Just Read...

Catching Fire.

And if you haven't read The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, put your computer down right now and go buy it.

I won't say much about the sequel, other than I was really anxious about it because of how amazing the first book was. But it definitely lived up to expectations. Don't know that it exceeded Hunger Games in my mind (not many, if any, books do), but it was still outstanding.

Just wish the third installment of the trilogy wasn't so far away.

It's Puzzle Building Without a Box Cover

As I start to put (yet again, hopefully for the last time) the finishing touches on my manuscript, I picked up a book I bought recently that is essentially a reference to all things fantasy.

In the introduction, hugely famous fantasy writer Terry Brooks writes about the importance of outlining, so that you can make sure you get your story right. He deemed this pre-writing part as "Puzzle-building without a box cover," and I really loved that phrase.

Because it's true. In all of our stories, we are pulling characters and plot points--the puzzle pieces--out of nowhere and trying to fit them together in a way that makes sense. When it's all said and done, we want to be able to glue those pieces together permanently and frame up that puzzle (or, preferably, to see it on a shelf in Barnes and Noble or Borders). The reason I love the box cover-less puzzle analogy is because it expresses how truly unique and challenging it is to write a good book. Imagine dumping a 10,000-piece puzzle of an ocean full of colorful fish on a table and trying to solve it with no point of reference. Daunting, huh?

You set out to completing it, though, because you've bought the puzzle (thought up a story you can't ignore) and feel it inside that this puzzle will not go away until it's finished. You start the puzzle and it's going great! You get all the outside pieces with the straight edges put together. Then comes the heart of the puzzle, and boy is it tough now.

Don't give up, though, because it's going to be a beautiful thing to see when it's all put together. Sure, there may be times when it seems like there's no way you'll get it done, and that the puzzlemaker must have forgotten to put several pieces in the box. And just when you're at your lowest and ready to tear the puzzle apart, your puzzle-friends will stop by on the weekends and solve a couple of pieces and remind you how awesome that puzzle will be when you get it done.

Kinda like writing. Everyone wants to give up at some point. Heck, J.K. Rowling almost committed suicide at one point. (Literally.) But then your family and other writer friends sympathize and encourage you, and maybe even solve a piece or two of that puzzle, and you keep plodding forward. So stick with it, because that puzzle will be something to behold.

Books I Officially and Publicly Recommend: The Mysterious Benedict Society

I have been on fire recently when it has come to selecting books to read, and have a couple really fantastic books going right now. I believe my streak started when I purchased The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart.

This book is a smart, fun story about four extraordinarily gifted kids who must stop an evil man from taking over the world through hidden messages in the television--basically, television is rotting people's minds.

It takes place in a very Roald Dahl-esque Real-But-Not-Real world (and if you've read any Roald Dahl, you know his thoughts on the television), and the characters are wonderfully memorable. The four kids have such fun character quirks and real emotions that you can't help but be endeared and cheer out loud for them. Along the way, the kids must solve several puzzles and clues to achieve their goal, and you find yourself working out the problems right along with the kids as you read it. The back jacket flap asks in bold, "Are you a gifted child?" From the very beginning of the book, you think hey, I believe I am, thank you very much. It's full of heart, and just a gem of a book. I can't wait to read the sequel, and then the third one coming out in October.

Having said that, I now Officially and Publicly Recommend The Mysterious Benedict Society.

A Nice (People) Story

Note: when moving a open trailer full of house stuff, make sure it's all tied down properly. Okay, on with the story.

This last weekend my parents and I helped my sisters move back to school. Per the normal routine, we loaded the trailer we had borrowed with beds, dressers, and the boxes-O-stuff that had been cluttering the garage for the last three months. We cinched everything down (or so we thought) with some tie-downs, and hit the road for the three hour drive. I should mention that my mom drives the car in our family.

Not twenty minutes later, breaking through the road-trip silence, my mom: Ohh shnow-tractors! (Okay, maybe snow tractors wasn't the exact word. But you get the idea.). My dad starts freaking out, "WHAT? WHAT DID YOU DO???" I look out the window and there goes one of the boxes zip-spinning off the trailer and crashing into the center divider.

We're going too fast to turn around, and my dad is bordering clinical insanity in his rantings about our liability, and what if it causes a pile-up? and oh no, they're going to helicopter onto the hood of our car and fly us to jail! He's yelling at my mom to "Keep going! Keep going! We can't stop now!" 

So I guess we had no choice but to press forward and hope that nothing valuable was in those boxes. Maybe we could've gone back, but we didn't. A couple exits down the road, we pulled off and bought more tie-downs so we wouldn't lose any more stuff, and proceeded the rest of the journey rather uneventfully.

