What do you call a bunch of librarians?  A pack?  A mob?  I hope it’s not a murder (it is for crows, you see).  Next month I’m presenting at the UELMA (Utah Educational Library Media Association) Spring Conference, where I’ll begin the session by pointing out that Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and R.L. Stine’s Welcome to Dead House are essentially (in terms of archetype) the same story.  I’ve never known any books to generate such antipathy in elementary educators as the Goosebumps books, so I’m a little worried that the session will end prematurely in some violent episode. 

If it doesn’t, I’ll claim much more than a foundational sameness between Great Expectations and Welcome to Dead House; I’ll argue for the following texts being riffs on the same elemental story: Pride and Prejudice, The Harry Potter Series, The Graveyard Book, Holes, Much Ado about Nothing, Fablehaven, A Wrinkle in Time, The Tale of Despereaux, Last of the Mohicans, Dracula, Dune, Little Women, The Illiad, and the books of 1 and 2 Samuel from the Old Testament (the story of King David).  And just for the record, I am NOT making a comment on the veracity or lack of such of scripture.  Archetypal theory is about narrative, not fiction; it addresses the structure humans apply to everything, including facts and events, in order to construct meaning.

Sound implausible, all those books being the same story?  Well, if you’re not a librarian you may have to figure out how and why this is true on your own.  Then again, once I have a presentation in my toolbox I’m not one to let it rust in there.  If things go well I’ll see about doing the presentation other places.  Then the world can share in the wonderful knowledge that Mr. Darcy is Darth Vader, Japanese Kabuki is only technically and cosmetically different from classical Ballet, and not only do all the world’s great religions believe very similar things, but that these things are taught using the same story that undergirds life.

I’ll let you know how things go next month, as always.  But next on the docket is LTUE!

It is currently just after midnight, which seems as good a time to post as I’m likely to get in the next few days.  Normally, I’m not one to post by light of the midnight oil, but as long as Casen is staying with me any reasonable hour just isn’t going to work.  I hear all of you who have kids laughing parts of your anatomy off.  “Ha!  He calls himself a writer, yet one little boy keeps him from writing a simple blog post!”  You’re right, or would be if I were a father.  A father, you see, can and must tell his children that he is working right now and will have to race trains later.  I, however, am an uncle (Uncle Clint, Uncle Clink, or Uncle Cwint depending on context, the particulars of which I haven’t quite figured out).  And as an uncle, I am also a favorite person in the whole world, and one doesn’t prioritize a blog posting above such esteem.  So for the next few days I’ll be writing in the odd moments of quiet I find, likely in the morning or evening, both at unreasonable hours.  You may read what I’ve written at your convenience.

*****

 My new year’s resolutions for 2010 in no particular order of realism, importance, or probability:

- Get a top flight NY agent who is a member of the AAR.

- Sign contracts for at least two more books by the end of the year.

- Teach my 4,000th student at SLCC, which I suppose is some sort of record to persistence or inertia or something.

- Sell the audio rights to a book of mine for the first time.

- Read at least 24 recent teen and children’s fiction titles by at least 15 authors to better understand the market (in addition to my regular reading for pleasure).

- Develop one new workshop/presentation for each of the following groups: writers, teachers, librarians, and elementary students.

- Visit at least 100 schools during the year.

- Sell both a book for children and/or teens and one for adults.

- Enjoy more than a small handful of movies that release during the year (2009 leaves me with, I think, three that I really liked, which isn’t much of a mark to be bested).

- Chisel off that last 3-5% body fat and put the weight back on in muscle.

- Spend $0 on haircuts and shaving (I cut my own hair and got 52 disposable razors for Christmas, so I should be set).

- Make up at least twenty new words and incorporate them into my for-use vocabulary (just now I thought of “discompunctuated”, which I rather like).

- Try truly good Japanese food in Utah, if it exists.

- Start 2011 with the same number of teeth, roughly the same quantity and quality of hair, and no more holes in my body than I did 2010. 

- Date every woman I can find who meets Benedick’s standard for earning a bachelor’s good graces: “Rich she shall be, that’s certain; wise, or I’ll none; virtuous, or I’ll never cheapen her; fair, or I’ll never look on her; mild, or come not near me; noble, or not I for an angel; of good discourse, an excellent musician, and her hair shall be of what color it please God.”  I think I’ll start with Nobel and Pulitzer winners first and then work my way onward.  It’s always so helpful to have reasonable standards.  (For more wonderful courtship advice, reeducate yourself into Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.) 

- Not adopt a stray kitten.  Again.

- Develop a magical power.  Any magical power, no matter how small or irrelevant, will do.

Now for those writers out there who endured this long, a reward: five resolutions I suggest very strongly—and very seriously—for any aspiring writer who wants to advance their publishing career.

1) If you want to write novels for a living, write one in 2010, meaning FINISH IT.  It doesn’t have to be good; it can even cause anaphylactic shock upon reading.  It just has to be finished.  If you’ve never written an entire book before, do it, I don’t care what it takes.   Write an entire chapter composed only of the word “fish”.  Just write a whole book.

2) Attend one new/additional serious writers conference while doing what it takes to make connections.  Ask questions.  Take notes on who you hear and see and what they say.  If you’re a bit more experienced and have been making the conference rounds for several years, get on a panel if you can.  Anything to go from one of the unknown faces in the crowd to a known face.

