Agent Hunting

So I'm now working on chapter 10, and I think it's shaping up fairly well. I'm getting excited to be getting close to done. So I'm beginning to research agents. There are a bunch of ways to go about this. Probably the most popular are the various books published every year listing agents and publishers: Writer's Market and Jeff Herman's, though there may be others I don't know about.

They are good resources, but I find that pretty sparse. You get names and catagories they are interested in, but still, you are searching for the business partner for your career and doing it by essentially looking in the phone book. I like to go a bit more in depth.

I subscribed to Publisher's Lunch. They send you emails every day giving you bare bones run downs on the news and deals in the publishing world. You get to see what agents are selling what. Anytime they have a book deal for a book kind of like the one I'm writing (and I'm loose about that. After all, agents usually represent more than one genre/catagory and it is worth checking out) I make a note of the agent and the agency and do a Google search. I look for website, content, and what books they've represented. Even if I haven't heard of it, the titles and covers still give me an idea of what sort of books the agent represents. Also, some agents have their own blogs or other pages of biography, etc. I always read those. I'm trying to figure out if the personality would fit too.

I like this method because you know for certain that these agents are legitimate. They are already making deals, since the deals are being reported. There is also a section in Lunch where they discuss the various movements, promotions, etc, of agents and editors. I make a note of anyone who has left someplace to start an agency or has been promoted up to an agent. New agents and agents building a business are going to be more likely to take on a new writer. Again, I do a search and see what I come up with.

I also go hunting through books. I try to hunt up who is selling the books of my favorite authors, and they are usually thanked somewhere in the acknowledgements.

Right now all the agent names I've collected live on a notepad until I'm ready. I'm not quite ready yet, but I have a decent sized list of possibilities to query, all of whom I have a decent idea of who and what they represent and who they are selling to.

I don't know if in the end I'll wind up buying the big tomes listing agents. I'm just getting started. For right now I have a list of 12 possibilities and I know a lot more about them than a list of catagories. So we'll see what happens with that.

Spies and Secretaries Update--Chapter 5

I just couldn't leave it alone, so I went back. And it is better. It felt bogged down the first time because Swan (the main character) was entering an important new area for the first time and I'd included loads of detailed description.

The instinctive thing to do is to cut the description down to the bone, but I didn't want to be so minimalistic in this section, though I did do quite a bit of cutting. But I also did a lot of adding. What I realized had happened was the description sat all by itself with no particular pull in the story. So while I tightened the description, I also started adding in Swan's thoughts, feelings, hopes, etc, as she enters this new place for the first time and looks around. I also found ways to tighten the sentences through punctuation, white space, etc.

So it isn't perfect, but it's good enough I feel I can move on with the story. I don't feel it sitting behind me, sniffling with a bad case of the adjectives.

And I'm done for the week. Tomorrow I'm performing with a band in the afternoon and days I sing I have a case of the nerves and I know I won't be able to write. And then Sunday morning is church, so I'll get back to it all on Monday.

some days it's just no go

Yes, I did get Chapter 5 revised. It's done. Kind of. But I'm really sure it is terrible and isn't working at all and I'll need to cut most of it later. I'm going to content myself with the idea that it is better than I found it and that the next draft I'll take another pass at it.

And now I need to go buy groceries. I can't continue living on pasta and oil.

Spies and Secretaries Update--Chapter 4

I got some feedback from one of my readers and it is tremendously positive. Thanks, Loretta!

Today I was working on chapter 4, and it's been like bashing my brain out with soap. Why soap? Because I'm trying to clean up and fix things. The problem is the big bang just happened in chapter 3 and now there has to be explanations of things that were hinted at before and reactions to what just happened. The whole chapter is a transition into the next set of decisions the character make. It's all a lot of thinking and talking and reacting and too much of that gets boring. Very boring. Which means you need to be really careful with these bits.

On top of this, various parts of the story have to be moved forward. Relationships need to be poked at. And it has to be the right relationships at the right times. So one scene that I had happening with John (the love interest of sorts) and Swan (the heroine) wound up getting changed into something between Mrs. Hamel (antagonist and mentor) and Swan because I realized I had enough with the guy and needed to move the other relationship a bit. However, the styles of each character are radically different. So while some of the same things got done and said plotwise, it still required a lot of rewriting and making sure those relationships gel.