Enter Rob and Ria Cross. 

Driving home Sunday evening we were planning on going by the spot we lost the boxes, just to see if they were still there. About five minutes before we got to the spot, though, my sister got a call from United States Swimming. The woman on the line said a guy had apparently found some bins of ours and was trying to get ahold of us (!). Tiffany (my sister) says thanks, and immediately calls the guy. Rob told us to pull off the freeway and wait right there, he'd meet us with the boxes. Let me tell you, we were thrilled (except for my dad, who honestly thought the guy was pulling a sting operation and would be arriving with the SWAT team and handcuffs.)

He pulled up, and was just the nicest guy. Apparently my sister's homework and US Swimming card had survived the box blunder; he told us how he and his wife had sent a Facebook message to every McBroom they could find, but no one responded. They had searched high and low, and all around to try to connect with us. I mean, they spent their entire weekend trying to find us, so that we wouldn't have to go without our two boxes (it turned out to be kitchen supplies, if you were wondering). Eventually, he took the Swim card and called up US Swimming, and that's when the magic happened.

So a big cheers for Rob and Ria Cross, who reaffirmed for me that you still can come across really, really nice people at random.

New Name, Same Look

As you may have noticed, my name has been a rather drab "...Under Construction..." the last few days.

Since my days as a singer in the world of children's books have (for now, at least) come to an end, I deemed it appropriate to evolve my blog as well. So I came up with a new name. I was going to change my temple to a fancy, fantasy-filled design, but it didn't come out looking right. I'm not all that good with that kind of stuff. So the look is the same, but I present to you....

(see title above).

My Personality Test Results

Prior to my business school orientation this Saturday, I was required to take a personality test. Apparently Chapman (my school) will use these results to better craft a program for each of us as students, which I think is really awesome.

Personally, I love taking personality tests/quizzes. I think it's really fun to reflect on the results and whether or not they are accurate, or completely out in left field. This particular test was called the StrengthsQuest evaluation; the results were divided into 34 "themes," that represent you as a person, and you receive your top 5 themes after the test.

My Top Five Themes:

5. Significance: People who are especially talented in the Significance theme want to be very important in the eyes of others. They are independent and want to be recognized.

4. Strategic: People who are especially talented in the Strategic theme create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.

3. Futuristic: People who are especially talented in the Futuristic theme are inspired by the future and what could be. They inspire others with their visions of the future.

2. Activator: People who are especially talented in the Activator theme can make things happen by turning thoughts into action. They are often impatient.

And Number 1.......

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1. Ideation: People who are especially talented in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.

Overall, I was pretty happy with my results (especially my number one, considering I'm trying to publish a book).

How about you? Do you like personality tests, or do you think they're just a bunch of fluff?

The Query Process: Damaging to the IQ?

According to an article in The Bottom Line magazine: Constantly checking your email--as opposed to checking it once or twice a day at a set time--lowers your IQ by up to 10 points!

I don't know about you, but this does not bode well for me when I've got a query or manuscript out.

Jammin' Out to Ideas

I'm reading a book right now called, "The Imagineering Workout." In it, a bunch of imagineers offer exercises to bolster your creativity, or different ways to brainstorm.

One piece of advice that I thought was really neat (and really well-phrased) was this: "When in the car, don't jam out to tunes. Jam out to ideas!"

Our right-brains love driving. It involves so many meticulous details: check your speed, look in your mirrors, make sure you're not wandering from your line into the car next to you, check your speed again, switch lanes, etc. and so forth. And when our right-brains get so engaged in driving, it allows our left-brain (our creative brain) to drift.

On my drive home from the conference I decided to decompress with a 5 hour Idea Jam-Out, and drove almost the whole way home in silence. And it was awesome! I set my thoughts first on my novel, and my mind drifted all over my plot and the details of my world that I need to get straight before I query again. And then I let my mind just wander wherever it decided to take me. I reflected on the weekend, and where I would go next with all the motivation I absorbed from it. I thought about business school coming up (just found out I'm officially accepted...woo!), and my plan of action for becoming an imagineer.

It really was one of the best drives home from Southern California I've had (and I've made that drive a lot), and was kind of cathartic...who knew silence could be so much fun!

Does anyone else drive in silence, or have any other creative-idea tricks they'd care to share?

PCPD has returned!

