Whew! Talk about some month...but I did it! A successful thesis defense and happy graduation day! Besides all the other crazy stuff in my family...my son's (David) jazz festivals, my daughter's (Celeste) singing performances and super crazy ballet recital, my son's (Jaime) gazillion sports games, and the CD Release concert for RTR (Ready2Rejoice - Celeste's and David's Christian rock band)!
So now what? I am returning to YA big time. First order of business...do one more round of edits on Awake and send out first batch of query letters to specific agents. Second, get back to blogging. I have read several books in the last two months (very exceptional books) and need to say great things about them. Third, revisit all the other novels I started but put on hiatus because of school...I even already have the first page of a new novel and have been building my story with research and plotting notes. Fourth, send more of my stuff off to get published in lit journals. Fifth, (fingers still crossed until like next Wednesday, though I already got the offer...I just have to go do paperwork) do some English/Language Arts planning. Sixth, lots of family stuff all summer long, picture organizing, house organizing, vacation time, a bit of summer school teaching (I hope), shopping, beach, lots of movies, losing 15 pounds (the grad school fifteen), getting my daughter ready for middle school, and lots more singing, RTR, sports, and general Vasquez craziness...
Well, the hardest part of writing a good query is the novel summary...in a way that will make someone say Yes, I Want More of This! I am going to try and get this done within next few days and when I do I will post my query letter here. The other thing is that some agents want a submission of the first pages, but my novel is in poetry so my pages do not have as much text as a regular novel. Should I just send the amount of pages requested or should I go with word count to match the standard 250 word count per page? Think I'm leaning toward just the number of pages they want and hoping its enough of the story for
them to want a full submission. So, my query better be awesome to make up for a significantly shorter word submission. Let's see how it goes!
Showing posts with label Me in YA-Landia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Me in YA-Landia. Show all posts
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Awake...Part I and Part II Summary
I want to start posting portions of the 2nd half of my novel in progress, so here is a synopsis for Part 1 and Part II
Awake by Minnie Vasquez
Part I: Alejandra de Luna has a disturbing home situation. Her father serves as a church leader, but in Alejandra's eyes he is a hypocrite prone to drunken rages against her mother. She is the typical Latina teenager who does not have any understanding of her cultural background even though she lives a few miles away from the Mexico border. Her relationship with her mother is strained as she wants protection from her mother but instead has to help her mother endure the abuse. She would love to fall in love but feels it is impossible since her father does not allow her any room to breathe. She misses her brother who left years earlier as an escape. Her only solace is art. Her new solace is dreaming...dreams of an ancient forgotten culture.
Part II: Alejandra's dreams intensify and come more rapidly and readily. She doesn't fully understand the dreams but does know they play out as a story and her identity is connected to them. She has been following the story of how an Aztec lord refuses a prophesy from his own daughter who came back from the dead. His daughter warns him of the conquest of his people, but he dismisses her. His daughter also provides opportunity for a young Aztec servant to escape a society of abuse and enter a new world...the world of 21st century America. The world of Alejandra. Their spirits merge in Alejandra's body.
Excerpt from Part I...I believe this is the second poem.
*Note...it is a verse novel...obviously ; )
August 14, The Same Thing At Home
Lilac petals line the chain-link fence, crying tears
for my mother, and I wake up to silence and morning
shadows. My father already gone on a Sunday, our day
of rest and pancakes, spongy, warm, butter swirled with syrup.
But the silence is loud. My window percolates in clouds
while coffee mugs lay dormant, unused, unmoistened by
lips in need of warmth.
Only unwashed dishes to clean and rinse, left undone
by my mother. My mother undone by my father
during dinner the night before.
Me in my room.
Hungry.
When did it all change?
Maybe it’s always been the same.
But I was the Princess.
My brother the Prince
who left when I turned thirteen
before it got out of hand
in front of me.
All he left was a note
addressed to me.
Take care. Leave when you can. Mom won’t. Will write when I can. Joined marines.
Four years later. No note since then. Antonio, why did you forget about me?
I wish I was a normal girl with a hot boyfriend.
He’d make me forget.
He’d make me feel special.
Cappuccino and waffles. That’s who we’d be.
Warm lips to kiss.
