Agent blogs

After sending out my partial, I discovered that Agent 3 has her own blog. She started it the same week I did. This is rather cool.

Luckily, her blog shows her to be a smart, sane, intelligent person. There are a few agent blogs out there that are actually scary - and no, I don't mean either Nadia Cornier or Miss Snark, both of whom I enjoy immensely. You will find them on the sidebar, over there.

I'm curious about the life of an agent. You would have to be both an avid reader and a salesperson - an introvert and an extrovert at the same time. I think such people would be hard to find. They seem to have a lot of fun reading and going to lunch and such, and yet the turnover for both agents and editors is astronomical. I think this must be because you have to sell to make a living, which always separates the wheat from the chaff pretty quickly. It may also be because there is not a lot of formal school training you can do, and you have to learn as you hit the ground running.

In other words, it's harder than it looks.

The amount of pure dreck that shows up in these people's inboxes must be discouraging. No wonder Miss Snark has tantrums.

I signed up for my local RWA chapter weeks ago. Are they supposed to send me something, I wonder?

I have finally entered the RWA listservs, but the overall scheme of things eludes me.

I am not allowed to buy books until my birthday, sometime in March.

Darn it - nothing else to do, but write.

Abby

In a Vacuum

No one is reading this blog, of course. I have no comments, and no emails. My own mother isn't reading it - because I haven't told her about it. I have told my boyfriend - who I live with - about it, and even he doesn't read it. Actually, this doesn't bother me. I'm used to writing in a vacuum.

However, since my boyfriend isn't reading this, I can do this:


MARRY ME, CLIVE OWEN

Yep.

Abby

Wage Slaves

I'm a working writer - that is, I have a full-time job, complete with long commute. I write in my "spare time", which is thin on the ground. Most days I'm so tired it feels like I have sand in my eyes, and I don't even have kids.

I work in a cubicle farm, in a sunless, fluorescent office breathing recycled air, the kind of place where everyone gets frequent headaches and no one knows why (the air? the ventilation? the bad ergonomics? the unnatural light? there are too many possibilites to choose from). It's a badly-run company, with too many layers of management coming up with lousy ideas, leaving the cubicle slaves to shovel the shit, overworked, understaffed, and chided for abysmal morale. I am one of thousands.

I have written on lunch hours, on buses, in hospital waiting rooms, in doctor's offices. I write longhand, because it's still the most mobile format - I write on scraps of paper, yellowed pieces of binder paper found in a drawer, spiral notebooks lifted from the office supply cabinet (oh, stop, we've all done it) - I have written on stolen breaks, wandering around my office looking for a few minutes of privacy with a door closed, where no one will ask the dreaded question "Whatcha doing?" (I've never found it.)

I know which seat on the commuter train has the wheelwell in the floor, allowing the writer to prop her knee up, angling her notebook away from the passenger in the next seat. I remember writing an entire short story on the streetcar, scribbling madly, ignoring the queasiness, desperate to get the words out of my head. I have typed everything into a succession of PCs, backing up to floppy disk, carting the disk to work in the vain hope of getting some writing time. I have tried to get in touch with my muse at 9:30 on a Tuesday night, so stressed I feel like weeping, the house uncleaned, the dishes undone. If I can't write - I'm driving, say - I have perfected the art of writing in my head, storing it up for transcription when I can get my hands on my notebook.

The work sells the soul, but the writing restores it. As long as I'm writing, my soul is forgiving of my endless transgressions against her.

It took me longer than you would think to realize that most people don't do all this - that only writers do it. That I'm not actually a worker who writes - I'm a writer who works. There is a big difference, and the mental shift is not only significant, it's hard. In my case, it wasn't conscious; it bubbled up from somewhere down below over the period of writing my second novel, and actually considering sending it out for publication. If you're going to try to get published, my subconscious said, then you're actually a writer. And my conscious mind said, At last, thank God.

I am by no means unique. Most of us can't support ourselves by writing, even the published ones. The self-supporting writers (or the ones supported by spouses) probably have very popular blogs, because the rest of us want to know what it's like - to get up every day, with nothing else to do but the thing you were born for. Writers who whine about how hard it is to stare at their laptop all day or write the synopsis for their next project actually don't get much sympathy from us, though we're too polite to say it. It's like making a starving person listen to you whine about how hard it is to choose which steak you'll eat. It falls on deaf ears, I promise you, no matter how convincing you are. If you're going to talk about being a self-supporting writer, don't complain.

