That's a Wrap!

You guys.

You guys.

SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS, guess what?

I finished my revision!!!!!!!!!!!!!

**cue confetti**

I'm so very, very excited at where this manuscript has ended up. Such a long haul, but it's been worth it!! With a few breaks (for revising a different book and drafting part of another) I've been at this rewrite since April 2013. 0_o But I'm finally finished and it feels GREAT.

And you know what else I'm excited about? My word count is down to 95,000!!!! That's 10K shorter than Draft 4, and, I'm embarrassed to say it, 23K shorter than Draft 3. :-D

So there you have it. I FINISHED AND I'M SO EXCITED!!! Off to dream about future projects, and stalk the #PitchWars feed on Twitter. :-)

All printed out and shiny!!

Pitch Wars Mentee Bio!

Welcome, one and all, to my Pitch Wars Mentee Bio! If you don't know what Pitch Wars is, head here for all the deets. And go here for the bios of all the other awesome mentee hopefuls!

And now on to the aforementioned bio:

Hi, I'm Joanna, and I'm overly fond of semi-colons and em-dashes, as well as a staunch defender of the Oxford comma (Oxford commas save lives you guys).

I've been writing since I was about seven years old. For proof, here's my first ever story, complete with amazing illustrations like this one:

You can clearly see why I decided not to pursue a career in art.

At 13, I was published in the children's magazine Stone Soup. I submitted tons of stuff before getting this story accepted—I didn't give up until they said yes!

That's me in the top photo. My bangs are pretty sweet, I know.

Since 2005, I've written six full novels and parts of three others, and revised (and revised and reVISED) several of them. I think I'm getting pretty good at this whole revising thing. Death to unnecessary words! Long live proper pacing and character development!

My six completed drafts plus one unfinished one.

My Pitch Wars novel was first drafted during NaNoWriMo 2006, and was inspired by the myths in Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief series, the British India time period in M. M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions and Shadow of the Moon, Tolkien's Silmarilion, the mood of Keane's album Under the Iron Sea, and a single frame from the first Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movie.

Incidentally, the name of my blog also comes from this album!

Interesting novel fact: I invented nearly all of the names for this book, and realized I'd accidentally given brothers (same father, different mothers) two different last names. Instead of making them the same, I decided that in my society children take their mother's surname, not their father's. (Okay I thought it was interesting.)

I'm a musician, specifically a pianist, and the cadence and flow of words and sentences and paragraphs are extremely important to me. I love the lyrical, flowing writing styles of Ursula K. LeGuin, Robin McKinley, Tanith Lee, and Erin Bow.

My favorite book of all time is probably The Return of the King. But I'm also madly in love with the aforementioned Queen's Thief series (seriously, I need the next book NOW), George Eliot's Middlemarch, Diana Wynne Jones' Fire and Hemlock, Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, pretty much anything Jane Austen ever wrote (but especially Emma and Persuasion), and Sherwood Smith's Crown Duel.

Possibly my favorite wedding pic.

Bert likes revising, too.

I daylight as a piano teacher, and have been happily married to the love of my life for almost two years now (seriously my hubs is the best!!!). We live in Gilbert, AZ, where we share an apartment with our stripey feline Bertie and an enormous grand piano. I'm obsessed with looseleaf tea, ice cream, the color green, and Doctor Who.

Book Review: Shadow and Bone

Pardon me for a moment, but I need to gush about Shadow and Bone.

I finished it last night at midnight and I'm still experiencing a book hangover. I'm giddy with ALL the feelings!!!!!!

This is not a very coherent review so far.

I knew practically nothing about this book going into it besides I was in love with cover, it was vaguely set in Russia, and that a lot of people raved over it. It's kind of cool reading a book and having zero idea what it's about!

Anyway, so the story follows Alina, who finds out she is a Grisha (somebody who has magical powers) and gets taken to the palace to be trained. The Darlking, a powerful Grisha who's second-in-command to the king, thinks Alina has the power to take down the Shadowfold, which is basically this band of darkness filled with ravenous dragon-like creatures called the Volcra that enjoy feasting on human flesh. The Shadowfold divides the kingdom, and the Darkling hopes Alina can destroy it and rejoin the land. The Darkling is dangerous and intoxicating and fascinating. There's also Mal, the boy Alina grew up with. He serves as a tracker in the army, and their friendship is the force that drives the novel. And that's all the plot summary I can give for fear of spoilers!

