I think I’m becoming more sanguine about rejection.
I’ll never like rejection, although one woman I met at Gateway Con said that she loved rejection because it meant another person read her stuff and knew her name.
I’ve been practicing my rejections. I’ve got Submittable (a submissions software) bookmarked on my computer and I try every day to submit a little something — a short story, flash fiction, a poem — to see if anything gets accepted. I’m hoping for acceptance. So far, I’ve been getting tiny rejections, and that’s not bad.
Of course, I know myself — I’ll be good about rejections till I get a major rejection. Like the one I’ll probably possibly get for Prodigies.
But even then, I know that a rejection doesn’t mean that my writing is bad, but could mean that my writing was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It means that it’s time to examine the piece and try, try again.
Category: Uncategorized
About Waiting
Sometimes, all you can do is wait for something to happen.
You’ve put out resumes, or queries, or submissions to a literary magazine. You put yourself out there, and then you wait.
While waiting the interminable wait, how do you look at your venture? Do you assume the worst hoping that you’ll be pleasantly surprised? Do you bask in a glow of possibility, entertaining the fantasy of success? Are you one of the few who can go on as if you haven’t handed your heart and soul out to strangers?
I myself wait impatiently to hear results, giddily checking Submittable and Query Tracker and email too many times. This is how I know that it was exactly 113 days (or 9763200 seconds) since I submitted Prodigies to DAW.
I have three other submissions out (two short stories and a poem) and one query out (Prodigies again). I know from the conference that rejections may not mean one’s work is not good, but that it doesn’t match current consumer demands. The odds are high given the number of competitors that I will get rejected all the way around. But I remain optimistic, because I need that vision of a change, of the possibility of bursting out of a cocoon having remade myself into an author, to season my days with sweet cinnamon and success.
I feel like a murderer.
This edit of Apocalypse is a bit harder than I thought. I need to make our unlikely heroes more unlikely, and by that I mean they need to struggle more. They need to be less successful.
More of them, in other words, need to die.
I don’t like killing characters. Not because of sentiment; I would kill major characters if I didn’t need them for the plot. I’m just bad at writing death.
But my dev editor is very, very correct. This battle is going to have to be stacked against my protagonists and people are going to have to die.
Funk and an old white lady
I didn’t know it was called funk when I grooved to it as a child. I didn’t know that I, a white child, wasn’t supposed to groove. I just felt the thumping play and the sense of play, and I wanted to shake my booty, which the adults around me considered slightly scandalous. I listened to that top 40 Chicago AM station and got caught up in its infectious rhythms; I didn’t know their names as well as I knew the Beatles’ catalog, but they became part of the background music of my childhood. I know their names now: “Flashlight” by Parliament, “Fire” by Ohio Players, “Mr. Big Stuff” by Jean Knight, “Tell Me Something Good” by Rufus and Chaka Khan (which gave me goosebumps as a child).
Years later, in college, I followed a community radio show that dealt in blues and funk, mostly funk. The first time I heard Parliament’s Aquaboogie, I sat there with this goofy grin on my face wondering “What the hell is this?” and called the DJ to ask. That was my introduction to Parliament/Funkadelic/P-Funk.
As I studied the genre (as an adult, I study everything) I discovered that funk, in addition to being playful, was sexy. And political. And inspirational. For example, P-Funk melds aspirations of political dominance (“Chocolate City”) with tales of survival (“Cosmic Slop”) and perseverance (“Aquaboogie”). The politically incorrect “Superfreak” rubs elbows with the motivating “Yes We Can” from the Pointer Sisters.
I’m very aware as I listen to the music that I am, as P-Funk would have it, devoid of funk. I do not have the shared experience of slavery and discrimination that funk seeks to rise above; I don’t even have the ice cool of David Bowie, whose “Fame” fits the genre. (I detest the song “Play that Funky Music White Boy” because it seems to be blatant co-opting.) I think about this because I’m going to see George Clinton and his P-Funk All-Stars tonight on his closing tour, knowing that I was not the audience funk was written for. I hope funk will accept me as a respectful tourist.
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This is for Steve Emmerman, who was the DJ for that long ago funk radio show on WEFT.
What I’m up to
What I’ve been up to lately:
Yesterday I wasn’t feeling it — at least not feeling like revising Gaia’s Hands or trying to figure out if another old book, Gaia’s Eyes, was worth resurrecting (as a short story, novel, birdcage liner, who knows what.)
So I entered a couple short story contests and a flash essay contest. I always feel more optimistic when I have things in the pipeline, whether they be queries or submissions. I still don’t know about DAW. I keep hoping.
I got the dev edit back for Apocalypse, and my work is cut out for me there. But it’s so promising now, and I want to get it in the hands of an agent. I’ll be proofing that starting today after I give platelets (or instead of platelets if my hemoglobin is low).
