The First Submission

After months of inactivity-- we have our first submission!

It's not to a literary agent, though-- it's to a publisher. It turns out that Penguin Books (which usually does not accept unsolicited manuscripts) is opening their email submissions to unrepresented writers until October of 2010! If you'd like to submit your manuscript, too, check out the details here. Yes, that's right-- you too can receive an abruptly-worded electronic rejection letter from a major publishing house! Dreams really DO come true!

Anyways, since this is an email query, I probably won't even get a rejection notice-- but if I do, I'll post it up here for everyone to see. So check back soon, kids!

A Room of One's Own

I need a place and a time to write.

I read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own in high school, and, much to my surprise, I hated it. First of all, it was much too long (Woolf expanded it from a series of lectures, and really, I do think it would have been better in lecture form), and secondly, I couldn't get my head around the idea that a woman needed to have a certain amount of money and space to herself to write. As Alice Walker points out, what about Phillis Wheatley, "a slave, who owned not even herself"? And I mean, what about all the men who have not had financial freedom as a precursor to literary success?

Now, though, I'm starting to get it. I'm starting to see how hard it is to write if you haven't the time or the space to do it.

When I come home from work, I don't have anywhere I can go to write. I could go in the bedroom-- but writing in bed is simply an invitation to fall asleep and have the cats play tag with the pages of my book. I could stay in the living room, but that's where my husband is, and he usually has the TV on, or is watching some great movie, and I get distracted by his wit and charm and snuggles and all of that. I can't write in the kitchen--there's barely enough room to cook, and nowhere at all to sit. And writing in the bathroom, perched on the toilet, would be kind of pathetic.

I'd go to a cafe, but I can't drink coffee in the evenings because then I can't fall asleep that night. This means that I can only go to a cafe on Saturday morning-- every other morning I either have to be at work or at church. And since Saturdays are my only real "day off" of the week, they're usually crammed full of things I didn't have time to do the previous six days: painting, grocery shopping, cleaning, laundry. This Saturday I have to be across town at 10 AM to pick up my Angel Food order, and then Claire is coming to visit, so I won't have any time to be writing. Next Saturday we're going hiking, and since we've pushed this hiking trip back every single week for the past two months, I'd REALLY like to go before it gets too hot. I already promised Adam we'd go to the beach the Saturday after that...and then the Saturday after that my sister is coming to visit...

I just feel like I need a haven, you know? I need a place where I can go and work and not be interrupted or distracted, where I can be comfy and yet also be focused.

Does that place even exist?

Surprise!

OH HAI GUYZ!

Long time no see, eh? I've had a few crazy weeks, and I really haven't had much time to work on the book. But guess what I'm doing right now?

I'm printing it out!

Adam made a special trip to go and get me a printer cartridge so I could print this puppy. I decided that investing in a new cartridge was worth it, if it would help me move forward on this damnable thing.

This weekend I have to paint a bedroom-- but then I PROMISE I'll work on the book. And then I'll write witty and amusing things here.

Really.

A Tribute to Sonia

Sonia-- a friend from Vassar, and a frequent commenter on this blog-- did an amazing thing this past week:

1. She read my whole novel.
2. She wrote out a ream of detailed, intelligent, useful comments, comments that both reassured me that I'm not a complete failure and simultaneously inspired me to make this novel better.
3. She did this IN THE MIDDLE OF FINALS. And she's a senior in college. So she was pretty busy. OMFG.

So let's raise our figurative glasses (or our real ones, if you happen to be drinking at 3:30 on a Wednesday afternoon) to Sonia: a fabulous friend, and an amazing person.

Thanks, Sonia!

(And Sonia, my husband still knows you as "Couch Sonia," in reference to that time we gave you the couch from our TA and he had to move it with the truck. I got really excited when I saw you'd emailed me those comments, and I yelled out, "Sonia is awesome!!" and he was like, "Oh...is this Couch Sonia?")

A Query Letter Draft

So even though I'm not yet ready to query agents, I'm going to get my query letter ready now. Y'know, because a good writer clearly puts effort into a query letter instead of, um, her NOVEL.

So...I've never written a query letter before.

The plan is to use AgentQuery to find twenty different agents that might like me. Or not hate me. Or whatever. (I'm going to look for agents who seem to represent both "Christian" fiction and mainstream/literary fiction, since I'm not sure whether or not this would be marketable as a Christian book. Or, y'know, at all.) I'll send them my query letter and then post all twenty (inevitable) rejections up here, in the order in which they were received. (In the event that I get a bunch of them returned at once, I'll space them out so as to hold your interest for a longer period of time. Oh, the cleverness of me!)

