Warning, guys: this is going to be long.

It seems I may have touched a nerve in my review of Becca Fitzpatrick’s Hush, Hush. At issue wasn’t my reaction to the book, but rather a fairly flippant comment I made over the research habits of Fitzpatrick’s heroine Nora:

Nora sees scars on Patch’s back, thinks “angel!”, investigates fallen angels on teh Google (and if you’ve read my reviews, you know how much I hate internet research scenes; writers, knowing that kids google shit does not equal being hip to the technology of young people), and decides that Patch must be an angel.

Several writers chimed in to say that they’ve included Google scenes in their books, and that they think it’s okay. One writer, Angie, summed up her feelings thusly: “Anyway, the thing about googling – I do have this in my book, but it’s not about the MC trying to figure out what kind of creature the guy is because she already knows that – she’s just doing basic research to learn as much about him as she can (my paranormal isn’t a vampire or a werewolf either) so I kind of feel like it’s justified. I mean what do you do these days when you want to find out about something quickly? Drive over to the library and start hunting the shelves? No, you go to the internet. So, I guess that I don’t see the problem – it makes sense to me.”

And so I thought I might talk a little bit about why these passages bother me–why using one in your paranormal is both a cliché and potentially a poor storytelling device. And hopefully I can convince at least one writer to think twice before including one and to rely on more convincing and effective mythology-building devices instead.

I think the Google scene has a friend in that old fiction-writing cliché, the mirror description. You probably know what I’m talking about, but in case you don’t, I’m referring to a passage where a fiction writer will have the character stare into a mirror and rattle their physical traits off in a long list (if you want to see a bad example of this, go over to my professional site and read the excerpt of my last project posted there under “fiction.” Yes, I included a prologue mirror scene. Everyone told me to cut it, but I just wouldn’t listen. I was wrong. They were right). New writers often insist that their mirror scenes are different–effective, interesting, somehow not cliché. And I’m not saying that it’s impossible that they’re right–only that they are likely to be wrong more often then not.

The problem with mirror scenes lies largely in the disconnect between real life and effective fiction. New writers might roll their eyes at this rule because, well, they look in the mirror and think about their physical traits. It’s realistic! Therefore it should be okay in fiction, right?

Well, eh, not really.

Readers rely on fiction to be better–more interesting, with a livelier pace and development–than real life. And one easy way to flatten a story is to infodump on your readers, particularly in a cliché way. Mirror scenes are infodumps of a very basic sort–they list facts (in this case, physical appearance). They stop the plot’s development almost entirely, at least for a paragraph or two. They pack information that could be scattered throughout the book into a very small space and force the reader to pay particular attention to it, at the expense of things the reader might find more interesting: character interaction, rising or falling tension, conflict.

And the same could be said for Google scenes.

I should note that I mean something fairly specific here, not the use of Google or computers generally. I’m talking about that scene, almost always present in a paranormal romance, when our main character sits down and Googles whatever she suspects her boyfriend to be. We’ll have a passage of her combing through links (or not–more on this in a bit) and maybe a wikipedia article or two will be quoted verbatim. This isn’t a particularly new trope; I asked about it over on ask.metafilter.com, and one responder told me that the old research cliché used to be characters running to the library and reading microfiche, and that the trope probably originates with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But an established history does not for effective storytelling make.

The problem, I think, like so many others, started with Twilight–when this trope was ironically used to much greater effect than in many of the paranormal romances that followed. About a third into the book, Bella, having been clued in to Edward’s ghoulish identity by Jacob, gets online and starts Googling searching her favorite non-brand name search engine. And here’s what happens:

. . . I turned to my computer. Naturally, the screen was covered in pop-up ads. I sat in my hard folding chair and began closing all the little windows. Eventually I made it to my favorite search engine. I shot down a few more pop-ups and then typed in one word.

Vampire.

It took an infuriatingly long time, of course. When the results came up, there was a lot to sift through–everything from movies and TV shows to role-playing games, underground metal, and gothic cosmetic companies.

