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July 15th, 2010
12:15 pm - Me & My Books
Hi. My name is Emily Horner and I'm one of the ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) 10_ers -- which is to say that my debut YA novel, Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad, is coming out in 2010. Sometime in the summer, to be specific.
You can get more info on my books at my official author page. I use my livejournal mostly for personal stuff, so go there unless you're really interested in my Rock Band exploits and what I'm annoyed about today!
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July 12th, 2009
01:06 am
The houseguests are here -- B. my friend from high school and her fiance R. Which means that it is happy funtimes and also insane busytimes.
(Today: Breakfast; Kinokuniya; lunch; sketchcrawl in Central Park; wandering around looking for a WiFi hotspot; meeting up with some friends of R's; a visit to a natural history shop called Maxilla and Mandible, which sells things like pinned butterflies, taxidermied opossums, and animal skulls; brief stop at the knitting shop; dinner at Beer & Cheese; Rock Band at Meaghan's house; sleep now.)
Luckily, I'm too exhausted to be stressed. (Not by them. By my deadlines.)
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July 10th, 2009
11:00 am
There is a fine art to being avoidant and procrastinatory for just long enough that by the time you get to work, it's too late to get anything done.
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July 8th, 2009
05:22 pm - This is payback for everyone who makes fun of Engrish.
A recent journal from the Max Planck institute had China as its focus. One of the journalists was asked to find a poem for the cover...
That worked out well.
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July 7th, 2009
08:56 am
It turns out that OpenOffice is buggy as anything when handling a long document with a ton of changes that need to be tracked. I'm not convinced that MS Word would do any better, and in any case I'm not going there, but I am starting to get annoyed. Maybe I should switch over to the Linux computer and see if that helps anything...
(No wonder: it's over 800K now. Now to figure out if there's anything I can do to reduce the track-changes-bloat.)
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July 6th, 2009
12:40 pm
Line edits: Getting better.
I only need 16 pages per day to have them done before the 22nd. That's perfectly doable. I'm suddenly excited to be so close to the end of the process -- err -- well, I'm still almost a year out from publication. But close to the end of the part that involves staring at my words and contemplating their badness.
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July 5th, 2009
09:45 am
I got my line edits on Thursday, so I told myself that I would give myself until the end of the long weekend to finish my rough draft, and then whatever I hadn't finished would have to wait. Wait a lot, actually, since I'm going into surgery on the 22nd.
So, at a very short 53,612 words -- I have achieved rough draft!
Hooray!
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July 3rd, 2009
01:14 pm
Via Cynthia Leitich Smith: KT Horning has been interviewed by School Library Journal, a must-read for anyone interested in multicultural children's books.
When we looked at the Subject Guide to Children’s Books in Print for that year under “Blacks”—that was the subject—there was maybe a half-page of entries for nonfiction and fiction. But if you turned back a few pages and looked for “Bears” fiction, the entries went on for three pages. There were more children’s books with personified bears as main characters than there were with African Americans as main characters.
So we started keeping track of that statistic on a regular basis and printed it every year in CCBC Choices. After a few years, we reached a point where we would have people quote that number back to us, which was always kind of funny. Publishers would say, “Did you know, there were only 30 [multicultural] books [published] last year?” Yep. I agree with [Coretta Scott King Honor winner] Alexis De Veaux: buying a book is a political act. You have to buy books by authors of color so that there will be more books published.
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July 1st, 2009
10:50 pm
Twilight is on for the purpose of mockery.
TWI : We consider ourselves to be vegetarians. We only drink the blood of animals.
DIANA : Yes, because that's totally the definition of a vegetarian.
EMILY : I'm going to make animal blood for my vegetarian friend next week. It's gonna be AWESOME. She's going to love it.
DIANA : For a second I thought you were going to say rommate blood.
EMILY : I'm not gonna take your food from the fridge, I'm not going to take food from your neck.
DIANA : Well, you are welcome to food from the fridge --
EMILY : Oh, can you -- can you look at something in the fridge?
DIANA : I think the light is off back there --
EMILY : Yeah, just a little more to the back... yeah, all the way in... mmmmm....
LATER--
DIANA : Oh, God, my family is so embarrassing! They always want to eat my girlfriends!
