Jo Treggiari/Feltus Ovalton blog

Voice

Treggiari — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:46:53 +0000

I’m not sure exactly why I decided to blog on this subject because I’m not sure I have anything useful to offer.
Voice is one of those weird things.
Most beginning writers haven’t found theirs yet.
I certainly hadn’t until a couple of books ago.
My first stories and books read like the love-child of Tolkien and Beatrix Potter.
Actually not a good combination.
I’m not sure exactly how I did find MY voice.
By writing, I suppose.
Just that one day after many painful days trying to write in a style that was not comfortable for me, I found it.
And once I had found it, I knew it intimately, and it fit me like a ….well, like a glove if I wore gloves. Like a boot, perhaps.
And by the way, should we start wearing gloves again? I quite like the idea of wearing gloves to drive my little, euro sportscar (If I had one) up and down all the windy hills.
I might not even have noticed except my writing teacher read a 30 page whimsical story I wrote in a frenzy over a couple of nights and said “What a great voice this has!”
And I scraped my sweat-drenched hair out of my face and said, “Huh?”
And realized it was because rather than think about what I was doing, I had immersed myself in this tale and just written it without thinking about impressing anyone with it.
Once you find your voice, you’ll know it, but how to get there?
Recognizing when it doesn’t work is quite easy.
For instance mine was pompous. I am not myself pompous but my voice was all fruity and used big, clumsy words and way too much description. It did not have a self-deprecating bone in its body.
And because it was torturous to capture words in this voice, it was torturous to write in this voice.
I have faced a blank page many a time in my career but never with such finality as I did when I was forcing myself to write in a way that was completely alien to me.
There is a comfort in knowing that the way you are going to tell a story is in a style that is innately yours.
I try to write in the same way that I would orally tell a story. Normally when we are speaking we utilize idioms, cliffhangers, and trickeries, which also have their own individual rhythms and abrupt changes, to engage our listeners.
Once you’ve found your voice all those wonderful idiosyncracies will come out too.
Writing is not flat. It has mood and flavor and hills and quirk.
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Twittering

Treggiari — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:20:29 +0000

My editor isn’t sure if tweeting has any effect on book sales.

What about all the cool YA book blog sites? I ask.
Those people are so enthusiastic about YA that they must surely create a buzz? I certainly find myself caught up in the excitement before a book’s release.

And these aren’t all Mockingjay-type books where a groundswell has built up from prior books, a combination of hand-selling and rapturous reviews.
A lot of them are debuts.

Author Nicola Morgan’s excellent blog source for all things writing and publishing recently conducted an experiment in social networking. Read about it here.

Perhaps twittering etc…..(yes, I know it’s tweeting but I like twittering better. I imagine a huddle of sparrows on a telephone line all going mad) does not directly lead to sales but it does introduce a mass of people all at once to an author and their clever (or not so clever) musings in 140 characters or less. At least there’s some name recognition happening and maybe if the twits (tweets) are solidly entertaining or informative, some of those people (tweeple) may click on the author’s name and check out the author’s blog or website. And perhaps if the author has a new book, they might be inspired to pick it up.

Lots of ifs.

But a lot of book-selling is promotion, and as a former indie bookstore geek I know how many books I hand-sold because of a favorable meeting with an author. Twitter etc…works the same way, just in a virtual realm.

If you follow writers on twitter as I do, how many of them do you feel you know? If you are like me, you’d answer with some surprise, quite a few. Surprise because of course you don’t know them at all. You may know their tweets- which are at least partially thought out beforehand and perhaps edited- and you may be able to guess that so-and-so is funny or kind or informative or powerful or an all-around good egg.
I met Jo Knowles at a book fest, followed her on Twitter and found her to be a very nice person. I picked up a couple of her books and discovered she is also a very good writer. I will, in the future, buy anything she writes. Ditto for Nicola Morgan, Sarah Darer Littman, Lucy Coats, Gillian Philip, Eric Luper, Katherine Langrish, and Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich.

There’s a reason politicians kiss all those babies and shake all those hands. And that writers go out on tour (and it’s not because of the hotel mints on the pillow and the towels).

Twitter is just the 21st century version of that, with less travel time.
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The Fellowship of Writers

Treggiari — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 13:00:14 +0000

I hope that when a hopeful young writer approaches me I am, well, approachable. I think I am. And as helpful as I can be too, although since I am only just starting out myself, there’s not a whole lot of knowledge I can share.

I have however made many mistakes so in that regard at least I can point out pitfalls and errors of judgment.