The characterization, plot and pacing (I am in awe of the pacing, for serious) are phenomenal, the writing is lovely, the setting vivid. It's a fantastic, smart story, executed to perfection. I can't wait to read the rest of the series!

ETA: My synopsis of this novel makes it sound kind of cliché. It's not. The story goes to dark, twisty places, and Alina is a fascinating, well-drawn character. She's flawed. She makes mistakes. She's not perfect. But I empathized with her in a very real way. Also, parts of this book strongly reminded me of an old favorite, Crown Duel, which made me love it even more.

Nook Love

You guys! LOOK WHAT MY AMAZING HUSBAND GOT ME FOR MY HALF-BIRTHDAY!!!

That's right! A Nook GlowLight!!

So excited!!

I'm already completely head over heels! First book I downloaded was Pride & Prejudice (because you always need Jane Austen at your fingertips), second was Shadow and Bone (which I've been wanting to read for a while. Love it so far!). I'll be trying hard to control my downloads so I don't accidentally bankrupt us. :-D

Anyways, I LOVE this thing. It is just the best! Thank you, awesomest of all awesome husbands!!

YAY YAY YAY YAY YAY!!!!!!!!!

All Along the Road

This long slow slog can get disheartening. Revision sucks. Rejections sting. Feeling like it's impossible to get to the next level—no matter how hard you try—is horribly frustrating.

But in the end, it's got to be about the writing. It's got to be about the stories inside you bursting to get out. It's got to be about your passion for the craft, your love for language and characters and story.

It's so easy to get discouraged, to want to give up. But don't you dare.

Keep fighting.

Keep dreaming.

Keep writing.

Drawer Novels

So I've been pondering "drawer novels" lately. You know, those books people write before The Book that gets them an agent/gets them published, etc, the books people shove into drawers that will never see the light of day.

You have to write lots to get better at writing. You just do. Which kind of means those drawer novels are like practice novels, except I don't really like to think of them that way. If you go into writing your first (or second or third or fourth) novel with the mindset that it's going to be crap and just practice/filler until that elusive Book that will really be Something, I think you're kind of missing the point.

I write because I love stories and characters, and I have tons of them in me that need to come out. But if I didn't believe wholeheartedly in every single one of my novels, I wouldn't have written them in the first place.

Since 2005, I've written six complete novels and three other incomplete ones, and it is absolutely true that I've improved as a writer since then. But even now, when I'm able to step back and look at those earlier novels and see their many flaws, I don't think they're completely worthless, or that their only purpose was in honing my skills. I still believe that those novels' hearts are sound, and that if I was compelled to revise/rewrite/reshape them, I could do something with them.

Granted, I have so many other stories to tell I don't know if I'll ever get around to doing that, but the point is (I do have a point!) that I am proud of every single one of my books, regardless if no one ever sees those earlier ones but me.

Those books have made me the writer I am, and I keep them proudly in binders on my bookshelf!

Nothing you write is ever a waste. If you don't believe your current project is something special—whether it be your first or your twentieth—why even write it at all?

Believe in your writing, in your characters, in your stories. Believe in those drawer novels. Own up to them proudly.

All the Novels I've Written Thus Far
From left to right: On Journeys Bound, The Rose Queen, The Whale and the Tree,
The Fire in the Glass, The Silver Crane, The Blind King (unfinished), Seer's Song
Not pictured: The Last Garden (unfinished), Reader (unfinished)

From the Mind of a Budding Novelist with Rather Strange Ideas

I don't know about you, but I had a lot of strange ideas when I was a kid. Stuff where I had questions about the workings of life and the world and everyday things, but instead of asking a qualified adult, I made up the answers in my head, and went with that.

Like, I thought that people actually died when they were killed on-screen in movies. And therefore I concluded that the people weren't actors so much as they were criminals on death row and that's how they were executed. You guys, I literally thought this.

We went on a lot of road trips when I was a kid. I always stared at the double yellow lines dividing the highways, and concluded that when the double lines morphed into dashed lines, the stripe-painters had obviously run out of paint.

I'm pretty sure I thought my parents were related. Not in a brother-sister kind of way, really. More like a Mom-and-Dad-have-always-been-Mom-and-Dad-and-are-therefore-related kind of way (I dunno. Made sense to me at the time).

And I was super confused when my grandmother came to visit from Michigan when I was little and my mom called her 'mom', and that didn't compute, because how could my mom have a mom?????

So anyway, now you know. A frightening glimpse inside my strange little mind…