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Amazon.com!!!

I "accepted"Super Power of the Day's print proof from LSI on Friday, was notified that my distributor was officially recognized by Ingram on Monday, and my listing showed up on amazon.com this afternoon (8/30/11).

Amazon hasn't figured out how to actually get the book yet. That may take up to a week. I'll certainly splash the news when it can be ordered.

Next, I need to add content to my Author Central page. That will include a link to this blog.

Things are moving right along!

Spell Check Doesn't Know These Words

You can theorize why...

inbox
texting

app

google (verb)

nightstand

hotdish (I defer to my Covenant Church cookbook. It is a word.)

restroom

pinstripe

kickball

doorframe

chainsaw (1974 film) or chain saw (Sears.com)

babysit

carsick
teleportation
weirded (out)
tarped
insults
nicknames
superglued
Spiderman
Mauer (as in Joe)
crap

I love this list. It gives a fun look into the books (vol 1-3).

PS The only legit spelling error I made was "kindergarteners,"
which is actually spelled "kindergartners".
My bad.

Writing is a Dangerous Activity

During the course of a school year, the left side of my right middle finger develops what can only be described as a mountainous writing callous. By the end of summer, it has healed to the size of a normal person's writing callous.

Exhibit A (the healed version):

Last week I noticed a NEW writing scar -- on the inside of my thumb where I rest it on the mousepad while working my magic mouse. Smooth as a baby's bottom.

Exhibit B:

A Surprise!

When I went out to the garage to fire up the old John Deere yesterday, I found this.
Can you identify the four items in the photo?

Answers (clockwise from top left):
1) Bags full of washed costumes from last year's fall play.
2) Extension ladder
3) Snow shovel
4) Proof copy of Super Power of the Day, overnighted to me from my printer, Lightning Source, Inc.

I am officially a published author.
But I still had to mow the lawn.

Creating a Cover

Once we had an illustration of Chase in his superhero costume, Ryan Scheife of Mayfly Design in Minneapolis put together the front cover.

I really like how "clean" Ryan's covers are. I also appreciate his work with Minnesota authors and education related books. Trust me, when you go searching for illustrators and designers for comics oriented material, you see a LOT of cartoon boobs on women who have little to no waists. I didn't want a kid to think "I wonder if there are more books like this if I look up the artists..." and end up at some inappropriate site online. I feel safe with my choices of Ryan and Sean.

 The plan is to do repeat the graphic and title but change the background color, subtitle, etc. for each of the next two volumes.

So...
Opinions on the color for #2?

Author Bio

It didn't take too long to select a photo for my author bio page at the back of the book(s).

I shuffled through my iPhoto and decided to appeal to my audience.

It did take a bit longer to write my author bio for the last page of the book(s).

I solicited help online. (Thanks, Jason G for "She does not play the oboe.")

I solicited help from my family. (That's... nice. Maybe you should get a professional to write it.)

I solicited help from my coworkers. (Bingo!)

Thanks to Cheryl Bj, I decided to simply say:

Author Ann Wachtler has loved reading good stories since she was a young girl. Turning the page to figure out what happens next is at the heart of all her passionate interests. Super Power of the Day is her first novel series.

PS The color of that couch is one of my strongest childhood memories. Orange and brown stripes. Go 1970's!

The Evolution of Chase Benjamin Cooper, Superhero, Part 2

This was Sean's first sketch.

We decided he looked older than twelve and had another whack at it.

Now that's more like it!

Here he is inked:

And here he is with his logo, in color:

I didn't want overly anime eyes, so we used these button eyes. This preference probably stems from an aversion to children's art from the 70's.

Here comes the creepy.

Sorry.

The Evolution of Chase Benjamin Cooper, Superhero

I think it was the Fourth of July weekend. I was sitting on the patio chatting with my mother, explaining to her how exciting it was to have learned a new program (inDesign) and to actually use it on my text. I told her that the next step was learning Photoshop, but that I had already tried once and found it much more complex to learn. I wasn't sure I had the time to learn it well enough to do a good job on my cover.

This was my inspiration:

Awesome, right?

I had a mock up cover to share.

Yeah, less awesome.
The "figure" was taken from a photo of G at Teddy R on our trip to Glacier.

I was more concerned about getting the "figure" right than designing it well.
Rene encouraged me to hire out.

So I did.

I used a few different online artist and designer databases (e.g. theispot.com) and wound up hiring Ryan Schiefe from Minneapolis as my cover designer. He, in turn, encouraged me to hire an illustrator to do the figure. I asked for bids from three artists and selected Sean Tiffany. I was impressed with his work in Sports Illustrated for Kids and his online presence, which seemed friendly.

