Suburban (in)Sanity

Joy so close I can almost taste it

This ties in so well with an old post of mine from when the now 9 year old was what, maybe 5 years old? Entertaining walk down memory lane with that one.

But to get to the point, reverb10 today is talking about joy. I reflected on this for quite a while today (compared to my normal "crud it's 10 PM and I should do my post for the day and haven't even looked to see what the prompt was!" kind of thing. Because I care about you guys *that* much.)

2010 was the year we got a dog. That was pretty exciting and a joy-full event. Which reminds me, my friends Susan and Bill are getting a new dog today, I wonder how that's going... We also said goodbye to Selene, our old lady cat that my husband and I got a year after we started dating. She'd seen a lot of years, homes, and hiding places. Good times.

Hestia, the Replacement Cat is an adorable little gray bundle of purrs, and I am enjoying every minute of her silly pouncing and playing, curling up and purring, and otherwise chumming around. Today she played with a drinking straw for an hour straight, not kidding. One end of the hall to the next, behind the bathroom door then under it, around and over, roll, bat, roll splat. She was a riot.

You hardly need me to tell you again how my children bring me joy on a daily basis. I mean, what, don't you read my blog or anything?

But, no, I think the thing that when I look back on 2010 and think about that brought me the most joy was an accomplishment of my own. Something I worked hard on and completed. That is finish editing a novel (that I wrote during National Novel Writing Month in 2007) and put it in the mail to editors. That's right, I'm working to become a published novelist, and I had a smile from ear to ear for a solid day or two after the writer's workshop I attended in Oregon (which focused on preparing a marketing package for a novel and mailing it.) The final task of the workshop was to leave the hotel where it was held and stop at the post office on the way out of town to mail your submissions packages. I did it!

I have three other novels now, waiting in the wings. One of which I'm convinced is actually quite good (I'm working on that one next!) and I have ideas for plenty of other stories and fiction to write. I'm still working on getting better at the story - the plot is what keeps holding me back (if I write without knowing pretty well what happens in the end, I meander far too much and can't stay focused, but knowing what happens in the end often takes a bit of meandering and writing to figure it out...thus it's a bit of a cycle...working on this in 2011...)

But in the meantime, I have five novel packages in the mail at the moment, five rejections (in varying shades of personalization - some just a form postcard, others an actual note to me) and a solid grasp of what is needed to market a novel. Hoping that 2011 is my year for the actual sale (and if not, I'm going to put the book out on my own mid-year as an ebook and POD book, I think.)

Make no small plans

for they have no magic to stir men's blood. (In case you were curious, it's a Daniel Burnham quote, -- at least according to this editorial in the NYT from 1999 which I am surprised to find online. I adapted it slightly. I think the real quote is "little plans" and I just didn't think the word little had the emotional resonance of "small" in the title.)

It's Action day for Reverb10. I'm not entirely sure what is meant by the prompt, but I'm going to go ahead and make this a New Year's Resolution post.

In no particular order, and with no fanfare lest I find myself on January 2 having broken every one of these, here's what I'm going to work on in 2011.

1. More home organization per my post of the other day enumerating 11 things to get rid of in 2011. There's a pack-n-play in the upstairs closet...and a cool particle-board castle that's big enough for a 3 year old to play in...and a basket of junk on my dresser from last year when we got the bedroom painted...and the summer crap is still in the laundry room and needs to be swapped out for the winter crap, etc.

2. Continue working out 20 mins every day, rain or shine, yadda yadda. I'm close to 3 months already and it's not hard, though would be harder if I were working more hours. DH is just about to round on a year of 30 minutes each and every day including the day after the marathon and days when he travels overseas and has to be creative about the definition of a "day." (If he can do it...)

3. Make money from writing. Somehow, have someone pay me for my writing. This is a many-pronged item. I will continue to submit the short stories I have to markets. I will continue to keep my main novel package in the mail. If by June it hasn't sold, I'll self-publish it both ebook and POD format. I will also put up a few more short stories in ebook form, using a psuedonym for "grown-up" work to differentiate it from my YA author name. I'd love to get some magazine articles or other non-fiction under my belt but have not had much success when I've tested the waters before. Might be going at it a bit wrong, reevaluate and figure out what to do there. Also prep novel #2 (A Star to Lead Me) for marketing, get it in the mail, too.

