Yesterday I finished a paranormal romance that I guess I liked. I mean, I kept reading to find out what would happen, and I REALLY liked the hero. The heroine left me a bit blah. And I just never fell into the story the way I wanted to. Today I read a sort of chick-lit-y book that I liked, too, but didn't quite love. I didn't write. True. Didn't. Much. Partially because I have DX in my head right now and the voice of that story is very different from, say, Possession, which I have been mentally fretting about. Why? Because the 1st three chapts are that place I want to be, and I need to be certain I keep the promise of those chapters. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate writing synopses? It's worse when the books not written.

My conversation with the agent who asked me to call went very very well. I almost said yes right on the spot. But I'd like to think about what I've read and heard. Mostly the usual anxiety and self-doubt going on. What happens if I can't write Possession the way it deserves to be written? What if I can't pull off Bloodhand? But I can, actually.

The stats so far:

I'm back from Palo Alto and the soccer tournament. The kids had a great time. My son hung out with the other kids most of the time which meant I got some unexpected blocks of time to read over the edits for DX. I got through it, and started reading Possession. Chapts 1-3 are really good. Really good. I started reading chapter 4. It's exciting and daunting because the characters have really taken on a life of their own and now I have to keep that up.

I transferred my DX edits into a coherent (I hope) package for my editor and emailed it off. Now I have to prepare the Possession chapters I'm going to submit for Engl 530 and think about how I'll get 19 copies made before Tuesday. Paid bills. Caught up on email. Did my soccer board meeting notes and emails those off. Made dinner, started laundry. I got a really nice email today about my historicals, The Spare and Lord Ruin. Here's hoping I hear something soon about The Rake.

Nothing to report agent search wise, but possibly tomorrow after I speak with someone else. Also, I've posted Chapter 1 of DX for anyone who wants to read it. It's available for pre-order from Amazon which also now has the cover art posted. Check it out!

Yesterday my day was like this: Get up at 4:30am. Go to the Gym. Go to work. Pick up son at school and get him to soccer practice at 4:00 pm. Park in Univ lot at 4:45 pm and realize that all my son's non-soccer things are still in the car (his shoes, his backback, his homework...) 5:00pm to 7:00pm attend Engl 530. Home by 7:24pm to drop off my son's things, give son brief hug, and start a load of laundry. Leave 7:40 pm to attend soccer board meeting. 7:55 to 8:10 pm stand in hallway notebooking the New Historical notion while waiting for the Soccer board to open the meeting to the Parent reps. Leave meeting 9:00pm. Arrive home 9:20pm - finish laundry and start new load, read and sign papers for son's school, kiss son and tell him to go to bed. Now. 9:45 to 10:30 read while waiting for 2nd load of laundry to finish. 10:40 to 11:00 pm try to wind down. I guess it worked.

Today, I realized that in order to get my son to his soccer game on time tomorrow morning, we have to leave the house at 5:30am. My brother is here from Santa Barbara, but I'm trying to answer emails from a couple of agents (MUST proofread!) and then I have to make sure we're all packed for the tournament, that I have directions and my laptop and a printed out copy of the revisions to DX.

Sigh.
Agent search-wise things are going OK. At last, I know I'll have an agent again one way or another. It's a matter of settling on the right one for me.

The stats so far:

I just now wrote two sentences in the erotic historical (EH), then got rid of the passive verbs and replaced the two sentences with one better sentence. That's all the writing I've done today. I almost didn't write the one sentence because I was sitting there staring at this white screen... Nothing to edit. Oy. And I was dithering about where to start and actually considering putting the hero several miles from the heroine until I remembered that I need to start smack in the middle of his problem. Which I realize now I still haven't done yet. Darn. Guess I'll go back and put my hero in his dilemma.

Yesterday was my first day of school. I'm taking Engl 530, a fiction workshop seminar thing. There's a lot of people in it. Should be a cool class. Here's an observation: We were asked to state briefly what we would be working on and how much we had written so far. All I mentioned was that I was working on a paranormal and had about 40,000 words with a need to totally rewrite the back half of those 40K. I was allowed to get away with that. (Whew!) Except for those with nothing written yet, everyone struggled to figure out how much they had so far and everyone expressed their progress in number of chapters or double or single-spaced pages.

