Life, editing, and the dreaded Query Letter

I've been remiss in keeping up with this blog writing thing, not that I was managing it all that often to begin with. At best I managed a post a month. I've no idea how people do this on a daily basis and still have a life. More than once a day and they are just blogging fools. Unless of course it's what you do for a living and you somehow make money off of it, or just love it that much, then more power to ya.

I lost my job and you'd think with all that extra time on my hands, I'd have been able to update. But no. Stress has a funny way of killing creativity. There's still stress. I'm still unemployed. Maybe I'm used to the extreme level of it now. I just keep on keeping on, somehow, managing my way down the highway, one foot in front of the other. I remain undefeated. Broke, but hey, the power is still on. So here I am, blabbing away, and I'm blabbing about something I can't do without - and that is writing.

The book is finished. I've edited and tightened as much as I think I can based on beta reader input. It is polished. It is done. Been in the oven and came out smelling like egg, cheese and sausage casserole. Now, it's time to send it out the door. Feed the masses if you will.

There is a fair amount of fear in this process of letting go and moving on to a different project. The grip I've had on this baby has been iron hard, forged of steel, unrelenting. Having someone else read it and like it, even while suggesting improvements broke the grip a little, eased the hard edges. Now after a couple beta readers, some needed confidence in my ability to tell a story, I'm okay with some people not liking it and happy when others do.

That's a milestone actually in the life of a writer - recognizing the strength of your own words. No one else can write like you, in your voice, with your style and cadence. There is a danger of listening to too many outside voices and changing words to suite what they think over what you think. It's one thing if you've got several different people saying this one element does not work. It's another if it's one out of five. The uncertain writer will alter, edit and refit a story based on those multiple suggestions and after all that work wonder why it isn't any better.

In the editing process it's important to keep in mind your own goals. You can't change every other word because someone is skimming. If they don't understand what you are saying, take a look at the work, but if the writing is clear, well then, they just don't understand. And that is okay. Someone else will.

So the editing is done. Any writer might want to hang onto that last step since what's next is so way worse than writing a whole book.

The query letter.

A query letter is the sales pitch to the agent, the new first readers of the industry, meant to get them to read your manuscript over the hundreds of other manuscripts out there. This dastardly letter has to work or you end up in the reject pile.

Some say the query letter is the hardest, most exacting and demanding process in this long road to being published. Pretty accurate. Just when I think I have it, someone comes along and says, well no you don't, there's no voice here, I don't give a crap about your character because this query is only a list of things that happen that tell me nothing about him. What does he do? What does he care about? Ugh!

It's a real pain distilling 83,000 words down to 250. And because the writer is far too close to the work, it's especially difficult to tell if those 250 words tell what needs to be told. The writer knows the story backward and forward. There's a lot going on from Chapter 1 to Chapter 27. Instilling character and detail and a two sentence summary in only 250 words is like trying to sift a single nugget of gold out of a mile-wide riverbed.

The best advice I've gotten so far, the key to writing a good query is to be in the head of your main character with every word. Would he say that? Would the character describe the story that way? Of course, this is easier said than done, but it's good advice. I've gotten a couple good sentences out of that advice so I'm taking it. It cleared up for me where other advice didn't what 'voice' means. Another good bit to think about as you write the next best seller, is writing that query letter. Take notes. Jot down ideas along the way as your craft the story. It might not be a bad idea to write a query letter at the very beginning and go back to it to make sure you're staying on track.

The other best piece of advice I got is to be careful of taking every piece of advice. There's lots of it out there. I don't have a perfectly written query, not by a long shot, but I've seen very good ones completely torn apart by nitpicking. The goal is to get the agent interested enough to read the pages you've sent along. Have faith in your ability to tell your story. Take the advice you can work with. Leave the rest. Query on!

Being read

So I've got a beta reader reading my story - a first for me. I've been looking for readers to give me feedback. I'm too close to the story, to the mechanics of it, to each word on the page to see where it doesn't flow well, or if I've used a particular word too often or if it doesn't make any sense! So many people are afraid to give constructive feedback, but writers need to know that the story is readable. If its interesting to someone else, well that's great. If it's good, if it's enthralling to them - icing on the cake. No, it's an amazing, wonderful, darn right cool experience to have someone read your work and they like it enough to keep going. She likes the characters. She gets them the way I intended for them to be understood. What a relief that is! She doesn't hate my style of description. Awesome.

