Rabies Shots

So the final book in the Jinx trilogy,  Jinx’s Fire, comes out in just 20 days, and I’ll be doing some events (more to come later). I hope you’ll attend, and that you’ll come up and say hello. I promise not to bite… 

…and anyway, I’m getting rabies shots.

There seem to be two FAQ about rabies shots, which I would like to address here.

Q: Is it true they are given in the stomach every day for ten days with a needle as long as your arm, and are horribly painful?

A: No. It turns out they are given in your arm with an ordinary-sized needle, and they don’t hurt any more than an ordinary shot. And I’m having four of them over a period of two weeks, which is standard. (Immune-compromised people have five over the course of a month.)

Q: DId something bite you?

Not to my knowledge. But I’ve been sleeping for the past couple weeks in a room that has periodically filled with bats. Not cute little upstate New York bats, but big honking New England bats.

Because there is a very remote possibility of contracting rabies simply from sleeping in a batty room (i.e. it seems to happen about once every few years in the US) the public health officials in Rhode Island, where I’m staying right now, advise people to get rabies shots under these circumstances.

I don’t really think I need the shots, but the disease is nearly 100% preventable with the shots, and nearly 100% fatal without them. 

So prevention seems like the way to go.

How to Plan for NaNoWriMo, part 3: Bubble Maps

Hi! Last week I shared one of my favorite tricks for planning a story, drawing. I'm happy to have heard from several people that they've tried this and found it useful.

This next strategy, like the drawing, should enable you to plan your story without your internal editor getting in the way. It has various names; I call it bubble-mapping. Over the course of a novel I'll usually make about 100 bubble maps-- about 25 of them at the planning stage.

Here's what one looks like:

This is one of about 20 bubblemaps I did about the Bonemaster (an evil wizard in the Jinx trilogy) over the course of writing the three books. There was a lot I had to find out about the Bonemaster, so I kept asking myself questions about him. (The different colors are color codes I assigned to different characters or aspects of the plot. This is optional. More about colors next week.)

Let's build a bubble map from the ground up. Start out with the central idea of your story... the thing you want to write about. Ask yourself 4 questions about it:

These questions are just examples. You can make up different questions if you like. Answer each question with whatever pops into your head:

Don't think too hard! Just let it flow.

For every answer, try to expand with more information or more questions as they occur to you:

Keep going till you run out of space on the paper. By that time you should have discovered some interesting points that you want to explore further.

Pick one of these points, take another piece of paper, and start a new bubble map:

The new bubble-map in this example is based on a question from the old bubble-map. ("Constitution?")

Note the question "When?" in the new bubble-map. I'm already wondering whether this story takes place before the election, and is about Silvia's run (scamper?) for the White House, or whether it takes place after the election, when Silvia's won in a landslide and the Secret Service has to outwit enemy cats and owls. Is this a story about an election, about a constitutional crisis, about one mouse's struggle to change the world, or about an alternative USA in which a mouse is president?

This was something I didn't think about till I started bubbling. I can make more bubble-maps to explore it, but I won't really worry about it till the next step of the process, which we'll look at next week.

Watch this space!

How to Plan for NaNoWriMo, part 2: Drawing to Write

Hi! In my last post I promised to share a few tricks I use to help me get ready to write. I call them tricks because they all do the same thing-- they fool me into disconnecting my internal editor. None of them involve writing words that will actually appear in my book.

I use all these tricks in the pre-writing planning process, before I begin a manuscript. They enable me (and hopefully will enable you) to forget about writing and focus on story.

Tonight's trick is drawing.

Doodling, sketching, scribbling, coloring. This is the very first thing I do to help a story come toward me. I draw pictures. I start out drawing the main character. Then I draw the other characters. I sketch in their surroundings, give them something to stand on, something to hold. Every single sketch tells me something new about the story.

Usually when I share this technique with other writers, they say "But I can't draw."

Well, really, as you'll see below, I can't either. But that's okay! Nobody has to see your picture but you. And you're a writer, not an artist, so it doesn't matter if the picture's not of professional quality.

If it will help, just draw stick figures. But do try it. Give it 15 minutes. If the 15 minutes go okay, give it another 15 minutes. You'll be surprised at what you learn about your story.

When I first started planning to write Jinx, I thought the main character would be Elfwyn. I drew pictures of her, of Dame Glammer, of Simon and Sophie... pictures of scenes that never occur in the book. Then I drew this:

 

As you can see, I wrote in a few descriptive sentences that occurred to me as I drew. These sentences didn't end up in the manuscript. Neither did the drawing, of course. But the scene it depicted ended up in the first chapter of the finished book.

In each picture, as I drew, the trees were becoming larger and larger. I began to realize the trees were going to play a very important part in the story, that they were a constant presence and had their own opinions. They even had laws.

Here's a picture for a story that's been kicking around in my head. I don't know if it'll ever get written.

