My Annual Shiny New Year's Post With Less Shininess

I'm not gonna lie, guys - 2013 has not been the best or most exciting year for me. It was a tough year for me as a writer. I really thought it was going to be the year I got an agent and my first pub deal, and it wasn't. But I'm not gonna whine about it beyond that - that's why writers have to be tough cookies. I'm just going to keep writing and it'll happen when it happens.

Here are some of the awesome highlights of 2013:

• I was a Pitch Wars contestant and me and my mentor won the middle grade category with my book Everdream getting the most MG agent requests. I got lots of awesome feedback on the book, even though it ultimately didn't pan out with an offer of representation.
• I did a ton of editing on two different books and wrote lots of shiny new words on some other projects.
• I queried one of the books I did a lot of editing on and got some really great feedback (your writing is wonderful, but I have something too similar; the market's not right for it but send me your next project, etc.)
• I got inspiration out of the blue (not from my existing idea list) and wrote my fourth novel in less than 6 weeks. It's an awesome concept which I love.
• I'm still in the running with one of my urban fantasies for the Harper Voyager digital submissions contest, the pool having been whittled from over 4,500 entries to less than 300.

I guess 2013 was a year of lots of agent near-misses. And I know that means I'm getting close to finding the right agent and making my break into the pub industry. So, I'll just keep on writing my ass off! I hope to query my latest WIP in the next couple of months and we'll see what happens from there. In my non-writing life, 2014 will be a year of lots of transition because I'm sad to say I'm getting a divorce. It's definitely for the best, but it's hard nonetheless. We need to sell our house, and my son and I will be moving into town and finding a place to board my horse. Lots of change on that front!

So, writer friends, what's your year been like? And what do you want to accomplish in 2014? I certainly am glad I have the support of such an awesome community of writers!

Happy New Year!

Fun Stuff Happening Around the Web

Hi, writer friends! There are a couple super fun things happening this week that I wanted to point out. If it strikes your fancy, hop on over!

First, head to Twitter and pitch to lots of agents tomorrow, 1/25 during the Pitch Wars Twitter party! The official Pitch Wars bloghop was on 1/23 and 1/24, but everyone is invited to the pitch party on Twitter. Use the hashtag #pitmad. Also, I got 3 agent requests so far for Everdream! So stoked! For more about Pitch Wars in general, head to Brenda Drake's blog.

Second, Jamie Ayre's debut novel 18 Things came out yesterday! Here's the Amazon link.

Here's a little about it:

 

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Olga Gay Worontzoff thinks her biggest problems are an awful name and not attending prom with Conner, her best friend and secret crush since kindergarten.

Then, Conner is killed in a freak boating accident and Olga feels responsible for his death.

When she downs an entire bottle of pills to deal with the emotional pain, her parents force her into counseling. There, her therapist writes a prescription in the form of a life list titled “18 Things”: eighteen quests to complete the year of her eighteenth birthday.

But there’s more to Olga’s quests than meets the eye and when her therapist reveals a terrifying secret, her world is shaken.

There’s only one thing she knows for certain: her choices won’t just affect her future, but all eternity.

 

Hope to see you at the pitch party, and give Jamie some love if you can! Hope everyone has a rockin' week. 

 

 



Editing Galore at the End of the World

We're all still alive! And I'm so very happy, because I've got some major editing to do. Some of you who saw my guest post over at The Unpublished Writer's Guide to Survival know that I entered Pitch Wars, right on the tail of Write Club. I actually entered on a whim, just a bit before the contest window closed. It works kind of like The Voice on TV, where a group of agented mentors picks mentees and they prepare together for an agent panel at the end of January. Well, I applied to the lovely Heidi Schulz and she chose me!! Holy crap, right?

Heidi read through the whole manuscript of Everdream and provided a super kick-ass critique, and now I'm editing my happy little writerly buns off! It's good timing, too, because I have the next eleven days off work. So, the world keeps spinning, I keep editing, and I'll jump into the new year with a much stronger book.

That said, I probably won't post here for a couple weeks. I do pop on Twitter once every day or two though, so you can catch me there. I hope everyone has a beautiful, magical, completely rad Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or Solstice and/or New Year and anything else you celebrate at this time of year!! I love all my writer friends and I can't wait to hear what everyone is working on in 2013. And just for funsies, here's a picture of Mr. Fox helping me wrap presents:

The Backwards Read

I think it was one of my very first college professors that suggested reading something backwards for editing purposes. I've done it periodically for short pieces of writing, and recently read Everdream backwards in its entirety. It's pretty tedious, but it was super valuable for editing.

We all know that once we've read our book a few times, it becomes easier and easier to overlook things. We become too close to it. We read through and find ourselves spacing out a bit because we've read it so many times already, it seems practically memorized. I for one am really big on flow in my writing. But when you get to flowing along over the pages, before you know it you've passed right over something.

