Home again, home again

My poor blog, along with everything else in my life, has been a little neglected as of late.  Late July/early August has been a whirlwind: several trips (including one to meet my lovely and amazing agent in London!), an online class, tutoring, writing/editing, and preplanning week at school.  Now that it’s all listed out like that I’m starting to wonder how I got any sleep.  No wonder I’m exhausted!

But now I’m starting to catch up (tell that to the pile of laundry haunting my hamper), so no more blog neglect.  I have a couple of things I want to post about, but since the most exciting thing that happened was London that gets top priority.

It started with a whim.  I get regular emails from Delta airlines with info about sales, and one came the first week of July advertising a sale for one day only, and only to London from certain cities.  Long story short: the rates were bargain basement, the timing was right, and Atlanta was one of those cities.  How could my husband and I not go?  So we booked it—completely oblivious to the fact that we’d be going the day after the Olympic opening ceremonies.  I was 100% focused on the fact that I’d actually get the chance to meet my agent, Clare Wallace of the Darley Anderson Agency, in person. 

My husband spent a semester abroad in the UK, so he chose the hotel and we were off.  Clare generously offered to take me to lunch, so I met her at the agency on Tuesday afternoon.  I presented her with a bottle of champagne and chocolates for the agency to share, as well as genuinely tacky “Georgia: Peach State!” shot glasses for Clare and Vicki.  A good Southern girl never shows up empty-handed. 

I got to meet a couple of people, including Darley Anderson himself (though sadly some of the agency was out of town hiding from the Olympics, so I didn't get to meet everyone).  I got to have a nice conversation with him, as he was kind enough to drive me and Clare to our lunch.  He is really such a fascinating man, a wealth of information about publishing.  Even in a twenty-minute car ride he had a lot of great advice to offer.  The agency is currently preparing for the release of the Jack Reacher movie, starring Tom Cruise and based on one of Darley’s client’s books. 

As Clare and I had lunch we discussed the latest iteration of Blessed Among Women.  I had to pick my jaw up off the floor when she said it’s ready to go out to publishers.  I know that’s always been the endgame, but it always seemed so abstract (a separate post on that later).  Now it’s happening: Blessed is going out to editors in September in advance of the Frankfurt Book Fair in October (again, I’m feeling a lot of feelings about that, they’ll get covered in a later post). 

The thing that struck me most as we chatted was that I couldn’t have dreamed up an agent that would suit me better than Clare.  She really gets my writing and feels so passionately about her work.  As we discussed it I could tell that she understood on a deep level what I was trying to say with the novel, how I wanted to present the characters and their world, their triumphs and failures.  I’m going to stop gushing, but I’ll just say if I was happy to be working with her before we met I’m ecstatic now.

Okay: gushing over.  London was spectacular, although the closest we got to any of the Olympic events was the TV at the pub (hey, we just wanted to experience the games like true Brits, okay?).  We did get to spend several hours at the British museum, which is where I spotted the plate in the picture at the top of this post.  Guess who that is?  That’s Diane de Poitiers.  Of all the treasures the museum could contain, and of the very few I got to see, I stumble on a portrait of my inspiration.  And it’s probably a plate she owned.  

I like to think it’s a sign.

Editing

Now that I've covered the changes since I last updated, I'll chat about what I came back to the blog for: to talk about editing.  Specifically, to talk about editing after the huge success of contracting with an agent.  Because editing on your own, just you in your little writer bubble, is very different from editing based on the suggestions of professionals in the industry. 

Before I start, though, I want to make clear a couple of things.  One is that querying can be really brutal and demoralizing.  Day after day of checking the email inbox only to find form rejections.  Even when the form is kind, even when the agent spells your name right, a rejection is a tough thing to take.  So I'm very grateful to be on "the other side", so to speak.  Second, the edits that my agent and the agency editor have suggested are only going to make Blessed Among Women stronger, and they are by no means big, overhaul-type edits.  It's not like I have to change the whole structure or something.  I've been tasked with adding a few critical scenes and expanding some existing moments.  They're all very natural additions that fall well in line with the novel's tone and narrative.  So, piece of cake, right? 

Here's the baffling thing about success at any level in this process: it is daunting.  I am daunted.  Because I'm sitting down to write the new material and I'm second-guessing myself big time.  I think there are several reasons for this, the most important of which is this:

It took me six months to get Blessed Among Women to the point where agents even wanted to look at it, and then another three before anyone wanted to represent it.  That's not actually very long in the grand scheme of things, but in that time I treated the novel like a full-time job.  I wrote, edited, educated myself, wrote, edited...hours upon hours of work.  And now I've got a couple of weeks to add segments that live up to the nine-months-of-constant-work level.  It's intimidating.  I'll start writing and get a few sentences in and think, this isn't the same.  Why isn't this the same?  And then I wander off to do my nails, because I know that's something I can do really well. 

