Category: Books

Suki, Self-publisher

Posted on by Suki

I never thought I’d self-publish a book. Of course, having a blog is like self-publishing your own magazine, so it’s not like I have a general problem with the idea. But as someone who once owned a small publishing company, I liked the idea that there was someone else vetting my work, helping me make it better, then putting their stamp of approval on it.

Then along came Hanna.

My daughter (who is not named Hanna!) went through a phase where all she wanted to read were chapter book series. Judy Moody, Ivy & Bean, Ramona the Pest, junie b. jones, and even Captain Underpants were her favorites…and were all about school. One day she stood in front of the chapter book section at our library and asked mournfully, “Are there any books about homeschoolers?”

Hanna, Homeschooler
Hanna is on sale now at Amazon.com and BN.com.

We looked for them, and there were a few. I keep a list of books about homeschoolers here. But there was nothing like the trials and tribulations of a young child at her studies—nothing like the books my daughter was obsessed with.

Back then, I homeschooled during the day and as soon as dinner was over, handed the household reins to my husband so I could go upstairs and work. That night, I went upstairs and invented Hanna, a young homeschooler who sits at the window seat in her grandmother’s house and watches her young neighbors leaving for the first day of school.

What I hoped to put into the book was the experience of homeschooling the way that other chapter book writers attempted to catch the joys and confusions of school. From what I have observed, most schools are more similar than different, whereas each homeschool is unique unto itself. I could no more contain the full homeschooling experience in a book than I could catch the unique details of each child in the world.

So Hanna, Homeschooler of necessity reflects my own experiences: a homeschool run by a mom who was ambivalent about the choice at first, an eclectic mix of structure and unschooling, a secular approach that includes education about religion, a dad whose job keeps him from being the primary educator but isn’t checked out from the daily lives of the kids.

I also added some fictional complications: My children’s own paternal grandmother never lived with us but in the story she is reimagined as the somewhat curmudgeonly denizen of the lion’s den downstairs. The father in the story is trying to better his family’s life and in so doing, has become less present in his daughter’s life. They have moved from the hippie mountain enclave that I imagined for them to a more conservative Central Valley town where they struggle to find like-minded families.

I wrote the book, got some feedback, and told my agent about it.

There’s this thing that agents do when faced with their client’s pet project that will never sell. “Well, certainly we could consider trying to find a home for the book, but let’s focus on the other manuscript first.”

In fact, my agent told me, she’d recently sold a book with a minor homeschooled character to a publisher. The publisher made it a condition of the sale that the author remove the homeschooled character from the story! “There’s no market for homeschooling stories,” they said.

Of course, I know the market for homeschoolers. You find it in households in every type of neighborhood. You find it amongst the upper crust and the barely getting by. You find it in libraries, in museums on free days, and anywhere they offer LARP. Homeschoolers are everywhere, yet largely invisible.

I agreed, however, that Hanna was hardly guaranteed to be a bestseller. I put her away, but she kept nagging at me. Why not just self-publish? she’d ask me. I don’t want to self-publish, I’d answer. Let someone else deal with it.

Finally, at a writing conference last spring, I attended a round table about self-publishing. As a former publisher, I had all the skills I needed save illustration. And all the other reasons I wasn’t self-publishing this book? Well, they didn’t seem to hold up when I tried to voice them.

“Go for it,” my fellow writers said.

“Well, I can’t think of why not,” I told myself. “So I guess I should just do this.”

So here she is, my girl Hanna: 

I didn’t do this alone, of course. I got a number of adult and kid readers to help me with revising and making it a better story. I hired a professional illustrator I knew whose kids had attended school with my son. I am reaching out to my friends and colleagues to help me get the word out the way word usually travels in our circles, from homeschool to homeschool.

I hope those in the homeschool community enjoy my little tale. I could imagine some families with children in school might enjoy it, too. But mostly, I am pleased to be adding one more little voice to the ongoing story of our culture that writers create, each day as we tell our stories. Not every child goes to school. Hanna doesn’t, and though she wonders about school, she ends up happy and thriving in homeschool.

