WEEKEND WORD: And it's even a good book!

She's blind, yes. But, that doesn't end the imagination, now does it? Unfortunately, it does make it hard to tell, when you're writing longhand, if you've got ink in your pen...

Fortunately, the police are here to protect and serve - and this time, they served as impression readers, in the proud tradition of TV detectives who always decipher the phone messages after the written-on sheet from the pad has been torn away.

Now, what's your excuse for not writing????

Yeah, I thought so.

Weekend WORD: A WEE REVISIT...

THIS WAS FIRST PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 14, 2007: How ironic that not much has changed, and yet so much has - and I STILL need to hear all of this again.
Maybe you do, too...

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For my Valentine's Gift today, I got a note from my agent telling me that yet another house has passed on my second novel. I just sighed and sort of wandered away from the computer, deciding it was time to raid my stash of chocolate chips again.

There's a part of me that just knows I'm going to be called on to revise this manuscript -- again, and right now, I just can't even think about it. I have a semi-solid mid-March deadline for the piece I'm working on now (before ye olde Agent, S.A.M., goes to Barcelona for the Book Faire), and I'll soon be doing final edits on the first novel, so there's a big "Noooo!" swelling up from my soul at the idea of going backwards yet one more time to mess with this piece. I've heard it's too dramatic, too this, too that, but everyone loves the writing, loves the way it deals with "sensitive subjects." All right, then... can anyone be more specific about what they don't love, then?

A trip to Our Jane's Brain has cured me of my tendency to pout, though. Well, not entirely, but work with me, huh? Jane Yolen spoke at the SCBWI Midwinters Conference in NY, and this is some of what she said, as recorded in her online journal:

"If you enter into revision angrily, hating the editor and all of her notes, you will get little out of the process. So learn to love the process as well...

"Read the letter, put it down, and re-read it again the next day. Call a best friend and read the letter to her or him. Or take a hot bath and let the water soak away that initial anger, which—after all—is just the body reacting to being thwarted in the age-old desire to be loved unconditionally.

Mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers can love you that way. An editor has better things to do with her time and your manuscript."

And incidentally, so does your agent have better things to do with their time! I have wasted a lot of time repeatedly allowing myself to become emotionally flayed by a guy who is really only doing his job on my MANUSCRIPT, not ME (oh, why is that still so hard to separate the two?).
Granted: rejection stinks. I still HATE hearing him say "No" and his gift for dry understatement in his pithy little margin comments initially brings me to hives -- or worse -- until I set his note aside for awhile. Writers just live too far inside of their own heads sometimes, and rejection in any form sometimes feels overwhelming. But when I'm sane (and when is that, exactly?) I know it's really not personal. Really. And though I may never feel comfortable with him, I know my agent knows his stuff. I think highly of him professionally, so maybe... maybe the fact that we'll never name our (non-existent) children after each other... well, maybe that's okay.

For Valentine's Day, I bequeath to myself the gift of realism: not everybody has to be best buddies.

All right, enough navel-gazing nonsense. Back to work...

WEEKEND WORD Turning Over A New Leaf

This is going to be somewhat of a serious post - but it's something that comes as a result of a lot of soul-searching and talking with other blog friends.

This month it's National Poetry Month, and we're all poised to enjoy the beauty and power of poetry - of literature - of words. For a long time, we've focused here at Wonderland on finding the joy and playfulness and depth of words through the lens of the young adult world of words, but for a long time, both of us have been struggling to keep up. YA and Children's Lit is mercurial - a new trend comes along every six minutes, and it's always something else - the next big new thing to top the charts.

Sometimes reading YA lit feels a lot like being still in high school.

Did you read Joel Stein's piece in the NY Times? Here is this gorgeous, intelligent person who is embarrassed by adults reading kids' books. He can't take people seriously who read The Hunger Games or Twilight. Suddenly, in the eyes of someone younger and on the cusp of his career, we're seeing ourselves a little differently - maybe in ways we should have been looking at ourselves all along.

