Elissa J Hoole

• Life Stuff,
• Writing

February 7, 2012

by Elissa Janine Hoole

I’ve been digging through this dangerous little box that I found in the basement about a year ago.  It’s a broken-down plastic carton full of old spiral notebooks, stray sheets of graphing paper covered with cramped handwriting, and a number of elaborately folded up mysteries — sekrit notes I’m kind of afraid to unfold, for fear I’ll never get them twisted up into their perfect configurations again.

I’m working on my guest post for Rebecca at Reading Wishes, for Road Trip Week.  My post is up on her blog next Tuesday (Oh, wow, I *just* realized my post is on Valentine’s Day. It’s a tiny bit sappy, so I guess that’s all right!)  She’s got a pretty awesome giveaway, you can sign up and maybe even win a pre-order of my book.  Or, I mean…you could choose one of those other awesome road trip books if you’d like.  I’m hooked on the thought of buying all of them.  Anyway, I was looking for some of my old road trip journals and ended up finding something else.

My very first short story.

At least, this is the very first short story that I remember working on for any extended period of time.  There are two notebooks, spanning the time frame from probably fourth to sixth grade, and they contain my first two short stories and then something that was meant to be my first novel.  The stories are called “Heavenly Hoofbeats” and “Country Dog,” and the novel bears the very trendy title, B/F/F, with chapters such as “The Popularity Problem,” “From Diapers to Designers,” and “A Dance and a Plan.”  I can tell the shorts are earlier than the novel attempt because my handwriting shifts from painstakingly perfect cursive to this sloppy, carefree, printing/cursive hybrid.   And also because the content makes the big shift from horse-obsessed to a surprisingly adorable boy-crush plot.

I can vividly remember writing these stories, especially the novel, which stretches on for 110 pages before devolving uncertainly into a few pages of Motley Crue lyrics, some goofy drawings of hippies flashing peace signs, and several pages of I <3 ???? in bubble letters.  I never finished the story.

In fact, I didn’t finish any stories, after Heavenly Hoofbeats and Country Dog, until my junior year of college, when I finally finished a short story called “The Hunter” for my creative writing class with Barton Sutter, who said my ending was a total beginner move (I killed off the protagonist, naturally.)

Endings are always the most difficult part for me, but when I was lying on my shiny green bedspread, scribbling away at my masterpiece, it didn’t bother me at all that I didn’t know how to end it.  All I wanted to do was keep the illusion going, feed my little character with my words and drawings until she lived and breathed on the page.  I even remember crying for the first time over my own writing, in a scene where Tracy has a high stakes bonding moment with her developmentally delayed sister.  It was so intoxicating, creating a vibrant fictional world that could make me feel real feelings for absolutely fake people.  I worked out my feelings about friends moving away, about my cousin being born with Down Syndrome, about my dad living far away, about having a crush on a boy who had no clue I was even alive and about not having a crush on a boy who wouldn’t leave me alone.  Some of the characters are embarrassingly familiar, and others are completely unique — my experiments with character creation.  I never got tired of writing, and if I did, I’d spend additional hours sketching all my characters, making my own fan-art.

Sometimes I miss that time, when I didn’t worry about adverbs and plot arcs and Goodreads and facebook pages, when the only thing that interrupted my writing was my mom telling me to wash the dishes or turn off the lights.  Although…that was awfully annoying, now that I think about it.

But the rest of the time I sort of want to lean in and whisper in my own ear, encouraging words that will convince me to keep it up, that this writing thing is not an impossible dream, as I later convinced myself it was.  And maybe that kid would whisper in my grown-up ear, a little reminder of how much she loves to make up stories.

Tags: book thoughts, embarrassing, firsts, gettin' all serious, good is a little bit boring, me me me, my third novel, storytelling, time flies when you're growing up

7 comments

• Kiss the Morning Star,
• Writing

January 16, 2012

by Elissa Janine Hoole

Welcome to my stop on the YAmazing Race, a crazy whirlwind blog hop featuring over 50 debut authors and prize packs including ARCs, gift certificates, swag, and more! If you haven’t yet been, head over to the Apocalypsies website to start from the beginning and read the complete rules.

I’m Elissa, and I wrote this book called Kiss the Morning Star.  It’s a road trip adventure story about girls and guns and grizzly bears.  Okay, so there’s only one gun.  And one grizzly bear.  But there are definitely two girls!

It’s also about poetry and Jack Kerouac and sexual identity and having faith and knowing what love is.  Yeah, most of all, it’s a love story.  With a tiny bit of hitch-hiking.  So…here’s the cover and the synopsis so you can enter the race and win incredible prizes, including my prize of a copy of the Kerouac tribute album, Kicks, Joy, Darkness, which, if you listen to it nearly non-stop with a bit of Ani diFranco in the shuffle, you will have recreated the musical experience of writing this book.  Enjoy, and I hope you’ll stop back and look around sometime when you’re not in such a rush!

The summer after high-school graduation, a year after her mother’s tragic death, Anna has no plans – beyond her need to put a lot of miles between herself and the past. With forever friend Kat, a battered copy of Kerouac’s DHARMA BUMS, and a car with a dodgy oil filter, the girls set out on an epic road trip across the USA. Maybe somewhere along the way they’ll prove or disprove the existence of God. Maybe they’ll even get laid . . .

