Universe, Give Me a Book Deal

Not so long ago, I was invited to a wine tasting. Being new to wine, I was entirely excited--so excited that even though my husband and I drove 46 straight hours from Montana to Massachusetts and only got home that morning, I was still going to go. In my mind, there would be ten to twenty people all bringing their favorite bottles of wine, there would be crackers to clear our palates, and I would leave with a list of new wines that I would love forever and ever.

It started out great because I saw these little cucumber things, but imagine my disappointment when people started showing up with cases of beer...in cans. I don't drink beer, but I'm a beer snob because my husband is a beer snob. No self-respecting beer comes in a can. Then there was a backyard fire. I hadn't dressed for a backyard fire. In fact, I hadn't even brought a sweatshirt, which I was sure to need.

The conversation eventually turned to people I had never met in situations where they might have been funny if I knew who they were. What did I do? I was rude. I pulled out my phone and started texting the babysitter. We spoke briefly of my daughter's refusal to go to bed and then moved on to the founder of Chinese communism. Yep. That's what we texted about.

Then, someone started telling a story in which she really wanted her husband to get a snow blower. It went something like this: Newly married and in a new house, she experienced her first winter in which she had to shovel snow. She told her husband they needed a snow blower. He said, "We live in the city and only have 50 feet of sidewalk to shovel. We do not need a snow blower. We aren't going to spend two grand on a snow blower." She told him, "That's fine. The universe will bring us a snow blower." Lo and behold, a couple weeks later, someone left one on their driveway for them.

So this woman continued. She told me her husband wanted a truck. They're sensible people, so after some discussion they decided they had neither the money nor the need for the power of a truck. But what did she say? She said, "If we really need a truck, the universe will bring us a truck." What happened? You got it. Someone gave them a truck, which after $300 in body work looks brand new and works like a charm.

Forgetting my whole texted conversation about Mao, I said, "I like your universe. Could you tell it I want a book deal."

"That's not how the universe works," she said.

If you know me, you know I have a really hard time in social situations. I promptly felt like I needed to go to the bathroom and hyperventilate.

"That's not how the universe works," she repeated. "If you really want a book deal, it's got to be something you need, and it's got to be something you're willing to wait for. The universe doesn't just give you things. You have to constantly give it things first. I'm always doing nice things for other people. That's why the universe gives us things. If you really want a book deal, you have to say, 'Universe, give me a book deal,' and then be willing to wait and give the universe back."

I was duly chastised.

Her husband saved me. "April's a teacher. She understands all about giving without receiving."

But it got me thinking. After I finished WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL, after completing and polishing it, I started to put every effort into my query letter. I wrote four drafts before putting a better draft up on Agent Query Connect to be peer-critiqued. Unfortunately, practically nothing came up for help. I had a maximum of 20 hits with only a few vague responses. I entered the New Agent Contest as hosted by Michelle Hauck. My query didn't make it onto anyone's 'maybe' list, but there was a tweet about an LGBT contemporary that might have been mine, saying it was still too much like a draft.Then I saw with dismay that WriteOnCon probably wasn't going to happen this year. And I thought to myself, "But I really needed WriteOnCon to help me with this query. I'm floundering here."

Still, I made sure to critique other queries on the AQC forum; all the while, I started to create a list of author friends who may be willing to take a look at my query letter and tell me where I went wrong.

But what did the universe do? The universe did not bring me a book deal--has not yet, at least. The universe brought WriteOnCon back! My vacation will have ended by then, and I'll have to overlap work with WriteOnCon. I'll be writing lesson plans while critiquing others' queries. So what. I'm optimistic now. With some perseverance, a little luck, and a lot of giving back, the universe may very well bring me that book deal yet.

Oh. Let's not be remiss. Thank you for the wine tasting. Even though I didn't taste any wine but that which I brought, I still learned some valuable information.

MSFV Drop the Needle Contest on Anger

If you write and you've never heard of Miss Snark's First Victim, a blog by the currently anonymous Authoress Anon, then you're missing out on some great writing and critiquing opportunities. With the exception of the Baker's Dozen--a yearly contest--all her contests are free, and they're excellent ways to connect with fellow writers and receive feedback on your own writing. Go there.

Last week, she called for entrants for her Drop the Needle Contest, this time looking specifically for 400 word scenes from novels in which the characters exhibited anger. I was lucky enough to have a scene near the end of WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL chosen. 