The rest of us are starving, out here.

The Artistic Commodity

Because I'm a new writer, I read a lot of stuff about writing, how to get an agent, and how to get published.

The main piece of advice everyone tells you is, "Write something good."

In many forms, over and over, this is the advice you will hear. Agents want something good; editors want something good; publishers want something good. "Write the best story you can! The rest will take care of itself," fellow writers say. "All we want to know is, can you write? Is your story fresh/exciting/gripping/extraordinary?" agents and editors say. "We want something great, if it's crap don't send it!"

Doesn't this sound good? Only quality gets published. Nothing else has a hope in hell. What a terrific business.

Dude, have you read the crap that gets published out there? My bullshit alarm is tripping. Someone is lying. I don't know who it is, but someone is.

No agent or editor claims to want material that won't sell, of course. They are upfront about the fact that publishing is a business and they require paychecks like the rest of us. But at the same time they all claim that they want quality AND saleability. It has to be a combination of both.

And yet, somebody is publishing crap, and lots of it. In fact, a lot of places are publishing crap that is the purest, thinnest, barely-written, overtired, fad-induced writing you have ever seen, put in trade paperback form to bilk the public of $18 per unit, put on the market purely for the purpose of making money and nothing else. The writer submitted stale crap to someone, and someone published it for a paycheck. Quality never entered into the deal.

Why?

1. Agents and editors, hope for quality, but rarely get it.

2. Agents and editors say they want quality, but are willing to publish all kinds of crap to make money, and won't tell you that.

3. Agents work on commission, so have to sell to make money; editors work with quotas, putting out so many books per line per month or whatever. Both of them have deadlines and numbers to meet. So they do the best they can.

4. Both agents and editors are so overworked that they don't have time to do a good job with every project.

5. Some agents and editors have terrible taste and don't know what good writing looks like.

It's probably a combination of all of these. Also, the money made from the crap increases the bottom line for the publisher, which means the publisher can take the odd financial hit from the low-selling literary-masterpiece stuff. You know, the "I only make big blockbusters to finance my artistic indie career" thing. So they publish crap, and they will keep publishing crap, for as long as people buy crap. And they just won't admit it.

Which leaves some of us writing the best we can, and hoping for the best in the crapshoot.

Abby

Update

Agent 3 wants to see a partial.

I know, it's just a partial.

Still - how cool is that?

The Book

I could go on and on about everything else on the planet, but I guess I should say something about the book I've written.

It's a historical romance; the exact period is early Victorian (I picked Victorian because I am crazy about the Victorians. If you are going to read this blog, be prepared for some Victorians. I love 'em. Someday I'll write a post about why I love the Victorians so much, and you will go straight to sleep. So what? Who needs you anyway??)

The plot, in two sentences or less, goes like this: A shy man, who happens to be rich, falls in love with a shy woman, who happens to be poor. He is being pressured to marry for heirs; she is being pressured to marry for money. Inevitably, they marry. Once wed, in the same house, they are faced with the enormous task of getting to know each other, overcoming a hundred complications, and falling madly in love. In the process, they become different, and better people, because they have each other.

That's sort of it. Like most authors, I worry about it. If you read too much writing and publishing advice, you will drive yourself crazy with second-guessing. My current worry is that it isn't "hooky" enough. Supposedly you're supposed to write something "hooky". Like, single British girl finding love, written in diary form. Or, woman time-travels from 1940s Scotland to 1700s Scotland and ends up at Culloden 1500 pages later. (Er, I guess that last one is sort of messy, but it got published anyway.) In any case, my novel does not have a hook to it.

Though last week I read The Perfect Waltz by Anne Gracie, and it had no hook at all. Man and woman meet in Regency ton, fall in love, unload wagons of baggage, foil villains, opine that they are not worthy of each other, et cetera, et cetera. It's all been done a million times. And yet, it got published - and I enjoyed it a lot. I suspect it got published because it was good.

As much as I worry, I think my book is good. It won't win Pulitzers, nor will it take the romance world by storm; Laura Kinsale will not fall to her knees, weeping with adoration. But it doesn't suck. I would like to write to an agent, "Hello, I know you get about 8 million semi-literate enquiries a day, but your website says that you are actively looking for material that doesn't suck. I have this book on my computer that has so far avoided the fate of sucking. What do you think?"

