I don't want to talk about it, okay?

I'm avoidance all the way.  This is why, with my first conference and a book pitch with an amazing agent looming on May 17th, I have been gardening.

My thought process looks like this-

It has to be perfect. Absolutely perfect.
Alright! I can do this! I'll make a list of edits to make.
Wow. This is kinda long.
Hmmm. Some of these are hard.
I know. I'll do a paper edit and address everything on the list.
And get my query done. The sole purpose of a query is to interest someone in reading more. Easy peasy.
It's impossible to explain all about my book in 2-3 paragraghs.
This is really hard. This sucks.
Everything I write sucks.
I'm going outside to play in the dirt.

So, there you have it. The garden is coming along, btw. The gladiolas are pushing up, the azaleas are blooming, and the hundreds of seeds are either sprouted and doing well, or not. I have no one to blame but myself that my edits aren't done, but I feel so in touch with nature right now;)

I also haven't lost the weight I wanted to this spring, but maybe I'll get some highlights instead. It's just as good, right?

In a side note, today is my 11th wedding anniversary! Nathan and I met before classes started our freshman year at UF and got married right before graduating. He's still my best friend and the funniest person I know.

What? You want a story?
Let me think.
Okay. I got one.

When we were renovating our old house, which I still miss so much, there had been a leak, not really a leak, but some previous owners had let water drip over the side of the tub and the plaster  in the kitchen ceiling below had fallen. They'd put in a nasty drop ceiling to cover it, which I had cleverly torn out before we moved in since it cost us a foot of height in the room. (It took me five years to finish all of the projects I 'envisioned' with a pry bar in that first week of owning the house). A short two years later I was putting up embossed-faux-tin-ceiling tiles, but first I had to screw all these pieces of wood to the ceiling so I could cover the giant hole in the plaster. I heard something dripping onto the kitchen tiles and rushed in. There was a lot of water on the floor and the shower was on upstairs, so I yelled for Nathan to turn off the water. Then I climbed the ladder I'd been working on so I could see if it was a pipe leak or the same old tilted tub drip. I peered into the dark space between the floor joists and a hand shot out at me. I screamed, of course, and tried to be angry.
Nathan had opened the access panel to the pipes and I still think he's lucky I didn't jump off that ladder and break my arm.  

Have a great weekend!
Glutton for Punishment?

Again! With Focus.

Or what I've learned from writing a query

Some authors write the book blurb or their elevator pitch first, before they even start their book, but not a pantser like me. My planning stages involved several false starts, a first draft that that has almost entirely been written over, and some early attempts at an outline. Currently, I've outlined up to Ch.11 (out of 30), but I did finish my 3 pg. synopsis, so I'm congradulating myself, even if noone else is.

As for my query, I started working on it maybe eight months ago and have gone through 10+ revisions, and still haven't got it right. I highly recommend writing your query as you write your book for three reasons.

Reasons to work on your query now instead of waiting until you finish your manuscript:

1. You will have something to say when someone asks what your book is about.

2. Your query needs time to develop through rewriting just as your book does.

3. It helps you to focus on the main points as you revise. 

In trying to pull out the major conflict that causes my MC to leave her perfect world and come to our fallen world, I realized that my opening chapters are diffuse. (Anybody watch that Medium episode? I was writing, but my husband told me about it. Joe gets asked by his boss to read the  boss's epic Sci-fi novel and keeps hounding Joe to give his impressions. So Joe finally says 'It was diffuse.' Which is not a word that I'd like applied to my writing, and this guy didn't like it either. So in Joe's performance review, everything was 'diffuse'. Communication skills? Diffuse. Organization skills? Diffuse. The moral- do not EVER tell your boss what you think of their writing. Just say you can't wait to buy it when it gets published and leave the heavy hitting for agents. Is this how people get delusional? Absolutely. Do it anyway. Save yourself!)

