Category: Writer’s Desk

all about writing, words, fiction, writing projects

Pick Your Favorite Pitch

So the other day I had this brilliant idea: instead of writing a book and then trying to come up with a good pitch for it – why not write excellent pitches first and then write books based on the pitches.  That way, when you’re done writing and are all up in the craw of the story, unable to sort the essentials from the superfluous anymore, you’ll already have a great pitch written.  I was thinking of nominating myself for some kind of writing genius award until my writer friend told me that that’s actually how most screen writers work.  Pitch first, write later.  Damn.  So no awards to me and my late to the party ideas.  Whatever.  So I spent my weekend writing pitches for books I haven’t written yet.  And then I wrote a pitch for the book I haven’t finished.  And then I wrote the pitch for the book I already wrote.  The one that’s killing me slowly.

I was going to put all of them here.  Now I’m wondering if I need to be paranoid and not share in case my ideas get stolen?  That’s not really my way, however.  I was thinking I wanted to know which story to develop later.  And also show that my pitch for Cricket and Grey doesn’t suck as much as it used to.  I keep having to go and read chapters from the book to convince myself it’s not complete shit.  It’s not.  Really, it’s a good book.  I have to keep reminding myself that not everyone is going to love it, or even like it.  That’s how it is.  Fact.

So here, then, are some pitches.  I’ll tell you what, these are some fairly distinctive ideas and if you write a book based on them, I’m going to know.  Others who read this post will also know.  So don’t be bastards.  Okay?  These are my pitches:

BABY GIRL SIX Pitch:

Baby Girl Six’s whole life has been like a twisted reenactment of Little House on the Prairie. Born to a family of fourteen kids in the woods outside of town with no modern conveniences, endless hard work, and assiduous devotion to scriptures, she has seen the rest of the world from the window of her father’s truck and monthly visits to the downtown stores. On her twentieth birthday she has only one wish: to leave her family compound and never come back.

She leaves with everything she owns wrapped in an old sheet and comes to town to forge a new life with running water, free thought, and possibilities. The only problem is she has no social security number, no birth certificate, no identification of any kind. She doesn’t, in fact, even know her real name. Without her parents’ help she can’t prove her citizenship but they won’t help her become part of a system they believe is evil.

Her upbringing made her resourceful and scrappy but nothing has prepared her for life on the streets.

THE QUIET LIBRARIAN Pitch:

Lydia, a shy librarian, is settling into the Victorian duplex she just bought, realizing a lifelong dream.  One night she comes home to find a man living in her house that she’s never met before who claims he has a deed to the duplex and won’t leave claiming that her deed is fake and she is the one who has to move out.  Before she can get a lawyer to untangle the legal mess, someone tries to strangle her in her sleep and her attacker is scared off by her hostile roommate.  Now she’ll have to trust him if she wants to live long enough to kick him out.

THE WINTER ROOM pitch:

After being raped and beaten by her mother’s boyfriend when she was thirteen Jane Bauer left home to live with her best friend Tim and his family, determined to rebuild her life and move on from her terrifying experience. Aside from Jane’s inability to sustain a relationship due to a crippling inability to have sex without becoming violently sick, she has built a quietly fulfilling life for herself in which she feels safe.

But when her mother Pat resurfaces thirteen years later with the news that she’s dying of cancer Jane finds out she’s still living with the boyfriend who almost destroyed her life. Jane refuses to see Pat who begins harassing her with pleading phone calls to let her back into Jane’s life. In desperation to make her mother and the past go away Jane threatens to report her rapist to the police, something she’s come to realize she should have done years ago.

Now her childhood rapist is circling around for a second act and this time he wants to take more than her body, he wants to take her voice.

Lastly, and with great sweat and tears… here’s the latest CRICKET AND GREY pitch:

Cricket thinks the worst thing her day will bring is the burial of her father, leaving her alone in the world. She’s a scrappy fiercely independent apothecary just getting by at the end of the twenty first century in a poor isolated town.  And she’s wrong. The day brings much worse than a burial. It brings a complete change in life as she knows it with the discovery that her parents led a double life as smugglers of medical supplies and her father left behind years of unpaid property taxes the feds are now demanding in full. If she can’t raise the money by the deadline she’ll lose her property and her livelihood with it.

In desperation she takes a job with the local Mormon crime boss as an armed guard. She thinks all she has to do is earn enough money to pay off her property taxes and she can move on with her mourning and the rest of her life. She doesn’t think she needs anyone’s help solving her problems. She’s wrong.

Her father’s death has uncovered more than unpaid taxes, it has uncovered the shocking truth about her mother’s murder three years ago making Cricket the next target of her mother’s murderer. If she wants to live long enough to pay off her taxes she’ll have to learn to trust those who want to help her and make peace with her parents’ duplicity.

The last one is a completely finished novel whose pitch I’ve been working at for months now.  The Winter Room is an incomplete novel.  The other two are just bald pitches.  If you could choose which book I work on next, which one are you most interested in reading?  Please leave a comment and tell me.  I really want to know.

What Makes a Great Main Character

Forgive me if you’ve seen this picture before.  I know I used it in a draft but don’t know if I ended up actually using it.  Pretend you’ve never seen it.

I’ve read a few books lately that failed to engage me.  Well, three failed to engage me so completely that I couldn’t finish them.  One engaged me well enough to finish it, the writing was good, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, the explicit sex scenes were irritating, and the main character (who was supposedly 20 years old) had the maturity of a 15 year old.  I am not interested in reading books about teens.  The last time I did that (Twilight) was enough to last me through the whole of my forties.  I’m not putting down adults who enjoy young adult fiction at all, it’s just not generally my taste.

A couple of days ago I started a great book and last night I went to bed a little early (there was no beer to keep me out of bed for) and couldn’t put down “Coil of Serpents” by Anne Stevenson.  I’ve bought every book she’s written just so I can read them because she’s not widely known in the U.S.  I had to get them on Alibris.  I bought them on the strength of loving the one book of hers my library has that I loved (“A Relative Stranger”).  It got me thinking about the importance and the subjectivity of main characters in stories.  The most important part of any story, in my opinion, is the main character.  Why people love stories, can’t put them down, is usually because they relate to or in some way care about what happens to the main character.  But what’s interesting is how many of us have different requirements for a compelling main character.

