'Tis the Season: Ghost Story Review #1

 Mary Downing Hahn must be the Queen of chapter book ghost stories. Granted she writes more than ghost stories, but it's the ghost stories I keep running across in used book stores. Wish I could squeeze out the suspense from my stories like Hahn does. What's worse for the inferiority complex is that Hahn makes it look easy.

Picked up Wait Till Helen Comes at the farmer's market. Hahn takes her talent for combining kid's family problems like lost secrets and general friction, then combines them with more tension in the form of a ghost story. Her books may be "simple" chapter books, but the story is scary enough to raise chills in an adult. [Guilty.]

In this 1986 book, Hahn tells the story a blended family -- the mother with two older kids who are expected to take care of their step-dad's younger daughter who hides a heavy secret. All the kids are unhappy about moving to a new home, but the youngest feels picked on until she finds a "friend", Helen, who wants to take her to a hidden land where she'll be happy forever. Molly, the older step-sister, soon finds herself trying to "save" a step-sister who doesn't want to be "saved". Molly finds herself caught getting blamed for causing trouble because every time she tries to help, her step-sister twists events so Molly appears in the wrong.

One of the wonders of a good chapter book is that it has all the elements of a larger novel, but there isn't as much internal dialog, complicated settings, or description to get in the way of the core. An adult reader can easily follow the basic craft structure of a novel in Helen: the introduction of characters, the complication that emphasizes the danger a character's in, and the working out of a realistic the solution. On this simplified framework, Hahn creates a scary story with a warm and happy ending, a must for younger readers.

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Yeah, writing for kids is deceptive -- looks easy but ain't. I can remember how once I thought I'd write kid's books so I could finish one book in one year. Two tween books even sit in my computer waiting for revision. See how that idea got blasted out of the water? WolfSinger Press, also,  sort of distracted me and pulled me back into my Half-Elven world.

If you're having problems plotting your novels, you might study writers like Mary Downing Hahn who have a closet full of awards. The books are relatively short and uncluttered, making the pace of the structure easy to see.

Yeah, when I revise, I go back to this elementary drawing board. I find I can learn a lot from reviewing what I thought I knew.

Newbery Books, Ghosts, and Other Things

The Reading Lesson:

A couple months ago, I thought it might be nice to read all the books that got the Newbery Award, but had already read most of them.  One I hadn't:  Ruth White's Belle Prater's Boy from 1996, if I read the copyright correctly.  The book was a nice dose of magical realism combined with a mystery.  Each character -- the narrator and her cousin, Belle Prater's Boy -- had a problem to solve.  Thought the book gave a good lesson in weaving two similar strength plot lines involving two different characters together.

Everybody likes a ghost story.  So, it's no surprise I picked up another middle grade book:  Mary Downing Hahn's The Old Willis Place: a Ghost Story.  The book was told from a ghost's point of view.  The three main characters are well drawn with an evil old woman's ghost lurking in the background, scaring the bejesus out of the kids, ghost and alive.  Hahn's setting the clues about the wild kids in the woods is masterful. --  Hop the younger step-grandkid enjoys the book when I give it to her for Mother's Day.

After reading the two books close together, I'm thinking more and more people trying to write publishable books for adults should read good middle grade.  It's so much easier to see how the writer's work their craft tools.

Web Promotion and Other Stuff:

I've been sending rough drafts of a short story out for critiquing lately, mostly because of time crunches.  This gives my critique partners an easy target where they get back at me for highlighting I've done of their use of "to-be" forms.  Only not all "was" forms are wrong.  Do you know when "was" is the correct word to use?  The Grammar Divas give you some hints, if you care to read them.

Tagging can get your or your friends books noticed in the great e-publishing swirl.  Karen Nut writes about a technique to bring your book to people's attention at the 1st Turning Point.

For those seeking agents, I thought I'd add this blog [from a link at Writer Beware's Facebook comments].  Jennifer Laughran of the Andrea Brown Agency commented on agency agreements at her blog Jennifer Represents.  While I'm not querying agents at the moment, I thought it interesting and filed it for when I get Emma revised, edited, etc.

Let's go on to imagine when we become a best selling author like, say, Yasmine Galenorn.  In her blog, Life on the Fringe, she blogged about how many pages she should produce each day ... and then goes on to explain there's much more to being a best-selling author than just writing, or even revising/editing, pages.

Progress:

Got the short short story [Devil in the Details] -- which is different from flash fiction -- back from the critiquers.  Sent it out to Betas after revising/editing it a couple times.  Wanna bet I won't revise it when I get it back again?  You'd lose.  --  It'll be nice to have something to submit to the professional-paying markets again.   

