The Tale of the Attack Cupcake

Thanks to the hysterically funny Victoria Dahl for this pic of me at the Harlequin party. Yes, this was well after midnight. I still like it.

I talked a little bit about the RWA Conference on Word Whores on Sunday. I'll keep filling in with the stories this week. But since I already started with the Harlequin party on Word Whores, I'll finish telling you all about that.

So, I headed over to the Harlequin party late. This is because I was at The Gathering through the PRISM ceremony. (Petals and Thorns took second place - alas no trophy for me! It was still a way fun party.) I dashed out of there, changed clothes, and went down to the taxi stand. The bell captain was loading another group of gals into a cab, so I waited. This pretty young woman walked up to me and asked if I was going to the Harlequin party and would I like to share a cab. We laugh, because we're both dressed in black and white, so the "going to the HQ Black & White Ball" is such an obvious flag. I am, of course, delighted to share the taxi ride.

She introduces herself: Nalini Singh.

Yeah - way famous, mega selling author Nailini. And, it turns out, nicest person in the world.

We chat on the ride. When we get to the Waldorf-Astoria, she sticks with me and introduces me to people. I got pulled away at one point and lost her. Later I ran into her again and I apologized for poofing. She laughs and says that's how these parties are. Then she asks if everyone is being nice to me.

Everyone was so great to me.

This party was AMAZING. The DJ played every girl power song you can think of while everyone danced barefoot or in our party-favor Harlequin footy socks. I had a mini-chocolate eclair with gold leaf on it. The coffee stations had bottles of liqueur lined up to be added to your cup at will. I drank flute after flute of champagne. There were stations manned by handsome young men where you could build your own ice cream cone or cupcake.

After lots of dancing, I decided I deserved a cupcake. I chose a red velvet cupcake and the handsome young man swirled cream cheese frosting on it with a pastry bag, then added my choice of chocolate shavings. It was a thing of beauty.

Proudly I carried it, and my champagne up to this balcony area. There I see Candy Havens. We hug. We chat. I feel my plate wobble. We both watch my special cupcake tumble from the plate and splat, icing-down, on the carpet.

We start to giggle. Yeah, who invited us to the fancy party?

I recover and reach to pick it up, but even as I do, this woman facing away from us, taking a photograph, takes a step back to position herself. Candy and I watch in impotent horror as her stiletto heel impales the crumpled cupcake, then rides off with her as she strides away.

We totally lost it. Gasping with laughter, we are unable to stop her, to tell her. She disappears into the crowd.

And, of course, because we were laughing so hard, I hadn't picked up the frosting splat before another bare-footed guest stepped squarely in it.

Alas.

Oh, and I did get another cupcake. After I cleaned up the first.

I sat down to eat it.

Is Writing a Really Good Book Enough?

I did a chat with the FFP gals last night and for the first time I was tempted to say one of the things I hear authors say that really annoy me.

One of the gals asked how to get published with Carina Press, because they're really difficult to get in with. I wanted to say, well, they're really picky and are pushing for a high-quality brand, so write something very good.

As regular readers know, I hate it when authors give publishing advice along the lines of "write a really good book."

I dislike this advice for three reasons:

1. It's self-evident. OF COURSE you have to write something good. Nobody tries to write bad stuff. Sometimes we don't push the story or the characters as hard as we should. Sometimes we don't revise enough, or polish enough. But everybody wants their stories to be good. This is akin to the advice to send in your best, most polished work. It implies that there's some kind of external, quantifiable standard for that. Wouldn't it be nice if writing was like chemistry and the document changed into a different color when you hit the correct amount of revision? Bing! Now it is GOOD.

Yeah, dream on.

2. It's pompous. I know I've been on this tear lately, but it's obnoxious when authors preen and suggest to the questioners that, to follow in the author's footsteps, the would-be just needs to gain that level of awesomesauce. If you say "to do what I did, you need to write a really good book" implies that your talent and skill just rises above everyone else's like it's ensured by the laws of physics.

And it's not true, because:

3. It's not enough to write a really good book. It has to be the right story, told in the right voice, that pleases the right editor, who convinces the right marketers that the right readers are out there to buy it.

So, I restrained myself from popping out the easy answer. Instead I told them what kind of stories Carina likes. I told them what my editor looks for and what my process was. I offered some leads to research their acquisitions editors, because I believe knowledge and networking always gives more power.

And I'm going to work on that answer.

Seven Calorie-Free Ways to Enjoy the Holidays - Day Seven

This is how we feel, getting to the final day of Calorie-Free Christmas. I did a little recap yesterday, if you need one.

And before we get much farther, I've also posted today at the FFP Blog about loving your baby novel and fretting about its future.

But now, with no further ado:

#7 Theater - full surround experience

You could argue that yesterday's topic, the books of Christmas, involve every sense because the imagination kicks in. But there's something about the TV shows of our youth, the Christmas movies, the ballets and concerts that just wrap you up and transport you.

