WriMo-ish

This has sort of been a year for me doing things I had said I wasn't going to do.

I wasn't going to start another project this year. (Technically I didn't I guess, I just expanded an already in progress project--but the outcome is the same. I'm starting work on another first draft.)

I wasn't going to write a series.

I wasn't going to do NaNoWriMo.

NaNoWriMo, for those that are unfamiliar, is National Novel Writing Month. It is, as the name implies, a month-long writing event. The goal is to write a 50,000 word novel draft in the 30 days of the month of November.

There are all manner of thinkpieces out there about NaNoWriMo from writers of all stripes and all levels of experience. The event has its supporters and detractors, and both groups are pretty vocal.

At the risk of making a generalization, I have noticed a trend in the articles that I have read regarding the merit (or lack thereof) of NaNoWriMo: professional writers--by which I mean writers for whom money from writing is either all or the bulk of their income--seem to think less fondly of NaNoWriMo than amateurs. 

This makes sense, I guess. The market has changed to the point where anyone with sufficient determination could throw 50,000 words on a page in November and self-publish their book in December or January. Even though most of these self-published novels won't see sales high enough to be threats to sales for authors with traditional contracts at bigger publishers, there is something uncomfortable about the idea of someone doing in a month, and seemingly on a whim, what can take literal years to do the "right" way. And having to fight for an agent or editor's attention for a work you might have spent months or years on against someone's thirty-day draft doesn't seem fair.

Beyond this, there are some more practical concerns. Marketable manuscripts usually run closer to 70,000 words than 50,000, so even if the writing on the November draft is perfect, it's probably not a complete novel--not for a publisher, anyway. And, if we're being honest, the writing on the November draft won't be perfect--a first draft never is.

You don't really have a true novel at the end of NaNoWriMo. You may have a great start, but you don't have a finished project. Not even close.

And, for me, I think that's the key. 

I am pro-NaNoWriMo. I can understand the frustrations, and I would hate to be an editor or agent on December 1 when I imagine hundreds or thousands of queries for 50,000 word rough drafts come to the slush pile, but I frankly think the benefits of this event are pretty great. Granted, my opinion isn't unbiased--most of the first draft of Evin was written during NaNoWriMo in 2011.

Sometimes, at least for me, getting the words on the freaking page is the most difficult part of a draft. I'm a perfectionist--at least when it comes to my writing. When it comes to revisions and editing, that's great, but it's not so great for the first draft. I want the words to be perfect--and of course they never are--so I keep trying to "get them right" before I get them on the page. Which generally translates to me never getting the words on the page. The looming deadline--50,000 words by December 1--helps serves as motivation. When I did NaNoWriMo with Evin, I didn't have a perfect draft by any means, but I had words on a page, and that's something I can work with.

And there's a community with NaNoWriMo. If you sign up on the official site, you can select your region and connect with other writers near you--on forums or in person (in public, well-lit places and in groups, naturally). This gives writers the chance to commiserate about their struggles, and struggles in a situation like this are inevitable, and provides a sounding board for ideas. Writing can be lonely under the best of circumstances. The marathon writing sessions that getting 50,000 words in 30 days requires can be even more isolating. ("Sorry, I can't go out tonight, I have to find some way to ad 1,600 words to a story that I have NO IDEA where it's going." "Sorry, I accidentally went to bed on time last night, so I'm 400 words behind.") This option to connect with other writers in your region--or around the nation--is a huge boon.

Honestly, my stance on all things writing is pretty much "do whatever lets you get the work done." If NaNoWriMo lets you finish a draft, then that is great (so long as you're realistic--it's not a finished product; it's a draft, and that is honestly still a crazy impressive achievement). NaNoWriMo has worked for me in the past. I'm hoping it'll work again.

I guess this post is basically my long way of saying that I'm going to be a NaNoWriMo participant this year. Since Project 2016 has expanded to a trilogy, I'm going to try to use the next month to pin down as much of the first draft of the first book as I can. I'm actually starting early (it's going to be considerably more than 50,000 words, so I'm giving myself more than 30 days).

What all of this means as far as the blog is concerned is that the blog will not be updating on the usual once weekly schedule. How often I post will depend on my where wordcount is. There'll be at least one post in the month of November, though I can't promise any more than that. If you're interested in keeping up with how things are progressing, check out my author Facebook page and/or my Twitter, where I'll be posting periodic updates.

