Random thoughts

La Shark says it best, as she often does: “1. A query letter is a business letter.“

The novel is finished. It took longer than I expected, but the next one will be easier, if only because I’m a hell of a lot more aware of the stuff that shouldn’t been included in the first place and had to be removed at great cost.

Nothing to remind you you’re writing for the public than the blog hits shooting skyward, and finding that an ex-co-worker seems to have linked to you on her Facebook page.

Writing workshops are immensely helpful. Today’s reality check: “Great images, but I have no idea what the narrative is.”

I never used to listen to music while working. Maybe a CD or two, but always stuff I knew so well that it could just exist in the background. And I never bought a lot of new music. Then I got iTunes and started developing a writing playlist, which expanded to ‘anything not involving a heavy beat and/or wailing’ (which, given that I tend towards female singer/songwriters, isn’t much of the collection anyway). Then last month I got an iPod shuffle – yeah, I know, I can finally join the rest of the universe – and suddenly it’s my constant companion. The interior narrative now has a soundtrack, and I’m not sure if that’s entirely a good thing.

Given that I want to carry more upon my person than the iPod and a bottle of eyedrops, I am resigned to making most of my future clothing purchases in the men’s department, for one simple reason: pockets. Seriously, my corduroy jackets have dinky little pockets that I consider myself lucky to have, whereas if I could actually find a men’s jacket in my size, I’d be able to travel to London for the weekend without worrying about an overnight bag. A fishing vest, now, there’s something useful – I once fit in four paperback books….

Making Mistakes Before They Matter

Sometimes gremlins sneak into your computer.

Really, how else can it be explained that I duplicated the first chapter of DNP, pasted in the next three chapters, saved it, copied it onto my USB key, moved to the internet-able computer, attached it to an e-mail, sent it, and then received an e-mail back saying ‘this seems really short for four chapters’? Because in fact there was only one chapter in the document? And when I go back to my USB key the document has four chapters?

Gremlins, I tells ya. Of the techy variety. (As opposed to the Trekky variety, because they’re all out watching the new movie.)

Thankfully, I didn’t make this mistake to Dream Agent. I made it to a most excellent friend who sent an insightful critique on chapter 1 and now wants to read more. Which means that the ramification of my error is that I might have to wait until she’s free to comment on the next three chapters, instead of getting a response this weekend – but that’s a hell of a lot better than a ramification of ‘the agent thinks I’m a moron who can’t follow instructions and/or a computer ninny, and I have to write a pleading e-mail saying “oops, here’s the rest”.’

And now you can be damn sure that I will triple-check every document that gets e-mailed out under my name.

Maybe I should update!

If I’m going to get hits from about.com I should probably pop back in and say hello….

(Though I get roughly as many hits now as I did when I was regularly updating.  I suppose I get hits from my mentions of agents’ names and the like.)

Just had the full draft of DNP critiqued, and before I perform major surgery, it’s being read by a few more people (at the original reader’s suggestion) – and, amusingly enough, the query package is being critiqued by students in a college class.  Well, even if none of them are going to be editors, apparently they have to take the editing class for their degree, and a friend of mine who teaches the class wondered if I’d be willing to be their query package…so of course the synopsis is a load of tripe deliberately.  Otherwise they’d have nothing to critique.  That’s my excuse….

I think all the pieces are there.  I just have to put them in the best order.  Which won’t be easy, but I’ve put too much into this book to let it go now.

And then comes the query process!  I’ll definitely blog about that.

Be careful who you ask for blurbs

Sometimes book publication goes very, very bad.

In preparation for the publication of her debut novel The Jewel of Medina, Sherry Jones suggested a few people who might be interested in writing cover blurbs. (The kind that praise the book with lots of adjectives, i.e. ‘Magnificent!’ – Thundercat.) Her novel, about the Prophet Mohammed’s young bride, was scheduled to be published by Random House next week. One of those potential blurbers, an academic named Denise Spellberg, had a lot of concerns about the novel, and her comments triggered (sorry, the puns just creep in) a complex reaction which led to the book being spiked.

