YALSA Teen Lit Symposium: Diversity

Last weekend, I headed out to Albuquerque for the YALSA Teen Lit Symposium. It was an amazing event that focused on the literature. If you are a writer looking for an ALA conference to attend, I highly recommend it. It's less about the ins and outs of running a library, and more about the books themselves, which was particularly great for me as an author and a librarian. I participated on two panels, one on LGBTQ lit, and one on Body Positivity and Fat Lit (incidentally, if librarian Angie Manfredi ever asks you to participate in a panel, say yes -- she is insightful, organized, and fun).

Here I am, pretending to sign a book at the Author Happy Hour:(Yes, dorkiness, thy name is Megan. Thanks to Ruta Sepetys for taking the picture.)


Anyway, now to the meat of this post. The theme of the Symposium was Diversity. This led to many great conversations both in formal workshops, and over meals between sessions. The general sentiment I picked up from both authors and librarians is that we are looking for books where whatever makes the person diverse or a minority is not the whole subject of the books. We -- and the teens we work with -- want books in which people from all different backgrounds are struggling with the same things teens are struggling with in other books: friends, romance, parents, zombies.

This theme came up most profoundly during the Saturday morning panel Commercial Success and Diversity: Are Both Possible, or Are They a Contradiction in Terms? Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, Neesha Meminger, Cynthea Liu, Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, and moderator Malinda Lo talked about the pressures they've faced as authors to make their work more or less "ethnic." It's like as authors we're trying to push past the barriers that are in place, but keep meeting resistance. As one panelist said (and forgive me for not taking better notes), if there isn't already a model for success, they don't know how to sell it, and thus they shy away.

It's a fine line, I think, between moving past the standard boxes that people try to put other people and literature into, and ignoring those boxes. Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez said she was taking a cue from television and working in the "stealth Latinos": characters whose ethnicity is pretty much irrelevant. While I understand where she's going with this, something about it didn't quite sit with me. Yes, I want teens in YA literature to have full lives beyond their gender, race, body type, sexuality, or abilities. But I don't think we should erase those things. They shape our characters and make them who they are.

On the other hand, in our panel on the state of LGBTQ literature for teens Malinda Lo spoke about the reactions she got to Ash in which people questioned her choice to create a fantasy world in which homophobia did not exist. She wanted, she said, to write a fairy tale, to allow lesbian readers to experience the simple pleasure of falling in love without the pressures of a heteronormative society weighing it down. This resonated for me: we all deserve fairy tales, don't we?

Alexa Martin: Base Work

So I’ve been thinking about running lately. In part I’ve been thinking about running because when I'm not impersonating a writer I work at a running store called Route 16. It's my day job but it is also one of my passions. I love turning non-runners into runners and it’s something that I’m good at, largely because I know without a shadow of a doubt that if I can run, ANYONE can run. I didn’t start running until I was nineteen years old, and I still remember how elated I was when I ran three miles without stopping to die. Over the years I've trained myself to run longer and longer distances. First a 10K, later a half-marathon, and then a marathon. 

In my early thirties, crippled with IT band syndrome, I nodded earnestly while the doctor told me I should never run for more than an hour. But I didn't exactly listen. Instead, I switched to trail running, partly because the impact is so much less on your body, but mostly because nothing makes me feel so much like a kid as pounding through the woods on muddy trails. Six months after the doctor made his dire pronouncement I ran a trail ultra-marathon... pain and injury free. I believe in the benefits of trail running, and if ever we meet in person I will tell you everything you never thought you wanted to know about trail running. And I will be so enthusiastic about it that you will probably forget to be annoyed with me and want to try it yourself. And you will love it. Truly. I promise (and if you are a female I will very likely convince you to join the Dirty Girls, my all-ladies trail running group). 