My mom commented yesterday that my stepdad's family loves A Christmas Story. In honor of that family, who are taking me and David in for Christmas this year, I've put Ralphie at the top. It's one of those brilliantly funny movie that you can watch every year and laugh hysterically at all the same parts. We know it so well, we start giggling even before the gag plays out.

Then there's the other end of the spectrum - the gloriously divine. My grandmother used to take me to see the Nutcracker Ballet at Christmas. We'd go down to the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, have lunch and shop around Larimer Square. There's something about the ballet, too, that just glistens. All those flowing tutus and graceful swaying. It feels like peace, love and joy.

This picture is from the University of the Pacific's production, which is sadly already over. Isn't it lovely, though? Most communities stage some version of the Nutcracker or a concert of The Messiah.

Then there's always the old TV shows. If you're like me, you remember the TV line-up leading up to Christmas. When would they broadcast Rudolf? Or the Peanuts Christmas Special? Sometimes you lucked into seeing a favorite, other times you missed them. But having them reappear felt like family members coming to visit after a year away and kissing you on the cheek.

So I'll leave you with a big hug and a grumpy Merry Christmas from my favorite curmudgeonly uncle, the Heat Miser.

Frosty Moon

Crazy Gym Lady (as I walk in the door): "Let's see, she's got on her red coat and teal headband - she's all ready for Christmas!"

Me: "Um, but it has nothing to do with Christmas."

Crazy Gym Lady: "Well, I'm very visual."

~

This moon is from Saturday evening. I would have liked to catch it last night, but I foolishly scheduled an FFP board meeting at the same time as moonrise. But, since the moon was technically fully full at 10:27am Sunday morning, the night before is pretty much the same as the night after.

November's moon is the Frosty Moon. It's also called the Full Beaver Moon. I am not Tawna Fenske, however, so I decided to stay away from that one.

Saturday wasn't frosty at all. In fact, it was fully and gorgeously warm. Doesn't that picture look like a summer sky? We went hiking and sat on the patio for cocktails. But, as if ushered in by the Frosty Moon, cold weather hit last night. The wind roared in, freezing rain pelted the windows. Between the bright, full moon and the turbulent storm, we and the animals woke several times during the night. This morning shows a dusting of our first snow.

Seems appropriate for Thanksgiving week to me.

Which, um, has nothing to do with Christmas.

Trans-Genre'd

This reminds me of hot summer afternoons, lying on suburban lawns and watching the clouds drift by. These are from sunrise this morning, though, thus the pink, and I was never up that early in my teenage summers.

Things change.

Irene Goodman, described as a "leading literary agent in New York who has has many New York Times bestsellers," which means she's one of the hottest agents out there, authored an article for the September Romance Writers Report. (RWA's industry magazine.) She titled it "Common Mistakes by New Authors" and lists five mistakes. Of those, three are related to genre:

1. They don't pick a genre and stick to it.
2. They choose uncommercial subjects.
3. They choose genres that are out of style.

(The other two are about plot and conflict/tension.)

This article immediately annoyed me. I can see her points, sure, but I think the article could be better titled "How to approach your writing like a product." To me, this is something for the agents to think about, not the writers.

I could be wrong, but hear me out.

Genre is a marketing thing. It's a false line drawn to give bookstores and libraries a way to shelve books. It's intended to give readers a way to find the kind of book they love best. Music and movies are divided up the same way. And we have all had that experience, as readers or listeners, of vainly searching the shelves for a particular author or movie, only to resort to the teenage cashier with a slow computer.

"I think this movie is drama, but clearly you guys don't."

"Oh! That's in comedy, actually."

I have had this conversation any number of times. I'm sure you have, too. And who knows? Maybe the writer and director absolutely believed they'd made a comedy and I'm the odd one focusing on the drama. Or, maybe they made a drama and the marketers said, look! right there, someone laughed! and stamped the nicely selling "Comedy" label on it.

I'm seeing a lot of this from agents lately, that we as authors should know what genre our book is. They consider it fundamental. Irene says that we should pick a nice, fashionable and commercial genre and write exactly that book. This completely ignores the fact that most writers aren't writing genres, we're writing stories. Once we're done, and we're writing up our queries, we tilt our heads at it and say, "well, it's got an urban fantasy premise in a non-urban landscape with high fantasy elements and also contemporary romance... I'll call it dark fantasy."

Yeah -all you agents out there (I fantasize that you read my blog - I have a rich imagination) are clutching your heads in despair. We're sorry. We really are. But you knew we were doing this, right?

Fact is, I have two writer friends with books coming out soon, who were coached to revise their books towards one genre or another, after they had the publishing contract. I suspect this happens a lot. And really, both were fine with it. Shape it in this direction? I can do that. Plan it that way to begin with? That means you're planning a product, not spinning a story. To me, as a writer, the two come from very different places in myself.

