The Old College Try

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I know I've been doing an absolutely despicable job at this whole blogging thing.  I don't think it's all college: I could probably eke out time to write if I applied enough willpower to it, and actually had things to write about.  But you see, I haven't been writing much, so there isn't anything to say about that; I don't want to turn the blog over to "the college experience"; and I'm always afraid I'm going to bore people if I simply post updates.  But the latter is what this post, at least, is going to be.  As for future posts - you tell me!  What would you like to read about?  I can't promise I'll be able to comply, but it's good to have ideas and parameters.

In the meantime, since today and tomorrow are my Fall Break, I figured I should put in an appearance in between paragraphs of a response paper on the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

university

I know some of you are more interested in this college business than others.  I also realized the other day that I have never actually said why I'm going to college at all.  Those of you who know my sister, Jenny, know that she opted out: my family doesn't put an overwhelming emphasis on college.  College is a means to an end.  If you have certain goals in mind, it is necessary to jump through the academic hoops; if you have other goals in mind, college is more of a hindrance than a help (and an expensive hindrance, at that!). 

For myself, I'd like a good foundation in history and especially in historical research.  I don't know at this point whether I will turn that toward nonfiction some day, but whether I do or not, the processes are things I feel I need to learn as I progress with my writing.  Of course there are less enjoyable aspects of college to endure, but fortunately I tend toward an academic, nuts-and-bolts sort of mind that can, I think, crank along despite that.  It's overwhelming when I stop and think that I've got four years of this, so I try not to think about it. I've got through the first part of the first semester, at any rate!

reading

"I never let my schooling interfere with my education."  Unfortunately I've got to say that it has a little: my pleasure reading has dropped off sadly.  The last book I finished was The Hounds of the Morrigan, which, although a rather fat fantasy, probably oughtn't to have taken me an entire month (in a perfect world).  But oh well: it was a relaxing, fairly mindless read, most remarkable for its original, often highly absurd cast.  Any author who can make a troop of earwigs or a family of spiders sound cute should get points, I say.

There has been quite a range of required reading in my classes, and some particularly interesting ones in the history course.  Unfortunately the dictates of time and the syllabus make it necessary to move on to the next book before finishing the last one; so, for instance, I've read four-and-a-half chapters out of six in a history of book-making technology, about five chapters in The Ottoman Age of Exploration, and most of The Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre.  The movement is necessary, but does rather give me mental whiplash and makes my reading in general seem fractured.  I don't like not finishing books.  Even if I don't like the book, I like finishing the book.

For lighter reading, I've been picking out Sherlock Holmes short stories and applying myself with greatest earnestness to Knights of the Sea, an account of the battle between the HMS Boxer and the USS Enterprise (hey! that's my ship!) during the War of 1812.  It is interesting, although I wish the author wouldn't define words in the footnotes.  I understand some people don't know what, say, "broadside" means, but I do feel a glossary works better; it feels less as though the author is imparting some great knowledge to a less educated audience.  But again, it's the "lucky little Enterprise"!  I feel a certain pride when I glance through the pages and see all the fights it won, or when I see a portrait and think, "Ah ha!  I know you!"

writing

Well, not writing exactly, but literary efforts in general.  I have been sending out a few queries here and there for Tempus Regina - even gotten a few rejections, hurrah hurrah.  (Also got a rejection on query for The White Sail's Shaking that I submitted five months ago.  Um...thanks?)  As I was telling someone recently, it is a little bit difficult to convey all the disparate elements in a cohesive, if not necessarily sane, way.  So often time-travel is used simply as a ploy, and somehow I have to show that no, wait, I really do know what I'm doing!