Always, Minnie
Awake by Minnie Vasquez
Part I: Alejandra de Luna has a disturbing home situation. Her father serves as a church leader, but in Alejandra's eyes he is a hypocrite prone to drunken rages against her mother. She is the typical Latina teenager who does not have any understanding of her cultural background even though she lives a few miles away from the Mexico border. Her relationship with her mother is strained as she wants protection from her mother but instead has to help her mother endure the abuse. She would love to fall in love but feels it is impossible since her father does not allow her any room to breathe. She misses her brother who left years earlier as an escape. Her only solace is art. Her new solace is dreaming...dreams of an ancient forgotten culture.
Part II: Alejandra's dreams intensify and come more rapidly and readily. She doesn't fully understand the dreams but does know they play out as a story and her identity is connected to them. She has been following the story of how an Aztec lord refuses a prophesy from his own daughter who came back from the dead. His daughter warns him of the conquest of his people, but he dismisses her. His daughter also provides opportunity for a young Aztec servant to escape a society of abuse and enter a new world...the world of 21st century America. The world of Alejandra. Their spirits merge in Alejandra's body.
Excerpt from Part I...I believe this is the second poem.
*Note...it is a verse novel...obviously ; )
August 14, The Same Thing At Home
Lilac petals line the chain-link fence, crying tears
for my mother, and I wake up to silence and morning
shadows. My father already gone on a Sunday, our day
of rest and pancakes, spongy, warm, butter swirled with syrup.
But the silence is loud. My window percolates in clouds
while coffee mugs lay dormant, unused, unmoistened by
lips in need of warmth.
Only unwashed dishes to clean and rinse, left undone
by my mother. My mother undone by my father
during dinner the night before.
Me in my room.
Hungry.
When did it all change?
Maybe it’s always been the same.
But I was the Princess.
My brother the Prince
who left when I turned thirteen
before it got out of hand
in front of me.
All he left was a note
addressed to me.
Take care. Leave when you can. Mom won’t. Will write when I can. Joined marines.
Four years later. No note since then. Antonio, why did you forget about me?
I wish I was a normal girl with a hot boyfriend.
He’d make me forget.
He’d make me feel special.
Cappuccino and waffles. That’s who we’d be.
Warm lips to kiss.
Always, Minnie
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
My Thoughts on the Blank Page Zone...and My Illusive Novels
This morning at about 5: 45 AM I was laying in bed trying to get back to sleep while my husband was out taking a early run. I figured I had another good hour of possible sleep before I really, really had to get moving for work. But my mind was on writing, and I promise I had like the entire opening paragraph to one of the many, many novel ideas I have...yes, I know...the illusive novels I always say I'm gonna write.
Anyways...it starts like this:
Some say I destroyed an entire civilization.And it ends with:I've loved two. One for politics. One for desire. Both betrayed for the same reasons, and now neither rules my heart.
Anyways...it starts like this:
Some say I destroyed an entire civilization.And it ends with:I've loved two. One for politics. One for desire. Both betrayed for the same reasons, and now neither rules my heart.
The northern gate to my homeland is closed. I live in death. Not the physical, but the one where the spirit sleeps and no one knows me.
And the middle?
It's somewhere in the abyss of my half awake-half asleep brain. Ugh! For the life of me I can't remember all the eloquent prose Sofia spoke to me.
And the middle?
It's somewhere in the abyss of my half awake-half asleep brain. Ugh! For the life of me I can't remember all the eloquent prose Sofia spoke to me.
Who is Sofia anyway...for those of you actually read my posts, you may remember some mother-long historical epic screenplay I wrote once for a graduate class. That's where she's from, but after about a year break from Sofia and her two men (Masinissa and Safix) and the ruin of Carthage at the hands of Rome, I think I am ready to revisit the whole thing. But I want to get the whole re-hashing of actual history (because Sofia/Sophonisba and Masinissa and Safix are real people dating back to ancient Carthage) out of the, and create some other world with other names and make this whole thing a fantasy/ maybe steam-punk novel. At least I have all the dialogue...I just have to make paragraphs now...
Anyways, back to the topic.
Why do brilliant ideas come to you when you don't have a paper and pen? And why is that when I have paper and pen or a laptop that my brain is sometimes zapped into the dreaded blank page zone? What's the solution to zapped brain? Well, I know the answer is writing and it really does work.
Here is an article I found on the Genreality website talking about the exact same thing. You can read most of it here, but I did cut out some parts for length:
From Genreality websiteBlank Pages and Open Roads
I always think of ideas in the shower...
But I also get ideas while driving my car...