And here's a character who has yet to find a story to be a part of, although I'm hoping her day will come:

Eh, so I have a little trouble with feet. Anyway, as you can see, the point here is not to produce great art but to completely free your mind from the need to Write Something. Draw to explore the world of your characters.

Think about the story you're planning to write for NaNoWriMo. Imagine the main character. Draw him or her. Add some more characters to the scene. Draw their surroundings.

Have fun with it!

In my next post, I'll share another pre-writing trick that I find even more useful than this one... and hopefully you will too. Watch this space!

On Writing A Fantasy Protagonist of Color

There's a difference between 1. writing a protagonist who is a person of color and 2. writing the experience of being a person of color.

#2 is difficult for an author who doesn't share the same cultural background as the character. Take the marvelous scene in Christopher Paul Curtis's The Watsons Go To Birmingham 1963 where the narrator, Kenny, recounts the family's reaction to the older brother, Byron, straightening his hair. Few white writers would have had the knowledge necessary to write that scene-- the undertones of the act, and the parents' outrage, come as a surprise to most non-African-American readers. This is the kind of deep cultural knowledge that isn't available to the outside observer.

#1, on the other hand, is what readers have in mind when they ask why more protagonists can't just be people of color, without it being a big deal.

In fantasy, they can. And easily. Especially in second-world fantasy.

In second-world fantasy, there is usually no stigma attached to varieties of pigmentation. (Hey, that's why it's called fantasy). As for cultural knowledge-- well, the writer is inventing the culture as part of the world-building. Hence any writer can dye a protagonist any color.

The weird thing is... well, I did it. And sometimes people try to convince me I didn't.

Here's the cover of Jinx. It shows a dark-skinned boy in an obviously-enchanted forest near an obviously-enchanted castle.

What's weird is that often people look at the cover and see a white boy.

 Do you? I don't. I've probably spent more time staring at this cover than anyone. Jinx doesn't look exactly as I picture him, but I don't draw well enough to show him exactly as I picture him, so that's a moot point. His picture certainly matches his description in the book. When people try to convince me Jinx is white, I direct them to the description, and they read it and agree that yeah, it does sound like he's not white.

Well. Ultimately a character exists somewhere in the space between the words a writer types and the image that forms in the reader's mind. I hope that for some readers, at least, my characters will look the way I see them. Sometimes Jinx shows up on lists of books with protagonists of color, and that makes me happy. Sometimes he's left off the lists, because Jinx's color isn't the point of the story.

 The same seems to be true of a handful of other middle grade novels that have come out in the last year or two. It would be nice to think that we're getting to a place where a non-white protagonist will be too ordinary to notice. Unfortunately, recent events suggest we're not getting to that place. Not yet.

Were the Oz Books Girls' Books?

Before there was Harry Potter, there was Oz. There was a lot of Oz. There were 14 Oz books by L. Frank Baum published between 1900 and 1920, and there were dozens more written by other authors after his death.

Baum received thousands of fan letters. People lined up to buy the books. There was merchandising. There was probably fanfic too, but, you know, not online. 

Oz was big.

Oz wasn't the "just a dream" world of the movie. It was a real magical world that was visited by real children-- a girl named Betsy, and a girl named Trot, and a girl named Dorothy, and... maybe some other girls. I don't remember.

My grandfather read all the Baum Oz books as a child, while women battled for the right to vote and men battled for German trenches. There was nothing remotely similar being published at the time. Children's fiction was dominated by the Depressingly Moral (let's just say Little Eva has a lot to answer for) and the shoot 'em up action adventure. No one could die in Oz. This was a flaw as far as narrative tension, but a real innovation otherwise.

Given a choice between reading about brave little heroines wasting away from consumption and reading about the caverns of the Nome King, kids chose the latter. Early twen-cen kids loved the Oz books.

Many decades later, my brother and I read them. First we read all the L. Frank Baum ones, and then all the Ruth Plumley Thompson ones and the John R. Neill ones. Even as late as the 1970s, they were a large part of the extant body of children's fantasy literature.

Although the main character, Dorothy, was a girl, and the other main child characters (Betsy and Trot and Princess Ozma) were girls, and the only boy we saw much of in the Baum books (Button Bright) was kind of a low-watt bulb, nobody ever suggested to us that these were girls' books.

One of the Baum books does have a boy protagonist, Tip,  who ***spoiler alert*** near the end of the book becomes a girl. Permanently. If this traumatized my grandfather or my brother for life, they never mentioned it.

 

(Chances a middle grade author could get away with that nowadays: Zero.)

(Possibly slightly less than that.)

I've talked to my brother about this a bit over the years, as he's raised children and I've raised books. According to him, he never, as a child, experienced any failure to connect to a female protagonist because of her un-maleness. According to him, the only books he felt were off-limits to him were those that were clearly identified as being "for girls"...

...and that is what we're doing far too much of today.

I'm picturing how the Oz books might be published today... in a world where they weren't already classics, that is. Pink and lavender covers. Glitter, perhaps. Lots of emphasis on the Princess aspect.

After all, no one would expect boys to read a book about girls.