Shrunken Novels and Little Else

I just realized I never posted about my Shrunken Manuscript experience, which was singular. So I figured I'd make up for it now, since there's not much else to report.

The Shrunken Manuscript technique came my way via Darcy Pattison, whose web site on revision I highly recommend. In July, just before I sent my editor the latest revision on SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS, I decided to give it a try.

You start the process by doing whatever is necessary to shrink your manuscript to about 30 pages: reduce the font size, eliminate all white space, narrow all margins. Then you decide what concerns you--in my case, whether everybody's sitting around talking too much, as my characters tend to do. You assign a color to each aspect of your novel that interests you, and mark up the manuscript with highlighters in the appropriate colors. In my case, I had colors for dialogue, description, exposition, action, and suspense. You can also stick colorful stickers at any place that you like a lot, although I found that less helpful because it was too subjective.

As I recall, dialogue was pink. Notice the decided pink tinge to the manuscript.

The end of the process is supposed to be spreading out your manuscript and stepping back to figure out if there are places where one color predominates more than you want it to, or if the colors aren't spread around the way you want them. (Sort of a visual composition exercise.) I found that I had my answers long before that point--it was informative enough just going through and marking up the manuscript.

Then it was just a matter of breaking up all the excessively pink places by cutting out their tiny individual bejesuses or interjecting a bit of green or purple or blue. Easy-peasy, right? HAhahahahahahahahaha.....

IN OTHER NEWS: Life has improved since the last post. Rob is on his feet, although he's still got a swollen eardrum and is having to take antihistamine pills, which he hates. The Work in Progress is humming along, 180 pages of excruciatingly rough draft so far and beginning to wind down toward the end. The nasty little voice does keep asking me if it's all Old Hat and poorly written beyond salvation and in general a Humongous Great Big Bore. I loftily ignore this voice until 3 a.m., when it borrows a megaphone.

Otherwise, there's practically nothing going on. I've been varnishing window sashes, because years of wintertime condensation have undermined the original varnish and the wood gets moldy. Rob is doing a marvelous job of holding himself back when every physical and spiritual inch of him is dying to grab the brush and do it right. Such is the torment of the Handy Person living with one who is constantly at war with the inanimate world.

So far I have managed not to tip over the can of varnish when it's poised over carpet or upholstery. In fact, I haven't tipped it over at all. (I suspect I just jinxed myself. *knocks on wood*)

I bribe myself into doing this project by listening to things, most recently an audio of MISTRESS OF THE ART OF DEATH by Ariana Franklin. (The link is to the hardcover, because the audio book page doesn't have a cover photo for some reason.) I also have been listening to MISTRESS to bribe myself into exercising, except on the stationary bike where I'm reading Diana Wynne Jones' HOUSE OF MANY WAYS. Before I go to bed I'm immersed in Neal Stephenson's THE DIAMOND AGE. I suppose this could get confusing after a while, but it helps that they're hugely different from each other and each is excellent in its own way.

And not a preponderance of pink in any one of them.

In Which the Author Employs Sarcasm

It's been an inspiring couple of weeks at Castle Ne'er-do-Well.

*Cue sarcasm soundtrack.*

I hit the doldrums with The Gloucester Ghost, about three-quarters of the way through an increasingly rough draft. Kept applying the seat of my pants to the seat of the chair, and did grind out 1,000 words a day, the bare minimum for self-respect, but then gratefully ran off to do other things. And the very last bit I did needs to be redone, I realised the minute I finished it, because we're finding something out that we shouldn't know for a chapter or two. *Cue tragedy soundtrack.*

Among the distractions was preparing for a trip to Montreal, where I would meet my cousin Abigail for three days of frolic. I also planned to visit my on-line friend Lyny and her family, which includes a one-year-old and a three-year-old and seeing them would have been a real hoot.

"Would have been" because Rob got woefully sick last Friday, and has been on a fever rollercoaster ever since. We thought it was the flu, but it turns out to be an ear infection caused by who knows what, maybe a cold, maybe seasonal allergies. His temperature was below normal this morning, so he leapt out of bed declaring that he was going down to his studio to work. I threw a hissy which, surprisingly, had an effect. He sat and read this morning, then his temperature went up again and he went back to bed. He'll be like this all week, if his previous experiences with fever are any indication. He gets them about once or twice a decade, thank heaven.

