18 posts tagged “novels”

first draft of the new book done. bigger than I expected.

That is 476 pages of pure I-dunno-what. I never really know until I've done a third or fourth draft. It is, however, the *real* reason I've been away from Vox. Sure, I've been putting in several hours a day doing home remodeling. Yeah, work has been hell, but pretty much every stray minute of my day for the last four weeks has gone into write this. I'm a little tired.

Oh, and those of you in my neighborhood, you can click on my Alter Ego link to check out some excerpts from this current project.

I don't get bored.  Unfortunately.  Something will always snap me back from the brink of boredom, whether I want it to or not.  Push me too close to boredom and I'll think of something to amuse myself.  I'll get a hobby, start a project, pull a prank, start an insurrection.  Something. 

Here I am in Brain Tumor Hall.  Too cheap to take a day of vacation.  There's nobody around.  There's nothing that needs to be done.  Nothing to do with everyone gone.

I'm supposed to be waiting until this weekend to tackle revisions on the my current writing project.  Where does this leave me?  What will I do to pull myself away from the boredom?

I'll start a new writing project.

Fine, I'm lying.  I already started the new project.  I'm already a thousand words into it and I'm trying to put on the brakes.  I have enough projects.  I have other things I should focus on.  Also this project is monstrous. Hideous.  Unlovable.  Have you ever had a story idea that was so horrific you shocked yourself?  Where you gagged a little and your finger hovered there, trying to decide between Delete and Save? 

I clicked Save.  Help.

Normally, this is a time of year when thinking about the publishing industry makes me happy.  After all, Xmas is coming soon, when I usually receive at least one and sometimes several gift cards to buy books.  Add to that the fact that the nominations for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award had been made public.  Then there's quiet time coming, with all the students gone away and campus deserted.  Time to write.

Alas, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has rained on my parade.  They have officially put their acquisitions on hiatus.  This means they are not acquiring any new books.  When you're a writer and one of the big publishing houses says, "We're not buying any new books," well, that's not a very shiny feeling.

No surprise, the blogosphere is chock full of writers in full-blown Chicken Little mode right.  The sky is falling, they're hunkering down, oh god oh god oh god noone will ever want to buy their book. 

Everybody needs to take a chill pill.

Yes, the economy is in the tank and that makes things bad for publishers, too.  Yes, the credit crunch means that heavily leveraged companies aren't able to access as much as they normally could.  Yes, there are probably going to be fewer books published in the next two years.  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt isn't absolutely representative of the publishing industry either.  They leveraged heavily to buy Harcourt and they are billions of dollars in debt, so they may be more representative of all types of companies who made reckless business decisions that are now coming home to roost.

The big three auto-makers in the US are in far worse straights, but that doesn't mean engineering students who have dreams of growing up to design cars should change their majors to agricultural engineering.  We're still going to make cars.  It's just that things are going to be tight for a while, and they may be different after this dark cloud lifts.

Hey, didn't we just elect a president who ran on the idea of change?  Why are we so scared?  Change could well be a good thing for the publishing industry, which has increasingly condensed itself into fewer, larger companies.  The end result of that has been a tendency toward publishing and pushing the concept of "The Blockbuster," which tends to be a book equally loved and loathed.

This is the publishing industry that has set a precedent of paying six-figure advances for unvetted memoirs that blow up in their faces.  That need to find a blockbuster often means that huge sums are paid for books that the publisher believes will sell big, and then more money is put into that book to make sure it sells big, but there are no guarantees.  There is no next Harry Potter or DaVinci Code.  There are just books, some good, some not as good, and readers make or break a vaunted "blockbuster."  (Either because they truly love the book or they fall victim to the hype.) 

This is also the publishing industry that has often preferred concept over quality, rejected good storytelling and promoted premise.  If you think that's just the free market at work--the publishers produce what people want--think about how hard it can to be find a book you really want.  It's that the publishers control the supply side in such a way that consumers simply have to choose from what's available, with little power to affect what's available.

