don't f*k with the system

That pretty much sums up the last couple of weeks. I should know better. I've been writing a long time. But still, every once in awhile I decide it would be fun to tinker and then my writing goes no where. Absolutely no where. I finally managed to put down 400 words today.

Ok, the system is this. I get up, make lunch for the guy, take him to the train, come home, feed the cat, make tea, turn on the computer, get cereal, play a game of free cell, and then write. In that order or the monster in charge of my creativity (he has floppy ears) decides to go pick daisies instead.

But my computer is old and its immune system is vulnerable to every sort of new virus that comes along. Most times I just keep it in the bubble of my apartment with no internet but it had to go out, so we put on a new virus scanner. A virus scanner that causes my poor, sluggish baby to take for-freaking-ever (which is even longer than forever, let me tell you) to load. Waiting for load time is not in the writing system. It's a sensitive system. I sit in front of the computer glaring at it, chomping on my cereal and wondering how many more million times I need to click the button to get free cell to come up.

So instead of waiting, I took to playing piano (ok, more like playing at piano, or playing with a piano--actually, it's a keyboard, I only wish I had a real piano, and my musicality is sort of limited anyway) while the computer loaded up. And the monster went to pick daisies. And it has only taken me TWO WHOLE WEEKS to figure out why I was suddenly and massively word constipated. Two weeks. I am a moron. In the meantime I have not been a joy to live with and have resolutely turned down everything and stayed in my little hidey hole hoping the monster would come and play with me.

And so I have tweaked the system in a way that just might work. Now I get up, turn on the computer, make lunch, etc, etc, and by the time I get home from the train station and the tea made and the cat fed, the computer is ready for me to play free cell and start putting words down. The creative monster has made enough daisy chains.

All Quiet on the Northern Front

Hello, everyone. Sorry things have been so quiet here; I've been quite busy at work and at home, and I'm not sure where my fellow contributor has gotten herself to these days. One can only hope that she is too busy with her revisions at this point to deal with such things as blogs and e-mail.
Anyway. I wanted to say a brief something from a production standpoint to all writers out there who may come across this.
Please, please, when you are marking changes on your copyedited manuscript or on your typeset pages, make sure they are logical and legible. It makes everybody's life easier.
Short and sweet, I know, but it's past time to go home already. I promise a longer ramble about my writing soon.

Community

I think that many of us secretly hold a romantic vision of the starving writer in our heads. This writer sits at a rickety table in a drafty, gray garret somewhere, scribbling (or typing) furiously through reams of smudged white paper while smoking endless cigarettes and downing bottle after bottle of cheap red wine. This writer does not have friends, or family, or pets. This writer exists in a perfect bubble of isolation, toiling way at the act of creation until voila! they have created something beautiful and unique and perfect.
Can you see your secret writer now, all rumpled clothes and mussed hair, dark circles beneath the eyes, ink smeared on fingers and cheeks? I can. I've had a secret writer in my head for a long, long time.
But you know what? I think that, for the majority of us writers, being that solitary is unhealthy. Our writing is fed by what we know, what we see, what we experience. It stands to reason that, therefore, our characters are fed by who we know, who we see, who we experience. We need exposure to the world in order to create. And beyond that, without the objective eye of our peers, how will we gain perspective on our work?
I believe that community is essential for growth as a writer/artist/what-have-you. But. It's important to find the right community. Don't just join the first critique group you come across. Check it out, by all means. Sit in on a session or three. Give them an excerpt, or a short story, of yours and see what they do with it. It's like a test. What you want in a community is a group of people who can read one another's work objectively (at least semi-objectively) and then give good, constructive, helpful feedback, be they fellow writers or not. Some the best feedback I get about my writing comes from a sibling of mine who doesn't write. But she reads a lot. So she has a sense of how stories work. And she's not attached to it like me, so she can tell me when things are good and when things are boring. I find feedback from other people to be immensely helpful. They always, always spot things I missed. Or just didn't think of. And that's the sort of community we should all be trying to find. A circle of trustworthy people who will look at your art, point out the good parts, and then politely poke their fingers through the holes, so you know that those holes are there. (And if you're really lucky, they may even have suggestion on how to fix those holes!)
It's taken me a while to build up a community for my writing to flourish in. It's still a fairly small circle of people. And I don't show them everything I write, not by a long shot. But just knowing that they will be fair and open-minded and helpful about whatever I toss at them is a beautiful feeling.
So I say let go of that lonely writer in the garret. Or write a story about him/her, and show it to your friends! Seriously, we can't help each other grow as writers if we all lock ourselves away from the world. So go out there and find or make some community. You'll be happier that way in the long run. I promise.