At the moment, I am working more on lowering wordcount.  It helps to have several different files, each of a separate draft, so that I know whatever I take out is still there: I can, if need be, add it in again.  In essence, it allows me to feel that the parts I've cut really are there in the overarching story; they just haven't been revealed to the reader.  Like colleges cutting costs (I'm sorry - everything does come back to college in the end, doesn't it?), I'm trying to avoid "sticker shock" by pitching a too-large novel.  Somehow agents don't seem impressed when I protest that for goodness sake, it's not as if it's War and Peace!

the miscellaneous

I want you all to know that I got that word right on only the second try.  That's pretty good for me.  I think to my dying day I will be unable to spell it properly the first time.  That and "mischievous" (took me about three tries).

Fall is just about here, I think.  We're planning on apple-picking today, which is one sure sign; and I got a pumpkin latte from Starbuck's last week, and that's another.  Even on the warmer days, I break out the long sleeves in a kind of defiant protest.  I will enjoy autumn weather, confound it, even if the autumn weather isn't here to enjoy!

My family and I are working slowly toward getting our passports together for a trip to Glasgow over Thanksgiving next month.  Two out of three have arrived, and we are hopeful that, Lord willing, come late-November we'll be standing on Scottish soil and preparing to do some trekking (via car and train: my father raised his eyebrows in true Mr. Bennet fashion at the suggestion of cycling). I am absolutely terrified of the idea of flying, but am very excited at the idea of getting over to Scotland and maybe getting to scoot all the way down to York.  Perhaps see Bosworth Field. Good nerdy stuff like that.

"BRRRRITISH...BICYCLES!"

The Glorification of Death

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With the first round of edits complete and the novel sent out to readers, I've moved on to the process of query-writing.  Not that any queries will actually be going out for some time yet, but it seemed like a good idea to buckle down and begin the work.  I think the current version is #3.  Getting there, getting there...

The process of researching and noting agencies is, as always, enjoyably frustrating: enjoyable because hey, books! and people to query! and frustrating because there are just so many pages to trawl through.  I am, however, beginning to memorize the agents of such bestselling novelists as Suzanne Collins, Cassandra Clare, Scott Westerfeld, and Stephenie Meyer.  And then there are the ones whose works are represented by more than one agency, and that just gets confusing.

Poking through lists of recent fantasy novels, I've also begun to notice trends.  One is that most of these books get some pretty awesome covers, and could I have a cover like that?  Why, yes, thank you, I will take the cover of Wither!  The second, though, is that dark seems to be incredibly in at the moment.  Everywhere I turn I see yet another book about the undead; about vampire-slaying; about the end of the world; about romance between a human and a devil or an angel and a devil or a SOMETHING and a devil.  Vampires are going out of vogue (Twilight is so 2005) and dystopian is in, but even in young adult novels technically labelled "fantasy," horror seems to be the overriding element. 

This is not to say that all of these are badly written.  I'm sure some of them are; I suppose some of them may very well not be.  Nor do I have what you would call an iron stomach, so perhaps I'm not qualified to judge the creepiness level of any book.  However, seeing all these books lined up in virtual rows and reading all these queries of books that sold has made me wonder where exactly the obsession with death came from.  Death is something alien to the way things ought to be and there is, or used to be, a healthy dread of it.  Now it seems to be embraced. 

I don't believe Christians ought to shy away from addressing the hard, dirty problems of the world: on the contrary, I think the attitude of treading on eggshells that believing writers adopt is part of the reason our literature is so terribly insipid.  Death is a hard, dirty problem that must be faced.  What I wonder in looking over recent publications is whether they are no longer treating it as a problem, or whether the authors are attempting to confront the problem and failing.  And I wonder, too, whether readers are not being inoculated to the issue by the prevalence of horror and skewed spiritual ideas.  If the trend continues, will it not become harder and harder to battle a problem that readers no longer imagine to be a problem?

What think you?

Things to Do, Places to Go

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Blog posts have been very scarce around here, I know: five days into August and this is my first one.  For that I apologize.  The brain has been running full steam on Tempus Regina edits, and the idea of then turning my attention to Blogger merely to write something else about Tempus Regina is uninspiring, to say the least.  Don't worry: everyone's questions are safely stored and ready to be hauled out and answered soon.  You've not been forgotten!

