Johnny Geller on the Thorny Question of Agents: THE BASICS

Johnny Geller of Curtis Brown Literary Agency appears in a series of videos answering FAQs about getting and keeping an agent. There are five videos and this is the first - on Literary Agent Basics:

The White Darkness Wins the Printz Award!

Yesterday, I went over to Amazon and bought a new copy of The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean (pictured here with her other amazing book Peter Pan in Scarlet).

All this time, you see, I've been reading a copy that my friend Miriam lent me which is getting rather battered because it's my book of choice while pounding the treadmill at the gym, and I've been carrying it everywhere to get quick fixes of McCaughrean's prose when I need inspiration. Yes. Sad, aren't I?

So yesterday, I decided to buy a pristine new copy, because I think I will be reading and re-reading this book for time to come.

This morning, checking my Google Reader for updates to the blogs I read, I discover that Geraldine McCaughrean has won the Printz Award - the equivalent of an Oscar for YA writers.

The White Darkness, by Geraldine McCaughrean, published by HarperTempest, an imprint of HarperCollins has won the 2008 Michael L. Printz Award. The award announcement was made during the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia, January 11-16.

Fourteen-year-old Symone's exciting vacation to Antarctica turns into a desperate struggle for survival when her uncleís obsessive quest leads them across the frozen wilderness into danger.

McCaughrean has won numerous awards for children's literature in her native England. Celebrated for her novels, picture books and folklore adaptations, The White Darkness is her first contemporary young adult novel.

"Symone's unforgettable voice propels this journey of discovery in a book that is intricately plotted, richly imaged and brings new meaning to the term unreliable narrator," said Printz Award Committee Chair Lynn Rutan. "Readers will need to hang onto their snow goggles in this compelling book in which nothing is as it seems at first glance."

John Green, who won the 2006 Printz for Looking for Alaska, commented on his blog:

When it comes to awards, I don't think we should make broad statements about trends. There will be some discussion about how all five awards went to women this year, and about how two went to novels with fantastical elements, and so on. But the Printz really only reflects one trend: Good books getting published for teenagers. And the fact that there was no overlap between the National Book Awards and the Printz Awards shows again that there are a lot of books being published for teenagers that deserve to be taken seriously.

The runner-ups were Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet by Elizabeth Knox, One Whole and Perfect Day by Judith Clark, Repossessed by A.M. Jenkins, Your Own Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath by Stephanie Hemphill.

Congratulations all!

Rewriting Your Novel (Or Moving the Deck Chairs While the Titanic Sinks)

At the moment, my thoughts are on revision because I'm revising my two novels, Ugly City and Volcano Child.

Revising, revising, revising.

I've been working so hard I'm beginning to see double. Are those two laptops I see before me?

Justine (Magic or Madness) has wise words about revising a novel in a long, special post:

There are two basic kinds of rewriting: structural and sentence level. Most beginner writers get caught up in sentence level changes. They go over their manuscripts deleting and switching words around (what’s called line editing in the biz). They do this before they’ve learned how to fix the structure. The result is lots of shifting around of deck chairs while the Titanic sinks.

Maureen (Devilish) spiced up her blog post on rewriting with plenty of pictures of Cary Grant. She says:

It’s a good thing that the Writer doesn’t design houses—because he would move the kitchen around seventeen times, rip out all the bathrooms, add six more stories, and set fire to the roof.

Unfortunately she fails to answer a burning question: where does she get all those pictures of Cary Grant?

Scott Westerfeld (Scott is Justine's squeeze. The YA universe is a cozy one) has an even more alarming blog post on rewriting a novel (this one was Extras).

Apparently he had to face up to the fact that his ms wasn't working:

there I was, 16,000 words (65 pages) into my shiny wonderful new book. Except it wasn’t wonderful; something was deeply, deeply wrong. The voice, the plot, the structure all seemed to be sucking! No matter how much I edited the writing, smoothed the transitions, caffeinated the plot, or voicified the characters, it all just came out flat.

In the end he threw out most of it and completely rewrote it from scratch.

Which brings us to Scott's ultimate rewriting advice:

Sometimes tossing out vast quantities of words is better than letting a whole book bleed slowly to death. Don’t give up, just start over.

Could you bear to do it?