I can’t believe it, but the time has come again to announce a new novel!  And do a GIVEAWAY!

The giveaway details are below, but first, here’s the cover! Bam!

How about that, huh? Oh, what is the book about you ask…?

THE DARKEST PATH follows Callum Roe, a sixteen year old growing up in the midst of the Second American Civil War.

Cal and his brother James were kidnapped by The Army of the Glorious Path in the early days of the war and forced to work in service of the revolution. But once Cal learns more about the life the Path has planned for him and his brother he decides it’s finally time to escape.

To get home, Cal must survive a perilous journey from Arizona to New York, while evading two armies locked in combat for the future of the country.

THE GIVEAWAY!

I’m going to do TWO actually, one for twitter and one for Facebook. Winners get a signed advance copy of the book! Yep, as soon as Scholastic puts those books in my hands I will put a personalized and signed one in yours. You’ll be one the first people anywhere to have it.

To enter for a chance to get your hands on an advance copy, simply follow me on facebook and/or twitter in the next two weeks.  Follow me on both and that’s two entries!

You can like my facebook page HERE.

And you can follow me on twitter HERE.

Thanks guys! Can’t wait to get this one out there!

Hi everyone! Hope you have a fun and safe holiday!!

Wow! I can’t believe we’re actually here already. Magisterium is now officially released. It’s in stores and shipping from web retailers!

Once again I’m bowled over by the simple fact that I’m actually being given the chance to publish a book.  Geez, I really hope that doesn’t come off as false humility cause it’s really true. As many of you may know, I went through many many years of rejection before getting here so the idea that I now have a 2nd book that was made a Junior Library Guild Selection and is now sitting on bookshelves and making it’s way through the mail to people’s doorsteps is simply amazing.

Thanks to everyone at Scholastic, my amazing family and my sweet wife Gertie! Also thanks to every bookstore, school, library, festival and conference that has supported me for the last two years.

I’m super excited about this book and hope you all will be too!

So what am I doing for my release day? Well it’s a beautiful and slightly chilly fall day here in Beacon so I’m thinking I’ll be making up a batch of butternut squash soup, putting a fire in the fireplace and hanging out with Gertie and our growing menagerie of animals. Should be much fun!

Oh and to just catch everyone up on Magisterium, you can read a synopsis and a sample RIGHT HERE!  If you’re so inclined to order a copy (thanks!) you can use the links on the right hand side of that page. Plase consider ordering from Indiebound and supporting local independent booksellers!

Hi friends!

So I just got these 10 author copies of Magisterium and they’re already burning a whole in my pocket.

So let’s do a  GIVEAWAY!

Just comment on this post (including some way me for me to get back to you) and you will be entered to win a signed copy!

Need a little more convincing before you enter? You can go here and read the first three chapters.  It’s ok. I’ll wait.

All ready? Ok, comment away! Sorry, I’m going to have to do this one USA and Canada only. I’ll let the old random number generator pick a winner on Friday.

The book doesn’t come out for another month so this will get you the book before just about anyone else!

So happy to offer you all the first three chapters of Magisterium! Since this sample is on Scrib’d you can read here on my site, on theirs or even download the chapters and read them wherever the fancy strikes you!  If you really think it’s nifty there even are handy embed codes so you can put the sample on your own site.

Hope you enjoy!

Read the First Three Chapters Here! 

When I go to schools I find myself comparing being a writer to being an athlete alot. Which is probably weird since I’m about the furthest thing from a sports fan as you can imagine. But I was thinking about this again today as I was editing Dog Soldier (which, by the way, is not going to be called Dog Soldier much longer. Not sure what it will be called instead yet. Stayed tuned) and I came to a scene that was just not working. I came at it from one direction after another until I finally realized that the problem was that I had absolutely no idea what one of the two characters in the scene wanted. I had no idea why she was there.

That, my friends , is that the sporty folks would call a problem with my fundamentals.

