Books: The Goose Girl

Shannon Hale just won a Newbery Honor for her latest book, The Princess Academy, and Wendi raves about Hale's The Goose Girl - for good reason. An extrapolation of the Grimm brothers' tale of the same name, Goose Girl chronicles a princess' fall from power and long climb back up from where she lands - tending the royal geese in the far-off land where she was supposed to marry the prince.

Goose Girl matches the tone and magic of fairy tales, while delving more deeply into character and consequence. I fell into the no-nonsense prose and moved swiftly through the tale, happy that the story's slower, more poignant moments didn't necessarily read that way. Unfortunately, Hale's even style also dulled some of the more exciting moments; there were at least two occasions where I felt serious action in the book demanded more electric, exciting prose. It almost felt as if surviving a rather vicious coup carried the exact same weight as playing chase with a goose.

But the narration always reminds us that what we are reading is a fairy tale, and like most fairy tales, this one has its pleasingly predictable ups and downs, and its happily ever after. I did think the end game was a bit messy though. I accept those "I have you now, Mr. Bond - but I'm not going to kill you until you've had a chance to escape/be saved" moments in some fiction (see for example, um, well, almost every James Bond movie) but in books like this I am a bit disappointed when the protagonist puts herself in a bad position, and then lives to tell the tale only because the bad guys didn't run her through when they had the chance.

And too, like any ripping yarn worth its salt, there are plenty of opportunities in Goose Girl for the good guys to square off against their particular nemeses, but I found myself rolling my eyes a bit as one of the villains moved from hero to hero, distracted from dealing a death blow only by someone else daring him or challenging him to come fight. After the book was over, I compared said moments to that classic scene in The Princess Bride where Inigo Montoya finally gets his revenge on the six-fingered man. Why, I asked myself, did I cheer for Montoya and the perfectly obvious resolution to his storyline, but roll my eyes at the parade of such scenes in Goose Girl?

I put the question to Wendi, and, as usual, she had the answer. Princess Bride tells its fairy tale with tongue firmly planted in cheek, playing with storybook conventions even as it exploits them. Goose Girl thrives on its fairy tale past, but is a much more serious novel. I suppose that's why I needed a bit more from the ending than what it delivered.

Again, I nitpick - and I only bother to do so because I enjoyed the book. Not perfect, but exceptional nonetheless. I look forward to reading The Princess Academy.

Someday. :-)

A good day

This morning, Jo and I took Atlanta's mass-transit train - MARTA - downtown to the Fox Theater. Unfortunately, tickets for Wicked, which comes to Atlanta on tour in May, were sold out for every show. We knew when tickets went on sale in December that we had better be quick, but we had to wait and see when, among other things, my book launch at Carpe Librum in Knoxville would be. May is going to be a busy month, what with the book coming out and all, and the delays in scheduling were our undoing for getting tickets to see Wicked. I suppose we'll have to wait for the inevitable movie.

But I said it was a good day, and I wasn't lying. I learned today that Ingram, America's largest book distributor, is going to be sending galleys of Samurai Shortstop out to their top 200 YA librarians as a part of a regular package of featured titles. In addition, I was contacted by the editorial manager of Ingram's Children's and Teen e-newsletter, which goes out to librarians across the country. They're going to do an interview with me about Samurai! Librarians are very good people to know, and I'm really grateful to my good friends at Ingram for are helping me spread the word.

This afternoon we ate at Mellow Mushroom and hit Borders - always a good outing - and then came home to have cake and open my present - "Batman: The Animated Series, Season Four."

Oh, did I mention it's my birthday? Told you it was a good day.

Books: Hellboy - On Earth as it is in Hell

Hellboy is one of my all-time favorite comic books. Except for the excellent work of James Robinson on Starman, writer-artist-creator Mike Mignola's big red paranormal investigator might rank number one on my favorites list. Mignola takes his time to produce Hellboy, and there are often longish waits between the mini-series that further Hellboy's continuing story. (And the books are most definitely worth the wait!)

But realizing there was a voracious readership eager for anything Hellboy, Dark Horse Comics began producing non-Mignola-created Hellboy comics, with varying degrees of success. Guy Davis' work on B.P.R.D. has been outstanding; Weird Tales, written and illustrated by a variety of guests, was very disappointing.