I know, for example, that not everyone who’s read Cricket and Grey really loved Cricket.  That’s kind of crucial for loving the book.  If you don’t get Cricket, if you find her irritating, then you won’t care as much what happens to her and you won’t enjoy the ride half so much.  My mom liked my book but in talking about it she is always hyper focused on Cricket’s stubbornness and her obsessing over her parents’ lies.  I get it.  She’s not the only one who found Cricket’s stubbornness irritating.  On the other hand, my friend Emma said she loved Cricket for her scrappiness and she “got” who she was.

What kind of main characters do you like?  I have no easy way of describing my favorite qualities in a main character.  Sometimes it’s easier to say what they aren’t than what they are.  I’ll list qualities I like and all the qualifiers necessary to make me sound like an asshole:

grown up – literally.  I like main characters to be 20 years old or older.  The important thing is that they don’t ACT like teens or kids.  I can’t stand general “innocence” in grown ups.  (Gentle adults whose tastes are all child like and who relates more to and acts more like children)  I like a grown up with grown up tastes and concerns and maturity.  It’s okay if the character is immature about a few things, because most of us are, but not if they’re immature on the whole.

Intelligent – I like a main character with some cognitive skills and some innate intelligence.  I’m not talking genius, just some sharpness in the head.  It can be street smarts rather than book smarts, but a little of both is always preferable to me.

Depth of character – I like a character who is multidimensional and who sees levels to things.  A character who knows there’s more to life than the surface.  A character who questions things, who considers their own philosophy about things.

Funny – I like characters with a sense of humor but that doesn’t have to mean they’re hilarious.  Hilarious can get annoying fast if that’s the main attraction.  I like a character with a wry sense of humor.  I like a character who can be both serious and humorous by turns.

complicated – I like a character with inner conflict, a person with contradictions.  Most people I know (certainly the interesting ones) have unresolved conflict in their personalities and world view.  They are very smart but have a dumb  blindspot.  They have a lot of sex but aren’t sensual.  They are physically strong and have a temper but hate violence.  They believe in love but can’t let themselves have it.  They work in lingerie factories but wear cotton grannies.  They are religious but question God.

Imperfect – there is nothing more insufferable to me than a character who seems perfect.  It’s unreal, it makes me feel like scum, and there can be no story in perfection.  It’s an author’s worst nightmare.  The perfect person is one I love to hate.  Always.

Irrevocably broken – the opposite of the perfect person.  Detectives in mysteries are famously “flawed”.  I get irritated sometimes with how broken authors feel obligated to make their detectives.  To the point where they are incapable of any healthy relationships, bent on self destruction, and not even likable bar-fly tendencies that make them assholes to everyone.  Yes, they solve the crime – whoopie.   I must believe a person is capable of evolving and of changing.  Broken is okay if there is, in due course, some evidence of growth and healing.

A cluster of characteristics I don’t enjoy in a main character: flightiness, passivity (the character just watches things happen in their life and lets things happen to them), arrogance (confidence is okay, arrogance is irritating), amorality (yeah, I like a main character with a conscience and Dexter is the sole exception to that), disloyalty (can’t relate to this, I need to trust that the main character is loyal to the people they care about – betrayal is only okay when it is part of the evolution of their character and comes with great struggle and regret), hyper sexual (I don’t relate and am not interested in characters who are largely motivated by having sex, especially when it’s indiscriminate, the only exception being with prostitute characters who do it for a living but don’t pursue it for personal appetite), adulterers (I really can’t stand characters who commit adultery and so I don’t read stories that revolve around this topic).

Characteristics I don’t necessarily love for their own sakes but which I find drive main characters very well through stories, add drama, and get them in just enough trouble to keep them from being sad boring people: stubbornness, irascibility, and personal irrational hang-ups.

In summary, my favorite kind of main characters are: complex, grown up, imperfect, learning, sharp witted, have some humor, capable of being serious, strong – but with weak spots, scrappy, independent, have a fairly well developed moral center or are in the middle of developing one, and an ability to eventually realize they aren’t always right and are capable of change.

Please tell me what kind of main characters you love best.  I will not ridicule anyone for loving completely different kind of main characters.  This is what makes writing books, reading books, representing books, and publishing them a seriously subjective arena.  Books are as subjective as art.  What makes a book great depends on what the reader is looking for, who the reader is, why the reader is reading (entertainment, edification, thrills, taken to places they’d never go in real life, etc.) so what I want, what I’m looking for and love is very personal and I can never be an expert on what is an excellent read for you.  But I do want to know what your own perimeters are for great main characters.  Share, please!

10 Bad Blogging Habits to Avoid

 

1.  Apologizing for how much more important your life is than your stupid blog.

Readers already know that everyone’s life is more important than their blogs.  Readers are aware that life trumps  blog writing, especially for those blog writers who are writing for fun and social reasons and who aren’t professional writers.  They will forgive you without your constant apologizing.  When every post you write contains some excuse for why you haven’t written in so long it diminishes the quality of whatever else you have to say.  And if every other post is nothing but an apology or explanation about how your life is too important to pause and tell us interested readers what you’re up to, don’t write at all.

2.  Suggesting that blogging is a self indulgent narcissistic activity.

If you feel this way, you should not write a personal blog.  If you put down your own blog writing as a shameful immodest navel-gazing waste of time – you also insult your readers, many of whom are also bloggers.  You make your readers, whoever they are, feel that they are wasting their time reading your blog and worse than that you make them aware that you think you’re better than them.  Would you accuse Steinbeck of being self indulgent for writing “Of Mice and Men”?  Writing is, by it’s very nature, is an introspective art.  Every writer sees through the lens of their own personal experience and all their stories have their germ in the writer’s personal life.  A blog is telling your personal stories, if you don’t respect it, don’t do it.

3.  Being a tease who never puts out.

There are few things worse than a blogger who tells you how much they’re not telling you.  You’re reading their story, you’re interested, they reveal something personal, then they tell you that there are all these details they’re leaving out because it’s too personal to share.  Fuck you.  If you don’t want to share something, don’t share it, but also don’t tell us how much you’re not sharing.  What that does is basically inform your readers that they aren’t good enough to be in your inner circle where all your REAL secrets live.  Congratulations for truly wasting our time and making us feel like a bunch of oily sardines.

