YA Author Stacey Kade

I hang out in the bookstore cafe a lot, writing, reading, just generally chilling out. My favorite spot, thus far, is the Barnes and Noble in Vernon Hills. The people who work there are awesome, and it’s a big B&N so there’s plenty of opportunity for one of my other favorite activities: people-watching. Or, in this case, people-listening.

Writers are, I think, natural eavesdroppers. It’s not intended maliciously, of course, but I think we’re just eternally curious and hearing snippets of lives going on around us is intriguing. We fill in the gaps with what we think the story should be, or at least I do.

In any case, the other day, in an effort to distract myself from the guy loudly clipping his fingernails (yes, seriously!) in the cafe (double gross) without any attempt to clean up after himself (gagging now), I was half-reading and half-listening to a conversation between a girl and her mom. Actually, it was a bit more one-sided than that. The girl had some kind of college guide and was reading descriptions, very amusing, tongue-in-cheek ones, of various colleges to her mother.

In that instant, I had a sudden flashback to those days of trying to pick my school out of the giant tome of possibilities. All of them sounded good on paper. Of course, they did. What self-respecting university PR person would send in “Eh. It’s okay as long as you don’t mind seeing the same 300 people over and over again”? Or, “Good luck meeting your professor. He’s the guy who never shows up for class”?

No, the true test of a college and whether it was right for you was the college visit day. And oh, can I tell you the sucky experiences I had?

Two school visits spring to mind in particular. The first, a small private school offered me a very good scholarship (as in, almost all my tuition paid) to be one of their “top scholars” on campus. Sounds good except…total campus population? 500. My high school? 800. It was terrifying exactly how tiny and incestous the place was. Everybody knew everyone and everything…people I’d never even met knew who I was and who I was staying with. I felt like I couldn’t breathe just on the visit weekend. The girls I was staying with also took great pains to tell me that they didn’t really have to study either. “It’s totally a party school.” Um, yeah, with the same 250 guys, assuming a 50/50 split between the genders, minus those who have girlfriends, are gay, are interested in your roommate, are not interested in you…which would leave, what, seven possible dating prospects?

And in fact, I suspected they were telling the truth about the studying thing. I didn’t see a single person with a book open the whole weekend–and trust me, I saw almost everyone on campus, literally–which made me feel really good about their “top scholar” offer. Eeesh.

Second, and this one was by far worse…I stayed with a friend I knew from church camp and her two roommates, whom I didn’t know prior to that visit. One of the roommates was locked in a drama with my friend and the other roommate, but no one seemed able to explain what had happened to cause this. The other roommate had her out of town boyfriend in town for the first time since leaving him in the summer.

During my visit, my church camp friend promptly got wasted and passed out in her bed. The angry roommate left in a huff to stay next door. And the third roommate and her boyfriend, despite having been given ample alone time earlier in the evening and refusing my offer to stay with the angry roommate next door, decided to have sex in the middle of the night while I attempted to sleep on the floor…three feet away.

Yeah. After having attended college, this seems like small stuff (oh, the stories I could tell.) But as a high school senior trying to find a place where I thought I might belong…it was enough to make me run screaming in the other direction.

These were both incidents that could have happened on any college campus (if you could find another one equally small, in the case of the first example), and on another visit or a different weekend, it might have turned out differently. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I didn’t spend the night at any more colleges after that second visit, including the one I actually chose, Valparaiso University. Oddly enough, what convinced me there was simply the feeling I got when I walked onto campus. It felt like home.

So, how about you…anybody else have college visit day horror stories? I’m sure mine are tame compared to others!

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the process of writing. I’m always looking to understand my own process better and learn something new, some way of making this even just the tiniest bit easier.

My friend Isabo Kelly and I have discussed this several times, and I think the analogy we came up with holds true. Writing a book is like finding your way across an unfamiliar room filled with furniture…in the dark. You stumble into things, bark your shins, get stuck in a corner, yell for help, and finally eventually make your way through it. But, unfortunately, because every book is different, once you make it to the other side of the room and turn around to go back again through that darkened room, someone has moved the furniture on you.

Still, there are things I’ve learned about myself and writing:

1) When a proposal (typically three chapters and a synopsis) is due, I need to write the chapters first. If I write the synopsis first, it kills the story dead, right then and there.

2) Before I can start writing, I must do the pre-writing first. Getting to know the people in the story is essential.

3) Everybody who is a main character (e.g. my heroine and her love interest) must have a goal. It’s better if it can be described in concrete action verbs. Like, win a music scholarship, stop parents from getting a divorce, graduate from high school, etc.

4) Characters either have a goal from the beginning of the story and events occur to change it (or try to), or events that occur in the story give them a goal that was not present before. I guess, technically, they always have a goal. It just depends on whether the story is about them keeping that original goal despite the events that occur, or changing to a new goal based on the story events. In the first, it would be like someone who’s determined to be an Olympic ice skater even though her parents lose their jobs, the rink closes down, her coach quits, etc. The other would be someone who’s content to stay at home until something dramatic happens and forces them on an adventure to save the princess, or whatever.

5) I think that good stories involve choices. It can’t just be about things that happen to people. They have to have some skin in the game, so to speak. They have to make choices that cannot be avoided with important consequences hanging in the balance.

6) There should be conflict in every scene. People walk into the moment wanting different things, and nobody wants to lose.

7) That little snippet of dialogue or description that drifts through your brain? Write it down. Immediately. Otherwise, you’ll forget it and drive yourself crazy trying to remember it. Chances are, you’ll remember it as being more erudite than it actually was, but better to know for sure!

I’m sure there are more…but this is what I have so far. One of the things I love about writing is the opportunity to keep learning. To try new things. Find better ways. So, yeah, there are bruised shins and another dark and crowded room to navigate each time, but it’s all about the journey and what you learn along the way. And I’m always interested to discover what I’m going to learn next.

Alona and Will’s story will continue! Disney-Hyperion, my publisher, bought the sequel, which is called Princess Poltergeist, and a third book in the series. I am SO excited!

The official blurb is below (my thanks to my friend and fellow author, Juliana Stone, for sending this to me):

Stacey Kade’s PRINCESS POLTERGEIST and an untitled sequel, continuing the story that starts in the forthcoming GHOST AND THE GOTH, about a newly-dead homecoming queen and the tragically uncool spirit guide she has to work with in order to get “to the other side”, to Christian Trimmer at Hyperion Children’s, in a very nice deal, for publication in Summer 2011 and 2012, by Laura Bradford at Bradford Literary Agency.

I’ve been a fan of Chuck Taylors (some of you may know them as Converse) since my sophomore year in college when I bought my first pair (w/blue and green plaid flannel…hey, it was the mid-nineties and flannel, baby, was hot!) My dad was amused. They were very retro to him because, as a kid growing up in the 50s and 60s, that’s what he wore.

So imagine my delight when I was browsing the web (read: procrastinating) and found that you can make your own custom Chucks! You can pick the colors, the pattern (no, thank you) and even have text put on the heel strip or the side. You can make Chucks with your school colors, your grad year, your upcoming college colors, whatever. I just love that!

Dude. I am so all over this. Now I just have to pick my colors and text. My book title (yes, I’m a dork and that was my FIRST thought) is too long. You only get 12 characters, unfortunately. Hmmm. Could maybe be Ghost & Goth–that’s only 10. But it sounds like a bar or a band name.

Go forth and design your custom Chucks here.