Phoebe North » Uncategorized

Sammy Katz Loves TV Time

Phoebe — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 04:01:40 +0000

To be honest, so do I!

Top 5 Recommended Books

Phoebe — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 15:00:14 +0000

Today in the best-of blog circus, I’ll be covering my top 5 recommended books of 2011! These books weren’t necessarily my favorites, but they’re easily the novels that I talked up more than any others.

5. Divergent by Veronica Roth

Because of The Hunger Games, this was pretty much the year of the dystopian. As a YA author, I get asked about comp titles to big, buzzed books a lot. If you recall my review of Divergent earlier this year, I didn’t think it was perfect, particularly in the world building department. However, what it was, instead, was solid. It has the same heavy emphasis on action as The Hunger Games, the same potential appeal to a cross-gender audience. And unlike some dystopian titles, it’s grown in esteem for me as time’s gone on. The reason was largely Tris, a strong sympathetic heroine who was very realistically rendered. Despite its flaws, I’d easily recommend Divergent to any dystopian reader–and frequently do!

4. Wither by Lauren DeStefano

Like Divergent, this title was one I frequently recommended to dystopian readers. It’s the beautiful prose and daring concept that distinguishes it from most dystopian titles for me–the story of a girl kidnapped into a plural marriage. Though, like Divergent, the world building wasn’t quite airtight, it nevertheless is a beautiful, lyrical, and absorbing read.

3. Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma

As an MFA grad, I frequently get asked about the literary merit of YA novels. It’s books like Imaginary Girls that prove to me that YA writers deserve literary props. Beautifully written, flawlessly conceived, and incredibly spooky, Imaginary Girls is a title that should work for any reader of adult lit fic in a pinch.

2. The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

This is yet another title I frequently pitch to readers of The Hunger Games–and one that I feel doesn’t get nearly enough press. The Knife of Never Letting Go is a complex science fiction story with incredible concepts underlying the adventure plot. With mysterious aliens, talking animals, and psychic men populating his world, Ness proves that YA readers can handle complexity in science fiction.

1. Across the Universe by Beth Revis

2011 saw quite a bit of whining about how little YA SF is out there. And every single time, I found myself countering: pick up Beth Revis. Across the Universe is classic space opera, and enormously successful space opera, at that. This unsettling, ambitious book is one that should be on every sci-fi reader’s radar.

—

Check out what other writers recommended in 2011!

Top 5 Favorite Books

Phoebe — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:00:34 +0000

Today as part of the 2011 best-of blog series, I’ll be covering my 5 favorite reads of the year! (This is a time when those goodreads stats sure come in handy!) Hope you enjoy.

5. A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle

Swiftly is, of course, also my favorite book of all time. Every few years I reread it, thinking that I’ll love it a little less. I especially expected that this year–I’m now an old, hardened, picky curmudgeon when it comes to YA (as many authors I’ve reviewed will tell you).

But it’s still pretty wonderful–delicate, complex, well-wrought, vivid, magical. I’m old enough now to know that not everything gets better with age; it’s a wonderful surprise when something does.

4. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

People have been telling me to read Meg Rosoff for years. People were absolutely right. This is a thorny, messy, and absolutely beautiful book–with just a touch of magical realism to up the intensity. When adult readers try to argue that YA is all sparklepires, I counter with How I Live Now.

3. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

I enjoyed Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go, but it didn’t destroy me. A Monster Calls, on the other hand, reduced me to a weepy, puddly mess. Not only a great middle grade novel, this is, quite possibly, the best book about losing one’s parents. I’d easily recommend it to anyone who has faced loss (though they should probably get their kleenex ready before they do).

2. The Boy at the End of the World by Greg van Eekhout

I’ve been talking up this middle grade title tons on the Intergalactic Academy recently. Though it’s a middle grade book, with accessibly language and characters, it also encompasses a great number of SF concepts. The characters are vivid and distinctive; our hero, Fisher’s emotional isolation intense. This is what middle grade should be–with plenty of humor for young readers and plenty of complexity for the parents that read to them. Plus robots!

1. The Magician King by Lev Grossman

I have an affection so strong for Grossman’s Fillory novels that, in my mind, I kind of consider them mine. They combine an affection with fantasy with a sort of post-academic experience processing. This is fantasy for those jaded by the Ivory Towers. And I’m one of those people. Plus, beautiful prose and references to a thousand well-loved franchises.

—

Check out what other books were adored in 2011!

Top 5 (Complicated) YA Girls

Phoebe — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 15:00:12 +0000

Welcome to day 2 of the 2011 best-of blog circus! Today I’m supposed to talk about my top 5 YA girls. But because I’m a rebel, I’m going to veer slightly off topic (please don’t hurt me, Sarah Enni!). Instead of my generic favorite YA girls, I want to talk about something pretty close to my heart–my favorite complicated girls.

