Two Months and Counting!

     Yesterday was my two-month blogiversary.  The number of people reading my posts is creeping up, and I've acquired a follower (okay, it's my son, but I'm totally counting it).  So in order to celebrate, I'm going to do something it seems I haven't done for a while, which is to write about young-adult books.      Some months ago my daughter (age almost 16) asked me to order her some John Green novels, saying that her friends had been talking about this author.  I'd never heard of him, so I googled him and liked what I read.  I ordered "Looking for Alaska" and "Paper Towns," and then I read "Paper Towns" while she was still working her way through "Alaska," and then over the next month or so, while she was watching TV or playing video games, I read "Alaska" too.  Then when "The Fault in Our Stars" came out last month and got fabulous reviews, I ordered it too, and since my daughter is still reading "Paper Towns," I read "Stars," and finished it yesterday.  So here's my take on John Green.  He's a very gifted writer with an uncanny ear for dialogue and a killer instinct for the descriptive phrase.  But I think there are two John Greens locked inside the same body and brain, and they're constantly engaged in a pitched battle with each other.  There's the John Green who wants to be writing novels, and there's the one who wants to be creating roleplaying video games.  I think that conflict between the two is probably part of what draws teenagers to him, but for an old fart like me, it creates a whiff of disconnection.  In the world of John Green novels, events which are presented as reality could not in fact occur in  reality, at least not in any reality I have ever experienced, and I have to say that in my years on Earth I've experienced a wide range of them.  Also, in his novels, randomly encountered nurses and stewardesses and cabdrivers are often only one or two levels less witty and insightful than the main characters, and sadly, that has not been part of my life experience either.  I sometimes get the sense, reading his novels, that the people in them are fully interactive, in the way that characters in a really brilliantly-designed video game can be interactive, but that they're not actually interacting, in the way that flesh-and-blood human beings do.   And I believe that might be because both John Greens are about 35 years old and, while they are extraordinarily high-functioning (if attention-impaired) 35-year-olds, they still have a lot to learn about life, and they also need to finish working through their issues about falling helplessly in love with a larger-than-life person who, voluntarily or involuntarily, ends up leaving.  Both of which I have no doubt the John Greens will do, and move on to explore other equally life-altering kinds of experiences, and then they will be truly awesome in every way.
     Happy Presidents' Day.  Washington was an exceptionally skilled CEO, but Lincoln was The Man.  And here is my blogiversary present to you.  Follow this link and you won't be sorry:  www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/08/russia_in_color_a_century_ago.html.   Enjoy!

An Art, Not a Science

Because not getting your writing published is an art, not a science, I offer no assurances that my method is the only, or even the best, way to achieve this goal.  I can only attest that it has consistently worked for me for many years, and so I thought it might be of some interest to the general public.  Here goes:

1. Consider yourself a writer from childhood on.  Write all kinds of things through the years: poetry, plays, short stories, song lyrics, journal entries.  Read a lot, in many different genres.  Slowly, painfully, via many trials and a seemingly bottomless pit of errors, improve your literary skills. 

2. Develop a nonwriting career - say, the law.  Get married, divorced, remarried.  Have two kids.  Raise them.  Continue writing and reading throughout, though more episodically than steadily.  Take writing classes when possible.

3. Eventually - say, by your mid-thirties - select a writing genre that seems most suited to your abilities and interests.  Say - oh, I don't know - young adult literature.

4. Focus your efforts in that genre.  Read a lot of young adult novels.  Take classes.  Join the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, a truly stellar professional organization.  Attend conferences and workshops.  Join a wonderful, supportive, intelligent critique group, and attend its meetings regularly.  Stick with all of the above for - just throwing this number out here - fifteen years or so.  Give or take.

5. Keep writing. Steal time at work.  Finish a novel.  Acquire, and lose, an agent.  Write a second novel.  Then a third.  Amass critical praise over the years; come close to having a novel acquired by a couple of other agents; revise, revise, revise, until it seems that you could recite the full text of each of your novels from memory.  Resubmit.  Be told that it's just not quite ___ enough to sell (fill in the blank).  Compare your writing to that of published authors; whether you come out better or worse, hate and envy said authors for having something (an unfair measure of either genius or undeserved good luck) that you don't have.  Get depressed.  Get angry.  Keep writing anyway.

6. Get better at writing.  In fact, get really good at writing.  But, simultaneously, get older.  And then even older.  Until one day you wake up and turn - just a ballpark number - 56.  Four days after that birthday, start a blog.  Because, hey - who knows?  Maybe someone out there in cyberland will read that!!

So that's it.  As I said, I can only personally vouch for one way of not getting published.  There must be countless other variations out there.  Suggestions, anyone?