Here's what I'm thinking in terms of a query letter (mostly inspired by the sample query letters on a few agents' blogs, as well as the one given on AgentQuery):

Attn [agent]:

As I see you have an interest in representing both Christian and literary novels, I would like to submit my novel Heavenly Country for your consideration. It is currently complete at a succinct 75,000 words. [Note: this is what the query letter WILL say WHEN I have 75,000 words. Which will totally happen in the future. Maybe.]

When Rev. Simon Parr's wife Ada begins acting strangely in church, the Episcopal rector assumes she's just tired and stressed. But Ada soon reveals that she's hearing voices-- specifically, the voice of God. As his wife descends into what could either be madness or divine revelation, Simon begins to question his faith, his calling, and his marriage, and finds himself helpless in the face of his wife's struggles and his own misunderstandings-- especially when he discovers a terrible secret about one of his least favorite parishioners. Written in both prose and verse styles, Heavenly Country explores the nature of God and of human free will.

This is my first novel, but I have previously published many pieces of non-fiction, both in newspapers (like The Los Angeles Times, The Poughkeepsie Journal, and The Salem News) and in books (Barron's Guide to the Most Competitive Colleges). My senior thesis at Vassar College, a book of poems entitled In Vivo, received distinction from the English department in 2008. I live on the campus of General Theological Seminary in New York City with my husband, an Episcopal priest.

I hope to hear from you soon. Thank you so much for your time!

Best,
Philosophy Walker

What do you think?

Make Me

Things have been slow on the novel front. For one thing, I'm auditing a class at my husband's school, and I have a paper due next week--I've never written an exegesis in my whole life, so I've been spending my time procrastinating on my paper instead of on my novel. This week, I'll be staring at Facebook and thinking about how much I need to be working on my theological project, not my literary project. What a change of pace, eh?

For another thing-- this whole being-a-grownup-and-having-a-day-job-that-pays-me-money-so-we-can-eat-and-stay-alive thing is totally cramping my writing style. I keep saying, "Oh, when I get home tonight, I'll definitely work on my novel for a bit," and then I spend the whole evening watching America's Next Top Model and eating an entire box of maple cream cookies from Trader Joe's. Or I'll say, "Hey, this weekend should be novel writing time," and then that weekend is sleeping in and eating chocolate chip pancakes time, instead.

See, what I really liked about NaNoWriMo was that it kept me from making excuses. After the first week, I had to write a bit every day, or else I'd fall too far behind to win and I'd end up throwing away all the previous effort I'd made. Writing on one day meant that I had to keep writing the next day, in order to avoid wasting all the effort I'd put in the previous day.

Now, I have no way to put a stop to the endless Facebooking, the forum posts (although--man alive, I gave this chick a major verbal smackdown this week on my married people's message board), the chocolate consumption, and the half-hearted reading of TIME Magazine while trying not to fall asleep in a bubble bath. I'm just so tired and frustrated after work that I simply want to relax and think about nothing at all.

This does not work well as a creative process.

C'mon, motivation...where the hell are you?

Here's A Present For You, Dear Readers

Here's an excerpt from the novel. In this section, Simon has just collected his wife from the hospital, where she was taken after an episode of what appeared to be psychosis. Enjoy! (And remember, comments/criticisms are welcome!)
...

When I came to collect Ada, there was no trace of the anxiety they claimed had come over her during certain parts of the examination. She seemed perfectly healthy, if a little dazed from her ordeal, and demanded to know why the whole hospitalization thing had been necessary in the first place. “Honestly, Simon, I’m fine,” she told me huffily, as I tried to get her to accept the lawsuit-prevention wheelchair on her way out. “Every time I do something just a little bit nutty, you people act as though I’ve got the consumption or something. I can walk just fine, thank you. Luckily, being crazy doesn’t affect my legs.”

During her short stay in the hospital, they had managed to get her to take a shower, and the black marks on her skin had faded significantly, although they were still faintly visible. You could see the discoloration, although you couldn’t make out what was written there anymore, so that when she turned or reached up, it seemed as though gray clouds moved under her skin. I wished I had listened to the doctors and gone home for a little while during her examination, so that I could have brought her some jeans and a long-sleeved sweater.

