Category Archives: writing

A Fun Writing Update for My Blog Readers

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My last update on the writing front was on June 5th, when I wrote:

I am in the middle of writing a short story.  It’s about four teenaged wards of the state living in hospice care.  Morbid much?  But I feel very invested in these thirteen pages, very passionate about these four friends who have no one but each other as their time is running out.  My writing group is helping me with the next draft, and I’m hoping to enter it into a contest before the month is over.

Then, on June 19th, I let you in on my writing process, specifically regarding the hospice care story, leaving a tiny P.S. at the end of the post:

P.S. I really did write Mack’s story about living and dying in hospice with other teenagers.  I’m submitting it to a contest this month, where I assume nothing will happen.  Once nothing happens, I’ll probably share it on my blog or over on Crux.

Well, guess what?

That short story– “Covered Up Our Names”– won the contest!  I’m so honored to be the 2013 winner of the Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing, a contest hosted by Hunger Mountain.

If you click here, you can even see their little write-up about me!  They called it a “powerful” story, and that fills my heart with deep gratitude.  The contest judge was Rebecca Stead, 2010 winner of the Newbery Medal.  I read her book “When You Reach Me” nearly one year ago and reviewed it on my blog, saying:

Brilliant!  I actually shouted aloud the moment that everything finally clicked into place for me– I was that excited.  Absolutely loved it.

writingI am thrilled that my story will be published in Hunger Mountain, and I’m so terribly grateful for the cash prize, but what makes the entire enterprise so special to me is that Rebecca Stead loved my story.

I’m honored and elated.

I want you all to read the story!  I imagine the rights will revert back to me after publication, so I’ll anticipate sharing it with you then.  Or you can purchase a copy of Hunger Mountain 18 for just $12.

 

 

My Favorite Things

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My friend Elyse recently posted about her favorite things, and I wanted to do the same!

1. The perfect phrase/image.  My writer’s heart takes delight in the phrases that make me catch my breath.

starsburnedmyeyes

2. Certain kinds of awkwardness.  Primarily of the I-think-we-have-crushes-on-each-other type.

awkward

3. Color.  Especially really rich reds and purples.  (More details here.)

redandpurple

4. Creativity and the joy that comes from it.  Although this is bigger than writing, writing probably tops my list!

writinggirl

5. Deep conversation sprinkled with silliness.  One of the common threads through my closest friendships!

convo

Bonus–

6. Smells.  Current favorites are lilacs, mown grass, and Love, NY&C fragrance.

lilacs

Writing is HARD … but worth it. (I think.)

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nobody saidNo, no, I don’t think it– I know it.  I’m just coming off of a long weekend chock full of revisions.  The hardest revisions of my life.

I mean, I’ll be honest, I got down on my face before God about these revisions.

Here’s the thing.  One of my #1 goals in writing is to make people think.  I’m not setting out to write a little beach read about which boy is the cutest one on the island.  (No offense to anyone writing a book with that premise.)  I want to write about ideas and history, about philosophy and religion and paradigms for understanding the world.  For teens.

The thing with that kind of book is that it’s hard to write.  Your brain churns like a waterwheel, and you have to process these ideas that you’re setting forth.  My goodness, I’m writing for young adults, so I feel this responsibility to present them with valid questions (and sometimes answers, although the questions are often more interesting).  When I write a pivotal scene and send it off to beta-readers, the response isn’t just, “I like it” or “Use more imagery” or “Better word choices please.”  Sometimes the feedback launches me into a re-evaluation of my worldview and the framework through which I see the world.

Makes revisions go a lot slower.

The thing is, I love productivity, so I want to revise quickly and efficiently, but sometimes that’s just not possible.

I am so grateful for amazing friends who are also fascinated by ideas and willing to process them with me.  Right now I’m thinking especially of Kristin Luehr and Cindy Hunt.  Thanks, ladies, for loving the questions and, each in your own way, embracing the incredible gray areas while believing that black and white also exist.

I and my book are indebted to you.

Teenage Creativity

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differentLast week, I shared about some of my creative childhood activities.  Today, I want to tell you about the (strange but) creative things I did while I was a teenager.  To truly understand some of these things, you have to remember that I grew up in a small town of about 700.  My class had about 70 people in it.

