Guest Blogger Claudine Gueh Yanting

One of the most interesting recent children's books is a picture book called My Clearest Me, by Claudine Gueh Yanting. The highly poetic text shows the thoughts of a shy boy who wonders how he fits into the world. I am delighted to have Claudine as my guest today. I asked her to talk about the experience of writing this unusual book.

*   *   *

THE NIGHT WIND KING

It started out this way: a boy would be asleep and there would be creatures appearing in his dream. Perhaps in alphabetical order. The focus would be on the train of creatures in the dream. The readers would be ‘watching’ a circus show.

Sounds like a good idea for a picture book.

Right?

Somehow, my mind kept drifting to the boy. The only quiet element in the ruckus.

Who was he? How was he like? Did he … want something?

Contrasts & Imagery

Wynn’s conflicts are based on my experience as an insecure introvert. Right from when I’d known the boy would be a quiet child, the image of a bout of fresh, gentle night wind came to me. He would be the Night Wind King, soft and clear.

So I looked for imagery in the night sky, in clothings, in masks and real appearances, and in music.

The train of contrasts followed:

- Wynn’s ‘shy and nestled voice’ VS the noisy swallows stirring the sky;

- a pale boy in soft-colored pajamas VS rowdy children in clown/T-Rex costumes;

- soft flute music VS clattery-clack drum beats;

- a bout of night wind VS sparks that crack the sky. 

Soon the sounds and silence began to mix. I started to think about presenting the story in a musical way.

So I Wrote In Verse, Which

… nearly did me in.

Honestly.

The concept was to set the tone in a softly blowing manner with a consistent rhythm. I’d wanted the language to be part of the wind imagery. Even Wynn’s worries would be presented in a style that was very honest and clear, like a voice that’s right next to your ears. No additional noise necessary.

Each word was reconsidered and each line revised over and over. 

Then came another challenge …

Combining Story with Art

Usually, the illustrator would take charge of the artistic direction, working closely with the editor on the book concept. In our case, I was the writer and the editor. And Sarah hadn’t learned to interpret a children’s book text as a professional illustrator yet. (My Clearest Me would be her first children’s book.) 

So we did what we could:

While writing the manuscript, I was already visualizing the artistic direction of each page.

Would this be a single picture in a double-page? Would this be a close-up? How could we show the contrast between Wynn and the other kids?

I related to Sarah my ideas and showed her a flimsy book dummy I’d made. She got things very quickly.

About a week later, she showed me the storyboard. We went through each page and tweaked the drafts, with Sarah putting in her ideas and details along the way. They worked amazingly. There wasn’t a moment of frustration during our partnership. None at all. It was so fun for us, and the book has turned out to be as whimsical and magical as we’d hoped it would be!

We’d done our best to sail this ebook out. Fingers-crossed, we just hope the rest of the world will like Wynn’s story, too!

*   *   *

A postscript from Claudia: My Clearest Me is a small gift of courage for children who are exploring their inner world. And if you have a minute, it’d be truly wonderful if you could help us grow and share your thoughts on Amazon. Good story? Not so good? I’d love to read what you think!

*    *    *

You can purchase My Clearest Me here and see the book trailer here.

An award and an interview all in one day!

It's been a hair-raising week of deadline editing on Green Light Delivery. That's why I'm a day late with this post. Good thing I have two pieces of news, since coming up with a pithy topic was well beyond me this time around:

1. I'm privileged to be an interview guest on Jane Richardson's blog, as part of her One Link Only series. Please stop by and learn embarrassing things about me!

2. This blog has received the Liebster Award!




This award is given to bloggers who have under 200 followers, with the idea of making new connections in the blogosphere. I'm very grateful to have been deemed worthy by Kelly Hashway.


In return for this honor, it is my duty to pass it on to five other worthy bloggers. I'm still on deadline for a few more hours, and this needs careful thought. So I will announce the next recipients tomorrow.




January 21. ADDENDUM: I hereby pass on the Liebster Blog Award to:


1. Lin Holmes
2. Pat McDermott
3. C.K. Volnek
4. Adriana Ryan
5. Rosemary Gemmell

Congratulations, everyone!

A Blog Too Many

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm very pleased with my new website. But I decided to kill its blog.

It seemed like such a good plan to have two blogs. I'm a very organized person, and I was sure I could find a specific use for Blog Number Two, separate from this one. But I was wrong. It was a blog too many.

So I replaced it with a Guestbook and a Contact page. And this Blogger blog that you're now reading is sniggering snidely (don't you think they get a personality after a while?). It knew. It just knew. It was my one and only.

But don't tell this blog that I moonlight elsewhere! You can see my latest guest post on the MuseItUp site, where I'm discussing the allure of the troublemaker in tween lit.

A writer's review of "Seminar," on Broadway with Alan Rickman

Last week I saw Theresa Rebeck's play, Seminar, on Broadway. Yes, it stars Alan Rickman, and I put his name in the title to lure you here and offer a picture of him to please you. But this post is not about Alan Rickman, or about any performance in this particular production. It's about the characters in Rebeck's play.

The premise is that four young writers have pooled their money to hire a has-been best-selling novelist as a fiction coach. Rebeck carefully distinguishes the four students and the teacher into five types of writers:

1) The spoiled rich girl, stymied by lack of urgency, who just needs a push
2) The slick boy wonder, benefiting from nepotism and too smart for his own good
3) The sex-pot who steams up the page and sleeps her way to success
4) The recalcitrant snail of a genius, hidden in his shell
5) The mysterious, misunderstood pro, trying to protect his wounds with a prickly skin

Now, I know a lot of writers. I know journalists and novelists and scholars. Writers of picture books, YA, sci fi, and erotica. Teachers and students, young and old, male and female. Those with multi-book deals at Penguin and those who've never published anything.

