Great Stuff Happening: FOGcon and Lit Camp

There are a couple of Bay Area events happening next spring that I've already started getting excited about and planning for.

→ Registration just opened for FOGcon, the speculative literature convention that I had a great time at last year and this year. FOGcon 2013, with a theme of Law, Order, & Crime, will be held March 8 to 10 in Walnut Creek (east of San Francisco and Oakland).

This is a convention for readers who enjoy science fiction, fantasy, horror, and related genres. Many of the attendees also write, so there are some events aimed at writers, but the main audience is fans -- people who like to read and think deeply about stories. The con activities are mostly panel discussions, some about the theme topic and some not. Now that the con is in its third year and growing in size, I expect the schedule will be fuller than ever.

I'm looking forward to my third FOGcon. I hope to see many friends there again and to recruit some new attendees! Register before November 15 for an early rate of $60.

→ Perhaps I shouldn't tell anyone about Lit Camp, because this new writers conference is juried, and the less competition for the 40 spots, the better my odds will be. I'm submitting a writing sample to apply for the conference, which will take place April 4 to 6 near Calistoga (north of San Francisco and Santa Rosa).

I have no idea what my chance of acceptance is, but I'd love the opportunity to attend this event organized by Litquake and the San Francisco Writers' Grotto. The faculty are writers and editors from a variety of publications who will lead workshops and panel discussions for the lucky selected attendees. (To be clear, after acceptance, there's still a rather sizable cost for the conference and accommodations.)

The submission deadline is December 31, leaving plenty of time to procrastinate, but I plan to get my application ready well before then. Next week I'll be pausing in the forward progress of my revision to go back to my first chapter and polish it as thoroughly as I can. After that, fingers crossed!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Juliette Wade offers a helpful explanation of techniques for writing in deep point of view: "Avoid ... putting extra words into your sentence that remove the reader from the experience of the character. When you go through your life you probably don't think distantly about what you're perceiving. You hear a car horn and you don't think, 'I'm hearing a car horn.' You think, 'Hey, that's a car horn!'"

Things Are Going to Start Happening To Me Now

Not long after the East of Eden writing conference and contest were canceled, I read about another contest in the San Francisco Writers Conference newsletter. The Houston Writers Guild puts on a contest twice a year that's open to everyone. It turned out that the first chapter and synopsis I'd prepared for EoE exactly matched the length of the materials requested by the Houston contest, so with very little additional work, I was able to send off an entry.

Once my submission was in the mail, I tried to think about it as little as possible and not get my hopes up. If you've ever submitted anything to anybody, you know how well that works. Despite my extensive daydreams about winning, I was still pretty shocked when the winners were announced and I learned that my chapter took third place in the mainstream category.

Dude. I won a writing contest. I won the first (non-canceled) writing contest I entered! I'm still kind of stunned.

This is the only feedback I've received on THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE from anyone besides my trusted readers, who are insightful and fair but necessarily biased by knowing me. It's huge to have a stranger (or likely, multiple strangers) decide that the first chapter of my manuscript deserves a prize. Entering a contest isn't the same as seeking representation from an agent, but this bodes well for when it's time to query. Plus, this win will be a lovely item to brag about in a query letter.

Now I need to use this to get truly motivated about making the rest of the manuscript as awesome as the first chapter so the querying can begin.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Christopher Gronlund of The Juggling Writer is podcasting his novel, HELL COMES WITH WOOD PANELED DOORS, "a humorous coming-of-age story about a family traveling cross country in a possessed station wagon." I'm enjoying the trip so far!

→ Nidya Sarria writes at The Millions about Reading Outside Your Culture: "Yes, Langston Hughes was a black poet from the Harlem Renaissance, far from me in distance and time. But Theme for English B touched a nerve. The speaker's relationship to society could have been my relationship to society."

Disappointment

Remember that contest submission I was preparing for the East of Eden Writers Conference? Well, the conference -- and its contest -- have been canceled. Not enough people registered to make it economically feasible to put on the event, and on top of that, the venue closed.

I'm disappointed. I'm sure the members of my writing club who spent the past year organizing the conference are even more disappointed. They've been working hard. It would have been a good conference, and it's a shame things didn't work out.

There tends to be a lot of disappointment along the path to success in writing. Last year I collected a large number of rejection letters. At first it was cool simply to be rejected, because it made me feel like a legitimate writer, but after a while I became impatient for the happy ending to my struggle. After a longer while, I understood that my novel and I weren't yet good enough. It was disappointing and demoralizing and no fun at all.