Then I found a promising site–Vampires A-Z. I waited impatiently for it to load, quickly clicking closed each ad that flashed across the screen. Finally the screen was finished–simple white background with black text, academic-looking. Two quotes greeted me on the home page:

[blah blah blah vampires]

The rest of the site was an alphabetized listing of all the different myths of vampires held throughout the world. [Then S. Meyer goes into some of the myths, showing the depth of her research]

Overall, though, there was little that coincided with Jacob’s stories or my own observances. I’d made a little catalogue in my mind as I’d read and carefully compared it with each myth. Speed, strength, beauty, pale skin, eyes that shift color; and then Jacob’s criteria: blood drinkers, enemies of the werewolf, cold-skinned, and immortal. There were very few myths that matched even one factor.

Now, Meyer does a few things surprisingly well here. For one, the act of searching the web is fairly accurately reflected in the description. Bella finds a lot of links, though those are breezed over, before she hits on something helpful. The depth of Meyer’s research into vampire mythology is shown–and the stuff Bella reads even comes into play in later books.

But this is still an utter infodump. A lot of the information here is extraneous, and this immediately follows another, albeit more effective infodump, where Jacob explains the rivalry between vampires and werewolves. That means we get two solid chapters where the plot all but stops–a palpable break in the rising tensions between Bella and Edward–so that Meyer can illustrate that she knows about Filipino vampire legends. And while some of this is relevant, most of it is not. It really screams to be skipped.

And worse, for all that the web searching is somewhat accurately rendered, some of it makes Bella sound . . . well, really sort of stupid. Because a lot of the traits she lists the Cullens as having–”Speed, strength, beauty, pale skin . . . blood drinkers, enemies of the werewolf, cold-skinned, and immortal”–absolutely are traits that pop culture vampires, from Dracula to Buffy‘s Angel–share. That passage seems weird enough that I’m led to wonder two things: first, if we’re meant to believe that Bella lives in a universe completely different from ours, and, second, if she’s just a poor reader or web researcher. Because I really can’t believe that amidst all those links she found about TV shows, she didn’t encounter something about Buffy.

Since Twilight exploded, quite a few writers seem to be relying on the first book as a sort of blueprint to craft their paranormal romance. Books where girls meet spooky creatures in bio class abound, and so do Google scenes. I can rattle the titles of at least a handful of these books, published in the past few years, that do this (off the top of my head: Wings, Hush, Hush, The Summoning, Deadly Little Secret–I’m sure there are more; feel free to send me more examples). The problem is that I can’t think of one that does this at least as well as Twilight, and as you can tell from above, it wasn’t executed particularly well there, either. Let’s take a look at a few of these.

First up, Wings. Smack dab in the middle of the book, Aprilynne Pike has her heroine, Laurel, start googling fairies at a computer in the local library. Here’s how it goes:

She sat at the computer and logged in. After a quick glance at her watch, she started Googling.

Forty-five minutes later, she had found pictures of faeries living in flowers, wearing clothes made of flowers, and sipping tea out of tiny flower cups. But no mention of faeries actually being flowers. Or plants. Or whatever. Lame, she thought peevishly.

She started reading through a long Wikipedia article, but every two or three sentences, she had to look up a reference she didn’t understand. So far she was only a few paragraphs into the article.

Okay, so at least this passage is very brief. But it’s also completely useless. Nothing that Laurel finds is outside the normal sphere of knowledge for any teenager: they, and we, already know about the stereotypical and prototypical fairy faery myths, so there’s really no need to reiterate those to us. Immediately following this passage is a conversation between Laurel and her friend Chelsea about fairy faery mythology. This conversation is both more informative and more interesting, because it not only informs but also illustrates the tensions between the two girls. And so the passage feels conspicuous, as if the writer is saying to us “I know that teenagers Google, and I use Google, and so it should be included in my book for realism’s sake.”

To which I can only reply, books are not supposed to be real life–they’re supposed to be better. Ever scene should advance the plot or tighten the existing tensions between characters. Don’t give us useless stuff just for the sake of realism! I don’t want to read about your character taking a dump just because you do!