Except me. Because I know pages are meaningless unless word count is at the root of the page calculation. I was sitting there mentally translating everyone's pages into word count so that I had a more meaningful notion of how far they were. A couple of people are pretty far along. Very few people thought of their work in terms of its genre or target market. Exceptions were the obvious ones, Sci Fi and mystery. I was getting really impatient and wanted to say, people, just do a word count! Word count is impervious to font choice, chapter breaks, line spacing and the amount of dialogue that may be present.

We have reading assigned and, I am now ashamed to admit, I groaned when Freud's Introductory Lectures turned out to be the main text. And now I must take back almost every hateful thought I've ever had about the man (and there have been a lot). Damn. You have no idea how this pains me as I have deep issues with Freud and the way he's been used to frame a misogynistic view of the world. But, we were told to read him as if the writing were a writer's manual. Oh. Insert profound silence here, while I struggle with having to say this:. It's brilliant.

OK, there, I said it. And, yes, it hurt. Damn. But if the lectures continue in this vein, my writing will improve a lot.

I am NOT looking forward to having anyone read my stuff. I hate that. Says the woman with four proposals with two editors (and yes, this time it's for real!) and five agents.

I won't have time to look at the DX revisions until Friday, I think. I want to get through it all in one pass, and since today was my son's first day of school (6th grade!) there was a lot of paperwork to fill out and a lot of helping him get organized. He's excited about the fortune in school supplies we bought today. As he should be. So, I should be proud of my one sentence. Maybe I'll have time for a couple more before I'm too tired.

I'm done with my first pass through the revisions for DX. Since I have time, I'd like to do a full read through before I send it off. Probably just the one so I don't hash it to death. But Chris's suggestions were stellar and I'm pleased with the results. I tweaked a few other things. When that's out the door, probably later this week, then it's back to Possession.

I thought grad school didn't start again until Thurs, but today I found out instruction starts tomorrow, so actually, I have school tomorrow night. Erk. I had to scramble to make arrangements for my son to be picked up from soccer practice. I can get him there, but my class is from 5:00 to 6:50. There's a light at the end of the grad school tunnel. I'm almost done!

My son goes back to school Wed. He has new clothes, which he needed because he grew about an inch and half over the summer. Today is his last night of summer vacation...

Just came back from seeing Snakes On A Plane. If you're a lover of B movies, which I am, Snakes on a Plane is a must see. It was fabulous. Right up there with Dawn of the Dead. A+ for this! I loved the ending. Loved it, loved it, loved it! It was really funny. The only disappointment was that Samuel L. Jackson didn't kiss the girl. Too bad. He should have.

I mailed three queries on the way to watch the Police Dog Trials. Gorgeous dogs. Kind of scary, too. I took care to park in a legal spot since, as you might imagine, the place was crawling with police. And their dogs.

I started on DX revisions this morning. DX is not an acronym, it's the actual title of my Crimson City anthology story, which in the story stands for Demon of Unknown Origin. It looks like the title might stick. Cool. Hopefully I'll finish the revisions tonight. (But not if I'm wasting time on the internet.)

The stats so far:

Boy, this is interesting. I'm just going to free form an observation I've been mulling over a bit. A while back, I read my first Lee Child book. I was floored, amazed, enthralled, and I've blogged more than once about his books. (Oh, joy, I have not yet read them all, I have reader's nirvanah to look forward too.) Today, Miss Snark posted about him. Here's the interesting thing for me. I read Lee Child and immediately turned the book over to my father and got him hooked. (that's 2) Then my sister (that's 3) then Megan Frampton (that's 4 plus Megan had also heard raves about Child from someone else.) Then I blogged about Killing Floor which it appears prompted Marjorie Lui to get his books (that's 5). I've mentioned him to everyone I know who loves to read.

I eventually picked up Lee Child in the first place because Miss Snark had mentioned him as someone she likes to read. Miss Snark is highly critical (meant in the nicest way!) so if she likes him, I figured chances were good so would I. I did NOT buy the book because I saw a slick ad or went to his website or read a review or whatever.