Sadly, I haven't gotten to run much this past year, at least not until very recently--which is another one of the reasons running has been on my mind. We want what we can't have, right? While rock-climbing last February, I took a huge fall and landed on my back and neck. I was hurt pretty badly, although I didn't find out how badly until late this summer when I started losing all feeling in my left arm and went five weeks without sleeping because of acute pain. An MRI revealed that I'd completely shattered the disc between C4 and C5 in my neck. My only option was surgery. To reach the C-Spine with minimal damage, surgeons go in through "the anterior" for an artificial disc replacement. Which is a nice way of saying that the good docs slit your throat and get paid a nice sum of money for the pleasure. Thankfully surgery is behind me now (though the bills keep rolling in like a tidal surge). The feeling has returned to my arm. The pain in my neck and shoulder is gone. I sleep most nights. When people ask me about my scar I tell them that I got into a knife fight. They don't press for details because who wants to piss off a girl who lived to tell the tale of a knife fight? 

On a different note (one that's relevant, I promise) I finished a book earlier this year. It's a contemporary YA novel called Girl Wonder. On multiple occasions in my life, well-intentioned people have tried to discourage me from writing--just as the doctor tried to discourage me from running long distances five years ago. I believe that one of my fatal flaws is that I don't always listen. I also believe that our fatal flaws are also often our greatest assets. Anyhow, in my final round of revisions my editor pushed me to go to the deepest, darkest most wounded places of my psyche. Kicking and screaming and crying I did what she asked. And I'm very glad I did, because ultimately I want my book to do some good in this world and help teenagers to heal from their hurts. When it comes to writing, if we want to offer our readers some kind of salvation we have to bare our own pain, right? But I won't lie to you... I injured myself finishing Girl Wonder, as badly as I injured myself when I fell off the rock wall (though it's harder to point out to the doctors the specific source of the pain when it comes to book writing). 

I am slowly healing from my neck surgery, and have recently returned to the trails. But I'm tired of being wounded and don't want to take unnecessary chances anymore, so I have a running coach now. 

"This fall is all about base work for you," he keeps saying. 

 "Tell me again what base work means?" I ask for the umpteenth time. I mean, I know there's got to be a reason why he has me doing hill-repeats, weight-lifting, and eating lots of protein. 

"Base work is about teaching your body how to endure so that down the road you can push it to do more without getting hurt. Base work is about developing good habits." 

Good habits? 

"You have to work the inside before you can work the outside. Base work takes time. You have to have patience."

Time? Patience? 

"You have to develop your tendons and ligaments and muscles and cardiovascular system before you can really push them. You have to hold back a little." 

Hold back? 

Base work. It's a concept that's hard for instant-gratification me to wrap my mind around.

The final push of Girl Wonder is fading to a blurry memory now. I've recently started writing again. It's terrifying being back at square one and feeling like a beginner. It's just me and the blank page and all these half-baked ideas in my head that mostly slip away the second I try to retrieve them. I delete more than I write. I wake up in the middle of the night suddenly realizing that major characters are irrelevant. I so desperately want every word and paragraph to sound like polished manuscript material. As I struggle to write I daydream about running. My very favorite runs are the ones in which the brush is so thick that I can't even see my feet but I'm not stumbling because my instincts take over, and my body listens to its surroundings and understands where to go and what to do without me having to guide it. It's primitive and primordial and the most free feeling in all the world. It's going to take some serious base work to get back to this place. But it will be worth it. This I know. 

Returning my attention to the computer screen, I realize that base work applies to writing as well. And so I try to trust that even if I delete today's work tomorrow that these words I am writing now are not wasted, that even if I never see them again, that even if no one ever reads them they are still leading me and my story to where we need to go. When it comes to writing, discarded words are simply a part of laying down the base work miles. Sitting in front of a blank page--seat work, I believe is the term--even though it's scary and uncomfortable and feels unproductive is simply mental strength training. 

It's going to take some time before my subconscious takes over for my new book. It's going to be a while before the ideas really start to flow. But I know something now that I didn't know before: I can't skip this part of the writing process, crazy-making as it may be. It will be worth it. This I believe. It's what keeps me writing these days. 

As my coach says, this fall is all about base work for me.

