Doing What Must be Done

     Where has May gone? Five days of it went on a trip to Madison, Wisconsin, to see my son get his doctorate in physics.Yes, I'm bragging a little. Having no math skills at all, having taken advanced biology and dissected a cat to avoid taking physics in high school, I am immensely happy he got my husband's brains for this subject. The weather was terrible--windy, cold, and rainy, but we rejoiced anyhow and mostly celebrated indoors. Spent one extra day of this trip stranded in Houston when our last flight was cancelled--and then there was the week long catch up on mail, e-mail, laundry, and groceries. You would have thought we were gone a month instead of less than a week.
     Regardless, I didn't work on my new book, Sister of a Sinner, for over a week.  It is hard to get back in the groove of a writing schedule even after such a short time.  A Will of her Own came out in April, and The Courville Rose is due out first week in June, both needing some publicity efforts. An Ashy Affair went through two edits and is now off to line editors and the galley stage. I guess it will be my autumn book, appropriate since it takes place in October. While all this was going on, I worked in spurts on Sister, five-hundred words here, a thousand there, and some days nothing.  It has picked up speed now since my only other resolution is to find an agent for my Regency series. I'd rather write than face all those rejections again.
     Yes, seventeen books in print, soon to be eighteen, and I still fear rejection.  A good friend has given me the name of his agent. As soon as he wrote the name, I realized this is a revered old agency, one that rejected me many years ago more than once.  I have grown a lot in my writing skills since then, have a modest fan base (and ten followers of this blog!), yet I am still scared to approach them.
     Being fairly good at forcing myself to do what must be done which includes painful cuts and rewrites of my work, I will take this plunge, but probably not before I finish Sister. I'm over twenty-thousand words in on what will probably be a seventy-thousand word book, so I should have it done in around sixty days or two months, say by the first of August. In the more laid back field of e-publishing, I've learned to set my own goals and deadlines.  Discipline is the key to getting 'er done, whatever it is that is holding you back.  Write every day. I strive for 1,000 words each time I sit down at the computer. Some writers won't have the time to do that much, so do whatever you can. Promise yourself  you will complete that book by a self-imposed deadline, good practice should your publisher ever impose one. When edits and galleys come through, do them at once, and then get back to writing your book. No dallying!
      I revise yesterday's work before beginning today's writing. This makes for a very clean first draft needing only light revision.  Once I polish the second draft, I move on to writing the synopsis and a blurb that can be used in a query or on a back cover. With this is complete, boom, off it goes to my editor to accept or reject, and oh, yes, I still get rejections.  I've had three I thought were sure things turned down. Two were accepted that I felt were long shots as they aren't my usual type of book.  However, those long shots went through grueling, unpleasant edits that often made me wish they had been turned down.  Both became very good stories, I think, and the reader will never know what blood, sweat, and tears went into them--as it should be.
     So, discipline, self-imposed deadlines and word counts, editing as you go along, then taking the big leap to submit will get you where you want to go--eventually.  Good luck to all of us.
   