And so with equal parts hope and fear I picked up Hellboy: On Earth as it is in Hell, an original novel by Brian Hodge. No artwork in this one - just a prose adventure starring H.B., Liz Sherman, Abe Sapien, and the usual cast of misfits working for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. I had never heard of Hodge before, but this was the first Hellboy novel not written by the prolific (and at times prosaic) Christopher Golden, so I gave it a shot.

Surprisingly, this novel is not a lightweight licensed book banged out to meet a minimum page count. Weighing in at 359 small-printed pages, On Earth feels like a labor of love, and occasionally felt like a labor to read. That's not to say it isn't well-written - Hodge is not a pretentious or flowery writer, but instead a measured and confident one. His prose strives neither to surprise nor to impress, only to carry the story forward as realistically and thoughtfully as possible.

But what made the book feel at times like a marathon was the lack of fist-pounding, floor crumbling, giant worm-wrangling pulp action that makes the Hellboy comics so much dang fun. Hodge is clearly an imaginative horror writer, and in that sense pays perfect homage to the darker, more mysterious aspects of Mignola's work. (There are very creepy moments, which is impressive.)

What's missing is the spirit of Doc Savage, the borderline camp of punchy dialogue and punching heroes. While there is good pulpy plot here - Hellboy and company are recruited by the Vatican to guard a controversial ancient document from the vengeful minions of both heaven and hell - the book is heavy on the thinking and light on the thwacking. With the exception of duking it out with the Leviathan and going toe-to-toe with some fire-wielding seraphim, the threats to Hellboy and Co. seemed pretty light.

All in all a good read, but I was expecting something a little different.

Pity poor Starman

Pity poor Starman, Golden Age superhero and father of the ultra-hip modern hero who inherited his astronomical mantle. DC comics put out a fantasticly sculpted set of action figures, but they were apparently never intended to be taken out of their boxes.

What did I do to snap Ted Knight's shoulder out of its socket? Just how did I ruin this great hero's noble career?

I tried to raise his arm so that it pointed toward the stars.

That's right - all I did was swivel the arm in its socket, and - POP! - off it came.

I'm so sick of this. I'm sick of action figures that take ten minutes to extract from their packaging because they've been posed in some crazy position. I'm sick of action figures who won't stand up on their own two legs, either because the legs are so spindly the figure topples over, or the legs are sculpted in some ridiculously unstable pose. I'm sick of figures with slightly variant paint jobs, of figures that talk or light up or speak. With rare exception, modern action figures make terrible toys.

Starman included.

Greetings from the road

Hello from Greenwood, Mississippi, along the banks of the Yazoo River!

I'm still on the road, though due to return home very soon. A proper update on my goodwill tour to bookstores in Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and parts unknown is forthcoming. In the meantime, I have great news:

It's official - Barnes & Noble will be carrying Samurai Shortstop in their brick and mortar stores! This is such a big deal, as it will mean far greater exposure for my book.

It's strange; you'd think that every book from major publishers like Penguin or Random House would automatically be carried by the big chains, right? Wrong. The chains are very picky about what they put on the shelves, and have been known to reject a book simply because they don't like its cover. A number of factors - including, it would seem, sheer luck - have to come together for a debut, mid-list author like myself to hit the shelves at a place like Barnes & Noble.

No word yet on Borders, but this is a fantastic start. If I can find out who the Penguin B&N rep is, I'll send him/her a fruit basket!

Or better yet, a Mellow Mushroom gift card . . .

Samurai Web Site Update

Find your own Japanese family crest, or print out a mini-poster featuring ancient samurai wisdom!

Check out the new additions to the Samurai Shortstop web site here.

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig

Wendi and I just got back from our first promotional road trip for Samurai Shortstop! It was strange to be in such gratuitous self-promotion mode, but we're bound and determined to do everything we can to make Samurai a success. Here's a rundown:

Wednesday We arrive in Knoxville, eat at Mellow Mushroom pizza, and then I go with Dad to see the UT basketball Vols destroy the Georgia Bulldogs. This has nothing to do with Samurai Shortstop promotion, but it was a lot of fun.

Thursday A long day of shameless self-promotion begins with a visit to Hardin Valley Elementary School librarian Ed Sullivan. Sir Ed is himself a children's book author: his non-fiction title The Ultimate Weapon: The Race to Develop the Atomic Bomb is due from Holiday House in April. He's also one of the most well-connected kid lit people I know - he's published more than two hundred articles and reviews in the field, and serves on several boards, like those of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents (ALAN) and the YA Library Services Association. Oh, and did I mention he's the chair of the 2007 Michael L. Printz Award committee? I kissed the ring and gave him an advance reader copy.