Happy writing, my friends. Happy Trails. 

Lisa: What's love got to do with it?

I recently read through a thread on a writer's message board started by a woman (I'll call her Jane) who felt really discouraged by a rejection she had received from an agent. This particular rejection used the phrase "not loving it." She said she can usually brush off rejections and move on, but this one for some reason really hit her hard. Her husband told her, "I don't know why she'd have to love it. Isn't it whether she thinks the manuscript can be sold?"

I'm not an agent or an editor, so I'm not going to tackle the topic as if I am. That wouldn't be right. But I want to talk about this a little bit, because it wasn't that long ago that I was receiving those kinds of rejections. Now that I'm in a different place, and have been through submissions with an agent who usually does love my work, I know I wouldn't *want* anything less than love. And since I'm guessing many people who read this blog are on the agent search, I thought it'd make a good discussion.

First of all, an agent has many clients, and often shops multiple projects to multiple editors at the same time. So, imagine an agent who takes on a paranormal romance YA because she thinks she can probably sell it, even though paranormal romances aren't really her thing. She read the book, and she thinks it's an okay read, but she definitely doesn't love it.

Over on the other side of her desk, though, there's this contemporary story that grabbed her from page one and didn't let go until she closed the book. She couldn't wait to tell the author how much she enjoyed the book, and she has sent it to specific editors who she knows love this kind of book. On top of that, she's halfway through reading a dystopian novel that is unlike anything she's ever seen and is trying to read as fast as she can so she can offer representation.

Personally, I don't want to be the lukewarm book in the bunch! Just imagine the conversation:

Agent: "Hi, this is Annabelle with Just-In-It-For-The-Money Literary Agency, and I have this paranormal romance you might be interested in. It has a girl and two hot boys. Well, I don't find zombies particularly hot, but I'm thinking teen girls in this market might. They're ugly and disgusting and they smell bad, but they want this girl, and they will stop at nothing to get her. She's really torn between the two, because one is nice and the other is mean. You know how girls love that bad boy thing, even though I don't think that means a boy who is out to kill you. But what do I know? I think this kind of thing is selling."

Editor: "You're not really convincing me, sorry. You don't happen to have any good contemporary YA, do you? Or an out-of-this-world dystopian?"

Agent: "Oh, do I ever! I just sent a fantastic contemporary out to eight editors, but I'd be happy to send it to you too. And I may have a dystopian to send you too..."

And suddenly, yours is forgotten and instead, the one the agent really loves is going out to one more editor.

Wouldn't you rather be the one the agent LOVES? Of course you would! And what I think Jane has to remember is that when it comes to books, tastes are subjective! Personally, I'd take a rejection that says, "I just didn't love it" over one that says, "The writing is really weak and the characters fall flat" any day of the week! Because to me, the first one says, "this isn't my thing," while the second one says, "you have some work to do!"

Writers, trust me, you want an agent who loves your work. Look at me. I write weird stuff sometimes. I mean, my book           I HEART YOU, YOU HAUNT ME? It's kind of weird. A few agents I queried were completely lost as to what kind of book I'd written. But Sara, who thankfully does not work for the Just-In-It-For-The-Money Literary Agency, loved it. She felt that the verse created an atmosphere I couldn't have created with regular prose. That's what she said in an e-mail to me setting up an appointment to talk. Do you know I didn't even realize at the time that creating that atmosphere is exactly why I write in verse? It is still, to this day, why I choose to write some stories in verse. She got it. I mean, she really got it!

We went on to get something like nine rejections on this story before it sold. Do you want another reason why an agent has to love your work? Well, here it is. Remember, agents get rejected too. They have to be able to pick themselves up and keep on sending that baby out. I'm guessing some days, it's not an easy thing to do.

Fortunately, I HEART YOU, YOU HAUNT ME found an editor who loved it, after many who didn't. By the time it finally sold, I couldn't believe it. I'd heard "No" so many times, it was hard to believe someone actually wanted to publish it.

