Tonight I'm procrastinating. I am writing, so it's okay, right? Except I'm not writing what I'm supposed to be writing.

I excel at procrastination and, in a masochistic sort of way, enjoy deadlines. Particularly those that hit right on the sweet spot of the blade, that give me the semblance of time for procrastination. They're a great way to get my whole house cleaned, the laundry done, and all the errands run as I engage time in a game of chicken. Sometimes I even get to organize my closet.

I should be working on my next critical essay for Vermont, which I'd hoped to post tonight. I've been re-reading Eleanor & Park, my assignment an examination of how Rainbow Rowell diffuses tension. Love-love-love this book and would just like to say that Rowell is a genius. This is going to be a great essay, but not tonight. Why? I've run into something with which, like many authors, I have a love-hate relationship, that dreaded r-word: revision.

For me revision is like labor, as in the childbirth kind. Something awesome is coming – after painful, hard work. I've written a pile of notes on Eleanor & Park but the essay is definitely at the “shitty first draft” stage. I'm through that first easy stage of labor and things are starting to get uncomfortable. I see tired on the horizon. I'm unsure of exactly what needs to happen when and how it will all sort out. And I can see the full-on hair-grabbing frustration stage coming, the “I swear I am never going to write again, I can't do this” stage. Tonight I'm too tired to push through. I want an epidural.

My girls came too fast for me to ever experience this medical miracle and for those who'd like to stick me right now, almost giving birth in an elevator is a whole different kind of scary you can be glad you never experienced. But for writing, I like to think of feedback as the best way to ease revision pains. Feedback provides a sense of direction, a set of steps to tick off. It's a countdown through the contraction, at least until the next wave of revising.

I don't get an epidural or feedback tonight, so I'm settling for some laughter about revising. I discovered Shannon Renee's tumblr today: http://writingelements.tumblr.com/. (Okay, yeah, sometimes I avoid cleaning house and use the Internet to procrastinate. Especially convenient when I've gotten to the stage where I really do need to sit down at the computer.) I love the picture of Kermit, captioned “My face when I read my old writing.”

For kicks and giggles, I thought I'd post an excerpt from my original draft of Pairing Up, which went through over twenty revisions before its appearance on Swoon Reads. (For YA/NA authors looking for feedback, check out the site. With its five heart rating and comment system, it's like getting your Amazon reviews before you hit Amazon – when you can still revise and do something about them! If your work is already really polished, the editors may pick you for their next list. Unlike the slush pile, though, you can get feedback from other writers and readers on the site, then revise and submit again.) Here's how Pairing Up began in my original draft:

Madelyn Spier smiled at the photograph hanging on the Smiths’ refrigerator. She never tired of looking at it, even though she had an identical copy on the bulletin board in her bedroom, even though she could close her eyes and picture every detail. The two preschoolers in the picture laughed back at her as they marched hand in hand down the ice, outfitted in a rainbow of winter apparel. It might have been a study of contrasts: the little girl petite and brunette, the boy tall and blond, the freshly resurfaced ice against the boards all dirty and scuffed by hockey pucks. The children’s expressions, though, were exactly the same. This, they seemed to say, is true happiness. She agreed.

Twelve years later and she loved the ice every bit as much as she had on that first outing. There was nothing else quite like the sensation of speeding down a pristine sheet of ice, of letting everything go and soaring into the air. Of finding the perfect center in a spin and feeling as though you could circle forever. She loved the feeling of a wind she’d created in her hair, the certainty of her blades beneath her, even the smell of the ice. With up to seventeen hours of practice a week, fifty-two weeks in a year, and twelve years of skating, Maddy had spent over ten thousand hours honing her craft. And she still couldn’t wait for the chance to do it again. “Shake a leg, Gabe,” she called. “We’re going to be late!”