But it was his initial sketch of what Chase could look like won me over.

Adorable.
Alas, the first "real" sketch went a different direction.

It's a Trilogy!

I decided to solve my length problem by splitting the text into three parts. 

Thanks to Sandra's emphasis on creating good bones to hang the story on, this division of plot worked better than I expected. 

In volume 1, Origins of a Sixth Grade Superhero, Chase experiences his last day as a regular kid and then gets his first ten superpowers over the next ten days. After the first three, he shares his secret with his best friends. By the end of the first volume, he has learned how it feels to save the day using his powers.

In volume 2, The Hero Chronicle Continues, Chase gets his next eleven powers. Several of the most dramatic moments of the series happen as he experiences the extreme powers of Invisibility, Flight, and Magnetism. By the end of the volume, he has experienced a Spiderman II moment.

In volume 3, The Final Face-Off, Chase finishes his month with his final ten powers. The series builds to a double climactic finish and brings closure to the month. 

I had to add a few chapters to make the transitions between volumes make sense, but that turned out well. I re-edited, hired a proofreader, re-edited again, then designed the pages in Adobe inDesign. Learning the program took time, but I really like working with it. (Thanks, Lynda.com).

Once I had the pages done, I reproofed the pages twice. Some difficult spots were rewritten. As of today's blogpost, I am done with volume 1, have only a small amount of work to finish on volume two, and have several full days of proof and design work to do on volume 3. 

Aaron Shepard: POD Guru

Thanks to Aaron Shepard, I did not go camping or traveling at all this summer. Instead, I spent my entire tax return on:

a new computer, professional publishing software, a block of 100 ISBNs, shades to privatize my old library/new office, a red office chair, a domain (snowmoonpublishing.com) and web hosting fees, and license fees to start my own publishing company.

I've now read POD for Profit five times.

A New Year's Resolution

The summer of 2010, I went to Hawaii with my mom and dad for a cousin's wedding. Lots of reading, no writing.

Then G and I went camping at Glacier. This is me at Teddy Roosevelt Nat'l Park.

Despite my travel time, I did do a quite thorough copy edit of the text over the summer. Wow, had I made mistakes. Once they were fixed, I made a plan for sending out three more queries. As the agents I was interested in noted that they preferred exclusivity, I decided to send out my queries one at a time over the course of the late summer and fall.

I heard back from all of them, but no one bit.

At Christmas, decided to get serious. I sent three more queries and gave myself the month of January as a deadline. If I didn't get an agent, I'd pursue some other path to publishing. Luckily for me, agent Sara Crowe at Harvey Klinger in New York asked for a manuscript. There was that thrill again.

Sara ultimately passed. So...

I made a resolution. For the entire month of February, I turned off my TV and devoted each night to figuring out what to do next. If you know me, you know this was not an easy task. I gave myself permission to watch the Superbowl and Oscars, but that was it.

I only cheated once the whole month. I researched self-publishing of all types (MN vanity presses, amazon.com's CreateSpace, lulu.com, etc.), read a lot of MG and YA fiction, and even started plotting out a new novel. I contacted self-publishing superstar Amanda Hocking BEFORE her publishing deal and she was helpful and encouraging.

Then I found Aaron Shepard.

Finding a Dream Agent

The summer of 2009, I cleaned up loose ends and problems in the story and sent out four query letters to agents. 'Cause that's what you do when you have a manuscript.

I knew my biggest problem: length. In its 2009 form, SPOTD was looooong. Too long for middle grade readers, my primary audience. How long? Probably 350+ book size pages. Now, Harry Potter proved that young readers will cart around and devour lengthy tomes, but not until they are hooked. Typical MG novels on my library shelves tend to be half that length.

I also knew the text needed a good copy edit, but I hoped that an agent would see its potential and that the publishing process would help me perfect the novel.

I sent my letters in June and got lucky fast. Jennifer Flannery, the agent for Minnesota YA author Gary Paulsen, nibbled right away. She asked for a full manuscript. I still remember how thrilling it felt to receive her postcard, even though it wasn't a personal letter. Most authors have horror stories of sending out dozens or hundreds of queries before an agent bites, and here I had caught the attention of my dream agent right out of the gate.

I figured out how to format and print it properly and sent it off. Then I listened to the crickets chirp for the rest of the summer.

Finally, just before school started in the fall, I received another postcard. Jennifer Flannery was passing on my manuscript.

Still.

Going Bad

I struggled with finding a villain for SPOTD.

I didn't want a murderer, alien, monster, or catastrophic weather event. I wanted the type of subtle, real world villain that a kid might actually face. And I didn't want a stereotypical bully, because that's been done.