4. I should probably be virtuous here and say I should eat less salt, drink less, or cut out the blow (kidding, kidding!) but I want to stick with resolutions I feel fairly confident I can make progress against. Goals, versus deadlines. Things that I can be working towards.

Last year I had an ill-fated resolution to "go to bed by 10:30" (which I progressively adjusted up to 11, then midnight, then dawn.) Those of you who know me well know this is really really really funny, but I was going to try! Sad thing is, my brain just doesn't want to settle until close to midnight, and putting that resolution down and then failing a few weeks in was pretty demotivating, so I want to avoid that this year.

Thus there will be no extremely-difficult-to-execute-on resolutions like salt reduction, caffeine reduction, or even weight loss. If I keep up my 20 mins of exercise a day and don't lose weight, at least I'll know I'm MUCH healthier (I already do feel healthier with my 3 months of it. I feel like a million bucks. Even when I got a cold in October, it was mild, I was able to walk each day anyway, and I felt like I got better *much* more quickly than I have in the past. Usually a cold will knock me down a few times a year but this was no big deal, so I'm going to maintain my presumption that 20 minutes (at the very least, many days it's 60, and my typical workout is at least 30) of exercise a day will contribute to a healthy me and that's the best thing I can do for myself right now. If you say "at your age" so help me god I will... :D

Okay, three resolutions, all keepable (though the household organization is going to take some discipline and quite a lot of work.) How about you? What's on your resolution list for 2011?

image again from morguefile and cracked me up, thanks!

Where doth wisdom lie?

Prompt is about wisdom today, which is funny for many reasons. Short people are extremely good sources of wisdom, they're always discovering some important life lesson like pushing up your sleeves when doing the dishes helps keep your shirt dry (and then they like to reflect on this lesson and seem so satisfied with themselves when they can put it into words and describe how they'll do things differently NEXT time, even while the water drips all the way down the front of the cabinets into a puddle on the floor that you slip in next time you walk by.)

But the specific prompt says to write about the wisest decision I've made this year, which is difficult because I'm a mom. I make wise decisions EVERY day. And about eighty unwise ones (reference aforementioned unsupervised dishwashing, for ex.)

As I've been talking about in other recent posts, I have felt so much more comfortable in my own skin here in my late 30s, so much more me, confidence that had sometimes eluded me in the past seems easier to come by. Is that wisdom? Perhaps? Or just age, hard to tell.

I think the *smartest* decision I made this year was to finally commit to writing as a potential career opportunity for me, and attend a writing workshop (which I highly recommend to any serious writers - Dean Wesley Smith's writing workshops are excellent) focused on marketing my 2007 Nanowrimo novel. Whether it was a wise decision, well, I suppose it will be but needs some time to be borne out before we see how wise it was. Just today I mailed three more novel packages to editors, so I now have 6 novel packages in the mail. I have been rejected three times, but the rejections clearly indicate they have read my work, and one even encouraged me to send my next project her way, so I'm satisfied. I keep them in a file so that when I go all JK Rowling one day I can pull these letters out and laugh.

I have to tie this back to the age thing, too, though. Which is interesting now that I think of it. I'm not one of those people who always knew I wanted to be a writer. A shockingly large number of writers are like this, but not me. I don't remember writing much of anything as a child. I kept journals on and off through most of my teen years (and carbon copies of letters I wrote to friends back home when we lived overseas - can you even imagine? But the only computer in the house was shared and there was NO WAY I was going to let my mom see that I had a crush on so-and-so or whatever. But even then I had a compulsion around keeping what I wrote, so I started keeping carbon copies. Literal carbon copies, using carbon paper and everything.)

Here I am now, though, four years into writing as a hobby/passion/something I really love to do. (It was my 2007 New Year's Resolution if you were curious.) And I've got a novel in the mail, a short story up on amazon (looking for a fun, light read? Buy it! You can get it from Barnes and Noble too, and Smashwords which feeds into all the other ebook stores including Apple's.) I've also got three other novels written (some worse than others) and a mess of short stories (some of which are in the mail, some of which I think I will just self-publish to create a few collections.)

Before my mid-30s I'm not sure I could have made a conscious choice to pursue a hobby and have such traction (I won't call it success yet, though from many indicators - sheer work output alone - I have met with some success...I'm waiting for a real publishing contract to call myself a successful writer.) That seems wise to me, though to be honest it was also a coping strategy since I was the non-working at-home parent at the time and feeling just a tinge toward insane. However, realizing I needed a solid hobby/life direction/new way of thinking about the world and actively pursuing it - that's wise, too, I think.