If the big publishing houses fall apart, that doesn't mean publishing will stop.  Books won't go away.  It just means that smaller publishing houses will rise from the ashes, and that may be a good thing for all of us, readers and writers.

Hey, go buy a book, why don't you? 

 

Show us a book you started reading, but never finished.

I used to have something of an affliction.  If I started reading a book, I would finish it.  I would finish it.  Part of that was my native stubbornness, but there was also something about starting a book and never finding out what happened that was untenable to me.  Perhaps there was also some anxiety about disrespect.  Here was this writer, who had worked so hard to produce this book, and I was just going to stop 48 pages in and never finish it?  So every book I started, I finished, whether I liked it or not.  The literary equivalent of cleaning your plate.

 

(It's true, I never finished Moby Dick.  Hell, I barely started Moby Dick.  I don't count that as my answer to today's VoxHunt, though, for two reasons. 

1.) Herman Melville is dead, so I wasn't worried about disrespecting him.  I didn't think I would ever run into him at an academic conference cocktail party and inadvertently let slip out that I had never finished his masterwork. 

2.) I already knew what happened, courtesy of Cliff Notes.  So I went into my MA exam and was lucky enough that I was able to pass it without answering any questions on Moby Dick.)

 

It was several years after Moby Dick that I met the book that would change my life.  Change my world.  Change my reading habits.

 

Hubbicula and I were living in Tampa, and it was our first Christmas, which we don't celebrate. A friend of Hub's, however, insisted that we should spend Christmas with his family.  The friend in question was a beat poet/philosopher-type named Stone.  (This nickname was a bit of a misnomer.  He should have been named Stoned.)  Christmas involved dinner with Stone, his girlfriend, his son, and the son's fiancée. 

 

Much to my horror, there was a gift exchange involved.  I don't even remember what random assortment of gifts I picked out to give to these strangers, but I remember quite vividly the gifts Stone gave to Hubbicula and me.  "Books, I like books," I thought as I unwrapped a package that obviously contained a book.  Specifically, it contained the first book in the Left Behind series.

 

As surprising as it seems, this is not the book that I stopped reading.  I read the whole thing, with that morbid, kinky fascination you read something that is simultaneously laughable and appalling.  I would go so far as to say that I enjoyed the Left Behind book.  I'm still trying to sort out what the purpose of the gift was, as I am very much an out-of-the-closet atheist.  Did he give it to me as a joke?  Or in a sincere attempt to educate me?  Or did he simply forget that I was an unbeliever?

 

Still, it wasn't Armageddon that did me in.  It was the book Stone gave Hubbicula that stopped me dead in my tracks.

 

The truth is, Hubbicula didn't become a reader until a little later in life, so whatever books he had, I was the one who read them, including this little gem: Justice of the Mountain Man.

 

To be exact, I read 17 pages.  It was so bad.  So terribly awfully cruelly unashamedly bad.  Poorly written with flat characters and ludicrous dialog.  A nasty, cheap knock-off of Louis L'Amour.  The funniest part is that I tried.  I tried to read on, but I couldn't.  It sat on the corner of my desk for weeks, with me eyeing it, trying to make myself pick it up.  I even put off reading other books, trying to force that down my literary gullet.

 

Then I had an epiphany.  I didn't have to read the book, if it wasn't good enough to deserve my reading efforts.  It was so patently unworthy of both my time and energy that I finally put it back on the bookshelf and went on to other books.  After that, it got easier.  I found myself a hundred pages into some book, thinking, "I'm really not that interested in this."  Lo and behold!  I could put it down.  I did put it down.  I took it back to the library and never looked back.

 

It's still a new feeling for me.  I am still reveling in the fact that I don't have to finish every book I start.  Sometimes I go overboard.  I go to the library and get five books and finish none of them, as though to prove to myself that I don't have to waste my time unless I'm really really really enjoying the book.  It's a work in progress, learning to quit.

