Finding the Time

Would you believe that's my biggest challenge these days? Not the hard work it takes to do revisions, not writer's block, not working instead of compulsively surfing the 'net (though that is a problem sometimes ;)) but simply finding the time. Although my world is completely new (not to mention wonderful!) the fact of the matter is my life hasn't changed much. I still have kids, and chores, and exercise, and a spouse, and various other commitments. To be honest, I don't know how those of you with full-time (or even part-time) jobs do it! That's why I had to go to my mother's house last week.:) There's just not enough time here.

So how do you make time? I have heard a couple of people say that they disconnect themselves from the internet. But I use the net for a ton of research. It was frustrating at my mom's house to have to run to the other room every time I had to look something up on Google or Wikipedia.

I generally try to work when my baby is sleeping, because my other kids are old enough to be pretty self-sufficient for an hour or two. But Gid is outgrowing one of his naps and I can't plan on them anymore. *sad* So I'm looking for some more suggestions. Bring 'em on!:)

In other news, my editor is totally awesome. I wanted to see if she could send me something, so I e-mailed her this morning to ask, and she replied just a couple of hours later to tell me it was in the mail! Yay for awesome editors!

Ciao!

Revisions! A Story in Pictures.

I'm baaaaack! (Did you miss me?:)) I had a lovely time at my mothers. Some good visiting, more than too much good food, and lots of babysitting by my mom. Life of leisure, right? Ummm, not exactly. I went to bed absolutely exhausted every night. Why? Because I spent 5-6 hours working on my edits every day.

It reminded me of doing renovations on my house before we moved in. And the more I thought about it, the more apt the comparison became. So here is the analogy of revisions/renovations.:)

When we went house shopping two years ago we had a rather small budget, but we were determined to get the best house we could. We looked at a couple and were rather disappointed. They were very small and clearly cheaply made. They were all in good repair, but I had trouble thinking of us living there for the next three years. Then we pulled up to a house that--although the colors of paint were kind of ugly--was larger and on a bigger sized piece of land. So far so good. We walked into the living room and almost gasped in appreciation! A large, finished room with paneling on the walls and a fireplace to boot! So what if they has decorated in terrible, terrible faux zebra stripes and cheetah spots. They would take those things with them. Wow! Why was this house in our price range?

We soon found out. For starters, there were cars and motorhomes (yes, that's a plural)in the yard as well as some other junk. Then the paint in the kitchen was this terrible orangish red, the laundry room wasn't painted at all, there was a room in the middle that was totally unfinished, and the old Coke machine on the porch didn't help much.

But you know what I saw? I saw potential! I wasn't afraid of a little work, and by buying a house at this price, we could spend a bit on revisions.

So we bought it (although I think our realtor thought we were nuts.) and soon the renovations commenced.

One of the worst rooms in the house was the bathroom. See exhibit A.:)

See that door . . . It doesn't even go anywhere! Now, the people who lived there didn't think there was anything wrong with it. They lived with it like that for five years. I wasn't quite so easily pleased.

So revisions began.

Who'd have thought that taking down that awful mirror would make it look even worse!

But we kept trucking along.



We pulled out the sink. That was an improvement right there.:)



Luckily, we were working with a professional. Our friend Kevin is a master electrician. He helped us with all the wiring.



But an interesting thing happened. In order to get all the the wiring done correctly, we actually had to go back and undo some of the work we'd already done in order to get everything in the right place. (See how the door that was boarded up is not boarded up in this picture?)



Luckily, Kevin knew what he was doing and soon our wall looked like this.





We added a new vanity and mirror as well as some pretty light and viola! We had a perfectly functional, and much prettier bathroom!

This is a lot like revisions. We think our book is just fine the way it is. (Although I trust all of your books are at a much better starting place than our bathroom was!) It gets submitted to an editor and--just like I saw in our house--one of them (hopefully more!:)) sees potential in it. They know it needs work, but they see what it can become.

The first thing they do is pull out all the bad stuff. Then they bring in their professional skills and do the things that you can't on your own (or, in this case, fix the issues you can't see in your "baby.") Sometimes that may mean undoing fixes a good crit partner or even you agent suggested!

But when they are done, you are left with something better than what you started with. In subsequent revisions they help you add those finishing touches that really make your book a beautiful thing. And hopefully, when you are done, you have something like this.:)




Ciao!