In the interim, I thought I would hop onto Mirriam's coattails and chart out my current plans for August.  It looks as though it intends to be an alarming month and I do think it just a little bit cruel of her to so casually fling out there that it is the last month of summer.  I don't like summer for summer's sake: I'll be glad when it shuffles by and I can haul out my fall clothing again.  (Apparently tromping about in boots in July is frowned upon by fashion experts.)  However, in this case I could stand for it to slow down and give me more breathing room.

The motive behind this post is mostly selfish, I admit.  I am going to set out the goals and requirements of August in the hope that, if blog posts are not forthcoming in the following weeks, you will allow me some grace.  For this month, Lord willing I'll...

find out what my fall courses will be

begin my freshman year at college

finish this round of Tempus Regina edits

continue brainstorming for the next project

get Tempus Regina packaged for my beta readers

soldier on with these "driving" shenanigans

determine how soon I can reasonably start wearing long sleeves

begin the business of query-writing

participate in an interview'n'stuff with the notebook sisters

finish reading Plenilune

buy shoes!

 

That First Step

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I haven't written a massive amount of query letters over the past three years.  This is probably a deficiency on my part, as it seems many writers draft about ten per novel; I prefer to write and edit one basic query per story and then edit it depending on submission guidelines.  After all, writing out one summary is hard enough.  I wrote a 100,000-word novel about this plot and these characters, and I'm supposed to sum them up within one page?  And leave room for an introduction/conclusion/biography, not to mention my contact information?  Are you crazy?

Many writers struggle with this aspect of writing, hence the half-funny, half-sad stories we read of editors and agents receiving full manuscripts from authors trying to opt out of queries.  We can talk for an age about our writing if someone broaches the subject, but trying to follow specific guidelines and rein in our loquacity is difficult.  I certainly haven't gotten the process down to a science, but as I said in A Plethora of Edits, it can be helpful to hear how other writers go about it; and besides, the subject of queries has been rattling around inside my head for the past several weeks.

Like most writers, I don't exactly enjoy writing queries.  The Soldier's Cross was torture, as I had never written one before and knew next to nothing about editors, slush piles, and all those gory details of getting published.  So I researched obsessively and culled through just about the entire archives of Query Shark before drafting my own.  By the time Wordcrafter rolled around, I knew more but was a little rusty on the application.  I read more Query Shark (the mainstay, I admit, of my query-writing process).  Then I went back to the arduous business of beating out a catchy, cohesive synopsis.

This month the time for me to write queries toddled around once more, this time for The White Sail's Shaking.  I did my usual perusal of the Query Shark archives, more for fun than anything else, and then sat down (with much trepidation and many "meh!" feelings) to begin.  After the obligatory "Dear Whatever Your Name Is" (but don't say that: I'm pretty sure that's an automatic reject), I always start into the brief story summary.  This isn't crucial, and many writers prefer to start off with something like this instead:

Thank you for the opportunity to submit to Blah Blah Agency.  TITLE OF MY AWESOME NOVEL is a 90,000 word YA/adult/middle-grade/what-have-you historical fiction/romance/yada yada, set in...

This allows writers to brief agents or editors on the marketing details of the novel.  One benefit to this approach is that it doesn't waste the agent's time: they can see right away what genre the book is and the age and sex of its intended audience, crucial elements to their decision process.  The con of this approach is that it isn't terribly catchy.  It's necessarily pretty formulaic, and although it works for its purpose (summarizing the more humdrum details of the book), it probably isn't going to capture the writer's unique voice - which is another major thing agents are looking for.

Neither method is wrong, and I seriously doubt a writer will be turned away for choosing one over the other.  Personally, I prefer to leap straight to the story itself with a hook that (hopefully) piques the reader's interest.  I try to keep it short and catchy, or, if it turns out to be longer, I at least try to keep the first phrase snappy.  Since I don't have other authors' queries to pull examples from, here are the opening lines of my queries for The Soldier's Cross, Wordcrafter, and the current draft of The White Sail's Shaking.