With the backwards read, you take out the flow. You take out the context. All you have is each sentence, standing on its own strength. Or not. And then you get to slash and tweak. I found so many typos or just plain sucky sentences I hadn't noticed in the many front-to-back reads I'd done of this book. I also found a lot of the same words too close together, and had a lot of epiphanies about plot and character and inconsistencies and such that had never occured to me before.

Anyways, I'll quit blabbing. I love the backwards read. You get it. Now I'm scared, because it's getting pretty close to querying this baby. And it'll either be third-times-the-charm or my agent search will be on pause for a while while I explore other options.

Have you done a backwards read? What's your fave editing tip? Hope everyone has a fab week!

P.S. Check out Write Club if you haven't recently - it's down to 10 peeps and things are getting super intense!

A Moody and Introspective Post About the Future

Moody and introspective? I must be a writer or something...

I'm in kind of a funky place with my writing. Simultaneously, I feel like I have a lot going on, and nothing going on. I was a finalist in GUTGAA, I've submitted Martinis with the Devil to Harper Collins' unagented contest, and I may or may not also be a finalist in another anonymous writing contest at the moment. I'm almost done writing a fantastic middle grade book that is incredibly unique and luscious and beautiful and fun. I alternate between feeling stuck in a rut and being on the perfect path. Not sure if it's because I turned 30 a couple months ago, or just that my overachiever self is feeling a lion's roar of impatience, but I just want something to happen! Now, please!

After writing throughout my teens, I took about eight years off for, you know, LIFE and stuff. In 2009 I wiggled back into the waters of my lifelong passion for writing, and in 2010 I dove down deep and have been immersed ever since. I know I'll be writing my whole life, and that my stories are my humble offering to the world. I know that I have three great stories under my belt that will someday be published. I also know that it's super hard to get an agent, and that getting my work turned down doesn't mean it's not good or marketable, but that the business is incredibly subjective and hard to break into.

So now I am obsessively editing my latest book, the unique, luscious, beautiful, fun one. I will be querying it by the end of the year. And if I get yet another round of rejections, I think it's time I explore getting my foot in the door another way. I absolutely will be published by one of the Big 6 one day. It's my ultimate goal. But I'm fine with taking some intermediate steps to get there. I think I'd look at small and medium presses first, and also trying to get some short stories published in anthologies or reputable sci-fi/fantasy lit magazines. Something to give me credentials and get me on the way to connecting with my readers, sharing my stories.

Anyways, that's where I'm at right now. Feeling the waves of change and transformation pulling at my toes, calling me into new waters. Where will they lead me? Not sure. But something is going to happen.

What about you?

Are You a Profiler?

Wasn't there a show a few years ago called The Profiler? Okay, just Googled it and it was more like twelve years ago. Anyways, I'm not talking about profiling criminals, but profiling your characters. Unless of course some of your characters are criminals, in which case I am talking about that...

But anyways, before we get into that, a brief update since my last post. I last shared with you guys that I was a finalist in Deana Barnhart's GUTGAA agent contest, and alas, I did not get any agent requests for my middle grade novel Everdream. There were twelve agents in the contest, and of the twelve only three were middle grade agents, and of the three I knew that one didn't like stories with animals. So, I knew my chances were slim but of course it was still disappointing. I did however get two nice comments from agents, including one from the lovely Molly Jaffa of Folio Lit who said about my book "it does evoke some Tamora Pierce-esque imagery in my mind, and that's great!". So, that was pretty rad, since I adored Tamora Pierce as a teen and got to meet her at WFC.

And that does actually lead back to my main subject of character profiling. Because I just finished my third round of edits on Everdream, a kind of fine-tune/polish edit. All of the major edits have been done, and at this point I just need to shine, shine, shine it up before I start querying, which I'm pretty scared about since it'll be my third time crawling down into the query trenches. So, for my fourth round of edits, I'm going to do some character profiles, and then go through and add in those rich details that really make a story shine. I've never done an in-depth character profile, so I Googled them to find some good ones online. These are the best ones I found so far:

http://www.eclectics.com/articles/character.html

http://childrenspublishing.blogspot.com/2010/05/character-worksheet-part-1-is-your.html

http://www.squidoo.com/CharacterProfiles

The one on the Children's Publishing blog has a huge list of mannerisms and common phrases to choose from. Fun stuff. So, that's what's happening with me. I'm going to do profiles on my three main characters, and start edit round four. 

Speaking of rounds, have you checked out Write Club? It's up to Round 28 now, with another few weeks to go before the finals. It's fun to see the two entries that go head to head in each round, so head on over, check it out, and put in your vote. Check it out here.

Anybody got any character profile links to share? Have you checked out Write Club yet? 

