Be Inspired - Tagged by Autumn

Man, I love the fall. Football. Baseball. The weather cools off. I came outside this morning, just after 5 AM, and there was frost on the windshield of my car. The air felt crisp. My dog hurried with her business. Autumn is my kind of season. Jeans and hoodies. Craft beer. Great sports.

Anyway, I got tagged in one of those things. You know, those posts that people tag you in? I was tagged by Michael Offut, and I then proceeded to forget about it, as I often do, even though I kind of wanted to do this one. I've wanted to talk about this book for a long time. So, then I got tagged again, by Adam Heine (who was tagged by Authoress) and I realized I better just do it, before I forget (reading back over the posts, these might be two separate post-chain tags, but whatever, I'm combining them here).

The idea is to answer some questions about your WIP. I'm not going to talk about my current WIP, because I'm still drafting, but I will talk about my last WIP, which is technically still in progress, because I haven't sold it.

So that's an image of The Eight Principles of Yong up there, separated into individual strokes. The character means 'permanence' in Chinese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji. East Asian Calligraphy features prominently in my manuscript WARRIOR-MONKS.

Now, to the questions:

What is the working title of your book?

WARRIOR-MONKS.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

Well, I actually went to reform school as a teenager, and one day the thought occurred to me: what if I wrote about that experience, except I made the school (mostly) cool, instead of some place you would want to run away from? Except, the kids do still want to run away, at least at first, because they're punks.

In what genre would you classify your book?

I call it YA Rural Fantasy, which is obviously a play on Urban Fantasy, but works, because it applies. It could also fall under Contemporary Fantasy or Magical Realism, but I don't worry too much about putting things in neat little boxes.

Who would you pick to play your characters in a movie adaptation?

This is going to sound like blasphemy to some of you out there, but I really don't think about this much. Do I think about my books being made into movies? Hell yes. But I don't think much about the actors, which is pretty odd, because my mother was an actress and my father was a stage manager. There is one character in my book I would love to see played by Ken Watanabe, or maybe Hiroyuki Sanada.

Give us a one sentence synopsis of your book?

A reluctant juvenile delinquent must achieve knowledge of self and let go of resentment amidst magic and martial arts at the world's strangest reform school.

Is your book already published?

Nope. Still working on getting an agent. Considering shelving this one for a while if the last full I have out comes back with a big R.

How long did it take you to write this book?

Write? I must assume you mean draft, because while I haven't made any changes in months, I won't consider it done until an editor has paid me for it. It took me just under a year to draft.

What other books in your genre would you compare it to?

None. I'm not trying to be a pretentious ass-hat, but I've never read anything like this. I suppose it's a little like Harry Potter, because there is a special school, but the similarity ends there. I suppose it's a little bit like Stormdancer, by Jay Kristoff, because it's a YA Fantasy steeped heavily in Japanese mysticism. But really, I haven't read a book like this.

Which authors inspired you to write this book?

I've wanted to write a novel ever since I was a little kid, so I guess J.R.R. Tolkien. It always comes back to Tolkien for me.

What else inspired you to write this book?

Well, other than my own past experiences, mentioned above, it was my love of Eastern thought, and things like tea, Zen, Japanese swords, Yoga, meditation, martial arts, and kicking ass.

What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

Well the setting is mostly absolutely authentic, because I actually lived in that part of the world as a teen. Also a lot of the story is based heavily in the truth of my own life. Other than that, there is a lot of awesome magic, weapons, martial arts like Kenjutsu and Aikido, and there is even some kissing, for the ladies.

Now, as far as actually tagging other people like you're supposed to, I'm not into it. I don't like tagging people, because I don't like leaving anyone out. And besides, I'm no good at following up to make sure they do it, anyway. Also, this post is way too long already. Happy Tuesday!

Michael Offutt's Slipstream Blog Tour

Morning, readers. Before I hand the reins to Michael, I just want to say a few things about my friend. He jumped on the scene (or at least I discovered him) about a year and a half after I started blogging. Right from the get go, Mike was shocking, honest, and even occasionally highly opinionated. But I learned to love him for who he was pretty quickly. We bloggers are part of such a wonderful community, and especially within the writing/book blogging community, many of us are close friends. But Mike has always ridden a wave of his own making. He's not afraid to tell the truth, and he's not afraid to say what he really feels, and I really respect him for it.

Now, I asked him to talk about word count today, because it's kind of my bane. This blog is yours, Mike. Take it away:

I’ve known Matthew for some time now. Aside from being my gossip partner, I get the sense that Matthew (like myself) goes to war with word count. I remember reading a post he did on Jessica Bell’s blog where he said he trimmed his novel down to 300,000 words, and I compare this to my own episode of cutting where I trimmed SLIPSTREAM from 180,000 words to 120,000 words. After I cut 60,000 words from the manuscript, what I had left was bare bones (this was really hard to do). I feel fortunate to have found a traditional publisher willing to put it out there for the world to see. But yeah…I hate the word count monster. I guess I just have too much to say, and I think really big. Sometimes those kinds of ideas take room to come to fruition. The only trouble is, when you are an unknown, traditional publishers don’t like fat novels.

Recently, I’ve been working on the sequel. It’s at 150,000 words and might end up at 160-170,000 words by the time I’m finished.