Good luck to my fellow NaNos. See you in December.

Partners

  I've never really bought into the idea of the solitary writer, sitting alone in a room pounding out page after page with no input from anyone else. I'm sure this is probably pretty close to how it works for some folks, but my process has never reflected this narrative.

 True, most of the actual writing is done on my own, more or less. I share a house with two other people and with two cats, so an actual private writing space is sort of a dizzy daydream, but the getting-the-words-on-the-page part happens when I'm allowed to work relatively uninterrupted. But I can't just thrown an idea at the page. The early stages of the process--of my process, at least--are things that I can't do on my own.

 Part of a text message conversation with my writing group partner.

I've written about my writing group partner before. She's generally the first set of eyes for any project that I write, and she's usually the person that I send the "final" draft to before I start querying. But beyond that, she's one of the first sounding boards for my ideas.

When asked if I'm a planner or a pantser, I usually say planner. I've discussed my outlines on here before, and even shared a picture of one on the Facebook page. And yeah, by the time I'm in a draft, I have a pretty solid plan. But, if I'm telling the truth, the beginning of a project is all pantsing. Every bit of it.

The earliest stages of a project mainly consist of throwing ideas at the wall and seeing if anything sticks. And this is where my writing group partner comes in.

In the past couple of weeks, I've sent probably two or three times my usual number of text messages. It's not unusual for she and I to send each other updates, especially when our schedules don't really allow for us to meet in person. But usually it's only one or two texts--maybe an update on where we are in the work or a question about when we're going to meet next. Lately, I've been sending little tidbits about characters or the world or relationships almost as quickly as I think of them.

It started with a message about not being ready to move on to new characters and a new world after finishing Project 2016 (which I guess I could call by its title now, since I sorta revealed it above).

"I think I'm too invested in my own story," I typed.

"You're never too invested in your own work," she replied.

I might have started brainstorming my way through the extra bits of Project 2016--which, by the way, is now a trilogy instead of a single book--on my own, but something about getting tacit permission from my writing partner sparked the fire further.

I started the first step of a new project--writing down literally everything I know about the story, world, and characters. And my writing partner has been my sounding board through the whole thing. 

"I'm thinking that I'll have to go back and tell earlier parts of the story."

"I'm not sure where the narrative for the first book is going to start, but I think I know where it ends."

"I've figured out who my narrators are."

 Technically, I guess I could have just written down these ideas without running them by anyone--it's never been part of our deal that we have to discuss every step of a project. I could have closed myself off and just started writing.

But there's something about sharing an idea with someone that makes you--or at least makes me--get more excited about it. 

For me, writing is always going to be a collaborative effort. The feeling of starting off with someone on my side makes the rest of the process less intimidating.

Building

I generally don't feel like I'm very good at world building. Which is awful, because I seem to always want to write things that require a lot of world building.

Evin required me to build the forest and the worlds connected to it. The forest and the places the characters came from each had to have their own distinct ambience and identity. It couldn't feel like I was sending the characters to the same places over and over. I hope it didn't feel that way.

Project 2016 also demanded some world building--more, in fact, than Evin did.

See, Project 2016 is a set in the far future. And in space.

I love Firefly, but I will never understand why you go through the trouble of telling a story in space only to not have any aliens. Seriously. None? None at all?

There are several ways that this gets complicated. First, though my two POV characters are both human, they don't have lives like humans living today. Time, technology, and interaction with other sapient species have changed social arrangements and day-to-day activities for humans. It's up to me to determine how much has changed--and how much has stayed the same. I have to determine what technology exists, how it's used, and who has access to it. Beyond that, I have to figure out who came up with the technology first, because that's going to play a role in things like where the money is, who gets to make governmental decisions, and even what language people will speak--not just my human characters, but the other characters they come into contact with.

I also have to figure out my nonhuman characters--to build their species from the ground up. What about them is similar to humans and what's different? Why did these particular differences develop? How might these physical differences shape differences in culture (for instance, one of my species has a very refined sense of hearing--so they don't listen to music with brass or wind instruments because they can easily hear the spit moving through the instruments and it sounds gross). Does each species tend towards diplomacy or warfare? I also have to figure out how each species first came into contact with the others--peaceful first encounters might mean alliances, where violent once might mean long-standing grudges, and either is going to shape how members of different species interact.

