I announced some exclusive information about the Renegade X sequel over at Laura’s Review Bookshelf, mainly that there WILL be one. Head over and check out my post to find out what this means for readers and what the book’s about.

Also head over there to enter to win a special annotated copy of The Rise of Renegade X! I’ve gone through a copy of the book and scribbled behind the scenes notes and drawn pictures all over it. It’s the perfect Christmas gift for the Renegade X lover or aspiring writer in your life, if you, you know, aren’t selfish like me and wouldn’t want it for yourself. Three runners up will also win swag packs. The contest runs from now until December 11th, so go check it out!

Here are a few teaser pics of the annotated book:

The first page.

A close-up of the cake building.

Don’t cry, PB&J, you’ll taste even worse if you’re soggy!

Three winners will also win a swag pack like this one!

I was watching my two cats fight yesterday. Teisel, the big one that looks like an ocelot, refuses to attack unless he’s *perfectly* calculated exactly how he’s going to do it. When he’s going to pounce, where he’s going to bite, and, most importantly, whether or not he thinks he’ll be successful. He only wants to attack if he’s going to win. But he loses every fight.

Kitten (the black one in the pic–you can see his eyes–who isn’t actually a kitten anymore, but the name totally stuck), on the other hand, has a completely different fighting style. He’s quick and bold. He makes lots of frequent attacks, even if a good percentage of them never make contact. He tackles and lunges and snaps his jaws at Teisel, not bothering to calculate whether he’ll actually hit him or not. Like I said, a lot of them don’t actually find their mark. You could say his attacks fail a lot, though it’s obvious he doesn’t see it that way. And yet, he kicks Teisel’s ass every time.

I think you can see where I’m going with this, because it applies not just to cat fights, but to writing. When writing a book, a lot of writers subscribe to Teisel’s methods. They don’t want to fail or be embarrassed or have anything go wrong so badly that they meticulously plan, and calculate, and make sure their attempt is going to be *perfect,* whether that means taking years to painstakingly craft their first book – because they want their first book to be good enough to get published, so they won’t have any “failures” – or if it means never submitting any books until they think it’s a “sure thing.” But Teisel hardly ever gets any attacks in. And when he does, no matter how perfectly he thinks he’s calculated everything, it’s never a sure thing. Sometimes he makes contact, sure, but never as much as Kitten does, and he always loses. And it’s obvious he always feels embarrassed and angry and like a failure.

Kitten’s method takes more guts. His first attempt might not be successful, and even if it is, it takes more than one attack to win a fight. But he doesn’t waste time worrying about failure–I don’t think Kitten even has a concept of what failure is (though Teisel is very conscious of it). Kitten attacks often, not waiting for the right time or calculating how to win without making any mistakes. In fact, technically he makes lots of mistakes, but never as big of a mistake as Teisel, who’s too cautious to make a move. Kitten wins every fight (seriously, EVERY fight, and they tackle each other pretty often), not just because he’s not afraid to make mistakes or fail, but because he doesn’t even see his mistakes as being mistakes.

They’re just part of the process of kicking ass.

And so, if mistakes are necessary to win, does that really make them mistakes? At the end of a fight, Teisel’s attacks might have made 100% contact, whereas Kitten’s are more like 50%, and yet it’s clear who feels like a loser. I’m not even saying that Kitten feels like a winner, because he doesn’t really care. He just wants to have fun. It’s Teisel, the one who cares so much about failing that he’ll never take a chance, who sets himself up for disappointment

I have to preface this post with a little story. Once upon a time, about 6 years and 6 books ago, I read Donald Maass’ Writing the Breakout Novel, and it changed my life. No, seriously, it did. And I’m not big on how-to books when it comes to writing. But that’s a post for a different day. Anyway, I read that book, and it’s companion workbook, and did all the exercises. And the book I was working on was SO much better than anything I’d written before, and I loved it SO hard.

So, so hard, you guys.

And I even sent in the first page to Miss Snark’s first page critique, and, while it wasn’t her genre, she thought it was good. I did not get Snarked, I got approval. And when I finished the book and sent it out, I got my first ever requests from agents. One for a partial, and one for a partial and THEN for a full! This was it. I was so in love with that book and its characters, and it was much better than anything else I’d ever written, and it was actually getting requests, which no book of mine had ever done before. It was definitely The One.

