Month: June 2014

The Book of My Heart: Imaginary Girls

June 14th, 2014
Thank you for reading the Book of Your Heart series this week, and special thanks to the authors who let me share their beautiful posts about their heart books. Today, on the three-year anniversary of Imaginary Girls, I wanted to tell you why I consider this book the “book of my heart” apart from all books I’ve written or will one day write.

In December of 2006, I was working as the senior production editor at Grosset & Dunlap / Price Stern Sloan, managing the copyediting of a great many mass-market children’s books and movie tie-ins and every known version of Mad Libs, and I was also quietly, in my downtime, a writer. I would get up early before work and write at a coffee shop near the office until it was time to go in. That December, I started writing a short story called “Werewolf.” (I may or may not have been listening to this song on repeat, from an album and artist my little sister introduced me to.) The story was about two sisters, the older one who lives with a violent, rageful man and the little sister who lives with her because she can’t live with their parents. The sisters dream of escaping to Paris. Instead they rarely leave the house. There wasn’t actually a werewolf in the story, but just go with it.

I wrote this short story on the side, cheating on the adult novel I was telling myself I should revise, again, and try to query agents with, again. The story started off as a diversion, a simple piece of writing that was entirely separate from the disappointment and hope and years of work that had gone into the novel. Untainted. Fun.

The original sketchy, unfinished file of “Werewolf” from December 2006 contained this paragraph from the POV of the little sister, Chloe, about her older sister, Ruby:

“I knew her another way. She did have a tongue, and she used it to lick peanut butter off a spoon, her most favorite snack. She was beautiful, truly, what I wouldn’t give for the way our collective features arranged themselves on her face, for the greener eyes, for the silkier hair, for the five distinct freckles that cast themselves over the bridge of her straighter, smaller nose. But he hadn’t seen her when we hennaed our hair, the mud we’d mixed for the most copper color dripping down her face and turning her ears orange. he hadn’t seen her after a crying fit, hadn’t seen her throw the rocks at our parents minivan when they picked up and drove it away. No one else had seen her that way, only me.”

I wrote that and sat up straight in my chair—or let’s say I remember I did. Let’s say I knew something important had happened. Let’s pretend.

In truth, I worked on that short story—changed its name from “Werewolf” to “Mythical Creatures,” but never changed the heart of the story between the two sisters, Ruby and Chloe, never ever let go of that—from the end of 2006 through 2008. I brought it to a short-story workshop with the full intention of polishing it up and sending it to a literary journal. That was its fate, if I were lucky, I figured.

I didn’t know it would become a novel.

I didn’t know it would become a YA novel, and that I’d become a YA author.

I didn’t know it would become the novel of my heart, the most true piece of writing I’ve ever set down on the page. The novel about my hometown. The novel about two very close sisters. The novel that became a love letter to my own sister—and though my sister is really the little sister, and I’m the big sister, pieces of us are tangled up in both Ruby and Chloe.

The novel that was wishful thinking. The novel that would become very important to me, in a whole other way.

Imaginary Girls was published on June 14, 2011, three years ago today. Though Imaginary Girls wasn’t my first published novel (haha, you think that I’m talking about Dani Noir, don’t you? My first published novel was actually a paperback series novel written under a pseudonym, on assignment), and though Imaginary Girls wasn’t the first original novel I wrote (that was a novel called Bardo, which got me my MFA, but not much else), Imaginary Girls was my first true novel. The first novel that was really me and felt worthy at the same time. If I die tomorrow, the creative part of my life will have been complete because I wrote this book. I would have no regrets.

It’s the book of my heart for this reason, yes, and another. I’m going to tell you about the other.

I always knew that it was a book dedicated to my little sister, but something happened during the writing of this book. Something that feels so connected to everything the book is that I can’t now separate it.

