Meeting the Muse

This weekend, is a big one. I'm heading over to Grub Street Writers' Muse and The Marketplace conference. This is my 3rd time at The Muse, and there are a lot less jitters. Partly, this is because I know that whatever happens, it'll be an instructive and interesting, and partly because I am practicing my Zen conference attendance skills.

Though I am meeting with an agent, I am approaching my 20 minutes without a smidgen of that do-or-die bustle. Rather, I've attained a state of reasonable detachment. I chose an agent who's focus is my weakness (yep, you read that right). She emphasizes the importance of plot. And, I, dear friends, get caught up in character and setting and voice and sort of struggle with plot. Rather than hawking my first 20 pages-- which I suppose I can do by email when the time comes, I am hoping to learn a thing or two about what makes a good plot tick and how she assesses the tick. I mean, does it have to look like this? How do I get it there?

Also, I want some feedback on my much-revised query before I start sending it out.

Also, I plan to take a bunch of seminars about plot and revision, hang out with some old writing friends, and meet some new ones.

There are many, many blog posts out there about making the most of a writers' conference. Most involve how to pitch and dress and optimize. I have no idea how to pitch.

And my clothes are Salvation Army issue "eh."

So I can't help you there. If you are going to a conference, it would behoove you to check out this or this. (I love using "Behoove" in a sentence!)

My tips mostly involve taking a few deep breaths and...

1) Have realistic expectations. It's alright to dream about some high-powered agent clutching your manuscript to his/her chest and declaring "This is absolutely perfect, I MUST have it!"

But perhaps you might set out some goals that you yourself can control, to learn something, to find out if a particular plot point works or doesn't, to meet 3 new critique partners. Maybe that agent will find you, but if this is the sole focus, anything short of it will be disappointing.

2) Meet and greet and meet and greet and meet and greet. When you are at a conference, talk to everybody! How often do you have a chance to mingle with so many serious writers-- in person? You never know who will stick and who you'll never hear from again, but let me tell you, I met the most wonderful critique partner and friend in the line for the bathroom at the last Muse.

3) Push it. I am a sort of shy person (people never really believe this, but at one point I very seriously wanted nothing more than to live alone in a remote cabin in Montana ala Ted Kaszinsky. I truly am a natural-born recluse.)

But when I am at a conference, I push myself to do things I normally wouldn't. Like participate in an open mic reading (gulp!) and attend a mixer alone. Push that envelope because, if you are going to all the trouble and expense of a conference, you don't want to go home with even one woulda shoulda coulda.

That's all. I can't tell you how to take good notes (Mine are always illegible) and can't figure out how to tweet for crap, but I can tell you to go into the thing with an open heart and Zen sense of whatever and enjoy!

What experiences have you had at conferences? Any additional advice?

The Upside of Failure

Sorry I've been away so long. No excuses, just a road trip holiday (from which I am still recovering) and a slight rejection induced funk (From which I am also still recovering).

Damn query process. I knew it wouldn't be easy. I totally did. Yet somehow I'd wandered into some happy lalaland where, I believed, things would come easier just because.

Big surprise. They didn't.

This is okay though. I have a direction for my revision now. And if I could find a little time to write, I might even get started on it.

The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades:

And yes, Timbuk 3 was indeed a one-hit wonder from those crazy 80's.

Taking the Yellow Crocs on the Road

Pretty soon, we'll be packing up for our annual Pilgrimage to Pinellas County (Florida, that is).

The first time we did this particular drive, our adolescent was less than two months old. THAT trip involved several nights' walking the colicky babe around roadside motels hoping we weren't keeping the whole place up.

There were two-baby trips (imagine a toddle with a stomach flu and a looooong fruitless Christmas morning search for a tube of Balmex), three-baby trips with endless Raffi sing-alongs, blizzards in New jersey, and buckets of toys, logy 2 AM passes through Washington DC and even a Christmas eve in which we broke down on the side of the road in Jacksonville.

I guess you could say miserable-yet-oddly wonderful road trips are now a holiday tradition with us. It just wouldn't be Christmas if I wasn't waking up in a Cracker Barrel parking lot after an all-night drive, shuttling the kids through the chachkas and into the bathroom to pee and brush their teeth and arguing over how many hot chocolate refills might make up for their hellish night in the car.

Anyways.... I'll try to update my query tally when I have more to say. So far.... silence.

Oh, and a holiday gift: one very nice rejection that pinpointed the thing I most worry about in my manuscript. (The start of another hellish holiday tradition, perhaps?)

Alicia over at Slice of the Blog Pie had a great post about the writing-towards-publication journey. It cheered me up, anyway. Check it out!

Just Keep Swimming

No news to report on the queries and manuscripts out there in the agent ether, but lately I've been thinking about the oft-shared advice to start something new while querying.