I really think it comes down to this: In the shower and in the car are two places where I don’t have a pencil and paper.
Yeah, it’s Murphy’s Law. But I also think that there’s no pressure in the shower or the car. No performance anxiety, because you don’t have a pen or a computer. You just have your brain and time on your hands.
Sometimes when I sit at the computer, confronted with a blank screen, my mind goes blank. Whatever idea I had in the car on the way home from Starbucks vanishes. Or the whole scene I envisioned dwindles to two uninspired sentences...
The best response to this is not to go open a bag of Doritos and watch a couple of episodes of Supernatural for “inspiration.” It’s to do what I always told my acting students when we’d be doing an improvisation class, and, confronted with a blank stage and no script (and an audience of their peers), they would lament: “But I don’t know what to say!”
Just start talking. Or in the case of writing, just start typing. Anything. Nonsense, a laundry list, what you had for breakfast...
Sometimes, you just have to fill the space so you’re not looking at a blank page. Momentum helps, too.
And it’s all a lot safer than bringing your laptop into the shower.Back to me:
Sometime this past May, I was on a writing roll. I journaled everyday for two weeks on a legal pad during my teaching conference hour at work. Everything was not brilliant or even good, but after writing for ten minutes straight I'd get into a pretty good writing high and then dish out some very nice paragraphs on whatever fiction piece I was working on for school or for my illusive novels. It's kind of ironic that when your brain and pencil don't connect to write anything decent, that just writing about anything and getting your hand moving and possible writing crappy stuff will get you to write better stuff.
Now do the ideas and sentences that you had in the shower or car or middle of the night come back to you after a blank-page zone? In my experience no. But you will get something and it might even be better than what you had before. That's how I came up with the very last lines I wrote above from Sofia's point of view: The northern gate to my homeland is closed. I live in death. Not the physical, but the one where the spirit sleeps and no one knows me.
Anyways, back to the topic.
Why do brilliant ideas come to you when you don't have a paper and pen? And why is that when I have paper and pen or a laptop that my brain is sometimes zapped into the dreaded blank page zone? What's the solution to zapped brain? Well, I know the answer is writing and it really does work.
Here is an article I found on the Genreality website talking about the exact same thing. You can read most of it here, but I did cut out some parts for length:
From Genreality websiteBlank Pages and Open Roads
I always think of ideas in the shower...
But I also get ideas while driving my car...
I really think it comes down to this: In the shower and in the car are two places where I don’t have a pencil and paper.
Yeah, it’s Murphy’s Law. But I also think that there’s no pressure in the shower or the car. No performance anxiety, because you don’t have a pen or a computer. You just have your brain and time on your hands.
Sometimes when I sit at the computer, confronted with a blank screen, my mind goes blank. Whatever idea I had in the car on the way home from Starbucks vanishes. Or the whole scene I envisioned dwindles to two uninspired sentences...
The best response to this is not to go open a bag of Doritos and watch a couple of episodes of Supernatural for “inspiration.” It’s to do what I always told my acting students when we’d be doing an improvisation class, and, confronted with a blank stage and no script (and an audience of their peers), they would lament: “But I don’t know what to say!”
Just start talking. Or in the case of writing, just start typing. Anything. Nonsense, a laundry list, what you had for breakfast...
Sometimes, you just have to fill the space so you’re not looking at a blank page. Momentum helps, too.
And it’s all a lot safer than bringing your laptop into the shower.Back to me:
Sometime this past May, I was on a writing roll. I journaled everyday for two weeks on a legal pad during my teaching conference hour at work. Everything was not brilliant or even good, but after writing for ten minutes straight I'd get into a pretty good writing high and then dish out some very nice paragraphs on whatever fiction piece I was working on for school or for my illusive novels. It's kind of ironic that when your brain and pencil don't connect to write anything decent, that just writing about anything and getting your hand moving and possible writing crappy stuff will get you to write better stuff.
Now do the ideas and sentences that you had in the shower or car or middle of the night come back to you after a blank-page zone? In my experience no. But you will get something and it might even be better than what you had before. That's how I came up with the very last lines I wrote above from Sofia's point of view: The northern gate to my homeland is closed. I live in death. Not the physical, but the one where the spirit sleeps and no one knows me.
But I don't have the middle yet...
And maybe all that Sofia says makes for a better ending to her novel rather than a beginning as my sleepy brain told me early this morning.
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