Posts Tagged ‘circus galacticus’

Circus Galacticus is OUT!

15
November
2011

Whee! Today is the official release day for Circus Galacticus!

I am so excited that Trix and the gang are finally flying out into the world! I really tried to push myself with this book, trying new things. I think it’s got a bigger and more epic scope than my first two books, and a more complex range of supporting characters. And it was just so much fun to write! So I really hope that you all will enjoy it!

But Circus Galacticus would never have been written without a lot of help and inspiration from:

  • The X-Men and New Mutants, which I fell in love with as a kid, who showed me that being different is okay, and that freaks can be superheroes. And that they can come in all colors…
  • The science fiction tv shows, movies and books that made my younger self dream of exploring the universe: Earthseed by Pamela Sargent, Star Wars, Star Trek (especially the novels starring Uhura), EarthStar Voyager (does anyone else remember that one?), and most of all, Doctor Who!
  • The Cirque du Soleil, for thrilling and daring feats of acrobatics and aesthetics!
  • All the generous folks who read portions of the manuscript, including Karen Jordan Allen, R. J. Anderson, Geoff Bottone, Melissa Caruso, Megan Crewe, Erin Dionne, Robert Dunham, Megan Frazer, Robin Merrow MacCready, Patty Murray, Cindy Pon, Jon Skovron and Luanne Wrenn
  • My amazing editor Reka Simonsen, and also Sarah Dotts Barley and Su Box, who both assisted in the production of the manuscript!
  • The team at Harcourt, who put together such a lovely cover and have worked so hard to get the book out into the world
  • Authors Lisa Mantchev and Elizabeth C. Bunce, who graciously provided blurbs!
  • Amanda Coppedge, who put together the fabulous list of Discussion Guide
  • My wonderful family and friends, who have given so much support through the ups and downs of publishing
  • Everyone who has read my earlier books and been so enthusiastic! A writer is only providing part of the story: the reader brings the rest! Thank you to all my readers, and to the booksellers and librarians and teachers who have helped them connect with books!

And lastly, I’ll repeat a bit from the acknowledgements:

I wrote this book in an attempt to capture some of the wonder and awe I feel every time I look up at the stars. I would like to express my deepest thanks to the scientists, astronauts, and all the other men and women who have worked over the years to understand and explore our universe. I’d particularly like to thank (and recommend!) the folks behind www.astronomycast.com, who provide a wealth of fascinating, inspiring, and accessible information about all sorts of topics related to astronomy.

If you are interested in buying a copy of Circus Galacticus, I encourage you to shop at your local independent bookstore, if you have one! And remember, if you want to read it but can’t afford to buy a copy, you can always check with your local library and ask them to consider ordering a copy.

If you’re in the US or Canada, you can comment to try to win a copy here at First Page Panda (through Nov 30th).

Or if you want to get a signed copy in person, I will be joining fellow middle-grade authors A. J. Paquette and Anna Staniszewski at a book event on Sunday December 4th at the Wellesley Booksmith in MA, from 12 to 2. There will be craft projects for kids!

Working

01
August
2011

I’m busily working away on my current writing project and having a lot of fun with this new world and new characters, hooray!

It’s been consuming my life pretty completely, however, so I’ve been on a hiatus from internet things that is likely to continue until September.

In the meantime, here, check out this fantastic documentary I saw recently on the lives of several kids involved with the traveling youth circus Circus Smirkus. I was lucky enough to see a showing, along with a short performance by some former members. There’s a trailer too, to give you a taste.

I’m hoping to see the 2011 troupe live later in August, when they come to Freeport ME!

And speaking of traveling youth circuses, here’s something I added to my website a little while ago: the first chapter of CIRCUS GALACTICUS. Whee! It’s hard to believe it’s going to be coming out in a little over three months. And I’ll be back with some other circus-related-niftiness in September, once I’ve finished my current draft.

Hope you are all having a great summer!

[Edited to add: I'm noticing some considerable delays loading pages on my website. My apologies if you have similar issues -- I'm looking into it!]

Giveaway winners and cover!

