Wednesday WOLF

I've got a collection of random information in my brain that makes me an awesome Trivial Pursuit partner, but is completely useless when it comes to real world application. Like say, job applications. I thought I'd share some of this random crap with you in the form of another acronym-ific series. I give you - Word Origins from Left Field - that's right, the WOLF (oh, how clever is she? She made an acronym out of her agency's name!) Er... ignore the fact that the "from" doesn't fit.

Last week I was racing around securing anything that could blow away outside and referred to it mentally as battening down the hatches. Because I'm a major dork, I immediately wanted to know where that came from, even though there was a funnel cloud heading my direction.

I knew it was from sailing (and man do we get a LOT of stuff from them) but I didn't know specifically how it applied. A hatch I've got covered because I watched Swiss Family Robinson a lot as a kid. For those of you who aren't so blessed, a hatch is basically those little wood gratings that flip up, leading down into the underbelly of the ship where the men sleep. It's grated instead of having a solid cover because... well, because men smell bad.

The battening part comes in when a storm is expected. Everyone goes below deck and the grated hatches are covered with a tarp to prevent the water from coming in, and the edges of the tarp were weighted down with wooden strips called battens. 

After reading all this, my next question is... if everyone is below deck, who does the battening???

A BBCHAT with Emily Keyes of The L Perkins Agency

A new BBCHAT awaits you! For my new followers, this is an acronym for BigBlackCat's Humane Agent Talk: In Which A Particularly Agreeable Agent Answers a Series of Questions that Have Nothing to do with Queries or Submission Guidelines. Yeah, don't try to make an acronym out of that last bit.

The BBCHAT is designed to get the personality of the agent in the spotlight, and an enterprising querier can use this information to figure out if the agent is a good fit for them, rather than just another agent who happens to cover their genre. The last question involves something that oddly resembles a contest, and ties in with the blog name.

Today's guest for the BBCHAT is Emily Keyes. Emily has a growing list of clients and is also the Contracts and Foreign Rights Manager at the L. Perkins Agency. She’s very passionate about YA, teen and middle grade novels and is looking to acquire in those areas. Follow her on Twitter for some great publishing talk!

What are you reading right now and why do you like it? 

I just finished BETTER NATE THAN EVER by Tim Federle. I liked it because it felt like a new story I hadn’t read before, because the main character (a boy in middle school who doesn’t yet know if he’s gay or straight, but loves musical theater) isn’t a protagonist you see a lot of. It also reminded me why I kind of love New York City, and why I’m privileged to live here, which is nice because I need perspective to keep me from being grumpy and negative.

Paper or plastic?

I’d say paper. I like actually having the books that I love. But I do really enjoy my e-reader for reading manuscripts and submissions—it saves on so much paper waste.

What's on your bucket list?

My actual list of things to do one day are pretty boring (for example, “redesign website,” “maybe get teeth whitened”). I would like to travel more. My new thing is that I want to go to a conference in all 50 of the states. I have a jpeg and I color in the states I’ve been to in Paint, because I am strange. But I also want to go abroad more—that would probably be personal time.

Have you ever ridden a mechanical bull? (It’s on MY bucket list, so that's why it's here).

I have not, but now I’m really sad about it.

If you had a guaranteed sell, what type of story would you like to represent?

I realize this is not specific, but I would like to sell the kind of book that ten or twenty years from now, some now-adult will remember with such clarity they can remember details like they read it yesterday. So many stories are told and then forgotten. I’d just really like to work on something that stays. (It could be a small thing, for instance, whenever you got to the Metropolitan Museum of Art you have to look in the fountain and see how much change is in there because you’ve read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and know that is how little kids living in the Met pay for their sandwiches. Rest in Peace, EL Konigsburg.)

Lastly, Emily has provided three facts about herself... except one of them is a lie. Vote for the lie in the Rafflecopter below and the winner will receive an e-copy of MY LIFE AS A LUMBERJACK: OR HOW I FELL FOR THE WRONG GUY by Sara V. Olds, a lucky writer who can call herself Emily's client!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

When Life Hands You A Derecho, Make A Wood Cord -- Or, Life Lessons from Irish Farmers

Those of you who follow me on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook know that I recently lost an entire building on my property to a nasty-bad storm. When I say nasty-bad, what that means is that there were very large items flying through the air at high speeds. One of them was a tree, and it hit my shed. The shed is no more. The good news is that I had recently toyed with the idea of turning that shed into a chicken coop and becoming a chicken-person. Because of general hem-hawing on my part, that never came about, and the would-have-been chickens were saved from being crushed by simply not existing in the first place.

The storm itself was a derecho - it's kinda like all the benefits of a tornado without the bother of a  funnel cloud - except I almost scored one of those, too. The boyfriend and I were peering at some rotation up in the sky when he suddenly bolted outdoors, camera in hand. This is one of the non-plusses of having a photographer for a boyfriend. Nervous for his safety and somehow feeling I could stop a funnel cloud from touching down if I were right next to him, I went outside too, and got stuck staring up at something really mesmerizing that had the ability to kill me in a split second if it felt like it.

Luckily for me it was feeling benevolent and passed over, but there was another cell that was taking some dance lessons from it, and decided to try out that whole rotation thing. It was right over my parent's house, which I can see from my house, and my sister can see from hers. Suddenly my phone rings and it's Sister, calling to say that there's a storm-spotter in her driveway and they're filming. So I rush inside, turn on the TV and there's Mom and Dad's house. Sister and I are so excited we call them to tell them to turn on the channel we're watching so they can see their house on the news. Oh, and also that there was a funnel cloud forming above them.

And that was the extent of our excitement for the evening. There was another line of storms coming at us, but it was loving on Illinois at the time, scheduled for a 1 AM rendezvous with Ohio. So I battened down the hatches, brought in wind chimes, pre-emptively put pets in the basement and then considered the ethical question of what to do with my car.

I don't have a garage. I always park in the driveway, directly under a big tree. My car is always covered with bird poop, but that's not part of this story. It's over 10 years old, makes noises it shouldn't, and is dedicated to going left of center when I'm not interested in doing so. So my moral dilemma is this - I know there's a storm coming, and I always park my old, insured car under a big tree. Can I conceivably leave it there when I have perfectly serviceable outbuildings?

My conscience won't let me. I put it in a big barn that was possibly built by a guy named Noah. It's that old, and that sturdy.

Sleep comes. Derecho comes. Sleep goes. Outbuilding goes. Barn stays. Car stays. Massive branch as thick as my body that fell over 30 feet lands where the car normally would've been. My conscience feels good, but my common sense is screeching.

Sister shows up with her husband and my cousin the next morning, and everyone gets out their toys. With our multiple chainsaws, machines to drag debris, and my log-splitter we clean up everything in about four hours. We feel good, we feel pretty accomplished, we have some beers. We make a wood cord that will keep my house warm for a solid month this winter, which is my revenge on the tree.

And yesterday the transmission went out on my car.

Conscience, I shake my fist at you.