Wow. I just read that over again and I know my face looks way worse than Kermit's face on Shannon Renee's site. Can anyone say back story dump? And I did not write “shake a leg,” did I? I'll also confess that in the beginning the characters weren't named Maddy and Gabe, either. Their original names are so embarrassing I'm not even ready to share them at this point. (Maybe one day I'll do a quiz to see if anyone can guess them. Here's a clue: a reader asked me if I'd gotten them from The Music Man. Ooh, definitely feel a quiz coming on. Check back, because I've been dying to share the Something Real love and I've got a copy of Heather Demetrios's new novel to give away...)

If you haven't read Pairing Up yet, check out what it's become here. Revision: it's worth it. Now back to revising that essay. Tomorrow. :-)

Last week for Technique Tuesday, I mentioned some of my favorite mentor texts. Miranda Kenneally's Catching Jordan made the swoon list for laughs but I also adore the voice of her main character, Jordan Woods. It's often said that if you want to talk the talk, you've got to walk the walk. If we want our readers to suspend disbelief and immerse themselves in our stories, we need to make our characters' walk believable through their talk. In Catching Jordan, a novel about a female high school quarterback who falls in love with a new teammate even as he rivals for her position, Kenneally uses sports similes and metaphors to show how fully immersed her protagonist Jordan Woods is in the world of football, thus building a credible world and characters.

Though the descriptions of football practices and games are realistic and well-researched, I found myself believing Jordan as a character more when she compared things normally unrelated to the sport to “football, dominator of fall – football, love of my life” (1). In Jordan's world, her friends don't make out, they kiss “as if winning the state championship depends on it” (6). The grass isn't just green, it's like “lying on Astroturf, only without the rug burns” (128). Instead of saying “after dinner,” Jordan says “before Monday Night Football” (187). Speaking “football” shows how close to her heart Jordan holds her beloved sport and quarterback abilities; football is always on her mind.

The comparisons extend beyond descriptions of events and setting to express Jordan's deepest emotions. Her emptiness is “a playbook without plays” (173). When she is angry at her father, really, really angry, she tells us, “And though it's sacrilege, I'm considering smashing his Joe Montana autographed picture” (167). Describing awe, she writes in her journal, “I thought I'd died and gone to the Super Bowl (as starting QB)” (38). Some of these comparisons may sound cheesy out of context or even in context, but the sincerity with which they are used only further drives the message home. Jordan loves all things football, even her best friend and long-time teammate Sam Henry's Cracker Jacks football charm prize that he wears religiously on a chain around his neck.

Other characters besides Jordan also speak “football.” When Jordan and Henry (Sam Henry goes by his last name) pair up for a class project to take care of an electronic baby, Jordan worries what they will do with the doll during practice. Henry says, “That's what grandparents and the junior varsity players are for” (105). JJ, another teammate, comments “Should I leave you two alone so you can make out with a football?” (189). Dialog examples such as these two bring credibility to the other members of Jordan's championship team.

In the case of cheerleaders Carrie and Marie, football knowledge expressed through comments such as “I loved your flea-flicker play the other night” (204) opens Jordan up to trust the two as friends and confidantes even though she previously referred to cheerleaders as “idiotic” (3). We know Jordan likes Carrie when Carrie says “Now go get 'em,” (122) and Jordan notes that Carrie sounds “just like Coach when he gives us pep talks before games” (122) and is “surprised she doesn't slap my ass too” (122).

The first time Jordan meets her new team mate, gorgeous Ty Green, she's taken aback by his seeming lack of dedication to the sport. “A Texas football player who doesn't kneel down and pray to the Cowboys every Sunday?” (21). Ty turns out to be not only handsome but a talented quarterback, Jordan's equal on the field. Even as Jordan determines that she cannot date a teammate and remain focused on her dreams of playing college ball for Alabama, it doesn't take long for her to become smitten, “wanting to tackle Ty in the guys' locker room” (32). She attempts to hide her feelings, later saying “I drew a bunch of Xs and Os, which aren't hugs and kisses, but offensive plays from the team playbook” (37), but hiding in a potting shed with her journal, she isn't fooling even herself.