Back to the workshop, by deciding to go, committing to go, I forced myself to finish editing the novel I wrote in 2007 (that I had been halfheartedly editing for ages), I forced myself to actually spend money on my hobby, which is a form of validation in and of itself though heaven hopes it pays back at some point in the very near future, I put my introverted self into a setting with a bunch of people I'd never met before (turns out that small-group thing isn't terribly intimidating to me anymore, certainly not when you consider that most writers are geeky introverts, too, it's like being at a programming class but they talk more.) I had a great time, I learned EXACTLY what I set out to learn (for instance, I learned about what belongs in a query letter and blogged about it) and I made new connections with a bunch more writers, some of whom are farther along the path than me and happy to share their knowledge.

Now I just need to get this first novel sold. And then the next one. And the next one.

How about you? What decision of yours from the last year was the wisest? Or the unwisest, that might be funnier... 

Today's post - what keeps you from writing?

So I'm kind of cheating in that I've reworded today's Reverb10 prompt. I'm calling it - what keeps you from writing? And, having recently expanded our animal family to include this little angel, I have to say she's among the list of things that get in the way of my writing:

She's really quite adorable, even when she's sitting on all my notes making it hard for me to see anything. Yes, I'm an abuser of post-it-notes, get over it.

Interestingly, in the course of getting Hestia (the keeper of the hearth and home, the Greek Goddess who gave up her seat on Olympus to Dionysus in order to tend the hearth) I have realized something important about myself.

I am a cat person.

Deep down, for reals, I'm a cat person. We got a dog in January and she really is an awesome dog and I love her very much and she's fantastic and loves us and is deeply devoted to me. But. Cats are what makes me smile, makes my heart warm up just to look at her (to be fair, I warm up just to see my darling Daisy Dog, too, but not quite to this extent.) Maybe this will fade as Hestia exits the kitten stage, but unless she sprouts fangs, begins biting and pottying out of the litter box (in which case she'll be in grave danger of becoming Kitty Soup) I really don't imagine this.

Some of my other typical distractions from writing:

Are these two little darlings, who are gorgeous and lovely and old enough to entertain themselves for hours on end but somehow fail to do so when I'm trying to write.

Is this a problem? The writing prompt for today suggests we consider whether we can eliminate the things that keep us from writing.

As per my post from yesterday, it's all a very fine balance, I think.

My kids won't be young forever. They won't want to talk to me this much forever. Their needs won't be this intense forever. In fact, their needs are already so noticeably different from their needs when they were babies that I find myself advising my friends with younger children that "this, too, shall pass." That there's no pause button on raising children, unfortunately, and we have to just adapt and adjust as time goes on.

But you know what's very interesting and cool? My youngest (almost 7) writes *all the time.* She's got books stuffed in every nook and cranny of the arts and crafts desk, books of her own design, her own making. I joke that she's already put in a good 8000 of the 10k hours Malcolm Gladwell suggests are necessary to become an expert/outlier. Wanna bet she's the one who becomes a world-famous author? I'd put money down on that today, and she's only in first grade. If that's my only legacy, I'm cool with that.

On being busy, in all its flavors and colors

One word to encapsulate 2010, that's what today's Reverb prompt is.

And all I can think of is busy. Busy busy busy.

My friends with kids older than me warned me this day would come, but I never quite understood them. Maybe it was their "Oh, you think you're busy NOW" delivery, or my own naivete? Or perhaps just a belief that I am the master of my domain, the captain of my own soul, and thus I can choose to be as busy or as not-busy as I like.

Ha ha ha. Oh that's nice. I've blogged about activities for kids before - how much IS too much? And I still don't know the answer, even many months and several different activities later. And it's a question that I can't seem to answer for the kids OR myself, that's the sticky wicket.

It's not just the mom taxi that keeps me busy (though between dance, gymnastics 2x/week plus monthly meets, baseball 3x/week, softball 3x/week, short-lived basketball 2x/week, various art classes, band, theater camp, regular summer camp, swim lessons, piano lessons, and all of the associated running-around that those activities create the need for, like baseball cleats and dance photos, and clarinets, I do find that the car's mileage continues to creep up.)

But I do all these other things, too. It's a constant balancing act, trying to prioritize and decide which things bring me the most enjoyment, where I feel my talents are best used, what things fill me up instead of just depleting me.

