Originally published at Megan Frazer. You can comment here or there.

For this trimester’s activity period I am leading a fiction writing workshop. Five girls, one boy, and one teacher are joining me in time to write every week. We’ve decided that I will bring writing prompts, but if people are inspired to write something else, that’s okay, too. “That’s okay, that’ll work, whatever you need,” is sort of the unofficial motto of the group. Unofficial in the sense that I just made it up right now, but I promise you, it’s accurate.

Today because it was gorgeous, we wrote outside (where I was attacked by a spider and its web, but that’s another story), and I prepared two possible sunny day writing prompts.

1. Start with this line I/He/She was sitting outside in her hammock, sipping on a lemonade when the strangest thing happened.

2. Almost everybody loves a sunny day, but there are some who prefer rainy, overcast days. Who are those people and what do they have against the sun. (Adapted from writingforward.com by Melissa Donovan)

The first brought on a fantastically imaginative piece by one girl, which she accurately labeled “satirically morbid” and included a drawing.

I chose to start with the second and here’s what I wrote, completely unedited:

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I was doing pretty well on my resolution to blog once a week until about mid-November. What happened? Well, first I had revisions that I needed to get done, and that took a lot of my writing energy. Then there was this little life growing inside of me that took my energy in general. My daughter, Matilda, was born on January 31st and I couldn't be more in love.

I'm a very lucky mom. My husband has been home on paternity leave and my own mother has come to stay with us to help keep our day-to-day life running. When my son went back to daycare, I suddenly found myself with time and an urge to get back to writing. With my new babe asleep by my side, I emailed my agent a very rough draft of a work in progress. I planned how I would do research and writing exercises to prep for a full scale revision this summer. Suddenly, the stories of Stephenie Meyer "typing one-handed with a baby in her lap" did not seem like mythology. Writing with a baby was possible!

Since that day I have done approximately nothing. I find hours go by as I nurse and then hold my baby. By mid-afternoon I'm so tired I need to take a nap. Where has that initial burst of energy gone? And why do I feel such guilt? Guilt that I'm not writing. Guilt when I put the baby down. Guilt when I sleep. Guilt when I stay awake since I'm supposed to be "taking it easy." Guilt that I am not taking advantage of my maternity leave to get some work done.

I can't help but wonder if this is a writer-parent problem or a writer-mother problem. Do male writers feel this push and pull in the same way? Writer-fathers, please chime in.

I will try to blog with more regularity, but I do still want to get some work done on my WIP so that it can, you know, progress. And of course there is that little baby who just now has awakened, demanding more milk.

Originally published at Megan Frazer. You can comment here or there.

Today I read three pieces that presented an interesting juxtaposition. First my Google Reader feed delivered Joel Bruns’ snarky-but-funny post at The Hub: DIY YA. With a Mad Libs style fill in the blank form, Bruns provides you with the template for creating your own YA bestselling paranormal romance. Bruns was riffing on a blog post by Nikki Grimes, The Trouble with YA Literature Today. She, too, lamented the preponderance of books being published today that seem to be variations on either Harry Potter or Twilight. (BTW: Does anyone know if you’re supposed to italicize series titles? This is the second time it’s come up today).

Next I headed over to Boston. com where I found “Young adult novels heating up the charts.” All those paranormal romances and boarding school fantasy novels? They’re pretty much saving publishing. ( Read the rest of this entry » )

Originally published at Megan Frazer. You can comment here or there.

You can’t just have someone sitting around thinking.

As I’m revising my next book, The Water Castle, I’ve had to remind myself of this several times. I can’t just have a character staring up at the clouds and ruminating about life and how to fix a wagon wheel. While of course there is time for quiet reflection, story and tension happen when one character rubs up against one another.

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Originally published at Megan Frazer. Please leave any comments there.

Happy November. In the world of writing, November means one thing: NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month for the uninitiated.

I have never participated in NaNoWriMo before, but that hasn’t kept me from being deeply cynical about it. This is probably because December always found the writerly listservs to which I subscribe bombarded with questions like, “I finished my novel in November. How do I get an agent?” I would roll my eyes, but others would patiently explain that perhaps a little revision was in order first. I understood their enthusiasm: when I finish a draft of a novel, I want everyone to read it, too. But, I know that it’s not actually ready yet, and a good waiting period for all readers — myself included — is in order. I guess that’s why I was unimpressed by the idea of writing a whole novel in a month. How good could a book written in 30 days actually be?