But you can probably guess how this story ends, since the book in question is not the one that got published. No, the partial and the full got rejected. With form rejections. And more form rejections came in from agent after agent, until I had about 50 of them. I revised my query letter a million times and drove everyone nuts with it. Eventually, I had to admit that this book was not going to be The One, and it broke my freakin’ heart.

It took a long time to get over it. I know because even after publishing another book, I’m still not over it. Not completely. Obviously, I’ve moved on, but there is still a tiny sliver of me that holds me back from ever loving a book so wholeheartedly again. Because I believed in it, and I was stupid. And it messed me up.

But that’s not the end of the story either, so bear with me. Because, you see, I have this tendency when a book “fails” to tell myself that book is dumb and not any good, so I can let go and move on. And since I’m never exactly sure what it was about the book that supposedly failed, the types of characters and the things that happened in the book become unofficially off-limits. What. this book was fantasy and it sucked? Don’t write fantasy anymore, duh! And this character you loved that had X, Y, and Z qualities? Don’t write about X, Y, and Z qualities, obviously.

Kids, don’t be like me. Because lately I’ve been rethinking this policy, and of course it is stupid, not my ideas. And the book that was supposed to be The One and turned out to be The One that sucked and betrayed me and broke my heart? Well, it was flawed, but maybe it was my writing that was so flawed, and the only reason it got any requests at all was because of how great the characters and ideas were. Or at least how passionate I was about them.

I don’t make a habit of resurrecting old books, because they’re hard enough to let go of as it is, and I’ve found it usually better to move on and not look back. But the other day–okay, maybe more like a month or so ago–this book popped into my head again, and I just knew how I would rewrite it if I was working on it again. The words for the new opening filled my head, and I started writing. And it was good. Really good. My critique partner thinks it’s awesome, and hopefully my agent will, too. And hopefully somewhere down the line a publisher will love it, and then maybe lots of people will have the chance to love it. And maybe it wasn’t meant to be The One that got published first, but it could still be The One that takes off or The One that makes a bestseller list. Or just The One that makes somebody feel good when they’re having a crappy day.

My point is, a writing career isn’t about any one book. And just because this book I loved so much wasn’t first doesn’t mean it has to come in in last place.

Hi, my name is Chelsea, and I write boy books. Even though I’m a girl and even though boy books aren’t necessarily flying off the shelves. But you knew that already.

There was a big kerfluffle lately, as a lot of you probably heard about, started when the NYT posted this article, about the lack of YA boy books out there and, consequently, the lack of boy readers. There have been a lot of good posts made by other authors about this, so I don’t want to get into the article so much as I want to talk about boy books in general. Especially since I’m a girl and I write them and that’s not exactly the norm.

I don’t really think of my books as boy books or girl books. They’re just, you know, MY BOOKS, and the ones I actually enjoy writing tend to have 1st person guy narrators. I don’t sit down and think, “Ah, I’m going to write a boy book! For boys! Now, what do they need to read about? What would I want to read if I was a boy?” Psh. Seriously, I write what *I* like reading. I’ve actually been surprised at how many girls have thought they wouldn’t like Renegade X–but totally loved it once they started reading–because it’s got a male protagonist. O__o I mean, I’m a girl, so I tend to write about guys that girls will love, while still being real boys. I write stories that I hope resonate with both genders, that are full of adventure and romance and snappy dialogue.

I can’t say how many boys are reading YA or not, but I can say most of my fan mail and reader comments are from boys, usually teenagers, while most of the public reviews are written by girls. I don’t know if this means girls are just more public about their opinions, or if it means boys don’t have enough books to bother making a review site. That’s not to say that girls don’t write to me, or that guys never write reviews, because they do. But girls have told me that they relate to Damien and his dilemmas in the book, and guys have told me they saw my book at the store and grabbed it off the shelf. So, yes, girls can relate to male protagonists (while also finding them swoon worthy), and guys are going to the book store, even to the YA section. They’re also going to the library.

It would be cool if there were more boy books out there, because I’d like to read them. (And I wouldn’t mind if I never got another rejection letter stating that a male protagonist makes a book unsaleable.) I’d also like if there were more dystopians (yes, really, especially actiony ones like The Maze Runner), and more horror. Definitely more horror. Double points for a dystopian horror with a male MC, plenty of action, and a romantic subplot.

Or at least it’s almost over. I have ONE MORE DAY of my temporary day job, and then I’m finished. I survived all the craziness of starting grad school, going to the week long summer residency at Syracuse (and almost not being able to get my plane ticket because financial aid took so long to come), coming home to jury duty (thankfully I never got called in), working a full time job while finishing up classes, and dealing with a tax issue that almost prevented me from getting financial aid. *PHEW*

And did I mention finding out that the Renegade X paperback got cancelled? There was that, too. And then there was also a brief scare where I thought there weren’t going to be any more Monstrumologist books, but luckily they came through!