The upshot is that tonight's the night I would have been with Lyny and Patrick and kids, and I'm home instead. Poor Abigail is all by herself in Montreal, although she's traveled alone before and is perfectly capable of entertaining herself.

Fortunately, I took a few days off from The Gloucester Ghost through all this, and when I got back to it today I had a much better time. Knock on wood.

The One Really Good Thing: On Monday, I went to the Belfast Free Library to talk to a teen book group, which was so much fun it almost made up for the ear-infected weekend. They'd all read The Unnameables and had astute questions and comments. They even said they wanted a sequel, mostly because they want to see what Mainland is like and how the Islanders would cope with seeing more of it. I want to see all that too, as I told them, although I've got a couple of pressing ideas that have to be dealt with first.

Anyway, many thanks to Jane Thompson, the youth services director, for choosing my book and inviting me over. Additional thanks and admiration to the lovely, intelligent kids in the group!

All Manner of This and That

The Bar Harbor Book Festival rocked, although not exactly the way some might have expected. As is typical of first-year ventures, it didn't draw much of a crowd, so we ran workshops for ourselves. But since there were 25 of us, it turned into the world's most intimate and helpful writers' conference.

Nothing beats hearing someone else describe the level of self-hatred they sink to while drafting. Not to mention the amount of obsessive email-checking.


I got to meet other Maine kidlit writers, always a plus. The lady at left with the great t-shirt is Deva Fagan, whose MG fantasy Fortune's Folly now has a place of honor on my To Be Read pile. Deva's a fellow blogger at The Enchanted Inkpot. I had a great time chatting with Megan Frazer, Erin Dionne, Robin MacCready, Kekla Magoon, and Bethany Hegedus, whose works also grace the now-tottering TBR pile.

Kudos to Carrie Jones for organizing this. And watch for it next year!

Wafting off into the wild world of book marketing, the estimable Kirkus Reviews authored a very sweet tweet on August 31: "The most tragically overlooked book of 2008: THE UNNAMEABLES, by Ellen Booraem. Reviewed 9/1/08: http://tinyurl.com/nojcy4." I'm not sure who overlooked ol' Medford, but whoever it is should consider themselves tweaked. Or tweeted, anyway. Kirkus has been a good friend to the The Unnameables, having starred it and highlighted it every chance it got. I'm very grateful.

They get results, too. I learned about the tweet from a comment on GoodReads, and then in a blog review on Librarilly Blonde.

The Horn Book, meanwhile, included The Unnameables on its list of "talented newcomers," which was sweet of them, too.

I think I win the "links per line of type" prize, if there is one. There should be, don't you think?

Bone Marrow

Watch out...I'm going to gripe for absolutely no good reason.

The weather is gorgeous--blue skies, sweet zephyrs, crisp air...and yet I am unsatisfied. The summer simply wasn't warm enough for long enough, and I don't have the resistance to cold that I usually do. The heat just didn't make it into my bone marrow. I'm wandering around in turtleneck, sweater, and fleece vest when it's 65 out...yesterday, almost 70.

I blame the Republicans.

Just kidding. (Although that's what the political climate feels like these days, isn't it?)

For the record, I thought Obama's health care speech rocked. I'm sorry he's hedging about the public option, and don't for a minute think he's going to stand up for it, which I wish he would. But I'll be OK with regional cooperatives, I guess. I'd even go for the trigger option if I were sure the trigger would set the standards of practice high enough to ever be ...er, pulled. (That "trigger" metaphor is a hard one to work with.)

We had a very nice Labor Day weekend, including a reprise of our neighborhood picnic from last year. Same deal...one measley attempt at game-playing, otherwise five delightful hours of talk, food, and drink. The weather was perfect except, as I may have mentioned, too friggin' cold.

