After taking some time with family, friends, and secretly doing work when we were supposed to be on sabbatical, we're firing the blog back up and (partially) opening up submissions once again. Please always check out our submissions page for the latest information about how to submit your work to us.If you're a writer who sent your work in prior to December 15th of 2009, please know we didn't quite hit our goal of responding to every single query before the year was over, but rest assured that a response is on its way!For now, we're firing up our computers, cracking our knuckles, and grinding the coffee to make sure 2010 is a fantastic year. More to come!
After taking some time with family, friends, and secretly doing work when we were supposed to be on sabbatical, we're firing the blog back up and (partially) opening up submissions once again. Please always check out our submissions page for the latest information about how to submit your work to us.If you're a writer who sent your work in prior to December 15th of 2009, please know we didn't quite hit our goal of responding to every single query before the year was over, but rest assured that a response is on its way!For now, we're firing up our computers, cracking our knuckles, and grinding the coffee to make sure 2010 is a fantastic year. More to come!
I am a huge fan of good design, and also a great fan of pithy expression. So it probably makes sense that Stefan Sagmeister would be a hero of mine. He has a firm in New York that has designed packaging for many things you've likely seen but not known came from his team, and he is also a creator of winningly temporary public art installations. For a few years now, he's been orchestrating a series of strange and stunning artworks that deliver aphoristic bits of wisdom (such as "Assuming is stifling," or "Helping other people helps me," or "Complaining is silly; either act or forget"), many of which have been collected in a truly gorgeous Abrams book entitled Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far. Want to give it a gander? Click on the video above. Abrams, who have never forgotten the impact of beautiful book production, show us just how beautiful a book can be—it's a series of pamphlets in a die-cut cardboard sleeve.But that's not the reason for this post. No, I'm writing because of the video I've linked to below, which is a talk Sagmeister gave via the free-lectures-by-awesome-people website TED (which I believe Martha Brockenbrough pointed me to way back when). A deeply reflective man, Sagmeister often takes time out of the hustle of life to consider who he is and what he is doing, so as to be certain he is focusing on where the worth of his life may be. In his TED talk, he explains why he requires his team to take a year-long break every seven years. It's not about vacation, it's about rekindling one's love of the work, and about seeing in a fresh way again.And that explains, in part, why the four of us here at Upstart Crow will be taking a sabbatical of sorts beginning 12 December and extending through 15 January 2010. I will be pulling down our submissions pages and putting up "Not so fast!" notes all over the website. Anyone who sends us a note will get back a brusque but friendly note explaining that we're closed for the duration. (We will likely continue posting to this blog, but much more infrequently. Just when we can't stop ourselves.)Partly, yes, we are taking time away because of the holidays. And partly, yes, we will be taking time to clear our desks and catch up on all the work that has not gotten done before now. (For me personally, that means editing three novels, finally clearing through all of my submissions, redesigning our rights guide and putting it up on our site, and drafting a novel of my own.) We will still be doing work for our clients, of course, but much of that work is finite.The rest of the time, we'll be reflecting on where we are and where we are going, looking at the industry and what's happening, reading current books, thinking about where, exactly, we want to be in twelve months—both professionally and personally. It's been a tremendous eighteen weeks since we launched, and we want to be certain we're doing this right and not falling into habit and thoughtlessness. So we're going to take some time to think about things, to gather kindling for the fires that will keep us warm in the coming year.And then, once 15 January 2010 has rolled around on the calendar, we'll raise the shades and open the gates and be at our desks, reinvigorated for the work to come.
