The Hate-Mongering Tart

Sometimes the pursuit of publication feels like being zapped into a Ms. Pac-Man game. It’s like I’m trying to gobble up all the dots of industry information, writing knowledge, and creative growth I possibly can before the Rejection Ghost catches me – and KILLS me again.

But sometimes, I get a power pellet in the form of an acceptance. Yeah, I just went there. And yes, my personal gamer development really did stop at Ms. Pac-Man, so humor me. Besides, Halo would make a more frightening metaphor for the writing life. I think. It looks much scarier on the cover.

Power pellets may sound like a small reference, but they save Ms. Pac-Man’s life, people! And sometimes a small acceptance is all you need to gain renewed energy as a writer, too. One “yes” can offset a whole folder of rejections, and it doesn’t have to be the sale of a novel. Many novelists still publish poetry, essays, and short stories.

I am poetically-challenged (to put it kindly) but I have sold some essays. It’s a great feeling to hear from an editor that she loves your essay and wants to publish it, but I’m focusing more on my children’s and young adult writing these days. I don’t have much to contribute in essay form for that.

Young adult short stories intrigue me. I’ve found I actually like the challenge of creating them from a fresh spark, or adapting a novel excerpt to work as a short story. I’ve learned things about my own writing, and writing in general, from this form. Everything needs to be more distinct. You have less room to introduce characters, and drawing out the back story is not an option. This is a nice way of saying they’ve taught me to shut up already and get to the point.

I really do believe learning to craft short stories has improved my novel writing. Plus, I like a change of pace sometimes. When I take a break to write a short story that calls to me, I find I come back to my novel-in-progress with greater enthusiasm. As a pre-published author, I still have the luxury of not being on a deadline so I take advantage of this stage in my writing journey to switch between projects and learn simultaneously from each form. Rather than feeling overwhelmed by the process of writing a whole novel, I come back to it grateful for the ability to use more of my words. Hopefully, I use them more effectively as a result.

And hearing that an editor wants to publish one of my short stories definitely provides that extra spark to keep going on the novel writing front. I’m not suggesting short stories are easy to publish, and I’m honored to have one of mine featured in the inaugural issue of Sucker Literary and one coming in the next issue of Verbal Pyrotechnics, but I do think they are worth my time.

Learning to craft a satisfying short story has furthered my writing skill, and hearing “yes” to some of my submissions has definitely drained some power from the Rejection Ghost.

Shelli Cornelison.

Shelli Cornelison lives just outside of Austin, Texas. She never was enamored with video games, but she did always wish Ms. Pac-Man had been given her own identity, beyond the bow. And this is probably the kind of obscure obsessing that caused her tenth-grade English teacher to say her writing gave him a headache; though she always suspected his head pain was most likely caused by an undiagnosed tumor, which also prevented him from following her complex logic. She is an avowed fan of sarcasm, who most often writes contemporary, realistic young adult fiction with a healthy dose of irreverant humor, but her next YA short story, coming soon from Verbal Pyrotechnics, is something completely different.

Dear High School, Thanks for being so sucky. Love, H

As an adult, I thank God that I’m not one of those people who look back at high school and think those were the golden years. If I had peaked in high school, my writing life today sure would be different.

So thank you high school for sucking the big one.

The moment I stepped through those double doors and onto the worn but well waxed linoleum floors of MHS, the odd school smell of stale cigarettes mixed with scrambled eggs floating around me, inspiration in the form of humiliation began.

That first month of high school was particularly horrific; I lost my two bffs, my boyfriend, and the freshmen class president election, all by October 1. I might have been the most hated girl at MHS for the month of September 1989.

Most publically humiliating was The Break Up…because the boyfriend enlisted his best friend to do the deed for him.

A Moment That Later Became A Scene…That Became a Story

Sucker Literary Magazine, Issue 1.

It’s a rainy Monday morning when my boyfriend’s best friend shuffles over to me at my locker.

Before I can say hi, he mutters, without looking at me, “Uh, so, *Rob says you’re dumped.”

My jaw hits the floor.

The best friend digs deep into the pocket of his super baggy pants. Pulls something out and tosses it at me.

I stifle an “ow” as it hits my toe, exposed in a lovely pair of Birkenstocks. The object bounces off me and lands in the middle of the crowded hallway.

I follow it with my eyes and see that it’s the watch that I had given the lovely *Rob just the week before. Tears now blinding me, I scurry out to get it…only to slip and fall…just as the bell rings.