Despite what you might believe from watching television shows like Glee, the type of bullies that toss Slushies into the faces of perceived geeks in the middle of a school hallway (outright bullying) are rare and would get caught and punished. Real bullies are much more subtle than that.

Also contrary to television, cinematic, and literary trope, most popular kids and jocks ARE NOT BULLIES. Most popular kids are popular because they are nice. A lot of smart kids ARE popular. Being athletic DOESN'T make you mean (unless you are doing 'roids). Being smart doesn't make you a target. And those are points I wanted the story to make.

One of the lessons I wanted Chase to learn was that he needed to be on the same team as his sister. So I had my villain bully Addy. It's right there, from the start. And Chase is so wrapped up in his own world, he doesn't see that she needs his help.

That's what happens as we grow up; we turn our view outward and our perception of the world expands. This is, at its heart, a story about growing up. A coming of age story, just as Sandra's original workshop asked me to write.

Of course the superpowers help Chase become more confident so he CAN face the bad guys. (Spoiler: There is more than one.) But when he does, he uses his smarts and heart to save the day.

Villainous Interruptions

By the end of my week in Iowa, I had a great premise, a bunch of half-formed characters, a few bits of plot, no villain, and lots of ambition.

By the end of the summer of '07, I had a great premise, a bunch of half-formed characters, a few more bits of plot, still no villain, and a new job as director of the Montevideo High School fall play. So that was it for writing.

Before I called it a day, I did jump online and print off a list of superpowers. I can't find that original list or site anymore, but there are dozens of similar lists out there in the googleverse. After making a spreadsheet of the novel's timeline, which is the month of May, I assigned each power I was interested in using to a date. I spread out the best and worst ones, coordinated certain powers with certain annual dates (fishing opener, Mother's Day, etc.), jotted a few notes about major plots events, and set the whole pile aside.

FYI: Still no villain. This was a problem. You can't write a NORMAL story without one, much less a superhero story.

In February, the new Iowa Summer Writing Festival booklet showed up. Sandra was offering a course entitled "Finishing Your First Novel." Perfect! I sign up and use the seminar as a deadline for finishing the first draft. Then I was hired to stage direct the spring musical. So that was it for writing.

I figured I could whip out the rest of the draft in June. Then my college roommates and I went to Maine for a week to celebrate a certain momentous birthday. So that was it for writing.

I didn't have much to offer in Iowa beyond what I'd left with the summer before, but the week was inspirational. Sandra and my classmates (above) were helpful, wise, and encouraging. I remember Sandra specifically saying, "You've got it. You just have to write it."

By the end of the summer of '08, heading into my second fall play, I had a full first draft.

And I had found my villain.

It's NOT Harry Potter

I've heard authors talk about how real their characters were, how they came to life and seemed to make their own decisions. I didn't get it. Until it happened to me.

I knew my main character needed friends of all sorts. The best minor characters act as a foil to the main character, so that's where I started. Johnny the reckless was born.

But as much as I wanted this to be a book boys would like to read, I mostly know how boys behave around girls. So friend #2 was a girl. Kat.

Before Kat and Johnny said a single word, I hit myself on the head over and over. How could I tell the tale of a boy-girl-boy trio, now that Harry, Ron, and Hermione were out there?

Then again, three boys become The Three Investigators (see above) and four boys turns into "The Body" (also known as Stand by Me) or The Goonies. Any combination of kids turns into some former literary or cinematic combination. I couldn't worry about how NOT to write the story, I just had to write it. And I was already picturing these two clearly.

As a concession, I deliberately veered away from the Harry Potter trio by making Johnny's and Kat's families as different from the Weasley and Granger clans as possible. Kat is not an only child; she has older brothers that figure into the story prominently. And Johnny's one older sister is the neighborhood babysitter. Also, his parents are divorced.

Sandra instructed us to write the pivotal scene of the story -- the place where the main character falls heavily (in a metaphoric way). I chose Flight day. I wrote the scene.

And Kat and Johnny took it from there. It was like they just took over and said what they wanted to say and did what they wanted to do, whether I liked it or not. I get it, now.

PS My reader remarked on the similarities to Rowling's trio and asked if I had noticed. Indeed.

A "Dark" Plot

By the end of my summer seminar in Iowa, I had the outline of a basic plot. A believer in strong structure, Sandra encouraged us to build the bones of our stories by focusing on an important place or moment that could recur with greater significance as the story progressed.

I knew my place instantly: a barn.

