I’ve been looking for music that helps encourage flow state while writing and editing. I’ve found that it has to be elegant, with very few words or ideally entirely instrumental. A friend of mine turned me on to Joep Beving, a fantastic contemporary pianist.

If you’re going to start anywhere with him, start at his 2015 album Solipsism (Spotify, Amazon)

Review taken from Amazon:

“Now available for the first time on CD, Joep Beving’s Solipsism has amassed over 81 million streams on Spotify alone. Inspired by the philosophical idea that reality only exists in one’s mind, Beving composed these introspective and often filmic piano pieces and recorded them at home in the still of night. Rejecting the often over-produced and layered music styles of today, Beving keeps the music of Solipsism stripped back to its essence: simple sounds to express complex emotions.”

One of the takeaways from this SCBWI LA Conference I’m at this weekend is that there are so, so many great young adult and children’s books that I need to read. Here’s a short list of what captured my attention:

• Darius The Great Is Not Okay – Adib Khorram
• Turtles All The Way Down – John Green
• Opposite of Always – Justin A. Reynolds
• The Hazel Wood – Melissa Albert
• The Lightning Thief – Richard Riordan
• The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
• Big Cat, Little Cat – Elisha Cooper
• Orphan Island – Laurel Snyder
• Insignia – S.J. Kincaid
• Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All – Laura Ruby
• Cinder – Marissa Mayer
• Fireblood – Elly Blake

I’m having a blast at my first writing conference, SCBWI’s annual summer one in LA. Some things that are sticking out to me:

• First impressions matter. Great titles, great 1st sentences, great 1st paragraphs, great 1st chapters. Best title I’ve heard so far today: “Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All”.
• Literary Agents want to know you’re respectful of the industry and thoughtful with your craft. It helps to be an avid reader.
• The Industry is talking about the books published in the last 2-5 years. Consider this timeframe for finding comparative titles.
• There is a book called Big Cat, Little Cat that is guaranteed to make me cry. I had to order it immediately.
• Don’t ask rhetorical questions in your query letters and pitches. But what if I do?? =)

As a new member of SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators), I’m pretty excited about attending my first writer’s conference in LA on August 9th-12th.

I’m debating how many panels I should attend on the industry of novel publishing versus panels on the craft of writing (lord knows I’d benefit from both). What I’m definitely attending though are panels hosted by wonderful women like Jane Friedman. Her book The Business of Being a Writer inspired a lot of my current work in getting my book closer to publishing-ready.

I’m looking forward to this!

I recently finished Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass on the Art of Storytelling (after getting sidetracked by an early recommendation in the class to read The Graveyard Book – amazing btw!).

Neil Gaiman is super inspirational, and it helped me get over a slump I was in during the revision phase of my first novel. Like in his prose, as a speaker he has a tendency to get to some deep truths in very artful ways. Here are a few of my key takeaways from the class:

• Fiction is lying, but you’re using the truth to make the lie feel true.
• A story is anything that makes you keep turning pages and doesn’t make you feel cheated at the end.
• Don’t be so dear with your characters that you’re not willing to have them face conflict.
• Show who a character is by what they say
• Characters will always get what they need, they don’t always get what they want.
• Don’t waste time arguing with critique partners. The feedback they’re giving you boils down to the important information that “something here isn’t working for them”. Just acknowledge the feedback and fix the problem.
• The five steps to being a writer: 1) Write 2) Finish 3) Send it out into the world 4) If rejected, send it out again 5) start the next thing