Posts - Kerry Gans, Author

Back To School

September 15, 2016 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

Back to school is the time of year parents rejoice and children cry. That the same event can cause such different reactions in two separate groups is a lesson in point of view, but that is a topic for another blog. While children view school as 10 months of incarceration, parents see freedom.

Back to school restores routine and sanity to parental lives. Children no longer need 24/7 care—even when kids are old enough to entertain themselves for a few hours a day, there are still summer camps, activities, and play dates to fill the calendar. Summer writing becomes a haphazard affair—I have written at swim practice, karate, even in the car waiting. Back to school means more concentrated writing time.

Sure September can be crazy because you have to start juggling the after school activities plus the homework plus activities such as the Book Fair and Back To School Nights and Open House and PTA volunteering, but those of us who work from home get about 6 splendid hours a day to do the things we need to do.

Already my writing in September has been much better than my summer. My worst month of the writing year so far has been July. In July my word count was 11,700. August wasn’t much better at 11,900. We’re only about halfway through the month of September—school started less than 2 weeks ago—and already I have passed both July and August with a grand total of 13,600 words. Things are looking up.

For all that back to school can be an adjustment, the routine is key for me. If I get it right, a routine makes me crazy efficient. This week I had one day where I revised 3,300 words (3 chapters). In one day I did 28% of the total I had for either July or August. Color me happy!

The concentrated writing time makes a big difference for me. Yes, I can jot down words at a swim practice, copy edit, write a blog post, read the blogs I follow, but to get deep into the voice and character of the story or to revise on a large scale I find I need a block of time. Time to fall into the story world and give my full focus to it. That sort of time is rare in the summer.

Summer is a wonderful time to spend with your family. I wouldn’t pass up the memories we made or the experiences we had for anything. But getting back to a routine that gives me time to write alleviates the pressure I’ve felt all summer—that tug of war between feeling I was neglecting my kid or feeling I was neglecting my writing (which is also neglecting myself).

So here’s to back to school! It has its own set of challenges, but for those of us who are parents and writers, it’s the time when we start to feel a little bit more like ourselves.

Happy back to school (and back to writing)!

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Summer is a Beach

September 8, 2016 By Kerry Gans 1 Comment

Summer is over, my daughter is back in school. And although I am glad to get back to a routine and overjoyed to get my writing time back, I found myself thinking about what summer means to me. While images of ice cream, heat waves, and the pool popped into my head, the brightest image by far was that of the beach.

Having said that, I will say that I am not an all-day-every-day beach person. If I get to the beach a few times a summer, I am happy. I dislike the heat and the sunscreen and those nasty greenhead flies. But I do find something soothing in the sun on the water, the warm breeze, and the roar of the surf. Water has always been a soother of my soul.

This year, my daughter got to the beach more than I did. She went with Daddy while at the Gans Family Reunion, and while I was at the Ocean City Authors Showcase. She described the waves the day of the Showcase as “fierce.” But she had a good time.

I went with her (and my mother) to the Long Island Sound during our last week of summer. We spent a day on the beach, building sandcastles…

Catching fish in a bucket (released back into the water)…

And swimming in the calm water.

As the tide went out, sand bars appeared and we were able to walk to “islands” far out in the water. Daughter named one of them Mossy Rock Island because of the algae-covered rocks all around the sand bar.

It was a relaxing day (aside from the bees attacking my daughter), and we all enjoyed whiling away the time. The water chilled at first touch, but then became pleasant—especially as the tide went out, creating warm shallow pools between the beach and sand bars.

We finished off our vacation at the playground near the harbor, where hundreds of boats bobbed peacefully in the sunset.

A wonderful way to end the summer.

Summer means beach to me because I lived my whole life close to the beach. Other people don’t live near the water. What does summer mean to you? What memories of summers past do you cherish most?

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Authors Showcase, Ocean City, NJ

September 1, 2016 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

This past Sunday, I participated in the inaugural Ocean City Free Public Library Authors Showcase. It was a beautiful day, perfect beach weather. I dropped my husband and daughter at the 17th Street beach and headed over to the Library to set up.

The Library is housed in the Ocean City Community Center. The Showcase set up in the Atrium, a sunny, open area right in the middle of everything.

We had good foot traffic coming from the library’s book sale. The library itself is beautiful, with amazing murals in the kids’ section. If I was a kid, I would never leave.

The showcase had a festive atmosphere. Hey, it’s a day down the shore, what’s not to like? The other authors all seemed to enjoy getting to know each other. I sat next to Kimball Baker, author of For Those In Peril: A History of the Ocean City Life-Saving Station and we discovered a mutual love of genealogy. We passed the time chatting about family lines and brick walls, and the joy of finally finding a piece of information that confirms a new generation.

