THREE AWESOME THINGS!!!! (And one not-so-awesome)

Hello, my friends!

I've been away for a while, I know. Long enough to have a bunch of announcements.

Are you ready for them????????

(I don't know if you're ready for them. I don't know if you can handle the SQUEEEEEE. *throws down gauntlet* :-P)

First, and most awesomely, I need to thank Kathleen Ortiz, Joanna Volpe, and Thananchai Pandey for THIS:

Thai rights to Shelby Bach's middle grade debut EVER AFTERS: Of Fire and Ice, to Amarin, at auction, by Thananchai Pandey at Tuttle-Mori Thailand, in association with Kathleen Ortiz at Nancy Coffey Literary and Media Representation on behalf of Joanna Volpe.

ISN'T THIS SO FREAKING AWESOME?

Thank you so much, Kathleen, Jo, Thananchai Pandey, and of course, all the fantastic people at Amarin! I am so thrilled!!

(On a random note, did you know that the ms mentions Thailand in the second chapter? It's just a passing comment in an convo between the main character and her dad, but still, it made me extra giggly to see it there when I was going over the copy-edits this weekend.)

Technically, I found out about this about two weeks ago -- one Monday evening, when I was making dinner. A totally unexpected email! I didn't even realize that this was going on in the far off realm of NYC, and even farther off place of Thailand, so I was totally blown away by the good news.

In case you're curious, I celebrated in the following ways:

1) I ran around the house singing and doing a happy dance (all pics of this incident have been destroyed/permanently deleted for the preservation of my supercool reputation :-P).

2) I watched the celebration video Kathleen sent me an obscene number of times. Here, you can watch it too:

KERMIT!!!! (Also, who ELSE is totally psyched for the new Muppet movie?)

3) I checked out what my Title looks like in Thai. I know you totally want to see it too:

หลังจากที่เคย | The Ever Afters
และบริษัทยักษ์ใหญ่ของน้ำแข็ง | Of Giants and Ice

Disclaimer: I don't speak/read Thai. I literally just plugged the title into a website or two and cut and pasted it here.

If you do read Thai and have a better translation, please contact me, and I'll post it and give you all my undying gratitude!

And at the suggestion of the lovely and talented Jenn Rush, I'm also gonna grab some friends and go out for some Thai food. There's a great place called Deejai just up the road.

So, anyway, some of you may have noticed that the deal announcement went up at Publisher's Marketplace last Monday.

Where have I been? you ask.

I've been here:

And here:


And here as well, even though it's just down the hill from the one above:


Pretty, right?

So, it might shock you that I only saw the beach for like seven hours altogether in the six days I was there. I basically found a fun, affordable, tiny one bedroom apartment at Carolina Beach; locked myself inside; stuck my butt in a chair at the kitchen table; and just wrote.

(As you may recall, I did something like this in February as well.)

I didn't take my computer with me. I uninstalled email on my phone. I was serious about having no distractions, and for a couple days in a row, I didn't venture out of the apartment until after the sun set.

My mom is going to paint something like this. (She came for the last two days.)

When I sent her out on Thursday morning so I could write, she headed out here with her disposable camera and shot tons of pics. (I know! Disposable camera! I offered to lend her my digital one, but she said the shadows are better with the disposable one.)

But just FYI, she didn't take that picture. I found it here. It just looked really awesome, with the crooked trees and the water glinting between the trunks - I had to share.

Anyway, that's the reason I was absentee for a week running. I didn't even realize that PM had announced it until I logged into Twitter after!

But I was very productive. I wrote as much that week as I did in the four or five weeks previous. And on the drive back, I had the most marvelous focus - the whole story stretched out shiny and winding, like the Yellow Brick Road glittering in daylight...

Until I stopped at a yellow light approximately ten miles from home, and a red PT Cruiser hit me.

So, yeah, I was in my first wreck on Friday. (Well, the first when I was driving - and the first where I was also all alone.)

You might have seen me squeeing over this little MINI on Twitter, but if not, let me just say: I just got this car on July 30, and I have been so excited that I've probably annoyed some people with all my enthusiasm.