It's a learning process too - damn, that learning thing keeps happening no matter how much I think I already know. No matter how carefully I think I've read the book for grammatical errors, my beta reader is finding more of them. Not a lot, thank goodness. I learned I'm using the word 'because' too often. I already knew I used 'that' too much and incorrectly, but she's finding them too. I love that she is finding mistakes. Sounds weird but it's what I need - really good mistake finders who aren't afraid to say this is no good here! You didn't put a comma there. This name has been used before somewhere so you need to change it.

Speaking of being read, my son's language arts teacher is allowing him to bring the kindle to school so he can read one of the books that's on it. One day, I hope all the books ever written will be available in electronic form, including the 20 pounds of text books my kids have to lug around. I know there's still the controversy and some writers just won't let it happen, but you know, save the trees people.

I'm re-reading, or trying to re-read one of my favorite books, The Sword of the Lamb, by M.K. Wren, book one of the Phoenix Legacy. Been trying to get my daughter to read it but she's got so much reading to do for school, she can't read for fun. She's writing her own book, or actually has written her own book, finished it and is editing it while she's getting started on the second. Not bad for a 17-year-old. Maybe once she's graduated it'll be easier to find time for reading. Maybe not. I'm not finding much time for it either.

Speaking of time...chores are calling.

Finished! But wait, there's more

I finished the massive rewrite I undertook on my YA Fantasy, bringing it in at 82K and 25 chapters. See before the rewrite I'd gone to this fabulous website called Absolute Write or AW, where the very best critiquers eat, sleep and live, who gently informed me that I didn't have a story. And after swallowing that one down with a little bit of ice cream and cake I determined that yes indeed, they were right. My main character didn't have a purpose. He didn't have something to do other than live through it and that just wasn't good enough. So I wrote him a shiny new story and gave him a huge purpose, a couple of obstacles to test his mettle and I managed to retain the original scope, themes and basic story line of the original while I toiled away.

Now onto the 'wait there's more' part. There's always more, isn't there?

The last two chapters were torture to write, probably because sleep deprivation makes it hard to think straight much less write well. Maybe it was the idea that I was almost finished that slowed me down. I got there after many days of staring at a blank page and eating more ice cream than is a good for me.

And now I have to...here it comes....edit.

Cutting, trimming, tossing out the extraneous bs that ends up between the important stuff is not a lot of fun, but a necessary self-check. Editing is the polishing cloth you put to the silver to rub off the tarnish that's obscuring your brilliant prose. I'm going to try and keep that in mind as I juggle the day job, the kids, the house, the bills, pets who pee on the floor, life, etc., while I make this baby shine. I hope it's more fun than the last two chapters.

Writing is learning

What makes writing so interesting and exciting and sometimes frustrating is in the act of creating, either on a discussion board, or blog or writing the next best selling novel, the discovery of what you don't know. Because of what I don't know, I've learned a lot about what I don't know. I've learned how to find where that information is and then learned about what I was looking for. My new mantra to my kids is google it. (sorry all you other search engines out there, google is it) I'm not sure how much they appreciate the ease of this knowledge gathering. It used to be you had to have an encyclopedia set and if you weren't lucky enough to own one, you had to go to the library and hope they had what you were looking for, if you could even get to the library - walking up hill both ways in the snow. I still have the World Book Encyclopedia set my parents bought back in the 60's. There's probably little in it that's accurate today since so much of the world has changed. Our knowledge of the universe has increased ten-fold.

Today I got into a discussion with a friend about immigration and because I knew very little about it, had to look quite a lot up, specifically about the Arizona immigration law that has so many people in an uproar. I wanted specifics because if I'm going to have a discussion I want to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of what I'm talking about. I learned that New York City, LA, and Chicago have roughly the population of the estimated number of illegal immigrants in this country, or about 20 million people. This led me to wonder how on earth do you deport that many people, especially since the deportation process takes so long - up to 6 months and sometimes even longer. So I learned a little something about immigration, just enough to know it's a huge, immensely difficult situation that we've managed to get ourselves into and I've little hope it'll get fixed to anyone's satisfaction. Such is the political climate we live in.