I've been president of the Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal chapter of RWA for almost two years now and a frequent topic of debate is which genre to sandwich a story into. We're obviously a polyglot of a chapter, with writers of Science Fiction Romance, shape-shifters, time-travel, vampires, swords & sorcery, ghosts, everyday magic. Really, if someone writes anything kind of weird, they end up with us.

I absolutely understand that this is something that publishers, editors and agents have to think about. That's their business. I suspect it's an interesting aspect of the business for them. I would think they'd have to get really good at it, to succeed.

However, I think it's a mistake to exhort writers to get on board that wagon.

And let me say, right here and now, that I do believe the agent/author relationship is a partnership. You have to work together for mutual success. Maybe it's just me, but it's very difficult for me to look at my story, which is this great swirling mass in my head of faces and feelings and conflicts and desires, and slap a label on it. If someone else looks at it and says, well, with a few tweaks, it would fit nicely here, I would be grateful.

To me, that's part of what an agent brings to the relationship. You wrote it, now I'll help you sell it.

Finally, the other day I watched Oprah's interview of JK Rowling on You Tube. (It's well worth watching and broken out into segments so you don't have to commit to the whole thing at once.) At one point, Rowling talks about signing the publishing contract for the first Harry Potter and how her agent said, congratulations, but you'll never make any money writing children's books.

Of course, Rowling is now the only billionaire writer in the world.

I totally don't hold this against her agent. Harry Potter could be slotted as a children's book and they didn't make money at that time. They were uncommercial and unfashionable. But if you walk into a store today, to buy a Harry Potter book - do you head for the children's section?

Yes, I know Harry Potter was an unpredictable phenomenon. Like Twilight, like a bunch of others we could name. They broke new ground, because they were new stories. Genres lines are bent to accommodate them.

Things change.

I wonder, if those new writers had followed Ms. Goodman's advice, would they have written those books? Of course, 99% of us will never become phenomena like them, so maybe it's good advice for the working writer. And yet, I think most of us write, not to churn out a product, but because we become obsessed with a story.

Of course, we'd love to sell it, too. Have patience with us. Help us out here.

Maybe it's really a High Paranormal Fantasy?

LEEzard

A new sighting on the wildlife camera! The rare literary lava iguana, also known as a LEEZard.

Yeah, okay, it's a running joke.

The difficult thing about inside jokes is, they evolve over time and are thus difficult to explain to those who weren't part of the (often punchy) process. And then, when you do explain, it's usually not funny anyway.

But I'll try. Because *I* think it's funny.

It started when I first moved to Santa Fe a year ago. David got a night-vision camera and set it up to see what all wildlife was coming up on our porch at night. I was messing with him by putting up my little purple iguana beanie doll that Val brought me from Australia in front of the camera as a "sighting." I thought I was SUPER DUPER funny and he erased the picture. I blogged about it, of course.

At this same time, I was spending morning writing time in the FFP water cooler - an online chat room where we gather to write. We write for an hour or half-hour and check in to compare word counts, cheer or commiserate. In this odd pattern, my internet would tank regularly sometime around 9 am, every damn morning, kicking me out of the chatroom. My critique partner KAK speculated that it was the lizard.

Really - it got to be very funny.

But it all peaked one night when KAK and I were IMing feedback to each other about our current novels. I told her I didn't care if her heroine did have lizard-like scales, the biologist in me didn't buy that she could swim in lava and not be affected. It turned out that she wasn't lizardy at all, but more feline and I'd completely misinterpreted the descriptions. KAK accused me of lizard bias. I pointed out that felines were even LESS likely to survive a lava-swim. She told me I needed to tell the reader how to pronounce some of my bizarre words, which I find it awkward to do without breaking that fourth wall.

Hey reader! You pronounce it like this! You see my point?

But just then I saw an excerpt from someone's published novel where the hero, Gunnar, tells the heroine, in his husky bedroom voice as he stalks towards her, gleaming and naked, "you pronounce it GOOnar."

I know, right?

Oh, GOOnar, take me!

I shared, KAK started in on LEEzards... it was silly and punchy and might not be funny to you at all.

But she sent me a LEEzard for my recent birthday. It's been out, running around and chewing up the internet lines.

Thanks KAK!

Go-to-Meetin' Clothes

Isabel is ready to go to the RWA conference!

Now if only I was...

Actually, it's not that bad. My plane doesn't leave until about 12:30 tomorrow, so I don't have to leave the house until 10 am. I'm mostly packed - including feline companion - and everything else is stacked up. We got back from Denver early enough yesterday for me to finish all the laundry and get organized on FFP's big party at the convention - something that actually took hours and hours of work. And I finished my costume. I don't like to do these things too far ahead of time...

People keep asking me if I'm excited to go. I should just lie and say "yes!" like they want me to. Truth is, I kind of dread going. Once I get there, I'm fine. I'll see lots of friends and it will be a non-stop whirl of fun. I'll have a great time; I know that. There's just a big part of me who'd like to curl up in the suitcase, too, and stay in the den.

