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Now that I’ve gotten an editorial letter for Book 2, I’ll be retreating into the revision cave for the next few weeks. Don’t worry, though, I won’t be totally abandoning you guys. In fact, I have a fun blog series in the works that I hope to launch very soon. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, for those of you in the New England area, I have a super fun event coming up at the end of June. A glow-in-the-dark mini-golf/book signing extravaganza! That’s right. Monster Mini-Golf meets My Very UnFairy Tale Life. How will the world survive the funness? I owe the awesome Heather Kelly (and her new publicity venture, Skipping Stones Marketing) for helping to set up the event; Heather is a total pro at out-of-the-box event ideas. I hope to see you there!

A friend and I were talking about revising yesterday and how, once you have the ingredients of your story figured out, you have to decide which aspects you’re going to emphasize. Funnily enough, I got my editorial letter for Book 2 yesterday (yay!) and my editor also talked about emphasis. She commented on how a more serious thread of the book should be de-emphasized and the fairy tale aspect should be emphasized more.

I thought this was a good reminder of one of the ways you need to look at your story when you’re revising. You have to step back, look at the bigger picture, and see which things you’re most highlighting. Then you have to figure out if that emphasis lines up with the goals you have for the story. 

Is anyone else figuring out the emphasis in your WIP?

I’ve been wrapped up in grading and writing, so I probably won’t be doing any craft-related posts this week, but I do have some tiny things to report.

-You can now subscribe to my blog posts via email. Just enter your email address in the sidebar (under “Subscribe by email”) and my “words of wisdom” will be delivered directly to your inbox. I know email subscriptions aren’t exactly new, but I’m still proud of myself for figuring out how to set up Feedburner all on my own.

-I have a shiny new brochure with info about my school visit and writing workshop programs. You can download it HERE or you can find a link to it on my “Resources” page. I used to be terrified of visiting schools, but now that I’ve learned I actually enjoy doing presentations, I’m excited to do more.

-Today is the last day to win a copy of Breaking Beautiful over on First Page Panda. All you have to do is comment to enter. (And hey, what do you know, there’s now a handy dandy “subscribe by email” option on that website, too.)

Happy Wednesday!

In case you missed me crowing about this on Twitter and Facebook the other day, Book 2 officially has a new title! My editor was afraid the original title, My Way Too Fairy Tale Life, might be too similar to the title of the first book. The last thing you want is readers not realizing there’s a new book out because the titles are too much alike!

So we put our heads together and came up with:

My Epic Fairy Tale Fail

I really like the new title. It’s funny and spunky, and it hints at the types of misadventures Jenny will face in the story. Now that we have the title, the fact that the book will be coming out in less than a year feels a lot more real. I can’t wait to see what the cover will look like!

The trick to writing a story that flows is making your plot move along without the reader realizing that you’re controlling the strings. Of course, this isn’t easy to do, and sometimes those strings start to peek out and the characters feel more like puppets than like organic beings.

I happened to notice this in a book I was reading yesterday. Essentially, the main character suggests a course of action to another character, and that character rejects it with a “why should I listen to you?” comment. This didn’t quite ring true to me because the main character had proven that she’s pretty intelligent. It felt like the character was rejecting her suggestion primarily for plot reasons.

So how do you keep your plot strings from showing? Ultimately, you have to make sure that each decision and action stems from the character and his/her motivation. If you’re imposing decisions on your characters, that means that you’re not letting them act out their own stories. And that’s when the strings can start to show.

I’ve been bouncing around between a few projects, but I was finally able to settle on a story I’ve been playing with for a little while. And this one is about g-g-g-ghosts!

It’s not my normal type of story namely because it’s a YA ghost story mystery, but so far I’m having a lot of fun with it. And–shockingly–I even managed to outline it, so hopefully that will keep me on track.

The main thing I’m concerned about with this story is making sure that it stands out from the other YA ghost stories already out there. I’m focusing more on the mystery and the character relationship rather than the supernatural element, which will hopefully help to make it unique. We’ll see how it goes!

How are you all doing with your WIPs? Anyone else working on telling a familiar story in a new way?

More and more I’ve been wondering if the blogging trend is fading, at least among the writing community. I’ve heard from more than one person (and I’ve noticed this myself) that blog traffic and comments have been steadily declining and people seem to be blogging less and less. I know everyone is busy–I definitely don’t have as much time to devote to reading blogs as I’d like–but I think it might be more than that.