(Clearly, here, I’m not lecturing James Joyce. Again, we’re talking largely about paranormal romance, not key modernist texts.)

Which brings me to Hush, Hush, which I found to be one of the worst offenders at relying on google to dump information on the reader. Unlike Meyer and Pike, who included these scenes before the climax, Fitzpatrick includes it at the climax, two thirds of the way through the book. Up until this point, our heroine Nora knows almost nothing about angel mythology–Fitzpatrick relies on the Google scene to tell both the character and the reader what’s going on. This necessitates that Nora make some ridiculous logical leaps to even get to the point of googling, and what follows is not realistic in myriad ways:

. . . I typed “angel wing scars” into the Google search bar. I hovered with my fingers above the enter key, afraid that if I went through with it, I’d have to admit I was actually considering the possibility that Patch was–well, not . . . human.

I hit enter and mouse-clicked the first link before I could talk myself out of it.

Fallen Angels: The Frightening Truth

[blah blah blah article about fallen angels that conveniently spells out the rules of Fitzpatrick's universe, including their biblical origins, how they become human, what happens when they mate with humans, who and what the Nephilim are, et cetera et cetera.]

Guys, I just didn’t buy any of this! It was all so convenient–the first link she clicks explains precisely what’s happening?! But . . . that’s not how the internet works! It seemed so convenient and unrealistic that, when I read it, I actually got up and googled “angel wing scars.” You can see the results for yourself.

But what bothered me the most about this scene was not how unrealistic it was but rather how Fitzpatrick seemed to be sacrificing the opportunity for more organic development of her mythology for the sake of a google scene. Because Nora interacts plenty with fallen angel Patch–but she never seems to ask him the questions that most sensible people would ask, instead bumbling cluelessly through most of the novel until that scene. This means that their interactions ring less-than true, and it damages the tensions between them through the novel’s first two thirds. Because if we’re going to talk realism, if I suspected the guy I liked was a fallen angel, you can bet that I’d ask him, point blank, precisely what the deal was.

In all of the above examples, the google scenes are action-stopping. They thud onto the page, calling attention to themselves in how poorly integrated they are into the text. They’re conspicuous, and often boring–whether they tell readers stuff they’re used to tell the reader about the mythology of the universe, as was the case with Hush, Hush, or if they lecture readers about mythology they should know about already, like in Wings. And when you bore your readers, you risk losing them. And when you lecture them, you risk condescending to them. These scenes are difficult to do well, even for the most skilled writers. They need to be judiciously placed so as not to damage the rising action, and often they can be dispensed with completely.

And they’re all over the place. They’re common, and they sound easy, and sound like a good idea, too. But let’s face it: they’re rapidly becoming cliché.

You might wonder what I’d suggest if not for a google scene. How can you realistically show a character in a technological environment learning organically about her boyfriend’s otherworldly origins? I have a few suggestions for that:

• Dialog. – One thing you might have noticed about all of the aforementioned examples is that there’s often a scene nearby where our hero talks to someone about this mythology. While these conversations can be infodumpy, they often have the benefit of serving a dual purpose: they illustrate the relationships between characters as much as they teach the reader about the universe of the novel. Even in a digital world, conversation remains the most likely means for gathering information. Do your characters conveniently avoid asking important questions of their supernatural boyfriends, or their friends? Do they conspicuously avoid the topics at the forefront of your readers’ minds? If so, you’re missing out on prime opportunities to do organic world-building.
• Judicious placement of research, if you must include it. – Please, if you choose to have your character google something, or go to the library to look at microfiche, or whatever, place these passages carefully. For realism’s sake–most of us would google this stuff immediately, if at all–but also for the sake of your story. Don’t make your reader stop and read encyclopedia/wikipedia articles right at your climax. It’s boring. It’s dry. It’s not what we, as the reader, care about. If you want to give us an academic context for your story, do it early, and make in unobtrusive. Here, I can’t help but think about Buffy. I’ve been watching the first few seasons, and research in the library is, of course, integral to the series. But in nearly ever episode, it happens early. The viewers are clued in, and then allowed to move on to the battles and the romance and the witty banter–the stuff Buffy, and we, really care about.
• Make it realistic. – Let’s face it, nothing sticks out worse than a sore thumb then a scene of characters using technology that runs contrary to the way it’s actually used. Don’t make the internet conveniently small. Make sure your descriptions of net-use and research ring true. (And here, I think of Buffy again–because not only is the research realistic, but the characters’ attitudes toward research is realistic, too. Willow and Giles love doing research, even if it’s wearying. Buffy could care less and just wants to know how to kill stuff.)
• And avoid infodumping whenever possible. – I’m speaking generally here, not just about net-infodumping. Try to develop your universe slowly, over many passages instead of just relegating it to one paragraph. A series of conversations, balanced throughout a book, are much more effective than a single blob of encyclopedic text. Always.