Unfortunately, beautifully sculpted nails will do nothing to further my writing career.  Neither will being afraid of producing something new, even if it's not as polished as what I already have.  And in the end I always wander back to the computer like a good little writer.  But those moments will continue to pop up where I convince myself that I've lost the magic touch, and my agent will figure out that I'm a hack, and it will all be over.  I will still worry that it will all be snatched away from me in the night. 

As far as I can tell, the solution is the same as it's always been: get back to work.  So I'll push those little nagging voices to the back of my head and try to listen to the characters again. 

Agented!

Long time no see...and a lot of things have changed since I last posted.  For one, I signed with an agent--the lovely Clare Wallace of the Darley Anderson agency!  This is the full story.  (Full disclosure: this is the first draft of a post I did as a guest on another writer's blog; I'll link to it when it's published over there.)

To give the truest sense of my journey to “The Call”, I want to start in fall 2011, so that hopefully people can learn from my mistakes a little faster than I did.  You see, in October 2011, I “finished” my historical novel, Blessed Among Women.  I thought, hey, this is just like what’s in bookstores!  I need to get this to a publisher stat!  Then I did a little research and found out that you don’t send it to a publisher, silly, you send it to a literary agent with a query letter.  So then I sat down to write a query letter.  And boy, did I bomb.  I’m deeply ashamed to admit that I went after some of the top agents in the field with a poorly-written query letter and a 55k word “novel”.  When their assistants got done wiping tears of laughter from their eyes, I got form reject after form reject.

I feel extremely fortunate that a) I have a hugely supportive husband who really believed that somewhere in what I had written was a real novel; b) I love researching things; and c) I am the world’s most stubborn person.  Ever.  So I was going to find out what I was doing wrong and fix it.

First thing: I dug back into the novel and made additions that enriched the story, and then completely re-wrote the beginning when my beta readers made the comment that it was a good novel “once they got into it”.  To me that said the beginning was too slow, so I concentrated on my strong suit (dialogue) to make the opening punchier.  Then I joined the “Where Past is Prologue” critique group on Agent Query Connect and learned invaluable lessons. 

In January I started the querying process again and got my first requests for pages.  Hooray!  Then I got form rejects on pages.  Ouch.  So I set it aside—stepped back, worked on other projects.  I thought I had shelved the novel, but it kept whispering to me from my Documents folder.  In a fit of procrastination on another project I dove back in to my first love.  I read Writing the Breakout Novel (Maas), On Writing (King), Self-Editing for Fiction Writers and, for the thousandth time, Bird by Bird (Lamott).  Then I thrashed my novel into submission based on what I learned.  I attacked my query with the same fervor, and then started sending again in March. 

That’s when things really started to happen. 

I started getting requests—I was still getting rejections, but now they were personalized, with real suggestions to help my novel, and invitations to re-submit.  I incorporated those suggestions and then sent another batch.  If it sounds like I sent a lot of queries, it’s because I sent a lot of queries.  Over 130.  Maybe even way over 130.  130 is when I stopped counting.  But therein lies the biggest lesson of all.  So many of those were losses before I ever hit send because I didn’t do my homework.  I thought I was done before I even really started.  The lesson is: study up and play by the rules.  The agents who are turning people down are not bad people who can’t see your brilliance.  They are businesspeople who have a job to do and their own rules to play by when they submit to publishers. 

So I sent my just-good-enough query plus the first 30ish pages to Clare Wallace of the Darley Anderson Agency (among others—I sent out batches of ten).  Within a couple of days, I got an email from the agency’s editor, the delightful Vicki LeFeuvre.  She and Clare and read the first part and wanted a synopsis and a full on exclusive.  I know exclusives are a hot-button issue among authors, but I was really drawn to the agency.  I decided it would be worth a delay in sending material to other agents and granted the exclusive.  When the read the full they approached me with a suggestion for revision that would draw the novel more to the “faction” side of historical fiction (basically, they wanted me to draw in more of the true historical element that inspired the novel).  I considered it, decided I’d give it a shot and see how I felt about the changes. 

