Procrastination...

I'm blogging in an attempt to procrastinate.

These days, I'm playing the waiting game. Wait and wait and wait some more for some literary agent to contact me saying, "I want to read and/or rep your book!" I'm also playing the: What the fuck am I doing with my life game? And the how the hell can I make some more money writing game? And the I need a freaking job badly game. And the applying for job game, which is less fun than the I need a job game.

I've sent out 27 query letters so far. Some were just query letters; some were query letters, a synopsis, and sample chapters. I've received 9 rejections so far. They sting. They just do. This book is an extension of my being. Of course, it's going to hurt when someone says she's not well-written enough or good enough or interesting enough! However, I try to move forward every single day. Even if it's just one small step forward, I MUST take a step forward EVERY DAY. Otherwise, I end up in crazy, lost, depressed writer land. Which, at this point, I've accepted as just part of being a writer, but it still sucks. It's not a happy place. I feel lost there and question myself. Which I can't be doing. Especially not now.

So, I send out more query letters. I tell all of my friends when I receive a new rejection letter, so they can say things like, "Bollocks!" and "Fuckers!" and "Don't listen to them! Just send out another query letter!" I generally listen to my friends instead of the rejection letters. And I'm constantly reminded that "it only takes one YES." Love all of you who have said this to me recently!

I'm also applying for jobs these days. I just want to write. And I'm a decent writer. I just haven't figured out how to make enough money off my writing. Every day I send out another resume and writing samples to magazines and websites just trying to land a gig writing anything. Because it's been almost a month since I sent out my first query letter, and I am now entertaining the idea that I need to get a job before my savings really does run dry. So, of course I want a writing job, but I can't figure out how to market myself. If anyone has any ideas on this front...you know...pass them along! Please!

I'm also applying for bar wench jobs. Because I need a job. And money. Plus, I need something to occupy my time. Because OMG am I a crazy writer if you let me spend too much time in my own head, especially while playing the waiting game!!! Again, if anyone has a lead on a job, please pass the info along to your friendly neighborhood unemployed writer.

I'm getting together my list of literary agents to query for round 2. There will probably be about 30 in this bunch as well. So, here we go! Let's do this! Let's all pray a little more, plan a little more, and write a little more. Maybe these are the keys to success. Who knows? But I am determined and willing to do WHATEVER IT TAKES to achieve my dreams. No matter what. I have said this before, and I stand by it: No IS NO T an option!

Slight Moment of Panic and A Long Night of Insomnia

I had a slight girlie moment of panic last night that led to a night of insomnia in which I was composing haikus instead of sleeping. Totally normal, right?

My moment of panic stemmed from the ten day trip I'm going to be embarking upon on Thursday. Yes, this Thursday. This trip includes four cities, two weddings (one of which I am in), and me in a bathing suit in a week from now, oh my god. Yes, this is one intense trip! It's going to be ridiculously awesome, and I'm going to see most of my very best friends, including my middle sister, over the course of the next ten days. However, I've been avoiding planning for it, meaning making lists of things to make sure I take and leave. Like take my gps for driving around L.A. but leave my Swiss army knife here instead of getting to the airport, failing security checks, and having to mail it home to myself and go through security again. So today I make lists and plans as I embark upon another work day with less sleep than normal.

Because I'm going to be out of town for ten whole days meaning I'll get little to no work done, I'm trying to get my book finished before I leave...in FIVE days! This may seem like unnecessary pressure, but you know when you're running a marathon and you only have a mile left...you're not going to stop for anything. Nothing. At all. No matter what. Because you're almost finished. And you really want to just be finished. I really want to just be finished with my book. And I'm so freaking close; I can literally taste it at this point!

Plus, I've written a rockin' query letter that I want to start sending out to literary agents to get this process moving along, so I can sell my book, you know, yesterday! So, I push myself to pack for a ten day trip, to not forget anything, and finish my book. All in the next five days.

So here we are. Yesterday, I put every event, major and minor, and time reference on a piece of posterboard. I had divided the posterboard up by months because in my head, I thought I knew when everything happened. Well, now I have all these events on my time line. (Yes, the dreaded time line I've been avoiding for a year is complete.) Putting all of these events on my time line made me realize two things: 1)I actually didn't have any idea when anything happened. I won't give away specific details of events, but there's one major event in the story that happened in the Fall in my imagination, but according to my book, it happened in early Spring. 2)The event that happens on the first freaking page of the whole damn novel is the one that's going to fuck up the ENTIRE time line of my story! Every other event can be moved or shifted pretty easily, but this one event was causing some MAJOR problems!

