36 posts tagged “novel”
To perk me up on Friday, I'm borrowing the Funnest Sentence of the Day idea from Laurie. So, here's mine from the current work-in-progress.
She was blond and blue-eyed, wearing a white dress that showed some skin. Like an angel, if you believe in that sort of thing, or like a Playboy centerfold, which I happen to believe in.
I love this character. He's such a bastard.
I bitch enough about the part of writing that isn't fun: researching agents and magazines, querying and submitting, getting my hopes up and swallowing rejection.
Today, let me just mention the part of writing that's fun. I mean, really, laugh out loud fun.
It's when a story idea hits me like a bolt of lightning. I'm out walking and by the time I get home, the whole story is there: characters, plot, dialog, climax.
It's when I spend several hours a day feverishly writing everything I can think of to do with the story and the characters. Not just the important, dramatic stuff, but the mumbled conversation two characters have over breakfast when they barely know each other or what a character thinks about as he's pumping gas, watching a stray cat sniff around a trash dumpster.
It's when I spend the rest of the day thinking about the story. Sitting at the dining room table, having what amounts to a conversation with a character, in which I say, "Why would you do that? What were you thinking?" And getting answers. Having him lean back, light a cigarette, and say, "I'll get to that, but do you got something other than this faggy import beer?"
It's when I look forward to boring situations, because I spend that time thinking about the story. Or I miss out on interesting things because I'm far, far away. Halfway through a movie, I don't know anything about it, because I haven't been paying attention. I look up from my desk and Hubbicula is moving his lips, has been moving his lips for a long time, and then I realize, "Oh, he's talking to me. I wonder what about?" (sorry, honey, that's just how it is.)
Above all, it's fun when I've been doing all of this for months and then one night I sit down and realize, I really only have one scene left to write and I know what's going to happen in it.
So, pardon me if I'm giddy as a school girl, but the rough draft is done. Now begins the really fun part: editing!
You know how I can tell?
It was foggy this morning and 45. After so many weeks of 15 degree mornings with tundra-like blasts of wind, 45 and foggy is like frolicking around in a sauna.
The garbage man and I smiled at each other. Our city has manual garbage trucks, with two guys riding on back to empty the cans. I see this same guy every Monday, running the route about four blocks from my house. It's a quiet, narrow street and I almost always cross right behind the garbage truck. (You see how predictable my life is?) Garbage Guy is about 22, skinny, and he wears a Jayne Cobb hat in the winter. Today I crossed the street behind the truck just as he was returning an empty garbage can to the curb. We passed each other just as he jumped back on the truck, and for whatever reason we gave each other a huge grin. Wonder what he was listening to on his headphones.
Stumpy Skwerl was sitting on my window ledge when I got to my office. He's missing all but about 2 inches of his tail and I often leave him my apple cores on the window ledge. As a promise for later, I set my apple on the inside of the window ledge so he'll know to come back after my morning break.
I sent off a query to an agent who reps a good friend of mine, so if nothing else, I feel pretty sure he'll ask to see the manuscript.
Plus, I actually feel pretty good about the manuscript today.
Yup, gonna be a good day. Hope you have one, too.
If not, I suggest you move along. That's all that's going on around here today. With a little pouting on the side, and the occasional heavy sigh. This submission business is taking the starch out of me. A rejection comes in, I rally, put the sucker right back in the mail. I'm prepping the one book for agents, another for a contest, a third for an application to a workshop. The worst part is that it takes time away from the thing I really enjoy: the writing. If I spend three hours a day on writing related stuff, only half an hour of that is actually putting new words on the page. The rest of it is working on submissions. I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, but it just makes me feel depleted. Depleted, but still dangerous, like uranium.
Nah. Not really. In fact, it burned so little that I--gasp!--forgot to post about it. I got my little rejection letter (for the story Word for a Thing, which I sent to Fiction magazine) on Saturday. On Sunday, I sent it right back out to Grasslimb. Neener.
