noun [from geography and Shakespeare, 2005] 1. A small forest of words in the great metropolis of Brooklyn 2. A collection of ruminations, photographs, and lists on topics including (but not limited to) books, writing, movies, television, theatre, current events, publishing, food, and nonsense 3. The blog of Cheryl Klein, reader, writer, children's books editor, and busy lady about town
The World Cup has put me in mind of one of my favorite passages from any book our imprint has published -- the following letter from Seb, an exuberant, soccer-obsessed teenage boy in Australia, writing to Lydia, a student at rival Ashbury High, after he asked her to get him out of an exam:
Dear Lydia,
You STOLE THE EXAM PAPERS FROM HIS CAR????
How did you even know what kind of car he drives? You rock. You’re a classic. You’re as beautiful as a Beckham free kick and as wicked as a Maradona header. I’m thinking about taking off my shirt and sending it to you. I’m that in love with you.
You realize that’s THREE challenges you have succeeded in without a single thing going wrong?
You know what you are?
You are Argentina.
In particular, I’m thinking of the fact that Argentina beat Japan, Jamaica, and Croatia without conceding a single goal in the first three games of the World Cup in 1998.
This time you have to let me take you out to say thank you. I’m not accepting a no.
Your No. 1 Fan
This is from Jaclyn Moriarty's utterly delightful The Year of Secret Assignments, and because of this passage, we occasionally use "You are Argentina" in the office as our highest form of praise. We just rejacketed it, at the same time we put out our third Ashbury book with Jaci, and this new cover for the book is Argentina:
As is the cover for said third book, The Ghosts of Ashbury High, which completes Lydia and Seb's story:
The other Ashbury books are Feeling Sorry for Celia and The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie, and they are all four hilarious, romantic, original in form, thoughtful in execution, with real depth and pain to their characters, and real pleasure in their storytelling. You won't find a better thing to read on the beach this year.
The following material is taken from my book, which is in its last editing stages, glory hallelujah. I'll probably post the rest of my goofy guide to punctuation over time.
Another ENEMY to sentence rhythm: the wrong punctuation. I am obsessed with punctuation because I am a very aural editor, and punctuation is (or should be) the writer's primary means of registering the tones and pauses in a dramatic scene. Pauses have drama, and too many pauses can make too much drama, but too few might make a reader miss some crucial information as the flow of words can overwhelm the facts within. Altogether, I agree with this wonderful quotation from Isaac Babel: “No steel can pierce the heart of man as icily as a full stop placed at the right moment.”
This, then, is the highly idiosyncratic Cheryl Klein Guide to Punctuation -- by no means a definitive guide to punctuation -- with the various marks analyzed in ascending order of their pause length and therefore drama. (The examples all involve squids for the lone reason that “squid” is a funny word.) If you would like a more serious guide to punctuation with clear and official rules of use, I suggest checking out http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/marks.htm.
,
The lowly hardworking comma. It creates the briefest pause, used to establish a quick hitch in the flow of speech for either organizational or dramatic purposes. While every house or copyeditor has its own rules on how to use commas, I generally try to abide by the taste of the author and the point of the writing in question. For instance, technically, both of these sentences are correct:
I, personally, prefer the elegance of the glass squid to the asymmetry of the cock-eyed squid.
I personally prefer the elegance of the glass squid to the asymmetry of the cock-eyed squid.
The point of a sentence like this is not just to convey information about squid preferences, but to show the personality of the speaker. A very sententious, arrogant, or dramatic speaker might want those pauses around “personally” to emphasize that these are his personal tastes, and as such, you know, they’re not that important—at the same time implying that, because they’re his tastes, you might want to pay attention. A less sententious speaker might not want those pauses so the sentence flows faster and reads more smoothly (indeed, a speaker not wanting to draw attention to himself might delete the adverb altogether). Thus, depending on how much the writer and editor wanted to emphasize the speaker’s self-importance, those commas might be left in or taken away.
Because commas create pauses, a good rule of thumb is: The faster the action should move in a sentence or a scene, the fewer commas-of-choice you should have. Consider these two sentences:
The squid, furious, lashed out with six tentacles, grasping Martha about the neck.