1. Question Book.
I carried around a regular old spiral-bound notebook, and inside it, on each page was a question.  Some were silly, some were interesting, some were huge (are people inherently good or evil?), and I passed it around in my classes, where people would add their responses and read those from others.  I loved looking through the pages and seeing all the opinions, especially when written conversations (or arguments) would take place right inside my notebook.

2. Memory List.
In sixth grade, I wrote down a half-page of things I wanted to remember about the Kimball High School class of 2000’s elementary years.  In seventh grade, I brought it to school, and word got out, and people started asking to read it.  When I got my list back, people had added their own memories to it, so I typed them up at home.  For the next five years, I’d bring a copy of the memory list to school for a couple days each year, circulate it around my grade, letting people add to it.  Upon our graduation, it was probably 12 pages long.  There is a copy of it in my dad’s safe-deposit box, and I hope my class will do something with it for a future reunion.

3. Thank You List.
I made a list of every person in my grade.  Across the top of the page, I wrote THANK  YOU, and next to each name I wrote one thing I was grateful to that person for.  I hung it up on my locker  during class one morning, and it was so fun to later find a big group of people huddled around it, looking for their names.  People said things to me that day like, “I didn’t know anyone even cared about that thing I do!” or “I had no idea that was important to you.”  Loved it.

4. Imaginary Organizations.
My poor, dear, delightful high school friends were subjected to my strange imagination.  I created a fake band for us (Tempest Pixy), including a theme song and stage names for each of us (my favorites were Chizel Smithbanger and Hexron Davis).  We also had a fake “Russian Spy Ring” where I assigned fake foreign names to each of my “spy” friends.  I should clarify, most of us were in the RSR, but we did also have Spanish, German, and Japanese arms to the group as well.  (Do you think I’m insane yet?)  In our senior yearbook, I even “bequeathed” presidency of the RSR to my friend’s younger brother, whom I had forced into the RSR.

5. Soap Opera.
Yup, I wrote one for a while.  It was about a group of friends from Sunnyside High who were dealing with little things such as AIDS, teenage pregnancy, love triangles, motorcycle accidents, and long-lost twins reuniting.  I’d write a couple scenes, pass it around among friends, and when the notebook returned to me, I’d write a few more.

During these years, I was also writing a lot of stories and poems (bad ones).  I had so many ideas, and I rarely saw stories all the way through to completion.  Can you tell what a strange kid I was?  And yet, I had amazing friends who loved me, loved my creativity (most of the time), and who thought I was smart and hilarious.  Again, it’s not hard to see how I became a writer, is it?

Bonus– my friends and I also did “gut checks.”  We live in a place that happens to have quite a few, um, murder sites and, um, “haunted” locations, so we would scare ourselves silly by visiting these places.  My dear friend Dustin would tell stories about children with glowing eyes coming out of the weeds, and then he’d turn off the car lights and slam on the brakes and we’d all scream, even though we’d just done the same, tame thing the weekend before.

How about you?

Random 5 Friday is a weekly meme over at A Rural Journal.

Dear Diary (Summer 2013)

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summer2013I can’t believe it’s almost September.  Here’s the scoop on my life.

I signed with The Chudney Agency!  Steven Chudney, my agent, will represent me to children’s and YA publishers as the two of us attempt to find a home for my young adult novel.  This upcoming holiday weekend will be dedicated to revisions!

Desiree got married!  My beloved friend and roommate of six years married my co-worker.  She moved out but not too far: just two buildings away in the same apartment complex!  For those of you wondering, no, I didn’t feel like an ugly bridesmaid on her wedding day.  Hooray!

Chelsea moved in!  My new roommate just moved in last weekend, and she’s a master of organization!  It’s interesting to see how this place I’ve called home for the last five years is getting an overdue makeover.

I saw HANSON!  My sister and I just fulfilled a childhood dream by seeing Hanson live at the Minnesota State Fair earlier this week.  (Full post to come soon!)