The new project is supposed to help me keep focused or less crazy or something. I have tried to do this. Really, I have. But there are a few problems with the "just keep swimming" approach:

1. There are three different books I've considered starting. Which do I start on? I know from experience that, like dating, it's hard to predict which is THE one from a few brief hours over coffee. So I've been bouncing around between the three totally radically absolutely different potential novels but haven't fallen head over heels for any of them yet.

2. I am totally preoccupied with the query process. At any given time, it's taking up about 35% of my attention. (That is when it's not taking up 100% of it)

3. I am sort of driven to return to the safety-net of revision, any revision. I have even considered returning for the umpteenth time to my first novel and reworking the plot (again!)

So, my question, fellow writers, is how do you keep sane during the query process?

If starting on something new is the answer-- how do you move past the old-shoe comfort of the novel you've finished?

Credit

A Big Ol' Zipline to Query Hell

Every year, I get the opportunity to engage in some staff and student "team building" at work.

I love this sort of stuff: low ropes elements, in which we have to work as a team to get all members across imaginary crocodile pits and over six-foot walls, high ropes elements that involve balancing on tree branches and leaping into thin air...

Well, I don't like that part of it so much. You could say that I have a more than healthy fear of heights... and also that I'm not athletic enough to pull myself up a swinging rope ladder contraption without looking totally ridiculous.

(credit)

But I have to set a good example for the students and so I do my best, wheezing however many feet upward and as far above the ground as I can manage before I lose my nerve. Most of the time it's a good experience all around.

But several years ago, I got myself in a little too deep, er, high.

It all started with one of our soon-to-be-graduates. He'd struggled through three previous team-building days and, seriously afraid of heights, hadn't made it to the pinnacle of the high ropes course: the dreaded ZIPLINE. This particular zipline required you to climb about 60 feet up a tree by clinging to giant staples in its trunk, stand on a teeny tiny ledge high above the ground and step off into a nothing that lasted 300 feet or so (Probably not the exact measurements here...suffice to say it was high, long and scary)

I truly believe that facing one's fears is one of the most worthwhile and life-affirming things a person can do, especially when done in relative safely. The ropes course thing has been a life-changer for many struggling students and with all good intentions, I promised this student that if he did the zip line, I would too.

THAT's how I ended up clinging to the tippy top of a tall tree in a helmet and rock climbing harness, whimpering something like "I'm the mother of three children! I can't do this!" in front of the entire school, students staff everyone.

I knew what was coming, knew I'd hate that stepping-off-the-edge-feeling-like-you-are-going-to-die moment and that probably, afterwards, it would all be okay. But the stepping off part loomed like you can't believe. I finally womaned up and did it. And really it wasn't so bad.

Fun? Eh, not so much. But definitely worthwhile.

Why the big long story about ropes courses, you ask?

Because I got one of those , ominous self-addressed-stamped form letter rejections today and looking at that sealed envelope, I experienced the same clinging to the top of the tree dread as I did during my zipline experience. I had gotten myself into this, gone and stepped off that teeny platform into a long, terrible (well, not soooo terrible) slide. The all consuming query and wait, hope and dashed-hope thing I (now) remember so well.

As with the zipline, I will learn something, face what I didn't know I could and, maybe, end up hanging 60 feet in the air from a crotch-hugging harness while the "team" finds a ladder and gets me the hell out of here.

At any rate, thanks for being the "team" part of this team-building activity. I really do appreciate all of your kind words.

Here's the updated Query Tally:

Queries sent-- 5

Fulls Requested-- 2

Fulls Rejected-- 0

Partials Requested--0

Form Rejections--2

Updated Query Tally

Queries sent-- 5

Fulls Requested-- 2

Partials Requested--0

Rejections--0

I'm an optimist. I choose to believe that no news (especially with the holidays and whatnot) is good news.....

I Did Something Today!

I mean really did something.

I sent out my first full and two queries. The process was a long one; I revised the full manuscript then agonized about my overwritten beginning until my eyes bled. Then I scooted down to the ending, returned to the beginning (more bleeding eyes) and finally, once all perspective had been lost, I took a deep breath, wrote an official-looking "the End" and sent the darn thing out.

All in all I cut about 6,000 words. Family, Genius, Species is now a svelte 86,010 words. Woohoo!... or Whew! anyway.

I plan to send snail mail copies to the other two agents who were near-misses the last time around.

I have hurried up. I am waiting.

They say the best thing to do during this tension-filled wait-and-see-and-send phase is to start on the next thing ("They" being sensible non-emotive people, highly competent people) and yes, I have been thinking through some new ideas...

But really, what else can I think of now that the gibbon is out in the world?