Vive la différence!

Book Review: Creative Home Schooling grows up

Posted on by Suki

It was the weighty Bible of gifted homeschoolers. You saw it on every shelf. My copy was so coveted, one of my homeschooling friends apparently walked off with it and it hasn’t been seen on my shelves since.

What was it? An extensively researched book called Creative Homeschooling by Lisa Rivero, published by Great Potential Press (who published my book, From School to Homeschool, ten years later).

The new version of Creative Homeschooling is slimmer and more focused on modern homeschooling.

Creative Homeschooling was exhaustive and a bit exhausting. At least one homeschooling mom I mentioned it to said that just looking at it gave her a headache! But it was a necessary resource when the Web was in its infancy. With the great changes in homeschooling since the first edition in 2002, homeschooling books have become something other than a resource list. At the time the first edition of Creative Homeschooling was released, however, parents were hungry for information.

“I wrote this book because I needed more information,” Rivero writes in her introduction to the new edition. “At the time, little had been published about homeschooling gifted children, and the Internet was not nearly the quick go-to resource it is today. Fewer people knew anyone who homeschooled or thought of it as a ‘normal’ choice.”

When I started homeschooling in 2007, Rivero’s book was already a classic. Although I couldn’t utter the G-word (“gifted“) in my usual homeschooling circles, as soon as I met another gifted homeschooler, we’d talk about Creative Homeschooling.

But now it’s 2015. People get their homeschooling information from the Web. Why a new version of this venerable homeschooling book?

Rivero says that the first thing she did in the revision process was to realize that her book was no longer valuable as an up-to-date resource list. In fact, even if she updated the list, it would go out of date quickly. The Web is the right place for resource lists. So what is left?

The new version of Creative Homeschooling is slimmer, more focused on the “why” and “how” of homeschooling. Paper listings go out of date immediately, but great advice is timeless.

“Present generation [homeschool] families have quickly learned that homeschooling a gifted child is not about finding the perfect approach or even the perfect resource; they know that the only way to make homeschooling work is to inform themselves as much as possible, and then to always make decisions based on their individual families,” Rivero says. “There is no book that can make those day-to-day decisions for them.”

Rivero’s book focuses on the keyword in its title: creativity. Homeschooling is not about following a formula, and learning is not about attaining a set body of knowledge. Modern education is all about creativity and flexibility; homeschoolers are well-situated in a world where being a lifelong learner is key to success (monetary or otherwise).

“Many of my college students can do a Google search in a heartbeat but are lost or anxious when it comes to organizing their own thoughts during an hour of solitude,” Rivero says. “Time is homeschooling’s greatest gift.”

Rivero gives away her point of view in many ways, not the least of which is starting her “Nuts & Bolts” section with thoughts on creativity. She focuses on creativity throughout, even when discussing such mundane topics as the loss of income in a household.

“Some homeschool parents give up a job to stay home with their children,” Rivero writes. “Often more stressful than the loss of income is the loss of intellectual and creative outlets.”

Rivero
Author Lisa Rivero

The book’s emphasis is on “gifted” children, but the definition of that word has widened and Rivero’s advice is applicable to any child who is an asynchronous learner. Refreshingly, although Rivero’s book is aimed at families who value academics, she doesn’t push achievement-oriented learning. Rivero doesn’t jump on any bandwagons. Her material is based on research, such as questioning the validity of learning preferences, a bit of a sacred cow amongst homeschoolers at the moment.

The updated edition incorporates much of the cutting edge psychological and neurological research that has happened in the years since its first writing. Rivero includes information gleaned from research, such as Carol Dweck’s Mindset, takes on the right brain/left brain fallacy, argues for considering the problem of applying labels to children, and takes on the damage that overly high expectations can have on developing minds.

The new Creative Homeschooling isn’t the resource Bible it once was. It’s now a lean and focused look at the value and challenge of homeschooling bright children. The fact that it’s only being offered as an e-book is perhaps its most telling feature. This book is not a romantic look at homeschooling past, but rather a guide into homeschooling’s future.