15
March
2011

First up, my handy random number generator picked me some winners for the Faery Book Giveaway:

wandering dreamer will get Small Persons With Wings
DM Domini will get Rebel
Lara will get Arrow

If any of you are reading this, please email me at deva at devafagan dot com with your mailing address! I’ll also attempt to contact you via the info in your entry comments. Thanks to all who participated! I wish I had copies enough for everyone!

The next news isn’t all that new if you follow me on twitter or Facebook, but for anyone who missed it, CIRCUS GALACTICUS now has a cover! Whee!


Click to engalacticize! Hope you all like it!

Circus Galacticus also available now on NetGalley for reviewers, and on various booksellers for pre-order. Wow. It’s starting to become real!

And since you don’t get to see any of the characters on the cover, here’s a sneak peak at some of the art I commissioned for the character glossary that I’m working on for this website. The full art won’t be going up for a few more months, but I’m too excited now not to share a few excerpts…

The art is by the talented Loraine Sammy and I can’t wait to share the full pieces with you! She did amazing work!

One Step Closer

29
December
2010

Circus Galacticus has a release date! At least according to my publisher’s website, it will be out around November 14, 2011!

It’s not available for pre-order anywhere yet that I can see, but still, yay! One step closer!

And since it’s out there on the website, I think it’s safe for me to add one other bit of news. Circus Galacticus was originally acquired by Henry Holt, who I will always be thankful to for publishing my first two books. This past summer, however, my wonderful editor took a new position at Harcourt. And happily she was able to take the book along with her. I’m so very excited to be able to continue to work with her! Plus, the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt symbol is a dolphin, one of my favorite animals, so I am taking that as a good omen!

Stars

23
June
2010

I’m seeing stars. Well, not real ones, not right at this moment, since it is (A) morning and (B) gray and rainy out. But I got the page proofs (aka my-last-chance-to-fix-things) for Circus Galacticus, and the title page has stars on it! Nothing is final yet, but I hope the black starry background stays. I love it! I need to try to find out whether it’s a real image and if so of what.

CG Proofs

And for your potential amusement and interest, here are the last five links I starred in my Google Reader:

Shannon Hale’s post on the danger of excusing bullying boy behavior as “that’s how boys show they like you.” Very thought-provoking!

A gorgeous new Hubble shot of a star formation region.

New video from Zooborns of a playful baby elephant!

A post from Discover about a recent study on how America sees the future. 53% envision ordinary people traveling in space. But 58% expect another World War.

Liz B at A Chair, A Fireplace & a Tea Cozy directs us all to a new READ poster featuring Nathan Fillion. Woohoo! I have recently been watching and really enjoying his new show Castle (and I was a big Firefly fan already). I was even more excited to see that the book he’s holding is YA scifi: The Softwire: Awakening on Orbis 4, by PJ Haarsma. Go scifi!

And in one last bit of starry news, I was delighted to find out that TeensReadToo posted a lovely review of The Magical Misadventures of Prunella Bogthistle, and gave it a Gold Star Award for Excellence. Thank you TeensReadToo!

ALA Midwinter

17
January
2010

I’ll hopefully post something more detailed tomorrow, but for now here’s some nifty ARCs I managed to get while I was there:

ALA2010Booty

I had a fantastic time, and am very glad I went, even if I had to leave home at 5:30 AM and didn’t get back until 11PM (whew!). It was wonderful to meet some of my online friends in person, and to see those I’d met before again. I met Inkies, Debs, fellow Betsy-Tacy fans, and a host of other cool librarians, authors and publishing people.

All that conferencing was fun, but it sure wore me out. After I crawled out of my extrovert costume I slept in to the extravagent (for me) hour of 8, and spent the day goofing off, working on LARP plot, and playing with my beeyootiful new MacBook. I also discovered something I must do to celebrate next year when CIRCUS GALACTICUS comes out (discovered via this blog post by author Kristin Cashore): Trapeze Class!

And now back to revising!

