Updates

I've been quiet for a few days, so here are a few updates for you:

Update #1: I'm still here. In other words, despite my boring diet of fresh fruits, vegetables, and the occasional splash of flavor, I haven't wasted away.

Update #2: This is finals week. No, I'm not a student. I'm a teacher, which makes finals week worse. Students have at most five papers/assignments to write. I have about 20 exams and 40 essays to grade from two classes. I can't imagine how full-time instructors feel this week in grading exams and essays from hundreds of students!

Update #3: THE DINER ON THIRD, my YA paranormal mystery about 17-year-old ghost hunter Leia Angeletti is out on submission with several agents. I've had some positive reponses and two outright rejections. I'm hopeful, but I'm also beginning to think the manuscript could be improved in a few ways.

Update #4: The April Marathon is over, obviously. I spent some quality time with great writers, racing to a finish line of either 500 or 1,000 words, and little by little I developed the plot for Leia Angeletti's second adventure. However, revisions for THE DINER ON THIRD and query letters slowed down the momentum for book two. Although I didn't meet my goal, I'm proud to say I finished the month with 25,000 words towards my next book!

Update #5: I've been looking forward to May for a loooooooong time! Here's why:

• May 4, Festival of Mystery hosted by Mystery Lover's Bookshop (FYI - The staff is fantastic, and they offer free shipping on any book orders more than $10, so give them a call). I'm going to embrace a dork moment and say I'm giggling inside at the opportunity to visit with writers I admire and meet new writers as well.
• May 9, Summer vacation begins. To focus my efforts on fiction, I won't be teaching this summer. Although I love my students, this is my first vacation from teaching since the fall semester of 2006. I'm looking forward to it :-)
• May 15-17, PennWriters Conference. I'm a newbie to the PennWriters organization, and the giddy dork inside will blossom mid-month to meet with agents and writers at the annual conference in Pittsburgh.
• May 24-30, New York City, here we come! My great friend and writerly colleague, Liz Hayes, and I are heading to the big city for some fun and some business. Monday to Wednesday, we'll be hanging out with awesome chicas (and I mean you Katie, Chelsea, and Kailen!!!), and Thursday to Saturday, we're attending the fantastic Backspace Conference.
• May 31, Bon anniversaire a moi! For those of you who know French, it's not my birthday. Let me spit out a cliche and say I can't believe a year has passed since my high school sweetheart and I tied the knot. But it has, and let's hope flights are on schedule, so I can rush home from New York to eat a year-old strawberry cheesecake before he eats it all on his own (and because I love him and all that)!

P.S. A.S. King's DUST OF 100 DOGS was discussed as a Great Read on this blog in March. She's an awesome writer and a cool gal, and she's running a contest on her blog this weekend. Write a 100-word story to win an autographed copy of her book. You know this giggling dork will be giving it a shot. You should too. Check it out.

Querying from the other side of the desk

Parents often tell their children to put themselves in someone else's shoes before judging.

After the Query Fail and Agent Fail debates of the last few weeks, one agent is giving writers a watered down opportunity to do just that by becoming literary agents for a day.

I've mentioned Nathan Bransford's blog before because it's an incredible resource for writers, but this week, he's running a contest in which simply participating is enough of a reward. The Curtis Brown agent said he gets 50 query letters each day (for the non-writers who read this blog, queries are the letters writers send en masse to agents in hopes one will say, "Ooh, I love this idea. Send me some pages.").

Yesterday, Nathan posted 50 queries randomly throughout the day, and his blog readers then had the opportunity to be an Agent for a Day (although it's called Agent for a Day, Nathan's giving participants until Saturday to read and critique all queries). Upon reading the queries, the "agents" have the option to: reject the letter outright, reject the letter with a personal note, or ask the writer to send pages for further consideration.

The catch is participants can only request pages from five writers.

It might sound silly, but I haven't had so much fun pretending since I was a kid.