This coming weekend I'm going to the Bar Harbor Book Festival, a new event author Carrie Jones has organized with an eye to encouraging literacy. I'm all for that. My bio didn't make it onto the web site for some reason, but I'm on the author list and schedule so that's what counts. I'll be reading at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, and doing a world-building workshop at 2:30. Hope to see you there!

September Book Review

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@Barrie Summy

As usual, it's like a curtain dropped here. The last hurricane sucked all the warm air and humidity out to sea, and now even a steady sun has trouble raising the temperature out of the sixties. Although I'm sad that summer's over, and wishing it had been a better one weatherwise, I'm ready to hunker down, work, and read. If you're in the same mood, a thriller by Stieg Larsson is a good way to acclimate to the new reality. And don't forget to click on the icon for more bloggy book reviews!

The Girl Who Played with Fire
By Stieg Larsson
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2009

God, I wish Stieg Larsson were still alive and writing.

Larsson, editor-in-chief of the Swedish magazine Expo and an expert on right-wing extremism, died of a heart attack in 2004, leaving behind the manuscripts for three of a planned ten-book series of thrillers. The first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was a huge hit when it came out in Europe a year after his death, and the English translation met similar acclaim in 2008.

Now the second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, is out in English, following the career of Lisbeth Salander, a bizarre but thoroughly engaging character from the first book.

Expect to stay up late.

Dragon Tattoo introduced us to Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist who has been convicted of libeling a billionaire industrialist. While waiting to serve his short prison sentence, he’s hired to write a memoir and investigate the disappearance of his subject’s niece forty years earlier. He brings in Salander, a private investigator, computer whiz, and pierced and tattooed misfit, to help him out. The two endanger themselves to uncover the hideously seamy circumstances behind the niece’s fate.

The politics and intrigue in these books ring true for very good reason: Larsson’s real life was not far different from Mikael Blomkvist’s. He was noted internationally as a tireless foe of rightist organizations, and reportedly was subject to death threats as a result.

His Blomkvist is a fine, compelling character, although nothing unique for a thriller. Salander is something else again, Larsson’s vision of what Pippi Longstocking would be like as an adult. Longstocking, the beloved pigtailed character in Astrid Lindgren’s series of children’s books, is exceptionally strong, smart, and self-reliant but exceptionally anti-social if you cross her.

That’s Salander to a tee, and she may be my favorite character in contemporary literature. She’s a scary-smart, a kick-ass heroine, yet as confused and vulnerable as it’s possible to be without spending life in a fetal position. It all fits together in one wonderful mass of human complexity.

In Played with Fire, Salander takes her turn as main character, with Blomkvist riding shotgun. We learn much, much more about “All the Evil,” the terrible childhood events that sent Salander into the Swedish mental health system and, eventually, into the hands of the sadistic guardian we met in the previous book.

All is not what it seems in Salander’s past, as the Stockholm police discover when she becomes prime suspect in a triple murder. The girl depicted in social service records hardly resembles the real girl at all. Why is that? You’ll find out, probably at 2 a.m.

Both of these books have their oddities, mostly in structure. Dragon Tattoo’s libeled industrialist plotline, although interesting and necessary to the series, slows things in the beginning and still has loose ends to be tidied up when the main event is over. That’s a disadvantage in a book that’s otherwise as tight as a drum.

The first half of Played with Fire is a more compelling read than the early pages of Dragon Tattoo, which has to fill us in on the libel suit before it gets moving. The second half, although still a blazing page-turner, goes overboard on Salander’s grievances against the world, and risks turning into a polemic. What happens to her at the end is just a tad too far-fetched, almost played for humor but not quite.

Nevertheless, I’d bring Stieg Larsson back from the dead any day. And I’m holding my breath for The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the next and—sadly—the final book in the series.

Foggy Blogging

I'm back, and ready to blog.

But you've heard that before, haven't you?

It's been a crazy summer here at Castle Ne'er-do-well. Like everyone on the East Coast, we froze in a fog through most of July. The weather broke in a big, impressive way on August 1 for the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta--a sparkling day, which we and our neighbors enjoyed by kayaking out to Hog Island to watch the fleet go by. I think that was my second time in a kayak all summer--the barometer of a bad season.