(Ironically, just as I was typing that paragraph, my Brenda-Novak-agent response came back with a few fundamental comments – one of which was, might my novel prove unpublishable on the grounds of controversy? And guess what news story the agent pointed me to. We write in the zeitgeist.)

(I don’t think Nazis prompt the same type of controversy, but that’s another entry.)

I hate that a publishing house made the decision to cancel a book because someone might get offended. Here’s one of the big problems: you cannot actually predict in advance what is going to annoy someone, or when it will annoy them. The Danish political cartoons that sparked protests were, in some countries, published without any notable protest; looking at the Wikipedia timeline, I’m genuinely amazed at how many countries published these cartoons, without reprisals from anyone. Hell, a Danish newspaper later reprinted one, and that doesn’t seem to have resparked outrage.

I’m not denying that people died as a direct result from this situation, but I’m worried that Random House jumped straight from ‘this academic said thus-and-such’ to ‘death and reprisals’ without due consideration. [I am not, of course, privy to their decision-making process. But I note that they took less than a day to decide 'to possibly postpone publication' and three weeks to end it completely. Oh, sorry, 'indefinitely postpone.']

[I also note that Spellberg and her attorney claimed they 'would sue the publisher if her name was associated with the novel.' Go punch her name into a search engine. Yeah. These things rarely work out the way you want them to.]

To quote the late (alas) columnist Martyn Harris, on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, ‘There is more devastating critique of the divine inspiration of the Koran in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and no one is burning that.’ There is some selectivity here, and clearly not everyone agrees that there is a particular response required for what may be interpreted as unfair criticism. I wouldn’t be surprised if Jones’s book received some annoyed e-mails, maybe even a copy or two burned. Heck, maybe it would be a bigger controversy than Danish cartoons + Satanic Verses combined. But what are the chances of that happening? Doesn’t matter – Random House is pulling up the pegs and going home.

What really bugs me about the process detailed in the WSJ article is that someone had a problem with the book – though why a love scene between two people known to have been married should be a ‘delibrate misinterpretation of history’ I can’t figure out, but again, I don’t have all the information (and haven’t read the book, and probably won’t now) – and e-mailed another person, who then posted on their blog about it, and then someone ELSE came up with a seven-point plan to kill the publication and demanded that the author ‘apologise all [sic] the muslims [sic] across the world.’ Note the point at which we move from a perfectly legitimate critique of a book (which Spellberg discusses here) to a decision that every person of a particular religion in the entire world deserves an apology.

Okay, at this point I’ve lost any semblance of a point, and you can probably drive trucks through my logic. I’m stopping here.

Writing a novel about the Third Reich suddenly looks like a much safer proposition than it did when I began this entry. But who knows? – maybe Random House would take on my book and then decide that some wacko neo-Nazi might decide to spray the offices with an MP40.

I feel so sorry for Jones.

Okay, I’m not done yet. If Random House were so concerned about stirring up Mohammed-related controversy, why the hell didn’t someone weigh in on this before the author was preparing for her eight-city book tour? Heck, I had one chapter and a synopsis read by a single agent, and she’s warning me about the ramifications of publishing this.

One chapter. A three-page synopsis (which I don’t think was even very good). And yet this is sufficient for me to receive a warning about controversy concerning a group that no longer exists and who are, among right-thinking people, known to be Bad And Wrong.

And we’re expected to believe that Jones’s agent, editor, copyeditor, cover artist, back-cover-description-writer – okay, scratch the last; they NEVER get the book right – basically, everyone involved in this book failed to consider the possibility of controversy? No one thinks about fatwas and bomb threats until they’re mentioned by an associate professor?

Clearly Spellberg wielded far more power than she thought.

If Random House really is concerned with the bottom line of ‘corporate interests’ (as Spellberg states), maybe they ought to worry about those interests long, long before they send the book out for review.

Polyphony is hard!

