A "Moving Forward Summer"

As I write this summer winds down, much too rapidly. I spent all of July and the first week of August at my home in West Virginia, escaping the Florida heat, but missing my friends here. Despite much outside yard work, I managed to do a major re-write of my middle grade novel The Whispering Chimney. Following advice given in a critique session in the June SCBWI conference in Orlando, I chopped off the first thirty pages and got the story started when my character Bethany first hears voices from the ruins of a pioneer chimney. I did weave in some of the back story after the story was cranking, and it all seemed to work. One of my "test readers" was a ten-year-old girl in my WV neighborhood. She and her mother came for a discussion after she had finished. I've been out of the classroom for a few years and it was refreshing to hear her talk about the book. In short, she loved it, identified with the main character, found her "likable" and "kid like" and enjoyed the story's up-beat ending. Needless to say, I continue to be pumped up from her review. She's exactly the type of reader I had in mind for my book. It was also interesting for me to hear her say she liked stories "told by the author" (third person) better than first person stories. I'm sending The Whispering Chimney to the same editor who gave me the critique. Hopefully, this story will be published and in the hands of many more ten or eleven-year-olds.

Getting ready for Orlando

   One of the workshops I'm attending in this weekend's SCBWI Florida summer conference in Orlando is on Digital Media. Emma Dryden, Rubin Pfeffer, Curtis Sponsler among others are presenting. In the past year, I have attempted to up-date myself by joining Facebook, reading more blogs, starting a blog of my own, and researching how and under what circumstances I might choose to digitally published some of my work.
   Several months ago a non-author friend recommended Nicholas Carr's book What the Internet is doing to our Brains: The Shallows published in 2010. Her point in our conversation was that reading and readers are changing, mainly by the influence of the short bits of information that sideline just about anything we might look at on the many Internet sites most of us access daily. The many attractive features of the Net (interactivity, hyperlinking, searchability, multimedia) capture our attention easily. Many are reading more and more quickly but, the author contends, seldom enjoying the total immersion into reading that deep readers previously experienced. We might follow an interest by jumping to a related link but seldom read beyond the first few sentences. Carr states a paradox: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it. Instead of a continuous, coherent stream of information causing us to reflect and think deeply, we are exposed to a "jumble of drops." We have switched from reading to "power browsing."
   How does this affect what I write for today's youth? I'm not sure, but I do know as I revise my stories, I keep in mind a comment from a trusted writer in my writing group. She said something to the fact that "long sentences and paragraphs lose her attention." She wants the story to move more quickly, wants the dialogue to be short and sweet. Good advice for any writer. But I still want to create moments when a reader can savor a scene, empathize with a character, think more deeply.
    Despite this, the interactivity idea excites me. I have some stories where I can see the possibility of hyperlinks to enhance, create more fun for a middle grade or younger reader. Maybe my workshop will guide me to learn how to do this. If I can see this now for stories I have already written, I know I can create new stories in a format that will fit into this new age.