So last night, while my roommates and I were making dinner and playing Wii, I start discussing this one MAJOR problem and trying to come up with a solution. But not just any solution. At this stage in the game, the solution needs to be like one or two sentences and thus, really easy to fix! Well, after explaining my situation, my roommates gave me a couple of potential solutions, but they were BIG fixes! I can't use a big fix at this point. I can't go back and rewrite lots of various parts of the story for one scene. It's just not realistic. So we kept chatting. It took a minute, but we finally came up with a really easy, one or two sentence fix that makes the first scene completely plausible. Hallelujah!!! Like I said, the first scene was the only really big problem with my time line. The rest of the stuff is little and just needs to be nailed down.

This morning I got lucky and found a blank piece of posterboard. So, I'm going transfer every event from one posterboard to another, making them all fit together in a precise puzzle as I go. And then, I have to go back in and make changes in the novel of all of these event time changes. Hopefully this process will be completed today because I have several other things to work on in the next four.

For now, I leave you with a haiku composed in a state of insomnia.

The NFL draft
Is like the smell of rain. You
Lust for the real thing.

Can I get a "Fuck Yeah!" and a High Five of Stoketude please?

It's been a freaking phenomenal day! I bought a case of paper this morning for $20. Woo hoo for cheap white paper on which I printed my novel! Also yay for new red pens! It's the simple things in life really.

When I edit/rewrite/revise/write, I print my novel out and write all over it in bright red pen! I know it's a waste of 100 sheets of paper every time I do this, but this is the only way editing works for me. I can't do nearly as good of a job on the computer screen as I can writing it in by hand. However, this makes double the work as I then have to go through the file and make all of the hand-written corrections. But it works, and that's all that matters. Oh, and I recycle!

Before I started my editing today, I read through my editors' comments and notes. I like to get a sense of the issues my editors are having, so I can easily and hopefully organically slip in solutions. I'm also flipping through a marked up copy while I edit my clean copy. There shouldn't be many more edits at all after this round, so I have to make sure I don't miss anything!

One of the comments one of my editors made was that readers needed to really get into the protagonist's head more. And I should describe her actions less. Particularly toward the end. So today I really tried to get into my protagonist's head. Which was difficult! Especially in the end of the book where the protagonist and the serial killer come face to face to duke it out. Having never been in this situation, it's hard to get into the mindset of thinking you're about to die at the hands of a serial killer who has brutally murdered a decent number of people over the last few months. Really getting into Leia's mind is crucial to my story's success.

So, I got fucked up, closed my eyes, and just wrote, trying to really concentrate and put myself in those feelings, her feelings. This might sound weird, and I'm certain I looked weird typing really fast with my eyes closed, but I think it helped. I hope her thoughts and emotions are coming to the surface more, so you can feel this intense level of fear and terror WITH her! So you will be afraid FOR her! So you will give a damn! So you will care about Leia Marie Sutherland, and you will cheer her on as she fights this psycho for her life. Cuz if you don't give a damn, I have failed in my mission as a writer. And if you don't care, you might not have even made it to the end chapters I worked on today. And you won't tell your friends to buy my book. Yes, you caring about Leia is this important and a crucial element to my success. So, I hone her voice and make her a stronger character.

Lots more editing to go for this round, but I'm off to a good start! I have to keep plowing through at a quick pace, so I can start querying agents ASAP now that I have my query letter finished.

My Query Letters Have Sucked!!!

I'm meeting with my editor tomorrow to get some help with query letters and other things. So, I decided I needed to make my query letters better or at least create a few different versions to choose from, one of which would hopefully be good. Thus, I got really fucked up, put on some Top Chef tv and just fucking wrote and referred to a sample query letter. And wrote some more. And referred to a sample query letter. And I came up with two new versions, one of which I think is pretty freaking good. Definitely less boring! I thought writing my novel would be hard. It was a cake walk compared to this. This shit is fucking hard!

Another issue I'm dealing with: who does my novel sound like? It's got to sound like someone else out there. I just don't know who. I've asked my editors and have stacks of mysteries I'm plowing through in an attempt to figure this out. My protagonist is different, but I'm not naive enough to think she's completely original.

The whole thought process contained here is why attempting to get published is MADDENING! You do one thing Monday only to have ten things to do Tuesday. So you do ten things Tuesday only to have 40 things to do Wednesday! If I didn't drink, I wouldn't make it. If I didn't have the support system I have, I wouldn't make it. If I wasn't as determined and unwilling to accept, "No" for an answer, I wouldn't fucking make it!

Have I mentioned how scary editing a novel is? Have I mentioned how scary trying to sell my novel to an agent is? No. Well, I have never been more scared in my life! Because I've upped the ante. It's all fine and well and good when it's just a job or a project or a whatever. But when you risk your livelihood to make your childhood dreams come true, "Yes" is the only acceptable answer, and you don't give up until you hear the one word that matters. No matter what.