Oh my god, guys! I’ve been so busy! So busy that I half-started a post on Wednesday’s YA Highway Roadtrip Wednesday Topic (because, as someone about to give away all of her furniture, move, and get new stuff–including a new desk; I can’t wait!–I have a lot to say about it!). But alas, it’s been sitting here, half-finished, for two days now. And probably will remain that way.

No loss, I assure you. When it comes down to it, all I was going to say was that I want to get an expedit desk from ikea.

It doesn’t help matters that I’ve decided to go ahead and finally give twitter a whirl. Poor timing, you know? I’ve resisted for years now–seeing the service as redundant in a world of real blogging, facebook, and google buzz (which I love–but no one uses!). But aaall the writing peeps seem to use it, so, since I have a guest post forthcoming on YA Highway, I figured it was time to jump in. My first foray looked promising. And last night, for the first time in a decade, I ended up in what was essentially a chat room with a bunch of real, live, working (and some publishing) writers. Sure, I still think it’s silly to essentially reverse engineer an AOL chatroom–but, damn, I’d forgotten how much I’d loved real-time chat back in the day. It was really exhilarating. I lost 30 minutes of writing time, but ended up feeling pretty inspired and pushing myself to 56,000 words last night, which wouldn’t have happened otherwise. I also got to hear about how Maggie Stiefvater was dancing around her living room to her own audio book. Adorable!

Anyway, Cindy Pon tweeted about an article she wrote over at Supernatural Underground about upcoming trends. The first trend there was “mermaids”–and I wanted to comment and be like, “Yes! Mermaids! Everyone should want to read about those!”

I hesitated, though, because I couldn’t help but think, “Damn, I’m trendy.”

It’s not like I don’t know that I’m writing to an up-and-coming trend. I’ll come right out and say it: I never would have started writing SEAS RUN DRY were it not for an agent’s tweets about how much she wants mermaid manuscripts. But I also never imagined that I’d be the type of person who writes to trends (and here I have to wonder–do any writers see themselves that way at all?). But what Ginger Clark’s tweets did was spark inspiration in me–or not even precisely inspiration, but rather memory. Because I thought, “Man, what the hell kind of story could I write that features mermaids?”

And then I remembered that, at fifteen, I’d started writing one.

I was never a big mermaid person generally. That was my sister, who collected them. They were all over her room when we were kids. Mermaid toys. Statuettes. Pictures. Books. Her mermaid love was so well-known in our family that our aunt bought her a toy mermaid as a get well gift when, at sixteen, my sister got mono–despite the fact that she was far too old and too cool for such things.

In contrast, I was a bit of a tomboy. I liked The Little Mermaid well enough, and even had an Ariel Barbie. But I didn’t play with her all that much. I did play with her tail, though, which was fabric and removable. I had this boy doll, the prince from the LadyLovelyLocks line, and I’d put the tail on him and make him a merman. He’d swim around underwater and have adventures.