4.  Accosting your readers with your music.

The trend for setting up music to turn on automatically when your blog loads is easing up but there are still way too many bloggers who don’t understand how rude automatic music is.  When a reader opens up a blog they are essentially bringing you into their home.  They may have chosen to read your blog but they did not choose to listen to your music.  You forced it on them and while you may think listening to Michael Bolton is the best part of every day, I assure you that many will not agree.  Go ahead and set up your music jukebox but make it mute so that when people come to your blog they can choose to turn it on if they like your play list but will not be blasted with it.

 

5.  Telling us how boring you are.

Nothing kills a reader’s interest faster than a blogger who constantly apologizes for being boring.  If you actually do think you’re boring, don’t write.  If you don’t think you’re boring but you worry that others do, keep it to yourself.  If you think you’re being charmingly honest – you’re not.  Nothing is less charming or disingenuous than a writer constantly apologizing for their writing.  Believe me, if you write a blog for long enough you’ll have something real to apologize for and you want people to actually believe you when you mean it.

6.  Ignoring comments.

Don’t ignore your readers.  It’s insulting.  Especially when they are reaching out to you after you’ve revealed something really personal and painful and they want to give you their warmest thoughts and hopes to help support and uplift you.  Nothing will confirm you as a truly self indulgent and self absorbed writer than ignoring the people who reach out to you because they care about you.  Blogging, at its best, is a communal sort of writing.  You tell your stories and people who read them and are moved (whether in a positive or negative way) have the chance to make a conversation out of it.  If you don’t take part in the conversations you start then you may as well declare yourself the Queen of England.

7.  Whoring yourself out.

I am not of the opinion that it is inauthentic to have ads on your blog.  My personal take is that your ads should never speak more loudly than your content.  A blog whose writing columns are narrower than the ad columns is not a pleasant place to be.  Sponsored content isn’t my personal deal but I’ve seen people do it tastefully.  You are not a whore for trying to make money from your blog.  It’s damn hard for writers to make a living and I cheer on anyone who makes a go of it provided they don’t over do it.  What’s over doing it?  If you have giveaways every week, especially more than one a week, and if you have sponsored content every week – you lose my trust in your authenticity.  Choose your advertising tactics with care.  If anyone is curious – my own ads don’t make me more than $2 a month so far (and that’s up from $0).  I’d love to make more.  Money is good.  Making money from writing is awesome.  It’s my main goal in life – to be paid to write, because I’M A WRITER.  Just don’t ever lose sight of the quality of your content.

8.  Telling poop stories.

The blogging platform allows all women (not just professional writers) to share the stories that matter to them with other women all over the world.  This has created a greater sense of community and shared knowledge and support amongst us all.   Unfortunately the new-found freedom to talk about anything real in our lives – like the fact that parenting involves a lot of diaper changing – has created some distressing trends in women writers.  I don’t know why it is, but telling stories about your baby’s poop is a great favorite on mom blogs and it has become an exhausted topic.  There are no revelations left to share on this topic.  The humor really isn’t there either.  Just stop it.  Same goes for snot and spit-up and projectile ANYTHING.  Stop it.  There are other ways to “keep it real” in your writing.  Find them.

9.  Telling readers what a burden your blog is.

This is similar to telling your readers that your life is more important than your blogging is, except it’s worse because now you’re suggesting that you don’t even like it.  If you have any readers (and most blogs, even tiny ones, have at least a few readers) they come to hear your stories because they’re interested and they probably really like you.  Otherwise they wouldn’t waste their time on you.  When you talk about what a burden your blog is and how you don’t even enjoy it, it’s like having sex with someone and then telling them that having sex just isn’t worth the effort.  No one wants to feel like they aren’t worth the effort.  If you find blogging a burden, don’t do it.  Quit your blog.  But don’t tell your readers they weren’t worth it, just tell them you’ve discovered that blogging isn’t your true calling.

10.  Being an asshole tightwad with your blogroll.

Do you have a blogroll?  If you blog you should have a blog roll.  Sharing the link love may not be required but other bloggers notice.  Other bloggers make up a large proportion of most blog readers.  Not having a blog roll is like saying you’re too important to share your readers with anyone else.  Some of the biggest  bloggers with insanely high traffic have blog rolls because they know that sharing the love is part of what makes the blogging world a largely generous and diverse place to spend time.  So don’t be a tightwad with your connections.

Bottom Line:

Don’t make your readers feel stupid, creepy, unwanted, inferior, or that they wasted their time reading your blog.

Excellent Reads for Writers

When I started working on Cricket and Grey I wanted to work in a more organized way than I had with The Winter Room because I wanted to avoid getting lost in pages of emotive crap that leads nowhere.  What I really wanted was to avoid emotive crap altogether.  I looked for a book that could serve as a guideline and found a great help in the book “Write Away” by Elizabeth George.  I didn’t want someone to tell me what to write but how to structure a plot and story thoughtfully.  Taking the time to work out a plot outline, do some character analysis, and to play with POV before digging myself into an enormous grave full of words made writing my second novel a completely different experience than the first.  Each draft I wrote accomplished very specific things.  I know that all writers have their own processes and mine, as it develops, will not match anyone else’s exactly.  Still, I think it’s useful for writers to listen to other writers talk about writing.  I think it’s useful for us to share notes, to compare notes, and to share ideas.

Through doing my agent research, looking for support with other writers, and reading advice from the trenches I’ve compiled a number of great reads (and a video) that I think most writers will find encouraging, interesting, and useful.

Write Away

Elizabeth George is one of my favorite mystery writers.  Though I admit I stopped reading the Lynley series a few books ago because I got really sick of Tommy and Helen’s inability to work their shit out and then she went and killed Helen anyway, so that’s alright.  I have seen George speak and I really like her.  So I bought her book and have found it very useful.  Her message isn’t “If you write exactly like me you’re guaranteed success!” (because she’s not stupid), her book is meant as a guideline to writing fiction, not a gospel.

Bird By Bird

Anne Lamott is funny, she’s real, she’s honest, and her book “bird by bird” is a great collection of essays about writing she’s taken from the writing classes she teaches.  It isn’t a manual (can you tell I don’t want anyone telling me the ONE way to write?) so much as it’s collected perspective from a seasoned and respected author.  Reading her book was illuminating and made me want to shove the book back on the shelf, roll my sleeves up, and write.

