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shalannaRemember that old Sunday School song . . . or maybe that was just Uncle Wanker after he'd had a few pulls on that ol' XXX Moonshine jug . . . the one that goes, "Oh, Lord, if you don't help me, then please don't help that bear!"
I don't know why that one is going through my mind.
Anyway, I just got in touch with the agent. As I suspected*, he didn't want to represent me. He didn't want to refer me to anyone. He just thought he'd been holding on to the material for a while, and wanted to give a personal response beyond "not for us." It's not a very commercial book, in his view, which is just the opposite of the way I see the book. He sees this woman having a comfortable life, and although this guy breaks her heart and she has a crazy job and so forth, her life is still comfortable. He said he loves the opening and the voice, but he didn't have any reason to care about the characters or what happens next. Okay, I can say that about books that are published and that other people rave about, so perhaps that is just an individual response. Still, it daunts me.
This is the book that everyone LOVES the opening of, and everyone LOVES the voice of. Perhaps I should run a website contest to give the book a new plot. No, because when Karen Harbaugh read it, she thought it was something special and that I shouldn't even try to make it chick lit. (But she's a writer and has creative vision, as opposed to an agent, who has bottomline-itis.) When Melissa Senate read it, she suggested a couple of plot tweaks. I don't think it is the plot. Then again, I suppose it must be.
I don't think that I am capable of writing a book that's like what people read today, oriented toward the way people think today. Mama said, "We are the old-fashioned kind of people, and we're out of style, and we are being thrown away. Isn't it sad?" But that's not entirely the case. We're thinkers, I'll grant you. And we're not the type to follow the crowd. My cousin (for instance) is now doing an entire genealogy project on our family; she called to ask my mother stuff, and Mama can't remember anything that cuz doesn't already know about. I said, half jokingly, "So are you going to convert to Latter-Day Saints?" Because the Mormon church asks members to do genealogy, you see. She didn't get it. "Everybody in the office is doing it," she said excitedly. As if just because others are doing it, she's fired up. Well, life must be much simpler for people like that. My interests are always offbeat. I'd like to have our family tree, but I couldn't research it or think about it past the grandparents and great-grandparents I knew or have heard about. I think that who YOU are and where you are headed is more important than who you came out of and where you came from. Another symptom that I don't fit into the modern world.
*Yes, I suspected he was going to blow me off, but I always have that stupid five-year-old's hope that Santa really WILL show up this time, that if I hide behind the tree and watch all night, the Great Pumpkin will rise out of the pumpkin patch and scatter seeds all over my head. I don't know why I can't shake that childlike hope and wonder, but I suspect that if I did, I would be like those policemen who shot themselves in New Orleans because they lost everything, all hope, all dreams, and so forth. So anyhow, I suppose I'm just going to have to face the constant reminder that I AM NOT GOOD ENOUGH, although the WRITING is good enough--too bad I can't teleport back to 1962, when the quality of the writing was the most important thing in getting published. Go read any book written in 1962 if you doubt me. The book you find in the library that's "popular fiction" from 1962 is not going to be plot-driven.
*ahem* What he said was that he read up to page eighty, and the writing is just charming, and the characters are great, and the voice is perfect, very commercial women's fiction. But that it didn't go anywhere. That it was just a slice of life, and that it didn't build to anything or have any indication that it would.
Okay, that is what I used to hear before I moved that scene up to the front of the book and put in the "explanatory" paragraphs, after hearing from Melissa Senate. So the changes didn't make any difference to him, or in his perception of the book. (He had seen the previous version.) However, I've seen stuff that really did just wander around from scene to scene, and this is not like that. The scenes do lead to worse and worse things happening for Daphne.
She has a comfortable life compared to the evacuees from NoLa or the people in Baghdad, but she is not comfortable in her life. She's up on a level where survival is assured (for the moment), but she needs self-actualization and meaning. This makes her just as valid a searcher as those who are clawing their ways up out of the sewer. And most chick lit doesn't have an A-bomb or a plague in it, but merely these types of "funny" situations that we can all relate to. Doesn't it? Or am I wrong again?
Now I'm just mystified. He said that all I have is internal conflict. I said that the book is really about ritual and the need for structure in our lives, that we need to understand what happens to us and we thus build a structure, the search for meaning, and all that Wittgensteinian bullcrap. I said that perhaps it is a literary novel. He replied that he didn't like to make distinctions between the lofty literary novel and the commercial novel, and that my novel has the commercial fiction voice, pacing, and style down pat. It's just that nothing happens.