Years later, when I was in high school, I stumbled upon a book of short stories about mermaids that had survived on my sister’s bookshelf through the Great Mermaid Purge of 1995. The stories there were pretty dark, and vivid, and sparked an idea in me. You see, we’d been reading The Odyssey in high school, and I felt for Telemachus. As a kid who had lost her own father pretty young, I saw his journey as the more significant one: how he believes, against all hope, that his father is alive, and how he journeys out to find him. I wanted to write my own Telemachus story. So I started writing this Telemachus/mermaidmerman mash-up about a half-human merman who tries to find his human father.

Like most of my writing projects back then, I didn’t get very far with it. But the idea stayed embedded in my mind for years. The merman, named Loril, was a surprisingly vital character. And so when I heard that people actually, you know, wanted to read about mermaids, I initially giggled–but only for a moment. Because then Loril came back to me, fully formed.

The story’s evolved since its incipience, of course. Because back when I was fifteen, I was pretty cheesy. In fact, I recently found the old version of this story buried in the netherlands of my harddrive. And . . . well, here; I’ll share my (unedited, with authentic ninth grade grammar intact) notes with you. They speak for themselves:

Loril Walker: Dead at Seventeen
I. Introduction
A.Loril Walker, age seventeen, is alone in New York City
1. He is hungry.
2. He is alone.
3. He believes his journey to the city is a mistake.
4. He is bitter and angsty.
5. He throws out his copy of “The Odyssey”
6. He is searching for his father.
7. He is different.
a. Emotionally-feels old, tired, weary of life.
b. Physically-has webbed fingers, bright emerald eyes, dark hair. Possible reference to breathing underwater or gilled legs.
8. He wishes to return to the sea.
B. Mazai births a human boy.
1. Mazai is a “creature of the sea” (don’t use mermaid)
2. Her people warned her against this.
3. The other women come to see the new child after his first breath. They are horrified.
4. She further offends her people by naming him Loril. a. Loril-”Song bringer”
b. From an ancient poem- “The moon rose in darkness above the waves and over the golden foam/Young Loril’s song spun red knots into the hearts of old/He took his shell and trumpeted, notes rising to the starry sky/The Gods lie dead in the seaweed, but their spirits would never die.
c. Loril was a hero akin to Moses. He led his people to off the coast of Florida, wrote their laws, and established their civilization as a major sea power. According to myth, he was a musician of the highest ranking whose songs could soothe the sea during a storm. He was brought to the monarch for a minor matter, but when disease struck down all at court accept for him, he took it apon himself to relocate his people.
5. She refuses to give him up. The women warn her that she’ll have to live with the consequences of being the mother of a “legger.”

Oof.

I have no idea what the title was all about, since I’m pretty sure the character was never going to die. And I have no idea what was up with all the angst in the first half (and it’s now set at the Jersey shore, which is a much better choice. Mermen in NYC? Unlikely!) The second half of the outline isn’t that far from some stuff that’s made it into the actual book, though; Loril is still named after a mythic character, and I still rarely use the term “mermaid.”

I’ve also since learned to spell “upon.”

Anyway, I still can’t deny that I’m writing to a trend. If I hadn’t heard that the subject might potentially be a popular one, I wouldn’t have thought of Loril or his story. It would have remained buried in my memory, latent. But so many people buck against the idea of writing trendy stuff. “I don’t write about vampires!” they say, “I write about paranormal romance about rabid foxes! FROM SPACE!” or “I’ve heard the next idea they’re pushing is mermaids–HA! AMIRITE?”*

All I can say is, and I’m sure it’s true of many people writing things they hope will sell someday, even if trendiness was the incipient motivation for writing SEAS RUN DRY, my story is no less important to me for it. Even if it never sells, I’ll be glad that I finally went ahead and wrote it down. After all, I’m not writing about a merman for those big merman bucks (sand dollars?)–I’m writing about a merman because he’s real to me, because he breathes (possibly underwater), and because I thought his story was worth telling.

*I’ll admit it–I laugh too! Snort! Mermen! Redonkulous!

What’s that you say? That it’s Tuesday? Did you bring your coat?

Oh yes, right. Teaser time.

Irene and Loril (previously) haven’t found his dad yet–but they have found what seems to be his brother. Under a less-than-savory pretext, they manage to get themselves invited to his home.