Next up, Webb School of Knoxville, where I both went to school and later taught eighth grade. I started with my senior year English teacher, Mary Jo Potts, who has been super supportive of me and my writing ever since, well, my senior year of high school. She's a fantastic, astute reader, and if she likes the book, many many people will hear her raves. Next up, I handed off a copy of the ARC and my new press kit to the faculty advisor for the school paper, the Spartan Spirit. (I was editor of this fine gazette for two years in high school.) I hope they'll give me a write up and possibly review the book.

On to see Tena Litherland, Webb's librarian extraordinaire. She's passionate about children's books, and regaled me with her recent (and successful!) attempts to bring Lois Lowry and Jacqueline Woodson to Knoxville. Thankfully there was still room on next year's school calendar for little old me, and I was penciled in for a school visit in February 2007.

After the library, I paid a call on two old friends, Ben White and Amanda Lee, both of whom teach seventh grade English at Webb and have graciously agreed to write up a teacher's guide for Samurai. In exchange, they get two of the ARCs, and my undying gratitude. I even got to do a bit of "author improv" in front of Ben's class, where he peppered me with questions about what it's like to be an author. To the question of, "What does an author carry in his backpack?" I was very happy to be able to pull out my idea book and explain how I've kept one since I was in college. (I'm now on idea book five.)

That afternoon, we paid a call on Carpe Librum, Knoxville's newest independent bookstore. The owners are old friends of ours from the now defunct Knoxville branch of Davis-Kidd Booksellers. We planned Samurai Shortstop's coming out party - a signing and launch party has been set for Saturday, May 27, 2006. Mark your calendars now!

Thursday night, we journeyed out to Maryville, Tennessee to visit my new niece, Claire, and then came home and absolutely crashed.

Friday Today it was off to Lexington, Kentucky, to pay a call on the massive and beautiful Joseph-Beth Booksellers there. This remains one of my favorite bookstores, and bears the distinction of being the bookstore where I first stumbled upon the photo that first inspired Samurai Shortstop! (I was reading a guide to Japan in their travel section when I saw a picture of a man in a kimono throwing out the first pitch at a baseball tournament in 1910. One thing led to another, and, well, it's in the book . . .) At J-B, we met with Rachel Ray, the great kids manager there, as well as old friend Angie Shuck, who is now the marketing manager there. We talked about ways to promote the book in Lexington, as well as the possibility of me attending the Bluegrass Book Festival later this year.

On Saturday morning we headed home, but throughout all our travels, Wendi and I worked through our marketing plan. The plan has been in motion for months now, but we're in the implementation phase, and things are getting woolly. Good, but woolly. It's do or die time!

Next week, we're off to Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi to meet with booksellers and distributors. What kind of tangible results these visits will have will be hard to quantify, but we're treating this pre-publication junket as a sort of "goodwill tour," in the hopes that booksellers and buyers will remember me and help to hand sell the book. When I have a chance to catch my breath next week, I'll blog our progress . . .

Happy Birthday, Claire!

I was already an uncle by marriage - Wendi's sister has three kids - but today I became an uncle on the Gratz side of the family!

Claire Elizabeth Gratz was born this morning at 8:45 a.m. She weighed in at 9 pounds, 6 ounces, and measured 20 inches. (We Gratzes like to grow 'em big.) Mother Laurie and daughter Claire are both doing well. The state of my brother John is unknown at this point.

It's still weird to think of John having a child. I mean, this is the guy I tricked into signing a contract making him my personal slave when I was in the fourth grade. (Unfortunately, the contract was later nullified in the Court of Mom.)

Congratulations to John and Laurie, and welcome to the world little Claire. Jo is already asking to play with you.

Recycling Samurai

I guess I just wasn't ready to let Samurai Shortstop go.

More particularly, I wasn't ready to let go of the world of Ichiko, the First Higher School of Japan. Okay, yes, the book hasn't even come out yet, but the writing on it has been done for a few months now, and it's too much fun to riff on variations during those short trips back and forth to the hardware store or the farmer's market.

What if my story had been a murder mystery, I wondered, rather than a baseball/family relationship story? Ichiko would make a fascinating arena for a murder mystery. I remembered from my research that a number of students actually died each year in the early days of Ichiko. Weird, but true. Donald Roden's terrific Schooldays in Imperial Japan even had a table that listed the number of students who died by year! What they died of varied - including the occasional suicide - but what if one of those deaths had been a murder? How would the Ichiko students - charged by the headmaster to govern themselves - handle a murder on the sacred grounds of Ichiko?

