Tag Archives: Young Adult

Freedom 25! (Wherein I Divulge Some Cool News)

Posted on March 6, 2015 | Leave a comment

You’ve heard of Freedom 55, right? It refers to the idea that one can retire from work at the age of 55 instead of the more probable age of 65 (or older, depending on financial situations and pension). But what if I told you I was aiming for freedom at the age of 25? I’m 23 now, and 25 is in reality only one and a half years away, so have I lost my mind?!

Not really. I’m not looking to retire at the age of 25. Not only is it entirely NOT possible unless I win the lottery, but I’m not even sure if I could just stop being productive altogether (but sometimes it’s a nice thought though, isn’t it?)

For me, Freedom 25 means that I will be at a stage of my life when I am happy with where I’m at, what I’m doing professionally, and where I’m going at the time I am age 25. I’ve been struggling with this a bit lately, but I can finally say I’m on track. So, without further ado, I have something to announce.

Along with having my first novel The Black Oracle released in the spring (official release date to come!), I have also been taken on as an Acquisitions Editor by Curiosity Quills Press!

Starting within the next few days, I’ll be on the front lines tackling the slush pile and looking for gems that are suitable to be published. Curiosity Quills Press, publisher of my novel The Black Oracle, is a small hybrid press that specializes in everything from science fiction and fantasy to contemporary romance and everything in between. They’re a legitimate publisher (no reading fees), and my experience with them has been amazing! You can check out more information about them here.

But what does that mean for you? Well, if you have a finished manuscript and you’re looking to have it published, consider sending your query to me! You can do so by going to this website, reviewing the submission guidelines, filling out the webform, and marking the submission “For Michael Cristiano“. So, would your project interest me, you ask?

First and foremost, I like reading anything that’s good, and by good I mean well edited and well thought out and polished. I generally read fantasy, so that includes but is not limited to epic fantasy, magic realism, urban fantasy (I’d die for an awesome urban fantasy — think The City Trilogy by Darren Shan). I dabble in science fiction, especially dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction. Some of my favourite sci-fi/fantasy authors include Patrick Rothfuss, Terry Goodkind,  JK Rowling, Suzanne Collins, and Lem0ny Snicket. I also like horror and paranormal novels, but I’m more into a slow creepy build than blood and guts and murderers. Not big on romance, but I am a fan of literary fiction — I adore Margaret Atwood, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Kurt Vonnegut. As for age groups, I’m open to all age groups from upper middle grade to adult fiction (as per Curiosity Quills’ guidelines).

In doubt? Send it along. If it’s not something I’d read but I think the premise is good, I’ll send it to another Acquisitions Editor.

Happy weekend and happy writing, everyone!

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Why is Writing the Ending so Hard?!

Posted on February 27, 2015 | 3 comments

So, I’ve been blogging about this for a while. I was writing something that I didn’t feel I was ready to write yet, so I jumped ship for another project, a YA paranormal novel that I’ve written in record time (so far). I completed 40,000 words of a first draft in two and a half months. Maybe most write faster, and that’s cool, but for me, that’s an amazing feat. It took me almost two years to complete a first draft of a project I finished last year, and that word count came in at 50,000 words.

But now I’m left with the task of writing an ending. I have 13,000 words left to go, and all the events are planned out and ready to be committed to paper. Perfect, right? Well, that’s what I thought. But why is this becoming so hard? I’ve chalked it down to one thing:

The honeymoon period is over.

it-s-over-snape-o

I hate to say it, but it happens in every relationship, especially the special kind of relationship that an author has with his or her work-in-progress (WIP). The initial impulse for a piece is like falling in love. There’s passion and excitement and obsession. With my current WIP, it was all I could think about. I’d develop the plot in the shower, daydream about scenes while sitting in traffic, have pretend conversations with characters while I was at work. This kind of mania made me really productive for the first two weeks. But then something happened.

I didn’t fall out of love, but I didn’t feel maddening passion anymore either. And then when I thought about it, I realized that this happens to a lot of my projects — all of them, actually. I get two thirds through a WIP, and suddenly, I just don’t feel the same. I get a little bored and the haze of the high fades away. Because of this, I get over critical and insecure. I start rereading earlier scenes, and when I find one that I don’t like, I get nervous. I start feeling like maybe my idea was stupid or maybe I won’t get my good ideas on paper in a way that *actually* makes them sound good.

All of this leads to slowed progress. I’ve written a grand total of 2500 words in a little less than four weeks. I used to write that in a couple days when I was on the writing high.