When Jordan injures her knee during the state championship game near the end of the book, we feel her pain intensely because we know how much football means to her. And of course, her thoughts center on “My ACL? Oh God...my future...” (249). When Henry accompanies her to the ER but her boyfriend Ty stops for flowers, Jordan realizes that “maybe my life needs some physical therapy too” (254). Later, upon hearing that her knee injury is just a sprain, she writes in her journal, “I feel like I've been given a free play” (256).

Kenneally masterfully twists this language of sports metaphors when she has Jordan try to discuss her feelings with Henry using a sports (albeit baseball) analogy, only to be told by Henry that he doesn't “speak Shitty Sports Metaphor Language” (162). Henry thus forces Jordan to confront her feelings for him directly, making the moment more powerful.

As with all writing tools, simile and metaphor may be overdone, but for sports novels I feel the grass is greener on the Astroturf side. Kenneally's use of sports simile and metaphor challenged me to think about how I could use comparisons from the world of figure skating in my own novel and I also saw applications for other hobbies that are important parts of characters' lives. Writing about a piano student? Metaphors may be key. An artist? Brush up your novel with similes. Until then, “I'm taking the ball and running with it” (256).

Works Cited:

Kenneally, Miranda. Catching Jordan. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks Fire, 2011.

I love few things more than finishing a book with the thought of, “OMG, how did the author DO that?” The first book that did this for me was The False Princess, by Eilis O'Neal. The second I finished, I had to go back and seek out how O'Neal had so successfully intertwined her plot threads and foreshadowing. So this week's Technique Tuesday is a shout out to my favorite mentor texts in each of the Swoon Reads site's four indexes: heat, tears, laughs, and thrills.

For heat, I adore Simone Elkeles's novels, especially Perfect Chemistry. Brittany's perfect life unravels when her teacher assigns gang member Alex as her lab partner but things soon heat up – and I'm not talking about their hand-warmer class project! I find many romance novels filled with kissing scene after kissing scene to the point where they all smear together like a lipstick stain but Elkeles works the heat in every touch. And when she does use kissing, she still makes the scene unique. My personal favorite is when Brittany loses a challenge to Alex and has to kiss him. If you haven't read this novel, I dare you to read it just to see where.

For tears, I have to cheat a little. Wendelin Van Draanen's The Running Dream isn't a “boy meets girl” or “girl meets girl” or “boy meets boy” kind of love story. Jessica's true love is running and her heart is broken after losing a leg in an accident while traveling for a track meet. I'm not usually big on tear jerkers but I cried the whole way through this novel: sad tears, angry tears, happy tears, and just about everything in between. I cheered Jessica on with each artificial limb stride. And as soon as I was done, I had to read it again.

For laughs, nothing tops Miranda Kenneally's Catching Jordan. I don't even like football but it was impossible not to love the sport when I saw it through the eyes of heroine and high school quarterback Jordan Woods. Jordan's interactions with her teammates kept me in stitches and made me want to hang out with them all. And, yes, I wanna date Henry, too!

For thrills, my vote goes to Crash Into You, by Katie McGarry. Rachel and Isaiah share a love for street racing – that puts both their lives in jeopardy and gives them six weeks to save each other. McGarry spins their story through alternating view points, which I love, and after two books which featured Isaiah in the literary backseat, I was so ready to see him get his turn behind the wheel.

Happy reading!

I'm excited to be beginning a new tradition here on the blog: Technique Tuesdays. I'll be posting abbreviated versions of my critical essay work at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Check back for weekly updates and feel free to reflect on how you might apply these techniques in your own writing in a comment.

In The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, author Sherman Alexie begins with three chapters of back story dump. His narrator, Junior, tells us how he ended up unattractive, poor, and best friends with someone who enjoys beating others up. So why was I still reading?

Voice. Though Junior tells instead of shows, he does so through one-liners such as “there is nothing better than a [Kentucky Fried Chicken] leg when you haven't eaten for (approximately) eighteen-and-a-half hours” (Alexie 8). He goes on to explain that the worst thing about poverty isn't hunger and describes how he had to carry his sick dog outside to his waiting father: “A bullet only costs about two cents, and anybody can afford that” (Alexie 14). Junior's voice is a compelling mix of both the hilarious and tragic.

