Karen Sandler

Author: Karen Sandler

  • RTW: Favorite Literary Moment

    Today’s Road Trip Wednesday on YA Highway asks us to relate our favorite literary moment–a long-awaited kiss, a surprise ending, a character’s decision. As with all the prompts that ask for my “favorite,” I find it difficult to pick just one. The thing is, different books or moments are favorites for different reasons. One book can delight me because the heroine finally kisses the boy, another because she tore the head off her enemy (okay, maybe I’m not delighted in that latter case as much as gratified).

    The first book that popped into my head while contemplating this prompt was Red Sky at Morning. I’m guessing many of you have never heard of it. Red Sky at Morning is a coming-of-age story published in 1968. It takes place during WWII. The main character, Joshua Arnold, lives in Mobile, Alabama with his Southern Belle mother and ship-building father. When Josh’s father enlists in the Navy, he has his family relocate to Sagrado, New Mexico where they’ve previously spent their summers.

    The book is hysterically funny, in a John Green kind of way. But like John Green’s great books, there is heart-wrenching emotion in the book as well. I’ve read the book uncounted times.

    So, favorite moments? There are several. When Josh discovers the bully is more bluster than action. When he finally sends the mooching “professional house guest” Jimbob packing. When Josh sees for the first time the tribute his sculptor friend has paid to his father.

    Beyond these key moments in the book, this is a fantastic book featuring an ensemble cast, including Josh’s best friends Marcia and Steenie. Although the main characters are all white, there is a significant number of secondary characters who are POC, who are interesting and well fleshed out.

    They did a pretty decent job on the movie adaptation, but read the book first. It’s simply wonderful.

  • Tankborn Outtakes

    Back around October 2009, I finished work on a manuscript titled GENeration, a young adult science fiction book. I knew it wasn’t finished finished. I didn’t yet have an agent or editor for the book, but I knew that when I did, they would have their say in further re-writes. But I thought the book was ready enough to start querying agents. It turned out I was deluding myself, but I nevertheless e-mailed out my first query on October 13, 2009.

    I’d been sending out queries for about a month and a half when it occurred to me that having a beta reader look it over would be a really great idea (gee, ya think?). Luckily, I could keep the read in the family via my younger son. He wasn’t exactly swimming in spare time (he was in the third year of his PhD in economics), but he’s a fast reader and brutally honest. He got back to me at the end of November 2009 with suggestions for some pretty extensive changes.

    Of course, I’d already sent the complete manuscript out to a few agents, including the agent who eventually took me on. Hindsight being what it is, this was when I realized I really hadn’t been ready to start querying. Yes, I wish I’d thought to send the book to my son before that first query. But water under the bridge and all that.

    In any case, those agents who had the manuscript were happy to replace it with the new and improved version. I eventually got offers from two agents. The agent I signed with asked for another major re-write before he sent it out. Then the book sold to Lee and Low/Tu Books, and required even more changes including a title morph from GENeration to Tankborn. Tankborn was released in Sept. 2011.

    Along the way, what with all this re-writing and editing, by necessity a lot of material got deleted from the manuscript. As part of the various and sundry editing, there were four quite sizeable chunks that ended up on the cutting room floor. Each of them was at least a few pages long and the content in them was fairly significant. They offered some pretty cool perspectives of life on the planet Loka, where Tankborn is set. Unfortunately, these scenes didn’t do anything to move the story forward. They didn’t “earn their keep” and had to go.

    But I thought it would be fun to put them up on my website, part of some exclusive material that will only be available there. So if you’d like to read what might have been in Tankborn, take a look here. If you haven’t yet read the book, there is some spoilerage, but it is clearly marked. So it’s safe for all to take a peek.

  • Tankborn Sequels!

    I’ve finally been given my editor’s blessing to announce my good news. There will be two Tankborn sequels: Awakening, which is scheduled for release in Spring 2013 and Revolution, scheduled for Spring 2014.

    I’d been working on Awakening these past several months, even before the offer was in hand, because I wanted so much for Kayla and Devak’s stories to continue. Now the pace for writing book 2 has picked up to a fever-pitch as I work toward a, shall we say, challenging deadline.

    What’s in store for our heroine and hero in Awakening? Aw, you don’t really want to know that, do you? No spoilery here. But I can say there will be more adventures, some familiar returning characters, some new characters, and more intriguing questions asked about humanity, race, and class.

    One fun thing about writing Awakening is that I already have a “story bible” to rely on to use as a basis for my world. Most of the heavy lifting of world-building was done in Tankborn. I get to reap those benefits, using Tankborn as my reference material. At the same time, I’m giving myself the freedom to invent some new things that (hindsight being what it is), I would have mentioned in the course of writing Tankborn if I’d thought of them. It’s very cool to add some layers to Tankborn‘s world. Also quite nifty to know there will be a third book which I can start to set up in Awakening.