So there were good things this summer, too, like Disney renewing the film option. And I got a new critique partner, who’s been giving me wonderful feedback and also giving me the swift kick in the pants I needed to get back on track and start writing every day. I’ve been putting in two hours a day five days a week (though I’ll admit to slacking during the past two weeks of day job exhaustion), and that’s worked wonders on my productivity levels. I have a book out on sub, and I’ve got two more that I’m working on. And the residency at Syracuse was amazing. It was one of the best experiences of my life! I made a ton of new friends, got inspired by teachers passionate about their work, and visited their special collections section of the library. Which was, ZOMG, the best thing ever.

I specifically signed up for a distance program so I wouldn’t have to move, but then they went and showed me their collection of 4,000 year old clay tablets, and an old map book written in Latin where what would eventually be the U.S. is a giant blob, and a piece of papyrus from Cleopatra’s time, and many more amazing artifacts, most of them written in either Latin or French (when they weren’t in English). Um, dude, I totally have a background in that. And the school totally has a certificate option where you combine library classes with museum classes and get qualified to work with these objects. There’s just one catch–most of the classes are only available at the school.

You can guess what I’m thinking about doing next year.

And as for the cancellation of the Renegade X paperback, it’s unfortunate, obviously, but I’d like to say that I have the best fans ever. The responses I’ve gotten to this book have been SO wonderful, whether it’s been through positive reviews or from readers emailing me to tell me how much they loved Damien’s story. And having that kind of support makes this business so much easier to deal with, so if you love a book, tell the author.

And if you love Renegade X and want to help spread the word, you can blog about it, post a review on Amazon, or even just tell your friends. And you know what else? Tell your library, especially if they don’t already have a copy. You don’t have to spend money to support a book. Obviously sales are awesome, but spreading information is just as important, and it’s free.

So if you loved the book, tell your friends. And if you hated it, tell your enemies. ;)

I leave for Syracuse, NY TOMORROW night. I’m flying through the night and getting there in the morning–fun, I know–and then I have the rest of the day to rest and get settled before classes start on Saturday. I’m going to be there for a week long residency, with 8 hours of class a day, plus homework in the evenings. O__o I’ll be staying in the dorms, which I’ve never done before, so that will be a new experience. (You never what experiences will matter later or be helpful…)

I’ve loaded up my Nook with lots of library books, some rereads, and a bunch of samples from B&N. This will be my first time travelling with my Nook, and I’ve got an 8 hour trip on the way there and 12 hours on the way back, so I’m thankful I can carry enough reading material to cover that! I know last year when I was coming back from BEA, where I got a bunch of free books, I brought three or four with me on the plane and still had to scramble during a layover in SF to find another one. Which turned out to be a good thing because I found the 2nd Dexter book and bought it and got hooked. I’d seen the show, but didn’t know what to expect from the books. But they’re AWESOME. And they go in different directions than the show. I won’t spoil anything, but I will say that the show doesn’t parallel the books all that much (though I can’t speak for the first one because I still haven’t read it yet–I get the impression it’s pretty similar to the first season, though there are some big differences) and they have their own story lines and a great voice–well worth reading.

Did you know that Chameleon Circuit released a new album yesterday? If you haven’t heard of them, they write songs about Dr. Who and they’re amazing. Their first album was good, and their new one, Still Got Legs, just blows me away. I can’t stop listening to it. You can listen to the whole thing for free here.

So you might notice I changed WP themes. I feel like this one’s easier to read and more pleasing to the eye. And it looks like a notebook!!! What is it about website themes that look like notebooks being so appealing? If I handed you a real notebook and was like, “Here, this is my journal, you want to read it?” you’d probably go O__o and run the other way. But anyhow, I’ve been so frustrated by WordPress lately, but I think I’ve got everything updated now and maybe stuff will actually work, like automatically posting to twitter when there’s a new blog post. And maybe accepting it when I try and install new themes.

I’m taking a break from rereading the Percy Jackson books to reread the Pretty Little Liars series, since the new book is coming out, like, on TUESDAY. OMG. I am so excited for these new books, you don’t even know. And yeah, I know the books could have ended after the 8th one and been done, but I can’t get enough of Sara Shepard’s writing, and I am so addicted to these books. If you haven’t read them, the description that got my interest was that it’s like Desperate Housewives for teens. And it is.

