Manuscript Editing Update

If I haven't been posting much of my recent art projects lately... It's because I haven't been working on anything.

With the Scarab Club and the downtown Rochester Gallery Stroll - and my trying to finish my six acrylic paintings in time to display them at the latter - I was prioritizing my art for several weeks, at the expense of writing. Now that I'm working part-time as a graphic design, I don't always have the time I'd like to for both, and I have to pick and choose which I want to focus on any given week (though - to some extent, I was doing that already anyway, before I started the job).

Furthermore, my novel had been more or less "wrapped up" in its current draft, and I'd given it to my husband and a close friend to read and give me advice/comments on before I did the next round of editing. Said close friend had also been working on a novel of her own, and in return I was reading and helping her edit her manuscript. So not only was a prioritizing art for awhile, but I also had little writing of my own to work on.

Now, I'm finally finished reading my friend's story, and she and my husband have gotten back to me with lots of helpful advice for my novel. I've switched gears back to writing and editing for now; it is still one of my goals for 2016 to polish this up and find a literary agent to guide it to the road of publication.

That is not to say that I won't also be making art, or posting about art on here - just that it will probably be less often while I am really focusing on writing.

Transitions and Marketing

This week marked my husband's last week working as a high school math teacher. He's been pretty unhappy lately - with the content he was teaching, the students who didn't put in any effort to learn, and the increasingly frustrating policies (from his district specifically and the state of Michigan in general) stunting teacher growth, experimentation, respect, and yes, even pay.

Thankfully, he was able to find new employment. Though he is sad to leave his current students in the middle of a school year, everyone has been pretty great and understanding toward him - from his students and their parents, to his fellow teachers, and the administration. They all know it's been tough for teachers lately, and don't blame him for finding something new.

Starting on Monday, then, he will begin a new career as an actuarial analyst at AAA. I'm excited for him for many reasons. First, the obvious - it seems like it will be a less-stressful work environment for him, and comes with a significant salary increase. The hours are more reasonable, too - which means no more waking up at 5 AM. It is unlikely he'll have to bring much work home with him outside of working hours. Of course, it is also a slightly longer commute (especially since now he'll be driving with the traffic), and he'll be giving up school breaks and summer vacations - but nothing new comes without some sacrifice.

The biggest reason I'm excited for him though is because he took concrete steps to change something about his life that he wasn't happy with. So many people get stuck in jobs they dislike and just stay there, for years upon years, without even looking for other opportunities. Change is scary, and it's hard to take a risk.

I know that I personally struggle with "avoidance." If something makes me anxious, I try to ignore it, or not think about it. Instead of acknowledging it and dealing with it and seeing if there is anything I can do to change my situation for the better, I often actively repress it and go about doing what I've always done - even if it means I'm hurting myself in the long run. Of course, being aware of this tendency of mine helps; I try to be cognizant of when I'm avoiding and curb it. I try to push myself to do things outside of my comfort zone. But it's not something that comes easily to me - or to a lot of people.

Self-marketing my artwork is one of the things I struggle with most. It feels comfortable for me to put my art up on Etsy, or post it on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook, so I do all of these things. But those things are not enough on their own. Instead of putting my art out there and waiting for people to find it, I have to work more at encouraging people to find it, at leading them to it.

One of my goals for this year is to submit my work to more exhibitions, to look at call to entries and see if any of my artwork fits what local galleries or art groups are looking for. I also want to start getting my art onto more websites - websites that do print-on-demand art prints, or other items with art printed on them - like notecards, fabric, etc.

I have been focusing a lot lately on my story because I am almost done with editing it. Once it's finished (again), I will be submitting query letters to agents and trying to get my manuscript out there. I hope to then also have more time to work on getting my artwork in more places, as well.

As far as transitions go, however, I have another big job transition to mention - my own. I met with the communications department of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield this week to discuss working for them part-time on a temporary basis (the next eight weeks or so) while they catch up on a lot of design projects that need immediate attention. Someone I used to work with at EMU's Campus Life works there now and thought of me when they started realizing how swamped they were and how nice it would be to bring in another designer. It's always so rewarding to be remembered! I will forever be appreciative of the people who have contacted me about opportunities - especially since I'm so often neglectful of seeking any out.

