Six and a half weeks

To continue the story....

I emailed my agent and suggested that we show my editor the plot treatment and the 100 sample pages. I also told him that I was trying to get into writers colonies this summer and that if I did I should be able to finish the book within a matter of weeks.

He wrote back quickly, but he must have misunderstood my email because he said "Well, since you're within a few weeks of finishing it, we may as well wait until you have the whole thing."

I started to correct him. There's a big difference between being a few weeks away from finishing it right now and going to a colony next summer and then being a few weeks away from finishing it. But once again I did this thing I rarely do, but need to do more often. I paused. I let time pass.

And during that time I talked to my writing friends, a couple of whom are farther down the path of publication than I am and who pointed out a very real truth. If you show a half-finished manuscript to an editor she might like it, she might take it, she might give you money for it. And that's all great because it gives you a cash cushion during the time you finish the book and because it shows your editor is committed to your long term development as a novelist. But what isn't so great is the fact that if an editor buys a book based on a half-finished novel or plot treatment she's going to create in her own head a sense of how that book is going to be as a finished product. By selling a book to an editor based on an idea, a plot treatment or a half-finished work, you invite a sort of collaboration.

And from watching the careers of my more experienced friends I know that this sort of collaboration has its dark side. It can plunge you into a circle of hell known as collaborative rewrites. I sold the first book intact. It took a while to sell it, granted, but once I finally found an agent and an editor who liked it, I knew they liked it as it was and they made virtually no suggestions for changes. A couple of additional scenes and I was good to go. This spoiled me. I didn't have to go through the months or years of rewrites some authors experience, trying to incorporate the suggestions of the agent and then the editor.

I mulled. My agent was thinking - erroneously, but optomisitcally - that I could have a rough first manuscript to him within 6 or 7 weeks. Could I? Could I push through and finish the draft earlier than I planned? If so, perhaps he could sell it and and then I spend the time this summer polishing an existing manuscript. It was a tempting thought.

I wrote him back and told him I'd have the full thing to him by the middle of April.

Maybe nutty, I know. But as I said in the last email I sense a window of opportunity is open to me now and I want to at least try to poke the second book through it.

Wish me luck.

You Can't Judge a Book By Its Cover. No, Really. You Can't.

Last week a lot of things happened, including the fact my mother was hospitalized. She's okay now but in the middle of all this - and it always seems to happen this way - I finally heard back from my agent and my editor. Yes, both of them. In the same week. Which I think is one of the signs of the end of the world in the book of Revelations, right after the plague of locusts and all the oceans turning to red.

For those of you who have lives beyond this blog, I'll recap: I had sent the plot treatment for my second novel, which is a sequel to my first, to my agent about four weeks ago. It was my fervent hope that he would fall in love with it, send it along to the editor of my first book, that she would fall in love with it and from there the dominos would all fall into a wonderful pattern.

Instead, I heard nothing. After two weeks I wrote him and nudged him and he said he would get to it soon. Two more weeks passed and then....

I got an enthusiastic letter from my editor talking about the first book. She used the word "thrilled" three times and the letter had two exclamation points. It also said that a jpg of the cover art was attached and that everyone, including the sales reps who had seen the catalog, loved it. The letter seemed a little effusive, especially in light of the fact I hadn't heard from her in months, but I took it as a good sign. I was at lunch when the email came in and I couldn't open the jpg file on my iphone so I rearranged my afternoon and ran by my house specifically to look at the book cover.

Here's the sad part. I think this is supposed to be one of the experiences that writers describe as fun.

I hated the cover. It was a sick pale turquoise color and the word LOVE was huge and the word AIR was huge and the words in mid were very small and tucked in the middle. It looked like the title of the book was LOVE AIR. Plus my name was wierdly big and they had the words "a novel" on the cover which I thought was strange too and there's a drawing of an upside-down house on a cloud. Overall, not exactly what I had pictured. Overall, quite cheap looking. Why had they asked me what sort of cover art I liked if they were going to create something that was the absolute opposite? Wy did they ask me what sort of art I liked if they weren't going to show me the cover of the book before the final decision was made? Now for the record, I sent the file to my friend Laura in tears and she didn't think it was that bad. But my reaction was like being kicked in the gut.

In a rare moment of lucidity, I decided not to respond to my editor at all. No response was really asked for or required....the cover was already distributed to the sales reps and set for the catalog and if they hadn't shown it to me for approval in advance it seemed unlikely that they would do anything about my dismay at this point. Which goes back to my earlier point - when you've sold your book, you've sold your book. In other words, someone else owns it. It's just like selling a house and you can't knock on the door months after you moved out and say "Excuse me, but why on earth did you paint my house that awful turquoise color?" I figured if I called my editor while I was upset, I would say the wrong things and I would say too many things. When I had called Laura all I seemed to be able to say is "They flushed it. They took my book and flushed it down the toilet." I didn't figure me ranting about flushing would help at this point and besides, the week was still falling around me in shambles. I closed the file and went back to the hospital to fetch my ailing mother.

