Tag Archives: writing

I have a good excuse this time…

If it seems like a long time since my last post, you’re not imagining things: I haven’t managed to post an update since I started my new job.

Which I love.

But nothing in life is free, which means that that which I am loving also comes with a few sacrifices: a more-horrible-than expected evening commute; less hubby, family, friends, and personal time; more stress; and, of course, less time for my own writing, including this blog.

But, in spite of a crazy weekend (which included an on-site assignment all day Saturday–sigh–and my first-ever TV interview–hooray!), I was hellbent that this blog would be updated before I went to bed Sunday night. And since staying awake past 9:00 p.m. is also included on the sacrifice list, it’s now or never.

The battles against traffic, parental guilt, and the eternal work-life balance are nothing new to many of you out there, but they have certainly intensified for me since my return to work full-time. However, although the last few weeks have been an enormous adjustment for me and my family, I think, on the whole, it’s been a positive experience for all of us (though how something so good for me could leave me so exhausted is still a mystery to me. I mean, other than running 10K races, which are also good for me and which also leave me exhausted. Coincidentally–no deliberate lead-in attempt here whatsoever–I’m doing another 10K on June 30th. Please visit this link if you want to support me: http://support.childrenscancer.org/site/TR/Events/General?px=1459792&pg=personal&fr_id=1190. I’m running in honor of my son’s dear friend, who died at age 7 from a brain tumor; this race races money for pediatric brain cancer. But I digress–hugely).

The TV interview I did today was exciting; could not believe how nervous I was. The lights! The camera! The lack of advance questions–eek! It was for the “It’s A Woman’s World” show on SPNN 6 out of the Twin Cities, and they were interviewing me about what it’s like to be a writer. Hope I didn’t embarrass myself too thoroughly. At least I didn’t throw up, which was my goal. Once it’s up and running, look for the link here.

My apologies for how disjointed and short this is–I usually like to put a little more thought into my posts, but (sigh) perhaps that–thought?–is another thing to add to the list of sacrifices. I hope not. Maybe I sound a little negative, but please don’t get the wrong impression–it’s only that it’s getting close to my bedtime, and I get cranky right around this time every night. Yep, cranky. Like a big, whiny baby just needing her bottle and her bed. Only skip the milk for mine…

Life is good–crazy, challenging, but good, good, good.

And the beat goes on…

Where was I? Ah, yes. updates. I haven’t done much since the last post. I’ll cop to it: I could not muster any enthusiasm for queries the last couple of weeks. But today, I forced myself back to the task and found myself surprisingly energized. I’ll blame the Bloomington Writers’ Festival I attended last weekend for that–a great event, and very motivating.

So where are we today? According to my submission spreadsheet, I’m up to 8 total queries, 3 of them completed today. It’s such a time-consuming endeavor, these queries, and I’m not even talking about the wait to hear back from anyone. I would feel guilty complaining about that after listening to one literary agent speak at the festival this weekend about receiving 3,000 queries a month. I understand why it can take a very long time to hear back about a submission with that kind of work load.

No, the time-consuming part for me is, and always has been, that each agency is so different in what they require. Take 2 of the 3 I completed today (hopefully someone will). One was very old-school: snail-mail only, absolutely nothing by e-mail, and roughly 60 pages–query letter, synopsis, and 3-chapter sample–to print out and send. Just the printing took half an hour! And of course, then I opened my address book only to find I had used my last stamp yesterday. Grumble, grumble…Add in a trip to buy stamps.

The other agency could not have been more different: e-mail only, no attachments, don’t send us any paper or we’ll hunt you down and horse-whip you and make sure you’re never represented by anyone. (I added that last part, though it was clearly implied in the submissions FAQ.) Sigh. Why can’t they all be like that? Minus the horse-whipping, of course.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed trying to follow each agency’s specific directions, which is probably why I took a couple of weeks off. But then I started trying to think of the steps as a sort of quest, a test of my endurance and my determination. Maybe, just maybe, if I jump through all these hoops they lay out, this’ll be the one that bites. Not in a pejorative sense (though this process definitely does)–I mean like the big fish biting at the hook I’ve so painstakingly buried within those reams of paper.

Here, fishy, fishy, fishy…stay tuned.

 

The 877th Time is the Charm

Surely it hasn’t been that many, has it? 

Queries, that is. Well, it can certainly feel that way. But once again, I am embarking on that same old journey to publication, but this time, I’m riding a brand-new wagon!

