Jo Treggiari

Pouncing like a cat

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Treggiari

The appropriately-named YA author Cat Clarke recently tweeted about how she works on her WIP by circumnavigating it via Twitter, Facebook, and random Internet surfing before sort of accidentally falling into her word.doc and being pleasantly surprised that it exists. She tricks herself.

Naturally I tweeted her back because this is also my METHOD, my MODE D’EMPLOI. It sounds better if you affix a professional sounding moniker to it especially if it is in French.

The way I visualize this is: I am a cat that is tossing a ball of yarn in the air and perhaps the yarn gets a little tangled and entraps the cat for a few minutes, and makes the cat flop around with its paws in the air slightly bemused and distracted, until finally the cat dominates the ball of yarn and sits on it. And then the cat is boss and the yarn complies and lets the cat get on with the real work which is of course finishing a book.

It’s not slacking. It’s my METHOD, I tell myself frequently.

Listen we all resolve not to spend useless time on the internet. Not that I in fact think it is useless- even the most useless bits like looking at people sneeze on YouTube- because it connects us to life and people. Mundane stuff maybe but still it reminds us that there are people and things happening outside our cocoon.

The main reason though that I indulge in a little surfing and messing around…I mean utilize this METHOD is that it un-tethers my mind and prepares it for work. In much the same way that washing the dishes/vacuuming/walking the dog does.
And by the way, were talking moderation in the METHOD here because too much turns your brain mushy and convinces you that being a writer is more about increasing your followers on Twitter and trying to come up with witticisms in under 141 characters. We can’t all be Kanye West.

So anyway, that’s my METHOD. What’s yours?

Posted in posts, the writing process | Leave a comment

Writing the hard book

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Treggiari

Sixteen years ago, my best friend committed suicide. She hung herself in her mother’s garage.

It was many years before I could speak it out loud without having a panic attack.

May 29, 1995. Memorial Day in fact. Although I didn’t need help memorializing the date. It was carved into my heart.

It was 2:33 pm when I heard from a mutual friend. Afterwards I used to see those numbers everywhere, sort of like when your birth date pops up on the digital alarm clock at the exact moment you glance at it, and you think ‘surely that must mean something lucky for me’?

But this was more like a knife to the chest. I’d see them on license plates, the VCR, houses, highway signs. I felt assaulted by them.
I don’t know the exact time she died but I feel I should have known. It should have stopped me in my tracks. It killed me that I was probably doing something mundane- eating, brushing my teeth, laughing. I thought the moment she ceased to be, that perhaps I should have ceased to be as well.

Like if our hearts were entwined as we felt them to be, then how could I still be walking around?

I’ve had many good friends. I’ve been blessed with them. But me and her, we chose each other. I remember seeing her on the other side of a chain link fence at a punk show in our warehouse. For weeks people had been telling me I had to meet this girl, that we would totally like each other. I had almost decided not to like her at all but as soon as I saw her shorn head, hair dyed blue, her nose ring, her big combat boots, I knew her. Just like that we were inseparable. We were both 18.

She died when she was 29. She was a little older and I was so pissed that she left me to turn 30 by myself.

I had 11 years with her always in my life, every day, and yet it passed in a breath. Now she has been dead longer than we were friends. It seems impossible and wrong. There isn’t a day I don’t think of everything she has missed.

So I had to write a book. But not about her death, because she wasn’t about that. She was about life and deep friendship and doing crazy shit with your best friend and laughing and having your back and generosity. Oh she was a kind soul!
It took me 10 years to write it. And I wrote it every which way- memoir, adult novel, fictional narrative- until I realized I could only write it as a novel, and not as a piece of my life.

God, I cried and raged over this book. I had panic attacks. My throat closed up, my chest felt tight when I wrote about her and me and everything innocent and carefree that we were, and all the awful crap too which comes from feeling things too much.

I had to be free to change things and make things up and toss it all around until it fell into the right order which was something new and true.

And that is FIERCE.

I don’t know what will happen with the book. It may just sit in my drawer forever. But for me that is enough.

Posted in FIERCE, Jo, life, posts, the writing process | 11 Comments

Los Angeles Book Club

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Treggiari

Look how excited they seem! This makes me ecstatic!

Posted in Ashes Ashes | 2 Comments

The Plan

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Treggiari

Perhaps I should have titled this “The Plan that went awry”.

