One-Sentence Wonderful

Sigh..... Yoda was right.

There is do or do not. There is no try. (I am probably misquoting the great green sage, but my Star Wars crazy kids are not here to double check for me.) Try sucks. Try is driving me a bit crazy these days.

I've spent a lot of time this beautiful labor day weekend tweaking my draft and query letter, researching appropriate agents, tweaking some more... researching, rereading, revising and so on.

At this point, my query is the literary equivalent of marshmallow fluff-- an amorphous mass that can be pulled a little one way or another but has stubbornly refused to be sculpted into anything close to a work of art. Or at least that's the way it seems when I've been so gosh darn close to it a while.

If ever there was a thankless and miserable task, it's putting together a pithy, slam-bang fantastic query letter. There are a hundred great resources out there to help, and yet... the thing just isn't falling into place.

Perhaps if my novel were more high concept, the sort of one-sentence wonderful that would sell itself I wouldn't struggle along like this. But it isn't, or at least doesn't seem like it to me. In fact, after staring at my 3rd draft for a few days and at my lousy query version #73, I have no idea what it is!

So, in desperation, I'm asking you guys -- all 12 of you... :) -- to tell me what's wrong with this query. (Please!)

Here it is:

"Roger “Zorro” Weitz has it pretty good, slumming off the scant profits from Hate You (Gonna Eat Cheese), a hit second only to Muskrat Love in the cornball-rich scene of 1976. But when a near-death experience leads him to a rare moment of introspection, Zorro decides to make a more tangible impact on the world. Believing “cool” is about all he has to offer, Zorro commits to helping his girlfriend Carla’s timid, obese daughter find the attitude and style that could bring about her own hip transformation… even if it means going behind Carla’s back to do it.

Eleven year old Dawn, a budding zoologist and certified genius, is puzzled by Zorro’s sudden attention but intrigued by his mention of a band mate’s long-abandoned gibbon. While she makes no progress whatsoever in “cool” she does learn a thing or two about blackmail, and before he knows it, Zorro is involved in a vaguely illegal rescue attempt, a slow-speed car chase and—most unexpected of all— he’s actually starting to care for the kid.

Readers of Tom Perrotta and Nick Hornby will enjoy Family, Genius, Species, a sort of reverse Pygmalion, replete with cheesy music references, a lesser ape, and a lot of heart. The book is 90,000 words and ready for perusal."

(I've left off the chummy and agent specific greeting and short bio as the crux of the matter is this middle part.)

Any ideas?

Technical Difficulties!

Has this ever happened to you?

You revise your manuscript, adding a new and important scene that drives or improves the plot in a truly significant way and then SOMEhow it gets lost in the MILLIONS of versions of your manuscript floating around in your hard drive.

I am not the most organized person around, but really, this is ridiculous!

It all started with the dropbox. My saintishly-tolerant husband suggested I save my mss in this dropbox thingy so that if the computer crashes I'll still have it. Plus, I wouldn't have to be emailing the thing to myself every few days.

Great idea (He is full of them). So I did. But-- here's where the law of unintended consequences comes into play-- I got all tangled up, saving some versions in my traditional documents file and some in the snazzy new dropbox and now, I've lost the version that has the cool new scene.

....Either that or I dreamed that I wrote the cool new scene (which seemed to solve all the weaknesses and warts in the manuscript....hmmmm......) That's possible too. It's been a sort of bleary summer.

Officially, I'm on version number 31 of Family, Genius, Species. Although there have been many more less radical alterations and edits along the way. I need a better system, clearly.

How do you organize your drafts?

Origin of Family, Genius, Species

Part 2: Hijacked!

If Idylwilde, my first completed novel was all first love heartbreak and drama, Family, Genius, Species is a more of a mature relationship-- a marriage, if you will.

I went into the thing with my eyes wide open. I knew it would take work, a lot of work. I was no longer afraid to erase whole chapters or cut my darlings from the page with a hearty punch of the backspace. I was "big picture" in my approach, I planned. (Well, I planned more than I had in the past anyway).

You see, in its first incarnation FGS was a mother daughter story. Zorro, my one-hit-wonder, cool-in-his-own-mind main character was a minor part of the original plot.

I wanted to explore the troubled relationship between Carla (mom) and her daughter Dawn. I thought the plot might work its way through the social service system, and so I talked to some social worker friends (research!) and spent many long commutes developing the plot. (Yes, this is often what I do on the 2 hour plus drives.... really. It's fun.)

When I thought I knew where I was headed, I wrote my first few pages. And THAT's when the trouble started. Zorro. my bit character, comic relief in the intense mother-daughter struggle, sort of took over.

What's more, I really liked what happened when he did. I discovered that he had his own agenda and that IT would drive the plot far better than all that "Women's fiction" social service stuff (Not that I have any issue with these things-- remember, that 1st book was Oprah-esque and all).

I wanted to sort through some pretty interesting ideas: the role of destiny (If we are so much ourselves do we have any real choice?) and How does a person sort of shapes him/herself over time? And love I wanted to explore a platonic, parental sort of love. And there's the interesting difference between how we think of ourselves and how we actually are in the world. (I don't know about you, but I am 5'9", thin brave and wildly amusing.)

Anyway, Zorro turned out to be the right man for the job.

Besides he's cool. Or thinks he's cool anyway.

The mother daughter stuff is still in there of course, along with the natural history stuff and the coming-of-ageness. Also there is a road trip and a pissed off teenager...

And yes, as in any mature relationship, I know I can plug away at it-- fully aware of the flaws and foibles, working towards that soul-mate perfection that would make the novel good enough.

As for Sweet Marie, the white-handed gibbon, that just happened. I have no idea how. You writers out there probably know what I'm talking about. The rest of you may be baffled by it.

I'll have to post more about this crazy process that can produce a full-grown gibbon out of thin air-- one with a goofy, Dylan-inspired name no less! But that's for another post. Suffice it to say that if you ARE baffled, you are not alone in that. My incredibly tolerant husband often feels that way too.