Fun link: Code Organ analyses the site at an URL to translate it into music.

The blogs that live at Geckotemple with the same install of wordpress don’t sound the same, so theme is at least analyzed, and maybe text?

So, today I received a rejection from a partial. It was actually a heartening rejection: compliment for writing ability, nothing wrong per se, just not the right match. It left me with some confidence.

Still, I needed to go for a walk and let it pass through me. So I popped on some headphones and off I went, as the sun was setting, just me.

I haven’t felt very settled yet in my new neighbourhood; but I haven’t done many walks by myself, either. West of Granville, I found a rolling little park singing out in cherry blossoms. The sunset was velvet and the sky clear – I had stars to look at, out in the middle of the grass, where the streetlights left me and I mainly had moonlight. On the way home, I smelled dinners – curry, fish, basil, bread.

I think to fall in love, I can’t have my kids with me. As the evenings lengthen and get drier, I need to walk the sidewalks here more. There are lovely and surprising little spaces to find.

So, say you’ve done everything you can in crafting your novel at the level you’re working at. You’re aware of your strengths, weaknesses, why you write, and what it is you’re offering the world. You’ve edited and you’re moving on. Well, then it’s time to suck it up and send it out.

But wait! First, the non-writing skill of understanding the business of publishing. I’ve been reading agent and editor blogs for awhile now, and they’ve made a huge difference. Mainly in my head.

There are expectations. What a query looks like; what a professional communication looks like. I understand that yes, you do have to pitch and sell your book in a handful of paragraphs, and it’s because everyone at the receiving end is buried neck deep in other manuscripts, queries, and elevator pitches. I understand that persistance means more than anything, but not persistance to a particular agent or editor – they don’t want to hear back from you after they’ve passed on a project, and don’t want to give notes about it.

I also understand that it really isn’t personal. Here is photographic evidence – the slush stacked up at Tor , about half way down, would take a braver woman than I to wade through. You’d have to become really good at evaluating in a paragraph or two; a query letter, a paragraph, NEXT.

And even if you do all your craft work and the elements are brought together skillfully and beautifully, you still have to query the right agent or publishing house on the right day with a project that excites them and fills an existing lack in their stable of *unpublished* books. Which is sort of hard to guess at, what with the unpublished part. You have to write something timely without being obviously derivative – or if you’re doing something derivative, it’s got to have some reason to grab the established market.

A recent lovely rejection from a partial said this: “Thank you for the look at INSIGNIFICANT HOLY.  I was impressed by your prose style but the story is hard to categorize and I worry would be a tricky sell.”

This is a great example of what cannot be controlled. It’s also not the end of hope – a tricky sell for this agent might very well be a good thing for someone else, depending on their contacts with editors and what they’re comfortable repping. I may have mistaken what this agent wants, or she may not have room for something she doesn’t recognize.

There may be agents and publishing houses and imprints who are in a place to try something not as easily catagorizable, those for whom taking risks have garnered rewards. 

Anyway, learning what was beyond my control helped make rejection less painful, but it’s also hard to seperate what is a rejection due to ’something you should do differently’ and what is rejection due to ‘not here and now’.

Compounding this problem, the sad truth every agent or publisher knows, is that those who rejected Hemingway or Joyce in the early days most certainly thought there were things they ’should do differently’. Whereas the real issues with Hemingway and Joyce were ‘not here and now’. If you’re an agent or publisher rejecting something that was written with care, it’s hard to give critique that means anything. This is why so many agents have something in their form letter rejection that says something like “opinions vary widely: keep looking”.

If I were an agent, would I offer to rep an unknown Hemingway? Only if I had no other challenging authors that needed much stewarding, I had money coming in, and I fell in love with the style enough to go to bat with an industry that didn’t accept that style yet.

So. Don’t take it personally. If you get notes, listen but don’t jump to rewrite. If lots of people say similar things, then rewrite. WHO are you writing for is a damn good question. I have a few people whose input I consider – you can’t write for everyone.

In the end, only you know what is ’something you should do differently’ vs. ‘not here and now’; hearing your own understanding or confidence in that might take 10 books and many failures, a good writing group, and a few honest critiques.

The first book, I think, is the hardest. You want all these things you can’t control to line up and speak to the things you did control. To tell you whether you nailed your part or not.