I'm getting better at this, but am still just busy. I plan all the family vacations/travel (there was a lot this year - Florida in March/April, D.C. in July, Wisconsin in August, my trip to OR for a writing workshop in October, New York and Kansas City in November) and am chief in charge of all food purchasing and prep in our house. We got a dog in January, and until recently had a very sick cat with complicated medical needs at home (instead now we have a 4 month old kitten who thinks licking knuckles while I type is FUN, and the cursor is some elaborate and very entertaining game designed just for her.) While I have a litter box man, pet food and daily care is mostly on me.

I'm a very active volunteer breastfeeding counselor, putting in 2-5 hours/week in my work there. I helped run the school's auction again this year, though unofficially which is one of those things I do well - being unofficially officially involved, lol. In the crunch time it was up to 20 or 30 hrs/week (plus plus), but for much of the early part of the year it was 5-10.

The garden doesn't plant itself, though I do mostly ignore it once it's planted. We've had a number of rather aggravating household systems failures this year (the water/well drama is still going on!), which require someone to be home and in regular communication with some service provider of some sort. Me. 

I'm a co-president of the Parent Association board at the kids' school this year, which is much more work than I expected (though not terribly hard work, but work that takes time.) And I volunteer in other ways at school as much as I can, and in ways I think are most helpful like attending Open Houses as an experienced parent to answer questions, or helping with the Book Fair because I'm such a big book geek. I think my tally of books read this year is up past 50 (counting the audio books the kids and I listen to in the car - something's got to take the edge off all that dull suburban driving! Listening to Septimus Heap or The Prydain Chronicles definitely takes the edge waaay off.)

And somewhere in there I managed to write another novel (a piece of crapola one yet, but I have faith in my ability to whip it into shape now that the bones are down,) edit and polish another, attend a workshop for and submit that polished one out to the great wide world of publishing, e-publish a short story, and write countless blog posts and little bits of ideas on scraps of paper and corners of notebooks and around the margins of work-related notes.

Oh, yeah, and I picked up another project, actual paying work that is occasionally difficult to shoehorn in among the other things that occupy my time (though work naturally gets highest priority given that people actually PAY me to do those things, whereas every other thing on my list is currently unpaid.)

So do I feel justified in being busy? I think writing it out helps me give shape to the busy, makes me feel like it's not just a smoke screen. Because I have often encountered people in my life who I think use "busy" as an excuse to avoid things, not have deep relationships, not develop their own interests, because they're just so "busy."

But then again, who am I to judge? Someone else might look at this list and wonder why I don't work more hours, why I haven't cleaned off my desk in a hundred thousand years, why is the basement is still stacked with paperwork and crud from our move 7 years ago, or why my children sometimes wear stained clothes.

The answer here isn't more Busy. It's the People Before Things answer that I love so so much. Yeah, we might be busy, but I can tell you all the books my kids have read in the last year, the names of all of their classmates (cheating a little, they attend a small school,) what brand of peanut butter is preferred, and how much washing is necessary before child A can interact with friend B who has a deathly allergy to peanut butter.

But I can also talk plot details and characterization in all of my active works-in-progress. I can speak intelligently about the latest research in breastfeeding, the current trends in the e-publishing business, the state of eLearning authoring tools, and the impact new technologies like the iPad are having on the world. Being a sane person with interests outside my children's (as much as I love them and cherish them) has been one of my goals of mothering, and I feel I have accomplished that goal well. However, in the process, I've become, well, rather Busy.

Next year, my goal is to look back on this prompt and write my 2011 word. For next year, I plan to aim for Balanced.

The death of newspapers? Maybe the paper-versions...

People moan and groan about the death of newspapers all the time these days. Oh the kvetching! There's even an entire website devoted to the Newspaper Death Watch. All the media houses I like and appreciate, as well as some I don't, talk about it.

It's to the point where honestly some day soon I expect to go out the door to get the newspaper [1] and find that they just stopped printing it last night.

But then...how is it that about 30% of the windows open in my browser right now (which is 30% of a considerable number...I have an addiction to opening windows to "read later" - soon. ish.) are links to not just any news site, but one particular one? Interestingly enough, the local paper (which we receive each day and read) is NOT the site that I have open, but rather the New York Times.