The furious squid lashed out with six tentacles and grasped Martha about the neck.
Removing the commas-of-choice around the appositive "furious" and moving it back to become a preceding adjective makes the opening of the sentence move much more quickly, as the reader doesn't have to pause for the appositive. The additional value of "grasping" with comma vs. "and grasped" without is debatable, as I think long sentences without some pause actually get harder to read; but that may be because I'm just so much an aural reader that I want breathing spaces even in printed prose.
Of course, you can also use pauses to drag things out. In The Hunger Games example [that I quote in the book before this excerpt], the parallelism and many commas of “I will stare her down, I will not cry out, I will die, in my own small way, undefeated” hold the reader in suspense for the moment the knife will touch Katniss and cause her death, putting us on that same knife-edge.
Commas are also used to separate and organize items in a list:
The squid, ravenous, ate five sardines, six mussels, seven anemones, and a Boston cream pie.
That comma before the “and” here is known as the serial comma. Again, style varies from house to house and author to author, but I like having a comma before the “and” for maximum clarity. The writer and grammarian Martha Brockenbrough once tweeted this possibly apocryphal example of a book dedication: ‘To my parents, God and Ayn Rand.’” One hopes very much that a serial comma would have proved useful.
On Tuesday, Arthur A. Levine Books published I Now Pronounce You Someone Else, the debut novel from writer Erin McCahan, edited by moi. I'll let this week's terrific Publishers Weekly review speak to the story:
Offering sharp wit and plenty of romantic interludes, first-time author McCahan captures the excitement and panic of a teenage girl on the fast track to becoming Mrs. Somebody. Seventeen-year-old Bronwen Oliver doesn't feel like she belongs in her family (she entertains escapist fantasies in which she discovers she was switched at birth and is really "Phoebe Lilywhite"). . . . When an old acquaintance, Jared, re-enters Bronwen's life and sweeps her off her feet, Bronwen thinks she's finally found someone to whom she can relate. And she's soon confident that she fits into Jared's world better than she fits into her own. On her 18th birthday, Jared presents her with an engagement ring. After readily accepting his proposal, Bronwen is on cloud nine until realities about potential married life bring her crashing back down. Told in lively first-person narrative, this intelligent romance teaches a hard but relevant lesson about living dreams and letting them go.
And that's exactly right -- it's an excellently Austenian romance full of moral development and funny observations, particularly about Bronwen's deeply, um, "eccentric" family. It's also a wonderfully Midwestern book, being set in suburban Michigan and focusing on marriage, which is not a subject that comes up much in coastal-set fiction for YA. (Which is one reason why I was so delighted by it -- my suburban Midwestern roots showing.) Erin answered some questions this week over e-mail: Tell me about the first book you ever wrote. In elementary school, I wrote a novel – in pencil, in spiral notebooks – about my stuffed animals coming to life at night. I, of course, was the heroine of the novel, and, in it, I followed my stuffed animals one night down the clothes chute, which wasn’t a clothes chute but a portal to a different land consisting of a number of kingdoms inhabited mostly by fairies and wee folk who were forever on the verge of being overthrown by evil fairies. Naturally, I stayed to help these kingdoms defeat the evil fairies by uniting all the good people into one empire, and in the end they thanked me by making me a princess and giving me my own waterfall.
I think I read a paranormal romance with that same plot last year. What is your writing process like? For me, it’s like framing the canvas before painting the picture. I know where to start and where to end. I have a general idea of what the thing will look like, but it always changes along the way.
Are you a planner, or a seat-of-your-pantser? Do you revise as you go along, or only after you've done a huge chunk? Some of the best writing advice I ever got came from my creative writing professor at Hope College who said, “Never write with the intention that you will go back and revise later. Understand there will always be revisions, but they will be easier if you make every effort your best effort.” This very often results in my working on one particular scene for days and days and, occasionally, days.
