Burnout

I don't know what's wrong with me this week. I am completely burned out.

I'm tired all the time, my eyes are filled with sand, and everything is pissing me off. No, it's not PMS, it's alarming. Normally I am a very nice person, I swear. But this week I feel like I can barely get up enough energy to get through ten minutes at a time.

I think it's just the job, though - sometimes my job just sucks royal ass, let me tell you - because despite my ginormous case of I Can't Do This Anymore I'm starting to get some good ideas for the next book. What I really want is, like, fifteen minutes at a time to write some of this stuff down.

I love this quote from Jennifer Crusie:

"Writers generally do not become writers to meet people. They become writers so they can sit in their underwear and make up stuff. You can't punish a writer by putting her in solitary confinement unless you take away her laptop, too. And then she'll write on the walls in lipstick. Or blood."

Man, is that ever true. Solitary confinement sounds awesome. No phones, no office politics, no paperwork, no bitching. Peace and quiet, and a laptop. I'm in.

Last night I went on Critique Circle for the first time and critiqued some folks' work. I had some fun doing it, and when I finished, I realized something: I was completely juiced. Rejuvenated. The burnout was gone. Then I went to bed and got up this morning and went back to work, and here it is again.

Last fall we had a labor dispute at my workplace (I told you it's fun, aren't you jealous?) and I was off without pay for two months. The without-pay thing was hard, of course, but that's another discussion. What matters is that in those two months, I finished my novel. I had to do most of it longhand (I don't have a laptop, actually) and I wrote so much my hands cramped, I had big red welts on the ball of my thumb and the side of my middle finger, and I could barely move my arm. I wrote for entire days. You know those scenes near the end of Misery (the book) where Paul has to put his hand in icewater so he can keep writing longhand after his typewriter breaks? That was me. Even the money stress couldn't weigh me down. It was a pure, unadulterated burst of creativity.

Solitary confinement, like I say.

Sometimes you have to listen to yourself, to what you're trying to tell yourself. Right now my body and my mind are telling me there is something wrong. So, I took tomorrow off. Screw it.

I'll go buy a new notebook, and get writing.

Abby

Readers

If you surf too many writers' blogs, they can get a bit repetitive. Everyone talks about their writing process, everyone links to everyone else, everyone talks about the RITAs on the same day. I'm not excluding myself here, either. This is a darned writerly blog, here.

So, some big-name writers got together and made a blog called Squawk Radio. You can snort at the strange name or the ultra-cheesy graphics, but if you spend a little time reading it, these guys can teach you a lot - not about writing, but about talking to readers.

The blog is aimed at readers, pure and simple. Sure, there is some stuff about writing, but only enough to interest a reader, not another writer. They talk about bands and their lives and the stuff they're working on and whatever else. And they get TONS of readers on there. Which makes me remember that the readers are supposed to be what it's all about, and it's easy to leave them in the dust.

But what is a reader, exactly?

Now, I love the folks at All About Romance, but sometimes the message board discussions make me shake my head. The readers on there are nuts. They catalog their books, they obsessively plan which realeases they are going to buy months in advance, they use spreadsheets and databases to track what they've read. Spreadsheets and databases. And every once in a while they ask each other, "Who's buying all those cheezy Harlequin Presents books? 'Cos it sure isn't us." And they wonder what "the average reader" is like.

Okay, here it is: The average reader just wants something to read.

That's it.

The average reader spends a lot of time in doctor's offices, train stations, mechanics' garages, and other sundry waiting rooms. They have lunch hours at the office. When life goes bad, they're at hospital bedsides, or in the hospital themselves. They don't care how this writer manages POV or how long that writer took to sell, or whether the pressure of making a series is ruining Lisa Kleypas' creativity. They just want something to read.

When I take a look around my commuter train, I see people reading the following: Dan Brown, J.K. Rowling, Nora Roberts, Tom Clancy, James Clavell, Nora Roberts, the odd Edward Rutherford brick, Nora, Debbie Macomber, Fannie Flagg, and Nora. When I was recovering from spinal surgery, I read the Outlander books one through four - Drums of Autumn had just come out - twice through. Life sucked and I was in pain, and I just wanted something to read.