From articles about Facebook hackers to random sh!t from the Freakonomics guys' blog about parents being addicted to parenting (snort, snicker) to cerebral stuff like this about your brain on metaphors, I'm addicted to reading news articles! From actual news sources! And even aside from the New York Times, I read articles on NPR.org, The Huffington Post, and all sorts of other places. The least-read sites for me are my local sites, but of course when I want information on a local event I need those sites to work, to have the information I want exactly when I want it.

But honestly, what is all the malarkey about the death of newspapers? If they want to narrowly define their business as print, perhaps (and that might explain why I don't have a bunch of links to my local Chicago Tribune open right now, they aren't as prevalent on the web it seems to me) but if they can conceive of themselves the way we consumers have *always* conceived of them - as purveyors of information and opinions - there's more of a role for them now in this big confusing morass we call the Internet than ever before. We need these information curators, the collectors, the sifters, the people who help us find the good stuff among the ten thousand offers to "lose belly fat with this one simple but wacky tip!" - now more than ever!

 

[1] Okay, this is a lie. My husband brings in the paper almost every day. When he's travelling, it causes me no end of consternation to have to get the paper myself - brr!

Reading with Teen Reads Week

Did you know it was the Young Adult Library Services Association's Teen Reads Week? I didn't, but now I do thanks to a great post by sassymonkey on BlogHer.

I posted a lot of this in the comments thread on her post, but then I realized it was worth it's own place on my blog, too.

It's true. I read children's literature. Lots and lots and lots of it. It's far and above my preferred content to read. Now, I'm a writer, an aspiring writer of children's literature, so part of my interest is professional, but let's be honest. Writers write what they love, and I love Young Adult and Middle-Grade fiction.

I've never felt a need to apologize for it, I think I have managed to find circles of friendships where others are reading the same kinds of things I'm reading. It is partly due to the fact that my social circles largely revolve around my children's school and their activities, and are based on the ages of my children, but it's been almost like a secret club membership, too. When I get talking kids books with other enthusiasts, the non-kids-book-readers are left out (for once! usually it's the other way around, where my eyes glaze over while someone talks about Water for Elephants or Lovely Bones or some other depressing romp through the roses.) And we kids-book lovers can go on and on and on.

Turns out there's a lot to read and enjoy in children's fiction! And many different paths to take. I personally take the speculative fiction path, which because of the lack of science fiction published in YA and MG, means mostly fantasy. Nothing wrong with that, but one of many reasons I write YA sci-fi is because there just isn't anything out there to read in YA sci-fi, and I want to read it (I've always wanted to read it, ever since finding my first Heinlein book on the shelf of my 8th grade school library.)

But I have other reasons for reading YA/MG. Here are a few of them:

1) It's less of a commitment to read YA/MG. I read the excellent fantasy series The Assassin's Apprentice early this year and it took me the ENTIRE month of January, plus some, to read 3 books. I prefer to be onto a new topic/book/concept at least once a week, preferably every 5-6 days.

2) I prefer the general tenor and tone of YA/MG. While dark themes are covered (Hunger Games in particular gets very psychological and dark) they generally (though I thought HG was the exception) end in a positive/upbeat way. The authors don't seem to feel the need to fill the stories with "it sucked, then he died" over and over and over, though there are some authors who do this who I tend to avoid because of it (or ones who put the main character in peril time and again with no break. Too tiring to read!)

3) There is some FANTASTIC fiction going on in YA and MG. Truly wonderful stories, wonderfully told, interesting ideas. I read science fiction and fantasy almost exclusively and the YA/MG writers understand how to create an abnormal situation yet make it completely intelligible to the reader. Grown-up speculative fiction writers sometimes forget this slight detail!

My favorites, in no particular order:

The Prydain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander, Anything by Shannon Hale, anything by Scott Westerfeld (including his high-YA stuff about late teens/early twenties kids like So Yesterday and Peeps), Diana Wynn Jones (oldie but a goodie), Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, Of course Harry Potter, Twilight, and Percy Jackson series, The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia Wrede, Septimus Heap series by Angie Sage, The Magic Thief books by Sarah Prineas, Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver, The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart, Blue Sword and Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley (those two are my all-time favorite YA books) and the Princess Bride (the novel is excellent.) .

One way we get the time to read more is by listening to them on audio books. We listen in the car (even short trips - because 5 minutes a day times about 3-6 trips/day equals plenty of reading time. It's also good practice for the kids to be able to pick back up where we left off a day or two before, remembering the plot and characters.) We listen while I cook dinner, or while doing other hands-intensive but mindless chores in the house like cleaning counters or organizing closets.

