Announcement

Listening to: Journey, "Don't Stop Believin'". Oh, hush up and let me have my sentimental fun, will ya? =)

I have no idea how to really start this blog post, so I'm just gonna dive in headfirst.

I have an agent.

As of this morning, I've officially accepted representation from Marlene Stringer of the Stringer Literary Agency. She offered representation based on my novel Grim Light, which many of you kids have watched me write. And I say now, thanks for sticking around through the craziness. And the craziness of querying, and all the craziness in between.

Wait, what am I saying? All that craziness had to be pretty entertaining.

Anyhow...holy tangent, Batman.

So.

The story.

I started querying Grim Light a little over two weeks ago. Yes, I know all the other writers out there want to hit me right now. Please don't hit me! Remember that I've queried three other novels, so it's not like this really happened right out of the gate.

Marlene emailed me last Wednesday to ask for a partial. I sent it and tried to think of other things. I was not successful, but I tried.

Then on Thursday, she asked for the rest.

I was a bit distracted on Friday. I think it took me 45 minutes to load the dishwasher. I would find myself standing in the living room with a dirty cup in one hand and a fork in the other, wondering how I'd gotten there.*

Then I stopped waiting and checking my mail and my phone, because it was the weekend and I figured the chances of getting any news were slim.

Silly writer, eh?

She emailed me on Saturday night, and I got it first thing Sunday morning. She loved Grim Light and wanted to speak on Monday to see if we suited each other.

We're gonna fast forward through the big smiles and the undignified dancing, k? You can all imagine it pretty well, I'm sure.

So I was up bright and early on Monday, waiting for The Call. I knew it wasn't coming until around 9, but I didn't want to be all groggy when it came. I'm somewhat incoherent for the first half hour of the day, and "incoherent" is hardly a good first impression for a writer to make.

We spoke for a little over an hour, and it was awesome. I knew very quickly that she was the perfect agent for me, but she wanted me to take a day or two to digest everything and contact some of her clients for their opinions.

So I did. Nothing but awesome, across the board. And the clients themselves seem pretty darn cool too, all very welcoming and interested in me and my writing. I feel like I've joined a very warm and talented family.

And then there was maybe a little celebrating. Just a little. And because I am lucky and I have such wonderful people in my life, I got TWO flower deliveries within a few hours of The Call.


The left ones are from my friends Amy and John, and the right ones are from The Husband.

So, after a day of calling people and celebrating and trying to make myself believe it, I called my agent--that's right, I said it--and officially accepted representation. We're both very excited about this, and I think it's gonna be a great working relationship.

I know I have a long road ahead. But it's been a long road getting here, so I'm gonna take a moment to thank everyone. So many of you have been so supportive and helpful, you've followed all the highs and lows and encouraged me and read my work, and it's helped more than you know.

So thank you, thank you, THANK YOU.

And now, because I know you're all wondering, "But what does the cat think of this?", I give you the Cat of Cats, The Bard himself, Shakespeare, looking very excited and proud:


Don't let his stern looks fool you. He really is very happy for me. No, really. He only tried to bite me once yesterday. That's totally cat-speak for "YAAAAY!"

*This is a slight exaggeration. Slight.

Revisionland

Listening to: Jack Johnson, "Holes to Heaven". Gotta say, it's nice to have a laptop with speakers that I don't cover with my hands when I type. Much more logical, yes?.

I'm still stuck in Revisionland.

It seems like I've been revising this book forever, but it's only been since December 8. Yeah, yeah, that's a bit of a long time, but remember that I had Christmas in there. The holidays always screw me up--all the hustle and bustle, all the buying and wrapping and traveling, makes it hard to work.

And then there was the avoidance. Oh boy, was there avoidance.

When I first started writing this one, I had no idea where it could go. Once I flipped the idea around in my head a bit, I saw some possible paths, and I took one. That path, in the end, required me to take a bit of a risk.

The scenes that are in my protagonist's POV are written in first person. Her voice just jumped at me as soon as I started, so there was no getting around it. The story demanded it. Which was fine with me, because I do first person a lot better than I do third. A LOT. While yes, this is something I should work on, I can't really change what the story is asking, can I?

Okay, done with the excuses now.

The story also, however, demanded another viewpoint character--my antagonist. That's one of the downfalls of first person--you can't really tell what's going on anywhere but around the protagonist, and since she couldn't have any personal contact with the bad guy for the first half of the book--didn't even know he existed, really--I needed to throw his POV in to up the tension, as well as help the reader get to know him.

It started out in third person. I didn't really want to take that very risky move of having two first-person viewpoint characters. I quickly realized that his scenes were becoming rather annoying, though--he was cardboard, one-dimensional, and kept spouting all these cliche bad guy lines. "She will be mine." "I would not fail again." Blah, blah, blah.

