Rune Michaels

Lost moms

2010-10-04T11:10:00.000Z

My two year old loves picture books about finding a lost mom. And there are plenty of those around, obviously a popular theme.

Monkey Puzzle by Julia Donaldson. The little monkey searches for his mother with the help of a butterfly who finds all kinds of creatures, but has a lot of trouble finding Mom.

Busy Busy Busy by Jonathan Shipton. She loves this one. It´s not about a lost mom in the same sense as the other books, but Mom is overwhelmed and crying in the kitchen and the little one comforts her. The Icelandic translation of the title is "Just the Two of Us", which I think is a great title, a line from the page where the two of them run out into the sunshine.

Hug by Jez Alborough. Little Bobo wants a hug. Everybody else is getting a hug, but Bobo finds Mom in the end and gets a big hug too.

Her absolute favorite is Owl babies by Martin Waddell. It´s a beautiful book about three owl babies, Sara and Percy and Bill, who wait for their mother to return, afraid she won´t. My daughter breaks out in a huge smile at the page where Owl Mom returns to her Owl Babies-- and her own mom gets a giant hug at the same time.

My guest blog for Guide to Literary Agents

2010-10-04T10:11:00.000Z

How I got my agent – guest blog for GLA by Rune Michaels

An American friend told me that my method of getting published would be called "carpet bombing".

What a strange phrase. I worried it had something to do with incontinent dogs but Wikipedia helpfully told me carpet bombing was "the large scale bombing of large targets ... usually by dropping many unguided bombs."

Yep. Pretty accurate.

I knew I wanted to write books for young readers. But I was drowning in insecurities. I wasn't sure I could write well enough for publication. I wasn't even sure what kind of stories I wanted to write. Or for what age. Or whether to write in the first person or the third person; in the present tense or the past tense.

So I started on some pretty random stories. One was a children's fantasy about a boy who is sent into exile. Another one was a futuristic children's book about brothers in a post-apocalyptic world. The third one was fantasy for teens about a young priestess who is banished from her village. The fourth one was about a girl who is imprisoned for a horrible crime. And the fifth one was a first person realistic novel about a boy who believes his father is an anonymous Nobel Prize winner.

I wrote beginnings. Five of them. Some in first person, some in third person; some in the past tense, others in the present tense, because, well, I just didn't know what was best. Diversity is the spice of insecurity.

Then I started searching for publishers. This was several years ago and I managed to find twenty publishers (or rather, most of them were imprints of the same few publishers, a fact I was only vaguely aware of) that did accept unsolicited queries or partials for children's books. And I decided to just send stuff to all of them.

Yes, I realise there is a special hell for people like me.

My theory was that this would tell me if my writing was any good and whether there was any point in continuing to write. I had already received positive feedback on some of my beginnings through www.critiquecircle.com but I wasn't sure what that told me. The publishers would be the true test! If nobody wanted to see any of my stories, they obviously weren't any good and I wouldn't waste my time completing them. And if I would get requests for some of the stories or for one of them, maybe that would tell me what kind of stories I should be writing and where to focus my writing.

So, I sent a query, synopsis and a partial to each of my five manuscripts to four publishers or imprints, a total of twenty mails. On the way home I beat my head against several light poles, in utter angst over having sent my babies so prematurely out into the world.

After reading about the pace of publishing -- whose reputation I have since learned is not exaggerated and has a lot in common with geographical time -- I was amazed at how quickly I started getting responses. I got my first request by email after only five days. It was for the first person YA story and it was from a major publishing house.

Cue hyperventilation. I hadn't written story yet. Not even close. I only had the first thirty pages.

So I started hitting the keys in that cozy state of mind called "last minute panic". The next few months replies trickled into my mailbox. In the end each of the five stories had received exactly one request for the full manuscript and exactly four standard rejection letters.

I wasn't sure what this told me. But by that time I had finished the first person novel. I sent it to the publisher that had requested it.

And then I started looking for an agent.

I had wised up at last -- violent encounters with light poles do that to you -- and didn't carpet-bomb the agents. I researched carefully and found a select few that I thought would make an excellent choice. I mailed them a query and a synopsis, email or snailmail depending on their preference, and asked if they'd like to see more. George Nicholson at Sterling Lord Literistic replied immediately, read the full manuscript -- and to my utter amazement he took me on a few days later.

