Thankful Thursday – Summer 2012 edition

Tags

family, garden, writing

This has been the busiest summer I can remember, a whirligig of days and hours that’s had me racing to keep up. But now the whirligig is spinning to a close, and I see that despite all the commotion, it’s been a beautiful season.

Here are some writing things I’m thankful for:

The page proofs for Chantress are done! (I always lose my mind over page proofs, and it’s good to have it back.)

The cover is beautiful and I’ll get to reveal it soon!

But as I sit here tonight, watching the summer night draw in, it’s the non-writing things from this summer that have the closest hold on my heart:

A joyful family wedding with music that still sings in my head

Seeing my whole family for the first time in over 2 1/2 years

Sweetpea learning to swim

Quiet nights stargazing in the backyard, marveling at the Milky Way

The hedgehog who snuffles through our garden on occasional evening wanderings

Dear friends who came thousands of miles to see us

The roses that have bloomed all summer long

What stands out about your summer? I’d love to hear.

Some thoughts on Wolves

Tags

inkpot, joan aiken, writing

Ducking out of the revision cave to say that I have a post up on the Enchanted Inkpot today about Joan Aiken and The Wolves of Willoughby Chase.

I’ve loved this book since I was small, and I’m amazed how much I learned by looking at it with a writer’s eye. The book’s backstory is thought-provoking, too. It took ten years from the start of the book to publication, and Joan Aiken had to persevere through terrible loss and some really bad luck to get there. I’m glad she did.

As China Miéville says of Aiken’s books, “If that kind of writing hits you at the right time when you’re a child, the impact is like nothing else ever.”

You can read the whole Inkpot essay here.

I hope to be back soon with a few thoughts on revision and some fun photos of summer!

Who’s in the room?

Tags

publishing, writing

This has been a busy month, bookwise. I’ve just turned in the copyedits – hooray! And the flap copy is just about ready to go. It’s almost another year before the book comes out – April 2013 – but publication feels more real with every passing month.

And that means I’m having to re-learn a central truth of the author’s life: While it’s a joyful thing to have a book published, it’s a scary one, too. And I suspect there’s no cure for that, since part of what makes it so joyful (people will read my book!) is also what makes it so scary (people will read my book!).

Already I’m having to do some fancy mental gymnastics to keep myself in a good place for writing book two. I’m all too capable of lugging a thousand potential critics in my head as I write. Readers, reviews, editor, author, family… it can feel like they’re all looking over my shoulder as I type.

So I’m thinking a lot about these lines***:

Dance like no one’s watching.
Sing like no one’s listening.

And I’m adding one more:

Write like no one’s in the room.

Sign on a staircase at Magdalen College, Oxford

____________________________
***The net credits the lines to Mark Twain, William Purkey, and Aurora Greenway, but that’s the net for you. Whoever wrote them, I think they’re great.

Thankful Thursday: Writing Retreat

Tags

outings, retreat, travel, writing

My word for this year is GROW, and that means doing some things I thought were beyond me. I did one of them last week: my first writing retreat.

I’ve always wanted to go on a writing retreat, but until now it never worked out. Sometimes money was the problem, sometimes health, sometimes family circumstances… sometimes all three.

Mostly I’ve been resigned to this; I have bad retreat karma, and that’s that. But when I heard that Kindling Words was holding a retreat here in the UK in March 2012, I desperately wanted to go, especially since some very dear friends were going to be there, friends I rarely get to see.

I just didn’t see how I could make it work.

Last fall, when we were supposed to sign up, I was going through a lupus flare. These happen sometimes, and I just grit my teeth and get through them, but this one was bad enough that my doctors decided it was time to try a new treatment… and the treatment just wasn’t working.

But then, in mid-February, I finally started to see some results. It’s not a cure (those are really, really rare with lupus), but the pain finally started to recede.