Really, man. It doesn't have to be complicated, does it? I think a lot of us overthink too much. That's what the Squawk Radio writers understand, and it's what a lot of us could learn, if we paid attention. Because the readers out there have trains to catch, and they're waiting.

Abby

No Quitting

Hey, I just got rejected by well-known blogging agent Jennifer Jackson. I am sort of chuffed.

My family asks me if the rejections are depressing, and it's a valid question. For the agents who only wanted a query letter, it means the least. Jackson asks for sample pages, so there's a bit of a sting there, because secretly of course we dream that our brilliant writing is going to knock everyone's socks off. But it only stung for a minute.

In the end, the fact that I finished a novel and had the balls to send it out wins over all. It's a very, very big deal. There is major personal stuff that goes into doing that - it has to do with how you see yourself, and what you think you can achieve in life, and whether you deserve to do better by yourself. It has to do with what you want, reaching deep to assess how much you want it, how much you'll sacrifice for it, and whether you want to end your life by saying "I should have..." It has to do with deciding to stand up and try instead of sitting on the sidelines, wishing. It's sappy, but it's completely true.

Most people want to write a novel, and few do it. Most people would love to try and get published, but never do. I finally filled out my form and applied for RWA Pro status, which is the status they give to writers who can prove they finished their novel and sent it out. You get, er, a pin or something. It sounds like a lame "You're a winner!" thing but really it's a good idea. They recognize that to get this far, you've had to push yourself, grow as a person, step up, try something new and scary. You're out of the small leagues and into the medium-sized ones.

So no, rejections don't really bother me. Tomorrow I turn 32. Barring cancer or dementia, that gives me about 40 more years of trying before I finally say "Screw this!" and go watch whatever crap TV the oldsters are watching in 2046.

Wishing I had tried harder is simply not an option.

Abby

Blonging

Typo read recently in a blog comment: "blong".

Posted recently on 2 B Read:

For my latest book, I'm expanding my method. I have spreadsheets that
explain the goals, motiviations, and conflicts of each character. I have a
character chart, where I explain what each character needs to make them happy.
And I wrote the most detailed outline I have ever done for a book.

Your process is as personal as your underwear, so in no way can I dis anyone's process, but this freaks me out. Charts? My last two ideas for stories came from dreams I had. I work from the subconscious, the unnoticed texture of the stuff I'm taking in, the almost-connections made by my mind, usually when I'm not looking. A chart would kill what little creativity I have.

This is one of the reasons (one of the many reasons) that Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer's blog is so fascinating to a writer. I'm not sure if Mayer makes actual charts - he never says - but he likes his process just so. Crusie, on the other hand, writes headlong, with barely an idea of what she's doing, until she decides to toss whatever doesn't work and start over. She is open about writing entire scenes, entire sequences, only to delete them when they don't go anywhere.

My method, so far, is somewhere in between. I start something with an idea of where it's going, but I'm open to any better ideas that pop up along the way. I'm thinking, though, that I should try the Jennifer Crusie way. Just drop myself into something and see what happens - the sheer, terrifying white page. Sure, a lot of stuff gets thrown out, but the stuff that's left is good. The charts have scared me silly; I can't stand the thought of them. I think I'm going to run the other way.

Abby

Don't Get Carried Away

I decided to go over my novel one last time before sending the full out to the agent, and ended up spending four days on it.

It's amazing what a couple of books of writing advice can do, especially Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. Don't get me wrong, it's a terrific book - but man, it's dangerous if you read it at the wrong time. Suddenly I was worrying about beats and proportions and italics (they tell you not to use too many italics. But some of my favorite genre writers use them, and so do I). I was worried about dialogue tags and interior monologues and adverbs and... the red alarm light went off when I was reading through my stuff and the words "this sucks!" came into my head. Danger. Danger. Step away from the manuscript.

So I fixed some punctuation, deleted three extraneous adverbs, and sent it.

The book was good enough to keep me interested through the two years it took me to write it, so I think I'll just have to go with that for now. The odds are it will get rejected, but the fact that anyone at all wanted to read the whole thing means I'm not wasting my time. If no one wants to publish it, I'll just write another one.

