Play Me Backwards COVER REVEAL!

Sometimes, you just have to trust that the dark lord knows what he's doing....

Leon Harris is perfectly satisfied being a slacker.  In fact, he’s embraced it.

But when Anna B.—yeah, that Anna B.—says she might be moving back from England, Leon is desperate to get his act together.  Desperate enough to ask his best friend, Stan (who may or may not be Satan), for help.

Stan’s orders?  Listen to the whole audiobook of Moby-Dick.  Find the elusive white grape Slushee.  Join the yearbook committee.  And go out with a popular girl.

As each strange task takes him farther from slackerville, Leon has to wonder if maybe Stan really does have unholy powers after all….

Excerpts, downloadable soundtrack, and maybe an a NSFW trailer coming soon...

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back cover

Advice for Writers: Using Playground Rhymes in Books

In grade school, I read every book Jamie Gilson wrote. She was the author of such classics as Hobie Hanson, You're Weird and 4B Goes Wild. More than most other writers, her characters seemed exactly like my friends. I could identify with Beverly Clearly's kids, of course, but hers always seemed to belong to another generation. And I loved Judy Blume, but Peter Hatcher lived in a world of skyscrapers and elevator operators. Hobie Hanson's class was just like mine - they even sang the same "Jingle Bells" parodies. They had different rules for "Truth or Dare" than we did, but a lot of the same folklore.

In 2010, I was a bit awed when I showed up at the Anderson's Bookshop Children's Lit Breakfast and one of the other authors present was Jamie Gilson. When it came time to man our tables, I left mine to walk over to hers and tell her how much I'd loved her books. I'm afraid I got a bit fan boyish. In the process, I told her about a blog I was working on called PLAYGROUND JUNGLE. The blog collected as many versions as I could find of naughty playground rhymes, jokes, and songs that The Smart Aleck Staff and I could remember, as well as those we learned from contributors, and seeing if we could find out where they came from. In some cases, we were able to trace rhymes and jokes back centuries.

I told Jamie that she was always good at working those songs into her books - indeed, many appeared in print for the first time in one of her books. She laughed and told me that she started doing that because she'd once used a line from "Yellow Submarine" in a book and had to pay Michael Jackson off, since he owned the rights. You can use playground songs without having to pay anyone!

I've since done it a few times in my books. While I'm on the side that says using pop culture in your books is fine (rules saying otherwise are BS), the way it'll affect kids WILL change over the years. Having your characters like the same stuff as your readers IS a way to draw the reader in and feel comfortable in the world you've created. But mentioning specific pop songs is risky, because the world changes, and soon your character may just seem like a period piece (not that there's anything wrong with that).

But having your character sing song parodies, and repeat the jokes, rhymes and ghost stories that every kid knows (but thinks is exclusive to his or her town) is one way to make them seem "real" immediately.

There's a sort of epidemic going around in which, in order to make characters seem relatable, people are making characters very, very bland. And it works, up to a point - readers can just project themselves onto the character and imagine their way into the book. But the characters don't' seem real. They don't seem alive. They don't seem to exist in the real world, but in some strange reality with no culture - local, pop, or otherwise - besides small town cliches of The Prom, the mall, and the diner. Real kids are aware of pop culture. They tell dirty jokes and gross-out jokes that can't really even be repeated in a middle grade text these days.

There's no danger that having a kid know a few verses to "The Burning of the School" or "Throw Your Teacher Overboard" will make your book dated in a few years. But every school has a playground culture - and you can use the information in the new Smart Aleck's Guide to Naughty Playground Songs ebook to help build one into YOUR books. This book collects over 100 rhymes and songs, as well as examining some of the jokes, customs, and ghost stories that have been common in schools throughout the English-speaking world for generations (though kids seldom realize that the jokes they're telling are more than a few years old, or could have possibly been known at their parents' elementary school on the other side of the country). While we debunk a few common myths ("Ring Around the Rosy" was NOT about the plague), our historical research brought up some sup rising things. Kids were playing "Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board" four hundred years ago. Saying "First is the worst, second's the best" to the first person in line goes back to at least the 1890s (and probably further). Over the course of 400 years, a ballad about using the bodies of murder victims to make violins can evolve into a playground chant about pooping in one's overalls - and that's what The Folk Process is all about.

The Smart Aleck's Guide to Naughty Playground Songs and Children's Folklore is more than 55,000 words of fascinating (and hilarious) info from The Smart Aleck Staff, featuring an active table of contents, active internal links, and a linked index of first lines.  It's now available on kindle and Nook for just 2.99!

Ebooks: The Good, the Bad, The Ugly

All right, all right. Every discussion I get into turns into an ebook talk these days. Here are my thoughts on the rise of the book:

THE GOOD

- People who buy ereaders are not reading LESS. All I hear from people is "I'm reading things I never would have before." Those big books seem less intimidating.