Unfortunately, the improvement had come too late for the retreat. Or so I thought. But then out of the blue, lovely Alison James of Kindling Words wrote again, just before the retreat began, urging me to come just for the weekend if I could; she said they would find space for me. I pieced together the travel arrangements and snagged the very last room in the hotel. My generous husband offered to cover for me at home and helped me pack. And suddenly I was on a train to the Lake District, headed for the misty hills of Derwentwater:

As you can see, the weather was blustery – perfect for curling up with a manuscript, or for a writerly chat over tea and scones. But we had sunny hours, too:

The lovely jeannineatkins, taking a post-breakfast perambulation with me

The view from the hotel window

My three days there were filled with laughter, hugs, and book talk. I wrote. I meditated. I spooned up sticky toffee pudding. I got soaked to the skin on a soppy lake cruise. I stayed up for late night heart-to-hearts.

The food was incredible, the company even better. An enchanted weekend, right down to the fairy butter sculpture:

Really, truly, she’s made of butter.

Look at those wings!

To be honest, the trip was at the limit of what’s possible for me at the moment, and I’m still in recovery mode back here at home. But as I told a friend the other day, I know the exhaustion will fade – and the memories of that weekend will be with me forever.

Thankful Thursday: Mr. Lynch’s Wonderful Readers

Tags

reading, virginia bound, writing

Recently I had one of the best surprises of my writing life, and it concerned a book that came out nine years ago.

Lots of people judge whether a book is a success by what happens in that first year, or even in the first few months. By that standard, my first book, Virginia Bound — a story about a boy who is kidnapped from London and shipped to Virginia as an indentured servant in the 1620s — barely held its own. There was a recession that year, and I wasn’t able to do a lot of publicity for it, and for a while I feared it would never find its audience.

Turns out, though, that the book was just a late bloomer. The year after it was published, it started showing up on state lists. Sales went up, not down. A few years after that it won a children’s choice award. And now, nine years down the line, I still get some lovely reader mail for it.

Still, I’ve never had a letter quite like the one I received last month from Mr. Andrew Lynch, a fourth-grade teacher at Creighton’s Corner Elementary School in Virginia. He emailed me to let me know that he’d read Virginia Bound to his class, and they’d kept a blog of the experience.

And oh, what a wonderful blog it is! At the end of key chapters, Mr. Lynch would ask them how they felt about what had happened, whether they would have made the same choices, and could they guess what would happen next. Even at the start, their answers are terrific. And as they get farther into the story, you can see how deeply engaged they become with the book and the characters — and loveliest of all, with each other, because there’s plenty of respectful but forthright debate in their blog. I tackle some really tough issues in Virginia Bound, and they were with me all the way.

In reading their blog, I got as close as a writer can to experiencing my book as readers do.

As Madeleine L’Engle once said, “With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.

It is wonderful to have a glimpse of the life my book is leading in Creighton’s Corner Elementary School. Thank you, Mr. Lynch’s fourth graders! You are wonderful readers, and you are moving and powerful writers, too.

Revisions and courage

Tags

revision, writing

After a month of hard labor, I’m coming into the home stretch with these revisions… hooray!

Revising under deadline is always a fraught process, I find. I’m lucky because my editor wrote me a wonderful letter and lots of notes, which built on what I’d already done and opened up new possibilities. Yet it’s easy for me to doubt myself at every stage of writing, and revision is no exception.

Revising under deadline only ratchets up the anxiety. Do I change this character’s name? Do I put the new scene here or here? Do I jettison a good scene in hope of a great one?

The annotated manuscript

When doubt freezes me up, I remember a story I heard from Frank Cottrell Boyce at the SCBWI-UK conference last November. Apparently, if you look at Mary Norton’s drafts for The Borrowers you’ll see that she made some brilliant late-stage changes, including elements that now strike us as essential, such as the title and the character’s “borrowed” names. The Borrowers only became a classic, in short, because Norton was fearless in revising to the last.

“Fearless” is not exactly my middle name. Yet I’m finding that courage is a good companion as I revise. I’ve pushed myself to dive deep; I’ve had to trust my instincts. But I think Chantress will be a better book because of it.

Wordless Wednesday: Fuel for the last lap of revisions…

Tags

food, revision, writing

… a lemon meringue tart

Resolutions, growing, and gardens

Tags

gardens, outings, revision, writing

I’m a bit late to the resolution game this year, and that’s only partly because I’m in the middle of revisions. Truth is, 2012 is shaping up to be a challenging year. When I finally sat down to take a look at what I’m juggling, the single-spaced list went on for over a page. And some of those juggling balls are mighty big: WRITE BOOK TWO, for instance.