In real life, Allison Dubois is a psychic medium who works with the police and husband Joe is an aerospace engineer, which makes their viewpoints very different. This clip was posted by CBS, so there's a 0.5 second commercial (really, it's that short, so don't give up), but I thought it was worth the wait. And it is interesting that the producer says here that it was the husband/wife relationship that made him want to do the show. Not the cool cases she solves, not the pyschic dreams. But their unique relationship. That's what I'm trying to show in my query!

Anyhow, diffuse. As in, there are too many motivations for my MC to leave her world and come to ours, but none of them stands out. There's no moment of decison, no leading the reader to see that OF COURSE she has to make this terrible decision. It's hard, and scary, but she has to do it. I realized this when I was trying to explain her motivations succintly in the query plus I have some crit partners who have made some comments that led me to start thinking about it.

I've stopped believing that there is only one way to write this story. There will be versions that feel more mysterious, versions that feel more grounded and explain the world more quickly, and it's up to me to judge which serves the story best. Because the story is there. I just have to let it out. So thank you, query. I'm working on it.

Has your query/synopsis/blurb writing helped you?
Glutton for Punishment?

Language Immersion For Kids: Query Speak

In an attempt to convince myself that I'm not neglecting my children, I've been making an effort to be funny. I flew my Jojo around on my back this morning and tossed him (merrily) on the couch until he was laughing (hysterically). Then we had tickle time and I read him a book that ended up being about a grandparent dying, not how to count to a thousand (book name- What Comes After a Thousand?) but he'd lost interest a few pages earlier and was playing with cars on the couch next to me while I finished. Misleading title, book folks.

Here's my play buddy.

Don't let his sweet boy face fool you. He has a LOT of angst.

Stay with me for two lines. This is going somewhere, I promise. When he was done playing with toys (read: covering the living room floor with toys) we ate lunch and had some chocolate wafer straws for dessert, then naps and carpool. 

I'd spent a few hours yesterday revising my query, trying different combinations, attempting to figure out what angle would grab people. And I knew I didn't have it. I posted my query in Nathan Bransford's forums and gave my advice on a few queries and blahblahblah. The point is, I really have queries on my mind and the peculiar lengthy sentence structures and qualifier-heavy phrasing.

So when I woke up Jojo this afternoon, I said something like, "Jonas Bryson, the youngest of four children, is about to make a decision that could change his life and shape the destiny of his world. After his mother, neurotic writer and chocolate addict, puts on his socks, she realizes that, tragically, his shoes are still soaking wet from playing in the melted snow the day before. Will he exercise his God-given right and demand that  the shoes be placed on his feet regardless of how much water they contain, or will he allow his mother to carry him, as if he were a little baby instead of the Big Boy that he so clearly is?" I said this all in my Movie-Trailer voice and he did not tantrum.
Besides the behavioral benefits, it made me realize that Query Speak is its own language. (C'mon. Eubonics? Creole? It's at least that good, and it has it's own set of rules, clearly.) I'm thinking that if I start immersing the children in query-speak now, that if any of them ever decide to become writers in the future that they will have a much easier time of it than I.

I could work on our Query Speak proficiency while doing a lot of daily tasks.

Laundry- A lone sock teeters on the edge of despair, knowing that unless his soul-mate (get it?) is discovered, his life will lose all meaning. His only hope for survival is to telepathically influence the children to make sock puppets. But can he accept such a degraded lifestyle? Or will it buy him enough time to find his other, button-eye-free half?

Dinner-The pantry is a big place, full of possibility and pasta, creativity and croutons. But there are dangers as well. Candied yams lurk in the shadows, flanked by saurkraut and ominous artichokes. When a lost onion is found in the back, sprouted and mushy, even the cook considers surrender. PIZZA NIGHT is novella about the travails of cooking. 

One more?

What's that? You want to hear about potty training? *shocked* But this is my professional blog.  You can't be serious. But I did an actual blurb for Jonas while he sat on the potty, so I guess it's only fair.