You spent some time working as a youth minister; what influence did that have on your writing? Did you always intend to write for teenagers, or did/do you write for adults? When I was 27 years old, I wrote a mainstream, adult novel, found an agent for it and thought my life was set. My agent even optioned the thing to a movie producer, so – even better, right? Of course, it all came to nothing, so falling back on my college minor and also some graduate work in seminary, I became a youth minister. Did it for 10 years and loved it, and I discovered, actually, an innate ability to connect with teenagers, who kept me on my toes and made me laugh all the time. So, when I was ready to write another novel, I just very naturally wrote for the YA audience.
Where did this book start for you? This book began when three unrelated concepts collided. Well, bumped into each other, anyway.
Years ago, I gave myself the alias "Phoebe Lilywhite" because it sounds English, which I wish I were for the accent, and it sounds like the name of someone, like me, who has never been tan in her life.
I have a shameless fascination with weddings. Tacky. Elegant. Shotgun. I don’t care. I love them all.
I always wanted to write something about my step-dad, who died before I ever told him how much I loved him.
So – Phoebe Lilywhite, weddings, and step-dad percolated and became I Now Pronounce You Someone Else.
Erin talks more about the role of "Phoebe Lilywhite" within the novel here:
Did anything surprise you about the way the characters or the book grew or changed during the editorial process? The entire editorial process surprised me. It’s fascinating. It begins conversationally, later involves e-mail and only then gets “down on paper” so to speak. Here’s what people should know and appreciate about Cheryl the Editor: She will not accept, “Well, that’s just the way she is,” as a justification for a character’s actions or thoughts. I tried to claim temperament once. (blushing at self) -- “She was born that way.” Ha! Throughout the editorial process, I had to defend – truly defend – my characters’ motivations, which wholly fleshed them out, and the result is – can I retell a compliment? – that one of the consistent praises I’m receiving from reviewers is that my characters are believable. Wouldn’t have happened without the comprehensive editorial process.
What was your vision of your Dream Wedding in high school? (In mine, all the girls were going to be wearing long, light pink dresses and carrying white flowers, and all the guys would wear gray tuxes with pink cummerbunds, bow ties, and boutonnieres. I have definitely grown out of this.) I think yours sounds too incredibly cute! Mine was going to involve some degree of royalty, so picture English gothic cathedrals, horse-drawn carriages and really dowdy shoes on the groom’s side of the church.
What was your own, real wedding like? I wish I could have bottled how I felt on my wedding day and sold or given it to future brides because my marrying Tim was all about marrying Tim and not about the wedding. It was important to me to be married in a church by a priest. Aside from that, nothing else mattered -- dress, colors, flowers, reception. Nothing. I didn't even want a wedding dress, kept telling my mother I'd just wear a suit I already owned, but we happened to be walking past a store in the mall one day that carried a line of wedding dresses -- eight, I believe -- and I picked the one I wanted from a catalogue, and they shipped it to my house. Didn't bother with a veil.
Tim proposed to me on Feb. 6th, 1999, and we were married the following April 17th. He told me, the night he proposed, that he asked me to marry him, not be engaged to him, and he asked my mother how quickly she could plan a wedding -- reasonably. She, Super Organizer Woman that she is, said eight weeks. We settled on ten weeks in keeping with a 17th theme in our lives. (Tim's birthday is August 17th; mine is October 17th.)
We were married at 11:30 in the morning on an unusually cold and drizzly April day. My brother, David, escorted me down the aisle. (Our father died young, and our step-father did, too.) And one of my funniest memories of the day is of David fairly yanking me back as I tried to bolt down the aisle when the music started. He was so calm and completely together as he set an appropriate processional pace.
Normally, I dislike being watched and was dreading the processional, but I remember feeling nothing but peaceful as I looked at Tim at the altar, and, once David adjusted the pace -- and we shared a near laugh -- I don't remember seeing anyone but Tim.
We each had one attendant, and we had eighty guests and a perfectly Episcopal ceremony and a perfectly Episcopal Brunch At The Club afterwards. We did the traditional cutting-of-the-nondescript-cake and fed each other small bites, and we drank champagne and laughed with friends, and it really was a lovely, simple day.