    So keep an eye out for updates–cover reveals, blurb teasers, Scribd samples. Spring 2013 will be here before you know it.

  • RTW – The Best Book Read in February

    YA Highway‘s prompt for today’s Road Trip Wednesday is What was the best book you read in February? No ties this month. The answer was easy-peasy.

    I read three books in February: Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races, M. T. Anderson’s Feed, and Beth Revis’s Across the Universe. I might have finished Stardust in the early days of February (I started it in January) and have started another book that I won’t finish until March, but I think the above three qualify as “books I read in February.” (How do you count the books you’ve read each month?)

    Anyway, hands down, no thought required at all, The Scorpio Races was the best book I read in February. I’m sure it will turn out to be in my top five for the year, without even knowing what else I’ll be reading. This book had the perfect combination of marvelous, engaging characters, a wonderful premise, a breathless plot, and an enigmatic, yet fascinating setting. Add the fact that I love horses (that’s my beautiful Belle to the left–doesn’t she look just like Dove?) and this book was a guaranteed hit for me.

    One thing about The Scorpio Races, which is true for other great books–it stuck with me for days. I kept reflecting on the book, kept feeling the pull of the story even though I’d finished it. That puts it in an entirely different category than other books I’ve enjoyed but weren’t quite elevated to greatness in my mind.

    So, what were your favorites this month?

  • Physics Professor Extraordinaire

    I just found out that my favorite physics professor–actually, my favorite college professor, period–passed away last July. Dr. James Imai was instrumental in me changing my minor from English to physics. He was a fantastic lecturer and as astounding as it may sound to non-science folks, he made physics fun.

    I entered California State College, Dominguez Hills in 1974 as a junior, planning to major in math and minor in English. Only one or two quarters into my first year there, I took a class with Dr. Imai and fell in love with physics. He had a way of using real world examples to illustrate physics principles and somehow injected humor into every physics lecture.

    For instance, in one of my first year physics classes, he escorted the class out to the parking lot to demonstrate how one would hotwire a car. He explained to us how we could wire in a switch that would interrupt the usual pathway a car thief would use to steal the car. You’d turn off the switch to break the circuit so the car couldn’t be hotwired. He also recommended that you dirty up the wires you use for the switch installation so the car thief wouldn’t notice it. I thought it was pretty hysterical at the time that he was teaching all these young, impressionable college students how to steal cars.

    He also assigned a very entertaining weekly homework assignment starring the fictional character Joe Whizz. These were page-long word problems in which Joe had some kind of adventure that would illustrate a physics principle. In one I remember, Joe went camping with his good buddy, Neighbor Jones. Near where Joe and his buddy camped, there were some large boulders in which small, natural pools had been carved out. Joe wanted to heat the water in the pools so he could do some hot-tubbing. He decided to put some handy 2-kg stones into the campfire to heat them, then put the stones into the water until the water reached the necessary temperature. We had to figure out how many heated stones it would take to warm the water to the desired temperature.

    What was pretty cool about Dr. Imai is that although he kind of talked a macho game, it was me and my friend Peggy that he seemed to take under his wing. When we complained that the wives of Joe Blow and his buddy were always on the sidelines in the Joe Blow stories, Dr. Imai came up with a homework problem in which the wives were the heroines of the story.

    My favorite memory is how Dr. Imai taught me and Peggy how to cook hot dogs using a “suicide cord” (kids, I do not recommend you try this at home!). We took an ordinary lamp cord, cut off at one end and with a plug on the other. We split the cord into two for maybe 6-8 inches. We then stripped the cut ends to expose the metal wire within. Those metal wires were each wrapped around a 10-penny nail (near the head of the nail). With the cord unplugged we poked the nails through either end of a hot dog. We then plugged in the cord and voila! the electrical current cooked the hot dog. Peggy and I actually started a modest hot dog concession in the physics lab, selling hot dogs and soda to students and TAs.

    Dr. Imai and I kept in touch off and on in the years since I graduated. I still have the wedding gift he gave me thirty years ago (at left). More recently, he requested some of my romance novels both for a friend of his and himself. As best I can tell, we last corresponded in December 2010, when I told him about my new granddaughter. I also mentioned that I would have a science fiction book, Tankborn, coming out. He said in response, “as you may recollect, science fiction is one of my favorite subject areas. I take it that TANKBORN is your chosen title. You can put me down for an order of a copy.”

    Now I know he died months before Tankborn came out in September 2011. I wish now that I could have sent him an advance copy. I would have been so proud to know he’d read it.

    If you want to know more about Dr. James Imai, do a Google search. He was a remarkable man.

    Note: Thanks to Leslie Ogg, Dr. Imai’s longtime companion, for the correction on Joe’s last name and for his buddy’s name.