And all of this is aside from the building required for any book--the characters' personal histories and their specific experiences with the framework of the world they live in and other characters associated with different groups, whether they're technologically savvy, if they've ever even seen a person from a different species.

There are so many moving parts that I'm not always confident that I'm doing a good job keeping track of them. Evin seemed like it was easier--though that could honestly have been more of a factor of my not knowing as well what I was doing.

For Project 2016, I built a universe bible. For me, it's a word document where I've listed the rules of the story's world--the history, notable people, some of the laws and political set ups. It has a brief description of each of the species and how they relate to the others, a history of how some of the important organizations and groups were formed and what the popular opinion of them seems to be.

I think I've been pretty thorough this time--more than I have been in the past. But I still worry that I've missed something. Part of the problem is that I don't usually know what aspect of the world I don't have pinned down until I need it in the story. And then I end up having to go back and put it in (and usually adjust everything around it so that things still make sense).

At this point, I know the world of Project 2016 well, and, as I said in the last post, I'm pretty fond of it.

Putting together the world of Project 2016 has been a lot of work, and I'm not sure how effectively I did it, though I can safely say I'm confident that I did it better this time than last time. And there's a lot of information that I have that's didn't make it into the project (though some of it may be in future projects, if I revisit this universe).

World building is the best and worst part of the process--there's so much potential for the story when you start putting the world together, but there's also so much that can go wrong or get out of hand (at what point does world building stop helping the story and start getting in the way?).

I'm in the early stages of world building for the next project, though I haven't completely left Project 2016. I still don't think I'm great at it, but I do think I'm getting better.

That's the best part of writing, I think. It's always hard, and sometimes I hate it, but I keep getting better--and I do love that.

Not Ready to Leave

Project 2016 remains out on submission (so far there have been 3 rejections, and I'm waiting to hear from another 5 that are currently out, and I have a list of about 20 more that I'm looking to send submissions out to).

This puts me in a strange place as far as working. I need to keep up my daily writing as much as possible. I've got a couple of other ideas that are roughly outlined. Reasonably, I could start on either of these new projects. Starting a new project would solve my "what should I work on" problem.

But there's a problem: I'm not ready to leave project 2016 yet.

As I think I've said before, project 2016 is very dear to me. I've been writing some version or another of this story since I was seventeen. I'm partial to everything I write, but project 2016 is special. It feels more complete than anything I've worked on--a benefit of having had the world and its characters rolling around in my head for ten plus years, I guess.

The manuscript as it is is about as good as I can make it. There's not really a lot left for me to revise or to edit. There is, at this point, nothing left for me to do on the manuscript.

I'm just not ready to leave the world yet.

The characters in project 2016, even the bit characters, are some of my favorite creations. I know each one's story backwards and forwards. I understand their relationships and their quirks. I have an idea of where they were before the story started and where they'll end up after the story's end. I know the avenues that didn't get explored in the story. There's so much more information, so many more scenarios that I could explore. And I want to play around with them.

Project 2016 was never supposed to be a series. I had one story that I wanted to tell, and the manuscript I wrote tells it. I was supposed to be done.

A couple of my early readers suggested that they'd like to see more with these characters and in this world--maybe pieces centered on some of the other characters or that lay out how the characters met or how the world ended up like it did.

I know these stories. I know how the situations arose. I know the history that the characters have with each other. There's a character that's in maybe two chapters of the manuscript whose whole life story I could recite. I hadn't thought about writing more in this world.

I haven't decided what my next project will be. As much as I love project 2016's worlds and characters, there are still other stories that I want to tell. I don't want my entire writing career to be spent in one story--even if I love that one story. But I'm also pretty sure that I'm not ready to walk away from the world of project 2016.

Maybe I'll spend a few days outlining--see which project tugs at me the most.

Too many ideas and too much enthusiasm for a story are good problems to have. But they're still problems--and I've got to figure out what to do if I want to keep on writing.

Querying

Project 2016 is at the part of the process that I may hate more than anything else.