A swarm of people converge into the hallway. I continue to stumble and fumble. The watch gets accidentally kicked and kicked…I lose track of it.

I hoist myself up and as I make my way back to my locker, I see the best friend and ex boyfriend laughing…and holding the watch…over a large trashcan. I turn away but hear the loud clink as it fell.

And that was only the first week of ninth grade.

How Writing Helped Me Survive

I had another four years of funny and/or humiliating moments. And the only way I survived was by writing about them…all of them. I also found that the more I wrote, the more power I felt inside and the more confident I became…and the easier it became to mine my pain for humor that I could turn into stories.

Now this scene eventually turned into a revenge story I wrote not too long after the break up. In the fiction version, the protagonist gets her revenge after the boyfriend dumps her by snapping a humiliating picture of him in a very compromising position (it involves nudity and another person…who’s a guy). She makes copies and is about to steal into the high school and post the pictures everywhere, when she realizes she is better than that and instead burns all of the copies, including the original. To read this story in its latest form, click here.

I took that awful moment in my life, and through my fiction, I made some sense out of. Sometimes, as with the scene above that became the Revenge Story, I was able, through the character, to take control and make sense out of a moment, when in real life I couldn’t, and that in and of itself was healing for me. Other times, pouring my heart out into my diary, telling the real life stories on paper, simply got the pain of it all out of my body, and that release was enough.

As a teen, I wrote instinctively to cope with life, and as an adult I try to teach my students to do the same.

How Writing Short Form Helps My Students

Because I still relive the pain of those years through my writing, I have an uncanny ability to connect with teenagers. This makes me really effective in the work I do as a writing coach and tutor to teens; I hear their stories of surviving high school every day, and I can help them to make sense of their pain through writing.

I instruct my students to write short stories, fiction or non, and in so doing, I provide them with the space to see their lives, not judge or fix them, but really observe themselves.  This is the best way to learn about who you are and what you want, something we have to continually revisit in our lives but begins when we are teens.

Writing (and reading) short form is accessible and as a teen, things are tough enough just making it through the day. Why not make reading and writing possible instead of impossible? Not to mention so many beginnings and endings happen in those four years of high school, with friends and boyfriends. The short form captures all those episodes perfectly.

So I Created A Lit Mag Dedicated to YA in The Short Form

One year ago I created a literary magazine that focuses on publishing YA stories that capture the pain and the possibility of those teenage years…all inspired by some very humiliating moments in the hallways of my high school.

It’s not coincidence that I named it Sucker : )

*Names changed to protect the so-called innocent .

For more information about Sucker including submissions and what we want, please visit our blog. Please go to Amazon and leave us a review! Submissions for our next issue are not open yet, but stay tuned for information about that. You can sign up for our newsletter  and follow us on Twitter @SuckerLitMag

Hannah R. Goodman.

Hannah R. Goodman is the founder/editor of Sucker Literary Magazine and has published YA short stories on Amazon’s Shorts, in an anthology entitled, Bound Is The Bewitching Lilith, and in the journal Balancing The Tides. Her first novel, My Sister’s Wedding, won first place in the children’s/YA category of the Writer’s Digest Self Published Book Awards, 2004. You can find her on Twitter @hannahrgoodman or @suckerlitmag or her blog Write Naked http://www.hannahrgoodman.blogspot.com/ She is represented by Erzsi Deak of Hen&ink Literary Studio.

So May is Short Story Month.  Which means I’m going to use this week to celebrate this funny little creature.  From flash fiction to the near-novella, the short story needs a little love.  To kick it off, courtesy of Candlewick Press, I’m offering up a copy of STEAMPUNK! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant.

From Amazon:

Candlewick Press, October 2011.

Imagine an alternate universe where romance and technology reign. Where tinkerers and dreamers craft and re-craft a world of automatons, clockworks, calculating machines, and other marvels that never were. Where scientists and schoolgirls, fair folk and Romans, intergalactic bandits, utopian revolutionaries, and intrepid orphans solve crimes, escape from monstrous predicaments, consult oracles, and hover over volcanoes in steam-powered airships. Here, fourteen masters of speculative fiction, including two graphic storytellers, embrace the genre’s established themes and refashion them in surprising ways and settings as diverse as Appalachia, Ancient Rome, future Australia, and alternate California. Visionaries Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant have invited all-new explorations and expansions, taking a genre already rich, strange, and inventive in the extreme and challenging contributors to remake it from the ground up. The result is an anthology that defies the genre even as it defines it.