One commentator wrote: "This is really great -- so much tension! The dialogue felt very realistic, too. I wish I could keep reading!" Take a look for yourself and let me know if you agree. Although, SPOILER alert. (Yeah, it gives away a huge chunk of the ending.) Any and all suggestions are welcome!

Oh, and I plan to introduce my new beta readers in the next week or so. I so so so look forward to working with them to make WINTER the best it can be. :)

Aaaaand DONE! (at least with the first draft)

This is what someone looks like when she completes the first draft of her second novel:

Alright, so it's what I look like. But I did it. I completed that difficult first draft of novel #2, WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL.

In case you've forgotten (not that you'd care to remember. I get that.) what it looked like when I completed my first draft of novel #1, it looked like this:

Here are some comparisons:

1. D1 of N1: that's me inside in my jammies after having eaten an entire box of chocolate. D1 of N2: I'm outside in the shade (and not in my jammies). My hair surprisingly looks the same. Weird. Okay, so no one really cares about that.
2. D1 of N1: completed during February vacation, after <2 months of writing. D1 of N2: April vacation, after 5.5 months.
3. D1 of N1: I look a lot more excited than I am with D1 of N2. Part of that is because it's true. There's something exciting about completing that first book that can't be matched with the second. I guess the main difference here is that with N2, I've proven to myself that I can do it. More than one story exists in me, which is comforting. Awfully comforting.

So yeah, there you go. Now to reread that which I haven't read since November. Oh, and if you haven't read it yet, here's what WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL is about.

Why I didn't sleep well last night

I'm completely wishing this winter over. Winters are so...difficult. They're...cold. Cold. Cold. Cold. Like a shoulder, turned away from me, instead of moving to embrace me.

I had this dream last night. It comes occasionally, but never too lucidly. In the dream, my mother has many children. My brother is still the eldest and I'm right after him, but then there are little kids. Sometimes three or four. Sometimes my sisters are there, too. Sometimes they aren't.

Last night, I was younger--not old enough to leave the house yet, but my brother was his age now. My mother's husband, who was not my father, was in a rage. I remember egging him on. I kept coming back at him and jibing him, making him angrier and angrier. I wanted to push him. 

Eventually, things escalated. Usually when it does in my dreams, I'm in cellar with its fieldstone walls and dirt floor, looking through a window into a sky of nothingness. Last night, when it escalated, all the children and I were in one of the upstairs bedrooms--the one I shared with all my siblings but one in real life. I had a cordless phone and a cell phone, so this was present times, because we only had a corded phone growing up and my parents would have killed us if we tried to use the one gigantic cordless phone. I tried multiple times to call the police, but it would only ring three times and then hang up. My mother's husband had somehow rigged our phones to not be able to call out. My cell phone couldn't even call 9-1-1. I tried calling my best friend from HS's parents house. Very often, she and her parents play a role in my dreams. In real life, she lives in Florida having moved there after college. In the dream, she was in Florida, but I knew her parents still lived up the street. I dialed the number a million times, but it wouldn't go through.

The kids and I resigned ourselves to whatever was coming--something involving gasoline. My mom was downstairs crying and screaming. Her husband was yelling. I took the plastic bag of clothing a neighbor gave us for our youngest sister (one year old)--not my real youngest sister--and started folding the clothes to keep my mind busy. They were in pristine condition. It was like the neighbor's daughter had never worn them. One of my sisters was younger. Maybe 13. She said, "He's our dad now. He's always provided for us." I pushed her down against the bed and pinned her there with my arm. "He has never provided for us," I screamed at her. "These clothes--they're hand-me-downs. Nothing we own is ours. Don't you ever say he provides for us." The one-year-old--she had dark hair and a round face--began to cry, as did the other children.

I grabbed my cell phone and dialed one more number. It had a 617 area code. I don't know who I was calling, but it wasn't my brother, but my brother picked up the phone. I whispered into it and asked him to please call the police. I almost thought he wasn't going to, but then I remembered what we shared when we were younger (because for a moment I was my real age again and things were real) and knew he would. I hung up without waiting for him to answer.

Moments later, he was in the room with me. He smiled at me and said he did it. He called the police this time. I felt closer to him in the dream than I do in real life--like I was 10 and he was 11 again, and we would be best friends forever. 

I looked out the window that was mine as a child, before the cold downstairs bedroom was given to me. Seven police cruisers pulled up in front of the house. Some of them crept into the U driveway, some of them stayed on the street. None of them had lights on. A feeling of peace came over me. And I woke.