I’m facing the word count monster again. But having published one book at 120,000 words might give me the writing chops that my publisher might let me slide in with 150,000. Oh well…word count monster I have faced you and defeated you before! I shall do it again!

So aside from Matthew and I, are there any others out there who war with word count? Care to share your stories?

I have a contest for the release of my book.  I will pick one random person who comments on this post to win a $5 Amazon Gift Card and a SLIPSTREAM jeweled spider (the same person wins both prizes). The jeweled spider really sparkles in the sunlight. I hope whoever wins it really likes it. Also, please make sure that your email is linked to your signature in some way J. And yes, the crystal spiders play an important role in my book.

Rules:

1)      Mark my book “To Read” on Goodreads.

2)      Comment on this post.

3)      Tweet this post if you have twitter. You don’t have to sign-up for twitter. It’s the “honor” system. 

That’s it. I will choose a winner on Saturday, May 19^th.  And thank you, Matt, for having me on your fine blog.

You're welcome, Mike! And here's where you can find slipstream:

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Goodreads

And here's a pretty thing:

The Follower Project

I have a silly goal.

I would like to try to reach 1000 followers before I start querying.

Hopefully this year.

That's an arbitrary number, and I know agents really don't care how popular your blog is, but it's just something fun to think about while I do my best at this networking with other writers thing.

Lately the growth of my follower count has been stagnant. Don't worry, I know why. It's because I haven't been discovering many new blogs lately.

I'm an extremely prolific blog reader, and a very loyal visitor to blogs I like (as many of you know), but one thing I don't do (which I probably should) is poach followers. If you don't know what that means, don't worry, it's not as bad as it sounds. Poaching followers is basically just visiting the blogs of people you see commenting on blogs you read.

You visit their blog, follow it, comment about it, say hello, and hope they'll do the same for you. I'm not saying I've never done it, because I have, but I don't do it often, mostly because I'm just lazy.

So anyway, I had an idea. If I was smart, like Alex, I probably would have planned ahead and made this into a blog fest, but no one's ever accused me of being smart. So I'm just going to do it today, and see what happens. The thing about blogging is that there's so much out there. So much content, and so many bloggers, it's hard to know who to follow. It's not all about who will follow back, because that's just selfish, but that is part of it. Mostly (at least for me) it's about how do I find blogs to connect with that have interesting content, which is actually relevant to what I'm trying to accomplish?

Well. I'll tell you how. You ask your friends. The people who run the blogs you already know and love. Chances are they read some great blogs you've never heard of.

So what I'm going to do, right now, is point you all to five blogs I love, that I think might be flying under your radar. They'll all be people I've never blogged about before (or at least not for a long time). I'll list them here, then you will go follow them, and tell them I told you to. That will make them like me even more than they already do (which is a lot).

Before I get to what I want you to do, I'll list the blogs. Here:

Micahel Offut - Micheal runs slckismet, and he's an interesting guy. He talks about books, and publishing, and his honesty is refreshing.

Adam Heine - Adam has an awesome last name. Add a -ken and he'd be a great beer. He also runs Author's Echo. Adam blogs about writing too, but he also loves Anime and Manga, and knows more about board games than anyone I know.

Sarah Ahiers (Falen) - Sarah runs Falen Formulates Fiction. She's a writer too, and knows the second most about board games of anyone I know. Her dog, Yvie, also writes the funniest Friday Funny posts.

Hannah Kincade (Palindrome) - Runs Musings of a Palindrome, and like Sarah, she's one of my Minnesota peeps! She also blogs about writing and publishing, and always finds the most interesting inspirational pictures (not inspirational like that, I mean as in inspiring you to write, duh). She also just got back to blogging, and we missed her so!

And here's one I know most of you don't know about, because it's nearly brand new. YA Confidential is run by some of the dopest ladies out there. Yes, it's a group blog, and I don't know if they have a follow back account, but this one is worth it for the fun design alone.

So. There's five blogs you should be reading and following. You know the rules. Go visit those links, follow the blogs, and told them I sent you.

Now here comes the important part. I don't want to just poach your followers, the people commenting on all of your lovely blogs. I want you guys to tell me who to go follow. Not just because they'll follow back (although that would be cool), but because you think I'd enjoy their blog, and you have an inkling that I might not already be aware of it.

You don't have to give me five, but please give me at least one blog you read in the comments, that you think I would like, and might not know about. You don't have to go through all the work to code the html. Just give me the link, I can copy and paste it into my browser.

Oh, and if you follow me, and lurk, and I haven't visited your blog to follow back, shame on me. Please tell me so in the comments, and I'll remedy that right now.

I don't expect this to astronomically improve my followers in one day, but it may be a repetetive theme for me, and if I get to 900 this year, I'll hold an awesome contest to get to 1000, and give a bunch of cool shit away.

NOTE: Google Friend Connect and Blogger have really been effing up the widget lately. If you visit a blog, and can't find the follower widget, hit F5 on your keyboard, to refresh the page, and it should come up.

ANOTHER NOTE: For the love of all things holy, if you run a blog, and your follower widget isn't right at the top, like mine, what are you thinking? Are you trying to make it hard for people to follow you?