Apparently it's going around, but today I'm officially declaring my hatred for overseas customer service call centers.  I work for a BIG university, so although I pay the bills for my department, the checks and everything else get issued out of a separate office.  Naturally, they make mistakes sometimes, and then I have to sort them out.

Today, that involved a call to Amazon.com.  Normally, I like Amazon.  I love books and they sell a lot of them and they give free shipping.  That said, I think it's going to be a loooooong time before I buy anything from Amazon again.  When things go smoothly, they're great.  When things don't go smoothly, you can spend four months tearing out your hair trying to get someone on the phone who can help you solve the error.  On the phone, because if you try to sort it out by email, you get three dozen form emails that never address your problem.  Right, Jaypo?

Look, I speak fairly standard English.  I can turn off the Okie idioms.  I speak slowly and clearly.  Those are the positives in helping me deal with non-native English speakers over the phone.  On the downside: I'm mostly deaf in one ear and can't hear very well out of the other.  Also, as you know, I have diminishing patience for people who can't think on their feet. 

So the last hour has been trying.  That is, I was trying.  The little girl on the other end, "Jesse," was not trying.  It wasn't her problem really that my accounting department had mailed the check to the Amazon's corporate credit card address.  She was perfectly content to keep mumbling the key phrases that appear on her screen, without any consideration for whether they were actually going to get me closer to solving my problem.

I came to Vox today planning to pitch NaNoBuyMo.  National Novel Buying Month.  (Yeah, I made it up.  So what?)

The book industry is flagging.  Stores are going under, publishers are closing imprints, buyers are getting cold feet, agents are getting nervous.  Sure, it's selfish of me, encouraging people to buy books to prop up an industry I'm trying to succeed in, but it's not like I'm encouraging people to do something harmful.  I'm not a tobacco executive trying to get you to smoke.  Reading's good for you.

After my experience this morning, though, I'm going to make my encouragement more specific.  Go to a local bookstore and buy a book.  If you know someone who's trying to sell a novel (you do), go a step further: buy a first novel by somebody you never heard of.  (Easy to check on the author bio flap.  Susie Smutzenheimer lives in Idaho with her 9 cats.  This is her first novel.)  That's how the more modest writing careers are made--people buying one book at a time.

I wish you well with any customer service dealings you may have today and I hope you enjoy your book. 

As many of you are already aware, November is National Novel Writing Month. (NaNoWriMo or just NaNo.) So, as we hit the midway point of October, people all around me are gearing up to get ready to write 50,000 words in November.  I've never participated in NaNo, because frankly, every month feels like novel-writing month to me.  I don't always produce 50K words in a month, but I certainly did in August. 

On the surface, I like the idea of NaNo.  Its stated goal is the triumph of "enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft."  Painstaking craft is good, but half the battle of writing a novel is getting words on the page.  I've known would-be writers who spend years polishing the first couple chapters of their planned novel, because they never seem to be able to move on and write the rest of it.  That's sad.  I'm a big believer in writing everything, no matter how bad, and fixing it later.

What makes me cringe about NaNo is this other quote from the website: "In 2007, we had over 100,000 participants. More than 15,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line....They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists."

It's a nice sentiment, but it's just not true.  Writing 50K words in a month doesn't make you a novelist.  Writing a novel makes you a novelist. A novel isn't just a lot of words.  It's a story, with rounded characters and conflict and a narrative arc.

What I've seen year after year are people walking away from NaNo and walking into one of the miscellaneous writing groups I participate in, wanting us to help them edit their novel so they can sell it.  These are painful moments, all the more painful because they're often funny.  Not for those first-time writers, but for those of us who already know that it can take years to polish a first draft of a novel into something an agent might want to look at, who will then require half a dozen revisions to turn it into something a publisher might want to look at, who may or may not be willing to buy the book. 

The other funny element is simply that so many of the participants don't seem to be participating in that other element of writing novels: NaNoBUYMo.  Reading a lot of what's produced during NaNo, I can't help but suspect that it's written by people who don't actually read novels. 