C. and I finished our edits, and I think the manuscript is worlds better than it was when we started, so I am much more optimistic about finding an agent or a publisher this time around, more so than I have been since I wrote my very first query letter.

Now the real work begins. (I bet you thought the hard part was writing the novel, didn’t you?)

Submission-tracking spreadsheet? Check.

2012 Writer’s Market? Check.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Book Proposals & Query Letters? Um. No. I skipped that one. I already feel enough like an idiot without broadcasting it to the world by buying a book titled to confirm it. Uncheck.

Here we go. For those of you unfamiliar with the process, let’s review the steps:

1.) Research the market.

2.) Research the specific agent/publisher to whom you wish to submit.

3.) Craft the best damned query letter you can (after, of course, having written the best damned book you can write)–if you don’t know what that looks like, see The Complete Idiot‘s reference book mentioned above.

4.) Research the agent/publisher’s guidelines and follow them to the letter.

5.) Wait.

6.) Wait.

7.) Wait.

8.) Wait.

9.) Wait.

10.) Repeat steps 1-9 as needed with new agents/publishers until a.) published; b.) definitively rejected; c.) death.

Nah, I’m just yanking your chain. It’s not that bad–it can just feel that way sometimes. Let’s face it, it’s a competitive endeavor, and some agents receive hundreds of queries–perhaps thousands–every month. This is not an endeavor for the faint of heart.

But wait–this is the new optimistic me, so let me turn over a new leaf: I’ll say step 10 this time around will be “open celebratory bottle of champagne when offer is made by agent of choice.”

After all, tomorrow is another day, right? Stay tuned.

 

A rose by any other name…

Last month, I attended a meeting of a group of women writers I joined last fall. Our moderator (who also happens to be C., my editor) often brings interesting bits of industry news and great pieces of advice to our monthly meetings, and last month was no different. She had stumbled upon a web site devoted to book titles and suggested we visit it, for inspiration or a laugh, or, in my case, for cautionary examples.

 

As I was hell-bent on finishing the editing of my manuscript this month, I didn’t visit the site immediately, spending time instead with my new BFF Search and Replace (see last post). Well, the process went quickly, more quickly than I expected, and C. and I got to the point where we were ready to start talking about titles.

 

I’ve been working on this same manuscript for close to five years now, and it’s always had the same working title, but just because I kept it this long, doesn’t mean I was satisfied with it. So I asked C. for some input, which she graciously provided; I also toyed around with some new titles of my own. Ultimately, between the two of us, we came up with more than two dozen possible titles for my book. Egad! How am I supposed to make a rational decision with a list that long? I can’t even decide which pair of shoes to put on in the morning, some days!

 

So C. invited me to open my list up to our group for feedback. That was a tough thing for me to do—I’m still new to this supportive group feedback concept. I’m more familiar with the paradigm of submitting to professors, agents, and publishers and receiving in reply either the stony silence of utter rejection or a scathing retort indicating I should not quit my day job.

 

Imagine my surprise, then, when the group came up with not only a number of excellent title suggestions, but even went a step further to provide insightful, concise, and helpful feedback on the book pitch I’d shared with them as well. Each new message was a wonder.

 

Now, for those of you who have been following me from the beginning, you may recall my agreeing in earlier posts with writer Philip Roth, that writing should not be done by committee, but in this case, I feel I have really been missing something, and I am here to ‘fess up to it: Feedback is good. Feedback is not only good, it’s critical.

 

To be absolutely clear, I’m not referring here to the type of feedback you get from your best friend or your mother or the local librarian you bribed with a cup of coffee before sliding her your manuscript. I’m talking about skilled feedback from readers with critical eyes yet supportive touch; readers who can tell it like it is without breaking your heart in the process. Readers like my other new BFFs in my writers’ group.

 

So—the title. Have I decided yet? Nope. In the end, with all the feedback I received, I wound up with a handful of frontrunners and an additional 7 title suggestions. I have studied the list, narrowed it down to my top 3, and when I meet with my group this week, I plan on asking them for a straight vote. I’m hoping it will be less contentious than the GOP primary, but you never can tell—writers have strong opinions about everything.

 

I’m still shocked, however, that of all the things I’ve spent so much of the last few years writing, rewriting, and editing, it is the title that is causing me the most trouble.

 

In an effort to educate myself a bit more about good titles, I did go to the site our group leader recommended, and I’m glad I did, because there were some real doozies in there. Cooking with Pooh is my favorite from the list, an illustration of another important concept in writing, that of reading your work aloud to hear how it sounds.