The Writing Life (writers on how they think and work)

Edited by Marie Arana.  This book is a collection of essays written by writers about writing (the process, the editing, the rejection slips, the magic, the slogging).  There are a couple of essays I didn’t get much out of but most of them had interesting perspectives and showed the diverse range of ways one can approach and succeed at writing.  Some of the writers have written only a couple books that took years to write while others write a book a year.

Here are some blogs I’m finding useful and entertaining right now:

The Novel Doctor An editor talks about novel writing and reveals your deepest insecurities.  He also says some useful things and cracks the whip against your indolent ways.

Query Shark Excellent site a friend shared with me while I was trying to write a query letter and was 100% bombing.  I’m still working at it but at least I’m avoiding many of the biggest mistakes thanks to this witty and ruthless agent who really wants you to write better queries.

Rachelle Gardner Another literary agent whose blog has many truly interesting and many useful articles about the business of publishing books.  She’s not the agent for me as she almost exclusively represents Christian fiction, but I think her blog is great.

Agent Query This is a great site to look for agents with.  It is reputable and has good information on query writing, looking for agents, and other things you’ll want to know such as how long an unpublished author’s first novel should be (yeah, this is useful to know before you’ve finished writing it).

Terrible Minds I would truly love to get Chuck Wendig together with my Grandma just to see who would win that inevitable clash sharp tongued titans.  His profanity is breathtaking (as in – I’ve never heard anyone swear so much who wasn’t a stand up comedian) and he finds the most shocking ways of making everything sound pornographic.  His writing advice is gritty but completely sound.

Novel: First draft, Second draft revision…  I loved this post and am enjoying her blog.

25 Things You Should Know About Suspense And Tension In Storytelling I had to give you an actual post to check out from Wendig’s blog.

Editor Alan Rinzler & Literary Agent Andy Ross On All Things Publishing This is a video interview with a written transcription.  It’s long but well worth watching.

Ditching Strategy For Instinct

I keep trying to figure out what my strategy should be for my career as a novelist.  Should I start working on the next Cricket and Grey?  After reading a lot of industry blogs and articles about getting published, what agents are looking for, what people are actually buying, and how writers should build their careers and their “platform”*, I thought that was the way to go.  I don’t want to just stumble down the road towards some ill-defined goals, do I?  I need to know EXACTLY what I’m aiming for, make a plan, follow the blueprint to success without wavering.  Right?

Right?

If I set aside all the research I’m doing that says a book series will sell better than a literary fiction one-off, if I ignore all the formulas for writing success that are offered by the published masses, my instinct tells me to work on the first book I wrote.  The one I had to set aside for two years to let it breathe.  I mentioned it here a few times since finishing Cricket and Grey that Jane is speaking in my head and won’t shut up.  It’s a complete wild mess right now, that story.  I don’t quite know what to do with the plot and I know I need to figure it out before I dig myself deep in the hole of writing it again.  While doing agent research I have this nagging thought that Jane Doe is more likely to get printed.  It makes no sense.  I feel very good about Cricket and Grey but the other story is something powerfully visceral to me and it isn’t good for a series.  It’s a one off.  It’s very dark.  I made a concerted decision that I wanted to write mainstream fiction because I want a career writing novels, I want to actually sell books.  That’s strategy.  That’s smart.  But does it matter what’s smart strategy if underneath everything there’s a story that really needs to see the light of day that doesn’t fit into the plan?

I’ve come to an important conclusion.  We all have our roles in life, in our chosen industries, our chosen paths.  In the publishing world it takes editors to polish manuscripts, agents to sponsor them- to get publishers to publish them, and marketing firms to market them, and book sellers to bring them to the public.  There’s such a long string of people that have important roles in bringing books to life and light.

The writer’s job, as I see it, is to put their fingers on the pulse of their community and the world they live in and translate what is living underneath the surface of life that everyone feels but don’t have the words to describe.  Writers say what others are powerless to say for themselves.  Writers are the eyes and ears of our times, just as other artists are, and tell the truth with lies.  And sometimes, their greatest work is to make you forget your own life for a little while so you can face another day of it.  Each writer has to trust their own instinct for what they have to tell, what they are here to reflect, share, voice, or expose.  There’s no one way to do it.  There’s no one method to be the writer you’re meant to be.  Keeping in touch with and trusting your own instinct is the only way you’ll truly know.

That there is an opinion.  You may contradict it if it isn’t true for you.

See what I mean?  Everyone has their own version of how to become the writer they need or want to be.  I have been paying too close attention to what other people think I should do and how to appeal to the right people.  I think I will appeal best if I follow my instincts.  I have never been steered wrong following my gut.  Never.  So I will continue to send queries for Cricket and Grey because I think it’s a great story and when I find an agent who’s excited to represent it maybe they’ll tell me I need to immediately write a second book.  I’ll listen, at that point.  But right now, while I look for an agent for that book, I know I need to sort out the first one because it is taking up too much space in my head and so must be finished to make room for whatever story is next.

This week I finally figured out what the real title of the Jane Doe book is.  Ready for it?

THE WINTER ROOM

I was talking about it to another writer friend and I suggested this might be the title and as soon as I said it I knew it.

It’s nice when things are so clear.

I am opening files now as I finish this post.  Files of notes, notes about the disaster of the first draft which is such an emotionally heavy work trying to get to the surface of the ocean from the floor.  My job is to cut the cement from the body of the story and stitch it up before the sharks find the blood.  It will continue to be heavy with water but clear with light.

I can do this.

*I loathe that expression as much as I loathe describing oneself as a “brand”.  It’s just splashy marketing words that have become obnoxious and pompous.

Fiction Book Trends

I spent much of yesterday researching literary agencies and managed to send out two queries.  One of the things everyone in the book business says is to research agencies to see what they specialize in, to be sure you know what specific agents are accepting, all to see if they’re right for you.  I get the importance of doing your due diligence.  It weeds out the real idiots.  If you want to sell a bible, you’re going to have a hard time selling it to someone with a bloody scythe in their hand, wearing a grin.  However, it does become obvious after going through the titles that five different agencies carry that there is a trend and the trend is pretty much the same from agency to agency.  Scifi/fantasy and romance are HUGE.  Literary fiction (and where is the line between “mainstream” and “literary”, that’s something I’m very curious to know) is definitely not a large category for anyone.  I am reading individual agent bios to try and figure out which ones are most likely to want to read and carry my book.  It’s not that difficult to say why I would send my manuscript to one agent over another in the same agency, but why approach one agency over another?  That I can’t answer.  My chances of finding an agent increase in proportion to the number of agencies I query.  All of them carry tons of titles in my genre.

