New Trends in Children's Books for 2011

Hi all
Recently, Publishers Lunch posted a blurb from Scholastic Book Club president, Judy Newman, on New Trends in Children’s Publishing, and I thought it was worth posting again. Here's what she thought was notable for 2011:

1. The expanding Young Adult audience
2. The year of dystopian fiction
3. Mythology-based fantasy (Percy Jackson followed by series like The Kane Chronicles, Lost Heroes of Olympus and Goddess Girls)
4. Multimedia series (The 39 Clues, Skeleton Creek, The Search for WondLa)
5. A focus on popular characters - from all media
6. The shift to 25 to 30 percent fewer new picture books, with characters like Pinkalicious, Splat Cat and Brown Bear, Brown Bear showing up in Beginning Reader books
7. The return to humor
8. The rise of the diary and journal format (The Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dear Dumb Diary, Dork Diaries, The Popularity Papers, and Big Nate)
9. Special-needs protagonists
10. Paranormal romance beyond vampires (Linger and Linger, Beautiful Creatures, Immortal, and Prophesy of the Sisters)

What do you think of these? Do you see other trends building? Do you see your fiction fitting into any of these, or do you prefer not to pay attention to trends? Which trends will you miss when they fade? What would you like to see more of?

Thrilling Holiday Gifts for your Author Friends

The holidays are fast approaching and you need to find those perfect gifts, including ones for your writer friends! Susan Kaye Quinn’s fun post on her Ink Spells blog about holiday presents for writers got me inspired to research and think up more great gifts.

You could buy your special author friend a party dress made entirely out of paper—specifically, out of phone books, designed by the awesome Jolis Paon. What a cool way to recycle! How about a gift certificate to a day spa for a massage, focusing on your writer buddy’s troubled neck. Or what about a tropical cruise? Neal Schusterman, the YA thriller author swears by cruises, and says that’s where he writes his best novels! Does your friend like jewelry? What about custom jewelry for writers? Tickets to hear your friend’s favorite author speak will, no doubt, be appreciated. A chocolate keyboard? Or simply some random keys? If your beta reader has a philanthropic streak, you could donate money to his or her favorite scholarship fund. Pen.org, for instance, funds Freedom to Write and prison writing programs. Or you could donate to an SCBWI.org scholarship fund, such as the work in progress grant for a needy author. A gift certificate to your friend’s fave indie bookstore is always a sure bet. Does your friend like to entertain as well as write? Then how about a great authors coaster set? Cups that say “Be careful or you'll end up in my novel” are always conversations starters. Finally, for the fanciful cook or writer of historical fiction, you could always gift a digital Medieval cookbook, with recipes from 1390, some from Richard II’s own kitchen!

What is your dream present? Any other great ideas to add to the list? Feel free to list as many as you want! And don’t get too distracted by putting up the tree and making sprinkle cookies to keep on writing!

Nanowrimo Finish Line: The Sprint to 50K word count

I did it! 50K+ word count. I’m a Nano winner! I didn’t give up. I only had a couple of really low word count days (and a lot of angst), but now I have a good part of a working draft. Halleluiah! As the amazing fantasy writer, Holly Black reminded folks who were slowing down and doubting themselves during that difficult 3rd week: “Right now you are not writing a good book, you are writing a good draft.” Or as Chris Baty, who started Nano in 1999 reminded folks who were experiencing a sluggish mid-point in their draft: “Incite change… juice it up by inflicting some major changes on your characters. Crash the spaceship. End the marriage. Buy the monkey!” Or, a last piece of advice from super-sage, Tamora Pierce: "Set characters in motion, even if it's just to higher ground. You learn something, you can tell us something, by how people deal with with something that requires them to assemble themselves and move from their comfort zone."

These words of wisdom from nano peptalkers helped free me up to continue barreling ahead without obsessively editing, or poring over material from the day before. My Nano writing buddies helped spur me on too. Thanks, all! One of the few things that suffered, was my blog posting. But now that December is here, I will post more frequently. Promise.

What I learned from Nano:

I can actually write before noon!
Disaster won’t ensue if I let the laundry pile sky high
My family will be fine without daily home-cooked meals
If I write every day, I keep the story thread quite fresh
I do not need to obsessively edit each chapter as I go.
I can do a live write-as long as it’s not in Starbucks, with music blasting
There’s a huge adrenaline rush in banging out a draft so fast

And the best part? My “you-did-it" gift is a trip to China!

What’s your Nano experience? The most important thing you learned? The funniest thing you discovered? The hardest struggle? Your most proud moment? Your post-Nano gift to yourself?