So, what do I do? Do I take a break and wait for the inspiration to return to me, or do I keep trudging through, knowing that if I get all my ideas out I can spit shine them later? I’m leaning toward doing the latter, but I won’t lie when I say that I’m ready to move onto another project for a while. I think being invested in something for a long time makes it easy to burn out, and I already have a short attention span. I honestly don’t know how some authors do it. Committing yourself to a series as expansive and time consuming as Harry Potter or A Song of Ice and Fire must be exhausting.

How do you keep yourself going? How do you feel about writing endings?

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Music to Write By: “We Slept at Last” by Marika Hackman

Posted on February 20, 2015 | Leave a comment

I may be back to freezing my butt off here in Toronto, but if I’m honest, I have a new distraction that’s got me thinking warm weather and springtime. My music tastes are rather eclectic and they range from neo-classical music to industrial, electronica to symphonic metal, and what I listen to tends to shape what I’m writing –regardless of whether the music is sad or happy, aggressive or manic. And lately I’ve been expanding my horizons into neo-folk.

Following my discovery of SoKo last year (check out “First Love Never Die”!), I decided to foray further into neo-folk where I discovered Marika Hackman. She is a 22 year old from England, and her cover of Lykke Li’s “I Follow Rivers” had me snagged immediately.

So imagine my delight when I discovered that her debut album would be out in 2015. Well, now it’s out, and I’m not gonna lie, it’s amazing. And not only that, it’s an amazing album to put on while I write my current work-in-progress. Marika’s full album is available for streaming on her soundcloud.

thPU9NOVACWhen I say that the album is one of the best I’ve heard in a long time, I honestly mean it. I am a big consumer of music, but very rarely do I listen to an album on repeat for long — and this is looking like I’ll be listening to this one for a while. Hackman not only nails atmosphere and tone with her neo-folks riffs and droning synths, but her songwriting is enough to make any writer or music geek excited. Half the time her lyrics sound like poetry, and the depth of her words offer new interpretations with each listen.

The album opens with “Drown”, the lead single. Though I like this song, I won’t lie that I’ve listened to it so many times now that I skip it. The second track is called “Before I Sleep” and I almost wish it was the album opener. Hackman’s soft guitar, droning synths, and soaring voice make this song ethereal and almost otherworldly and is definitely one of my go-to tracks when I’m writing a scene in my young adult paranormal WIP.

The third track is one of my favourites from the album and it’s called “Ophelia”. I had heard it in complete acoustic previous to the album’s release, but the rhythmic drums in the official recording make the tracking haunting and a perfect complement the melancholic lyrics: “But did you hear the sun go down? | Silent as a child I found | Hiding in the midnight of my soul | I am ready now to let her go”.

The next two tracks are also big highlights for me. “Open Wide” is reminiscent of a Nirvana track and both the guitar and low singing keep with the melancholic feel of the album. “Skin” is a slower duet track with English singer Sivu and the dichotomy of the two voices in the bridge is heavenly: “I’m a fever in your chest | The burning sun I’m west”.

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Did I mention the artwork was stellar?

“Claude’s Girl” is the sixth track on the album and it’s a more stripped down, folk track. The vocal work in the outro is fantastic too, and I think it really shows how well Hackman is at creating musical atmosphere. “Animal Fear” is the second single off of the album and it’s probably the most uptempo song on the album.  The personification of savage animals makes for a pretty sick music video too. It’s downtempo again for “In Words” and there’s also some pretty interesting, haunting guitar work while Hackman sings about feeling lost and homesick.

I haven’t listened to the final four tracks too intensely just yet, but my general impressions are great. For me, the tracks “Monday Afternoon” and “Next Year” were a surprise because of the Celtic and almost medieval feel. Definitely a good tracks to write scenes set in the 1700s to. “Undone, Undress” is probably the slowest on the album. It’s reminiscent of Hackman’s cover of Lykke Li’s “I Follow Rivers”, and I can’t say I mind.

The album closes with “Let Me In” where the lyrics “we slept at last” are finally heard. It’s at this point that the motif of sleep and drowning comes to fruition, especially after all this talk of vainly searching and being lost: “I chanced into the lake to hide my tears, conceal my salty fears | She could be the light | Help me base a trail and they’ll follow | To a cruel, hard heartland”. It’s actually at the end of the album that you can best appreciate what Hackman has created: she hasn’t just written a bunch of songs and thrown them together for better or for worse. She’s created a cohesive mood, a complete unit, consistent from beginning to end. I find this very rare in modern music. I find that a lot of artists as of late just release albums with 12 songs and call it a day. Rarely do these songs work well together or complement each other in the way that the songs on this album do. It’s a welcome change. If you’re a fan of appreciating albums as a whole, I definitely recommend this one.

