Some days are easier than others.
Publishing is all about the waiting. You wait for the words to flow. (They tend to flow best when you’re driving, when your parents are talking to you on the phone, when you’re at work, or when a kid is demanding that you come and examine what he has built from Legos.) You wait for responses from agents or small publishers on your queries. Sometimes this wait is minutes, more often weeks, but sometimes it takes much, much longer. No joke, I got a rejection in May 2015 for a query I sent in January of 2014. I had high hopes for that one, too. If you’re lucky enough to be agented, you wait for responses from editors and updates from your agent, who is swamped and busy and trying to carve out approximately fifteen minutes of personal life per week, but is still probably 2000 queries behind. If you get a book deal, you wait for the cover, for the blurb, for the new title, for the publication date, for the readers to find you. Then you wait to find out if you have another book deal. It goes on and on. I’m both terrible at waiting and great at it. On the days when I show a real talent for waiting, I’m Zen. No eastern philosopher can spout more platitudes than I can on those days. I read—both published books and my friends’ manuscripts. I scroll through Twitter. I play touch football and go hiking. I cook and I enjoy it. I even examine the Lego creations with real non-faked interest. During those days, the Zen days, I’m a delightful companion. I’m fun Mom. I’m loving Wife. I can say heartfelt supportive things to my fellow residents of Waitingville. I can write long stretches of my work in progress and read them and think they are wonderful. It’s the other days that are not so good. The ones where I. Can’t. Stand. It. Another. Minute. The ones where I feel like storming the castle and demanding answers, in shouty caps with lots of exclamation points. Those days my kids know that I’ll let them watch way too much TV. My husband, with whom I go for a walk every evening, decides to go for a solo run instead. I eat too much and none of it is healthy. My online friends manufacture all kinds of refreshing outings in dark caves with no internet after they’ve tried fruitlessly to remind me that I signed on for this, that I knew what I was getting into when I first decided to pursue traditional publishing. Fortunately for me, the Zen days outnumber the Not-Zen days. Just know, though, that when you have the Not-Zen day—and you will, if you’re trying to be published—you’re hardly alone.
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I’ve been hiking many times with my husband and family and I love it. I’m a terrible athlete: I ducked and avoided the ball in softball, never managed to hit it in tennis, and can well recall my body screaming “Stop!” whenever I ran. I’m good at hiking, though. Miles disappear under my feet in the silence of the woods. The quiet is broken only by the regularity of my own breathing in time with my steps. Woods are good for both conversation or introspection, whichever mood strikes. Most hikes are designed to take hikers over a mountain or three. After all, the views are better up there and the views are the carrots that take so many people up so many vertical miles. On occasion, the view at the top is so spectacular it takes your breath. You sit down, crack open your water, and feel glad to be alive. A lot more often, however, the view is only of a more distant peak. When that happens, there’s nothing to do but keep going if you want the spectacular. Hiking back down the mountain without reaching the true summit seems ridiculous, pointless, impossible, even. Publishing is like that. The first peak is finishing that novel, the one that 95% or whatever of people want to write but never do. You’ve done it. You’ve typed “The End.” Your word count is reasonable. Your concept is hooky. Your parents brag about you. Your spouse looks at you as if you were an eleven when you were only a ten before. Celebrate that view, but there’s another peak in sight. The next one is finding an agent. I’ll be honest: this hike is twelve thousand miles long, or it seems like it. The trail rises and falls often, tiring you out and making you think about going home for dinner. Every time you decide to, though, there’s a little glimpse through the trees and someone you know waving at you from the top of that next peak. A lot of hikers bite it during this part. Sometimes you have to write more than one book. Sometimes you have to write more than two. It’s a hell of a slog, but if you hang in there, learning and working, it’s achievable. Even after that, there are plenty more peaks: getting a book deal, getting a second book deal, completing revisions to an editor’s satisfaction, meeting deadlines, and keeping away burn-out. Nobody ever reaches the end: there’s always another mountain in the distance. I’ve learned, in both hiking and publishing, that good endurance is a must. It’s not a walk in the park. It’s the whole damn Appalachian Trail. Bring water and food. The only thing stopping you from reaching the spectacular is your determination and your feet. Take care of them. It’s rare that I go to the bookstore with enough money to buy more than one book. When I manage to get to Barnes & Noble with cash and without hangers-on, I have to browse within a limited amount of time (because the kids, and the dry cleaning, and my stomach growling). I grab what I grab. I grab what looks most enticing, for the mood I’m in, and—here’s the important part – I walk away from thousands of amazing books, many of which are on my mental TBR list. I go to the cash register. One author gets that tiny little royalty check. The rest don’t.