It was 2:30am. I didn't fall back asleep last night. 

Except for the fact that the lights weren't on in the cruisers, and there aren't as many kids in my family, and my mother has only recently remarried (to the loveliest man on the planet), and my bedroom really was downstairs--IT was very much like how I remember it happening, and IT was much of what I forgot. The feelings, I mean. 

And the cops. There were a lot of cops. In real life.

This is why the winter needs to end. Because sometimes real life feels like a dream. And sometimes a dream is only an echo of real life. And sometimes the winter isn't just the winter, and sometimes the winter is more than just cold. Sometimes it's cold.

First Five Pages Workshop

Read the first five pages of my WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL for January's First Five Pages Workshop. This month's mentor is Geoffrey Girard (Project Cain). Over the course of this month, I get to refine my opening with the help of him and other writers.

On another very cryptic note, I hope to have some good news to share soon.

On Seeds of Ideas and Outlines

This weekend, I was asked, "When you started writing LitD, did you do any prewriting or note taking or any system for organizing your ideas first? Or did you just jump write in and start writing? I only ask because...I started getting little seeds for a novel...trying to figure out a way to develop turning those seeds into a basic plot line is sort of tough right now. So I just wondered how you started out initially in the planning/writing process."

This is actually something I talked to the hubby about recently. Those of you who follow me on twitter and Facebook know I've been working on another novel, which I have tentatively titled WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL. It's a **very** fictionalized version of my life growing up on the farm. I was telling  my hubby that I'm having a harder time plotting it than I did LitD. His response was, "Well, LitD was inspired, right? This one is more...work." And it's true. LitD was the story I had to tell because it wouldn't leave me alone until I told it. I did minimal plotting. My characters introduced themselves to me and--it sounds cliche--they made everything in my novel happen.

That's not to say there wasn't any pre-writing. It took me a wicked long time to learn my MC Celia. Unlike the other characters, she had to spend much more time explaining herself. It look me somewhere between 3,000 to 5,000 words (which eventually all got cut) so I could get to get to know her. You know, this. I already wrote about it here.

The funny thing is I hadn't a plot in mind when I started writing LitD. I had a setting. I knew I wanted Celia in the Woods, but that was it. To me, the Woods would be where Celia came of age. So at first there was this big empty gap from the first fifteen pages until she got to the Woods. It wasn't until she spent some time in the Woods that I finally figured out a way for her to get there.

I tend to be organized. I like lists. Except, none of those propensities came out when I wrote LitD. I never once thought I'd be a "pantser" when it came to writing a book. Even by the time I got to the final chapters of LitD, I hadn't known exactly how it would end. When I wrote the last page, I was in disbelief. Could LitD possibly be over?

Now that I'm working on WINTER ON BRIMSTONE HILL, I'm finding that each time I attempt to plot, it gets lost, and the writing doesn't come as naturally. I've got about 20,000 words written, but right now their basic sketches of the characters instead of plot. My working outline has changed a lot since I originally started it. It's still very much taking shape.

WINTER was similar to what the person who asked me this question posed. It started with two sentences; I started to explore them. That's how I discovered Sarah (although, I might change her name). I took the two lines--"She rolled over to check if the milk was frozen. It was."--and played with the scene the two lines offered me. After I had about 3 pages typed, I changed it to first person and saw what happened. I liked it better. I had to alter some things, but it felt more genuine. Then I wrote some more, and as I kept writing, I kept slipping into first person present. So I went back and changed it to that. 

Each time I did this, I'd get this little nubbin of an idea of who Sarah is and what her world entails. I keep getting a better sense of plot. My current manuscript has all those pieces scattered between paragraphs and chapters and added to the end. Sometimes they're just lines that I've since elaborated upon, and sometimes they're tiny bits of plot. 

I wrote this way with LitD, but with LitD it felt more organized, less fragmented. I'm definitely not organized with WINTER, and it's certainly fragmented. I only have a couple scenes that have transitions into other scenes. I'm still learning about Sarah's life. I've got a good idea what I want to have happen to her, but I haven't made it "fit" yet.

I guess the whole thing I've learned so far is that I'm a pantser. I can't seem to stick to an outline; I prefer to let my characters decide what's going to happen. When I do that, the writing feels more natural. And hey, if it feels that way, it's gotta come across that way in my writing, right?