Dance a Dream

Today is a little less Silversteinish, but still a good day for little poems and simple sketches. (The slightly monkey-faced munchkin is actually me from when I was three.)

So, in honor of those who need no fancy toys or video games to "find" something to entertain themselves:

Dance a Dream

Today I want to dance a dream

Open a window and ride on the rain

To catch a butterfly and fly to Saturn

And waltz on the rings in a star dust gown.

Today I want to munch a dream

Dive off my spoon and splash in my bowl

To brave sugary currents on chocolaty rings

And swim with marshmallow bears.

Today I want to gaze a dream

Slide down a rainbow and run through the sun

To fall with the snow in a balloon made of ice

And bounce on thundering clouds.

Today I want to dare a dream

Go on adventures in far away places

To spin on my globe and meet friends where it stops

And see things that I’ve never seen.

Today I want to play a dream

Visit a dream-house and drive my doll’s car

To swim with my fish in his big shiny bowl

And grow in my garden of flowers

Today I want to draw a dream

Climb on my pencil and gallop away

To paint all my fingers and all of my toes

And splash in watercolor puddles.

Tonight I want to dream a dream

Fly among stars with a cape made of wind

To wander and wonder in a colorful place

And play with my friends until dawn

Copyright -- Josin L. McQuein -- 2011

Meet My Baby

This is the idea that started it all. "All" in this case being my serious desire to get published. I'd like to introduce you to my baby. Meet: A Griffin Called Sphynx.




When I talk about the near miss from my early query days, and the emails I sent out to editors for the big publishers, which resulted in requests from 2 of the "Big Six", Sphynx is who and what I'm referring to. He's the star of a picture book series I wrote when I was a teenager - one that was sadly not ready to be queried when I did it.

But, I'm not willing to give up on the little guy yet. He's tenacious, you see, and he'd never let me live it down. (He can't help it - before he was a purple-winged griffin, he was my seal point Manx, Katana :-P ) His story is no longer in rhyme, and at some point, hopefully, Sphynx will get his moment in the spotlight. (It's been 2-3 years since baby boy was on the query-go-round.)

I thought I'd show you some of the process I went through when creating this little guy and the world in which he lives.

Sphynx lives in a place called Maripu. I don't really remember where that came from other than it sounded like caribou and kids seem to find that a giggle-worthy word. There are several inhabitants of this place, but for Sphynx, the important ones are:

The House Turtle that totes his home around on its shell (and often gets lost so said house is never easy to find)



And "The Baker", which is the human Sphynx lives with.



The Baker, who is married, is a befuddled old man who can't tell the difference between a cook book and a magic book, so he consequently ends up as more of an incompetent wizard than a cake maker. He's as likely to have his dinner attack when he tries to conjure up some calamari as he is to get it onto plates.


(This picture is extremely rough - in the literal. It's concept art, and you can see the page crinkles at the top and the torn-off bottom, right corner.)


As you can see, Sphynx is a bit of a dreamer.




This is another concept piece where I was toying with those braided columns on either side as a unifying look for the pages. (Hey, I was a teenager. I thought I was supposed to draw the pictures, okay? I had no Internet access to tell me different back then.)

He's adventurous, and likes to explore the outside world... so long as the door's unlocked and he can get back inside.



And he's absolutely fearless in the face of imaginary enemies and bubble-monsters who attack from the cooking pot.



Anyway, the point of this long, silly, and somewhat self-indulgent post is to let others see my baby in the light of day. Hopefully, he'll get a life in print, but if not, my favorite little guy will at least have been seen by all of you.

I'm curious as to what you non-editor types think of Sphynx, and his associated players.

Copyright -- Josin L. McQuein -- 2011

*meep*

SOMEONE JUST BROKE INTO MY HOUSE! WHILE I WAS IN IT!

(They ran off when I yelled at them and they realized someone was home.)

A Different Kind of Nerves

I'm very excited and want to share something. Hopefully this doesn't come off as being overly-braggish (<--- My blog, I can make up words if I want to.) but I couldn't think of a topic for today, and I want to share.

So, we're all familiar with the nervous jolt that comes from putting ourselves out there, right? We write our hearts out, whittle our opuses down to those less than 300 word blurbs and send them off. Maybe they strike a chord with agents, maybe they don't. It's subjective, and all that...

I'm in a slightly different boat at the moment.

Some of you may remember the post I put up about my YA Contemporary WIP "Premeditated" and how it was one of the queries featured on Query Shark. I'd subbed the query to LaShark to see if the unconventional structure was off-putting or intriguing. She voted for intriguing.

I thought "Great! When the MS is ready to go, then I'll have something that can grab agents' attention! Woo Hoo!" There was much confetti tossing in my head (as real confetti tossing tends to get my laptop gummy).

Then something (wonderfully) strange happened: I got a read request. Without querying.

I thought "This is cool!" (Yes, my thoughts are usually marked by overuse of parentheses and exclamation points; you get used to it.)