What are you listening to lately?

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Writerly Updates + Mid-Manuscript Inspirations

Posted on February 6, 2015 | Leave a comment

I thought I’d just do a quick post before I leave tomorrow. Oh, yeah? Did I mention that I’m off to the Dominican Republic for a week? No? Well, I leave tomorrow and I’m extremely excited and I shall make a post about it when I get back. In any case, I thought I’d talk a little bit about a project that I’ve been working on the past couple months.

In the beginning of December, I cheated on a work-in-progress with another work-in-progress. One thing led to another, I became invested with WIP #2 and slowly stopped working on WIP#1, and BAM! I have 40,000 words. I’m proud. This is the quickest I’ve ever written anything, and I’m thinking that my vacation will clear my head and rejuvenate my creative juices enough to power through another 15,000 words when I get back so that I have a completed young adult paranormal/horror manuscript first draft by the spring!

In fact, besides ditching WIP #1, this writing process has been very typical for me. I became enthused with the project from the beginning, wrote 25,000 words in no time, slowed down in the middle, the scenes leading up to 40,000 becoming more difficult to write, and now I’m taking a two week break before writing the climax and the end.

The one difference this time, however, is that I have a blog.

I’ve never had a blog while I was writing and completing a first draft before. Think of all the feelings I could document! Think of all the goal-setting I could do and then fail at! Well, instead, I thought I’d talk about what was inspiring me.

New Tunes!

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Like all of my other manuscripts, this one has a particular feel to it because of the music I’ve been listening to. This manuscript has been inspired by recent albums by BANKS, FKA Twigs, and Bjork (trip hop and electronica for a paranormal/horror novel?), but also by the new Marilyn Manson album and the singles that have been released by Marika Hackman for her upcoming debut neo-folk album. And as usual, I’m really into neo-classical music (AKA. the best writing music). I’ve written a lot of scenes to Ludovico Einaudi’s Nightbook. It’s haunting and creepy and wonderful. I definitely suggest checking it out.

Horror Movies

What can I say? I’m writing a paranormal novel. No, I’m not aiming to write the next Twilight or romanticize vampires or werewolves or zombies. I wanted to move away from all of that, move into a little bit more of a traditional sphere. So, I decided on ghosts and spirits and hauntings… And I’m happy about it! I love traditional horror, and I’ve been inspired a lot by its revival in the film industry lately, most notably Annabelle, The Conjuring, the Insidious movies. To me, those things are always a little bit creepier than vampires or werewolves, and to be honest, I really don’t want to write a paranormal romance. Amendment: I will never write a paranormal romance.

Ahhh! So creepy!

Ahhh! So creepy!

Books… Okay, Maybe Not Quite

Books have been inspiring me in a weird way this time around. In fact, I’ve been finding it really hard to get into any of the books I’ve been reading. Sure, the books I’m reading are well-written enough, but I’m just not passionate about them. I’m not lost in them. I’m not obsessed with them. (Got a good book? Get at me… I’m in a lull).

So, I’ve done some soul-searching–or rather, bookshelf searching. What YA books did I absolutely love? Which ones was I obsessed with? There’s Harry Potter and A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Demonata to name a few. I’m not looking to recreate those series, I just want to understand what made them so good and then apply that logic to this piece. I may not have figured it out yet, but I’m trying.

How’s your writing going? What are you working on? What’s inspiring you?

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How I Kept the Fire Burning

Posted on December 16, 2014 | Leave a comment

This is a response to my previous blog post about getting in the mood.

Well, let’s just say I got in the mood. I tried to push myself to keep up with a manuscript that just wasn’t coming. I was getting frustrated and a tad depressed that I was making time for writing and then feeling like I was wasting it because nothing was coming out. And if I did write something, I didn’t like it. I just couldn’t get the mood right.

But then it hit me. I was in the shower one morning and I was tormenting over another writing “session” where I managed a whopping word count of 110 in three hours when I had a stroke of inspiration: a new story idea waltzed into my head. Angels starting singing and music started playing and I couldn’t get dressed fast enough so that I could get back to my damned laptop and write some of the stuff down.