It'll be nice to have regular projects to work on (and a regular paycheck) for a while. I think this will be good for me, and still provide me with enough time to work on wrapping up my manuscript edits and doing what I want to with my personal artwork.

What a coincidence that my husband and I both will be starting new opportunities next week!

More Manuscript Editing

Lately, I've been focusing on my novel (which is why there haven't been as many posts of artwork as there used to be). Most of my spare time goes to trying to make what I have work better, in the hopes that I can hook a literary agent and get my book published.

One of my biggest concentrations right now is purpose - giving everything a purpose, from minor characters to the setting to the scenes themselves. I've been giving minor characters "double duty" - as in, instead of just pushing the plot along, they also contribute something else to the story, like conflict (by irritating the main character) or by paralleling or adding to a major theme.

I've been doing the same thing with the setting for each scene. I'm trying to avoid cliches (kitchens, cars, etc.) as much as possible and put the characters into more interesting venues. I'm also trying to have the settings work "double duty"... In going through and looking at word choice in an earlier round of edits, I realized there were a lot of references to height. Some of the characters are building a treehouse, and so there are references to climbing up and down, or calling up/down to other characters. In another part of the story, there are also hills, which create the same situations. This wasn't really intentional, but maybe on some subconscious level it was - the differences in height often reflect the character's state of mind, and how they see themselves/the people around them. (Looking down/up at other people, putting others on pedestals, thinking they're better than others, etc.) So in places where I can change the setting, I've also been looking at how I can add height into the mix, like having conversations on rooftops and in basements.

As for the scenes themselves, I'm trying to make them more engaging by increasing the tension or conflict. There isn't a whole lot of action (instead, there's a lot of existential rumination), but I have found ways (often through the minor characters that I wasn't utilizing in the best way I could) to irritate the main character more.

I have also been trying to turn exposition into dialogue whenever possible (while making sure that the dialogue remains the sort of thing someone would actually say and isn't an obvious "info dump"). I've found that this also increases the tension - when the characters revisit memories together (instead of just thinking about them silently and ruminating), arguments often follow. At the very least, it's easier to get an instant sense of the characters - when they talk to each other more, their personalities and how they relate to other people come out much more clearly.

It's been a lot of work - there are scenes that I'm basically rewriting entirely - but I really do think it's making my manuscript better. It's hard to tell until the whole thing has been worked through, but I think it's getting there.

All of these ideas came (at least initially) from a great book I've been reading - "Revision and Self-Editing: Techniques for Transforming Your First Draft into a Finished Novel" by James Scott Bell. If you're looking for ideas for fixing plots, scenes, and characters, definitely check it out.

Novel Update

I spent a lot of the end of last year working on editing the first book of the series of novels I've been writing. It's not always easy self-editing your own stuff, but I think I did a decent job, considering.

One thing I noticed as I was going through and doing this editing were several themes that started popping up. Some of them I sort of intended (or at least, noticed early on and played up a little), but others I did not notice until this recent bout of editing (though, again, I played those up a little as I went through and edited, since I did like them and wanted them to be more obvious). It's always nice to go back and read something you've written and realize there are interesting and profound nuggets of thought that crept in that you weren't totally conscious of at the time. To be honest, it makes me feel pretty damn proud of myself - like I'm doing something right and supposed to be a writer.

Other than editing the parts I do have written, I also have been working on some new sections to incorporate into the novel - sections that are basically straight up non-fiction, or at least non-fiction memoir essays (except that they are written as if my fictional main character wrote them). My manuscript already consisted of a contemporary story line, a dystopian future story (a novel that my main character is "writing" that sort of parallels her own life), and short sections of descriptions from the main character's dream journal - and now I'm also adding in sections of essays. I'm not trying to overly complicate things - I really do think it'll work, and add to the story. What these sections are are parts of the honors thesis the main character supposedly wrote at the end of her undergraduate program, and they give a lot of insight into how she interprets the world and what she's learned. Before, I had the character just sort of thinking about her thesis intermittently, as asides. Now I'm including parts of the "actual" thesis instead.

