Ashley is STACKED.
I dragged myself out of the dissertation cave long enough to vote... and to make an appearance at STACKED for the Contemporary YA week to talk diversity. Here's a bit:
Often I hear from readers of What Can’t Wait and The Knife and the Butterfly with questions along the lines of, “How did you know it was like this for me?” Readers of What Can’t Wait sometimes assume that I’m telling my own story (I’m not, except in that something of every author lodges in her books), but since The Knife and the Butterfly deals with gang culture and is narrated from a Salvadoran-American teenage male’s perspective, the question is all the more frequent in that context. How does a nerdy, twenty-something mother make the leap into that world.
You can read the rest of my engaging rambles over here.
Don't miss out on the 2012 Summer Book Blast Tour
I'm writing you from the depths of a hideous stomach virus, and I recommend each and every one of you to stay FAR, FAR away from me. What better way to keep your distance than by making a few stops on this year's Summer Book Blog Tour? You can see the whole schedule, with links and snippets posted each day, here at Chasing Ray. Here are a few hot stops from days one and two:
Kate Milford - Chasing Ray: "Staten Island is a perfect blank for lots of folks, except they know there's a ferry and they know there's an expressway."
Randa Abdel Fattah - Crazy QuiltEdi: "...A feeling of dread came over me as I worried that I'd be the last person to be chosen. And it clicked then that the desire to belong and not stand out as 'a loner' never quite leaves you, even after your school days are long gone."
Tim Lebbon - Bildungsroman: "Blimey...quite some time since I wrote that story. It's a tale about a guy losing his wife, and then trying to regain some hold on her by bringing back all the dolls she used to collect."
Nalo Hopkinson - The Happy Nappy Bookseller: "It's a dilemma for many -- not all --young black Canadians as they try to self-define. On this continent, blackness is seen as synonymous with black Americanness. If they don't look and act like what people associate with American blackness, they get seen as weird, inauthentic."
Tuesday
Timothy Decker - Chasing Ray: "I put hours into every illustration because I want to make drawings that are so interesting or intense that a child falls into them. I want them to have a magical adventure inside their mind, where my words or maybe just my illustrations spark all kinds of thoughts or questions. No one blows through my books as if the stories are mindless entertainment, they have to bring their brain and meet me half way."
YS Lee - The Ya Ya Yas: "What's not to love about a perfect storm of mega-pollution, heat wave, and the great public health panic of urban London?"
Tanita Davis - The Happy Nappy Bookseller: "A little bonus fact: I wrote Ysabel's backstory twice because originally she was in orchestra, and my editor said that there were too many YA novels with female characters who played cellos."
What a fabulous way to discover new authors and old friends (if you missed the mad love I have for Tanita Davis and her book Happy Families, go back to this post). And you can find me chatting with Edi Campbell of Crazy QuiltEdi on Friday, by which time I will be safely uncontagious, I hope!
How to beat writer's block over and over
Last week, I shared one of my favorite tricks for beating writing block with figment.com, the amazing (as in, "Holy cow, where were you when I was sixteen?!") online writing community for teens and YA lovers. (Seriously, everybody... if you know a teen writer, make sure they know about this site.)
My method involves any book whose prose you admire, a pencil, and some careful attention to the joints between words. It's guaranteed (just about) to shake you out of writer's block if you've got it, and you can use it over and over...
Read the whole prompt here. You won't be sorry!