Nano food, Nano diversions, and Name Your Inner Editor

What do you feed yourself when you’re trying to keep up your strength for Nano (National Novel Writing Month), basically writing each day until you keel over your laptop, in an exhausted haze?
I’m eating fish. Brain food. I had langostinos last night for dinner. What the heck are they, you ask? A crustacean sometimes called the Squat Lobster that lives in the waters of Chile and Spain. My hubby made langostino pasta. Mmmm. Today, I had sardines for lunch, in my salad, and tonight I’ll dine on Salmon teriyaki takeout. My brain will be fully charged from all of that omega-rich fish, but I fear possible mercury overdose a la Jeremy Piven. Perhaps I should switch to spinach and collards. A plain old mineral-rush.

Many writers are probably binging on junk food: fries, ice cream, Twinkies. You heard about that guy on the news who lived on Twinkies for a couple of weeks and still lost weight. It’s all about the calories, he determined. Don’t use that as a rationalization for self-medicating your wobbly confidence this Nano season or your stomach will rebel, and you’ll lose a few precious word-count days.

On another note, Erin F, the NYC Nano moderator posted about her inner editor. She named hers, Ethel, I want to say? I think I’ll name mine too. David. (My inner-editor is a “him”—a father figure from childhood, who paid close attention to details?? My muse is male too, so figure that one out, Dr. Freud!). Problem is, I’ll have to give my inner-editor more than one name. You see, David, has a few sides to him. When I’m sailing along he’s mellow too, so I’d call him Dave. But when I’m stumbling and the writing’s messy, my inner editor rails on me to go back and edit the darn mess. I reason with him, remind him that I’m not ALLOWED to go back and edit during Nano. He snaps, “But you’re writing’s sloppy, full of gaping holes and spelling errors.” That guy I wouldn't call David or Dave. I’d call him Mr. Thang.

Finally, the fabulous Aimee Bender, author of Willful Creatures, and Nano’s pep-talker of the day, encouraged writers to deviate from their outlines. She told us to follow our Nano daydreams, the playful questions percolating in our heads. In her words: “If you are writing a grocery scene, let’s say, and, if, on aisle 4 of the grocery store, character 1 starts to open up a peanut butter jar and eat it, and character 2 is so irritated she goes to flirt with a guy on aisle 3, and if this scene was supposed to be their first kiss—well? Maybe it's just not their first kiss at all. Maybe the guy on aisle 3 will end up being incredibly important!” Follow the scene to an unexpected place in the way you normally would NOT, in a tight outlined piece. I’ve learned to outline. I have to, to avoid wasting huge amounts of time as I spin a story into the outer rings of Saturn. BUT, now may be a great time for me to deviate—to noodle—to play—to take a dialog to an unintentional place. I’ll allow myself that liberty, in between scenes.

What about you? Special Nano foods? Your inner editor’s name? Your bravest deviation from the norm? Spill it here!

Nanowrimo Newbie

I decided to try Nanowrimo for the first time. It’s an amazing online writers’ event, where you bang out a draft of a novel in 30 days. You have to reach 50,000 words to win. And there are multiple winners! What do you win, you ask? Um, not $$ or a trip to Paris. You win a certificate with a coat of arms inscribed with a coffee cup, a laptop, and stack of manuscript papers… and, well you get the drift. You gather together some writing buddies, and you can see their daily word counts, which can either send you into a panic, or inspire you, or drive you on—or a heady mix of all of it. No editing allowed!

That’s the hard part, and the greatest lesson. I always edit every chapter, or scene. Not to do so, feels like I'm an incorrigible nail-biter in mittens, or as if I'm resisting a big bowl of chocolate ice-cream sitting right in front me.

But there are perks. You get to create a fake book cover, like my clunky attempt at Photoshopped layers (above-working title). And there are write-ins every day in NYC, and probably lots of other places. I mean, this thing is global, folks! Nano is even in Africa, which is why the site is operating at the speed of tar advancing on a level pavement. But they promised to have the kinks ironed out asap. Besides, it prevents you from checking on your writing buds’ word counts too often.

So far, so good for me. I’m sure by day 20 I’ll have a backache. But hopefully, by day 28, if I keep up the word count, I won’t care about the backache, or the wonky eyes, or the fact that my house is getting messier and messier as I ignore everything around me.

Are you Nano-ing? Newbie like me, or old pro? What’s your experience with it this year?

Text, Art and the Virtual World--new directions in novels

Graphic novels, manga and video games have infused popular culture so completely that kids today are born making the connection between text, images and the virtual world.

This does not make them “bad” readers, nor should one assume that kids are any less literate or have shorter attention spans. These are the sort of paranoid, knee-jerk assumptions that the older set has, those of us who have vivid memories as a kid of going to the library to pick out summer books for vacation reading. When the Commodore 64 was too coded for anyone but programmers to figure out, the only sanctuaries for those hungry for story were libraries and "ye olde" neighborhood bookstores.