I then went on to enumerate (because I know I am not in the same reality as the rest of the world, but surely there is some intersection--even the neocons and the hippies agree that we should keep the sun shining) the things that happen. First she says she thinks she has jinxed herself, then a series of events begins that put her in more and more trouble. She observes this and tries to fight it, to no avail. Is that not what is written in every "how to write your novel" book? To make it worse and worse for your character? I even use a schtick about her charm bracelet to tie things together--various charms are referred to in various contexts. The reader is never sure whether she really HAS had rituals that worked as far as superstition, or whether she is just OCD and a mixed-up kid--I leave that ambiguous on purpose, although you could construct a reading either way.
In any case, here's the external action. First she has a fender-bender, then a crisis at work where she rescues a presentation. Then she has an unpleasant encounter with her "ex," the guy who broke her heart (he wants his "stuff" back, including the laptop and stereo that she has, but he won't come in to get them, but wants her to bring them to him--she says she'll do that later). At a party, she meets a new guy who will soon break her heart (and we find out her beliefs about rituals, which is something that Natasha Kern said I needed to state), and at home she tries to settle a dispute between her roomies that makes them both turn on her. The ex sneaks into her house while she's gone in the evening and takes the laptop computer, which has a presentation she has been working on all day for work. She needs the presentation, but can't get it back from him, though she goes to see him and ask for just that file. She tries to re-create the presentation by the next morning, but fails, and the boss chews her out. She realizes this must all be happening because of the ritual she screwed up to jinx herself, and starts trying in earnest to "get the jinx off" as she also works to fix her problems. Things are happening. There is external conflict that builds. But he didn't SEE any of that.
So who's crazy? Probably me, as usual. Once again, an agent praises my writing to high heaven, but doesn't want anything to do with my books because he can't figure out how to pitch them. I suggested it could be pitched as a chick lit about an OCD woman who thinks she's jinxed herself and who becomes engaged in a search for meaning instead of for the perfect little black dress. But he said that's not a pitch, that's a theme, and what editors want is action and so forth. I don't think that my idea of action is the same as the world's. If you are enjoying a book, then why is there a problem pitching it? Pitching it against the wall?
The solution, my mother insisted (as I sat there after the conversation trying to figure out what I could tell her that would not result in, "See, I told you not to get excited," and so forth), is to not waste my time and my life writing stuff that cannot be sold. "Isn't it sad that the world is passing you by while you waste your life typing away on these little things that have no hope?" She said that if I would only write the life of this friend of hers (who has had a soap-opera-style existence for years), something like you see on "Lifetime For Women" TV, I could sell it. (This isn't true because I don't know or like her friend and all the friend's family, and thus I could not write them.) The stuff on "Lifetime" is penny dreadful stuff. I have TRIED to write that kind of stuff, and I can't. It does not come out right. I suppose if someone gave me a plotline, I could write a novel and develop the characters and put in the funny stuff and have the voice and so forth, and that might be the only way, but I can't find any ghostwriting jobs.
And I don't see why people can't see the same thing that I see in books. I see action in this book. I see a progression from a woman who doesn't want to take any responsibility for her own actions and problems and what's happening to her . . . to a woman who realizes that we make at least some of our own luck. If you heard that as the tagline for a movie, it would make sense, wouldn't it?
I see an engaging story that is like the chick lit I see out there. I don't see car chases and wrestling matches and political intrigue in chick lit. I see the type of relationship drama and striving for love that is typical of women's fiction. If only it were something fixable, like bad grammar, lots of adverbial tags, characters that are stupid, or whatever. (I don't know what I did in a previous incarnation to deserve this kind of luck, but I hope I was at least Eva Braun or Marie Antoinette and had a helluva blast doing it.)
All I know is that other agents may or may not read it the same way. Maybe there is only one way to read it, and that's their way. Maybe I am imagining the action. I've gone to many different readers, and they have all said, "Well, *this* is why people don't see your premise! All you have to do is move this scene up so that they'll be wondering if she gets him back!" Or, "What you need is to state up front point-blank that she thinks she's jinxed herself! That puts the following scenes in a different light!" I don't know what people are expecting as far as "signaling that we are going somewhere." I don't know anything any more. My other books don't have this same voice, but I don't hear that people think they're not going anywhere or that the scenes aren't connected, so maybe they are structured differently.
