How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

1. Although I'm not a fan of winter, I am a fan of the holiday season. It seems that people really are nicer during this time of the year,* and Christmas lights are pretty. But the television really sucks. Seriously, it's like every channel turns into the Hallmark Channel or Lifetime Movies, showing movies where lonely (but beautiful and talented and sexy) women get hooked up with random (but hunky and smart and secretly rich) men by Santa. I like the cartoons and other holiday specials, though. 2. I like Noah Wyle a great deal, but even I couldn't suffer through The Librarian films on TNT. Is there anything as bad as a bad fantasy/adventure film? 3. One of my favorite things about the end of the year is all the top 10/top 100/best of lists that come out this time of the year. For example, Vh1 Classic has this show on right now called "One Hit Wonders" in which each show has a theme, like One Hit Wonders: British, or One Hit Wonders: Dance. The host is...

Girl by Blake Nelson is the book that taught me timelessness. That sounds strange, considering that it was published in 1994 and is actually pretty rooted in the emergence of the grunge culture, but it's true. I look at some books today, full of pop culture references and technology, and I think "this book is going to be out of date in 6 months." But Girl talks endlessly about bands and popularity, only it does so only through fictional references. So we understand what kinds of music Andrea listens to and what kind of person she is, but we don't think "oh God , she's into Nirvana? That's so 1994." And that's why Girl fourteen years old and is almost as fresh and perfect today as it was the first day it came out. I don't remember how I heard about Girl --for some reason I have an impression that I read about it in a women's magazine like Cosmopolitan or Sassy or Jane . Although I didn't really read those women's magazines....

This will be a short one: Agent Diana Fox has a message for all writers out there who think "oh, agents don't even read anymore! They don't even recognize a famous piece of literature * when someone changes the name! I bet I could just pretend she requested something from me and she would believe me!" Fox's message is simple: you're wrong . ~~~ *As Guardian writer Jean Edelstein points out , sometimes agents do recognize that someone is trying to pass off famous work to see if it will get published. But they just don't care.

1. To the girl who hit my car and then drove off: If you think that I did not get your license plate number and drive immediately to the police station and file a report against you, you are mistaken.* Had you stopped, we could have exchanged insurance information and called it a minor inconvenience--stuff happens, you know? Since you didn't, you've won the Grand Prize: A first degree misdemeanor charge, with a potential penalty of up to 6 months in prison and $1000.00 fine.** Nice job, honey. I'm sure your mother (whose car it was) will be pleased. 2. This is not a picture of my car, just a car that looks just like it. 3. When I went to make the police report the officer looked at me with these tired and cynical eyes. "A hit and run?" he said. "Did you get the license plate number?" "Hell yeah, I got the number," I said, and he brightened right up. 4. I really wonder how many car accidents have resulted from people texting while t...

Over on The Swivet, guest blogger Courtney Summers talks a little bit about how to stop worrying about offending people* by just being true to the story you're trying to tell. I think that's something that all YA writers are concerned about to some extent: because our books are read by kids, sometimes fairly young kids, and because our books deal with things that teenagers are dealing with (like sex and drugs and rock'n'roll) that are "adult" things, we occupy this sort of grey area where we can get called on the carpet by actual adults for the things we appear to be advocating when we include them in stories for young adults. This concern isn't a huge one of mine,** I think because of the way that I was brought up. My mother was (is) a single working mom and didn't have a lot of time for hands on supervision. The good news is that I didn't need a lot of hands on supervision. I was (am) a very independent person, even as a child. Put me a room wit...

This is another one of those recommendations that you may look at and think "Jesus, Jay, when do you think I'm going to have time to read 800 pages? I have a job ," but what can I say? This feature is called "Jay Loves A Book" not "Jay Says You Can Finish This In An Afternoon If You Don't Have Anything Else To Do." I used to study Victorian Lit and I like long books, what can I say? Both of those facts means that Strange is a double win for me, because what Clarke has done (in this, her first book) is essentially write a Victorian novel. The book tells the story of the emergence of two magicians in 19 th century England. And by magicians, I don't mean guys who do magic tricks in top hats, I mean real magicians, who use magic, like wizards, only more...English. The plot, like the plot of all good Victorian novels, is way too complicated to go into, but the basics are these: in England, most magicians only study magic, they don't perf...

One of the things I always need to do after I've got a first draft is raise the stakes for my characters. I think it's because my stories almost always start from characters instead of events. I will get an idea for a scene and my first thought is always "what is the character doing here?" I spend a lot of time thinking about the character, until I understand what type of person the character is and what she (or he) would do next, and then I'm off to the races. But what ends up happening in the resulting first draft, then, is that I have a lot of scenes where I'm just working things out about the characters, and not much is actually happening. In the earlier editions of The Book, for example, there were a bunch of scenes where my character was sitting on the porch thinking. And those scenes were necessary to my own understanding of the main character, they were...they were boring . Nothing happened in those scenes. Combine that with a plot that had ver...