Shannon Hale's books are generally done on audio by Full Cast Audio, which uses...you know, full casts to do their audio books. Each character is played by a different voice actor (or a good actor using different voices/accents.) Way cool. The Golden Compass audiobook was done by a cast as well and I really liked that. The Prydain Chronicles narrator is EXCELLENT, as is Jim Dale who reads Harry Potter (as well as the Peter and the Starcatchers series, which didn't catch my fancy as much.)

I can't say enough about great children's fiction. Some of my writer friends believe that children's fiction is the only growing category, since a good book or series like HP, Twilight, and Hunger Games will cross over into the adult market (but you rarely see an adult book cross over into children's fiction, The Book Thief excepted, though it's such a borderline book since it features an eleven year old protagonist, but being narrated by death during World War II, it's really an adult work that is appropriate for more mature YA readers.)

Still not convinced? Okay, then I dare you. Try The Blue Sword, or Ender's Game, or The Book of Three (first in Prydain.) Try Dealing with Dragons (First in Enchanted Forest Chronicles) and try not to laugh at the way Dragons keep princesses in that fitional world. Immerse yourself into an ancient setting with Wolf Brother, or try to keep a straight face while reading The Princess Bride. See if you can finish The Princess Academy (Shannon Hale) without your heart racing along with Miri, the main character. I dare you to not get sucked into the Golden Compass. Try not to be surprised at the turns of events in Westerfeld's Uglies. I dare you not to cry at The Book Thief's climax. And honestly, I'm just picking out speculative fiction, there's a ton out there that's more mainstream like Chasing Vermeer and Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie (or anything by Sonnenblick,) and mysteries to solve in 39 Clues, honestly at this point you've got to stop me because I could go all night.

So what about you? Did I convince you? What of your favorites did I neglect to mention?

 

Sidenote: Photo credit: iStockphoto via MS Office's clip art online gallery. I have no idea if I should be crediting/referencing that when I use their images, since I own the licenses to the software through which I gain access to the website. Would appreciate any insights...

Writing a Query Letter to Pitch a Novel

I recently attended a novel marketing workshop in Oregon conducted by Dean Wesley Smith, with help from Kristine Kathryn Rusch. While I had some idea about what was needed to sell a novel, honestly I was clueless.

If you ever have the opportunity to attend one of Kris and Dean's workshops - do it. There is no substitute for an experienced professional writer sharing their thoughts, ideas, tricks, and tips with you. That's not even counting the benefit you get from networking with a number of other writers at a similar career level.

You don't have to agree with everything Dean says (though it is generally simpler, since he, like many seasoned professionals, has a low tolerance for argument about things he's seen for himself over the years) but you can gain a ton of insights about the publishing industry today (literally today, as he's constantly tinkering with his workshop content to suit today's specific publishing environment.) And you can identify what in your novel marketing package is working, what needs to be tweaked, and how best to present yourself to a publisher. By the end of the workshop, you will have your novel in the mail to at least two editors.

If you're looking for input on how to land an agent, you may wish to attend a different workshop. This was focused on how to get your novel package dressed up in business dress and in front of actual New York editors, ones who are in the position to buy your book.

A note on the "business dress" of your novel package. Kris, Dean's wife and a highly accomplished writer, says that getting your novel package into the right manuscript format with the right information in it in the right order is like getting dressed up for a job interview. Your packet *is* an interview. You wouldn't show up at a job interview in your pajamas, so your novel package should conform to standard practices so that it rises above the novel packages submitted on crayon or in wacky fonts. You don't want to be the guy in the waiting room in the clown suit, right?

Query Letters

So query letters. There's a general flow to them. Like any business letter, at the top is your name/address/contact information block. Be sure to include a phone number AND an email address. Dean recommends against using the free email accounts like hotmail or gmail, saying they are notoriously difficult to get through to New York Publishers. That's fodder for a whole 'nother post, though, so for now just make sure you have a valid email address up top that you anticipate having active for a minimum of the next 6 months (since your package may not get read immediately.)

Next comes the editor's name, company name, and mailing address. While some publishers accept email submissions, snail mail is still the standard.

BIG IMPORTANT POINT: Make sure that when you list the editor's name up top, you also match your salutation to the editor's NAME AND GENDER. I got the gender right, but accidentally included the salutation to the *previous* editor on one letter. I have to assume that query packet is going into the trash, as that's what I would do if I received a resume/cover letter addressed to the wrong person in the business world.

