Touching base

So, I’m taking a couple days’ writing retreat in southeast Kansas after the memorial service for Richard’s mother. Surprisingly, Pittsburg KS has one of the best coffeehouses I’ve ever set foot in. I’ve drunk a small nitro iced coffee (after two cups at breakfast at Otto’s Diner, so I’m really caffeinated!)

I’ve missed writing to you. As I said briefly yesterday, I finally finished my first draft of Prodigies — but that doesn’t mean I’m finished with it. It only means that I have something to tear apart in the second draft part. Is there going to be a sequel? Let me edit this one first.

Pretty soon I’m going to put Voyageurs back into the rejection cycle. At this point, I’m not sure I’ll ever be published, but I might as well model perseverence for other writers. What I really need to do is get more beta-readers and get information on how to fix the other books.

Beta readers for Mythos — haven’t heard from you for a while. Let me know how bad that book is messed up!

Other readers — want to be a beta reader?

Well, Kindle Scout didn’t bite on Voyageurs, as I thought they wouldn’t. However, I’m not too bothered because it’s on the road to improvement. And I’d rather have a solid book than a published one, strangely enough. Although I would like to be read as well.

Well, Tor rejected my novella of Gaia’s Hands.

The myth of becoming a recognized writer goes like this: a writer writes original work, writes what they love as their friends exhort them to, and after a double-digit number of rejections, finally gets published and makes big splashes in the publishing world. You may recognize this as the storyline of J.K. Rowling, but it’s been told about almost every big writer (“Do you know that Big Name Writer got rejected 23 times?”).

I’m not feeling very optimistic right now. I’ve been rejected somewhere over 100 times; I’ve lost count. I write, revise, submit, and fail. I cling onto the hope that this time would be the time I get published.

You’ve heard this all before. I’ve said it all before.

I’m supposed to write for just myself, and that makes no sense to me. Why would someone write several novels — 80,000 pages apiece — and edit, and polish, so that nobody will read it? If I did this all for myself, I’d write short romances with damn near zero for plots. I’d never get them published because by “romance” I would mean “romance” and not sex.

The optimist in me feels crushed for trying something new. The pessimist in me says “I told you so.” The realist in me can’t figure out how “writing for myself” justifies writing novels nobody reads.

Realistically, I may have to stop writing novels. I don’t know if I will have the motivation to write much if I give up novels, because the possibility of being heard (an antidote to a childhood of not being listened to or believed) was my major motivator, and the reason that not being able to be published is so heartbreaking.

I know I’ve come back before, but right now the thrill is gone.

The Optimist vs the Pessimist

I’m discovering that I am an optimist.

I’m waiting for a few things in the pipeline as I explained yesterday, and I feel good about my possibilities, despite all the times I got rejected before on these very same writings. This is why I keep submitting to agents and publishers. I fantasize about getting published. Again and again, I’m drunk on possibility, captured by potentiality, suspended in rosebuds, surrounded by perpetual spring.

The pessimist in me tries to shut down the optimist to no avail. Optimism provides a kind of high that pessimism can’t compete with. The pessimist in me is in its full glory when I get rejected, and feels no obligation to commiserate with me, preferring to kick me while I’m down.

I’m trying to find a way around the Pessimist’s great timing when I get rejected again, which I suspect will happen (despite the optimism), because realistically, there are a lot more of us writers than there are agents and publishers.

To Query or Not to Query (again)

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

I’m contemplating sending out queries — the packets of synopsis and short excerpt and stuff the agents request — again. Even after the over 100 rejections I’ve gained over the years, I want to try again. Just in case someone’s in a better mood or something.

I’m thinking of trying something different:

Going by a pen name?
Going by a MALE pen name? It would burn my butt if I got a agent’s representation as a male and not as a female (but imagine that first meeting)!
Send in to literary fiction agents in addition to (or instead of) science fiction/fantasy agents?
Just giving up?
Retitling the book?

I’m not sure why I’m contemplating this again — could it be because I’m sitting on seven finished books, five of which I believe are publishable? Or that I don’t sit still very well, I don’t watch tv, and my Internet use mainly consists of blogging and researching (books and plants)? Or that I refuse to believe that my writing isn’t good enough? Or maybe I’m just a masochist?

Or maybe, just maybe, the stars will align and a receptive agent will take a chance on something just a little different. Or tell me what needs fixing instead of the standard “It’s not you, it’s me” form letter.

I really want to reach the next part of my journey.

