Friday funnies- March 8

I wore a T-shirt and jeans the other day outside bc it felt like spring. It was 37 degrees. ALSO: the Iditarod is going on now in Alaska. Check out this site for some great photos:






Odd that my life hasn't changed much since I was an undergrad.





In my case, it's the blank looks.





Love this: Vermeer, Updated



And...yes. I'm told someday I'll be nostalgic about these times.




Have a great weekend!

Why It Works: Rip Tide

Rip Tide is the sequel to Dark Life, a YA scifi written by Kat Falls. I read Dark Life last year and got sucked into the author's vision of a future planet covered with water (a la Waterworld) and humans that grow gills. Falls's book didn't get a whole bunch of press - or at least if it did, I missed it - but it has a few things to recommend it. It's from a boy's POV, it's pretty clean language-wise and it doesn't focus too heavily on romance. Yeah, I know that can be a bummer for a female audience but frankly, there just isn't enough out there in YA for guys... that's a topic for another post.
Anyway, the first few graphs of Rip Tide:
Easing back on the throttle, I slowed the submarine's speed. The light-streaked ocean around us seemed vast and empty, but I knew better. We were heading into the biggest trash vortex in the Atlantic. A piece of history could broadside us at any time.
  
Sure enough, a shape swirled out of the darkness, glimmering in the sub's head beams. Gemma leaned onto the viewport. "A bicycle," she said with amazement. "Just like in old photos."
"That means we're almost there," I told her.
"We're hiding a wagon full of crops in the open ocean?"
"In the middle of the trash gyre," I explained. "Genius, right?"
Red: time indicator - the characters are in a submarine, which tells us this takes place in the 20th century at the earliest. Then Gemma mentions that bikes are pictured in old photos, which propels us past the present and into the future.

Green: setting - we're not only in the Atlantic, we're in a trash vortex. Since we wouldn't call our oceans a 'trash vortex' today, this solidifies the clue that we're in the future. Even if I hadn't read the first book, my mind would combine lots of water + trash = a global warming future.

Blue: occupation/reorientation - The characters are in a submarine but Gemma mentions a wagon full of crops...which the sub must be either pulling OR Gemma is calling the sub a wagon, meaning it is used as farming equipment, meaning farming is done underwater. This solidifies the setting in our mind. It also tells us that our characters are involved with growing crops.
Pink: mystery/why we keep reading factor - Why in the world are these two hiding crops in a trash gyre? (What is a trash gyre??) What kind of world allows them to not only grow crops underwater, but then forces them to hide what they've produced.

 Hooked yet?

Have a great week!

The brilliance of Graceling, a bloghop and a winner

 Thanks to everyone who stopped by last week and voted in an informal poll. I had to take it off my blog due to a weird formatting glitch but the results were helpful.

 Tied for first place was diagramming of successful YA, and a fun bloghop. For the next several Mondays, I'll be examining passages from popular YA books (if you have a title suggestion, let me know) and preparing for a Most Embarrassing Writing Moment bloghop sometime in July.  I need a co-host or three. It'll be a one-day hop with a People's Choice prize-to-be-determined. If you're interested in co-hosting, email me.

Random.org choose Michelle of Books on the Run to receive an ARC of ARTICLE 5. Yay! Michelle, I'll be emailing you soon.

Now, on to examining the brilliance that is Kristen Cashore's Graceling...
I first read this book as an ARC when I was working in a middle school library in 2009. The cover caught me first - that shiny, glinting sword with the girl's eye peering out at me. And then the blurb mentioning a female spy/fighter who was Graced with kick ass power.  (I mean that literally: Katsa is able to kick anyone's ass.) Right away, Cashore appealed to the latent ass-kicker in me because even though I've never been in a physical fight in my life, that hasn't meant part of me didn't want to be. I'm just too small (and too smart) to pit myself against the odds. My teeth are fine where they are, thank you. But if I could kick ass with impunity...well, then, BRING IT ON.
So I was hooked enough to flip open the cover. The first paragraph is all about setting - the dungeon, the smell of moss and damp, the feel of cold stone and flickering torch light. As a reader, I love tactile hints of setting  - they draw me in, give my brain lots of clues to trick myself into going into that hypnotic state only good writers create. But Cashore doesn't stay here long. She tells me in the third paragraph why we're here: Katsa has been sent for the guards. It was for them she was sent first.

