About Kaleb

Daily thoughts and writings from the life of Kaleb Nation.

Secret Meeting!?

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Yesterday I had a meeting with Kami Garcia (co-author of Beautiful Creatures), Brett Hudson (of The Hudson Brothers) and Mark Morgan, producer of The Twilight Saga films! We have a huge secret project on the way (NOT my secret book project!). I’ll post more about it soon 😉

Here’s some stuff that happened while I was there:

Guard The Books [How I Became An Author]

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I’ve been writing stories since I was nine years old. My first dozen or so tales starred a particularly familiar character named King Kaleb, who had a penchant for explosions and was friendly to aliens. My parents would dutifully print these out, draft after draft, and let me pile them in my room.

But by the time I was ten, I was over the Microsoft Word double-sided printout booklets. Normal printer paper does not fold into the same width of an actual book book, and this wrecked the realism when I signed these booklet prints for my imaginary audience*. And besides, as anyone who’s tried this knows, it’s impossible to get the staple in the exact center of those pages.

Growing sick of this cruel sequestering of my obviously superior storytelling skills, I eventually decided it was time to be published, and let them deal with the folding and the stapling. I figured being twelve years old would give me some credit, because I was only one year away from being a teenager, and teenagers were practically adults.

So, I dug up the number of the senior editor of a giant publisher, and called her office.

I was prepared. I had a pitch ready for my amazing story about a town of elves being invaded by evil flying wizards, loosely based upon a city of Legos I had built (with photographic reproductions on hand in case my future publishers needed them / my little brother smashed my enormous buildings). The title: Enchanted Memories. If you can judge a book by its cover, this would be the cover:

The editor was not enchanted by any of my memories. Somehow, my call was immediately routed to the security guard downstairs.

This might seem like a rather depressing turn of events, but the guard ended up being instrumental to me. In the process of telling me I could not simply call the head editor’s office, he informed me that there was a process to publishing. For some reason, I had thought books were published simply by calling the biggest and most powerful name in the list of editors you could find, and convincing them you were awesome sauce. But here was something new: revising and querying and researching and never, ever phone-calling.

As the guard hung up, he encouragingly said he hoped he’d get the chance to guard my books one day.

After that first rejection, I didn’t want to be naive to the publishing world any more. I refused to let myself be forwarded to security again. So I read every single book I could find on the publishing business. I went to the library, searched for any books under the categories “Authorship” or “Publishing”, and then unloaded as much of the shelf as I could carry. My mom had an educator’s card that allowed up to 100 books checked out at once. We’d cart a van-full home each trip.

In fact, I was so eager to see my book in print that by the time I turned sixteen, I knew ALL of the major publishers, their head editors’ names, the names of their assistants, their mailing addresses, and the top selling frontlist titles at each house. I would go into a library and pick up books based on which publishing house’s logo was at the bottom of the spine, until I learned exactly what type of book each company seemed to like best. Years before my first novel was even completed, I had compiled a database of agents and a dossier of New York literary bigwigs to almost-creepy proportions (Liz Szabla: in 2001, you had an assistant named Jennifer, right? RIGHT?! Of course you did…**).

To some people, this might seem like a very desperate dream at that age. But it was a big dream, and I knew that if I wanted to reach it, I couldn’t put it off until I was older. I had to start aiming for it right then, before I was thrust into the world and lost myself in a job or college or the important things that the big scary adults did all day. I knew that if I skipped my chance then, it might be years before I could devote time to becoming an author.

I had my first book signing for my first novel on my 21st birthday: a grand birthday gift to myself for nearly half my life of hard work and big dreams. I’m certainly not a literary genius like John Green or JK Rowling. But, I wanted it, no matter how many years of improvement it would take me to get published. I didn’t want to settle with talking to the guard downstairs.

For anyone who wants to write, and anyone who dreams of becoming an author: reaching for the dream is the best first step you can take. If you want something enough to work for years with no promise of any concrete reward, you will find a way to make it happen. My first stories were abysmal. The first ten drafts of my first published novel were abysmal too. But when you want something so much that you’re willing to go after it despite the rejections, you’ll eventually get an editor who will call you on the phone instead.

There’s a happy ending: the publishing house who sent me to security is now one of my publishers. Guard the books well, Mr. security.

