Forced to care about technology

I’ve been trying hard not to delve into the particulars of the Google settlement, the Amazon-Macmillan throw-down, or just how many Kindles Amazon claims to have sold, but the word at last weekend’s Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference in NYC is that the last year has been a game-changer. 

At the 2009 conference, editors encouraged us to submit our work directly to them (while the agents sat there and gnashed their teeth with forced smiles on their faces).  This year, even the editors were saying, “Don’t even try to get published without an agent. They’re negotiating e-rights on your behalf that we barely understand.” 

The new frontier of electronic books, and the blurring of what used to be mutually exclusive categories of rights (video, print, drama, audio) has the Manhattan publishing community pretty freaked out. I’d been toying with the idea of submitting directly to a couple of small presses. Now, not so much.

Today’s count: 21 queries in the universe, 3 agents reading the full manuscript. I spoke to one of them at the conference–a very nice, very relationship-oriented legend in the industry–and came away thinking, “ME, ME, pick ME!”

I’m icing my tennis elbow, more accurately described as swimming-injury-exacerbated-by-too-much-chopping-of-Community-Supported-Agriculture-vegetables-and-a-ridiculous-number-of-client-deadlines-in-the-last-month elbow, and am getting whiny about the referred pain to my hand and shoulder. I have a pretty good sense of humor about my disability but being a one-handed writer is enough of a challenge without repetitive stress injuries. For chrissakes.

On a lighter note, I read INGLORIOUS by Joanna Kavenna.  I found myself getting nearly as bored with the protagonist’s existential crisis as I get with my own, but thought the following line was great:

“Usually, they were measured with each other. He had thanked her for dinner, a solitary foray. ‘Thanks so much. Delicious sauce.’ ‘Sainsbury’s very own,’ she said. ‘Delicious.’ ‘Mmm, I know.’ It was the sort of script that ended with a murder.”

I’m loving OLIVE KITTERIDGE by Elizabeth Strout. Evidently, some other people have loved it too because it won the Pulitzer.  It’s a collection of related short stories.  The highest praise I can think of is that Strout’s writing reminds me of Alice Munro’s (at whose altar I worship). It hits just as hard, only it’s chattier and funnier.

Query-o-rama

I have 15 queries out in the universe and 3 agents reading the full manuscript. Not bad for a two-week holiday sinus infection.

Favorite books of 2009: WATER FOR ELEPHANTS and GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY (although this is a frivolous title for a serious-yet-highly-readable book).  Currently, Diane Ackerman is blowing my mind yet again, this time with THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE. Is there any academic discipline she hasn’t totally mastered?

I’m excited to go to NYC at the end of January for the winter Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference.  I get a room to myself.  Oh right, and I get to meet agents, editors and other writers.

Exercises in humility

My six-year-old asks about twice a week, “Did someone buy your book today?”

Uh, no. Four agents are reading the full manuscript now. That’s good, although not nearly as good as having an offer of representation or a publishing contract.

Here’s how I summed up my year in our family holiday letter:

“Having never read it, I’m sick to death of the “Twilight” series. After dozens of humbling-yet-encouraging rejections from literary agents last spring, I hired a freelance editor to critique my manuscript and tell me the truth. She did. Then I turned 40. Four months and one extremely painful revision later, I’m peddling a version that’s leaner and faster-paced. Evidently, I manage my anxiety with craft-therapy: I’m halfway done with Paige’s baby book (she’s six), made each of the girls a London scrapbook, and am nearly done needle pointing Bryn’s Christmas stocking (now that she’s almost ten). During my two-year gamble as a full-time novelist I told myself that my professional identity as a writer didn’t hinge on a steady paycheck. I lied. I’m relieved to be freelancing again for worthy causes. I depend on Dave’s dance class at the YMCA, yoga, my book club, and the occasional glass of Shiraz to keep it real.”

Pausing this week to enjoy the season. Happy holidays.

Books that have nothing to do with vampires

I just finished CATCH A TIGER BY THE TOE by Ellen Levine. It’s a middle grade novel set in 1953 about a girl trying to keep a secret of the fact that her parents are Communists. Levine paints a textured historical setting for a character you love, all without beating you over the head with the knowledge that you’re learning something important. I highly recommend it.

I’m having a hard time putting down QUAKING by Kathryn Erskine, about a girl in a Quaker foster family who learns to confront old ghosts and political bullies in a conservative town at the beginning of the Iraq war. Again, I highly recommend it.