Today on her blog, my lovely client Shannon Morgan detailed twelve ways an agent can sign a potential client based on our own experience just about one year ago. I thought I'd return the favor and catalog the twelve steps a writer may experience when signing with an agent. (Author's Note: If you look hard enough, you may actually find some decent advice in here. But no promises.)1. Write an awesome story, revise, share it, sit on it, revise again, research agents, send it out, and commence fingernail biting.2. At first, check email constantly, even though you've researched response times and know, in your heart of hearts, that you're in for a wait. Finished with fingernails, move on to toes. 3. Begin to hear back on the queries. A few nos (Boo!) but a few yeses (Hurray!). If I'm requesting, it's always for a full manuscript. I don't request partials. I'm just cool like that.4. Send out the manuscript. Begin to get scared. You can handle someone passing on a paragraph about the book and maybe a few pages, but what if they actually pass on the whole book? Nails bitten down to nubs, seek out husband/child/poodle's nails and begin to chew.5. Driven crazy by the waiting, begin working on a new book to take your mind off things. Pare down how many times you're checking your email a day. Look to get the number in the double, rather than triple, digits. Check out your local chapter of Nail-Chewers Anonymous (NCA). Admit you were powerless over chewing - that your nails had become unmanageable.6. Hear tentative interest from an agent! Ack! Get a bit excited! I usually send a note to say I'm enjoying a story and ask for more details about the author and other projects. At this stage, I'm sometimes looking to do a revision and not officially offer representation quite yet and will be looking to gauge an author's reaction to this idea. For the sake of this post, let's say I want to make an offer...7. Schedule "the call." Get nervous. It's just a phone call, right? Right?! It's no different than talking to Nana! Make sure to attend an NCA meeting and cover your feet and fingers with socks and gloves to avoid temptation. Purchase padlocks if necessary (but make sure you can still answer the phone). If you are Shannon Morgan, "coincidentally" be in the city at the time the agent wants to offer representation.8. Talk! Be yourself, be excited, ask lots and lots of questions, and receive an offer. Get off the phone and take a deep breath. Realize your nails are actually starting to grow back a little.9. Inform other agents who are considering the manuscript of the offer. Set a reasonable deadline for them to get back to you. What if an agent only has the query, you ask? It's common courtesy to let her know of the offer as well, especially with us here at Upstart Crow, since we still have to read the 20 pages attached to it.10. Really think about your decision. If anything didn't sit well or you have misgivings, make sure to follow up with additional questions. Give the other interested agents time to get back to you. If you receive multiple offers, really ponder the pros and cons of each (unless one of the offers comes from an Upstart Crow agent...in that case, it's a no-brainer, right?)11. Talk it over with your spouse/children/poodle. Show off your almost-back-to-normal nails.12. Sign already! Jeez!
The other day, I asked readers to vote for their favorite villains of children's literature. We received some great responses. There were a slew of witches from various stories, included witches of the sea, the West, the Waste. Harry Potter's foes received several nods, although no one picked Voldemort, the big bad guy himself. A surprising vote was cast for Nellie Oleson from the Little House books...I mean, sure, she always had those nice dresses, but she wasn't exactly killing people, was she? And it simply wouldn't be an Upstart Crow poll without some tongue-in-cheek replies, with the top two wise guy choice going to the fish from The Cat in the Hat for his "nagging, whining, threatening" and "joy-killing negativity."Roald Dahl's Mr. and Mrs. Twit each received multiple votes, as did the sadistic Jack from Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. When your first act in a story is murdering the protagonist's entire family, I guess that counts for something, right?Two great characters who finished just outside the winner's circle were Count Olaf from A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Trunchbull from Matilda. I always personally loved Count Olaf. To me, he's a quintessential middle grade villain--somewhat menacing without ever feeling truly dangerous, a funny, ridiculous caricature, and with a depth to his character that reveals itself over the course of the entire series. And The Trunchbull is just deliciously awful, and rightly gets what is coming for her.But the villain you most found putrid and compelling, awful and engaging, horrid and fascinating was...
A tie!
That's right! Readers couldn't decide between Mrs. Coulter from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and Professor Dolores Umbridge from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. One beautiful and one described as looking like a toad, both are dark, sadistic women with a fondness for animals (a daemon monkey for Mrs. Coulter and kittens for Umbridge) and torture.Mrs. Coulter exemplified evil in the early part of the trilogy--she and her monkey both enjoying toying with their victims before killing them--but does have a soft spot for Lyra and proves to maybe not be completely evil by the end. But jeez, anyone involved in kidnapping and experimenting on children receives points on the villain chart.Professor Umbridge, whom Stephen King once described as the, "greatest make-believe villain to come along since Hannibal Lecter," is great on a few different levels. On the surface, she seems like the teacher we've all had before, the one whose frilly exterior hides a darker nature underneath. The twisted pleasure she experiences by forcing her students to injure themselves echoed with an eerie plausibility, as it was the first time Rowling ventured beyond the overblown evil of the earlier villains in the series and into a deeper, more sophisticated type of creepy that unsettles adult readers just as much as the children.So there you have it! We wound up with some great answers. Thanks for participating, and good luck creating your own twisted villains.
There are many great villains out there, from the moustache-twirling doofuses, to the sick and twisted sociopaths, to the evil wizards bent on world domination or the misunderstood loners who think their heinous acts are actually doing good.Kids books have seen the arrival of some truly memorable villains in the past few years, so I thought I'd take the pulse of you readers and writers to see which ones rank as your favorites. Are you more a fan of the classic, 100% evil villain? Do you like your bad guys to have a troubled past and some sympathetic reason for going afoul? Are you into the darkly charming bad guys/girls who you either love to hate or hate to love? In either the comments below or using the hashtag #kidlitbadguys on Twitter, cast a vote for your favorite villain from children's literature. The winners (or losers?) will be revealed on Monday. Please note: I'll only be counting the first villain you list, so if you want to name a bunch of favorites, make sure to put your number one choice first!