The experience has been incredibly enlightening. My respect for agents has grown exponentially, which I anticipate may have been Nathan's secret plan (I envision him behind his desk cackling lik Dr. Evil with his pinky to the corner of his mouth). The fact is, it's painful to read query after query after query after...you get the idea, especially when you have no interest in the project. What's harder is trying to let the writers down lightly, a task some "agents" had no interest in attempting.

If you take a peek into the comments section for any of the queries, you'll see what I'm talking about. It can be brutal.

In any case, if you're a writer (or even if you're not), I urge you to go to the blog and at the very least take a look around. It takes time to read and respond to 50 queries, but choose a couple and give it a go. I suspect it will be kind of like opening a tube of pickle-flavored Pringles - once you pop, you can't stop.

April Marathon Update: I've been losing steam the last few days. I took a break from the marathon to finish revisions on The Diner on Third, but I have a plan to get back into the race. Word count: 15,500

Writing is a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Speaking of marathon, the Backspace April Marathon is going well so far. Although it's a thirty-day challenge, I've been participating in smaller 500-word sprints with a few other writers (mostly J.E. Taylor and A.S. King).

These races have been incredibly helpful.

Basically, this is how it works. In the Backspace forum, everyone meets at the starting line, and someone types "GO!" From there, writers around the country (and one writer from Germany) clickety clack their keyboards until they hit 500. When they do, they post a victorious "Yay," and we have a winner.

The good news is by the time I hit 500 words, I'm deep enough into the writing that I'm able to keep going for another thousand words or so. And my win-loss record is strong, by the way, or maybe it just seems that way because hitting 500 words in less than 20 minutes is a win for everyone.

Word Count: 12,100

The brilliance of writing bird by bird

On Agent Nathan Bransford's blog earlier this week, he opened a discussion about the best books on writing. I found it fascinating, and two books that were named again and again were On Writing by Stephen King and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

I have to say I've read both and would agree they're must-reads for writers.

Taking a second look at Lamott's book this week, I've picked out a couple excerpts that I found particularly interesting.

First of all, to explain the title..."Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'"

Lamott suggests to write a bad first draft "bird by bird" or short assignment by short assignment, not allowing perfectionist ideals to cramp your creativity. But there's a downfall with that theory of a bad first draft.

"The whole thing would be so long and incoherent and hideous that for the rest of the day I'd obsess about getting creamed by a car before I could write a decent second draft. I'd worry that people would read what I'd written and believe that the accident had really been a suicide, that I had panicked because my talent was waning and my mind was shot."

Presently, I'm working on that bad first draft as part of Backspace's April Marathon, as you know. By way of an update, I'm at 5,000 words (and will be on target if I get another 1,700 by midnight).

I should be writing at the moment, but it's time to make dinner, and I write better late at night anyway. So, on to another Anne Lamott excerpt on procrastination. When she should be writing, here are some hilarious thoughts that steal her focus:

"After a moment I may notice that I'm trying to decide whether or not I am too old for orthodontia and whether right now would be a good time to make a few calls, and then I start to think about learning to use makeup and how maybe I could find some boyfriend who is not a total and complete fixer-upper and then my life would be totally great and I'd be happy all the time, and then I think about all the people I should have called back before I sat down to work, and how I should probably at least check in with my agent and tell him this great idea I have and see if he thinks it's a good idea, and see if he thinks I need orthodontia - if that is what he is actually thinking whenever we have lunch together.

"Then I think about someone I'm really annoyed with, or some financial problem that is driving me crazy, and decide that I must resolve this before I get down to today's work. So I become a dog with a chew toy, worrying it for a while, wrestling it to the ground, flinging it over my shoulder, chasing it, licking it, chewing it, flinging it back over my shoulder. I stop just short of actually barking. But all of this only takes somewhere between one and two minutes, so I haven't actually wasted that much time. Still, it leaves me winded."