Some days it all just feels very fuzzy and I have no idea what I'm doing and usually those days fall on these sorts of chapters. There is probably a link. But I think I have ended the day with something better than I started with. Chapter 5 will unfortunately be more of the same before the story picks up again. But in the next couple of days I should be to the part where things are exploding again. Those bits always feel easier. And more fun. Car chases and explosions. What is more fun than that?

well, I'm back

I haven't done well with this blogging thing. This isn't the only time I've tried it, and I didn't do well then either. So why try again? Because the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, and I'm trying for certifiable.

But beyond that, I actually have something to write about. So here is the whole story:

A long time ago (ok, November 2005), I was working at an office while putting my husband through his Ph.D. I knew what I really wanted to do was write, but I had a full time job, friends, voluteer stuff, a husband who was perpetually nuts from the horrors of graduate work and scientific research. It wasn't a great time. So I started a blog (my first failed blog) and on it was a progressing story. Not anything I thought out. I had ideas for "serious" books, but this wasn't going to be a serious novel. It was just a way to keep writing here and there in the hopes that eventually I'd learn how to write a novel. I'd attempted 3 before and never gotten very far. This starting over and over at things I'm no good at is a trend. Eventually it sticks.

I had this crazy idea about a group of secretary spies. After all, secretaries know everything and they really do run the world, so there must be a group of secretaries out there saving the world from evil villians and such. I could just see my secretary from grade school, her gray curly helmet hair and a sweatshirt with teddybears on it, pulling out an Uzi or some such. She'd have made a great spy. No one crossed her. With no more ideas than that, I proceeded to write.

But after about 9 "episodes" (webisodes) I quit. However, some friends liked it and said I should resurrect it. So one day a few months later I was emailing a friend funny bits while goofing off at work and I continued the story. She mentioned there were a couple other friends who would also be interested so I emailed it to them as well. And soon other friends heard and wanted to be on the mailing list. I just wrote whenever I had time at work, with no set schedule. Friends forwarded it to their friends and soon I had people I didn't know asking to be on the mailing list and by the way, where was the beginning.

Pretty soon my list of people who wanted the updates was longer than my email at the time could handle and sending people the beginning meant having to forward 20 or more old emails to them. And that wasn't including the first 9 episodes that had been on the blog and I'd never kept a copy of.

Someone suggested I put up a website which would let people read the archives to their hearts content and I could put the new stuff up there. So I did. I learned some HTML. I got a domain name. Spies and Secretaries went up in March 2006 and ran until March 2007 when I finished the story and the website went down, since I couldn't afford to pay for it anymore. Things had changed. The husband had graduated with his degree and we'd moved to New York where things are much more expensive. But in that time I'd gotten a fair number of readers and I'd learned I could actually stick with and write a novel.

After the website went down a number of the readers urged me to try to get the thing published as a novel. I said ok. But I had no idea what that would entail. For one thing, I had a problem: it wasn't very good. At least I didn't think so. It had it's funny moments and some likable characters, but as a whole, it was sort of messy.

I had no idea what I was doing, however, so in May 2007 I attended a conference that had a whole round up of agents. You spent 3 minutes with an agent and then if they were interested they said to write them. Technically you were only supposed to do it if you had the novel ready to go. I didn't. I had a mess. But I did it anyway and the agents were interested. So I went back home and tried to revise. I realized I couldn't revise this and so let it go, deciding it was high time I got a real job anyway.

However the economy was starting its downturn and no one wanted to hire someone who'd been a low-level secretary for the last five years even if she did have graduate work. No experience beyond office work meant no one wanted to hire me for anything other than office work. The only real interview I got was for an unpaid internship at an agent's office and even she didn't want me (she was quite nice though). I couldn't even give away my work (unless it was answering phones and filing).

By spring 2008, I'd bottomed out. I attempted writing another novel, but couldn't get anywhere at all. I tried to get some other stuff published and no one wanted it. I went back to Spies and Secretaries. This time I was thinking webcomic.