It's funny having just come from my high school reunion. The turn-out was quite small and many people I would have liked to see didn't show. But it was funny to hear some of the stories and have people ask me didn't I remember that party? No, because I was almost never at the parties. I always thought it was because I wasn't invited, but I think now it was more that I was usually so happy to have "my nose in a book," as my mother would say, that I rarely got up the gumption to go socialize. When I did, I had fun.

Just like convention.

Odd, at this stage in life, to recognize this pattern in myself. It helped, oddly enough, to take the Meyers-Briggs personality test and discover that I test as an introvert. I've always thought of myself as a basically social person and I'm socially confident in general. But my little introvert heart is happier tucked in where it's quiet and people don't ask me questions.

(No, I won't start mumbling to Precious. Much.)

Fortunately, fence-sitter me, I just barely score into the introvert category, so I can dig up some extrovertedness if necessary. The thought just sounds draining at the moment. Once I get there, the excitement will pump me up.

So - am I excited? No. But I will be.

En Route

We left Santa Fe this morning at 4 am, the full moon dropping to the horizon as we made our way to Albuquerque.

I spend a lot of time in airports. But this is vacation, so I tried to set up this trip so we weren't exhausting ourselves just to get there.

It ended up feeling like leisurely hopping, from Albuquerque to Dallas/Fort Worth, to Miami to San Juan. This is a really neat sculpture on the E Concourse at DFW. It makes music while you walk through it.

It feels like found art, except that someone put it there on purpose. It's an unexpected delight, nonetheless.

We're spending the night in San Juan. Tomorrow morning we'll hang by the pool. I'll get a little writing done. Then we'll fly to Tortola and take a ferry to Virgin Gorda. I like this wending. With every stop, the weather has warmed and moistened. With each stage, the pace slows and we ratchet down to match.

(For my work cronies - we're staying at that same Isla Verde Embassy Suites. And the access road is still torn up in exactly the same way. It's as if time hasn't passed.)

This evening we had dinner and drinks on the beach. And I got to meet up with Melissa Arroyo, FFP's conference coordinator this year. She and I had only met online before this, so we had fun talking in person. She's a real dynamo. Now when we meet at the September conference in New Orleans, we'll recognize each other.

And son of a gun, this evening? There was that full moon again, rising up through the palm trees, seeing us on our way.

Forever Stuck on the Road Less Traveled

I may have made a mistake.

I know, I know -- we can crack all the jokes we like about writing it on the calendar, etc. But I'm begining to think I really miscalculated, becoming involved in this whole genre thing.

When I first began writing, and I really trace this back to grad school, since I don't believe childhood stories and adolescent angsty poetry really count, my work came out as essays. To get some relief from what had become the crushing pressure of my PhD in Neurophysiology program, I began taking classes with the visiting writers program.

And, oh, the excitement of those days.

I loved meeting the visiting writers, and the other students. I loved the workshops, the stimulation of it all. And they supported me in very useful ways. I learned to explore my new art. An artist's retreat accepted me to stay for two weeks, I received fellowships and other awards.

And I was rewarded early on with publishing success.

I wouldn't say the magazines fell over themselves to publish me, but it was fairly steady, from Redbook to Literary Mags, I published in several a year until, eight years after my first class, I held my essay collection, published by a university press, in my hands.

Then I stalled.

There were a lot of reasons. Mainly I couldn't quite get the two nonfiction projects I was working on to gel. So I wrote a novel, Obsidian, about sex and magic. I thought, oh, I'll sell this and the genre work will bring in the money so I can focus on the nonfiction projects.

Yeah, it didn't work out that way. Even though one of the editors at a sci fi magazine I'd published with said that an agent would snap up a writer like me, no one has. One agent early on wrote me a letter saying how disappointed he was, because he'd loved my idea but then I'd gone and written it like some kind of literary book.

A few months later, I went to the RWA National conference, where my name tag identified me as unpublished. Because Romance Writers of America considers you published only if it's in the genre. A month before, I'd been a featured writer on a panel at a book festival. At one lunch, I sat next to a woman I didn't know. In fact, I did at every meal since I knew no one. I don't remember her name -- she was another unpubbed wannabe like me. At the end of the meal, she said she looked forward to reading my book. Foolishly, I pulled my essay collection out of my bag, saying I had some with me. She looked at me like I'd offered her dog shit and said, no, she meant my romance novel, whenever I got it published.

I sent my first query on Obsidian 12/20/07. Just over two years ago, for those keeping score at home. Admittedly, it wasn't really ready for prime time then. Hindsight is 20/20. Meanwhile, a gal I know wrote a book while snowed in during December 2008, that she just sold in a three-book deal.