See, when you think about it, baseball comes down to throwing a ball, catching a ball, hitting a ball and running. As you move higher up in the sport layers of strategy and complexity are put on top of that but the foundation is always throwing, catching, hitting and running.  Look at pro athletes, no matter where they are in their career they are still practicing those fundamentals. It’s the basis of everything they do.

I think with writing, especially after you’ve been doing it awhile, you can get too wrapped up in the complexities of things and, like I did in that scene, lose sight of the fundamentals. To move forward I had to stop thinking about theme or character arcs or any of that stuff and simply ask myself…why is this person here? What does she want in this scene?

Of course this raises the question of what exactly are the fundamentals writing wise? Opinions absolutely vary, but for me at least, I think they are….

• What need is each character trying to fill?
• How do they go about trying to fill it?
• What gets in their way?
• Specificity and clarity of language.

I’m curious. What do you all think are the writing fundamentals?

Hi all!

Not alot of detail yet and nothing to link to, but I can tell you that MAGISTERIUM  has just been made a Junior Library Guild Selection for Fall 2012!!

This is super exciting! If you don’t know the JLG, their mission is to help libraries wade through the mass of books published every season and pick what’s best for their collections.  They review thousands of upcoming titles and pick just a few as their official selections in several categories.

So happy to be a part of it! Thanks to the Guild!!

Just as a heads up, this brief posts assumes you have either A) have already seen Prometheus B) Haven’t seen it, don’t plan to and therefore don’t care about spoilers.

If you answered B, well, all I can say is that after having seen the movie I wish I had made the same decision.

Don’t get me wrong, there was some good stuff in the movie (Pretty much the beautiful visuals and Michael Fassbender) but there were also things in the movie that are really great object lessons for people who write. Namely:

Don’t set up that your characters are all brilliant and then make your plot dependent on them acting really really stupid: Honestly this is the movie’s worst failing. Sure, no one says that the crew are all geniuses or anything, but hey, they’re scientists good enough that a company is sending them a trillion miles from earth in what may be the greatest scientific expedition of all time. They’ve probably got some game, right?

Well, if they do then one would think they wouldn’t:

• Remove their helmets on a completely alien world. Sure, we know the air is breathable but how can they possibly know that there isn’t some alien super flu (or whatever) just floating around ready to make their innards into soup? I mean, wouldn’t it  pay to be a little extra cautious when you’re the first person ever to step onto an alien world?
• Stuff alien artifacts into ziploc bags and the take them onto the ship to examine them without bothering to put them into some kind of isolation before you do it. (Also, why were they in such a hurry? Sure there was a huge storm coming but this stuff had been sitting there for thousands of years and I don’t think the dead guys head was going anywhere. Again, a little caution was called for.)
• See a bizarre alien cobra thing floating around in an icky black lake and think “Hey! I know! I’ll just go ahead and touch it!”

Now sure, smart people do dumb things all the time and maybe these people are overcome with, I don’t know, space madness or something, but if that is the case the audience needs to be made aware of it. I need to understand why they’re making these decisions or else I just wonder why the mega corp sent the  Three Stoooges on a trillion dollar mission

Don’t do things just because they’re convenient for your as a writer:  Ok these drove me nuts as well. Three things. Fassbender using his weird helmet thing to see Rapace’s extremely exposition heavy dreams,  the incredibly convenient but baffling Engineer holograms we see running around inside the ship and Rapace’s magical de-aliening surgery.

Seriously? The dream helmet thing? It was used once in the whole movie simply to communicate a piece of exposition that A) the robot could have known in many other ways and B) could have been simply communicated in a line or two of dialogue. (For brevity’s sake we’ll ignore the fact that it really wasn’t an important piece of exposition anyway)

And the Engineer hologram thing? I grant you that it looked neat and all but, why would it have existed? I guess the aliens were recording everything they did on the ship in hologram form. Why would they do that? Seems awful convenient for our heros. And our writers. Again, ultimately I guess this was done to communicate some exposition to us and the team but man, it was a pretty heavy handed way of doing it.