So, when I started writing the book which became Ashes, Ashes, I went pretty deep into my characters’ back stories- in particular Grammalie Rose, Aidan, Sammy and Del’s pasts. I wrote down copious notes and imagined many different scenarios for why they all were the way they were. Back story is important. I knew my characters so I knew how they would talk and interact, what their failings and triggers were. They felt alive to me
But Lucy was always my focus. It was important to me that AA be Lucy’s story and I didn’t want anyone else to steal her limelight. I wanted her decisions to be her own and even though she falls in love with Aidan despite herself I didn’t want her to lose herself in him. It’s rare that an adventure story features a heroine prominently. I read an article recently that suggested that Hermione was the real hero of the Harry Potter books and my reaction (though I love those books) was “Yeah, why the hell wasn’t she?”
So all those back stories served to inform my characters but otherwise none of that extra stuff made an appearance in the book.
It was always my plan to write a companion book (Pocketful of Posies) which told the story of the pandemic and subsequent events from Aidan’s point of view and incorporated Sammy and Del’s stories as well.
Oh yes, Del knew Aidan and Sammy prior to the founding of the settlement. And a lot of the reasons that she is the way she is (bitchy, proprietary) are due to her upbringing and how she first met Sammy and Aidan.
I outlined the hell out of it, wrote the first few chapters. I could visualize how everything unfolded, the parts that overlapped with AA, those that didn’t. It was going to be epic.
But alas, the best laid plans…
As of right now (and really I am fooling myself to think that this will change) Pocketful will never see the light of day. It is a hard thing for a writer to bear because we love our books. They are our babies.
I’ve written 2.9 books since I plotted Pocketful and still that book echoes with me. I have thought of writing it anyway just for the pleasure of it, but other stories- to- be told- which- may- actually- sell- to- a- publisher take precedent. Maybe I’ll have a free year someday and I can work on it then.
I know that the big trilogy deals always get a lot of notice. It’s weird how I felt comfortable writing 2 books set in the same world but not 3… But in fact, my situation is the more common. Just because one book sells, doesn’t mean a sequel, prequel, companion will sell also. Maybe the publisher is looking for stand-alones. Maybe your agent didn’t push hard enough. Maybe you, the writer, didn’t clarify your demands or your expectations. There are so many variables involved in the publishing world, and as writers we don’t have a lot of control over them, which is why I say- Educate yourself to what is out there, Take a good hard look at your story idea, Ask yourself is it unique, different, does it have a hook or a unusual perspective?, and then go Write your ass off.

Posted in posts, publishing, the writing process | 10 Comments

The Last Day of 2011

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Treggiari

I like the sound of 2012. 12 is a multiple of 3 and 3 is my favorite number just because it’s so neat and independent. A tripod- solid but with a little possible sway in its makeup. Potentially unpredictable if you don’t approach it correctly.
Always been mad about the 3′s and don’t even get me started on 9. Perfect, perfect 9.

Anyway, this year was certainly a roller coaster. What’s that curse? May your life be….interesting. I am a little too close to my life to have found it particularly interesting this year but it was. Perhaps in ten years or so I will look back on it with gratitude.
I mean you should always look back on your year and life with gratitude because it means you are still here and able to reflect, but I will have gained perspective and distance and that requires time.

I don’t really have anything specific to say on this, the last day of 2011, an interesting year but I wanted to say thank you, and yes, I am grateful for everything, and I wanted to post a snippet of a Mary Oliver poem which feels pertinent to me. This is a stanza from her poem Dogfish which is astoundingly beautiful.
So here you go:

I wanted
the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know
whoever I was, I was

alive
for a little while.

Posted in Inspiration, Jo, life | 2 Comments

Around town; a few of my favorite things

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Treggiari

I live in a small town. It used to be mostly retired folks but over the last few years, a lot of younger people are moving in. It’s a cool mix of traditional, old-fashioned with just enough funk.
I don’t mean the funk in the local pub bathroom, or funky stuff like the scary lady snowman outside the beauty salon with the corncob nose and real human hair glued to its head.

I mean funky random things like the mysterious person who decorates trees along the walking trail with tinsel and ornaments and knitted decorations made out of toilet paper rolls. This year there was even a wreath.

And this, the local elementary school which is built on the original site of the Gallow’s hill (yeah, where they hung criminals) and is located next to the the town cemetery.

And this beauty which is the local haunted house. Yes it’s pink but check out those turrets. Plus it’s sinking into the ground very slowly and surely, and it just screams to have a story written about it.

For some reason my computer won’t let me upload a picture of my favorite tombstone epitaph (which was pointed out to me by my mother who in true British fashion noticed it first). It depicts a stylized farmhouse with rolling hills and cows and underneath it says “Please Pass the Butter”. I can’t think of anything more appropriate (or funky).

Hoping all of you have a happy holiday!

