Reflecting Jenn... my life at Calvin College

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

a massive pile of books

Time is ticking away until the SCBWI conference, and I’m working like crazy to read everything that could possibly be helpful before then. After browsing through the speakers’ biographies and the listing of publishing houses represented, I compiled a list of young adult and middle grade titles that I wanted to read before the conference. ...And I felt a little sheepish at the library, checking out seventeen children’s books!

It is fun, though, reading these off-the-wall stories. I gravitate toward the more fantastic books; I’m not a big fan of gripping, edgy fiction. (If I want edgy, I can just turn on the news and be depressed for free.) It’s no real surprise that my stack of books has a bunch of retellings (Spinners, Sirena, and Capt Hook). I read Cornelia Funke for the first time (The Thief Lord) and had lots of fun with it. So far, I’ve made it through three of the books—and I flat-out gave up on another one—and am coasting through the next: The Looking Glass Wars, by Frank Beddor. Twelve more to go! And I’m hoping to finish them before February 9, which is when we fly to NYC.

As far as writing goes—I’m abandoning the thought of novel-work just now. (As much as anyone can abandon their novels…) The characters are still lurking in the back of my mind, but I’m trying to focus more on short fiction techniques. I want to spend this time—this “semester”—zeroing in on the main elements of fiction: setting development, point of view, characterization, dialogue. I figure if I can get really good at the basics, it can’t hurt me when I go back to my novels, right? And in the meantime, I need to get better at sending out my work. There’s a lot of research and hard thought that goes into it… which I’d rather spend in composing and reading!

In between this reading and writing, I’ve been knitting. Mom taught me to knit right before my senior year, and I love it. I just finished a pair of leg warmers—which are great fun—and have started a hat. It’s turning into a very, very big hat, even though I tried to calculate the correct number of stitches… oh well. It’s out of scrap yarn, anyway.—jl

my lovely leg warmers