The next day it occured to me that, for whatever reason, my editor did indeed send a very positive letter. When I saw the book cover my first thought is that she'd sent the positive letter because she knew the cover was awful and I was being placated. Not much money to spend on her book, not enough to get an art director for the cover or send her on a book tour, but we'll send her a real upbeat letter and that will have to be enough. But after talking to Laura another possible interpretation emerged - as difficult as it was for me to believe, just maybe my editor really did like the cover and maybe she had meant the things she said in the letter about being optomistic about the book. Maybe the window of opportunity was open an inch or so.... maybe it was open wide enough to slip the second book through.

Because here is how it works. I don't understand much about how publishing works, it's all through-a-glass-darkly stuff to me but I do think I'm right about this. Editors and agents are easily distracted. They have a lot of people and projects vying for their attention. When you are on the top of the pile of things they have to do, they give you a lot of focus. This focus usually only lasts for a brief period of time and then something else moves to the top of pile and takes their focus. If you try and contact them when you're not their top priority, they won't respond at all.

When you're a writer you live on maybes. You suck them in gratefully, like air.

So, I figured, at least my editor is thinking of me right now. It might be a good time to hit her with the news that this book she says she's so thrilled about has a half-finished sequel.

I wrote my agent. Please contact my editor, I said, trying to write in a way that didn't sound like begging. Tell her about the second book. I know that the odds I'll be on the minds of both my editor and my agent on the same day are astronomically small but still, I thought I had to try....

And that's where the story gets complicated.

Complicated enough to require another entry on another day.

But in the meantime, I have a blue book.

Lame Joke

There's a joke I always do with my Queens classes. It's not a very funny joke. When we get to the part about writing query letters and being willing to do something on spec and all the various hoops writers have to jump through in order to get the attention of editors and agents, someone in the class often ventures a word of protest. And they should protest, because it's painful to realize we've chosen a profession in which we're constantly auditioning, selling outselves, being critiqued and being ignored.
Okay, so somebody often interrupts at this point. They state the obvious - that all the power seems to be in the hands of the publishing industry and the writers cluster around like extras on the set of Oliver. Grimy street urchins, their hats in their hands, saying "Please, sir, please." Does it ever get more fair? Do the scales ever level themselves? I suppose that in some cases it does get easier and some writers attain levels of popularity and success that make them more powerful than the agents and editors, levels of success that make them the sought after parties. But that's rare. Usually the writer is the one doing the asking. Usually the writer is the one who has to put his work, and his ego, on the line. So yeah, we query. We offer to show them more ideas. We offer to show them more ideas. We ask if we might contact them again, at a time more convenient. We offer to do write without a contract, to give them a look for free. To cut a 100 pages, to add 100 pages, to switch the voice, to change the title, to begin it in a different place.
Ergo, my lame joke. I look the students in the eye and say "They don't call the process by which writers get published 'submission' for nothing."
Like I said, it's not a very funny joke.

And now a few words from our sponser

I'm leading a workshop on the ups and downs of freelancing at Hollins University this summer, during the week of June 14th. I've done a mini-version of this class each semester for the students at the Queens low-res MFA program and this is my chance to expand the workshop and really get into the nitty-gritty of the writing life. For details, or to register, go to www.hollins.edu/tmww.

One more point about point of view

Talking to Laura yesterday got me thinking....

Much of my theories about first person point of view - which, God help us all, I am actually going to be lecturing on this summer at the Hollins College writing workshop - stem back to a single event from my childhood.

I was three or four. This is the first memory which I'm sure is an actual memory, neither a story I was told by my relentlessly story-telling family or a snapshot I saw in an album. The reason I know this is that I don't see myself as a character in the story - I see the story as I would have seen it if I were actually there.

Here goes. The entryway to my family home was a staircase of brick, leading up to a landing. There was a row of shrubs in front of the house. I would play out in the little protected area between the brick wall and the shrubs, pretending this was a fort or a castle or a boat or whatever the fantasy du jour required. Also, I realize now, when I went out into that little space I was hiding. I was always hiding as a child. Hiding and spying. It was a behavior that would serve me well in my later life as a journalist and novelist.

On this particular day my father was working in the lawn and my grandfather, who lived next door, approached him. They began to argue. I didn't know then and don't know now what they were fighting about but I instinctively knew that I was overhearing something I wasn't meant to overhear. Neither man had noticed me behind the shrubs or I'm fairly sure the argument would never have taken place - we were a dignified family, not inclined to open confrontation, and the adults certainly did not fight in front of the children. That's probably why I found this scene so fascinating. Up until that day I don't think I'd even known if was possible for adults to disagree.

Now here's where point of view comes in. On two sides I was surrounded by brick. On one side the shrubs were high and the only direction in which I could see out at all was partially obscured by lower shrubs. It was literally a limited point of view. I was so absorbed in trying to figure out what my father and grandfather were doing that I was shocked when suddenly (at least suddenly to me) my grandmother appeared. She had been standing on the lawn too, but on the part of the yard I couldn't see, the part obscured by the brick stairwell. She ran up to them and put her hand on my grandfather's arm and just then I was conscious of a noise above me and realized that my mother had also observed the fight. She had been standing in the doorway at the top of the stairwell.