Querying.

I think I've explained before that, with this project, I'm trying to get wider distribution--I want, for example, to be able to pick up my book at a big box bookstore rather than just being able to order it online. Meeting this goal means that I'll have to get my manuscript picked up by a larger publishing house--one of the "big five" publishing houses, maybe.

The thing with bigger publishing houses is that everyone wants to get picked up by them. Dreams of the seven-figure book deal start with signing a contract at a HarperCollins or a Macmillan. Given the option, almost everyone who writes would send their manuscripts to them.

So they don't give people that option.

There are two types of submission that an author can make to a publisher or agent: solicited and unsolicited. The second is pretty much what all unagented authors are sending out (with the exception of, like, if you talk to an agent at a conference and the agent asks them to send a query or something like PitMad, where an agent makes a request for a particular project). An unsolicited submission is essentially a cold call. Hey, here's my work--you interested? Smaller publishing houses accept unsolicited submissions from unagented authors. But the big five don't. If you're sending a submission to one of the big five, it's either because they asked you to or because you have an agent that's convinced them to take a look.

And so, since an agent is more or less required for me to take the next step up, I'm trying to find one with Project 2016. For the sake of full disclosure, I should say that this isn't my first time trying to make this happen. I tried to find an agent with Evin for a while, but, for various reasons, I didn't have success. I'll get to that in a minute.

Finding an agent is in part about matchmaking. Project 2016 is YA speculative fiction, so the genre of the book has to guide my search. I've made use of Manuscript Wishlist and Writer's Digest (in addition to generic Google searches) to try to find agents that are looking for work like mine. I find the name, I look at the agent/agency page to try to determine if I think I will want to work with them, and, if I think I want to query them, I add them to my list. My list right now has 15 agents on it. I might go back and add more later, but I think this is good to start with.

I organized my list according to which agents I was most excited about. I don't want to send out all 15 queries at once (what if one of the agents has feedback that might help with my next query?), so I set a loose order for sending out queries.

Queries are hard. Your query is meant to sell your story in a paragraph or two. It's not a summary--not exactly--but a short pitch. It's got to introduce your protagonist(s) and set up the stakes. For me, this is always pretty complicated. How do I pick the most important part of the manuscript when, to me, it's all important? Which characters absolutely have to be in the query? Of all of the conflicts that are in the manuscript, which is the conflict? It usually takes me a couple of drafts to get a query down--and I'm usually unhappy with it no matter how long I work on it.

I started with three agents. I tailored the opening paragraph of my query for each agent--making note of what the agent has said s/he is looking for and what I think my manuscript has to offer. Then, I follow up with my two-ish paragraphs about the manuscript and a paragraph about my publication history.

Depending on the agent, I add sample pages (usually they ask for the first 5-10 pages) and a synopsis (and oh my God, writing a synopsis is an ordeal worthy of its own post).

And then off it goes. The query packet is sent to the agent, and I wait for a response.

This is the point where I start checking my email every five minutes.

I call this phase of the process the land of a million rejections. When I was querying with Evin, I got discouraged pretty early. I sent out maybe five queries total and got five rejections.

It's worth noting that this isn't uncommon. Rejections--several rejections--are part of the deal. Sometimes the work isn't ready, and if that's the case, you need to find out. Even if the work is great, the agent might not feel like they're the work's best advocate. But rejection always stings.

Two weeks ago, I sent out my first three queries. And within three days, I had already gotten back my first rejection. It was very polite, and I don't think it was a form letter (which is encouraging, even though it's still not the outcome that I wanted), but I can't deny that I felt pretty bad about it.

Last time, this might have been enough to derail me. This time, though, I've got my list of agents. I got a rejection, so I sent out another query (and got another rejection--this one was a form letter, I'm pretty sure). The let down of a rejection sucks, but having an action that I can take in response--sending another query--helps keep me from getting too bogged down.

I've still got three queries out--two of them from the first batch I sent. I have eleven agents left on the list as it is. I'll probably add more as I do more research.

The querying roller coaster is rough and certainly isn't my favorite part of the process, but this time, I'm not going to give up--or at least, I won't give up so soon. And who knows? Maybe I'll find someone who is as excited about Project 2016 as I am. 