Except I can't draw. But it made me look again at the stuff I had. And I liked it. It was a mess. It was completely unfixable. But it had some moments. I decided to start over from scratch. Previously I'd always written things by winging it. No plots, no plans, no idea of the ending. I'd write the first draft and then revise the mess. This worked fine for short stories. I'd even had a few of them published. I had done just that with Spies and Secretaries and it didn't seem to be working for me. Not on a longer work, anyway.

So when I decided to start over I sat down with a notebook and made a full outline of the story. I figured out subplots and characters and histories. It took about a month. And then I sat down to write. Some of it was easy. Some of it I had already written and could pull directly off the previous stuff. But most of it was all new. Same characters, same situation, but now with some structure and maybe a coherent plot.

I finished it last fall and am now working on the third draft. And that's why I decided to attempt a blog again. I've never tried to publish a book before (the previous ones being too awful and unfinished to bother with). I have no idea what I'm doing. And for some reason I think it would be useful to the world to write about this journey as I finish revising and try to get published. Who knows, maybe my mistakes and missteps will help someone else avoid the same problems.

This blog probably won't be all about writing and publishing, but that is what I am specifically setting out to talk about. I will still probably post pictures of my cat.

The big news of the day is I finally have the first three chapters in a form that I'm willing to let someone else look at them. And so I have passed them on to two of my friends, one who read the original stuff and one who didn't and now I just have to wait for their responses. I am attempting to practice patience. But I always pace nervously when waiting for feedback. And munch things. Tonight I intend to spend watching for email and eating cookies.

It's not just me

So recently I finished up a short story called "Incend" and start it on its way to amassing rejections. This story took my five years to write, largely because it terrifies me. It is about the friendship of two boys in a rural Nebraska town just as the Defense of Marriage Act (an act defining marriage as between a man and a woman) was voted in. Because it is a story of mine, there is also spontaneous combustion involved.

What scared me so much about writing it was that I didn't feel I had the right to. I'm not a man. I haven't been 15 years old in fifteen years. I'm a woman married to a man. I was terrified I was overstepping some bounds. How could I write this when the viewpoint is so very much not my own?

So today, on my usual looking at my favorite blogs, Nancy Kress wrote about the same thing, but her issue is a dwarf. I'd hug her, but I'd be too shy and if I could open my mouth I'd be fangirled out telling her I love her and asking if she'd sign my tattered copy of Beggars In Spain. As it is, she's a better writer than I am and has been writing a lot longer than I have, so that she worries over the same things is very comforting to me. Can't wait to read Dogs and Steal Across the Sky.

And hey! I have managed a nonpolitical post. Sort of.

An Inspiration To All

Today the New York Times put up an article on Malika El Aroud, a Belgian woman who uses the internet to inspire others in the fight against the west. She says, "I have a weapon. It’s to write. It’s to speak out. That’s my jihad. You can do many things with words. Writing is also a bomb."

The article goes on to talk about the rise of women within radical Islam and how they are using this power to help Al Qaeda and others. It also talks of Ms. El Aroud's arrests in Switzerland and surveillance in Belgium for connections to attacks or planned attacks.

But she is right about one thing: writing is powerful. I am inspired and here is what I propose to do: I can NOT fear.

Fear is a temptation. You read of someone telling the west to order coffins for our husbands and sons and you get scared. That's someone I love. I want to protect them. But in the end fear is the first step towards hatred and it is the biggest step.

I cannot change decades of overbearing and damaging U.S. policy. I cannot apologize and expect that it will be accepted. I cannot offer flowers, any more than I could, as a white woman, walk into the worst ghettos in the United States and expect that because my intentions are good, I am somehow protected or absolved. That is naive.

What I can do is not be afraid, so the next time the big political machines come rolling into town crying, "Fear them! Fear them! Let's get them before they get us!" I can say no, I do not fear them, whoever the big danger is this time, and cast my vote accordingly.

And I cannot write words that will heal the breach between the Middle East and the West. Nothing I write will make a jihadist suddenly turn around and decide Americans might be okay. Let's call off the suicide bomb today. But maybe, just maybe, I can find powerful words to inspire my own people. Words that will help others to not fear and not listen when the powers-that-be start rallying, FEAR, FEAR, FEAR, and ATTACK, ATTACK, ATTACK. Words that will inspire governments and businesses to think about the policies they are creating and the enemies they have made with them.