Kids have more options now. This is a good thing. They are adapting very quickly to eBooks as they will to interactive and enhanced eBooks—those with embedded online links and video. As I said, the younger-than-twenty-set were practically born with keyboards in their paws. Authors, rather than fear the new technology, think of the many opportunities it presents for us to create content: enhanced eBooks, interactive eBooks, such as my recently penned A Girl’s Best Friend, from American Girl for the Innerstar University series, which has an online gaming component. Or the 39 Clues series from Scholastic (various authors), where a child goes from book to online game, and back to the book to solve the mystery.

In a similar vein, until recently, including pictures with text was a no-no with any fiction above a chapter book. Not any longer! In addition to the straight-on graphic novel, we now have the pleasure of reading all stripes of art-text hybrids. The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick was among these first wave of hybrids. It caused a major stir in 2007 with its innovative drawings that oozed from one page to the next, and peeped out from corners, only to explode into full-blown drawings on the next page. Scott Westerfield’s YA steampunk series Leviathan and Behemoth is another example of this growing trend of art/text hybrids in fiction, in this case for teens.

Why not infuse YA and even adult fiction with brilliant, color-saturated illustrations? Why should the chapter book set have all the fun? I am thrilled, especially as an illustrator, to know that we can look forward to more and more novels, rich with illustration on the level of a Gustave Doré or an N.C. Wyeth.

Have you stumbled upon any new YA that’s filled with gorgeous illustration? A middle-grade fantasia of art and text? Tell us all about it! What do you think about these growing trends?

Pros & Cons of the Omniscient POV

How many of you have tried omniscient point of view? That’s when the author can write how any of the characters are feeling, and what they are observing. Unlike first person POV, where the narration stems from one person, or third person limited, where the “I” becomes “he” or “she”, but is still limited to one POV, omniscient can wander, from one person’s POV to another, but also in camera scope, from an extreme close up to a cinematic long shot, which describes the action from a distance.

The omniscient POV, or OPV, was out of favor for a very long time, especially in young adult literature, which favored extremely close first person POV, in the style of Catcher in the Rye’s stream of consciousness rants. OPV is hard to write well, because in fiction for kids and teens you still have to make sure you are telling a story with a main character, who will remain the focus. Thus, you have to have a strong editorial sense of when to go into another character’s head—it must be crucial to the forward action, not simply because you want to “head-jump” as some editors derisively call OPV.

So, why use OPV at all if it’s so tricky? Will it ever shake its bad reputation? Or, on the other hand, is it coming back in favor? More and more YA books seem to be in OPV. Ursula K. Le Guin, a well-known fantasy writer defends the OPV when she says, “the voice of the narrator who knows the whole story, tells it because it is important, and is profoundly involved with all the characters. It cannot be dismissed as old-fashioned or uncool.” Why then, has it been so discouraged in writing workshops, and even in MFA creative writing programs? Perhaps, because it is so easy to do badly! The downside is that we limit our options from our automatic negativity and fear of it. As Gwenda Bond says in her excellent Vermont College MFA thesis, “By rejecting the storyteller's (OPV) voice, we lose far more than we gain… The omniscient narrator is no more intrinsically artificial than a first-person narrator telling the tale, or of a third person limited perspective that comes from a vaporous invisible teller.”

Some authors swear by the OPV when writing multilayered fantasy, or where it adds to the story to have a scene, let’s say, in a wizard’s den where one has access to his plotting and planning, independent of the hero being there. Again, think of it as using three or four cameras in various locations, instead of being limited to one camera angle—the eye of the hero or heroine. OPV is also a way to delve deeply and quickly into the characters’ motivations, and bring out historic information.

More and more authors are using OPV, to great effect! A favorite of mine is Nancy Werlin’s Impossible. She exhibits masterful control over when and where she switches viewpoint, doing so only when it is crucial to the plot. Other examples are Phillip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy and Marcus Zusaks’ The Book Thief.

For more information on this subject, check out Gwenda Bond’s thesis, Eye for a God’s Eye: The Bold Choice of the Omniscient Point of View in Fiction for Young Adults:

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:nSZMxWdqO50J:gwendabond.typepad.com/bondgirl/files/BondThesis.pdf+YA+books+using+omniscient+pov&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgBZwz0tnlllHzgPqzeO-76A5Bumoi8GlL_J2bgVS36eENo0tz9pJ4jJHJvA4L2gdX2TbEYXysdBletktLCQGbda8PBUNA06HjGbXe4Vv_p8TF1mi8DkQCHCNq5Hb4sQW-fJfjK&sig=AHIEtbSu2DnmyVLvSkrWr4DE5X153DuqWg

For another good post on OPV visit Justine Larbalestier’s blog: http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2006/11/16/theyre-just-techniques-people/

Or this helpful post from Five Editors & You:

http://writingonthewallblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/fashion-statements-and-omniscient-pov.html

Have you ever tried to write in OPV? Do you see evidence that it’s coming back in fashion? Any OPV novels you would recommend? What's your favorite POV to write in?