But the only cure for that desire is to keep writing.

I think I’m coming to the point where I’m judging myself first. I would say, for me, the desperation for non-rejection was a sign that I hadn’t settled in yet. I didn’t understand my own work, yet.

Settling in is good. It makes the writing more fun. Rejection still sucks, and especially the rejections from those who *are* interested, but it’s not quite the same level of suckage as ‘finger-on-the-delete-key’.

As I blogged 4 years ago, I heart the Olympics. I get misty eyed and sentimental at all the athletes working, all the people cheering and smiling and laughing and crying and concentrating and striving unabashed in the eye of the world.

Living in an Olympic city, however, has really bashed up my Olympic lovin’ heart.

Well, first, the good: the design is awesome. I’m not a huge supporter of the mascots, but I rather think the ’shades of teal and grass green’ palette is lovely, as are the icons and shapes. They work well with the backdrop of our city, without fighting, but rather perking up, the colours already present in a Vancouver February. Good work, design team.

Vancouver has, through neighbourhood houses and other places of outreach as well as live sites and local parties, attempted to include folks without means.

The schools and kids are excited. I’ve been grumping about the marketing of Olympic Crap (TM), but Ripley and Tate are excited to be part of something big. We still won’t get Ripley that Miga he’s been eyeing, but I won’t stand in the way if that’s one use for his birthday money.

The Cultural Olympics is a very cool companion to the Olympics.  

There will be snowboarders. This is always good.

Elderly Canadian Olympic athletes carrying the Olympic torch: ahem.
I have something in my eye.

Now the bad: We’re living in the least affordable city in the English speaking world, and some of this has been blamed on the Olympics.  SROs have gone ‘upscale’. Speculative investors have descended hoping to reap profit.

There have been the barking nuisance lawsuits. After years of not thinking about it, I’ve decided: I think the business people of BC selling Olympic themed every frikkin’ thing should be fine - it’s been breathing down our necks and we’re all sponsors via taxation. If Joe Charismatic decides to sell OLYMPIC NOSE RINGS, and someone wants to remember their time here by buying one, why not, exactly? At least in our province.

We’re paying for the sucker; having the upside be limited to the Corporate Sponsors seems a lot like subsidizing them.

Special everythings for Olympic Committee members. 

Denial of the female Ski Jumpers – hell, I think I most distrust and dislike the IOC because one of our judges said the discrimination against female ski jumpers IS against our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and yet, somehow, we have no jurisdiction over these people running shit in our house.  That’s not right.

Basically, the IOC feel a like money-grubbing bullies on the playground of the world. It’s not right – because that’s not what the *Olympics* are about.

That’s not why I love tuning in and get teary eyed.

I think the reason why the IOC gets to go strongarm on cities and people is because it is protecting investment. And the reason it needs to protect investment is because this event is bloody EXPENSIVE.

30 years after the 1976 Montreal Olympics, the city paid off the stadium it built.  This was the Olympics the mayor of the Montreal said would be auto-financing and pay itself off. Depending on who you listen to and what you include as Olympic expenses (some infrastructure was expidited due to Olympics, but may have eventually happened on its own), Vancouver’s Olympic overruns range between Gaglicious and Barftastic. I’ll most likely be thinking about my grandkids before we have Vancouver anywhere close to paid off. $900-million for security alone. Gulp.

But just because it’s expensive, doesn’t mean it’s not worth it. The athletes who work so hard are physical artists, and they also subsidize the games, with hours of work for which they make very little compensation. Many make no compensation. I remember being a teen and learning that many Olympic athletes work at Home Depot – and my heart broke that these people doing such extraordinary things worked jobs for which *I* was qualified. It seemed, seems, wrong.

The athletes aren’t there for the money. Any government who does the math knows there’s no immediate payoff, and is taking a huge gamble on the ROI re: advertising budget over a longer window. Will our kids someday go to Turino because the Olympics put it on the map? Will Turino (Torino?) still be paying off their infrastructure? 

The corporate sponsors, on the other hand, are in it for the immediate payback. Just looking around my son’s school today at the official clothing says someone’s getting paid. Well, hmm.

So, here’s the thing. No grumping without a solution.