I can dream. It's my blog.

Memorial Day

So today, in honor of Memorial Day, my husband and I took a walk to the oldest cemetery in our town. We live in one of those small towns on the Hudson River in New York, so the cemetery has graves dating back before we were a country. We walked up the road and went in. There are no fences around this cemetery and no gates. Only old stone steps that are cracked and uneven. On the stones to either side of the steps someone had put flower baskets, probably some section of the American Legion or the D.A.R.

No one has mowed here in a long time and the grounds look more like a sunlit field with waist tall grass and little yellow flowers with headstones sticking up through the grass. Under the shade of the trees the tall grass gives out in favor of moss and clover. Other wildflowers grow in various clumps, pink ones, white ones. And here and there are fresh American flags, stuck in markers probably placed by the same person who left the flower baskets. The bright colors stick out as much as the wildflowers do. More because the yellows, whites, and pinks fit among the green and yellow grass and the white, gray, or brown stones, while the red, white, and blue does not. Still, it isn't always easy to find the graves of the soldiers.

Some say which war they were in. Others make no mention of it. We spend some time guessing which wars the soldiers fought in. Born 1845, so he probably fought in the Civil War, right? We try to remember the dates of the Spanish-American War. Somewhere in the late 1890s. Sometimes the grave the flag is planted nearest doesn't seem to be a soldier. Why is one near the grave of an 18 month old? Or was it near the grave of the mother? Was she a nurse? Given the time period, would she be remembered for that service? Did she find a way to fight? Some of the graves with flags are so worn we can't read the names or dates. The unknown soldier.

At one end is a low wall with a plaque that marks this as the sight where a cannon ball shot by a British boat hit in 1780. I look at the damaged section of the brick wall, a visible reminder that war had been on this land once.

We leave the way we came, down the broken stone steps, though there is nothing to stop us picking a convenient section of hill and going down that way. We hold hands, happy for each other's company and the extra day off together. I mentally thank God that my husband is now too old to be in the first draft if that were to happen. He's too educated too. Educated in things the military would want to use. He is safe. And even though I have had family members in most major U.S. wars since the Revolution, including my father in Viet Nam and my brother who has now left the Navy, war feels distant for me. I am cocooned here, free to worry about gas prices and blog posts.

My husband and I look back at the cemetery before we go. This place is old and unused. The most recent burial we found was over forty years ago. No one comes here. No one but us and some person who placed the flags and the flower baskets. The sun shines and a breeze blows and the grass, wildflowers, and flags all move. The day is perfect. We are safe. This is why we remember.

reading material

I finished reading two books in the last 24 hours, not because I'm such a crazy fast reader (I'm actually a slow reader) or anything. Babbitt took me several weeks to finish and the other one, Four To Score is one of the Stephanie Plum series and I always read them in a day. They are short and fast and hard to put down.

Four To Score is one of the best of the series. Really hilarious. I even read some parts aloud to my husband, they were so funny. Not much else to say about that.

Babbitt, however, by Sinclair Lewis, was awesome. It follows George F. Babbitt, a real estate man, husband, father, and otherwise Solid Citizen as he goes about his life. He's a Republican, an American, a member of several organizations, like the Athletic Club and the Booster Club and the Elks, and attends the Presbyterian church most Sundays. He owns his own business, co-owned with his father-in-law. He secretly isn't in love with his wife but likes the moral high ground and being a good citizen, so he doesn't have affairs. He is greedy, self centered, and materialistic. He's a back slapper and a fisherman and a poker player and a good ol' boy and pretty much every stereotype you can name to fit the white, conservative, middle class, businessman. The book is at once a scathing criticism and a sympathetic portrait.

It follows George Babbitt as he comes to realize that he's not really happy with his life. He does something about it, falls from the grace of his friends and the business community, and eventually goes back to being the same person he was before, taking up the same ideas and life he was so sick of in the beginning, but now renewed in them, choosing them, even as he knows he may be wrong. This is the way things are done. But that summary makes the book sound rather sad and a downer, and it isn't. It's funny and ends on an upbeat note, even as you know George will never change.