(Teaser removed)

I finished this painting a few nights ago. I was working on it, very sporadically, for probably about six months. Still, I’m pretty happy with the result.

It’s based on a photo from a book I got from a used book sale–Foods of the World: Cooking of the British Isles. All the photos are like this, velvety darks and seventies color schemes. But I saw this one and knew I wanted a painting of it.

(The caption in the book? “Resting on the usual fish-and-chips wrapping, fried haddock and potatoes will be seasoned with salt and vinegar.”)

I pretty much adore fish and chips. There was a restaurant–if you could call it that–near my hometown called The Chippery. It was hardly more than a shack, and the ceiling was a repurposed boat bottom. There were wine-dark glass bottles of malt vinegar on the wall, and I always ordered “the Cabin Boy”–one piece fish, chips, and a little plastic container of cocktail sauce.

Plus some clam chowder for good measure.

I went there with my dad, and then later, with my mom and my pop-pop. My grandfather and I would continue to go there together into my twenties, after he had his stroke. The last time I was in New Jersey, Jordan’s dad (also a fan) told me they shut down. The loss I felt was palpable–like an aftershock of the grief I felt over my grandfather’s death years before.

So the food in the picture means more to me than just delicious food, though it means that, too. It also has something to do with memory, with family, with tradition.

There was a time when I thought I might be a painter. In high school, I’d stay up all night painting (this, too, has something to do with loss: my mother’s friend Chuck gave me free art lessons, my first canvases, my first set of acrylic paints. He taught me how to do underpaintings, value scales, teased me about Pern, took me to life drawing sessions at the Watchung Arts Center, then, over the course of a few months, faded away from cancer). I applied to art schools. Then I freaked. For years, I’d been struggling to define myself as either an artist or a writer. The kids’ at the portfolio review days seemed much better prepared than I was, and I worried I was making the wrong decision. So I changed my mind. Art will always be there for me, I told myself.

And it has been, but only in fits and starts. I probably do one painting a year, with other art projects thrown in now and then. You can find some of my more recent stuff here, among other places. I even illustrated a book last year, though it was a long, arduous process. I’ve seen copies in Publix, and although the experience was hard, I couldn’t help but feel proud. For some reason, I know that (so long as I push myself), I’ve actually matured as an artist–that feels fortuitous and slightly unearned and weird.

(Have I posted this picture? I don’t think I have. I made Jordan a pretentious portrait of himself for his last birthday. Most of the time these days, my art is a gift for someone. I rarely do art-for-art’s sake anymore. That doesn’t mean that it’s not awesome. Haughty White Jordan, as we call him, is definitely awesome, if I do say so myself.)

I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot lately, thanks to SEAS RUN DRY. My heroine, Irene, is, at eighteen, supposedly about to embark on her own art school adventure–but she, too, is having second thoughts. Art is an emotional, loaded thing for her (as it is for most artists, I suspect), and she can’t help but wonder what her other choices are. All her life, she’s been Irene-the-girl-who-can-draw. She wonders what she’d be without that. Of course, a run-in with a certain merman gets in her way a little bit.

(I keep thinking about how, in her speech at our college graduation, my friend Tiff spoke about changing her own plans during college. I think that’s common. I think it’s a lot to ask of an eighteen-year-old, to know who she is and to make decisions about who she will be.)

Anyway, I’m rambling. Mostly, I just wanted to share my painting with you. I think it might go up by the eating area of my new apartment in my new state. Mostly, I just felt proud.

In other news, I bought a new, vintage-style bathing suit, which I absolutely adore. Polka dots!

Also, I really, really love this story, “How to Make Friends in Seventh Grade” by Nick Poniatowski, in this week’s issue of Strange Horizons–so much, that, when I finished proofing it, I sent the author a squealy fan-girl letter. Please do go take a look! It’s young adultish and so, so good.