You can talk about marketing and promotion until you're blue in the face, but that's not what turned one reader into 5. Great writing did that.

I have until Sept 1 for the DX revisions, but that still means I need to shoot for being done this weekend since next weekend my son has a soccer tournament in another city. Shouldn't be too bad, I don't think, considering. At least then it will be a long weekend. My son and I did another round of Mentos/Diet Coke testing. This time: rocket bottles. Alas, this was mostly a bust. Lots of fizz, but no lift off. Tomorrow we're going to the Police Dog trials. After that my nose is to the keyboard...

I'm exhausted with the agent search thing. Many of the agency descriptions sound so un-friendly. They've pulled up the drawbridge, closed the portcullis and the hired thugs are staring over the crenellations shaking their iron fists and threatening the boiling oil for anyone who dares approach without a query, SASE and a complete MS. Mostly, I feel like slinking away to look for someone who wants to hear from an author who just needs an agent to put her proposals in the mail. Anyway, I'm tired and feeling a bit beaten down by spending all my evenings reading and Googling agents and their agencies, sending queries and preparing stuff to send. I haven't written a word in days. I started putting together some of the snail mail ones and if the cat weren't asleep on the printer I'd print them out just so I can mail them tomorrow and stop thinking about this.


The stats so far:

Today was mostly a good day. First off, my editor emailed me about DX, my Crimson City Anthology Story. He loved it. Yay!! I have two revision suggestions from him, the King of revisions. I read through DX today and plan to make some additional changes. I can definitely see where he's going with the revisions he did ask for. He's really good. I confess, I read his letter a few times just to bask in the compliments.

Also, someone emailed me today about The Spare, which is was really nice to hear.

I had another agent packet to prepare tonight, this one said OK to send as Word attachments so I had to spend some time re-living the nightmare that is Word. Why on earth would any writer want to torture herself with this *$*)$!@ application? Argh!! Word Perfect, people. Please. And don't even think to suggest that it's just because I don't know Word. I work with Microsoft Applications all day long, and just about all of them display the exact same we know better mentality that drives me insane with Word.

Anyway, I have revisions due, not sure when. I hope to have them done this weekend.

At this precise moment, I'm feeling better about the agent search. It's interesting to note that the last time around, when I had fewer credits, that also had a lot rejections at this point. I'm loving the email query bit. But I probably should be snail mailing, too.

The stats so far:

I have a really good idea for a shorter totally hot erotic historical. It'll be awesome. At the moment, I have a whopping bad headache because I think I accidentally switched my contact lenses this morning. As long as I wasn't looking at anything close, my vision was awesome. Closer than 4 feet and I couldn't focus and since I stare at a computer all day, that was not so good. I bought some solution at lunch, but then I was afraid to take out my lenses and switch them back in case something awful happened. (Tearing, losing, etc) I didn't have my glasses with me. I may just go to bed right now.

Also, my son and my sister took it into their heads to personally test the chemical reaction of mint mentos and diet coke. I can personally represent to you that fizzy diet coke shot at least six feet into the air. Diet Pepsi had the same reaction, by the way. And, if you try this OUTSIDE at home, be warned, the reaction is instaneous. Also, my son reports that if you have mentos in your mouth and you take a swig of the diet coke or pepsi, the liquid does, indeed, come out your nose.

Two more requests for material. So when I got home today, I prepared the packages to send out tomorrow. Then I heard CK is going on vacation or something, and I know he has Possession. So, the question is, has he read and rejected it yet? Or has he not read it yet? Or what? Sent out two more emails. Went to bed early last night but didn't sleep.

The stats so far:

Today I mailed out the two sets of proposals requested in the two responses I've had so far. Tonight, I emailed 4 more. I confess, I'm doing all the email queries first, and the funny thing is, there are really only 2-4 agents I'm hot to query that don't accept email queries. Paper last. I'm going to go broke sending stuff by mail.