These games would be a truckload cheaper if they weren’t a movable show. If they went some where – say, summers in Greece, and winters in what, the Alps? – and there they stayed. Where local governments could pay off the ovals and stadiums with the money they make every four years. Sure, they might want to switch up the courses: no probs, Bobs; ongoing investment would be worth it with ongoing tourism. During non-Olympic years, hosting people for training, for other events, for tourism would become your bread and butter: you’d have resort towns designed for the crowds.

So yes: those towns might be the Disneyland of Sports, but Whatever! The IOC would have a place to land. They could get all their CEO jollies in one place, in a big ole Coke and McDonalds sponsorship lovefest. 

There would be many people who couldn’t attend from other places in the world - but cities and countries that wanted to make Olympic parties of their own still could. AND SHOULD. There is no reason why we couldn’t have (financially athlete/athletics) supportive events and sales in Olympic years, locally. A big part of everyone’s excitement is the release after the run up:  Olympic sponsors always get their marketing going in Olympic years, and cities just need to get behind that energy.

And what about world-wide torch runs? Hmm? Have that torch circle the globe. It’d be like doing the wave, globally. All sorts of money and excitement making events, sponsorship, and celebration could happen in such an idea. Whoo-hoo!

The last thing all the writer resources talk about is plot. Plot was my weakness in Eureka, and is less of an issue in Insignificant Holy – I was trying to get less done on the artistic side, so mainly I wrote a story. But I think plot is the stumbling block for lots of novelists, because the scope is so large and it has to be helped out in editing.

Very few of us end up writing the same story we think we’re going to.

To that end, good editing is key. So many of the resources on writing talk about elements of the novel and talk about process enough to insist having one’s bum in one’s chair is the first and most important thing to do - but when it came to editing, I needed sterner help. I was splashing around in a great pool of WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?

This is why I went searching for editing tips, and I loved the tips by Holly Isle. Read it! She’s brilliant. I think she’s removed some of her steps – or else I’ve combined more than one bit of advice and stewed it for myself, but what I have come to is this:

