Good morning kittens, and welcome to 2013. Here is my New Year’s wish for you:
Hold on to the people that you love, and love the people you can’t hold onto. So often the things we take for granted are the ones we will miss the most when they’re gone. Take time to cry if you need it, and time to laugh as well. Do something kind for a complete stranger. Do something kind for yourself. Cherish the small things – the first shoots of green in the spring, an unexpected smile, a sentence that leave you awestruck and trembling.
It’s been a hell of a year. I found two critique partners, both of whom I’m incredibly lucky to have. I’ve found a writing mentor whose life seems to be on a track strangely similar to my own. And while I finished the first draft of a new novel, the one I thought was finished for sure is back in revision-land. Oh, and did I mention that my husband and I moved four times in four months?
I’m finally starting to feel like a working writer rather than a dabbler. In that vein, here’s what I’d like to get done over the next year:
Revise Pomegranate Seeds by Jan 25, in time for PitchWars. I’m still not convinced that this is possible, but Suzanne has assured me that it is. Since she had the wisdom to pick my novel out of the slush, I’m going to go ahead and believe her on this one.
Apply to Clarion West. Because Neil Gaiman is teaching this year. And because, Clarion. Plus, it will force me to put together a pitch and synopsis for Railroad.
Speaking of which, revise Railroad and start submitting it to agents. I figure it’s got one major revision and one round of line edits before it’s ready. Realistically, that means it probably won’t go out until fall of next year, or perhaps as a Baker’s Dozen debut.
I’d also like to write and submit a few short pieces. I’m not entirely sure where the time for this is going to come from, but one of the things I really like about short fiction is the ability to try out something different. Of course, submitting short fiction will mean needing to read short fiction will mean even more short story magazines on my Kindle that I keep meaning to read when I have a few minutes…
And that’s it. I’m not going to worry about getting an agent, or selling a novel, or getting published. Instead I’m going to write, and keep writing, and talk to writers, and critique other people’s work, and listen to what other people have to say about my work, and write, and keep writing.
I’ve been slowly coming to the inevitable conclusion that I’m going to have to revise Pomegranate Seeds (again!) if I want it to sell.
Here are the cold, hard stats:
8 form rejections
1 closed query (no response after a follow up email and 5 months)
1 rejection with feedback that opening was too quiet
2 contests “wins” with ultimate rejections (one cited voice; the other said it was a little “flat”)
1 request for a full with a pass (too many fairy tale retellings on the market)
1 open request for a full
2 open queries
1 pending contest (PitchWars)
Counting the PitchWars agents who haven’t seen this yet, that’s about 20 agents. Now, we’ve all heard the stories about writers who went through numerous rejections before hearing yes on the 21st, or 51st, or 99th query. We’ve also heard the stories about writers who self published after being rejected by the publishing world and went on to sell over a million copies on Amazon.
This isn’t that book.
Kids, when I wrote this, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I’d written a handful of short stories in college, and a NaNo project the previous year (it’s since been locked in a drawer for its own protection). Now that I’ve finished a draft of a novel that was plotted and outlined and beat-sheeted (hat tip to Authoress), I understand so much more about how a novel works. Enough to know that while Pomegranate Seeds isn’t irreparably broken, it could definitely use an overhaul.
All of which is leading me to the point where I need to make a pretty difficult decision. Do I put Pomegranate Seeds back in the drawer? Or do I take a deep breath, get out my notebook and pen, and begin to quietly murder my darling?
About two or three weeks ago, I came across something called #PitchWars, a multi-part writing contest. First, you submit your query letter and the first 5 pages of your novel to a “mentor” (generally a newly published or aspiring to be published writer). Second, the mentors each pick one person and work on polishing that person’s 3 sentence pitch and the first 250 words of their novel. Finally, toward the end of January, the pitches go live on Brenda Drake’s blog for a bunch of agents to request fight over.
I entered Pomegranate Seeds but wasn’t sure what to expect. A huge chunk of the mentors were looking for kid lit; the ones that were looking for Adult didn’t seem as interested in women’s fic. I was cautiously ecstatic when one of the mentors asked me to send her the first fifty pages. I was floored to see my name on the page announcing the teams.
The mentor who picked me is Suzanne Palmieri, a new writer whose first books will come out next year. We emailed back and forth a bit, I checked out her blog and twitter feed, she probably checked out mine, and I agreed to work with her. From what she wrote yesterday, it sounds like she’s already got some ideas for revisions.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I could really use some good, honest feedback on what does and doesn’t work in the story. On the other… this is my baby! The novel I spent six years writing. The first novel I finished. And while I want people to like my baby as she is, the writer in me wants this to be the best book possible.
The next few weeks are going to be very, very interesting.
Once upon a time, there was a boy who built a snowman. And in the dead of night, while all the world was sleeping, the snowman came to life and took the boy for a marvelous adventure.
I stayed out much, much past my bedtime last night, at a housewarming party in Brooklyn that was exactly what I thought adult parties should be like when I was a child: candles burning, mulled wine on the stove, and a group of people clustered around a piano, singing.
If I were writing this in a story, I would pull you into the scene, make you see his fingers flying across the keys, playing Liszt so fast his knuckles and fingertips blurred. You would know that the room was warm, almost too warm, windows fogged from all the bodies in motion. You would smell the cloves and cinnamon and orange peels from the wine simmering in the kitchen. At the end of the party, you, too, would feel a faint regret that the night was winding down, that the magic was beginning to ebb.
If this were a story, you would leave with some handsome young thing you’d found there, still singing to each other as you walked reluctantly toward the L train and the city and the apartment you live in alone. You might even stop somewhere along the way and kiss, and because this is fiction you will be standing under the streetlight in exactly the spot where the raindrops misting down look like falling stars.
The real world is somewhat more prosaic than the fictional world though, and though I walked out of the party with a handsome young thing, I left him somewhere around Grand Central, setting off in pursuit of a young thing of his own. I did, however, walk under a series of streetlights on my way from the subway to the apartment, and the raindrops falling through that glow of light looked exactly like falling stars.