Project Book Babe: Support a great cause

Part I - April Marathon Update

So now I realize what other writers are talking about when they say they don’t blog, or Twitter, or Facebook, or MySpace because it just takes too much time away from, ahem, writing.

I’ve bookmarked about 25 blogs that I hit daily. I try to blog here at least three times a week. I check Facebook several times a day, and don’t get me started on email. Last night at eight o'clock, I sat down to write the beginning of my second book – on Day One of the April Marathon. At 8:55 I was still surfing the web.

As a reporter, I often wondered what news writers did before the Internet. How did they research correct spellings and definitions of words (um, an actual hand-held dictionary maybe)? How did they double check the contact information and other details for companies, schools, and nonprofits featured? How did they survive!?

I can tell you one thing of which I’m fairly certain. They probably spent more time doing their jobs.

Okay, let me be honest. I’m not writing this today, April 2. I’m writing it April 1 at 8:56 p.m. That’s right. More procrastination.

After writing a 64,000-word book and working for weeks on editing and revising it, it’s painfully daunting to open an empty, blank, zero-word Microsoft document and essentially start over. But I have to...forcing myself to write.

Stay tuned.

(Time passes).

When my fingers finally started tapping the keys last night, the opening scene of my book, the one I'd been visualizing for weeks poured out of me - 2,000 words in about 80 minutes. Not bad.

April Marathon Word Count, Day One: 2,056


Part II - Coveted books for a great cause

Interested in an autographed copy of Twilight? It might be difficult finding a teenager who answers no to that question, and the organizers of a fund raiser in Arizona probably realize this.

I heard about Project Book Babe Auction on author Ally Carter's blog. I'm a huge fan of Ally's and check her blog often, and I was excited to see that this Saturday she and several of the other authors I have "crushes" on are auctioning off their manuscripts, character naming rights, signed book copies, and their time to raise money for breast cancer patient and Book Babe Faith Hochhalter.

The event includes a live auction as well an eBay auction, for those of us who cannot attend. The online auction is in full swing, so if you have a few minutes, check it out.

Kissing books goodbye - for now

Last night I was able to finish A.S. King's The Dust of 100 Dogs, and the timing couldn't have been better (the ending was fabulous, by the way). The author and I have been chatty over private messages in the Backspace forum. I have to admit I've been interacting with authors often in the past year. I've emailed with them, rubbed elbows with them at conferences, and followed their blogs like a lost puppy. And I get this sort of excited 12-year-old girl inside of me screaming when I get emails/messages/etc. from authors I admire.

Such as A.S. King.

She might check back to see this blog, which would be great. But I guess this kind of puts me out there like a seventh grader who has a crush on a classmate, athough this crush is purely professional.

In any case, her book might be the last one I read for a while as I've signed up to challenge myself with a writing marathon this month - 50,000 words of my next book. April 1 to April 30.

Deep breath.

A.S. King herself is joining in on the fun as the marathon is sponsored by the fantastic writing group we're both members of, Backspace.

I succeeded at a similar marathon in November, which is National Novel Writing Month. Nanowrimo is an international phenomenon in which writers spend thirty days writing 50,000 words. I met that goal and haven't opened the Microsoft file containing my 50K since. I'm not sure I'll be able to do much with it. Nanowrimo 2008 taught me a few things.

1. I can write every day, producing lots of words.

2. Without preparation (for me a detailed outline) before I begin, the result is nearly useless.

So this time around, I'm hitting the keyboard with an outline beside me. I've already written about my characters before, in The Diner on Third, and I'm hoping that's a bonus. In any case, I'm going to be spending more time this month writing than reading.

If you're up for a challenge, another contest to consider this month is ScriptFrenzy. This is a Nanowrimo-ish contest for scriptwriters. This isn't an April Fool's Day joke. The good thing about writing is if you want to write, you can write. It's up to you to do it. Maybe I should turn that finger around and feed myself that advice.

It's Day One of the marathon. Time to get writing.