PitMad

Project 2016 has been through four readers and roughly three drafts, and I am about ready to call the revisions done. The current draft is back with my writing group partner for one more once over, but the opening pages are about a polished as they are gonna get, so it's time to start the submissions process.

I'll spend the next few weeks discussing how I've handled this process in the past and what I'm doing/how things are progressing with Project 2016. Most of what I'm going to do with Project 2016 is going to follow a more traditional approach--querying agents and sending submissions to publishers directly.

But this week, I tried something I hadn't tried before, and I thought it'd be worth looking at.

This past Thursday, I participated in my first ever Twitter Pitch Party.

These events are a relatively new alternative (or supplement, really--seems like most of the folks who participate also go the slush pile route) to the traditional querying process. The idea is that you tweet a short pitch for your manuscript with the appropriate hashtag. If an agent or editor favorites your pitch tweet, it's an invitation to send them a submission. This means that your submission gets moved to the top of the pile. It doesn't guarantee that you'll snag representation for your manuscript, but it lets you go into the next phase with better cards in your hand.

There are several of these events. The particular event that I took part in last week was PitMad, a quarterly event involving agents, editors, and some publishers. It's a twelve hour event--Thursday's was 8AM to 8PM EDT. You can pitch multiple projects, but you only get three tweets per project. A favorite from an agent, editor, or publisher is a request for a submission of the manuscript you pitched.

Since this was my first time doing this event, it was more learning experience than anything. I made my three pitches. Honestly, I'm not sure I did it well, but I didn't come up empty, and that's something. I wanted to show what my pitches were--to do sort of a postmortem on my PitMad work.

(Yes, you'll see my Twitter handle in these pictures; yes, you're welcome to follow me on Twitter, but that is where I talk about politics, so if that's gonna bug you, maybe stick to the blog and the Facebook page.)

Coming up with a pitch that expresses the charms of a 300-ish page manuscript in less than 140 characters is super difficult. My biggest mistake with this was not starting on my pitches earlier. I drafted three pitches a day and a half before the event. That may seem like plenty of time, but it meant that I didn't have a chance to have anyone else take a look at my pitches to see how effective they were. There wasn't as much time to rework and revise.

I don't feel like my pitches were particularly great. That said, I didn't exactly come up empty: I got one favorite on a pitch from a publisher. But more about that later.

I tweeted three pitches--one in the morning, one around lunchtime, and one just before the event ended.

My first pitch:

This one didn't get any hits. I thought the comparison was pretty strong, but it didn't leave a lot of room for details about the story itself--which I feel like you probably need in order to justify the comparison.

The hashtags, in case you were wondering, are the PitMad event tag, the age group tag (na for New Adult), and the genre tag (spf for speculative fiction).

Pitch number two:

This was the only successful pitch I had, and even then its success was limited. Without the comparison, I was able to introduce the main character's name and set up the exposition of the story, which might have been why this one got the favorite.

Pitch three:

Nothing on this one, either, but I did manage to work in some more specifics about the manuscript. I changed the age tag to Young Adult (my main character starts the story at 16 and is 18 by the end of it, so I'm in a little bit of a grey area there). I don't know if leaving the tag as it was would have made a difference, but that's something to keep in mind for next time.

All in all, maybe not a strong as it could have been, but it was definitely a learning experience.

My first big piece of advice to anyone considering participating in the next PitMad or similar event is pretty simple: be prepared. If I'd taken more time to prep my pitches, I think I would have been able to court more response.

The second big piece of advice I have is to do your research and know what you're looking for in an agent/editor/publisher. The thing with these events is that there's not a lot of vetting when it comes to who's able to favorite pitches. The draw of someone that wants to look at your manuscript is powerful, but you're not under any obligation to send a submission to someone just because they favorited your pitch.

I got one hit--from a publisher, not an agent or editor--so I did my research. I looked at the company's website, I looked at writer forums, and I looked at my list of goals.

For Project 2016, I want to go further than I did with Evin. While publishing Evin has been an excellent experience and I would happily recommend my publisher to anyone looking to put out a first book, I feel like I'm ready to take new steps. I'm not interested in digital-only publishing--ideally, I'd like to see Project 2016 on shelves in retailers and not just available for online ordering. What I really want is an agent, someone in a better position than I am to negotiate bigger deals for my work.

