Lucid Dream: The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater

Listening to other people describe their dreams can be the most boring thing in the world. I know this. And yet I still can’t stop myself from telling people, “I had the craziest dream last night…” Dreams come straight from our raw emotional cores, which makes them a powerful experience that so colors the waking world that we need to share them with someone else just to continue our day. This also makes them extremely difficult to describe. “I saw this pink poodle, only it wasn’t a normal poodle, it was really scary,” doesn’t cover the visceral terror you felt when staring into the black, soulless eyes of a girly hell-dog. Dreams have unstable settings, as well as mysteriously vanishing and reappearing characters, and unresolvable plot holes. And yet Maggie Stiefvater’s The Dream Thieves, a book about dreaming, perfectly evokes the otherworldly feel of those nighttime phantoms while still maintaining a stable base of story.

Literary Inspiration: All Our Pretty Songs by Sarah McCarry

"Cass has a guillotine heart, severing ties as neatly as a whistle-sharp blade cutting the head from the body. Like any good revolutionary, she pretends that the casualties mean nothing."

-Sarah McCarry. All Our Pretty Songs. 2013. St. Martin's Press, New York. pages 30-31.

Untold by Sarah Rees Brennan: I Promise I Won't Spoil the Ending

Sarah Rees Brennan is really good at endings. The conclusions of her Demon’s Lexicon books were good, with big reveals and thrilling battles. But she really perfected the art in Unspoken, the first Lynburn Legacy book, aka the novel with an ending that turned the internet into one giant shocked, crying animated gif. The ending of Untold is another doozy. But since I can’t talk about it here without majorly ruining the reading experience of those who have not yet read it, let’s discuss some other things that Sarah Rees Brennan is really good at: writing awesome dialogue and confounding narrative expectations.

To Coin A Phrase: Fangirl

Celebrating innovative use of language in YA.

Emergency Kanye Party

An activity engaged in after a painful situation--such as job loss, breakup, or school failure--occurs, that consists of uninhibited dancing to a playlist consisting only of songs by Yeezus himself, Kanye West.

Original Usage: 

"...'Emergency Kanye Party!' And then it was the other person's job to run to the computer and start the Emergency Kanye playlist. And then they'd both jump around and dance and shout Kanye West lyrics until they felt better." -Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell (2013. St. Martin's Griffin, New York. p. 109)

Not Your Typical Mean Girl: Top Five Lydia Quotations from Teen Wolf

I know I’m late to the Teen Wolf party, but I am making up for my tardiness with my enthusiasm! The show is fun, soapy, and at times so over the top it feels like a fever dream. But, most importantly, Teen Wolf has brought Lydia Martin into my life, and for that I will be forever grateful. On first glance, Lydia comes off as a standard pretty, popular girl character: perfect hair and make-up, dating a star athlete, and a little bit mean. But the show gives you little glimpses behind that façade, like when Lydia somehow figures out that it is Allison’s birthday and breaks into her locker to decorate, or when she has perfect bowling form, or when she knows how to construct a Molotov cocktail using materials found in a high school chemistry lab. By the end of the first season, it is clear: Lydia Martin is a secret genius. Here are five of my favorite Lydia quotations.

Small Moments of Genius: Words as Spacers

Sometimes when I’m writing, I discover a special new way to fit words together. This may not actually be new to anyone but me, for the small moment after my discovery, I feel like a genius.

Today’s small moment of genius: using description to physically and temporally space moments in text.

We all have tics as writers, words or phrases that we reach for repeatedly and then have to cross out during rewrites. One of mine: “They were quiet for a few minutes.” I find myself using this, or some form of it, pretty much constantly when writing dialogue between two characters. I don’t think it’s a bad instinct; giving the conversation room to breathe allows for a more relaxed rhythm and a break from the onslaught of dialogue (unless you want an onslaught of dialogue between two hyper, fast-talking characters, in which case, go for it!).

Opening Lines: Uses for Boys by Erica Lorraine ScheidtIn

"In the happy times, in the tell-me-again-times, when I'm seven and there are no stepbrothers and it's before the stepfathers, my mom lets me sleep in her bed."

-Uses for Boys by Erica Lorraine Scheidt (St. Martin's Griffin, New York. p. 1)

The secret weapon of this opening sentence is the unique “tell-me-again times,” which evokes a child who has discovered something she loves and wants her mom to do it over and over, and a mother who loves her daughter enough to indulge her. The “happy” times in the past and the foreboding future presence of the stepbrothers and stepfathers let us know that the present is not as sunny as the past. Without overtly doing so, Scheidt’s first sentence cuts straight to the core of the main character in prose that promises a pleasurable reading experience.

What stories did you make your mother tell you over and over again?