It’s a journey both outward and inward. Through the Badlands and encounters with predatory men and buffalo. A crazy bus ride to Mexico with a bunch of hymn-singing missionaries. Facing death, naked in the forest with an enraged grizzly bear . . . Gradually, Anna realizes that this is a voyage of discovery into her own self, her own silent pain – and into the tangled history that she and Kat share. What is love? What is sexual identity? And how do you find a way forward into a new future – a way to declare openly and without fear all that lies within you?

Coming Marshall Cavendish, April 1, 2012

(Also, if you’d like a signed bookmark of Kiss the Morning Star, send your mailing address to elissajanine [at] yahoo.com, and I’ll get on that as soon as I manage to make some stamps appear at my writing desk again!)

Remember, you have to complete ALL FIVE quizzes to win one of the awesome prize packs, but don’t worry…you can come back and check your answers!  Your next stop on this leg of the race is the website of Tom Ryan, author of Way to Go!

Tags: amazing race, apocalypsies, contest, debut, exciting stuff, kiss the morning star, prizes, writing

7 comments

• goals,
• Kiss the Morning Star,
• Life Stuff,
• Writing

January 1, 2012

by Elissa Janine Hoole

Apparently you’re supposed to spend New Years Eve the way you’d like to spend the next year.  So I spent it writing, revising, looking at pictures, listening to music, putting together a new jigsaw puzzle, relaxing in a hot bath, snuggling my kids, reading a book, eating pizza, watching beautiful snow fall, and enjoying conversation and a glass of wine with my best friend — David.  Perfection!

I can’t improve on that too much, but just in case, here are my goals for next year!

Writing:
–Survive the launch of Kiss the Morning Star, and manage to do a few things right, including having some kind of fundraiser book signing party thingy. (I’m thinking of looking into a way to benefit literacy and LGBT youth in my area, maybe raising money for the YA section of the library?)
–Finish my revision of The Truth About Never and Always
–Finish outlining and first drafting Six Impossible Things
–Go to NYC for the first time, attend the SCBWI Winter Conference, and have a blast! (eeee!)

Life and Happiness:
–find, join, or start a real life writing group, even if its main value to me is social (i.e. leave the house, form complete sentences, make eye contact, you know.)
–exercise regularly (shooting for 3 times per week, but I’m not going to stress about it. I just want to do my best.)
–take another road trip or two with the family, try to make it back out to Oregon.
–work to get outside in the woods more often, even for short jaunts. I’d love to be at the point by next summer where we could go backpacking again, but I’ll settle for some car camping and a canoe ride or two!
–learn to cook at least 4-5 recipes and cook them ahead of time. Work on filling our new freezer with foods that we can prepare quickly to make dinner time healthier and less stressful.  Stock up on cereal for the picky kids and just enjoy the meal despite their gagging noises.
–do a jigsaw puzzle, sew something, play cards and games, draw, and other fun things with the family.
–drink more water.

Tags: book thoughts, gettin' all serious, goals, me me me, puzzles, time flies when you're growing up, writing

3 comments

• goals,
• Kiss the Morning Star,
• Life Stuff,
• Writing

December 31, 2011

by Elissa Janine Hoole

Keeping this blog or letting it go is a question I struggle with periodically, usually when I realize that I haven’t updated in a while and I really don’t know what the point is of continuing it – I could go on and on about all the questions I have about my intended audience and purpose, even including words that give me the heebie jeebies like “promotions” and “marketing,” but paging through the posts for 2011 (even though they might be few and far between) made me so happy that I have a record of this year.  Life is so busy.

Yes, the topics of my posts have become more focused on writing, with some thought on trying to be valuable to an audience interested in my book, but I know my limits, and I’m not the type who can run a big, exciting writing blog full of contests and giveaways and interviews and valuable information about publishing – it truly exhausts me even to think of doing that.  But every so often, I have a thought or two I’d like to share, or progress to celebrate, or goals that I wan to put out there in the world and hold myself accountable, and I hope that’s enough.

So as I paged backward through the year, I enjoyed a feeling of accomplishment that sort of surprised me.  Oh, look how I tore my book apart and stitched it back together again so many times! Look at that post I wrote for Dear Teen Me, how proud I was! Look at how I got an actual paycheck for writing!  And there are my first ever copyedits and my Edith Wharton costume and our family road trip and Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Badlands and making an author website and meeting my agent and baking my first loaf of bread and moving into a new school and teaching and having a second grader and a preschooler and hiking in the woods and my NaNo club and my shiny cover and my OMG blurb from Julie Anne Peters and making my own bookmarks…and then getting my galley!  It’s SO NICE to see a year like this, to see that it was more than just waiting (sometimes it feels like it’s all waiting) and failing (and there has been an awful lot of failing, or what feels like failing) and to see that probably my kids and my students have made some good memories of 2011, too.

So.  Goals.  A year ago, I made a wrap-up post for 2010, and I set a goal that I decided would be a permanent goal, when it comes to writing.  So here it is:

I’d like to remain thoughtful, objective, gracious, and rational about anything that happens with this book.

This book is, of course, Kiss the Morning Star, and I think this goal is becoming more and more important as the years go by.  When I wrote that goal, I was on the brink of “trunking” the manuscript – basically I was giving it one more chance to find a home in the publishing world before I put it away forever and moved on.  Well, obviously that one more chance paid off, and now, in a few short months, the book will debut.  It will go out in the world, and people will (I hope!) read it and have opinions about it.  Although there are some things I can still do to give my book a good chance in the world, to do all the “promotional” things I can so that people might actually hear about it (Add me to Goodreads! Like my facebook page!  Pre-order! *heebie jeebies*), the truth is, I’ve already spent much of 2011 doin