FOOTNOTES

*I have been practicing my autograph since I was 9 in preparation for the time I knew I would become an author. This is why my signature now takes .045 seconds.
** Liz Szabla was once an editor at a giant publisher. This is an example of my creepy publishing spy work.

I Am Not In Any Of My Vacation Photos

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I’m finally home from one of my rare long vacations! This time I went to Canada, then southwards to visit my family for the first time in over a year. It was a much needed break after all that non-stop, up-to-4-AM work on the Secret Project!

Of course, I’m that person who vacations for 10 days, and doesn’t end up with a single photo of himself. My friends want proof I actually took a break for all that time, because THE VACATION COULD BE FALSIFIED. Will photos of chickens do?

On NPR’s “All Things Considered” Tonight

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I’ll be on NPR’s “All Things Considered” this evening, talking about the awesome that is Gayle Forman. If you remember, I wrote an article for NPR.com back in October of 2010 about Gayle’s masterpiece novel “IF I STAY”. It went on to be the #1 article for multiple days, thanks to loyal upvotes by the Nationeer army.

Now months later, NPR will be broadcasting my recording of it tonight. It’ll be fun to hear myself back on the radio after 3 years of absence! You can hear it on All Things Considered or on their website after 7 PM EST.

The Search And Destroy List [Ideas On Revising A Book]

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Writing a book can cause an effect similar to self-hypnosis. After hours of clicking keys with my brain in another world and my mind blocking out all natural surroundings, I tend to fall into a type of trance. Suddenly, the words being typed aren’t even intelligently thought-out paragraphs, but just what spills out as my fingers move. In this state, though our appearances may vary slightly, little differentiates me in writing skill from a stupid monkey with a typewriter:

This works, though, because the words are flowing and the story is taking on its own life. But the phenomenon makes you lose track of time. It makes you forget lunch and then dinner and then the next day’s breakfast. It also makes you forget that you are typing the same words over and over and over.

Thus, to my horror,when I go back over first drafts, I find paragraph gems similar to this:

The magnificence of this mansion, every piece of magnificent furniture it housed: I would have eagerly thrown it all away for the magnificent device before me now. My eyes had glanced over the Bentley Coupe, the Rolls-Royce, and even the Ferrari – locking on the single piece of flaming red glory behind them. A Shelby GT500. The most magnificent car that earth had ever been graced with; the car no road deserved to feel trample its gravel. The wheels were the blackest of black, the windows tinted, the sweepingly magnificent angles of the hood and side and door like a carefully crafted ship. The silver cobra on its front seemed to whisper seductively at my heart. If I had had my camera, I probably could have photographed its two front lights, and likely would have been able to read nothing but magnificently magnificent bliss behind their magnificent pupils.

Isn’t this paragraph magnificently magnificent?

It is a very good thing to be able to write a first draft without thinking of what the words sound like or what you are repeating, because the first draft is intrinsically just getting the story out there. But when you’ve finished telling the bones of a story, it can’t stop there, or you end up with paragraphs like the above — with a kind soul and good heart but eighteen ugly arms growing out of its back. The manuscript has to be rewritten, revised, and a Search And Destroy list has to be made.

With every book I’ve written, I’ve gotten hung up on a list of words that somehow get repeated dozens of times in my drafts. My brain simply passes over the 15 times I said a character ‘hissed’ on page 211, or the 15 uses of the phrase “demonically possessed since birth” when describing any goats. But when I go back, with the help of friends, I am able to form a list of my most commonly overused words, to search them out and destroy them. For example, in my current Secret Project, this is part of my Search-And-Destroy List:

Memories

Gasp

Remember

Eyes

Direction

“face lit up”

Dismay

“All at once…”

“…only stared”

Breathless

Jerk

Abysmal

“Any mentions to someone spreading their arms because what on earth does the even mean”

The list goes on. Before anyone gets to see this book, I will have successfully found every time these words were overused in my manuscript, and VANQUISHED THEM.

Rewrites like this are a huge part of writing. My first book went through so many rewrites, I began labeling my drafts with decimals. Deep in my OLD STUFF subfolder of the BRAN HAMBRIC subfolder of the KALEB’S NOVELS folder on my computer, there are many documents labeled things like BHTFC-Draft9.7.doc, BRAN-HAMBRIC-FINAL.doc, BH-REALLY-FINAL.doc, FINAL-FINAL-VERSION-BH.doc, etc.