I still blush when I think of some of the agent queries I sent out. One of them was so rambling and incoherent that the agent called me just to ask me what exactly I was looking for. I mean, she couldn’t tell from the letter if I was looking for representation or just a swift kick in the pants.
Now I know better how to query and I also know how fortunate I was to have an agent take the time to phone me even if, ultimately, she didn’t want to represent me.

I’ve had the same bunch of talented and creative young people in my writing workshops for three years, and obviously I helped them as much as I could , but what I’m talking about now is the aspiring or established writers I’ve met on Twitter and Facebook and MySpace. People I don’t know at all.

Writers are solitary folk but they also seem to be social (whether or not they network on the web.) They might, like Eva Ibbotson for instance, reply to letters and postcards. Or they might be totally plugged in like R.L. Stine.

I mention these two in particular because they have both been so supportive to me. I asked Eva for a blurb back before my first book came out, and ever since then we’ve sent Christmas cards and the occasional postcard. Although she is in her 80′s and not in the best of health she still reached out to a beginning writer published by a tiny Canadian independent.
Don’t bother her for blurbs. She uses all her available time to write her wonderfully humorous, magical and touching books.
Who made me cry with a description of a worm’s death? Eva Ibbotson!

R.L. Stine is a more recent acquaintance. I wrote to him asking for an autograph for my 7 yo son,one of his millions of fans if not his biggest fan. I still can’t believe he tweeted me when I announced my Scholastic book deal on Twitter. R.L. Stine tweeted me!

You might say that it’s because these writers have achieved success. They are perfectly content and at home in comfort counting their money and resting on their achievements but they’re not. They still write one or two or ten books a year. They still do signings and appearances. They still take the time to offer support to those just starting out.

I have been overwhelmed by it. It’s what I love most about the writing community and the fellowship of writers.
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Waiting

Treggiari — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:18:19 +0000

A good friend of mine who is going through some hard times, tweeted me today and said that she “knows changes are coming but it’s the waiting that is hard.”
And I thought, YEAH, I get that!

Because things move slowly in the writing life. Like snail on an emery board slow.

Writing a book takes a long time. Even thinking up a story that can hold up to book length takes a long time. It’s not like we’re snoozing in the apple orchard and the most amazing tale just drops into our head. Oh, except for that Rowling woman, of course. Most often (at least for me) I get a little flash of an image in my head. Could be a girl (or a boy) doing something like….discovering a portal under his dining room table or cutting the head off a recently deceased snapping turtle.

Or it could be a place…a dark room filled with hunched figures over endless rows of desks or two girls on top of a billboard. Or it could just be that I finish one of those “wouldn’t it be cool if?” thoughts that I sometimes have.

Somehow I have to extrude 80-90,000 words from this glimmer of an idea. It’s sort of like that magician trick where he pulls meters of colored scarfs out of his mouth, only not as effortless.

Revising it takes a long time.

Finding an agent, getting a book deal, editing with an editor, waiting for the book to be published, waiting to see if it sells….
And the above scenario is not necessarily the one that happens.
It could be write a book, sell it, sell a few copies, write another book which doesn’t work, write another one that isn’t quite there, stick head in sand for a few months.

Write another book.
At the moment ASHES ASHES is at a fun stage. All edited, cover artwork getting tweaked. I’m just waiting on the page proofs. I should be receiving them in the next week or two and I hope they send them by courier because mail in Nova Scotia is delivered by decrepit whale and it takes over a week and a half to receive anything from the States.
(That’s from the East coast. West coast mail has to come by flightless bird (emu?) and then must bide time for the next decrepit whale heading north-east, which is why I’ve been waiting almost two weeks for something important from my agent in Los Angeles.)
I’m about 15K words into my current WIP but as I mentioned before that is slow-going. Things usually don’t start to pick up for me until I’ve completed about 40-50K words. Just after I break the hump in the middle and start the downward spiral. So although I’m having fun writing about Max and Skif and all, it’s not exactly making the hours whizz by.
11 days left in August….Has this always been an extra-long month?
I ask this because although I know I should be enjoying the relative leisure of just working on the new book, I am anxiously awaiting September.
In September (for the first time) both the kids will be in school, although the little one is only doing Mon-Wed-Fri.
In September, Super Agent Man (S.A.M.) and I are conferencing with editor re. marketing plans for ASHES. Also I’ll be chatting with Publicity person. And finishing up the aforementioned proofs. In September S.A.M will begin super secret discussions with other super secret entities. Can’t talk about that right now, but a plan is being formulated. Yes, a plan!
And all these exciting things will be going on in the 9th month
So from where I’m standing, August= bleh (of a sort) and September = a treasure trove of amazing and wonderful events.
The awful thing is, I always seem to be waiting for something that is just off in the not-so-distant future.
The danger is that I won’t appreciate what’s happening right now, in the now man!