1. Rest the novel. Give it, and you, some time to breathe.
2. Print the thing out.
3. On one page in a notebook, get reductionist.
   1. Write a one paragraph summary as per Nathan Bransford’s mad-libbed query – here’s what’s important: “[protagonist name] is a [description of protagonist] living in [setting]. But when [complicating incident], [protagonist name] must [protagonist's quest] and [verb] [villain] in order to [protagonist's goal].”
      Eg: Russell the Rodeo Clown loses a leg at the Turnerville Rodeo and must return to his family farm in defeat; he was planning to return a vanquishing hero rather than the loser his family accused him of being. Once home he learns the bank is threatening the farm with repossession in order to cover the cost of dad’s Disneyland Vacation addiction. Using all his tricks of distraction, humour, and machismo, Russell is able to overcome his family’s scorn, the challenges of lack of leg, and his pathological fear of chickens, to save the farm and be the hero.
   2. Make note of your most important themes &/or symbolisms.
      Eg: Chickens – being unable to spread one’s wings and fly…
   3. Make note of your protag’s most vital internal and external conflict. Eg: Phobia, self-doubt, family addiction, bank
4. PAPER COPY EDIT (Pull out your picky editor): Split each chapter into scenes. I wrote these in my notebook. Each of these scenes should be a little play in itself, whether internal or external. They should usually contain:
   1. one setting
   2. feature a major conflict
   3. sometimes feature theme
   4. should move the story forward as per the query
   5. should have an introduction, rising action, and an action the character experiencing the conflict takes towards resolution of the moment - although it should obviously still leave drama on the table for your overall rising action. (So running away weeping works as a scene resolve, even if nothing is resolved in the big picture.)
5. Where themes or substories were dropped, make a note in your notebook to cut them throughout. Where themes or substories grew up as you were writing, make notes to add scenes to firm the storyline up. 
   For adding in, I used post-its more than my notebook –  if I realized I had to add something apropos of a theme, I’d write WHAT I needed on a post it note, like a brief outline, and put it on the paper copy manuscript in the place that scene was needed. Paper is really the best way to envision the scope of the thing all at once.
6. Chapters should end with rising action. These scenes can hang without resolution. If they’re not dramatic, re-shuffle your chapter division. Rachel helped me see I had a bad habit of chaptering at the end of a day when my character is winding down. Don’t do it.
7. Any scene that doesn’t have conflict gets axed, or if the scene is important to character or theme, gets situationally appropriate conflict written into it. I would usually long hand write a “sketch” on the back of my paper of what was needed.
   (When you do your write in again, keep these bits you’re axing in a slush file. Sometimes you can cannibalize your slush file for depth elsewhere.)
8. If you’re resisting axing something – a scene that isn’t really carrying conflict that makes any sense to the larger story – then understand your characters are probably hiding something from you. There’s likely internal conflict here that does serve the larger story, and you have to figure out WHAT THE HELL they’re doing. So sit with them awhile and figure it out. For me, these scenes were the most important for the book.
9. Changes to tempo, detail, setting, wording, etc., should be made in margins, or notes as to what’s wrong with the feel of that. Anything that ’sticks out’ too far, even if it’s because it’s good, needs examination: you need to maintain the fictive dream, not to make people think how interesting you are. Of course, some poetry is a lovely thing: letting the beautiful stay to be discovered and cherished is fine, as long as the reader moving quickly after the plot or a character can chase over it without stumbling or slowing down.
10. If you’re like me, make sure that any time your characters get emotional, you ride them to be honest. I have a profound fear of being maudlin, and so let my characters get away with reporting rather than experiencing. This may actually be *true* to someone’s experience, but it makes for hard to read fiction.
11. Read out loud where you’re stuck.
12. When done, you should have a really good sense of your whole novel. Rest it again.
13. TYPE IN EDIT (Pull out your tempermental artist): You’re back to shitty first drafts, here, because you’re writing again. All those scenes and paragraphs you’ve asked yourself to rewrite need to get rewritten, inspired. Try not to futz too much with sentences your editor has fixed, but anything longer than one sentence’s minor changes deserves the full on hallucinatory and unhinged re-write. You may find stuff the editor missed.
14. If a whole lot of your manuscript changed in 13 – say, more than 25% – definitely go back and print out and do a PAPER COPY EDIT – only when you do it next time, only do the sentence , paragraph, and character edits. Don’t rewrite a whole new plot, or you’ll be writing this book forever. No book is all books. If not, you can rest it a day or two and reread that which you just rewrote on the computer, with your perfectionist editor brain, get back in there.
15. Now, you’re done.

The essence of plot is conflict. Conflict, for a lot of people – myself included – is an anxiety producing state. You’ve heard “write what you know”, yes? I think in plot this usually translates to “be sadistic to your characters in ways that echo conflict that scares the living shit out of you”.

If it scares you enough, it might scare you to submit: I think the best cure for this is resting the manuscript, and editing the conflict so that it’s not yours anymore – it’s your story’s, and your characters’.

Continuing this odd series of anxiety and the things I’ve learned indirectly from writer’s resources, I’ll talk a bit about character and dialogue.

Practicing character and dialogue is often linked to practicing observation. What do people do, talk about, smell like?

I am very rarely anxious about my ability to develop character, because I hallucinate people pretty vividly. I rarely gift characters specific attributes – catching the lady on the bus twirling her hair around her finger won’t cause me to write that into someone later – but I’m sure that all of those observations get pulled in subconsciously. I’m driven around by character rather than crafting it: I’m not sure I could “work” on character in the same way I’ve worked on setting, style, and plot. Yet character is where I’ve got anything interesting to say.

Interestingly, Eureka was criticized primarily on character – but the criticism didn’t hurt or make me doubt the book. I’d happily edit to allow things to become clearer or more accessible, mind you: but the characters are the art of that book. With another two novels done I will probably go back to work on plot, pacing, and structure, but I’m not worried about the art. 

I think knowing where your strengths lie is helpful because you need to have some sense you’re bringing something to the table. You have to be communicating something of value. This has got to be the best of all anxiety busters – knowing what you’re putting out there that you think has worth, what you’d be willing to fight for.

It’s also, for lots of us, a hard question to answer. Why you? What are you good at? 

There’s nothing vain about self-knowledge, and knowing where these places are, where I’ll stand up to challenge, has helped me immeasurably in answering why I think it’s worthwhile that someone fish my manuscript from the slurry of slush. I write about people that know something of the work we’re all doing, just living.