Back to the Beginning

Before I get into the main portion of my post, I have a fun announcement. I'm one of the GUTGAA finalists over at Deana Barnhart's blog!! This past week anonymous judges voted on their top 50 queries and first 150 pages, and next week, 11 agents will pop over to Deana's blog and look at them. They can make requests if they want, so fingers crossed!! If you have time, pop over and cheer me on. My book is called Everdream.

Okay. On to what I'd originally planned. So, I've completed three novels now. Completed being the key word, since I've written many others, but not finished them (mostly in my teens). My first completed novel was Countless, about a witch. It wasn't strong enough, so I had to put it on the back burner last year and started writing Martinis with the Devil, about a vampire. Well, that book is very strong, but vamps are a super hard sell right now, so no luck with that so far. So, my third book is Everdream, a middle grade fantasy. GUTGAA is it's debut into the world; I hadn't started querying it yet. So, if I don't have any luck with the agents next week, I'll be jumping on the query train and will need a distraction.

So, I'm finally circling back to Countless, to rewrite it from third to first person. It's a great story, but I never got the voice strong enough. It was just missing that vital sparkle dust that takes a book from good to great. I realized a while back that I really should have written it in first all along. Not only do I write better in first, but the story goes so deep into my MC's thoughts and feelings that it really is best in first. And you know what? I am so super stoked to get back to those characters and the journey they're on! I adore them, and I can't wait to dive back in and make it shine like it deserves.

That's pretty much the plan for the fall. After that, who knows? No writing plans yet for next year. We'll just have to see how the literary cookie crumbles. What about you guys? What's your main project this autumn?

Pimp My Query

I'm participating in Deana Barnhart's Gearing Up To Get An Agent contest (aka GUTGAA)! Deana is a great blog friend, and even though she's now repped by Sarah LaPolla, she's still so awesome that she wants to pay it forward by hosting this contest. Go follow her if you're not already, and check out the contest. She has helpful contest links in the upper right hand corner of her blog.

And a quick update for those of you who read my last post on virus woes, I'm using hubby's computer this week while I wait for my Toshiba recovery disks to come in the mail. He's just going to wipe my hard drive. So, hopefully my cute little laptop will be healthy again soon.

Okay, so on to GUTGAA! I'm entering my recently completed upper middle grade fantasy. For those of you that don't know, middle grade is usually readers between 7 and 12, and upper middle grade is the oldest category, usually the 11 and 12-year-olds. This is my first full length middle grade novel, though I wrote a short novella for my son once.

So, what we're supposed to post is our query and the first 150 pages of the book. The judging round is next week, so please offer up your feedback so I can polish! Tell me what works and what doesn't. I really would appreciate any and all constructive criticism. Also, definitely let me know if you're participating in GUTGAA too, so I can make sure to visit your entry. I know I'm not going to be able to make it to all 200 or so entries, so that will guarantee I return your visit. And, please feel free to provide feedback even if you're one of my regular blog friends not in GUTGAA!

Query:

(Agent's proper salutation),

The last of the dreams are running out…

It’s been thirteen years since the Queen of Ravens cast the spell to strip all Taravel’s inhabitants of dreams. Or so she thought. Unbeknownst to her, there is one remaining who can dream unaided, twelve-year-old Eleven, the dreamseer.

An orphan, El has been raised in a black market dream caravan, caring for the ponies who grant people the ability to dream. The citizens of Taravel pay generously for a ride on the dream carousel, a chance to touch the magical, dream-inducing manes of the ponies. But when the ponies start losing their ability to spin dreams, El knows she must do something.

Accompanied by Dusti, a persnickety pony, and Ryn, the pirate-poet, El sets out to break the Queen’s spell. The three companions’ adventures take them from crystal pirate ships, to cities in the sky, to underground palaces and the home of a sea witch. Along the way El realizes there’s a lot more at stake than the ponies: a rebellion is brewing, the Queen has learned of her existence, and the truth about her parents is far different than she ever imagined. And worst of all, if El doesn’t free the dreams soon, they’ll be gone forever.

Everdream is a 50,000 word upper middle grade fantasy. Per your submission guidelines, I've included (whatever requested) below. Thank you for your time and consideration.



First 150 words:

Dreams seeped through the flaps of the tent, escaping into the sky like multi-colored ghosts. It was a busy night in the caravan. Though the metallic taste of thunder sat on my tongue and dark clouds pressed down over the crowd, we were still packed. The other merchants had begun to close up for the night. But we weren’t exactly ordinary merchants.

I counted bodies as I walked along the line of people snaking out the purple and white striped tent. Sixty-two. Eight-eight. Ninety-six. When I hit one hundred I cut in.

“Sorry, but this is the cap for the night.” I watched the opposite expressions of relief and disappointment on the faces of the two people I stood between. Groans and angrier protests rose around me.

I walked back to the tent as the crowd behind lucky number one hundred dispersed into the darkness.



Thanks for taking the time to read my entry! Good luck to all GUTGAA participants. And everybody have a great week!