So, the wreck was a double bummer. :-(

But it could have been much much worse. A patrol car was on the cross street of this intersection, so when we pulled off, a policewoman appeared before I even thought to call 911. The PT cruiser's axle was broken, and its driver reminded me of my eighth grade French teacher - very mild-mannered and apologetic. The crash tore a hole in my bumper, and it needs to be replaced. But I could drive home.

(That concludes the not-so-awesome portion of today's program. I'll stop complaining now. :-P)

And guess what else was waiting for me when I got home from the beach and (auto) body shop?

COPYEDITS!!!

Wasn't that fast? I feel like they came super fast. Almost shockingly and dauntingly fast.

And they were due back to S&S on Tuesday, which meant I had to pass them to the nice UPS man before 6PM on Monday evening. My timing for that little writing retreat could clearly have been better; the deadline was very tight. But with much caffeine, several late nights, and a little green pencil (to contrast the copyeditor's red pen), I MADE IT!!

(And as I was leaving the parking lot, I literally saw the UPS truck pull up to pick up those copyedits and whisk them off to NYC's Rockefeller Center and Courtney B., my wonderful editor. Which entertained me greatly.)

My one regret was that I didn't get to pore over the pages and make sure everything was as it should be as I promised to do here. Sigh. The best laid plans, etc. etc.

But I did enough. And you know, I actually believe that everything happens for a reason. Maybe, the copyedits kept me from bemoaning the wreck all weekend long. Maybe, if I had time enough to give each page the time I wanted, I would've gotten nitpicky in a crazy way and screwed up the ms with too many unneeded changes.

Sometimes, you just need to let go. (Ah, the laments of an overachiever.)

Okay, y'all - if you have read all the way to the end, you win about a thousand AWESOME points and my undying love.

And also, a lemon-ginger scone next time I see you. :-)

No, seriously - if I can, I'll make them for you (mine look more like muffins, though).
Also, click through for recipe. :-)

This Author Has Three Selves (Part II)

What happened with me and my three selves:

Another recent realization: it's really hard to be three people at once.


So, I don't try to be all of them in one day. Instead, I just devote whole days to each role. Recently, I've been devoting whole weeks.


See those long (yellow) streaks of editing? The scarier name for that is "under deadline."

(And I have another one coming up! *wrestles with panic*)

And this past month, I have been immersed in a joyous terrain of dragons, fairies, and phoenixes, a.k.a. the first draft of Book 2.


But poor author-promoter self has clearly been left by the wayside.

Why Such a Tragedy Has Occurred:

To be perfectly honest, I know why: it's my least favorite of the three - and easily the one I find most stressful.

Being a writer-promoter is also the area I have the least experience in. Writing I've been doing since fifth grade (which is...geez, fifteen freaking years?? When did I get so old?). My editing/revising skills have been honed through my late teens and early twenties (nearly seven years). Through that experience, I find a healthy dose of confidence. It means I can tell my neuroses: "yes, you can can write 300 pages in a row, Shelby; you've done it before." Or "Yes, you can make draft 6 better than draft 5. Wasn't draft 5 better than draft 4?"

But this self-promoting stuff is new. It's uncomfortable: I want to do a good job, but I'm not sure I know how.

From what I can tell, I'm not the only one with this problem. Usually, an author tends to be good at two of the three. I've seen authors who can manage a brilliant revision in the same week s/he lands two great author interviews, holds a squeeworthy contest, and also, moderates a twitter chat - but these tend to be the authors who feel like writing a first draft is complete agony. Other authors can pump out tens of thousands of words, without much sweat, while tweeting great lines from their WIP and creating facebook pages for each of their main characters, but they also have a really hard time getting enough distance from their beautiful words to figure out how to fix their pacing problem.

For me, writing and editing are the easier two; promoting makes me uncomfortable.

(Because it feels like bragging!! And talking about myself all the time! I am not a fan of either of those activities.)

The only thing I really know being an author-promoter is that doing it well - whether writing a stirring post, or designing a fantastic website, or keeping up with tumblr which keeps people coming back for the pretty pictures and cool is music - takes a lot of time.

Time that my author-writer and author-reviser parts steal for themselves. Clearly. (See above for evidence.)

But something must be done. My blog needs my love also.