Though, as always, I am having a very hard time accepting that Cricket and Grey is truly science fiction and it isn’t likely I’ll be writing any other science fiction novels.  Or fantasy.  Will an agent care if I want to skip genres?  After the last bout of publishing research I became convinced of things I’m now unsure of.  But those thoughts will keep for another post.  Last night I discovered a couple of interesting trends in genres and I want to note them here.

In Science Fiction/Fantasy (not the same genre but lumped together as I believe there is much crossover and they share the same audience):

Vampires.  Duh.  You knew that.  They’re everywhere in fiction.  Good thing I didn’t write a vampire story because, surely, the market has reached saturation point with them?  There are teen versions, urban modern versions, vampire detectives, vampires on motorcycles.  You name it, there are teeth everywhere.

Werewolves.  Well, that isn’t surprising either.  I think it must stem from the same inspiration.

Girls in leather kicking ass: seriously, does it matter what they’re really doing in the story or who they are?  The covers speak louder than the stories.  Lots and lots of babes in tight leather in various stages of coverage.  They are hot, they are fierce, they are hot, and did I mention the leather?

In romance there are some very surprising trends going on:

Tycoons.  Mostly Texan Tycoons.  I guess men from Texas are supposed to be super sexy and obviously they’re pretty much all either rich cattle ranchers or Tycoons in Stetsons (to remind us that they started off as cattle ranchers? What is it with the Texan love for Stetsons?  I personally think they’re awful.  But whatever.  Of course I do.  I’m a west coast girl.)

Vampires.  Wait, what?  Yep.  Where “drink me” is both literal and metaphoric.  Sexy vampires getting it on.  Or sexy vampires trying to drink up non-vampires but getting distracted by all the tight leather (Yes, plenty of tight leather here too.)  Seriously,  I get the appeal.  I was a huge fan of the Anne Rice vampire books when I was a teen.  Those were very romantic.

Babies.  This one freaks me the hell out.  Women getting pregnant by their lousy ex-lovers and turning to their best guy friend (who is secretly in love with her, obviously) to do “the right thing”.  Or, men falling for single mothers.  Or a woman getting pregnant by the man she is in love with but who only meant to have an affair with her and she doesn’t tell him she’s carrying his baby but tries to win his love while gestating.  Really?  This whole thing with babies and pregnancy in the romance genre really freaks me out.  I can think of almost NOTHING less sexy or romantic than being pregnant.  And babies.  NOT SEXY and NOT ROMANTIC.

Amish Fiction:

This one is very surprising to me.  The only place I’ve seen it is on a rack near the checkout at Winco*.  They have at least 10 Amish themed novels.  After eying them curiously for many months I finally read all the back covers to discover if they were steamy romances for regular women with an Amish fetish or if they are gentle stories written for actual Amish women.  Do Amish women read mainstream fiction?  These are not steamy books.  They are very chaste and alarmingly gentle and Christian in flavor.  I don’t know who’s buying them here in McMinnville but I’m pretty sure we don’t have any Amish nearby.  There are many Mormons and Mennonites.  Could it be that Mennonites are reading them?

I’m off to continue my agent and agency research.

*The photo in this post may or may not have been taken at a Winco or other grocery establishment with a strict “no camera” policy.  No one is admitting anything here.

Women in Fiction: Telling all the Stories

I have never been dedicated to the feminist cause in a militant way.  I believe in equal rights for all sexes.  I believe in equal pay for all sexes and I’d be willing to march for it, to sign petitions for it, and maybe I’d be willing to fight for it on a grander stage than that.  But I am not, and never have been, a lighthouse looking for breaches against the seawall of womanhood.  I refuse to see the world in terms of Her versus Him.  I refuse to see any sex as the enemy.  I like to think we’re all equal in value but different in expression, in parts, in personality.

There are a lot of familiar stereotypes of womanhood based on what exists as the truth for the majority of women divided into nice clean identifiable groups.  There’s the fecund version of women who want to have lots of babies, as many as they can muster, or maybe even just one, but it’s vitally important to give birth.  There’s the career woman who doesn’t want children if it gets in the way of her career, she has so much more to offer than children and is (according to many of the fecund version of women) rather selfish in her preference for self aggrandizement over children.  Then there are the women who always wanted children and cherished the desire in their breasts for the great holy union between man and woman but who never cracked the code to creating that life or finding the man.  This woman pines for lost opportunity to have babies.  Next there are the women who want everything and arrogantly (according to some) think they can distinguish themselves in the professional world and turn around and pop out well adjusted babies.  Everyone who isn’t this woman hates this woman.

There’s another archetype of woman.  There’s another story to tell.  There aren’t many people telling it.

There are the women who are nurturing and caring and love children but who don’t feel it’s important that they give birth to have this experience.  There are women who aren’t particularly career driven, who aren’t bitter spinsters, and who like children and have the nurturing spirit but who feel no drive to express this with their own wombs.  There are women who just don’t have any urge to have children but who are absolutely womanly in every other conceivable way.

I realized recently that I can never tell the story of women longing to have babies.  I can never tell the stories of women devastated because they aren’t able to have them.  I am not the person to tell the stories of women who see themselves as high powered executives too busy and important for children.  I don’t relate to any of these people.  I can’t tell the story of women who mourn their reproductive services shutting down during menopause because everyone is already telling that moving story.  There’s another story.

It is tedious to me to read yet another story about yet another woman LONGING to have babies.  I don’t think it’s ignoble or stupid or bad to have babies.  Obviously I succumbed to the hormones that incite a woman’s body to produce offspring.  I can never be sorry for having had my son.  I never dreamed of babies.  I did plan on taking over the world at some point but other than that I wasn’t even career driven.  It wasn’t a question of babies getting in the way of my ambition.