- No more cover anxiety. Many readers don't want to be seen reading a book with a bad cover, or a girly cover, or a YA-looking cover. This is not an issue with ebooks. A good cover is still important, though.

- Every book stays in print. People will probably never have as much trouble finding How To Get Suspended and Influence People as I did finding Bugs Potter Live at Nickaninny.

- If my textbooks were on ipad in high school, my backpack would have been a LOT less likely to cause back problem (those things were HEAVY) and the text books would have been more up to date.

THE BAD

- As it is, if a book isn't by a "name" author and doesn't have a lot of marketing money behind it, chain stores are very reluctant to carry it unless it sticks RIGIDLY to a proven formula (or can be made to look like it does). This is probably going to get worse. Eventually we're likely to see many book stores look like the CD department at Target - hot new sellers and a little bit of selected backlist only.

- The growing belief that books should cost no more than $2.99. I'm not immune to this myself. I paid 15 bucks for an ebook just yesterday, but don't think I didn't look for a cheaper copy first.

- When you self publish, you don't go through the same editorial process, the copyediting process, or any of that. You can pay a freelancer, but I don't see anyone adding "professionally copeydited" in their descriptions. "Self published" will likely continue to carry the same stigma it already has.

- Libraries can get left out of this - they have a hard enough time getting "boy books" for the YA section now. What'll happen if the only ones coming out are ebooks?

THE UGLY

- Piracy. This is bigger than people realize. I'm pretty sure that illegal downloads of my last book outnumbered actual sales. Certainly there were more downloads than sales of the legal ebook edition.

I'm a Big Sell-Out

I have a post up today on Author2Author about my long history of selling out.

Read it right here!


Meanwhile, there's a new post on Chicago Unbelievable about The Hauntings of Harpo Studios. Employees there aren't really supposed to tell me about ghost sightings, but sometimes they do anyway. I hope Rosie doesn't mind working in a haunted studio!

By way of an update on my activities, I'm deep into revisisons of the draft of another YA novel, and I'm finishing new drafts of other projects at a pretty remarkable rate these days. I have my first music gig in four years coming up in a month at Duckcon (I think I go on at noon for an hour-long set) and may be recording a new EP with my old band from middle school this summer, too.

News All Sizes, Notes on Writing.

We should have a cover (and, hence, a trailer) for EXTRAORDINARY: THE TRUE STORY OF MY FAIRY GODPARENT, WHO ALMOST KILLED ME, AND CERTAINLY NEVER MADE ME A PRINCESS soon! That book will be out next Summer/Fall.

I've also just turned in a revised version of another YA book, which just MIGHT end up using the title I planned for it: DEBBIE DOES DETENTION. This is just one of a handful of titles under consideration, though. The book is a John Hughes-esque (or maybe Kevin Smith-esque) story about a neurotic, Full House-obsessed girl who tries to get over a crush on her best friend by embarking on a "holy quest" with a couple of misfits who have invented their own religion.

Now, the question that will inevitably asked: Will the pop culture references make it become outdated quickly? Do kids still know about Full House? In answer to the latter question, teenagers of today grew up in world where that show was on five times a day. It's now a part of the Teen Nick lineup. Fans of the show will recognize plenty of references in the book, but all people who haven't seen it need to know is that it's an old family-friendly sitcom with a lot of hugging (which the main character explains right away).

The former question is the biggie - debates about whether there ought to be pop culture in YA books are endless. Many are the blog reviews of I Kissed a Zombie that went to great pains to say that the book will not "stand the test of time" because of the pop culture references (I'm not sure which ones they mean - most of them are to Leonard Cohen and Cole Porter, which I can't imagine will be more dated in twenty years than they are already).

I've covered this before, but it bears repeating: there are arguments against using pop culture in books, but "the test of time" is not one of them. Pop culture references in books can make it look like you're bending over backwards to look hip and contemporary (which readers see right through), and if you have your main character be, say, a big Beyonce fan, many readers who hate Beyonce will judge the character (and the book) harshly (it would be nice to say that most people are better readers than that, but believe me, it's an issue).

However, when I read a book from fifteen or twenty years ago, the pop culture references are usually the LEAST dated thing about the book. ALL books from back then are "dated" - the characters don't have cell phones, they lick stamps, flip channels, watch videos on MTV, have no access to Youtube (so if they miss something on TV, man, it's GONE), read encyclopedias, think a college degree will get them a good job, buy film, get chicken pox, and have trouble tracking down a copy of an old book.

