Rewriting a Query Letter

Saturday has me fixing my query for the next book to go out, the revised Apocalypse. An editor gave me advice to run my query through Manuscript Academy, where I had a chance for an agent to read, review, and suggest in a ten-minute review what needed to happen with it. This cost $50.

My reviewer, Caitlin McDonald, gave me a sound review and the advice that I needed to expand my discussion of the book to three paragraphs. I didn’t realize that — as long as I keep it at one page, I can do more with it.

Here’s wishing me luck. Hope springs eternal.

The Rainbow Bridge

Right after I thought Stinkerbelle was rallying, she had a major seizure and we had to put her to sleep. She was in pitiful shape, I see now, and we would never have been able to restore her to health.

I’m pretty stoic about things. I don’t know if that is a good thing. I only get weepy when I think about the Rainbow Bridge, and I think that is because I would rather be at the Rainbow Bridge with all the cats than in the traditional conception of Heaven.

The Rainbow Bridge is a celebratory realm, where cats and dogs frolic, unravaged by age, illness, or neglect. They wait there for their owners, and then join with them as they walk up the bridge to Heaven. I would love to reunite with Cream Puff, Sandals, PJ, Kismet, Sasha, Opalina, Kitty, Belvedere the Kitten, Snowy, and Stinkerbelle. Yes, I am a crazy cat lady.

But once we make it to the gates of Heaven, what happens? I stand at the gates waiting to be judged and found worthy or unworthy. My poor cats are stuck waiting with me, which means they’re probably chasing each other. And what if I’m found unworthy? I’m cast into Hell and the poor cats are left bereft.

If I make it there, the Bible says that we get into Heaven with all the other souls to perpetually sing Hosanna with the heavenly choirs. What in Heaven’s name (I did that on purpose) is that all about? Unless I am stripped of all that is human, that’s going to be really boring. My cats are going to be really bored, I think, and will need toys.

The Rainbow Bridge, on the other hand, sounds like a perpetual picnic with gallivanting pets and grassy meadows, presumably without chiggers and mosquitos. I could dwell there forever, petting kitties and doggies and talking to the occasional macaw. I think I’d stay there.

Notes on Life

Note 1: Stinky is still hanging in there. Every time we think she’s a goner, she does something like eats again. Right now she’s faceplanting in the couch cushions, but she’s alive and somewhat upright.

Note 2: I am struggling with my work in progress — writing Gaia’s Hands without it being a total downer is hard.

Note 3: I am still struggling with my future as a writer. I have not had any luck after several rewrites and several sets of queries on my (four now three) books. I am wondering if it’s time to self-publish, keep trying, or give up the writing thing entirely. Don’t worry; I’ve gone through this before.

The COVID-19th Nervous Breakdown

There’s a COVID-19 hot spot in a summer camp in Branson, and I know they’ve been practicing social distancing and masking because I have a contact down there. Still, 85 people (kids and counselors) have COVID-19.

I have to teach this fall face-to-face (or F2F as we call it in education). I teach human services courses at a university 5 hours north of Branson. Although I will meet with only 1/3 of my students on any given day (Monday/Wednesday/Friday) in order to practice social distancing, and we will (hopefully) all wear masks, I’m still a bit wary.

I’m not sure there’s much I can do about it. If the university says we’re face-to-face, we’re face-to-face. It’s a little nerve-wracking, especially as our plans don’t take into account the residence halls, the hallways, the food court …

I have just about resigned myself to getting COVID this fall. It’s better, I think, than fretting about it for the rest of the summer.

Stinkerbelle is Dying

Stinkerbelle in better days. Note the evil gleam in her eyes.

I think my cat Stinky is dying. She’s fifteen years old, and she has taken a sudden slide into not eating much, not moving much, and not using the litterbox, instead deciding to go on the blanket where she lies. She is still eating, though, and purring, and she doesn’t seem to be in any pain, so I don’t know if it’s time to put her to sleep yet.