So, humans of the planet Earth, I have a confess that I’m excited to share but I’m also a little ashamed of: I kept the fire burning by, in essence, having an affair. Yes, I have started a second manuscript: a young adult paranormal novel. Now, I know that is a touchy field. Young adult has been a little over-saturated lately and any mention of young adult paranormal automatically screams Twilight (bleh!) but I can assure you, I have something that I am happy with and I am excited to be writing it. In fact, I managed to hammer out a little over 8000 words in two weeks. How’s that for a fiery romance?!

2 hawt.

2 hawt.

Now, I have no intention of abandoning the first manuscript, partially because I have 15,000 words there and also because I really do like the story. But I’ll be honest, I’m okay to put it on the back burner for a bit and take a break while I work on something else. It’s not you, it’s me, right?

No, it really is me…

I am somewhat of a planner, and by that I mean that I do a lot of romanticizing about ideas before I get the chance to write them. Needless to say, this is the first time I’ve been so struck by an idea that I’m willing to abandon another one mid-first draft so I can work on it. And to be honest, I kind of like it. It’s a kind of exhilaration I’ve been missing in my writing lately because I haven’t given myself the freedom to just go with the flow and write what feels right to me at the moment. I guess the motto strike the iron while it’s hot has some merit to it after all, huh?

But there is one downside that I didn’t anticipate: the worry. Since I’ve now left one project to work on another, I essentially have two projects on the go. I guess my fear is that if this second manuscript fizzles out like the first one did, I have two work-in-progresses that are not completed. I understand the notion of going where the wind takes me, but I’m also paranoid I won’t get either of them done. Publishers work with full manuscripts after all.

But I guess I can relax: with The Black Oracle coming out next year and a second book (hopefully) to commence the publishing process soon after, having two projects that are not yet completed isn’t so bad. The publishing process has so far proved to be a long one (though, definitely enjoyable) so I guess I do have quite a bit of time.

Have you ever left one project unfinished to pursue another?

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Review: The Gateway Through Which They Came by Heather Marie

Posted on November 30, 2014 | Leave a comment

19089172Aiden Ortiz is a gateway who allows the souls of the dead to pass through him on their journey to finding peace in the afterlife. His job is inconvenient enough and it becomes even more so when the Dark Priest returns and threatens to use Aiden’s power to bring back souls that are better left dead. Throw in a long-lost lover who mysteriously resurfaces without an explanation (or a home) and this quickly becomes a recipe for a young adult masterpiece.

I was drawn to this book for multiple reasons. Primarily, I was really excited for the concept. The horror geek in me loves this idea: souls having to cross over into the afterlife by physically walking through a person. And better yet, that person was a young adult. Unless you’ve been asleep for the past couple years, it’s evident that some of the most popular books have been in the young adult genre. Secondly, the hype around this book is massive. Heather Marie, a fellow Curiosity Quills author, is an all-out rock star with TV and radio spots as well as features in the Huffington Post and Cosmopolitan and a slew of good reviews to back her up. Oh, and that book cover? Let’s just say I went into this one with high expectations.

Well, I was not disappointed. Marie does a great job of developing Aiden as a character and really allows the reader to get into his head. I enjoyed the relationship between Aiden and Koren, the long-lost lover. Their backstories were so intertwined and riddled with intricacies that it made for well thought out characterization, something that I feel the YA genre lacks at times. Also, the story almost had a neo-gothic feel to it: the paranormal, eerie churches and passageways, lovers who cannot be. We need more books like this. I miss this!

Further, I liked the themes presented in the novel. With subject matter such as this, it’s hard not to overemphasize the battle between good and evil, but Marie handles it with grace and doesn’t jam it down the reader’s throat. I think it’s easy to inadvertently do so, especially with a primary setting being a church, but I liked how Marie left it up to the reader to make those good-vs.-evil distinctions. Also, I love how Marie touched on Latin and LGBTQ+ themes in this novel. These are things that are prevalent in our real world society, so I like when current books reflect that. I only hope she develops these further in her later work.

My only criticism of this novel is that my expectations were sky-high. Don’t get me wrong, Marie does a great job with this debut and I am excited for the second (and third, I think) installments, but I was a little less blown away with the writing. It was a little too young feeling for me and used a few too many cliches. The pacing was also a little slow and even though the action scenes were good, Aiden only ever seemed to black out in the peak of them — though, I can’t say I blame him.

That aside, I can honestly say I enjoyed this book and look forward to reading Heather Marie’s subsequent work — and following her sure-to-be rock star career!

All in all, I suggest buying a copy.

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