Maybe my only hope is the mystery. Everything revolves around the murder in that, although the sleuth wanders around trying to figure it out, and that's considered normal in a mystery.
(Maybe all the agents are friends with somebody I pissed off years ago and had no idea I was doing so, and this person is now very powerful and holding an eternal grudge, and therefore he/she is causing the agents to string me along for a while, praising my ability and my "actual writing," whatever that means, and then has them do whatever will humiliate and hurt me the most. This would make more sense than any other explanation so far. It sounds like the plot of a suspense novel written by a writer who always writes about writers. At least I don't write about writers! I hate that.)
Really, I don't know why I can't just be happy having no destiny and a wasted talent. They all RAVE about my ability to write. That is what they can't teach. Yadda yadda yadda. So why can't some editor or agent give me a plot that they'd like to read, something structured the way they think it is supposed to be, and I'll invent the characters and setting and voices and all the HARD stuff, and then finally maybe it'll be worthwhile. . . .
# # #
EDIT: *contains snark* *not to be taken literally seriously*
Is it unreasonable of me to have hoped (or assumed) that this agent wanted to talk to me about representation, or about getting the rest of the manuscript? Because my mother says it was a nice thing for the agent to do, to call to reject me and rub my nose it in once again, but hey, I think that was more cruel than just sending the "not for us" thing on a quarter-sheet of toilet paper. Seriously.
Because of course I DID get pumped about the call. Of course I thought, "Well, this time it's good news!" I mentioned it to hubby and asked if he didn't think that might mean good news. He said, "Yeah, they have to be thinking about taking you on. The agent probably wants to talk terms, how long you'd sign with the agency, what to expect, and just see if you're a good fit. Why else would they call, and not just email?"
When will I learn to keep my frelling mouth SHUT? Why do I ALWAYS say something to him about it? At least I don't jump up and down shrieking excitedly the way I used to years ago. But I should just KEEP QUIET. Now I don't know how I'm going to tell my husband that it was just a novel way to get rejected. *pun groan* I mean, our conversation simply consisted of him telling me the same things I've heard before from people the book didn't click with or appeal to, and it was devoid of suggestions as to how I might modify the work and resubmit it to him . . . so what was the point, really, other than to make me feel like dirt and humiliated once again. And I used up a bunch of my Anytime minutes, to boot. To get the boot buried in my butt, as usual.
It's never an offer of representation. It's never, "We like your book and we'd like to publish it." It's never even, "If you will make the following changes, we'd like to see the novel again."
And dammit, I deserve that. I've been doing this seriously (and **writing well**, according to the people who reject me, for frell's sake) for 22 years now, since just before we married. I've had long "fallow" periods in which I redirected my creative drive into piano playing and improvisation, worldbuilding for fantasy role-playing games, craft/art stamping, and even writing technical specifications and webpages for nerds. This was my typical response to a slap in the face, yet another rejection after initial encouragement, statements that "maybe the next novel will be something we can figure out how to sell," and so forth. But I'd always come back to this because I am good at it.
They're not saying that I'm doing three chapters of throat-clearing; they love the opening. They're not saying there's any problem with the writing. The voice is great. The characters are appealing, distinct, and believable. Not too much introspection, no lack of motivation. There's subtext that is enjoyable for those who pick up on it. Hell, that's more than I can say about many of the books I pick up off the shelf at Borders! And *beta readers* come to me saying, "That was funny!" And "It really moved fast and I was waiting to see what happened with her curse." And "I thought those superstitions were hilarious." They NEVER MENTION that this or that scene doesn't immediately connect up with the next in some obvious fashion. They trust the author. They know you're going somewhere with this. If they're enjoying the book, they don't try to invent some problem with it.
I'm sitting here reading Sara Lewis's third novel. Her novel is just as pointless and wandering and whiney and shit as MINE is--it really is. So how come they publish her and not me? It isn't fair. I don't know Ms. Lewis, and obviously I do enjoy her work, as I have all three of her novels (but not her short story collection) on my "keeper" shelf. What I do know from seeing her books in stores is that there is an audience for a book that has a lot of subtext, that has what seems like a lot of "meandering" stuff that comes together near the end. She writes long passages of dialogue, in fact, the way I started out doing . . . and that I would now do in a condensed fashion, implying a lot and actually putting down less text. But I think that her readers would like to read me.