I ran this after last year's conference, but after seeing all the mentions of "conference withdrawal" on the twitter feed of #scbwi09, it seems that PCPD is sweeping the nation once again! So, the "article," updated for this year:

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A new disease has spread across the continental United States, and looks to potentially capture the world as well. Post Conference Partum Depression, or PCPD, as it becoming more conveniently known, is a severe form of delusional depression. When asked how such a paralyzing disease could have entered our land, doctors indicated that the bacteria the disease grows from was likely born from a small mass of fun that gathered in the lobby every night at the 2009 SCBWI Summer Conference in Los Angeles, CA. Symptoms include spending countless hours cycling through everyone else's blogs to read different spins on the exact same event, refusing to wear anything but blue, making pillows with everyone's faces on them and sitting around in a circle to talk with them, aimlessly wandering lobbies of local hotels looking for fun people to talk to, and culminating in a series of creative bursts of energy. If you or anyone you know is experiencing any of these symptoms, I am very sorry, but there does not seem to be a cure for this tragic disease arriving on the horizon of the foreseeable future. The only therapy suggested for PCPD is to continue to keep in touch with other sufferers of the disease. May fortune shine upon you and let the disease avoid your residential area.

SCBWI 2009: An Outsider's Perspective

This year's conference was an interesting one for me. Because of certain extenuating circumstances (interviews to take, houses to look for, upcoming school to pay for) I was not actually able to attend the conference this year. I had to be in the area that weekend, though, so I decided to stay at the hotel and enjoy the social side.

I am happy to say that I had a wonderful time--and kept surprisingly busy!

From what I saw, there was this really cool vibe of openness throughout the weekend. I was only around during the end-of-the-day lobby festivities, but I saw lots of editors and agents interacting with writers, making themselves available. Everyone was so approachable, and genuinely seemed interested in talking to the attendees.

And as Paul mentioned in his recap, who said anything about the book business declining? Everyone really did seem hungry, on both sides. It seemed like every other person I met had either won an award or had an agent/editor pleading them to send a manuscript immediately. You could almost hear the doors opening everywhere you turned.

I must say that I, too, had my own bit of excitement. On Friday I had my interview for business school; not only did it go well, but one of the staff members at the school has a brother who is a Walt Disney Imagineer! For those of you who don't know, it is my ultimate dream to design rides for the Disney parks. The imagineer's sister gave me his card, and let him know I'd be in touch. Talk about an amazing opportunity!

Of course, back to the conference, I can't forget to mention the ever-expanding bank of memories and friends that seems to grow exponentially as each year passes. And this year, between wacked-out Dr. Seuss character look-a-likes, an angry astronaut (Did they remember the theme???), an improvised limbo breakout, some renegade socializing (it was kool-aid, I swear), a KEYNOTE with a twist, several discussions of urinal edicate, Face Up Uno, and the best new YA picture book that needs to be written ("You think you like me in economics class..."), this year was certainly no exception.

I would have loved to soak up all the knowledge that you gain in all those breakout sessions, because it did seem to be quite the year for speeches, too. But considering the circumstances, I was pretty happy just being able to spend the weekend with so many wonderful people--again. So thank you to everyone who was part of the magic that happened at SCBWI 2009. And I'll see you next year.

Another Year, Another Awesome Weekend

And I'm home....and blogging again!

It was great seeing all the old group, and awesome meeting all the new people, too! The best conference I never attended!

Have a Great Memorial Day Weekend (and wish me luck)!

Anyone have any awesome plans for Memorial Day weekend?

For my "holiday" weekend, I'll be working about 12 hours a day. Of course, it's really cool work because I am going to be a referee for the Men's Junior National water polo tournament. This will be by far the biggest event I have ever reffed, and if I do well this weekend, I could potentially get on the fast track to start reffing internationally! Am I justified in being just a little bit nervous?

Anywho, I hope everyone has a great Memorial Day weekend!

My First Blog Award(s)!

Yesterday, Casey McCormick announced a couple of awards over on her blog Literary Rambles.  The first was the Lemonade Stand Award ("for great gratitude and/or attitude"), and the second the One Lovely Blog Award ("For loveliness, I'm assuming").  Turns out I was one of the lucky recipients of this double award! So thanks a bunch Casey! These will forever be the first blog accolades I ever received.

So it's time for me to share the love! In the spirit of how I received them, I'm also going to combine the awards.

The Lemonade Stand Rules:

1) Post the award on your blog with the name of the person who gave it to you and link them.

2) Nominate ten other blogs and link to them .

3) Let your nominees know that they've received the award.

 The Lovely Rules:

1) Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person who has granted the award, and his or her blog link.

2) Pass the award to 5 or more other bloggers that you've newly discovered.