Also, I'm reaching the middle of the editing (yet again) of There Be Demons.  [Then, I'll submit it to a couple of e-publishers.  In the end, I expect I'll be self-publishing it.  The language is really rather strong even after I've been removing the f-bomb.  [Hey, it's my favorite expletive, though sometime I soften to "screw it".]  We won't talk about my bureaucratic angels, twisting of Catholicism, and wrong-aged protagonists. --  And, I thought it was middle grade?

Say, aren't I supposed to be creating something new?

Trivia:

I've been reading a couple romances and thinking about "happily-eve-afters".  I think the HEA comes after you learn to keep your mouth shut ... until you think of a neutral way to present your position.       

Formatting and Being Well-Spooked

The Read ...

Abandoned the book I was reading again ... for the new book I ordered:  Mary Downing Hahn's The Ghost of Crutchfield Hall.  The clone of The Secret Garden mixed up with The Turn of the Screw and a host of other ghostly classics makes a good read even if written for young readers.  The other book only featured Mexican vampires doing vampire things.  I read a Crutchfield review somewhere and ordered it and was immediately hooked by the first paragraph while drinking coffee at the bookstore.

"Take good care of this girl," Miss Beatty told the coachman.  "She's an orphan, you know, and never set foot out of London.  Make sure she gets were she's going safely."

[Many writing gurus say you aren't supposed to start with dialog, but this works ... even if it breaks the "fiction formula".]

The book is early middle grade as you might guess from the reading level above, but it makes it all the easier to see the structure of the novel.  The introductions of the somewhat cliched characters and the bits that individualize them, the hints, and the growing power of the ghost all happen in the midst of the action.   The end result a scary story in the grand tradition that can hold the attention of an adult.

Hahn follows the "fiction formula" for story arc.  Looked down at the page numbers of the chapter where the new girl meets her secretive invalid cousin ... and it was indeed half way through the book.  If your having problems with you story flow, I suggest you buy the book and study it.  

Is Hahn worth studying?  Well, she's the award winning author of some 20 books.  [I may loan the Crutchfield Hall book to the step-grandkid, but I want it back.]

The book I abandoned?  I stayed up last night until after midnight to read it, but I won't be commenting.  Not only did it have a strange chapters long flashback (novella length) ... just when the story started to get rolling, but the characters weren't much more than cardboard stand-ins.  Two boys and girl, helped by an old codger, fighting evil Mayan vampires.

Web Stuff ...

For all the time I spend at the AW Water Cooler, you'd think there was nothing new to discover there but the daily posts.  Wrong.  While seeking tech info on formatting I found an article by one of the members on using Microsoft Word for quick edits covering such items as word frequency counter, and phrase frequency counter.  Carlson also gives instructions to highlight passive words and adverbs.  These come from Robert J. Carlson , and you can check his website for the whole story.

Of course, you smarties already know this ... but I flunked computers. Now I have to get up the courage to download the band-aids and use them.

Progress ...

Nothing spectacular or even much worth mentioning. -- Entered a flash fiction piece in the Jeffrey Archer/St. Martin's  short story contest.  -- Revising/editing of the Voices of Ghosts Creek continues, but I'm starting to worry because I like it too much.  --  Mariah is still pondering how to one-up Martonsfeld in the Half-Elven saga.  --  Still, thinking about sending out agent queries.  [Only have two books to submit.], but can't get interested.  

Yeah ... I really did have a piece of fiction that was more literary/mainstream and not fantasy.  (Thanks to a Northern Colorado Writers class given by fantasy writer Victoria Hanley.)   Got the contest info at AW Water Cooler too.

Oh, and I'm trying to format Dark Solstice, the most worked Half-Elven manuscript, to submit to an e-publisher.  Got the 1.5 spacing done.  Can't figure out how to get the extra space deleted from my periods.  Got some answers at AW Water Cooler and gave rep points.  Unfortunately, after I follow the directions, the form says it "made 0 replacements'.  --  Have I ever said I hate computers ... or is that Microsoft Word?  I never had such problems with WordPerfect.

Trivia...

Fall's happening.  

While the temperatures are dropping, the leaves have started to drop too ... right in my front yard.  Have never figured out why the Lindens (Lime trees in England) are the last to leaf out and the first to drop them. 

The jays have also moved in to harvest the acorns in the backyard.  One got territorial and dropped an acorn on the old man's head when he got too close to the tree.  I prefer the robin song in the spring to the jays' squawks in the morning.