Humanoid Aliens

07
January
2010

Author PJ Hoover (THE EMERALD TABLET) poses an interesting question about writing books with humanoid aliens over at The Spectacle, about humanoid aliens. Check it out!

Her last question is: So what do you think? Humanoid aliens or not? Which do you like? Which would you write?

Here’s what I said in my comment:

In visual media I tend to just suspend any disbelief, as long as things are consistent (frex when watching Avatar I kept thinking “why do the Na’vi have four limbs, and all the other fauna on their planet have six?”).

In books, where we don’t have to worry about SFX budgets, I think it is very cool when authors create completely alien creatures. But you can’t just say they look like giant fuschia spider-apes, and then have them nodding their heads for yes and eating with forks and forming democracies and listening to rock music. You have to provide a whole alien culture that also makes sense. Off the top of my head I can’t think of very many MG/YA sf novels that do that.

I myself spent a bunch of time thinking about this when writing my third novel (CIRCUS GALACTICUS, tween sf due out in 2011). Part of the reason I was writing it in the first place was to try to capture that feeling that science was cool and that space exploration could be fun and exciting. So at the same time I really wanted to try to make it an accessible story. A down-to-earth story. For me, that meant making my aliens very “human”. So I built an explanation for the similarities into the fabric of the world of the novel and the plot. Hopefully will make sense to readers. I guess I will find out!

I am curious to hear what others say, and if there are any examples of really well done non-humanoid aliens in YA/MG lit that anyone can recommend.

Circus Sale!

03
December
2009

Tis the season for good writing news in these parts!

I am thrilled to announce the sale of my third novel CIRCUS GALACTICUS to Henry Holt, for publication in Spring 2011. I am so happy that I get to keep working with my fantastic editor Reka Simonsen, especially on this book, which I will admit right now is my absolute favorite of anything I have every worked on. I sure do hope other folks like it, but for me, the joy really was in writing it, and meeting the characters and discovering their world. I’m trying not to babble too much about it since hello, it won’t be out for another year and a half, but it is hard not to! So I will stick to the short blurb:

CIRCUS GALACTICUS, in which a fifteen-year old orphan girl joins an intergalactic circus troupe led by the dazzling yet enigmatic Ringmaster in order to unravel the dangerous mysteries left by her astronaut parents and to find her own place in the universe.

Or you can think of it, as I do sometimes, as “Cirque du Soleil meets Dr Who”. Wheeeeeeee!

I can tell already it’s going to be hard not to buy up every cool punk-circus-robot-rocket-alien-space doodad I find, for potential swag use. In fact, I already did buy some nifty outerspace origami paper, and a bunch of neon hair extensions.

Here’s hoping aliens are the next big thing! :-)

Super Heroines

09
October
2009

There is an excellent post by Colleen Mondor over on her blog Chasing Ray about Super Heroines. It’s a part of the ongoing “What a Girl Wants” series, which has provided a bunch of other thought-provoking discussions over the last few months that are worth checking out too.

Reading all the great responses in the WAGW post inspires me to gush about my own love of super heroines, especially because comics and superheros were one of the inspirations for my most recent writing project, CIRCUS GALACTICUS, and because Trix, the main character of CG, owes a whole lot to the glorious tradition of butt-kicking super-heroines

Like Colleen, I grew up reading comic books. I started with Archie but the Betty/Veronica/Archie triangle wore me out pretty quickly and I moved happily on to superheroes. My absolute favorites were always the Marvel mutant books, starting with the X-Men and the New Mutants. I loved the idea of a band of young people with strange and scary powers, feared by the rest of the world but pledged to defend it. I also found characters I could identify with (Kitty/Shadowcat, Rahne/Wolfsbane) and others I admired for the qualities they had that I felt I lacked, like toughness and self-confidence (Ororo/Storm, Rogue, Dani/Mirage). I started reading X-Men when Storm was the leader of the group and Mirage was the leader of the New Mutants, which I suspect had a lot to do with my instant and intense attraction to the books.