Self-publishing and POD is an answer, but now they want $800. When Dennis Havens placed all nine of his novels, there was no charge (they were just getting started.) For a couple of years after that, it cost $99. But now . . . now it's really getting ridiculous. And my books *have* the "New York publisher kind of writing," according to editor and author Melissa Senate. (Don't get the idea that I have connections; I "bought" a critique from her for over $200 by donating to a relief fund for a fellow author. I've never had a mentor or anyone who encouraged me since I left high school. I was apparently the best fiction writer in high school, but that ain't sayin' nothin'. I ended up writing all the incidental copy for the yearbook because the other two who were chosen by the English lit staff to do it wouldn't let anyone edit their work, which was Too Important and Too Pristine To Be Touched, and I said, "Yeah, sure, edit it but show it to me." That was the last time anyone said anything about how easy I am to work with, too. *wink*)
I don't know how to cure this curse. Where do you make a deal with the Devil? Obviously Dan Brown has made a deal to keep his book on the top of the charts. Hoodoo says you go to the crossroads and wait for the crossroads spirit to come, but that's for guitar playing. If you go to the crossroads (say the legends) and play for a few hours every Sunday starting at dawn, then the twelfth Sunday the crossroads spirit will appear and take your guitar and play a tune, then hand it back to you. After that, you can play anything you like. This is of no use to me because I can already play anything (within reason) on the piano or guitar by ear. That and $2.25 will get you a Route 66 Diet Limeade. I assume I'd bring my laptop with the manuscript on it instead of a guitar. What I need is the getting-published location. Would that be in front of the Random House building in New York? I can't say. Who would show up--a demonic Bennett Cerf?
Alas, I know that deals with the devil eventually backfire on you, and then there's a price to pay. It's too high a price. Even if you put it on your credit card.
I don't know why that one is going through my mind.
Anyway, I just got in touch with the agent. As I suspected*, he didn't want to represent me. He didn't want to refer me to anyone. He just thought he'd been holding on to the material for a while, and wanted to give a personal response beyond "not for us." It's not a very commercial book, in his view, which is just the opposite of the way I see the book. He sees this woman having a comfortable life, and although this guy breaks her heart and she has a crazy job and so forth, her life is still comfortable. He said he loves the opening and the voice, but he didn't have any reason to care about the characters or what happens next. Okay, I can say that about books that are published and that other people rave about, so perhaps that is just an individual response. Still, it daunts me.
This is the book that everyone LOVES the opening of, and everyone LOVES the voice of. Perhaps I should run a website contest to give the book a new plot. No, because when Karen Harbaugh read it, she thought it was something special and that I shouldn't even try to make it chick lit. (But she's a writer and has creative vision, as opposed to an agent, who has bottomline-itis.) When Melissa Senate read it, she suggested a couple of plot tweaks. I don't think it is the plot. Then again, I suppose it must be.
I don't think that I am capable of writing a book that's like what people read today, oriented toward the way people think today. Mama said, "We are the old-fashioned kind of people, and we're out of style, and we are being thrown away. Isn't it sad?" But that's not entirely the case. We're thinkers, I'll grant you. And we're not the type to follow the crowd. My cousin (for instance) is now doing an entire genealogy project on our family; she called to ask my mother stuff, and Mama can't remember anything that cuz doesn't already know about. I said, half jokingly, "So are you going to convert to Latter-Day Saints?" Because the Mormon church asks members to do genealogy, you see. She didn't get it. "Everybody in the office is doing it," she said excitedly. As if just because others are doing it, she's fired up. Well, life must be much simpler for people like that. My interests are always offbeat. I'd like to have our family tree, but I couldn't research it or think about it past the grandparents and great-grandparents I knew or have heard about. I think that who YOU are and where you are headed is more important than who you came out of and where you came from. Another symptom that I don't fit into the modern world.
*Yes, I suspected he was going to blow me off, but I always have that stupid five-year-old's hope that Santa really WILL show up this time, that if I hide behind the tree and watch all night, the Great Pumpkin will rise out of the pumpkin patch and scatter seeds all over my head. I don't know why I can't shake that childlike hope and wonder, but I suspect that if I did, I would be like those policemen who shot themselves in New Orleans because they lost everything, all hope, all dreams, and so forth. So anyhow, I suppose I'm just going to have to face the constant reminder that I AM NOT GOOD ENOUGH, although the WRITING is good enough--too bad I can't teleport back to 1962, when the quality of the writing was the most important thing in getting published. Go read any book written in 1962 if you doubt me. The book you find in the library that's "popular fiction" from 1962 is not going to be plot-driven.