The other authors at the showcase were: Carol Brill, Tim Kelly, Jane Mayer Lueder, Laura J. Kaighn, Jennifer Shirk, Dave Rhodes, the Fabulous Gabriel, David Webb, Victoria Devine, Mary Ann Bolen, Catherine E. DePino, John Sweeden, Jonathon King, Kimball Baker, and Kiernan Shea.

I thoroughly enjoyed my experience at the Authors Showcase. I thank Julie Brown for setting it all up, and the Ocean City Free Public Library for hosting us. I hope they do it again next year. If so, I will be there!

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A Powerful Message to Our Children

August 25, 2016 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

When you are a parent of a young child, you often have the pleasure of watching the same movie over and over and over. The one good thing about this is that you get the chance to dissect the movie into itty-bitty parts in a way that you never thought possible. (I could write a doctoral thesis on some of the movies my daughter has binge watched.) Sometimes, even if it’s a movie you’ve seen before, you suddenly see a message or theme you never did before.

That’s what happened lately with me and Disney’s The Rescuers. That movie was one of my favorites as a child, so I thought I knew it pretty well. But after seeing it for the 100 billionth time, I suddenly realized it had a theme I had never noticed before. (SPOILERS BELOW)

Small people can make a big difference.

Now, perhaps that should have been obvious—I mean, it does star mice who rescue people. I just never saw it before. In the beginning, Rufus the cat asks, “Two little mice? What can you do?” And when the mice first talk to Penny, she asks, “Didn’t you bring somebody big with you? Like the police?” And the mice themselves, in their darkest moment, wonder if they are capable of helping at all.

But, of course, they are perfectly able to save the day—with a little help from other small animal friends.

This theme of being small but capable may be why I loved the movie so much as a child. My author theme is that every child has the potential to change the world—an extension of this very theme. It seems this theme has been in my heart for a lot longer than I realized.

I’ve talked before about another good message kids can take from The Rescuers, but I think this one is something all kids need to hear:

You are small, but not helpless.

In a nutshell, giving kids the idea that they can change the world for the better sends them perhaps the strongest message of all:

You matter.

And isn’t that a message we all need to hear from time to time?

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Children: Not Just a Mini-Me

August 18, 2016 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

I know many parents joke about their child being a “mini-me”—so much like them that it’s scary. And sometimes it’s actually true. But just this week I was struck with the opposite realization: my daughter is very much NOT a mini-me.

We were playing with my Breyer horse collection when it occurred to me (not for the first time), that this child of mine is almost nothing like me. She plays with my horses in a way I never did. I played that they were horses—they lived in a corral when not running in their pasture (my carpet was green), I had a doll who could ride them, and saddles and bridles for them. My daughter puts them into family groups and has them getting married and having children.

In fact, she has everything she owns get married. Horses, stuffed animals, dolls… She re-enacts marriage scenes from Disney movies. I can’t remember ever playing getting married when young.

I only ever had 2 dolls that I can remember, while Kinder-girl loves her dolls. They are often her babies (making me a young grandma!), until she gets tired of that, then they become her sisters and I suddenly have many more births to my name than I remember.

She is in love with all things pink—a color I have spent a lifetime rebelling against.

Playing dress-up and changing her outfit multiple times in a day is the norm. I couldn’t be bothered with tiaras and necklaces and rings, and if I had my choice I’d be in jeans and T-shirt all the time—both then and now.

Our most obvious difference (aside from our polar opposite physical appearance) is that she is an extrovert, and I am an introvert. She loves going out, and everyone she meets is her friend. If I never had to leave the house, I would be happy.

I do see some glimpses of me in her. She is artistic—although I lean toward realism and she likes her art colorful and full of fluid shapes. She’s a creative, and enjoys writing—something she gets from me, and not from my husband, who is a great reader but dislikes writing. She has a tendency to over-think, to be a disorganized mess, and to get lost in a book she’s reading or a project she’s doing. She can be stubborn, argumentative, fiercely loyal, and scary smart. She is a complex mix of fear and courage, confidence and timidity, and joy and sorrow.

In other words, she is fully human, and fully herself.

She is not just a mini-me.

While this makes parenting her a challenge—I am not sure if it is harder to parent the parts of her most like me or most unlike me—as a writer I can take a lesson from this. When I create children, I mustn’t make them carbon copies of their parents (unless the story demands it). Certainly, some of the child’s characteristics will reflect their parents, but those characteristics will refract through the lens of that child’s uniqueness.

