Friday Five: BEA edition

BEA is over.

1. For me, it began Monday night with the Lerner librarian preview. I met a few folks, got to chat with the AE about |-1| in front of a small but apparently interested crowd. Also I drank a high ball. For supper, alone, I visited Zen Palate, a vegetarian restaurant I miss pretty regularly, and Simon's favorite:


After ordering, and while I ate, and after I finished, I finally started The Freak Observer. It is a difficult book to put down. Loa really pulls you along. There is great pain.

2. Tuesday, the first official day of BEA, was a visit to Simon & Schuster and therefore several of my favorite people. That was followed by a great lunch with my wife and our good friend, also once from S&S. We met halfway between Midtown and Soho, at Elmo in Chelsea. Good sandwich. Hip place. And Samantha and I got to exchange ARCs. Tuesday night at eight (the latest I've started supper in a dog's age), I met ENIV and the AE for a completely awesome burger and a few awesome beers and plenty of awesome conversation. Excellent day of old and new friends. Good stuff.

3. Wednesday morning, after an excellent breakfast with the Lerner crew at the hotel restaurant and a quick tour of the BEA floor, I needed to rest the dogs (shout out to Heidi -- orange Chucks look cool, but hurt!), so I sat down on a comfy couch far from the exhibition and took the opportunity to get back to Blythe's debut. Soon it was noon, and that meant lunch with several Tenners, and meeting several awesome bloggers. Please see this photo that Berk and I keep stealing from Heidi.


4. For me, BEA ended Wednesday at around 5:15. That's when I signed the last available copy of |-1| and got up from the autographing table. I admit it: I was worried the line would consist of exactly 8 people, all of whom I knew personally. But we gave away 100 copies of the book, and I got to meet many a librarian and blogger and reader and writer on that line! It was pretty great.

5. And now I'm on Long Island, and vacation. We have many friend and family and new-baby visits to make! Ta!

Friday Five: A New Hope

1. Without at first realizing that today is the 30th anniversary of the release of The Empire Strikes Back, I'd planned to blog today a little about the original three Star Wars flicks, which I've just watched in rapid succession thanks to my recent birthday gift. That was a long sentence.

Empire, as we all know, is the best of the three. Jedi is the worst. A New Hope, as we now know the original Star Wars movie, doesn't get a lot of credit either way. Sure, it gets quoted plenty ("But I was going to Tashi Station to pick up some power converters waaah," for example), but its strengths as a film and tale are not so often discussed. I'm here to tell you, it's really good. It's a freakin' awesome fantasy YA, is what it is. Imagine, if you will, a novel version of A New Hope. We'd have third-person POV, natch, with alternating close third for Luke and Leia's convergent arcs. Both characters do quite a lot of "meeting the world," in my mind the foremost quality in good YA. And, if not for -- let's face it -- Mr. Hamill's catastrophic acting and whining, both characters would be insanely sympathetic to adolescent or arrested-adolescent viewers. LIKE ME.

As for Jedi, it's as bad as you remember, or possibly worse. I found it was worse. I found the Ewoks more annoying than I thought they were. I was happy when one died. Also, Luke is STILL freakin' whining. Han, once a scruffy-looking dangerous man, is endlessly slapsticking around with his goofball sidekick Chewie. Poor Chewie. I ask you, would Chewbacca of A New Hope fall for the old meat-on-a-branch trick? No freakin' way.

But I've said too much.

2. It's also the 30th anniversary of Pac Man, in case you haven't noticed.

3. What else? BEA is what else. For me and the good people at Carolrhoda Lab (and the rest of Lerner), it starts on Monday night with the big to-do. I'm not remotely nervous!

4. Did I mention finals are in? Lookit.


5. And finally, as if I wasn't already a nervous wreck, today Sam, Beth, and I visited a pre-school. In the fall, my tiny baby boy will very likely join a two-year-old, two-day-per-week pre-school. I can hardly stand to think of it. Luckily I have the whole summer to get used to the idea.

