Big news on the blog today, and it’s about EL LIBRO DE MONICA! Why the Spanish? Well, in my house, we speak only Spanish. When my critique partner, Monica Ropal, called with THE BEST NEWS EVAH, my little girls hovered, asking. “¿Qué pasa, Mamá?” So in the midst of general hysterics, I told them, “¡EL LIBRO DE MONICA VA A SER UN LIBRO!”

Translation: MONICA’S BOOK IS GOING TO BE A BOOK! 

That’s right! My amazing critique partner, Monica (aka @MonicaYAWriting) has scored a book deal for her debut YA novel, THE BODY OF COOPER MCCAY! Her whip-smart agent, Barbara Poelle, did the deal with Running Press Books, and COOPER will be coming out in 2014! Yaaaaay! *passes around champagne and brownies*

Monica and I met as roommates at a novel-writing retreat at VCFA (deets on this excellent program here: http://www.vcfa.edu/programs-faculty/postgraduate-non-degree/writing-novels-young-people-retreat), where we began our hopefully-lifelong friendship as critique partners. I fell in love with her characters in THE BODY OF COOPER MCCAY then, and fell even deeper in love as she revised. Let’s talk with her about the book!

Kip: So, hey, Monica! What’s your book about? *cues spotlight*

Monica: The Body of Cooper McCay is about Cass, whose secret boyfriend is murdered, and one of her best friends is the prime suspect. But it’s not your typical murder mystery–because it’s also about how Cass deals with violence, mourns her loss, and learns to emotionally trust again in the midst of trying to figure out who killed Cooper!

Kip: You definitely have a way with characters, but I think I’m not alone in my head-over-heels love for your MC, Cass’ best friend, Mattie. Can you describe him through Cass’ eyes?

Monica: Mattie is … everything. Mattie is the one constant that has been in her life. He’s mute, and the challenge is their communication. But the challenge was for me, not them, because they have known each other so long, that every quirk of the brow and twist of the lips is worth lines of dialogue to them. 

Kip: Your novel takes place where you live, in Minnesota. Did the setting become a crucial character for you, or do you think your story could have played out anywhere?

Monica: The part of St. Paul that I chose is, I suppose like many city neighborhoods where rich and poor meet within a very small number of blocks and creates a very interesting but troubling dynamic. The space in which it’s set is very iconic. Everyone around here knows the shops on Grand, and the houses on Summit, and they understand the struggles of those in the Midway area.<

Kip: Now for some fun questions! What’s your writing routine like? Top three favorite authors? And how did you celebrate your book deal?

Monica: Writing routine: I’m not superstitious, but I do like to have my Hermione coffee mug and music . . .  there’s always music. Moody, emotional, emo-type music. Something to get me closer to the emotional truth that I’m writing in that day. Top three authors: JK Rowling, Stephanie Perkins, and Megan Miranda. Celebration: We celebrated by going out for ice cream on Grand Avenue and I gave them a little tour of landmarks from the book. While we were there, a guy called out to his friend whose name was MATTIE! I nearly choked on my root beer float. We will have extensive celebrating next week in Disney World. And of course Harry Potter World! We’ll toast with Butter Beer!

Sounds great! THRILLED for you, Monica, and so glad to get to take part in this journey with you!!
 

In celebration of the release of Ace Hansen’s seriously funny middle grade story, JULIUS CAESAR BROWN AND THE GREEN GAS MYSTERY with MuseItUp Publishing, my girls got the opportunity to steal my blog and ask Ace a few questions about the book and what it’s like to be an alien.

Lyra: I love your picture. You look silly like me.
Ace: Are you green, too?

Lyra: Is it true that aliens communicate with their eyeballs?
Ace: Doesn’t everyone communicate with their eyeballs? ***rolls eyes***

Lyra: Do you speak any languages with each other?
Ace: We speak a secret language known only on my planet. That way you Earthlings don’t understand when we make fun of your funny skin and hair. 

Lyra: Does it sound something lie “jugga-jugga-jugga?”
Ace: Jugga, jugga, jugga? That’s the sound my belly makes when I’ve eaten several pounds of gummy worms!

Violeta: What is your planet like? Is it like Earth?
Ace: My planet is nothing like Earth. All the food on my planet is sweet. The rivers taste kinda like your grape soda and we have three suns. Our rain is orange and tastes like your mangoes. Our clouds are bright pink and it only rains at night. All of us have one baby every seven years. I have a pet wumblybumble. He doesn’t have legs, but bounces like a rubber ball. 

