March Event in Shelton, WA!

I'm going to be on a writing retreat in Washington in March, and while I'm there I'll be at an event in Shelton, WA with some wonderful women from YA Highway, the group blog I'm a part of: Kristin Halbrook, Kirsten Hubbard, Kody Keplinger, and Phoebe North! We will be talking books and writing and life, answering questions, and then signing. If you live in the area, we would love to meet you!

The deets:

For easy transcription purposes:

Who: Me, Kristin Halbrook (Nobody But Us), Kirsten Hubbard (Wanderlove and Like Mandarin), Kody Keplinger (The DUFF, A Midsummer's Nightmare, Shut Out), and Phoebe North (Starglass, out in July)
What: A discussion and signing (for those who have books out)
Where: Timberland Library, 710 W Adler, Shelton WA
When: March 12, 4-5:30pm
Why: Because it's going to be fun and awesome. Also: books are good! Yes!

RTW: Writing Seasons

Road Trip Wednesday is a ‘Blog Carnival,’ where YA Highway's contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question that begs to be answered. Check out the other responses here!

This Week's Topic is: How does your writing (place, time, inspiration) change with the seasons?

To answer this, I am going to quote George Eliot: "Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns."

(source: blmiers2)

Ah, autumn: that special, brief time between the soul-crushing heat of summer and the onset of my mild winter-related seasonal affective disorder! It's when I wrote the rough draft of Divergent, it's when I did my most successful revision of Insurgent, and now, God willing, it will be the season in which I finish the rough draft of book 3, provided my hands don't crap out first.

(Seriously, my right hand is all throbby and upset right now. It's making life difficult, since I can barely grasp a cup in my left hand without dropping it. In other news, I am a whiner.)

Summer is the season of sunshine (or at least, the season in which we most celebrate sunshine), and I hate sunshine. And heat. (No, I am not a vampire.) Yes, yes, I recognize the necessity of sunshine in promoting life and in keeping me from going crazy, but I usually groan when I wake up and it's all bright and perky outside, because that means I don't get the instant cozy feeling of a rainy day that I so cherish. It's hard for me to write without that cozy feeling, for some reason, so summer is always the worst writing season for me.

However, Instant!Cozy is what autumn is all about. Hot beverages and crisp air and scarves and the crunch of fallen leaves when I walk to my "office," aka a coffee shop, and the thoughtful reflections that necessarily arise when the world is dying around me-- these are the things that put me in the writing mood. (Oh, look-- more morbidity! No wonder people die in my books.)

(source: Zara Tcherneva)

(source: katebartnik)

Winter is almost a tie, because while it is also cozy and I love snow and blankets and seeing my breaths and winter holidays and all those things-- I even love winters HERE, which tend to feature below zero temperatures and slush and salt stains-- my emotional state does tend to take a plunge when the days get shorter, so I have to whip out my light therapy lamp and think cheerful thoughts to compensate. Which eats away at writing time.

And spring in Chicago is very drippy and cold and bare and gross and lasts a maximum of two weeks, so whatever, spring. Whatever. 

For me, writing feels the best when I feel calm and cozy and thoughtful, and that's during autumn and winter, for me. It's also the time when the Midwest feels most like the Midwest, to me-- more about that fascination/obsession here.

What about you? Favorite season, go!

Knowing When To Trunk

My first post for YA Highway is up today! I've been following that blog for quite some time, so when I got the opportunity to be a contributor, I said, "Um...YES." If you haven't checked it out, please do, it's great.

Anyway, my post is on how to know whether to revise or trunk your manuscript: Love Is Mandatory.

The Wonderful Thing About Outlining (And Tiggers)

First: my first "rereading childhood books" post on The Giver goes up on Friday. If you are also planning to put up a "rereading childhood books" post, please either put the link in my post's comments, or email it to me at veronicarothbooks@gmail.com, so I can add your link to the original post. (And so I can read about your rereading experience.)

Second: some of my thoughts about voice are up on the GotYA blog today, if you want to check it out.

Third: the Road Trip Wednesday topic at YAHighway is awesome this week. I tried to participate, but in the process I discovered that I can't do it without seriously spoiling DIVERGENT for everyone (which should tell you just how good this topic is.)

In other news, I'm hard at work on DIVERGENT's sequel, which I will hereby refer to as D2. It has an actual title, but I'd rather not use it until it's final, on the off chance that it changes.

And I have discovered the wonderful thing about outlining. (Not to be confused with the wonderful thing about Tiggers, which is that Tiggers are wonderful things.)

I don't know if you know this about me already, so I'll tell you: I don't like to outline. And when I say I don't like it, I mean that the thought of doing it fills me with terror. Not frustration. Not annoyance. TERROR. Why? Because up until recently, I thought of outlining as the enemy of my creative process. Once I decide that the plot of a book is going to go a certain way, I have serious trouble getting that idea out of my mind. I have to practically dig it out of my brain with a scalpel in order to think of any other options.