Lucy was waiting for us when we got home, meowing piteously. We hadn’t been home since that morning and now it was late at night, and she thought we owed it to her to open up a can of cat food. The whole house seemed strange, as though we’d been gone for months instead of less than a day. It was as though the entire surreal experience— the service, Ada’s episode, the hospital, the evaluation, my conversation with Dr. Rabasaki— were events that should have taken an epic amount of time, but instead had been packed into only a few hours.

I flopped down onto the couch, exhausted. Lucy jumped up and walked delicately across my chest to stick her cold nose into my ear.

“What are you doing, goofy kitty?” Ada crooned at the cat, standing over me and scratching Lucy’s head. “It is catfood time?”

She disappeared, and a few moments later, I heard the creak of a can lid opening.

Suddenly I remembered: no sharp objects. I imagined a long silence, then a thud as Ada hit the ground, her throat slit or her wrists cut by a can lid.

“Dammit!” I roared, heaving myself up and sprinting into the kitchen. “Stop it! Let me do that! Don’t touch it!”

Ada was holding the can in midair, a spoon half inside already. One of Lucy’s food plates, a small saucer with little blue paw print designs on it, stood on the counter. There was no blood.

The look Ada gave me made me feel like I was the crazy one. “What’s wrong with you? Why am I not allowed to feed the cat, Simon?”

“Because…” I swallowed. There was no way this was going to come out sounding even remotely kind. “Because the doctor said no sharp objects.”

“I know how to open a can of cat food. I’m not stupid. It’s kind of hard to screw that up.” She scooped out the remaining food angrily, placed the plate on the floor, and practically threw the can into the sink, rinsing it out with hot water.

“It’s not about screwing up.”

She looked at me, and there were tears in her eyes. “You can’t be serious.”

“It’s what the doctor said, Ada—”

“So now I’m not just crazy, I’m suicidal?” She began to cry in earnest. “Jesus, Simon, when did I ever give you that impression? Why would you even say that?”

I reached out, intending to pull her against my chest and hold her, but she backed away, nearly stepping on Lucy, who was gorging herself on her dinner. “Don’t touch me,” she cried. “I might kill you or something. I’m a fucking psychopath, remember?”

She ran into the bedroom and slammed the door, and I couldn’t even follow her. I told myself that I wasn’t up for fighting right now, that it had been a long day, but honestly, I just didn’t know whether or not I agreed with her. I just stood in the kitchen, while the cat gave me a reproachful look.

At some point that night, in between fragments of a confusing dream about scarecrows in a field, I felt the couch shift and a warm body climb in next to mine. Ada and I lay there, not speaking, not moving, just feeling the contact between our bodies, the way we fit together like pieces of a broken plate. When morning came, she smiled sleepily, and I kissed her quietly, and we said nothing. There really was nothing more to say.

Size Does Matter

I've finished the first basic clean-up editing of my novel. But there's a problem.

This novel is only 51,000 words, and it's finished.

Like, this is the story I wanted to tell. This is it. To add in more stuff would just make the plot seem to drag on, the characters repeat themselves. I've said what I had to say, and I can't see where I could add more padding.

The problem: while a novel is technically anything longer than 40,000 words, most people say a decent novel is between 80,000 and 100,000 words.

I don't have 80,000 words inside me. I only have 51,000.

And this has nothing to do with being a poet. I can rant and rave for pages and pages if that's what I have to say. In college, I once had an assignment to write an eight page paper, and I turned out a twenty-five page paper. I've always been one to ask, "Well, I know that's the minimum word count, but what's the maximum?"

But this novel is only 51,000 words. How do I make it get bigger?

Computer Quandry

I wish I knew a way to access my novel from everywhere.

See, I want to be able to work on, and save new drafts of, my novel from work, so that I can work on it over my lunch break. But how?

A flash drive or other USB device won't work, because the computer in the back would have to be yanked out of its special little nook in order to insert anything into the USB port. I downloaded Dropbox into my computer at home, but I think I need to download it onto the computer here for it to work, and they don't like it if you download things onto the work computers. (Plus, it's a public computer, so someone would probably erase the application in a matter of days, anyway.) I'm tempted to download a writing app to my iPod, but I think it'd be tedious to type out every word using that tiny little touchscreen keyboard. My thumbs would probably fall off after a few pages.

Argh! I think it's time to invent that device that places a wireless-internet-capable computer directly into our brains. APPLE, I'M LOOKING AT YOU.

Voices and Values

I have decided that the biggest problem with my novel is that it is narrated by a man.

