Classing Update

A couple of days after I posted about having no ideas for the second story I had to submit for class, I found a seed that gradually grew into a viable premise. Much of the concept was vague when I started drafting, and the lack of a plan for the end made the writing process especially harrowing. I did figure out a conclusion before I had to write it, and after several frantic days of work, I completed a story I'm quite pleased with.

I might be getting the hang of this short story thing. I still have novel ideas churning in my head, and I want to focus on those soon, but it's certainly satisfying to create something that can be finished in a few days or weeks. I hope I can continue to generate ideas for stories without the pressure of a class deadline.

Even before this class, I've been inspired to return to short story writing by my friend Christopher Gronlund, who like me, has put most of his time into novels for many years but recently set himself a short fiction challenge. He produces a monthly podcast, Not About Lumberjacks, in which he presents one of his short stories. Some are older pieces, but the project has gotten him writing a lot of new stuff as well. I especially enjoyed listening to his latest release, "Standstill", a sad and beautiful story about a couple faced with the problem of time.

I'm not a podcaster, but I would like to get some of my stories out into the world. The class is wrapping up now with a final week about the publication process. I intend to use what I learned in class to revise my new stories, plus some others languishing on my computer, and then I'm going to try submitting to literary magazines.

I've only made one tiny attempt at story publication before, because it's another time-consuming avenue for rejection on top of the agent querying I'm already doing. But this week I received such a kind and encouraging rejection for my novel that I'm actually looking forward to collecting more.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Book Riot, Katie McLain reports that Librarians Don't Read All Day and tells us what they actually do: "When I'm at the reference desk, I can usually be found answering technology questions, helping high school students with research papers, showing someone how to create a resume, making book suggestions, notarizing documents, and restarting the public print station for the tenth time in an hour. And when I do have time away from the desk, you can find me planning the summer reading program, training coworkers, relabeling books, writing blog posts, or prepping for a high school book talk."

Fall Forward

Rain made an appearance today in the Bay Area, so it feels like an actual change of seasons as we head into October. My excitement is building for the fall literary events I wrote about last week. When I'm not too distracted by anticipation and precipitation, I've been busy with various projects, and I can report forward progress in several areas.

You may recall that in June I once again finished that novel I keep saying is done. You may have read the series of posts I made in August about how the latest revision led to a significantly shorter manuscript. You may wonder what's happening with that manuscript now. I've resumed sending query letters to agents, which means I tell them about THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE and share the opening pages in hopes that they'll be interested in reading more. I don't talk much about querying here because the process moves incredibly slowly, and there's nothing really to say about it until that glorious time when there might be something to say. But now you know that's in the works.

In that same June post, I also mentioned the novel I've been planning out in detail before writing, which is a new strategy for me. I reached a point in the outline where I discovered the plot was heading in a direction that didn't work, so I've returned to the beginning. A little at a time, I'm changing things around to make it all fit together better. Yes, I'm doing a revision of the planning stage and still haven't written a word of the actual novel. That means everything is going as intended, because so much less time and agony is involved in redoing an outline than in producing multiple drafts. I'll write this novel when it's ready, and in the meantime, finding the right version of the plot is satisfying and instructive.

That said, I've found myself itching to really write again, so I'm thinking of getting started on something else. It's been a while since I embarked on a first draft, with all the freedom and frustration that entails, and I could use the practice. Stay tuned.

This has nothing to do with writing unless I come up with a metaphor about stitching ideas together or something, but I've recently been spending a lot of time and attention on knitting after one of my occasional dormant periods with the hobby. (If you're a member of Ravelry, find me there.) Over a year ago, I finished knitting all the pieces of a sweater, and now in anticipation of cooler weather, I'm finally tackling the less fun work of assembling them. Yeah, there's definitely a metaphor in there somewhere.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Stephen Sparks at Literary Hub looks at novels written in invented dialects and some variations on this theme, "works that similarly inhabit languages unique to themselves, whether through dialect, an attempt at capturing the singular nature of consciousness, or in one case, unique because it is essentially alien."