Eventually the ever-multiplying hydra-like heads of the X-books became too much for my budget and I stopped my monthly comic splurge, but I’ve continued to be a big fan of superheroes in general, and occasionally daydream of trying to catch back up on the lives of my childhood heroes. But I’ve found other venues, and other cool girl “superheroes” like Buffy and Xena and Sydney (Alias) and Max (Dark Angel). [I also recommend the animated X-Men: Evolution TV series. It takes some liberties with the comic book canon, but I found it to be marvelous and rich and entertaining in its own way. The goth Rogue from Evolution does a lot to balance out my disappointment with the wimpy Rogue from the otherwise enjoyable X-Men feature films].

I think we definitely need these type of strong, active “super heroines” out there in our media — and we particularly need characters that reflect the diversity of our real world, in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, class, etc. I do think that there are more of these heroines out there right now than we might think. But there are also plenty of frustratingly unempowered characters, and it can be a challenge to avoid them when so often they are dressed up in the same tights and cape, so to speak.

One issue that some of the panelists bring up on the WAGW post is that of what it takes to be a “super heroine” — how much of it is based on the sort of butt-kicking power and action that typifies the superhero genre?

I find it an interesting question because part of my motivation in my first two books was to create strong girl characters who accomplished significant and challenging deeds using their wits and guts rather than kung-fu prowess and KAPOW! knockout action. And that wasn’t a reaction to the many male superheroes out there– it was more directly a reaction the fact that most of the tough female role-models I was familiar with were warriors, confronting their challenges physically. Don’t get me wrong– I LOVED those tough girl fighters. I loved watching Buffy staking vampires and Xena trouncing warlords; I ate up books about sword-swinging gals like Robin McKinley’s Harry and Aerin and Tamora Pierce’s Alanna. But I wanted to experiment with characters who didn’t have as much raw physical power, and see how I could get them to kick butt too (even if it was metaphorical butt). Much as I enjoyed fantasizing about being a shield-maiden, I really didn’t feel like one. So I do think we need girl heroes who are strong in many different ways, in order for all of us to find a hero we can identify with.

On the other hand, while I’m glad to have had the chance to write about my not-quite-Warrior-Princesses, after I had finished their stories I decided that it was time to write about a girl who really was an action hero: someone whose first instinct was to fight back physically. Someone who maybe even was a little reckless letting her words (and fists) fly. Someone confident in her body and in her physicality. Someone who was not really like me at all, but who I could still find inspiring and fun because she had qualities I wished I had. That was, in part, where Trix came from, with her pink hair, her brashness, her acrobatics, her daring, and her courage.

So bring on the super heroines of all kinds: butt-kickers, scientists, and peace-makers. Buffy and Willow. Kitty and Ororo. Because I think we all need a super hero who can inspire us, both by reflecting the best of what we are, and by illuminating what we wish we could be.

And now I have to go try to get my hands on the Justice Society of America and find out more about Power Girl!

The Journey and the Destination

29
August
2009

Circus Galacticus is now out of my hands and off in the big world (good luck, little book!), but the universe and the characters are still very much on my brain. What is interesting to me is that I don’t think I’ve ever felt this kind of burning desperation to get to the end in my writing. That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed writing my other books– I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t love all these stories and characters. But just as I love reading different books for different reasons, I am discovering that I love writing different stories for different reasons. I’ve been trying to explain this to myself in terms of the journey and the destination.

There are some books I love to read because of the journey. They have marvelous characters I just plain enjoy hanging out with, and detailed worlds I can sink into and enjoy. I don’t want to race through these books to find out what happens. There may be overarching plots and usually the main characters do undergo some sort of character development, but that’s not the main reason I am reading the book. I read them because I want to linger in the world, with these characters. Some of the books that fall into this category for me are: the Anne books (L. M. Montgomery), Dragonsinger (Anne McCaffrey), the various Georgette Heyer books I’ve read so far, the Betsy-Tacy books (Maud Hart Lovelace), Howl’s Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones), Flora Segunda (Ysabeau Wilce), the Beezus and Ramona books (Beverly Cleary), Dairy Queen (Catherine Gilbert Murdock). Just because I didn’t feel compelled to stay up all night finishing these books doesn’t mean I think they are inferior by any means. In fact, several of the above books are on my all-time, take-to-a-desert-isle list.