Foolhardy thoughts — repost. OOPS

I’ve gotten at least five more rejections since the last time I’ve mentioned it, and I’m contemplating something crazy — querying non-genre (i.e. literary/upmarket fiction) agents to represent me.

Maybe it’s the depression talking — “You have nothing more to lose. You might as well set yourself up for rejection and get it over with.”

Maybe it’s that a friend of my husband’s (a writer in the small-press horror genre) said I write too well for genre fiction. I don’t know if I believe him — I might, however, write too subtly for genre fiction.
Maybe, though, I write too subtly for any fiction.

I don’t think I stand a chance. I write about ordinary people rubbing elbows with preternatural creatures who together face supernatural warfare that is in some ways all too human. I write about the intersection of time travel and global warming. I write complex, imperfect characters who may not be human, with all that means. I don’t know if literary or upmarket wants to read that.

I’m still thinking, folks. I’m still thinking.

Wish me luck.

Gardens in my Dreams

It’s January, and time for planning my garden.

What does this have to do with writing? A writer writes what they know and what they love, and I love plants. Particularly plants I can eat, because I like food as well. And if they also smell good, that’s a bonus because I like things that smell good. As you might expect, my best friend is named Basil, and he grows in my garden every year.

One of my favorite characters in my books was a garden. Or a Garden, perhaps, because it had begun as a food forest, a planting of perennial edibles modeled after the layers of a forest. The picture below will be worth 1000 words:

from: Permaculture, a Beginner’s Guide, by Graham Burnett

The Garden in question incorporated fifty of these units in a three-dimensional pattern: one canopy tree, surrounded by three dwarf trees, and clumps of the other units as needed. It had been commissioned by a eco-collective (a coop based on ecological principles and striving toward self-sufficiency). Little did the collective know that they had called on an acolyte of the earth-soul Gaia to design the project and direct the work crews. Overnight, the garden grew a foot, and in a few short weeks offered up its first crops. The residents felt unsettled for a long time, because it’s one thing to call something a “force of nature”, and another to meet it face-to-face.

There are other stories about the Garden, but I will not tell them here.

My Work-in-Progress has a collective with greenhouse domes in an ecologically efficient desert habitat. Below each greenhouse is an underground living unit with tunnels to the central unit, where the Great Room/kitchen and workrooms reside. The dome above the main unit holds a grafted tree bearing two different colored apples that came from the central trees of the original Garden. These two gardens, the original food forest and the desert domes, are connected by more than the scion from the mother Trees, but that truth is scattered across several books.

*****
I received another rejection today.

My novels don’t grab agents within a synopsis and three chapter (or less) form, and I have no idea why. I’ve edited, and I’ve polished, and I’ve improved my query letter and etc., but I don’t know if I can write what they want. My ideas are speculative, utopic, ecological, egalitarian, and not very dominant culture. The ideas themselves may not sell — pacifism instead of war? Ecologically sane utopias that struggle with prejudice and discord?

I seem to get better at dealing with rejections. I’m quite calmly considering whether my goal of getting published is worth the time investment. Writing itself is rewarding and enjoyable, but as a hobby it takes about 14 hours per week. The gardening, at least, yields food; the writing has not yielded readers or income. I know hobbies don’t yield income in most instances, but I don’t get the return in writing alone — I want to share ideas. I want to be read.

Writing is another garden I’ve been tending — and at moments like this, all I can think of is that my back aches and I’m weary, and as is true in all kinds of gardening, I will not know if the effort is worth it until it sets fruit.

I’ve received two same-day rejections from my latest 3-a-day query sendouts. That’s a little hard on my system, although at the same time I appreciate not waiting. Someone once told me that querying is a lot like dating — you have to face a lot of rejections.

I’ve had to face a lot of rejections in dating — A LOT. In the days before wingmen, there was no buddy to woo the — oops, now I remember the really dimunitive circus acrobat who showed me his 12-page Bulgarian drivers’ license while his taller comrade tried to woo my tall, blonde, vivacious roommate Kristy and our other roommate, Beth, cleaned up the pool table like the pool shark she was. (Yes, that sentence should be read all in one breath, because that’s how it happened.) That was a true wingman. And he was cute, but I wasn’t into one-night stands in a performer’s train berth.

College stories aside, back to the topic of rejection. I have lots of practice in accepting rejection from the dating side of things. Some guys gave me nice rejections — “If I were straight, I’d date you”. Some gave me mean rejections — “You’re fat. You must have a self-esteem problem.”

