Les Mis!!!

My junior year of high school, I went on choir tour from Sandy, Utah to Seattle, Washington. We rode in a tour bus. It took about (checks Google Maps...) 14 hours. At the beginning of the trip, a friend lent me her cassette tape (if you young un's reading this don't know that that is, Google it) of Les Misérables. I plugged it into my walkman (yes, I'm OLD) and turned it on. I spent almost the entire trip with my hands clamped over my headphones to block out the party going on around me, absorbing the beauty of this musical. Later, another friend who had seen the musical live and purchased the extended soundtrack spent three glorious hours describing each scene to me as we listened to it together.

One of my greatest sadnesses is that I've always lacked the funds to see a lot of live theatre. So I've never seen Les Mis live. (Yeah, I majored in Theatre Arts. My priorities are WAY out of wack.)

Which is why I was so ecstatic/thrilled/weepy when I saw this:



YOU GUYS! Can anything be more wonderful?

Edit: OH! A trailer! This is pretty dang wonderful, too!

Squee! An actual TEEN likes my pitch!

I'm crushing on Drama Girl right now. Not that I've met her, or even know her real name, but I gotta say: having a real-live teenager read 11 YA pitches and first pages and pick MINE to "buy" is a thrill. A THRILL!  Especially since I'm poised on the brink of the scary query plunge.

As soon as I knew there was a Drama Girl, I hoped she'd pick mine--my book has a play in it! Thank you Drama Girl! You give me hope!

If you're writing YA--even if you didn't enter the "teen judges" contest-- you're gonna want to head over to Brenda Drake's blog and read the finals posts. (Drama Girl was the second finalists post. Choir Girl was the first. We're still waiting for Book Girl and Sports Girl tonight or tomorrow. UPDATE: Book Girl's post is now up! UPDATE2: And so is Sports Girl's post!) Brenda has been running a super-cool teen book club for a while now and got the four teens to agree to judge a pitch-and-first-page contest. After the entries were in, the girls read the pitches and divvied them up by who liked which pitch best. Then they read the first pages of the pitches they chose and commented on each one, picking only two to "buy." Their comments are a priceless insight into our target audience.

And, obviously, Drama Girl has very, very good taste. :)

Now, if everyone will just send happy thoughts my way for the announcement of the overall winners tomorrow night, that'd be great. :)

UPDATE: I didn't win, but I still loved reading all the comments. Such a fun contest. Thanks Brenda!

Laryngitis vs. Dialogue

I used to get laryngitis a lot. About once a year, my voice would freeze up (with or without the sore throat), and I'd wander around shrugging, pointing at my throat, and mouthing the words I have laryngitis.

And, honestly, it was dang fun. (Speaking of dang fun, my sons just called my name, I responded with "What?" and they informed me that I have "five minutes to get rid of that word," meaning I have to get someone else to say it. All together, now: "What?")

Where was I? Oh yes. The glories of non-verbal communication.

You might find this attitude strange in someone who loves to talk as much as I do. I am quite enamored with the sound of my own voice, I'm not what anyone would call shy, never have been, and I have a very healthy respect for the power and overall convenience of words. In fact, one of my high school friends once declared, while I was on an overnight trip with her family, that I could never go a single hour without talking. Boy was she sorry when I shut up until the next morning! :)

Maybe I have the soul of a mime, maybe this is just my acting obsession talking, but the truth is, as cool as words are, it's fun to explore the many ways you can communicate without them. (Though I also love sign language, I'm not talking about that.)

Faces are expressive. Bodies are constantly "talking." A change of posture or a well-placed eyebrow can communicate as much as a thousand words (just like your average picture).

The challenge for a writer, of course, is putting these expressions into words. This is not impossible. Observe:

"John, I need to talk to you," Marsha said.
OR
Glaring at John, Marsha stood, folded her arms, then jerked her head toward the door. 

Do we need the dialogue to know that Marsha wants to talk to John? How about this one:

"If you kids don't settle down right now, you're going to walk home," Mom repeated for the tenth time.
OR
Mom flicked the turn signal on, swerved to the side of the road, and stomped on the brake. She jabbed the button to unlock the doors and pointed out the passenger side window.

Which one is more effective?

Now, as you've noticed, non-verbal communication uses more words to record. Some might call it inefficient. A whole book with nothing but non-verbal communication would be a massive tome, indeed.

Doesn't mean it's not more fun.

What do you think? Are there places in your WIP where non-verbal communication is / would be more effective than dialogue?