Even after I sent the FINAL-BH-SEND-TO-EDITOR.doc version off, there were still so many changes that now my original document only slightly resembles what has been printed. My plans of making my own pirated version of my book that search-and-replaced Bran Hambric with Uncle Pennybags are ruined.

In a few hours it will be January 2011. I recently finished the rewrite of my Secret Project, so I can start the New Year entirely fresh. Writers who ventured into their stories during NaNoWriMo will also have a chance to go back to their manuscripts with a fresh eye in a fresh year. You’ll have to become acquainted with my friend Revisions. R. and I know when the time has come for us to have lunch together, or fifteen lunches together, or when we have no choice but to stay up until 3 AM sharpening our Backspace Swords and our Delete-Key Javelins together.

As you re-read your first draft, you may be horrified by the things you placed on the page. But don’t worry. I learned quickly how to use the FIND key in my word processor, and how to remove the 823 times my antagonist feels chagrined.

Comments: what words do you find yourself repeating in your early drafts?

Covers Of Awful

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Almost eight years ago, I had the idea that would eventually become my first published book. I wrote the first draft in six months. Time to publish! thought I. Little did I know that five years of rewriting lay ahead.

All writers take this road. You’re left for a long time with your goal dangling just out of reach, your publishing legs growing longer with each day but your logical side wondering if you’ll ever be tall enough. You live on dreams and hopes. For this reason, to keep me going as I rewrote my story, I dreamed ahead by making my own book covers.

The first cover of my first book was made in 2003/2004, and featured Lord Of The Rings concept art and the original title of the book. Also, my old pen name, and a very, very audacious bit of labeling at the top. I call this BRAN HAMBRIC AND HIS BRIGHT RED WORDART TEXT:

In 2005 I went dramatic. I tossed the moon necklace into a floating orb of energy and made BRAN HAMBRIC, VAMPYRE KNIGHT MASTER:

Later in 2005, I was informed my book was not dark enough to merit neon blue text. Also, I decided to drop the second part of the title altogether. So I cartooned it up a bit with some blue and gold, to make BRAN HAMBRIC IN HAPPYFUNVILLE WITH TWO CURVED GRADIENTS:

Even later in 2005 (I was on a design craze) I propped up a pair of jeans with paint sticks and made my most contemporary cover in ARE YOU THERE GOD? IT’S ME, JUST AN ORDINARY BOY BRAN HAMBRIC:

In 2007, I finally learned some basic design essentials. My parents relented and let me use my full name. I brought back the rest of the title. I tossed in some gnomes, misty clouds, and boom! BRAN HAMBRIC AND CASPER THE GHOSTLY TEXT:

Later in 2007, I got the latest Photoshop, and really went at it. I designed a logo from scratch, turned the inner glow WAY DOWN, and went for a simpler, more mysterious cover. Also, mist. Which makes this BRAN HAMBRIC YOU BETTER WATCH OUT FOR THAT BLACK HOLE:

As you can see, my design skills improved somewhat as I went on. The logo in the last book eventually became the logo used on all the Bran Hambric covers. So sometimes, procrastinating around in Photoshop between drafts actually does pay off.

Things I Have Learned As An Author

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I remember very distinctly how it felt to be unpublished and wonder what it’d be like when I got to the other side. Since I started writing when I was very young, I approached the publishing machine with an even more child-like awe than most other, older writers around me, staring upwards from far below and hoping that one day I’d be tall enough to reach the buttons.

Me, In The Style Of The Oatmeal

I think I revered authors as some type of alter-species, superior in every way. Surely, I imagined, published authors would live atop gigantic buildings in New York, and type and type and type book after book, with a growling publicist coming over daily about interviews, and golf with their agents on Saturdays.

Now I am here. I’m twenty-two years old, with two of my published books beside me. I am at the same desk I’ve had since I was fourteen, surrounded by no less than eight empty water bottles, notebooks and scribbled-on papers strewn in piles everywhere, an empty tin of Eclipse mints I’ve nervously chewed my way through in a week, a tangle of headphones in knots beside me, eyes bloodshot from staring at this abysmal computer monitor past 3 AM last night, and sitting in my pajamas. If I wrote my stories on cardboard, you could easily mistake me for a hobo.