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Over the past couple of weeks, I've interviewed several of my favorite bloggers on their blogging history, practice, and philosophy. You can read the interviews with Cynthia Leitich Smith, Melissa Walker, and Jennifer Hubbard. I also spoke with Joyce Valenza over the phone. There were a few common themes to all of their responses.

1. It can take a while to find your voice. Both Melissa Walker and Joyce Valenza admitted to floundering for a while. For me this was extremely reassuring, and I hope others were reassured as well.

2. You can't know who your audience is until you have an audience. The best way to build an audience?

3. Be yourself. Write about what interests you in a way that you find natural. There is no one way to blog. Everyone I spoke with said this in
one way or another.

4. You don't need to share your whole self. Being open, honest, and friendly does not mean you need to share the details of your home life, your work, or your political views.

5. Be a part of the community. This was the aspect that Joyce Valenza most stressed with me, saying that in her long career as a librarian, she's never felt more connected than she does at this moment. Yet being part of the community, in its various online forms, can be overwhelming. Dr. Valenza wrote about this in a recent VOYA piece. For me, I find I use Facebook mostly for family and, frankly, rarely update my author page. Twitter seems to be the province of people with much more free internet time than I have. With Google+, though, I feel like I'm finding my way a little bit better. I think the circles really help me to focus my attention.

6. Structure can help. Whether it's a goal of writing a certain number of times per week, regular features, or deadlines, a little structure goes a long way in keeping the blog posts flowing.

Talking with these fabulous women has of course made me think, and I have some new ideas for this blog that I hope to roll out soon. My goal is to write at least once a week from now until the end of the year. We'll see how it goes.

I am very excited to share the Carlsen catalog page for Secrets of Truth & Beauty. Or, translated back from the German: Truth, Beauty, and Goat Cheese.

I love the new cover. Isn’t that the cutest goat ever? She only looks mildly annoyed by the tiara. I believe the headline is “Summer on the Hippy-Farm” or maybe “Summer of the Hippy-Farm.”

If I’m reading the German Amazon site, you’ll be able to get the German version in February of 2012. I can’t wait to see it!

Originally published at Megan Frazer. You can comment here or there.

In the class I am taking about teaching writing, I am learning a tremendous amount. My classmates are all fellow-teachers and we all share strategies that have worked for us in teaching writing. One technique that has come up time and time again is the idea of reinforcing writing strategies by saying, “That’s the way professional writers do it.”

Whenever I see this, I think, without any sarcasm, “Really? There’s a way?” I get a little jolt and think that if I could just be let in on the secret, it would make this whole writing thing a lot easier. I am not exaggerating when I say that my heart beats a little faster at this prospect.

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Originally published at Megan Frazer. You can comment here or there.

The summer after college, while waiting to deploy for the Peace Corps, I lived at home and got a job driving a bright blue-green bus around to low-income neighborhoods in New Hampshire. My partner and I would read stories, do a related activity, and then lend out books to the children. It was a great summer job and led me down the path to where I now find myself: cultivating literacy in teenager as a high school librarian.

But this post isn’t about literacy, it’s about what I did with my first paycheck: I bought a guitar.

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Originally published at Megan Frazer. You can comment here or there.

For a graduate class I am taking, we need to describe our vision of the ideal future of writing. Here’s mine:

“Writing will survive, but it will survive in a debased form. It will lose its richness. We will no longer read and write words. We will merely process them, the way our computers do.” Nicholas Carr, writing in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica Blog. The culprit: technology.

As for me, while I see the potential pitfalls of technology, the changes I am seeing are all positive. In fact, I believe that advances in technology will make more people writers and will allow those writers to share their work with an ever-increasing audience. Students will enjoy writing, and will do it on their own time because it allows them to connect within and without their community. Most importantly, students will be empowered by writing.

Connection:
Writing has always provided a way for us to connect to others. Technology is allowing that reach to go farther and to more people. Sometimes people say that a drawback of online communities is that people will write things they never would “in real life”. This can also be a positive. Recently I told an English teacher, Tim Gillis, about the Parent-Teacher-Student journals described in Engaging Parents Beyond the Back to School Night. He decided to add a parental component and asked students to interview their parents about whether or not they had ever read Moby Dick, the class text. Some parents talked about how they had never read it, but remembered other books they read. Some liked what they had read in high school, others didn’t. Graham’s father took over the computer and wrote a very poignant response. You can see all the responses at his blog, Moby Tweet.

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Originally published at Megan Frazer. You can comment here or there.