Let's get into the meat of the query letter. Important point: One page for the letter. One page MAX. And leave enough whitespace so that you can breathe. You can use either indented paragraphs (print standard) or the white line between each new paragraph (the web standard.) Personally I prefer the white line for readability so I include a blank line between each paragraph, that also adds to the overall impression of whitespace. Remember, standard 1 inch margins around, no header/footer, single spaced. You can use a different/smaller font for the letter, but remember it should still be normal-looking and READABLE. You're presenting yourself as a professional, someone an editor will give money to. Don't monkey around with fonts.

What should you talk about in the letter? The thing I think many writers are shy about is talking about THEMSELVES. But this is a little counter-intuitive. When you're selling your novel, you're not just selling these words you wrote on a page, you're selling yourself as a writer of stories, as someone who has things to say, someone to have a relationship with. Ideally your editor will be interested in more than just the one novel you're offering them in this query letter.  (However, in general it's not such a good idea to try to pitch multiple-volume novels, particularly if you're a first-time novelist. You can have those other novels/outlines in the wings, but leave them in your back pocket for now.)

Depending on the kind of case you make for yourself and why YOU wrote this book, why YOU'RE the best person to tell this particular story, you might consider leading with a paragraph about yourself. If you've had any contact with this editor before, definitely mention that early as well ("You considered my novel XYZ and suggested I send you other projects...." or "We met at ComicCon at XYZ restaurant with ABC writer.")

After this (or first if you don't have a specific personal opening) - you should talk about your book. This paragraph (just one!) is third-person past-tense, announcer voice. Imagine the voice-over teaser for the next episode of a hot TV show. "When Carrie uncovers a plot to overthrow her pre-school through her teddy bear, she's more than a little surprised, particularly since she didn't realize she could read. But this is the way of it for a pre-school super-heroine, and is just the beginning of Carrie's adventures. Will she be able to save the day, her school, her teddy, and still get home by naptime?"

Think about what your book is ABOUT, not what happens in it. What role does your main character play in the book? One way of thinking about this paragraph is to think about your main Character, in a Setting, with a Problem.

Have I mentioned lately how Dean helped me crystallize this thinking? I knew these things before, but it wasn't until the novel workshop that I really understood them and feel like I can practice them outside the boundaries of this one novel.

If you haven't already promoted yourself in your letter, now is your chance. Who are you? Why are you special? Why are you the best person on earth to tell this particular story? If you have any publication credits, mention them here. Even blogging can be a useful credit if you have a niche blog specialty or garner a lot of readers. But keep it brief. A few lines. What's your personal hook? The thing that makes you interesting? One workshop participant stated he had nothing interesting to say about himself, until he mentioned that he has held sixty-six jobs in his life. That's interesting! Someone like that has stories to tell. I'm intrigued. Be intriguing!

Next up, mention your novel's title, length (there are some exceptions to mentioning length but it usually needs to be up front), and the fact that it's completed. Important! Genre can be mentioned, but in edge cases where your novel might be a suspense novel or a mystery or a thriller, there's no need to mention it. Your short blurb and synopsis (coming later) should tell the editor what they need in order to understand how your book would fit with their line. It could be that they're over-bought on mystery right now, but if they market your book as suspense it would fit well. Don't pigeonhole yourself unnecessarily.  [1]

Lastly, tell the editor what you've included (a sample of your book - typically somewhere in the 15-30 page range, a few chapters, enough to get the flavor of your writing, and a synopsis. Full plot synopsis where you tell the major events of the book including the ending!)

Don't forget to thank the editor for their time/consideration! Depending on the flow, you can also mention that you'd be happy to send the full novel for their consideration (this should go without saying, but it's an important step so the editor understands it is complete.)

Leave a few blank spaces. Then SIGN your letter - in blue ink if possible so it's clear you actually took the time/trouble to print your letter and sign it. And then get it in the mail. Dean recommends priority mail flat rate envelopes. They self-seal (do NOT add tape!) and are becoming the standard way people in the publishing industry interact. It's a little under $5 to mail a packet, which is a reasonable investment. You're a professional, after all. Right?

More in this series soon. But remember - if you have the chance to attend a Kris/Dean workshop - go!