The thought of  being pregnant was horrifying and terrifying to me.  The reality of being pregnant was also horrifying and terrifying to me and wholly unpleasant.  It took seven years for my baby hormones to dominate all my intellectual objections to having a child, giving birth, bringing more people into the world, the selfishness, the fucked up family I’d be bringing a being into, and the enormous lifelong responsibility I would have to that being.  My hormones won out and though I’m glad they did, they have never since been stirred to recreate the event.  I have come to understand that I only had a child because Max needed me for a mother.  Otherwise, I was not meant for motherhood.  I don’t have that desire, the pangs, the thrumming uterus that so many women seem to have.  All these years after having a baby I still relate much more to women who chose and are choosing not to than anyone else.

A woman’s inherent womanliness is not dependent on her having or wanting to have children.  There is so much misty emotional driftwood about women  being women because of their need to mother, their need to constantly nurture, to pop the goddamn babies out and when her children are grown she becomes a shell of herself because she’s been in service to children and husbands for decades and it’s all she ever wanted so when her children leave she focuses her hopes and dreams on grandchildren.

Either that or, so it is suggested constantly in popular culture, she rejects all that to be hard as a man who has no nurturing spirit, who fucks and makes money and watches football and is filled with the bile of ambition.  What’s amazing is that women with incredibly sharp brains and the desire to rise can do so and be fierce and stand up for all women to say that what we’re capable is limitless.  Yet, these women are often depicted as nothing more than men with vaginas.  Other women see them as unnatural.  I know this view has been slowly changing over the last two decades but I notice we’re a long way from understanding that these women leading their industries aren’t flukes and they aren’t unnatural, that they’re women who’ve spent their time following the lines of passion and hunger that do us all credit.  Some of them have children, some of them don’t.  They’re all women to be proud of.

I don’t, as I’m sure it often seems I do, look down on women whose true and most close desire in life is to have babies.  I think this is a legitimate and honest and wonderful choice to make if it’s an actual choice.  There’s no denying that I have a difficult time empathizing with this life choice.  I don’t relate.  I don’t empathize much, even though I keep trying.  I don’t give up.  I do, however, resent the belief that motherhood is the most sacred calling for any woman.  That’s such total rubbish.

The life choice so few women acknowledge, write about, talk about, or revere is the woman who has no desire to give birth to her own children.  As modern as this country of mine likes to think it is, there is still a very strong prejudice against women who don’t want to have children.  Women who don’t feel the ache in their uterus at the sight of babies.  Why is this such an untold version of womanhood?

I realized recently that the two heroines I’ve written so far are women who have no desire to procreate but who are unambitious for power.  In other words, they are women who simply don’t want babies, not that they’ve traded in babies to have a career or to do something else.

It feels like new language.  I can’t tell any other story because every fiber of my being screams that babies are not necessary for fulfillment in women’s lives.  I don’t see anyone telling this story and it pisses me off.  It alienates me.

What’s great about being a writer is that  I have the power to write what I know, what I think is important.  I can give voice to the unheard or underrepresented.  There are a lot more stories to tell from a woman’s perspective, many more than I know of and I fell sure that over time other writers will present stories I have not thought of or been much aware of and the more that happens, the more we veer away from the major archetypes the more truth will be revealed.

If all I ever do in my life is show a different side of being a woman, showing that our stories are diverse and multidimensional, I will feel I have done something worthy.

I’m pretty sure Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman will not be fans of my fiction.

I’m completely at peace with that.

Cricket and Grey’s First Rejection Slip

I feel stalled like an old car whose engine fell out on the road to Vegas and has been abandoned in the most disgusting gas station in Truckee.  I still haven’t heard from the NYC book agent and I just found out that I wasn’t one of the five winners of the Shewrites contest.  I suppose I ought to feel comforted that my period of extreme rejection has begun.  The sooner I rack up my rejection account the sooner I can get to the part where I get published.  I should rejoice in being part of the well-respected depressing part of the writer’s life.  This is it.  I have a  book and am beginning the process of getting nowhere with it like thousands of other writers out there.  Today it feels like joining a cult that you know is going to take all your money and burn you on a special author-sized rotisserie.

The usual advice for writers who’ve gotten to this spot in the life of writing is to remind them that they aren’t writing for the sake of fame and fortune, right?  We’re really all just writing because we are driven to write, because we HAVE TO WRITE.  I’ve been asked many times “If you knew you’d never get published would you still write novels/poetry/blogs/stories?” and the answer is yes and no.  Yes, I’ll keep writing whether I get published or not.  But I don’t write simply to pursue pleasure.  This is not, for me, a fun hobby.  It isn’t something I do lightly or for the joy of it.  I do it for what I could make of it, for what I can build with it, for what it can become, for what I can create and then contribute to the world I live in.  A writer who has no desire or fire to be published is not a writer in the deepest and truest sense.  Not in my opinion.  A “real” writer is someone who feels compelled to share their words, who has a strong drive to tell other people stories, who wants more than anything in the world to be heard because they have something to say.

Being published isn’t the same as seeking fame and fortune.  I think every writer dreams of making enough money to live well on, to support their families on, and every writer hopes to have a name that means enough to publishers and agents that they can continue to publish as they create.  But being published and fame and fortune are not necessarily the same thing as many writers will tell you if only you will listen.  The J.K. Rowlings of this world are few.  However, a large audience is necessary to remain in print.  To get your story out there.  To say what you are burning to say you need people interested in listening and the best way to get more people to listen is to find an advocate with power (an agent and/or publisher), the power to put you in front of an audience.

Being published, no matter how you go about accomplishing it, is the most important thing a writer can do aside from the actual writing.  So yeah, this is incredibly important.

But I’m only in the beginning.  How to keep myself from getting bogged down is the question.  How to go through this process and not lose faith in myself or the strength of my the book I’m trying to get out there.  I don’t know.  I am itching to start work on Jane Doe but that one is so dark and I feel like having a book out there that isn’t published and working on others is like typing in the dark.  If Cricket and Grey turns out to not get published because it’s complete crap but I don’t find that out for five more years – what if I am just writing more crap?  What if I’m writing thinking I’ve written a great book and really it’s horrid but thinking it’s great I move forward in that style?