3) Remember to contact the bloggers to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

Your award winners, without further ado (and in no particular order):

1. Paul Aertker

2. Nidal Bukhari, Tyler Kelly, and Jeremy Olson - Twigdiculous

3. Corey Schwartz - Thing 1 and Thing 2

4. Heather Hansen

5. Purple Clover (She won't reveal her true identity. ;) So I can't put her real name here)

I limited it to five, just because I don't have an extensive blog roll, and I want the award to mean something.  All these people are either newish to the blogosphere or newish to me! So check 'em out! (And sorry for the weird spacing, it got all messed up when I added the pictures)

SCBWI L.A. '09: The Conference Breakdown

Last night I had the strangest dream. It was the beginning of this year's SCBWI Writer's Conference. Instead of being in the usual beautiful hotel, however, it was in some cheap Super 8-type Motel, in their run down continental breakfast room.  We were all there, everyone who was part of our awesome group last year. Lin Oliver introduced me as SCBWI's Sanjaya to the small room. Then, instead of opening with a glorious keynote, we chowed down on some dry breakfast.

And guess who showed up? My family. My sister snuck into the table and informed me of her recent aspirations to write a picture book (she has none of the sort), and my Dad--and this is the part that made me laugh hardest when I woke up--ran to the head of the table and led us all in a Scottish jig.  How I knew the jig was Scottish, I couldn't tell ya. Do Scots even do jigs?

We all marched out in orderly fashion, jigging along the way. Paul was dressed in this overly long green and white sweater, and was skipping--yes, literally skipping--in and around our orderly ranks and chanting in fluent Gaelic, making sure we got really into the jig. Paul, I knew you spoke lots of languages, but Gaelic, wow!

That's all I remember, but it provided some great inward entertainment this morning, and is a great segue into the blog post I was planning (at Paul's request, oddly enough).

As I think is pretty obvious, I've been started to look forward to this year's conference (understatement, maybe?). On top of seeing everyone again, there seem to be some absolutely wonderful keynotes and breakout sessions this year.  On the website they're touting it as the largest faculty ever; bigger doesn't always mean better, but it seems so in this case. I'm just glad we have such a big group, so that in some cases we can split up and share notes.

Everyone comes to the conference with different goals and aspirations, and we all base our decisions for our breakout sessions on those goals. Because of where I'm at in my writing process, my main focus this year is agents. It's my first conference with a completed manuscript--a manuscript that is yet to have representation--and I'm really hoping to hit it off with one of the agents that are attending this year.

Of course, I still want to learn about craft, social networking, and the editorial process. In order to achieve a balance, I decided to break down the keynotes by type, so that I could achieve a balance that favored agents but let me experience everything.

Here's what I came up with:

Novelists (and the like): 7 speakers, 3 of which are Fantasy, 1 Historical Fiction, 1 Contemporary, 1 chapter book-age, and 1 is Ellen Hopkins (poetry, but fiction too; not exactly sure how to classify her. The Awesome category might cover it).

Picture Book-ers: 2 speakers, 1 panel.

Editors: 3 speakers, 1 panel.

Agents: 1 panel.

The editors attending, with either keynotes or breakout sessions, are: Dinah Stevenson (Clarion), Jordan Brown (Walden Pond Press, a new HarperCollins imprint), Allyn Johnston (Beach Lane Books), Wendy Loggia (Delacorte), Krista Marino (Delacorte), Anica Rissi (Simon Pulse), Arianne Lewin (Disney-Hyperion), Andrea Welch (Beach Lane Books), Courtney Bongiolatti (Simon and Schuster), Elizabeth Law (Egmont), Bonnie Bader (Grosset & Dunlap, Price Stern Sloan, both imprints of Penguin), 

The agents attending, who have breakout sessions, are: Daniel Lazar (writer's house), Steven Malk (writer's house), Jen Rofe (Andrea Brown), Marietta Zacker (Nancy Gallt Lit), Sarah Davies (greenhouse lit), Jamie Weiss (Andrea Brown), Kelly Sonnack (Andrea Brown), and Stephen Fraser (Jennifer De Chiara Lit). 

I'm surprised (but personally, pleased) at the plethora of fantasy author keynotes.

Sherman Alexie is the opener; he spoke at my school and was HILARIOUS, so look for another incredible opening keynote this year (the two I've seen, Bruce Coville and Walter Dean Myers, were both phenominal).  The closer is Kathleen Duey, who is a pretty big name too.

Whew! I think that's it.  Who's all going to the conference this year? And what are you going to focus on when there (other than Beer:30 and fun, of course)? Any personal highlights for you? I'll leave a comment later about my personal highlights, as I think this post has gone on long enough.  See you on the Avenue of the Stars!