"You Said 'Tavern;' I'm Goin' to Moe's!"

Hehe, we love The Simpson's in our house. Tons of fodder for appropriate quotes.:)

Anyway, the title really will come back and relate in a minute.

First I have to tell you how cool my husband is. My hubby, Kenny, is in law school and doing quite well. But only because he works SO hard. (He's in the top of his class and on the board of the law review and has managed a couple of 4.0's in his classes. *grin* I love my hubby!) However, about four weeks into the semester *cough, cough* NOW *cough,cough* he reaches this point of stress where he gets really worried about how he's going to keep up with everything and understand his classes enough to pass his exams. (Last semester he came up to me at about the four-week mark and said, "I think I bit off more than I can chew this semester." In the the end he had his best semester yet!) Well, it's that time of semester again. Yesterday he was so distracted when I dropped him off at school that he forgot to move his hand when he shut our very large and totally unpadded van door and crushed his fingers (on his right hand no less) pretty good. *Ow!*

So I invoked the Pike household rule. "You were so stressed you slammed your hand in the door: I'm goin' to Mom's!"

So I am off tomorrow. I'll still be around--they do have internet in Idaho . . . it may still be dial-up, but I'm sure it's there *winks at Mom*--but probably a little more absent. With my husband stressing out so much and me needing to get my edits finished, Kenny and I could both use a week of relatively uninterrupted work. Hopefully we'll both be less stressed when I come back.

My mom's taking me to the symphony while I'm there. I've never been to the symphony before, but I think it will be a nice treat! So I may or may not have another entry up until I get back. So until then . . .

Ciao!

It Really is a Lot of Work!

Little update . . . I got my first editorial letter on Wednesday!! Hooray! I feel like things are actually moving now! I was very pleased with my ed letter. When you have signed up to write a series--especially a series that is already mapped out--I feel like the first ed letter is even more important than with stand-alone books. With any first ed letter you discover your editor's editing style as well as their precise vision for your book. And you just hope that everything meshes.

With a series you are kind of in a different boat. Everything above applies, but instead of finding out if her vision of the book meshes with yours, you find out if her vision of the entire series matches with yours. And there are, inevitably, changes involved. Will they be the kinds of changes that will make both the book and the series better--stringer? Or are they the kinds of changes that will reverberate through the series and pull down a super-important plotline later on in book . . . say, three?

There's no way to know until you get that letter.

I am happy to say that my letter was awesome. Tara asked some great questions, brought up some extremely valid concerns and then gave a lot of guidance regarding character and pacing. Ten pages. Which is neither long nor short. About average. But it was chock full of great stuff and I really think she is going to help me make this whole series the very best that it can be! I'm very excited.

However, I did have a moment when it really hit me just how much work this revision is going to be and I felt momentarily overwhelmed. And this is just the first revision. There will probably be a minimum of two more before this book goes to copy-edit. (and maybe we'll have a title by then!:))

Folks, it is a lot of work.

Being published is a job. It really is. They don't pay you just because you wrote a cute little story, that's only half of the job. The rest of working on revisions, being available for marketing, doing promotion, etc. It takes a lot of time, and a lot of effort.

And I am totally up for it!!

Now the query recap I promised.

In a query, it's not enough to just tell what your story is about. There a story somewhere that is about the same thing yours is, I guarantee it. But the strength of your query letter (and of your story for that matter!) is finding what makes your story unique and marketable and then highlighting it.

And please do so with correct grammar and eloquent word choice.;)

Ciao!

Queries Take Three!

So it is totally blizzarding at my house. I haven’t seen a storm like this in all the winters we’ve been in Utah! (Five now.) I’ve seen storms like this in Idaho, but that’s why I don’t live in Idaho.;) I went to get my mail a few minutes ago and my door was frozen shut!! I had to pull really hard to even get it open! It took me about three tries! Yuck. I don’t like snow.

Okay, this is our last query workshop. It was suggested in the comments that I do Pride and Prejudice and although I like and appreciate the suggestion, P&P is popular now because it is a classic. As-is, it would not sell in today’s market and the whole point of a query is to present the marketability of your story. So thank you for the suggestion! . . . But I’m going to do something else.;) I’m thinking Libba Bray’s A Great and Terrible Beauty.