So, it's Thursday, and I'm kicking my own butt into gear, so I'm going to go back to writing awesome query letters!

Thankful Thursday!

Thankful for an easier writing day than some I've had recently. Today, I told myself I was going to write x, y, and z, and my brain said okay. Let's get it done. And I did.

Thankful for sunshine. It just makes me happier and my writing better.

Thankful for the ability to run as much as I do. Again, the physical activity just makes me happier and thus my writing better.

Thankful for my imagination. I spent the afternoon running around in my imagination trying to figure out what messed up thing my new character, Stephanie, was going to do next. My imagination makes me feel like a little kid: free, like anything can happen if I can just dream it up. And that's why I read so much fiction and write murder mystery novels. I like spending time running rampant through the wilderness of my imagination.

Thankful for the ability to swear in my writing, since I gave it up in real life for Lent.

Thankful for the ability to think outside the box sometimes. Instead of composing my query letter in front of my computer, which WAS NOT working, I walked the dog. And I took pen and paper with me. Thankful that this approach made all the difference. And I now have a query letter. Finally.

Thankful for my fellow writers. I love all of you near and far. It's good to have people to bounce ideas off of, to help me work through ideas when I get stuck, to help me edit EVERYTHING, to help me write some of the difficult things, and to just generally provide a supportive, knowing ear when I need it.

Yesterday

I turned my whole novel into my adviser/editor yesterday. She will read it, do her thing with it, and return it as a...well...who knows what it will look like when she returns it, but I am greatly looking forward to hearing her expert, objective opinion.

In the interim, I will pour over my Writer's Market 2010 Guide to Literary Agents to figure out how I'm going to get a literary agent, pour over books as to the best publishing houses for murder mystery novels, and figure out what exactly my query letter is going to say so I can sell my book to someone, anyone, the highest bidder, but really...anyone. Let's get this baby in print! It's about that time.

Well, okay, so maybe we're not quite there yet. But the book is almost perfected. So, it's time to move forward to the publishing, making money, another hard part because it's a first for me, but oh-my-God-we're-really-excited part!

To my editing friends, be looking out for an email with aforementioned query letter in it along with a sweet, polite plea for you to use your amazing editing skills to make my query letter great.

To anyone and everyone who reads this, please keep your good vibes coming my way. Writing the book is only half the battle, and it may not even be the hard half.

And the editing process continues...

I call it editing. But it's editing, revising, rewriting, writing new sections, writing new chapters, all in lots of red ink on the all almost 200 pages of my novel. So, it's days and days of frantic, "in the zone" scrawling in red ink. Bright red ink, so I can see it and hopefully read it. Lots of arrows and boxes with text in them and instructions in the margins as to where this new bit of text is going to go and where that sentence should go and crossing out and rewriting and consolidating ideas, paragraphs, and sentences.

And lately it's been The Shins but before that it was everything country and sometimes it's Modest Mouse but not normally rap. Something inspirational with a good groove that will hopefully keep me moving forward. To the next paragraph, the next page, the next chapter...until I get to the end. And insanity. Lots of creative, beautiful, inspiring, wonderfully worded, and not-so-wonderfully worded insanity. It's intensive and tiring and lots and lots of hard work, but it makes me so freaking happy.

This is my novel. My first. My baby. And I love it. I love everything about it. All the rough, ugly, grotesque, beautiful, twisted, funny, scary parts. So I trudge forward through the mire of living, breathing, loving, terrifying words. Day after day. Only to be followed by days of making all of these corrections in the computer. Back to my novel I go...

Questions, Questions, and More Questions!

So, it's about that time. I've been avoiding writing the ending of my novel like the plague. I don't now why, but it just hasn't come to me yet. Well, it's about that time. It's time to write the ending. Luckily, I've had a few ideas that have fallen into place recently, so this has gotten me going in the right direction.

Tonight, while watching a movie about a serial killer for inspiration, I started working my way through what has to happen in the end chronologically. I wrote a million different questions. Only half of the questions I wrote down tonight have answers. But at least some of them do.

Tomorrow we start the writing of the ending. Really pushing to get my whole novel written this week.

Got out of bed to get the computer and get back in bed to post post

Writers's group tonight. Read them one of the new chapters I've written from Leia's perspective. This is the chapter that stemmed from something one of the members of my writers's group said last week. I got some really great feedback and ideas to make the chapter even better!

I had lots of ideas this past week. Met with my mentor and discussed a tentative deadline for me to have the book finished. Time to get serious again. Time to dig my heals in and finish this damn book! Woo hoo!

Tomorrow's goal: 3 chapters