As you may know, we met at a conference in 2009, for which we are forever grateful. As a result, we have a soft spot for conferences, and all that they bring to a writer. This year, we would like to pay forward some of our gratitude to other writers out there who are looking to form the right connection.

We’d like to help you prepare your selected pages for critique sessions, and/or evaluation at a conference. Even if you aren’t planning on attending an event, we hope you’ll still enter. We take pride in the intensive feedback we offer each other, and will extend that same helpful hand to our winners.

The prizes are as follows:

Grand Prize: a critique of the first 10 pages of your manuscript by all four YA Muses – you’ll get to see how we critique each others’ work, and build on each others’ strengths.

Four First Prizes: a critique of the first 10 pages of your manuscript by one of the YA Muses. Each winner will get a different Muse. Drawing will be random.

The contest is open internationally (electronic submissions and critiques).

From today through May 14th, you can enter by:

Becoming a new follower (one entry)

Commenting on the YA Muses blog (one entry per comment)

Tweeting about the contest using the @yamuses mention, or the #prepyourpages (one entry per tweet or retweet)

Enter one day or every day!

Winners will be announced Friday, May 20^th.

Thanks and good luck!

From Goodreads:

New York City has been decimated by war and plague, and most of civilization has migrated to underground enclaves, where life expectancy is no more than the early 20's. When Deuce turns 15, she takes on her role as a Huntress, and is paired with Fade, a teenage Hunter who lived Topside as a young boy. When she and Fade discover that the neighboring enclave has been decimated by the tunnel monsters—or Freaks—who seem to be growing more organized, the elders refuse to listen to warnings. And when Deuce and Fade are exiled from the enclave, the girl born in darkness must survive in daylight, in the ruins of a city whose population has dwindled to a few dangerous gangs. As the two are guided by Fade’s long-ago memories, they face dangers, and feelings, unlike any they’ve ever known.

From Me:

I love a good post-apocalyptic novel, and this one definitely kept me entertained. Aguirre tells the story of Deuce, a Huntress whose adventure begins in the underground world she has always called home. Here, she defends her colony from zombie-like creatures called Freaks with the help of her hunting partner, Fade. The duo’s journey moves topside to the skeletal remains of New York City, now ruled by rival gangs. Guys, this is survival, and then more survival, and then more survival. Lots of action in a well-drawn world. Aguirre has a knack for keeping the pace charging along. Deuce is a sturdy, likeable heroine who had me cheering for her more and more as the story progressed. This is well-crafted adventure that will please fans of post-apocalyptic tales.

Don’t forget to stop by Myra McEntire’s blog for more awesome info on our first Bookanistas Give Back project

And, as for the rest of the Bookanistas…

Elana Johnson thrills over The Third

Christine Fonseca takes a shine to Demonglass

Shelli Johannes-Wells scribes about The Story Board

Shana Silver is rapturous about Moonglass

Carrie Harris revels in Divergent

Rosemary Clement-Moore adores Enclave

Stasia Ward Kehoe has Perfect cover love

Megan Miranda travels the pages of Blood Red Road

What do the following books have in common:

• Dinner with a Cannibal
• A Natural History of the Senses
• Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game
• The Human Experiment: Inside Biosphere 2
• Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why
• Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing our Minds, our Bodies – and What it Means to be Human
• The SAS Survival Guide
• The Gift of Fear

Answer: They are some of my favorite research books.

There are many more, but these are the ones I leaned on heavily in the creation of UNDER THE NEVER SKY. I’ve found everything from minor details to major world-building ideas within the pages of the above books.

The best kind of research is the kind that feels effortless. It’s searching for information that excites you—that spurs ideas and makes you hungry to write. None of the books above were a chore to read. In fact, the process of reading and consulting these books has continued as I write the second book in the NEVER SKY trilogy. I dip into them often, scanning a few pages, reminding myself of the passages I noted.

I keep a stack of research books on my nightstand. DEEP SURVIVAL by Laurence Gonzales is currently at the top of the pile. This book is dog-eared and peppered with highlighted passages. I adore this book. I bought it up because I knew I’d be writing a story about survivors. My characters are people who regularly face life and death situations. Seeking to reconnect with that, I picked it up recently and randomly turned to a page. I found this underlined passage:

“Killip had entered the final stage that separates the quick from the dead: not helpless resignation but a pragmatic acceptance of—even wonder at—the world in which he found himself… He had discovered the first Rule of Life: Be here now.”

Give me a minute as I do back-flips over the awesomeness of that bit of insight.

Knowing this—knowing that the people who live in dire situations are those who can accept and move on—gives me a fantastic window into how my characters will react in those moments. Those are the kinds of nuggets a research book can give you. An idea. The perfect detail. The right lens through which to view a situation.

Setting fiction aside completely, how wonderful is it to be reminded: Be here now?