I emailed Erskine, and asked her how she pitched a YA novel with political content to agents. (In my experience, politics are a hard sell in times of scary recession and technological upheaval in the publishing industry).

In her encouraging and friendly reply she told me that her editor scooped it up without agent representation. I’m happy when good things happen to good writers–truly–but these catapult-to-publication stories are hard to take when you’re told at every conference to find an agent.

I think I’ll take out my frustration on Stephanie Meyer for whose books I’m feeling a deep and abiding loathing.

Back in the game

The revision is done, the agent queries are going out a few at a time, and two agents have asked to read the full manuscript. This all feels really, really good.

There are hundreds of great agents out there, most of them in Manhattan. I have notes on agents who handled similar books, emails from writer friends who heard so-and-so speak at a conference, Publisher’s Weekly blurbs about people who’ve left their old jobs to start at a new agency, and a solid list of yet-to-be-researched people listed in various writer references. It’s kind of overwhelming.

There are wing-nuts out there, people who try to charge you money to read your manuscript, and agents who never communicate with their clients. Weeding out the wing-nuts is another tricky business, requiring many hours on AbsoluteWrite.com (the writer’s water cooler) and a bunch of other writers’ blogs.

I tell myself that finding an agent is a process, not an end-game.

Right.

Free at last

Yahoo! I finished the revision last Friday, shopped it to two honest friends, and updated my query and cover letters.

I can’t overstate my relief at having this stage of the text-murdering process behind me. I shaved 8,000 words, picked up the pace, and moved the politics into the background. Best of all, I still respected myself in the morning.

Yesterday I sent it out to the agents who had expressed an interest in the revised version.

There are lots of other great agents out there but I have no time at the moment to research them. November is full of client work: I’m writing a workbook on diagnosing mental illness in young children for a child psychologist, fundraising for a human services organization, and writing a donor letter for a women’s clinic.

The amount of obsessive needlepointing I do is proportionate to my fiction-writing anxiety level. I’ve finished half a Christmas stocking in the last two weeks.

Mid-point

I’m one week into my novel-revision.

I sailed through the “isn’t this fun to be back with my characters again?” stage in about five minutes.

Wallowing in the “I’m so bored with these tedious people I want to scream” phase is taking quite a bit longer.

I’m making progress. I am. It’s just that every sentence is so familiar at this point (almost four years into it) that I can’t tell if it sparkles or thuds. I’m sick of each and every syllable.

My friend Amie Klempnauer’s new book SHE LOOKS JUST LIKE YOU, on being her daughter’s non-biological lesbian mom, is about to be published. I’m happy for her. No, really.

Accountability

My friend Sue asked me last night how the writing was going. I told her I planned to execute my quick and painful revision (filed, by the way, under “BF Revision”) in a two-week period starting on the 19th.

She said, “And you really stick to those self-imposed deadlines?”

I told her I do when I’ve told the whole world about them.

Countdown to revision

I’ve blocked out October 19-November 1 as The Two-Week Period During Which I’ll Kick Ass On Revising My Manuscript.

I’m in the “acceptance” stage of grief regarding my paid reviewer’s insightful edits, and think it may be possible to make major changes without selling my soul.

In the meantime, I’m freelancing again in a big way. God, it feels good to earn a paycheck. In these last two years of creative writing I’ve told myself that my professional identity isn’t about my earning power. I lied.

I’m writing web content for a progressive early childhood development non-profit and ghostwriting two books for its founder. It’s a lot to take on while trying to publish a novel but what the hell.

Mulling is work, too.

I always underestimate how much the end of school will affect my work schedule and concentration. Can you call yourself a blogger if you haven’t written a post for three months?

After numerous rejections, I’ve paused in my search for an agent. It occurred to me that the problem might have to do with my manuscript.

I paid a former Harcourt Children’s Books editor and two-time YA author Deborah Halverson to critique the whole thing. A month ago she sent me ten pages of very insightful feedback.

The upshot is that I can, in fact, write but that I need to carve out most of the scenes that made me want to write the book in the first place if I ever want to get it published. She says that the chapters with the most political content slow down the pace. Ouch.

I’ve moved on from pouting to serious thinking. I think I can do a major revision based on her suggestions without killing all of my darlings. I have high hopes for September.

I described my anxiety about getting my book published to a friend of my dad’s. I ended my rant with, “and I’m 40!” He told me that in his professional opinion as a financial planner, I have fifty-three more years to get it done. That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.