YA authors get a lot of duff when they give us “unlikeable” heroines. But what’s a crabby witch to one reader is a complicated, vividly rendered person to another. These are my favorite thorny, complex, real girls in the YA I read in 2011.

5. Tris in Divergent

My relationship with Divergent is kind of complicated itself–though fundamentally it’s not my sort of book, it’s grown in esteem for me since reading it (spoilers: I’ll talk about this more in two days when I discuss my top 5 recommend books of the year). What’s stuck with me is Tris, a much more complex heroine than one usually encounters in dystopian YA. Tris is selfish–she says so herself–single-minded to a fault, definitely flawed. And yet she remains very real in my mind, months after reading. I think this is because of her flaws, not in spite of them. They make her a real person, one whose vividness easily rivals Katniss Everdeen’s but who feels, well, a little more grounded in the reality of what it is to be a teenage girl.

4. Chloe in Imaginary Girls

Either of the girls in Nove Ren Suma’s Imaginary Girls easily qualify as “complicated.” But narrator Chloe was the more compelling for me. She’s got a scary, obsessive focus on her older sister, and yet the narrative never quite tells us what to make of this. Are we to read their relationship as tender and loving, or fundamentally abusive? And who is crazier–Ruby, for manipulating the people of their home town, or Chloe, for going along with it? There are no easy answers, which is part of what makes Imaginary Girls so insanely compelling.

3. Lissa in Shut Out

Poor Lissa. Girl is a hot mess, caring for her brother and father like some kind of make shift parent, controlling in her relationships, less than honest to the guys in her life–and to the reader. She’s hard to like sometimes, but you know what? Her reactions to her situation are very, very honest. There’s a tendency in some fluffier contemporary YA to gloss over the kind of mistakes that teenage girls make in favor of making them more likeable. Keplinger doesn’t do that here, instead bravely showing us how blind we can be so she can also realistically show our growth.

2. Rosalinda in A Long, Long Sleep

Through the first half of Anna Sheehan’s debut, I was frustrated by the passive, mousey heroine. She reminded me of so many girls we encounter in YA Paranormal–Bella Swan and Nora Grey–whose passivity seems celebrated and is at least unexamined. That’s not the case here. The reader eventually learns that there’s a real, and really horrific, reason for Rosalinda’s passive nature. Suddenly, the book is elevated above a simple story of time-shifted romance to a narrative that’s . . . well, I don’t want to give it away. But I’m glad I didn’t give up on Rosalinda.

1. Micah in Liar

It doesn’t get more complicated than this.

I still don’t know what to make of Micah, the kinda queer, kinda pathological, kinda insanely complex narratior of Justine Larabalestier’s Liar. I still don’t know what part of her story is true, and not. And that’s what makes this conceit so great: Larbalestier refuses to give us easy answers, and instead builds Micah in complexity as she layers one lie on top of another. One reading of this book renders Micah a psychopath. The other makes her more sympathetic, but more fantastic, too. I’m not sure if I’d want to be friends with Micah, but reading about her, and all of the possibilities that her narrative entails, was a fascinating experience.

—

Check out what other characters people are celebrating today!

Top 5 Favorite Albums to Write To

Phoebe — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 15:00:23 +0000

Welcome to day 1 of the year end best-of blog circus! (Also, welcome to my birthday! Yay!) Up today, my top 5 albums to write to.

(Just a note that the music I love may contain dirty words and subversive ideas. Sorry, kids–when it comes to music, part of me is still a sixteen year old mohawked punk rocker!)

5. Now You Can See by the Thermals

On the surface, Now You Can See sounds like typical indie-punk. But take a closer listen to the lyrics: this is about evolution, the story (either) of a human turning into a sea creature or a race of sea creatures becoming men. There’s a strong sense of epic history here:

We were born on an island,
we grew out of the sand.
Never saw another creature,
never knew another man.
Yeah baby we were nothing,
we existed for less!
Our present was empty,
our history a mess!

This is great music to write to when you want to mine the same sense of history. Who were your characters “before they could see”?

4. England Keep My Bones by Frank Turner

I first heard Frank Turner on late night television–he was playing his goofy quarter-life crisis anthem “I Won’t Grow Up.” When I picked up his album England Keep My Bones, I got the rousing drinking songs I expected–but I hadn’t anticipated his depth.

This is writing music for days when you have doubts, when you fear you’ve forgotten who you are and where you came from, when you need to be reminded the value of pure effort and moxie.

