My So-Called Writing Life

Work’s busy, evenings I’m beat, and there’s always a lot to do on the weekends. I write for about an hour each morning before work on weekdays, and for a few hours on weekend mornings. So it’s easy to let slide an aspect of writing life that’s imperative to moving forward: getting published.

It takes an entirely different writing muscle to send out material for publication or agency placement. It doesn’t matter if you’ve attended the most prestigious MFA in creative writing program ever, all that learnin’ won’t help you place your brilliant writing. (Okay, an MFA can get agents’ and publishers’ attention more easily, but that’s another story for another blog post.) It’s after you finish your poem, story, or novel that a new sort of dogged creativity gets tested. Now it’s time to write the perfect query letter, research the agents and/or publishers that seem the best fit for your manuscript, and target the literary mags that best suit your stories. This is a full-time job. It can get immediately disheartening and even the small stuff can throw you off your game.

Recently I looked at my Excel spreadsheet where I keep track of my query activity on the novel front, and submissions on the story front. For "A Little Disappeared," the novel I worked-shopped at Grub with Ms. X, I have about five or six queries still out to agents and publishers. I have about eight or ten instances of stories or novel excerpts out to literary journals. Some of these have been out for over a year.

I realize, looking at the sent dates, that there’s a new publishing biz practice. No longer will an agent, publisher, or lit mag guarantee a response. If the answer is no, you may never get a response. I suppose I understand this behavior, as they are getting more and more queries and manuscripts, and have fewer and fewer employees to handle the slush piles. Still, that great big NO meant closure, allowed me to move on to try again somewhere else. Now, with no real NO to work with, I need to remind myself to move on myself after, say, three months.

I always try to stick to a self-imposed schedule: send out a story or query once a week. But, after a few weeks I always fall off the wagon, either because my writing isn’t going well or the rejections become overwhelming. I recently showed a new story to Liz. She had some good ideas, and I rewrote the story. Then had my writing group critique the story. I got a good response and also some great ideas on how to make it better.

So, for the first time in a few months, I’m excited about sending out writing again, and this is bleeding over into trying to again place "A Little Disappeared", and getting back to my so-called writing life.

Muse and the Marketplace Update

I was alerted this week to the workshops I will be attending next week, and I’m happy with the choices:

- Marketplace Panel: The State of the Industry
- Eternal Rocks Beneath: the Relevance of Setting, with Lewis Robinson
- Building Character, with Stephen McCauley

New Year, New Writing Goals

I haven’t posted about writing much lately. So, you can imagine where my brain is at. Other stuff. But reading my sister’s blog got me thinking about resolutions and new year ideas. My sister is a romance writer. She’s been setting writing goals for herself like: finish writing a book, start writing another book, send out queries. She also tries to write everyday, no matter what. I think she sets a daily goal of a 100 words.

I don’t generally set strict goals for myself, especially for an entire 365 days in a row. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have goals hidden from view. Sometimes hidden from myself. If I start a novel, the unspoken, or implicit, goal is that I'm going to finish it. If I start a story, I aim to complete it. These goals aren’t always met (I have a problem finishing things), but I’m getting better.

And just because I don't always achieve my goals, that doesn't mean I can't come up with a few for this year:

•I’ve started writing a story based on a true story I heard over the Christmas holidays. I’ll finish that in another week or two and hand it off to Liz to read for an initial review.

• I’m joining a writing group. Ms. X is still busy writing her second novel on a deadline, so her restless students have convened beyond her reach and will be meeting every other week to critique whatever works were handed out during the prior meeting. I’ll probably hand out the above as-yet-unfinished story to this writing group for feedback.

• I recently received more feedback on my novel, A Little Disappeared. The critique was from a thirty-something female who had a mostly positive reaction. She had some reservations about the first and the last chapters. I never felt as strongly about the opening of the book as I did about what came after, and here was ancillary evidence that indeed the chapter warrants another look. So, add that to my list of goals: revise chapter 1.

• Ms. X may hold another class in the summer. If I attend, I will need to write a hundred pages of my next novel. Or significantly revise the last novel I workshopped with her, American Standard. I currently don’t have plans for either. So, perhaps, it’s time to start making novel-centric plans for this winter/spring. If I want to attend her workshop. If I’m indeed invited back.

• Over the weekend, when I wasn’t watching movies, I sent the first three chapters and a synopsis of A Little Disappeared to a small press, Two Dollar Radio. I’ve been considering forgoing agents and heading straight to publishers. Smaller ones, those that don’t care if your stuff is agented or not. Those that agents probably wouldn’t send stuff too, forgoing them for the six major U.S. publishing conglomerates. I haven’t heard back yet. But I plan to continue marketing A Little Disappeared in its current, or similar, state to agents and publishers. Trying all avenues before I begin the arduous, possibly odious task of restructuring it as two full-length novels (one adult literary, one young adult) as per Ms. X’s exegesis.

• I have a bunch of short stories that I’ve already written. They are mostly not finished. A few are in a state I would call complete, possibly publishable. I will continue to look at these older stories as candidates for revision with an eye toward publication. I will continue to (sporadically) send out the handful of stories that I think are finished.

I had considered taking about a year off from working on any novels, and concentrate on short pieces, trying to get something else published to get my name more established. Making my road to getting a novel published a little easier. But after struggling to revise dusty stories and fall in love with new stories, I miss novels. In fact, the steps to conceive them, write the drafts, and revise them have floated to the surface of my internal writing infrastructure, usurping the shorter pieces. I guess I’m a novelist first. All other writing second.

Thanks blog, for helping me prioritize my goals for the new year. I’ll check back in a year to see how I did.