Bronwen feels strongly that she wants to wait for sex until after marriage -- an interesting contrast to a lot of YA books at present, where sex is a matter-of-fact part of teenage life. Where did you see this conclusion coming from for her? Bronwen is one of those girls who understands that sex is a huge deal. She hasn’t trivialized it to the level of a handshake, and she doesn’t buy the line that it’s special simply because her boyfriend says I love you or even because she says it. She’s smart. So is her best friend, and they see the flaw in the argument that sex is okay in a “committed relationship,” because there really are no committed relationships in high school. Agreeing to date only one person is agreeing to date only one person . . . until you break up with him or he breaks up with you. Which you do. You always do! Bronwen knows this and would rather not share the single most intimate and powerful act with a guy she’s going to break up with one day.
She also visits Jared at college twice for overnights and stays in a girls' dorm, which leads to some of the most fun scenes and conversations in the book. I'm guessing you had a good time at college? Staying up all night talking with your best friends? Few things are better than that.
How did you develop your ear for dialogue? This is such a nice question, thank you. I was a very shy, very quiet child who preferred listening to speaking. What I heard was often less interesting to me than how it was said. It still is, now that I think about it.
Finally, Lightning Round! In the course of the book, Bronwen fills out a Roommate Questionnaire for college. How would you answer these same questions?
1. Do you consider yourself a: Morning Person Evening Person Morning. I’m up early, but I’m not coherent and chatty for an hour at least.
2. Do you usually keep your room: Warm Cool Cold Cool – by which I mean freezing – when my husband’s home. Otherwise warm.
3. Do you consider yourself: Shy Average Outgoing I am a shy person trapped inside the body of an outgoing, chatty person.
4. How often will you let your roommate borrow your clothes? Never Sometimes All the Time She can borrow my clothes, but they have to come back to me cleaned. Preferably professionally. Twice.
5. On weekends, will you be: On Campus Off Campus Well, what’s going on and where is it happening?
6. How many hours a week do you spend watching television or listening to music? Never Three or Four Five to Ten More Than Ten Five to ten – I watch the news morning and night and listen to music on the treadmill.
7. What word best describes the current condition of your room? Occupied.
8. What two qualities would you like most in a roommate? Good hygiene and a contagious laugh.
9. Do you have any allergies? No. There’s some family controversy over this, but no.
10. Do you have any special needs? Yes. At least once a day, I desperately need to be someplace where no one is talking to me.
11. Please list any hobbies or interests that would further help us place you with a compatible roommate. I will be compatible with anyone who likes animals. Doesn’t matter what our other interests are. (I realize this is not scientific, but it’s true.)
(And thanks, Mom, for texting me with the news. You sure you don't want a second career in book publicity?)
In other nice news, I learned this week that a couple met at our BEA Kidlit Drinks Night last year, fell in love shortly thereafter, and as of this year's (awesome) event, they're planning to move in together. As someone who loves connections -- between characters, between the right editor and the right writer, between the right reader and the right book -- I find this immensely delightful and satisfying. Hooray!
And because good things should always come in threes, let's see. . . . Ah! It's a three-day weekend! Go forth and be frivolous.
(I did not know this poem before tonight, but then I saw it quoted on a friend's Facebook profile and Googled it, and my goodness . . . That series of connections shows why the Internet is great, and this shows why poetry is even better.)
One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice-- though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. "Mend my life!" each voice cried. But you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do-- determined to save the only life you could save.
I love books, music, and romance, so here's a fun little video playlist of songs that celebrate all three things. And I'm always looking for more (or any song with "Book" in the title, really), so if you have one to suggest, please leave it in the comments.
