Tween the Weekends: Favorite Christmas Story Ever…

“Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge’s name was good upon ’change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.”

Love those first lines in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Dead as a doornail really sticks out in my mind. Dickens sure had a way with words! And believe it or not, Charles Dickens wrote the classic Christmas tale as a novella—something I never knew. In fact, I decided to read A Christmas Carol for the first time a few years ago. I knew the story like the back of my hand, and most movies based on the book were true to form. But there’s nothing like reading the actual script written by an author’s hand. Though the language was a little archaic, it still didn’t take away from the magic of the story.

For many historians, the success of A Christmas Carol directly redefined the modern Western conception of Christmas and its sentiments, in effect creating the modern version of the holiday itself. Charles Dickens wrote four more novellas with a Christmas theme after the great success of A Christmas Carol, which was published in 1843: The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man. Hey, when you’re on a roll, you don’t want to disappoint your readers!

As this is a Tween the Weekends post, I thought I’d share the movie trailer of one of the most recent family oriented versions of A Christmas Carol produced by Disney in 2009. Love Jim Carrey’s take on Ebenezer Scrooge!

Since it’s Christmas Day, and the Ghost of Christmas Present is probably hanging around, I thought I’d share that I have a free short story available for download only through Musa Publishing until the end of December. It’s called The Terrible, Mighty Crystal and features a teenage portrayal of Shu-Tu, the old, cross-eyed seer from the prequel of The Last Timekeepers series, Legend of the Timekeepers. Here’s the tagline and blurb:

There is the known and the unknown. And then there is the unknowable.

A rumor around Atlantis whispers that the mighty crystal has the power of resurrection. Fourteen-year-old Shu-Tu believes this to be true and will do whatever it takes to bring her father back from the dead. Recruiting two trustworthy classmates, and with the help of her beloved teacher Thoth, Shu-Tu sets out to change her father’s fate, and right a wrong.

Instructed to meet Thoth at his grotto, Shu-Tu and her friends are forced to flee underground, and must follow the maze of passages to find another way out. There, they come across a baboon-headed human hybrid possessing a rare firestone—one of six harvested from the mighty crystal—which has the power to restore life. Shu-Tu agrees to play the hybrid’s bizarre game to win the firestone, knowing that if she loses, she loses her father forever.

Wishing you and your families a very safe and happy holiday season, and a prosperous 2014! I thought I’d leave you with Charles Dickens’s preface to A Christmas Carol:

“I have endeavoured in this ghostly little book, to raise the ghost of an idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.”

Their faithful friend and servant,

Charles Dickens
December 1843

Tween the Weekends: Seven Steps to Success for Tweens & Teens...

There is a powerful seven step formula that you can use to set and achieve your goals for the rest of your life. It’s a discipline, so if started at an early age these steps will become as natural to you as breathing air. Every successful person uses this formula or some variation of this formula to achieve more than the average person.

Step one: Decide exactly what it is you want. Do you want to play in the NHL, NFL, NBA or go for gold in the Olympics? Do you want to get your driver’s license by 16 and a car at 17? Do you want to go to college, university, or own a business? Do you want to go to Disneyland with your family? How about designing a kick-butt video game? The possibilities are endless.

Step two: Write down what you want, clearly and in detail. Get a journal or notebook for this. Always think on paper. A goal that is not in writing is not a goal at all. It is merely a wish and it has no energy behind it.

Step three: Set a deadline for your goal. If you’re saving for a family trip doing babysitting, odd jobs or have an after school job figure out how much you’ll need by the time you leave. Start a savings account for any goal that is material based like a car or clothes. A deadline acts as a “forcing system” and motivates you to do the things necessary to make your goal come true. If it’s a big goal, set sub-deadlines too. Some goals are worth the chase!

Step four: Make a list of everything that you can think of that you are going to have to do to achieve your goal. If you want to play in the big leagues, and feel you have the talent, how much time per day do you think you’ll need to practice to get there? Want a new laptop? How many babysitting gigs will it take to get one?

Step five: Organize your list into a plan. Decide what you have to do first, second, third, and so on. Decide what is more important and what is less important. If you want to be an engineer, you’d better be prepared to study hard, rather than play video games all night. Once you’ve made your decision, write out your plan on paper. This becomes your blueprint for success.

Step six: Do something EVERY DAY that moves you in the direction of your most important goal at the moment. Study, practice, work, play, write—do what you need to do to develop the discipline of doing something 365 days each year to move you forward, and closer to your goals.

Remember, it’s up to you to invest in yourself, and the sooner you get started, the sooner you will reap what you have sown. Invest in the best, that’s YOU!

Tween the Weekends: Creating the Perfect Author Presentation

I’ve been blessed with an abundance of retired teachers as neighbors on the lake where I live. Their brains are fresh for the picking. Yeah, I know, sounds like something out of a Zombie novel, but the fact is that teachers can be an author’s best friend. I recently corralled two friends —a hubby and wife team—one is a retired elementary principal and the other taught teachers to give presentations. My mind went to mush. It needed to in order to be sculpted into the perfect author presenter. So what did I learn?