This is how writers write. I learned as soon as I moved out and became a full time writer that to really do something in writing, you’ve got to throw everything in to writing. You’ve got to be so immersed in a story that you forget to shower, you forget to eat, you forget that it’s 4 AM, you forget that you haven’t paid your internet bill and that’s why Pandora suddenly won’t load the next song on your writing playlist. You stay up writing. You go to bed writing. You get up again and brush your hair back with your fingers because you want to get back to writing and don’t have time for a brush. You do have time for a brush, but taking two minutes to get it would seem like eternity. This is why your clothes sit in the dryer for a week — why put them away when you can just pull them out when you need them, and have five more minutes to write?

I’m hardly one of those people who can be considered an established author yet. But after a year of living like this, I’ve picked up on a certain amount of things, including:

– Do not wear a suit coat to a book signing, and never ever wear a hoodie over a button up,

– Do not wear dress shoes to BEA if you value being able to stand up,

– Carry two copies of each of your books in your luggage for when you find yourself on a plane beside the producer of The Spiderwick Chronicles,

– Sign your name in Sharpie because ball point pens make your signature look weak,

– Make a code system for when you autograph things: blue ink is first book tour, green is second, a dot means you met them in person, etc,

– Make sure your thumb is not covering your book title when taking photographs for magazines,

– Do not say you know another, more famous author if you don’t want the entire interview turning into trivia about said author, and the only quote used in the interview to be “Why yes, I am good friends with…” so that you sound like a name dropping toad,

– When on tour, make sure you arrive at your hotel before your publicist leaves the office, because inevitably your reservation will have been eaten by glitch maggots,

– Learn the art of the Secret Book.

When you are a writer with no publishing contract, no agent, and no possibility of something you tweet being retweeted endless times and somehow reaching your publisher and causing them to ask ‘A new book? Can we take a look at it next week? You haven’t finished? Alright, two weeks?” then there is no fear of talking about your novel on blogs or online. You do not need the Secret Book. Anyone with a good DNS search will know that I launched BranHambric.com in 2005 — four years before I was even published. I was so immersed in this story that I couldn’t resist sharing it with anyone I could.

But more importantly, when you’re unpublished, you have the freedom to just write. You can let the ideas simmer in a pot of word stew, changing the title hundreds of times, changing the main character from Freddy to Sue, splicing chapters 3 and 4 and eliminating that awful part about the zombie leeches altogether. You have freedom to revise and change without confusing anyone, and when you suddenly realize that the whole thing needs a rewrite and it’s going to take you six more months, you CAN do that because there is NOBODY waiting on you.

After you become published, however, things immediately change. You have a publisher who wants a new book every once in a while. You have readers who, in their awesomeness, send you daily emails asking for updates on when the next novel will be out. When you accidentally tell readers that you’ve had an awesome idea and you’re calling it “Sammy Squid’s Riotous Undersea Adventures With Abraham Lincoln” and then later decide that a Hoovervillian is far more interesting than a Gettysburg Gun, suddenly everyone implodes into a cloud of confusion.

Therein lies the art of the Secret Book.

Anyone who follows a multitude of authors on Twitter knows of this. Authors hashtag their projects with things like #FantasyIdea or #damnhistoricalnovel or #SecretVampireRomanceProjectSetInWashington. They tweet about finishing chapter twelve, or beg Twitter for a good British male flight attendant’s name, or about how they’ve fallen asleep at their desk and dreamt of throwing phosphorus on people because they’re just that exhausted.

But never, ever, ever do they say the Title. Or the Plot. Or the Main Character’s Name. To say such would violate the code of the Secret Book. To reveal those while still writing would immediately tie the writer down to keeping these things inside the story, and what a writer needs least when writing is anything tying them down to something in the first drafts. How many Harry Potter fans waited for years to see ‘scar’ as the last word? I wonder how many hours it took Rowling to get the strength to change that one tiny part, and how many versions of sentences did she go through trying to keep ‘scar’ as the last word just because she had already told people it would end that way.

Because even though writers know readers will understand if we have to change something, there will still be that nagging voice — what IF someone is most looking forward to seeing Abraham Lincoln under the sea? What IF I’m insane and this is awful and it never gets published, and all of my readers think that I am an absolute miserable failure of a writer who will never amount to anything? You have the freedom to toy with an idea when nobody is watching, until you’ve got it perfect.