And I bet you do that, too. Pitch Wars is exactly the same. I received 127 submissions. Each of them is the story of somebody’s heart. Each of them was written with care, revised, revised again, spell-checked, and then revised again. Each had memorable characters, beautiful writing, a brilliant concept, amazing dialogue. A lot of them had all of those things. I could only choose one. The one I chose hit me in lots of places where I could relate. It had all those things – characters, writing, concept, dialogue – but it also had things that just happened to be right for ME. It’s set at a major convention. I just came back from one. It has a main character who is awkward and uncomfortable at the convention. I was awkward and uncomfortable at mine. The main character has a thing for hot British guys. I have…you get the idea. (Hi, Dear Husband Who is Not British!) The bottom line is that story grabbed me in the place I am. The fact that I chose that one has nothing whatsoever to do with any weaknesses in the writing or the concept or the marketability of the others. I grabbed what I grabbed. This is what SUBJECTIVITY means. You’ll hear it a lot when you query. It sounds like nonsense. It isn’t. You wrote a great book, but it didn’t happen to have a convention. I was in the mood for a convention. With a hot British guy. And kissing. Trust me: someone will be in the mood for your serial killer or investigator or overseas trip or Regency duke or dark family secret. If you submitted to me, please know that I am truly humbled that you trusted me with your work and that you wanted my help with it. The weight of that responsibility made me cry at one point. Since starting this writing journey myself, I’ve been amazed at the strength of community in the writing world. I want to support you – all of you, even if you didn’t submit to me. Please keep in touch. Wednesday is going to be rough for something like 95% of you. Support each other. Get off Twitter to lick your wounds if you need to. Eat a lot of ice cream. But please, come back. Reach out to me or any other mentor you feel comfortable talking to. We can cry together. Do it on Twitter, or here in the comments. Remember that you didn’t write that book to get into Pitch Wars. You wrote it because you loved it and you couldn’t NOT write it. Trying to get published is hard. Try hard to remember why you started writing in the first place (hint: I bet it had nothing to do with getting published). There are thousands of books in Barnes & Noble. Every one of those authors has been where you are. Hang in there.
Okay. So funny story. I’m at RWA in New York. Nine lovely ladies who are fellow alumnae of 2014’s Pitch Wars meet to sing karaoke in a bar. Because we love her, we invite Brenda Drake, who brought us all together and made this spectacular singing extravaganza possible. She is SO AMAZED by the level of our vocal entertainment that she CAN’T STOP HERSELF from making us mentors because we were so awesome. Or because we so badly needed to be doing something else.
So I get to be a mentor! Last year, I was an alternate with a terrific mentor (Kara Leigh Miller) and I got my lovely and amazing agent, Sarah Younger, with my Pitch Wars manuscript. I write women’s fiction and romance for various ages. I’m also a full-time lawyer and a full-time kid chauffeur (I write half my words at their lessons and practices). I’ve been writing for years, have a copy editor for a father and an English teacher for a mother, and some of the most amazing critique partners in the business (ALL of whom are also mentors in this contest). And I want your Adult manuscript!!! What I’d love for you to send me:
A note on diversity: I want it. I do not want diverse characters who are present only to teach me something or to allow you to say you have a diverse book. I want diverse characters who act like people and who are neither offensive stereotypes or sterling, saintly examples. I'm not a fan generally of saints: never yet met one.
There are many amazing books in the world that are not at the top of my TBR pile. Life is short, and there are a lot of books. Please DON’T send me (because I don’t read enough of these to be able to help you):
Okay. If I get to work with you, my plan is to help you do the following: Get your plot holes filled.
I’ll read your manuscript and send you back an overall critique with my thoughts on all five of those categories. You’ll need to put on your big kid pants before you open that email. I’ll also send back my in-line thoughts on the little stuff. Then you fix. We talk. We email. We argue. Then you fix some more. I’ll read what you’ve fixed. I’ll critique. We’ll polish. And it’ll be amazing. One caveat, and this is a big one: If you can’t handle criticism, don’t submit to me or anyone. If all you want is for someone to tell you what an amazing writer you are, you’re barking up the wrong tree. This contest is for people who want to IMPROVE. That’s what we’re going to do. And I can’t wait!
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I'm on an Amtrak train on the way home from RWA. As I stood in the rush of people waiting to board, it occurred to me that I'd never have come to New York and had the amazing time that I did without Twitter and Brenda Drake's PitchWars.
I submitted to PitchWars last year with my critique partner kind of on the spur of the moment. We had rushed to finish our manuscripts to be ready and we weren't entirely sure they were ready. We were chosen anyway by great mentors and got some requests. That wasn't the best part, though. For support, the 150 writers chosen last year created a closed Facebook group to vent, to question, to cheer, and to cry. It lasted way past the end of PitchWars, gave many of us genius critique partners, and is still buzzing me with notifications every single day. Every request is cheered. Every rejection is soothed. Every time someone gets an agent or a book deal, we throw a party (and we've gotten to throw a lot of parties). That was the best part. And the best thing to happen to me as a writer. I met another critique partner, and she begged me to come with her to RWA. I, in turn, begged that first PitchWars critique partner to come too. Several others of our group came as well, and we spent the four days of the conference as if with long-lost best friends. A few others of our group live in or near NYC, and they met us for dinner one night and a crazy night of karaoke another. I love each and every one of my PitchWars 2014 group (Table of Trust!). If you write, and you don't have a writing group, find one. They're just waiting for you to ask. |
the darkest web:The Darkest Flower:Lying Beneath the Oaks:
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