Stinkerbelle (her full name; she’s also been called Stinky, Stinkerbelly, Soccer Ball, Sockerbally, and Turnip Head) has always been a trial of a cat. I adopted her at four months out from under a friend’s porch, and she always has been a little bit feral. She earned her name from the time when she was a kitten and she crawled on top of me while I was semi-napping. She walked up to my face and looked at me sweetly, then punched me in the eye with a paw.

Stinky then unleashed her reign on terror on the house. Fighting with the other cats, escaping the house, swatting at us — Stinky was our cross to bear. I loved her in the way I loved my bratty inner child — with a combination of exasperation and awe.

Now Stinky stands only long enough to rearrange her old bones. Her head hangs down and she wobbles. She doesn’t have enough meat on her bones anymore. She lets my husband and I pick her up and hold her like a baby. She purrs instead of fighting us.

It will be time soon, I think. When she stops eating, when treats are not enough to entice her, when she has trouble breathing. But for now, she’s still on the couch waiting to get petted again.

Learning about my Characters: Jeanne and Josh

I’m what’s known as a plantser — I start a bare outline and fill it in as I write. I’m finding out more about Josh and Jeanne as I write, and they’re turning out to be quite the couple.

Josh is afraid of an intimate relationship, but not for the usual reasons. He believes in another world, a world of spirits, hidden (as he puts it) in plain sight. He feels these spirits, sees visions, dances among the unseen in aikido. If he opens up, he reveals that world inside him.

Jeanne, meanwhile, is afraid of herself. She has been repressing her own relationship to the hidden world, because it wars with her adoption of the logical world of research. What happens, then, if she finds out — or remembers — her true connection to the world of the plants she nurtures?

I’ve gotten to the point where Josh has spoken of the hidden world as a theoretical, a source of poetry, and Jeanne begins to examine the imagination that she left behind in her chemistry labs. It’s exciting to see them launch into the second part of the book, the part of mysteries.

Another excerpt from work in progress

Another excerpt from the work in progress:

Friday came, and Jeanne felt exhausted after a day in her laboratory, a day alone where she tried not to ruminate about the offer she had rejected or the threat to her chances for full professor. She sat on her couch and put on some U2, listening to the call to righteous action. Something blossomed in her, the memory of her childhood when she began studying the plants in her yard, when she felt something greater than herself. Her imagination, she thought, when she had used it.

That evening, she almost didn’t go to the cafe to meet Josh. She knew he’d be disappointed if she wasn’t there. And maybe there would be comfort for her

She arrived early to find Josh already sitting at the table, head bent over what she learned was his always available notebook. He looked up as she sat down across from him and put away his notebook. His eyes searched hers; his smile upon greeting her shaded quickly to concern.

“What’s up?” Jeanne asked.

“Not much. I was just writing. You look wiped out — the Growesta stuff?” asked Josh.

Jeanne nodded. “It’s not over yet. The dean tried to put a GMO plot next to my research plot; it would have destroyed the conditions of my research. He backed down on that. Then he berated me, berated my work, and doubled down on the threat to keep me from getting the promotion.

“The worst part of it for me is that I can’t do anything about it. No matter how hard I try, the body of my work will not be judged by its worth. I’m not used to being powerless over a situation.” Jeanne grimaced. “But the alternative is betraying Gaia.”

“Gaia. You’ve mentioned that before. You talk about Gaia as if it’s a being.” Josh glanced toward his notebook and pen and apparently decided against it.

“Well, that’s the hypothesis,” Jeanne explained. “That the earth is a living organism, a whole organism based on systems. I believe that it’s more a metaphor than something to be taken literally; at any rate, I don’t want to be promoting Growesta’s need to extend its market share. I’ll allow that factory farming and the monoculture systems it creates are a necessary evil until alternative farming systems can be created or resurrected. But I need to work toward the alternative.”

“So what now?” Josh asked.

“What now? There’s nothing I can do.”

“Yes, there is,” Josh insisted, taking her hand. “If you have no control over what happens, you have nothing to lose. What would you be doing if full professorship wasn’t in question?”

The warmth of his hand startled her; she didn’t want to pull away. Jeanne paused. “Much the same as I have been doing, but … ” She thought. “I wouldn’t worry so much.”

