESOME.

##

Yikes, I'm leaving for a book tour in India in (*checks watch*) three and a half hours.

For the past two days I've been prepping for jet lag, trying to stay up very late and sleep during the day. Somehow my internal clock just can't get over waking up at 6:30am, no matter what time I go to bed. Sad.

This isn't a publisher-sponsored book tour, but one sponsored by the American Center, which is the cultural arm of the U.S. Embassy. Each stop has planned different things, plus I'm doing an event for the books' distributor over there, Penguin-India.

Anyway, I'm all packed! It's going to be all kinds of crazy fun, beginning with the Bookaroo children's book festival in New Delhi, and then stops in Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, and Mumbai. Then home on December 8th. Whee! So excited.

#

Before I go! A heads up that the Bridget Kicks Cancer auction is going on right now and includes an item from me: a full manuscript critique PLUS a referral to my awesome agent, Caitlin Blasdell, who will read a 50 page partial.

Another thing is that the amazingly wonderful author and all-around nice guy Patrick Rothfuss (author of The Name of the Wind, pretty much the best book I read last year) is raising money for Heifer International. The deal is, your contribution enters you in a drawing to win one of a long list of prizes, including signed first editions of the Magic Thief series.

Here is Patrick's blog and the information needed to enter.

#

I'll try to blog with pictures from India. Here I gooooooo!

##

The leaf vacuum is coming! Do you know what this is? I'd never heard of a leaf vacuum until we moved to Iowa. Anyway, if you rake leaves out to the curb, this big truck comes around and sucks them all up. Me and Best Dog got busy raking.



Dog didn't do much but follow me around. Fortunately, we had some help:



And ended up with this!



Then the kids found this. Recognize it?



I’m pretty sure it’s the butterfly we raised from an egg, because the kids found it right next to the place where we released it.

Alas. It was buried with due ceremony.

I don't do very many writing-craft posts...

(jeez, have I ever done a craft post?)

...but I'm participating in this mentorship program organized by the awesome Sacha Whalen, and I wrote a long email about voice to my mentee, Adam Veile, and he kindly gave me permission to repost parts of it here because I've always had trouble articulating what I mean by voice, and I managed to get closer this time.

Voice has to do with BELIEVING, which is, I think, the most crucial skill for a writer. You have to truly and completely believe in your characters, inhabit their headspace, take on their attitudes, see what they see, think the way they think. With belief comes voice.

And here's what I wrote to Adam (this all relevant to the close third person point-of-view he's using in his middle-grade novel):

Voice lies in the intersection of style and point-of-view, and is evident in the rhythm and the word choices. It's style informed by point-of-view. Using voice is a way of getting even closer to your character's experience, and it helps your reader get closer, too.

Voice partly means that what is seen is described in words the protagonist would feel comfortable using. Here's an example. Rusty is a 12 year old kid, so how would he describe the other kids in his class? As "pupils"? As "fellow students"? As "the other kids"? Probably that third one. A book that had an omniscient narrator might use "fellow students," and an intrusive narrator might say something clever, like, "the other little horrors in his class."

Voice also means, at least some of the time, using the rhythms your character might use when speaking, even if you're in the third person pov and not the first.

As you can see, voice as it applies to word choice and rhythm is tricky, but it's something you can tune your ear to 'hear.'

[Here's part of Adam's first paragraph, used with his permission]

Rusty Monroe drifted through a crowd of his 7th grade classmates. They followed a chubby tour guide with a plastic sheriff’s star pinned to his chest down the main street of Silver Strip, a Montana ghost town about an hour from New Buck Hills Middle School. Rusty gazed at the old houses with crooked wooden walls that lined the outskirts. Businesses along the street were semi-original, but now, with props staged inside and out, they felt like a movie set. The only thing that looked truly authentic to Rusty was a massive, brick-lined vault that stood in a pile of sandstone, the crumbled bank building’s remains. He briefly tuned in to what the tour guide was telling them...