Query Letter #3

Here we are getting a bit better. More engaging. Better tone. Much shorter. Better first line, though I have ideas on how to make it even better. This isn't perfect, but it is a leap forward. In this one I feel there is a possibility the reader will believe I can write.
****
Swan Shreve thinks her former middle school secretary has lost her marbles. It's been fifteen years since the last time she saw the old bat and now Mrs. Hamel shows up out of nowhere, announces she's actually a spy for a top secret government secretarial pool, and says she needs Swan's help. Even if it were real, Swan isn't interested. She just got her Ph.D. in English and working as a secretary to an upper level engineer in a weapons company is only temporary until she can find a tenure track position teahching the importance of Aphra Behn to sleeping freshmen. But Mrs. Hamel has more of her marbles (and various other weapons) than Swan realizes. The Strategic Secretarial Services (SSS) is real and when a coworker is murder and the killers come after Swan, she'll need every bit of Mrs. Hamel's help to stay alive.

Query Letter #2

Ok. This one is shorter, which is better. However I apparently still thought the line, "Secretaries know everything," was a good hook. And never let it be said that I let go of a bad phrase when I have convinced myself it is good. I'm far too stubborn for that. It is still quite long though and not really engaging. Not to mention it's never clear who the main character is anyway. (Hard to be engaging when the reader doesn't know who she's supposed to engage with.) And there are a few (many) cliches in here. The bad kind. The lazy writer kind. Yup. All in all, #2 goes in the bin. Here it is, in all it's awful glory.
***
Secretaries know everything. In WWII when the precursor to the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services was created, a top secret sister organization was also started: The Strategic Secretarial Services (SSS). Throughout the Cold War the ladies of the SSS kept America and the world safe. They infiltrated the most dangerous networks, made the most daring rescues, and were an unstoppable force in the intelligence community. Until women's lib. Now all the smart, strong young women want bigger and better careers than being a secretary.

Swan Shreve is a modern, young woman. In the last 6 months she's finished her Ph.D. in American Literature, gotten dumped by her boyfriend and found a job as a secretary to an upper level engineer in a weapons company until her ship--in the form of a tenure track at a nice university--comes in. All she needs to do is survive rude callers and being stalked by the secretary of her old middle school, now retired, who keeps going on about spying. Clearly the woman sniffed a lot of copier fluid. Or so Swan believes until a fellow secretary is gunned down before Swan's eyes.

Query Letter #1

And because I am a glutton for punishment (or maybe it's that I'm a sadist), I am going to post all 6 query letters. So here it is, my first crack at it. #1. Possibly not the worst query letter ever written, but that bar is too low to limbo under. I bet I don't miss it by much though.

The tone is wrong for the book. It is far, far too long. Just this synopsis takes up the whole first page of a one page letter. Oops. Yeah. I suspect it was looking at this mess and realizing there was only so much revision could do that gave me the idea of tossing and starting over several more times.

Query letter #1


We all know secretaries run the world. What we don’t know is there exists a governmental department of secretary spies, the Strategic Secretarial Services, that grew up in World War II and has been saving the world ever since. In my novel, Spies and Secretaries, Swan Shreve is about to learn.