The requests keep coming, including interest from an editor. At least one of the agents in question is someone I hadn't thought about querying before. (I do the obligatory Googlefu on the ones I don't recognize by name.)

Now, I'm in the place where I know people are intrigued (so there's no excusing a "no" as lack of interest... *meep*...) and I feel like I'm on a deadline to get the changes finished before their interest wanes. (*double meep*)

I still haven't queried it (It's getting a face lift because one of the background characters slapped me upside the head and told me I was an idiot for the way I resolved her storyline.) And................ (*deep breath*) Premeditated was my "back up" WIP that I intended to finish after Arclight.

It's nerve-wracking and terrifying and (surprisingly) still awesome. I may even be freaking out just a little.

Livingston Kidd

I'm feeling a big Shel Silverstein today (Yes, it's an actual feeling.) You remember his little poems from elementary school, right? Simple language, simple line drawings, and unusual stories that you can probably still recite.

To that end, I did a (hopefully) Silverstein-ish bit of silliness. It was fun, and I may make a habit of posting similar little ficlets.

The Story of Livingston Kidd

This is the story of Livingston Kidd
Who slid, and slid, and slid, and slid.

He slid down the stairs, and on out the door,
Crossed his front lawn, and then slid some more.

He slid down to Main Street, past the stop sign,
Passed Maple and Elmwood, still doing fine.

But between going zoom, and practicing loops,
He thought about something that made him say, "Oops".

It was a biggish big deal, like some kid mistakes -
When building his slider, he didn't build brakes.

So Livingston's sliding with no way to stop.
He's seen the world's bottom, right up to its top.

He's seen mountains and oceans, a city called Gnome,
And hopes someday soon he can slide his way home.

Copyright -- Josin L. McQuein -- 2011

American Idol -- the literary edition

Today on her blog, Janet Reid linked this post from writer Chuck Wendig. One of the comments on his comment stream inspired this post - specifically the one that compared him to Simon on American Idol. It struck me that it was a perfect analogy.

Vanity publishing = an American Idol cattle call

You get a stadium with 30,000 hopefuls who parade in and do what they think is their best.

• Some seem confused.
• Some are off-key.
• Some bring props and just want to hang out with the judges.
• Some are monumentally tone deaf.
• Most are in an "okay" middle ground where they can carry a tune, if they're singing along in a car, but they're not at a level someone would pay to hear.
• A precious few are so talented, they make your soul bleed out your eyes for the privilege of hearing them.

Now, imagine that someone was recording every single track used to audition with the intent of throwing them up into an "American Idol Sound Store" at the end of the audition so the listening audience could purchase the ones they want for 99cents a pop.

Sounds cool, right? All those unknowns with a huge audience, and they're all - technically - American Idol Recording Artists. But here's the catch... there are 30,000 of them. PER CITY.

We see less than 100 people on each episode of the audition shows, and of those less than half are someone you'd want to listen to without threat to your home or person involved. 20-30 make the cut to go on and *maybe* make it to the actual show.

They're an auditory slush pile.

You might dive into the AI Sound Store with high hopes, struggling to find that one gem you know is buried in the list, but after hearing the same 6, garbled, off-key songs mutilated in new and horrifying ways, what are the chances you're going to spend anymore time (or money) looking deeper?

THAT's the vanity publishing the public sees.

Your book may be life-changing and beautiful and full of prose that could melt marble with its magnificence, but after the 17th rehash/mash-up/blatant rip-off of [insert best seller with new character names] and the 32nd fantasy novel that reads like a prescription catalog threw up on Tolkein, and the 29th volume of poetry a 2nd grader could tell is terrible... no one wants to read any further to find your amazing story.

It doesn't matter that YOU are great. It matters that THEIR experience with vanity published books wasn't. Potential readers will assume that you fall into the majority, not the exceptions.

Generally, commercial books that are backed by a publisher meet certain standards before being published. The reputation of that publisher speaks for their books just like the reputation of vanity publishers speaks for theirs.

Yes, the guy in the chicken suit playing the backward accordion on stilts and whichever hopeful wins at the end of the show both performed on American Idol, but it's not enough just to show up for the cattle call.

Thundersnow!

*meep*

Something strange is afoot! The sky has turned an angry red, thunder rumbles overhead, and a nasty mix of rain, sleet, snow and just plain yelch is coming down. We've got wind blowing ice across the road, all the freezing rain we've had falling since the early hours is turning the roads into black ice....

In short, it feels like the beginning of a story.

Seriously. I look out the front door this morning, and after being blown back into my house by a frigid gust of wind, I changed tactics and peeked out the window. The street was deserted and frozen over. The only sound was the weather, and there was this odd glow where the streetlights were refracting in interesting ways through the precipitation.

(Which reminds me - Hello, Nature? You seem to be turned around. This is Texas, Sweetie, we don't do frigid. kthxbai.)

And THUNDERSNOW! Nothing's stranger than thundersnow!

There's a perfect setting for a creepy dystopian right outside my house.

Eeek!