Most classic works of literature - Dickens, Shakespeare, Twain, you name it - are loaded with pop culture references. They're dated now: our concept of what's funny changes over time (for a good 100 years it was widely agreed that The Pickwick Papers was the funniest book in the world - when I read it now I find it funny, but get a "well, you had to be there" vibe). And sometimes their references to popular songs and political scandals of the day require footnotes. But these are no more dated now than the references to the kind of clothes the characters wore or the kinds of carriages they used. And yet, they've all stood the test of time, because the stories and characters continue to entertain and to resonate.

If the main character of a book is a teenager, it's ridiculous to imagine that pop culture is not a part of their life (whether they love it or hate it). All books end up being period pieces eventually - to attempt to keep this from happening would inevitably result in a very bland book. There are readers who don't want to read a book that seems as though it must have taken place two years ago, not right that very week, but those same readers aren't going to want to read a book that came out two years ago in the first place.

So, there's always a danger that I'm going to get dinged by some bloggers for the Full House references, and the day will probably come when readers are less familiar with that show than they are now. But I don't think it'll matter. The book isn't ABOUT Full House, it's about Debbie trying to figure out who she is and who she can be when the life and future she's imagined for herself have fallen apart. People will still be dealing with that sort of thing long after any book where the characters' cars need gas have become period pieces.

Here's me with Dave Coulier in 2002:

On the Joys of Goofing Off

On Career Day at my middle school, one of the speakers was an old man. I think "being an old man" was actually his career. He spent his time traveling the world, having adventures, and burning the names of places he'd been into his walking stick. A couple of weeks later I was listening to a Cubs game, and they were interviewing him in the broadcast booth. This sounded like the career for me.

One thing I remember him saying was "even if you get straight As, if all you know is what you learn in school, then you're stupid." And he was right. I would be nowhere today if I hadn't goofed off a lot.

The key to it all is goofing off productively. For instance, I wrote a couple of plays during class in high school. One was a musical called "In the Absence of Absolute Truth;" it was about a guy who woke up one morning and found that everyone believed everything he said, no matter how outrageous. If he called a radio station's "traffic tip" hotline and said there was a jam because Darth Vader's TIE fighter had landed on I-285, they'd believe him. It was written out in notebook paper in my biology notebook. It didn't do wonders for my grades, but it was a better way to goof off than throwing paper at people.

I also wrote one called AT LAST, ATLANTA! It was a retelling of Don Quixote (which I probably read instead of something I was supposed to be reading) featuring a folk singer going on a cross-country quest (utilizing all the stuff I'd learned about violent traditional folk and blues music outside of class). Reading classic comedy books and finding out which version of "The Ballad of the Twa Sisters' was the goriest (it's the English one, version 10A, btw) were all examples of me goofing off - none of this stuff was covered in class, and I only rarely managed to work any of it into a school project. The idea for the title actually came out of a conversation I was having about Christopher Marlowe, a buddy of Shakespeare's that I was reading about during goof-off time (he was quite a character - a writer, badass philosopher and spy who died under mysterious circumstances. Some even say he faked his death and wrote Shakespeare's plays for him).

I've just posted that script on the Facebook page. The summer after high school I expanded it into a full-length script. Ten years later, I was standing in a field out someplace in Illinois, surrounded by fancy equipment, watching a couple of actors filming it. The short film based on that original script, At Last, Okemah!, has been making the festival circuit this year. It even won an award or two - and now the production team is trying to raise money to film a feature-length version to be filmed next year.

Once again, kids, I'm not saying you shouldn't study or do your homework. You absolutely should. But no one's giving me awards for algebra homework from ten years ago. I sincerely believe that everyone needs to goof off. The thing is, you can spend your down time throwing paper at people, running around the room and getting in trouble, or you can goof off productively. Read a book that isn't assigned (and that no one will test you on, so you can skip ahead if you get bored). Learn about something weird that they'd NEVER cover in class. I did - and you can scroll down a post or two and see the trailer for the movie that came out of it!

As for me, well, I'm goofing off right now! I really SHOULD be working on this new book....

Will Your Book Be Dated in Five Years?

Almost any time people make lists of suggestions for aspiring writers, one of the bullet points is "avoid current slang, pop culture, or technology. This will make your book seem dated in five years."

This much is true: if you're using slang and "modern" references in attempt to connect your book with "today's teens and tweens" (or using the phrase "today's teens and tweens" at all), you're picking the wrong way to get readers to connect with your book.

But as long as a writer understands this, I think that leaving pop culture out altogether is fairly bad advice. If your main character is a teenager, then slang, pop culture and technology is probably a big part of their life and will probably heavily influence the way they see themselves and the world. Characters in historical fiction have no problem using the slang of their day and dealing with current events - why shouldn't modern characters? And, most importantly, you need to know that leaving that stuff out won't protect your book against being dated in five years one little bit.