Author of award-winning, adventurous realistic and historical fiction

writing

New Book News!

Jun 12, 2014 | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

So you might have seen this in Publishers Weekly this afternoon (click to make big!):

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That’s right! I* sold my second book! The Summer of Lost and Found will be in bookstores in 2016. It’s full of everything I loved to read about as a middle-grader: history, mystery, beach towns, and ghost stories.

I’m so excited to be working with the uber talented Jordan Hamessley and everyone at Egmont to tell this story.  The way it feels when Jordan shares her editorial vision for your book can only be expressed with a Liz Lemon GIF:

 

Liz Lemon, 30 Rock, self high five gif

 

I’ll leave you with a picture of the beach at Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, on Roanoke Island. I was there doing research while this deal was coming together, and while a trip to see such a beautiful and historic place would always be special, this serendipitous timing made it even more so.

 

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*And by “I,” I do mean my fantastic agent, Suzie Townsend. I’m incredibly thankful to her for being such a great advocate for my writing, and to everyone at New Leaf Literary for their amazing support.

ETA: The announcement also ran in the June 13th Publishers Marketplace deal report (you can click to make big). Hooray!

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What’s Up Wednesday, 10/9

Oct 9, 2013 | , , , , , ,

WUWAutumn

What’s Up Wednesday is a weekly meme that helps readers and writers touch base with blog friends. If you’d like to join in, you can find the link widget on Jaime’s and Erin’s blog posts. I love this idea because it gives a structured, easy way for me to keep up with blogging. Also, the buttons are cute. Thanks for the idea, Jaime and Erin!

What I’m Reading 
I’m still reading The Weird Sisters. I’m kind of lingering in the story, which is nice. I tend to read quickly, and sometimes I forget how satisfying it can be to take more time with a book.

What I’m Writing   
When Audrey Met Alice odds and ends, which are writing-related.  I’ve come to the realization that some of my writing time, going forward, needs to be allotted to the business-y side of publishing. And that’s okay! Otherwise, I’m still on a bit of a writing break. I did open a planning document on Sunday night and had fun brainstorming for an old new idea. I’m toying with the idea of doing a NaNo-inspired November writing marathon.

What Inspires Me Right Now   
I’m going to repeat last week’s inspiration: great weather and great books. I’ll also add the camaraderie and kindness in the kid lit writing and publishing community (see below).

What Else I’ve Been Up To
Revealing this new blog, and revealing the cover for When Audrey Met Alice! It was so fun to get to share the cover on Monday, and I am really grateful for the enthusiastic responses to it. (Mundie Kids is helping me give away an ARC, if you’d like to enter to win it!)

IRL: Making progress toward winning the title of Clumsiest Ever–I fractured my toe. By walking into my bathtub. But at least it’s an excuse to sit around and read, right?

So what have you been up to lately?

Some Good News

Oct 9, 2012 | , , , , , , , ,

From Publisher’s Marketplace today:



Click to read, or see below:



Rebecca Behrens’s debut WHEN AUDREY MET ALICE, featuring the thirteen-year-old First Daughter who finds Alice Roosevelt’s secret diary hidden beneath the floorboards of the White House and is inspired to “eat up the world” though one wrong step could mean tabloid scandal, to Aubrey Poole at Sourcebooks, by Suzie Townsend at New Leaf Literary & Media (World English).

Dude! My book is being published! It’s definitely surreal to write this post announcing my good news. The closest approximation to how I feel right now is this. I’m thrilled that When Audrey Meets Alice will be in print! I’m so excited to be working with Aubrey Poole and the rest of the Sourcebooks team. And I’m incredibly thankful to the amazing Suzie Townsend for being such a great advocate for my writing and finding a home for my book.

I’ll leave you with a slightly dorky picture of me at Alice Roosevelt’s childhood home, Sagamore Hill. I already had a visit planned for the weekend after I found out this great news, which was serendipitous and awesome. Happiest day trip ever! I don’t think I’ve stopped smiling since I got the call. 🙂

The Next Big Thing

Oct 5, 2012 | , , , , , , ,

Thanks to Katy Upperman for tagging me. I loved reading about her fabulous WIP, Cross My Heart. Here are some answers about my upper-MG WIP:

What is the working title of your book?
When Audrey Met Alice

Where did the idea come from?
It’s kind of a long story. I knew a little about Alice Roosevelt from my dad, who has always been a huge Teddy Roosevelt fan. I have always been fascinated by the lives of first daughters, and I suppose that interest was re-sparked when the Obamas moved into the White House.

But the specific idea for a book about a first daughter who “meets” Alice Roosevelt came to me while I was walking home from work one day. That’s not very special, but I later found out that I was walking past a home where Alice once lived, as a young person, right at the time that this concept popped into my head. Which is a little spooky.

What genre does your book fall under?
A blend of contemporary and historical fiction

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Alice Lee Roosevelt (from Wikipedia.org)

I am a huge Mad Men fan, and one of my favorite characters is Sally Draper. I would love to see the very talented Kiernan Shipka as Audrey. As for Alice, I’m not sure. Any suggestions?

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Lonely first daughter finds Alice Roosevelt’s long-lost diary, and shenanigans ensue.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
I am so fortunate to be represented by the amazing Suzie Townsend at New Leaf Literary.


How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Hmm, I got the idea in summer 2010, and I had a finished first draft by the end of that year. I wasn’t working on it continuously, though: there were some distracting life events (e.g., a move) and some revisions on a previous manuscript that pulled me away at times. So I’d say about five months. But that was a first draft of two completely separate narratives, which I had to try to weave together.