Creating a compelling voice for one character is a challenge on its own, but what about works with multiple points of view? When I first read Rita Garcia-Williams's Jumped, the story of a girl fight told through three voices, I found two of the voices stood out distinctly because they were linked to personal passions.

Trina's obsession is art: “Add color, my crazy point of view, and – bam! – I make you look twice” (Williams-Garcia 7). This love colors her world, and she sees everything through a rosy pink filter, including others' opinions of her. Dominique just needs to punch that ball down. Basketball, volleyball, any kind of ball. Even her sentences come out like basketball dribbling:

I punch Vivica.
Vivica punches Shayne.
Shayne punches me.
I punch Viv.
Light punches. Sweet punches. They don't mean anything. (Williams-Garcia 13)

So why was the voice of the third girl, Leticia, so hard to distinguish? She does have a passion for her cell phone and even names it: “I keep Celina on vibrate, stashed in my bag” (Williams-Garcia 23). Was her voice simply not as well connected to her passion? Or was her less distinctive voice done on purpose?

Leticia's lack of voice sets up her position as a passive viewer. She sees life like she's watching TV. Even when she reflects back on a time when she walked in on a teacher having a medical emergency, she describes the incident as “like watching a reality-TV show” (Williams-Garcia 141).

Though Trina is disfigured at the novel's conclusion and Dominique in jail, I'm left feeling most sorry for Leticia. In living only for the sound bites of life, she is missing out on her own life potential. She has no understanding of how real the consequences of the event she could have stopped were and her only regret is that she didn't make TV herself:

And I'm like, wow, I finally know real people on television. And to think, I was there when it all went down. I could have been on that news program being interviewed. I knew all about it from start to finish. I just look at the TV and I can't believe it. I just can't believe it. (Williams-Garcia 167-168).

Sometimes hearing voices is a good thing. Maybe sometimes, it's better not to hear a voice.

Works Cited:

• Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007. Print.
  
• Williams-Garcia, Rita. Jumped. New York: HarperTeen, 2009. Print.
  

I had the pleasure of meeting Heather Demetrios during my residency at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she helped me with revisions on my work-in-progress, DANCE WITH ME. When she returned my manuscript, she confessed that she “used to be a figure skater so this was super fun to read!”

Heather's web site has a list of ten interesting things she might tell you if she met you at a party, including that her mom was struck by lightning when she was pregnant with her, but here we're getting an exclusive peek at her figure skating past:

“I skated with the LA FSA when I was in elementary school and part of junior high. When I stopped skating, I had landed my double flip. (But only once! The rest of the time I landed everywhere BUT my feet.) I started skating late - when I was ten years old or thereabouts. Maybe 11. Ultimately, I didn't really skate for years and years, but the time I did was very intensive (those 5:30 a.m. practices, etc.). I was struggling to master my jumps and was about to transition into ice dancing when I had to stop skating due to my family's financial situation. Still, I love it to this day and miss being on the ice. My favorite move was my best attempt at a Nancy Kerrigan Spiral and I loved doing sit spins. I HATED the axel, but loved loop jumps. My favorite memory is of my mom sewing sequins onto a costume while watching me practice. She was a single mom and it meant so much to me that she was making so many sacrifices for my skating. She sat in the cold and sewed so she could support me while I was practicing. It's one of my favorite memories of my mom, period.”

SOMETHING REAL, Heather's debut novel, isn't about figure skating but skaters will emphasize with the problems faced by main character Bonnie Baker. A skater's falls may be broadcast live and replayed, but Bonnie's whole life has been on TV. When her family's reality TV show, Baker's Dozen, is canceled, Bonnie gets a chance for real friends and maybe even a boyfriend. Then she finds out that her family is going back on the air. SOMETHING REAL hits the shelves on February 4 and is available for pre-order on Amazon right now. For more about the novel as well as Heather's upcoming works, visit Heather online at http://www.heatherdemetrios.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter: @HDemetrios