Sara Ryan

1. I am still giving away copies of The Rules for Hearts.

2. The group that inspired the giveaway:

3. Other people are giving things away too! You can get a Bliss shirt from Lauren Myracle, and until November 30th, you can read Alan Gratz’s book Something Rotten — the whole book, not just an excerpt — online.

4. I got back to the gym today! It has been way too long, although I have been going to pilates classes every so often. I was relieved that I could still do a little over 5 miles an hour on the elliptical trainer. (And pleased that the gym had upgraded its equipment — though that also demonstrated how long I’d been away, sigh.)

5. For Sharyn, overheard at the dentist’s office:

Mom: Time to go get your tooth looked at!

Girl, about 5: You can’t make me!

Mom: Do you want your tooth to keep hurting?

Girl: Sure.

Mom: Come on now…

Girl (carefully): I will…I will let it hurt.

Hey all:

I’m excited that The Rules for Hearts will be coming out in paperback in January. So excited, in fact, that I’m going to give away some hardcover copies to celebrate!

What’s on offer: Copies of The Rules for Hearts for gay-straight alliances. Consider it a belated honoring of National Coming Out Day, an early hobbit-style birthday present (mine is coming up November 13th), or simply a sneaky, underhanded way of spreading the word about the book — however you think of it, key message=free books.

Q. Why gay-straight alliances?

A. Because GSAs are awesome. And because in between fighting homo/bi/transphobia, planning actions and events, and trying to find a meeting time that everyone can actually make for once, sometimes it is nice to read.

Q. We don’t call ourselves a GSA, we’re the QQQQQ (Quintessentially Quirky, Querulous, Queer & Questioning). Can we still get books?

A. Yes. (I won’t go so far as to say I’ll give preference to groups with, ahem, original names, but…)

Q. How many copies are you giving away, anyway?

A. That answer is shrouded in mystery.

Q. Are you giving away Empress, too?

A. I already have, as a series of podcasts. Download in good health!

Q. Hey, weren’t you going to podcast Rules?

A. ::looks at ceiling::

::clears throat::

::whistles nonchalantly::

Q. Okay, right, we get it, you’ve been busy. So how do we get the books?

A. Email me: sara (at) sararyan (dot) com with the name of your group, how many regular members you have, and an address to send the books. The giveaway will run until November 13th or when I run out of copies, whichever comes first!

And please feel free to repost!

…on my lunch break:

1. You can still get tickets at the door for Rick Riordan’s talk tonight at the First Congregational Church.

2. Go read David Chelsea’s super (and rhyming!) Yard Sale comic. (Favorite bit of dialog: “Three for a quarter — that’s pretty darn low!” “You’re not buying secondhand underwear, Joe.”)

3. I found a lovely and thoughtful Empress review at the excellently named Bi-Furious blog. It makes me happy that folks are still discovering the book even though it’s been out for, um, a while.

My super exciting Friday night: Unpacking the SPX suitcases, beginning to tackle associated laundry. Corralling the paperwork that if left unchecked will cover all available surfaces. Feeling like Sisyphus knowing that I am leaving town yet again in a couple of weeks.

I like travelling, or rather, I like being in other places, but I hate the side effects.

I asked some friends recently for their best strategies for travel and recovering therefrom. One suggestion I intend to implement posthaste: Have a set of toiletries and a set of chargers for your electronics reserved solely for travel, so you don’t have to ransack the house right before a trip.

Any other favorite techniques for minimizing the impact of travel?

One of the two places we thought he couldn’t get to. The other, the top of the bookcase that serves as Tchotchke Containment Zone, is right next to it.

I kind of love the odd spotlight effect on his paw.

Hey Caitlin, thanks so much for writing! I couldn’t find an address to get back to you, so I decided to answer your question here.

Caitlin writes:  Hi Sara my name is Caitlin 13 years old and live in australia. I would just like to say how amazing your  books and comics are they are great! Which do you prefer writing comics or books???

First off, thanks! I’m really glad to know that you like both the books and the comics!

As to which one I prefer: I like them both for different reasons, and I plan to keep on writing both prose novels and comics.

Two things I like about writing comics:

Playing with time. Stretching out a moment over several panels, making a year or a decade pass between pages, everything in between. It’s what Scott McCloud calls “choice of moments.”

Collaborating. I can’t draw, so any comic I write is going to be drawn by someone else, and I’ve been fortunate to work with extremely talented artists. I often know who my artist will be as I’m writing, and I try to shape the story to play to my artist’s strengths.