For now, I've given myself a week off to regroup and read. I've lined up a whole bunch of stuff that is not romance fiction to let my brain take a break and stretch a bit and think about other things. I started with Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood - okay, so it's scary and depressing, but it's darn good. Now I'm starting in on some nonfiction.

Oh, and my long-suffering boyfriend will finally get some attention. I think he'll be happy to hear it.

Abby

Nuts to these Pen Names

There's this weird thing in romance writing that I just can't figure out.

If you write, say, a contemporary, you are supposed to use one name. Then, if you write a historical, you're supposed to pick a different name. And if you want to then write, say, an erotic romance, you're supposed to pick a third name. And so on.

This is accepted wisdom everywhere I go. Here is a quote from an article by Roxanne St. Claire, from none other than my '06 Novel and Short Story Writer's Market:

The benefit [of using only one name on all your work] is a reduction of marketing costs... The downside, of course, is the possibility of diluting that brand so readers don't know what to expect.

She herself uses the name "Rocki St. Claire" when writing chick lit.

Does this really matter to any reader, anywhere?

If Tom Hanks made a horror film, he wouldn't change his name; he'd keep it. If Green Day made a blues album, they'd still be Green Day. But if a writer tries something different that is still in the romance genre, a reader won't be able to comprehend it?

Tom Hanks has spent 20 years in Hollywood building his name. Why the heck would he call himself anything else at this point? People go to see a Tom Hanks movie because he's in it. If he made a horror film, there would be a possibility that a few people would say: "Gee, Tom Hanks made a horror film. I like him, but I don't like horror. So I'll give this one a pass. I'll go see his next one."

See? Even the movie-going public - not noted for its outstanding intelligence - can grasp this kind of concept without chaos. Why can't people who read books do it?

My theory is that they can. They can. Why this "rule", then? Because marketers think we're stupid?

Could that possibly be?

I hesitate to say it, but I think they think we're stupid.

Too bad. I'm not stupid, and neither are you. If they figured that out, they would figure us out. And maybe some writers would get to build a name properly, the way other artists do. For now, I guess we'll just have to start a band.

Abby

Full On

I just got asked by an agent for a full manuscript.

Please excuse me as I quietly, and with great decorum, freak the fuck out.

I hope I'm doing the margins right. And the italics.

If I screw it up over the italics, I'll be really, really mad.

Back to work.
Abby

Drawing Boards

I got another rejection:

Please know that I appreciate and respect the time, effort and imagination
you have put into your manuscript. I wish that time would permit me to respond
in a more personal manner, but the volume of submissions I receive does not
allow me to do so.

Nice folks.

The two responses I got so quickly were from query letters only; the agents that wanted pages as well are taking longer to go through their slush piles.

I went to query some more, but discovered that I had mistakenly deleted my synopsis from my hard drive, and I didn't keep a hard copy. So I have to start over. This might be fateful, because I suspect my synopsis was lacking; I treated it as a business document, assuming the reader just wants to know what happens in the book. Apparently I'm supposed to add zest, verve, emotion, and a distinct voice that matches (but not too much!) the voice of the novel. For pete's sake. I had no idea when I started that all this stuff would be way, way harder than writing the book.

Since it's possible my synopsis sucked, I'm starting to wonder if my novel sucks, too. So I signed up for Critique Circle, though I haven't critiqued anything yet, and you have to critique other people before you can offer your own stuff. I like the idea of anonymous online critiquing - it takes some of the sting out of it. Baby steps.

So the selling is on hold for now, while I go back and make sure my stuff isn't garbage. As long as I'm writing a synopsis anyway I decided to enter my local chapter contest. These things make money for the chapters, and you know, your chapter is your peeps, so you have to come out, but holy crap, the rules made my eyes bleed - who comes up with these things? Is all this analretentive stuff about spacing and fonts created to weed out morons? Or did everyone really just not get enough of school?

In order to rest my mind, I did my taxes and was finished in about 45 minutes. The contest, though - that's gonna take time.

Abby

Boom!

Through reading the comments at Miss Snark I came across this fascinating link in which an agent proposes the idea of charging a reading fee.