3) Pick one aspect of your writing that you feel is a weakness, whether it be dialogue, or blocks of weak prose, or characterization, or cliches, or whatever, and improve it.  Study writers who have a strength in the area.  Write exercises and short stories, even chapters from a longer work, focusing on this aspect of your craft.  End 2010 with one less writing weakness than you began the year with.

4) Write an entire short story in either a genre, a perspective, or using a POV character with attributes you’ve never before used—preferably one that you’ve never wanted to use.  Find something that you don’t particularly like or find relevant and then write something that changes that.  It will force you to utilize your unique voice and perspective on narrative in creative ways.

5) Make one professional connection on a respectful personal basis.  You can do this at a conference if the chance comes about; you may do this at workshops authors, agents, or editors offer; you may do it through constant and informed (and always respectful) correspondance on someone’s blog; whatever method is available, use it.  Make a new connection with a person in the industry that is strong enough for them to identify you by your face, name, or both.  Don’t force the issue.  If you attend some writing event and the opportunity to make a connection doesn’t appear, go to other events and look for new opportunities.  Don’t end the year without identifying the specific new connection that you’ve made and brainstorming possible ways this person could help you in the future, even if only years down the road.    

That’s a lot on all of our plates, so I’m going to bed.  After all, I need to be rested up to deal with a three-year-old running on a week’s worth of holiday sugar—not to mention all those dates with gold medal winning shipping heiresses.  G’night. 

L.T. Elliot wrote the following in response to my post about waiting:

I hate to sound preachy but have you thought of submitting elsewhere? A year’s a long time and unless you have some specific agreement with these individuals, I would consider sending out your MS to other venues. You’re a good writer, Clint. I wouldn’t wait to see if other fish take the bait.

First off, thank you very much for the compliment.  As for thoughts on submitting elsewhere, yes, I have considered it seriously.  What I’ve decided is to do my best to have my cake and eat it too.  I think the book is a terrific fit with this particular publisher, and that combined with a strong recommendation I received make me think that my chances with this house are about as good as they come in this industry.  For these reasons, I’ve wanted to respect their exclusivity for the time being—at least among publishers.

What I have done is submitted the book to agents.  That doesn’t count as a multiple submission, so no breaking the exclusivity I promised.  Meanwhile, if a really good agent falls for the book before a contract offer is extended, I’ll be able to discuss the next step with them.  If they believe that submitting to other houses is the best step, I’ll do that; if they want to approach the current publisher and seek a deal, I’ll do that.  If, on the other hand, the publisher does offer a deal first, I’ll contact my top agents and tell them that an offer is on the table and I’d be interested in exploring representation.  Either way, it works well for me.

So that’s the situation in more depth, L.T.  I don’t have all my eggs in one basket, exactly; rather, I’m trying to cook them two different but complimentary ways.  It’s just a fact of the business that even when you’ve got things on multiple burners—which all writers should, if they’re serious about publishing—you find yourself waiting a lot while the pots simmer.  Four of my top agents have had my package for a long time now, and the publisher’s had my book for an eternity.  None of it’s empirical evidence, but the trends are looking good.  It’s just one of those times when I have to let things finish cooking, no matter how hungry I am.

Perhaps I should say starving?  Famished?  Or maybe follow Shakespeare and use the classic “in a consumption.”  Well, take your pick, whichever screams to you more loudly, “I HATE WAITING!”

When I was a boy, my mother decided that my health would benefit from naturally therapeutic supplements.  She decided upon a concoction based, I believe, on the following equation: a substance’s nutritional and antioxidant value rises in direct proportion to its difficulty to ingest without gagging.  The result of this formulaic search turned up a brew foul enough to sterilize a person who’d had their tongue removed prior to quaffing the draught.

I’ll not name the product, but here’s a hint: I’m pretty sure that it was created by scraping the topsoil from a never-before-cleaned dog kennel, liquefying that in a blender, then carefully folding in charred bits of lemon peal, linoleum, and bone (likely human).  If you taste it, you’ll know (and hopefully this knowledge will not have left you blind).

Now,while I maintain to this day that the only benefit I gained from exposure to this noxious material was a built up immunity to radioactive waste, there are plenty of nasty medicines out there that are good for you while being no fun whatsoever to take.  This is, I think, the best way to describe my presentations at the Idaho conference two days ago: I think the event benefited me, but it wasn’t much fun to go through.

Without going into too much detail, let me say that I misjudged my ability to talk over the heads of some educators despite the fact that I have little formal training in education and pedagogy.  I spent weeks researching my topics to substantiate my claims (teaching narrative literacy by killing the canon and teaching metacognition by writing fiction) in the belief that educators would demand such theoretical underpinning to even consider listening to my proposals.  When I finished my presentations, I’m fairly certain the attendees would swear that I knew exactly what I was talking about; they’d also swear, in many cases, that they had no clue what I’d talked about.

So lesson learned.  Teaching educators isn’t that much different from teaching writers (despite the fact that I consider myself a professional writer but not necessarily a professional educator).  I need not worry that the material I deliver will be either obvious or already assumed.  My brain just doesn’t move in those well-traveled channels.  If I’m interested in something enough to teach it, I’d better keep it largely to the basics, because it’s going to be new to a whole lot of people (and weird to perhaps even more). 

But all’s well that ends well (the only one of Shakespeare’s plays I just can’t sit through), and I’ve even been invited back next year, as well as been added to the possible presenter list for additional events.  My mysticism must have impressed enough to earn me a second go around, during which I’ll be certain to KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid—any other interpretations will only be considered with the submission of a personal picture).