While I was writing Imaginary Girls, she was going through some health problems and having difficulty getting a diagnosis. She was having trouble with her eyes. She kept getting tests. I was aware of this, and concerned, but it didn’t truly hit me until she called me one day with the news. I was under deadline, frazzled, a mess, doing revisions and unable to focus on anything else. But I remember stopping everything and sitting on my bed while she told me over the phone from where she lives in Philadelphia.

She told me that the test results had come back. She had been diagnosed with MS.

It was the summer of 2010. She was just about to turn twenty-six years old.

What can I say here to explain how I felt about my little sister so you can sense the impact? How much I love her? How when she was born, when I was nine and a half, it felt like she came into this world for me and only me? How can I explain how after that phone call it all came down on me and I didn’t know what to do and there was nothing I could do and my heart felt broken and I cried for two solid days? Why I had to suck it up and tell my agent what was going on, and ask him to please tell my editor, and that I wasn’t going to make the deadline because I couldn’t word an email to explain it myself? Because how could I work on a stupid book? How could I think anything I did was important when my sister, at not even 26, was facing this? How can I explain how I Googled “multiple sclerosis”—the symptoms, the treatments, the reality, the possible future—and how until that moment I didn’t realize what exactly this degenerative disease was, and that there is no cure? There is no cure. How can I even put to words how it felt to be so helpless, apart from my sister, knowing I couldn’t do a thing, realizing I had no true sense of what she was going through, and I didn’t know how to express to her how I would always be there for her, forever forward, until we were both old ladies, and how empty those words sounded? How much I loved her, how much I meant those words?

Oh, maybe you know. If you’ve read Imaginary Girls, it’s there. The way Ruby loves her little sister, Chloe? What Ruby does and would do for Chloe to keep her safe?

It’s there. It’s all right there. It’s in the book.

That’s why it’s the book of my heart. For that reason and all reasons beyond it. Because it felt like the first real piece of me I published and put out in the world, because it features my hometown in the way I sometimes remember it, but mostly because the beating heart at the center of the book is really my heart beating.

It’s what I didn’t know how to say to my sister—before I even knew I’d need to say it.

I’d written it down already. It was in the book all along.

To celebrate the three-year anniversary of the book of my heart, I gave away signed copies of the book to three readers. Congratulations, Jessi S., Alessa, and Penny! I’ve emailed you for your mailing address.

(hardcover)

(paperback)

If you would like to order a copy of Imaginary Girls, some buying links are below.
- Order Imaginary Girls from one of my favorite indies, Oblong Books, in the Hudson Valley, where the book takes place
- Buy Imaginary Girls at your local independent bookstore (find it here!)
- Barnes & Noble
- Powell’s
- Book Depository (international)
The posts in the Book of Your Heart series:
The Book of Your Heart Series: Corey Ann Haydu

June 13th, 2014
Three years ago as of this week, the novel I’d consider the “Book of My Heart” was published. Tomorrow, on Saturday, June 14, when Imaginary Girls is officially three years old, I will tell you all why it connects so deeply to me and why I’d consider it the book of my heart apart from all books I’ve written or will write. I’ll also hold a giveaway for some elusive hardcovers!

So what is a book of an author’s heart, you may ask—and why say such a thing about one book and not others, when we love all our books and put pieces of ourselves into every one? I’ve asked a few author friends to share the book that holds a distinct and special place in their heart and tell us why.

Here is Corey Ann Haydu revealing how hard she tried not to write the book of her heart, but she did, and you’ll be able to read it in the fall of 2015. Here’s how it came to be…

Guest post by Corey Ann Haydu

I tried not to write The Book of My Heart. I tried so hard not to write it, that I didn’t, in fact, write it. The first draft of RULES FOR STEALING STARS had most of the elements that are in the book today. Four sisters. A troubled family. A bit of magic. A girl named Silly.

But it didn’t have my heart.

The problem with writing RULES FOR STEALING STARS is that I wanted to write about a kind of grief that I understood, but without actually writing the hard parts. The parts where you watch your world crumble. The real panicked, hopeless moments that are sometimes part of families and childhood and life, in general.