Credit

Here's my infant tally:

Queries sent-- 3

Fulls requested-- 1 (This from the conference I attended)

Rejections-- 0 (Well, the search is a few hours old)

Happy, Happy, Yikes!

I attended the WriteAngles conference last Saturday and, first off, would like to say a big thank you to all the local folks who made the conference possible. WriteAngles is a not-for-profit event put on by writers, and it was refreshing to see the proceeds go to support local arts programs. Makes me extra glad to be a part of it.

I went to this conference in a (relatively) Zen state. It was local and reasonably priced, and I'd lucked upon it just a few weeks ago. I was determined not to get my hopes up. I sent my query in to the waiting list (in case a slot with an agent should open up) and submitted my first page to a public critique panel.

I woke up and went. No fanfare. No fuss. This in itself was something of an improvement. I'd worried myself into a sinus infection several years ago while attending one of those pricey, stress-central pitch conferences in New York (Definitely WON'T do that again!). I managed to maintain my Zen even when I had to backtrack home to drop off a birthday present I'd taken off with (Three kids= at least one kids' birthday party a weekend). Kept my balance even when I got lost in the wilds of Holyoke and arrived with not a minute to spare.

The speakers were fantastic. Magdalena Gomez and Andre Dubus III inspired me with their focus on writing as art and the mystery that is at its core. (I will have to dedicate another post to the content of their keynote addresses.)

I enjoyed the panel on internet publicity, although all this twitter, goodreads, podcast, vlog, content, link, etc world is churning a bit too fast for me. Here I thought I was doing alright maintaining my two blogs, plugging away at the novels, raising a family and working. Evidently, we writers have to do more, a lot more. And if we can't, we maybe should hire someone to get our names out there in the blogosphere, make the rounds of comments and content and..... um. Well, that was the gist of it anyway.

I enjoyed hearing Ellie Meeropol, Elinor Lipman and Richard Michelson talk about their processes and purpose.

And then I had my agent meeting. I was still in my Zen mode, more or less. But I experienced an absurdly irrational brain fart when the wonderful agent I met with asked me to tell him something about myself that wasn't in my query bio. Um.... all I could come up with was "I commute two hours to get to work." (Really! I have a slight blush of PTSD just thinking about it.) This could have been a sort of interesting tidbit, maybe if I described what it's like to be driving down the dark highway at 4 AM, working through plots and characters, scrawling illegible notes on the notebook beside me before heading into the heat and clamor of Seaport Academy. But I didn't I just sort of stared. Blankly. (The Zen had dissipated by then, let me tell you.)

The agent, an incredibly kind man, moved on. "Tell me about the book" he said. And I did. Things went smoothly from there. In fact, we had a great conversation. I could tell he appreciated the quirk factor (big in this book) and he said he liked the details. At the end of the ten minutes, he asked me to send him the full manuscript. Forget Zen, I was giddy with excitement when I walked out of the place. (Whew!)

During lunch, I met some lovely writers all at various stages of the process. Three of the conference's four agents sat at our table, and we got to chat with them (though I could not bear to pitch, it just seemed so crass). Instead we talked about Western Mass and the lovely town of Shelburne Falls. And I got a chance to thank Jenny Bent for her wonderful blog post about pitching.

Things were just so darn perfect!

Then there was the public critique panel. (If this post was a movie, here's where the music from Psycho would start up). In this panel, the agents comment upon first pages of manuscripts submitted by the audience and read aloud. The agents loved the first submission and liked the second and slowly, slowly, they started to look at the pages with a more critical eye. Mine was last. The very last one in the conference.

They said it was overworked. Which it totally was. In my enthusiasm to grab an agent's attention I had gone back and added enough verbal pyrotechnics to choke a horse. I had, like, three metaphors in that thing. And a lot of... well, convolution. Though I was blind to this fact back home, I could hear it immediately. I waited, heart pounding in my ears, for the specifics of my failure. Two agents were totally not into it (These were the two that I figured weren't a good fit anyway) and the other two agreed that it was overworked but liked the tone and the writing (I wish I could say more about this, but the notes I took-- of course!- were all about the bad things).

And that was the end. Whew! I wasn't crushed by the agent panel. Not totally anyway. Instead, I tried to be thankful that I now knew what to fix, that I had a chance to pare down the showboat writing before I sent it out.

On the way back home, I was supposed to pick up a pizza for the houseful of kids and frazzled husband. And so eager was I to fix that durn first page I sat in the pizza place and tore into that thing while the pies cooled on the counter.

I'm better now. Really. (And, yes, I do have the most wonderful, understanding and supportive husband in the world.)

So that was the WriteAngles conference. If you are attending a conference for the first time, my advice would be reign in your expectations, make the most of every panel and discussion, meet some new writing friends and just, basically, be a little Zen.