When I think about point of view this simple little story always comes back to me. Partly because it's such a concrete way to consider what point of view means: Where is your character standing? What's her angle on the action? And fron that angle what would she logically observe or notice? But also I think this story has stuck with me because it shows that point of view is partly about what the character sees - in this case the argument between my fahter and grandfather - but that point of view is equally about what the character doesn't see. I couldn't see what was on the other side of the brick wall or above me on the stairwell so it was a shock when my grandmother and mother appeared.

Ergo my conclusion. First person point of view is just as much about what your character doesn't know as it is about what she does know.
Now I try to ask myself: What does my character fail to understand about the situation? What does she not know about herself? Where are the literal and metaphorical blind spots? What in the story is going to surprise her when it appears? Will there be things that the reader will see before she does?

And this also speaks to something I think is a misconception about first person, i.e., that the narrator knows the exact same amount that the writer knows. Someone once said to me that he was surprised I was so wedded to the first person pov because it had a single major drawback, i.e., you lose the omniscient voice. I agree that this can be a little problematic....your character can't know about conversations that took place when she wasn't in the room, or describe the troubled childhood of someone she just met. But there are ways around these limitations and most writers figure them out quickly enough. I think my friend who was critical was speaking of a deeper issue - the belief that the first person point of view forces the reader to accept reality just as the first person narrator is dishing it out to them. I disagree. I think there are plenty of ways for the author to alert the reader that the narrator is wrong about certain things.

Still with me? It's hard to talk about these things and that's why I'm nervous about the Hollins lecture. Maybe an example would help. My first novel is narrated by a character named Elyse who is essentially a reliable narrator, i.e., she isn't insane or mentally handicapped, she isn't on drugs or on trial for murder or a 2 year old child. The reader can basically accept Elyse's interpretation of events as sound. But yet Elyse is flawed, as she must be in order to work as not merely the narrator of the story but also the main character. Her primary flaw is that she is impulsive. One of the ways I showed this in the story was to write in present tense so that we see her doing things and regretting them or questioning them almost immediately. Another way is that I have her frequently interrupting other characters when they speak, cutting them off midsentence in her impulsive, impatient way.

Here's what I hope. That the reader will understand that while Elyse sees a lot and knows a lot - she's presented as a bright and thoughtful person - that she doesn't see everything and know everything. I hope that the reader will sense when Kim the writer is pointing out "Elyse shouldn't have interrupted Kelly there....Kelly's making sense" or "Phil has a point, Elyse just can't see it" or even "Elyse is totally wrong on this one."

So there's a point of view within a point of view. Kim the child standing behind the bushes can't see much. She's the first person narrator of the story. Kim the adult remembering the event can see more - she knows what happened later, she realizes that the mother and grandmother were also in the yard, she can come up with more elaborate interpretations of what caused the fight. She's the writer of the story. So if we accept that the writer and narrator are different people it seems logical that we can also accept that the writer knows things the narrator can't know and can thus use the poor narrator's blindness, or at least her limited point of view, as a means to advance the story.

Hard to talk about as this blog, I fear, painfully illustrates. But still I think, worth considering. Sometimes I just stop myself while writing, while sailing along on the wave of a first person narration and ask myself "But what's there that this person isn't seeing? What's on the other side of that brick wall?" This question almost always leads me to something interesting. Maybe even a plot point. And God knows we can never have too many of them.

But that's another subject.

Like Tom Petty Says

The waiting is the hardest part.

About two weeks ago, maybe three, maybe four, I sent the plot treatment and 100 pages of novel number two - which I am tentatively titling The Gods of Arizona - to my agent.

My fantasy is this. He loves it, he sends it to my editor. She loves it and offers me a decent advance (by decent I mean larger than my first advance....Okay, who am I kidding? Much larger). The advance buys me time away from the freelancing to devote the to the book and then, bingo bango, I get invited to a nice writing colony. Like Yaddo. Or Ucross. Or Jentel. And I go there for a chunk of time this summer, finish the book. When the first book comes out it does well (Who am I kidding? Very well) and the second book is already in the pipeline, locked and loaded and ready to follow shortly on its heels.

That's the fantasy.

The reality, at least for now, is that I'm waiting. Waiting to hear from my agent which is step one of a sequence of events which may or may not go the way I'd like.

After a couple of weeks I sent my agent an email asking if he'd read it yet and he said that no, but he'd get to it asap and in the meantime a couple of other people in the office "Had read it and enjoyed it very much." Hard to know how to take that. While it's certainly good news that someone somewhere has read it and likes it and certainly good news that David will pick up the pages with a positive first impression there is always the paranoia that a) no one has read it and he's just trying to humor me b) the reason he personally hasn't read it is that I am his 3956th most important writer c) these unnamed people who are enjoying the book are the non-English-speaking office staff who are using the pages as cleaning supplies or the ever-popular d) an asteriod is going to hit the earth the day before my first book is due to come out and this whole process is inherently doomed.

In the meantime, I wait.