About Me

For information about this blog, please see One Thousand and One Nights: The Frame

#PITCHWARS 2016!

Dear Mentors and fellow entrants of #PitchWars 2016,

Hello,

It’s me.

I was wondering if after I submit, you’d like to meet.

To go over, my writing.

They say that mentors are good for ya, and I could be a great mentee.

 

Hello, want to meet me?

My name is Christyl Rosewater and I like to write MG.

My MCs are younger… twelve, thirteen.

I write low fantasy and magical realism stories.

 

There’s so much to learn, between us, and a million words…

 

HELLO FROM THE MG SIIIIIIIIIDE

IN CHILDREN’S LIT I’VE GOT SOME PRIIIIIIIDE

IN MY KNOWLEDGE AND LOVE OF FICTIONAL BOOKS

I’VE STUDIED BOTH CRIT, AND CREATIVE WORKS

 

HELLO FROM THE MENTEE SIIIIIIIDE

AT LEAST I CAN SAY THAT I’VE TRIIIIIIIED

TO TELL YOU HOW STRONG AND FIERCE I WILL BE

WHEN IT COMES TO EDITS AND REWRITING

 

Okay…that’s as far as that song is going to get. BIG thanks to Lana Patterson for hosting the blog hop this year! Please CLICK HERE to check it out and explore the bios of some amazing entrants!

I feel like if Pitch Wars happened over a hundred years ago this would be us

SOME FUN FACTS about me:

• I grew up in the New Mexican desert, aside from one year in fourth grade when my parents moved to Oregon to be closer to their parents but later decided that was a bad idea. We slipped back into our same house, same jobs, same schools when we returned.

Beautiful Sandia Mountains over Albuquerque. Sandia means “watermelon.”

• I went away to Wellesley College on the east coast where I pretended to be not interested in writing because I was intensely afraid of other people laughing at my dream. Instead I double majored in theatre studies and psychology. Those subjects actually help a lot when it comes to writing.

We called it “Swellesley.”

• Instead I acted and directed in an all-female Shakespearean troupe. It was an amazing experience and the other members will always be family.

Our “mask & quill” emblem, both on the Shakespeare Haus as well as on me!

• Upon graduating I decided I would actually try at what I loved to do, and pursued an MA in Children’s Literature. I took many classes and found special interests in magical realism, oral storytelling, the fantastic, and treasure hunt picture books. I graduated with my degree from Hollins University in the spring of 2014.

Awesome sign on Hollins campus

• I have one play published that has been performed in high schools around the east coast. It’s called Open Position and is about an intern that masquerades as the boss of a company when his own boss is called away. I wrote it under my maiden name (Christyl Watters.)

BTM sponsored the opening of Open Position

• I have a been a middle school teacher for four years and I love working with 11, 12, and 13 year olds. I have taught 8th grade English but my forte is 6th grade drama.

 

Some brilliant sixth graders leading themselves through warm-up.

• I have an adorable border collie mix. Her real name is Sadie but I sometimes call her “La Rue” after Mark Teague’s picture book titled Dear Mrs. LaRue. The actual dog in the book is named Ike, but Sadie looks more like a La Rue to me. Of course, I am terrible with proper nicknames anyway. I also call Sadie “silvery minnow” because when I’m excited pretty much any combination of words will come out of my mouth.

 

The majestic silvery minnow out for an evening desert run.

• I also have a husband. He doesn’t read or critique my work because I have other people for that, but he loves to watch me walk in circles all over the house talking to myself with a notebook in hand.
  • (Side note: when we met his last name was Rose and mine was Watters and we combined so both of our last names are now Rosewater.)

Us in front of spectacular sculptures created by Patrick Dougherty

• I also love to draw!

Prismacolor is my jam

• This blog was created just over a year ago when I was naive and thought I’d have enough time to be a teacher AND work my tail off on manuscripts AND also write one short story a week. I can’t will myself to start the blog over, however, because I think a lot of great seeds are spread out in the almost 40 stories I’ve written thus far.

The image that inspired my first post on The Story Challenge

 

WRITING BACKGROUND:

• I have three wonderful CPs, all met over Twitter, along with a handful of reliable beta readers.
• I’m a member of SCBWI and attend the monthly meetings held in Albuquerque.
• I LOVE getting feedback and I take critique seriously. More than anything else in the world, I want to make my work better.
• I am working on four manuscripts, all in separate stages. One of them won a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt sponsored contest and received a full read by an editor. She loved it and wanted revisions, so I made them. Six months later they didn’t take the book, I collected my tears in a jar, and effectively ended New Mexico’s 20+ year drought. Okay that didn’t really happen. She said they would be open to seeing new things from me, so I’ve kept that offer in my back pocket. The four manuscripts are:
  • KALEIODSCOPE (Won the HMH contest, received a lot of interest from agents, ultimately the protagonist was not likeable (oof). Currently on the back burner.)
  • ANTVENTURE (Solid rough draft from 2015 that needs to be rewritten.)
  • DOPPELGANGER (Will be submitted for #PitchWars 2016! More info below.)
  • WHERE OUR KNEES ARE POINTING (I’m in the middle of researching and writing this one. It’s a delicate baby bird of story at the moment.)

 

ABOUT MY SUBMISSION:

I see two woman touching palms. What do you see?

• DOPPELGANGER is a middle grade contemporary with magical realism, told in first person present tense, and is 52k words long.
• DOPPELGANGER follows a 12-year-old protagonist with vitiligo as she moves across the country to an unexpected reception. It does feature a doppelganger, and is based off of my childhood experience when we moved to Oregon.
• DOPPELGANGER has two comps: David Almond’s SKELLIG and Katherine Erskine’s MOCKINGBIRD.
• DOPPELGANGER was first completed during a writing seminar I led with high school seniors. The earliest rough draft was written within a month because I was jealous of always missing out on NaNoWriMo, so I created my own.
• DOPPELGANGER is my heart. It’s a piece of me, and I want nothing more than for someone who believes in it to tear the story apart so I can rebuild it word by word and create the strongest manuscript possible.

 

MY PERSONAL FAVORITES:

• Movies: Chocolat, Little Women, Pride & Prejudice, Vertigo, Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain, Grand Budapest Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom, You’ve Got Mail, Spirited Away, The Princess Bride…

 

• Books: The Book Thief, The Princess Bride, The Hobbit, The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler, Coraline, A Wrinkle In Time, When You Reach Me, Out of the Dust, One Crazy Summer, The Haunted Bookshop, Holes, The Clockwork Three, Marcelo and the Real World, Matilda, Harriet the Spy, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brown Girl Dreaming…

 

• Authors: Neil Gaiman, J.R.R. Tolkein, Ursula Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Jacqueline Woodson, Francisco Stork, Karen Hesse, Rebecca Stead…

 

• Mentors: …YOU

 

Thank you for reading!