Swan Shreve graduated with a doctorate in American Literature and then hit a wall. Unable to find a decent job at a university because of her focus on Edith Wharton’s ghost stories, not serious enough literature, she finds a job as a secretary and now feels insecure and defeated, still sending out resumes every Tuesday.

Mrs. Hamel and the Strategic Secretarial Services have another problem. Ever since women’s liberation all the good candidates have gone into “better” careers. And while she can still wield a machine gun and crush a larynx with the best of them before going home to bake excellent cookies for her seven grandkids, she knows if they don’t get some new members soon, the SSS will die out and the country will be left with only the CIA to protect them.

However Swan is more inclined to believe Mrs. Hamel is senile than a master spy and refuses to join. When another secretary at her company in assassinated, Swan finds herself helping the SSS discover the mole in their midst and learning that her own self worth doesn’t need to be tied to her job title.

attempting more coherence tonight

And hoping I will make sense. Maybe.

I went out to lunch with a friend of mine and had him take a look at the latest and greatest of my query letters. He pointed out the ways it wasn't working. This bothered me, because I really thought I had it this time. But despite my pleading, he refused to say it was wonderful and perfect as is. This is why I have him look at my stuff.

So more on writing query letters, because they are essentially writer kryptonite. People can turn out novels that run hundreds and hundreds of pages and then flip about a one page query letter and a two page synopsis, the general industry standards.

I'm starting pretty early with this, mostly because I know that the second I feel completely finished with the book, I won't have the patience to do a good job on the query letter and synopsis. I'll want to start sending it out NOW. So I'm doing this while I have patience.

And since I also know that writing the perfect query letter is writer kryptonite and a writer can become paralyzed at just the thought of doing this task, I have set myself up to write six of them.

Why six? Why not just one and revise it to perfection? Several reasons. 1)When I write something down and then try to revise, I tend to get stuck with the way I wrote it down in the first place. I can't seem to imagine another way to write it. And when it comes to query letters or other things of this nature, the first version will be bad and I'll just be revising bad into mediocre. Where when I start over from scratch, I find other ways of addressing the letter that will be better. Really. Letter 2 was better than 1 and letter 3 was so much better I seem to have forgotten that I meant to write six. I thought I was done. Turns out I need six.

And 2) It gets rid of a lot of the anxiety to set out to write a bunch of these rather than just one perfect one. Gives me room to mess up.

Six is a good number for this. After all, it is only one page, so it's not like this takes tons of time. I'm not just sitting down and banging out six in a row. I'm giving myself weeks to do this. I write one. Stare at it. Write another. Compare and contrast. Wrote the third. Showed it to friends. Took some comments. I'm on to number 4. Now I need to tackle the synopsis just as seriously.

More writer kryptonite. I can feel my powers draining.

blink, blink

I have recently given up cooking. It's that bad. I'm doing 6-8 hours of revising and rewriting a day and when I finally look away from my computer screen it feels as though all my brain has turned to mush and I can't think anymore for the rest of the day. Deciding what to make for dinner is too complex. I'm progressing at a rate of a chapter every other day. I'm a slow writer. This is breakneck speed for me.

I'm glad it's going like this. I think I'm actually within 100 pages of the end of this draft. In the meantime, I'm just glad Andy is willing to make dinner and not make many other demands on me.

This is the first novel that has been worth revising. And the other ones, let's just say I wasn't as serious about them. So I have to wonder if this is what it is going to be like at the end of writing every novel. Will I always hit this pushing phase where I am otherwise useless to the world? The hardest part of writing this novel is really all the time its taken me to learn my own process of writing. I write in the mornings. Usually by hand, but when I get going I type, etc., etc. Each of the failed novels (5 of them) I got a little further along and a little better. This is the first time I've made it this far. I did them all in different ways (for 4 of them I had no outline or idea of where I was going. The only sad thing is that it took me FOUR failed novels to figure out that doesn't work for me. FOUR. Excuse me while I continue banging my head against a wall because I like it) until I finally figured out something that worked.

