In Appreciation

My first manuscript, SOUL TIES, is complete, or at least for the most part. I still wake in the middle of the night with words I know I must add in specific passages, but it’s all minor at this point. Although it only took me a couple of months to write the first manuscript, it’s taken the better part of a year to truly finish it to a point where it’s ready to put out there. I made the same mistake many writers make on their first manuscript; I started the query process too soon, well before it was ready. Live and learn—learn being the operative word there. 

The manuscript I have now is very different from what I started with, and I have several people to thank for that. I’ve been fortunate in having great beta readers who took their duty very seriously. For the beta reading process to work, you need to find readers willing to say things that might be hard for you to hear. To grow as a writer, you must be willing to listen objectively and then figure out what you need to do to remedy those issues they raise. I wanted tough critics, and I was lucky to find a great group of savvy professional women who were all avid readers. With the exception of one, all my first readers were entrepreneurs, and I knew they understood how important truthful feedback could be to success. The one exception in that group happened to be a sitting judge, someone else who would have no trouble expressing her opinion. She happened to be a “blind reader,” set up by a mutual friend so neither of us knew the other. She would be free to be as critical as necessary, and that fact bolstered my confidence that her critique wouldn’t be tainted by friendship. I’m happy to say that I finally met her, and her excitement about the characters continues to spur me on every day. Each one of my betas has given me something invaluable, and I can’t begin to express how thankful I am for every one of you – you know who you are!

           

Another important group of people who deserve recognition is my classmates in Barbara Rogan’s Next Level Workshops. Her Revising Fiction workshop helped me tighten everything and give it that extra polish. Her submission workshop helped me craft multiple queries and synopses, because just one won’t do – each literary agent has specific things they look for in a query and synopsis. It wouldn’t be the story it is now without input from Barbara and the other writers in those classes. Writers make the toughest critics, but it’s amazing what they see and what you can learn from them. Two of my last beta readers came from that class and were gracious in their willingness to pour over the manuscript after my final revision after the workshop concluded. Each and every one of you has helped me refine this manuscript and also helped me build my confidence. Without that confidence, I'm not so sure I could go through this process. I thank each of you for that.

            

Finally, I’ve taken the scary step of putting it out there. In addition to sending out a few queries, I’ve entered it into RWA’s Golden Heart Contest and a couple of other RWA Chapter Contests.  I'll never know if this thing will fly if I don't push it out of the nest. The manuscript falls in the genre of Women’s Fiction, but it has strong romantic elements. The story is about two people who find each other when neither is interested in sharing their life with anyone else. Their emotional journey in discovering that they might need each other despite not being what the other wants is one fraught with conflict and tension, but sprinkled with laughter and love. In my next few posts, I’ll share more details and an introduction to my characters.

To Anniversaries and Time Well Spent

October is a month of anniversaries for me. The first week of October my husband and I celebrated our wedding anniversary, and this upcoming week I will celebrate another important milestone. It’s the first anniversary of my first blog post, my first query, and my first rejection.   

After ten rejections, I decided to pull back and reassess. I had great beta reader response to the characters and story, so what might I be doing wrong at the query step? What else might I be doing wrong? I knew I needed a professional to steer me in the right direction. Just as I did when I started my decorative finishing business over a decade ago, I needed to find a great teacher to guide me. The last thing I wanted to do was waste time. If I’m going to invest this kind of time in something, then I want to do it well.

Just as in fine art and decorative arts, there’s a big difference between the professional and the amateur that the untrained eye might not perceive. As I told one of my fellow decorative artists after I began to learn more about the craft of writing, “I had lap lines all over the place.” For those of you unfamiliar with the term ‘lap line,’ it is the ‘veining’ that you sometimes see in glaze work. If the artist can finesse them, they look like veins; if they can’t, they appear as darker lines and areas that ruin the look. Either way, they are something that marks an amateur. To the untrained eye, they might be interesting; but to the trained eye, they are a major mistake that make professionals cringe.

Fortunately, I found Barbara Rogan who taught me how to avoid those ‘lap lines.’ Barbara is a former literary agent, current teacher and editor, as well as author of eight novels. With her critique of my first twenty pages came an invitation to participate in her Revising Fiction Workshop, a once a year, invitation-only boot camp she offers to a select few with completed manuscripts. Boot camp is my name for it because that’s what it felt like. It was rigorous and intense for the eight participants who completed the course. We began in mid-June and finished a couple of weeks ago. I learned more in those four months than I did in all my college writing and literature classes. I may still commit some of those ‘lap lines,’ but now I know how to recognize them and correct them. I’ve also gained a circle of friends who are amazingly talented writers willing to share their time and wonderful stories. I look forward to seeing our collective progress over the next year. We all seem to be similarly obsessed with the craft of writing.

I love writing—much to my surprise, more than I love painting. It’s a very similar process for me, the under painting equivalent to my first draft, the subsequent detail and layering of light and shadow my fleshing out of the setting and characters. The last year was time well spent doing something I love. How can that ever be a waste of time?    

It's Been Awhile...

The last six months, I’ve been lost in a haze of addiction.