George sold Nobel Genes to Simon & Schuster soon after. It was finally published last month.

Since then I've written three more first-person YA novels, Genesis Alpha and The Reminder which have already been published -- yes, ahead of this one -- publishing moves in mysterious ways -- and one more which I should be revising as we speak.

The other four partial manuscripts I sent out? I never finished them. They're still sitting in a dusty folder on my computer.

I bet the four editors who requested them are still holding their breaths...

Treasure everywhere

2010-09-16T14:15:00.000Z

Obviously I'm about as good at blogging as I am at knitting.

But I just had to share this with my horde of followers: http://www.chorewars.com/ Brilliant!

I will now go look for treasure in the dishwasher.

Nobel Genes release date

2010-08-10T23:19:00.000Z

Nobel Genes is finally out today. I haven't seen a copy yet myself, but I used my mouse to pat the cover that's up at Amazon. I hope it fares well out in the big bad world.

In not so related news, we picked blueberries. I'm not much of a blueberry-eater, and my hard-earned berries sometimes go bad in the fridge before I think of doing something like actually eating them or baking blueberry muffins or something.

But there is something hypnotizing and compulsive about picking berries, the silence of the countryside and the scents of the fields and getting so close to the ground. Not to mention, to the spiders.

I thought my daughter might quickly get bored, after all she's just two years old, but she loved it. She carefully plucked each single berry off the stem with her little fingers, opened the box, put a berry inside, and closed the box before getting the next one.

There is something I should be learning from that.

Yarn attack

2010-08-09T13:33:00.003Z

When I was pregnant, my nesting urge took the shape of wanting to knit, needing to knit.

I've never knitted. I didn't have the patience for it when I was a kid in school, and quickly discovered I didn't have a patience for it as an adult. Or, what's worse, the skill. I am notoriously clumsy, something that isn't much of a problem for a writer (well, not in the age of computers, anyway. I shudder to think of writing longhand), but is a big problem for a knitter.

Still, my motherly hormones were a hard boss, and I bought pretty colored yarn and persevered with the knitting needles, knitting small and ugly thingies that I told myself I would be able to sew together to make a baby blanket.

My pregnancy was cut short after only six months when my daughter was born prematurely. I spent the next 15 weeks in the NICU and the knitting urge vanished in the face of greater urges, such as keeping my daughter alive and myself relatively sane. But I'm quite sure that if I'd made it the whole nine months I would be a master knitter by now.

Now I want to knit again. No, I'm not pregnant. I just discovered Yarnbombing.

Picture books we're reading

2010-08-08T08:47:00.002Z

Having a two year old means reading a lot of picture books. And they are just so much fun!

These are some of my daughter's favorite books:

My Dad by Anthony Browne -- This was the first book that really reached my little one. She seemed ecstatic to find a book that appreciated how fantastic Dad really is!

Little Beauty by Anthony Browne -- A gorilla and a kitten are best friends and in the end the kitten saves the day.

The Tiger who came to Tea by Judith Kerr -- A tiger comes to tea and eats and drinks everything Sophie and her mother have in the house! We read this one dozens of times every day for the first week, and it's still a daily read.

Goodnight Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann -- The gorilla (who is a sweet little monkey who doesn't look much like a gorilla, but that would be nitpicking...) steals the zookeeper's keys and breaks out all the animals. They all follow the zookeeper home. We got this one as a present from a friend in the US and it was an instant hit with all of us. It even got my picky daughter to start eating bananas, the only fruit that will pass her lips. One bite for every page with a picture of the mouse carting around a banana...

Hug, Tall and Yes by Jez Alborough -- My daughter loves little Bobo, especially how his mom is always there for him.

The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson -- we got this in English first, and she really liked it, even with Mom and Dad's halting on-the-spot translation which is pretty much impossible with rhymed text. Then we got the Icelandic translation, and she LOVES it now that her parents have stopped stuttering their way through...

Busy! Busy! Busy! by Jonathan Shipton. Something about comforting a crying Mom seems to appeal to my daughter.

