The Zero

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I consider my junior year to be an opportunity for change. It’s a fresh start. A chance to actually be authentic or real, or possibly even enjoy myself.

I don’t realize exactly how much I’m changing though, until I’m forced into an uncomfortable situation, and once there, I make the kind of decision that Sophomore Brenna would just never make.

It’s the last period of the day. I’m in history class, and Mr. Tully is assigning us random partners because even though he is, in many ways, a fundamentally decent man, he still believes in torturing us with strangers.

I’m hoping I’ll get Pony, or else Dill, but in a cruel stroke of luck, they’re assigned to work together. When Mr. Tully finally calls my name, it’s to pair me with #4.

“Wait, who do you have?” Dill asks.

I tell him.

“Ooh—that sucks,” he says. “Welcome to doing the whole thing yourself.”

And I don’t say anything, because Dill may or may not be right, but that’s completely immaterial. I don’t have the slightest problem doing the whole thing myself. I love doing things myself. What I hate, as in hate with a fiery toxic HATE, is group-work.

Our assignment is to draw a picture of a colonist and make up a story about them—a biography explaining why they left England for America.

We’ve been in school for about a week at this point, and I’ve spent that week feeling pretty good about things. Like I finally know what I’m doing and have even achieved some new kind of mastery. I have leveled up.

Then, I glance at #4, who is sitting back by the supply cupboards—waiting for me, but not really looking like he’s waiting for anything—and all that goes straight out the window.

I meander across to him, clutching crayons and butcher paper. I stand over him, trying to act like everything is normal and okay, like I’m cool, or at least acceptable. The kind of girl he wouldn’t mind spending the next twenty minutes with. He doesn’t say anything.

Brenna: Hi, I’m Brenna.

#4: I know.

Brenna: . . . Okay.

Sometimes moments are excruciating because someone is being purposefully awful or doing something cruel to you, and sometimes they’re excruciating because they just are. This is the second kind.

I take a breath and compose myself, accepting that the next half-hour is not going to be easy. In fact, it’s going to be miserable.

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Cover Songs

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As anyone who has ever met me can tell you, I like things.

I like horror movies and Sweet Tarts and cigars and eggnog-chai and Christian Bale. I like couture sewing and heirloom tomatoes. I like dogs. I like way more things than I dislike—so many things that if I were to assemble a detailed and comprehensive list, it would take me three months and would be far too long to ever read.

So, in lieu of that detailed list, today I’m going to narrow it down and share one particular well-liked thing.

Confession: I have a deep, abiding love of cover songs. I collect them. I hoard them. I covet them. (Also, I’m a huge fan of retellings, modern versions, graphic-novelizations, and movie remakes, but that’s a post for another day.)

The concept of the cover song appeals to me on a very frivolous level. Like musicals about cannibalism, or wearing combat boots with petticoats, the perfect cover song is a seamless melding of totally disparate things. It demonstrates profound understanding of the source material, but also wild departure. Honestly, there’s probably a term paper or a dissertation somewhere in all this, but that would take a long time and I would have to cite sources. Instead, because I’m currently-drafting and all-the-time lazy, I’m going to keep it simple.

Now, the simple thing.

I am going to share with you my favorite cover song in the history of cover songs:

It is performed by one of my favorite bands of all time, and it exemplifies that glorious combination of the wry, the highly-stylized, and my personal favorite, the “why would you ever cover that?”

By which I mean, this:

What about you: Do you like cover songs—or do you hate them? Which ones? Why?

The Brand-New Girl

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If Sophomore year was the year of Learn by Watching, then Junior year is the year of Boys. And I mean that in a whole spectrum of ways. It is the year of noticing boys, and of studying them and admiring them and being noticed and of having friends who are boys.

This boy-onslaught is made possible, in part, because the girl I just spent a whole year being seems to have vanished over the summer.

The easiest thing would be to say that in the last three months, I’ve completely transformed. But that’s not really true. Instead, it’s more like I’ve reverted. I’ve simply gone back to being the at-home girl—the one who makes physics jokes and likes Warren Zevon and glitter lipgloss and sewing beads and sequins on her shoes.

Already, I’ve become less pokerfaced and more Mona-Lisa-ish, and I’m actually kind of looking forward to going back to school and trying again. Like Beckett says, fail again, fail better.