I’ve had lots of rejections for jobs too. The nicest one told me who they hired, and she had 20 years experience and a textbook under her belt. The most frustrating one basically said they couldn’t find a qualified candidate for their consumer — or family — or whatever — faculty job despite 206 applicants.

I have about 12 queries out now — oops, ten — and I send three out every day. I will send 72 out by the time I’m done. And if this time is like last time, I will have 72 rejections. Some rejections are form letters. Some are really nice, and I wonder if those are form letters as well. All of them tell me to keep trying.

I keep trying under the assumption that I haven’t found the right agent yet. And if I keep trying, I will find the right agent. I accept that my writing style and ideas aren’t necessarily simple enough for genre fiction (like science fiction and fantasy), but maybe too non-mainstream for literary fiction. I’m in an odd place.

As a Friend (Quaker), I believe that I am called by the Divine to write secular books about fighting societal ills in the present, but set in a near future with fantastic elements. I’m called to write, but maybe for a purpose that has nothing to do with getting published. I don’t know. But if the world needs my novel, as NaNoWriMo believes, I need an agent.

Ready to try again

This morning, I woke up wondering why I write.

It’s been six months since I’ve sent out my query materials to agents. It’s been six months since I received a rash of rejections from said agents. I have learned some about how to improve my writing since then. I haven’t, however, gotten over the dejection I feel when I get rejections, dejection I’ve written about in these pages and that you’ve read.

If I send queries again, I will invariably get rejected.
If I do not send queries, I’ll never get published.

I’m going to have a busy Christmas Break, between tweaking my classes for Spring (I have a day job as a professor in Behavioral Sciences), writing on my book that suddenly became two books, and editing something well to offer up to the agents. I wish I could afford to pay a real editor, but we can’t right now, so I have to limp along and hope my own skills are up to it. I worry that this puts me at a disadvantage.

I’m apprehensive. But I need to have an external reason to write, because writing takes up a lot of my time, and I would like it to pay off in some way — earning money from writing is good, but being heard and being read is a bigger payoff. I don’t want to think writing is just a time-consuming hobby that I do all for myself while clutter still inundates my office. I want to think the world needs my novels, and that an agent would recognize this.

You Are a Writer

Dear Readers — this is for all of you. All of you are writers whether or not you think you are.

Becoming a writer requires only one thing: That you write.

You suspect it’s not as simple as that. You’re right, of course.

You may stare at the page, clutching your lucky pen, but no ideas come to mind. There are many ways to break that impasse: take the pressure off and just write, freeform, on whatever comes to mind. Interrogate a dream (my favorite method). Do word sprints — a method where you use a prewritten suggestion and write on that topic, exercising your mind in a non-threatening way. Because writing is threatening — you risk internal reflection, growth, exploration of disconcerting topics. And maybe, possibly, recognition. Give yourself a pep talk — you are a writer! You can withstand the threats of reflection and exploration.

Then, you follow the flow of writing, and you feel the flow of ideas — until you don’t. You stare at the page in front of you, where words abruptly stopped in the middle of the page. You have several options at this point: create an outline and fill in the plot points so you know where to go. Write what you know. Research the details you’re not sure of. Take a break. Think of a future, more exciting scene and write that. Give yourself a pep talk — you are a writer! All writers face that moment when ideas run dry.

When you’re done with your manuscript, you face the most important and most difficult part — editing. You need to edit because, while your words flowed, your grammar, punctuation, and continuity did not. You may find that your characters ended up on a yacht with no indication why. Or one of your characters practices “elf-defense” and there are no elves in the story. Maybe your protagonist changed race. Little things like that. This part of editing you may be able to do yourself. Give yourself a pep talk — you are a writer! Tedious as this is, you can do it.

The other type of editing you will find more challenging, and that is reading for plot, flow of ideas, and readability. You may be so used to your story by then that you can’t recognize problems with description, plot holes, characterization, and other aspects that will make or lose the reader’s interest. You may feel threatened by someone else reading your manuscript — “oh, G-d, what if they don’t like it?!” Give yourself a pep talk — you are a writer! You can bear the criticism and use it to make yourself better.

Writing is not just a creative process — it’s a journey of growth. Few writers get their first work published — I thought I would, but I have since edited it so many times, it’s no longer my first work! I sent that revised, revised, and revised document out on queries later this week, and I’m holding my breath that an agent takes the hook. I’m giving myself a pep talk — I am a writer! I can withstand rejection again!