I don’t write to be famous, I don’t write to be known, I write because I am and I want to be read. How sad to fill a room with paintings no one sees or play music no one hears. Writing is talking without sound, singing without score and dancing without movement and yet, it is all of them. It is a solitary art conjured from thought and expressed by the need to communicate.

HEAD SLAPS, SPEED BUMPS and LIGHTBULBS, one woman's WTF, oops and ah-ha moments of life.

They were published once, and as every writer knows, once is not enough.




Tuesday, January 14, 2014

I have'nt given up on help arriving, just yet



Yesterday I sent the full manuscript of my first novel to an editor for a look-see. I’ve made those pages into as proper a book as I can make it without professional/divine intervention. The editor asked me to list some of the agents I have already queried. (She said my query sucked. Her words not mine but the same meaning.) I was at a loss to recall who I have queried over the past seven years, so I went into my ‘sent’ file (on this computer, I have two others as boat moorings stored in the attic) and started to list the names.

When I got to twenty-five agent names I started to cry. Some of them I queried twice and one agent, a true gentleman allowed me three chances. All the hopes and dreams regarding that book, all the ups and downs of clicking send and checking emails came back. When the list reached in the high thirties I became embarrassed. Admitting that my query produced no requests for fulls and only a few partials was beyond heartbreaking. The partials, which garnered no further requests, at least got me to re-write, not just edit, the opening pages well over a dozen times. Only a few members of my writing group have read the entire book.

One of the members of our group is a college level creative writing teacher; she loved the book and said it was “the one.” My first reader, a very astute non-smoke-blowing truth teller also loves the book. I have clung to those opinions as if I am splayed across the bottom of a flipped boat in the middle of the north Atlantic. It’s cold and rough out here, and lonely. I have been waiting on the bottom so long that I fear all my paddling has been for nothing. All my efforts for fiction survival hinge on one set of eyes to spot me floating in this see of  saline.

I haven't just been waiting. I've worked hard on other stuff and achieved a modicum of small successes elsewhere, but that book, "the one" is my ship.

Is that a rescue helicopter on the horizon or is it someone throwing stones?

I am adrift. Where are you?

4 comments:

  1. I hope this works out...assuming the list of those you've queried is so they aren't approached again. I'm hoping you get the life ring tossed. Keep paddling till then.

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  2. Yes to the life ring Donna but I keep thinking she'll say it's crap, don't waste your time. My list of agents is so extensive that I think I'm left with some guy with a computer and a phone book somewhere east of New Yorphilabostochicaangles.

    BTW Caroline sends good wishes your way.

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  3. Well, don't give up just yet...you might be surprised. When I thought my writing was the worst, is when it was the best...and vice versa...(unfortunately) if that makes any sense.

    I love Caroline, she's (as Averil would say) the bomb diggity bomb.

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  4. AN UPDATE
    My editorial letter was very promising.
    She loved the story and suggested a change in POV so I am on to playing God with words in a world I created eight years ago.

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