Psst...Super Cool Contest

Okay, I know that we've been promising a contest once we reach 100 followers...which we FINALLY HAVE! Woo hoo! Thank you all so much! We will aspire to be as informative and entertaining as possible.

But we're not talking about our contest yet. Be sure to stop by Monday for deets on that. Instead, we're talking about a chance to win Delirium by Lauren Oliver!

That's right, Lauren Oliver herself is giving away 5 SIGNED COPIES of Delirium! All you have to do is comment on her blog, but there's also chances to get extra entries.

What are you waiting for? Click here now! Then swing by Monday to see what Quita and I have in store for you all. :)

The End? Now Roll the Credits!

Revising Song of the Day: "Waiting For the End" by Linkin Park

So this month I've been delving into another round of revisions for Wants based off suggestions from my super agent. She provided input for a few minor changes throughout the manuscript; however, our biggest concern is the ending.

Beginning and endings of novels are always tricky. For beginnings, you want to give readers just enough to pull them into the story (click here for my post on a Finger Lickin' Chapter 1--but make sure you're not hungry!). But endings are different--you want to make sure you wrap up the major conflict and show that your protagonist has changed since the beginning. Some people like happily ever afters--where the heroine rides off into the sunset with her love interest on a horse (or a lawn mower if you're a fan of Easy A). Others prefer a little intrigue, where they can make their own conclusions of what the characters may do next (in my head, Breaking Dawn never happened. It was just a feverish dream Bella had after getting food poisoning).

Writers have to understand that not every reader is going to be satisfied with their endings, but I think it's good to take a look at some common ones in many novels. And since I'm currently trying to eat a little better, I won't torture myself with another food analogy. Instead, I'll choose another love: movies.

WARNING: The rest of this post contains spoilers--but I hope you read it anyway. :)

The Never-Ending Story
You know this type of movie. It's where you start packing up your things to leave the theater only to discover (gasp!) that there's still another half hour or so left in the movie! What happened? The main character made amends with his mom/lover/mortal enemy, so what else do we need to know? I heard a few people grumble about how The Social Network could've ended much sooner. After we saw how Mark Zuckerberg "betrayed" his friends and classmates, what else was there to see? We knew they all ended up in court.

Pro: If you choose to go this route, readers may get a chance to see more character development...

Con: ...but then they may start hating your character. To the point where they're bellowing to the sky: "For the love of God! When will this thing end?!" Confession: this is my problem. Hopefully, I didn't make my agent and beta readers pull out too much of their hairs before they reached the last page.

And They Lived Happily Ev...

Fan of the abrupt ending? Well, this is the conclusion for you. This is where you're leaning forward in your seat to see what may happen next...and then the screen goes black. Fans of Inception know what I'm talking about. Dom finally returns from dream purgatory and gets to see his kids. He spins his lucky token--then blackness. Both times I saw this in the theater, the audience let out a collective groan and then laughed.

Pro: The laughter meant most of the audience was impressed. By choosing this ending for your novel, you're not spoon-feeding your readers. You're allowing them to interpret what may or may not have happened. Which leads to interesting debates. Which leads to more people wanting to read what you may have next up your sleeve.

Con: Or you could just really piss them off. If you don't set up enough foreshadowing or clues throughout your novel to indicate what could happen, you might just come off as a little lazy.

Ha! Joke's On You!

Ah, so this is the famous twist-ending--director M. Night Shyamalan is a huge fan. If you've ever seen The Village, you'll know that the audience was led to believe the characters lived in this tiny, well, village...set some time in the past. But as the protagonist ventures through the big, bad, scary woods, we find out that they actually live just outside of an urban city...set in the present day. Ha ha! Funny, right?

Pro: As long as you're free from other twist cliches, you have the potential to do something really groundbreaking here. Just make sure the seeds of a possible twist are present somewhere in your manuscript or...

Con: ...again, you may piss readers off. It's absolutely cool to keep readers guessing, but you don't want to come up with a completely far-fetched ending. If it seems to come out of left field, then readers may wish bad things upon you and your first-born child.