This is a hugely hot-button issue. People get mad about it immediately, and I've never really thought about it in-depth enough to wonder why. But today I did - hey, I have a looong commute - and when I followed the logic, what I came up with was staggering.

First, let me say that this Andrew Zack - by all accounts a successful agent and in no way a hack or scammer - has a point. To wit:

One might assume that if the typical reading fee was $75.00, authors would do more due diligence regarding the agents to whom they are submitting. Thus, they might only submit to two, rather than ten.If you go to my site, you'll find a very specific list of areas in which I like to represent books. I can say with confidence that every day I get at least one query that demonstrates that authors do not always bother to visit that page. I get YA novels, romance novels, children's books, religious books, and the like. All of which I clearly rule out on my site.

And:

... [T]he bottom line is that the universities charge an application fee and the majority of applicants get nothing for their money. Yet universities couldn't exist without students, so why shouldn't they allow everyone to apply for free? Right now, every agent I know is allowing every writer to apply for free.

Really, there are a lot of idiots out there, and agents have to deal with all of them. The stuff written in crayon, written on scraps of newspaper, sprinkled with sparkly glue. The idea of cutting some of this dreck must be very tempting, and to make some money at the same time is a bonus.

However, follow me here.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that agents begin to charge a $75 fee.

If the agent spends an hour reading the query and writing a personal response, he/she is now earning $75 per hour. How many books would you sell if you were earning $75 per hour? How many $75-less hours would you spend sending stuff to editors? Because you no longer have to sell books to make your money.

Now, a writer querying 10 agents has just spent $750. If you don't have $750, you cannot market your work as widely as someone with more money. That's a problem. The other problem is that you've just spent $750 sending stuff to agents who don't have to sell a damn thing.

I don't know about you, dude, but I'd be sending to editors.

I hope agents have no editor friends, because the editors are going to be some pissed to see their slush piles increase astronomically. I think tenfold is a realistic, if not conservative, estimate. The result will be editor meltdown, and can't be sustained.

So, editors could start charging fees. Goodbye to most of their submissions - people will just give up. Do not pass Go. Let's say they don't start charging fees, but instead have to hire more assistants for the slushpiles. Assistants make pitiful salaries I'm sure, but money is money, and it comes out of the publisher's bottom line.

When publishers have to spend more money, they will take fewer risks on new authors and genres and only go with "sure things." This means that the market is so tight that bookshelves are full of Nora Roberts and no one else. The rest of us just aren't sure enough.

For the writers: Publishing on demand. Because we won't stop writing, that much is sure. For the readers: Complete boredom with the airport-sameness of what's out there - the nosedive of sales - possibly leading to the purchase of books straight from authors doing publishing on demand.

Thus, the complete revolution in, or possibly the end of, the mainstream publishing industry. Boom!

Yes, there are some leaps here. PoD means next to no editing, lots of crap, and no distribution. Personally, I'd hire an editor, publish my books, and market the crap out of them. Hey, I would already be spending $75 a pop to lick some agent's boot soles. Why not invest that money in my own project rather than putting it in the agent's pocket with no chance of a sale?

I'm no insider, but from my view the entire industry is sitting on a house of cards anyway. Andrew Zack probably won't get his way, but hey, I could be wrong.

In case I am, I guess I'll start saving.

Abby

Ouch

I got my first reply from the last round of queries - a rejection.

"Due to the current status of the publishing industry, and the selectivity that the market now demands, we regret that we cannot consider your material at this time."

If I get a few of these, I'll make a special page, and put them all on. I'll call it "Read 'em and Weep." It'll be like a gallery for the rejected. Lemonade, and all that.

Hey - at least the SASE worked.

Our Genre

Today is International Women's Day. What does this have to do with romance? Everything.

There is this huge, buried truth in the romance genre - we all know it, but we rarely take time to think about it. Today is the day.

This is a genre written by women, for women, about women. It's our genre.

Really, there are no men at this party. The so-called mainstream media refuses to acknowledge us, and is anyone really surprised? It's just a bunch of women, after all. The odds have always been against us, and they always will be. And meanwhile, as the men aren't paying attention, we're writing our own stories, about the things we care about. We're making money at it, too - writing while we work, build our careers, raise our kids, live our lives. It's really just us, talking in a room, no boys allowed. Men aren't listening.