And the surgery? Ok, we sometimes have to fudge the timeline on things a little, but seriously? She has what is essentially a C-section, while awake, and then she is stapled up and running through the ship literally minutes later. I think, at most, she winces once. Now honestly, it’s not so much that it wasn’t realistic that bothers me, it’s that the writers put a character in a huge and interesting predicament and then solved it with what is essentially a punt. “Eh she gets magic surgery and she’s fine. Whatever. Let’s move on.”  That’s just weak writing. I think if you embrace the difficulty of a problem and the seeming impossibility of solving it, you are forced to come up with  better and more creative solutions.

Shut up already: I had this same problem with Dark Knight Rises. Too often writers think that if characters spend alot of time talking about big heady issues–like faith or the responsibility of creators to their creations–then it means that the movie is about those things in some significant way. It’s not. A story is about, say,  faith when we see the ways in which faith, or the lack thereof, effects a characters actions, when it creates conflicts, when it is the engine of the story. Not when people talk about it. This is a classic show vs. tell problem. Don’t talk about your ideas, show us your ideas in action and let us make the connections.

How about y’all? Anybody see this and take other lessons from it?

Wonder what you need to be reading this coming Fall? Then you need to check out the just posted 2012 Scholastic Fall Preview, with videos of me, Maggie Stiefvater and others discussing what we have coming your way.

I struggled to figure out a way to get this embedded but I was mystified so here the link!

Enjoy!

So have you guys seen this? Basically there’s some talk that there should be movie-like ratings created specifically for YA books.

On one hand, I get it. I’m not a parent but I can get why parents would want a hand figuring out which books do and do not conform to their values.  There are alot of books out there so asking for  a simple way to look at a book and it’s content isn’t out of line.

But I think my problem isn’t so much it being done, as it is how it would be done. Any rating system is going to be based around a list of flagged content, right? In movies its nudity, language, violence, smoking, drug use, etc. When it comes to books some board will have the job of deciding what deserves to be flagged. Langauge? That one is pretty cut and dried. Violence? OK, but how do you deal with the way violence is depicted? Is it action movie type glorification? Is it critiqued? Does it matter? And what about sexuality? Will hetero sex be flagged in the same way and to the same degree as gay sex, for instance? How about the way religion is handled in YA books? Could “blasphemous content”  become an issue thats flagged? I can sure bet there are people who would want it to be.

And once a list of flagged content is determined  how do we weigh these instances and arrive at a rating?

The MPAA, the group that does movie ratings, is frequently challenged for it’s tendency to allow astonishing acts of violence in a PG-13 movie, but will slap an R on something that has a tiny bit of sex or a few bad words, no matter the context. Or, in another recent controversy the anti-bullying film Bully, a well reviewed film and an important one for our time, was given an R rating for using a bit of bad language. (As an aside, the MPAA is primarily made up of former big movie studio execs and, in what I’m sure is a total coincidence, the board tends to be much harder on indie films, even when they have similar content to studio films.)

And all of this brings us to the huge economic issues that will be at play. If a book is rated as being for more mature teen readers will B&N carry it? Will Target? Or Wal-mart?  Now, buyers may read a book and decide that despite challenging content it’s an important book and deserves to be on their shelves. Once you start putting letter grades on things suddenly it becomes very easy for corporations to make a blanket statement that they won’t carry anything with this or that rating, no matter the context. Saves them from being criticized. And once buyers say they won’t take them you’ll see publishers stop publishing them.  This ends nowhere good for books.

So in some ways I’m at a loss. I get some parents desire for this but I just can’t think of how this can done in a way that doesn’t get hopelessly tangled up in politics and doesn’t ultimately hurt publishing and deny readers good books.

Any wisdom out there on this?