Randy Ribay's Blog, page 9

Are you that super cool kid who likes to know about stuff BEFORE everyone else? I bet you are, you sly devil.

In that spirit, here’s a great list compiled by Ami Allen-Vath of middle grade and young adult books hitting the shelves in 2015. I might be biased, since mine’s on there!

Happy New Year, friends! I hope it was as good a reading year for you as it was for me. I read about 70ish books on this trip around the sun, and of those, here were my 14 favorites:

14. THE WALKING DEAD (vol. 20/21) by Robert Kirkman. Some pretty crazy action in there.

13. FAT BOY VS. THE CHEERLEADERS by Geoff Herbach. Hilarious and heartfelt.

12. ANOTHER LITTLE PIECE by Kate Karyus Quinn. Creepy and surreal and beautifully written.

11. SAGA (vol. 3) by Brian K. Vaughn. This series just keeps getting better.

10. COLUMBINE by Dave Cullen. Painful to read but engaging and thought-provoking.

9. FORGIVE ME, LEONARD PEACOCK by Matthew Quick. Great voice and powerful character arc.

8. WINGER by Andrew Smith. Every sentence had me cracking up and then it yanked my heart from my chest.

7. WE3 by Grant Morrison. A single volume graphic novel that I wished were an entire series.

6. NOT A DROP TO DRINK by Mindy McGinnis. Gorgeous and brutal.

5. STRENGTH TO LOVE by MLK, Jr. Some real truth bombs in here. Even added it to my AP Engl curriculum.

4. WE WERE LIARS by E. Lockhart. Masterful voice and storytelling.

3. BROWN GIRL DREAMING by Jacqueline Woodson. Because, my God, the feels.

2. JELLICOE ROAD by Melina Marchetta. Some of the best prose I’ve ever read.

1. WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE by Shirley Jackson. Subtle and creepy, and amazing voice.

In case you’re curious, here’s my complete list of books I read in 2014.

Or like this.

Or this.

Or this.

Or this.

Or this.

Or this.

I could go on, but I think you get the point.

I’m pretty damn happy that I can officially announce that I’ve sold my first book, AN INFINITE NUMBER OF PARALLEL UNIVERSES (Merit Press/F+W Media, 2015)!

Here’s the official post on Publisher’s Marketplace:

One of the reasons this feels so great is because of all the effing hard work I’ve put into it. See, “first” book is a little misleading. It’s actually my second…of four. My first completed manuscript was a YA zombie apocalypse novel that will remain in a dark corner of my hard drive like the Man in the Iron Mask. I’m currently revising the third. The fourth is in time-out until it can play nicely with others.

That’s not counting all the other ways I’ve been working toward this for so long. The bad poetry and even worse songwriting. The awkward writing workshops. The reading. MY GOD, SO MUCH READING. The shunning of my parents’ insistence that I secure a financially viable career. And so on.

Let’s not forget the stream of rejections, which has flowed like the Ganges ever since I began submitting my work to agents and publishers and strange men who assured me that they were agents and publishers. I even have a folder in Gmail labeled “Crushed Literary Aspirations” which currently holds 49 emails from over the past four years.

So, yeah, it feels amazing, but not in in a “SUCK IT!” kind of way. Though always soul-crushing initially, I knew that so many rejections meant I needed to improve my writing. So I did. I went to workshops and conferences. I read about craft. I joined a writers group. I dusted off that second manuscript (because I still loved the characters), and I revised the hell out of it. It’s incredibly rewarding, then, to have someone–who is not my mother–affirm that my writing has improved by embracing it as my agent and Merit Press have.

But, hands down, the best part of this is that people will actually be able to read my story (I hope YOU do)! They will get to know the characters I’ve come to love–Archie, Sam, Dante, and Mari–and I hope readers will connect with them. They live on the social fringes. They need help but don’t know how to ask for it. They long for true friendship. They are goofy and geeky and sad and beautiful, and I hope you’ll let them break your heart into a million pieces and then put it back together imperfectly.