Jayne Ann Krentz wrote an interesting post on the FFP blog recently. She speaks frankly about writing as a business, which she's clearly better at than I am. She says this:

DON’T GET TOO FAR AHEAD OF THE CURVE: Trust me on this. I’ve been there and done that and it rarely goes well. Back at the beginning of my career I tried to do a futuristic/paranormal. That very first manuscript had all of the elements that I now work with freely: romance, suspense and a psychic twist. I can’t tell you how many rejection slips the manuscript garnered. They all had the same theme: “Really enjoyed the writing but unfortunately there’s no market for this kind of romance.”

She could be talking about me. For some reason, no matter what I'm doing, I never quite fit neatly into what everyone else is doing. I didn't in high school, I didn't in my PhD program. I don't now.

I really don't think I'm doing it on purpose.

At any rate, I'm back where I was three years ago when I started writing Obsidian. Unable to sell my current project, I think I'm going back to nonfiction. I actually know where to take one of the two I was working on then.

I have learned one thing, that querying and selling have to be background activities. You can make yourself crazy if they're your main focus.

It might be precious to say, but it forever and always must be mainly about the writing.

No, but What Do YOU Think?

This morning in the Water Cooler, we had an interesting conversation about contests and a pitfall I'd never considered.

The Water Cooler is a chat room on the website of our Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal Chapter. One of our board members is an amazing web designer and she created these various chat rooms for us. The Water Cooler is for hanging out while you write. Sometimes we do timed sessions and then report back word counts or pages edited. Sometimes we throw out problems we're struggling with, for feedback.

Sometimes we just yak.

This morning, one gal mentioned that she wasn't working on her WIP -- lingo for Work in Progress -- but instead doing penance and judging a contest entry. Penance because she'd failed to notice that one of the entries given her to judge was the exact same entry she'd judged for another contest the week before. These are for our chapter On the Far Side contest and everyone is supposed to be done judging by tomorrow.

She turned the entry back in and took another because she "would have had to write all the exact same comments."

So, it's an interesting thing. So many RWA chapters sponsor contests that the market is arguably flooded. And yet, these are opportunities unmatched in the business, that you can get your work in front of agents and editors who serve as final judges, but who won't accept unsolicited submissions. Some people get caught up in collecting contest finals and wins (one group keeps count and actually gives the person with the most finals in a year an actual TIARA -- yes, these are all women). But really, the point is that this is a chance to get your manuscript that much closer to publication.

The real prize.

The editors and agents serve as final judges, meaning that they judge the finalists. As determined by the chapter members who volunteer to judge. And sometimes people from outside the chapter, if the chapter in question can't get enough volunteers.

Now, many people in RWA belong to several chapters -- maybe a local one or two and a couple online groups. So there are two or three contests you'll be hit up to judge right there. More if you're feeling generous and volunteer to help another group. The pool of people submitting to the contests is largely this same group and they usually hit as many contests as they can, to maximize their chances.

There's a word for this syndrome.

MFA programs have been accused of producing literary clones. (I tried Googling "MFA Syndrome" to give you a good link to an article, because I know I've read a couple, but all the hits were in other blog posts. Hmmm....) The academic/MFA environment produces literary writers who get university posts to teach MFA programs.

Right! Incest.

And we all know what the product of incest is. Lethal mutation at worst; reduced heterogeneity at best. Reduced heterogeneity in biology leads to weaker individuals, for those not up on their genetics and evolutionary biology.

There have been complaints that the contests are past their prime. That the agents and editors don't request full manuscripts as much. That they aren't making as much money for the chapters.

Maybe we should think about doing something different.

Quite Continental

From Travelblog to Guestblog!

Welcome today to Candace Havens, member of FFP and author of the new release Dragons Prefer Blondes. Take it away, Candace!

One of the things I love most about romance novels is the happy endings. I like knowing that no matter how much hell the character goes through during the book, in the end he or she is going to get a happy ending.

I can guarantee you’ll get one of those with every book I write. It may not be the happy ending one might expect, but there will be one. (Smile). In my new book, Dragons Prefer Blondes, it doesn’t look like my heroine, Alex, has much chance for happiness. She’s in charge of keeping dragons from attacking Earth. It’s a tough job, but the wealthy club owner just looks at it like another day at the office.

She’s a woman who has most definitely given up on the concept of love and happily ever afters. She’s certain those things will never be a part of her life. Imagine her surprise when love smacks her upside the head and she realizes that she could possibly lose the one person who matters most to her.

Through the years I’ve had a chance to talk to Nicholas Sparks about his various books and films. While talking about “Nights in Rodanthe” I thought he explained his style very well. “I write Greek tragedies, and there are no happy endings in a Greek tragedy,” he said. “I give people a hopeful ending, but not necessarily a happy one.” As much as I adore him and his books, it hurts my heart every time I read them or watch the films.

So, while I can’t tell you the ending of Alex’s story, I can say that there is a resolution. And that while she may not get what she thought she wanted, she does end up happy. (Smile).

Don’t tell me the endings, but share some of your favorite books that had wonderful resolutions at the end.