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11:14 am
Expats talk about Canada.
We don't much like to wave the flag,
We find patriotism shocking,
So we celebrate on Canada day
By going cross-border shopping
Forgive us, we're Canadian
We try hard to be nice
You too can be Canadian
If you follow this advice
-The Arrogant Worms
Five years after moving from Montreal, I get more and more nervous about claiming "Canadian" as my identity. I spent all of high school with no higher goal than to move to Montreal as soon as possible, and -- since Cornell fortunately rejected me! -- I made it. But I like Brooklyn enough, and my French is bad enough, that I don't feel that way any more; and I get emotionally involved with American politics even though I can't vote, and I don't follow Canadian politics that much except when they get especially crazy; and still, I do not want to become an American citizen.
Ultimately I guess I don't really mind feeling like an inadequate Canadian.
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June 29th, 2009
08:53 am
Rethinking my deadline panic: I was working on Death Squad for a LONG time, but I didn't get a first draft finished until May '07. That was a bad, messy, unfixable-seeming draft. But the draft I had by November was essentially the one I sent out on submission, and that's with working full-time. So six months is a perfectly reasonable time frame for revisions (if I can just get to the end of my first draft pretty soon...)
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June 28th, 2009
07:54 pm - Twelfth Night -- my favorite parts
* Andrew Aguecheek "speaking French" in Act III, scene 1. Hamish Linklater stole every scene that he was in, he was just ridiculous.
*Speaking of which: Where Cesario and Andrew cross swords, both clearly terrified and chagrined by the idea.
*Where Cesario is going on about how she might hypothetically love Orsino if, hypothetically, "he" were a woman. And Orsino looks at him with this long silence and an expression of "Okay, I'm going to pretend you didn't say that."
*Viola and Sebastian reunited -- I think it's a brilliant bit of plotting on Shakespeare's part that this incredibly joyous moment, of these two people who thought each other dead, is also the moment that untangles all the messy "people in love the wrong way 'round" stuff.
*Olivia being kind of surprised that she's not married to the person she thought, but then realizing that Cesario is still going to be her sister-in-law. Because, even as Cesario has been protesting against Olivia's love for the whole length of the play, there really seems to be a bond between them -- after all, they've both lost a brother recently...
*The part at the very end where they sing, "For the rain it raineth every day." Which drew a big laugh because indeed the rain it raineth every day lately.
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June 25th, 2009
12:33 pm
To sympathize publicly with Holden is to acknowledge that you feel unacknowledged, that you have a difficult time escaping the prison of yourself, that you are unsure of how to be a person, that you are lonely and dishonest and feel reviled. Adults can do this in a way that teenagers cannot.
--John Green.
I have never actually read "Catcher in the Rye." But I think I understand this.
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June 18th, 2009
01:34 pm - A little good news
The tentative budget agreement is: no union layoffs, but a 32% cut in the materials budget. Churlishly, even as I'm thrilled not to be laid off yet*, I'm grumping about perhaps not getting my Mango Languages or my new YA books.
*Bloomberg had to restore our funding because it's an election year. We could be getting some of this money taken away from us as early as November.
Oh well. I'm relieved, profoundly relieved.
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June 17th, 2009
10:59 pm
42233 / 65000 words. 65% done!
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10:58 am
A conservative talk show host explains Williamsburg
I was going to excoriate this guy for how unbelievably, hilariously, wrong he is, but then I realized that there's a tattooed person with dyed hair living in my very apartment!
I wish someone had told me we didn't believe in toilet paper, though. We could save a lot of money.
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June 9th, 2009
03:38 pm
How I dislike the middle of a story!
I know that I can't get away with pushing over that domino that leads into the ending just yet. But for now, the general shape of what happens is "pretty much the same thing, until it changes." And if it's that, you might as well just skip ahead to the ending.
Hmm. The obvious solution is to see if I can get just two or three good scenes to stand in for the next few weeks of story-time -- and then perhaps I can get the last of those scenes to knock over that domino. But it's not too easy to figure out what those scenes are.