In January, it will be three years since the book was released. It's still on the shelves, which is no small feat. It's sold well. BUT, does everyone love it? No! Some people hate it - it's just not their thing. We must *always* remember - tastes are subjective! I try not to focus on the people who don't love it, because I don't write for them. I write for all of the other people who DO love it. And yeah, it all started with an agent who loved it.

I say, don't settle for anything less than love. Keep looking. Keep trying. Keep writing!! And when you finally have the perfect match, between an agent and one of your manuscripts, you'll be glad you kept looking until true love found you.

I'm curious, though... do the rejections that speak of not quite loving it bug you more than the other ones? And if so, why do you think that is?

~Lisa

Christine: Authenticity in Characters' $*&%$ Dialogue

Today sucks.

Okay, a couple of disclaimers:

1. No, it doesn’t.
2. Even if it did, I would never say that.

But some of the characters I’ve created for my novels would. Lots of teenagers populate my novels, and teens aren’t necessarily known for the most nuanced of vocabularies.

I’ve had several conversations recently with people who think literature is among the arts contributing to the coarsening of our society. They don’t like vulgar language, or even relatively mild slang, in books—particularly those their kids may be reading.

I totally get that. I’m a mom myself, and I’m the daughter of a mother who grimaced once when I used the word “stink,” admonishing me to replace it with “smell unpleasant.” Her prim New England sensibilities are etched indelibly on my brain. And like my mother, I consider the standard not just a matter of etiquette, but of wordsmithing. Where’s the challenge in settling for language’s lowest common denominators? I’ve tried to set comparable standards for my own kids.

But do I trust that they can hear other people using salty language without following suit? Yes. And time has proved me right. They’re young adults now, and I’ve never heard them say anything that would make their grandmother blush. (Well . . . almost never.)

So how do I feel when they read dialogue coming from my characters’ lips that they could never image their mother saying?

Well . . . fine. First of all, I’m happy the distinction is clear, and second, I consider it my job to create characters who are credible, relatable and relevant. This doesn’t mean all of my characters cuss like sailors (which would be unrepresentative of and disrespectful to my readers), but it means that, by and large, they communicate differently than the middle-aged woman who created them. I think my art demands it.

When I’m writing at my best, my imagination is on cruise control. The characters have taken the wheel, and I’m just along for the ride. But if I start censoring them, the smooth path suddenly seems riddled with speed bumps. That doesn’t mean my characters have carte blanche to act or speak any way they please, but it means I have enough respect for them to be as true to them as possible. And if they are acting and speaking authentically, I think my readers respond to that, without compromising their own values in the process. Indeed, bad behavior in literature tends to cast our own values in sharp relief. It would seem condescending and inartful to give readers any less than a fully realized character, flaws and all.

Consider a scene from my young-adult novel, THEN I MET MY SISTER. The scene involves my protagonist’s frustration that her cold, controlling mother can never let herself be vulnerable, and therefore can never fully connect with her daughter. The mother’s emotional unavailability has no doubt blunted the shattering grief of losing her firstborn in a car wreck 18 years earlier, but this scene suggests the price she is paying:

Mom looks at me squarely. “You saved my life.”

A chill runs up my spine. I’ve heard this all my life, usually from other people: You gave your mother a reason to go on, they’ve said, or, I don’t think she could have made it without you. No pressure there, right?

I squeeze the blade of grass and green moisture stains my fingers. “It freaks me out a little when you say that, Mom.”

Anger flashes across Mom’s face.

“I mean, I’m glad you were happy to get pregnant again,” I clarify, trying to sound casual. “It’s just. . . .” It’s just friggin’ hard to be born with a job.

“You don’t have to explain,” Mom says, her voice steely.

“Don’t get mad, Mom,” I say. “We should be able to talk about things.”

“We’re talking,” she snaps.

I stand up abruptly and put my hands on my hips. “I hate it when you do this—shutting me out every time I try to open up to you.”

Mom turns defiantly, returning to her hands and knees, returning to her weeds.