Lyra: What’s your spaceship like?
Ace: My spaceship is like a canoe with a bubble-like canopy on top and is it ever FAST! 

Lyra: What kind of food do you like to eat?
Ace: I love to eat gummy worms, of course!

Violeta: What’s your book about?
Ace: One day you Earthlings stop passing invisible gas and start farting green like us aliens and it causes chaos!!! Someone has to solve the mystery of the green gas!

Aliens, farts, and chaos! As you can tell, the book is a lot of fun for young readers, so my Lyra and Violeta are looking forward to the day they get to read it! In the meantime, thanks, Ace, and thanks for your questions, Violeta and Lyra!

If you’d like to learn more about Ace (of course you do!) you can find him on:

Today I’d like to welcome Gayle C. Krause. I first met Gayle at the Falling Leaves Writers’ Retreat in 2010, and we both had short stories included in the TIMELESS anthology of YA romance published by Pugalicious Press last year.

Kip: Gayle, it was great reading your work in the anthology, and I was so pleased to see that your debut YA novel RATGIRL: Song of the Viper will be published by Noble – Young Adult. Congratulations!

I’d love to hear more about your novel. It’s a dystopian with the setting providing a really unique twist. Can you tell us a little more about what the world is like in your story?

Gayle: The year is 2511 and global warming has affected the entire world. Six of the seven continents are devastated by intense daytime heat, and the 7th, Antarctica, is known as the New Continent, because the ice has melted to reveal a temperate land beneath. It is the only sustainable land left, and produces food for the rest of the world.

The rich have fled Metro City, in favor of the New Continent. Those who couldn’t afford passage are forced to live in abandoned sewer tunnels, or subway stations by day. Nighttime, as dangerous as it is, is the only time they can come to the surface to barter for food or trade their services.

Our heroine is a descendant of one of the ECOS, an environmental group who tried to save the earth from global warming in earlier generations. She has learned from her grandmother how to survive on foods from the wild, so she and her brother do not rely on the roasted rats or rotten vegetables that feed the rest of the homeless.

Kip: I’m personally not a fan of rodents, so your character’s talent to hypnotize rats made me shudder a little. Would you say your story is a retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, or is that the only similarity?

Gayle: It is a retelling of the Pied Piper set in a dystopic future. It loosely follows the premise of the fairy tale, but is darker than the original, and the subplots give reason to the elements of the story. It’s part thriller, part mystery, part love story.

Kip: Who is RATGIRL and how did she come to you?

Gayle: Jax Stone is Ratgirl. She is a sixteen-year-old streetwise orphan, with a hypnotic singing voice, who has the responsibility of raising her five-year-old brother in a dying city, where food is scarce and rats are plentiful. When the tyrannical mayor kidnaps her little brother, Jax schemes, along with her ragtag band of friends, to save her brother and secure passage to the New Continent for all of them, but her plan puts all of them in danger.

Jax came to me a few years ago during NaNoWriMo.

Kip: I’d love to hear more about your journey to publication.

Gayle: Four years ago, I received my first contract with a major publisher, Scholastic, and they published my seasonal, rhyming picture book ROCK STAR SANTA. To date it has sold over 139,000 copies. Then, last year, Pugalicious Press published my short story, The Storyteller’s Daughter, in their YA historical romance anthology, TIMELESS.

Kip: Can you tell us a little more about your publisher?

Gayle: RATGIRL: Song of the Viper was requested by Erika Galpin, submission editor for Noble Young Adult, through the Submissions Mailbox at YALITCHAT, an online writing organization. Noble Romance is primarily an adult romance imprint, but recently has opened a YA imprint called the ‘Sweetheart’ line, where the motto is “not just romance.” The stories in the Sweetheart line are YA stories with very strong romantic threads. The focus is on the developing romantic relationship and the underlying story.

Kip: Do you have an agent, or were you submitting directly to editors?

Gayle: I do not have an agent, but I hope to sign with one this year. 🙂

Kip: You mention you also have a published picture book, and of course the short story with Pugalicious. What else are you working on these days?

Gayle: My current WIP is a MG fantasy/action adventure with a cast of humorous, and unforgettable characters. It is my only story with a male protagonist, but I’m enjoying writing it.

I’m also am feeding my poetry muse by writing a MG “fractured fairy tale” collection, in various poetic forms. It is titled, “Once Upon a Twisted Tale.”

RATGIRL: Song of the Viper will be available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble in ebook or paperback. Look for it this month.

