Karen Sandler

Category: Books

  • Do You Know the Title of This Book?

    Last night, my husband was doing a little electrical work. We’re getting a new vanity installed in our master bathroom with some fancy granite as a countertop. The new vanity is taller than the old one. The old outlet on one side is so low it would be in the way of the backsplash. Yes, we could have the installer cut the granite to fit the outlet, but we preferred the option of moving the outlet up on the wall.

    I bring this up because at one point, my husband was trying to fish wire between those two small holes you see in the photo. There’s insulation inside the wall and sundry other things to block the cable from sliding easily from point A to point B. As he was struggling a bit to get the wire through, a memory popped up in my mind of a book I’d read (and re-read, and re-read) as a child.

    I was maybe 8 or 9 when I first read it. Sadly, I can’t remember the title. It was probably published by Scholastic since I bought plenty of books from their school catalog. I hung onto the book for years, loving the story each time I re-read it.

    In any case, the story went like this. A boy goes to the local pet shop to buy a pet mouse. But the mice cost more than he has saved up. He spots a mouse in the cage that’s missing its tail. The pet store owner agrees to sell the mouse at a discounted price (which the boy can afford) because of the missing tail. The deal was something like, Well, it’s 3/4 of a mouse, so you can pay me 3/4 of the price.

    Thrilled, the boy takes his pet home. This is a particularly clever mouse and the boy manages to teach it to come when he rings a bell. One day he takes the mouse to where his dad, an electrician, is working on wiring a house. The dad is trying to push electrical tape through a conduit. Once the dad has that tape through, he’ll attach the wiring cable to it, then fish the wiring back through the conduit.

    But just as the dad has almost got the tricky tape through, the pet mouse gets loose. When the boy reaches out to catch it, he bumps his dad’s arm. Now the tape is hopelessly stuck and Dad has to start over. He’s angry and tells his son he shouldn’t have the mouse at his job site.

    The boy gets an idea–attach the tape to the mouse (I think it had a little collar or harness) and let the mouse pull it through the conduit. The boy will ring the bell at the other end to summon the mouse. Of course, the boy’s works, and the boy and the mouse save the day.

    Why has that story stuck with me for so many years? I’m not sure, but I suspect it’s because the boy was the one who was the hero. It was his patience and cleverness in teaching the mouse that solved the problem. I remember also thinking how cool it was to have trained the mouse to come when the bell rang. I liked the dad too, who despite the frustration of having his son jostle his arm, gives his son a chance to try his plan.

    As a side note, I identified with that little boy and wanted to be him. Even though I was a girl. The fact that all the heroes in books were boys back then didn’t faze me. It never crossed my mind that as a girl I couldn’t be as heroic.

    So what childhood books have stuck with you? The ones that your mind returns to at odd times, the ones that still make you smile? Extra special credit if anyone can come up with the title and author of the book I described.

  • RTW — My YA Buddy IRL

    This week’s YA Highway prompt is What IRL people can you talk to about YA? I confess it took some head-scratching to figure out what IRL meant. Yes, I’m an old fogey (hah! how many of you even know the word fogey?) and sometimes I have to look up those Internet acrynyms. For those as fogeyish as me, it means In Real Life.

    After figuring that out, it took a little more cogitation to come up with an answer. My hubby might read YA if I told him it was a fab book. He read my book TANKBORN (and even got annoyed with me when I interrupted him while he was reading it), so why not other recommended YA books? Well, you should see this guy’s TBR pile (hah again! see, I do know some Internet acronyms). He’s got books piled everywhere and he often only has time to read late evenings (when he promptly falls asleep) and weekends (when he sometimes falls asleep). Plus most of my YA books are on my Kindle and he likes reading paper.

    My younger son reads some YA (Neil Gaiman for example), but he’s often the one giving  me recs for books. Also, he’s got his own eclectic tastes and I’m pretty sure the YA books I’ve been swooning over wouldn’t be to his liking.

    Then there’s older son. Since he lives in Osaka, Japan, we bought him a Kindle so he could buy and read new books without having to have them shipped at great expense. I have lent him nearly every lending enabled YA Kindle book I own and have strongly recommended he buy others if I’m not able to lend. I lent him The Hunger Games after I read it, and when I didn’t get around to buying the other two books, he told me he would if I didn’t. So I got him somewhat hooked on YA.

    So I guess he’s my YA buddy IRL. I look forward to sharing many more books with him in the future.

