I'm finding out, just like my child, I have very little control over how my books are going to grow up.

I've written a total of four and three quarters novels at this point, not including my current WIP.  The first three and the three quarters ones have been permanently shelved for various reasons, but writing each of them was a different experience from the others.  However, those experiences weren't as disparate as what happened with my most recently completed novel and what's happening with my WIP.

My fourth novel, Seeds, the one I'm currently submitting to agents, was an absolute joy to write.  My mind dwelled on it almost constantly and my brain was forever coming up with new scenes to add and new ways to tweak old scenes.  I opened my computer every night with a sense of anticipation and couldn't wait to see what my fingers churned out next.  I loved to immerse myself in the world and in the characters and usually had to tear myself out, bleary eyed and dizzy with exhaustion, around two in the morning.  When I finished it I handed it off to my beta readers with a sense of excitement, hoping they'd enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.  And they did.

My current WIP is turning out to be a very different kind of writing journey.  For one thing the inspiration for the story slammed into me one day while I was cleaning my kitchen and not even remotely interested in coming up with a new idea for a book.  By the time I worked my way through my house in my weekly ritual of Saturday cleaning, I had the entire plot worked out in my brain start to finish.  I don't write like that.  I'm not an outline kind of girl.  I get an idea.  I start a story and I discover the twists and turns of the plot along the way.  This book, though, has a two page long outline, hurried and harried and sometimes a little incoherent, but an outline nontheless.

This book draws from a traumatic time in my life.  It isn't the first thing I've written that does that, but it's the worst. I know the world that my WIP is set in, know it intimately because it was my world for several years.  I don't like revisiting that world.  I don't like my protagonist because there is so much in her of the me that I was before I got my head screwed on right.  I have to go deep to remember what I felt like and experienced then so I can truthfully and evocatively bring that to my hypothetical reader. It's hard and it hurts.  I also have a sense that I'm holding myself back from the story because it's too difficult and frightening to go all the way in and I know that will show in the finished product, so I force myself to go as deep as possible.  I don't write every day because I can't stand to.  I have to write a chunk then give myself a few days to recover.  Usually within three or four days my brain will inform me, by coming up with a good piece of dialogue or an excellent metaphor or fleshing out part of the chapter that I'm currently working on that I'm ready to write.  Then I dive in and start the whole process all over again.

The strange thing is, on the surface, these two works of fiction are essentially the same; words strung together to form sentences, sentence to form paragraphs, paragraphs to fill up pages until the novel is complete.  But their insides, their guts, the things that my experiences inject into all those words are so very different.

For awhile I fought against that difference.  I tried to force myself into the same sort of writing schedule I had with Seeds.  I refused to give myself those days to recover between writing bouts and opened my WIP every night regardless of the reluctance or downright loathing I felt for the idea.  It's only been within the last week or so that I realized trying to do that is like trying to make little blond person a fan of football and having dirty hands and wearing jeans instead of tutus around the house. No matter how hard I try, it's not going to happen.  I just have to let it be what it's going to be.

The agent with the partial asked for the FULL!!!!!!! That is all.

Hope is the thing with feathers, but sometimes those suckers are razor sharp and sting like a bitch

Well, here's my current query tally; 24 sent out, 9 unanswered, 14 rejections and one partial request I haven't heard back on yet.  And you know what, the rejections aren't the worst part of that list.  It's those outstanding submissions that are KILLING me. 

Seriously, the last couple of days I've been feeling almost brink of insanity obsesssed with those unanswered queries.  The buzzard of hope circles endlessly: Have they received it?  Has it perhaps just crossed the desk of an agent who will decide my book sounds like the most stellar work of fiction in history and said agent is scrambling for his phone right now to offer me representation?  Did some disgruntled postal worker plaster the walls of his home with my pathetic little queries, so no one at these agencies even knows that I'm desperately trying to make that magic agent/writer connection?  Did an agent run from their office shouting for their assistant to contact me at once and immediately only to find said assistant was gone to lunch?  Did said assistant return from lunch to find a query with a sticky on it on their desk, disregard it as unimportant and now it's lingering in his 'to do' box that will perhaps get taken care of in the next century?  They can't possibly not have answered yet because they have a stack of queries from authors just as hopeful and desperate as me towering to the ceiling and only one pair of experienced eyes to evaluate them all.  It couldn't possibly be that.

While I know all of the scenarios except the last one are almost equally impossible and ridiculous this is just a little sampling of what that crazy maker hope does to me.  And so, agents of the world, as if you care, I am taking a stand.  I'm not sending out another query until I've received a response from each and every one of you that I've contacted (except, of course, those that say no response means no).  Aren't you sad now that you didn't write me back or at least tuck a little 'no thanks' card in the SASE I sent you?  No you're not and that's really okay, because I'm not doing this for you.  And actually I'm not really doing it for me.  I'm doing it for my husband and daughter who recently have been watching their mother and wife pace endlessly from computer to mailbox while pulling her hair into odd modern artish sorts of shapes and mumbling to herself.  They can't take it anymore and frankly neither can I, so no more irons in the fire, not until I've removed and doused the heat from the ones I've already got roasting.

On a  more positive note, I had a friend who does book binding by hand offer to make me one copy of my book.  She sent me a video of the finished product today and it is gorgeous.  It may be the only copy of this particular work of fiction ever made and I'm so excited to get it I'm practically giddy.