But seriously life is mostly made up small amazing moments rather than big WOW moments, and I should try and remember that.
Waiting (brooding) never made that whale swim any faster.
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forging ahead

Treggiari — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:06:29 +0000

I am (rather painfully) getting back to work on my WIP (BRINY DEEP).
The final copy edits of ASHES,ASHES have gone back to the publisher. FIERCE is in the capable hands of my agent.
My parents have been here for the last 3 weeks. Prior to that I was unpacking after our big move.
It’s been a busy summer.
I’ve written about 11,000 words so far. It’s always slow-going for me at the beginning because even though I’m working with an outline there is much I don’t know yet. I know my MC well (and fun new quirks are appearing every day), I know the basic plot, I have sketches for the rest of the characters, and a pretty clear sense of what I want to happen, how I want my MC to change, the climactic points, but some of it is still a mystery.
This is how I approach writing a new book. It is not entirely methodical. And others do it differently.
I make lots of notes.
I walk miles.
I think about my MC almost all the time.
I write at least 1000 words a day. Some times more, but never less.
My mother-in-law is coming in 10 days and I aim to have doubled my word count by the time she gets here.
Today I wrote about 1600 words because tomorrow is a busy day and I wanted to be ahead.
They were hard words to find and pin down. I felt the pace suffer. I was annoyed by my inability to find my –ummm- groove. Often this is how writing is. Sad fact, but the days when words are winged and soar are few and far between. Most of the time they (and me) are stuck here on the ground, hunting , searching, pawing over a barren soil and coming up empty-handed.
It can be almost excruciatingly painful to string together the simplest sentence.
I know I may well cut all of them but I don’t worry about that right now. I ignore the voices.
Oh yes, there are voices. The kind that tell me I should be ashamed to pass myself off as a writer. “I mean seriously. You couldn’t compose a shopping list to save your life.” Sometimes they just moan “pathetic” over and over again or groan sepulchrally.
My inner voice sounds a lot like a Shakespearean actor. It quivers with barely withstood anguish and disappointment.
I ignore it as much as I am able.
I’m just trying to get the story down. 1000 words each day.
I know many of you edit as you go along.
Sometimes I do, but mostly I don’t. I immediately get rid of words or sentences that are abysmally bad but for the most part I let them lie as they lie.
The better part of writing is in the revision. I know that I’ll have time (and time and time) to go over each word and fix it later, but I can’t really do that until the whole, ungainly mess of a book is laid out in front of my horrified eyes like a corpse on a table.
You think this is an overwrought comparison?
It isn’t to me.
The book will look like a spilling of body parts, dismembered, bloody awful. I’ll pick up a section of flab here, a tangle of visceral metaphor there, and I will be appalled. But I will take out my knife (Oh yes, my knife, and oh yes, it is sharp and ruthless and subtle) and I will cut and pare until I have something pretty to look upon.
I admit to watching too many episodes of Dexter back to back.
Now that I am completely disgusted and glad to be a vegetarian I will leave you. I have 1200 words for the day and they are coming with a quickness and ease that I can never take for granted.
How do you get down your first draft? Slow and sure? Or in a big sloppy rush?
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Books, Shelves, My new office

Treggiari — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:41:35 +0000

I have never met a writer who does not read voraciously.
If you have, I have no desire to hear of it.
I have an innate distrust and suspicion of anyone who does not have books in their home. It can be James Patterson’s oeuvre, it can be Nicholas Sparks, I don’t care really as long as there is reading material accompanied by somewhere comfortable to read it.
However, if you do only have works by the above writers I will not come and stay with you.
When I was young I was forced to visit an aunt who only had Harlequin romances and those abridged Readers Digest classic omnibuses.
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Yes, I read everything while I was there.
But it wounded me deep in my soul.
And I am older now and far less amenable.
Our new house is settled and moved into. And after 10 years of writing in my bedroom, I have an office.
It even has a door which I can shut.
But then it is open (sort of) on the other side so I can stare out the sun room windows at the sea, the war memorial and the court house which is red brick with green copper roofs and pleasing to stare at.
This is my view:
Sorry about the sun spot. The blasted sun is always shining in Nova Scotia.
And I have one wall which is spanned by two floor to ceiling bookshelves.
These are my bookshelves:

Note how full they are…this is just my YA collection and a few MG books. The adult books are on other bookshelves scattered around the house.
I was quite mortified by the sheer number when I was unpacking the boxes but now I am glad that I have so many.
They are an investment, right? I think I read that in the Wall Street Journal once. Well, anyway they don’t depreciate by 30% when you drive them off the lot, and they give hours and years of enjoyment and when I am done with them I will donate them to the library.
This is my desk. Actually it is an extremely heavy farm table my father built which has somehow moved from Ontario to California to New York to here even though it tips the scales at a bazillion pounds. This is where I sit when I am staring at the ships on the waterfront and thinking about sailors. Umm, I mean plotlines.