Announcements!

Some big announcements today--relative to recent announcements, anyway. But first, to sum up:

On Saturday, the honorable Kurtis Scaletta alerted me to the fact that local YA author Swati Avasthi was reading at the Loft from her just-released debut SPLIT. I went to the reading. It was fantastic. I'm not far into the book yet, but so far it's superbly and vividly written. Great voice, serious subject matter handled well. I recommend it! Of course, I got my new copy signed by the author while I was there and we chatted a bit. It's nice to live in a town (err, twin town) with such a strong community of writers for young people. In fact, I'm at the Loft right now. My class begins in 90 minutes or so.

What have I been doing down here all afternoon? Well, I've finished my first read-through of YA MS the Second, and it . . . wants for much, let's say. I like it, mind you. I really do. It's even okay in some places where I thought it was utter garbage. But there's this one interesting character in particular who literally vanishes after page like 15, never to return. I ask you: wtf.

Okay, so, on to fun announcements. I'm nearly ready to end the signed ARC contest, but I'm going to give one more chance to enter, and this one will be the biggy--LOTS of chances for entries, such that previous entries will seem like chicken feed, kind of like that bonus round on the Family Feud. Watch for details on that in the next few days.

And finally, BEA! I'll be there, signing on Wednesday late afternoon. But even more exciting is the Carolrhoda LAB big event on Monday night. It's a swanky, invite-only affair, and I'll be (gulp) at the front of the room waxing intellectually with the AE. What, me worry?

Resolutions, but not the kind you expect

You'll notice I haven't posted any resolutions this January. I suppose I could--like finishing both my YA WIPs; like cutting my cholesterol and getting back on my bike this spring--but I don't feel like it. So let's just say it's those three things and move on.

Here's a rare Sam update: We got him this little blue chair, still a little big for his modest frame. Still, he uses it well. He pushes it all over the house, then uses it to climb up to places he ought not, like toy chest tops and kitchen counters and dining room tables. So that's fun.

Beth has taken to bakin'. There is fresh bread all the time. It's fantastic.

Today was red-carpet day in children's books, as most of you probably know, and I have a lot of reading to do, for sure. You may recall a mention of one winner here at the Exile some time ago. I loved it then and am happy with the choice, for sure.

But awards day is something else to me too. It's a day I get particularly fired up to do the hard work it takes to write a really good book. Last year, I had just submitted a complete MS to the AE for the first time, and was taking a little break before shooting off to SCBWI in NYC. This year, I haven't submitted anything to anyone in far too long, and I have a week and a half and a couple of write days and nights before SCBWI in NYC. So I plan to take advantage of the ALA-inspired fire in my gut. With that in mind, I'm making not New Year's resolutions, as I mentioned above, but instead, ALA Awards Resolutions:

1. YA MS the Third: this thing has been sitting about twenty feet from the goal line for months, no exaggeration. Plenty of excuses, but no exaggeration. There are a few scenes I know I need to write, but that will also mean lots of revisions to existent scenes that I love and don't want to revisit. That idiocy ends now. The work will get done on Wednesday and Saturday.

2. YA MS the Second: this needs a synopsis. This time last year, I thought I was about to finish it. I had written about 40k in about a month, and was loving every minute of it. Then plot holes and wrong turns reared their ugly heads (as did another book by a brilliant writer also about a girl and her werewolf man), so I put it on the back burner and have only tweaked it slightly over the last year. That idiocy ends now. I will synopsize this beast by the middle of February.

And that's it. Beyond February 15 (happy seventh birthday, Harry!), I'm not making any promises. Sure, there's that middle grade series that I want to rewrite YA, and there's the story of a couple of background characters in |-1| I want to revisit, but I'll probably make a nice set of post-BEA resolutions.

Oh, and I promise to blog more. Natch.