Thanks for having me, Kip. Support of fellow writers is very important to any author’s success. 🙂

This part week, I read A Cold November Road, a wonderful Civil War-era YA novella by author Debbie Causevic. You can download it (for free!) here.

This gripping romance was not only a page-turner for me as a reader; it also was a great lesson in short fiction for me as a writer, so I wanted to talk with Debbie a little more about her story and her writing process. Welcome, Debbie!

Kip: I’ve been intrigued by novellas for a while, but I haven’t been able to complete one myself. The one I tried ended up needing a full novel. I know you’re also a novelist, so how did you constrain yourself?

Debbie: A Cold November Road is my first novella.  Writing full-length novels is definitely more what I am used to doing. I’ve completed five full-length manuscripts, two of which are part of the YA urban fantasy series that resulted in my signing with an agent last fall.  In order to start building readership, my agent suggested it would be a good idea to release any short-stories or novellas that I had completed.  I didn’t have anything ready at the time so I decided to write one.  It took a few months, but it was a fun journey nevertheless.

I wrote the novella much like a novel, only I focused on three specific things while writing it.

1. Word count. Knowing that my limit was 40K served as a great reminder as the word count climbed with every scene.  It kept me thinking “do I really need to go there or explain that…”  
2. Moving forward.  I was frequently tempted to add scenes to better develop the main characters.  However, I asked myself at every new scene, does this actually serve to move the story forward?  If the answer was no, then I’d cut the scene regardless of how much my fingers yearned to type it.  
3. Developing characters through dialogue.  Revealing some of the major characters’ pasts and personality traits via dialogue, rather than devoting actual scenes to them, served as a great way to add back story and depth, while being fairly merciful on the overall word count.

Kip: I totally agree on these points. When I wrote my short story for the Pugalicious Press Timeless anthology last year, I was thrilled to write something that took less time, but even though it was short, I found it followed much of the same process: it still had to develop a full plot and character arc, and it still had to go through several rounds of critique and revision, and then more with an editor once it was accepted. Did you find that your process for the novella was also similar to novel-writing? Any big differences?

Debbie: The biggest difference for me in writing this story as a novella is that I was constantly staring at the word count on the screen. 🙂  That and I kept telling myself no, I can’t go there, I don’t have enough words.

A few manuscripts ago—after becoming frustrated that my story was veering too greatly from its original outline—I stopped writing detailed outlines and plots, etc.  Now, I pick the main characters’ names and just start writing. Once the MS is approximately halfway through, I write a very basic outline of what I still hope to incorporate before it’s over.  Usually I still arrive at the same ending that I envisioned when I started writing.  I’m not sure if this would work for most people, but I find it is easier for me to enjoy the writing of the story this way.  One caveat is that I never start writing anything until the characters feel like real people in my head.  I followed this same process with A Cold November Road as well.

Kip: These are great tips! Now, a little more about this piece in particular. You write urban fantasy, but this piece is historical fiction. Was it something about the story itself that made you switch gears, or did you find that historical lent itself better to something shorter?

Debbie: Truth be told, I love to write across several genres.  In addition to The Timebender’s Curse YA urban fantasy series, I have one contemporary YA MS and two contemporary adult ones.  Like most writers, at any one time I have a dozen or so stories floating around my head that I’d love to find time to write.  A Cold November Road was one of them.

I had the idea for this novella while doing research for The Timebender’s Curse series which features a heroine traveling back in time to the Civil War era in part of the story.  While doing research for this, I was moved by what ordinary citizens endured as par for the course during those tumultuous years.  And, whenever I am moved by something, a story idea arises…  Since novellas typically end in times of change, and the end of A Cold November Road coincides with the end of the war, I felt this story would work well in novella form.

Kip: Having read A Cold November Road, I totally agree that it was the perfect amount of story for a novella. Have you thought about looking for a publisher for this? I know Entangled pubs novellas, but I’m not sure what else the market for novellas looks like. I’d love to hear more!

Debbie: That is certainly a possibility in the future or, depending upon continued feedback from the novella, expanding it into a novel-length MS.  It’s off-genre from what my agent is submitting this spring, which I know is a factor for publication.  I wrote the novella based on the age-old advice of “write what moves you and build your audience from there”.  For now, I’m just releasing it in e-book form and hoping to expand readership.  Although the genre is different from my other works, at its core it is a good love story.  That is one thing I aim to put in everything I write.

Kip: I definitely agree that a good love story! Fans of historical fiction, take note! And make sure to follow Debbie’s journey on her website and twitter. I predict great things from her in the future.