I'm not saying one of these endings are better than the others. Again, you have to decide what feels authentic to your story. So what type of endings do you prefer? Do you have trouble deciding your ending?

RTW: In Which We are Pretentious!

Writing Song of the Day: "The Story" by 30 Seconds to Mars

Of course, it's that time again--Road Trip Wednesday! It seems as if YA Highway wants us to love on ourselves today. :) This week, we've been challenged with the task of picking out our favorite lines from either a book or our own writing. We have plenty of faves from books, but alas, we can't bring the stacks to our day jobs. Therefore, we will go with option B. Neither of us are too stoked by this as we are our own worst critics...but here goes!

Quita's Fave Lines from Untitled WIP (Possible YA Mystery):

This is about a boy who's best friend is murdered. He wants to find out who did it, b/c his father was also murdered and the cops never found his killer. This is the opening:

Thursday Morning 6:45 AM
Henry Knight was found bludgeoned to death early this morning.
I’m pretty sure I was whacking off to one of those phone sex commercials at the same moment that someone was bashing his head in. I don’t know if anyone is going to miss him. Hell, I don’t know if anyone even remembers him. Maybe David Warren does. Especially since he’s our friendly neighborhood drug dealer. I know I remember Henry. He’s my best friend’s number one customer at school. Henry’s the main reason Kyle was able to buy me that bad ass skateboard for my birthday.

Pam's Fave Lines from Wants:

Okay, Wants is told from 4 different POVs, and this is the opening from "bad boy" Austin's first chapter:

In tenth grade, my geometry teacher said I meandered. Yeah, I didn’t know what the f-- he meant either. But I looked it up. To wander slowly and aimlessly. Hell yeah. I started saying it all the time. I like how my lips have to squeeze together to form the first sound. How my cheeks have to stretch into a smile to complete it. Hell, I love “meandering” so much that I wrote a song about it. But I never finished it. The lyrics wandered a bit.

What about you? What are some of your fave lines from books or your own work??? Feel free to leave comments about the writing--we welcome criticism. We might cry a lil' on the inside, but really we welcome it ;)

That's Soooo Been Done Before!

**Editors' Note: Well, Anonymous tooooold us :) Yes, I mistakingly left out the author's name. It was written by Joelle Anthony and it was a GREAT article. Again, as stated in the post, this was from the SCBWI Nov/Dec 2010 issue...and there is an actual link for the article in the post.**

Writing Song of the Day: "Heard it All Before" by Sunshine Anderson

There are so many perks to being a member of SCBWI if you are a children's writer (Young Adult, Middle Grade, Picture Books etc.). You get to go to conferences--both the regional and awesomeriffic national conferences-- you get insider information, a group of peers who understand exactly what you are trying to write, and a really cool bi-monthly bulletin that helps you stay sharp with your writing.

Because we love our readers so much we wanted to go deeper into a topic that was brought up in the November/December 2010 issue of the SCBWI Bulletin. This one page article briefly discussed the fifteen most overused things in YA writing. We are sure that just like us, as you read this list, a great YA book will pop up in your head...but since we REFUSE to talk about books b/c we love them all so much, we won't list examples...but I'm sure we'll all be thinking of the same ones. ;)

So, take out your pen and paper and write a check mark for each of the following that you have done in your WIP or manuscript...If you find that you have checks next to five or more, then you might want to go and fix it, STAT!

15-Stories with irresponsible parents (leaving the kid to do the cleaning/cooking)

14-The MC likes retro music (usually b/c it's the music YOU liked in high school)

13-Hot, young moms who are the MC's best friend

12-Female MC who is obsessed with Jane Eyre

11-Lab partners where one person is the dork that does all the work...then they are the love interest later

10-A MC with only one best friend...then they get in a fight and the MC is all alone for awhile

9-A poor scholarship student in a private school

8-First POV and the MC describes themselves by looking in the mirror

7-MC that is a tomboy who doesn't know how to do anything "girly"

6-Younger sis. that is the popular, gorgeous one

5-Big vocab. words put in by the author and then passed off as an SAT word

4-MC who happens to be the only one in their group of friends without a cell phone

3-Clumsy characters who couldn't dance or play sports if someone had a gun pressed into their backs

2-Guys with striking, beautiful, gorgeous green eyes- this is used so much that green eyes are becoming as common as blue eyes. They no longer pack the same punch, so to speak.