I admire people who can Twitter, Facebook, Blog, pursue their profession, and do all the necessary marketing to create their ‘platform.’ To those who can juggle it all, I congratulate you. I do not see how you do it. I had no idea when I pulled that old manuscript out of the chest of drawers what exactly I was about to get myself into. Thoughts of publishing and all that might include never entered my mind. Now, eighteen months later, I’m learning about ‘platform building’—a concept that is a bit unnerving to a very private person who has never been compelled to express her thoughts to the world.  I began to realize there is only one thing that would drive an introvert like me to put herself out there willingly—Addiction. 

Hello, my name is S. J.  I’m a wordaholic.

It started out as nothing more than an exercise, pulling that manuscript out and writing again. Before I realized it, something had clicked between my brain and my fingertips. It was the completion of a circuit that I had forgotten was there. Characters and scenes dropped into my brain and flowed so rapidly from my fingertips onto my laptop screen it was frightening—and amazingly pleasurable. It was like opening up a vein, the words flowed through me like a drug. 

I’ve read about the science of addiction, how once the pleasure center of the brain is stimulated by a particular activity it becomes impossible to control the desire to repeat the activity. In the last year, words have become my drug. Try as I might to set them aside and focus on more productive work, it is a struggle to do so. My only saving grace is that my income generating work is conducive to quiet contemplation, allowing me to lose myself in the movie playing in my head. These characters and stories demand my attention, bombarding me with their world. They make it impossible to do anything else until I give in and let it flow from my fingertips into a document. My focus narrows to such a point that I can only think of writing, the monkey on my back. 

So, here I am, building a platform…

Eating the Elephant

Most writers learn about the publishing industry and all that getting published entails well before they complete, or even start, a book.  Me, on the other hand, I came into the world backwards and continue my journey in a bassackwards kind of way. I didn’t even think about these things until the manuscript was complete. The day I actually sat down and started researching what my next step should be, I discovered I would be spending a lot of hours revising and rewriting. After that, I would have to tackle the dreaded query letter, then craft a concise and interesting synopsis.  And while I'm doing this, I needed to wade through hundreds of agents and find a good match who might be interested in what I'd written. Who said writing the book was the hard part?  If I ever find who said that I’m going to flog them. Writing the book was the easy part! 

I had no clue about queries, synopses, and literary agents.  I had no idea that between 80K and 120K words was the preferred size for a first manuscript.  Who knew that shelf space and paper costs played that much of a role in getting published.  For me, a 400 page novel is a quick read.  I’m one of those who skips over the thin books and goes for the nice long read; I want to live with characters for a while. Unfortunately, I write the same way I read.  Imagine my horror when I realized I had a 270K tome that had to be pared significantly, well beyond the obvious rewrite into two books. Needless to say, the day I learned these things I felt like beating my head against the wall. I went from the sheer joy of having finished a manuscript to complete and utter despair in a matter of minutes. 

Then I remembered the elephant.  How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time. So, that’s what I did; I focused on eating the damn elephant.  I gagged on it the first week of my new diet, then I started developing a taste for it the more I consumed. That was about three weeks ago. I trimmed all the fat from the book. If it didn’t move the story and play a significant role it got cut; if it could be rephrased more efficiently, it was. I was brutal. I rearranged, brought conflict and action to the fore; I did all the things I learned you are supposed to do. As a result, I have a much tighter book. Next, I tackled the query, where you condense the essence of the story into one or two intriguing paragraphs that will hook the reader and make them want to read more.  I never knew two paragraphs could be so difficult. That was an elephant unto itself. The synopsis may be the worst of all three efforts. Imagine squeezing a 400 page story into six, making it enticing. I wrote the synopsis yesterday, it is done, ready to send.

The elephant is nothing more than a heap of bones.  Who knows, I may decide to stew those bones for soup.  I can only hope that one of the queried agents will be interested enough to ask me to do exactly that.

I Guess It's Real Now...

...because I sent out five queries last night.  As I sit here pondering my first blog entry, I’m thinking I should probably get back into the shower.  Little did I know when I got into the shower a few days back I would hear, "Go Start a Blog…NOW."  Please, NO!  I’m the woman who said she hated blogs; I’m the woman who said she’d never do a blog.   

Of course, I’m also the woman who never dreamed she’d write a novel, either. Then, I was the woman who figured she’d never finish a novel. So there you go. With the help of messages from my showerhead, I wrote and finished the novel.  After endless rounds of editing, revising, and paring (which I keep being compelled to do), I finally let it go and put it out there.  Now, I'll armor myself for rejection and, hopefully, some interest. 

This is my story, my journey of educating myself about literary agents, publishers, query letters, synopses, etc., etc., the story of my process now that I realize I actually have two completed manuscripts.  And, I might add, a Book III in my head with these same characters. You see, I didn’t plan to be a writer so I know nada about these things; I am clueless about the process.  Oh, I’ll admit, there were occasions when the thought of writing would flit through my mind.  I’d had more than one friend along the way tell me, “you should write a book,” to which I would just roll my eyes – I am not a writer (I thought).  I never seriously considered that was a possibility for me. 

   

Thankfully, I actually enjoy research; and I don't mind educating myself about what’s next. And the showerhead told me to document the process; so here I am, sharing with you all my excitement, frustration, and - dare I ask for it? - joy along the way.  I do not kid myself that this is going to be fascinating reading or interesting to anyone; but, maybe someday, this might be helpful to some other beginning novelist/writer, illustrating what someone else experienced.  You know, misery loves company and all that…