The first two sentences here are an example of insufficient voice, because they sound like dry data from a more omniscient narrator, not the world as Rusty sees it and using words he might use. As the paragraph continues, would Rusty use the words "outskirts" or "semi-original" or "authentic" or "briefly"? If he were a smart cookie, he might, but those choices don't seem quite right for the character you've presented here. I could hear Rusty saying "really real" for "authentic" and "for a second" instead of "briefly."

Or here's an example from the bottom of page three: "...making it clear to Rusty that he expected a response." The diction here is a little formal. Better might be "...making it clear to Rusty that he wanted an answer." Do you see the difference there? It might seem like a minor thing, but those word choices are hugely important in maintaining the sense of voice across a whole book.

By way of illustrating this further, I've put the first page from my next book behind a cut tag. Unlike The Magic Thief books, which are in the first person, this one is in the close third. I've tried to point out [in brackets after each paragraph] examples of where voice is evident, so you can see the sort of thing I'm trying to describe. Also note here

The other day I went over to get my tattoo finished. The first round with the tattooist, she just did the black outline.

People asked if it hurt, and I was like, "pffft, it was nothing, ha!" I felt so tough.

Turns out adding color is another thing altogether. More needles, apparently. Lots more ow. OW!

#

So here it is! (It's still healing, but not too scaly and awful, I hope)




Click through for another picture, where you can see the color swirls in the wings.

#

This (heavily tattooed) guy came into the tattooist while I was on the table.

HIM: "So is this your first tat?"
ME: "Ow yes ow, ow, ow."
HIM: "Yeah, having tattoos is cool."
ME: "I'm not getting this to be cool! Sheesh!"

I mean, it's a dragon, for cryinoutloud. It's not cool. It's like flying my geek flag high. I love my tattoo with a gleeful, giddy love. It's my dragon companion! Fifty times a day I look down at my arm and go "hee!"

And I don't care if that means I'm a big dork.

Appointment today to get it finished.

Good morning!

A bunch of other Iowa writers and I spent the weekend without Internet here:

http://prairiewoods.org/

It's a retreat center run by nuns, a spiritual place, and I'm about as spiritual as a sledgehammer. Still, it was a lovely couple of days with lots of laughing and stories and good writing talk, and plenty of bacon for breakfast.

#

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you've already heard about this, but homeschool boy and I raised a butterfly from an egg, and on Thursday it emerged from its chrysalis. We were both amazed and elated. Here are pictures:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/22581660@N07/sets/72157607074676961/

#

It's a new month at the homeschool, which means new study units. Exciting! We're continuing our Middle Ages unit from last month. Theo is writing a NOVEL about a boy named Roald who is becoming a knight (it's thinly disguised Alanna fanfic with a boy protag). This is from a kid who couldn't write half a sentence for his school assignments! So fun. We're also moving on to swamps for our nature subject and astronomy for science, and we'll read a bunch of Middle-Ages related texts, like Kevin Crossley-Holland's Arthur: The Seeing Stone and Avi's first Crispin book, Cross of Lead. In September we studied how boys become knights; this month we'll imagine life for a peasant boy; plus we'll study medieval castles and towns and villages.

Some fun!

#

At the retreat I got some ideas about starting places for my next book. Have much to ponder...

#

Did you have a good weekend, yourself?

##

The other day on the Shrinking Violets blog I posted a rant about marketing on social sites. The various responses to it got me thinking.

I was cheating a little, calling it a rant, because doing so allowed me to frame the discussion a certain way. To “rant” is to admit right up front to being unreasonable and obnoxious and opinionated, and to overstating one’s feelings about the subject, and framing it as a rant doesn’t exactly invite reasoned response. I was psyched to see that most of the commenters in various places did engage in thoughtful debate.

The comment that really got me thinking was from lisa_schroeder, who feels that our online community has lost something. She said

And I think what's sad is that our blogging community that used to be about friendship and community has drastically changed. Hardly anyone comments anymore. Is that because people stopped reading because so many blogs became like billboards? I don't know. But I miss the way it used to be.