“About what?” Josh inquired, and she found herself looking down from his penetrating gaze.

Jeanne considered. The wayward scents, the behemoth plant in her greenhouse. Gaia as a living thing rather than metaphor. There was a time when she would allow herself thoughts, fancies she didn’t have to prove. She ruthlessly pruned them away with scientific method. “About how I think. About Gaia. I used to have imagination. I used to be able to embrace fuzzy concepts like Gaia as an organism, even …” Jeanne paused. “Then there was college, and graduate school, and the scientific method. I began to let go of that part of me.”

“Why do you want that part of you back?”

Jeanne remembered a prior conversation, and how it put tendrils in her mind while she fought against Growesta, against her Dean, against the injustice of being denied credit for her work. “It was something you said the other day. About the unseen world? I used to believe in that. It fueled my desire to go into my field. But then …” Jeanne faltered. The scent of spice viburnum wafted through Jeanne’s consciousness. It would be weeks before those flowers bloomed.

“How can I help?” Josh asked. “I seem to have planted the seed.”

“Tell me about this unseen world.” The scent of flowers grew stronger.

Music and Memory

Sometimes I feel so old.

Usually it’s when I listen to music from the 1970’s. I was a child then, as I graduated high school in 1981. As a child, I didn’t go out of my way to listen to music; I absorbed it by osmosis from the AM station in our car and clutched my little brick AM radio with its mono earplug at night.

I knew all the songs, however. I knew them as narrative to a time of solitude, of lying in my room crying over the bullies at school, of words not being sufficient, of glimmers of light when someone extended a hand. Of scraps of poetry, words written in pencil on lined paper, fading as pencil often did over the years.

I do not remember well. My memory is like a pile of Polaroids, instant photos, jumbled on a table, and I pull a random one out. I remember the snippet of memory in the photo and it evokes emotion. The story that goes with the words starts with “I remember when” but has very few words attached. The few stories I remember don’t have video with them, only words.

The right song pulls the most obscure photo from the bottom of the pile, the one that’s faded, whose colors have reverted to greyish brown. All of the emotions, however are there, and I find myself weeping at something lost that I can’t really see.

Right now I’m listening to a playlist on the stereo, with luscious rich tones that we didn’t know in the AM radio era, and I travel in the back of a station wagon in 1974, nine years old, trying to make sense of the world.

Nagging fears in COVID

Here’s me, writing during the time of COVID-19.

I’m scared of the future. I’m scared about the students coming back this fall, bringing their contagion from far-flung places. I’m afraid of what happens when they’re all congregated in their living spaces, in close proximity to each other. I’m afraid of their parties, their incaution, and their bravado. I’m scared that my university, who needs the revenue of on-campus students in residence halls to survive, will fail if students don’t show up and will fail if they have to refund students’ residence hall money if they have to leave.

I can’t be fearful of everything or else I won’t survive. So I put the fear in a box and go through my day-to-day activities. Sometimes it reappears when I read the news.

There’s nothing I can do but adapt.

First Draft

Now that I’ve done two hours for Camp NaNo (July edition), I can write today.

I’m starting to feel like a writer again. I don’t know what happened, except I put pen (fountain pen) to paper and came up with about a chapter’s worth of plot for Gaia’s Hands. It’s really rough — I don’t know if my characters are consistent or my atmosphere atmospheric or any of that, but this is all about a first draft

I’ve learned a lot about first drafts in my six years of writing novels, and this is what I’ve learned:

You just need to write. Edit later.
When you’re new at writing, you will think your finished first draft is glorious. When you’re more seasoned, you will think your first draft is an abomination. In reality, it is somewhere between the two.
Let yourself get exhilarated by what happens in your first draft. Marvel at the characters, feel excited by the plot. Think of it (to use another metaphor) as planning and planting a garden. It will take a lot of weeding to get to its final result, but you’re not at that stage yet.

So right now I’m really excited about Jeanne’s experiment with the basil, where she learns that she has a green thumb, something she can’t ignore when the results are quantified in front of her. Later I’ll grimace at how my characters haven’t necessarily reacted to type. But that’s later.