Not everyone grows up to be an astronaut,
not everyone was born to be a king,
not everyone can be Freddie Mercury,
but everyone can raise their glass and sing.

I may not be the perfect kind of person,
I may not do what mum and dad dreamed,
but on the day I die, I’ll say at least I fucking tried.
That’s the only eulogy I need.

3. On Avery Island by Neutral Milk Hotel

If you’re the least bit of a hipster (I’m a pretty big hipster myself), you’re probably familiar with Neutral Milk Hotel’s seminal In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Aeroplane is a great album, but I prefer to write to their chaotic, raw debut, On Avery Island. There’s something desperately YA about these lyrics–I’m fairly sure it’s about girls who grow up poor and chaste in Louisiana. Or, uh, something.

Threw a nickel in the fountain
To save my soul from all these troubled times
And all the drugs that I don’t have the guts to take
To soothe my mind so I’m always sober
Always aching, always heading towards
Mass suicide, occult figurines . . .

2. Dead Media by Hefner

I love all of Hefner’s music–but Dead Media is what I reach for when I write. Trippy and electronic, it’s a great background soundtrack. And yet it remains just as deliciously character- and story-driven as Hefner’s other albums.

Moving to the west end was a big, big, big mistake
We lost all our money and we got mostly heartache.
Some nights she would sigh, and place her head upon my lap
And she would cry. I couldn’t stop her shaking.

And I said, “Let me let you let me down again,”
She said, “No.”

1. Every Scene Needs Its Center by Tullycraft

I can’t explain my love for Tullycraft.

They’re my favorite band. And this album isn’t just my writing album, but also my dancing album, my making-out album, my afternoon-pick-me-up album. If there’s anything wrong with Every Scene Needs Its Center, it’s that I’m prone to jumping up and dancing like a dork while it’s playing. Makes it hard to reach your daily word count goals, but it sure is fun.

Every song on this album is about loving music, except for that one that’s about aliens. Every song feels like coming home at 2 am from a concert, your hair stinking of someone else’s cigarettes, your throat raw from singing. You’re tired, but you’re so, so happy. Yeah. It’s like that.

An orange glow, some blinking lights.
Don’t know how most folks spend their Friday nights.
Well I’ve seen evidence no one would dare dispute–
Witness accounts make up my life’s pursuit.
And in those photos there’s a sadness
And a message I can feel
Just give me one sign that you’re real.

Please give me one sign that you’re real.

—

Now go check out what all the other writers are rocking to!

Sonic Probe Winner and 2011 Best of Blog Circus!

Phoebe — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 15:00:06 +0000

Happy Christmas to all you Christians and Santa-lovin’ non-Christians out there! Just popping in for two quick announcements. First, the winner of the sonic probe for my big Doctor Who give away is . . .

Colin!!!!

Congrats, Colin! I’ll be in touch shortly to get your shipping info.

Secondly, I’ll be participating in a Best-of Blog Circus over the next five days, organized by the lovely in and incomparable Sarah Enni! Each day, stop by the following blogs to hear our favorites in writing music, YA novels, and more:

Two Years in the Life of a Short Story

Phoebe — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 16:27:11 +0000

I recently had a short story, “Elsie and the Wild Boys,” accepted by the Young Adult Review Network. Hooray!

No word on the run-date yet, as I’m still working with one of their editors getting the story into tiptop shape. But I thought it might be interesting to share my submission statistics for this story. I know I always find such information interesting, at least.

I wrote “Elsie . . .” in 2009, shortly after my graduation from MFA@FLA. It was the second short-form fiction piece I wrote in that summer, as a sort of warm-up to a novel I was gestating (which has been, and shall remain, trunked). I’d been reading a lot of Kelly Link at the time, and so her influence was definitely there. Also a lot of Cat Rambo-era Fantasy Magazine. Those influences are pretty obvious to me in the story, though it’s different, of course. It’s more like contemporary fantasy than magical realism. I think. Maybe.

Anyway.

In those days, I had trouble Writing Short, so its final wordcount was somewhere around 6,000 words–making it too long for many markets. But as time passed, and several kind editors sent me feedback, I whittled it down, clarified. It original opened with a long, somewhat cliche dinner scene, which my mother (a harsh critic!) called “boring” and “obnoxious.” So that got cut about a year ago. In its final form, it’s likely to come in right around 4,500 words. Less is more, sometimes.