I’m particularly excited because Little Sister Yovanoff is starting tenth grade, which means that I finally have daily access to a girl who understands me. We ride the bus together. We are locker partners. We are on the same soccer team. We share shoes and clothes and ice cream cones and coffee and look absolutely nothing alike, which means that I can basically be best friends with my little sister and there are no social consequences.

shoes and stars

On the first day, I am wearing leaf-green Chuck Taylors with gold foil stars sewn all over them and jeans paired with an old-fashioned thrift-store blouse. I’ve cut the sleeves off, tailored the bodice. The blouse has tiny fake-pearl buttons and a high lace collar and a crumbling cluster of dried rosebuds safety-pinned to the shoulder. It makes me look vaguely Victorian and also strangely frail.

Little Sister Yovanoff is similarly bedecked, resplendent in ragged cut-offs and tiny plastic barrettes. With her burgundy velvet blazer and her purple hair, she looks bold and statuesque. She looks much sturdier than I do.

Me and Dad

I spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to find pictures of our outfits, but sadly, it seems the best I can do is the close-up of my shoes (yes, those are soccer socks I’m wearing. What? I had a lot of them), and a shot of my second-favorite outfit from that era—also quite lacy. You’ll notice that my dad has the decency to ignore the state of my jeans. Which are actually his jeans. My dad is nice.

School is anticlimactic. I go to my classes, introduce Little Sister Yovanoff to Catherine and Elizabeth, use up my shiny new free hour by driving around with one of my sophomore-PE friends.

Things do not get interesting until US History, which is the last class of the day. I show up after the warning bell, only to find the room half-empty. Honestly, this should already tell me pretty much all I need to know, but because there’s some stuff I still haven’t figured out yet, it doesn’t.

Ponyboy is there, so I take the seat next to her and congratulate myself on having a class where I already know someone. We play Outsiders for a little, which mostly just means her asking me how prison was and me asking her if she had a good time at reform school.

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Introducing, Paper Valentine!

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Okay, so.

I’ve been sitting on this for a while now (which will come as no surprise—this is a business of patience, secrets, the occasional meaningful look), while behind the scenes, things have most assuredly Been Happening.

And then last week, the deal memo hit Publisher’s Marketplace, which means that I can finally share it:

NYT bestselling author of THE REPLACEMENT and THE SPACE BETWEEN Brenna Yovanoff’s PAPER VALENTINE, in which a girl haunted by the troubled ghost of her best friend finds herself sucked into a darkly mesmerizing string of murders, in which a serial killer who leaves a paper-heart ‘valentine’ on his victims’ bodies draws ever closer, again to Ben Schrank and Jocelyn Davies at Razorbill, in a good deal, in a two-book deal, for publication in Spring 2013, by Sarah Davies at the Greenhouse Literary Agency (NA).

Here is a quiz. I am:

a) Thrilled to be working with Razorbill again (they’ve done such a beautiful job with The Replacement)
b) Excited to see Paper Valentine take shape (they helped me make The Space Between into the book I always knew it could be)
c) Ecstatic to have Ben and Jocelyn in my corner as I dive into my weird, creepy ghost story (with kissing)
d) All of the above

(P.S. I’m not giving you a hint)

Facetious quizzes aside, I DO want to treat this with the gravity it deserves. But I’m really bad at being earnest. I wish I could say something profound and articulate about goals and dreams and milestones, but as soon as we approach the things that really matter to me, my talking almost always breaks down.

Most of the time, it’s easy not to think about this being my job. I mean, with enough dogged insistence and enough avoidance, I can regard sitting down to the keyboard and writing books as “something I do every day.” That’s accurate and true. It’s reductive. It’s manageable.

This is not one of those times. Seeing my name in print—my work summed up in a tight, hooky paragraph—always seems to bring on that crashing realization that this is what I do now. It is actually a profession. Like that aptitude test I took in high school. My life is distinctly this, and not something else. Not any of those other jobs I had. This is the state of things now.

This is the career.

It’s everything I ever wanted.

Also, significantly less monumental, but still exciting in its own way: I get to make a new tag.

Hello, Paper Valentine tag—hello!

Candid

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Life after Dill is much like life before Dill. Except, now that my boyfriend-curiosity has pretty much been satisfied, I spend a lot less time thinking about kissing. And somewhere in the middle of dating and soccer and needlessly complex term projects, Irish has kind of stopped being my friend. Not because of Dill or school or soccer, just simultaneous to those things.