Like making clothes for your Barbie that last year of junior high, young adult literature has become a guilty pleasure. But, if we truly believe that there's power and beauty in words, then it's the right move to embrace them - as an adult, in an adult sphere. It's time to reenlist the classics in helping us make sense of the world, and use the full range of our collective minds to embrace the power and potency of literature.

So pardon our dust as we reconfigure and reconstruct and rebrand ourselves into something new. We've looked for wonderland long enough. Now we're finding adulthood, and we welcome you to come along for the ride.

Best,
T&S

The Weekend Word... from Hello *Ello

Why The Pretty White Girl YA Book Cover Trend Needs To End.

I love it when I find a writer with whom I agree, who is much more genteel and polished than I whilst still giving a teensy rant. So, so, so many well articulated points made. Here's hoping she's not just preachin' to the choir.

Happy Weekend...

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In case you didn't know: "Ello is short for Ellen Oh. Transplanted from Brooklyn, NY, I'm a lawyer, a writer, and a college instructor now living near the nation's capital. I have three smart, beautiful little girls and an ultra-supportive husband who tells me to write every day so that maybe, one day, I'll actually get a book published. I'm repped by the amazing Joe Monti of Barry Goldblatt Literary. And what do you know, Da Man was right! My first book, Prophecy: The Dragon King Chronicles, is being published by HarperCollins Childrens for release in Winter 2013! Life is very good."

WEEKEND WORD: ON PRIVACY: TED Talks...

Like many in the blogosphere, I often get videos from TED talks passed to me. I love TED stuff - conversations, since 1984, about the best in Technology, Entertainment, and Design. In some ways, I'm a little torn about their role - I think the conferences are ridiculously elitist, in that it's so prohibitively expensive to attend them that only the über rich do, and in that way sort of create themselves (dominant culture, male, AND the 1%) as the leaders in the field of "spreading ideas." On the other hand, I appreciate that TED invites thinkers to speak to them from every field and also that they always encapsulate the messages the thinkers present via free and easily accessible video media, worldwide. So, there's that.

Anyway.

Because Tech Boy's doctoral dissertation is on information management and media, I'm familiar with Sherry Turkle, author and director of MIT's initiative on Technology & Self. What she said about privacy struck chords with me - big, ringing chords, like tolling bells.

Whether the bells are tolling, TOO LATE TOO LATE TOO LATE or some other message, however, remains to be seen. Think on this:

From NPR's All Tech Considered:

"We like to say that we grew up with the Internet, thus we think that the Internet is all grown up. But it's not. The problem is that we have not created a privacy culture on the Internet that we can live with. We created the wrong one. What I think about is: What is intimacy without privacy? What is a democracy without privacy? We weren't asking those two questions when this was created and we bequeathed to our children this culture then we shrug, 'they don't care about privacy.'

"I was trained to care about privacy. My grandmother of Eastern European descent used to marvel at the mail. The idea that you were in a country where mail was sacrosanct... that to tamper with the mail was a federal offense, to her, this was one of the great things about being an American. What drives me crazy is that people turn to these babies, these children and say, 'They don't care about privacy.' But it was our responsibility to teach them.

"[Facebook CEO] ]Mark Zuckerberg says privacy is no longer a social norm. When he said that, I tweeted — and I never tweet, that's how angry I was — it may not be relevant for the social network, but it is for intimacy and democracy. Technology makes people stupid. It can blind you to what your underlying values are and need to be. Are we really willing to give away our Constitutional and civil liberties that we fought so hard for? People shed blood for this, to not live in a surveillance society. We looked at the Stasi and said, 'That's not us.' And now we let Apple do it and Google do it? For what?"

Turkles message resonates with me because I'm old enough to have been taught voting by "secret ballot." In many ways, the political ...contagion brought about by media saturation and social, wherein we now know what everyone else thinks about everything, is kind of scary to me - I was raised believing that political stuff, like religion, was a matter of intense personal belief, and thus deeply private. In many ways, I still view myself as an educator, so these things matter to me, on behalf of the teens with whom I interact, and on behalf of myself. Who do we want to be, as writers and bloggers and people, online? Who do we want to be seen as? Or, does that no longer matter, since it seems that we're seen whatever we do? Is there any going back from the edge of this cliff??

Talk amongst yourselves.