I think she’s right. As I said in a comment, I did take a strong, ranty stand, and I stand by that stand because I think it’s important for us to have social spaces where we can talk and be friends and not worry about all that marketing crap.

In an authentic conversation, you have give and take. One person talks while the other listens, and then there is a response. When marketing intrudes on social spaces, there can be no conversational transaction. One person talks about the thing she’s selling, and the appropriate response is not to answer, but to go buy the thing.

I don’t like that. It makes me ranty.

#

I should probably lay down some context for why such a stand is important to me.

First is that I have a horror of marketing, of branding, of the selling that intrudes into our personal spaces. I haven’t had a TV since 1991 because, and I paraphrase Barbara Kingsolver here, having a TV is like running a sewer line into the house. And the trash it brings in is commercials. Ads for stuff. I can’t stand it.


The other thing is that, as you may know, I have a PhD in English literature. My dissertation was on the uses of conversation in various social spheres in eighteenth-century England. So it’s an area of interest. In the blog I ranted about the way conversational spaces online are being coopted by marketing efforts, basically. This is nothing new; conversational spaces have been coopted by various constituencies for various purposes since the drawing room and the coffeehouse were invented. And before that, too.

There’s a reason why I chose that dissertation topic. I’m interested in how people talk to each other. I’m interested in the words they choose, the things they say—and the things they don’t say. I’m interested in the fact that the way people say something changes depending on where they’re saying it, and to whom. I’m interested in the different registers we all use when we communicate, whether it’s chat or rant or confession or polemic or twittering or real conversation.

Plus I like talking to people. And hearing what you have to say.

There is wisdom in this post, but it's at the end. First, various bits of news.

One is that the book that I have long referred to as THE CROW BOOK, which was also known as THE CROW KING'S DAUGHTER (try saying that three times fast and you'll see why it had to go), THE CROW QUEEN'S DAUGHTER (yes we had some gender switching going on there), and then THE CROW LADY'S DAUGHTER (the queen wasn't really a queen after all)...

Yes, that book. It has a title!

It is called WINTERLING.

I love this title. It reflects perfectly the sense of wonder and magic that I'm hoping the book will evoke in the reader. Now my editor wants me to go back and put the word "winterling" somewhere in the book. Heh. Yeah, probably should do that.

#

In further good news, WINTERLING just sold to my German publisher, Random House/Bertelsmann. They've done a fabulous job with Der Magische Dieb. The second book just came out there, too. I'm not sure what the title means in English. Something about shadows. Here's the German book website, if you're interested:

http://www.der-magische-dieb.de/

#

So now the wisdom.

My editor and I were chatting via email. She noted that the title she wanted for the book hadn't been chosen, and was talking about how it would have been perfect. Then she said this:

"One, two three. Okay, I'm over it."

Which struck me as the best possible way for all of us writers to deal with the ups and downs of publishing. In fact, I am adopting it as my new mantra.

"I'm over it!!"

As you may know, I blew out my knee about six weeks ago. As a running-addict, this was pretty tough to deal with. But in some ways, the injury has been okay, because it's helped me discover two new passions.

To get my daily endorphin fix, I started swimming. Before, I thought swimming was boring. Back and forth in the pool, trying (and failing) to keep track of how many laps I've done, squinting through ill-fitting goggles...

Now I swim a mile a couple of times a week, and I love it.

Swimming wasn't enough, though, so I found another way to get my happy on, which is biking. My mom, who is a gearhead, left her fancy road bike here, so I dug it out of storage, took it to the bike shop for a tuneup, got some nifty clip-on shoes and padded shorts, and have started biking three times a week.

Biking is great. I love feeling the burn as I climb a hill and then zoom down the other side at 35 miles per hour (yes, we have hills in Iowa). I love powering through a 15 mph headwind. I love getting into this rhythm where I'm a machine and my legs are pistons, steady and strong.