*ahem* What he said was that he read up to page eighty, and the writing is just charming, and the characters are great, and the voice is perfect, very commercial women's fiction. But that it didn't go anywhere. That it was just a slice of life, and that it didn't build to anything or have any indication that it would.
Okay, that is what I used to hear before I moved that scene up to the front of the book and put in the "explanatory" paragraphs, after hearing from Melissa Senate. So the changes didn't make any difference to him, or in his perception of the book. (He had seen the previous version.) However, I've seen stuff that really did just wander around from scene to scene, and this is not like that. The scenes do lead to worse and worse things happening for Daphne.
She has a comfortable life compared to the evacuees from NoLa or the people in Baghdad, but she is not comfortable in her life. She's up on a level where survival is assured (for the moment), but she needs self-actualization and meaning. This makes her just as valid a searcher as those who are clawing their ways up out of the sewer. And most chick lit doesn't have an A-bomb or a plague in it, but merely these types of "funny" situations that we can all relate to. Doesn't it? Or am I wrong again?
Now I'm just mystified. He said that all I have is internal conflict. I said that the book is really about ritual and the need for structure in our lives, that we need to understand what happens to us and we thus build a structure, the search for meaning, and all that Wittgensteinian bullcrap. I said that perhaps it is a literary novel. He replied that he didn't like to make distinctions between the lofty literary novel and the commercial novel, and that my novel has the commercial fiction voice, pacing, and style down pat. It's just that nothing happens.
I then went on to enumerate (because I know I am not in the same reality as the rest of the world, but surely there is some intersection--even the neocons and the hippies agree that we should keep the sun shining) the things that happen. First she says she thinks she has jinxed herself, then a series of events begins that put her in more and more trouble. She observes this and tries to fight it, to no avail. Is that not what is written in every "how to write your novel" book? To make it worse and worse for your character? I even use a schtick about her charm bracelet to tie things together--various charms are referred to in various contexts. The reader is never sure whether she really HAS had rituals that worked as far as superstition, or whether she is just OCD and a mixed-up kid--I leave that ambiguous on purpose, although you could construct a reading either way.
In any case, here's the external action. First she has a fender-bender, then a crisis at work where she rescues a presentation. Then she has an unpleasant encounter with her "ex," the guy who broke her heart (he wants his "stuff" back, including the laptop and stereo that she has, but he won't come in to get them, but wants her to bring them to him--she says she'll do that later). At a party, she meets a new guy who will soon break her heart (and we find out her beliefs about rituals, which is something that Natasha Kern said I needed to state), and at home she tries to settle a dispute between her roomies that makes them both turn on her. The ex sneaks into her house while she's gone in the evening and takes the laptop computer, which has a presentation she has been working on all day for work. She needs the presentation, but can't get it back from him, though she goes to see him and ask for just that file. She tries to re-create the presentation by the next morning, but fails, and the boss chews her out. She realizes this must all be happening because of the ritual she screwed up to jinx herself, and starts trying in earnest to "get the jinx off" as she also works to fix her problems. Things are happening. There is external conflict that builds. But he didn't SEE any of that.
So who's crazy? Probably me, as usual. Once again, an agent praises my writing to high heaven, but doesn't want anything to do with my books because he can't figure out how to pitch them. I suggested it could be pitched as a chick lit about an OCD woman who thinks she's jinxed herself and who becomes engaged in a search for meaning instead of for the perfect little black dress. But he said that's not a pitch, that's a theme, and what editors want is action and so forth. I don't think that my idea of action is the same as the world's. If you are enjoying a book, then why is there a problem pitching it? Pitching it against the wall?
The solution, my mother insisted (as I sat there after the conversation trying to figure out what I could tell her that would not result in, "See, I told you not to get excited," and so forth), is to not waste my time and my life writing stuff that cannot be sold. "Isn't it sad that the world is passing you by while you waste your life typing away on these little things that have no hope?" She said that if I would only write the life of this friend of hers (who has had a soap-opera-style existence for years), something like you see on "Lifetime For Women" TV, I could sell it. (This isn't true because I don't know or like her friend and all the friend's family, and thus I could not write them.) The stuff on "Lifetime" is penny dreadful stuff. I have TRIED to write that kind of stuff, and I can't. It does not come out right. I suppose if someone gave me a plotline, I could write a novel and develop the characters and put in the funny stuff and have the voice and so forth, and that might be the only way, but I can't find any ghostwriting jobs.
