Saying Yes to OPERATION YES

Our guest blogger today is Cheryl Klein, a senior editor at Arthur A. Levine Books (an imprint of Scholastic). After Cheryl moved to New York, she landed her dream job as Arthur Levine’s editorial assistant. She also worked as the continuity editor on the last three Harry Potter books. On Sept. 30 at noon ET, Cheryl will be hosting a live Twitter chat (#YESchat) with Sara Lewis Holmes, the author of Operation Yes. But, I’ll let Cheryl tell you how this unique relationship began (cue dream-like blur)…

Cheryl Klein as illustrated by Dan Santat,
artist on Bobby vs. Girls (Accidentally)

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In February of 2008, for the very first time, I acquired a manuscript from a blog.

I was pretty familiar with blogs by that point in time; I’d been writing cheerfully for three years on my own personal site, http://chavelaque.blogspot.com, and because many writers were interested in reading an editor’s thoughts on writing and the industry, I’d gotten to know a number of them through the comments. When a literary agent named Tina Wexler sent me a manuscript about a sixth-grade class on an Air Force base in North Carolina, she noted that the author had an active blog and website, and I thought, “Oh, that’s nice. She’s part of the conversation”—because to me the great pleasure of blogs is the conversation, the opportunity to talk about a subject for a bit and hear what other people think, and to listen to their stories in turn.

But I didn’t think much more about it until a week or so later, when I decided to read the author’s novel down in the Scholastic library, and fell instantly in love with it. The manuscript was bursting with smart, funny characters; brilliant little details (there’s a librarian who swears using children’s-book titles—“Frog and Toad!”, she shouts once); a timely storyline; and rich thematic concerns. The author not only painted a terrific portrait of the lives and psychology of military kids during the present wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, she explored the definition and uses of community in the world those kids created together in their classroom, led by their charismatic teacher Ms. Loupe. The manuscript made me think; it made me laugh. And just as the kids in the book learn to say “Yes” to the theatre exercises Ms. Loupe sets for them, I knew I wanted to say “Yes” to this book.

So I came back to my office and sat down at my computer to Google the author’s name: Sara Lewis Holmes. The first results took me to her website and blog, Read * Write * Believe, where I read through a few weeks’ worth of entries. Sara wrote about her passion for great children’s and YA novels, many of which were my favorites as well. She wrote poems for Poetry Friday that were full of beauty and fire. She analyzed the creative process with humor and truth, and she talked about her experience as a military mom, so she clearly had insider knowledge of the world she described in her novel. A good blog, like a good diary, reveals its creator’s true mind, and I liked the way Sara thought and wrote. More to the point, without our ever exchanging a word, I liked her, and I felt we would work well together thanks to our shared tastes and interests. When we chatted on the phone a few days later, I learned that she had been reading my blog for quite some time, so she was equally excited about working with me, and that mutual liking and respect was a great beginning to our author-editor relationship.

Based on my enthusiasm for her book, her blog, and Sara herself, I bought the manuscript in a two-book deal soon after that—an event Sara announced on her blog. We then set to work shaping and polishing the book that would become Operation Yes. Hints of this process trickled through to our blogs, of course: I noted that I enjoyed editing Sara’s book so much I even did it on my birthday, and I explained the process of writing its flap copy in a post here. When Sara wrote posts like “It’s All in the Manuscript” soon after receiving an editorial letter, I knew she was thinking hard and working away on the book, even when we weren’t in frequent contact. She highlighted her second-round edits, line-edits, and the copyediting process in later posts, culminating in this one, where she celebrates the arrival of the hardbound book in her hands.

Operation Yes officially debuted earlier this month, and it has received a starred review from Booklist and much love from Sara’s and my fellow bloggers, including The Reading Zone, the Old Coot, and Finding Wonderland. Over the last few months, our conversation has expanded from blogs to Twitter, where we both tweet away about our daily work activities, great kids’ books links, and random interests. As a result of this, we’re going to have a Twitter chat about the book, our writing and editing processes, our favorite Southern foods, and sundry other topics tomorrow (September 30) at noon EST, live on Twitter.com. To be part of it, follow our Twitter feeds @saralewisholmes and @chavelaque; the discussion will be marked with the hashtag #YESchat. If you can’t tune in then, you can read the transcript at one of our blogs soon after—and please join in the conversation yourself.

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Previously On Our Minds:

* Scholastic Hearts Book Bloggers
* A reminder that books matter
* What kind of books do boys like?