But if you want a trilogy, or even a sequel, you have to learn to outline. Because your publisher isn't going to say, "oh, you don't have an outline for the next two books? Well, that's all right. We trust you to make them good, debut author who we have no prior experience with." That would be extremely foolish of them. So: I'm sorry, fellow pantsers, but we are all out of luck.

I outlined D2, and freaked out for awhile, and then got scared, and now I've finally found my inner writing badass again, and I'm writing. (That post I did last week actually worked, people! How cool is that?)

The wonderful thing about outlining is this: I can write anything. At any time. No more forcing myself to write the next scene in the narrative sequence even though I really don't feel like it. (Yes, I know that some of you were never prisoners to chronological order. Shush.) Yesterday I wrote a scene from the middle of the book. The day before that I wrote a scene from the end, and then wrote a scene from the beginning.

Yes, that's right: now I just wake up and think, what kind of scene do I feel like writing today? And then I consult my outline and find a scene that corresponds to my mood.

It's freaking awesome.

So this week's motto is: embrace the outline. The outline is your friend.

And this week's D2 song is...





Also, look!
My very own copy of The Contract! Signed!
This, my friends, is a look of "OMG."

RTW: You + $$$ = ?

I considered posting a video of me blinking one eye at a time to see who else can do that, but then I remembered that it's Road Trip Wednesday over at YA Highway, and I haven't participated in awhile (because I live in Crazy Town, Population 1), so I'm going to do that instead.

Today's question is: if you had the insane success of S.Meyer and JK (I talk about them like they're my homies), what would you do with all that $$$?

I am more prepared to answer this question than I should be, I think. Because I have a step by step list.

1. Buy a house. Also: get married. It's already part of the plan, but if we had major $$$, we could do it sooner. Anyway, when I say "house," I don't mean "giant monstrosity." I mean a nice little house with a nice little yard...possibly in Green Lake, Wisconsin...where the view out my windows would look like this...



2. Donate. I have an organization in mind. Particularly given some of the themes Divergent (briefly) touches on. And some of the problems the kids in my old high school seem to be facing recently. I will probably go into this more at a later date.

3. Invest. Yes, I really am that lame person who answers this question this way.

4. At that point, after all my sensible uses of money are done, I would do the following things:

A. Fill a pool with mini marshmallows and jump into it.
B. Rent out a cafeteria and have a GIANT FOOD FIGHT. Really.
C. Statewide scavenger hunt. A few groups of people, a few strategically placed clues in the wilderness of Illinois...funtimes all around.
D. I would go to this site and go totally nuts. For example, I would purchase this LED faucet light that changes color depending on the temperature of your water:

Or this NERF MACHINE GUN.

(Can you IMAGINE the ridiculousness? I CAN.)

But really, after all is said and done, what I would mostly do with a whole lot of cash is WRITE ALL THE TIME. Day jobs? Pshh. Who needs them? If I could just set up a nice little room in which I could write all day and supply myself with infinite tea, I'd be pretty much good.

RTW: Writing Places

I haven't done this in awhile, but over at YA Highway there's a thing called "Road Trip Wednesday," in which you can answer their question on your blog and then bounce around other people's blogs reading their answers. Did I make that sound confusing enough? Okay. Good.

This week's question: where is your favorite place to read/write?

I have what I like to call Screen-Looking Paranoia. That means that when other people are directly next to me or behind me, and could potentially read what's on my screen, I freak out and make my font so small I can barely read it myself and basically can't get any writing done. Therefore my options for public places to write are limited, unless I can find a place where my back is to a wall and no one is near me. So my favorite place is...

1. At my desk, in my room...

...with the door closed and my headphones on. Also, my desk has to be clean. Like...Spartan clean.

2. On the train, on the top level where the single seats are.

The train is a place where you are surrounded by people but no one talks to you. I also like the feeling of being in motion, for some reason.

3. In the library. Reference section.

Don't ask me "why Reference?" because I have no idea. Study carroll:



4. On my bed.

Sometimes the desk chair hurts my non-cushioned butt, so I migrate to the bed. Apparently doing homework/writing/whatever on your bed during the day isn't good for you, because it trains your body to think that the bed is a place of awake-ness instead of sleep-ness, and then you won't sleep as well at night. So I try to avoid the bed before I'm ready to actually sleep, but sometimes I just say "ah, screw it."



So there they are. Some of my favorite writing places.

YA Highway Contest

Let us discuss the awesomeness that is this contest.

Annnnd the books you can win are:

Graceling by Kristin Cashore
Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff
Cracked Up to Be by Courtney Summers
Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater
Wondrous Strange by Lesley Livingston

This is particularly awesome not just because of the winning potential but because it's like a little list of book recommendations for me to add to my "must read someday" list.

I have to keep working on my paper now, though, so I'm not going to sit on Amazon reading the summaries, I'm not. Not.