In each of the three main houses of my childhood and college years, there has been a barn either behind the house or across the street. These barns were off-limits, for the most part, being either abandoned, the property of others, or both. The picture at the top of this post is the actual barn from 16th Street in Willmar, where I lived until 1976. It has since been torn down.

As a student of archetypes, I knew that a character's descent into a dark place is a common, if not essential, moment in a good plot. What's darker than a barn? I plotted Chase's visits to the barn quite deliberately as the framework of the overall structure.

As a student of psychology, I also knew that the descent into darkness represents a look into the unconscious. One's fears, especially, are revealed when that unconscious is glimpsed. As my character's defining fears were a) growing up and facing the challenges of moving into adolescence and b) making mistakes/being imperfect, the barn presented a perfect symbol for his childhood (which must be faced and ultimately left behind) and the place where he would make his biggest mistakes.

Whew. All that to say, the barn at the top of this post symbolizes all that for me, as well. When we left Willmar and moved to Kandiyohi the summer between my 2nd and 3rd grade year, part of my childhood remained behind. Interesting fact: They had turned the barn into a children's theater, which I never dared try out for.

Pop psych question of the day:  How much of my current love for live theater and even directing stems from a desire to get into that barn, to recapture my childhood, and to face my own fears?

Despite my firm efforts, I failed miserably in creating a character unlike myself.

Names

By the end of my week in Iowa at the summer writing conference, I had most of my characters on paper:

* My sixth grade superhero, Chase Benjamin Cooper. He is named for one of my favorite aunts, Margaret Wachtler (whose nickname is Chase), my brother Cheyne (whose middle name is Benjamin), and my great great grandpa Jan Kuiper (an Americanized version of the name; he was husband to the great great grandma I mentioned in the Off to Iowa post). Chase is pictured above, as drawn by the awesome Sean Tiffany.

* Chase's fifth grade sister, Addy. At the time, I didn't know anyone named Addy. Now I do. Hi, Addi! Anyway, that drew me to the name. I wanted Chase and his sister to be close in age to rev up their conflict early in the story. Learning to be nice to his sister is one of the story's main lessons. Brothers and sisters should be on the same team.

* Chase's preschool brother, Charlie. Because I've never taught a Charlie I didn't like.

* Chase's photographer mother, Leigh. Named for my sister (middle name, again).

* Chase's best friend, Johnny Li-Larsen. He was always Johnny, named for a great grandfather on my Mom's side. His last name changed several times over the years... I eventually settled on Li-Larsen because I wanted him bi-racial and "Li-Larsen" reminds me of my friend Kevin.

* Chase's friend Kat. Mary Katherine Nathan. I have two wonderful cousins named Katherine, so that was an easy call. And not only is Nathan my baby bro, it is one of my very favorite words to say.

* Chase's father, Will. Despite the name having been used for a main character in a famous novel (Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier), I stuck with it. You can guess in the comment section where the name came from. (It's not a hard one.)

What I didn't have was a villain. And what good is a superhero tale without a great villain?

Off to Iowa

In the summer of 2007, I decided to go on vacation -- to Iowa.

I signed up for a class at The Iowa Summer Writing Festival, booked myself into a bed and breakfast, packed up the S-10, and off I went. The class was lead by Sandra Scofield and was titled "Writing the Coming of Age Story."

I had the itch to write, but was intimidated by all the amazing authors on my library shelves. I thought starting with a YA novel, by and about younger people, would simplify the whole process of getting words on paper.

Right.

Writing is hard work, no matter the subject or audience. And writing for younger people presents challenges akin to writing poetry. There is no room for superfluity. Beauty is expected.

In any case, my classmates were wonderful and Sandra was inspiring. As I listened to my fellow writers defend their autobiographical plots, I realized that I didn't want my story to be about me. I'd pick a main character as unlike me as possible. So I scrapped the story I'd been tossing around in my head, the one about my great great grandmother's journey to homestead in MN, and picked up that seed of an idea about getting superpowers. My character would be male. He'd be young. He'd get superpowers. In short, this would not be an autobiography.

It turns out when you write from your heart, when you write something true, it's all autobiography.

My Inspiration

The seeds of the novel Super Power of the Day were sown by NPR, specifically This American Life episode 178. Even more specifically, the John Hodgman spot "Invisible Man vs. Hawkman." The story posed this question: Which is better, the power of invisibility or flight?

Ten years later, I remember exactly where I stood as I listened. I remember wondering why superheroes were limited to one or two special powers each. I remember my final answer to the question: Why just one?

Welcome!

After five summers of writing and revising, Super Power of the Day is almost ready to go to the printer. I have intended all along to share my journey on this project, but never sat down to get started.

It's time.

Here we go!