And I don't see why people can't see the same thing that I see in books. I see action in this book. I see a progression from a woman who doesn't want to take any responsibility for her own actions and problems and what's happening to her . . . to a woman who realizes that we make at least some of our own luck. If you heard that as the tagline for a movie, it would make sense, wouldn't it?
I see an engaging story that is like the chick lit I see out there. I don't see car chases and wrestling matches and political intrigue in chick lit. I see the type of relationship drama and striving for love that is typical of women's fiction. If only it were something fixable, like bad grammar, lots of adverbial tags, characters that are stupid, or whatever. (I don't know what I did in a previous incarnation to deserve this kind of luck, but I hope I was at least Eva Braun or Marie Antoinette and had a helluva blast doing it.)
All I know is that other agents may or may not read it the same way. Maybe there is only one way to read it, and that's their way. Maybe I am imagining the action. I've gone to many different readers, and they have all said, "Well, *this* is why people don't see your premise! All you have to do is move this scene up so that they'll be wondering if she gets him back!" Or, "What you need is to state up front point-blank that she thinks she's jinxed herself! That puts the following scenes in a different light!" I don't know what people are expecting as far as "signaling that we are going somewhere." I don't know anything any more. My other books don't have this same voice, but I don't hear that people think they're not going anywhere or that the scenes aren't connected, so maybe they are structured differently.
Maybe my only hope is the mystery. Everything revolves around the murder in that, although the sleuth wanders around trying to figure it out, and that's considered normal in a mystery.
(Maybe all the agents are friends with somebody I pissed off years ago and had no idea I was doing so, and this person is now very powerful and holding an eternal grudge, and therefore he/she is causing the agents to string me along for a while, praising my ability and my "actual writing," whatever that means, and then has them do whatever will humiliate and hurt me the most. This would make more sense than any other explanation so far. It sounds like the plot of a suspense novel written by a writer who always writes about writers. At least I don't write about writers! I hate that.)
Really, I don't know why I can't just be happy having no destiny and a wasted talent. They all RAVE about my ability to write. That is what they can't teach. Yadda yadda yadda. So why can't some editor or agent give me a plot that they'd like to read, something structured the way they think it is supposed to be, and I'll invent the characters and setting and voices and all the HARD stuff, and then finally maybe it'll be worthwhile. . . .
# # #
EDIT: *contains snark* *not to be taken literally seriously*
Is it unreasonable of me to have hoped (or assumed) that this agent wanted to talk to me about representation, or about getting the rest of the manuscript? Because my mother says it was a nice thing for the agent to do, to call to reject me and rub my nose it in once again, but hey, I think that was more cruel than just sending the "not for us" thing on a quarter-sheet of toilet paper. Seriously.
Because of course I DID get pumped about the call. Of course I thought, "Well, this time it's good news!" I mentioned it to hubby and asked if he didn't think that might mean good news. He said, "Yeah, they have to be thinking about taking you on. The agent probably wants to talk terms, how long you'd sign with the agency, what to expect, and just see if you're a good fit. Why else would they call, and not just email?"
When will I learn to keep my frelling mouth SHUT? Why do I ALWAYS say something to him about it? At least I don't jump up and down shrieking excitedly the way I used to years ago. But I should just KEEP QUIET. Now I don't know how I'm going to tell my husband that it was just a novel way to get rejected. *pun groan* I mean, our conversation simply consisted of him telling me the same things I've heard before from people the book didn't click with or appeal to, and it was devoid of suggestions as to how I might modify the work and resubmit it to him . . . so what was the point, really, other than to make me feel like dirt and humiliated once again. And I used up a bunch of my Anytime minutes, to boot. To get the boot buried in my butt, as usual.
It's never an offer of representation. It's never, "We like your book and we'd like to publish it." It's never even, "If you will make the following changes, we'd like to see the novel again."
And dammit, I deserve that. I've been doing this seriously (and **writing well**, according to the people who reject me, for frell's sake) for 22 years now, since just before we married. I've had long "fallow" periods in which I redirected my creative drive into piano playing and improvisation, worldbuilding for fantasy role-playing games, craft/art stamping, and even writing technical specifications and webpages for nerds. This was my typical response to a slap in the face, yet another rejection after initial encouragement, statements that "maybe the next novel will be something we can figure out how to sell," and so forth. But I'd always come back to this because I am good at it.
