Still trapped under heavy stuff

I'm still getting quite a few pageviews despite not having posted anything since November (that's when my editing business really started taking off), so I decided to stick my head in the door and update the three of you who may be following this blog on a regular basis.

First, I'm still working on my own YA sci-fi, but extremely slowly as other people's edits are currently taking precedence. They're paying me, after all.

The promised YA post hasn't materialized yet--I agonize over every word, so these posts actually take awhile to craft before I feel they're worthy of being read.

Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane comes out June 18 (cover your ears while I let out a fangirl squeeeee). Okay, I'm done. He is such a generous author; anyone who ordered an advance copy (me!) gets an autographed first edition. Links here (containing advance reviews and tour dates). Denver, where my sister lives, and Seattle, where my daughter lives, are on the list. He's not going to be anywhere near enough my neck of the woods, unfortunately *sadface* and here. The second link is an earlier post, from which you can order advance copies. Oh, that reminds me: I have to go order Unnatural Creatures and finally get around to reading Anansi Boys. 

ALSO: PIMPING MY TABS:

I worked very hard on the Characterizations posts as well as the Revision Strategies, although the latter can certainly afford some tweakage now that I've been editing semi-professionally for awhile. But I am quite proud of the Characterizations essays, particularly as concerns female characters. So, in the absence of new posts every week, you can always read these.

AND: BEST STUFF READ so far THIS YEAR:

Just finished A. L. Kennedy's The Blue Book and Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. Literary/realistic fiction is my first love and it was nice to come back to them.  Our school is participating in the 50 Book Challenge; of course the teachers are encouraged to participate as well; but having been fed a steady diet of YA most of this year, I decided to be a rebel and choose what I wanted to read for the last two months of the school year.  So there. I write reviews of most books I read, so if you want my take, head to my Goodreads "READ" shelf and see what I wrote. Review of Kingsolver forthcoming, since I only finished it yesterday.

Best YA read this year:

Far and away, hands-down, leaves-all-others-in-the-dust: Jellicoe Road the US title for On The Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta.  Doesn't condescend, handles teen sexuality tastefully but realistically, the prose is lanky but controlled.  Worth reading twenty-five other mediocre books to have found this one.

Thanks for stopping by.

Anne Tyler interviewed on Goodreads

To mark the release of her 19th novel, The Beginner's Goodbye, the usually-shy Anne Tyler did an interview with NPR last week--her first NPR interview in 35 years--and another on Goodreads, which made the site's April newsletter. In the interview, she talks a bit about her writing process, which I always find fascinating. She writes with a Pilot gel ink pen (I'm guessing her pen preferences have changed since she started writing, as gel inks weren't around in the 1960's) on unlined white paper. I actually know of some twenty-and-thirtysomething writers who hand write at some point in their process as well, so it isn't just a generational thing. At a certain point in her process, she reads aloud into a tape recorder. I believe I've suggested reading your work aloud or having somebody you trust read it to you (see Revision Strategies tab, the article "What if I can't find any problems in my writing?"). There are free digital recording programs such as Audacity that will enable you to record yourself or somebody else reading your work. A ten-dollar mic would do just fine for a voice recording that doesn't have to be stellar quality.

Every Tyler novel is about ordinary people in fairly mundane situations, but it's the quirks she gives them and the sometimes unconventional ways in which they deal with these situations, their search for transcendence--and the subtlety with which Tyler writes--that take her work up a level from "popular" fiction.

For the first time in her career, Tyler has tackled a subject I never thought I'd see her try.  In The Beginner's Goodbye, a grieving widower is visited by the spirit of his dead wife. This subject matter could turn maudlin or didactic in the hands of a less skilled author, so I'm eager to see how Tyler handles it. If you're waiting to find out what her personal views are on the subject of an afterlife, you'll have a long wait.

My personal favorite Tyler novels and which would I recommend?  Glad you asked.  Saint Maybe, Back When We Were Grownups, and Breathing Lessons. Among her more difficult, darker reads are:  Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Amateur Marriage, Celestial Navigation, A Patchwork Planet. I have also read and appreciated A Slipping-Down Life, If Morning Ever Comes, Digging to America, and Ladder of Years. A Slipping-Down Life and If Morning Ever Comes are two of her earliest novels; it's interesting to see how her writing has evolved.  She admits that she wouldn't recommend any of her first four novels to anyone to read. That kind of modesty is refreshing and rare these days, and my personal opinion is that she's better at her worst than many authors are at their best.