So I go back to writing while raising not a “mini-me”, but a fully-realized “her”.

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BOOK TRAILER REVEAL + GIVEAWAY FOR JOSHUA AND THE ARROW REALM!

August 15, 2016 By Kerry Gans 3 Comments

Donna Galanti is a good friend and a fantastic author. I am beyond thrilled to unveil the trailer for book two in Donna’s fantasy adventure Lightning Road series, JOSHUA AND THE ARROW REALM, arriving August 30th. The Midwest Book Review calls book one, JOSHUA AND THE LIGHTNING ROAD, “a heart-pounding thrill ride full of unexpected twists and turns from start to finish.” Grab book one for just $.99cents now through September 20th.

Be sure to enter the fun giveaway package at the bottom of this post that includes a paperback of book one, poster of the Lost Realm, bookmarks, and a $25 B&N gift card (U.S. only). Sign up for Donna’s Thunderclap book release campaign and help her zap the world through social media with her lightning message!

ABOUT JOSHUA AND THE ARROW REALM:

On August 30th take the lightning road back to a world of beasts, bandits, and heroes in book two of the Lightning Road series. Join Joshua in a new fight for power in the Arrow Realm. Can Joshua and his friends conquer an unstoppable evil?

Joshua never thought he’d return to the world of Nostos but is soon called to the Arrow Realm to free his imprisoned friend, King Apollo, kidnapped as a power pawn in Queen Artemis’s quest to conquer every realm. With his loyalties divided between our world and theirs, Joshua wonders whether he alone can restore magic to the twelve powerless Olympian heirs and save all those enslaved. But when he finds himself abandoned in his quest, he fears he cannot only save those imprisoned—but himself as well.

“Fast-paced and endlessly inventive, Joshua and the Arrow Realm is a high-stakes romp through a wild world where descendants of the Greek gods walk beside you, beasts abound, and not everything—or everyone—is as it seems.” ~ Michael Northrop, New York Times bestselling author of the TombQuest series

JOSHUA AND THE ARROW REALM BOOK TRAILER:

EXCERPT:

A faint rumble groaned through the whistling wind.

Boom!

Thunder ripped the sky overhead.

Charlie reached the frozen pond, spinning across it. “Woohoo! I win! You Americans can’t beat us at speed!”

Lightning flashed. It zinged across the pine trees like brilliant sunlight. A seed of terror flickered inside me.

Boom! Boom!

Another flash scorched the sky.

Charlie’s smile fell to a frown as he raced across the ice, peering up into the swirling clouds.

We both knew what lightning could do.

Suddenly, sneaking outside for a moonlit sled ride before Bo Chez got home from his monthly poker game didn’t seem so smart.

The sleet turned to snow. Icicles flew off trees like glass splinters, shattering on the hard snow. As I shot toward the pond, a tree on the edge moved. Its branches swayed in the swirling snow.

It wasn’t a tree, but a girl! She stumbled through the mad flurry, arms outstretched.

“Charlie, look!”

Gusts snatched the words away as my sled hit the ice and careened out of control on the bumpy surface. The girl staggered and fell onto the pond. I twisted my sled away to avoid hitting her and smashed right into Charlie. With a yelp, he pulled me up, and we clumped toward the girl. We lifted her up, half dragging her back up the hill to the house in the pelting snow and sleet.

“Who is she?” Charlie yelled.

“No idea,” I yelled back.

He said more, but his words were lost in the wind.

My lungs burned with the cold and effort. There was only one reason someone would appear with lightning—to steal us. This girl might appear like a waif unprepared for a storm but I couldn’t trust that’s all she was.

PRE-ORDER JOSHUA AND THE ARROW REALM:

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Joshua-Arrow-Realm-Lightning-Road/dp/0996890491?ie=UTF8&ref_=asap_bc

Barnes & Noble: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/joshua-and-the-arrow-realm-donna-galanti/1123486660?ean=9780996890496

MEET DONNA GALANTI:

Donna Galanti is the author of The Element Trilogy (Imajin Books) and The Lightning Road series (Month9Books). She attended an English school housed in a magical castle, where her wild imagination was held back only by her itchy uniform (bowler hat and tie included!). There she fell in love with the worlds of C.S. Lewis and Roald Dahl, and wrote her first fantasy about Dodo birds, wizards, and a flying ship. She’s lived in other exotic locations, including Hawaii where she served as a U.S. Navy photographer. She lives with her family and two crazy cats in an old farmhouse, and dreams of returning one day to a castle. Donna is a contributing editor for International Thriller Writers the Big Thrill magazine and blogs with other middle grade authors at Project Middle Grade Mayhem. You can find her at www.donnagalanti.com.