Creative Homeschooling
by Lisa Rivero
Great Potential Press, 2014
Buy at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble

Five Writing Mistakes I Learned from Harry Potter

Posted on by Suki

I wrote this essay a couple of years ago after attending a rather dispiriting writing workshop, which was led by agents who pretty much insisted that if you aren’t doing what everyone else is doing, you will never get published. Each of the rules below were ones I heard at this conference. I’m republishing it now inspired by this weekend’s SCBWI Golden Gate Conference, a lovely, supportive environment wholly at odds with that other one. This piece was originally published on the Write for Kids blog.

Harry Potter
What do you do when J.K.Rowling does everything you’re not supposed to do?

I once heard a writer of adult literature read an essay she’d written about how Checkhov proved all truisms about what makes a well-written story wrong. But writers of children’s literature don’t have to go literary to get examples of their own. Here are five rules of writing I learned in children’s writers workshops, and what a quick rereading of the opening of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone says about such advice.

1) Kids’ books should never start with adults, a.k.a. “kill the mother.”

True, Harry doesn’t have a mother. But the first book immortalizing this character starts with the Dursleys, who aren’t even major characters. Their names are apparently Mr. and Mrs. Their son is “small”—definitely not a middle grade fiction reader. As we move forward with the confusing narrative, we meet elderly wizards sitting on a wall. This goes on for seventeen pages. The wizards talk about a baby. A giant arrives (OK, this sounds exciting, except he), bursts into tears, and needs to use an enormous hanky.

2) Kids’ books need to introduce the central tension immediately, without any confusion about “what this book is about.”

Yes, we do find out that Harry has been orphaned and he is going to live with “Muggles,” whatever they are. But we don’t get a whiff of the central tension of this book, or the series, anywhere near the first pages of this book. The Dursleys, who open the book, are always bit players, the tragi-comic relief of the series. You-Know-Who is mentioned but is apparently dead. And Harry himself, the boy who lived, literally sleeps through the scene. Judging from the opening, what the Harry Potter character “wants” is a good night’s sleep!

3) Kids’ books need to stick with a kid’s point of view.

Students, take note: Kids don’t want to read about what grown-ups are thinking and feeling. Never, ever write about a grown-up’s perspective or a grown-up’s concern. This line from Harry Potter must be a fluke: “It seemed that Professor McGonagall had reached the point she was most anxious to discuss, the real reason she had been waiting on a cold, hard wall all day…”.

4) Never start with generalized background descriptions of our characters.

I need only quote the second paragraph of Harry Potter: “Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere.”

I could stop there (it’s pretty self-evident), but I must channel now the voices of JK Rowling’s writers’ group, who all learned what children like when they took writing classes as adults. “Now, Jo, you’ve got to cut all that Dursley nonsense. All those details can come up when they’re necessary. No kid is going to get past that first page with an expository paragraph like that!”

5) Children get impatient with long descriptions—keep it to a few words.

I can’t do better than Rowling, who stakes her £560 million on the belief that children do love a delicious description: “Nothing like this man had ever been seen on Privet Drive. He was tall, thin, and very old, judging by the silver of his hair and beard, which were both long enough to tuck into his belt. He was wearing long robes, a purple cloak that swept the ground, and high-heeled, buckled boots. His blue eyes were light, bright, and sparkling behind half-moon spectacles and his nose was very long and crooked as though it had been broken at least twice. This man’s name was Albus Dumbledore.”

So what does it tell us that the biggest selling children’s series in history breaks every one of the “unbreakable” rules offered in children’s writing workshops? I think it tells us a few things:

First, it tells us that great writing makes its own rules. I’m sure that if Rowling had followed all of the above advice, one of the twelve big publishing houses that rejected the book would have published it. And I’m equally sure that there would now be no Harry Potter mania of the sort we’ve seen. It would have been a fine book, as dismissible as the other fine but dismissible books that publishers feel safe publishing.