There are two exceptions to the no-boys rule: The publishing rules are made by men, and the covers are made by men. Coincidentally, those are the two largest detriments to the creativity of our genre, and the two biggest reasons we're not widely accepted. I'm not talking conspiracy here, I'm just talking reality. Our writers will always have worse covers, and tighter rules, than the unbearable Dave Eggers, and there's a flat-out a reason for that. We are reluctantly allowed to succeed financially, but not artistically. It just isn't allowed.

The other men in our industry are the ones we create. When women get together, we frequently talk about men, and our novels are the same. Our heroes may be pure spun fantasy, but they say a lot about us, both good and bad. We never get tired of writing about men, in a book where we can control them, make them what we want. It's a pleasant reversal.

So, today, if you're reading a romance, take a minute to think about the woman who wrote it, and what she's saying to you. Take a minute to give props to the kind of courage it takes to put yourself out there and say something. Take a minute to think, "Damn, I'm happy I can read what I want, and no one can tell me different."

There are improvements to make, for sure, but it's only a matter of time.

Abby

Who won?

The revisions are almost done, and this thing is yelling, "Finish Me!" It's driving me crazy.

As a break, I'm going to talk about movies for a minute.


If I ran the Oscars, I would have given Munich everything. Directing, writing, set design, costumes, cinematography, music, just everything. I was blown away by this film - it's brilliant. I love a film that makes me think, makes me question everything. I love a film that is obviously made by an entire crew at the top of their game. I love a fim with Eric Bana in it. (Dear sweet lord, but that man has an ass that could drive a woman insane. Oops, I digress.) And of course, I love love love a film with good writing.

About once a year I see a film that beats all for me. Last year it was Sin City; the year before (or the year before?) it was Signs. Agree or disagree, I don't care. These are films where good writing meshes with the visuals to create the best kind of storytelling. There is so much going on between the characters in Signs that you can't catch it all in one sitting, because the dialogue is so sparse. And Sin City is pure story, gleeful and vicious and nonstop. In Munich, Spielberg uses one shot to say what he could have said in ten, and one line of dialogue has more impact than a page. The minute you see the main character's apartment, you know what kind of life he has. Storytelling is storytelling, no matter what the medium, and the best films can teach you a lot.

Happy viewing - I'm going back to work.

Check out Open Blog Night

WTF! I wandered over there today to find they've posted my blog.

Turns out I'm not crazy - lots of others have quit TV, too.

The funny thing is (this is what we smart writers call "irony") my day job is in television. I wanted to add that to the post but I couldn't manage it without sounding cutesy and subtracting from my original point.

I've worked in television for over ten years, and it's hard to make stuff that sucks. It's easier to get published than it is to make a good television show that anyone sees.

On the plus side, I've always thought I could write a good, short, biting Blaze and set it in the TV world. Or whichever line is the one that didn't get cancelled. It's on my to-do list, anyway, as long as they don't cancel the other line and expect me to make an 85,000 word erotica out of it instead (what do you put into an 85,000 word erotica novel, anyway? I guess we'll find out.)

Back to work tomorrow. Ugh.

Abby

Reviews, My Way

While I'm in the mailing-out-and-waiting phase, I've decided to review some books. Because I read an absolute godawful amount of books.

I've been hesitating because reviewing is a bit of a quagmire. You can really piss people off, and you can really offend them. The net is really bad for this. Normally I wouldn't mind, but 1. hate mail would bother me and 2. someday I would like to go to a RWA conference and have people speak to me. So I've decided that if I read a real stinker by someone I might offend, I'm just not going to review it.

I realize this is completely chickenshit so, in penance, if I ever get published I vow to send copies of my book to every snarky review-blog I can find, to be ripped to shreds with no strings attached. (Or to be ignored, as the case may be.)

Also, I'll never do plot summaries in my reviews, on account of their utter boringness. If you want a plot summary, go look the thing up on Amazon. I only have so much time. Be warned.

Also, I'll only spend so much time finding a graphic of the cover before giving up, so I might not put up the covers too often.

So far, so good, at least for me.