This is why even though Cricket and Grey is meant to be a series of four books I’m reluctant to work on the second one before knowing if anyone will ever print the first one.  I have my sights set on Jane Doe because it’s entirely different and at least if Cricket and Grey turns out to be a genuine bomb I will have a second (completely different) book to push.  That feels important.  Of course, if anyone does publish Cricket and Grey and likes the series idea I will probably have less than a year to write the second one even though the first one took two years to write.

Two years.  Two years of work and I love what I made but have no way of knowing it it’s viable in the publishing market and may not know for another two years.  My grey streak is getting thicker and whiter by the day.  I’m a little awed by the vast difference between the book writing and publishing time frame and the blogging publishing time frame.  A book can take years to see the light of day.  A blog post can take seconds.  I publish myself every week and it takes so little time.  I write a book and it took me two years.

I can’t see the future.  I can’t know what I really want to know.  Today I’ve lost a writing contest and I may very well soon get my first agent rejection.  My happy reflection is that I haven’t gotten it yet and as long as I haven’t heard from her she has not yet said no.  Since I can’t see the future I have to move forward, like all people do, listening to my instinct and trusting that while there are so many opportunities out there that aren’t meant for me, I will eventually find the one that is.

One last thought I have is that as disappointed as I am for myself, I am happy for the writers who are getting their book deals, agent offers, and winning contests because in a way they’re all part of a broad creative cultural family I belong to.  They are all people who may one day give me inspiration, courage, and help on my own path.  Learning not to resent the people who’ve finally found purchase on the ladder going up is part of being a truly professional writer.

I may feel stalled but I need to keep the momentum going so my goal for the next week is to research agents and pick five of them to query.  Meanwhile I will begin reshaping Jane Doe with the goal that by the new year I will have a finished first draft to start polishing up.

Goals are important.

I would also recommend that you don’t ever get stranded in Truckee.

An Agony of Pitches: #3 (First Person Pitch for Cricket and Grey)

Philip couldn’t help but notice all the hair pulling and chest thumping going on behind the closed door of my office.  I sometimes think the partners and spouses of writers might have more stories to tell than the writers themselves.  Part of what gave my agony away was the puff of sooty air that belched into the hallway after each time I cursed Chick and Pippa for wanting in and out of my office in a constant pet rotation.  Philip asked me (which took guts) if I wanted to talk about it.  Naturally I said no and immediately launched into a speech covering every single possible reason why talking to him about pitches would not only NOT be helpful but might also usher me more quickly into the shallow grave I was digging for myself in my office carpet.  What usually happens is he just lets me spew and then he starts saying smart stuff that makes me think.  That makes me put the shovel and the knives down so I can consider what he’s saying.  Then he gets everything to turn around until I’m arguing with points he’s making but with excitement and clarity and a much-cheered perspective.  That’s what happened yesterday.

Basically what it all boils down to is what everyone already knows: writing pitches sucks.  But more than that I had been grappling with what kind of book I wrote.  Except I wasn’t grappling at all.  I was just letting everyone else’s ideas about it pollute the truth I know which is that Cricket and Grey may have many story elements to it such as a romantic relationship, coming of age subtext, dystopian context, and a murder that does get solved… but it’s none of those things.  If I have to boil it down to one description then it’s always going to boil down to: suspense.  Not in the Grisham school of suspense, but in the Du Maurier school of suspense.  If you haven’t read the book “Rebecca” I highly recommend it.  Dauphne Du Maurier writes fantastic suspense.

“Rebecca” is about a young girl who meets a moody older man at a fancy resort while working as a “companion” to a snobby old lady.   She falls in love with Maxim and he seems to love her too, though he’s reticent and brooding and a little jaded with life.  He moves her into his exalted mansion after a quick marriage (because of course he’s very rich and his family is well known) and expects her to acclimate herself to his grand way of life but she is shy and insecure and makes a lot of gauche mistakes trying to impress him.  It soon becomes evident that the entire household is still in awe and in love with the previous wife, Rebecca, and the young narrator (who’s name is never revealed) becomes obsessed with the dead woman and begins to uncover facts about her that don’t add up to the picture the worshipful servants and family friends paint of her.  She believes her husband is still in love with Rebecca until she discovers a secret he’s been hiding.*

Suspense.  It’s broody, it builds quietly and menacingly.  There’s a major romantic component to it in the relationship between the narrator and Maxim but I DARE anyone to call this book a romance.  In fact, most people probably just call it literature because it’s become such a classic.  However, if you had to say what genre it is, no one is going to put it in the murder mystery shelves because it isn’t about solving a murder, though a murder does get solved, it’s about all the suspense and imminent danger that secrets and obsessions about the dead Rebecca cause to the living.  SUSPENSE.

And that, my friends, is what I want my career of writing to be built on.  Suspense novels.  You know who else writes suspense novels?  Mary Stewart.  Each one of them has a major romantic component to them and each one has a mystery in them but the books aren’t about sleuthing or collecting clues- the characters are all too busy trying to stay alive to sleuth and none of them are detectives or wannabe detectives.  Powell’s Books did shelve one Mary Stewart book in the mystery section but usually you find her on the literature shelves.  (Except her Merlin books which are often found in the science fiction shelves).

Bottom line is that Cricket and Grey will be considered to be technically science fiction but what it truly is, above all other possible categorizations, is a story of suspense.  Now that I’m once again clear on this point it wasn’t quite as hard to sit down and hit my temple with a hard rubber mallet until words started slipping out.  I tried several new pitches but it wasn’t until I tried doing one in first person that it felt like I was on the right track.  I’m going to put it in this post.  Maybe I’ll cringe over it later but I think recording this whole process for other writers is important.  I think I’m going to make a few more tries before sending anything to an agent, but here’s my best effort up to now.

First Person Pitch for Cricket and Grey:

I could feel eyes on me the day I found the photographs of my mother’s corpse in the closet after my father’s funeral.  But I kept working because at the end of the twenty first century, no one can afford to stop working to grieve.  I put on my black band and prepared for the flu season, which is always devastating because no one can afford to lick the stethoscope of the local doctor or get vouchers for the hospital.  That leaves me, Cricket Winters, the town’s only apothecary, to do what I can for them.  I felt the eyes crawl over me in sleep and while I argued with my friend Julie about how to pay off the years of unpaid taxes my father left for me.  The watcher’s eyes never left me.