Posted in Inspiration, life, posts | 1 Comment

The Comfort in Books

Posted on December 10, 2011 by Treggiari

So my life has taken a turn recently.
My husband and I have decided to divorce after 16 years together. He is moving out January 1st.
It is as amicable as we can make it but of course we are both concerned about our kids who are 9 and 4.
The 4 year old doesn’t really understand it all. I think she will find it hardest living in two different places each week, and not always being able to snuggle in with me at 3 in the morning.
My 9 year old does understand although of course until something theoretical becomes a reality, you can’t really know how you feel about it.
I’ve been watching them both anxiously, looking for changes in behavior, regression, anxiety, acting out, and I haven’t seen anything worrying yet.
Lucy is the same rascal she always is, and Milo is Milo.
In fact I am quite surprised by my son’s equanimity. He is a solid, confident kind of person. A weird and cool mix of introspection and happiness being on his own, and a social, outgoing, joker side. He astounds me actually because he has the same outsider, loner qualities I exhibited as a child with none of the shyness and social ineptitude. He is so solid in how he is that it never occurs to him to wonder if he’s not cool. Or if other kids think he’s a dork or odd or any of the other things kids decide about other kids who run outside the pack.
I pray this lasts throughout school.
I think that nothing will enrage the mother wolf in me so much as him succumbing to pressure to be like everyone else, or to be ‘average.’
Anyway, he is handling our separation well but I started wondering if part of it was because he is such a voracious reader that he is familiar with different kinds of families already. None of his close friends have divorced parents. (We live in a small town).
But in a way he has been exposed to all kinds of situations outside his realm of experience through books.
Harry Potter introduced him to a boy whose parents were dead and whose guardians were cruel.
Percy Jackson introduced him to a single parent family.
My first book exposed him to a household where the parents fought all the time.
Lyra Bellacqua’s parents were uncaring and absent.
And in the next few years he can vicariously experience first love, having his heart broken, intense fear, pain, magic, death, sacrifice, faith, sex, addiction, depression, war, acceptance, racial bigotry, complete happiness, abuse. EVERYTHING in the human experience, including divorce and growing up in a single parent household.
Of course there are many things I’d prefer him to know nothing about but that is an impossibility.
Books offer a safe experience and the time to take it in at his own pace and decide how he feels about it, and they open lines of communication.
I was grateful for books as a child and I am even more grateful for them now.

Posted in all about Books, Jo, life, posts | 12 Comments

The Right Agent, The Right Book

Posted on December 3, 2011 by Treggiari

Those of you who follow my blog, know that back in August my agent told me he was closing up shop. He was a one-man-show so unfortunately this meant that I was cast upon the waves.

I thought it would be a relatively simple matter to find a new agent. I had two polished manuscripts, one a gritty contemporary and the other a fantasy adventure. I was published and my most recent book was doing respectably well and had garnered some accolades.

I’ve queried before. Endlessly. I know the score.

I remember how hard it is to remember that not just any agent will do. It has to be the right agent. And this makes things more difficult. But I had had the right agent, and I knew I would find another.

However there are other factors to the equation and one of them is, it has to be the right book.
Ashes, Ashes was the right book, and Garrett was the right agent and Scholastic was the right publisher. I look back on that time and I think how lucky I was. Everything just fell into place.

And I guess I thought that that was how it would be again.

But agents are in this business because they need to sell books. Yes, they love books and some of them are total fangirls/fanboys (they HAVE to be) but bottom line is they have to make a living in this incredibly competitive business.

And because most of what they do is speculative and the pay-off can be months or even years away, they have to absolutely love your manuscript. There can be no doubt in their minds.

Feedback on my submissions has been very positive but no one thus far has felt that all-encompassing passion that is so necessary. They have all pretty much said that I am a gifted writer, that my writing is beautiful which is so nice to hear but that is not enough. They have to know that they can sell the book, at the end of the day.

It’s been quite eye-opening for me.

I’m working on something now which is giving me the same sort of buzz I felt when I was writing Ashes, Ashes. Just a deep, visceral sense that it is the right book. The book I should be writing. It’s still hard and frustrating and some days are a total grind, but at least I know that a few months from now (hopefully) I’ll have something new to show the agents, and maybe it will be another case of the right book going out to the right agent at the right time.
I can’t believe anything less.

Posted in agents, posts | 3 Comments

These are so beautiful they make my heart hurt

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Treggiari

This is one of the mysterious paper sculptures which have been popping up at a library in Edinburgh and elsewhere in the city.

They are breath-taking and remind me of the best of the Brothers Quay animated films, and pop-up books by Robert Sabuda, and magic and childhood and other miraculous things and feelings we tend to forget when we get old.
Here’s another:

You can check out more of them by going here.