So I wrote the After. I thought I was writing the hard part. I would have told anyone who would listen that I was writing the hard part. But I was writing the After. I was writing the moment after the hardest moment.

I was not asked to add the hard part. I don’t think anyone knew I had skipped the hard part except for me, and I only knew because of a note my editor gave me on my first draft. It was an open-ended, big picture sort of question which is the best kind of question to get asked by your editor. A question that makes you think but doesn’t give you the answer.

Something’s missing in the plot, she said. She didn’t say what. She mused about different characters and their journeys and how building up or tearing down bits and pieces of their journeys might solve the problem.

As soon as the question was asked, I knew the answer.

I had to write the thing I didn’t want to write. I had to write the messy parts of families. Not the after, but the before. The DURING. Not when something is already gone, but when you are in the process of losing it.

Sometimes a hard story is when something is taken from you. Lots of wonderful moments take place in the year after a death or a loss or a trauma. But the story of Silly and her sisters is one where they are watching things fall apart. I was scared to write those scenes. I know a little something about watching things fall apart.

RULES FOR STEALING STARS is the book of my heart not because I went through exactly what Silly goes through at the exact age she goes through it. It is the book of my heart because while I was writing it, I was also in the process of loss. The during. The watching and the waiting. Not the before and not the after. I wanted to write the after, I tried to write the after, because in some ways I wanted to be there. I maybe even thought I was there.

Sometimes when we’re writing we skip over the most important parts. The hardest parts. The emotional parts. We do that to protect ourselves. It takes some amount of hurt to write hurt, in my experience, and we skip those hard parts so that the characters don’t have to feel the full extent of the pain of life, and neither do we.

I skipped the hard parts, but it took a little while for me to see it. It was unpleasant to admit that I had written the wrong part of the book. That while I’d been congratulating myself for how brave I’d been, I’d actually shied away from the scary parts.

So I rewrote the book.

The revision process for RULES FOR STEALING STARS was the hardest I ever had. The emotional journey of the characters had to be reimagined, and the heart of the book had to grow and shift and find a new way to beat.

The book of my heart has to be the book that is about the hardest parts and the things that break us. And because I am a girl who believes in the After and the What’s Next and the Surviving, it also has to be a book about hope. So it is both a book about the things that break us and the things that put us together. About the things that seem hopeless and the places we find hope.

It is a book about a girl and her sisters and the During. And the hope, hope, hope for an After.

Corey Ann Haydu is the author of OCD LOVE STORY (S&S 2013), LIFE BY COMMITTEE (HC, 2014), MAKING PRETTY (HC, 2015), and RULES FOR STEALING STARS (HC, 2015). Visit her at www.coreyannhaydu.com or follow her on Twitter @CoreyAnnHaydu.

The posts in the Book of Your Heart series:
Come back tomorrow for my own post about my book of my heart, and for the giveaway of Imaginary Girls!
The Book of Your Heart Series: Dahlia Adler

June 12th, 2014
Three years ago as of this week, the novel I’d consider the “Book of My Heart” was published. On Saturday, June 14, when Imaginary Girls is officially three years old, I will tell you all why it connects so deeply to me and why I’d consider it the book of my heart apart from all books I’ve written or will write. I’ll also hold a giveaway for some elusive hardcovers!

So what is a book of an author’s heart, you may ask—and why say such a thing about one book and not others, when we love all our books and put pieces of ourselves into every one? I’ve asked a few author friends to share the book that holds a distinct and special place in their heart and tell us why.

Here is Dahlia Adler revealing that her first book, Behind the Scenes, out this month, may not be the “book of her heart,” but we will soon get to read the one that is…

Guest post by Dahlia Adler

This month, I release my very first book. It’s called Behind the Scenes, and it’s fun and sexy and I’m thrilled it’s going out into the world. I worked hard on it, and I love it, and I hope readers will too. But there’s a truth behind it that I don’t talk about very much, and that’s this:

I would never have written it if I hadn’t had to shelve the book of my heart.