“By all means, Summer, open up and let me know it annoys you to be told you make me happy,” she mutters to the dirt.

My stomach tightens, and my eyes shimmer with tears. God. I never cry in front of my mother. “I’m not goddamn annoyed!”

Mom turns and stares at me sharply. “Don’t curse at me, young lady.”

I open my mouth to respond, but Mom has resumed digging in the dirt, clawing her fingers into the soil, yanking up weeds and tossing them aside without giving them another glance. Each weed will be purged methodically, systematically, impassively, until her garden is perfect.

And she is finished talking to me.

I think this scene demands the cold-water jolt of harsh language.

And I think my readers can handle it.

Kristen: My Comfort Zone Update (it’s actually getting bigger)

Last we left it, I was a freakishly private person who adored my cat and avoided the Internet and wrote books for teens, tweens, and people who are younger than that. I am still all of those things. Mostly. But I also Twitter. I did not create a wit-busting handle.

You can find me at http://twitter.com/kristen_tracy

I mostly discuss my bus adventures in San Francisco and also offer quirky (sometimes startling) animal facts.

Sample tweet: Researching tween book and found out polar bears are so toxic (PBDEs attack sex and thyroid glands) that 3 out of 100 are hermaphrodites.

In addition to my Twitter birth, since I last reported on my comfort zone, I’ve repeatedly left my house. I even went on tour.

It’s true. This summer I bought some new shirts and went on my first national book tour to promote my teen novel A FIELD GUIDE FOR HEARTBREAKERS. Hyperion-Disney sent me out into the world with Stacey Kade and Brent Crawford and we flipcammed various parts of this experience and posted the footage to Hyperion-Disney’s unRequired Reading Facebook page.

http://www.facebook.com/unREQUIREDREADING

During the San Francisco leg of our travels, I gave them a crazy behind-the-scenes tour of Alcatraz. Seriously. I even took them inside a secret tunnel. (I guess that tunnel is a lot less secret now.)

In addition to the tour, a couple of weeks ago, for San Francisco’s Annual Literary Festival, I performed at the Porchlight Storytelling Series in front of several hundred people. I told a story about my book tour (My story focused on a pigeon that I saw that got run over and killed by two Segways in Washington, D.C. Apparently, pigeons don’t understand what Segways are yet). I was SO SCARED. Somebody told me I made the piano player laugh. I don’t remember any of it.

I also hit the airwaves. Yep. I read a bunch of my poems for KQED Writer’s Block, which meant I got to hear my own voice coming out of the radio and it freaked me out beyond belief. Because I don’t really sound like that, do I?

And I did more radio. I was interviewed by Michael Krasny on his show Forum with a group of women poets. Holy crap! I was scared out of my mind. And before we went live the show’s producer read us a huge list of naughty words we weren’t allowed to say on the air, and after she finished saying the naughty words, I said, “I am very afraid of the direction you think this interview is going to take.” And everybody laughed. But I was serious.

And then, as if I hadn’t done enough, I believe I may have joined a literary movement. I know. I know. It’s been quite a year. I’m part of The Contemps, a group of 21 contemporary authors with books coming out next year. It’s a fantastic group.

http://www.thecontemps.com

I was really nervous about joining them. Because I am afraid to blog. Because I am a carbon-based life form mostly made out of water and fear.

Okay. That’s my comfort zone update. Do I miss my reclusive life? TREMENDOUSLY! Then why am I doing this to myself? Because I am a writer. And I’ve come to realize that this means playing on the Internet (a little bit). I try to play for less than an hour a day. I have no plans to join Facebook or anything else. And I will only blog if I’m part of a large pack of people. Because at the end of the day, I still believe that the Internet is a time suck. Slup. Slup. Slup. (That’s the sound of my writing time getting sucked away while I write this blog post.)

Thanks for reading! And for your viewing pleasure, I have attached my teen shark novel cover. SHARKS & BOYS comes out summer 2011. Chomp!

Rob: Things Never Work Out As Planned

And sometimes that can be a good thing.