Today I went for a walk and found a giant middle school that was actually half middle school, half high school. Facing one way, it’s a middle school, and facing the other way, it’s a high school. They both have different names and seem to be separate entities that meet in the middle, like CatDog. And speaking of things that are half one thing and half another, I also saw a cat whose front half was short haired and whose back half was long haired. We stared for a while, each of us perplexed by the other, no doubt.

So it’s been a little while since I posted. Real Life sort of kidnapped me and locked me up in a cage dangling above an oversized cauldron and I only just now escaped. *phew* It’s been a busy sprummer, and I think it’s only going to continue to get busier until fall. (In the NW, we have winter, sprinter, mud, a short spring, and a long sprummer, followed up by a few days of real summer, and then fall.)

But anyway, here’s what’s been going on with me. I started grad school, which at first was underwhelming and now is totally overwhelming and I have to go to Syracuse for a one week residency in only a little over TWO WEEKS and I have to get all the work done for two classes first and agghhh!!

Ahem. Grad school has made this a pretty crazy sprummer, especially since it took over a month for financial aid to go through, due to me taking different amounts of credits during different sessions. (I’ve never had financial aid in time to buy books and stuff before the beginning of school, but this takes the cake and eats it too.) And then I have the two classes I’ll be attending during my residency, but I have to get all the work and reading done for them ahead of time. Plus keep up with my regular class that spans the whole semester. Hopefully in the fall things will calm down a bit, especially since I’ll only be taking two (hopefully evenly spaced) classes.

Oh, and as soon as I get back from my residency, I have jury duty. -__-

In more exciting news–I know it’s going to be hard to top the excitement of jury duty, but I have to try–my film option with Disney was almost up, and they decided to renew!!! Huge W00T!! I know very little about this project, but I do know that the writers are making good progress and that Disney liked their revisions to the script.

The paperback version of The Rise of Renegade X is out on August 23rd, if my current info is correct. I don’t remember if I posted about it here or not, but it was supposed to be out in May, BUT the sales reps liked the blurb on the cover from the awesome Julie Kagawa and wanted more time to pitch it to bookstores and stuff. (Or whatever sales reps do.) It will be much cheaper than the hardback, but just as cool! And I’m planning to have a contest to go with it, where I’ll be giving away a behind-the-scenes annotated copy of the hardback.

I also have a new book going out on sub soon that I think you guys are going to love.

And that’s all for now because my five page paper isn’t going to write itself… by Friday.

Since I finished a book last week and am picking up another one I started on a couple months ago, I decided to share some thoughts.

Some of you might not have written a book before but are thinking about it or are busy on your first. And it’s terrifying and you’re biting your nails and thinking, “OMG, I have NO IDEA what I’m doing!” And you know what? Don’t let that feeling discourage you, because you will pretty much always feel that way when you start a new project. I’ve finished eleven books over the past eighteen years, and I’m starting my twelfth now, and I still have no idea how to write books.

Okay, that’s not exactly true. Obviously I’ve learned a lot and improved my skills and all, including my discipline and perseverance (I highly recommend getting some levels in those two, because they will be invaluable if you want to write novels). But novels are big and messy and complicated and there’s no magic step-by-step formula for figuring everything out. And the methods I use to figure out who my characters are and what they’re going to do in one book won’t work at all for another book, and I have to muddle through the confusion with no real map. In short, there’s nothing scarier than a blank page. It strikes terror in the hearts of millions.

The scary never goes away, and every time I start something new, I find myself going, “Uh, wait, how did I do this before? Was I possessed by wizards all those other times I made this happen, because I don’t even know how to get started, and obviously if I’d really done this so many times before, I’d know what I was doing by now.” I look at the book on the shelf with my name on it and think, “How exactly did that get there?”

I don’t remember who, but someone once said that you can’t learn to write books, you can only learn to write the book you’re working on. It’s so true.

Finishing a book is much less scary than starting one (or at least it’s scary in a different way), but it’s hard to get there. I think for every book I’ve written, there’ve been times when I thought I was really never going to finish. Some of them I *knew* I would finish, but there were still extreme moments (read: days, weeks, months) of doubt. Doubt that even if I finished it, it was going to be stupid. Doubt that the whole premise was stupid. There was a time when I was writing Renegade X, about 1/3 of the way through (that’s where I ALWAYS have my freak out–I’ve learned now to ignore any doubts I have at the 1/3 mark), where I started questioning everything. My scenes started to unravel until I was worrying that this book I was loving working on and writing in like mad was completely stupid. Too stupid to exist, really, and here I’d written so much of it and I should probably toss it all and start over on something new.