Second, it tells us that writers who want to rise above the din need to stay true to themselves. If the story that speaks to you is about wizards, it just can’t matter that the publishing industry says (as they did before HP) that kids are over wizards and are looking for dystopian romance or some such. A fine writer can crank out fine books that sell well by catering to the market. A writer who wants to do more must follow her muse, which may be whispering a long paragraph full of flowery adjectives in her ear.

Finally, the success of Harry Potter tells us that the publishing industry is too quick to elevate practical advice to received wisdom. Every piece of advice quoted above is good advice in many cases, but that doesn’t mean that it’s law. Of course, good writers work on their craft, and they try out advice to see if it improves their writing. But good writers, unlike mediocre writers, are not beholden to the rules.

As Harry Potter himself might say, when what you know to be true is at stake, there’s no point in following rules just to stay safe.

A grown-up Harry Potter for me and you

Posted on by Suki

Some years ago my husband was reading a book he’d bought on the basis of a good review. He was sitting in his chair chuckling, and occasionally he would say, “You have to read this!” and then “I mean it, you’ve really got to read this!”

“OK, dear,” I said, and back to my own book.

Then I did. The book was The Magicians by Lev Grossman. After I finished it I was hanging out with my sister and she said something like, “Oh, my book club read the greatest book!” and I answered, “I just read the greatest book, too!” And it turned out to be one and the same.

Harry Potter for grownups! Put the kids to bed early and enjoy.
Harry Potter for grownups! Put the kids to bed early and enjoy.

The Magicians has now morphed into a trilogy, the final episode published last month, and it’s one that I think every parent who was jealous of their kids for having Harry Potter just has to read. Remember how reading Harry Potter with your kids (or in my case, listening to the wonderful audiobooks) made you wistful for how the Narnia series really didn’t cut it once you put them side-by-side? Harry Potter let kids be real kids. They did real stuff that was not in the least allegorical. They lived in a world that was tactile and dirty and complex.

All we got as kids was weak Christian allegory. (Apologies if you still love Narnia, but reading it as an adult killed all my affection for it!)

The disappointing thing about Harry Potter, from the adult point of view, is that because it’s a series for kids, it does have to stay within the kids’ world experiences. There are no great revelations, no deep learning that happens in that series. The kids have adventures and eventually they overcome the evil.

The end happily ever after et cetera.

The Magicians is Harry Potter for grown-ups. It opens when our “hero” (rather less heroic than Harry, even) stumbles his way into a college for magicians. He doesn’t even know that magic exists. He’s never done anything the least bit magical, yet they’ve been watching him and they want him. Why?

In Harry Potter,  that question gets answered, but Grossman’s books are for grown-ups. Questions don’t get answered; they just balloon and get overwhelming, then subside and let you get on with your life. Quentin, Grossman’s protagonist, stumbles through young adult life in an endearing and somewhat scary way. Quentin’s a thinker, and he lets you know why he makes the decisions he makes, but unlike in a children’s novel, it doesn’t all come together to make sense. It ends, but the ending is just the beginning of the rest of his life.

These are not books for kids, or even your teenagers. In fact, don’t let your teens read these books. They’re yours. I mean it. I think you have to have lived long enough to realize that you don’t really know what the hell you’re doing in life in order to appreciate these books.

I love this piece by Grossman on how he found himself as a writer. I think Grossman does a great job of summing up why his books are so great to read:

“Fantasy is sometimes dismissed as childish, or escapist, but I take what I am doing very, very seriously. For me fantasy isn’t about escaping from reality, it’s about re-encountering the challenges of the real world, but externalized and transformed. It’s an emotionally raw genre — it forces you to lay yourself open on the page. It doesn’t traffic in ironies and caveats. When you cast a spell you can’t be kidding, you have to mean it.”

It’s clear that Lev Grossman means it. Go read these books. Ignore your children for a while. Really. And don’t let them read over your shoulder, as my 11-year-old attempted to do last night. She could see I had a good read, and she was jealous.

Let them be jealous. Let them have Harry.

We have Quentin.