I deferred another semester till grad school.  Although I am thrilled to be admitted to the incredible Vermont College of Fine Arts, it just didn’t feel like the right time of my life to start grad school this January.  I had been doubting myself and my decision for a while.  The money I planned to save this year did not materialize as I’d hoped, and I had this strange hesitation about starting school.  After prayer and seeking out the wisdom of friends, I decided that I shouldn’t jump into grad school half-heartedly.  I asked the program director yesterday if I could defer for another semester.  If nothing else, it gives me time to sort out my thoughts.  (Gosh, this could be another whole blog post too.)

I started working on a new novel.  A young adult story about a girl who, after losing both her parents in a drunk driving accident, returns to her boarding school for her senior year.  Though she shares the story of her parents’ death only with her best friend and the school superintendent, she is very clearly changed.  No one seems to understand her strange grief– except for the quiet boy who missed all of last year and has secrets of his own.

With grad school on pause, I am entertaining the idea of attending a conference or two.  (And everyone thinks in unison, What was that about saving money?)  I’d love to go to BEA and SCBWI and the national OCD conference.  And VidCon.  And LeakyCon.  Okay, probably going to have to make some decisions.

I began as a guest contributor to the International OCD Foundation’s blog.  I am so honored to be an official contributor to the IOCDF blog.  My first post can be read here; it tells the story of my excruciating but ultimately liberating experience with Exposure and Response Prevention therapy.

My favorite five-year-old is about to turn six and starts kindergarten in ONE WEEK.  I try not to say too much about my favorite little ladies on my blog to respect their and their parents’ privacy, but they are such an important part of my life, I feel I need to throw a shout-out to Miss Emeline, the smartest, sassiest, prettiest, most creative soon-to-be kindergartener in the world.

What else, what else?  Work is picking back up.  I will be traveling soon to recruitment events in Minnesota and South Dakota (oooh, exotic!) for a few weeks.  I am ridiculously eager to spend this holiday weekend alone with my manuscript (and I wouldn’t mind your prayers, if you’re the praying type).  I continue to meet with Monica, my mentor at the University of Northwestern.  The new students moved in nearly one week ago, and classes started on campus yesterday … and you’d better believe that in my office, we all took a deep breath and then starting recruiting the Class of 2014.

Oh, the life of a recruiter.

Amalgamation

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writingI took a quiz, one that will supposedly analyze my writing and tell me what famous writer my style is most similar to.  I don’t put a lot of stock in it because I did it three times and got three different writers, including Chuck Palahniuk, Dan Brown, and Cory Doctorow.

So, which writers do I especially want to write like?  Great question.

I want to have the lyrical quality of Jandy Nelson and Peter Beagle and Leif Enger.

I want characters like those created by Melina Marchetta.

I want to raise thought-provoking questions just like John Green.

I want catch-your-breath imagery like C.S. Lewis and Markus Zusak.

And I want to command the senses the way Erin Morgenstern does.

Your turn!

Childhood Creativity

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(First of all, the new students move in at the University of Northwestern in the morning– hooray!  A year’s [sometimes two!] worth of work parades in front of us today, and it’s fun and exciting and campus will be buzzing with teenagers embarrassed of their parents and about to meet their new best friends!)

childartistToday, for Random 5 Friday, I wanted to share with you some of my creative endeavors of childhood.  Next Friday, I’ll tell you about my high school exploits!

1. Story Society.
My sister Kristin, our childhood neighbor Amber, and I formed loads of clubs, but the best idea we ever had for one was the Story Society, which sadly was quite short-lived.  We had a clubhouse (a room in one of the sheds on our farm), which I painted.  Kristin and I went in there just last month, and one wall still says, “Story Society”; another, “Expanding our Imagination”; the third, a freehand castle with just one window lit up.  We were each supposed to write one story a week, then read it aloud at our club meeting and critique it for each other.  I remember my first story was this melodramatic piece about a jealous best friend who ended up shooting her friend’s boyfriend with a bow and arrow– only the friend jumped in front of her boyfriend, and the arrow pierced both their hearts.  Awesome, right?