My dad read The Hobbit to me when I was in elementary school, and it got me fascinated with fantasy and quests and epics. So, when my fourth and fifth grade teachers asked me to write stories, I'd always start writing an enormous quest, describing the characters and their cool swords, all the wacky stuff they had in their backpacks, and how they were going to kick the bad guy's butt.

Inevitably, I'd get bored of writing this after a page or two, and I'd find a quick way to end the story. I'd set up the storyline so that the characters were going to have to overcome big obstacles and fight the villian, and I'd end it with "And they did."

It was a lot more fun for me to look at the beginning of the story and imagine the possibilities than to actually bother with writing it out. I just assumed that everything went according to plan: my awesome characters did awesome things, the bad guys were defeated, and everyone was happy.

But stories rarely go according to plan--we'd hate it if they did! We don't want to see a hero easily defeat every foe and waltz into a victory; we want to see him try and fail, and try and fail again, and barely crawl across the finish line against all odds.

One of the great military philosophers, Carl Von Clausewitz, wrote the following about battle:

"In war more than anywhere else things do not turn out as we expect. Nearby they do not appear as they did from a distance."

Clausewitz refers to this as friction: nothing goes according to plan because there are so many variables; the slightest thing could change (ruin) everything.

"...[A] general in time of war is constantly bombarded by reports both true and false; by errors arising from fear or negligence or hastiness; by disobedience born of right or wrong interpretations, of ill will, of a proper or mistaken sense of duty, of laziness, or of exhaustion; and by accidents that nobody could have foreseen. In short, he is exposed to countless impressions, most of them disturbing, few of them encouraging...."

The obvious comparison with all of this--especially in the context of this blog--is to our writing: it's this friction, these try-and-fail cycles, that make our stories interesting. They provide surprises and conflict and drama and suspense.

But that's actually not the point I wanted to make. Yes, things not going to plan can be good for our stories, but they can also be good for our lives.

In the Spring of 2009 I graduated with my MBA. Normally, the program boasts a 97% job placement rate at graduation, but the economy had just fallen apart and most of the graduating class was unemployed. We'd expected jobs approaching or above the six-figure mark, but that salary target dropped and dropped over the following months, as we became desperate for a job--any job.

My wife and I (and our three kids) only lasted for a couple of months before moving back in with my parents. Bills went unpaid. We were uninsured. Things were definitely not going according to plan.

Every day I'd go to my dad's office and work--I'd tweak my resume and call leads and scour job listings. And then I'd write, because I had nothing else to do.

In the fall, my brother, Dan Wells, came to me and told me that if I had something to pitch, he'd pay my way to the World Fantasy convention, and he'd introduce me to agents and editors. There were only two problems with that plan: I didn't have anything sci-fi or fantasy (which is what editors at the con would be interested in) and the con was only two months away.

So, I wrote VARIANT. I pounded through the first draft in a little under two weeks, and then spent the next month and a half revising and polishing. I went to the con and pitched very poorly (and unsuccessfully), but Sara picked me up about a week after that.

VARIANT sold in April to HarperTeen in a fantastic three-book deal.

But here's the thing that just blows my mind: if things had "gone to plan", then I'd have an MBA job (that I'd probably dislike, because business has always been the backup plan), and I'd still write novels in the evenings and and on weekends. But things didn't go to plan--I failed to get a job. And there were dozens and dozens of try-and-fail cycles in those months of unemployment.

If things had gone to plan, I'd have never written the book. I'd have never gotten an agent. I'd have never gotten a book deal.

Sometimes it's great when things don't go to plan.

Troy: Cover Story

When I pulled up the chair to my drawing table, to illustrate the cover for my middle grade novel, there I sat competing with myself, having an artist-writer stare-down.

Problem is, I find it easier to depict a scene or a subject with words than with paint.

I wrote The Dragon of Cripple Creek (Abrams/Amulet, April 2011) with no intention of illustrating it, and hardly knew what I'd do for the cover. I had already painted with words—the images were there, waiting to be enhanced by the reader's own vision. I had said all I'd wanted to say.