As a reader, I'm wonder what the heck that means and turn the page. Katsa dispatches four guards before amazement had even registered in their eyes. There was only one more guard, sitting before the cell bars at the end of the corridor. He scrambled to his feet and slid his sword from his sheath. Katsa walked toward him, certain the the torch at her back hid her face, and particularly her eyes, from his sight. She measured his size, the way he moved, the steadiness of the arm that held the sword toward her.
"Stop there. It's clear enough what you are." His voice was even. He was brave, this one. He cut the air with his sword, in warning. "You don't frighten me."
He lunged toward her. She ducked under his blade and whirled her foot out, clipping his temple. He dropped to the ground.

Cashore shows me four things in this short piece of writing. (There would be five if I'd included the first two graphs of setting but I didn't want to make this post super long.)
BLUE - character building -  Katsa is a fast and efficient fighter. She's been trained and she doesn't waste time.
GREEN - play to engage reader sympathy - Katsa notices the guard's behavior with approval; it shows us both her business-like attitude and her fairness. It's important we root for her despite her ass-kicking abilities and showing us her other qualities makes us like her. A few sentences later, this impression is reinforced when she treats the knocked-out guards gently.
YELLOW - backstory/worldbuilding. Her eyes give away what she is, although her attempt to hide this from her next opponent isn't successful. He's guessed it from everything that's just happened. This tells us that her ability is widely recognized and feared in her world.
RED  - mystery. Why does she hide what she is? It isn't for her protection (she obviously needs none) so I have to read on to figure it out.
Cashore does all this in less than 500 words. Her writing is tightly designed to give your brain all the tools it needs to stay engaged - setting, sympathy, intrigue, mystery, a hint of a world to explore. This is exactly what agents are talking about when they say: write tight, keep it moving, hook me fast.

What are some other examples of great opening scenes?

The next big idea...

Up until this week, summer here in Alaska has been fantastic. Our weather's been better than average - 3-to-1 for rain/sun, when it's usually 5-to-1. My kids kept busy and although hubby dearest (HD) has been gone for almost two months, we were cruising along pretty well.

Then I finished Saving Andromeda. For the past six weeks, I'd lived, breathed, and dreamed this story. When other writers described this experience, in my heart-of-hearts, I was a bit skeptical. Seriously? I thought.  Lived, breathed AND dreamed? Uh huh. Sounds to me you're trying to make other writers feel insecure/jealous/not-like-real-writers.

Then, like a stroke of literary lightning, I got zapped. Every day for hours I could fall, entranced in this world hardly able to stop typing. I wrote chapters surrounded by five year-olds playing Thomas the Train, took the laptop into the kitchen to type while making sure the Rice-A-Roni wouldn't boil over. At night I couldn't sleep for plotting. (The daylight helped, too.) During conversations with real people, I'd drift away thinking about my imaginary people. I was a ditzy as a teenager in love for the first time.

Now, alas, it's over. The MS is in the vault and I'm twiddling my thumbs wondering what happened to the magic.  Because when I re-read my precious darling after a month away, the honeymoon will be over. I'll see all its warts and back hair, wonder why certain scenes smell like my son's dirty socks and roll my eyes at misplaced sentimentality. Or dive into despair because there's NO passion at all even during the kissing scenes. My relationship with this MS is a beautiful illusion - of course I know this, I knew it even in the middle of my fall - but oh, I hate when the magic fades.

I'm forcing myself to finish The Weight of Angels, the MS I abandoned chasing after SA. It's a good story but I'm thinking that it'll always be my rebound relationship. Meanwhile, I wait  for the Next Big Idea to strike....
Anytime now.