Before I post today’s teaser, I want to talk a little bit about the structure of my current manuscript. Seas Run Dry takes place over the course of a single week. This is true for several reasons–for one, I wanted to try to create a densely packed narrative. For another, I wanted to highly the brevity of the summer romance contained within–and the romance of many teenagers, really. Things change and evolve so quickly when you’re seventeen or eighteen years old, and thanks to the intensity of adolescent emotion (one of the things I love about writing for and about this age group), it’s completely realistic to have a pair of characters fall head over heels for each other over the course of a handful of days.

Lord knows it happened to me when I was eighteen!

To highlight the brief course of action, Seas Run Dry doesn’t have chapter breaks. It has scene breaks, and also “day breaks”–the larger section headings are named “Thursday,” “Friday,” “Saturday,” and so on. I feel like this structure is a little risky; I’ve learned how to place tension at the end of chapters in my other manuscripts to propel the reading forward, and I can’t really do that here. But it’s fun to try something new, and it gives me an opportunity to shift tone a bit in the middle of the night. At first, I was worried about this; would it seem abrupt or unrealistic? But so far, I’ve found that it really just feels accurate. In the words of my favorite Ferlinghetti poem, we think differently at night.

So, here we are. Loril, in the earliest hours of Sunday morning, thinking differently:

(Teaser removed)

My teaser today, which draws inspiration from the infamous Tillie of Asbury Park (pictured above), comes from Loril (merman extraordinaire) and Irene’s first date. Irene’s been drinking, but Loril doesn’t know that yet. He’s more concerned with how her younger sister, Evie, just stomped off in a huff:

(Teaser removed)

This is the first time a book trailer has ever given me (heh) shivers.

Kristin Otts has issued a challenge:

The truth is, ladies and gentlemen, perfection is boring as hell. We are human beings. We are as diverse as the earth we live on. And we need to embrace it.

So, lovely readers, I have a challenge for you. I challenge you to help me start a wave of positive body image – a celebration of pimples and glasses and freckles and curves.

Post a picture of yourself – sans makeup, fashionable clothing, or a fancy-schmancy hairstyle. A picture of yourself in your PJs, hugging your teddy bear, making a stupid face. A picture of YOU.

It won’t be perfect, but that’s the beautiful truth about people. None of us are.

There was a time, age 12-14, when I did not wear shorts. I did not wear shorts because my knees were “fat”–thick and dimpled around the joints. All July and all August, too. I hid my body. I didn’t see that those were strong legs: legs that I hiked with, that I walked with (that same summer that I was thirteen, after my sister left for college, my mother and I walked every night at sunset the entire length of the town, my favorite thing about that summer, that stage in my life when there were few things to love, when I felt so unlovable). I don’t know where I got this idea, but I had it: fat knees, fat knees, had to hide them away.

There was a time, years and years and years, when I tried to smile with my mouth closed. This boy–a friend of a friend-turned-enemy–made a webpage about me when I was sixteen. “Phoebe’s teeth are attacking someone,” he said, and I knew what he meant, of course I knew what he meant–my “gummy smile,” the one that the orthodontist told me he could fix when I was 11, when my mother told him that my smile reminded her of my father’s. We can fix that, he said, but it will mean breaking bones, gum grafts, surgery.

I hadn’t even known there was something wrong with me. I hadn’t even thought I needed fixing before that. So for years, I smirked in photographs, but if you know me, you know that I love to smile, that I can’t help but smile, that everything shows on my face, especially joy. To this day, I can’t help but cringe at my grin, my genuine grin, in photographs.

Do all women–do all people?–feel like this about themselves, to varying degrees? Do we all think we need to be fixed, hidden? This has been a part of my thought process for so long that even now, when I try to change my attitudes, I still whine to my husband, “I’m fat, I’m fat, I have a double chin.” I don’t know how true any of it is–or even how earnest I’m being, and I’m generally pretty earnest. I know he thinks I’m beautiful. I know a college boy driving by in his car honked at me this morning, said, “Hey gorgeous” and I felt momentarily bolstered even as I felt assaulted and annoyed. Validated. Why can’t I validate myself?