Well, maybe it will sell, and maybe it won't. I'm revising it now, and when I'm finished I'll revise it once or twice more, and then it is on its own, being sent into the publishosphere over and over. In the meantime I have another idea for the next book and I think I need to start my research. (Though this one will be Victorian again, of course, so half my research is already done.) Oh, and I have another query letter to write... just in case.

Bad Writing Advice

Shouldn't there be a law against bad writing advice?

I don't mean to pick on Sol Stein, but listen:

There are a lot of ways that a character can get across a room. Walking is the easy, lazy answer... She can promenade, stroll. She can amble, saunter. She can wander aimlessly.. hasten, scurry, scoot, rush, dash, dart, bolt, spring, run, or race...

Whoa! Just reading this puts my teeth on edge. If I read that an actual person promenaded anywhere, I would wonder what the writer was smoking. The fact that I have never seen it is a testament to sharp eye of editors.

His advice on writing love scenes is worse:

With adult lovers in the child-bearing age group, one of the most powerful forces of nature is at work, the drive toward procreation... The human race is perpetuated by drives that are endocrinal in origin. Romantic love... is a cultural invention.

This from a book that constantly exhorts you to "engage the reader's emotions". In other words, fake it, since love doesn't really exist. I'd rather listen to Stephen King's advice from On Writing: paraphrased, he says that even though you're telling a story, you should never, ever lie. The reader always knows.

Some of the best writing advice I've read recently came from Ken Dryden, hockey coach turned politician:

"There's always a way to win; there's always a way to lose. And it's up to you to find that way before the final buzzer goes. And you know that if, in fact, that final buzzer goes and you don't find the answer, it's not that it wasn't there. It's just that you didn't find it. It was there. It was there all the way along."

Substitute the words get published for win, cut this out, and put it over your computer. Hell, substitute any goal you have for win. It's the best advice I've read in a long time.

Abby

The Blogosphere

I'm new to the world of blogs, so the other day I checked out writer blogs.

Writers are usually interesting people, so maybe it's the time of year, but no one is up to much these days. Lydia Joyce is cleaning her cupboards; Karen Templeton is listing the items on her nightstand. Alesia Holliday opines that she should really try to leave the house sooner or later. Authors I don't recognize are taking their cats to the vet and potty-training their kids. Nothing against anyone - and no, I don't have to read them - but these blogs are, er, a little bit boring. It's kind of like blogging gone mad - too much trivia. Life has too much trivia already.

I ended up at Paula Reed's blog. How interesting, I thought, an English teacher. A passionate one, too, with lots to say. Her blog about funerals led to a musing about her own grandmother's; and in the middle of it she drops this little bomb:

For one thing, [in her coffin] they put her hairpiece on - well, I don't know - maybe the person who did it was drunk, maybe it was to cover the bullet hole.

Um.

The next paragraph explains that her grandmother did, in fact, commit suicide by shooting herself in the head; her way of taking control after a series of strokes showed her the end was coming.

Two paragraphs later, she writes some of the most gripping prose I've read anywhere recently, online or off:

I was almost desperate to see Rachel. I knew before I went home on April 20th that she had been killed outside. It snowed that night, and I couldn't get it out of my head that they might have left her on the ground while they investigated the massive crime scene. I fretted all night that no one would put a blanket on her. I thought, Dan and Isaiah are in the library. It's sheltered and carpeted, but Rachel...

It's no secret anywhere on her website, or in her blog: She is an English teacher at Columbine High School, still combating the effects of PTSD. Now she also writes romance, good escapist stuff about pirates and tropical islands and stowaways. Eat that, Mr. "Transient" Stein.

Guys, we're writers - let's write something, okay?

Abby

Busted

Okay, so James Frey is a liar.

This story is sad, but only for the addicts who saw him as an inspiration.

Otherwise... it's funny.

I mean, the guy wrote a book about being an asshole, to great acclaim. Now we're all shocked and disappointed to discover - horrors! - he's actually an asshole. But he's not the kind of asshole we wanted: the blood-and-vomit-spewing, here's-What's-Wrong-With-Society kind. Nope, he's just a plain old asshole.

Turns out, he's the asshole in high school who stares at a popular girl and makes stories in his head about being her best friend. He's the preppy frat asshole who gets pulled over for having an open can of cheap beer in his car and brags about being William S. Burroughs. He's the kind of asshole who could let Oprah get teary over him on national television and never think to tell her the truth. If you ask me, he's still a shining example of What's Wrong With Society. It just isn't the lesson Oprah, or anyone else, wanted to learn.