It’s strange how a death can dislodge so many other things in your life until it becomes unrecognizable.  Grey Bonneville, a young colleague of father’s, showed up at his grave to pay respects and then stayed on, being chivalrous and annoyingly protective.  It’s true he got me out of jail after I got in a fistfight with the federal officer who accused my father of being a smuggler and my mother of being a whore.  I liked him even though I knew he was hiding things from me about father.  The worst thing I ever did was get myself hired as an armed guard for the local Mormon crime boss, because if I’d never taken that job I might never have killed a man.  It was also the best thing I ever did, because if I hadn’t I wouldn’t have gotten to travel to Portland with Grey.  I just wish my mother’s killer would have shot me instead of him.

 

Not Mother Approved.

Naturally, the moment I came downstairs and told my mom that I had finally done a decent pitch and that it has to be in first person she tells me that she doesn’t like to read in first person and that it doesn’t seem like a good way to pitch to an agent.  SIGH.  This is the way it goes.  For every single person whose opinion you solicit on the matter of pitches you will get completely different input.  None of them will complement each other and it will just make you feel like grabbing the hard rubber mallet to hit THEM instead of yourself.  At some point you just have to trust yourself or let an agent knock you to the ground instead of your friends and relatives who, while possibly doing you a service, certainly can’t get you a book deal.

 

*Look at me pitching it like it’s as easy as snapping my fingers.  Is that practice or just cause I didn’t write “Rebecca” myself?

An Agony of Pitches: #2 (The Angry Parody Romance Pitch)

As promised, here is my novel pitched as a romance.  But it’s being pitched from a place of bitter anger and frustration and is not a real pitch.  This is not at all reflective of the tone of my book.  If it was, my book might actually be much better than it is.  I’m considering changing the whole thing into a parody wherein I hate my main characters because they’re all just stupid dip-shits and being stereotypical and ordinary.  it would be so easy to pitch that.  Have a look:

The Angry Parody Romance Pitch of Cricket and Grey:

Cricket Winters like all redheads in the entire world has a hot temper and like all heroines is independent to a fault.  She doesn’t need anyone.  So when her father (who she obviously worships because he’s also a fiery redheaded troublemaker) dies and she discovers that he’s been keeping secrets from her about her mother’s unsolved murder (her mother was also a redhead, but lacked an imprudently hot temper, which may actually explain how come she got killed, but not even the author can say for sure) Cricket becomes disillusioned and angry.  Grey Bonneville, a totally hot Scottish guy who doesn’t look anything like Justin Bieber and has a steady nature (because that’s the only kind you can pair up with fiery redheads – cause every redhead needs someone to “tame” them because their tempers are evidence of an inherently feral nature) shows up to look after her at her own father’s request.  This obviously enrages Cricket who can fight and shoot better than Grey can, so what the fuck makes him such a great protector?

Meanwhile, Cricket does a lot of angry gesticulating and pacing, as all important heroines do rather than lean on friends and family or, worst of all, allow themselves to lean on a MAN who might become an irritating beau, and realizes that her parents were both lying douche bags whose secrets have now put her in the unenviable position of being stalked by a person intent on annihilating her for what she’s discovered about her mother’s murder.  She’s scared, even though she’ll never admit it, because she’s pretty stupid that way.  Plus, her father hasn’t paid property taxes for over three years.  Between the burial expenses and the property taxes, her property is at risk of being seized which threatens her livelihood.  It just so happens that this is the end of the twenty first century and there’s no civilian access to oil so no one drives cars and Cricket’s town is devoid of money or work and she’s broke as shit because she’s compensated for her apothecary work more often than not with eggs, firewood, or braces of birds instead of cash.  She’s so fucked!

Even though her best friend Julie and Julie’s really pious brother Tommy who, though it’s a mystery why, Cricket used to be in love with, offer to help her pay off her taxes which any normal person would have been thankful for seeing as it would solve some of her problems.  But heroines in general, and redheaded ones in particular, are a very tetchy lot and like to make their lives as difficult as possible.  Just to complicate things she finds herself witlessly attracted to Grey who she’s convinced is a lying sack of shit like her parents, and the fact that the FBI think he’s a smuggler lends weight to her tendency to think him a pretty annoying person.  The fact that the FBI also think her father was a smuggler adds to her general sense that the entire world is just full of criminal douche bags.

She has lots of choices but decides to make some money working as an armed guard for the local crime boss Malakai Jeffers, escorting his underaged niece to be delivered to her prospective creepy old man fiancé in Portland.  This is a dangerous job since it must be done with horses on a road full of ruffians that hasn’t had maintenance work done on it for at least thirty years.  She’s livid when she discovers that Grey is working the same job!  He really is a liar!  Which vindicates her sense of righteous anger, dampened only slightly by Grey pointing out that she is now doing morally questionable work herself.  Lots of things happen but most importantly, while shooting each other up, they find love and then come face to face with the bastard who snuffed her mother.

Pretty catchy, right?

Except that if I was really going to write a romance I would never make my heroine an independent feisty wild redhead.  That cliche sailed generations ago.  I would have to constantly vomit it’s so stupid.  Though I did write a redhead with a temper who gets in fistfights.

So fuck you, Angelina.

But that was before I knew I was writing a romance.

I could change her into a mealy-mouthed mousy girl.  That would be a refreshing new take.

That’s right.  I want to abuse my characters because I’m upset with myself.

I’ve already decided that the only way to make this something non-romantic is to have Cricket kill him.  I think I’ll make Tommy turn out to be an abusive bastard to Rebecca too.  While I’m at it I may as well make Cricket’s dad turn out to be her mother’s real murderer.

My most brilliant realization through all this is that next time I can write the pitch first and then write the book, being very careful to stick to the pitch.  Then when I’m done with the book I won’t have to go through this brain-crushing process.  I’m going to go write a few pitches for books I haven’t written and just start over.

Important message: I’m spewing because I’m frustrated.  I’m being hateful and mean and vile.  Take me literally at your own risk.  I’m venting, not giving you the oracle of truth to Angelina’s life.  Take it all with a grain or two of salt.  Or crack, if you prefer.  I’m in a black and horrid mood an fighting off tears every second and contemplating vacuuming because that sounds like fun.  None of this should be so hard.  I think the fact that I think it’s like pulling intestines out of live cats is a real testament to my unstable nature and a reminder that I’m NOT A FUN PERSON.