When biking, I see a lot of stuff on the side of the road. The other day I saw an unbroken drinking glass, an unsquished maraschino cherry, and a hand-knitted mitten. Yesterday, the road had corn kernels scattered on it for miles (my rides all go way out into the country, and it's harvest time).

And my goodness, you wouldn't believe the roadkill. Lots of road-trotting mammals, but oh, how I lament the poor little snakes and frogs.

Usually I think my interviews sound sort-of blah, but I really enjoyed answering the questions on this one, for Jennifer Wardrip at Teens Read Too:

http://trtbookclub.blogspot.com/2010/09/visit-with-sarah-prineas.html

You can probably guess which question was my favorite.

If you leave a comment at the blog, you could win a book!

Way back in June, for various reasons--mainly that he's a bright kid who is not "neurotypical" and school hasn't been working out despite his teachers' best efforts--I decided to spend this year homeschooling my ten-year-old son, Theo.

(you know, while revising and writing books...!)

This summer, Theo and I went to the non-fiction section in the library and he made a list of all the subjects he thought were interesting. Stuff like feudal era Japan, and dragons, and ancient Rome, and Norse mythology, and comic books, and owls.

Then I built a curriculum so that the subject areas would be connected during each month-long unit. So, for example, during August we've done butterflies and moths for science, prairies for nature, the history of prairies in Iowa for history, and Laura Ingalls Wilder's On the Banks of Plum Creek for English/language. We went on a field trip to a prairie where we saw lots of butterflies and grasses and flowers (but no bison, alas). We also walked in our neighborhood and saw a monarch lay an egg on a milkweed leaf and are now raising our own caterpillars (one hatched this morning!).

Every day the kid does math for an hour with J, who as physics guy is in charge of the numbers. And he writes and reads and thinks and discusses. We've been homeschooling for three weeks now.

I swear, if his teachers could see the work he's done so far, they'd have trouble believing it was really him.

It's a good start, and on we go! Wish us luck.

As my options are either crutching or sitting on the couch, I've been reading a lot lately and have some reviews to share. Only the good ones; I won't mention the books that haven't worked for me...

#

Today is release day for my buddy Ingrid Law's Scumble, which I adored. My review:

Ingrid Law's marvelous Newbery-honor-winning first book, Savvy, was about just-turned-13-years-old Mibs and her journey to help her injured father. It's also about Mibs discovering her "savvy," sort of like her secret power, and discovering herself.

I liked Savvy a lot, but Scumble won my heart. It's not a sequel to the first book, but a "companion novel" about one of Mibs' cousins, a boy named Ledge who, like Mibs, has just discovered his savvy. As it is for Mibs, the savvy is not a simple magical power, it's more complicated than that, and presents Ledge with huge challenges. In order to "scumble," or learn to control, his savvy, Ledge is sent off to stay with a bunch of his crazy relatives at their remote ranch. From there the adventures begin as Ledge tangles with an unscrupulous (or, maybe grieving) land developer, a tenacious girl reporter, and some of his very own cousins and their sometimes dangerous savvies.

Ledge is a compelling character who tries to do the right thing despite his own wish to run away from everything and his...let's call them "self destructive" tendencies. At times Ledge's predicament made my heart hurt. Yet he never asks the reader to feel sorry for him, even at his worst moments, like when dealing with his mother, whose savvy is that she must be obeyed when she gives an order (can you imagine!!?).

One of the great delights of the book is all the secondary characters and the genuine relationships between them. It's a huge cast, but every single character is remarkably distinctive. I fell in love with Grandpa Bomba, with Rocket, and most of all with Mibs' youngest brother, Samson. I'd love to see another "Savvy" book about Samson; there's a big story behind this character, I'm sure.

In some ways this is a sprawling book, with lots of secondary characters and plotlines running all over the place, but the author ties everything up wonderfully at the end. It's a satisfying, wondrous read.

