Tag: writing

“Teenage Dream”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings1 Comment

I met up with one of my CP’s yesterday (see Dahlia’s excellent post for more on CP’s).  We had a lovely time, discussing all sorts of topics, including what I think of as the elephant in the publishing room:  YA.

YA is hot.  It’s where publishers are buying, and where authors are selling.  It also seems to be where the writing community on the internet is hanging out.  Most of the writerly people I follow on Twitter write YA.  Contests, even if open to adult authors, tend to heavily skew toward kid lit.  Most of the agents I follow rep it, if not exclusively.  A “YA ______” seems to be the top of most agent wishlists.  And quite frankly, this isn’t anything new.  YA has been a trend in publishing for so long I’m starting to wonder if it’s now the norm.

What I’ve been noticing about YA lately, and what makes me a little frustrated with all the hype, is that very few of the YA books I’ve read have been good.  Good like Gone Girl good.  Good like it hits you between the eyes and doesn’t let you off the floor for several days good.  And I like to read good stories.  It doesn’t bother me if what I’m reading is hard core SF aimed at astro-physics nerds, or romance novels aimed at bored housewives, or YA contempts aimed at teenage girls.  What I look for is a book that stays with me after I read it.  That gives me something to think about after I’ve turned the final page.  That worms its way into my consciousness, coming up at odd moments.

Very few of the YA books I’ve read recently have done this.  I remember reading Madeline L’Engle’s Arm of the Starfish and House Like a Lotus as a teenager.  I went back to those books again and again, each time finding another layer of meaning.  I bought Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising (although arguably more MG than YA) a few years ago, and was delightfully surprised to find that it held up.  By contrast, what’s being published today seems more like candy.  It’s deliciously sweet, easily consumed, and has very little substance.*  Even the dystopian novels all seem to have (relatively) happy endings.

This worries me.  What does it say that the books written for the “me” generation are, for the most part, easily digestible bits of fancy that avoid the hard questions?  Is it that kids these days aren’t willing to put any work into reading?  Or is it that the industry has decided to keep throwing softballs on the grounds that any reading is better than no reading?

I write adult fiction.  I write about hard questions, and choices where there is no right answer, and the intersections between love and selfishness.  I write flawed characters who make poor choices and don’t always learn from their mistakes.  It’s going to cause difficulties for me down the line, once I get past the writing into the selling.  And I’m okay with that.  But a part of me has to wonder whether, in writing about the dark and the gritty and the adult, I’ve closed myself off from the audiences who’ve grown up reading today’s YA.

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* I’m not saying that this is true of all YA books, not by a long shot.  And I’d welcome suggestions for YA books left you sitting on the couch, stunned, when you finished them.  For that matter, I’m open to suggestions for good books, period.

“Plans”

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

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.

War is Hell

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings2 Comments

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.

“Tell me on a Sunday”

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings1 Comment

Another Sunday afternoon alone in the apartment.  I finished up the first draft of a new story, a short about the Wild Hunt, that I’m rather pleased with.  After spending the past five months on the same novel, it’s nice to be able to bang out a whole draft of something in a few hours.  My writing plan for the rest of the year is to focus on getting some good drafts of short fiction done, things I can polish up and start sending out to magazines after the new year.  There’s also a secret plan involving the new novel, but I don’t want to say anything for fear of jinxing it.

I’m also planning on entering a couple of year end pitch contests.  Pitches, by the way, are so not my thing.  I’ve had an inordinate amount of trouble trying to get the description of Pomegranate Seeds into something resembling pitch length.  Either it ends up sounding like a romance, which it is definitely NOT, or my antagonist comes off as a total douchebag (he’s NOT), or it sounds so generic as to be unreadable.

Back when I was still doing choir and theatre, one of my favorite teachers used to tell us that what mattered about an audition was the process, not the result.  My sixteen-year-old self thought that was the kind of bullshit teachers say to make kids feel better.  Now, after two contests, three major revisions of my query letter, and more rejections than I care to think about, I get it.

I’m viewing the pitch contests not as an end, but as a step along the way.  Here’s what I’m hoping to get out of them, in this order.  A good, solid pitch for Pomegranate seeds that I can use when people ask what my novel is about.  A few more writers to follow on Twitter and possibly connect with.  A few agents to query that I might not otherwise have considered.  And, possibly, maybe, if I’m really, really lucky, some interest in my manuscript.

“(500 more)”

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

A wise man once said, the secret to being a great writer is to apply ass to chair.*  So far as wisdom goes, it seems to be accurate and, remarkable of remarkables, working.

In January, I started tracking my writing via spreadsheet.  Eight months later, I have a novel with an agent, a short story ready for submission (already rejected once, poor thing) and a new novel that’s already 1/3 of the way done.  Which is not bad at all.  But what I’ve really noticed, even more than how much I’ve written and how submission-ready it is, is the learning curve.

In 2005, I did NaNoWriMo for the first time.  I wrote a 50,000 word story about a girl who set off to rescue a kidnapped boy from her village and fell in with a group of amazon-type women along the way.  I don’t remember it having much of a plot. For that matter, I don’t think she even rescued the boy.  I haven’t looked at it since the end of that November.  I expect it’s rather terrible.

In 2006, I did NaNo again, after a year of not writing much of anything.  Again, I didn’t have much of a plot, and most of my writing was a frantic attempt to stay one step ahead of my daily word count.  This time, though, I submitted the opening pages to a writer’s workshop.

In January 2007 I workshopped my Persephone story with a mystery writer named Laura Lippman, who gave me enough encouragement that I thought it was worth doing a rewrite.  That spring, I took myself and my new laptop to the Oakland rose garden or to Lake Merritt or anywhere else that was bright and sunny and wrote.  When it was done, I had a passable second draft that still needed a lot of work.

In August 2007, I started law school.  It took me until last summer to drag my novel out of the box it had been hiding in, brush it off, realize it wasn’t half bad, and start revising with a vengeance. That project finished up around March, and of it went into the world.

Around April of this year, I started the new book.This time, instead of writing from scene to scene, I outlined.  I deliberated.  I thought about the choices the character would have to make.  I thought about who she might run into along the way.  Then I started writing, almost every day, with the understanding that if I went to bed at a reasonable hour I would make myself get up and write, but if I had one of those days where I didn’t get home from work until after midnight I wouldn’t beat myself up for sleeping in.

More than anything else, it has made me a better writer. I think about what I’m doing with the story and what I need to be doing constantly, not just while I’m in the chair. Because the muse may come when and where she chooses, but if I’m in my chair in the morning, she’ll always know where to find me.

*  http://samjmiller.com/2012/08/14/clarion-2012-every-brilliant-piece-of-writing-advice/