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I have a problem with this blog right now. I keep getting visits from some Eastern European porn site blog. The one time I thought I’d isolated it, it was from Ukraine. The sad thing is, I get random hits now from other Eastern European countries like Moldova and Asian countries like Azerbaijan (sp?). I’m afraid these addresses aren’t real and are being spoofed by the porn vendor. Sigh, time for that marketing plan. (Although I’m likely to wait till I have product.)
Wait for it.
So what happens when you come out of an affirming moment into ordinary life?
If you’re me, you feel like someone launched you out of a cannon into … a field. A muddy field. In the middle of nowhere. With cows placidly munching on grass.
“What should I be doing in this field?” I ask, realizing that a chair and my laptop have materialized in the field beside me. I sit down; the chair sinks into the mud about an inch or so, and I realize these shoes will never be the same.
I set myself to writing on a story, but I don’t know which one to write on — the serious rewrite of Gaia’s Hands? The attempt to write a short story out of the long lost Gaia’s Eyes? Some other short story? A new novel?
I ruminate: Will I ever get an agent? Will I ever get published? Is there a reason for all this? Is this God’s will? Is there really a God, and if so, doesn’t She have something better to do than land me a writing career? A placid bovine eyes me with sympathy.
Restless, I stand, setting the laptop on the chair. The cows low about me. Disgruntled, I take a deep breath and remind myself:
I am out standing in my field.
Slush Pile
Prodigies is still sitting at DAW, probably in a slush pile somewhere, as the status hasn’t changed since I sent it in.
DAW publishes science fiction and fantasy. They’re one of the big publishers for fantasy and science fiction; the others being Baen and Ace. The interesting thing is that these publishers will take submissions without an agent, and ask for the whole book instead of a query.
But submissions begin in a slush pile, or a pile where unsorted books get a first read, and most people don’t make it out of the slush pile. What gets the book out of the slush pile and into another set of hands is less how good the book is (though that helps) but how sellable salable the book is.
I admit I fantasize that my book is on someone’s desk, a someone who has influence in making decisions. Or in a meeting. Or on the “Congratulations!” pile. Realistically, however, it’s probably still on the slush pile, waiting.
At least it hasn’t been rejected yet. There’s always hope.
Working on a marketing plan
Even if I don’t have a book to sell yet, I (optimistically) will. So I’m going to start playing with a marketing plan here.
Who is my audience — other than my current followers here?
- Readers of intelligent contemporary fantasy/magical realism.
Where do I find them? (I have 20 regular readers of this blog and 100 readers of my page on facebook — I don’t think new people will find me if I don’t look for them). So where are they hiding?
- fantasy writer groups on facebook
- fantasy READER groups on facebook
What will I talk about?
- being a writer
- progress on books
- anything published
How will I present the message?
- craft messages/blurbs about my writing
- consider excerpts of my work
- use hashtags: #gardenofeden #archetypes #prodigies #talents #fantasybook
- use instagram and twitter (I hate twitter; I don’t ever have good pictures for instragram, but time to up my game)
How often will I send messages?
- continue to blog/hootsuite the blog to twitter and facebook daily
- newsletter monthly
Ha! A marketing plan!
Not home quite yet
Two hours into my drive, I needed to stop because I got too sleepy to drive safe. So I’m about to leave the Holiday Inn at the edge of Columbia for the rest of the ride home.
I have documents to edit (kill the ellipses!) when I get home, a small business plan to make (with help from our local small business council), a marketing plan to make, 30 pages to shoot to Marisa Corvisieri, hope DAW can let me know what they thought of my manuscript (probably a rejection) …
The Conference
Sorry I haven’t written for a couple of days, but I’ve been busy busy at the conference. It’s been a very positive experience, and here are some of the things I’ve learned:
- A lot of the people here write science fiction and fantasy. And the stories are all very different from each other.
- Character may be more important than plot in hooking an agent in.
- My work is good — I was told by one editor that my work was “going places.” I hope so.
- The same editor told me I need to back off on the novels (high effort) and start writing some short stories to submit to journals. I have 5-6 novels, none sold yet. He is probably right.
- The same editor teased me about my character padding her calves to look like a man, saying that several females he knew had more muscular calves than he did. Well, shit.
- Comp titles (“Twilight meets Hunger Games”) really exist for a reason.
- I made a friend who’s about my age who introduced me to Broad Universe, a writing space for women (love the pun) and might get me into a critique group if there’s a space.
- I made another friend in Kansas City (about my age) who writes stuff with similar worldview quirk (turning mythologies on their head).
- I need to put the fact that I was a runner-up in Cook Publishing’s Short Story contest in my query letter.
- I need a business plan
- I need a marketing plan (this blog is part of it)
- I need to quit using so many dashes — and ellipses …
- The conference has coffee service ALL DAY.
That’s probably not everything, but the experience has been affirming and I’m a little giddy thinking about it. I’m sure the impostor syndrome will take hold tomorrow, but for now, I feel like a writer.