Now I'm figuring out rewrites. Sure, I've rewritten stories, but this is a tad bit... bigger. My longest short stories top out at 10,000 words. This is already at 90,000. We'll see where it ends up after the revisions. So it is a whole new game. It's taken me almost a year to do the first draft through the third draft. Will it always take that amount of time? Will I get faster at this once I know how this works? Will I ever feel like my brain is functioning again or is the mush thing permanent?

Ok. I'm off to sleep and then get back to work. I have another chapter that needs doing and I'm so very close.

weekend roundup

• Agent Janet Reid rebutts the Wall Street Journal article I posted last week.
• Editorial Anonymous has a fabulous post on what to put in the autobiographical portion of the query letter.
• An interesting bit of questions and answers, most up for the first few.
• Various literary terms that may not already be in your vocabulary.

That's all I've got this week. I'm going to go see if the Husker baseball team can pull out a win (already down by 3 in the first inning) and avoid doing the mini-sweetrolls I need to make for coffee hour tomorrow. Procrastination will make my baking better. I'm sure of it.

Here I Am

Apologies for taking so long to introduce myself, but here I am. My name is Lauren, and I'm Leigh Anna's new coblogger. (Is that even a word?) I write fantastic fiction of various sorts, and also work in the production editorial department for a major publishing company, which leads to all sorts of interesting insights as an aspiring writer. I'll do my best to be here regularly, discussing the ins and outs of writing and publishing. I think for today, since it's my first post, I'm just going to say a couple of vague, pertinent things.
First, don't be afraid. Write what you want to write, how you want to write it. It takes time to develop both a good writing habit and a body of solid writing. Be patient with yourself. Don't be afraid of writing junk. Don't be afraid of the blank page before you. Don't be afraid that no one will like your story, or that it will never sell because there are tons of books in that genre already. If you let fear paralyze you, you won't get anywhere.
Second, keep reading. I firmly believe that you cannot be a good writer without being a good reader. You need to know what's out there and what's selling. And, even more importantly, reading books helps you grow as a writer. You'll learn about story arcs, about developing characters, about good descriptive passages, about how to write a hot sex scene, etc., etc., etc.
Third, do your research. I know that if you write genre fiction there's a temptation to just say "Well, I created the world my book takes place in, so I can just make it up however I want." But the truth of the matter is, consistency is important. If you're writing urban fantasy in eighteenth-century London, find a map of the city appropriate to the time period. Look into the slang people used then. Find out what people wore. If your fiction takes place in the now, and has some real people/places/things entwined with your fiction, make sure that whatever you say about those real things is accurate. (I know researching is often not as fun as writing. But trust me. Readers notice when things are askew.)
There we go. A solid trio of things for you to ponder. Have a good weekend, everyone!

Various Things

1. I'm now reading Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress. I love her. Also reading Bath Massacre: America's First School Bombing by Arnie Bernstein. It came in the mail earlier this week. It's wonderful to see the real thing in print.
2. Yay Iowa!!! I got married there! Very proud of that part of my midwestern roots.
3. Bookends blog has an interesting post on what good things an author can do (from an agent's perspective). I skipped the agentfail thing since most of the writers seemed to be largely griping that a) the agents aren't reading their superb and wonderful queries/submissions fast enough b) they hate the no response means no thing and c) how dare agents publicly Twitter or otherwise admit to having a life and taking a break from work when they should be reading all the wonderful queries and submissions from all the commenters. There may have been something interesting further down, and perhaps if I were an agent, I'd find it all useful. As it is, I decided working on my writing was a better use of my time.
4. Finally, FINALLY finished chapter 11!!!!!! (I don't think I have enough exclamation marks there to convey my excitement at this.) It feels really good to feel like I'm moving forward again. Maybe I will finally finish and get to start sending out.

That's all. Want to get this up. There is a beautiful thunderstorm going right now. The mist has floated off the Hudson and the thunder rattles the apartment. So besides the worry that my electricity will go out before I post, I'm really enjoying the show.