I’ve always believed in the power of story, the way fiction entwines itself in our real lives and reminds us of the beauty of the world and our shared humanity. I’m unbelievably honored for the opportunity to bring you such a story.

Whenever I have the chance to meet an author, I like to ask them where they get their best ideas. Answers have ranged from sitting in front of the computer, driving, exercising, on the toilet, or showering. I never asked myself that question, but my answer came to me recently:

I get my best ideas when I am bored while listening to someone speak at a meeting (or a conference, or something like that) and have a notebook in front of me.

I always have my notebook open, intending to jot down the speaker’s wisdom. But when I’m bored–something easily accomplished–my mind wanders. Instead of listening to the speaker, I start jotting down ideas for new stories, notes to revise current stories, blog post ideas (like this one!), books I’d like to read, etc. It’s like tapping into a river of inspiration. It can make me feel somewhat rude, but I’m sure I look like the most attentive person in the room, as if I’m scribbling their talk word for word.

Where do you get your best ideas?

I’m kind of in a weird in-between phase in writing at the moment. I just finished the first draft of a story I’m really excited about, and despite my desire to immediately call it finished and begin sending it out, I know I need to let it sit. I know I have a tendency to put down that last period and think, THIS IS BRILLIANT, and then reread it and think, THIS IS NOT AS BRILLIANT AS I THOUGHT IT WAS. I truly think the act of COMPLETING SOMETHING floods a writer’s brain with dopamine levels that create a drunkenness or a high.

However, I’ve found that some time and space allows me to see things clearly so that I can make edits that truly improve the work.

So while I’m sobering up and letting that story chill, I’m returning to a manuscript that I wrote about a year and a half ago. I did a couple of drafts and did not have the wisdom mentioned above. I finished it, thought it was brilliant, and started sending it out. Not surprisingly, I received nothing but rejection, and looking at the story again for the first time in probably just under a year, I understand why.

And this time around, I’m trying something new. I’m using SCRIVENER. I forget how I stumbled upon it (maybe NaNoWriMo stuff?), but it seemed like a pretty rad piece of software, so I bought it. It basically allows you to section your writing into parts and then easily view and manipulate these parts as index cards on a story board. There’s also a section where you can compile and view your research. I’m just starting out with it, but so far I like it–and I promise that nobody is paying me to say this.

It’s neither new nor graduation season, but here’s Neil Gaiman’s “Make Good Art” speech. It’s pretty rad.

One of the things he says in it is that when he started out, he didn’t have a career plan. He had a checklist of things he wanted to write (novel, comic, etc.). So this has been on my mind a lot because I’ve been thinking about trying my hand at writing a video game and a comic. (Not together; two entirely separate projects).

The problem is, I have no idea how to write in these formats. Any of you fine people have recommendations for worthwhile books that could help me out in these endeavors?

If you grew up in the U.S., you probably read “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson. What you probably don’t know is that Jackson wrote a few novels, as well. One that I had been hearing great things about for a while but only recently got around to reading is WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE.

Katherine lives with her sister Contance and Uncle Julian in an affluent house isolated from the villagers who despise them. As she tells you in the opening paragraph, the rest of the family is dead. The reader gradually discovers what happened to them as the outside world creeps in.

Everything I heard about this story praised its voice, and I’m going to echo that. Jackson does a masterful job of crafting a narrator who seems earnest and content, but subtly unreliable. For example, there’s a section near the beginning where she’s telling us her daily routine and just drops the fact that on Thursdays she goes into the attic and wears their (the deceased family members’) clothes. It’s no more than a sentence. Without missing a beat she moves onto describing Friday, leaving you to be like WAIT DID SHE REALLY JUST SAY THAT?!

This book is certainly not for everyone, though. It’s mostly slow and atmospheric, the payoff being gradually and unwittingly drawn into a world of disturbing behavior and borderline psychopathy. There’s very little action. No gore.

Yet it’s still creepy as hell.