Well, they’re the experts for a reason.  The suggestions strengthened the novel enormously.  I sent the revision and got an email from Clare a couple of weeks later.  I was actually standing in the grocery store when I opened the email!  She said she wanted to talk about representation.  Let me tell you, there is no better feeling than standing in the frozen foods aisle reading those words.  Several days later my phone was ringing and I was trying to keep my cool. 

We talked for about thirty minutes, but I knew immediately that she was the right one.  Her vision for the novel perfectly aligned with mine, and she was excited to hear about the other projects I’m working on.  She sent me the contract later that afternoon.

I know this is long, but if it saves anyone some heartache it’s worth it.  I learned a lot about patience in this process, and it’s what served me best.

Critique Group

I am very lucky to have found a critique group to read Blessed Among Women.  Though it's a non-traditional historical (which I know makes it a tough critique) it does seem to resonate, and my group has so far been giving me dynamite feedback.  Apparently I have character on lock--setting is my issue.  I think that's a problem I'll continue to have.  I hate taking time away from my dialogue to describe things, but that's very necessary.  I need to make myself do it.  The world-building involved with the fantasy novel makes that a little less of an issue.

I've also been in the process of edit/re-edit/edit again/dammit, how'd I miss that typo?  The to-be-or-not-to-be nature of contractions in HiFi (how cool is that for historical fiction?) has also been bugging me.  On the one hand, we can't hope to approximate how people spoke with one another several centuries ago, which is why I'm more than tempted to go stylistically natural and let the characters have a conversation.  But on the other hand, there's a certain voice readers of HiFi expect, and if I don't deliver, it makes my book that much less likely to sell.  Well, less likely to get to the agent stage, honestly.

I feel tough.  July in Madrid made me believe that I could do things that I'd never have attempted otherwise.  And hell, if all else fails, I've got a vision board, dammit.  (Thanks, Happy Endings.)  If it's not this book, it will be the next.  Or, God help me, the next.

Soundtracks

I know I'm not alone in this, but whenever I'm deep into a story I need the music to accompany it.  For Blessed Among Women I have no fewer than seven soundtracks (my husband made five--he's way more knowledgeable about current music than I am).  Some of them are general, some are geared toward specific characters, but all of them helped me to flesh out certain things and expand.

Sample of songs on Blessed soundtracks:
"There Is No Rose of Such Virtue", Sting
"Gotta Have You", The Weepies
"Only You", Joshua Radin
"My Body Is a Cage", Peter Gabriel (cover)
"Skinny Love", Bon Iver
"99 Problems" (no, really), Hugo (cover)
"The Scientist", Willie Nelson (cover)
"Scarborough Fair", Simon and Garfunkel
"Possession", Sarah McLachlan
"Fear", Sarah McLachlan
"King of May", Natalie Merchant
"Mess", Ben Folds Five
"Worn Me Down", Rachel Yamagata

There's much more obviously, so as I continue to work with Blessed I'll post more.

Likeable Characters vs. Unlikeable Characters

I had a friend read Blessed, and one of his first comments was that he didn't like Thomas (one of the MC).  I weirdly felt like I had done my job.  Because Thomas is really just a big baby.  He's selfish and sulky--mainly because he's a young man, and he's immature.  He's not supposed to be perfect.  He's got some deep-rooted psychological issues.  But I love him.  My husband loves him.  Because we know him really well.

The other MC, Joane, is just sort of blah to me.  She's nice, and she certainly grows a lot by the end of the novel.  But she's very vanilla.  I think what happens to her is more interesting than she herself is.  My favorite character is Thomas's brother, but I think so far I'm the only one that's read it that feels that way.

My husband, he is probably most intrigued by Marie, Thomas's wife and his personal antagonist (I wouldn't call her an antagonist in the traditional sense).  I really don't care for her, but a lot of people who've read the MS are interested in her.  You hear a lot at the beginning about what a nightmare she is (from Thomas, natch), and then she surprises you.  But I still get sick of her pretty fast.

And then there's the main antagonist, Richard, who everyone agrees is the worst.  And, yet, people tell me gleefully that they "like" him.  He's someone to root against.  He is not doing a half-assed job of being bad.  He is putting his whole ass into being a rat bastard, and he's really good at it.

Interesting to reflect on the lives that characters take on once their outside of your head.  I heard a story about Toni Morrison at a conference, listening to papers on her various works.  When asked how she felt about them, she said that they were wonderful, but that she had no idea what books those people were talking about.  It's disorienting to have a product of your head reflected back at you through someone else's eyes.

(And, yes, I have people other than friends and family reading the story.  I like my honest critiques as well as my flattering ones.)