  • Give Every Scene a Purpose

    The other day, I gave a talk to a high school class about how I did the world-building for my SF book Tankborn. This was a creative writing class, and the students were very motivated to learn more about how I wrote Tankborn and about the writing business in general.

    During the talk, I brought up an essential fact about writing fiction: that although real life is full of the trivial and mundane, there’s no room for the unimportant in fiction.

    In real life, all sorts of things can happen. You try to start your car and your battery is dead. So maybe you’re late for work and get a chewing out. Or you happen to meet a friendly stranger at the supermarket and you chat for the few minutes you wait together in line. Or when you get home from the market, you discover you got regular coffee when you meant to get decaf. Or perhaps you spend days at your father’s care home (as I did earlier this year) as he’s dying.

    Could these things happen in your fiction story? Of course they could, whether you’re writing a realistic or speculative story. But here’s the big difference. All of those events, from the mundane (chatting up a stranger) to the life-changing (the death of your father) would have to have a purpose in your story. They should not, must not be there just to fill space on the page.

    For instance, the battery going dead might mean that your main character gets to work late and discovers a police cordon around her office building. Then she sees the bodies wheeled out, including that of the mass murderer who just killed her boss and several co-workers.

    That stranger your character chats with in line could be a harried single father in desperate need of a nanny. Perhaps your main character is in desperate need of a job and she agrees to watch the father’s three unruly kids. This would lead to true love and the taming of the kids (yes, I used to write romance novels).

    That accidentally purchased coffee could have scrawled across the bottom a message that leads the main character to a factory where the employees are victims of a human trafficker. If the character had grabbed the decaf instead of the regular, she might never have seen the message.

    So think about your own story. Does every scene count for something? Are your characters finding clues, are they revealing information, are you raising the stakes for them in ways that moves the plot forward? It’s pointless to have the heroine narrowly avoid being run over by a car (as nail-biting as that might be) unless the person driving the car (or the person who hired them to drive the car) is crucial to the plot. If she slips and falls down a cliff, she’d better find a secret cave or a dead body or a treasure chest. And if she doesn’t get herself out of that fix, the person who does rescue her had better be the love interest.

    If you’re sure every scene in your manuscript does have a purpose, let me up the ante. Find a way for at least some of those scenes to do double or triple duty. Have the scene reveal not only information, but character. Have it expose a character’s weakness and also set up a crucial plot point that will be paid off later. Use that scene to not only describe the setting, but how that setting impacts your character.

    Nearly every scene can do double duty. Many can do triple duty. Your goal is to give the reader aha moments, when she or he realizes, “Oh, that’s why that was in there.”

    Because here’s the thing, here’s the reason every scene must have a purpose. It is the nature of books and stories that as a reader reads, they are accustomed to noticing what happens to the characters. They are used to tucking away unusual events and to consider them important. If you describe your character brushing her teeth every morning, but that never factors into the plot, it will irritate your reader. Brushing teeth is trivial…unless it’s not. Unless that’s how our character is poisoned. Or that’s part of her OCD routine (maybe she has to do it at a set time and for a set number of strokes each day).

    Your reader is going to notice those little details. She’s going to want her payoff later in the story. Make sure she gets it–or hit that delete key.

  • RTW – Best Book in April

    A very late entry into YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday. I’ve been out all day, some of that time spent speaking to a fantastic high school creative writing class. So much fun.

    But I’ve got to give my pitch for my fave April read–Cat Girl’s Day Off. Who doesn’t love a heroine who can speak to cats? And a kidnapped kitty who’s been painted pink? And a mystery, a sweet romantic lead, and some goofy, laugh-out-loud humor?

    Full disclosure: 1) I’m an inveterate cat lover, and 2) Kimberly Pauley is my Tu Books “sister,” that is, we’re both published by Lee and Low/Tu Books. But that’s not why I’m raving over Cat Girl’s Day Off. It was just a fantastic book. Check it out!

  • RTW – Images That Inspire

    This week’s prompt on YA Highway‘s Road Trip Wednesday is What images inspire/ represent your WIP or favorite book? This one is pretty easy because my publisher, Lee and Low, hired an artist to draw some of the creatures and flora that appear in the Tankborn series. So while I’ve been working on Awakening, book 2 of the Tankborn series, I’ve had these images swirling around in my head (bhimkay, seycat, rat-snake, and sewer toad):