Annnd the # 1 most overused thing done in YA novels is.....

Having your MC hate math

BTW- In Limbo had little traces of two of these cliches and has another one big time, so if you found a few, don't be ashamed!

Now that you have this list handy, there are two things we'd like you to do for us (and for yourself):

1.) Do a quick writing exercise (this will be graded tomorrow--sorry, that's the educators creeping out of us). Write for ten minutes straight using this beginning sentence: Mandy/Marc always hated his/her first day at a new school. Just write freely, then go back and see if you included any of the above cliches. If so, change them around and see how your free writing sounds now!

2.) Can you think of anything else that has been overused in YA that should be added to this list?

Really...you can come back and tell us later how the free writing went :)

What did they say??

Revising Song of the Day: "Try Again" by Aaliyah (Check it out on our Rock With Us tab)


I'm revising the mess out of my historical YA, trying to make it pretty for querying...but I'm in that level (pun intended--my manuscript is called In Limbo, tee hee!) that kinda sucks. The fact checking level.

I have to make sure I'm not using present day slang and phrases. For example, I wanted to talk about music and I automatically wrote CD player, then record player...then I looked it up and realized that in 1918 they called them phonographs. Which then leads to what did they call the records they played on them? Records, Vinyls, Albums? It all gets really, really shaky. So I tried to look up slang/English language in 1918. I didn't find anything that different but there were a few key phrases that I made sure to throw in...

Rotary dialing = Dialing on a (Home) telephone (so archaic, right!)

Fooling = joking around

Neat/Cool/Swell = well...neat, or cool, awesome etc. :)

Sweetheart = Girlfriend/Boyfriend ie going steady

Colored = African American

Soda pop = obviously, soda

Denims = jeans

And it goes on and on...

The words weren't all that different--some of them we even use today. I guess the point is to make sure that I don't have one of my characters say/do anything that is too 21st century and also watch out for making the material too dated. I am hoping to have a book that is obviously historical but that can be relatable for every generation. Is that too much to ask???

What about you, lovely readers? If you write historical how do you get past the fact checking slump? If you read it, what are some great books that you can think of that are timeless?

RTW: Best Books of 2010...and The Longest Title in History!

Reading Song of the Day: "The Humpty Dance" by Digital Underground

It's Hump Day again--but instead of doing the Humpty Dance, we're joining the awesome ladies of YA Highway for another Road Trip Wednesday. This week they want to know: what are the 5 best books in 2010 and/or how would you sum up your 2010 in a book title?

We struggled more than usual with this one. Asking us to pick our favorite book is like asking us to pick our favorite cupcake! Then there was the whole confusion if we could include books that we read in 2010, but weren't published in 2010. To make our lives easier, we decided to just go for novels published in 2010--and these "six" made the cut:

5. Tie: Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan and Linger by Maggie Stiefvater

Quita and I were about to thumb wrestle to determine what would take this spot, but since her thumb is freakishly larger than mine--I settled on a tie. Why WG,WG? Can you think of a better YA dream team than Green and Levithan? Not to mention that it predominantly features gay characters--whom I plan on including in every single one of my novels in some capacity. Quita chose Linger because the writing was basic but beautiful, and just as I (Quita) think Pam does in Wants, Stiefvater was able to successfully balance out four, count them, four main characters. Also, the ending had me yearning for the release of Forever.

4. Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers

I cannot get more fan girly over Ms. Summers. Her prose is direct and to the point, and she seems to understand the high school world better than most authors (which is odd, because I think she has admitted that she didn't attend one for long). The girls in this novel are brutal, but as a school counselor, authentic to the whole teen experience. I'm sure Fall For Anything would have been ranked on this list had I had a chance to read it. :(

3. The Absolute Value of -1 by Steve Brezenoff

When I mention this book to people I have a huge smile on my face--which is weird because the story is kind of tragic. It follows the point-of-views of 4 different teens (just like my baby, Wants) as they grow apart. Each voice is distinctive, and the subject matter doesn't shy away from grit. I cannot wait to see what Brezenoff has next up his sleeve.