#

And some mini-reviews:

Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork. Very good book. While Marcelo's verbal tic of referring to himself in the third person and hardly ever using the "you" pronoun bugged me after a while, the story carried me past that. Marcelo articulates lots of coming-of-age issues (good versus evil, finding a place in the world, falling in love) in ways that will be fresh and interesting to lots of readers. The secondary characters were real and distinctive; I particularly enjoyed Marcelo's conversations with the rabbi. I read Stork's next book, The Last Summer of the Death Warriors, and while it didn't work quite as well, I admire the way Stork's work is completely distinctive in a field where there are so many books that are trying to be like everything else out there.

The Rise of Renegade X by Chelsea Campbell. I liked this one a lot. The plot goes off the rails in a couple of places, but gets back on track by the end. This one is worth reading for the smart, snarky narrator and for the ironic gap between who he thinks he is, and who the reader can see he truly is. Plus the relationships are complex and genuine. The ending felt satisfying and right.

Magic Below Stairs by Caroline Stevermer. I was lucky enough to read an early copy of this and blurbed it. A servant boy named Frederick gets involved with the characters from the Sorcery and Cecelia books. Well-written adventure, magic, and one of my favorite MG tropes, a kid finding his place in the world.

#

So, for those of us stuck on the couch, got any reading recommendations? I'm heading to the bookstore and libra

For some reason, being stuck on the couch with a bag of ice on my knee makes me feel a lot more sociable. So hopefully I'll be around the blogosphere a bit more than I have lately. My old rule was that I'd blog once a week, and maybe I can get back to that, and to commenting on other blogs again. I'm kinda missing it. You're all very nice to put up with my comings and goings...

#

So anyway, as charmingbillie pointed out, it's better, rhetorically, to get the bad news out of the way first, and then post the good news. So here it is!

(I hope this is not anticlimactic, after the big buildup...)


The first bit of good news is that I've sold three books to publisher Quercus in the UK. They published the Magic Thief books and have been all-around great to work with, and I'm thrilled that I get to continue working with them. This is the first foreign rights sale for the Crow book (still untitled) (and still under revision, too!).


The second bit of good news is that I've been invited to attend Bookaroo, a children's book festival in New Delhi, India. I'll be one of four "international" guests, who include Briton Anthony Horowitz, Canadian Wendy Orr (who wrote Nim's Island), and Australian Lian Tanner (whose book comes out in the US this fall). It's possible the books' distributor over there, Penguin-India, will have some things for me to do, too, so it'll be like a mini-tour. As you can imagine, I'm very excited about this! India!!

The other bit of good news is that my biceps are already looking buff from all this crutching around... Read the rest of this post

Hello, it's me, badblogger SarahP. I do have good news to post, but that can wait until tomorrow.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter already know about this because I've been fussing about it for days, but...

Well, let me start with the context.

#

When in high school, my three younger sisters and I played varsity soccer, and we were a Dynasty. During this time, all three of my sisters injured their knees, requiring arthroscopic surgery, and for two of them, reconstruction of torn ACLs. I never injured my knee, all the way through high school and four years of division III college soccer.

To celebrate our beloved coach's retirement this year, a reunion soccer game was organized: the alumni ("Old Ladies") versus the current junior varsity team (the varsity is the state champion team, so it's a good thing we didn't have to play them).

Anyway, during the game (while scoring a goal, I should note!), I landed badly and basically destroyed my knee.

#

The injury is called the "terrible triad", or as I've been calling it, the "trio of doom." Torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), torn medial collateral ligament (runs up the inside of the knee), torn meniscus (cartilage). Plus a fracture at the end of my tibia. This kind of injury usually happens to football players who get hit from the side...

Ow!

I'm on crutches for a couple of weeks while the fracture heals, and then will have reconstructive surgery and rehab, and hopefully will get back to running in six months, though the doctor hasn't promised that I'll be able to run again. Six months is a long time for a running-addict like me...

#

The moral of the story is this:

"Old ladies should never play soccer against teenagers."