The first literary love song I ever knew, thanks to the "When Harry Met Sally . . ." soundtrack: "I Could Write a Book," music by Richard Rogers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart, performed here by Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak in the film of the musical in which it first appeared, "Pal Joey":
"Everyday I Write the Book," by Elvis Costello (thanks to my friend Ben for introducing me to this one):
I'm including this video because it seems like the result of a lot of teenage daydreaming about love as it's presented in books. . . . It's exactly the fantasy I would have had at age 15, after swooning over "Romeo and Juliet" in Honors English I and watching the Keira Knightley "Pride and Prejudice" two hundred times. And I'm also including it because, ah hell, I love this video now: "Love Story" by Taylor Swift:
But a much better and more honest song about love, and one of my all-time favorite songs, period, is "The Book of Love" by the Magnetic Fields, performed gorgeously here by Nataly Dawn:
And finally, to finish on a fun note, "My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors," by Moxy Fruvous:
(Another guest blog from my dear friend and Scholastic Press Senior Editor Rachel Griffiths, who is entirely too modest about her editorial gifts in writing this post.) "A charming little bonbon of a book.” That’s what Cheryl called My Invisible Boyfriend by Susie Day, a book I co-edited that just published on Scholastic’s Spring 2010 list. That’s it exactly, I thought, and spent so much time chattering to Cheryl about right she is, and how this book should be in everybody’s beach bag, and how it’s the kind of book that you read on the R train and embarrass yourself because you keep snorting with laughter and people look over worried about swine flu and other diseases you can catch on subways. I must have blathered a lot, because Cheryl offered once again to let me write a guest "Behind the Book."
Of course, what I really want to do is sit here and gush, because this is an adorable book – zippy, with awkwardness, wooing and a British boarding school completely full of glamorous misfits. But Cheryl’s Beyond the Books are so informative that even as an editor I learn something new each time. So this post is gushing plus information too – a case study in how to make a package that (I think) says "Pick Me Up, Please!"
One of the fun things about being an editor is that you get to work on all kinds of different projects. Right now, I’m editing The 39 Clues, a series about kids hopping around the world chasing a huge treasure; Kathryn Lasky’s new Wolves of the Beyond series about a wolf pup struggling to survive alone in the wild; a graphic novel about a superhero’s pets, and a host of others that I love. Cheryl and I, coming from the Arthur A. Levine School of editing, think about emotion first when we approach a book. The feelings a manuscript evoke are paramount for us.
And that’s how I approach a book’s package too. Each of the books on my list bring to mind a different mood. The little wolf story is deeply felt and written with profound respect for the natural world. And so the cover is realistic, a close up on a noble wolf alone in a vast wilderness. 39 Clues is full of action and danger, and so the covers are bright, vibrant, and with a lot of movement and motion lines.
My Invisible Boyfriend is like a great pop song, and I wanted that flavor. Figuring out how to get a mood expressed as an image is beyond me, and my good luck here is that we have a great design team -- in this case Elizabeth Parisi and Becky Terhune. I asked them for a juicy cover, full of energy and a bit of humor, which would reflect how funny and awkward the book is. I also wanted a cover that would stand out on shelves. The YA section is currently overflowing with pale girls looking miserable and slightly ill (seriously, don’t vampires ever eat healthy people?), and this book is firmly YA, but has nothing paranormal about it. It’s outside the pack, and I wanted it to have that look – a splash of color in a sea of black. (Sometimes you advertise that you are different, and sometimes you want to make your book fit in. It depends on the book and your guess at the market. This book bucks the market trend, but I’m gambling here that some girls who like romance might be ready for a break from the supernatural.)
My first thought to get the book attention was to do a paper-over-board die-cut. I wanted the silhouette of a hot boy cut out of the board of the book, and no traditional jacket. But we tried a few covers like that, and nothing really popped. The cover looked like a gimmick and conveyed nothing of the flavor of the book. Then Becky came back to Elizabeth and me with a photo she’d found of a bunch of kids on a couch. What if we silhouetted one, she asked? The book has such a great ensemble cast, and the kids on the couch looked full of mischief and fun. The concept was perfect.
Unfortunately, the photo wasn’t. Occasionally our designers find a stock image that’s exactly right for a book, but in this case it was clear that we needed a photo shoot. So together, the designers and I picked models. We wanted attractive teens, but no one glamazon – we wanted to give readers the feeling that they could hop on the couch on the cover without anyone sniffing at them. So we cast our main character first, and then found others to fill in. (The photo shoot was a blast, by the way. There were five good-looking teenagers told to pretend to make out on a couch. The guys were flirting outrageously, and the couple on the right of the front cover ended up exchanging emails.)
So the cover was done, and now up to bat was the next part of the package – the flap copy. It was killing me. The list of cool things I wanted to convey was clear to me:
The book has a very fun plot, in which the main character invents a boyfriend to gain acceptance from her friend. The neat thing is that Susie takes it farther than most books – her main character creates an Internet profile for her boyfriend, and her friends start writing to him.