But books need covers, and logically, since I'm also an artist ...

I believe a cover should read like a premise. It's the book's visual pitch. You get one shot, usually. Setting, protagonist, antagonist, conflict, genre, theme, even voice—some or all of these can be conveyed on the cover, though the simpler the design the more immediate the message. Above all, audience is the primary consideration. Had this been a book for adults, I would have depicted the little scene of Cripple Creek, Colorado, in early lithographic style, with the dragon hovering skyward in psychic distance. But being an MG, it must appeal to that age group, and also appeal to them through the eyes of parents, grandparents, aunts, booksellers.

The story involves the last dragon on earth who's been holed up in a gold mine for ages. A real gold mine—the Mollie Kathleen in Cripple Creek, Colorado. Kat Graham, the heroine, discovers Ye, the dragon, after an accidental fall down an abandoned chute, and consequently triggers the twenty-first century gold rush. Her mishap also endangers Ye and his glittering subterranean Wonderland. In short, it's Calamity Jane colliding with the Reluctant Dragon, and the dragon in turn colliding with our world.

Illustrating a book cover is not a time to indulge the inner artist, though that may happily occur during the process. It’s a time to submit to the needs of the book.

Here's Kat narrating the moment she meets Ye:

And beyond that, smoldering like a thundercloud at dusk, lay the dragon. He was as tarnished and mythological as prehistory itself. Two gold-leafed wings with silver veins were folded along his back; a scarlet ruffle ran ridge-like between them, into the shadows where his tail was curled; two silver strands hung from his chin; two filaments of smoke rose from his nostrils; two glowing eyes glared into mine. Fire-and-cinnamon eyes. They say that dragons can cast a spell with one look—and I believe it. I was stuck in that stare. If I stepped up and peered into it, I’d see myself trapped like an insect in amber.



My first visuals were simple: a close-up of the girl holding a nugget of gold, and the dragon. (I'm showing one of many here.)

The designer, Chad Beckerman, set a rough layout for type on an altered version of a sketch.























Then I thought of focusing more on one of the main elements (pardon the pun): gold. Gold runs like a vein throughout the book. My editor, Howard Reeves, claims I've created a new mythology about dragons and gold, so I tossed a bigger chunk of gold into the picture. This new idea grew from Chad's version, with a nugget replacing the dragon's head as the central image. Gold represents several aspects of theme within the story, besides being something everyone wants to cling to, so this made sense.

It then became a matter of creating depictions true enough to what I'd already described, though I felt the words still eclipsed any pictures I could conjure up with paint.



The girl was easier than the dragon, and a young friend provided the model.


Wanting to stay true to my original vision for the book, which was that of rolling the American West and an ancient dragon into one tumbleweed tale, I aimed for a similar effect for the art and ended up with a stylized version of realism, the kind you’d see on a Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show poster that features Annie Oakley. And as you delve into the story, my cover decisions become more apparent. Kat’s pose, for example, represents her dilemma: One of her hands is pocket-bound, where she hides not only a stolen chunk of gold but her mother’s heirloom ring, to which Ye has a particular attraction; her other hand reaches out to him in compassion. As for Ye’s looks, he becomes less the stereotypical fierce fire breather after Kat’s first impression, until on further acquaintance you realize he’s a reluctant dragon by choice, becoming the antithesis of greed. A deteriorating nineteenth century wanted poster appears in one of the subplots, so that becomes the cover’s background. I credit the designer for this idea, and an artist friend with the idea of adding faded type. The wanted poster also symbolizes the craze for gold that occurs—everybody wants it—and Kat's world is crumbling; also, the aging dragon's destiny is uncertain. This kind of symbolism is not of course obvious at first glance or even after a studied look, but no matter: It helps convey mood.


In doing the cover for my own novel, the challenge was to successfully perform the task over again in an externally visual way. You’re welcome to read it and conclude for yourself whether this book can be judged by its cover.