For me, research is an ongoing practice. It’s that daily 30 minutes of aerobic exercise for your mind. It’s a reminder of the vastness and complexity of the human experience. A way to tap into all the million little details that make life interesting and rich. You can only benefit by bringing some of that into your fiction.

(Yes, I really do own this book.)

(And yes, it's quite informative and interesting.)

I had no idea that when I sat down to write my first novel, that I would spend nearly as much time researching it as I would writing it.  It was fiction, right?  Couldn't I just make stuff up?

Sort of.

Books are so much better when the include a level of truth, whether it's a setting detail, a character trait or an emotional undertone.  We've probably all experienced those moments when a story is so real, that we're completely transported.  Conversely, we've all been taken out of a scene when something that seems out of character, out of context, or just plain wrong happens.

As a teen I was an avid equestrian.  But whenever girls were shown  riding horses on television or in movies, it was always wrong and I could never enjoy the stories.  I remember watching an episode of Full House (okay, I might've been in my twenties) where one of the Olson twins was supposed to be in a horse show in the "Junior Jumpers" class.  Junior Jumpers is the upper echelon of amateur riding for teens- it basically involves Olympic-style show jumping over very large jumps.  But in the show, the girl was jumping tiny little cross-bars that a beginning level rider might take as her very first jump.  Rated shows don't even have classes with jumps this small.  It drove me insane.

I have the same problem with legal shows on television now that I'm an attorney.  It's hard to suspend disbelief when the basic premise is so wrong.  Most civil cases settle, never getting to trial, and those that do take years to get there.

But as writers, we can't always write about what we know, or we'd run out of ideas, characters and stories pretty quickly.  And even when we do know about a topic, sometimes reality is kind of boring. (See paragraph re: litigation above).  So I think we do get a little creative license when writing stories.  At least I hope so! There has to be a balance between faking it and boring the reader senseless with mundane details that go nowhere.

I like to have just enough information to be dangerous.  I want to know enough about a topic so that there is a grain of truth to what I'm writing, a foundation from which the story can grow, but not so much that I don't feel the freedom to let the story go where it needs to go.  It's a fine line I know.

In BANDIA, I wrote a contemporary fantasy that is based, in part on Celtic mythology.  I say in part, because much of the mythology is my own- stories I developed by answering the "what if" questions that were sparked by the "real"  myth.  To me, this was the perfect marriage of  fact and fiction, a seed of truth that became something original.  Real scholars of Celtic myth might feel like I felt while watching the horse episode of Full House, but I'm hoping that the rest of the world will be curious enough to discover for themselves what is real and what is fictional.  


Researching a topic almost always leads me to new ideas, fresh perspectives or perfect details.  For SPIES, I tried to imagine what kind of spy gear my teenage private investigator might have access to.  Enter the internet.  It turns out that a lot of really high tech spy gear is just a click away.  So is a lot of low tech crap that may or may not even work.  Can you see how this might spur the creative juices?

The danger of too much research is that you get bogged down in details.  As important as research is to your story, it must always serve the story first, not the other way around.  I mean, I could write a paper on the quality and efficacy of online spy gear, but I'd rather just tell a story.

Research can help you to understand your characters and their world and write with authenticity.  There's a fine line between peppering your story with true details and stalling the story completely in the name of factual accuracy.  There has to be a balance.

How do you use research to make your story sing?

I can spend days researching.  Months.  I live in fear of being called out on an historical inaccuracy, even though I’m sure it’s bound to happen.  As hard as I try, I don’t know everything.  But that doesn’t stop me from trying.

I have researched:

The color pink

The use of corsets

Lace-making

Renaissance tapestries

The locations of the Royal Court from 1539-1542

The life of Thomas Howard, 3^rd Duke of Norfolk

The life of Henry Howard, his son

The life of Thomas Howard, his son, and 4^th Duke of Norfolk, who was beheaded for treason by Elizabeth I, 30 years after the action of my novel takes place.

You see, each of these have taken me into a poppy field, to use Donna’s analogy.  I got stuck for almost a half an hour – even after I learned that yes, people did wear pink in 1539 – on the use of plants for dyes, their names and uses and the colors they produced.  Because, as Donna says, research allows me to become a “pseudo-expert” on anything and everything that interests me.

And I’m interested in a lot of different stuff.

But because I want to be as absolutely accurate as I possibly can, I do my best to find the bulk of my information in accountable reference materials. 

Primary Sources

Kind of hard to find a letter written by Henry VIII in California.  But the brilliantly fabulous Letters & Papers of Henry VIII have been transcribed and posted online for everyone’s viewing pleasure.  Someone has deciphered the indecipherable scrawl that was Henry's handwriting, and that of his courtiers and scribes.  Want to know what the Privy Council was doing on November 11, 1541?  It’s right there!  You can even search key words!  This is the first site in my bookmarks folder and I have spent days trawling its awesomeness.