The anthology features stories from: Cassandra Clare, Libba Bray, Cory Doctorow, Shawn Cheng, Ysabeau S. Wilce, Delia Sherman, Elizabeth Knox, Kelly Link, Garth Nix, Christopher Rowe, Kathleen Jennings, Dylan Horrocks, Holly Black, and M.T. Anderson.

To enter to win, leave a comment on this post!  Winners will be chosen by the random number generating fairy.  Please remember to leave your email!  U.S. addresses only, please.

When I picked up FEROCITY SUMMER by Alissa Grosso, I was not expecting such a twisty, turny action-packed book.  I knew that the book dealt with a few unsavory things that are all too real to many teens: a rough home life, a best friend with an alcohol problem, the huge divide between working and upper class, and drugs.  Specifically the fictional-but-could-be-ripped-from-the-headlines drug called Ferocity.

So as not to spoil you, I’m going to give you a wee list of fun other things that make what could have been a simple issues book into a pseudo heist thriller:

Flux Books, May 2012.

1. The BFF’s older brother who may or may not be the main character, Scilla’s, honey.  Sometimes.

2. Said older brother may or may not be involved in some illegal dealings with illegal substances.

3. Someone has been going town to town robbing convenience stores.

4. Road trip.

5. An FBI agent with horrible fashion sense.

6. That older brother’s ex-college-room mate who knows things.  And hates the government.  But likes Scilla.

7. And then there’s that whole Scilla and her BFF might have killed someone by accident thing.

So that’s the deal.  And it’s all told in tight, unflinching prose that made the book not only compulsively readable and emotionally gripping, but also a literary delight.  FEROCITY SUMMER takes teen issues and ups the stakes. Sort of like Laurie Halse Anderson’s WINTER GIRLS meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer, minus the supernatural.  And the scariest part?  It could probably happen in your town.

The narrator of THIS ONE TIME WITH JULIA by David Lampson is possibly one of the most likeable narrators I’ve ever met.  At the same time, I know it couldn’t have been easy to write from his point of view, which is probably why I found this book so brilliant.  THIS ONE TIME WITH JULIA is a story of family, friendship, and almost romance with a side of road trip and summer antics.  And it’s told from the point of view of an eighteen year old who is best described as “simple.”

Razorbill, February 2012.

Joe has lived his whole life looking up to his twin, Alvin.  And at eighteen, having dropped out of school, he’s under the care of their older brother Marcus.  In truth, both he and Alvin have been Marcus’ responsibility for years, since their parents died in an accident, and Marcus is absolutely sick of Joe.  He’s even more sick of Alvin, whom he sees as manipulative, taking advantage of Joe’s trusting nature and inability to make good decisions for himself.  Alvin took off recently, on a whim, to be with a girl named Julia who was visiting in L.A. but lives in Tennessee.  Alvin misses him desperately — as brothers and especially twins are want to do when separated. So when Alvin unexpected reappears in L.A., even though Marcus says he shouldn’t meet him, and even threatens Joe with eviction, Joe ignores him.  And, in a strange turn of events, Joe ends up road tripping in Alvin’s abandoned car with Julia back to Tennessee where pretty much everything he thought could never happen to him is on the menu.

The story is beautiful, hilarious, and heart-wrenching.  The book was impossible to put down, and has stayed with me long after having read it.  It has that certain flavor that John Green’s books have — the universal truths of growing up boiled into a character who can hardly hold it all inside, the brutal honest and utter joy of being a person, and the way love takes hold when you’re least expecting it — the way it makes you do things that are so outside you’re nature you’d swear your someone else.  THIS ONE TIME WITH JULIA is a tremendous achievement of a novel, and it’s one that I hope will be on many many lists this coming year, including ones that come with shiny stickers.

There is something about Timothy Decker‘s THE PUNK ETHIC that I just can’t put my finger on.  And it’s what made me like the book — that raw energy behind it, the main character Martin Henry’s uncertainty and genuine angst, the brevity of the text.  These elements wrapped up to make that something that makes THE PUNK ETHIC special, even if I can’t quite describe it.

Namelos, March 2012.

