School Visits: Bouncing May Occur

Mention doing school visits and some authors cringe and try to collapse into themselves. Trust me, I get it. Facing a room (or worse, auditorium) of teenagers - some of whom are being forced to be there - is totally intimidating. You've got a mic in your face, a picture of yourself behind you, and are going to be talking about yourself or your book for at least half an hour... maybe more. If a bucket of pig's blood doesn't drop down on you, you'll call it a success.

But it can can also be totally awesome.

I spend 40 hours a week talking to teens who (trust me) could not be less impressed by my publishing credits. I'm just their librarian. I've even dropped so far as to pick up the nearest book and start reading aloud with a fake Irish or British accent just to gain their attention. (This totally works, by the way, and I highly recommend everyone use this trick).

That being said, I love doing school visits. Sure, there are kids that don't want to be there, but once I start talking about how extreme dehydration makes your eyelids stick inside your skull and your tongue swell so much you can't close your mouth I usually have their attention too. Even if they despise reading, they're interested in me talking about horrible ways to die. And I totally excel at that.

But you also get kids that are thrilled to meet you, kids who want to have pictures taken with you (sure!), ask for signed bookmarks (no problem!) and bounce up and down while you talk to them (sometimes I bounce too just for fun). You also get emails later, from the kids who weren't quite up to the picture taking and bouncing, lovely emails where they want to share what the book meant to them and how much they enjoyed meeting you.

And you get stuff like this... kids who wrote an original song inspired by your book. I'm floored. 

Authors Move In Groups For Our Mental Well Being

The best part about being a writer is meeting other writers.

People ask me all the time what my favorite published experience has been, and this is always my answer. Yes, seeing my name on a book for the first time was awesome, but much like Christmas, the best part about publishing is when it has nothing to do with what you're getting.

This past weekend I had the awesome experience of meeting some really amazing ladies. Joseph-Beth hosted the first of a two-part YA Beach Bash featuring myself, Mindee Arnett (THE NIGHTMARE AFFAIR, AVALON), Melissa Landers (ALIENATED), Kristen Simmons (ARTICLE 5), Saundra Mitchell (MISTWALKER), and Julie Kagawa (THE IRON FEY, THE BLOOD OF EDEN).

Authors are a different sort of people. If you are one, or if you've ever met one, this probably isn't news to you. The week before last I had the chance to sign with both Rae Carson (THE GIRL OF FIRE AND THORNS) and Ann Aguirre (RAZORLAND, MORTAL DANGER). During the course of normal conversation I mentioned vomitoriums (as one does) and I didn't have to explain what those are. It's worth nothing that neither one of them blinked, either. I knew I was among my people.

So, meeting other authors is always welcome. It's an expansion of the realization that I'm-Not-So-F'ed-Up-After-All hangover from high school. Or at least, if I am F'ed up, I'm not the only one. Meeting people and maintaining friendships has become more of a driving factor to me when I agree to do events than selling books. Most authors will tell you that when we do a convention, festival, or signing, we do so not because we think we'll be moving copies, but because our friends are going to be there.

I like friends. Friends are good.

The Thin Line Between Fiction & Reality

I'm working - hard - on my book for 2015. It's a Gothic historical, and as I am the nit-picky research-loving librarian that I am, I refuse to leave any stone unturned. The other day someone needed to call the cops in this book, and I didn't finish the sentence because I first had to go find out what cops were called in 1890's Boston. Are they policeman? Coppers? Constables? Fifteen minutes of research went into finding the right word to end that one sentence with. I also got distracted by the origin of the word "cops" - policeman's badges were originally made out of copper, so they were reffered to as "Coppers" which became shortened to cops. Now you know. I do too, and I just lost another ten minutes where I should've been writing.

I bought a map of the real town where my novel is set ($25.00 gone) from the right time period so that I could look at street names, locations of shops vs. residential areas, the locations where bridges crossed the river, etc.

Then I came to a line of dialogue where my main character and her partner in fighting crime are bemoaning the size of the population and their inability to catch a killer within such a large group. So I checked the 1900 census data for this city so that my line of dialogue was completely accurate... and hit a huge roadblock.

The city was much smaller than I had expected, population wise. In fact, it was so small that finding a killer within it would actually be a fairly easy proposition, given that his method of operation definitely points to a man of a certain occupation. I was wretched. Truly wretched. I'd built my entire plot around this city, researched for a year before even starting the book and literally have a map of it in my head so that when I visited a few weekends ago I could guide the boyfriend as he drove.

And now it was too damn small during the time period my book is set.

I seriously felt like puking. I shut the laptop, stomped downstairs and the boyfriend takes one look at me and says, "What's wrong?"

I tell my horrible story. All the wasted work and knowledge that now means nothing, the restructuring of the plot that's going to have to happen if I switch to a more metropolitan area. And the boyfriend leans back on the counter, looking horribly confused and says, "Well, this is fiction right? Just make the city bigger in 1900."

And this tiny fact that should have in no way been a revelation pretty much turned me on my head. I was ridiculously happy to realize, that yes, if I wanted to inflate the population of a city in the 1900's to serve my purposes I can, in fact, do that, because it's fiction.

Sometimes writers need to realize that while the research and dedication that goes into our writing is admirable, we can't let it dictate to us the parameters of our world - because it is, in fact, a fictional one. My 2015 release is my first historical novel, and I've been doing my damndest to keep it as accurate as possible. But the truth is that even with years of research poured into this thing, I'm going to have to tilt the mirror a little to make the picture fit the plot, and I'm also going to get some things flat wrong that I thought were right. And, of course, there are probably going to be points that I know I'm right about that people will think are wrong.

And that's okay - because it's fiction.