Otherwise known as, multiple characters can be really confusing.

I regret having to ditch some, but when I went through three chapters and removed all but two characters, I found that I only needed to rewrite one scene to keep the plot moving – in other words, out of 2500 deleted words, I only had one necessary scene. There were a few observations I want to work back in, but that should be easy enough to do in dialogue format. It’s always a wake-up call when you cut things and the novel doesn’t suffer for it – and in fact, improves, as you clear out the underbrush. Phyllis Eisenstein once mentioned something about having deleted some thousands of words, then joining the two ends together and finding they came together seamlessly.

My theory is that if I reread it and don’t notice anything’s missing, then it really doesn’t need to be there.

So I’m effectively left with two narrative voices, emphasis on voices, because if they sound alike there’s no point in splitting it at all, and I still feel that’s where the book needs to go.

Meanwhile, getting critical responses to my first chapter has been an eye-opener, not least of which in the sense of ‘everyone’s going to think differently.’ One reader had primarily minor suggestions with some advice about structure, one felt the writing was good but that major structural changes are required, and one – well, ‘they misread the draft!’ sounds like a knee-jerk response, but I can’t think of any other way to interpret the most important part of the feedback. The reader’s belief that the book is fatally flawed and unpublishable (even by a small press) seems to be based on the assumption that the character flaws in the opening chapter are continued all the way through the end of the novel. I didn’t include a synopsis, which (hopefully) would have clarified things. It’s a reminder to me to make the reader aware that the character – who’s a young Nazi – is capable of breaking out of that mindset, and to weave that in from the beginning, because I don’t want the reader to think ‘this is all played out on a single emotional level,’ but I refuse to believe the book is unpublishable.

Well, my next reader is an agent rather than an author, so it will be interesting to see which of the readers they agree with – or, more likely, they’ll have yet another response….

I love coincidences

Yesterday I was reading Swastika Night, a 1937 novel by Katharine Burdekin (published, like many of her novels, under the pseudonym Murray Constantine – apparently adopted to protect her family from attacks, but I’m guessing also to avoid the whole ‘dismissed for being a woman’ issue). Google Books has a limited version here which is enough to give you a taste.

I’ll try to review it after I’ve finished, but what I noticed yesterday was one character stating:

I often have imagined him, perhaps on a fine summer evening, for the date at the end of the book is June 6th

I can’t recall ever reading a book when they mentioned a date and that’s the date.

Perhaps I am too easily amused.

Meanwhile, I’m thrilled that my critique partner had only a handful of substantive comments on chapter 1 and also said ‘The writing itself is very, very, very good.’ Of course, I’m now thinking, well, that’s the chapter I’ve taken the most time with, the next one won’t be so good…sometimes it’s hard to accept compliments. I now also, thanks to her, have a cracking idea for a preface which will add multiple dimensions to the story, so I have to go write it!

Things we say that are not really what we mean

What we say to editors, workshop leaders, critique partners, or anyone (other than Mom) who is reading our work and giving feedback:

Of course I want honest criticism. I can’t improve if I don’t learn what isn’t working on the page, or find out that something which makes sense in my head isn’t necessarily clear to the reader. Given that I can trust you not to be criticizing me in order to try and boost your own self-esteem, I know that my work is very likely to be better after your feedback – and even if I end up not editing much at all, I’ll have been forced to think carefully about some of the choices I’ve made, so that will still give me a more confident, solid approach to the work. And of course if I take your suggestions on board, I am going to have a much better piece of writing!

What we actually mean:

1. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
2. Please don’t say anything bad! Please!
3. *hides under bed*
4. Please just say ‘it’s perfect! Might want to run spell-check.’
5. No, don’t tell me to run spell-check! I can’t bear the criticism!
6. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

(I have a piece with a professional editor and something else nearly ready to go out for critique. So, yes, I’ve been thinking about this.)

But of course, number 7 (or beyond, depending on how much screaming and hiding under the bed occurs) is ‘goes and edits the damn thing.’