Another search for my writing involved mythology and religion, two subjects I thought I didn't know much about but turns out I have a kind of ingrained knowledge since I discovered I've been writing quite a bit about mythology without really knowing it. My that was a long sentence. Ought to look up grammar maybe. I was trying to find another name for demon and came up with Belial, also Belhor, Baalial, Beliar, Belias, Beliall, Beliel, Bilael and so on. I learned that Belial is one of the four crown princes of Hell - I didn't know Hell had crown princes to begin with, so that was a bonus learning moment. I found out that Belial is present across a number of religious beliefs. Also interesting. Not sure if I'm going to use the name or not because I don't want there to be religious comparisons between my story and Christianity even though there probably would be if anyone ever has the chance to read the thing. There is it turns out a lot of religious symbolism and reference in the story, which I didn't consciously mean to put in there, or be about religion at all. That is what sometimes happens with writing - it just goes where it wants.

That is the joy of writing - it goes where it wants and you, the writer, have only to follow and let it take you to places you've never been, where you learn what you didn't know.

Fitting in writing

How do people write and work a 'real' job at the same time? Not having the best luck figuring that one out. There's no time! I get ideas in the middle of the day just when there's not a computer in sight. By the time I get home, poof! Gone! Maybe I should start taking a small notebook in to inconspicuously write this stuff down. Doubt that will work. And then there's the exhaustion factor, as in too tired to think straight much less string together coherent thoughts on paper.

Speaking of...It's time for bed.

The Non-Conformist

It’s the eve of meteorological spring. Thank the good Lord for that. I feel positively Russian.

I didn’t write today, reading a few snippets of my book instead. When I wrote it, I didn’t intend for it to be a YA fantasy even though two of the main characters are 15. Upon consulting the ‘industry’ I was told that in order for my book to be YA it had to have this, that and that and in order for it to be considered ‘adult’ it shouldn’t have those or the other thing. The more I learn about markets and publishing the more I see that there’s a pervasive rigidity to the business. Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the signs?

I have more than one story going on that doesn’t fit neatly into the YA category, or any other category, or someone else’s view of how a book ought to be written. The question I have to answer is do I drastically alter what I have written to satisfy the market view? Must we comply? Confirm and conform?

Maybe I should change markets and go for the adults. Everyone else of importance in the book is an adult. But on the other hand everyone else being an adult shouldn’t preclude the book being read by teenagers. That's really a burner for me, the dictum that in order to be a YA book the main character has to be a teenager. Beyond elementary school I don’t recall there being books for my specific age bracket. There were books that had sex in them that we weren’t supposed to read (but did anyway), otherwise everything was fair game. I read Robert Heinlein, who didn’t write for teenagers. I read Stephen King. Mary Stewart. M. K. Wren. Anne McCaffrey. Tolkien might have written The Hobbit for children, but he didn’t write The Lord of the Rings for teens. The characters those authors wrote about were adults, but as a teenager I read them all. I wonder if that isn't as true now as it was then. When did we start categorizing to such a degree anyway?

I’m not exactly a rule-breaker by nature, but I don’t believe in too much conformity either. We, as different, individual people don’t fit into rigid categories. How can we expect our books to do the same?

A day of beginnings

Today I decided to create a new blog about my experiences with writing. I'm at a difficult place in my writing and need to step back. At the same time, I'm not really happy not writing at all - thus the creation of a blog about these difficulties that might help solve some problems and keep the creative juices flowing at the same time. Kill two birds.

Speaking of birds - they are eating a massive quantity of birdseed this winter. Must be because of the massive amount of snow cover that lingers and lingers. Come on Spring. I think the birds would agree.

Today I'm learning how to make a blog. Thank goodness for templates. I've yet to learn how to make a website. I suppose that'll be next on my things to learn how to do list. I made a previous blog about my old house but haven't done a good job keeping up with it. I hope to do better with this one.

Writing is what I know. It's hard to prove you know it unless you're published which is a goal extremely difficult to achieve. Writing is what I want to do and I hear that no matter what I should continue writing. Reach for the dream. Of course I want to be published. I haven't met a writer yet who doesn't. I'd like to be well-read, not necessarily famous, though I'm not going to turn that down if it happens. I'd like to have an income derived from writing. Trying to make a living doing what you love to do is a dream many people strive for. I'd like to believe that hard work alone will make it happen but it's likely going to take so much more than that. Fate? Luck? The right place and the right time?

I'll keep you posted.