We still say hi to each other in the halls. As long as we are both walking alone. We still communicate using our own private vocabulary, which consists largely of inside jokes, and sometimes he catches me at my locker and presents me with an open package of gummi strawberries or half a bagel for no apparent reason except that he’s hungover a lot and also, he knows that I am pretty permanently ravenous.

He still borrows a dollar so he can buy a Sprite, and he still makes it a point to always pay me back the next day, even though his open tabs with other people are verging on actionable.

We nod politely and smile, and if we miss each other, we do not actually say it.

Because we’re on the block system, Geometry is over, but I still see him most days even, though we don’t sit together anymore. All the sophomores have to take a class called Critical Skills, and my desk is situated somewhere in the middle of the room, while Irish is at the back. With the other drug dealers.

Now, I know I’m supposed to be a professional at this whole writing endeavor, describing and all that, but some things (such as Critical Skills) just seem to defy description. Let’s see—okay, basically this: the class alternates between cripplingly boring and unintentionally hilarious. It involves a lot of activities intended to Prepare Us for the Real World. But Brenna, you say, Be fair. That doesn’t sound so bad.

Let me finish.

When we’re not watching our teacher’s vast collection of uplifting 80s movies and practicing shaking hands, we are performing skits about job-interview hygiene and learning to fold several varieties of origami bird. We are being presented with The Internet. Really.

Between the skits and movies and the handshaking and the origami birds, we are subjected to a barrage of personality tests. And every time we’re handed a new bubble sheet, I sigh and fidget along with everyone else. However, as much as I hate to admit that anything about Critical Skills makes me think, the personality tests kind of . . . do.

The things I learn about myself are not surprises. My Myers-Briggs results indicate that I’m solidly an INTP. So, a walking, talking cortex. With eyes. The Big 5 agrees that I am basically a robot, and I knock it out of the park in the categories of Inquisitiveness and Emotional Stability. My career aptitude test reveals that I am analytical, abstract, self-possessed, indifferent to physical risk, and ranks my most promising employment options in this order:

  1. Stunt person
  2. Probation officer
  3. Novelist

It turns out that Irish is ideally suited for the FBI. We would laugh about this, except for the part about us not really speaking to each other anymore.

For the final, I give my mandatory presentation on stunt performers. Standing at the podium, I’m careful to gesture vaguely and often—make sure everyone gets a good look at my fragile hands, my delicate wrists. Every time I smile demurely or sweep my hair out of my face, it underscores how ridiculous the test result is. I get an A. I never mention to a single soul that my absolute dream job in the whole entire universe is to be a novelist.

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I ♥ Librarians!

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Whew! So, I’m back from ALA—and first of all, I just have to say that while I’ve loved librarians devotedly for pretty much my whole life, in the wake of ALA, my love for them now far outstrips what it was even a week ago.

About the conference: this was the first time I’ve been to a big industry event, and let me tell you, ALA was BIG. The convention center in New Orleans should have its own zip code.

(In fact, although I started this line of speculation fully intending it to be facetious, the convention center may actually have its own zip code. )

There are a lot of things that made ALA a really excellent place to be, including delicious food and stellar company, but the highlight of the trip is the fact that on Saturday, I had a chance to sign ARCs of THE SPACE BETWEEN, and I have to say, it was one of those completely inexpressible experiences. And naturally, because it is inexpressible, I will try to articulate it . . . now.

Okay, wait. I’m actually going to back up and start by saying this: writing books is weird. I mean, there are a lot of different things that make it weird, but right now what I mean is that writing books is weird because a book takes a long time to write and you work on it every day for months and sometimes years, and you obsess about the book and you dream about it and breathe it, and even after all that, it can still feel like a very hypothetical thing.

Like the Velveteen Rabbit,* a book takes a certain amount of unconditional love and quiet suffering in order to become real. You have to soldier on and have faith that if you just keep going, your ideas will eventually be transformed into something actual. But you never quite know what that first acute moment of realness is going to be.

For instance, the moment The Replacement felt real—really-real, I mean—wasn’t when I sold it or revised it or did my copyedits or any of that. It was when I walked outside to find a package on the steps and when I opened it, discovered that I was holding an ARC in my hands. The book was right there, in my hands. And suddenly, it became undeniable.

So for The Space Between, I sincerely thought that I’d already had my real-book experience, because I’d gotten my ARCs right before I left for ALA (and they are so, so pretty, which certainly contributes to it being a very Real Thing). But my assumption turned out to be distinctly not-true. Not to get too convoluted, but it was still hypothetical realness that I was passing off as genuine in my own head.

