Mina Witteman – author | editor | teacher of creative writing

Posts tagged “Ellen Hopkins”

Books at the Bay Area Book Festival

Posted on July 3, 2020

It was a steep learning curve, this shelter-in-place pivot from an in-person book festival to an online happening. Instead of two glorious days in May in downtown Berkeley, we worked round the clock to get at least part of our line up ready for an online happening. And not just a two-day online festival. We managed to get two and a half months of just beyond incredible book programs to you via our YouTube Channel.  What can I say about the children’s and YA programming? I learned new skills every single day. I am out of this world grateful to the entire technical team that made it possible for me to produce 30 just absolutely delightful and insightful programs for young audiences. This post is…

Categories: A Bit of Everything, Books, Children's books, YA books

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Daily Distraction: What Am I Working On?

Posted on May 27, 2014
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My most recent project was a YA thriller, a scary story set in marijuana-ridden Amsterdam. I’ve worked on the manuscript with the ultimate Master of YA lit Ellen Hopkins through the SCBWI Nevada Mentor Program. Ellen’s critiques and suggestions made a world of difference and I am very thankful I had the opportunity to work with her. These past few weeks I have done a thorough –and ‘thorough’ stands for ‘an extremely painful, soul-searching, kill-your-darlings kinda’– line edit of the manuscript and sent it out. So now I’m working on my nails, BITING MY NAILS, that is.

Since biting nails, like all girly stuff, is not my favorite pastime, I write to keep my mind away from this agonizing waiting game. Four projects are on my desk, all in neat stacks, because I am what I am, a former architect school dropout and a diehard math girl. Here goes:

  1. A middle grade adventure series for my Dutch publisher Ploegsma about a young boy who is forced – yes, can you believe that? The nerve! – to sail around the world with his parents.
  2. The English rewrite of an adult psychological thriller with a very creepy techno twist. The thriller set in the heart of the Internet where techies rule our worlds.
  3. A brand new and exciting but very edgy young adult thriller. Can’t tell you much about it yet, except that it will be scare as hell.
  4. As always, I have a few picture book manuscripts lined up, too.
Categories: Books, Children's books, Thrillers, YA books

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Daily Distraction: Trees and Blue Skies

Posted on February 18, 2014

Daily Distractiion: Trees, Skies and How the Brain Works

Not sure if it was the blue skies or the whiteness of the bark, but this tree pushed me forward in my writing. It stands in a park outside Asheville and I looked up its trunk for a while, noticing how its now leafless branches fork out and reach up to the sky. From down below they seem all tangled up and yet, like a story plot, they form one single whole.

While standing there and staring up, I realized that I had to go back to the manuscript I am working on, shed all the leaves and study just the trunk, the boughs, the branches, the twigs. I did just that: strip the manuscript from all the fluff and scrutinize the bare bones. Today, I knew what it missed. Not the trunk that forms the storyline, not the boughs that reach out to the sky and layer the plot, not the branches or the twigs that fork out and make the subplots. What my story missed was a root. My mentor Ellen Hopkins had already pointed that out, but I failed to see what she meant. Now I do. One more chapter, that is all it needs. I will push it out tonight, in the confidence that it will root my story firmly to the ground.

Categories: A Bit of Everything, Books, Children's books, Thrillers, YA books

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