But I wasn't worried, even when the weather started a rollercoaster ride of freezing and fair after the sailboats went home. I knew our friends Linda and Michael were coming up from Rhode Island on the 15th, with their 24-year record of bringing us stupendous weather. Sure enough, the skies cleared as they drove up last Saturday, and we were hot and happy all week until the fog enveloped us Friday, when we wanted to do indoor stuff anyway. I kayaked three times in that one week. My friend Shelly and her son Graham are coming up from Connecticut today and Hurricane Bill is expected to suck the fog out to sea with him, so I anticipate further kayak adventures tomorrow and maybe Wednesday. That could be about it, because my kayaking buddies Lisa and Peg, who live down the road in the summer, head home to Minnesota Thursday.

Fortunately, the bad weather made it a pleasure to sit inside and work--often a conflict this time of year in Maine. I feel I have to spend as much time as possible outside listening to the wind in the leaves--the world's most relaxing and renewing sound--because the leaves dry up and change tone around mid-September, beginning the long slog to June. This time, I had no trouble staying inside at the keyboard, and finished revising THE FILIOLIi (now called SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS) around the end of July. My editor Kathy Dawson liked the changes, calloo-callay, although I suspect she's going to want more.

Just now it's foggy and muggy and I'm sitting at the dining room table with Brionna Blodgett, a member of my writers group at the school who, remarkably, wanted to keep going on her story this summer. She's pounding away on a school laptop as I write this, periodically raising her head to discuss some conundrum or other. She also was working full time with the Brooklin Youth Corps, going to basketball camp, babysitting, and heaven knows what--when do these kids have time to lie in the grass and watch the clouds?

Or, this summer, the fog.

July Book Review

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@Barrie Summy

One nice thing about incessant rain--lots of time for reading! Here's this month's installment of the Book Review Club, a blog round-up organized by Barrie Summy. Don't forget to click the icon for more reviews. (The icon may not work until a it's a decent hour of the morning in California, where Barrie lives.)

Number the Stars
By Lois Lowry
Yearling, Random House Children’s Books, 1990

I’m reading The Book Thief right now, Marcus Zusak’s remarkable young-adult novel about a German girl caught up in the Holocaust. It’s narrated by Death, the one with the most to gain. I’m not quite half-way through it and am absorbed.

Last week in Bangor, though, I overtaxed my new bionic knee on a shopping spree at Staples, and had no choice but to go across to Borders for a cup of coffee and a pretzel. You can’t just sit there, so I bought a book to read; Number the Stars, the 1990 Newbery Award-winner by Lois Lowry.

This is a slim book physically, especially in a Yearling paperback. It is far from slim in spirit, however. I’ve read other slim books by Lowry—the lovely Gossamer, and her slim-ish second Newbery winner, The Giver. I don’t know how she packs so much information, insight, and food for thought into so few words.

Much as I’m loving The Book Thief, I expect that Number the Stars will stay with me longer. Lowry’s characters aren’t as conflicted and dramatic as Zusak’s—they are pleasant, everyday Danes, painted in restful colors, who react to horror with courage they kept stored in their bones. They could be you and me—their bravery is approachable, within our reach.

The protagonist is Annemarie Johansen, a ten-year-old who lives in Copenhagen. Her best friend, Ellen Rosen, lives down the hall, and their mothers are best friends, too. The Rosens are Jewish; the Johansens are not.

The book’s first scene shows Annemarie and Ellen racing down the sidewalk, two kids with nothing more on their minds than whose legs are longer. They’re stopped and questioned by the Nazi soldiers on the corner. We feel a twinge of dread. Thirty-four pages later, it’s midnight, the Rosens have disappeared, Ellen is pretending to be Annemarie’s sister, and Nazis are banging on the Johansens’ door. The stakes creep higher and higher until one night Annemarie finds herself running through the Danish woods, risking her life to save the Rosens and others.

This is not a tumultuous, edge-of-the-chair kind of book. It gently draws you in and pulls you along. You feel you have had Annemarie’s experience, not just read about it. That’s what a novel’s supposed to do, and few of them do it this well.

Thanks, stupid knee.