But to do that, I had to write the whole damn thesis - not just the parts the main character would consider for this first book. Because I had to know how the thesis would be organized so that I would know how the parts of her thesis relate to each other. And also, I'll use the thesis for all seven books that I have planned for this series, so I thought I might as well write the whole thing now so that I already have it ready to reference in the future.

The thesis is basically a list of philosophical conclusions/interpretations that the main character has written about some of her favorite Latin quotations. She looks mainly at ancient Romans, but also Catholicism, and even some Enlightenment-era philosophers (those who were still writing in Latin). But of course, I knew basically nothing about ancient Rome, or Latin - though I have been doing research into those topics for this story all along, since I know my main character would know all about Rome and Latin, and I'm trying to get her head to embody her beliefs and her voice. So I had to up my research and do a bunch more - all so I could write a "fake" thesis for my main character to reference.

It was a lot of extra work. I like to make extra work for myself. I do this kind of shit often. "Yeah, my story is good... but it would be EVEN BETTER if I added in this whole other idea/layer and made it more complicated! Or changed the point of view and entirely rewrote it!" "What if this is the only set of novels I write ever? I better make sure I put EVERY IDEA I'VE EVER HAD in it. Leave no philosophical stone unturned!" I don't know if that's just a me thing or a writer thing, but I do all this research and put all this thought into it and combine all these ideas - and then I get to the editing of said writing, and end up paring a lot of it down or not even using whole ideas, or scraping entire weeks of research. Writing, it turns out, is a lot more than just writing. There's a lot of behind the scenes stuff that no one else ever even sees. (At least, how I do it there is.)

So anyway. Now that I've finally (more or less) finished the fake thesis, I'm back to editing the book by adding the sections into it that need to be and giving it another read-through. I am hoping that soon I will be at a place where I am comfortable sending it out to literary agents again. Because I would really, really like to find an agent. I have all these ideas and outlines and drafts and plans, but I don't really know how to go about turning my plans into a reality.

My goal would be to have the entire series published as a series of seven books. Very J.K. Rowling of me. And then, when the series has TAKEN THE WORLD BY STORM and is beloved by everyone and I am rich, maybe also publishing some of all this supplemental stuff I've gathered, like the fake thesis I've written/am writing. (I'm sure I'll come back to it later and add in more stuff. Things are never quite "done" with me.)

I don't really expect that to happen, but it certainly would be nice if it did. ;)

Manuscript Editing

I've started following authors and agents and accounts with writing tips on Twitter and I'm so glad that I did.

I saw mention the other day that descriptions of body language during dialogue is a big no-no for fiction writing. You know - sighing, staring, blinking, frowning, fidgeting, shrugging, breathing, rubbing chins, crinkling foreheads, biting lips, and the like. It doesn't add anything meaningful and a lot of people tend to skim over such descriptions anyway, focusing instead on the actual words being said.

When I write dialogue, it bothers me to leave that stuff out - the page looks too sparse with short paragraphs, quotation marks, and 'he said's/'she said's. But when I read a book, I prefer conversations that are quick and easy to follow.

I need to be thinking about the potential reader now. After going through two drafts and getting input from friends on content, characterization, and flow, my story is fleshed out enough that I can focus on this type of editing. So I've been going through my manuscript recently and "killing my darlings," as they say - finding all the places where I made those newbie mistakes and hitting the "delete" button a lot.

I copy-pasted my entire manuscript into a free text analyzer online to see what words/phrases I overused. In addition to those dialogue issues, I found that I'd made several other offenses.

Here are some of them:

1) First-grade adjectives like good, bad, happy, sad, warm, cold, young, old, kind, beautiful, afraid, large, small.

I'm trying not to use these words at all - nor any of their synonyms. I should be able to convey that emotion without coming out and saying that the character feels sad (or disappointed, or pessimistic, or destitute, or somber, or whatever).

2) Colors that are found in the Crayola-eight.

Why say "brown" or "red" when molasses, henna, bronze, cinnamon, raw hamburger, merlot, and even "recycled paper bag" paint such a clearer picture?

3) Unspecific nouns like people, someone, anyting, everything.