But I don't know any of the five writers in Theresa Rebeck's play. I understand that, in fiction of all genres, it is useful to condense and stylize characters. But what Seminar glosses over is a sense of the individual work it takes to be a writer, the constant internal push a writer must give him/herself to keep going. I longed for an acknowledgment of how the creative engine is stoked by each writer in his or her individual (and often rather insane) way. Instead, all we see are stereotypes with their prose already on the page.


Seminar is a good play, but it could have been great (and a funnier comedy) if it had shown more truth about writing.

Official Website Unveiled!

If you haven't visited it yet, please pop over to my new website.

It's a work in progress, but I've got a good start on it. It includes a blog (although I'll keep this one running, too),  a complete publications list with read/buy links, cover images, an appearance calendar, and eventually pix and video from events.

I have a reading from Green Light Delivery coming up very soon, but I don't have the exact date yet. Please check my website for that sort of info. This blog will be continue to feature my own and my guests' essays about writing. Hope you'll keep coming back here to join in the conversations about this wonderful world of fiction.

Of Publishings and Editings

Greetings, all. Just a round-up for the week. Several things to report:

1. The zombie anthology So Long, and Thanks for All the Brains, containing my story "Stir-Fried Cerebrum," has been released. You can purchase it here.

2. My fractured fairy tale, "An Exceptional Clothier," has been accepted for publication in Enchanted Times, to appear sometime in 2012.

3. I've received first edits for my middle-grade paranormal mystery novel, Ebenezer's Locker. Nice to have that process up and running.

4. I'm three-quarters finished with the first draft of the sequel to my middle-grade medieval mystery novel Trouble at the Scriptorium. This new novel, featuring several of the same characters, is called The London Hurdy-Gurdy.


5. My story "Cheering Up a Friend" is published on Knowonder! You can view it here.

6. My story "Sisters' Sight" is published in the pagan anthology Etched Offerings, from Misanthrope Press. You can puchase it as print or e-book here.


I hope you're all having a productive December. I'll be taking next week off from blogging, so I wish you all a wonderful holiday!

Guest blogger: SF novelist Susan Jane Bigelow

Please welcome today's guest! Susan Jane Bigelow is the author of Broken, a dystopian sci fi superhero novel from Candlemark & Gleam. Its sequel, Fly Into Fire, is due out in January. I asked Susan to talk about writing superhero characters.

*   *   *

Hi. I'm Susan, and I write about superheroes. Sort of.

Superheroes, or any kind of super-powered character, can be a great vehicle for incredible storytelling. The problem, unfortunately, is that we tend to think of superheroes in terms of heroic archetypes in tight costumes Doing Good Things, because that's the image we usually have of them from comic books, cartoons and movies. If you don't read a lot of superhero stories, or even if you do, this is likely where your sense of them begins and ends. The challenge, then, is to turn a type of character that most people expect to be cardboard and cartoonish into someone they can relate to and understand.

Lots of writers and directors have done this well. Peter David's run with Supergirl was one of my favorites for just this reason, even though a lot of other fans don't like it. Supergirl is this impossible character to write, but David's reboot of her allows her to become more human (how, you ask? Well, it involves a pile of pink goo and... um, maybe it's better not to know), and he lets us see her ambivalence alongside her pride in who she is, and her desperate need to belong and fit in. The final arc of his run, with its mix of the human and the heroic, is one of the better superhero stories I've read.

That's the kind of thing I strive for when I'm writing these kinds of characters. I like to make lists, so here is a list of questions I start off with when creating super-powered people in my stories:

1.      Powers – what are they? What exactly can this character do/not do? It's good to know about limits. Can they leap a tall building in a single bound? Two or three? And how tall is “tall,” anyway?

2.      Powers – what's it like having them? How does the character feel about different aspects of their power? As in, if they can light fires, is that comfortable to do emotionally? What about physically? How does it feel to shoot fire from their fingertips? Is it hot? Do they mind if it is? Are they kind of a pyromaniac, or do they want to hide under the bed when someone lights a cigarette?

3.      Super-visibility or super-stealth? Is being a superhero or a differently-powered person visible? Do other people around the person know? Is there a lot of hiding going on? What's that like? Bruce Wayne seems to get a kick out of hiding his “true” bat-self from board meetings at the Wayne Foundation, but not everyone might react in the same way. If there is a secret identity, which one is the mask and which is the real person? Is it some mix of the two? Is it more difficult to hide, or more difficult to be seen?

4.      What's it like being different? And that's another important thing: super-powered people are going to be markedly different, sometimes in extremely visible ways, from everyone around them. How does this character react to that? How does anybody react to being different from the “norm” in some fundamental way? I think this is one of the questions that matters the most, at least in the stories I write.

5.      Are you a hero, a villain, or something else? Is this character heroic? Evil? Avoids the subject altogether? Never uses their powers except to get that can of applesauce open? Can a healer walk past a hospital and not help? Can a firestarter walk by a camp full of shivering people and not make them warm? What do we do in moments where we're tested? This is such a key question, and it's often central to the best stories. When the moment comes, whatever that moment may be, what do you do? Do you run away? Stand your ground? Set a city block on fire with your mind? The answer may surprise you.

There are other questions, of course, but it's the intersection of humanity and super-humanity that I think makes for the most compelling and interesting stories. After all, it's not the alien birth of Superman that interests us, but the human he's become.

*   *   *

You can visit Susan Jane Bigelow on her website.
You can purchase Broken on Amazon.
You can find the pre-order Kickstarter campaign for Fly Into Fire here.