- June 25th, 2011 at
12:49 pm by --KALEB NATION-- -
Aside from being a very serious business author of literary fiction intended only for the most prestigious academic circles, I sometimes make music videos and post them on Youtube. My latest, “Pop Tart Heart”, is the tragic and true story of a cat searching for love in space:
You can get the song on iTunes here. It truly is the perfect music to listen to whilst enjoying a respectable plate of crumpets and cheese.
LYRICS
What do I do with my heart,
When it’s flying through space like a cat in a pop tart?
Where do I go when I fly all alone
Wishing outer space might lead me home.
What do I do with my pop tart heart
The edges and the middle are burning hot
You sent me flying into space and into the dark
Cutting through the galaxies, colliding with stars.
All I hear you saying is
Nyan Nyan Nyan Nyan
All you hear me praying is
Nyan Nyan Nyan Nyan
All the voices telling me
Nyan Nyan Nyan Nyan
That outer space is where I’ll be
Nyan Nyan Nyan Nyan
[Chorus]
How can I find love so far away in the stars
My heart is going faster than an outer spacial race car
All the broken promises you said you would keep
Without you here the galaxy just isn’t complete
- March 6th, 2011 at
3:12 pm by --KALEB NATION-- -
I’m thrilled to announce that this week, Elana Roth of Caren Johnson Literary Agency signed on to represent my new YA series.
As some of you know from my frequent posts online and the flurry of tweets last year, I’ve been working on a secret project that is entirely separate from Bran Hambric. This was an idea that came out of nowhere in 2010 while I was living in California, and was written in exactly a month and entirely rewritten six months later. The book is a paranormal YA and the first in a series. It’s kept me up past 4 AM on multiple occasions. I haven’t been this excited about a new idea since I was 14.
I found Elana through my friend Kiera Cass, who was once famous as a Twicurl and then famous for The Siren and now soon-to-be-famous for her upcoming book The Selection. Now we’re agent-mates! That’s almost like family in the literary world.
I can’t say anything about the book or the title yet but if you look back through a category on my blog, you’ll pick up some things. Also, I should say now that the code hashtag #Callista that people have been using on Twitter is not the title.
You should follow Elana on Twitter. You never know when she’ll slip up and send a DM as a tweet and unknowingly reveal my secrets.
The process with Elana will take at least a few months, so there won’t be much news after this for a while. I do know for sure that this is exactly the type of book Nationeers will enjoy, especially my older readers. We have some very exciting months ahead. I can’t wait for you to read it!
- February 19th, 2011 at
4:48 am by --KALEB NATION-- -
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.
- February 15th, 2011 at
4:28 pm by --KALEB NATION-- -
I like to make music. That is, if you can call what I make ‘music’. I made this last night in an insomnia-induced stupor, and this is how I found it this morning:
Beside that Owl-City-ish file was this All-Caps-esque one, from last week:
And probably 20 others. My keyboard has become the go-to place when battling sleepless nights.
Since I was about 15, I’ve used Cubase and a giant set of virtual instruments to make songs. I started with horrendous MIDI beats, and slowly — as technology/my experience/my instrument collection improved — things ceased to resemble the disharmony of three Atari’s playing different games in the same room.
I start a song with absolutely no purpose in mind. I do things backwards: I play around with the keyboard until I find a sound I like, then build on that, and then only after the song is done do I start thinking about putting words to it. This is probably why most of them never end up with lyrics at all. I also can’t read music, so my range of playing around is limited to Finding-Middle-C-And-Then-Counting-Up.
Unfortunately I happen to lack any and all vocal talent. In fact, my vocal abilities are so pathetic that even layering two or three levels of autotune on top of them still sounds like a gorilla humming into a can (this is actually very accurate. I suggest finding a gorilla to reproduce this noise).
Me, singing. Also, you, reacting to my singing.
And if there’s one thing that irks me, it’s people who do something badly while thinking they are doing it wonderfully. This is why all the songs that I DO put online are jokes — if I can convince people my songs aren’t serious, my abysmal vocals become part of the joke
making music... with no instruments
So until they make an autotune that physically corrects every possible aspect of someone’s voice until it’s barely recognizable as the person’s voice at all, these songs will likely not have my voice in them. But I pick old songs back up and remix them all the time, so don’t be surprised if you hear one of these in a video in the future. And, technology is always improving — maybe one day I WILL be able to sing/hum/gorilla-voice my way along.
I’ve found that making a song is like writing a book: you start off with an idea, you work around and build on the idea, then spend more time editing that you actually spent writing it in the first place. So the song I made last night is one of those first-draft things that either stick around and get edited into something worth putting up, or forgotten in the stacks of songs that were not.
I have so many of these currently-unused-but-might-be-used-one-day song ideas. I might start posting bits and pieces up to see what people think when I make them. 4 ears are better than two