There has to a better way to say these. What kind of people are we talking about? Adults? Students? Babies? Firefighters? Southerners? Millenials? Dog lovers? Chain smokers? Feminists? Specificity is so much more interesting.

4) First-grade verbs like go, come, leave, keep, hit, give, eat, cry, bring, put, show, work.

Go/Come/Leave --> Advance, Proceed, Progress, Approach, Decamp, Withdraw
Give --> Contribute, Deliver, Donate, Provide, Dispense, Endow, Issue
Show --> Demonstrate, Exhibit, Reveal
etc.

5) Cliches and other extraneous/uncreative phrases.

- All on ... own: "The skin repaired itself all on its own."
- Fall to / down on / brought to ... knees: "He fell to his knees"; "She was brought to her knees."
- The world: "When the world is crashing down"; "His favorite possession in the world."
- What to do: "I can show you what to do."
- No idea why / Don't know why: "I have no idea why he's suspicious." "Why is he suspicious?"
- With a press of a button
- On the other hand
- On behalf of
- Without thinking / Without asking
- Particularly / In fact / The truth is / Actually
- Really / Very / Quite / Only / Just / Still - These are there for emphasis and are completely unnecessary.

I'm trying not to feel bad that I made such Writing 101 mistakes - and forgot to check for them before starting to send out query letters. Instead, I'm choosing to focus on the things I have to be proud of - that I started following the right accounts, that I listened to good advice, that I'm willing to go through my manuscript again to look for these things, that I'm not daunted by the task and eager to put forth the effort.

And thankfully, I only sent out four queries so far, so I have plenty more names to send my improved manuscript to once I finish making these changes.

Well That Was Fast

It's official - I've gotten my first rejection from those query letters I sent out about my novels!

(screenshot of rejection email)

I honestly wasn't expecting a reply so quickly. It's only been a few days since I emailed them out, and most of the agents' websites I've been looking at say it might be 6-8 weeks before they get back to you (if they get back to you at all). I'm trying to be appreciative that this agent replied so fast - I wasn't left waiting around wondering for long! - but a tiny part of me can't help but wonder if that means my story/query letter was unbelievably bad, that the agent was able to make a decision so quickly.

Of course, it's also possible that I've been rejected because of reasons outside my control. This agent's roster was already full of projects like mine, she's decided she doesn't want any more dystopian novels right now, she doesn't like working with series, she doesn't have time to take on another first-time novelist right now, etc. etc.

Whatever the factors that went into her decision, with her reply I have officially passed a threshold. Now I think I won't be so anxious to send out more queries - because I've seen that rejection is survivable. Also, I feel like a real writer, now! Everything I've ever read about being a professional writer says to expect a million rejections before you finally get your "yes" - so with my first rejection under my belt, I'm clearly on the right track to literary superstardom.

#cliches
#positivethinking

Query Letters

Last week I started sending out query letters to literary agents. For almost two years I've been working on developing a seven-book Upmarket NA (New Adult) Contemporary/Dystopian series. I have finished manuscripts for the first two and am currently working on the third book. I'm currently calling the first two books "Our Heroine" and "Our Outcast."

In case you're interested to hear what my novels are about, here is the short synopsis I've been including in my query letters -

-

Silvia Parrish – dream-recorder, Romanophile, and recent college graduate paralyzed at a precipice – is secretly writing the fates of three twenty-somethings living in a dystopian future.

“The Enterprise knows each of us by name, knows the entire personal history of our families and finances. It keeps a complete record of every daily confirmation – the date, the time, the location, the confirmer’s vital signs, and the medications dispensed – because the Enterprise cares.”

OUR HEROINE follows two parallel narratives. In the “real world,” Silvia has moved back to her parents’ house in suburban Ohio, where she takes on a job as a babysitter for a nine-year-old neighbor boy and learns that her old high-school crush is engaged to marry her best friend. In her fictional Enterprise story, Carbry Chrism, a young police officer, must find his missing girlfriend, a nameless heroine who desires to remove her wrist implant and explore the Outside.

-

If I happen to hear anything back from my queries, I'll make sure to update here. I've never sent out query letters before, so I really have no idea how long it'll take and what might come of it, but here's hoping I find some publishing success! :)