For this week’s Road Trip Wednesday,  YA Highway asks Who is your favorite African American author or fictional character?

I’m pretty excited by this question, because I’m been thinking a lot about writers and characters of color, and what they mean to me, a white writer. I’m very conflicted about writing characters of color myself, which I rant about here and here (a bit). But that’s my own stupid problem. I’ll save that for some hapless psychiatrist’s couch.

I don’t check the color of authors before I read them, and I’m sometimes surprised when people start talking about characters as being this race or that. I guess maybe my eyes just drift over those details. So maybe I might be more widely read in terms of African American authors and characters than I think I am. I’ve read Toni Morrison of course; who hasn’t? I think BELOVED did permanent damage to my brain. Possibly Ms. Morrison is the reason I gave up trying to read literary fiction for adults. She’s too darn smart for me. I don’t feel worthy.

That’s not to belittle the author I AM going to choose – Walter Dean Myers. I was thrilled when he was chosen as an ambassador for young people’s literature.  I admire his body of work (such prolific authors scare me) and I love that he uses multi-modal formats. I was a screenwriter, so MONSTER was particularly appealing to me. The protagonist STEVE is great.

I’m going to cheat a little bit though, when it comes to my favorite African American character, because he’s not African American, he’s Jamaican Canadian. Yes, I have to choose Harry Ambrose, the protagonist from my upcoming book WICKET SEASON. After all that angsting, I still wrote a book with a black protagonist. I wrote this book on contract so my choice to make Harry Jamaican Canadian was driven as much by the needs of the publisher and the subject matter (in Canada, cricket is played almost exclusively by people of color) and my own stylistic choices. Also, since this is a hi/lo book there was a requirement to keep the plot and language simple. This eliminated the need to get into the Jamaican culture in detail, or to use more than a smattering of Jamaican Patois. Nevertheless, I tried to do my research and make it seem real, for the love of cricket. I hope readers love Harry as much as I do.

For this week’s Road Trip Wednesday,  YA Highway asks what words do you absolutely hate?

A couple of years ago I started a thread on Agentquery.com called ‘Words that Should never Be In Queries’. A great deal of hilarity ensued about such phrases as ‘fiction novel’ and ‘the next Twilight’ (although I said this to my agent the other day, but I was joking).

What inspired me to start the thread was the ubiquity of certain words and phrases in the summary  section of queries. These types of words also appear on IMDB a lot, and in TV Guide. So rather than focus on one word I hate, here are a few words that fairly strong consensus indicates should NOT be used in queries:

1. Tumultuous

Tumultuous is not such a bad word I guess. I guess the problem I have with it is that really ALL books are tumultuous, or should be. Not many people want to read about someone’s average, uneventful day or life. Too many YA romance queries point to some teens “tumultuous summer” at her aunt’s beach house, or “tumultuous romance” with some mysterious loner etc. “Tumultuous” is not descriptive enough. It can be a good, bad or just busy summer or romance. Be specific.

2. Fast-paced or Action packed.

This is basically a cheat that says “My book is good, really really good. Trust me.” Therefore it’s a review. One should never “review” one’s book in the queries. Three more offenders are riveting, inspirational, and enthralling.

3. Rousing or rollicking

What are we? Speech writers from the 1930s? Both these words says exactly nothing except perhaps that things happen, whatever they may be, loudly or in fast succession with a lot energy,  usually sometime before the Second World War.

4. Chaotic

Scientists have shown us that the universe is governed by chaos. Telling an agent that your MC has a chaotic life is not helpful.

5. Spirals out of control

Even if this wasn’t a cliché (it is) and even if it wasn’t regularly combined with other clichés to create the most horrendous mixed metaphors imaginable (“the fairytale romance spirals out of control”,  “His life spirals out of control as he tries to keep the wolves from the door” etc), this phrase is too vague. It’s also inaccurate, or it should be, because a good story is driven by INTENTION and an ACTIVE character, not just one who watches the proverbial sh*t hit the clichéd fan. Also why is lack of control always circular, like a spiral? Why not fractal (like chaos) or linear (like a runaway train)?

Generally I object to the above because they don’t really say anything. They are words used by lazy writers who haven’t bothered to really think about how to describe what happens in their books. A query needs to be pithy, above all, packed with meaning and clear. Don’t waste precious space in a query by using one of the above clichés. If you’re not sure about your query try agentquery.com. I comment there as “Petal65” and am happy to offer feedback, especially on queries for Young Adult and Middle grade.

For this week’s Road Trip Wednesday,  YA Highway asks about names. Not character names, writers’ names. Pseudonyms, in other words.

First I should point out that my sister browsed my blog the other day and complained that on the Why Angelhorn page I didn’t give some background as to my own name, Gabrielle. You can see from her comment that she was looking for some recognition of our late father, after whom I am named. His name was Gabriel, the masculine version of Gabrielle.

My sisters and I all have the same last name as our father (and mother), none of us changed our name in marriage. This wasn’t any kind of feminist statement on my part at least, more apathy. By the time I got married I had three passports, a driver’s license and about eight credit cards. I just couldn’t be bothered.

So it was that I found myself at the beginning of a screenwriting career with a name that was very close to my father’s name, who was, before he died, a moderately successful (if mostly unknown) stage and screen actor. To avoid confusion, this is when I began to toy with the idea of having a pen-name.

My mother’s surname, before she married dad, was rather dull, but HER mother’s maiden name was BERGMAN. What better name for a screenwriter, thought I. And thus, for a mercifully brief time, I went with my second name, Sara, and became G. Sara Bergman. In short, I became Swedish and/or converted to Judaism.  And contrary to popular belief this didn’t turn me into an instant Hollywood sensation (one has to be a MAN for that to happen). Frankly, the name never really stuck. By the time Hildegarde was in production I had reverted to using my given name, adding the middle initial S to create a little distinction.

My dad died before the movie was released (although I did read the novel to him). It was an exciting time for me though, the only low point being the day I finally got a copy of Hildegarde on DVD. I flipped it over to see my name under “Screenplay by” and there it was : Gabriel. I literally cried.  I could not believe it. Where the wires got crossed and who is responsible, I may never know. The DVD has been re-issued a couple of times and I don’t know whether the mistake has been corrected. To be honest I no longer care.

Now that I’m writing fiction, I find myself toying with the idea of having multiple personas. I genre hop, and think maybe one persona could be the contemporary YA verse novelist, and one the sci-fi fantasy girl, one the picture book lady, and maybe, one day, the screenwriter again. I’m tempted to go with my initials, like JK Rowling, just to avoid the whole misspelling risk though.

But the last name, Prendergast, awkward as it is, I think I’ll keep. It has a really cool history, and my family’s Norman founder, Maurice de Prendergast was a heck of a guy.

Or maybe I’ll just go with my stripper name: Tequila Juliett. What do you think?