I have two computers because I don’t altogether trust either of mine on their own. My PC is old and doddery but I like the keyboard. And my Mac is shiny and fast but likes to do weird things if I brush the mouse pad and then refuse to explain itself or switch back.
I alternate between the two because then I feel as if I am super-organized and breath-takingly efficient.
I have cork boards nailed to the wall with photos, pictures, outlines and maps referencing whatever I am working on currently. It’s seals, northwest California and fishing villages right now.
If you were able to zoom in closely you would see print-outs of the mock-up cover for ASHES,ASHES.
I am hoping you don’t have mad computer skills and are unable to do that because it will ruin the surprise!
Do you have a special place where you write?
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Bloggery

Treggiari — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:59:34 +0000

I’m on copy edit deadline at the moment.
This is the final pass before the text gets set, ready for printing.
My super editor is on the case. Also a copy editor and another editor.

My manuscript (which I had previously done a word by word edit of my own on after editorial revisions, and prior to sending it back in to the publisher) bristles with many-colored balloons filled with sharp, astute commentary.

I can’t believe I missed so many duplicate words, sloppy phrases, and awkward descriptions.

But that’s what an editorial team (bless them) is for.
And that’s why I haven’t been blogging much this month.
Deadline= MONDAY
YIKES!
I also have had nothing much to say about anything including the process of writing because I am knee-deep in it.

It amazes me- ME a person who took up knitting in order to force myself to stay sitting down for longer than three minutes at a time- that I can spend the whole day poring over my computer, debating each word, and deciding the necessity of each phrase. And not just one day. Currently I am on Day #4. We’re talking cumulatively about 40 hours.

The last time I spent 40 hours doing anything I was in labor.

This is pretty much the same, just without the overtly icky bits.
*AWWWWWWWWW!*

And still you know I’ll miss stuff. And so will the editorial team (but maybe not this one who are truly excellent).

Like in my first book where I had the word ‘pink’ two or three times in the same paragraph. That paragraph is so excruciating to me that I skip over it when I read.

When I have taken some time away from blogging(bloggery) I begin to ask myself why I do it in the first place.
Is it because I like being part of a massive community? Is it because I think I have something (occasionally) useful to share?
Is it because I’m a lonely ego maniac?
Or is it just part of my personal need to document feelings and events in words? The same thing that drives me to write fiction?
So,
shut-in hermit with Napoleon complex?
OR
writer?
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Pottering

Treggiari — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 20:54:36 +0000

Where did July go?
*looks around and peers over shoulder confusedly*
I just spent the last three weeks either
A) sleeping on the floor and spending my days trying to recover feeling in my hands OR
B) unpacking about 100 dusty boxes OR
C) finding a place for the plethora of books, video/dvds and clothing that I seem to own
*hangs head in shame*
OR
D) arguing with the moving company who were booked months ago but nonetheless who picked us up late, dropped us off late and managed to crush my mattress, break my mexican day of the dead figurines, and lose my favorite art deco standing lamp.
*forms will be filled out*

My house is looking very nice. We are having it painted whipple blue (after blogger extraordinaire Natalie Whipple ) and colonial cream (oo lala).
Here is a picture:

I have been busy…
and yet now that it is (mostly) done, I am still pottering around.
Nothing to do with (insert pic of HP)

or even of (insert pic of Hogwarts world)

a place i would dearly love to visit. Indeed I would risk exposure to dancing teacups and overly made-up silicone princesses to go there.

One reason is that both my kids are home and underfoot.
(Insert pic of two cute small kids not of my loins)

One 7 year old and one 3 year old = lots of bickering
lots of bickering + hot weather= not much more than pottering about.

AND my parents are coming tomorrow!
(insert pic of stern parental types from whose loins I did not come)

I HAVE 4 CHAPTERS OF A WIP COMPLETED AND THE REST OF THE TALE BEGS TO BE TOLD
Sorry for yelling but I am trying to remind myself of this fact and also spur my a** into gear.