The story, of course, is compelling. Inspired by comments from his English teacher, Martin decides to put on a charity concert at a local coffee shop featuring as many local musicians as he can, hoping he can adopt a landmine and deactivate it.  Meanwhile, Martin is struggling to deal with his feelings toward his best friend Holly and with his own ambitions as a musician.  I found Martin one of the most true-to-life teen boy characters I’ve read lately — full of ideas, passionate, and uncomfortable in his own skin.  And despite his awkward social status, and his own presumptions about the people around him, the way Martin, fumbles and all, pulls together a community is inspiring. THE PUNK ETHIC is a short novel, peppered with delicious illustrations by the author, and one that makes for a delicious afternoon read.

Q: How much fun was Kimberly Pauley‘s latest novel?
A: A heck of a lot!  CAT GIRL’S DAY OFF is one hundred percent ridiculous, in the best way possible!

Tu Books, April 2012.

I loved reading this book.  Based on the premise that, in our modern world, many people are born with talents.  Natalie Ng, for example, has several talented people in her family.  One of her sisters can tell if someone is lying, another can blend in with her surroundings like a chameleon.  Natalie, however, has the supposedly low-grade talent of being able to talk to cats.

So when her bff, Oscar, shares a video of celebrity blogger Easton West nd her fabulously pink pets with Natalie, the last thing Natalie expects is to be launched into a rescue mission.  See, when most people see this video, they just see a perturbed cat.  Natalie hears the cat screaming for help.  And it turns out the plot is even thicker than it appears.  Easton West is in town to check out the filming of a movie loosely based on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — and the movie is being filmed at Natalie and her friend’s high school and the surrounding Chicago area.  When Natalie, through a bit of hijinks, finally gets to talk to Easton’s cat, it appears that Easton isn’t Easton at all.  The real Easton may have been kidnapped, and the only evidence they have is, well, the word of the blogger’s pets.

This fun, exciting romp of a book is in part love letter to Chicago, and very much in the spirit of John Hughes.  With all its goofiness, the characters are real and compelling, and totally loveable.  Even better? The villains are just as fun to read.  I’m looking forward to future novels for Kimberly Pauley — I’m sure they’ll be just as refreshing as CAT GIRL.

There are books out there that don’t so much entertain the reader as hit the reader over the head.  THE CHILDREN AND THE WOLVES is one of these books.  Told in multiple perspectives, it’s the story of three troubled teens and the little girl that they’ve kidnapped.

Candlewick Press, February 2012.

Yes, you read that right.  Teenage kidnappers.  Most of the characters in this novel are middle school age.

And yet, you feel for these kids.  You want them to grow, to do the right thing, to get what they want in life.  You want Bounce to maybe not be a sociopath and to find a way to deal with her wealthy, neglectful parents.  You want Orange to find a way to help his dad or at the very least help himself.  And you want Wiggins to overcome his situation at home, stand up to his friends, and to let the little girl go.  He takes care of her, he brings her food, lets her play her video game.  But he knows it’s not right.  Wiggins is the hero of this book as well as one of the villains.  And with Adam Rapp‘s lyric style, his voice is so honest, so real.  As are his cohorts.  And, hauntingly, the voice of The Frog — as they’ve dubbed the little girl — is just as distinct.

THE CHILDREN AND THE WOLVES is a beautiful book about horrible things.  It’s a story that maybe shouldn’t work, but Adam Rapp makes it happen.  I hope you’re intrigued enough to check the book out for yourself.

In Lissa Price‘s debut STARTERS, most adults are dead.  The Spore Wars, during which a contagion spread and killed everyone between 20 and 60, has wiped out much of the population.  Callie is one of the many “unclaimed minors,” kids under nineteen without grandparents or other living relatives.  Many of the unclaimed minors have been institutionalized, living in dorms built and run by the government — dorms that are rumored to be unpleasant.  Which has left Callie with very little in the form of options.  Her brother is sick, she’s living on the street with a small band of friendlies including her kind-of-but-not-really boyfriend Michael, and it’s illegal for her to get a job — unless, of course, that job is the underground market for human body rentals.

Delacorte Books for Young Readers, March 2012.

At Prime Destinations, Callie is given a contract.  She will do three rentals, at which point she will be free of her contract and paid and on with her life.  Sure, an Ender — an elderly person — will be renting her body and doing who knows what, but at the end of her contract, she’ll be able to afford a place for her and her brother and Michael to live.  Of course, things don’t go as planned.  During her third rental, she finds herself slipping in and out of consciousness, she hears her renter’s voice, and she finds herself in the middle of a way bigger plot than the month-long nap she’s supposed to be taking.