BOOK REVIEWERS:

E-book ARCs are available for this next thrilling book in The Lightning Road series! Email donna(at)donnagalanti.com for copies and specify the format you’d like.

GIVEAWAY:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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Beta Readers: A Vital Part of the Process

August 11, 2016 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

I met with most of my beta readers this week for my middle grade manuscript The Curse of the Pharaoh’s Stone. My daughter’s wonderful school librarian put together an amazing local team of readers—4 kids, 2 teachers, a librarian, and a mom of middle grade kids. I also have 2 other incredible teachers and authors reading it. I am so excited to get their feedback!

Yes, I said excited. I know many writers get butterflies when they send their manuscript babies out to beta readers. Some writers are downright terrified. And I agree, when you let your work out into the world, even in beta, it can be scary. You’re opening yourself up to criticism, to the possibility that people won’t love your story as much as you do. Sometimes writers even see criticism at this stage as a failure on their part.

But I am strange—I love honest feedback. I think it comes from how my writing process evolved in a collaborative model with my best friend Donna Hanson Woolman. Then when I got my Master of Arts in English, my advisor was a blunt yet positive critiquer. Of course, if the criticism is personal or nasty in nature, I don’t like that any more than the next writer, but in this post I am talking about thoughtful and honest feedback.

I enjoy the red pen on my manuscript because of my mindset. I am confident that Pharaoh’s Stone is a good book. Its plot is solid, its characters rounded, and the prose is clean. I have read enough middle grade—both published and from an agent’s slush pile—to know my book is good. I am excited to get my beta readers’ feedback because I know that their feedback will get the book from good to great.

That’s how we writers have to approach any constructive feedback—as a way to make our manuscripts better. A challenge to dig deeper and raise our craft higher. After working so long and hard on our stories (I’ve been with Pharaoh’s Stone for 11 years), we can lose the objectivity we need to make the final adjustments that will make our work shine.

That’s why beta readers are such an important part of our writing process. They bring fresh eyes, fresh brains, and a fresh perspective. I am so lucky to have an enthusiastic team reading my book, and I am so grateful to all of them for making the time and effort to help me.

Do you use beta readers? Where does their feedback fit into your process?

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Productivity and Expectations

August 4, 2016 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

Worst. Month. Ever. July’s word count scraped the bottom of the barrel. My productivity hit the lowest monthly number since I started tracking in January. So, naturally, I have beaten myself up over this failure for many a day.

I managed 11,700 words in July. Which is not nothing, by the way. 11,700 words either drafted, revised, or copyedited. Not a terribly small number. Many writers would be proud of that number.

But.

Among all my data, for the month of July sits a big goose egg next to Veritas, my current work in progress. Zero. Nada. Nothing. Not a single word on my WIP. For an entire month.

It’s killing me.

I went to the Writer’s Coffeehouse in Willow Grove over the weekend, and afterwards got to talking with Marie Lamba. I lamented to her about my lack of productivity, that I had not worked on my WIP all month, and how upset that made me. She said:

“Your problem is that you expected to work on it.”

That stopped me. Because she was right. I knew my writing time would be almost nil. I knew I had other obligations that would take up what writing time I had. I knew I’d have a small shadow pretty much 24/7 for July. And yet I had somehow expected to work on my WIP in some significant manner.

Because I always expect too much from myself.

I always think I can do more in a given time frame than I can. I always think I will have more time than I do. I always think I will have more energy than I have. I always think life will not throw me obstacles the way it does. Always.

In other words, I have unrealistic expectations.

And that will always lead to disappointment.

Now, I don’t mean not to push myself to the fullest or to use this as an excuse to get lazy. Because, yes, I need to up my productivity where I can. But I need to get better at understanding when I actually CAN increase productivity and when I merely BELIEVE I can. Successfully parsing those two will result in a much healthier attitude.

By adjusting my expectations, I hope to gain more contentment in spending time with my daughter, lose the guilt of work left undone, and stop beating myself up so much.

So what about you? Do you lay unrealistic expectations on yourself?

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Gans Family Reunion 2016: Blood Is Thicker…

July 28, 2016 By Kerry Gans 2 Comments

I attended the 2016 Gans Family Reunion this past weekend. This is the 3rd such reunion, over the span of almost 10 years. Prior to the first one, I knew very few of my Gans relatives—they were names in a family tree, elusive cousins who existed somewhere in the wilds of Haverford.