In the end, really, the story is the same - he made millions of dollars off of being a jerk. We let him do it, and we'll keep letting him do it - the book will keep selling, of course. So why aren't we at least partly blaming ourselves on this one?

Fiction for the indigent

Here is something else I do while I’m waiting: I read books about writing.

Currently I’m reading Stein on Writing, by Sol Stein. I have never heard of Mr. Stein; according to himself, he’s a big name in publishing. As I don’t know any names in publishing, big or small, that’s fine by me. He uses a phrase that I have never heard before: “transient fiction.”

He never defines this phrase, but it’s obvious from the usage - especially when he says “whether it is transient or literary fiction.” Ah. Transient fiction, then, is the opposite of literary. It’s throw-away fiction; his first example of it is The Firm. It’s fiction that just passes through, never to be remembered again.

Most romance fiction, in terms of time, is transient fiction. Series fiction is only on the shelf a month; single-title gets a slightly longer sales period before going out of print. This makes “transient” a pretty accurate term for the genre, in the literal sense.

But what about the psychological sense? There are hundreds of romances that we still love, so many years later. Everywhere I go I read about Keepers – we love our copy of Anya Seton’s Katharine, or The Windflower; we have our copy of All Through the Night till death do us part. Prices for Mary Balogh’s early Regencies on Ebay give the big lie to the word “transient”. In fact, it’s amazing that Balogh’s books – which had only a one-month shelf life over ten years ago – are so astoundingly well-known, well-studied, and well-loved. Word of mouth in this genre is phenomenal, isn’t it? Ulysses has had a shelf life of over half a century – but who clutches their copy close to their heart and won’t lend it to another living soul? Who avidly searches out Sartre on Ebay? Who remembers what they were doing, where they were the first time they read Saul Bellow? I remember exactly where I was the first time I read Flowers From the Storm. To me, that book is anything but transient.

Kinsale’s out of print books are slowly being reissued; so are Balogh’s Regencies, starting with The Secret Pearl, which I read for the first time last month. A decade later, a new generation of readers want to read the books they’ve heard so much about from their peers. I guess transient fiction isn’t so transient after all.

Querying

I sent out another query today - that makes two queries wandering the publishing void.

Here's how it works:
Back in October, when I was ready to start sending, I had a small stroke of luck - I happened to notice on the net that the excellent Toronto Romance Writers were about to have an editor/agent panel. I emailed them and got permission to come as a guest. It cost me the best 30 bucks I ever spent.

I pitched to two agents, both of whom asked for a partial. So I sent them out. Agent 1 has sent me a rejection; Agent 2 hasn't responded. It's only been 8 weeks, and their site says to give them 10 - 12; plus, Christmas was one of those 8 weeks. So technically, I could still get struck by lightning. I'm a realist, though, so I'm working on my next round of queries.

I queried Agent 3 today because they are a younger agency and the books they sell look a little different than the cliched norm. In my humble opinion, I sent them a good query letter; they might not like what I'm offering, but at least the letter will get a read. I have Agent 4 picked out as well - this time, the agent of an up-and-coming writer I like. I'll get my shit together and send it out to her this week.

Then, well... I wait.

There's other stuff to do while you wait, besides writing. I joined RWA; after that, I joined TRW as well. I'm still getting my feet wet in both these organizations, trying to figure out what they have to offer.

RWA in particular is hard to crack; they send you passwords, and you have to confirm back and forth, then log into their site, then change your password and confirm back and forth again. After all that, the site is strangely inhospitable and unhelpful; links take you round and round to the same pages, and one of the most important links (the one taking you to the members-only page) is so obscurely buried, it took me forever to find. When I finally got there, I found a list of listservs; these sound interesting. But you have to start with the first one before you can join any of the others. So I email for permission, and get a password, and... well, you get the idea.

Anyway, the newsletter is good. And the conference looks amazing, if you can afford to go. I wonder if they make the site so humorless in an attempt to be taken seriously? TRW is better; I will probably get more out of it. We'll see.

Oh, and research. I've been doing my agent research. God bless the internet, really. How did people do it before 1989?

Later,
Abby

What's the story?

Books completed: 1
Partials sent: 2
Rejections received: 1
Words completed in latest draft: 35,000
Ideas for next book: at least 5 at last count

Follow my earnest attempt to get published, my valiant effort to get the attention of agents, editors, or anyone who will listen.

Plus, writing stuff, stuff I like and anything else that comes to mind.

Abby