Instead, my first really-real moment came last Saturday, when I showed up to sign at the Penguin booth, and was both humbled and ecstatic to find a contingent of bloggers and librarians already lining up to get their copies. Suddenly, it occurred to me that other people were not only aware of The Space Between but watching it expectantly, waiting for it to stand up and say something. Which, I will admit, kind of bowled me over.

I signed ARCs. I talked to people about the story. I tried to act normal and like the whole situation wasn’t just incredibly surreal. I think I mostly succeeded. Mostly. Because I still can’t stop thinking about this: it is entirely possible that there are librarians out in the world reading about Daphne—my Daphne—right now!

Which is very . . . actual.

(And that is the story of how The Space Between stopped being a toy rabbit and became a real book.)

*If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I won’t take up unnecessary space by explaining it in mind-numbing detail here, but please read it. Because it is a much-loved cornerstone of my childhood. And also a Real Book.

The Ice Girl

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Here is where we last left high-school Brenna: she’s just been asked out on her first-ever date and now, in the privacy of her physics notebook, she is hastily backpedaling.

On the surface though, everything looks neat and under control. Smooth as glass.

The date goes down like this:

Dill shows up at my house precisely on time. He wears matching shoes because he wants to make a good impression on my parents. I don’t tell him that whatever impression he makes will have nothing to do with shoes and everything to do with whether or not he strikes them as being interesting.

The movie is enjoyable. There is popcorn, which I like. (Soccer season has started, and I’m perpetually starving.) Dill is polite, entertaining, and very much a gentleman. When the movie is over, he asks if I want to hang out for awhile and get to know each other, and even though my interest in kissing has kind of evaporated, I say yes.

So instead of taking me straight home, he pulls into one of the scenic overlooks above the city, where upperclassmen go to flail around in the back seat and grope each other.

I consider this. Even at her most flustered, new Assertive Brenna has a certain coolness, a chilly mantle of calculation. She is self-possessed. She is completely without diplomacy.

“I’m not going to make out with you,” I said. “I don’t know you very well.”

He laughed. “I didn’t bring you up here for that. Really, I meant I want to hang out. To talk.”

He was looking across the seat at me, smiling awkwardly, and he wasn’t even lying. Much.

But Dill is true to his word and doesn’t try to kiss me. Instead, he unbuckles his seatbelt, leans back, and starts to talk. And I spend the next two and a half hours feeling really, really happy. The city looks kind of glorious, lit up below us like a sea of colored sparks, and I’ve been waiting for months to have a conversation with someone who is not my sister.

It turns out that Dill is a lot of fun to talk to. He’s animated and enthusiastic and actually thinks about things like art and religion and philosophy.

There is, however . . . a problem.

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My Query Letter for The Replacement

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Over on Twitter just now, I’ve been discussing queries with and it occurred to me that it might be helpful if I shared my own query. For clarity/continuity/etc., I should point out that back before The Replacement was . . . well, The Replacement, I was calling it FE. Which I felt was an excellent title. Later, I was forced to admit that if you always have to explain the joke, it’s probably not a very good one.*

Without further ado, here is my query:

Dear Wonderful Agent

Mackie Doyle is the dirty secret that no one in his family talks about. All he wants is to pass for normal—and maybe get a date—but he’s running out of convincing explanations for why his eyes turn black in dim light and why the smell of stainless steel makes him sick. To top it off, his allergy to iron is getting worse and despite his sister’s best attempts to come up with a miracle cure, the prognosis isn’t good.

When he encounters a tribe of grisly-looking faeries living under the local slag heap, he doesn’t want anything to do with them. However, when they offer a concoction that will restore his health on the condition that he put in a few hours a week as their courier, it seems like a small price to pay. The job isn’t quite as easy as it looks, though, and soon Mackie finds himself caught between a pair of powerful rivals. Now there are two clans vying for his loyalty, two sides to every story, and with the lives of his friends and family at stake, no way to stay out of the skirmish. Either alliance means honoring an age-old sacrifice, and the simplest solution is to pay out some blood. The problem is, he didn’t think to ask how much.**

A contemporary YA fantasy, complete at 70,000 words, Fe will appeal to fans of Holly Black and M.T. Anderson.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
Me

Update: I feel like I should expand on this and add tips and tricks and all that, but Maggie does an excellent job of breaking down the query letter here on her blog and I would just wind up saying the same things she does, only not as well, so instead, I’ll suggest that you visit her handy list.