An Author's Pet Peeves

     It seems that agents and publishers are always posting their pet peeves, but authors are not allowed this outlet. Sometimes, we need to gripe, too. No names shall be named here. These are just general complaints brought on by my recent spate of submissions.
     Oh, how I wish for a standardized submission form. Yes, I do the usual, doubled-spaced in Times New Roman,standard margins, and headers, but then there are some publishers who even specify margin size and insist you cram your entire life story in the header which really messes up the look of the page. Then, a few want single-spaced. Some want attachments, some want embedded chapters, some want fulls, some chapters. A few make the submission process incredibly complex such as asking for your marketing plan and all your platforms as well as your publishing history. I realize they want to weed out the insufficiently motivated, but some also say if you make even one tiny mistake in following their directions, you are not professional,.and they will not take even a glimpse at your work. They have the power to do this of course, and we are at their mercy. We are too many and must be culled, but I am so tired of constantly reformatting.
     Most submissions are done by computer these days--easy to receive, easier to reject and delete, easier for me, too, than running a brown envelope to the post office to be weighed and paying for postage. However since we are in the age of computers, you would think agents and publishers could at least set up an auto reply that says, "We have received your submission."  Some do, but others don't. Their site will say if you haven't heard from us in two or three months, we aren't interested.  But, how do you know they ever got the submission in the first place. What if you broke one of their rules? You will never know. Some say you can inquire after a certain period of time. Frankly, I've never done this as I know they don't want to be bothered, just as people you pitch to do not want your card or contact info which they will only throw out later. I did once submit the same manuscript to an agent twice as I wasn't sure it had been received. To this day, I do not know, but I won't submit there again. Do I really want an agent who can't take the time to at least send an auto reply that says the classically vague, "Not right for us" so you won't go out and kill yourself over all the months you've wasted waiting to hear from them. Yes, I long for the days of the SASE with the standard brushoff and sometimes a single sentence of encouragement.
      Okay, got that off my chest. I shouldn't be broody. A contract did come through for my women's fiction novel, A Will of her Own, about a young woman whose life takes some unexpected turns when she decides to get over her college crush and date men who might really be interested in her. It's already undergone a title change and a blurb rewrite. Edits will show up soon taking me away from working on a new romance, A Splashy  Affair.  Best guess is that it will be out next spring, but She's a Sinner surprised me with a release date months before I expected it.  In publishing, you just never know anything.

Silver Threads

After my rather disastrous conference last month, I returned home to lots of buzz on one my writers' loops about ageism in publishing. Evidently, a young agent blogged that she would never take a client over forty because they would not be able to produce enough books to make a good career or enough money for her. Truth be told, I would rather have an agent with some silver threads in her hair, lots of clout and contacts, rather than the baby agents sent to small conferences to start their careers-but I know this is not likely to happen as more mature agents already have long lists of writers to represent. At least, I'd give a young agent a chance to show her stuff.
Let's see. At forty, I had just given birth to my third child, consequently moved into a larger house with a bigger yard needing more upkeep, was running a county library system with eight branches, and had a husband to keep happy. Time to write - zero. Ten years later, I eeked out some short stories, rewrote two old novels, and over the next five years, wrote two more. By the time I got published, I had twelve books in my closet, now up to twenty though six have been sold and two more will most likely be printed. So, lack of productivity as one gets older, I don't think so. You actually get back some of that time and energy that formerly went into family and career.
I don't know if that is what happened at the conference, if the young agent took one look at my silver threads and stopped listening to two pitches for very viable books. It is the first time I went through that excruiating process and was not asked for at least a few chapters. I do believe if that is the case, I am done pitching in person.
I did have a last laugh. Before going in to pitch, I spoke to another person in waiting. She had twenty inspirational novels ready to go and was at least ten years older than me. When her name was called, she went in on her walker. Good for her! I wish her luck.

Little Fishes

I've come to think of authors as a vast school of little, silver fishes endlessly circling in a vast ocean and hoping to be landed. The publishers, those huge sharks who take most of the risks and make most of the profits, usually pass us by. Editors, toothy barracudas who intimidate the authors into writing better books, come next in the hierachy. Then, the agents-I'd say they are remoras, but most of us don't make enough to feed a remora. No, agents have always seemed more like fishermen to me. They stand on the shore pulling in many fishes, throwing all but one or two back, seeming all-powerful.
Recently, I got a message from a young agent I'd approached. I was surprised to be on her mailing list since she'd turned me down pleasantly but firmly. She hadn't changed her mind, but rather was announcing the closure of her agency. I was sorry to hear that. Sometimes I forget if the publishers aren't taking on new clients, the younger agents don't thrive either. In the RWR magazine, nearly all the first sales have gone to e-pubs and small presses in the last year or so, no profit for agents there. Lots of casualities in this economy, and it is not only tough on us small fishes either.