The search for the girl scientist in literature

Posted on by Suki

Note: This piece was published by a publishing industry blog a few years ago, but they have apparently reworked their site and I can’t find it anymore. So I am reposting it here. This is one of the pieces that I have written that people find over and over—we need to support our scientist/techy/mathy girls, and part of that is letting them know through literary role models that they aren’t alone. Unfortunately, I got some wonderful suggestions on that blog for other books, but they are now lost! If you have any other girl scientists up your sleeve, please do leave comments!

My eight-year-old daughter is a scientist. This isn’t a career choice. This is just a fact of her being.

When she was 18 months old, she accidentally pulled on her sensitive big brother’s hair.

He cried!

Green glass sea
This is a lovely book for aspiring girl scientists—or any girl who doesn’t fit in.

Another child might have felt guilty or might have been upset. Not my daughter. She had only one possible reaction:

I wonder what will happen when I do that again!

And again and again.

Fast forward seven years, and she’s a regular exhibitor at our county science fair. If I want her to practice her penmanship, we do science. If she learns new words, it’s through science.

In the midst of this we had an accidental book club. We’re homeschoolers, and we do a lot of driving. Those two combined mean that we love audiobooks. I balk at the high price tag, so we get most of our audiobooks from the library. This means that more often than not, we listen to whatever happens to be on the shelves.

Unintentionally, two of the books we listened to were about girls who love science.

The first was The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. This lovely book by Jacqueline Kelly covers nearly a year in the life of a girl living in rural Texas at the turn of the 20th century. She forms an unexpected alliance with her grandfather, an amateur naturalist, and becomes entranced with science the way that some girls now become entranced with teen idols.

This positive portrayal of a girl scientist in a place where she is so completely out of place is riveting. Not only did it inspire more interest in evolution and botany in my already science-loving kids, but it presented the role model of a girl who is a scientist against all odds.

The second book, The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages, is also historical, set in Los Alamos as scientists work desperately to create the “gadget” that will end the war. Dewey is a born scientist also, in this case, an inventor. She loves to create her own gadgets, and largely ignores the taunting of the other kids. When she is unexpectedly required to spend a few weeks living with another family, she forms an alliance with another misfit girl, who is finding her calling as an artist.

Sea and Tate are very different books. In Tate, the negative pressure on the main character comes largely from adults. In Sea, however, adults are largely charmed by Dewey’s inventiveness, but the kids are just short of brutal to her.

In both books, however, today’s girl scientists can see girls sticking to science because it is what calls to them. Interestingly, both books almost ignore the girls’ schooling, which seems tangential to their real lives.

In the midst of this mini girl-scientist book festival, it occurred to me to look for more books. In my wanderings, I got a recommendation to ask Tanya Turek, who runs the blog books4yourkids.com. She mentioned that Sea has a sequel, White Sands, Red Menace, which I had found.  She also reminded me of A Wrinkle in Time, which fits closely enough to the theme I was looking for. But then she came up with a blank.

“I spent quite a bit of time on the internal book search system at the Barnes & Noble where I work as well as the internet and I could not come up with any more books that what I suggested already,” she e-mailed me. “I think that there really, truly are only a handful of books that have scientific themes AND female protagonists.”

I can imagine the reasons for this: Few women are scientists, and scientists in general are unlikely also to be fiction writers, so when you look for the cross-section of those two small groups, you apparently only come up with two current writers amongst our many writers of fiction for children.

To explain the lack of these books, however, does not excuse it! We need more books about girls who love science. Girl scientists, even in the 21st century, meet with a good measure of what met Calpurnia in 1899 and Dewey in 1945: misunderstanding, social pressure, and disappointment. Books are where misfit kids can find themselves, and where they find out they aren’t misfits after all.

When my daughter was three, she was nearly impossible to have in a preschool room. All order would be upset; all expectations would be stymied. Forget learning outcomes, her teachers just wanted her to stop experimenting!

I finally found the right teacher for her. One day when I went to pick her up, Cari said, “I have realized what is going on here. Your daughter is a scientist. She must find out how everything works, and the laws behind everything the classroom.”

As soon as Cari understood my daughter, things went much more smoothly.

Books like Calpurnia Tate and Green Glass Sea will hopefully help my daughter understand herself.

Now available