But my head is not in the right space.
My head feels like this
(insert pic of a tuber)

I am spending a certain amount of each day while I potter (today I made bread, and a delicious thai-style coleslaw for dinner) thinking about how I really should get back to writing, and a certain amount of the day castigating myself (something I do quite often) so therefore I am sort of, kind of, lightly delving into it. Right?
I mean that counts, doesn’t it?!
Thinking about how I really should be working but am not must give me at least 1.5 points (tabulated by the great gods of writing) towards eventual completion of said WIP.
I believe that I need to accumulate at least 46,838,937 SBT( sweat, blood and tears) points before I can send it to my agent.
I’ll get cracking right after I post this blog and have a slice of fresh-baked bread with butter and black currant jam. Oh, and take the 3 year old to the park.
Right after that. Yup.
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Ten Very Nice Things About My New Hometown

Treggiari — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 14:37:35 +0000

1) There is fog and a foghorn. It sounds like a mournful bull lost in the mist.

2) Everyone has a cottage garden that looks wild and natural with lupines, poppies and mallow self-seeding and spilling out onto the sidewalk.

3) I can walk to one beach, and drive a short distance to two more.

4) My town is built on a hill but some streets are steeper than others. I can choose whether to exercise my calves or not.

5) There is a store that sells homemade ice cream, makes their own waffle cones, and they stay open until 10pm. I had the pistachio yesterday.(I walked the steepest hill back home).

6) The church next to our house has a cod fish weather vane on the steeple. My 7 year-old uses it to navigate himself around town.

7) There are purple moon jellyfish and starfish in the harbor.

Every house is painted a different combination of colors. Ours is going to be slate blue and cream with black on the front columns. Yes, we have grecian columns.

9) The internet cafe has the best coffee I’ve had since leaving San Francisco and you can choose to add 10% or 18% cream.

10) The library is open 7 days a week, and they already had a copy of my first book.

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Friends

Treggiari — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:14:19 +0000

My agent is about to go out with my latest WIP, FIERCE.
It’s about 2 punk rock girls in 1983 Northern California. And it’s about art and music and stage-diving and dumpster-diving and skinny-dipping and punk boy guitar players but mostly it’s about friendship.
The kind of friendship where you feel like you’ve known each other in a previous life, or that you’re twin sisters separated at birth.
It was important to me to write about since I feel female friendships are sometimes devalued in YA. (See my previous post Hos before Bros).
I’ve had a few of these special relationships at different stages in my life.
The first I remember was around age 10. Her name was Miriam and she loved animals as much as I did. We made up a secret language which only the two of us could understand. I wrote it all down in a turquoise fake leather phone book which has since been lost.
Then I went to school in England for a year and when I came back she had gone to another school.

There was always (and always will be) my sister. She’s younger with older kids, and far away but we can still finish each others sentences sometimes.

In my late teens there was HER.
We were determined to hate each other because too many people had told each of us that we would love each other. She could put on the mean face as well as I could. Our first meeting would have ended up in a fight but instead we stayed up all night talking.
Afterwards our boyfriends nursed seething jealousy but they were the ones who pushed us together.
For ten years we fought for each other and sometimes with each other. We also shared a stubborn streak, and a certain aptitude for wildly crazy dangerous escapades. We were fearless and we needed no one else.
She died.
But I don’t want to talk about that.
I had other friends too but I wouldn’t let them close for 3 or 4 years afterwards.
They are still my good friends but I moved to the other side of the country, and one of them went to China to teach.
So we are heart friends but I don’t see them these days.
It seems that the older I get, the harder it is to make connections. Everyone is settled in their own hives. Everyone has a wife/husband or boyfriend or girlfriend, children, absorbing job.
It might just be that it’s hard to sustain a friendship. It takes work, I guess.
I like people a good deal more than I used to. I meet lots of people and enjoy them. Every once in a while I’ll really feel a connection to someone. I like them, they like me, we share some of the same interests. A friendship just happens…it’s nice.
I’m worried that I expect more from a friend than most people are prepared to give these days. Some of their time.
Not in a needy or clingy way. But just in a ‘hey we both have fun talking about books and taking walks by the sea’ sort of a way.’ No big deal. Fun, mellow, relaxed.
It seems harder and harder to find compatible friends or people I can count on in the most basic ways.
Maybe it’s more important to me, since I lost my very best friend all those years ago.
My husband and I are close but I need female companionship as well because women talk about things.
My dog takes walks with me but she’s more interested in sniffing than discussing the new Philip Pullman book.
I adore my kids but basically kids are ego-centric. They like to do all the talking.
I spend so much of my time alone, hunched over the computer, talking to myself, arguing, cursing words, yanking on my hair, wrapped up tight in my own head. I get tired of listening to myself. I want to know about someone else. It keeps me balanced. It gives me perspective.

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