[1] Note: In my case, I explicitly tell both the age-range and genre of my novel, because the age range is dictated by the age of my character. She is 14, that makes the book a YA book even though it's written with tame themes, her age alone categorizes it as YA. I further specified that it's YA Science Fiction, because there is very little in the market in this space, so I'm drawing attention to it because I hope to find that editor who is just DYING to find some good YA Sci-Fi since there is very little of it. I may be pigeonholing myself a bit, but there's really no other way to dress up this particular pig, seeing as how it's set on a space station and features a high schooler as the main character.

Science Fiction geeks as technology prognosticators

Search engines, virtual worlds, the Internet — ever get the feeling you're living in a science fiction fantasy? Well indeed you are. For more than a century, inventors have been driven to create what sci-fi writers have boldly imagined before.

via www.npr.org

This is one of many reasons why I write science fiction. The only difference is that in my case, nobody was writing what I wanted to read back when I was discovering science fiction (stories about what it was like to LIVE there, BE there, amidst all this technology that changed things, but didn't change things.) So *that's* what I write. Science fiction about being there, living there, wherever, whenever, or however technology-assisted "there" is.

The mom angst that is so hard to explain

My husband and I celebrated our wedding anniversary this weekend (14 years, thank you very much. I am relatively sure there are people who attended our wedding who now owe us significant sums of cash, seeing as how we beat the over/under estimates on our relationship's duration...)

We had our usual dinner at this wonderful fondue place in Chicago called Geja's. We've anniversaried there since the first anniversary and it's always yummy. Our very awesome friends watched the kids for us, which amounted to a 22-hour playdate since the friends' kids are the same ages as ours. We stayed downtown at The Sutton Place, which was a lovely hotel and welcomed our furry four-footed friend (we don't have a simple way to handle overnights with the dog just yet, so for now she comes with us. Kind of silly, but it's also cute because people just fawn over her, she's pretty and unusual - most people haven't ever seen a whippet.)

The evening was lovely, the food excellent as always, drunk guy at the next table provided train-wreck style entertainment most of the evening, but I have this funk that I've been trying (and failing) to explain to my husband the last couple days.

I'm torn. I have such mixed feelings. I love love love downtown Chicago, with a passion I usually reserve for chocolate products. We used to live downtown. 

 

I loved living in the city, but similar to the way a pet looks at you when "it's time" and you know it's time to let go, when it was time for us to let go and move out of the city I was ready. It was time. It had something to do with not wanting our children to ask what the drug dealers on the street were doing, not wanting to put up with the challenges of raising a family in the crowds and chaos of the city, but also being closer to family, being able to have room to stretch, grow, breathe, dig in the dirt, learn to ride bikes. Something more similar to what both my husband and I had growing up.

And truly, we live in an amazing house, on a big 'ol plot of land with trees and a swingset and a brick paver patio and a crazy amount of wildflowers. We're doing our part to reforest and reprairie this little patch of former farmland. I'm not complaining about what I have, but what I haven't. 

We used to live downtown. Take the el everywhere. Eat out at non-chain restaurants on a regular basis. Meet friends for drinks on the spur of the moment. Bike to the lakefront. Get to be known at the neighborhood bar.

I don't miss being the young, childless person. That person isn't compatible with who I am now, but, well, yeah, I kind of miss being that childless person. It's a weird ache. A pining that makes no sense, because I really am content with my role as mom, and recognize already that as the kids grow up I am free to pursue and extend myself in ways I might not have anticipated (case in point, I didn't even know I wanted to BE a writer until the youngest was three, but now I can't really imagine a lot of other futures for me that don't include writing.) 

I know that this is just a period of time in my life. A waystation, a passing moment. This period of time where the primary thought that occupies most of my day is related to two small people who still rely on me for most things.

At the moment, though, this is my life. Some days it's hard to remember it won't always be this way.

And I wonder about that young, childless person. That idiotic girl. She was fun, but driven. She designed these great learning systems. Other people wanted to talk to her because she knew that style of design and was good at it. She had expertise.

Sure, I have quite a lot of expertise in many areas now - lego de-connecting and board-game-instruction-interpreting not the least of my newfound skills. I do a lot of grown-upish things now, too (breastfeeding counseling, working with the PA at the kids' school, other volunteer work, and paid contract work, too.)

But after a night downtown seeing all kinds of people who seem so much more fabulous than me, who seem occupied with things beyond legos and board games...I wonder, is this all I'm known for? Is it enough?