For a while, I think writers were blogging because they were told that’s what you’re supposed to do in order to have a web presence. But now, there are other options such as Twitter, Tumblr, etc. Those are easier and don’t take as much time.

There’s also so much good info out there already about writing and publishing that people might feel like there’s no point in blogging since they don’t have anything original to add.

The thing is, if writers stop blogging, I’m not sure we’ll be able to get the same info or sense of community elsewhere. When I first started trying to get published, I learned so much about the business through blogs. I also met amazing people who have become real friends. I’m not sure I would have gotten that any other way.

While social media sites might be easier than blogging, I haven’t felt that same sense of connection through them. (The only other place I’ve been able to get a similar feeling is on Verla Kay’s Blueboard, a message board dedicated to writers and illustrators.)

Something else I like about blogging is that it gives me a chance to work out the things that are buzzing around in my head. If I read a book that really grabs me, for example, doing a post about why that books works pushes me to really analyze it. Many of my posts are as much for me as they are for other people.

If blogging is really on its way out then I guess I’ll just have to adapt, but I’m hoping that something else will pop up to help give writers a sense of community.

For those of you who don’t blog or have been cutting down on blogging, are you able to get that sense of community elsewhere?

I’ve been reading (and savoring) The Anatomy of Story by John Truby as I brainstorm a new project.

The book is full of wise tidbits, but this is one that stuck in my head:

Make the audience empathize with your hero, not sympathize.

It’s simple advice but so true. You don’t want readers sympathizing with what your character is going through. You want your readers to feel like they’re living the events with him. It takes a lot of work to make your readers empathize with your character–to make them feel like they’re right in the story–but it’s oh so worth it.

What was the last book you read that made you really empathize with the character?

When it comes to trying to get published, it’s pretty much a given that you’ll have to deal with a lot of rejection. There’s no easy way to get over having someone tell you “no.” The advice I give is to keep writing and try not to take it personally.

But sometimes you’ll hear success stories of people who seemingly sat down, wrote a book, and got it published with little-to-no rejection involved. It can be hard to keep those stories from affecting you if you’ve been slaving away, trying to get your work out there.

While I have a feeling those overnight success stories aren’t quite as rosy as they sound (there was probably a lot of rejection that we don’t know about) it’s funny that there’s almost a sentiment that those people don’t “deserve” to be published because they haven’t gone through enough stress and toil and rejection.

I guess when it comes to writing–as with any other craft–you have to put in your time and earn your success. But how much work is enough? At what point do you deserve it?

Remembering my own writing journey, I must say that I thought I’d gone through quite enough stress years before I actually got published. I went into it not realizing just how hard this business is. So when I found an agent, I thought I’d finally gone through enough. Um, right. Too bad it took a whole year to actually sell a book, with many rejections along the way.

So once I finally got that contract, did it feel like I’d gone through “enough”? I’m not sure. At that point, I could see why my previous projects had gotten rejected, why I needed to keep working on my craft. I had to earn getting publish, mostly because I needed to make my writing good enough and to find the right project to push me to the next level.

I guess that’s the trick: Making your writing good enough and finding the right project. For some people that might take decades. For others–the ones we’d love to hate–it might be a much faster process.

When it comes to writing fantasy, we talk a lot about the need for rules. You must give your fantasy world rules and stick to them. So if a character needs to eat a donut in order to be transported to another land, the next time he needs to go there, I expect him to have a donut. If he grabs a danish, instead, there needs to be a darn good reason for it.

Something I’ve learned about creating rules: The simpler the better.

If you have to spend a lot of time explaining the rules and making sure your readers “get them,” then you might be making things overly complex. And sometimes, that can be a big turn-off for readers.

For example, I was reading a book the other day and was suddenly pulled out of the story by a rule that seemed completely arbitrary. In essence, it was something like this:

If [X] occurs within [arbitrary number of days] then [Y] happens.

Emphasis here on “arbitrary number of days.” I sat there pondering why that number had been chosen. If it had been a 3 or a 7 (numbers which often seem to have power in stories) I might have overlooked it. But as it was, it seemed so unnecessary complex that I found it really distracting.

Ultimately, I think simplifying would have made the rule much stronger:

If [X] occurs then [Y] happens.

Cut out the explanation and the arbitrary number of days and the rule is much simpler to follow. This was a great reminder for me to keep rules straightforward. You want solid rules in your story, but you also want readers to have no trouble following them.