The Magnificent Plan:

Disclaimer: though magnificent, this plan is a work-in-progress and thus subject to change. That's what happens when there's no grand tradition and you're basically making it up as you go along. But writing down the plan adds a reassuring amount of structure to it. And also, the fact that I'm posting the plan in a public place dramatically increases the chances that I follow through.

1. I'm going to start devoting whole days to my author-promoter-blogger self - the same way I devote whole days to writing and editing.No more of this "whenever-i-feel-like-it" nonsense. (If I've been working all day on something else, then I'm just not going to feel like it. This is just common sense.)
2. Maybe two or three days a month. (So far in June, I've spent one day on the blog, plus a few hours on other days.
3. I am going to start scheduling posts waaaaaaay ahead of time on those days. (Evidence: this post was scheduled on Sunday afternoon. Okay, so two days aren't totally a long time, but some of them will be longer. Like I'm thinking about writing a Father's Day post for next year.)
4. I will keep a list running of all the brilliant blog post ideas so that I'm never short on inspiration. (Currently, there are twelve on it. I started it Friday. Clearly, I have more ideas than I know what to do with.)
5. Spur of the moment posts are okay too, but they're going to be like the icing on the cake. An added and expected bonus.
   

The Practical Application:

Buuuuut since I have a deadline on Friday (aaaaaaaaaaah!!!), this may be the last time you hear from me until after that.

Till later, my friends!!

This Author Has Three Selves (Part I)

It was one of my favorite jokes when I was a kid: "Here we come - me, myself, and I." (I always walked the border between silly and slightly insane.)

But recently, I've realized that I do have three selves in this profession: 1) the author-writer, 2) the author-editor, & 3) the author-promoter.

The Definitions:

The Author-Writer

Not my hand.

She writes.

Her head is full of stories. The characters talk to her constantly. They won't let her sleep sometimes until she gets them on the page. She doesn't think about anything except the story. She sits at her computer, the playlist she made for this chapter thudding through her headphones, and she types and types and types. Or she grabs her notebook and her favorite pen, and she watches gleefully while the lines fills with her handwriting. The hand she writes with is always stained with ink.

Her goal is to string words together on the page until she reaches The End. (Yes, that's it. Even making it good isn't a priority.)

The Author-Editor

My ms, draft #2.

She revises.

She has this draft in front of her. She shapes it the way a potter shapes clay. She untangles the plot snarls one by one. She lops off unneeded scenes and unnecessary characters. She polishes the dialogue until it snaps, crackles, and/or pops. She throws in a few more descriptions and takes them away if she decides that they don't work. She watches over her characters like a micromanaging director, and she makes sure that everyone follows their cues exactly. She is obsessed with different colored pens, post-its, and outlines. She kills her darlings and buries them in word file called "Excess (use later).doc"

Her goal is to make each draft better than the last one, to make the book as good as it can be. On her very best days, she has no pride - only determination.

The Author-Promoter

Love this. :-P

She blogs. She tweets. She holds contests. She sends out postcards with her novel's cover on the front to booksellers and librarians. She updates her website regularly. She might even have a business card with her website, blog, twitter handle, email, and book covers on it. She is a social butterfly in the online literary world, knowing and greeting everyone. She is a master about talking about her book...and getting other people excited about it.

Her goals are to strengthen her platform, reach out to her readers, and market her book(s). (Notice that she is the only one who has more than one primary goal.)

---

As an author these days, you're responsible for the first two. The last one is strongly encouraged.

Authors once weren't expected to handle all three of these, but now that's the norm. I don't mention this to bemoan the past. (I wasn't writing back then. It's hard to feel nostalgic for something you never lived through.) But it's worth bringing up, because being such a new situation, there's no grand tradition for me to follow - there are no set rules. Everyone is still working out the details as they go along.

I find that incredibly comforting when on the days when I have no idea what I'm doing.

One big challenge: each of these roles could easily be a full-time job (by which, I mean, a 40 hour/week commitment). It's incredibly easy for one role to overpower the other two. Which means that you have to be really disciplined and really creative with your time to perfectly fulfill each role.

And y'all, I have come up with a magnificent plan - both disciplined and creative. (And clearly, I'm modest about this plan. :-P)

You'll find it here tomorrow.

(No, really - you will. I already scheduled it.)