So challenging is putting it nicely. How about terrifying?

After making that list I felt like cowering under the covers till 2013. Only I’m not sure it’s going to get any easier then. And cowering under the covers isn’t any fun.

Yesterday I decided it was time to reframe things. It’s the beginning of January, and when I look at that list, some of the items on it look darn near impossible. I have no idea how to pull them off. But you know what? I don’t need to know right now. I don’t need to have the perfect game plan. I just need to get in there and try. Because in the very act of doing these things, I’m going to grow. And it’s the growing that will help me find a way through them.

So that’s my word for this year: GROW.

I have to admit, the word was inspired partly by a New Year’s visit to the Oxford Botanic Garden, where I saw these beauties:

Geraniums — aren’t they bright?!

Oranges! In midwinter! Admittedly in an orangery.

Cyclamen blooms, which look so fragile but are surprisingly sturdy

Snowdrops — the earliest I’ve ever seen.

Who knows? Maybe by the end of the year, my word for 2012 will turn out to be BLOOM.

Climbing the story mountain

Tags

writing

Tuesday morning, and it feels like I’m climbing a mountain. I’m a quarter of the way up, and I can’t even see the top of the mountain for the mists. I’m going to get lost here, I can just tell. I might even barrel my way clear off the mountain face. And in the meantime, every muddy step feels like a slog.

But it’s time to lace my boots up, and get going. Because I know that once I start moving, I’ll remember why I do this: For the moments of grace when I find the right words. For the sheer rush of joy when I hear my characters speaking to me. And for the richness of getting to know this story’s wild heart.

Wishing luck to everyone who’s out in those story mountains with me!

A sale and a leap of faith

Tags

chantress, sale, writing

As writers, we have to make a lot of leaps of faith: Believing we can create something out of nothing. Believing we have a story to tell. Believing someone will want to hear it. Believing our work is worth doing.

In my writing life, there have been a lot of those crazy leaps, but maybe none so big as the one I made five years ago, during a very bleak time in my life. I was between books then – never a happy place for me to be – and I couldn’t settle on what to write next. My mind was a muddle of other people’s voices – editors, agents, critics, reviewers, well-meaning family and friends. I could no longer hear myself. It didn’t help that it had been a devastating year for me personally, and that the blows showed no sign of stopping.

One day, reeling from news that I thought would break me apart, I sat down in a coffeeshop and just let myself write about how I felt. And there on the page, I asked myself a question:

If you were only allowed one more book, what would it be?

Sometimes when you ask the right question, you get an answer. Right there in the coffeeshop, a story started to come to me. And kept coming over the next days and weeks and months. A story about – of all things – a Spymaster, a ruby, and a girl who heard music that no one else could hear. A girl who needed to find her own voice to survive.

It wasn’t like anything I’d ever written before. It wasn’t anything like my agent or editors were expecting from me. But oh, how I wanted to write it!

And so I did.

It took me much longer that I expected, partly because I had a baby not long after I started, and also because we later made an international move. I had to set the work aside for long periods of time – at one point for more than a year – and even when I was working on it I usually only had tiny pockets of time. The story, too, was a challenge, requiring many more drafts than usual.

But this leap of faith has a happy ending. When the book finally went out last month, it had the good luck to fall into the hands of Julie Just at Janklow & Nesbit. She loved the story so much that it made me cry. And when the book went out to editors, well, my friends… that was one amazing week. And now the book has found a home.

Here’s the official announcement: ,

From this week’s PW Children’s Bookshelf:

“In a pre-empt just before Frankfurt, Karen Wojtyla of Margaret K. McElderry Books bought a YA series by Amy Butler Greenfield called Chantress. The series, set in London in the 1660s, centers on a girl who can sing magic in a world that forbids it; her talent quickly gets her into trouble with an evil Lord Protector. The first book in the trilogy is set for summer 2013. Greenfield is the author of the middle-grade novel Virginia Bound and the nonfiction book A Perfect Red. Julie Just of Janklow & Nesbit Associates negotiated the deal for North American rights.”

So here’s to leaps of faith! And here’s to the friends – including you wonderful people who read this blog – who helped sustain me through mine.