Previous to this novel, I had only written in a male voice twice: once as part of a cycle of poems for my Verse Writing class (in which I imagined my father discussing my great-grandmother's funeral), and once in a three-part poem that took as its subject the Biblical story of the Levite and his concubine (in which I imagined what could possibly possess a man to hand his lover over to a violent mob to be raped and killed). Outside of these two projects, I've always written in a voice that is decidedly female.

For one thing, writing as a woman allows me to say things about womanhood that I think are important, things that feel meaningful to the female experience. (Dammit, Vassar, look what you've done to me-- now I'm writing phrases like "the female experience.") For another thing... well, it's easier to write as a woman. I understand women much better than I've ever understood men. I was never one of those people who had a million guy friends, and I think maybe my affinity for female friendships is one of the reasons I tended to date guys without necessarily falling deeply in love with them. I've known I was attracted to men from an early age, but I've also always known that there's something confusing about men, something I never quite understood. That's how I knew Adam was the one for me: he's the only man I feel I can truly understand.

So I was surprised when, upon sitting down on November 1st to write, I automatically began thinking in the voice of the male main character, Simon. Simon's wife, Ada, is the subject of most of the novel, and she's so very much like me that I would have thought it'd be far more natural to write from her perspective. I was pleased, however, that I seemed to be trying something new, and that it appeared to be working fairly well, at that.

But now that I've finished the bulk of it, I'm starting to worry about the effect that this narrative is having on the novel's message. The story is only told from Ada's perspective three times; there are three sections to the book, and each section begins with a short poem in Ada's voice before switching back to Simon's prose narration. And I'm concerned that this objectifies Ada, that by preventing her from telling her own story, I'm somehow...I dunno, reinforcing gender inequality or something.

It might not be so bad if this wasn't a story about a crazy woman. After all, that's part of the reason I chose to continue narrating in Simon's voice; part of the mystery of the novel is that the nature of what is happening to Ada is unclear, so that the reader is never quite sure whether or not Ada is dangerously ill, harmlessly addled, or somehow inspired by something the rest of us can't hear. If I narrated the whole thing from her perspective, I'd have to get a lot more specific-- what the voice of God would sound like, what it would say to her, whether or not she thought she was actually crazy herself-- and the deliberate ambivalence towards her experience would be lost.

But is it right to let her husband speak for her?

I don't want to sound uptight about this, but: I'm a feminist, and I want this book to be an unabashedly feminist book. There are feminist themes in here (another reason I couldn't market this as a typical Christian book, I'm sure), but I want to make sure I'm not undoing all this by refusing to let the female characters speak in their own voices. And the only other main female characters are a secretary and a mean, bitter old woman, so it's not like there's a plethora of other women's voices in the work.

I don't know how to rectify this, though, without rewriting everything. Should I add another female character? Should I simply increase the number of Ada's poetic monologues to two per section instead of just one? Should I smack myself across the face and scream "GET A GRIP!"?

The Evils of Editing (Or, I Need To Stop Blogging and Work On This Book)

See, the thing about editing is that it's hard.

Writing is the easy part. When you're in the middle of writing a sentence and you start to think, in the back of your brain, "Hrm, maybe this sucks a little tiny bit," you can shrug it off, because hey-- that's what editing is for. You'll go back and fix it later, but for right now, it's totally fine to shove a million overheated adjectives in front of that poor little noun. I write like I eat cookies-- I think, "Oh, I'll go ahead and indulge; I can always work it off at the gym later."

The problem is: later on, you're too tired to go to the gym. The gym is too far away. The gym will take such a long time. The gym is too damn hard.

And editing is worse, because, unlike the gym, it requires a certain amount of talent to see results.

Since I'm a poet, I'm trained to be obsessive about details-- which is okay, except that then I often lose sight of the bigger picture. I'll spend half an hour on, say, deciding whether or not to use an Oxford comma, or whether the character would end a sentence with a preposition, but then I forget the more overarching stuff. The big stuff. Stuff like, oh, y'know...character development. And plot.

I mean, if I want to flog this dead horse gym metaphor even more, I could say that, just like exercise, editing can get easier with practice. But even that's not necessarily true, because if you keep giving up on the editing before you've whipped your piece into shape-- or if your piece is so bad it's just beyond whipping-- then you're right back where you started.