Kicking and screaming, young master Bryson is brought to the proving grounds of toddlerhood. His honor and his family's budget depend on him mastering the art of disrobing from the waist down and climbing atop his greatest fear and his greatest hope, the potty. (And he went!) 

And because you needed to know, Jonas is right now having a tantrum because Eli touched his tricycle and Jonas started screaming and I put the tricycle on the back porch in time out. Not a happy ending.

Got any Query Speak in you?

Glutton for Punishment?

Editing and Persistance

How To Get Published

Okay, I'm not published, but here's how I'm going about it. I am writing an awesome story, and that has to be number one. I will estimate that I have spent two-hundred-fifty hours a month for seven months thus far writing a total of about 200,000 words, including all of the edits and deletions. (The finished MS should be around 100,000-110,000) I write whenever I can. Literally.

Right now, my four year old and two year old are sitting on my bed with me, playing with a deck of 'Go Fish" cards. Yesterday, when all four of the kids were playing on a big inflatable water slide at the neighbor's house, I sat out there and edited a chapter. (Thanks again for the laptop, hubby. Best birthday present ever. Ever ever ever.)

I remember when I was a kid, my grandma would pick a Harlequin Romance out of a big box that she and her sisters passed around, sit on the the swinging bench on the edge of the pond, and watch us swim for eight hours every summer day. I still don't know what she would have done if one of us had gone under. The water was brown with tannic acid from the cypress trees, and she couldn't swim. None of us drowned, so I feel okay about following her example.

Potty training while writing a book is a little more challenging, however. That's all I will say on it.

As the writing improved, I tried to get some home grown criticism, but decided it would be better for my relationship with my family if I sought impartial criticism from...impartial sources. That was tough for me. I honestly felt sick to my stomach waiting for that first crit. Down to the twentieth email notification of a new review, they all made me ill.

I'm over that; now I just get a little excited. There is a whole world of writers out there, and some of them are going to like what I'm doing, and some will have other preferences. They've all been helpful, though, since the different comments have given me new insight into what other people are bringing to the table.

So, do I start a blog, write some things so clever and interesting and helpful that people pass it on and a new weed is born? Perhaps, but I don't expect that.

Mostly I'm writing this because I want to. I have read a lot of blogs on writing: queries, synopses, hooks, POV, even articles as forward thinking as how to get a good contract!

What I hope is that the more contact I have with the writing world, the more I will understand the mindset of agents and publishers, and what they are trying to do. Why some books are published and others are not.

Is there really such a book as "this is fantastic, I couldn't put it down, but the timing is just wrong"? I'm not sure I believe in that. I think that is a nice way of saying "this is pretty good, but I don't think it will sell because it's missing 'something'."

I will not let 'something' elude me! I will be patient, waiting to query until I can read through the MS without having to stop and change anything. Seeing possibility for change is okay, but seeing something that has to change is not.

Here is my anticipated querying process, step-by-step.

1. write query (this is the hardest part. I've done four versions already)
2. send query via email (no stamps needed, no SASE- very good)
3. wonder if the query has arrived (SKIP this step! I love it! I will save three days of obssessive worry right here!)
4. wonder if they've read it.
5. three months later, still wondering if they've read it?

I am hoping that the turnaround on emailed queries is faster than this, as it is purported to be. I have a short list of agents that claim to reply within a day or two most of the time. That is extremely attractive to me. Even if it's a no, I'm okay with that.

My query is developing, just like the book has, and they'll both be ready one day. In the meantime, it has helped me answer coherently when someone asks me what I'm writing, instead of 'it's about this girl, and, um...she has this uh....problem..."

I hope that I am correct in assuming that, though I will be sick about the first round of queries I send out, it will not kill me. Then the second round will not be too bad, and eventually, agents will be just as much 'real people' to me as crit partners are. Real people who should just give my book one little chance. Pretty please?

That's my plan. Editing and persistance.

Excuse me now, I have to go mop...somehow the floor got wet.
Glutton for Punishment?