Two things I like about writing books:

Describing characters and settings. I do this when I write comics, too, but the artist is usually the only person who sees them.

Finding the right narrative voice. I’m not saying that narrative voice isn’t important in comics, but I think that readers experience voice differently, and maybe more intensely, when they’re seeing words on a page than when they’re seeing both words and pictures. What do you all think?

At the Small Press Expo, everything is unique, even the chairs.

It was a great, crowded show, and it kept me mostly away from the Internet. When I finally did get back online, all kinds of folks let me know I’d been BoingBoinged, which was excellent to see. And in an uncanny coincidence, Mr. Rushkoff was also giving kudos to Ed Park’s Personal Days, which I bought and very much enjoyed after seeing him read at Powell’s earlier this year.

I may write more about SPX, and perhaps locate some photos from folks who, unlike me, enjoy taking pictures of people rather than inanimate objects, when the clock is not ticking on my Internet access. Soon!

I was glancing at some post about the cultural impact of viral videos — only I read it as feral videos. Am I inadvertently predicting the next Internet trend?

In other news: leaving for the Small Press Expo tomorrow! With the usual array of comics, novels, stickers, buttons, sundries.

We’re flying into Baltimore and will try to restrain ourselves from going on a self-guided Wire tour.

See some of you at SPX!

I was very pleased, a couple of weeks back, to be invited to chat with Melody Simpson over at Hollywood the Write Way, although I fear that I was only intermittently coherent.

I think there might have been some points where the connection faded out — plus there’s just something about phone interviews that makes me pile qualifying clauses onto each sentence like they’re going out of style — or maybe that’s just the way I talk, and I’m only made aware of it when it’s transcribed — um, yeah.

Anyway, check it out, and check out the rest of her blog, too!

Had I not finished Minders of Make-Believe: idealists, entrepreneurs, and the shaping of American children’s literature mere days before attending KidLit 08: Bridging the Worlds of Books and Blogs, I would’ve experienced the conference differently. I’m sure I would’ve enjoyed the sessions and the people I met just as much, but I wouldn’t have seen them/us, as I did, representing a sort of living, not-yet-written next chapter in Marcus’s history.

As I read Minders of Make-Believe, I kept thinking that in this –sorry– small world of literature for youth in the U.S., we’ve always been fighting the same fights, worrying about the same things. A few examples:

What stories are “appropriate,” and who can tell them?
Whose voices are heard and whose are left out?
How far off are the tastes of librarians, publishers, and reviewers from the tastes of actual young people?
Are tie-in products a good idea? (Did you know that Disney made Ferdinand the Bull toys in 1936?)
How do new technologies affect publishing? (Radio, television, and movies all shook things up way before we started debating about videogames and the Internet.)

At the conference, when the book bloggers discussed how authors should or should not approach them, they reminded me of editors or agents talking about the protocol of querying manuscripts. “Don’t just send something without knowing the kind of books I review.” “Don’t email to ask why the book you sent hasn’t been reviewed yet.” “Don’t send something addressed to “Dear Blogger.”

I thought a lot all day about the increasing importance of online reviews. They’re accessible and persistent, and it’s so easy to interact with the reviewer. I’ve thought for a long time that the increased ease of interaction between authors and readers that comes with the Web is influencing publishing, and will influence it even more strongly as the next generation of writers, for whom that ease of interaction is a given, comes of age. But yesterday was the first time that I really recognized how much reviewers are part of that shift, as well.

I liked Greg Pincus’s point about “setting yourself up for a happy accident” by using clear, descriptive post titles and subject tags to make it easier for people to find you when they’re searching for whatever it is you’re writing about. As you know if you’ve been reading me for a while, I am thus far a tag-free blogger, but he certainly presented good reasons for taking the time to tag. We’ll see if those good reasons are sufficient to overcome my disinclination.

The session at which I took the most notes was, appropriately, Sara Zarr’s fantastic presentation about balancing the personal and professional on your author blog. My notes, verbatim:

– Your blog is your most controllable publicity — you are your own PR rep
– Don’t be shy about sharing good news, and don’t advertise your bad news
– Find your own private, uncensored writers’ community, separate from your blog, for venting
– Be a champion of other authors
– Don’t write anything you wouldn’t want your editor or your agent to see
– With both personal AND professional news, ask if you can share before posting
– “High risk” posts on hot-button topics can bring high rewards, but COMPOSE them

As much as I enjoyed both the official sessions and the conversations in between, it was a long, overwhelming day, and I fled after the group photos.

But I’m very glad I decided to go.