It is also a startlingly relevant book to today. Beginning with the main character, George is "nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay." Haven't we seen something like that recently?

In the twenties there was a big uproar about unions and how workers unions were going to turn the whole country communist, destroy business, coddle everyone, undo the American way, etc. etc. And this is the issue facing George Babbitt. Of course, George stands against unions and fair pay for workers along with all the rest of the Boosters and business men in his aquaintance. At one crucial point in the book Babbitt talks with Seneca Doane, a local politician who had recently been defeated in favor of a candidate Babbitt and his good old boys prefered, partially with the help of Babbitt's stump speeches. Doane is for workers' rights. Babbitt says to Doane:

"Oh. Like dancing?"

"Naturally. I like dancing and pretty women and
good food better than anything else in the world. Most
men do."

"But gosh, Doane, I thought you fellows wanted to
take all the good eats and everything away from us."

"No. Not at all. What I'd like to see is the meetings
of the Garment Workers held at the Ritz, with a dance
afterward. Isn't that reasonable?"

Isn't that reasonable? But I am both a liberal and a feminist, two words that have turned into insults and generally bring up images of humorless, politically correct (another term that has become an insult, as if there were something wrong in being aware of our language and the hidden and subtle ways we demean people), and angry.

I loved the book and I loved the character, just for giving me a sympathetic handle on a sort of person that I would otherwise like to demonize.

probably not the best diet

I was busy this morning and sort of forgot about food, munching along as I went. So today I have eaten: a bowl of corn flakes in soy milk, a bowl of popcorn with margerine and nutritional yeast, corn chips, and now some helva with pistachios. Except for the helva, it's a bit like the grapefruit diet but with more fat. I should probably go rustle up some vegetable or some protein.

In other world shattering news, the cost of the laundry machines in my apartment building went up by a quarter apiece. One would hope that this means the machines will work consistently now, but no, the middle dryer already has an out of order sign on it again. I hate laundry to begin with. This doesn't help.

I knew processing and fat were good for me somehow

See here. I'm off to eat salad with full fat dressing.

emetophobia 2

See now this is exactly what scares me. Thank you J. Jacques for displaying it so well. Is there a word for fear of being thrown up on?

(Honestly, this isn't taking up that much of my thinking time, but I saw the comic and had to post it.)

text msgs need smilies :)

They really do. I'm just saying.

I know there has been some controversy between a few stick in the muds and the rest of the world as to whether smilies are a force of good or evil, the argument going that a little semicolon paired up with the right parenthesis is a shortcut that makes people not think about wording and degenerates our writing skills. I say, when you are texting or emailing or talking on a forum, you don't want to spend fourteen hours considering your wording. You want to keep in touch with friends and make new ones. Hell, for most of the history of humanity, most of us have been illiterate anyway. So that we have a society where pretty much everyone can compose such messages at all is good.

I am queen of the smilies. I put them on everything. In one forum I once accepted a challenge of using every smilie in the forum's system. Took me three hours to compose and some creative usage of a few of those smilies, but I did it.

So yesterday I was texting the lovely husband and put in a sarcastic remark. He texted back asking whether that was serious or not. And it occurred to me, what my phone needs is a :, a ;, and a ( and ). This would cover such things.

Or maybe I need to learn to compose my text messages better instead of letting my text writing skills degenerate.

backwards weirdness

I was helping out at my church today, sorting books for this huge rummage sale they are doing the first weekend in June. Yesterday was the last day of Sunday school and there had been a picnic, so there was food left over, including a huge sandwich of meat, cheese, and mayo cut into parts. The nice lady I was working with asked me if I wanted some.

All of that sounds normal until I blinked at her like she had three heads and said, "I'm vegan."

I know. Horribly rude vegan of me. I should have just said, "No thanks," and left out any reasons why. But I blanked. People don't usually ask me that question. I know most of my friends also eat meat, but then it is something they deal with, not me, so I actually forget things like people actually eat meat and dairy. And even when I haven't forgotten that people do still eat meat, no one asks me if I'd like some. Friends and family know, of course.