So I switched all his scenes to first person, sometime last summer. Surprisingly, it seemed to work--it fleshed him out quite a bit, got me much farther into his head. It helped me come up with a plausible backstory that explained his current actions. And that backstory even begged the reader for a bit of sympathy, which I like. I'm not a fan of antagonists that the reader automatically hates.

It was only when I finished and was reading through the manuscript that I realized: his sections were also ridiculously telling. Since he was alone most of the time, and we were stuck in his head, there was nothing for him to do but tell us his plans, hint at why he was doing what he was doing, fume over this and that. I wanted to smack him. I wanted to smack myself.

So I made a plan to add another character to his scenes, a sidekick or cohort of sorts, someone he could talk to.

And that's where the avoidance came in.

This seemed like such a big project, I couldn't help but shy away. The little voice in my head whined, "But we already changed all his scenes! I don't wanna do it again!"

I finally got to work on it, though. And on a whim, I changed the scenes back to third person. If done with care, I can keep the things that cropped up in first person that helped flesh him out. And boy, I'm only halfway done, but those scenes are so much better now. The dialogue in there, plus the character I pulled from the second half of the book and into my antagonist's scenes, who amuses me (he's very impassive, and it infuriates my antagonist, which pushes him to do things he might not do otherwise, just to try and get a reaction from his cohort).

I'm going to try to finish those scenes today--just power right through them. Looking back over how these sections have evolved, I can only say that, once again, writing has surprised me.

I don't care how long you do this--there will always be something that takes you by surprise. And that? Is just one of the many reasons why I love it.

All right, FINE.

All right. I'll come back.

I've been avoiding the blog recently because, well, I just didn't really feel like it. NaNo went south for me (and not in the good, "hey it's warmer down here" way, more like the "this book belongs in a basement somewhere, gathering dust and being eaten by rodents" kinda way). Yes, yes, I know, with NaNo, you're supposed to write badly, that's the point, blah blah blah.

It wasn't the writing itself that was bothering me. It was the plot. Dear lord, the plot. With such a short span of time in which to create it (I'm not an outliner, and never will be), I turned in desperation to overplayed cliches, done-to-death tropes, and plot twists that even a blind man could see coming from a mile away in a thick fog. As I told my husband, "I think I liked this novel better when Dean Koontz wrote it in 1995."*

Bad writing, I can fix. A hopelessly terrible plot...not so much. That would pretty much require scrapping 90% of the novel, and the very idea of putting in all that work only to do it all over again...bah.

My plotting process, such as it is, cannot be successfully completed in 30 days. I need at least six months. I don't know exactly how things work in the cobweb-strewn attic that is my brain, but when I let it do its thing, everything falls into place. If I give myself time to let my subconscious work, to put all the pieces into place without any real conscious effort on my part, then it does the job. Or at least, it makes a somewhat coherent plot structure that uses all the elements I tossed into the first 3/4 of the novel for just that sake. I can't necessarily say it's truly successful, since I remain, as I like to put it, gloriously unpublished.

Example: With Grim Light, a novel I was never sure I could complete from the very beginning, I reached a point of true despair about two days before I finished the book. I looked at everything I'd written so far and saw no way in which to resolve it all, no way for my heroine to get out alive. still truly human, and somewhat happy. No. Way. Whatsoever. So I set the book aside for a few days, struggling with the idea that it may not actually get finished. I didn't wrack my brain, didn't brainstorm--none of that. I just set it aside and brooded.

Then it happened. I sat back down to write, determined to give it my all, and finished the book in one night. I like to use the cooking metaphor: If I let everything simmer for a while on low heat, I get a (to me, at least) wonderful resolution with a few twists and turns that even I didn't see coming. But NaNo...NaNo is like broiling or microwaving. Everything happens very quickly, and there's no time for all the elements to coalesce into a delicious whole.

That's right, people. I'm a freaking Crock Pot.

Anyhow, so, that's that. I will eventually come back to that novel and try again, but it needs some time to sit by itself in the corner and think about what it's done. Then, when it's ready to apologize, maybe we'll talk.

In the meantime, I'm now in the editing and revision stages for Grim Light. Yesterday, I found a massive plot hole--okay, more like an epic failure of logic on my part--that I'm still trying to fix. As a whole, I feel the book will take more than one serious pass to get it to where I want it, but that's nothing new. I hope to be querying by April, though. I'm going to throw myself into this with everything I've got. Because I'm chomping at the bit to start on my next idea, which will be somewhat of a departure for me in terms of setting, theme, and voice. I'm projecting that this novel will take about two years from first page to final edit. It's going to be tricky, but I love the idea and I can't wait to get started.

In a future post, maybe even today, look for website and book recommendations for editing and revising. This should, I hope, be especially helpful to the first time NaNo-ers out there. I know one in particular that I promised this information to, and hopefully others will benefit from it as well.

Because that's what I'm here for, folks. Just here to help. And, you know, whine. It's a strange mixture.

*Don't get me wrong, I'm a big Koontz fan from way back. It's more the "1995" part that is the insult.