Because this is a part of every woman–especially every young woman–I know, I try to put this in my books. How we see ourselves but don’t see ourselves as worthy. How something happens in our brain between the moment we see ourselves in the mirror and the moment we process the image of ourselves. I know that these thoughts are rarely accurate, and even if there are vicious people who would agree with them, that it’s all so, so subjective.

So this is what Irene thinks of her legs:

Irene pulled the drawer open, grabbing clean underwear, then the wrinkled black polo shirt and short cotton skirt that made up her work uniform. Irene hated the skirt. It was short enough that the male customers stared—she supposed that was the point, but it still made her feel self-conscious and lumbering, like her legs were huge, jiggling tree trunks.

And this, of course, is different from what Loril thinks:

Irene was an entirely different sort of wild. Her hair was coarse and unkempt and sheared short, like a man’s, as if she couldn’t be bothered to wear it any other way. Her long, finely muscled legs seemed stronger to him than any writhing, swaying tail. He imagined how they must have been forged—on land, running barefoot, the sand burning her toes.

He liked that image. He kept it in his mind when he spread himself out on a bench that night with his hands propped behind him to try and sleep. Irene—running through the surf, looking back at him and laughing, even beckoning to him to come join her. But he’d have to stay back, away from the water, feet firmly in the hot, dry sand.

This is pretty much what life’s looked like lately.

If you think martinis and meatball and television with my favorite person in the world are a bad thing, well then, you don’t know jack.

(Because really, it’s pretty terrific.)

In other terrific news, querying is going well. I’ve had a much more enthusiastic response to my last set of query revisions. Here are my current stats, stat!:

• I have queried twenty five agents.
• Of those, thirteen have sent me form rejections.
• I have received two partial requests, one of which led to a very thorough, thoughtful, and precise rejection. It was so nice–and fairly complimentary–that I didn’t feel bummed about it at all. Seriously, I wish all agents could be like this one.
• I have received two full requests (one not from the original agent queried, but another at the same agency), for a total of 16% of agents who wanted to see more.

In case you’re curious, this is the version of my query I’m currently using. Two writers–Kirsten Hubbard and Gretchen McNeil–gave me some help with revisions and I’m incredibly grateful for both of their awesomeness.

Fifteen-year-old Miranda Cohen wants to shed her dorky old image and reinvent herself someplace new—so she applies to Sacred Grove Academy, a residential free school for gifted students. But it’s not until she arrives on school grounds that she realizes how gifted she truly is. Turns out that Miranda is the long-lost descendant of a changeling, or fairy child, and mysterious powers course through her.

Students selected to attend Sacred Grove are supposed to spend their time learning to tame their otherworldly powers, but Miranda has other things on her mind. She’s struggling to redefine herself as “Randy,” a gorgeous, cool, and powerful Diviner—able to read patterns in nature, see into the future, and even tell when someone is lying. And falling for Mikhail, an older student with a gift for music and a tragic home life, seems precisely like something Randy would do. It doesn’t hurt that Mikhail can’t keep his hands off her, something that attracts the admiration (and the jealousy) of the other girls at Sacred Grove.

But when Mikhail begins to pressure Miranda to take part in a sinister ceremony, she finally realizes the steep costs of their relationship—and how truly dangerous playing with magic can be.

THE STONE SORTER, complete at 66,000 words, is a young adult urban fantasy with dashes of dark romance that will appeal to the readers of L.J. Smith, Kelley Armstrong, and Holly Black.

I have to say, though, amidst all this query business that I’m really happy that I’ve started something new. If I don’t give into the urge to be a vegetable this weekend, I’ll probably hit 20,000 words on SEAS RUN DRY. I’ve reached the part of the book that feels immersive, but still has the promise of a new beginning. You know, that stage when you’re past the point of no return with a project, but are still pretty much in love with the idea. The work is really sustaining me through the query process; if I don’t get any bites on THE STONE SORTER this time around, I feel confident that I can bounce back with this manuscript. That’s a great feeling.

Do you want to meet my mermaids? You know you do.

(Teaser removed)