2. Glamour Shots.
Kristin, Amber, and I wanted to do our own version of the beautiful Glamour Shots that adults sometimes did, so we raided the dress-up trunk and took *glamourous* (read: hilarious and awkward) photos with a disposable camera.  I distinctly remember choosing outfits Claudia Kishi of the Babysitters Club would wear.

3. Library.
You’re starting to see the roots of my current writerly nerdiness, aren’t you?  Well, how about this: one of the “games” we played was called Library.  Amber would haul some of her books down to our farm, Kristin and I would add ours in, and we’d lay them out on the deck stairs before each choosing one and then … reading.  (Let’s be honest, all I ever really wanted to do when I was a kid was just read uninterrupted.)  Amber had naughtier books than we did (i.e., books where girls and boys kissed), so that was a total bonus.

4. So many plays.
I wrote them.  Kristin, Amber, my brother Kevin, our friends Brandi and Tina, and I would act them out.  Most of these illustrious scripts have now vanished, but we do have one play (on rollerskates!) recorded on video.  It’s about rollerskating Olympics, and I was the star.  Of course.

5.  Mysteries.
For my sister and her friends, I would create these elaborate mysteries that they would then be tasked to solve.  Again, it was writing.  I’d set the scene for them, and then there would be a series of clues– some that would seem to incriminate various characters and some that (sneakily) exonerated them.  If you were to process all the clues together, you could come up with the culprit.  After everyone guessed, I’d read the true answer.

So, was I a dork growing up?  Yes.  Do I care?  Not a bit.  Look at how early the seeds of creativity were sown in me!  I’m proud of creative little Jackie Lea.

Random 5 Friday is a weekly meme over at A Rural Journal.

Imaginings

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When nerves cancelled my plans,
I imagined that another, separate me
made the drive to St. Paul.

My other me entered the room with the
the more-important-than-things-really-are candles.
My other me was confident; her cheeks were flushed.
She made conversation; she made you laugh.

Maybe she even found out the truth,
knows things now that this me doesn’t.

And this me resents her surety, is angry
that she didn’t take the chance, take the drive,
take the hand of the boy in St. Paul
instead of the pen to write this jealous poem.

writer girl

How I Got an Agent: the (Really, Really) Long Story

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If you haven’t heard yet, I just signed with literary agent Steven Chudney of the Chudney Agency!

I know that some of you are curious about how this all came about, and for you, I’ve decided to write out a more detailed account here.  This might be boring to those of you who aren’t writers, but here goes!

LIGHTS ALL AROUND

My journey toward agent representation actually began about six years ago.  I spent four years working on a novel about OCD; I began that as a poet and somewhere along the way became a novelist.  I poured my heart and soul into that manuscript, and it was/is very near to my heart because it was my first novel and because it is a fictionalized version of my own battle against obsessive-compulsive disorder.  I actually started writing that story before I even started cognitive-behavioral therapy!  So writing some of those scenes were very difficult, visceral, heart-wrenching experiences.  When I felt the manuscript was ready (which makes me laugh now– it’s quite unpolished, and though that can be embarrassing, I wrote it for obsessive-compulsives so you can read it here), I started to research agents.

This can take a long time.  I started with The Guide to Literary Agents, making a note when an agency repped my kind of book, then going to each agency’s website to learn about each agent and then creating a spreadsheet of agents who might be a good fit.  Meanwhile, I was working on a query letter, which is very different writing from novel writing.

When I first queried agents back at the beginning of 2012, it took weeks before I heard back from anyone.  In the end, one agent requested my manuscript, read it and liked it and requested revisions before she’d look at it again.

But let’s be honest: I was completely burnt out on that story.  I’d spent four years writing it– and 20 years living it.  I told the agent that I needed to set it aside for a few months and work on something different.

I never went back to it.

TRUEST

Instead, I started writing another adult novel.  Right around this same time, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green was first released.  I read it, fell in love with his characters (especially Augustus Waters), and when I finished it, I wept for two reasons: the story itself and the fact that I didn’t write it.

After that, I scrapped my adult manuscript (50 pages in) and started over.  It occurred to me that young adult fiction was my favorite, and yet I wasn’t writing it (what was up with that?) and that I wanted to start my story with a character I could love as much as I adored Augustus Waters.  So I created Silas Hart.