*Sometimes, I’m not nearly as funny as I think I am. There. I said it.

**You might notice that this part sounds a little different from how it all goes down in the actual book. Due to a mysterious process known as editing, the various words used in The Replacement are often different words than the ones included in the manuscript version, FE.

It Is Way too Early to Start a Countdown

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Okay, yes. I already know I’m getting ahead of myself. But here’s the thing. I just did the release-date math, which is, in and of itself, kind of impressive because I resent math a lot (even though I understand on an intellectual level that it’s valuable because we need bridges and roads and shortbread recipes).

Here is what I discovered: The Space Between comes out in exactly 168 days. That is 24 weeks. That is less than six months. That’s heart-stoppingly close and incredibly far AT THE SAME TIME. This is the kind of mysterious time-conundrum that really makes me wish I understood quantum physics. Although I’m given to understand that no one actually understands quantum physics. True? False? Do we know?

I don’t have ARCs yet. But I cannot wait until I do, because I’m already fantasizing possible teasers and contests and giveaways, because I just have to say, I’m having a really hard time waiting 168 days to share this book. Because I like it, you guys. It seems indecent to say it, because I—you know—wrote it, but I do. I like it a lot.

So, because today I am Impatient Girl and I really, really want to share something, I’m going to settle for sharing some music.

This is the song I listened to 1 billion times while I was in the end-stages of editing. There are a lot of songs that have been the anchor-song for The Space Between at various times and various stages, but this one is the most recent, and in my mind, that makes it the Official anchor song. At least until I decide the anchor song is actually something else. Because I am nothing if not capricious. (You’ll have to excuse the scrolling lyrics—this was the only video I could find.)

The Real Boy

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By now, it should come as no surprise that Brenna at sixteen is essentially an orderly creature.

True, she doesn’t always do her homework. She has a bad tendency to lose her pens and sometimes she shows up to PE only to realize that she’s wearing one purple sock and one brown one, but she is methodical. Self-contained. She is placid. You’d be hardpressed to hurt her or scare her or break her heart. Basically . . . she is this girl.

Even though she spends most of her time with Catherine, who is perpetually In Love (not always with the same person), she doesn’t believe in things like fate or destiny or soul mates.

When she considers the possibility of a boyfriend, it’s abstract. Which is not to say that she doesn’t think about it. She does, but only in the context of an activity, like sand volleyball. Or backgammon. She views dating as something that might be interesting to try, and also, she wants to know what it’s like to kiss someone. The idea of a boyfriend is appealing in a general way. It is, however, ruled out by the fact that she suspects she may be undatable.

She likes herself—don’t worry. In fact, some days she likes herself quite a bit. But she doesn’t really believe that anyone else will like her. This is mostly because she has a very low opinion of high school boys, but we’ll cut her some slack because so far, her test group has not been promising.

The thing is (occasional crushing boredom aside), she really finds herself very entertaining. She is ironic. She likes 80s horror and Quentin Tarantino and pasting foil decals on her fingernails. She enjoys the color red, but finds orange appalling. She likes Sweet Tarts, coffee, and drawing elaborate pictures of medieval fortresses and panopticons in her physics notes. She doesn’t believe in miracles, she believes in unknowns. When she zones out in class, she dreams the gleaming daydreams of scientists.

These are things she knows about herself. She doesn’t want to change.

But she’s beginning to suspect that if she wants to go on dates, she might have to. She has a hard time imagining that any boy is looking for this—what she is. And she has an even harder time imagining that any of the boys at school have anything to offer that she actually wants. So, instead of scouring her classes for potential suitors, she invents fictional ones. And fictional boys never disappoint.

She wants someone wistful and tender (and nicer than she is), but she wants him to be that way in secret. Sentimentality is only attractive if it’s private. She kind of wants to be adored, but not from mountaintops, never over the PA system. She wants shy, lingering glances and wishes made on stars, because nothing appeals to her more than longing. When she considers herself unromantic, she is lying. Did I mention that she is selfish in the way that only teenage girls can be?

It would be both gratifying and very literary to say that my wishlist ties into my first dating experience, but absolutely none of this has any bearing on what happens next.

Dill isn’t like the other boys in our grade. He’s taller than most of them, but not in a gawky way. He has an actual physique. He’s on the swim team and wears two different colored Chuck Taylor high tops and drives a red sports car.

And the thing is, he notices me.

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