For most of my adolescence, I’d worked on a series of books set in one particular world, but then, about five years ago, I got an idea for something completely new. It started with a character’s name and something that’d happened to me in college and swirled out from there until it took on a life of its own. Then I got an opportunity to take a class on writing YA, and I took it as the ultimate sign that this book was meant to be.

I’d been writing for years, but this time, I was falling in a deep and true love I’d never felt before. I loved and related to my main character, with all her quirks and flaws and sense of humor. I loved the secondary characters, who made me laugh and challenged my comfort zone. I loved the love interest, who was so much more than that, and the way it was sort of a slow, tentative burn into the brightest, steadiest of flames. And I loved that I continued thinking about the characters and what was happening in their stories long after the end.

In nearly twenty years of writing, I’d always been reticent about sharing my work, but this time I happily threw it all over the place—to classmates, to friends…dear reader, I queried. Seriously. And I got a lot of requests, too! Such encouragement! Such love! People were going to adore my characters and story as much as I did!

Until they didn’t. Sure, they found things to love, but ultimately, it just wasn’t the right fit for any agents. And it took about fifty rejections until I got the one that made clear why:

The pacing was awful. The tone was completely uneven. The book was entertaining, sure, but it was like two different books crammed into one. It didn’t matter if people thought it was funny or romantic or thought-provoking—from a writing perspective, it was kind of a disaster.

So I shelved it. And I determined I would write a plot-driven, well-paced YA, one where I didn’t get so lost in my love for the characters that I was blinded to structure flaws.

That book goes on sale in two weeks.

Since then, I’ve written many more books, but the characters of that first book—the book of my heart—have never left me. And even the story—that flawed, oddly paced story—still pulls me back. So when my editor, who’s also a friend with whom I happen to share reading taste, asked me for something fun to read one day, I actually thought to say, “Well, I do have this one thing you can read for fun that I think you’ll like…”

And she did. She fell head over heels for the characters the same way I did, and thought about them long after the end. The difference was, she had magic words at the end of that process: “If you want this to be your Book 3 [of your 3-book deal], I am totally cool with that.”

Just like that, the book of my heart had a pulse again for the first time in three years. And it’ll take a lot of work to get it to where it needs to be, but I can’t imagine work more worth doing. It’s like I’m going to get to introduce the world to my first love. And though with a release date of November 17, 2015, it’ll be my third impression on the world rather than my first, I hope it’ll charm its way into the hearts of both people who’ve read Behind the Scenes and Under the Lights and people who haven’t.

But the beauty of having a book of your heart is this:

When it comes down to it, it doesn’t even really and truly matter how much other people love it. Because when you write that book that lives on inside you no matter its publication fate; the book whose characters are practically family and whose setting feels so real to you that you can close your eyes and transport there in an instant; that book you love so much, that years later you’re still throwing it at people to read, and unknowingly saving its life in the process—you remember exactly why you do this in the first place. And there’s just nothing better than that.

Dahlia Adler is an Assistant Editor of Mathematics by day, a Copy Editor by night, and a YA author and blogger at every spare moment in between. You can find her on Twitter at @MissDahlELama, and blogging at The Daily Dahlia, YA Misfits, and Barnes & Noble. She lives in New York City with her husband and their overstuffed bookshelves. Behind the Scenes is her debut novel.

The posts in the Book of Your Heart series:
Come back tomorrow for another Book of Your Heart guest blog! And look for the giveaway of Imaginary Girls on Saturday, June 14!

distraction no.99

Month: June 2014

The Book of My Heart: Imaginary Girls

The posts in the Book of Your Heart series:

The Book of Your Heart Series: Corey Ann Haydu

Here is Corey Ann Haydu revealing how hard she tried not to write the book of her heart, but she did, and you’ll be able to read it in the fall of 2015. Here’s how it came to be…

The Book of Your Heart Series: Dahlia Adler

Here is Dahlia Adler revealing that her first book, Behind the Scenes, out this month, may not be the “book of her heart,” but we will soon get to read the one that is…