May we see an intro?
I’ll give you the first line:
It is ridiculously difficult to
get a pizza delivered to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

What other books would you compare this story to?
In some ways, the structure is similar to Revolution, which I read long after the first draft. But my manuscript is upper middle grade, so the subject matter is a little lighter. Promise the Night, an MG about famous female aviator Beryl Markham, is also kind of similar. I like to think that both Audrey and Alice have strong voices, and there is a lot of humor in the stories they tell. So I might compare it to some of my favorite voice-driven books.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Alice Roosevelt, of course. She was a scandalous White House wild child at a time when girls had a lot of social constraints. Also, there was a photograph of Sasha Obama on a beach that I found really poignant–she’s in her swimsuit, playing in the sand. But you can see behind her a horde of people gawking at her and taking pictures. First kids are afforded some incredible opportunities and experiences, but I imagine they also lose a lot of privacy, freedom, and normalcy. I wanted to explore that situation.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
There is a very cute boy. And lots of descriptions of food.

Have you shared about your WIP? If you’d like to, consider yourself tagged for the Next Big Thing!

Revision Trick: Wordle

Sep 20, 2010 | , , ,

Before I started inputting my hard-copy edits Saturday, I decided to make a Wordle of my MS. (Yes, I was procrastinating.) Copying my entire 70K MS to the clipboard and pasting it into the Wordle maker almost killed my computer, which was probably EXTREMELY STUPID to do, especially because I didn’t save the file or anything beforehand. But I lucked out, my geriatric MacBook regained its footing, and I got this cool Wordle out of it:

Neat, huh? Also–educational. Notice which words are the largest? Alex, like, Emma, really, and just. Two of those refer to characters, so I would expect them to be used a lot. One of them can be used as several parts of speech–like is verb, modifier, and verbal tic/filler–but still shouldn’t be that prevalent. The MS is not a courtroom drama, so I doubt just was ever used as anything but a modifier. And really–really? I guess I really need to cut down on how really often I use really. Really.
Obviously, after several rounds of revision I’ve varied my word choice and cleaned up the prose and a lot of the interesting words I’ve used aren’t going to show up in a Wordle made from 70,000 words. Even if I only use really and like every three pages, they’d still be big. That doesn’t mean, though, that I shouldn’t try to cut their use as much as possible. Making the Wordle was a giant reminder that I need to watch for repetition and be mindful of what I can cut so the story is told more eloquently and efficiently.
Ready to revise your WIP? Try just making a Wordle, and help yourself see which words you really need to snip.

My mom is my biggest . . . critic?

Aug 30, 2010 | , ,

I love getting comments from beta readers. In particular, I love getting comments from my mom as a beta.

My mom isn’t just a sweetheart reader, although she is very encouraging and supportive and tactful. She’s also a really good critic. I must have gotten my reading genes from her–she reads more than almost anyone I know. She’s also a former English and Language Arts teacher, so she’s a stickler for proper grammar and usage. Thanks to her years teaching teenagers, she is really familiar with YA and a big fan (sample conversation: What do you mean you haven’t read SPEAK yet? You really should. or Oh, I love the HUNGER GAMES.) She cares enough about me and my writing to push me and ask tough questions and be critical. Yay, Mom!

Anyway, I got some comments on my revisions from her this weekend. This page cracked me up because, well, it’s my mom’s note:

People are going to turn around and look up

Jul 29, 2010 | ,

I was at the Happiest Place on Earth on Monday, and it occurred to me that Disneyland is sort of live-action fiction. You wander through all of these very detailed, distinctive fictive neighborhoods, waiting in line to get on rides that simulate space or fairytale lands or somewhere under the sea (cue Sebastian), etc. The whole park is actually built above ground level–you’re walking over a series of tunnels that “cast members” use to travel to and from the different lands (in order to preserve the magic element of the park). I think the word for it is verisimilitude: everything has the appearance of truth but isn’t really true. It can feel a little like walking through a book.

But even if you immerse yourself totally in the experience, it’s easy to get to reminded that what’s going on around you isn’t real. All you have to do is turn around (or look up at the rafters) and you see carefully concealed emergency exits, strings of lights, security cameras, animatronic ghosts and pirates and animals repeating the same canned movements. Most rides depend on the rider keeping his or her butt in the seat (and hands safely inside the ride at all times!), facing forward, never turning to look back behind. Of course, people do turn around and look up.

Maybe there’s a lesson for writers in this: you need to assume that your reader is going to turn around, look back, glance upwards. Disneyland does a remarkably good job of creating an alternate world (except for It’s a Small World, which kind of looks like it was set up in an empty hotel ballroom, with track lighting on the ceiling and exposed staples and exit signs everywhere) but if you look closely, you can always see little signs to remind you that this is all Made Up. When you’re writing, you need to try to make sure that you conceal those types of signals. Sometimes that’s making sure you don’t miss continuity errors (“Jean” becomes “Joan;” a 14-year-old neighbor celebrates her 12th birthday, etc.); sometimes it’s making sure that your protagonist’s actions and emotions make sense based on how you have established him/her so far and where his/her arc is going. Make sure your readers aren’t asking (unintended) questions along the lines of, How come I can still see Captain Jack Sparrow inside the Pirate’s cave while directly in front of me he’s locked up in a jail cell? Such as, Why is Rachel suddenly attending the dance that she spent the last 30 pages trashing? And at all costs, avoid slowing down the pacing to a stall (the equivalent of the dreaded “The ride will be moving shortly” announcement); you don’t want your readers shifting in their seats, waiting for something to happen.

I am clearly not “waiting for
 something to happen” here.

Not all works are striving for verisimilitude with the real world, but whatever environment you are creating should be as seamless as possible. You want your reader to believe in its authenticity. Whether you’re building the world of a suburban high school or the kingdom of the Mer-people, remember that your readers will be looking in all directions.

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