Anticipation

It's almost time for the first Bay Area Book Festival, June 6 and 7 in Berkeley, and I can't wait! The organizers have put together an amazing schedule of talks and panels featuring an incredible set of authors, and there will be art, exhibitors, and food stalls to wander through. The festival is free and open to everyone, but to reserve seats for the indoor events and avoid waiting in line, you can purchase individual session tickets for a couple of dollars each. I have tickets for a bunch of Saturday events, and I'll report back on my festival experience.

I'm also excited about heading into the home stretch of this revision! As of today, I've completed all the chapters that I expect to be tricky. Yes, sure, two chapters ago I also declared I was through all the tough parts, but now I'm totally confident that the rest will be smooth sailing. And no matter how the process of tackling the remaining chapters goes, I will be done with this draft soon, and I'm thrilled.

What happens after this revision, you ask? Well, I'll send out the improved, shortened manuscript for another try, and then I'll work hard at distracting myself with other writing. Planning on the future novel has slowed the past couple of weeks due to putting more time into revision, but before that I was making steady progress on an initial detailed outline, and I'm somewhat close to the end of that as well.

Summertime means travel on the horizon for me, and I'm looking forward to enjoying that with at least one major writing project accomplished and some steps toward whatever comes next.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Hillary Kelly argues that publishers should bring back the serialized novel: "When we can freely turn to the next chapter in our novels, we can quash any suspense with the flip of a page. Slicing a novel into bits and slowly doling it out to the reading public takes control of that tension away from the reader, allowing it to ferment and blossom." (Thanks, The Millions!)

What's Up

It's been a while since I've posted anything about my current writing projects. That's because for much of last year I was frustrated by how little writing I was accomplishing. It was difficult to think what to say on the topic, and easier and more fun to talk about the many books I was reading and the awesome stories I wrote 30 years ago.

But writing has gone much better in 2015, so I think it's finally time for an update. I'm working on two projects right now: yet another revision of the completed novel and a detailed plan for the next novel.

Another revision? Scary, but true. I received a lot of interest and encouraging comments during my agent search last year, but so far nothing has panned out. After spending a year away from the manuscript, I gave it a hard look with fresh eyes (if that isn't scrambling a metaphor) and saw room for improvement. I'm making another pass with a focus on tightening and shortening, and then we'll see how it goes. I'm pleased with my progress on this revision so far. I don't want to get into the details of numbers and timeframes and so on, but I will try to corral my thoughts and advice about reducing word count into a post at some point. In the meantime, check the Good Stuff for someone else's tips.

For the next novel, I've decided to try a completely different process in hopes of cutting back on the number of revisions required. I'm doing very detailed advance planning and plotting so that I can identify problems with the story and make improvements while it's still in the outline stage. This method works great for some writers and not at all for others, and while it's a new strategy for me, I'm finding it useful. Of course, the ultimate test will come when I start the actual writing, but by then I should have a firm grip on the story and characters. No plans yet on when the actual writing will happen. I'm deliberately working slowly on this, only spending a little time on it each day, so that I have plenty of space for contemplation and random flashes of brilliance as I go along. I'm sure I'll post more eventually about my experience with taking this approach.

In addition to these major endeavors, I'm also pondering other short and long writing projects I might undertake. And I'm getting excited about attending FOGcon in a week! There's a fabulous list of panels lined up, and I'll be moderating one on apocalyptic fiction, one of my favorite genres. Again, I'm sure FOGcon will be the subject of an upcoming post.

That gives you the general idea, though. If you've been politely hesitant to ask about my writing lately, now you know that things are looking up.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Fiction University, Jodie Renner outlines steps for shortening your novel: "Delete or condense scenes that don't have enough conflict or change, or add much to the plot or characterization. Condense parts where scenes drag, eliminating the boring bits. (Take out the parts that readers skip over.) Summarize transitional scenes or chapters in a few sentences to tack onto another chapter."

Fit to Print

It's well into October (in case you haven't noticed), which means that the bulk of the year is over. The most substantial thing I've accomplished in 2014 to this point is that I've read a lot of books. I've done some other stuff too, of course, but most of that remains stalled in a state of incompletion.