But I got past it. I can't figure out how to say the next part without sounding like a motivational speaker, so I'll just go with it: Staying on that path to success requires persistence, resilience, and a weird combination of honest self-assessment and overconfidence. Instead of quitting, I worked on another novel and focused on becoming a better writer. Disappointment isn't fatal.

I hope the conference planners can console themselves with knowing how many valuable skills and connections they gained while organizing. And I hope they are able to offer some type of smaller event or contest this fall, as has been hinted. I know that my own work on my first chapter and synopsis was definitely not wasted. I'm going to need those same pages to be as strong as possible when I next start collecting rejection letters -- and maybe this time a happy ending.

Diving Back In

Writing can suck you in deep. I'd almost forgotten.

I was very busy last week, and it was partly just having so much to do that led to an unplanned blogging hiatus. But it was also that I was primarily busy with revising Chapter 1 of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE for the East of Eden Writers Conference contest.

Though I've been doing lots of thinking and planning work for the novel over the past few months, there hasn't been any actual writing during that time. Last week, I dove back into the manuscript itself. I ripped apart paragraphs and threw out useless sentences and sent conversations off in new directions. Most of all, I reinhabited the characters to figure out what they were thinking, experiencing, and trying to say.

I believe it's that process of becoming the characters that makes writing so all-consuming. After intense writing sessions, I emerge a little bit uncertain of who and where I am, and definitely unclear on what season it is. Or I don't fully emerge at all. I appreciate how tolerant my loved ones are about my occasional (okay, frequent) lapses in attention when I'm deep into a story and the fictional people are more present for me than the real ones.

I've been reluctant to start the next round of revision because my expectations were more about finding it difficult than finding it enjoyable. Last week reminded me that while writing is difficult, as well as intense, it's also something I really like doing. Last week also demonstrated that my concern about not having time for both writing and blogging is legitimate. I deliberately started this blog during a non-writing period in the hope that I'd get into a groove I could sustain when I returned to writing. I'm still working on that.

For now, I'm on vacation, visiting family for two weeks. I've known for a while that when the trip was over, I'd start revising for real. I think I'm finally ready for it.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Jason Black looks at what Star Wars teaches us about character introductions.

What Am I Writing?

I've been writing a synopsis. Those who have done this know that the process is painful and involves a lot of crying out in despair, along the lines of, "Oh my god, why would anyone want to read a novel like that?" The purpose of a synopsis is to describe a novel from beginning to end in just a few pages, and early drafts generally result in the novel in question sounding completely stupid. It's not an easy task to condense a brilliant, complicated plot into two (or three or five) double-spaced pages without losing everything that makes the story interesting. I'm proud to say that after a few days of very hard work, I have produced a decent two-pager for THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE that I will use most imminently for entering the contest associated with the East of Eden Writers Conference (September 24-26 in Salinas, CA).

I'd written a synopsis for a previous novel, but I was stumped on how to approach this one, since DAMAGE has three interlocking storylines featuring different narrators in different time periods. I found a post from the amazing Anne Mini that addresses exactly the topic of synopses for multiple protagonists, and that helped immensely. (I should have known she'd have an answer, since I've followed so much of her great advice in the past.)

As I worked on telling my story in two pages, I also made a start at explaining the novel more succintly, in a paragraph and in a sentence. I don't need these for the contest, but they'll come in handy when I'm ready to query, and when I talk to people at the conference, and whenever I'm presented with the question of what my book is about. Or, for example, when I want to give my blog readers some context for this novel I keep discussing.

This is what THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE is about, in 100 words or less:

When an earthquake devastates northern California, Nathaniel reluctantly joins the relief effort and returns to his native San Jose, where he's forced to examine the wreckage of his own life. As aftershocks rattle the city, Nathaniel's addiction and depression are exposed to his family, and he unearths generations of resentments and lies. Alternating chapters follow Nathaniel's father and grandfather as young men in San Jose during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s and the aerospace boom of the 1960s, constantly struggling to make the right decisions for their family.

I also came up with a one-sentence tagline that I'm very undecided about:

Three generations of fathers and sons are kept apart by secrets and resentments that are harder to budge than the plates of northern California.

First of all, does "three generations of fathers and sons" mean what I want it to? And second, come on, really, "harder to budge than the plates of northern California"? Who writes like that?

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Gayle Brandeis muses that "We write towards what we need to understand." Brandeis (who, incidentally, wrote at least one of her first drafts during NaNoWriMo) talks about life uncomfortably imitating art. (Thanks, Louise!)

→ Funny stuff: "Children have an acute understanding of the economic realities of being a writer" and Great Literature Retitled To Boost Website Traffic (Thanks, LitDrift!)