Yesterday I had the pleasure of doing a teen writing workshop at Lilly Library where I described writing as the "Mad Gift." This is because to be a writer is to be slightly insane, listening to the whisperings of imaginary people in "what if?" worlds that don't exist and devote a substantial amount of our precious mortal time on Earth to writing things down in the greater hopes of sharing them with the world, but most often to simply be allowed to get some sleep. Like much of life, writing is not so much a choice or an occupation, but more like a vocation thrust upon you with a geas from an unknown entity who says, "Here. I give you this. Now go do something about it." Or being hit with a particularly large bat up the head.

We write because we can't NOT write.

I don't know about yours, but my Muse is fickle as the weather in New England; one moment sunny and trilling and free and the next petulant and moody and prone to bite. She is stubborn, recalcitrant and goes into fits and rages at ridiculous times (I often imagine her laughing as she hits me with a bout of inspiration in the middle of a shower or driving in a storm). She is also benevolent and kind when pacified by peaceful thoughts, regular exercise, and creative conversation. She can be hilarious in the wee hours and sparkling when inspired. I accept my lot as her plaything, a puppet on dancing strings, and only hope that I'm lucky enough/gracious enough/smart enough/present enough to be there when the bolt strikes.

And when I'm not, I have to keep writing, anyway.

Writing is like reading: transporting and prone to time-travel. Hours pass unnoticed when I'm at the keys and I have to remember to do things like eat or pick up the kids from school. I accept this and I'm (usually) grateful. I feel it missing if I haven't been writing for too long a stretch of time. And then I wait and a beg and I try to outsmart the fact that I haven't had a new idea or I'm stuck in the Great Swampy Middle and am starting to resemble a hobo in my frizzy hair and sweatshirt, muttering to myself aloud.

This is acceptable if, and only if, you are an artist, right?

Writing is an addiction, with all the highs and lows, and I hit all the verbs in the process: I laugh, I sweat, I rail, I rage, I cry, I get bored, hungry, tired, scared, hopeful, angsty, euphoric and then do it all again the next day. And the next. And the next. Until I hit the magic words "The End"...and then start all over again. I can't help it!

If writers described their symptoms to a doctor, she'd pronounce us insane with a nice rubber room to sleep in or a prescription of pills with very long names. But the hapless world allows us to roam freely amongst them, never realizing that we're watching, listening, waiting, dreaming, imagining, scheming... and writing them all down.

BWAHAHAHAHA!

Here's to hoping that the Mad Gift never leaves you. ;-)

Photograph by Katie Koster

By Eric Pinder
for Cynthia Leitich Smith's Cynsations

A teacher once learned the hard way not to tell his college class to write a children’s book without specifying a genre and topic. He anticipated a wonderful mix of fractured fairy tales, rhyming romps, and heroes’ journeys.

A week later, almost the entire the class turned in alphabet books instead.

“It looked easy,” they explained.

The teacher, of course, was me, and I shouldn’t have been so surprised. Alphabet books do appear as easy as ABC. A constant cast of 26 characters and a familiar, orderly structure provides writers with a ready-made template, which gives the false impression that alphabet books are the literary equivalent of connect-the-dots: A is for alphabet; E is for easy; Q is for quick.

The sad truth is that the very same template that makes alphabet books so easy is to write is precisely what makes them so challenging to write well.

Ask a hundred people to complete a connect-the-dots picture, and the result always looks much the same. But an alphabet book needs to be distinct and unique, or else there would never be a need to publish new alphabet books, and we writers would never get paid.

How’s a writer supposed to be original and, more importantly, earn enough to eat when we’re all stuck using the same 26 characters?

26 characters for your perusal

I learned the answer to that question when a helpful librarian brought me an Everest-sized pile of alphabet books. I almost needed bottled oxygen to reach the top of the stack. The expedition to the top of that mountain of books taught me a lot about what works in alphabet stories, and what doesn't. Climbing back down, I eagerly set out to write one of my own.

Exactly 24/26ths of the way through my plot, my pen faltered.

What the heck was I supposed to do with the X?

Cat in the Clouds (The History Press, 2009)

The biggest hurdle for writers of alphabet books, but also the greatest opportunity for originality, is the letter X. Discerning book buyers often flip right to the last few pages to see how the writer has handled the alphabet’s most troublesome letter. Fail to impress the bookstore browser with letter X, and the book gets returned to the shelf, and the starving writer's belly keeps grumbling.