Once upon a time, my great-grandfather George married Catherine. He had 2 sons and a daughter that survived to adulthood. His wife Catherine died in the 1918 flu epidemic, when her youngest child, my grandfather, was only 3 years old. George married Helen some six months later, and with her he had 2 daughters and a son.

Although we cannot know the family dynamic, we do know that the younger children did not know for some time that the older children were not full siblings. We also cannot know Helen’s feelings for her husband’s first children. All we know is that when my grandfather Bill married my grandmother, my great-grandfather disowned him. The story is that it was because my grandmother was not Catholic, but many feel that was a convenient excuse to cover whatever deeper issues prompted the move.

The rift was not a complete sunder—my eldest uncle remembered his first cousins, and they remembered him. My father remembers being at my great-grandfather’s house on one occasion, and my great-grandfather letting them into the movie theater where he worked for free. Once my grandfather moved his family from Haverford to Ocean City, though, the gap widened as distance took its toll.

Still, tenuous ties remained. My eldest uncle would stop in and see his cousins when in the area. He attended an earlier Gans reunion, which sparked the ember. Finally, my father’s first cousins decided on a full Gans Family Reunion. They were all getting older, and what did some falling out 70 years ago matter anymore? All the participants were long dead.

Gans cousins 1950

And thus the first Gans Family Reunion happened. Everyone had such a great time, they have repeated it twice since. Several of us from different branches of the family are interested in genealogy, so we shared information and continue to do so today. It was gratifying to find that the 3 of us had found the same family line—independent confirmation of our findings.

Nowadays, we have DNA to help in our genealogical research. My dad did a DNA kit already, and two of his first cousins are also going to do it. Hopefully they will all match!! Our Gans DNA is strong. Looking at the first cousins, the resemblance is striking. And people this time noticed how much even some of the 3rd cousins looked alike.

Gans Cousins 2011

I am so grateful for my Gans cousins for hosting these events, where distant cousins become not-so-distant. Blood truly is thicker than water, calling us together as time diminished whatever squabble had torn the family apart. I look forward to having more get-togethers in the future, where past, present, and future collide.

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Summer Slump: Is It September Yet?

July 21, 2016 By Kerry Gans Leave a Comment

I got the call yesterday. The Theater Camp my daughter was supposed to attend next week was cancelled because they didn’t have enough kids. My gal was disappointed–but I was the one near tears. Why? Because I just saw 10 hours of precious writing time vanish into thin air.

I’m in the summer slump.

I haven’t worked on my WIP since June 27th. Not a word. Chapter 50 is waiting for me. And waiting. And waiting.

Between running my gal to swim lessons, teaching at her summer camp, shopping for a new car, and entertaining my daughter, I have had no time for anything other than the necessities.

Mostly I’ve been doing marketing. Blogging, sending requests to reviewers, setting up appearances, and lining up beta readers for another WIP. Yes, I realize that if I stopped blogging I would have more time to write, but a) I like blogging and b) right now I get more name recognition for that than my books.

So, I am wrestling with the guilt I always deal with. When I’m chilling with my gal, all I can think about is the work I’m not doing, and when I’m working I think I’m neglecting my daughter. This is probably typical for working moms, but I think it’s magnified during the summer slump when my daughter is home more frequently.

Once you move into the published side of writing, there is an incredible amount of pressure to churn out material. Everything you read implies that the most successful authors are the ones with many books. Having my writing come to a complete halt (when I am already slow) adds to the pressure. On the other side, being a mom is always a pressure-intensive job. I feel like I’m being squeezed in a vise between the two. It’s not pleasant.

I think I need to just accept that I’m going to write almost nothing for the next six weeks. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but if I keep striving for the impossible I will grow resentful. Not the way I want to spend the summer with my daughter. I want to enjoy our time together, as I know soon enough she will be making summer plans of her own and I will never see her.

In future years, I will try to structure my writing year with this “summer slump” in mind. I will try to schedule as much marketing and other tasks I can do in snatches of time for this time of summer.

So I’m going to take a few deep breaths and see what happens.

How do other parent-writers survive the summer months?

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Follow Me

Back To School

Summer is a Beach

Authors Showcase, Ocean City, NJ

A Powerful Message to Our Children

Children: Not Just a Mini-Me

BOOK TRAILER REVEAL + GIVEAWAY FOR JOSHUA AND THE ARROW REALM!

Beta Readers: A Vital Part of the Process

Productivity and Expectations

Gans Family Reunion 2016: Blood Is Thicker…

Summer Slump: Is It September Yet?

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