*Disclaimer: This work belongs entirely to Libba Bray and even though I will be writing this query from a first person point of view, this is no indication that the work in question belongs to me at all.;)*

We’ll start with the basic, “what is this book about” paragraph.

When Gemma Doyle’s mother dies, Gemma is sent to a finishing school in London. At first she is an outcast, but eventually she a three other girls form a tight friendship. Gemma has been having strange visions and while she is out visiting a cave she finds the diary of a young woman who attended her school 25 years before who had similar visions. The girl was a member of “The Order” and as Gemma begins reading the diary, she and her friends set up their own club. Little do they know that their predecessors committed terrible acts of violence and betrayal. Gemma discovers that her “visions” allow her to step into another realm where she brings her friends and finds her mother. But the further Gemma gets into the diary, the more evil and danger she discovers till she finds out a terrible secret about her mother and is forced to leave one of her friends in the other realm.

The nice thing about this book is that it is so unique and interesting that it is hard to write a bad query about it. Even this fairly flat recitation of events is interesting. But just because your basic synopsis can be interesting doesn’t mean that you should settle for it. So now we are going to highlight the unique elements.

When Gemma Doyle’s mother commits suicide, Gemma’s laudanum-addicted father sends her to an old finishing school in London. Originally shunned as an outsider, Gemma soon forms a fast friendship with three other girls with whom she shares her greatest secret; that she has been having strange visions. Soon the girls discover an old journal and the power to pass into a strange spirit realm where—to Gemma’s surprise—they discover her mother, trapped between earth and the afterlife. Within this new realm the girls are granted the deepest wishes of their heart: love, beauty, self-knowledge, power. But both the new realm and the journal reveal a darker side as well. A dark goddess, a not-so-accidental fire, a forgotten murder.
Ooh, I like this one! But let’s add some voice and let’s not forget to let the agent know that we are dealing with a different time period.

In the late nineteenth century a young woman’s ability to pass into another realm not only reveals evils in the past, but forces four young ladies at Spence Academy to choose between reality and a place where the deepest wishes of their hearts are granted.

When Gemma Doyle’s mother commits suicide she is sent to Spence Academy to become a distinguished young lady. At first Gemma is an outcast, but a fortuitous bit of blackmail soon nets her four fast friends with whom she shares her greatest secret; that she has been having strange visions. The discovery of a 25 year old diary reveals stunning secrets to the friends. Another girl with visions, a tragic fire, a secret society. The girls set up their own secret society and discover that Gemma’s “visions” allow them to pass into another realm full of the spirits of the dead where each girl receives great magic—beauty, love, self-knowledge, and power. And even better, Gemma’s mother is there. But as the diary continues to reveal its dark secrets—secrets that are twisted up in Gemma’s mother’s past as well—the girls begin to see the consequences of their choices leak into the real world. And with it comes the wrath of an evil sorceress.


Hmmm. I think that works. Mind you, I haven’t spent nearly as long on this as my personal pitches, but I hope you are getting the idea of how I go about the process.

For the last part we’re going to add a commercial pitch and finish our query.

Dear Agent,


In the late nineteenth century a young woman’s ability to pass into another realm not only reveals evils in the past, but forces four young ladies at Spence Academy to choose between reality and a place where the deepest wishes of their hearts are granted.

When Gemma Doyle’s mother commits suicide she is sent to Spence Academy to become a distinguished young lady. At first Gemma is an outcast, but a fortuitous bit of blackmail soon nets her four fast friends with whom she shares her greatest secret; that she has been having strange visions. The discovery of a 25 year old diary reveals stunning secrets to the friends. Another girl with visions, a tragic fire, a secret society. The girls set up their own secret society and discover that Gemma’s “visions” allow them to pass into another realm full of the spirits of the dead where each girl receives great magic—beauty, love, self-knowledge, and power. And even better, Gemma’s mother is there. But as the diary continues to reveal its dark secrets—secrets that are twisted up in Gemma’s mother’s past as well—the girls begin to see the consequences of their choices leak into the real world. And with it comes the wrath of an evil sorceress.

The Victorian era frames this dark, paranormal Young Adult novel that questions family ties, the worth of life, and the consequences of dreams come true. The manuscript is complete at 100,000 words and available for your perusal. Thanks etc.

Wannabe Libba 

We’ll sum-up next time.:)

Ciao!