Writing a sentence that does what you need it to, is interesting, and is recognizable is context dependant - a good presentation is not the same as funny TV – but the most basic skill of placing words in sentences and sentences in paragraphs while adhering mostly to grammar is fairly universal. Not having such a skill will usually get you rejected.

Of course culturally accepted styles do change – no one wanted to listen to Hemingway until they did; commas aren’t as cool as they once were. If you have a very unusual voice you may amass many rejections while trying to change the culture. If you’re e.e.cummings, you just perservere until someone understands what you’re doing.

However, I have had some serious nerves around sentence construction, and not because I’m Hemingway. I’m not trying anything.

There is a subset of writers for whom linguistic sensitivity is the point and exercise of writing. I know I am not so poetically tuned. I read all kinds of schlock if either the character or story is good enough to hold my attention: I heart narrative. Post-modern stuff just doesn’t do it for me, no matter how silver the wordsmithing, because, n a good story, I don’t usually read words.

It’s why I read so quickly. I’ll only pop out to sentence level if the sentences are freakishly bad or the other elements insufficiently gripping. I remember a murder mystery, way back when, with some character slumping against the “doorway” and “sucking hard on a nicotine nipple”. Sadly, it is THIS book whose words I best remember.

So there’s a good question to ask. Where are your writing weaknesses and what are you doing about ‘em?

Working on my ‘ear’ has really helped. I read my Strunk and White’s and snug up to another reading of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. I give my writing to people who I know do have linguistic sensitivity. Finally, slow reading of books – even the post modern ones I don’t like -  help tune my rusty ear. It will always be something I watch, but I’m less anxious.

Practice. Not just for after school specials.

Even then, I still don’t know WTF they’re doing vis style in the literary programs. Sometimes I read the poetry-prose in literary journals and gawp. Which is how I think I’ve found a clue as to finding core weaknesses when you’re just beginning – how to know what to work on and take constructive criticism about.

I didn’t like the post modernists: they’re all about words in theme. I know theme pretty well, but with a tin ear, character- and plot- weak storytelling is as gripping as beige. I’m reading poetic essays, but the poetry doesn’t hit my emotional chords. I like abstractive paintings, but I also react emotionally to colour and form. So my own inability to enjoy comes from words not being enough. It’s a pretty good clue I’m missing the buzz.

Similarly, if someone dislikes populist books, it may be that they don’t find plot gripping enough to immerse them. Then eading a populist book or three with an eye toward the mechanics could be helpful if there are plot struggles.

Not only has this been useful for me as a writer, but as a reader. I’m not a huge fan, for example, of Dan Brown – but his *plots* are fairly tight. There’s something to be learned there; it’s just the sort of conflict he provides don’t easily suspend my disbelief. But I understand part of why he’s famous.

That’s not a bad thing to understand.

Gah!  The problem with writing a post about anxiety in submissions and putting yourself out there is that it’s hard to get hold of. 

So you’re getting a SERIES, People.

I would guess that submissions will bring with them simple stage fright for most novelists. I wonder if Atwood still experiences submission fright when she packages up the next Great Canadian Classic to send off ? Does she worry she’s lost her touch or that this one will be too challenging?

Novel writing is an exceedingly LONG TERM speculative art project - I was working on Insignificant Holy pretty seriously for most of a year. Before you start submitting, as a writer, you’re writing for you and maybe one or two other people: it’s only in submitting that you can see whether your story will connect more widely with audience.

But there’s a whole bunch of intertwined factors in that connection. Only some of which you can control. Of course, doing what you can and knowing you’ve done your best can help tame anxiety that you’ve just sent a dog into the world, and more than a few people are willing to sell you writing books, courses, manuals, how-tos, etc.,  to help you out. I’m going to take a little tour through what I learned from some of the areas other writers have talked about in profusion — things I learned thinking about their work.

1) Anxiety and Writer’s Resistance

There’s all sorts of stuff on how to force yourself to write. ( I like War of Art and Bird by Bird). This is not something I can speak to well because I have not yet experienced really debilitating writing resistance: as I said to Cheesefairy recently, I’d be more than happy not to write, if I could find an avocation that fit the space in my life, was as essential, and made money. I keep fucking writing just because.