I gave myself six months to write the first draft and finished it right on schedule.  It was a really bad first draft by most standards– and yet, compared to the first draft of my earlier novel, it looked pristine.  (Ha!)  Through the advice of several friends– but especially Kristin Luehr— I was able to point the story in the right direction.  I worked hard on a new draft of it and determined that my new year’s resolution would be to put more money into my writing.  So I hired a local editor who helped me restructure the novel.  I did a complete frenetic revision in only six weeks so that I would be ready to take the manuscript to the Big Sur Writing Workshop in California in March.  While I was there, I met some amazing writers, agents, and editors– and made even more big changes to my manuscript.  After another post-California revision, I hired the local editor for line edits, after which, I pronounced the novel complete (for the time being).

I had in the meantime been compiling a whole new list of agents (as this manuscript was YA and the former one was adult, I needed to start over from scratch).  I made a three-tiered list of 100 agents to query, ready to attack this querying process again.  I also worked and re-worked my query letter, putting a lot of research into successful queries, changing my mind about various things, and then finally taking my friend Elyse‘s wise advice, which I believe was the lynchpin to a successful querying experience.  (Thanks Elyse!)

(And yes, in case you’re wondering, I pretty much worked like a draft horse this whole entire time– writing every single day, slaving away over the keyboard, discussing my manuscript concerns with my long-suffering friends [thanks, Cindy, et al!], thinking constantly about my characters, jotting notes about scenes and ideas, weeping when I got them into situations from which I couldn’t see the way out [again, Kristin Luehr to the rescue!], leaving no stone unturned in my search for literary agents.  I probably only took the tiniest handful of days off over those 19 months.)

QUERYING

I queried my top tier of agents on July 11th and was shocked when I heard back from over a dozen people requesting partials and fulls.  It was very evident that this time was a far cry from the querying I had done just a year and a half earlier.

My friend and fellow writing group member Addie (who has a book coming out in October and so is many, many steps ahead of me in the process) mentioned something to me about the emotional rollercoaster of querying, and I wasn’t sure quite what she meant.  That’s because I hadn’t started getting the rejections yet.

The most emotional moment for me came one weekend when an agent remarked, “I’m captivated by what I’ve read thus far and I’d love to see more! Could you please send the full manuscript in a Word document (.doc)? I can’t wait to keep reading your work.”  Somehow, I knew– just knew— that she was going to say no and that it was going to hurt worse because of how eager her email sounded.  I cried like a baby that weekend, prayed a TON, and eventually returned to the manuscript for more revisions (even before I got her rejection, which came the next week).

Some of the comments I got from agents who ultimately rejected the manuscript:

“I think you have a very interesting and unique writing style, which drew me to your work.”

“I think you’re a strong writer.”

“I do like your idea and writing.”

And from the agent I worked most closely with at the Big Sur workshop:

“I came away from Big Sur so impressed by you, certain that you have the authorial (and editorial) eye, the professionalism, and the charming/witty personality to be incredibly successful in this industry. And now that I’ve had a chance to read your work, I’m even more impressed and even more certain. You are a truly talented writer, with a masterful command of language and of your characters. You make it look effortless, like the best of the best do. All of your characters are fully round and compelling, and your depiction of small town teen life is vivid and fully engaging.

“I get lost in your writing in the best way, and I believe TRUEST is about something (which I mean as high praise).   I will be first in line to buy my copy of TRUEST.”

exhausted2

But Steven Chudney of the Chudney Agency loved it.

“I like smart kids,” he told me when I talked to him on the phone earlier this week.  “I’m not so interested in prom night as I am in teenagers exploring questions of spirituality and philosophy.”  (Okay, he said something close to that– I was a little nervous on the phone!)  I find it fascinating (and, I hope, indicative of the far-reaches of the story) that Steven himself is not religious and yet was drawn to these characters who are exploring spirituality.

The contract arrived in the mail yesterday.  I couldn’t be more excited to be represented by the Chudney Agency!

(So, there’s the long story.  I know … so long … but this is essentially the last six years of my life wrapped up into one blog post!)

Now … I just need a book deal!!!