Fiona is not so bad.

Justin King writes fantasy. He never expected to be living it. 

Being a failure comes naturally to Tip Brighton.

These hooks should segue neatly into the next part, a one or two paragraph long summary of the plot.  For The Soldier's Cross, the hook leads the reader on to Fiona's self-satisfaction and her "good enough" philosophy.  Wordcrafter foreshadows the upheaval in Justin's life when it turns out that "fantasy" is a bit more uncomfortably real than he expected.  The White Sail's Shaking captures Tip's mindset and paves the way for the conflict between honor and glory that follows.  Sometimes these hooks are in a paragraph unto themselves; what follows then is the meat of the synopsis. 

I'm not very fond of writing summaries.  I never enjoyed it in school when I had to write book reports, and what is this but a book report on your own novel?  However, a little before starting my query for White Sail's I came across a "Back Cover Contest" over on the NextGen Writer's Conference; I didn't enter, but I did find the basic outline and the examples provided in the rules to be very helpful.  The outline covers the five or six points that the synopsis on the back cover of a book almost always covers.

Character - Setting - Conflict - Action - Uniqueness - Mystery

I like my hooks to start out with the character.  After all, the character is going to drive the rest of the synopsis, and waiting to introduce him or her can often lead to confusion.  Then in the rest of the summary you weave in the character's setting, including the time period if it's historical fiction; the conflict and action, which will often be very much related; and the mystery, which constitutes a sort of question at the end.  Note that the mystery doesn't have to be a direct question, like "What is heroine going to do?" but can be an implied question.

I left "uniqueness" out, as it tends to be a rather nebulous concept.  Obviously everything you just wrote should communicate to the reader that your story is unique in some, if not all, of the elements mentioned above.  For myself, I tend to think of uniqueness as more related to the next part of the query: the marketing details (wordcount and target audience, mentioned above) and the thrust of the story itself.  Here is where you can show what sets your story apart.  Maybe it's in a unique time period; maybe it approaches a particular theme in a unique way.  For White Sail's, I wanted to point out that the story is a sea novel, but differs from the classic works of Patrick O'Brian, C.S. Forester, etc. in its themes.  Never, ever, ever say that your book is similar to someone else's, but different in that yours is awesome and the other author's is rubbish.  Besides the fact that such an approach is the height of arrogance, it will be just your luck to find out that the agent is a huge fan of said author. 

After you finish this bit, you write up a brief bio.  Many authors, I've found, like to write these in third person; I find that a little awkward, but whichever works best for you will be acceptable.  You'll want to keep this pretty short, especially if you don't have many credentials, and avoid saying things like "This is the first novel I've ever written."  You might briefly mention what prompted you to write this particular story ("I had a dream about it" doesn't count).  Whatever you write, it should be professional and writing-related, not a list of likes and dislikes.  As a sample proposal I read recently said, unless your book is about knitting, saying you like to sit with your labradoodle and knit scarfs does not constitute a bio.

I conclude after the bio.  Always thank the agent for their time: it may be their job, but being polite is just, well, polite!  Also mention if you're submitting to other agencies at the same time, and then close with a neat "Sincerely" or "Regards" or whatever professional conclusion you prefer, add your name, and then your contact information.  And after a massive amount of edits, you're ready to send it off to agents and take that first step into the great wide world of the publishing business!

In summation, and for the sake of tired eyeballs, my query outline looks something like this.

Dear Agent 

(but use their name, if at all possible)

HOOK

SUMMARY 

(one or two paragraphs; they may ask for a multiple-page synopsis later, 

but in the query you should always be brief)

BOOK INFO 

(wordcount, audience, uniqueness)

BIO

CONCLUSION

CONTACT INFO