Your Blog on Kindle?

I opened up Publisher's Lunch this morning and found something very interesting.  Apparently, you can publish your blog posts to Kindle and make them available for purchase for a couple of bucks.  Amazon keeps most of the profit, but I don't really think it's about the profit.

To me, this opens of worlds of opportunity for the power of the web presence.  Maybe not as a pre-published author with a few followers, but as a published author with fans who want to get the latest scoop on their favorite writer, a quick download from Kindle is all they need.  It's just another step in this new development of ebook technology.

What does everyone else think of this? Do you think it has the potential to significantly impact an author's publicity? Or is it an experiment that won't achieve success, and be out of mind in a few short months?

You Tell Me: First Draft or Polishing?

I've been diving back into my manuscript in the last couple days as I start a massive rewrite that I want to complete by SCBWI L.A. in August.

The last couple months have mostly been dedicated to querying and all that, so I haven't even looked at my manuscript since probably February.  While I have definitely made some pretty significant changes already, it has been such a joy to reread my manuscript and remember what I wrote.  And thank goodness, I still really really like my story.

As I've said before, I love the spontaneity and excitement that comes with writing a first draft.  There's nothing like spinning a new story and falling in love with new characters.

Another thing that has no parallel is the revision/rewrite process.  Both are really hard work, but also awesomely rewarding.  I love taking that hefty draft I just wrote and getting down all nitty-gritty-like on a sentence level and turning all those cliches and boring sentences into words that have pizazz and jump off the page.

Of course, whether I do this successfully has yet to be determined.  But it's still fun to try.

So which do YOU like better, the blitz of a first draft, or the fine-tuning of the rewrite?  Discuss!

Happy Mother's Day!

To all you mothers out there, I hope your day is filled with awesomeness!

And now, since I just got a new camera (yay!), the best mom in the world! (no offense to everyone else):

The Reject via Tweet

A month or so ago I received my first rejection via twitter.  Anyone else received one of these yet?

I suppose this may require a bit of explanation.  This wasn't a cold query that I sent to an agent, who proceeded to seek me out on twitter just to get my hopes up and then blast me down with an @tmcbroom reject.

I had met this agent at SCBWI LA last summer, and through a series of exchanges I won't go into detail about here, he ended up passing on my partial by sending me a direct message on twitter.  Obviously I was disappointed, but at the same time I felt like I was pioneering a new form of rejection.  So that was cool.

What also came in the direct tweet was the promise of a detailed response (yes!).  That response came in yesterday, and oh man was it enlightening.  He told me I was being overly respectful of both my character and the world I created.  I was describing the world as I had created it rather than how my character saw it, and this was creating distance between my voice as the narrator and the voice of my MC.  Another brilliant little tidbit he bestowed on me was the idea that too many descriptors of a scene don't help connect the reader to the story, but actually do the opposite.  It only takes one quick detail to ground a reader in the scene, and anything beyond that just jumbles the reader's mind and confuses him or her.

I had been debating a rewrite lately, and I'm so grateful to have finally been pointed in a proper direction.  Now it's time to take the guidance to heart, and churn out a drastically improved manuscript!

The Final Percy Jackson Book

Just came out today!

And I had no idea that it was actually the last book in the series.  When I read the inside flap on my way to the register and learned that I held in my hands the conclusion to my favorite book series out right now, a swirl of responses mixed inside of me--excited to read the end, but sad that these were the final pages.  I don't know how this piece of information escaped me, but I usually like to anticipate and mentally prepare for a final installment in an epic series.  Like Harry Potter.  I knew it was going to be the end, and I was ready for it.

But now I really can't wait to read it.  I thought I'd have to wait at least another two or three years to learn how the series would end, but now it's sitting in the back seat of my car.  I actually (no joke, this is how big of a dork I am) jumped in the air and pumped my fist as I walked out of Target, book in hand.

Does anyone else read these books?  They're really fun; kind of a similar plot line to Harry Potter, but one of the best examples of a unique, kid-friendly voice out there.

Update: Disregard Anything You Read

Turns out I had no idea what I was talking about when I reflected upon being an agent for a day:  I didn't get any of the three.  Not a one!  I really thought I had some good ones, but ohh well.

To me, this means one of two things: 

Either, 1. I am really terrible at being agent, and can effectively eliminate that as a career choice, OR

2. This completely reinforces the idea that you need to query widely.  Based on the widespread number of queries that had quite a few requests, it seems that it really all does depend on the taste agent, and even more so on your actual manuscript.

How did everyone else who participated fare?