Tasha K. Rookswater

Voting has opened on my proposal! Everyone so far has voted for it, which is hugely encouraging, and people are saying some really nice things. I'm still nervous, of course. I'm sure I'm going to be on the edge of my seat all week. But I'm particularly delighted to see comments like "I can't wait to read with my 7yo!" I love reading with kids, and seeing kids discover the joy of learning to read for themselves. I hope lots of people in the Nouns community -- whether they're parents, aunts/uncles, grandparents, siblings, teachers, librarians, babysitters, or anyone else with children in their life -- find this book to be something that they want to share with the kids who matter to them.

I did my first Twitter Spaces yesterday, which was a lot of fun, though I'm afraid I probably sounded a bit muddled. (I'm not going to listen to the recording to check, because hearing my own voice just makes me wince.) Everyone was so kind, though, and I hope I managed to get across at least a bit of my enthusiasm for the project. One thing I talked about was the title. It took me a long time to come up with the title of this book, and I went through several working titles that were mostly terribly bland. For awhile it was just "Caden and the Nouns," which was the eight-year-old's suggestion and honestly no worse than most of what I'd been using. The title of chapter 2, though, "Situation Nominal," I was very pleased with. "Nominal" means both "satisfactory, according to plan, as good as possible under the circumstances" and "having to do with nouns." I love puns. So at some point, 4156, the person who intro...

As you may have guessed from the last couple of posts, I'm unveiling the New Project today! It's a middle-grade novel called "The Nominal Hero," and I'm just so excited to be sending the first few chapters out into the world. "But Tasha! Doesn't posting the novel to your blog mean you can't sell it to publishers?" That is indeed what it means. When you try to sell a novel to a traditional publisher, you're selling what's called "First Rights," which simply means the right to publish something first, before it's been seen anywhere else. It's harder for the publisher to get people to pay money for something that's already available on the internet for free. There are exceptions, of course; publishers continue to put out new editions of public-domain classics all the time, for instance, and some, like the Tor ebook of the month club and the Baen Free Library, give out free samples, usually the first book in ...

The Nominal Hero (A Nounish Tale) by Tasha K. Rookswater Chapter 2: Situation Nominal Caden stared. The person--thing?--facing him was like nothing he’d ever seen. It was sharp-edged and blocky, as though made up of thousands of Legos, but the blocks seemed to ebb and flow as it moved, appearing and disappearing at its edges. It was human-shaped from the neck down, in what looked like normal clothes, orange shirt and grey pants, except for the texture. Its hands were four-fingered and coloured a uniformly flat beige--actually all of it was made up of flat patches of colour, without the shadows of a normal object, as though it generated its own light. But all this weirdness was secondary compared to its head. It was a bright pink cylinder, too narrow to be hiding a normal human head, with a cartoonish smile and flat square glasses identical to the ones Caden was still wearing. He wondered for a second if this was some kind of projection on the lenses of the glasses, like a ...

Here it is, friends: the beginning of the new project! The Nominal Hero (A Nounish Tale) by Tasha K. Rookswater Chapter 1: Specially Marked Boxes It was one of those days where everyone seemed to want to make things Caden’s fault. First he was late getting out the door to school. That was maybe a little bit his fault, because he was reading during breakfast and stayed in his seat to finish the chapter instead of getting up and brushing his teeth. But it wasn’t fair of his mother to say he was dawdling, and anyway he would have had plenty of time if he’d been allowed to run to school by himself. Instead he had to walk with Paz, his little sister, and she really did dawdle, stopping to stare at the construction equipment in the Wellco lot or to poke at the snowbanks with a stick. By the time he dropped her off at the gate of the little kids’ yard, the kinders were already filing into the school building, and the bell had rung. That meant the gate to the main s...

Oh dear. I made the mistake of counting the number of unused or partly-used-and-available notebooks in my notebook drawer, and, um. Thirty-nine, apparently. Is that a lot? I mean, for a non-writer it would be a lot, but I'm not sure what it is by writer standards. In my defense, most of them are really pretty. (Actually, the notebook I'm working on New Project in isn't pretty; it's subscriber swag from The Economist, which my dad gets, and which occasionally mails him things he has no use for. But I did cover it with shiny stickers.) I do most of my writing longhand, because I like being able to take it places. Particularly for this project, which I'm reading each chapter of to my favourite eight-year-old as I finish them. It's much easier (and more cozy) to pull out a notebook to read from than to drag my laptop around. I suppose I could email things to myself and read them off my phone, but I can't do any writing on my phone. I mean, in an emergency I ...

 Gosh, listening to one's own voice is weird, isn't it? I recorded the proposal for my New Project the other day, and I don't think I'm ever going to get used to that. It took us about two hours to get about twenty-three minutes of usable audio, which seems not bad, even if a goodly amount of that time was spent getting me to sound more relaxed and/or more enthusiastic. Those are both difficult even on their own! Doing both at the same time is extra hard! I'm really happy with how it turned out, though. Very grateful to have had the help of someone who has a lot of podcast experience and a good microphone and editing setup. Talking into my phone would have been a much more stressful experience. Playing with Noun Sounds for the intro music was also fun; I just love finding new creative tools and messing around with them.