Reading books is great. You start at the first page, you move forward through the (hopefully wonderful) story, and then you get to the end, and it's over. Maybe you're sorry it's over, maybe you're a little bit relieved, but in any case, the book is done. You've had the experience of reading it, you get to add it to your list, and you can tell other people what you thought of it.

This is why all my posts for the past few months have been about books I've read. Reviews are a nice concrete chunk of prose representing a specific accomplishment that I know how to tell the world about. While I sometimes struggle to accurately (and diplomatically) express my opinions of the books, these are feelings I'm comfortable sharing.

The rest is trickier. I am still making gradual progress toward the new novel. I'm still actively seeking an agent for the completed novel. I'm always contemplating what other sorts of things I could write, or should write, or might do with myself and my time. It's all kind of vague.

I had hoped my accomplishments would be more thrilling by this point in the year. Any day now, I could have exciting new things to post about, and in the meantime I'm going to work on coming up with a bit of variety, even if it's not too new or too exciting. But when all else fails, it's a comfort to know that there are always more books to read and discuss.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Edan Lepucki studies the metaphors in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: "Throughout the novel, Offred continually turns her body into something other than a body in this way. At the same time, she also regularly personifies objects. In this passage, for example, while she is a piece of a toast, the ceiling has a 'blind plaster eye' and the moon shines on 'the breast of the new-fallen snow.' In Offred's imagination, everything is turned on its head, or given one." (Thanks, The Millions!)

Getting A Move On

Early in January, I admitted to having a little trouble restarting my brain after a long period of time off. I did manage to remember some things about writing, though, and I started making notes on a new project.

I dove enthusiastically into story planning for a little while, and then I found that thinking up good ideas was hard work. It was a lot easier and more fun to sit around reading all day, and that's how I actually ended up spending most of the month. Since the start of the year, I've read five complete books, plus the majority of the long and dense GRAVITY'S RAINBOW and a third of GREAT EXPECTATIONS. I'm sure that's the most I've read in a month since childhood, and it's probably a record I'll never surpass.

This was a lovely, lazy way to spend January, and now it's really time for me to get back to real work. I've had a chance to do some background mulling on the ideas for the new novel, and I'm ready to bring the story into the foreground again and face the fact that it will require actual effort to turn it into a draft.

Meanwhile, the query process continues, also mostly in the background. I'd love to get a move on with that, but I'm already doing everything I can at my end, and the majority of my role right now is to wait and be patient. I'll admit to that being another thing I'm having a little trouble with...

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At the New Yorker's Page-Turner, Thomas E. Kennedy recounts a tale of Aggravated Bibliophilism: "You return to the shelf of dictionaries, where it should be, and run your finger along the twenty-something multicolored spines, but there is no royal-blue one. You feel along the back of the shelf to be certain that the book has not slipped behind the other books. It has not."

Life After Revision

I've had some questions about what I've been doing with myself after finally, finally reaching the end of revision. Now that all those years and drafts have resulted in a novel I'm really satisfied with, I'm occupied with a few different things:

→ Getting started on the querying process. I'm not going to be blogging about the details of my specific query-related activities, but I assure you that things are happening. The basic idea of the process is that an author sends a query letter (generally email at this point) to a literary agent, briefly describing her book and why this particular agent might be interested. The agent reads the query and potentially some sample pages, and if she is in fact interested, she requests the manuscript. Then when an agent and a book love each other very, very much... No, maybe that's something else. Anyway, connecting with an agent can be a lengthy undertaking, and it involves a lot of waiting, but I'm glad to be on the journey at last.

→ Chilling out. Hey, I've earned it, right? The end-of-the-year timing worked out nicely in that I feel quite comfortable about not getting started on any new writing projects until all the holidays are over with. I have a big list of random stuff to get done this month, and I'm gradually checking things off, but I'm also not getting too stressed about not being all that productive.

→ Reading. A large component of the chilling out has been compensating for all the reading I didn't have time for in November while I was so focused on revision. Last week I finished three books that I'd started weeks earlier, and there are a bunch more I want to read in the rest of this month. Several book-related posts are in the works.

→ Miscellaneous and sundry. Some of this has been boring real life tasks such as reporting for jury duty (I didn't get to do anything except sit in a waiting room for an hour) and having my teeth cleaned (no cavities). But I've also done some far more fun things, including offering feedback on a friend's story and shopping for books for my nephews.