But I’m going to guess that writer’s block would make the submission process that much more anxious because of all the sweat in the manuscript. And for that, I shared similar anxiety.

I remember, after writing Eureka, that the idea I might write a second novel without publishing the first was HI-LARIOUS and obviously not going to happen. Why would I invest that many evenings into something less productive than sweater knitting? 

Working through that anxiety was about asking: Why is it that I write and can I choose something else as a thing to do?  (Like, for example, sweater knitting.)

For awhile I needed writing to be the answer away from my mucked up career path. That generated a hell of a lot of anxiety. The pain was not about writing, but about money, success, and what you tell people you do when they ask at a party. It was Rachel at Milkbreath and Me that slowly convinced me that, re: artistic pursuits, trying to make money define your work is a fool’s game.

I spend shitloads of time and sweat on this work.  Ergo, it is my work, paid or no. I’m not sure why it was so important for me to justify my compulsion with payment in order to acknowledge my time… but it was untenable to demand that of myself. I can’t stop and I work very hard, therefore I work as a writer. That helped some of my submissions anxiety: I’m not justifying anything.

There are a lot of things you cannot control when sending a book, right? Market forces and saturation, the headspace of the person you’re sending to, etc. If you write an opus and it’s brilliant, there’s still a good possibility it won’t sell: as my brother has said, sales is a numbers game. What keeps you going through the numbers is the writing for its own sake – if writing for its own sake isn’t enough, the submissions anxiety will enjoy eating your stomach as a tasty snack and belch your opus after. All the writers I know have similar advice: send it and get writing something else.

Tomorrow! Stammering out a Manuscript

4 request for partials, 1 personalized rejection, and 3 form rejections. Plus, I found this page – On Failing.

I’ve been dealing with an above average amount of anxiety; I was on my way back out of the forest when Query Day came.  Not much you can do to stop having *some* stage fright, only I had frightitis and hair trigger moperism already going on, which all made it seem much more fraught. Plus, I know the odds.

Well, it appears misery does love company – it was lovely to read at that link about how awful Abe Lincoln once felt for not getting anything to work out right.  Great therapy, the suffering of others…

Or at least when there’s a happy ending.

And then, tonight, I finally got my synopsis licked. The narrative, abbreviated, is the suffering of another with a happy ending – and oddly, very personal to me. Going through it again? There’s therapy too.

It seems like the cure for Query Day Anxiety is more writing. Even if that writing is a dreaded synopsis.

Today is my first 21 agent submissions; the supah-star agents. My cunning plan is to see if any of them have notes, and if they do, use those notes to help prepare for the less known agents. I am moving on re: work after 50 submissions if I get notes/rework/don’t find representation: this is a BIG number, but since I abandoned ship after 11 last time even though I’d had a higher number resolved, I figured this time it was Go Big or Go Home.  Also, when it comes down to it, I suck at Query Day and everything associated. I love writing, but I don’t know how many of these I have in me.

As for this book? Well, it is more commercial, plus in the meantime I’ve learned a thing or two about a thing or two. I figure it’ll have a better chance – but I kept the previous rejections from Eureka, and looking back, they’re pretty good. I’m not sure why I thought it was such a dismal failure – I had three people send notes, five request for partials, and one person requested full.  That’s not quite the horrorshow I’d misremembered out of 11 agents. In fact, if personalized rejection is an indicator of progress, it is almost hopeful.

Anyway, I’ve already gotten one lovely and apparently personal rejection from the agent of De Lint and one request for partial.  Many of the agents won’t get back, if they’re not interested, but since my first two communications do seem to find the query interesting, I’m going to call that a win.

Now. That request for partial needs a synopsis. I’d planned to do 25 submissions today, but four need synopses. Only I’d procrastinated getting my synopsis finished, because BARFOLA.

Gonna need to get that sucker done tonight.

This post came out of some gentle prodding – I *am* supposedly writing a writing blog, but I do all sorts of crap without mentioning it here. Like the awesome edit process I found – it rawks. Did I tell y’all? Nope.

It seems when things are feeling like they’re working, I’d just rather not mention it. JUST IN CASE.

I’ll have to think on that one – and maybe write about it, even.