 

All this focus on choosing the perfect title for my book brings to mind Shakespeare’s immortal lines, “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” He’s right, it would, but I guarantee, if the rose were called “Pooh,” a lot of people out there would never give it a sniff to verify if that’s really true.

 Yep. No doubt about it, titles are important, and I hope to have one locked in soon.

Search and Refine: My New BFF

I confess: I’m a technophobe.

Or, perhaps more accurately, I’m techno-resistant, which frustrates my geek husband to no end, poor thing. Up until roughly three years ago, I’d never sent a text, I still did all of my writing longhand on legal pads, and I had no idea how to use a GPS. All right, I still don’t know how to use a GPS.

I used to resist out of fear that I would irreparably harm whatever gadget happened to be at hand by pressing the wrong button, because, as we all know, modern technology always comes with a well-camouflaged but easily-activated self-destruct button.

Now, however, I think I resist because even though, on a rational level, I know there are faster, easier (and cooler) ways to accomplish my goals through the skillful use of technology, spending the time to learn those skills really irritates the crap out of me. And then, by the time I’ve learned them, the technology has already morphed into yet another version, which I then have to learn all over again. I don’t want my phone to do 800 different things; I just want it to make my call, for cryin’ out loud.

Yeah. Not a geek. But I know I need to catch up with the rest of the 21st century, so I am trying, even if I’m ridiculously slow to adopt, which brings me to the subject of today’s post, my recent introduction to the Search and Refine feature in Word as an editing tool.

All right, all of you out there laughing at how backwards I am: off with you! I’m speaking to my people now, those who still fight the persistent fear that they can make their laptops explode just by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Delete one too many times. (You can’t, by the way. I checked it out.)

As you may remember from my last post, I recently started working with an editor, hereafter referred to as “C.” Just like “Q.” and “M.” in the Bond movies, she’s fun to work with but she uses fewer pyrotechnics. C. is helping me prepare my manuscript for publication this year. When I first met with her last spring, she recommended I read the book Write in Style, by Bobbie Christmas. I gamely purchased a copy, read the subtitle, “Using Your Word Processor and Other Techniques to Improve Your Writing,” and promptly buried the book under a stack of files on my desk. Word processor. Harumph.

The book remained buried until I sent C. my first 5 chapters. She inquired if I had used the Search and Replace feature on my manuscript yet, (referred to in said book). Of course I hadn’t; that would’ve involved learning what those other buttons on “the ribbon” do. [Who names these things, anyway?]

C., who probably had me pegged from the start as a techno-resistant arse, appealed to my practical side instead. She suggested that if I used that technique before having her make her first editing pass, it would save me money, since I wouldn’t be paying her to make all those refinements. Moved by her gesture of self-sacrifice, I plugged my nose and decided to give it a shot.

C. provided me with a list of overly used words that she regularly sees in her work, and I set out to search the first 5 chapters of my manuscript for those awful offenders. I was skeptical (after all, my work is perfect as is), but as I searched, and discovered, offender after offender, my attitude soon changed.

I found instance after instance of those pesky little words—words like “only,” “just,” and, the mother of all offenders with 224 appearances, “so.” In all fairness to me, however, the search did turn up “so” not only when it stood alone, but also when it appeared within other words and expressions, like “masochist,” “sophist,” and “son of a b—.”

My reactions as I searched and replaced veered from “Holy cow, what was I thinking when I wrote that?” to “What was I drinking then?” and, on at least one occasion, “Clearly, I wasn’t drinking enough!”

When I finally finished the process (and keep in mind, this was just the first 5 chapters), I was broken, a shell of my smug former self—and a true convert. When I read back over those 5 chapters, the difference shocked me. It wasn’t just better; it was radically, drastically better, and I felt like an idiot for not having used the feature sooner.

Thank you, Peanut Gallery, for not providing confirmation.

My point to all of this?  I have learned that technology is not the enemy.

Wait. No, I still kind of think that.

How about…the enemy and I have called a truce? My fellow techno-resistant lambs, if you don’t yet use the Search and Refine feature in your writing and editing, it’s a superb tool for showing you where every little weakness in your work is hiding. It can’t fix them for you, you still have to put in that work yourself, but it pinpoints them in a fast, easy way that makes the revision process so efficient, you wonder (as with most technology), how you survived before you discovered it.

So thanks, C., for the suggestion—I’m setting off on my next Search and Refine mission now with the next 5 chapters, and feeling like a Lean, Mean, Writing Machine.

Oh, wait—you’re right, I did gain some weight over the holiday. Guess I’ll have to settle for Mean Writing Machine now instead.