LDStorymakers First Chapter Contest: Publishing Practice

When I was a Theatre Arts major in college, I really wanted to be on the acting track. Acting is fun. You get to be on stage, you get to pretend to be someone else, and you get to hang out with other actors, who are almost universally COOL. So, every semester, I would endure auditions for the next semester's acting classes. Every acting class beyond the most basic required an audition with a certain benchmark score. I can't remember for sure (I think I'm blocking), but it seems that I never made it past the basic classes. Maybe to intermediate? Certainly not onto the acting track. *Sigh*

So, I did directing instead, which was also very cool. (I mention this only because, on Saturday, I ran into Shelly, who acted in one of my first directing projects, a Theatre of the Absurd student-written play called The Dialogues of Il and Elle. Shelley was Elle. She was awesome. Still is--only now she's an awesome writer.)

My point is that I'm absurdly practiced at dealing with rejection. With people telling me that I'm not quite good enough. With picking myself up, dusting myself off, acknowledging the subjective nature of the arts, focusing on the constructive parts of the critique, and moving forward. Rejection is disappointing, but hardly crippling. Shrugging is possible. Tears are highly optional.

In that vein, on behalf of the 130+ First Chapter Contestants who waited until the very last award, hoping that our names would appear on the Grand Prize announcement, only to force a smile, clap enthusiastically, and pretend that we knew all along that our chapters weren't good enough... I present my scores. Two years of scores, actually, since I did this last year, too. I'm hoping they'll be enlightening, and will help us all to understand that, like in publishing, not every reader will like our work. But not everyone will hate it, either.

I'm a bit hesitant to post this, since there has been a lot of advice lately on how to respond to critiques and NONE of it has advocated breaking it down on your blog. (Most good advice is to scream in private / ignore in public.) The difference, of course, is that my book isn't published yet. I'm still editing it, so flaws and mistakes are expected, and most importantly, CAN STILL BE FIXED. Please feel free to assume, as you read the following, that I'm going fix every last mistake. All of them. I'm even going to win over 2010 Judge #5.

Before you read the chart, you should know that, in my humble opinion, my first chapter 2011 was vastly superior to my first chapter 2010. When I re-read the chapter before the 2010 conference, I knew I wasn't going to win. This year, I had hope (as you probably noticed). :)

So, voila the spreadsheet!

GEAS is the title of my book. 5 is the maximum possible points per category. The blank was probably an oversight by 2010 Judge #4, and the score of 31 was calculated with a zero in that category, though I skipped the blank when I calculated the average for that category. Even if 2010#4 had given me a 5 in Pace and Style, my 2010 average would only have gone up to 33.2.

Conclusions and things of note:

1. I'm improving overall. (Yay!) My average is 1.3 points higher this year from last year. Therefore, in 5 years, I'll have a perfect score! ('Cause it totally works like that.)
2. Out of 72 scores, I have 25 5's, 35 4's, 8 3's, 3 2's and a no-score. That's 83.3% 4's and 5's, and 16.7% 3-and-under.
3. For every category, taking in both years, I have at least two judges out of nine giving me perfect scores. Yes, folks, fiction is subjective.
4. My strength is in mechanics, described as "grammar, spelling, etc." 2011 Judge #2 told me that I needed to format my page #'s differently, and add my name to the header (which was against contest rules). I can't possibly know if the lack of name got me docked a point, or if it was something else. 2011 Judge #3 only commented "good" on mechanics.
5. My weakness is in Resolution/Read-on prompts. 2010 Judge #5 confessed that s/he didn't like fairy stories, and said "don't take my not liking as a sign that you can't write--you write very very well--I just can't find myself caring. Remember not everyone is going to like my stuff and not everyone is going to like your stuff-tough it out and keep writing to show that jerk judge from Storymakers." It is honestly my favorite comment of the lot. This judge is NOT a jerk. :)
6. Also on Read-on Prompts, 2011 Judge #2 pointed out that, the way I'm currently ending chapter 1 gives my readers an excuse to put the book down. Though other judges were happy with the premise and the set-up and wanted to read more, s/he's right: it's a natural stopping spot, with no compelling reason to turn the page right now. Few first chapter readers will find themselves on my doorstep, begging for the next page. Gonna have to try to fix that.
7. If 2010 had only had four judges (and if #5 was the one missing), my 2010 average would have been 34. Which would have meant I'm now getting worse overall. Which means it's completely useless to agonize about what-ifs. (Also, I would have missed out on the awesome things #5 said.)

At the end of the day (and the blog post), I'm happy to have played. I'm thrilled with the feedback and that it seems that most of the professional reviewers really seemed to like the chapter. They might not have judged it to be "better" than another chapter in my (really big) genre group, but most of them said they'd like to read on. That's good enough, right? So long as we can keep our readers turning pages, we've won.

Hopefully, they'll like it enough when I query to make me ineligible next year....