Part mystery, part romance, hugely sci-fi, and really fun STARTERS is sure to satisfy some dystopian cravings in the coming months.

May 3, 1963. Forty-nine years ago today, the seven-times elected Safety Commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, ordered the firemen under his control to join together powerful water hoses, mount them on a tripod, and blast the resulting gale-force barrage of water through heavy-duty nozzles called monitor guns. Connor and his firemen must have been facing an enormous conflagration, right? After all, with a force equal to 100 pounds per square inch, the water surged strongly enough to sheer bark off a tree, strip clothing off of innocent bystanders accidentally caught in the spray or even knock them off their feet.

Peachtree Publishers, February 2012.

Actually, there wasn’t any fire in Birmingham at that moment, at least not where the firemen were aiming their hoses, around Kelly Ingram Park in the city’s black business district. The hoses did everything I just mentioned, except put out a fire. What Connor intended to put out was children.

I learned bout these events in detail while researching WE’VE GOT A JOB: THE 1963 BIRMINGHAM CHILDREN’S MARCH (Peachtree Publishers, February 2012). To explain them, let me back up the timeline.

In January 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to town from Atlanta to help a local black Baptist minister, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, force the city to undo its Segregation Ordinances. Among other requirements, these laws, adopted in the early 1940s, prevented “Negroes” from eating in restaurants with white people unless the two groups were separated by a seven-foot-high wall. The code also prevented them from playing “with each other in any game of baseball, softball, or basketball” or checkers or cardsin any inn, restaurant, or home.

Dr, King’s plan called for civil rights protesters to picket and sit-in at segregated stores and restaurants, get arrested, and “fill the jails.” Once the jails were filled, other protesters could continue to break the law—without consequences. Then, once they could do so with impunity, the city’s criminal “justice” system would disintegrate, and, surely, the city fathers—all three ruling commissioners were men—would have to agree to rescind the odious ordinances. All King and Shuttlesworth needed were about 1,000 protesters willing to go to jail.

Scheduled to begin in early April, the plan was doomed, however, by a fatal miscalculation, as you can see from the following timeline.

On April 3, only 65 demonstrators sat-in at segregated lunch counters, and only 20 of them were arrested. On April 4, four were arrested. April 5: 10. April 6: 29. April 7: 26. But, on April 8: 0. And, on April 9: 3. At this rate, it would take years to fill Birmingham’s jails. Actually, they would never fill because no one would stay in jail that long. There would simply be a revolving door of reluctant protesters taking each others’ meager spots in a few cells.

Cynthia Levinson.

Hoping for greater numbers, nevertheless, activist black ministers kept calling for volunteers. But, by the end of the month, only a couple of hundred, at most, had been cajoled into getting themselves imprisoned. They included Shuttlesworth and King, who wrote a soon-to-be-famous letter from jail; however, they, too, were eventually released.

Believing in the plan but not the strategy, another minister, James Bevel, proposed a radical alternative: jail children. His rationale was that, whereas adults legitimately feared losing their jobs while they were in prison, kids had less to lose. His proposal caused dissension within the black community—the black adult community, that is—but hardly any among the kids themselves. As Arnetta Streeter, one of the demonstrators I interviewed, told me, “It was something that the children took hold to and wouldn’t let go.”

So, 49 years ago yesterday, May 2, 1963, about 500 children, aged nine to eighteen, streamed out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, marched a block or so up the street, were arrested by Connor’s police force, and shoved into paddy wagons or filed onto school buses, and taken to jail. In other words, in one day, twice as many youngsters offered to go to jail as adults had in the entire previous month. The cells were filling! The plan seemed to be working!

But, that was a problem. Connor grew desperate. So, when hundreds more children piled into and swarmed out of the church the next day, May 3, he retaliated with the hoses.

Remarkably, although children, firemen, and bystanders were injured, the marchers kept on coming. Connor’s next tactic was to sic German shepherds on them. No one was killed, fortunately, but some were dangerously bitten, and many more were terrorized.

What happened next? It was all up to the numbers of kids who would be willing to continue to face hoses, dogs, and other brutalities. I encourage you to read WE’VE GOT A JOB to find out.

Meanwhile, check out my daily Children’s March Countdown on my website.