Then there are books that I read (and do not necessarily enjoy) because of the destination. I race through to get to the end to find out what happens, even if I don’t particularly care about the characters or the world. I just want to KNOW HOW IT ENDS. Most of the time I don’t even really remember these books after I read them (and sometimes, I admit, I do skip to the end) so I don’t have a lot of examples fresh in mind, except for The DaVinci Code. I read it, even as I was frustrated by it in many ways, because I was compelled to find out how it ended. They’re like popcorn or mindless action movies. I can’t stop consuming them once I start, but they don’t really satisfy.

Lastly, there are books that I read for both journey and destination — I want to linger with the characters and explore the world, but at the same time I have to find out how it ends. Will the characters I love be okay? Will the things I am hoping for happen? Will character X end up with character Y? I only had to read the first chapter of The Hunger Games online to become obsessed with finding out what would become of Katniss and her loved ones. When I finally got a copy I tried to slow down, to make the most of the reading experience, but it was very very difficult. If I could have gotten my hands on Catching Fire last fall, I would have read it at once to find out what happened next. Likewise as each new Harry Potter book was released, the only thing that kept me from devouring them whole was that my husband and I were listening to the audio versions together. And even so, there were many nights we didn’t do anything but sit there listening to find out what was going to happen. As much as I loved the details of the wizarding world and the wonderful cast of characters, I also wanted desperately to find out how it would all end. More recently, I listened to the audio book of Tamora Pierce’s Beka Cooper: Terrier, and even before I was on the last disk I went to check out book 2 from the library, because I was obsessed with finding out if certain things were going to happen (and alas, it looks like I am going to have to wait for book 3 to find them out!).

For me, writing has most often been more about the journey. I am not sure if that’s because my books themselves are more journey-books than destination-books, or just a feature of my practice of writing from an outline. CIRCUS, however, has been a different sort of beast. I did very much love the journey of writing the first book, and I believe it ends with the characters reaching a satisfying destination. But more than ever before, I want to know where these characters are going to go next. Will character X end up with character Y? What tragedies and joys will they experience? How will it all end?

At first I thought maybe I could quiet those clamoring voices by outlining the rest of the series I envision, and perhaps writing the last few chapters (the big climactic ending) of the final book. But what I’ve realized is that I really do need the journey too. If it were enough to simply find out what happens, this would just be one of those forgettable type 2 books as described above. So, since I’ve finished my writing goal for the year in completing Circus Galacticus and sending it off, so now I will take some time this fall to play, and indulge my own passion to find out not only the destination my characters are headed for, but what sort of journey is going to get them there. I am looking forward to it!

Fellow outliners — what is your experience with the journey versus the destination, given that you may have a pretty detailed map? And those of you who are more seat-of-your-pants writers, do you feel this sort of driving passion to find out what happens in your books, since you may be finding it out at the same time as your characters? Or is your writing experience more about the journey?

Finally, here’s some other tidbits:

  • I feel very fortunate right now to have such excellent friends and family. Like my college friend Tara, who went out and got a copy of Fortune’s Folly, sent me a sweet note about it, then also forwarded me happy little notes from her own relations who she passed it along to. And my uncle Eric (who always sent me the best books for my birthday when I was a kid!) just forwarded a lovely little review from a friend of his at work (thank you, Bob!).
  • I’ve got four library visits and one bookstore signing scheduled for this fall, whee! I am looking forward to getting out and meeting more book-loving people. I will be updating my website with more details once they are fixed.
  • I’m also going to be attending the Bar Harbor Book Festival on September 12 and 13. There will be panels and readings and Real Author Stuff. Plus it’s in an absolutely gorgeous location. I am really looking forward to meeting some of the wonderful writers I know online in person for the first time, like my fellow deb Erin Dionne, and the event organizer, the fabulous Carrie Jones. And even though we’ve already met in person several times, it will be great to see my other fellow deb-from-Maine, Megan Frazer.