The idea excited me, and visions of a short story danced in my head. It's been some time since I attempted a short story. They are tricky creatures, and I have the utmost respect for those who can write them well. Two of my most recent attempts - and when I say "recent," we're talking at least a couple of years ago - were real stinkers. They had good ideas, but terrible execution. They languish in my file cabinet to be recycled at a later date. I think I was actually better at writing short fiction back when I was in college. I wrote a great many short stories for classes then, and had ample opportunity to hone that craft. (I even sold two stories to Confrontation: The Literary Journal of Long Island University. What can I say? I started alphabetically with the A's and made a sale in the C's . . .)

Regardless, I had just finished the second of two novels that my new agent hasn't even read yet, so I figured I had time to take a break from long fiction and give it a go. It took me a little while to plot the thing out to my satisfaction while keeping it short enough to be sold, but I did it. The final result is called "To Honor Ichiko and Defend Japan." The story has none of the same characters as my novel, but the three main characters have their roots in the character work I did for Toyo, Futoshi, and Junzo from Samurai.

I've been through the story a few times now, wielding the backspace key with as much abandon as I can bear. Today I excised the first 5/7 of the first page and started the story that much sooner, cutting out a bit of preamble that I realized unnecessarily slowed the story down. Wendi has yet to read the final version (she's my in-house copy editor, and always gets final approval) so it isn't out the door yet, but I'm very happy with it. I expect to package it up here in the next day or two and submit it somewhere.

Where to submit it is the current question. My theory about slush pile submission is to start at the very top. What do you have to lose? Dial was one of the top publishers on my list, and I made a sale with Samurai. (This time I did NOT start alphabetically.) If you never try for the top, you'll never know if you could have made it. Besides, if the top magazines don't take it, I'll submit elsewhere.

So my two leading candidates are Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. I decided to go for magazines that focus on mysteries, rather than try magazines that print young adult fiction specifically, mainly because there are more opportunities in mystery magazines. They also have a wider readership, and given the mystery element to the stories, the fact that they have a YA protagonist doesn't really matter.

EQMM and AHMM are published by the same company, but are different entities with different editors, offices, and submission policies. It would be uncouth to submit to both at once, and their response time isn't so outrageous that exclusive submission is really a problem. So - which do I try first?

I've read both magazines. I think "To Honor Ichiko" would fit nicely at both, so there's really nothing to tip the scales there. I think EQ might have a slightly higher subscription base, but both magazines are readily available at most bookstores. This afternoon I was leaning toward AH, but now I'm swinging back toward EQ. Maybe I should just pull a copy of both off my shelf and let my three-year-old daughter Jo choose one. (She's remarkably good at making arbitrary decisions.)

If I never sell the story, I'll have wasted no more than a couple of weeks' writing time, which I can spare right now. Even then, I might print a dozen copies up on nice paper in a little chapbook and offer them as prizes on my website to anyone who read Samurai and stops by to say konichiwa . . .

UPDATE: "To Honor Ichiko and Defend Japan" went out today (1/5/06) to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. I'll let you know when the rejection letter arrives. :-)

Books: Planetes, Volume 2

Planetes, Volume 2 by Makoto Yukimura

Oh wow. What can I say about a book where the climax is a hug?

It's really not as cutesy as it sounds. In the midst of a "John Woo moment" - bullets whizzing, karate kicks flying, grenades exploding - Hachimaki reaches a moment of truth. If he shoots a friend turned terrorist, he will lose every last shred of humanity he posseses. And yet his old friend now violently opposes all that Hachimaki holds dear: the exploration of space and its explotation for the betterment of mankind. To kill him will mean accepting the vast emptiness of space into himself, and still Hachimaki pulls the trigger . . .

Until the new girl, Tanabe, steps in between him and his victim to hug him and kiss him. It's a simple, compassionate act that does far more than words could, and it brings the chaos of the scene to a screeching, tender halt. It's as though everyone has been under the influence of something otherworldly until Tanabe steps up and asserts her humanity. Meanwhile, Hachimaki is prevented from taking that last, irrevocable step into the abyss - if only for a time.

Love, love, love this series. First volume was better overall, but this one has brilliant moments. Doesn't pull any punches either - in the end, Hachimaki is still pursuing his dreams of space, no matter what the cost . . .