→ Not revising. It's really kind of weird. I basically spend all day going, "Okay, wait, it's all right that I'm not working on my novel right now." I can't quite get myself to believe that I'm not procrastinating. I'll be happy to resume writing in January so that I can get back to avoiding it.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Instead of releasing best-of lists this year, the NPR staff put together NPR's Book Concierge, a neat way to browse through 2013's great reads.

That Is All

At long last, the moment you've been waiting for: I am done revising!

Let's all take a moment to bask in that, shall we?

Now, I'm certainly not saying that there will never again be further changes to this novel, because that's not the way it works, but for now, I am finished. It's time to embark on the next step, which is to send this manuscript out into the world and see how it goes. Specifically, I'm going to start querying agents.

That next step is another doozy, and it will be another long process, but it will be a different one, and I'm very thankful for that. I'm thankful for the support you've all given me, and I'm thankful that now I get to really enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday with my family and friends.

More on all of this in December. I hope that all of you get to enjoy a wonderful little break of your own in the next few days, however you celebrate!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ I was intrigued by this list of 50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers assembled by Emily Temple at Flavorwire: "some absurdly long, some notoriously difficult, some with intense or upsetting subject matter but blindingly brilliant prose, some packed into formations that require extra effort or mind expansion..."

Submitted

Today I submitted my application to Lit Camp, the juried writing conference I posted about a while back.

I ended up spending quite a bit of time overhauling my first chapter and then going through it again to address the suggestions from my critique group. I finally got the chapter into a state I was happy with, and I ran it by some more people to make sure the changes worked. Thanks so much to everyone who read and gave feedback!

It will be another two months before I find out if I've been selected for the conference, so I'm going to try not to think about it for now. I really don't have the slightest idea what my chances are. It would be very cool to be accepted, but I'm not investing too much in hoping for it.

The good thing about the work I put into improving my first chapter, plus writing up a new description of my novel, is that it needed to be done eventually anyway. My submission package for the conference is similar to what I'll send to agents once I'm ready to start querying. It's nice to know that the opening of my novel has already been scrutinized and made strong. Now I have to make it to the end of the damn thing.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Edan Lepucki at The Millions analyzes literary fiction as a genre: "The reader of literary genre fiction should feel the structure in her body, particularly with short stories. It's a recognizable rhythm, it's a shimmering in one's veins as one moves from opening scene to well-placed background information to the next, more tense scene to that special, oh-so-revealing flashback about the time our protagonist ran over his rubber horse, or the time he knew he was in love with a real horse, or the time he -- oh you see what I mean."

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.

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!)

My Story So Far

I write novels. I've written quite a few, and some of them over and over again.

Last year I thought it was time for all my writing and revising to pay off, and I sent a lot of carefully written and targeted query letters to agents. I received just enough interested responses to know that my confidence wasn't completely unrealistic. Eventually I also got enough feedback, from both professionals and critique partners, to decide that my manuscript still wasn't ready.

I'd written four drafts of that novel (or maybe six or seven, depending on what you count) and made substantial changes to the plot and characters. The current version of THE OVERWORLD has many strengths, and it reflects the improvements in my writing skills that resulted from working on this novel for years. There are also so many big problems with the manuscript that I had to put it aside for a while.

Another first draft that I'd written a couple of years earlier had been on my mind, and I turned my attention to revising that novel, keeping in mind everything I learned during OVERWORLD rewrites. I've now completed the second draft of THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE, and I'm making plans for the third. The new version is a fairly different story than the original, and I like it a lot better. I also like it better than THE OVERWORLD, and that's a hard realization after all the effort and expectations I put into that book.

At meetings of the South Bay Writers, several speakers have chronicled how many seemingly promising novels they went through before getting published. It gives me hope when I hear stories like Erika Mailman's that go, "Again I reached that point I had with the [last] book, where I thought, 'Okay, maybe this isn't my book either.' So I started writing a third book."

I'd like to believe that THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE is my book, the one that will turn all this work into a career. But I've thought that before. And that's how I know I'm on exactly the right path.