The stats so far:


Which reminds me that the other times I've searched for an agent, there are three or four agents who stand out in my mind as NEVER EVER having given me the courtesy of a reply. And I always include a SASE. I mean, if you can't even bring yourself to scribble pass in teeny-tiny letters on my query, then hey, You're off the list! And you know, even though I laughed and shook my head when one agent replied to me 9 months later, and said he'd be happy look at my material if only I had a paranormal... (by that time, I had sold the Crimson City book), but you know what? His reply was really nice, if brief, and at least he replied. So maybe I'll query him again. With luck, he'll reply in 10 months and say, oh so nicely, oh, if only you had an erotic fantasy proposal, by which time I will have sold some erotic fantasy project I haven't written yet. Or maybe one of those ones I have written... Other agents are off the list because they rejected me so fast there's no way on earth anyone looked at the query and still others are off because, one hears and sees things don't you know.

Edited 8/16 to add: Is that weird or what? In this post, I joked about an erotic proposal and this morning at the gym, I thought of one.

Possession is as ready as it can be in it's present state (don't think too hard about that, okay? It'll only make your head hurt). So I printed the chapters and synopses x2 and will get them out in the mail tommorrow. Overnight, of course, so that my stuff has extra days to sit around! I'm buying peace of mind for my impatience. It's worth it.

So, the good news is that I think I really like Possession as it stands now. Tomorrow I will hate it, but today, I will go to bed as happy as any neurotic writer can be who doesn't have an agent anymore. sigh.

Oh, now my son is taking pictures of TV and bringing them to me to see. He's having a good time. Except, I've just remembered that the TV is supposed to be off at 9pm...

Sunday. I have to get up at 4:30am and go to work tomorrow when really I need to do one more read through of Possession chapts 1-3 before they go out. I was hoping I'd be all done, but my son had a soccer tournament this week, and they advanced to the championship round, and won! So I was soccer mom most of the weekend.

In other news, the soccer god Gianluca Zambrotta has left Juventus and now plays for Barcelona. So now I must root for Barcelona. Go Spain!

What else? Nothing. The Great Agent search continues.

Since this blog is about what it's like to be a writer, I suppose it's only fitting that I should report now and again on my search for new representation. Yesterday I sent 4 email queries to agents. Today I got two responses with requests to send my proposals to them. So, that's cheering. I'm not so sure what to do about agents who don't accept email queries. Emailing makes it easy to introduce myself and ask what they'd like to see from me. Snail mail strikes me as altogether different. If I send a letter without pages and synopsis, 1) it wastes time getting them what they need in order to decide and 2) I'm likely to be rejected by the assistant right off the bat (that's what happened last time I had to do this). But imagine you're an agent and some dufus writer queries with 4 proposals attached (more than a hundred pages). Not good. But I'm writing in more than one genre, and the stories are different. Argh!.

Do I just send one and ask if they want the rest? Should I call? I hate phone calls. You can't backspace over a verbal typo. I know me. I'll sit there staring at the phone: You should call now. But what will I say? They'll hang up on me or tell me to get lost or I'll just get voice mail and leaving a voice mail is stupid. I'll sound like a dork. I'll wait an hour and call then. Maybe. Maybe I'll just send the first 5 pages of the proposals. That's only twenty pages. Doh. I'm such an idiot.

I haven't done any writing yet because I've been writing cover letters and printing pages. And obsessing. There is much soccer to attend this weekend and I haven't got chapter 3 of Possession adjusted yet, and I have to do that before Monday so I can send those pages.

Good news for anyone who read this far: Liz Maverick posted to her blog! Hurray! Green and black stockings. Check it out.

I have officially parted ways with my agent and am now about to start the search again. Sigh. Pretty discouraging. I'm sorry it didn't work out.

I just finished reading Lee Child's Killing Floor, the first in his Jack Reacher series. I'm reading them all out of order, but I'm getting them as I can. For any writer who wonders what Donald Maass is talking about in Writing the Breakout Novel all I can say is this book is a text to study. And it's a first novel. I think I'm going to just cry green tears of envy. Want an illustration of how to make the stakes personally high? Read this book. Need to know how to get your character in an impossible, hopeless situation? Read this book. Need to remind yourself about what an Alpha Hero is like? Reacher drips Alpha. I guess you have to like hard, gritty mysteries which, fortunately, I do.