Bearing all these things in mind, I looked at what the publisher could offer. I've decided to pass on submitting. They seem like a fine outfit, but they don't line up with my goals.

So PitMad was sort of a mixed bag for me--I didn't come up empty, per se, but I'm not going to see any submissions from it. Still, the event was a good experience, and, depending on how things go with my querying over the next few weeks, I'll likely participate in other events like this again.

If you're interested in trying an event like this, here's a list of other similar events:
Pitch America (focuses on Latinx voices)
Hot Summer's Cool Pitchfest
Pitch Slam
DVPit (coming up in October)
Nightmare on Query Street
AdPit and KidPit (in November)

Authors

This blog has mostly focused on walking through the novel-writing process--or at least, my novel-writing process (such as it is). But this week, I haven't really been doing anything new. I'm deep in the rewriting slog for Project 2016, chugging towards getting it out on submission. My goal is to have it out the door by the end of this month or early next month--before NaNoWriMo starts, in other words. I don't think you could pay me to start submitting a novel in November/December. (Man, I have lots of thoughts about NaNoWriMo...but that's a post for another day.)

So I won't be discussing the writing process this week, since I've talked about rewriting already. Instead, I want to talk about something that I've mentioned in passing in a previous post.

I read and was read to a lot as a kid. I liked stories--which is not in any way unique. But it was several years before I made what may seem like an obvious observation.

People actually write these stories.

I mean, duh. But as a kid, I really didn't know that. Even as an adult, I sometimes forget that there's a person behind what I read and watch.

One of my favorite movies, Sunset Boulevard, centers on a man who writes movies. (It doesn't end well for him--and that's not so much a spoiler, since you know from the beginning of the movie that things don't end up going his way.) The writer character, Joe Gillis, sums up the way that writing sometimes gets viewed pretty well.

Joe Gillis:
Audiences don't know somebody sits down and writes a picture; they think the actors make it up as they go along.

This was more or less what I thought for a while. But when I was about nine or ten years old, I started reading the Harry Potter series. 

I was one of the kids that grew up with the series. I was about nine when I read the first book, and eighteen when the last book came out.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was loaned to me by a neighbor, who told me a little bit about the author. Specifically, she told me that the author used her initials as her author name because of concerns that people wouldn't read a book about a boy that was written by a woman.

At nine, I was not quite able to wrap my head around the sexism that implied, but I was able to latch on to the fact that a person  wrote this book that I enjoyed so much--and that that person was like me.

Rowling was the first author that I started to do research on. I wanted to know about her life and how she came to write this story. 

This is what got me started writing. Rowling, I had read, started writing little stories when she was a child.

When I was a kid, I had a different lifelong dream every week.  But this caught me. I started writing stories as soon as I read it. Not good stories--in fact, I'm pretty sure I never finished most of them--but I wrote. I even won a little contest in elementary school.

It was the first time that I realized someone could create a story and get it out there for other people to read.

My attention to my writing waned as I soldiered towards middle school. I was into everything as a kid, so the notion of picking my lane wasn't an appealing one. This spark would dim for a while.

By the time I was in eighth grade, I had almost stopped writing. I'd scribble little stories with friends, but nothing serious. The drive wasn't there.

 We read a book that year that reminded me that real people create the stories I love. The Outsiders by SE Hinton was one of the books in the unit that year. Apart from loving the book itself, I was fascinated by the author.

Hinton was a teenager--fifteen years old, at the start of the process--when she wrote The Outsiders based on the relationships between teenagers from different social classes in Oklahoma.

While I reread Harry Potter pretty frequently and have read all of Rolwing's other books (including the mysteries written under her Robert Galbraith pen name) and have only read Hinton's The Outsiders and only read it a couple of times, Hinton lit a more lasting fire in me.

Rowling made me want to write. Hinton made me need to write--and need to start writing immediately.

I made my first attempt at writing a novel that year.

It took me almost twenty years after discovering that authors were a thing and almost fifteen years after that first attempt to write a novel and get it out in the world. My getting started as an author may have been meandering and have come with several starts and stops, but I know exactly what it traces back to.

When did you figure out that there were people behind your favorite stories? What authors made you want to write?