Candace Havens

The Rest of the Story

So, I've found myself explaining to various wonderfully supportive friends and family types how the whole "refining my craft vs. selling out" crisis is going, over IM and email.

I figure I'll write out the update here, then I can tell people just to go read my blog, which saves me typing the same stuff over and over, and has the bonus of irritating people, because I've found most people really hate being told to read my blog. It's the techno version of "come over and see my slide show of my vacation and I'll tell you about it then." Beware of expressing idle interest in someone else's obsession -- you'll regret it sooner or later.

For those listeners at home who may just be tuning in, I've been working this last week on trying to discern where the two different voices are in my novel, that this agent identified as conflicting with each other, to the detriment of the book. One is a more commercial voice and one more literary. Guess which has to go?

David, the love of my life, offered to have me read it aloud to him. This is a big favor, because he doesn't really read fiction. I did once read the entire Ender/Speaker for the Dead series to him over a summer of road trips. Now that we have more comfortable incomes we usually fly places and have very few road trips.

So, I printed out the first couple of chapters, read them to him and he stopped me anytime he lost the thread of the story or thought it got vague. Which ended up being a lot. It's a good thing he loves me because at one point when he stopped me, I snapped "What? I don't get ANY description?!?"

But I marked all those sections and our relationship survived and was fully repaired over cocktail hour. It's funny, because the agent told me that if I could make the fixes, she'd love to see it again, but that she also understood that this was the "hardest and most emotionally frustrating part of the process." And she wished me luck. Turns out I needed it.

The next morning, I sat down to revise. And decided pretty quickly that David was an idiot who had no idea what he was talking about. All the stuff he picked out was really good stuff.

Just then, an email arrived from a contest I failed to final in, with comments from the judges. Now, I've pretty much stopped reading judge's comments. I enter the contests for the opportunity to put my novel in front of editors and agents if I final. If I don't final, most of the time it's because at least one judge REALLY HATED my book. Like giving me a 50% score hated. Usually the other judge will give me a nearly perfect score. So between the two, I don't get super-useful feedback. Just the love/hate thing.

But I decided to look at these comments, to see if any of theirs coincided with what David identified. These scores turned out to be unusual because all three judges ranked me highly, with just enough points taken off to keep me from finalling. And they ALL picked on the exact thing the agent pointed out. And their comments? Yes: exactly the sections David thought slowed the story.

Another writer friend told me she read her novel to her tattoo-artist boyfriend, who was not a reader, but spends his days talking to people. She says "I'd want to kick him when he'd stop me and say 'what? wait? what?' But he was invariably right.'"

There's been discussion lately on the FFP loop, about finding someone to critique your work who understands your particular sub-genre. Several people have chimed in that their best critiquers don't write anything remotely the same, but they know a good story.

I lost a page and a half in the revision of Chapter 1. I read it again to David and he didn't stop me once. He was surprised when I stopped at the end of the chapter, he was so caught up in the story.

So, yes, it's painful. But I see that I can do it now. One of the judges clearly also writes in first person and she warned me to watch out for "I wondered," "I thought," "I saw," "I heard" and "I noticed," as constructions that yank the reader out of deep POV (point of view). She means that it brings in the narrative voice and the reader loses the sense of being in the character's head. She's dead right. I've been searching for those phrases and they cluster in the "slow" sections. Alas.

I suppose it's part of life, that you never stop discovering new flaws. As you get things polished and handled, new problems are revealed.

Guess I won't run out of stuff to do!

And the German Judge Gives It...

I realize my title is probably dating me.

There's a whole couple of generations who don't understand references to German judges. Or who think Mikhail Baryshnikov is just a cute guy on Sex and the City; they're surprised to hear he's a dancer and ask what kind. I swear to God I've had this actual conversation. I have witnesses. They didn't understand about Political Asylum either, or why he might have claimed it.

The German judge, for those who didn't watch the Olympics in the 70s and 80s refers to the international panel of judges scoring the various Olympic events. There was often a perception that the German judge was a) tougher and b) inclined to mark down competitors from the non-communist countries. For accuracy, we should really say the "East German judge," but idioms aren't about accuracy.

There's been an interesting conversation on the Fantasy, Futuristic & Paranormal writers loop the last day or so, about contest judges. I've written before about the RWA chapter contests, so I won't reiterate here. But the way it works is you generally get scores from two or three judges. In many contests, if the point spread exceeds a certain margin, a discrepancy judge is called in and the lowest score is dropped. The idea is to account for reader preferences, which can really affect scores. For example, on a recent contest I entered, one judge gave me a perfect score of 100 (with comments that it was so splendid she couldn't gush enough) and another judge awarded me a 54 (with a snarky comment that beastiality is not an appropriate subject for a romance.)

One got me; one didn't.