Speaking of hunger pangs, the very first English language alphabet book, The Tragical Death of An Apple Pie, circa 1840 ends in a rush, with four letters crowded onto the last page: “X, Y, Z and & — they wished for a piece in hand.”

What a cheat! But a clever cheat. The sudden rhyme on the final page, linking “hand” with “ampersand,” provides a lyrical flourish and a satisfying conclusion, like the crashing of chords at the end of a song. At least the writer didn’t resort to using The Dreaded Xylophone.

The book skips several other letters altogether, a decision that may have freed the writer from thinking up six more apple-related words, but which also limits the book’s educational value.

An incomplete alphabet is not an option in today’s competitive market . . . unless, like Mike Lester in A is for Salad (Grosset & Dunlap, 2000), you make the omissions funny.

(You can break a lot of rules if you make readers laugh.)
In A is for Salad, Mike Lester declares that “X and Y are bad letters. Never use them.” An illustration shows two men carrying off the letters in stinky garbage cans.

The lack of familiar, child-friendly X-words other than the overused xylophone is enough to make many writers agree.

Lester's joke works because it doesn't come out of the blue. The book starts with silliness and a twisting of expectations right on page one, with a picture of an alligator eating a salad. So a child listening to the book already anticipates humor.

For children too young to be in on the joke, Lester’s technique plays into the collaborative, interactive, conversational nature of picture books. The image prompts questions from the child listener, and invites the adult reader to explain that the letter A is really for alligator.

By the time the reader reaches letter X, the garbage pail gag provides a change of pace, a funny, welcome break from the expected “A is for” sentence structure.
Lisa Campbell Ernst’s The Turn-Around, Upside-Down Alphabet Book (Simon & Schuster, 2004) prompts even more child-parent collaboration, in a tactile way.

Rotate the book on all four sides, and each letter, viewed sideways and upside down, looks like three different objects. The letter A morphs into a bird's beak and an ice-cream cone.

Best of all, Ernst cleverly sidesteps the usual problem with X. No need to delve into the dictionary for child-friendly X words or resort to the xylophone cliché. Instead, she has an easier task: name some everyday objects that just happen to look like the letter X.

While many alphabet books are “list books,” others find originality by telling a simple, unique story.

In Albert’s Alphabet by Leslie Tryon (Aladdin, 1994), the school carpenter gets a note from the principal instructing him to build an alphabet-themed walking path on the playground by the end of the day. The time crunch and the worries about whether Albert has enough material to finish his task give the story momentum, and the troublesome X doesn't appear in the text at all. Instead, X is pushed off into the illustrations, where it shows up as a waterwheel that Albert has constructed out of pipes.

Thanks to some alphabet-related carpentry and masonry and a simple plot, the writer is spared the need to rummage through volume X of the encyclopedia for useful words.

There are only so many ways to get from A to Z, and on every path, the letter X is a hurdle that can't be avoided. Innovation, turning the alphabet book format on its head—literally, in the case of Lisa Campbell Ernst—is a must if writers hope to create unique, twenty-first century alphabet books that distinguish themselves from the pack. The first person to use a xylophone in an alphabet picture book should have been the last.

Cynsational Notes
Eric's latest picture is If All the Animals Came Inside, illustrated by Marc Brown (Little, Brown, 2012). From the promotional copy:

The walls would tremble. 

The dishes would break. 

Oh, what a terrible mess

we would make!

If all the animals came inside, bears would run down the stairs, kangaroos would bounce on the couch, and hippos would play hide-and-seek through the halls! Join one family's wild romp as animals of all shapes and sizes burst through the front door and make themselves right at home.

Extraordinary collage artwork from beloved illustrator Marc Brown (creator of the bestselling Arthur book and TV series) pairs with Eric Pinder’s hilarious rhyming verse to make this the perfect picture book to read aloud again and again.

kith_koby sent me this link. As you're watching, see the effect of personal history on the map, and other elements. At least I found it mesmerizing.

By Cynthia Leitich Smith
for Cynsations

Check out this video celebrating Twice as Good: The Story of William Powell and Clearview, the Only Golf Course Designed, Built, and Owned by an African-American by Richard Michelson, illustrated by Eric Velasquez (Sleeping Bear).