Here are the stats:

Fantasy Magazine (no submission date recorded) – 9/8/09 personal R
GUD (no submission date recorded) - 9/25/09 personal R
IGMS (no submission date recorded) - 11/16/09 form R
Abyss & Apex (no submission date recorded) - 1/10/10 form R
Weird Tales (no submission date recorded) - 8/23/10 form R
Ideomancer (no submission date recorded) - 9/11/10 personal R
Subterranean Press 9/12/10 – 11/19/10 personal R
Shimmer 11/20/10 – 12/5/10 personal, second-pass R
Electric Spec 12/6/10 – 2/2/11 personal, second-pass R
Fantastique Unfettered 2/2/11 – 2/20/11 form R
Not One of Us 2/20/11 – 3/12/11 form R
Scapezine 3/12/11 – 6/14/11 personal, second-pass R
Clarkesworld 7/25/11 – 7/29/11 form R
Apex 8/14/11 – 9/1/11 form R
YARN 9/1/11 – ACCEPTED!! 9/26

(Format’s pretty much right out of my spreadsheet, except that’s all in pretty colors.)

So as you can see, that’s a pretty long path toward publication, even for a single short story. I don’t begrudge any of the editors or readers of these fine magazines for passing on my story, of course. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles. This also wasn’t my first shot at submitting to YARN; they rejected another story of mine, but invited me to send another. Good things, I think, come from persistence.

Revision Junction, What’s Your Function? (Fixin up plots and characters and . . . other stuff)

Phoebe — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 03:00:30 +0000

In case you were wondering, I’m still hard at work on revisions for agent Michelle. At some point, hopefully soon, I won’t be–though I won’t say anything when that happens and we go on sub. Mum’s the word, and all that. But for now, she’s still helping me nudge my book into shape.

When we had our first phone call, she asked if I thought I was done revising. I think that every author hopes–on every draft!–that this version is the final version. And Daughter of Earth had been revised more than any book I’d written previously. The changes came about in a large part because of my now-defunct critique group, but more importantly, my change in attitude toward revision came through my online friendship with fellow YA sci-fi writer Sean Wills. Sean had an unspeakably good attitude toward feedback. He seemed to take it all in easy-going stride. I asked him about it one day, and he told me how he thought praise was useless. He wanted to write great stories, right? Only accepting criticism in good stride would help him do that–not reacting defensively or in a proprietary way about his words. After our conversation, I began to shift my ego away from me, and my vision, to the book that was in front of me. No matter what happened with my career, I wanted my stories to be strong. I wanted them to stand up to critics who are just as tough as I am, if not tougher. And you can’t really do that alone, or in one fell swoop. You need time, and you need help.

So Michelle and I started revising.

I won’t deny that I’m impatient, or that I whine to my husband about how, ugh, revision hurts! I find it far more difficult and far more boring than writing. Writing I can handle–spewing out rivers of words. Revising is more delicate, more painstaking–but I’m starting to think it’s more important, too.

It’s been fascinating to see how my book has changed. Or . . . not changed really; that’s not quite the right word. But first my critique group, and now Michelle, have been able to see the latent promise in those earlier drafts. They’ve teased out meaning and nuance and plot twists based on little more than innuendo and gaps in my own flawed thinking. Daughter of Earth started simply, a long time ago. It had its genesis in a short story I wrote back in graduate school for a class on James Joyce. It was a pastiche of “Eveline” set on a generation ship (which will be published in March of 2012 in Aoife’s Kiss–makes me feel better about the B it netted in class!). The very skeleton of the story was there: abusive father, absent siblings, dead mother, ship in orbit, a closed society, a choice to be made. All of these things were present in my very first draft–Terra, on a spaceship then called the Maya, grieves the loss of her mother and then must decide if she’ll join up in a shipboard rebellion. But each subsequent revision has cast these plot elements into doubt, or given them nuance, depth. The story is now one of Judaism in deep-space diaspora; there are several twists. It’s more epic than I ever dreamed of, really. But the raw material for this story was there even way back in 2008, before I’d ever considered turning it into a book.

And I love it–I really love it. I have more affection for Terra than any protagonist I’ve ever written, and more of a sense of the Asherah than any setting I’ve ever visited before. Sometimes I feel like the books I was writing before were rushed, more vehicles for a career than passions. This book–this is a passion.

And damn it, I want to do it right.

OMG OMG Launch Day!

Phoebe — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 14:31:11 +0000

Hi guys!

You may have noticed that I’ve been quiet for the last month. That’s not because I suddenly developed a social life (ha!), but because I’ve undertaken a new enterprise with my droogie Sean. Today, we’re launching the Intergalactic Academy, a blog specializing in YA sci-fi. Today’s just an introductory post; we’re getting started in earnest on Monday, but head on over and check it out! And don’t forget to subscribe via RSS reader or Google Friend Connect. You know, if that’s your thing. No pressure or anything.