This happened to me on Monday night, when Spucko and I went for our usual writing night (equal parts writing and emotional support.)  Sitting at a table next to me, with his back to me, was a young man working on an outline for his NaNo project.  I could easily read it over his shoulder and it took a supreme act of will not to laugh out loud.  That's how I know I'm not really a totally hateful person, because I didn't want to laugh, even though his idea and his writing were both laughable.  Something about a mercenary with the last name Gunn, involved in some sort heroic firefight in Kirkuk.  All written in the most lurid, pulpy 15-year old fanfiction prose.  Cringe-worthy.

I had the overwhelming urge to reach around him, hit Ctrl+A, delete.  I didn't, though, because no matter how bad his writing was, at least he was trying.  I had to give him that.

Oh, and I promised an FSotD, so here it is:
I'd never had any trouble getting lucky before, but let's just say, you can pick up women with a dog, with a cast, with a baby, but not with the Creature from the Fugly Lagoon sitting ten feet away.  
  

Well, you've had to hear me whimper about bad news on the publishing front, so I suppose I should share a little bit of good news.  Yesterday was set to be a rejection day--got a short story rejection first thing in the AM--but then lo! Came home from work and had a short story acceptance.  So, that's two this year, which is nice.

In other writing news, I did something that at first seemed "constructive" and now strikes me as a big mistake.  I made a little note card for each novel I'm working on.  Posted them up on the closet door of my office, so I could track when I'm working on each one and how far I'm getting.  See?  That looks constructive, doesn't it?  Except when I got to note card seven, I realized: "Oh, I'm working on seven different novels in various stages of completion."

Sick sick sick.  Sure, some are closer than others.  One is more than half done, while two are just in embryonic research stages.  Still, it can't possibly be a good thing that I have that many ideas jockeying for space in my brain.

Sometimes you get a rejection that makes you erase the play board and start over. 

I drank too much coffee yesterday and was awake too late, thereby putting myself at risk of the dreaded unexpected late-night e-mail rejection.  It was one of those rejections that's hard to set aside, because it was personalized and it came from a place I'm already familiar with: obvious writing talent and not a commercially viable project.

I know this about the book I've been querying.  It's too big, too convoluted, a bit too smart to be straight genre, but I love the book.  I want people to read the book, but I'm not without a certain amount of pragmatism.  After eleven rejections, knowing what I know, I'm putting this one on indefinite hiatus.  It's time to move on.

The next book I'm querying is distinctly more commercial, so at least I don't have that hurdle, but that whole issue is weighing on me pretty heavily as I try to decide what project to work on next.  I always have about half a dozen things waiting in the wings, but as I work on a decision, I thought I'd ask my Voxy neighbors what kind of things you're interested in reading these days.  What sorts of stories, issues, people are you interested in?

It's not just the case in knickknack stores--it's true about writing, too.  Thanks to a timely reading by the esteemed Val, I've concluded that the first chapter of my aforementioned fantasy novel is busted.  I broke it, probably with too much revising, editing and a little over-vigorous "polishing."  I've always known this about my rather pathetic attempts at poetry.  My first and second drafts are usually pretty good, but never really good.  My third and fourth drafts are usually crap.  I don't know why, that's just how it is.  It has not ever been that way with my fiction, but perhaps that's only because my fiction is sturdier, more able to stand up to 20 or 30 drafts before it crumbles under the sheer weight of my tinkering.  Now I know.

As of today, I've got about a week to go back and unbreak that first chapter in time to query the book on March 11.

Luckily, the boss is away for the rest of the week, so I'm in the clear for a couple of 8-hour writing days.

It's already been that kind of week.  I got my annual review yesterday and my boss gave me "exceptional" marks on all categories.  That's me: Redzilla the Exceptional Secretary. 

I am not currently Redzilla the Exceptional Writer, because along with my exceptional marks as a secretary, I got three (3) rejections yesterday.  I'll return when I feel more like an Exceptional Blogger.