In the real world, this would translate to a person who would buy my book and one who would burn it. Fair enough. The common wisdom is that these kind of splits result from having a "strong voice" -- readers tend to love it or hate it. All of this is lead-up to using one of my favorite examples, from country music. (Yeah, you saw that one coming, right?)

I heard this story on NPR many, many moons ago, but it's always stuck with me. They were discussing the perception that country music radio stations had become less, well, interesting. It turns out that there had been a huge study where "they" looked at what caused people to change the radio station -- anathema for advertising, of course. They found that people changed the station, shockingly enough, when a song they hated came on. So, it seemed simple: don't play the songs people hate. BUT, what the studies showed is that the songs people rated as most hated were also rated most loved by an equal number of people. Where people converged was on the songs that they neither loved nor hated. More importantly for radio, when a song played that a person neither loved nor hated, they were likely to let the radio station play on.

Thus country music programming went to playing music that the vast majority of people neither loved nor hated, playing innocuously in the background, exciting nothing untoward.

I've seen this play out in writing workshops, too. Half the class will love a particular scene and half will insist it ruins the piece and must be removed. The profound emotional reaction means the writer has hit on something, but it takes courage to accept that for every person who loves what you wrote, someone else will hate it.

And it's tempting, especially in genre, where people hope to actually make money with their books, to write the thing that will sell to the most people, innocuous and exciting no untoward responses.

Then again, it can be a little satisfying, too, to throw a little bestiality in the way of the book-burners.

Pretty Please

Email is a funny thing.

And can be an annoying thing, which is where all the rule-making comes from, I think. I belong to several online loops for writers. I'm even president of one--a deeply ironic development since I hadn't belonged to the group all that long before I was elected. Every day I discover something else I didn't know. Yesterday, in the course of conversations with our webmistress, who is trying to take our site from pitiful to adequate, we discovered that there are a whole bunch of standard emails being directed to people we've never talked to. Along the lines of secretary@ourwebsite.com -- and it's going to someone who isn't the secretary and may not even be a member anymore.

The whole online-group thing has this impenetrable quality that way. It's like this huge underwater octopus --only there's something more like 300 tentacles--and you can only see fleeting glimpes of the eye or tips of the tentacles now and again. The surfacings are when people send email. I love it when I can IM with people because I have a better sense that I can grasp them. At least it's a real-time interaction, more or less.

Anyway, I emailed one gal asking who she was and what was her niche in the group, which turned out to be this whole sub-group I didn't know about (reference: every day = something I didn't know). She wrote back -- yay! not everybody actually answers -- with a detailed, complete message. I was hammered under a day-job deadline, so I popped her email to the webmistress, fully intending to write the woman back later. As it should be, she and the webmistress engaged in email conversation on the mechanics of what each needed -- and I got a reproving note to let her know when I cc or forward her emails.

Does this strike you as odd? It's this whole loop etiquette thing. You're not supposed to forward anything off-loop without permission. This wasn't on-loop, but I did have a vague idea that many of these ladies expect that as a courtesy. They also have this deal about when and how to "clip" the original message, so the emails don't get so long -- it has to do with reading on digest. Now I use email all the time. I'm on email all day. I work in an office in Wyoming with people in Boston, New Hampshire, and Florida. Unless I'm on the road, all of my business interactions are virtual. And it's interesting to me that the professional email rules are different than those developed by these social groups. My work email gets archived for three years and can be used as evidence in a court of law, for or against me.

I'm keenly aware of what I write in emails and make sure that if, say, my boss or ethics officer, were to show me a copy of one and ask me to defend the content, I can. The fact that any of my emails can be forwarded, cc'd or bcc'd is a given. Asking a client to notify me if any of my emails are forwarded or cc'd is beyond the realm of possibility.

What I'm coming to is, I suspect it's a generational thing. The older generations -- the Boomers and the Silents -- have been understandably appalled at the informality of the internet and the consequent lack of universal etiquette. I think some of these writing loops were established by people like this, the presidents of their chapters, the esteemed leaders. There's a bit of the ladies' society, junior league aspect to the romance writers collectives. The thing is the Gen X'ers and my cohorts -- I forget what group I'm in... something like the straddlers between the Boomers and the X'ers, have been using email for pretty much all of our working lives. It's just another tool.

I understand why people want to try to tame this animal, to break it to the harness of polite society, but it will never be the embossed, hand-written thank-you note. (Yes--horribly mixed metaphor.) I've been having computer issues with my personal laptop, as you know. Turns out my hard-drive tanked (ten days after the warranty expired). What with one thing and another, it took a month to get it fixed. (See? and I never ranted about it!) I'd been viewing my personal email all that time on the work laptop, but when I fired up the personal laptop again, it finally pulled all my personal emails from the server. There were nearly 1,500 of them. This does not include junk mail or anything work-related.

It gives me good perspective on why I have no patience for "netiquette." Give me an email with all of the back and forth retained, so I can save one copy of the entire correspondence. No, I'm not going to pause and think to let you know that I forwarded your information to the person who needed it. I can see where the laments come in here, how our fast-paced society has done away with the measured grace and manners of the past. But it has. The world turns and times change. I think it was a Boomer who said that.