But those of us not protected by publicists whose job it is to keep our mouths shut — we can’t keep it all inside. Writers want everyone to hear their idea. We’re too excited by it, to entranced by this world and the prospect of other people enjoying it too. That’s why we search out ways to secretly spill out bits of it. Where will my words be most untraceable? Least recordable? Least getting-me-into-trouble-able? Will anyone know if I just call it my #SecretProject? Because, most of all, like anyone who writes, we want people to read it. We want them to fall in love with it in the same way we have.

Inside, I am still the same as I was before I was published. Outside, I act as professional as I can in my pajamas.

Mention In “Blood Rivals:…etc.”

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I was told that I’ve been mentioned in the upcoming book “Blood Rivals: Vampire vs. Werewolf: Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner: The Biography” the title of which, if my eyes do not deceive me, contains every buzzword intended to get Twilighters to buy it, except “shirtless”. To be honest, I don’t actually remember saying the things that I’ve been quoted as uttering, but as last year I did so many of these interviews, I don’t suspect that the words have been fabricated. They do sound quite good so I wouldn’t mind if they were entirely the author’s invention, though I would have preferred he (yes, a male author of a book about Rpattz!) include some of my favorite words, “horticultural” and ‘abysmal’ and ‘loathsome’, at least once in the quote *.

When it gets to the point that you’ve done so many interviews in the space of two years, you start to play a little game of “Where-Did-They-Get-That-Quote ** ” which is far less entertaining when the article quoting you casts you in a less than favorable light, but fun in cases like these where you can’t honestly remember speaking to this author. My guess is that I said this quote while I was in Forks for the Summer School In Forks convention. I don’t think the author was actually there, but I have a feeling that this quote was taken from the Twilight In Forks documentary, in which I have a strange recollection of using the word ‘logging’ (yes I have a habit of remembering when I use unusual words, even years later). I also wonder if he might have been at Twicon getting quotes, as that was such a whirlwind I could have said anything and not remember it.

I’m not quite sure where this book fits on a bookshelf, as it can’t be read or classified until it’s out, but I think it could occupy the same space as “Robert Pattinson: Eternally Yours” in which I also had the unusual honor of being mentioned as well:

When I started TwilightGuy.com, I threw a hastily-written biography onto the page, with absolutely no thought to a future in which it would be quoted endlessly on television and in recent days, in published books. Now that I look back, if I had simply added some “golly-gee!’s” and “me-oh-my-oh!’s” I might have sounded like the true-to-life, fresh-out-of-my-parents-house teen guy I was:

“Golly gee willikers! I’m trying to find out what a girl is, and why every one of these unexplainable creatures in the world is toe-tappin’ obsessed with them Twilight books by Stephenie Mayors! ^

— Kalip Nayshun

Lesson learned: never post anything to the internet without first considering that it might be quoted in a published book without your knowledge and/or permission and/or opportunity to edit. DOING SO WILL COME BACK TO HAUNT YOU ONE DAY.

Either way, I’m very thankful he decided to include me in his work, as it’s always thrilling when your name is in four published books, while you’ve only written one of those — especially considering that being mentioned in real non-fiction books means that someone thinks I’ve made some mark, albeit a small one, on a bit of fandom history. Surely the upcoming “Blood Rivals:…”, will be a wonderful addition to Books-Bearing-The-Face-Of-Robert-Pattinson, of which 63% of my readers surely have a secret home collection 😀

*and a new favorite: “lavatorial” thanks to my introduction to the word by good friends over dinner.
** not to be confused with the dissimilar game of “How-Do-I-Swim-This-Moat”, which requires alligators.

Baby Kaleb Computer Man [Video]

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Some old video clips I found on my computer 🙂

Youtube Thumbnail Timeline

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kaleb-thumbs_01kaleb-thumbs_02kaleb-thumbs_03kaleb-thumbs_03kaleb-thumbs_05kaleb-thumbs_06kaleb-thumbs_07kaleb-thumbs_08

It’s interesting to look at the thumbnails for my Youtube videos and see how much I’ve changed in just a year and a half. I think sometime around April, 2009 (which was when I first started flying out to California regularly) you really start to notice how the west coast sunshine started to make me look a little different. Also, March – July, it appears I’d wear nothing but plaid shirts all the time 😀