I'm also counting agent query #6 as a rejection. She's a non-response, both to the original query and my follow up saying, "Hey, did you get my query?" There's one more thing to hate about e-mail queries.
Anyways, the plan for this week is--rewrite the query letter again, and send it out to #7.
To cheer me along, my friend Spucko sent me some Savage Chickens:
Yup, it's rejection again, speeding to me in a mere 21 days. Oh, sure it's a form rejection, but I'll give Curtis Brown this: they reject people on nice stationery.
Books: Show us the longest book you've ever read. (All the way through.)
I was preparing to show you this book:
Then, I became curious about just how long War and Peace is, so I googled it. To my surprise, I found that it's not the longest book I've read. It turns out I've read TWO books longer than War and Peace, which only comes in at #14. Victor Hugo's Les Miserables comes in at #16, but I admit, even in French, it didn't seem as long as War and Peace. What I'd discounted was this book:
But wait! There's more! If one is willing to consider Clarissa as a single novel, then one can also consider this a single novel:
All in all, it makes me feel a bit odd about my current obsession: getting my novel down to 160,000 words.
As children, my sisters and I never dared to be bored. On the rare occasions we dared to suggest that we were bored, my mother responded with withering contempt: "Only boring people get bored. Are you boring?" We learned not to be bored, and it's a lesson that has stuck. I have always had an active intellectual life, and I usually manage to fill any downtime with stories I've imagined.
All the same, in college I discovered that for all my refusal to be bored, ennui had sharp teeth. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as "The feeling of mental weariness and dissatisfaction produced by want of occupation, or by lack of interest in present surroundings or employments." That weariness, that lack of interest in the task before you...it goes beyond mere boredom, drags you into the abyss of existential doubt.
Imagine Samuel Beckett, in a cold water flat in Paris. He's standing at the sink, washing out a pair of socks. In his mind, the ideas for myriad plays toss about in a miasma of daily tedium. The socks, they need to be washed, but that's not the worst part. The worst part is that they will go on needing to be washed. Laundry is a vicious cycle that reminds us of the horror of our existence: the daily rote actions required to keep us alive, but that require no mental energy. Wash a pair of socks, wear a pair of socks, wash a pair of socks, wear a pair of socks. The laundry is never done until someone dresses you in the clothes you'll wear at your funeral.
I feel this way about querying and submitting. The writing, the stories--that's glorious. Pleasurable. Exciting. I feel like I'm alive when I'm engaged in it. Even doing laundry feels special when my thoughts are spooled full of ideas for a novel. Days like today, when I'm tethered to my list of likely agents, my list of contests to submit to, my drafts of letters for magazine submissions, ennui has me by the throat. The task is tedious, unpleasant, and from here, seemingly endless. Even writers who have had a modicum of success are still on the treadmill of submission cycles. The socks are still dirty as soon as you put them on.
I feel like an expectant father in the waiting room, but instead of a nurse coming in to tell me if it's a boy or a girl, I just get an e-mail saying, "It's a form letter."
I may as well keep with my Vox tradition and post the actual thing:
Dear Redzilla,
Thank you for submitting to Prospect Agency.
We greatly appreciate your submission, and have
given All of Flesh careful consideration.
Unfortunately, your project is not a good fit for
us at this time.We wish you the best of luck in finding an
enthusiastic agent and in your writing career.
Again, thank you for thinking of Prospect Agency.Respectfully,
Prospect Agency
At least it's not a reject letter, but it's still a downer. It think it's the complete and utter impersonality of it. A form letter seems to confirm that the person on the other end has glanced oh-so-briefly at the cover letter and first page. If it had been more than a cursory glance, the letter would contain something specific to the actual submission. I wonder, do agents and editors think writers are fooled by merge documents? Back in the old days, when I typed up a rejection letter, if I typed in the author's name and the title, it meant something. Now, of course, it just means that the agency knows how to use Word's merge function.
The truth is that this rejection doesn't just go to eleven. This one goes to fourteen. That's how long my original list of likely agents was. This was #4. Ten left. Here's hoping I don't have to work my way through all ten.
