Too much of not much

It's deep summer, the time when I don't do much of anything.

Except put my classes together for fall, which includes voiceovers of all my lectures so we can spend our one day a week in-class doing hands-on things.

And try to get some plot confusion sorted out in Gaia's Hands.

And rewrite my other query letters to implement what I learned from an agent.

And grade some internship stuff.

In other words, I'm doing a lot for not doing anything. 

A Glimmer of Success

Yesterday, an agent asked to see my full manuscript for the first time. Mind you, I have sent out hundreds of queries for my five novels. 

Let me be honest -- I have sent out queries for books that I hadn't sent through developmental edit or beta reading. I have sent out queries not knowing how to write a query letter. I have, rightly, gotten rejections.

I have learned a lot from my failures. The visual above doesn't really show the road to success because it doesn't incorporate learning from failure. One can work hard but wrong, and all that effort means nothing. 

This is not to say that I will get an agent out of this. I could get rejected by the other 27 agents I have queries out to. The agent who has my manuscript might pass. Hard work and learning from failures may not be enough. The book might just be "not what we're looking for".

But it's a glimmer of hope, a glimmer of success. I'll take it.

If I get published

If I ever get a book published traditionally (my optimistic friends say "when", not "if"), it will change my life in many ways. 

The money won't be a big change -- according to Derek Murphy, the average amount an author earns is the advance, which is $10k, or $8k after the agent gets their cut.  

I will have to hire an entertainment lawyer to look over the contract and see if there are any potential hitches. 

I will have to sign a contract, after which my rights to my book will be curtailed for a period of time.

I will have to consider promoting my book, which will include travel. I would likely do this in the summer, which means I will have to schedule around internship visits.

I will have to step up my social media game. I haven't done that yet because I have nothing really to promote except this blog. 

I've probably forgotten something.

Sometimes it seems more work than it's worth, but it's worth it to me. So I keep trying, keep improving, keep pushing myself.

Riding the Struggle Bus with my Novel

I'm struggling with Gaia's Hands again. 

I just don't get a feeling of cohesiveness. I feel like I'm blobbing paint on a sculpture randomly and it's not smoothing out. I'm not sure what to do about it.  

If ever a novel needed to be burned in a bonfire, this is the one. Or is it?

Sometimes, my negative notions of a book I'm writing are based more on how I'm feeling at the moment than the book itself.  So I have to ask myself if the book is really as bad as I think it is, or whether I'm just feeling discouraged. Conversely, I have to ask if the book is as good as I think it is, or whether my opinion is being buoyed up by a bubble of optimism. I don't come up with many answers, which frustrates me.

My husband is not much help. No matter what I write, he says it's good. First draft, good. Twenty-times edited manuscript, good.  Never great, never bad. 

So I have to go back to that beast of a novel and try to smooth the random lumps:

• Does the relationship between Jeanne and Josh (given the 25-year age difference) make sense? (This is a fantasy novel; suspend your disbelief.)
• Are their connections with Gaia developing at a reasonable pace and/or precipitated by plot factors? 
• Is the plot with Growesta/her department (the bad guys) developing?
• Does anything feel just "stuck in there" for no reason except to pad out the word count?

I didn't understand what editing was all about for the longest time. I copy-edited (proofread) and considered it editing. Now that I know what real editing is like, I understand why editing takes longer than writing the book. It's challenging, and often bereft of hope.

Wish me luck, folks. I'm considering building that bonfire.

The joys of rejection

I am beginning to like rejection.

No, honestly, I don't like rejection. After all, who likes rejection? Who gets up in the morning and says, "I'm so looking forward to getting rejected!"?

I like improving my work, honing my craft (although that latter phrase sounds so pretentious to me and nothing like the actual process with all its sweat and tears and cutting savage chunks out of a work in progress). 

I like looking at an old draft and wondering how I thought that was the book as it should be. 

I like the image of myself as someone who cares enough about their work to seek out a developmental editor. Who cares enough about their readers to not put out a rough version of that book.

I also like the idea of getting published, so wish me luck.

Hard Work

Got a rejection for a short story yesterday. I'm not too upset; I think I shoehorned my entry into the theme and it didn't quite fit. I only have one thing out there now, and that's Prodigies with a major press. The likelihood of this being accepted is very low, I'll admit, but it will still hurt a lot if I get rejected.

What from there? Try to shop out the dev-edited version of Voyageurs, which is short at 70,000 words but we'll see. Work on the rewrite of Apocalypse (which will take a few months at best guess) and send it back to my dev editor.  See what tweaks might help Prodigies' saleability and shop it back out. Send Whose Hearts are Mountains to dev edit. See if I can salvage Gaia's Hands in case Apocalypse gets sold and it needs a prequel. Write something else, maybe finish Gods' Seeds.

It's hard work, and so far has been fruitless. But if I'm going to be published, I want it to be my best, and my expectations have been raised by beta-readers and dev editors and my own revelations about where my stories could go. 

Someday, I hope,my hard work will bear fruit.

In a Stuck Place

So I've been told by my developmental editor that I need to rewrite Apocalypse -- not because it's so bad, she says, but because it's so good. My developmental editor, Chelsea Harper, knows her stuff and I know she's right. Apocalypse is the combination of the second and third books I'd written, and I didn't know things that I know now.

Still, I'm finding it hard to rewrite. First, because my semester is winding down, I have end-of-semester items in mind even when I'm not doing them yet, things like the final exam and projects to grade.  

Second, because -- well, basically what I have to do with the rewrite is:
1) Stretch out three chapters into the first third of the book
2) Rewrite the rest of the book with fewer points of view
3) Cut out some of the lag from the second half of the book
4) Add more tension and loss.

I think I can deal with 2-4 relatively easily, but I struggle with stretching out that first three chapters to eight chapters. I've tried outlining it (being a plantser, or someone who roughly outlines and fills in) but I don't feel the inspiration. 

I think I need to sit with it a while, talk with my characters and see what it is they want to do. 

Wish me luck.

The Plan

I have a plan for how I'm going to handle the whole querying thing. Bear with me:

1. I will continue dev editing and re-editing my existent books one at a time because that's just good practice wherever I'm published.
2. I will wait for six months for this querying cycle on Prodigies to complete, researching self-publishing and self-marketing as I go.
3. If at the end of those six months I don't have any takers, I will self-publish Prodigies. You will hear a lot about this and hopefully you will read it. :)
4. I will query other books as they get edited -- Voyageurs will probably be the second book in the pipeline, followed by Apocalypse. And so on.

This plan doesn't include writing. I have not written since I finished Whose Hearts are Mountains, which I am sure needs serious dev editing as do the others.  That's only been a month and a half. I haven't been inspired to write lately, but there are various directions I could go -- a sequel to Prodigies, a sequel to Voyageurs, another book in the Archetype series, a faerie adventure/romance novel ... I have enough books that need to go through the dev cycle, though, that I wouldn't have to write for a while. But I don't want to get rusty.

I am hoping, of course, that this hard work pays off. I don't know why I'm getting rejections from agents except for the usual "...I'm very selective ... I don't know if I can represent this novel with the enthusiasm it deserves." (Question: If it deserves enthusiasm, why aren't you -- oh, never mind.) But at least I have a plan so that I'm not at the mercy of judgments about "what sells". I just know that I write for a reason, and I want to see what that reason is.