First—engage the class—draw them into your presentation. Bait the kids—in my case, upper middle grade and lower YA is my target audience. Then I hook them into thinking that it’s all about THEM. Actually, it is all about them, they just don’t need to know that! So I dusted off my fishing rod and began to create an author presentation that would lure them in by asking these specifically designed questions:

“What’s your favorite video game or game App?”

“What happens in the game?”

“Who are the characters in the game?”

“What makes this game interesting to you?”

Then once I get enough responses, I reel them in with:

“What’s your favorite book?”

“What do books have in common with video games?”

Do you see what I did? Hook, line, and sinker! Engagement first, then I went into the actual presentation. From there, I ask the class:

“When a teacher gives you a writing assignment, how do you come up with ideas for your stories?”

“What’s the hardest part of it?”

“What do you think about before you write your story?”

More engagement ensues before I get to share my writing process with the class, which I start by telling the class to remember that the heart of storytelling is to write what you know or like. For me, I love all things time travel, paranormal, and the mysterious, so that’s where my imagination goes. My writing process is always the same for every book…

First, an idea for a story can come to me through a dream (like The Last Timekeepers), or something as simple as a ‘what if’ question. Asking ‘what if’ is a very powerful question for a storyteller. What if a teen with a psychic ability was sent to a small, rural tourist town? What if a group of adolescents found an ancient time portal buried in an overgrown backyard? Once I’ve got the seed idea, I’ll write notes in point form until I have the bones of the story.

Second, I create a cast of characters and build the story around them. I begin by writing out character tracking sheets (stats on characters appearances, clothing, likes and dislikes, etc.) which helps keep the characters organized. I do this even when I’m writing a short story. Once I’ve accomplished this, I add the sheets to a binder that I use as a guidebook for my entire series, where each book has its own section. BTW – I make sure I have a character tracking sheet handy to show the class.

Third, it’s on to research, research, and more research! I find this process is the biggest investment of my time, but it’s a necessary evil. When you’re writing time travel, you’ve got to know your facts to create the fiction.

Fourth, only when I have enough facts, and I feel my characters are sufficiently fleshed out, then I begin to write the first draft. Sometimes I’m a panser (writing by the seat of my pants), sometimes a plotter (outline entire storyline or chapters)—it all depends on the tone of the book and where my muse directs me.

Then it’s on to the best part of an author presentation—the reading. I set up what has happened in my book so far before I read the selected chapter, and ask the students to imagine my story as if they were playing a movie in their head. My teacher friends suggest that the whole presentation should be no more than half an hour (unless you’ve prepared a workshop), and to make sure you have enough time to take questions from the students. When the presentation is over, I have signed trading cards and rubber wrist bands available to giveaway, and leave my book order forms with the teacher.

That’s it! A made-to-order Author Presentation created with the help of two wonderful people who have shaped the minds of both children and adults. Now that’s what I call passing the baton!

Tween the Weekends: The Power of Cliques...

I think it would hard to be an adolescent in this day and age. Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of hard choices and problems I faced when I was a tween back, well back in the ‘day’. We still had bullying, but not cyber-bullying. And there was no such thing as sexting, texting, or twerking. But there have always been cliques whether in elementary school or high school. In fact, even as adults, cliques are prominent in work, sports, post secondary education, clubs, and neighborhoods.

By Wikipedia’s definition, a clique is a group of “persons who interact with each other more regularly than others in the same setting.” Interacting with cliques is part of normative social development regardless of gender, ethnicity, or popularity. Although cliques are most commonly studied during adolescence and middle childhood, they exist in all age groups.

It’s almost tribal, this power cliques have over us—wanting to be a part of a certain group, or the ‘in’ crowd, or the top of the heap.

When you think of the word tribal your mind conjures images of group identity, group force, group willpower, and group belief patterns. Tribes have very primal connections. Shame your parents, and you’ve shamed your family. Snitch on a friend, and you’re on the blacklist for a stint or forever. Date someone who has a bad rep, and suddenly your name is all over the social media, and not in a good way. Lose the game, and you’re shunned by your teammates.

The Breakfast Club is probably one of the best movies that exemplify cliques. There’s the Jock, the Beauty Queen, the Misfit, the Rebel, and the Geek. All tribes fitting into one box. If you’ve never seen this 80s gem, take a peek at the trailer:

So how do we break the power, the dare-I-say spell that cliques can have over us?

In the first book of my MG/YA time travel series, my characters—five kids who are all from different ethnic and social backgrounds—were given a detention too, but unlike the actors in The Breakfast Club, they were made to work together to clean up a yard for a period of two weeks. Once they found the weathered stone time portal, barriers started to crumble between them, and they got to know and understand each other better. They became connected in a way they would have never imagined, and I believe that understanding each other is a good place to start breaking the bonds of cliques.

What do you think about cliques, and the power they have in our society? I’d love to read what you have to say…   

Tween the Weekends: Developing a Middle-Grade Book Series…

 “Tween the Weekends is a monthly feature hosted on Emblazon. This is an opportunity for writers and readers to promote tween literature, that age bracket squashed between middle grade and young adult. You can review a great tween book, post about writing for kids, connect with others who love the genre, support and encourage one another, relate news, share links, or just about anything else tween related.”

Join me over at the Emblazon website today as I share my experience in developing a middle-grade book series, and while you’re there, please check out the other wonderful MG authors and their books. You never know, you might find your next favorite author…