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June 7th, 2009
09:41 am
I've been thinking about characterization in light of the premiere of "Royal Pains," a new doctor-drama that proves I'll watch just about anything on Hulu if I'm bored on a Saturday night. (This is after I had done an hour of Mandarin lessons, for boredom-context).
It is possibly one of the worst hours of television I have seen, outside of the first episodes each season of American Idol where they're just making people cry.
So, the protagonist is an ER doctor in Brooklyn whose life is going absolutely perfectly - and then, on his day off, he sees a teenager collapse playing basketball, takes him in to the ER. At the same time, a rich guy on the board of trustees comes in with a heart problem. He operates on Rich Guy, it looks like everything's fine, so he goes to take care of the kid. The rich guy ends up dying, and the doctor ends up getting fired.
I don't think stories of victimhood work that well in fiction. One of the issues I had with "The Art of Racing in the Rain" was that the Big Issue that threatens to tear Denny's family apart is absolutely, completely nothing to do with him; it's caused by other people being malicious or dysfunctional. A lot of stuff happens in life that is extremely unfair. But in fiction, you are aware all the time that things happen the way they happen because the author has set them up that way; so I get suspicious when things are set up in just such a way that the hero is completely blameless. It feels like that special kind of Mary Sue-ism where you're swimming in your own martyrdom.
Anyway, the protagonist -- Hank -- is depressed and drinking for a month, then his brother takes him up to the Hamptons to get his mind off things. At an exclusive party they've sneaked into, a beautiful woman goes into an apparent drug overdose. The mansion's private physician is there, but misdiagnoses. Hank notices the misdiagnosis from across the room, yells a lot, saves the girl's life. Oh, great. Not only is he Unjustly Fired, he also has to be the Best Doctor Ever. Word gets around, and all the rich people in the Hamptons are seeking out his services as a concierge doctor. And he settles, very reluctantly, on doing that.
If he still had any of my sympathy, he would've lost it here. Hank is completely passive, except when there's a convenient life around needing saving; and yet a job lands in his lap, dealing with rich people in a beautiful place; and he's still kind of "meh" about the whole thing.
The best rule I ever heard about opening a story is that it should take your protagonist from a dangerous situation to a more dangerous situation. And being a rich doctor in the Hamptons just doesn't read to me as "dangerous." It doesn't feel like there's anything there under the surface -- especially when the ending has the pretty young doctor girl telling Hank, "You never should have been fired! You totally did the right thing!"
I think there are interesting ways you could have spun this.
1) Make Hank have done something truly, genuinely bad. He wasn't fired for the truly, genuinely bad thing he did, though -- he was fired for something else. Maybe he broke a rule in the course of covering up the truly bad thing he did, and got fired for breaking the rule, but the bad thing itself was never discovered. But the evidence against him exists, and he knows it. Give him both some earned guilt and a Sword of Damocles dangling over his head.
2) Give Hank a personality besides "blandly good." House works because of the contradictions between House, Best Doctor Ever, and House, A Drug Addict And Not A Nice Person. You don't have to be dysfunctional to be an interesting protagonist, but give him something he's trying to achieve -- this is why it doesn't work for the job to fall into his lap. I think it would be a lot more interesting for him to not be the Best Doctor Ever -- if he has a history of partying and slacking off and just squeaked by in medical school, maybe. Or conversely, if he was a star in medical school but got cocky and overconfident and didn't ask for help when he needed it and ended up killing a guy because of it.
I think I'd still have a hard time caring about the minor medical conditions of the fabulously wealthy. But this is just lazy writing.
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June 4th, 2009
07:29 pm
I have my passport! That is all.
But for the rule that you're not allowed to smile, it's not a bad picture.
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June 3rd, 2009
07:07 pm - Tidbits from YA reading
Jake Wizner, author of Castration Celebration, relates that his name got on a white power web site, with the headline:
"Jew teacher advocates castration." (The book, for the record, does not advocate castration. The author of the musical, in the book, has been soured on men, so...)
Curiously, two of the authors (Jessica Wollman and Jake Wizner, who is a teacher and writes during the summer) said that they didn't write every day because they had full-time jobs. I had been working under the assumption that you really should write every day even if you do have a full-time job. (Not that I manage it. It's been about five-six days a week at best.)
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