Editing this novel is much harder than writing it, particularly since I feel like I could move forward a lot more quickly if I could print the whole thing out. But I can't print that many pages on my printer (printer ink is expensive! I am but a humble secretary!) and my husband's school charges you by the page to print stuff at the library. If I could just get a free print-out of this stupid thing, then I could really attack it with a red pen. And red pen editing is easier than virtual editing for me, because then you have a record of what you've changed. Like, if you cross a word out in pen, that word is still on the page, so if you get twenty pages ahead and realize that the word you crossed out is actually terribly important, you can just write it back in. But if you delete the word from the virtual document altogether, then you might forget what you deleted later on, and that's bad if it turns out you shouldn't have deleted it, after all.

Anyways-- editing. Hard. Ack.

Tips? Anyone?

About The Novel

In order for this blog to make sense, I'm going to have to tell you about the novel I'm writing.

Here's the most damning piece of information: I wrote it for National Novel Writing Month. For those of you not familiar with this concept, NaNoWriMo, as it is known by its initiates, is a project wherein feckless writers like myself commit themselves to writing 50,000 words of a novel during the month of November. You can input your daily words count on the NaNoWriMo website, check your progress against a pacing graph, and chat with other hopeless literary romantics.

Now, in and of itself, NaNoWriMo is a good idea-- if you are an experienced novelist, or if you know how to write a novel at all, or if you like to write fiction for your own satisfaction. I am not an experienced novelist, and I do not know how to write a novel at all, and I don't usually like to write fiction, as a rule. I majored in poetry composition in college, people. (Now THAT is a useful degree!) I can turn out a sestina like no one's business, but chapters are a mystery to me.

So on November 1st, all my friends were like, "Yay, we're writing novels!" and since I'm a sheep, I said, "Yay, I'm writing a novel, too!" So I wrote one. I didn't outline, I didn't write out character biographies, I didn't even think very hard about the plot. I just wrote.

And y'know, it was FUN. It was a lot more fun than I thought it would be, actually. (And I really do highly recommend NaNoWriMo-- it's a great experience.)

But when it was done, I was left with a 50,000-word Frankenstein's monster-- well-intentioned, but hideously piecemeal, lacking true self-control, thrown together out of hubris. I love this novel, so I can't just forget about it, but, like the mother of a serial killer, I know no one will ever love and understand it like I do. I'm currently editing it, and I'll probably have it up to 80,000 words when all is said and done. But for right now, it's too short, too squat, too garbled, and its table manners are atrocious.

What It's About

Here's my summary: Simon, a young Episcopal priest who has recently entered his first parish, questions his faith, his calling, and his parishioners' support after his wife, an abortion clinic intake counselor named Ada, is diagnosed with a mental illness that causes her to believe she is hearing the voice of God.

The best part about this novel is that it's probably not marketable in the least. Technically it's Christian fiction, as it deals positively with some Christian themes and portrays its main characters (both Christians) in a positive light. However, the novel is pretty unabashedly liberal, as the main female character is both Christian and pro-abortion, and from what I've read of the Left Behind series, most Christian readers won't be down with that. (Although what I've read of the Left Behind series amounts to three pages of the first books and then subsequent hilarious commentaries from The Slacktivist, so...)

So for the immediate future: I'll be blogging a little bit about editing, seeing as I have to edit the damn thing and add 30,000 more words before I can query. After that, I'll be whining about query letters, then posting rejection letters, and then hopefully freeing myself from this useless and destructive writing passion for good.

The Obligatory Introduction Post

Welcome to the world of low self-esteem.

My name is Philosophy, and I'm a writer. Well, by "writer," I actually mean "secretary who majored in English in college and gets in trouble at work for daydreaming about what she would say in her Pulitzer Prize acceptance speech instead of actually doing the work that real grown-ups are paying her to do." There are a lot of us here in New York City, actually-- our Facebook pages all list "freelance writer" or "freelance journalist" or "freelance blogger" as out current job, but curiously, there is no date of employment written in. When people at parties ask us what we do, we say things like, "I'm a writer, but I work at Taco Bell on the side," or "I'm doing this thing in an office or whatever, but it's only until my novel comes out." We avoid sending in updates to our college alumni newsletter, and avoid reading the newsletter, too, because the shame of hearing about how our classmates have all achieved their dreams already is only eclipsed by the shame we would feel if we actually admitted that we have yet to publish anything of note.

Dear Writer: You Suck is to be a collection of my rejection letters. Here's the deal: I've written a novel, and while I obviously think it's fabulous, no one else will. I'm going to write a query letter and send it to fifty literary agents, then post the rejection letters here, possibly with some humorous, self-effacing commentary included.

Probably no one will read this except my mother and my husband, but if they do, I want them to take heart. Fellow rejected writers, when you get discouraged, remember this: you can't possibly suck as much as I do.