As my first review, I was going to write this insightful essay about The Historian, but then I wandered around the net and found that Candy at Smart Bitches already reviewed it, and she already said my opinion, word for word, only she did it last October. So if you want my opinion of The Historian, read it here.

If you read the comments, you'll see that Laura Kinsale agrees with her, so I guess I'm not crazy, which I really wondered when I finished this book and said, WTF?

For the first 200 pages I was happy as could be - I was eating it up with a spoon. Then I fell into a coma for a long, long time, and when I woke up, Dracula was dead, and the plot was so absurd I could barely follow, and everyone was sitting around discussing what had happened in a civilized manner and I was so disappointed.

There's one thing Candy didn't touch on in her review that I just have to add, because I've read the original Dracula about ten times - I just love that barmy, messy, nasty old book. The reason I love it is because the original character of Dracula is still scary. Kostova's biggest crime in her book was to make Dracula just... not scary anymore.

You see, in the original, Dracula is basically a dead beast with a thin veneer of civilized gentleman over it. But underneath, he's the base, terrifying beast in all of us. So he takes all these dull Victorians and he drives them mad with fear - he makes them start wanting to eat spiders and cats, and he makes them want to do kinky sex (blood-drinking, you know) with him and he makes them want to go to crypts and do unspeakable things to female dead bodies, and they start liking these things, which terrifies them even more, and is fun to read.

In The Historian, he just wants his books catalogued.

This is a crime against Dracula. He's supposed to drive people mad with fear! The book would have been better if Rossi had started eating animals and Helen had wanted orgasmic blood-drinking sessions and the narrator's father (name?) had started having orgies with female vampires the way Harker did. Now that would have been a book.

Wait, that's Dracula.

Sigh. The moral of the story is, if you want good vampire fiction, just read Dracula. I think I might do a reread. It's unsurpassed, over a hundred years later, and looks like it always will be.

Okay, next review will be a romance novel, I promise.

Abby

Anonymously famous

Miss Snark answered my question!

This is me.

Brought on by several more hours of cross-referencing the agent info at RWA, agentquery, and my trusted WD to try and figure what the heck to send everyone so they don't throw out my stuff. From her answer, I'll just make the best guess I can and cross my fingers.

Back to querying,
Abby

Brave Souls

I hear a lot about the Young Adult market, how it's taken off, et cetera, et cetera. Everywhere I go online I come across YA writers. Somehow YA gets sort of lumped in with romance. I'm not sure why - maybe because there's some romance in the books, but more likely because they are being written by women, who are also writing romance. And agents and editors are looking for YA, blah blah. And I can't get past the concept that a whole bunch of grown ups are voluntarily writing about what high school felt like.

Are people out of their minds?

Here is what high school taught me:

1. It is really, really not okay to be different, especially if you wear glasses, dress badly, get A's, and are five pounds overweight;

2. Life is fucking awful.

I am 31 now and have changed my mind about the second one, but at nineteen that was it. You would have to pull out my fingernails before you could get me to write about high school. And if you tortured me long enough to make me write something, my book would be one line that says: "Just get through it, it gets better, sorry. Oh, and read Catcher in the Rye."

The fact that people voluntarily write about this awes me. I speculate they must be one of the following:

1. The bravest people ever;
2. Actually have good memories of high school (someone must);
3. Have deluded themselves into thinking being a teenager was fun;
4. Have finished poking themselves in the eye and are looking for something really painful to do.

I don't read much YA. Okay, I haven't read any except the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. As a teenager, I would have liked that book, but there was no "YA market" when I was a teenager, so it was just Anne Rice, Stephen King, dorky classics, whatever for school, and the Catcher in the Rye. So it's good that people are writing this stuff, unless the stories are about the gorgeous guy falling for the Ugly Duckling, which would piss me off because that will officially never, ever happen in any high school ever. And it's sort of cruel to say otherwise.

Anyway, if I ever meet a real YA author, I intend to ask her what the hell she is thinking, and I will report answers on this blog. You will hear it here first. And if you know of any good YA books, tell me about it, and I'll read 'em, and again I'll report here. Because someone has to report on these crazy people before they take over the world.

Abby