When the Internet Turns On You

I spend a lot of time on the internet, probably way more than I should.  The thing I love about the internet, it has loads and loads of information that is accessible within a nanosecond.  The thing I hate about the internet, it has loads and loads of information that is accessible within a nanosecond. 

The seemingly interminable waiting game that is the querying process has really started to weigh on me.  For some reason it makes me feel like I'm moving forward with my writing to endlessly surf writing related blogs, websites and forums (rather than, you know, actually writing).  I allow myself one hour of surfing time after I put my daughter to bed and before I add some more words (hopefully bunches and bunches of really good ones) to my current WIP. On Saturday I came across this post on Nathan Bransford's forums.  I read the discussion in full and followed all the links, including this one which took me to author Natalie Whipple's blog and then from that one I found this one also by Ms. Whipple. In reading how many drafts people did and how much they went through before they decided they weren't just 'good enough', they were ready to submit, I decided my manuscript was crap, I hadn't worked hard enough on it and I was nuts for submitting it at this point.

Don't get me wrong, I did drafts, lots of drafts and had a professional edit and then did more drafts and then a couple spot edits, but from idea conception to first query was almost exactly a year, none of this tinkering around for three or five or eight years.  Now I'm beginning to think these rejections that are coming my way are because I wasn't ready.  It's crazy making because prior to reading that forum thread I honestly felt that my book was strong enough to get published.  I didn't send in something I felt was 'good enough'.  I sent in something I felt I had given my all to, something I was really proud of and something I honestly felt was worthy of publication.  Now, not so much.

After reading this post, I opened my current WIP, stared at the screen for awhile, turned my computer off and read Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon while desparing that I'd never ever write something that good.  Sunday gave me a full twenty four hours to shake off the funk before attempting to write again.  Guess what?  No good.  I didn't write a word.  That forum robbed me, for the time being, of my belief in my ability to write and without that belief, I couldn't, not a word, not a letter.  In fact, I barely restrained myself from deleting all 40,000 some odd words of my WIP. 

The internet, folks, turned and rended me.  I know this funk will pass (hopefully it won't take too long. I'd like to get my first draft completed before the bun in my oven is cooked to warm golden brown and ready to come out).  When my belief in my ability to write resurfaces from the gallons and gallons of criticism and despair I've poured over it  in the last 48 hours I need to remember that while I'm cruising all those fabulous tidbits of info on the net, it's a good idea to have some salt near by.  Anybody have a shaker handy?

When jobs collide.

I haven't been published, but I think of myself as a writer, simply because I do it all the time, just as when I was in the professional world I thought of myself as a legal assistant, not because I had a degree, but because I legally assisted all the time.

However, no one is ever just a writer or just a legal assistant or just an accountant or . . . okay I think I've made my point.  My other hat, the one I rarely take off (last time was for a writer's conference I attended in September '09) is that of chauffeur, dietitian, bodygaurd, jester, educator, maid, cook, personal trainer, groomer, shopper, dresser and all around slave to a two and half foot tall blond person who has the face of an angel and a temper that's more usually attributed to redheads.  She also has a deep need to take home all things Disney princess related from wherever she finds them, you know, Walmart, Toys R Us, other children's houses.

Yesterday morning I was trying to get her to a playgroup that began at ten o'clock.  I was also being hounded by my current WIP.  Dialogue, scenes, metaphors, descriptions were churning around in my head as though my muse had inserted a stick into my brain and was whirling it around at top speed.  So there I was at quarter to ten unshowered, unbrushed, clothed in grey sweats, a t-shirt and a Snuggie (yes a bona fide Snuggie.  Favorite Christmas gift EVER!) typing as fast as my little fingers could fly.  All the while said little blond person kept asking 'time for 'nastics now Mommy?  Time for 'nastics now Mommy?' in a sort of hopeful yet despairing voice that would have skewered the heart of someone less immersed in a reality apart.

Finally when the hope gave way to high pitched screeching, I hauled my Snuggie covered bum off the couch rushed upstairs and had us both ready and out to door by ten thirty.  However, all the way to playgroup my story kept plaguing me, torturing me really with fantastic ideas that, while bouncing on trampolines and plunging thigh deep in the foam pit and holding little hands while little feet negotiated the balance beam, I had no way of getting down on paper. 

Then it was time for grocery shopping and by the time we pulled into Walmart the rabid pestering of my muse had died to a sort of fatigued, intermittent plucking.  I rushed through grocery shopping, hoping that by the time I got home and put little blondie down for her nap there would still be a spark of inspiration left that would roar once again into a bonfire when I got in front of my computer.  So home we went.  Groceries were put away, lunch was fixed and consumed (sort of) and blondie was settled in for a short winter's nap.  I hurried downstairs, turned on my laptop and sat staring at the blinking cursor while the spaces of my brain echoed back at me their emptiness.

After fifteen minutes and several false starts, I admitted defeat and, due to the prodding of little person number two who is currently baking in my oven, went to take a nap of my own. 

Yesterday's tally: Ideas, a bajillion.  Actual words on paper, zero.  Happy, appropriately fed, appropriately stimulated, well rested children, one (and a half if you count the bun if my oven). 

I guess somedays there's only time and opportunity to do one job right.  I just hope my muse comes to roost at a more opportune time today.  Note to muse: naptime is between two and four.  Bedtime is at eight thirty.  See you then (right?)