But here is this nice lady offering me a bit of sandwich and I'd forgotten how to respond to this. There's no way she could have known I'm vegan, but somehow I was amazed she hadn't read it off of my forehead or something. So instead I stared at her like she'd just asked if I wanted to fly to Monaco or something and blurted, "I'm vegan."

That's me, doing what I can to strain vegan/omnivore relations. And I'm just neurotic enough to be writing about this 2 hours later.

there will be lies

I embrace lying to a certain extent. I'm not talking about big lies, such as cheating on spouses, going to war over nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, or who ate the last brownie. But lies, no, let's rename that, stories about life are acceptable lies. Acceptable, hell! Encouraged!

See, I understand James Frey and Margaret Seltzer. Big things happen to other people. Exciting things happen to other people. This isn't just that I'm unlucky, but also that I probably didn't go out that night and instead curled up to read a book with a nice cup of tea and some cookies. It's my own fault really. So instead I make things up shamelessly or steal from other people's experiences. I used to feel bad about it. Now when I start into my bits of stories I'll just warn people--Do you want the truth or the lie? But honestly, the lie is more interesting.

There are some rules to this. You don't lie where it would incriminate another person or would otherwise make people uncomfortable. In other words, no made up stories of child abuse, rape, jail time, etc (which is where James and Margaret fall down). Those are big. If you are saying it, it should be real.

The stories I tell are goofy bits about how I started smoking (yes, I quit), the time a date left me at a party for his ex-girlfriend whom I was supposed to be keeping him away from (actually happened to a friend), funny driver's ed stories I picked up from all over and appropriated as my own. That kind of thing. Stories that sound more fun and immediate if I tell it like it happened to me rather than a friend or worse, a friend of a friend. Or...um... I read it in a magazine one time and stole it.

Because my own life is rather uninteresting and I can't help but want to put just a little spin on it and keep the listener enthralled in the story rather than tell the truth. But this does mean that I have accepted my fate. I will never be able to write a memoir. My own sense of story will keep the lies humming along, getting wilder and wilder, until I wind up on the bestseller list and outed as a fraud. Then Oprah would hate me and how does one live with oneself after Oprah hates you? Better to start by being honest and saying, I lie.

emetophobia

Also known as fear of vomiting.

It came up in conversation and I needed to know the word. But the thing is, it isn't fear of my own vomiting that gets me. It's fear of other people vomiting. Seriously, this is one of the grossest bits of human physiology. If I'm vomiting, I know I can usually make it to toilet and really, I'm too busy being sick to fear my own vomiting. Sometimes you actually wish for it, knowing that as soon as you puke, you'll feel better.

It's another story when it is somebody else doing the vomiting. I don't even deal with baby spit up well. I would not have done well as a Roman going into a vomitorium (which is actually not true, but everyone has heard of it).

So this is my fear. I'll be on a rollercoaster or that centrifugal ride and someone will throw up and the forces of the ride will splatter it far and wide. You always hear stories like that. I've never experienced it, but it is a big fear of mine. More than just grossed, actually afraid of it.

Is there a word for that? It's not emetophobia, which is fear of vomiting yourself. This is something different.

mind suck

The problem with working from home. I have all my toys to distract me. It is now 1pm and I haven't done anything and I have to have lunch first. Can't work without food. It's wrong. And then I can't work while eating. And then there is the post lunch digestion period where I must nap. And then....

Okay. must work now. will play with more fonts and colors on my new blog later.

I'll take naive, thank you

So the general election fights have started with McCain and Obama shooting back and forth on foreign policy and which one is naive. The Republicans and various pundits have been calling Obama naive for a long time. So I largely skip it, having already burned out on this election and all candidates.

A little further in the news there is an article on Bush visiting with King Abdullah at his ranch in Saudi Arabia and it mentions how the Saudi's used to be allies and are still considered as such, but they really don't like Bush Jr and aren't about to go out of their way to help him, even if they could. And even further on, in an article on starving people in Somalia, there is a mention of how Bush announced there were Al Qaeda hiding in Somalia and went after said terrorists with airstrikes in some of the most parched areas of the country. Now Somalis are so ticked at the United States, we can't even go in to help them. Western aid workers are being killed. Threats are issued. Etc.

If those little tidbits of foreign policy are examples of not naive, I'm beginning to think naive is the way to go.