I'm a week behind on LJ from all the traveling and conventioning and alumni weekending, but I saw this on tumblr, and I had to share - especially with imaginarycircus, flourish, smilie117, thistlerose, chickadilly, loneraven, roguebitch, cho_malfoy, and all my mid-January cohorts! We seem to be the least popular birthday chunk of the year, but I think I have more friends born in that 10 day timeframe than almost any other. Or is it, because it's me too, just more noticeable to me? ( Birthday Chart )

I stayed up late to finish reading Dead and Buried by Barbara Hambly, then had to resist the urge to start the next one this morning.  There are two more that I haven't yet read, that I have been saving.  I resisted the urge.  I will save them a little more, while I do some reading for my WisCon panels.

Eight days until I depart for WisCon!  I need to pack as well as make panel notes.

You know how when you're in love with something, all songs are about your love? Yyyyyyyeah, so, I need vidding skills, and I need an Avengers DVD. ALL THE VIDS ARE IN MY HEAD. So all I can do is play the songs on repeat two dozen times and watch the vids in my head and THAT'S NOT ENOUGH DAMMIT.

This could be the film that makes me learn to vid at last. I thought about it when I fell into anime fandom, but the daunting thing about that is that all the anime series are, like, twenty hours long minimum, and who's got the time to pick the perfect clips from all that? But two-and-a-half hours of movie to choose from? You can work with that, the obsessed voice in my head keeps whispering. GIMME A FEW MINUTES TO BREATHE, VOICE.

Lacking the DVD in the first place (whenwhenwhengimmegimmegimmeNOW), I should settle for making myself some more icons, 'cos I know how to do that. Text icons. Funny text icons. The only kind worth having.

Meanwhile, this is my current favorite promo pic of my favorite boys:



You're welcome.

Terms searched for: various combinations of; poisonous plants, animal poison, Japan, organ failure, infection like symptoms, blood poisoning. Working my way through the '~medicine: poisoning' tag.
Setting: Warring States period (Sengoku) Japan. Our world.

I need a character to murder a healthy female in her mid-teens and to get away with it.
The female character is recovering from or newly recovered (I haven't decided on which yet) from two broken legs. Ideally I want her death to appear to be due to some complications connected to her injury, and for it to work quickly enough/be serious enough for her not to be able to tell anyone. 

I'm thinking of some kind of poisoning, but the girls' private doctor would intervene if he noticed any obvious tampering with the wound and I also haven't found a poison that would give symptoms similar to an infection.

Does anyone have any idea of what sort of poison I could use or is my scenario impossible?

I'm more than open for suggestions, thank you in advance for any help.

I've been working on a story about a sixteen-year-old girl in London during WWII. Specifically, during the Blitz, so I'm thinking about 1940. However, I'm having some trouble because some important parts of the plot depend on what sort of access she has to American films and information about Hollywood and American stars.

I want her to be very enamored with Hollywood and American movies, but would she realistically have much access to this stuff during the war? Would she have any access to American media? I've read that UK theaters were closed for a time due to concerns about safety, but I haven't found anything more specific than that, and it didn't say anything about films being imported from other countries.

Secondly, assuming her having access to Hollywood movies or at least news is plausible, I wanted her to have a crush on a popular American actor, but could use some ideas about who it could be. I'm looking for a Johnny Depp or Leonardo DiCaprio sort of figure -- an actor who would have been popular with young women at the time, and would have been seen as a heartthrob. Obviously, my character could be attracted to anyone, but the point here is that she's more attracted to this guy's image and popularity, so I want the 1940 version or equivalent of your stereotypical teen heartthrob. I know a decent amount about movies and actors from that period, but I don't know a lot about how different demographics perceived them at the time. That is, who was popular with young people vs. older crowds. Would someone like Errol Flynn work?

I've done some searches like "Hollywood film distribution, 1940s, UK," "1940s teen idols," "Movies in London during WWII" and variations thereof, but I'm not finding a lot of stuff that seems to address these questions, and I don't honestly know what to search for. So I'd appreciate some input -- even a nudge in the right direction. I don't need a ton of background. I mainly need to know if my plot is plausible, and find a few specifics like an actor she can like and a few films she might have seen. So thanks a bunch to anyone who can help.