Published Secondary Sources

There are some incredible historians out there writing about Henry VIII, his Court and his wives.  Lacey Baldwin Smith, David Starkey, Alison Weir, Antonia Fraser, Robert Hutchinson, Julia Fox.  I have read dozens of books –cover to cover, as well as footnotes and endnotes – and every time I discover something new and enticing.  They all have referable bibliographies, so if I need to find a particular reference in a different source (like L&P!) I can do so at my leisure.  Plus some of them are a rollicking good read.

Personal Travels

Setting.  To build a world, it must feel real – whether you are writing science fiction or history.  And in order to add visual details, I love to get the visual reference.  The Tower of London.  Hampton Court Palace.  Syon House.  St. Paul’s Cathedral.  Windsor. 

But don’t let me fool you.  I just love to go to these places, too.  Did you know that the crests of all the Knights of the Garter are on the ceiling of St. George’s Hall in Windsor?  Only some of them have been removed, leaving only a white plaque.  These are the Knights who were stripped of the Garter when they were attainted for treason.  There are lots of these from the 16^th century.  One of the reasons I love the Tudors.

And last is the Internet.  I do not cite Internet sources, and if the information is important enough, I make sure I corroborate it elsewhere.  Because I have caught Internet sites (even Wikipedia!) in historical inaccuracies, I cannot trust a reference that has not been fact-checked.  Why, yes, I do have a control-freak personality.  I call it attention to detail.

And attention to detail is what research is all about, right?  You can’t have a Tudor drinking tea just like you can’t have an open door on a Mars-bound spaceship.  As a writer, I need to make my world and my characters real and believable.  I can’t lose a reader’s willing suspension of disbelief with shoddy research. 

It’s a good thing I love it so much.

This week's theme is Research and I'm currently in the process of researching how to handle separation anxiety in goat dogs (see photo). (Yes, those were feather couch pillows)

Seriously, research is one of the BEST THINGS EVER about being a writer. It's an open ended adventure down a road to discover new plot twists, specific details and unusual characters. You may eventually get to Oz (and finishing the WIP), but you'll definitely discover a few tangent poppy fields along the way. Research on a writing project allows me to become a "pseudo expert" on anything and everything that interests me. It's the total excuse for attention issues,but you might be surprised what people will tell you when you lead with, "I'm writing a book and was just wondering what it's like to be a ... fireman...or bartender...or cab driver...or tight rope walker."

My favorite research writing story happened about fifteen years ago. I was writing a mystery where the main character was involved in an internet dating site. At that time, Match.com was not a household word and very few women were on the Internet. I was single and decided the best way to learn about Internet dating sites was to post an ad. So I wrote one from the perspective of the main character (and me) which was to be included in Chapter Two of the book. I followed all the directions carefully, posted the ad, and left for a business trip. I had no idea what to expect. Later that night in a Chicago hotel, I logged onto the site to find I had received over two hundred responses in the span of a few hours. Everything from "I'm seventeen and still live with my parents. I hope you don't mind." (I did) to "just ignore the woman in the picture. She's no longer around." (He had attached his wedding photo!) Just reading the responses was quite the story. The Internet mystery I was writing never fully developed, but that little research side trip did end up in LOTS of potential characters that are still populating stories and even led to a marriage (mine).

Another poppy filled sidetrack involved my research for a mystery where the victims are killed by arrows through the heart. It seemed somehow poetic, but I didn't know anything about arrows and archery. The result, however, was a seriously freaked out sporting goods employee who didn't quite know how to answer all my questions about how I might kill someone with a bow and arrow. What KIND of bow? What would the wound LOOK like? etc. etc. He eventually came around and a snippet of the resulting information is included in the paragraph below:

The pine needles crunched quietly beneath his booted feet, the only sound in the new night, as he walked away from the white sheet of paper suspended in mid air. He turned slowly to face the target, drawing an arrow out of the quiver, and raised the Hoyt Deviator bow - nocking the arrow in place. Bringing the bow to full draw, he felt the back of his hand brush against the consistent, unchanging bone structure of his face. His nose lightly touched the bowstring as he settled his breathing by sheer willpower and he felt his heart begin to slow, just the way he had taught himself to do. His body was in harmony with every sound - every light push of the wind around him - and he waited for every pause in the beating of his own heart for the exact moment to loose the arrow. He exhaled half way into the cool night air, and then, with ever increasing back tension on the string, his fingers opened and the arrow took flight - sailing swiftly and effortlessly through the air -cutting through the paper smoothly to find the target beyond.

Research nurtures the discovery part of the writing process. Yes, it can definitely be a procrastination tool and a distraction, but it's just so much fun!

To prove it, here are just a few of the random things I've recently researched:
Acting Lessons
Male Teen Age Models
Trail maps in the National Forest
Internet security
Trees of East Texas
Water Moccasins
Musical Lyrics
Clothes from Gossip Girl episodes
Favorite Female Baby Names
Chemistry Experiments Gone Wrong
Twirlers

So, enjoy the research poppies and if anyone knows a goat whisperer (or wants a dog???) let me know.