NO! Thankfully, I didn’t. And you can convince yourself that *any* book is too stupid to exist, or that no one will love it. Your brain will set traps for you while you’re writing. No matter how much fun you’re having, no matter how in love with your characters you are, some part of your brain is sitting there rubbing its hands together and going, “Now, what lies can I spread to sabotage this?” There is unfortunately no cure for this, but the good news is it can be treated with discipline and perseverance.

The more books you write, the more you learn to ignore the lies your brain tries to tell you. Doubts go with the territory, but you can learn to ignore them and keep going. And frankly, if writing wasn’t scary, it wouldn’t be exciting either.

I claimed I was going to do a post about writing today, but I had trouble deciding on a topic, so I procrastinated until now. And even now I’m still not sure what this post is about, but as I type this, some ideas are forming because, well, butt in chair, fingers on keyboard kind of puts you in the hot seat, and then you either get up and walk away, or you make the magic happen.

Which is writing–and being a writer–in a nutshell. (Probably a largish shell, like a walnut, with twisty spaces and maybe a few walnut crumbs inside.) It’s really easy to say, “Eh, well, I don’t know what happens in the next scene, so… Ooh, look, the kitchen needs cleaning and there’s yarn shopping I could be doing because several hundred skeins just isn’t enough!” And yeah, sometimes I sit down and I really don’t know what happens next and my brain just isn’t on the right track and I can’t find the right word thread to get me going on a scene. And I sit there until my eyes get blurry and there are STRESS chemicals raging in my chest and I have to stop and do something else for awhile. But I try not to let that be the norm, and I always try to come back to it as soon as I’m feeling better.

I guess you could call that writer’s block (or writer’s wrage), though I’m never sure what people mean by “writer’s block” because it could mean a couple of things, ranging from not knowing what scene comes next to not knowing what book to write next or even knowing what happens but the words for it are being elusive. So basically writer’s block could mean technical problems with the book, or it could mean a lack of enthusiasm from the writer.

And you know what?

I have these problems all the time.

I’ll tell you lack of enthusiasm is definitely the hardest to deal with, because the reasoning behind it is usually hard to diagnose. Fear and stress can dry up your creativity like nobody’s business. Or sometimes it turns out to be some kind of health problem like not having enough vitamin D or not getting enough exercise. And sure, if you know you’re having creative problems because you’re not getting enough exercise, then the answer is pretty straight forward. But sometimes you don’t know why you hate your book or why you love reading your book but hate working on it.

But the lack of enthusiasm problem can also come up because writers sometimes feel like they need “filler” scenes. And this can creep up on you, especially if you find yourself going, “AGH, I really don’t want to write this boring scene that I hate, but I NEED it for the story.” Forcing yourself to slog through scenes you don’t like can make you, you know, not want to work on them. And the truth is? No matter how much you think you *need* that boring filler scene, if it’s boring, then you don’t need it. It’s like saying you need ugly weeds in your garden so your flowers can feel extra pretty.

So cut it and figure out something else that can go there. Don’t waste your garden space on weeds, because you’re going to need all the flowers you can get. And if you really don’t want to cut it? Add something that makes you love it. If you’re like, “It’s really important that the scullery maid washes all these dishes in this scene because that’s how she cuts her hand and gets it infected and loses it later on, and we HAVE to see it happen, so it has to stay!” then add something to it that makes it cool. Like while the scullery maid is washing these boring old dishes, someone comes in and says, “Hey, the prince you’re not-so-secretly in love with is getting married to your worst enemy! Oops, didn’t mean to startle you and make you drop a dish and cut yourself on it.” Now this boring old scene has stuff that makes you squee inside and go, “OMG, I can’t wait for that to happen!” It could be anything, really, as long as it gives you that scene-crush feeling.

You should have a scene-crush on every scene! Isn’t that awesome? Isn’t it awesome and liberating and exciting that every single scene in the book should have something that makes you drool with anticipation? It can sound overwhelming at first, but it also means you have permission to have fun with every scene in your book. That doesn’t mean they’re all going to be easy to write, but it does mean you can look forward to them all.

And… this post is getting kind of long, and I’ve only addressed one type of writer’s block, so I will continue it in another post.