They're not saying that I'm doing three chapters of throat-clearing; they love the opening. They're not saying there's any problem with the writing. The voice is great. The characters are appealing, distinct, and believable. Not too much introspection, no lack of motivation. There's subtext that is enjoyable for those who pick up on it. Hell, that's more than I can say about many of the books I pick up off the shelf at Borders! And *beta readers* come to me saying, "That was funny!" And "It really moved fast and I was waiting to see what happened with her curse." And "I thought those superstitions were hilarious." They NEVER MENTION that this or that scene doesn't immediately connect up with the next in some obvious fashion. They trust the author. They know you're going somewhere with this. If they're enjoying the book, they don't try to invent some problem with it.
I'm sitting here reading Sara Lewis's third novel. Her novel is just as pointless and wandering and whiney and shit as MINE is--it really is. So how come they publish her and not me? It isn't fair. I don't know Ms. Lewis, and obviously I do enjoy her work, as I have all three of her novels (but not her short story collection) on my "keeper" shelf. What I do know from seeing her books in stores is that there is an audience for a book that has a lot of subtext, that has what seems like a lot of "meandering" stuff that comes together near the end. She writes long passages of dialogue, in fact, the way I started out doing . . . and that I would now do in a condensed fashion, implying a lot and actually putting down less text. But I think that her readers would like to read me.
Self-publishing and POD is an answer, but now they want $800. When Dennis Havens placed all nine of his novels, there was no charge (they were just getting started.) For a couple of years after that, it cost $99. But now . . . now it's really getting ridiculous. And my books *have* the "New York publisher kind of writing," according to editor and author Melissa Senate. (Don't get the idea that I have connections; I "bought" a critique from her for over $200 by donating to a relief fund for a fellow author. I've never had a mentor or anyone who encouraged me since I left high school. I was apparently the best fiction writer in high school, but that ain't sayin' nothin'. I ended up writing all the incidental copy for the yearbook because the other two who were chosen by the English lit staff to do it wouldn't let anyone edit their work, which was Too Important and Too Pristine To Be Touched, and I said, "Yeah, sure, edit it but show it to me." That was the last time anyone said anything about how easy I am to work with, too. *wink*)
I don't know how to cure this curse. Where do you make a deal with the Devil? Obviously Dan Brown has made a deal to keep his book on the top of the charts. Hoodoo says you go to the crossroads and wait for the crossroads spirit to come, but that's for guitar playing. If you go to the crossroads (say the legends) and play for a few hours every Sunday starting at dawn, then the twelfth Sunday the crossroads spirit will appear and take your guitar and play a tune, then hand it back to you. After that, you can play anything you like. This is of no use to me because I can already play anything (within reason) on the piano or guitar by ear. That and $2.25 will get you a Route 66 Diet Limeade. I assume I'd bring my laptop with the manuscript on it instead of a guitar. What I need is the getting-published location. Would that be in front of the Random House building in New York? I can't say. Who would show up--a demonic Bennett Cerf?
Alas, I know that deals with the devil eventually backfire on you, and then there's a price to pay. It's too high a price. Even if you put it on your credit card.
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-09 07:19 am (UTC)I'm currently waiting on a rejection from Poisoned Pen and hoping a helpful critique will come with it.(I'm not even fantasizing that they'll take my book on.) What I'm desperately afraid of is that my book is coherent and publishable and nothing else. I mean, volunteers and beta readers in the ideal reader group professed to love it, but I have no illusions about that. I'm just afraid that the best thing about this book is that there's nothing really wrong with it,and if that's the case it'll never get published, ever.
You have my deepest sympathies--especially since I'm beginning to wade in those waters myself.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-10 04:47 pm (UTC)Consider submitting to epublishers. Some of us love old fashioned cozies.
You won't get rich and probably won't get famous, but you'd avoid the New York ratrace.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-11 01:00 pm (UTC)I know your stuff is already at a pretty sophisticated state, but that's the reason why the prices went up, I'm sure of it--to weed out (some of) the people who are wasting their own time and those of the printers. A lot of people could apparently throw ninety bucks away and pretend they were authors. But to plunk down several hundred, they've got to be serious about it.