2. Room by Emma Donoghue

This is the only adult fiction title to make it on our list. Why? Because, sadly, these types of stories are featured on the evening news frequently--but we've never heard it told like this. We both fell in love with Jack, the 5 year-old narrator. What's scary to everyone else is home to him, and his innocence will just break your heart.

Now drum roll please....

1. Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

Wow. Just...wow. Quita and I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Oliver at a conference before either of us finished reading this novel, and she's so lovely that we wish her years and years of success. However, she won't need luck if she continues writing like this. It's nice to read a story in which the "mean girl" is the protagonist. We get to see Sam Kingston redeem herself, and we laughed and cried along with her as she went through her personal journey. Can you see why we're giggly over Oliver's next book, Delirium?

With our best books out of the way, it's time to sum everything up with a title: Before I fall into a lingering state where some girls are the absolute value of -1, I hope I still have room for Will Grayson.

Okay, that was terrible. But we're awful with titles, that's why we asked you all for help before. :) Do you all have any faves from 2010?

Our 2011 Writing Resolutions!!

Writing Song of the Day: "We Need a Resolution" by Aaliyah featuring Timbaland


Oh. My. Goodness. We've made it--2011, peeps! It just looks weird typing it. I have to say, I'm a little disappointed. Where are the flying cars?

Besides that, Quita and I are uber-excited. This is the first time in a while that I've truly been optimistic about the New Year. Good things are on the horizon, I can feel it. We have our standard resolutions: eat right, exercise more, yadda yadda yadda. But for today's post, we really wanted to focus on our writing resolutions for 2011. So, without further ado...

Pam's Writing Resolutions

1. To revise the ending of Wants by the end of January and submit it to my super agent.

2. To complete my second contemporary YA manuscript and send to beta readers by March/April.

3. To revise my supernatural YA that I wrote for NaNo and see if it has any kind of potential (it's weird, but I've actually missed the characters. Maybe I do have something there...)

4. To settle on an idea for my third contemporary YA manuscript and outline it by this summer.

5. To try to write at least 500 words each day. If I can't reach that goal, then to NOT go more than three days without writing anything.

6. To continue to support the YA community by reading TONS of books. I'm shooting for at least 2 each month. Work and school will get in the way, but I'm determined to keep up with my reading.

7. To read more adult fiction. Reading Room was a revelation. I've been ignoring too much awesome writing outside YA, and I really miss Jodi Picoult, Stephen King, and Brett Easton Ellis. I would love to read at least six adult titles this year--one every other month.

8. Finally, wishful thinking, to get a BOOK DEAL. I know, I know--this isn't the most important thing, but it's been my dream since I could hold a crayon in my hand to see my name on the spine of my own published book. 11 has always been my favorite number, so maybe 2011 will be my year. :)

Quita's Writing Resolutions:

1. To complete my first contemporary YA manuscript by the end of January/early February.

2. To nab an agent with my historical YA manuscript, In Limbo.

3. To revise my NaNo supernatural YA manuscript by the end of March/early April--it's so lame, but maybe I can make something happen from it.

4. To complete our shiny YA idea inspired by Inception.

5. To read as much as possible so that I can continue to learn (especially more historical YA--The Book Thief, Fever:1793, and What I Saw and How I Lied, here I come!)

6. Ditto to Pam's adult fiction comment. I'm working on John Grisham's The Confession now.

7. To plot a new contemporary (or historical) YA by early June so that I can write it over the summer.

8. Again, ditto to Pam's comment about writing at least 500 words a day, or just writing SOMETHING each day.

9. Oh...and this might be complete wishful thinking since I don't even have an agent yet, but I wants me a book deal, too :)

Tell us, have you set your writing goals yet??