The book has a fabulous, fluttery love story and there is lots of romantic angst that gets resolved in a very satisfying way.
It’s hilarious. (Reference the aforementioned subway snorting.)
But the author is endlessly inventive with language, making great daisy chains out of words, coming up with hilarious nicknames (Tarty McSlutcakes for an enemy of the main character), and playing a lot with Internet jargon. Susie is young and works in a boarding school near Oxford, and she has an ear for the language of the teens around her. I wanted to convey that in the flap copy, but I don’t have that voice at all, nor that knowledge – I recently had to ask my baby sister what LMAO meant. But my assistant, Mallory Kass, came to Scholastic straight from getting her master's at Oxford (I know. How lucky am I?). She had the British tone, she’s fully up to date on all things Internet-related, and she cracks all of us up all the time. So we wrote the flap copy together, tossing it back and forth until it worked, Mallory providing the clever bits.
Heidi has the perfect solution to her popularity problems – a fake boyfriend. She’s even made him a real-life Internet profile that makes him look like a motorcycle-wearing bad boy who reads poetry for fun. *swoon* Heidi’s friends are impressed. So impressed they start e-mailing Heidi’s fake boyfriend for advice about their own problems. Including their problems with, um . . . Heidi.
As if that weren’t bad enough, a mysterious, rather delicious and possibly single person who calls himself “A Real Boy” e-mails Heidi to say he knows the truth. Can Heidi escape from her (worldwide) web of lies before it’s too late? Or will her chance at real romance disappear faster than you can type gtg?
There’s only one thing that’s certain: A fake boyfriend causes a lot of real problems.
To me, the result is a book package that announces the story within as the delicious treat it is. I hope we did justice to the deeply charming cast of characters Susie created, and more, I hope that it will catch teen eyes and make teen hands itch to grab it.
Back in the summer of 2006, I shared a list that still makes me giggle madly: "Lines from 'Star Wars' That Can Be Improved by Substituting 'Pants' for Key Words." A genius reader named Melissa W. applied the principle to selected quotes from Pride and Prejudice in the comments on that post, with equally hilarious results. However! In the years since, Blogger has apparently gone through and deleted nearly all comments on this blog prior to October 4, 2006, which means her work of brilliance has been lost. Melissa W., if you're out there and you still have that list, might you repost it here? My pants and I would appreciate it.
Thanks to this fabulous quotation on today's A.Word.A.Day, I at first thought the theme of this Quote File would be "Parts of Speech," featuring quotes with the words "noun," "verb," "adjective," etc. Alas, the people whose quotations I collect have been mysteriously silent on the subject. But searching my actual, digital, one-hundred-plus-page Quotations File for the word "verb" brought me to these multiple wonderful proverbs, and voila, a different theme was born:
A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience. -- Miguel de Cervantes
The fly cannot be driven away by getting angry at it. -- African proverb
If there’s no enemy within, the enemy without can do you no harm. -- African proverb
A closed mind is like a closed book: just a block of wood. -- Chinese proverb
A diamond with a flaw is better than a common stone that is perfect. -- Chinese proverb
The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out. – Chinese proverb
A beautiful thing is never perfect. -- Egyptian proverb
Good deeds are the best prayer. -- Serbian proverb
No matter how far you have gone on the wrong road, turn back. -- Turkish proverb
A man is not old until his regrets take the place of dreams. -- Yiddish proverb
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. -- Zen Buddhist proverb
Ten things I love: Books, trees, stars, roasted vegetables, "Singin' in the Rain," medium-tip blue rollerball pens, oatmeal, community, Scrabble, and my tall black boots.
All opinions expressed here are solely my own and should not be taken as those of the company for which I work.
As is the cover for said third book, The Ghosts of Ashbury High, which completes Lydia and Seb's story:
The other Ashbury books are Feeling Sorry for Celia and The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie, and they are all four hilarious, romantic, original in form, thoughtful in execution, with real depth and pain to their characters, and real pleasure in their storytelling. You won't find a better thing to read on the beach this year.
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