Courderoy by Don Freeman. My agent sent this to my daughter, it came packaged with a small teddy, and Courderoy was of course renamed George after my agent. A little teddy wanders around a department store hoping to find a button to fix his trousers and then gets brought home by a little girl.

Tommy goes to the doctor by Gunilla Wolde. My daughter spends a lot of time at the hospital and seeing different specialists. There has been a lot of fear and pain. This book has been a great comfort to her and for a long time we called it "Tommy has a blood test" because she had painful blood tests all the time and in the book Tommy has a vaccination and cries.

Not a picture book, but I have to mention the Moomin books by Tove Jansson. My daughter is mad about the Moomins. She can watch the series endlessly.

Now her dad has started to read the original books to her at night. We thought she might be way too young, but she listens carefully and recognizes the story from the television series.

It's so much fun reading with my child and watching her develop through books. There are so many wonderful books I look forward to sharing with her.

The background for Nobel Genes

2010-08-07T12:30:00.002Z

I first heard about the "Nobel Sperm Bank" when I was a kid. When I started writing I thought it might be a great basis for a book. I wrote the first few pages about a child who has been raised as a "Nobel Child", not sure where I would be taking the story, and then started to research.

Nobel Genes was written long before The Genius Factory by David Plotz was published, but his wonderful series of articles in The Slate were available online and I was fascinated.

I was somewhat disappointed to find out that "Nobel Sperm Bank" was not exactly that because I had wanted my novel based on fact. I even considered scrapping the book.

But then I started wondering: What if my character reads these articles and finds out a "Nobel Sperm Bank" never quite existed?

Two great walks

2010-08-07T10:13:00.000Z

Since I am about to dress my daughter in her yellow raincoat and push the stroller up the hill all the way to the local bakery, I thought I'd share a link to another great walker's blog:

http://www.walkingtheamazon.com/

Ed Stafford has spent over two years walking the Amazon. He will be out of there in two days.

semi-birthday and PW review

2010-08-05T08:44:00.007Z

News item #1: Today is my daughter´s second "adjusted" birthday. Her real birthday was more than three months ago. She still got cake and two candles. :-) Well, her parents got cake. Daughter is picky and doesn't like cake.

News item #2: My agent just sent me a wonderful review in from Publishers Weekly for Nobel Genes. The highlights: "... skillful, deeply disconcerting tale... Michaels makes effective use of first-person narration to give readers a highly believable protagonist and a riveting, from-the-trenches look at what it is like to live with a parent who suffers from a serious mental illness."

This is my first review from Publishers Weekly and I'm so glad they liked it.

Taiwan

2010-07-25T08:49:00.001Z

I'm happy to announce that I just signed a contract with the publisher Locus in Taiwan for Nobel Genes! :) This is my first Taiwan contract and I'm really thrilled.

Nobel Genes will be out in the USA on August 10th and reviews are starting to trickle in. Booklist called it "a sensitive, authentic look at the overwhelming responsibility and heartbreaking love of a boy for his mentally unstable parent," and Kirkus called it a "taut and disturbing story."

Arcs

2010-07-15T10:06:00.001Z

I've received some requests for ARCs for Nobel Genes. I only got three ARCs myself, so I have none to give, but do contact my publisher and ask them. There is a "contact us" link at the bottom of every page.

World Blood Donor Day

2010-06-14T11:55:00.006Z

Today is World Blood Donor day. My daughter would not stay alive without blood donors. Thank you.

Please consider donating blood and joining your local bone marrow registry. Both save lives.

Hammock and chocolate from Belgium...

2010-05-28T11:01:00.002Z

I got a package in the mail today, a striped hammock and Belgian chocolate shaped as a sports shoe.

I wish I had a yard and trees for the hammock, but alas, the tiny balcony will have to do. Fortunately here is just enough room!

The hammock and the chocolate came from Belgium, where Genesis Alpha won a prize called Prix Farniente. This is a reader's choice award, which is all the more satisfying. Thank you! :)

Paperback publication day

2010-05-18T11:19:00.008Z

The Reminder, my second novel, is out in paperback today, with a lovely new cover. :)

Muse

2010-03-23T11:15:00.002Z

I got a wonderful package today, a statuette sent all the way from France, where Genesis Alpha won a prize, Gayant Lecture.

It will have a place of honor on my desk and I have named him Muse. :)