Genre Schizophrenia

I'm beginning to feel a bit between worlds, as a writer.

Today I head to Evanston, at the behest of Carol Dee at Dee's Bookstore (& Boutique). I'm meeting with some kind of ladies group at 2 o'clock, to read from and discuss Wyo Trucks. Then there's a spaghetti dinner at 6, to encourage more folks to come visit with me. You now know pretty much everything I do. The funny thing is, Carol emailed me about this gig a couple of months ago -- when I'd initially emailed her back in 2004, when the book came out. I'd contacted most of the Wyoming bookstores and visited many of them for various events. She was going through old emails and found my note. And here we are today.

When the Evanston newspaper called to interview me yesterday, the reporter was surprised that this isn't a new book. I told her I didn't know why now. But that the Georgia Review published a review of it in 2006. Things move slowly after publication sometimes, too. I'm expecting Oprah to call in 2012.

It's funny to me, because I'm doing less and less for Wyo Trucks these days, which is natural, since the book is now five years old. I've been doing fiction since, cloistered away writing novels. Then less-cloistered trying to sell at least the first one. Worse, I'm writing genre-fiction -- whether you consider it romance or sci-fi/fantasy, so I'm feeling like a bit of a pariah from my erstwhile literary community. I used to be on the university's Creative Writing MFA email list, but have been dropped. Sometimes I was invited to speak to university classes on writing, but no longer. A lot of this is because people have moved on and times change. But some is also because I'm no longer really investing in the literary nonfiction world. It's not where the lion's share of my attention is focused. Instead of hanging with the MFA types, I've been going to meetings of the Colorado Romance Writers, the Romance Writers of America national convention, and interacting online with the Fantasy, Futuristic and Paranormal writers.

So, this feels like a distraction, doing this today. And more than a little schizophrenic. Which surprises me, since I made a deliberate decision to publish my speculative fiction under the same name as my essays, believing that all my writing is really of one piece. Clearly I see a split, since my website poses the fundamental dichotomy up front.

Apparently it's up to me to hold the pieces together.

FFP Prism Award

Say, if you published anything even vaguely paranormal in 2008, you should enter FF&P's Prism contest. (I'm the president, and I support this ad!)

Info here: http://www.romance-ffp.com/contests.htm.

To E-Pub or Not to Be?

I didn't post yesterday because I was on short time. After the workout, I grabbed breakfast, cleaned-up and headed down to Brighton, Colorado for the monthly meeting of the Colorado Romance Writers (CRW). I met up with Liz Pelletier in Ft. Collins and we drove the rest of the way together. Meeting Liz in person was great fun, since we'd only ever talked online, via the FFP loop (the Futuristic, Fantasy & Paranormal interest group of RWA).

The CRW folks welcomed me graciously and with great enthusiasm. Renee Hagar, who writes as Renee Knowles, and both writes and is an editor for Wild Rose Press, gave a workshop. Wild Rose Press is interesting because it's an e-publisher. I confirmed with Renee that they have no bricks and mortar offices. The editors work out of their homes, books are published either electronically or via a print-on-demand service, probably through Amazon.

Wild Rose Press is an up and coming publisher for romance, which continues to be the hottest selling genre. And they have my full manuscript right now. It makes a writer like me feel torn. If Wild Rose Press will have me, how could I turn them down? Yet, electronic publishing still carries a stigma. RWA will not allow ebooks for consideration in the industry's most prestigous award, the Rita -- the romance equivalent of the Hugo or the Nebula. RWA's stance is that the writer is not valued enough in e-publishing. When few writers make more than $1,000 on an e-book, RWA has a point. Those are hardly professional wages. To provide a contrast, ten years ago Redbook magazine paid me $3,000 for one essay, which was right about the "industry standard rate" of $1 per word.

E-publishing is clearly the future. As the big publishing houses tighten their belts -- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt editors were recently told not to acquire new books -- as printing materials grow more expensive and less acceptable in the Green Era, shipping and distribution grow more problematic, e-publishing is the answer to so many problems. E-book readers are becoming popular and affordable. And a younger generation is coming up without the resistance so many of us feel to reading electrons on a screen. I think there's no denying that e-books will eventually lose their stigma and will be the primary, if not exclusive medium, for reading in the future.

And yet, the advent of the internet has clearly devalued the written word. Blogs such as this one, where I write for free, abound. Anyone can pay to have a book published. E-publishers can take risks on new authors because it costs them little investment -- a double-edge sword for the writing world as it's easier for a new author to get published and yet, it implies that the standards have lowered.

And the writing itself? Is inarguably cheaper. Never mind a writer being paid $1/word. From an e-publisher, she may be getting less than 50 cents per book. Which, of course, is better than no book at all.

What a brave new world, and what shall we make of it?