If you haven't seen it yet, this video has been making its way around the InterBloggaTwittersphere today:Short of making the cardboard frame yourself and purchasing an iPhone to slip inside, we're not quite there in terms of this capability on the current eReaders, but this video does suggest some wild possibilities, no?We're raising children who are obviously comfortable with the ever-adapting technology, sometimes more so than their parents. So why wouldn't something like this work? Can you envision a model you'd be willing to pay for? Perhaps purchase the dedicated device (or an app for the iPhone) and then pay for each new title? Interesting possibilities, for sure.(Thanks to @mitaliperkins for the link)
See that woman up there? She's swell. That video has nothing to do with this post—and worse, is months old—but it does give you a sense of the wonderful Bridget Zinn.A few weeks ago, we sold her first two novels at auction to Hyperion/Disney. While a book sale always gladdens drear heart, this one was especially pleasing. A thirty-two-year-old writer and part-time librarian, Bridget has had an extraordinary year. It began with one action-packed week in March: she was offered agency representation; she received the first batch of edits for her novel; she was diagnosed with cancer; she was married in the hospital to her boyfriend-since-teenhood, Barrett Dowell; minutes later she was whisked into surgery. Since then, she has been married a few more times (they had some idea that a ceremony would be a nice thing; go figure); done a spiffy revision of her novel; and undergone many hair-curlingly expensive treatments to shrink and obliterate the tumors that remain. Happily, the treatment seems to working; unhappily, much of it is not covered by her scant health insurance. (Want to know more about Bridget? Of course you do! Go here, to her blog and webpage.)To help pay the bills, Bridget and Barrett's friends and family are rallying, and rather than just hold out an empty cup on a street corner (the Stearns Method), they have amassed a pile of one-of-a-kind donations to be auctioned off. Many authors (Bridget's friends, acquaintances, far-flung admirers) have donated signed copies of books, sure, but there are also manuscript critiques and proofreading services for authors (including one from yours truly), and that's just the boring stuff. There are also works of art, note cards, food, drink, baby gifts, jewelry, and much more. Many of these items would make lovely gifts, and I'm told that this is the time of year when people give each other things. (Really? Why? What is that about, anyway?)Whether or not you actually bid on anything, you certainly ought to mosey on over and take a look. Auction items can be viewed here, or just go to www.32auctions.com and use the Auction ID: bridget, and the password: rules to view the auction. You will need to create an account on the site in order to bid on auction items, but that's a simple matter of submitting your name, email address, and a password so that the organizers can contact you if you win an item.Bidding began on 27 November and runs only through 11 December. By my reckoning, that means you have about ten days to go forth and do some good via shopping. And if that isn't the American way, I don't know what is.
If the queries I receive are an indication, many writers see whatever story they've created as just the proverbial tip of the iceberg. "You think the story ends here?" they'll say. "Just you wait, mister! Just because Timmy and Jimmy rescued Wiggles the dog doesn't mean their adventure has ended!"I've blogged about unlikely sequels before and don't want to rehash too much of what I've already said, but I got to thinking recently about some children's books that had unexpected, and pretty damn good, follow-ups. Some examples include Beverly Cleary's Dear Mr. Henshaw and the subsequent Strider qualify, Richard Peck's trilogy of tales involving Grandma Dowdel, and Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, the lesser known follow-up to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.So I'm wondering, gentle readers, what titles you wished had produced sequels that never made it into print. Did you want to see what other sorts of violence could be committed to animals after finishing To Kill a Mockingbird? Perhaps wonder what sorts of colored plants sprout up in other locations at the end of Where the Red Fern Grows? If you could continue any classic book for children, which would it be?
It's been quite the year in the world of books and elsewhere, and no one is more aware of our ridiculous good fortune than all of us here at Upstart Crow Literary. So we are counting our blessings. And boy oh boy, do we have lots of reasons to give thanks as the holidays approach.Because we will be taking a break from our (almost) daily blogging to spend time with our loved ones, Chris, Danielle, Ted and I have compiled a list of the things that inspire us to clasp our hands together, roll our eyes heavenward, and say, Thank you!In no particular order, we present to you our first annual "Things the Agents at Upstart Crow Literary are Thankful For List."(just rolls off the tongue, don't it?)