I've got my dad hooked now. When I gave him the book, he got all excited. He's hooked on Stephanie Plum, too.

So, I've been taking a bit of time since I sent my proposals off (three whole days!) and reading like a maniac. I read the Sandra Brown book from a couple of posts ago and two Jack Reacher books.

I worked on Possession a little bit today, and I have another shift in my heroine that I'm really excited about. Plus, I'm now prepared to be stern with myself about a secondary character who I really, really like and didn't want anything bad to happen to her but it must be.

Looks like i can sms my blog but do i want to?

My certified mail letter went out today, as did Possession, The Rake, Shift and Dark Elf. Now I know my work is out there.

Right now, I'm going to go give some further thought to next steps.

To explain the Sigh, I have written an unpleasant but alas necessary letter, which is now ready to go into the mail tomorrow certified mail.

The Plus Other Stuff simply means that I have taken matters into my own hands and Possession is ready to go to an editor and other proposals are ready to go to another editor.

Which means, technically, I have nothing to work on writing-wise. I think I'll keep working on Possession, but maybe tomorrow I'll brainstorm other ideas.

Yesterday I read Suzanne Brockmann's Breakpoint which I enjoyed. Last night I read the first story in Brockmann's Tall Dark and Dangerous and today I read the second one. I enjoyed them both. Now I have the joyful dilemma of deciding what to read next. More Lee Child? Loretta Chase? Or The Lies of Locke Lamorra? Or maybe something else entirely.

The puppy is asleep on my lap. He's so cute when he gets tired. He looks at me with his little eyes at half mast, just like an exhausted two year old, without the insistance he's not tired.

Let's see, I've been working on whipping the 1st 3 chapters of Possession into shape. It goes into the mail Monday. And, some other proposals are going out at the same time since, well, never mind. I shouldn't have to be doing this myself, but I have to, it seems. Whatever. Fortunately, I bought expensive paper yesterday. I'm having my usual self-doubts about what I'm sending out, but I can't figure out what to do about that. For all I know the stuff does stink.

I got a $50 Barnes and Noble gift certificate. The books arrived today: Breaking Point and Tall Dark and Dangerous by Suzanne Brockmann, Echo Burning and Killing Floor by Lee Child, Mr. Impossible by Loretta Chase and White Hot by Sandra Brown. I haven't ready anything by Sandra Brown in a while, so I'm looking forward to it.

There's a pair of Barn Owls nesting in the Cypress trees along part of our driveway. They have babies and we hear them screeching all night long. I went out the other night and the parents flew maybe 20 feet over my head, looking for dinner, I hope. Our across-the-field neighbor is trying to attract Barn Owls because he has a little vineyard and they eat gophers and rats. I guess it's working for him, though they're in our trees. Today as I was coming up the drive, I slowed down at this Cypress hoping to see the nest. No nest, but one of the young owls was sitting in plain sight on a branch. My son and I watched a bit then went to the house to fetch the binocs. Gosh, they're pretty birds!

Indeed! Twenty minutes ago we had an earthquake. Only 4.4, but when they hit 4 or so, there's always that moment when you think, gosh, is this going to stop? It did. I was in San Francisco for the Pretty Big One in 1989, and that was NOT fun. The USGS has this really cool website where you can report an earthquake, so I filled it out and based on my responses, they estimated in the 4 range, and sure enough, a bit later the actual numbers came in. But we were all guessing mid to high 4. We beat out San Bernardino's piddly little 3.3. Yeah!

Anyway, I was writing at the time Nature so rudely interrupted, and I must get back to it. If I have enough paper, the Possession proposal goes into the mail tomorrow. I'm currently re-doing the synopsis (torture, pure torture and no cookies to get me through it.) Oh, and I hear it's hot on the Right Coast and would someone please explain to me why 100 in NY is such a freaking big deal when it was 113 here just the week before last and 119 in LA, which, I might point out is not Death Valley except maybe culturally. You didn't see those numbers on the front page.