Checking in

For those of you wondering where I am with publishing my first novel, or curious about the history of it, I thought I would drop a post.

On Monday, I queried a wonderful agent, Jennifer Laughran, about A Cause to Cringe.

Recently, I have been leafing through agents, looking for just the right ones to send off to, and when I happened upon Jennifer's blog, I had to send off to her.  First, I noted how well she takes care of her authors, and second, I read this:

"Always on the lookout for sparkling YA and middle grade fiction with unusual and unforgettable characters and vivid settings, she is drawn to all kinds of books, whether realistic comedies or richly imagined magical adventures. However, the common thread in her favorite stories is an offbeat world-view. "

That matches A Cause to Cringe exactly, and is exactly what I aim for.  Hallelujah!

So I sent away.  Sometime near the end of March or the beginning of April, I suppose I will hear back, and I will let you know how that goes.  If I don't post about it by the end of April, then it has probably come to nothing.

Either way, I'm enjoying the process.

Making her Atrocious

I think that the funnest part about the villain of A Cause to Cringe is that I got the chance to betray the laws of decency.

And that is the fun in any villain, isn't it?  Gaston comes to mind, with his witless chauvinism and jealousy.

So, I simply asked myself, what are the laws of decency that apply to motherhood?

• Presence, actually being in the life of the child.
• Care and comfort.
• Consistency.

And then I began to mold the story around this character, giving her a history and a persona that showed why she was so much the opposite of these things.  She paved the way for so many rich depths that I had the chance to plunge to in the story.

Down to Business

(If you've smudged around in this blog long enough to get here, thank you.)

To finish the story I began earlier, here are a few fun facts about my own story.

After the brutal psychological beat-down on my own soul, somehow I survived long enough to begin writing.  I chucked a few stories, although endearing, and I wrote my mother-in-law a book that extended a few slightly twisted bedtime stories she had told to her kids earlier in life.

Then I flushed out the book with a recurring character whose name is a reference back to my mother-in-law.  Thus, Strange Tales of Salem and Sugar Cleveland was born.

I sent Sugar off to thirteen publishers, knowing full well what will probably be coming back.  So far, I have cheered the arrival of two form rejection letters.  They are proudly hung beside me now.

I have done a few things to prepare myself for rejection:

• I noticed a trend that many good authors are rejected often enough before they break through, and I gave myself a limit of forty-five rejection slips received before I would let myself feel a little downhearted for a moment.
• I bought 2013 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market.  *Hugs book
• I found someone very close to me, my wife--lucky me--who will be entirely honest with me about my writing.  Her impeccable taste leads to absolute clarity about where my writing is at.  If she says, "This relationship feels a little forced," I obey the unspoken suggestion to improve it, period.

After Sugar happened, I sat down and looked at what I had accomplished and where I wanted to go next.  Sugar is a book without a character arc, or a plot.  Each chapter is simply fun, much like Sideways Stories from Wayside School.

I looked in my heart:

1. I wanted more character development.
2. I wanted to push myself.

Thus, I began brainstorming.  I happened upon an idea that led to my favorite novel that I have ever written.

I began with the villain, which is all I will cover today.  I interrogated myself about her, because villains are often as or more critical to a story than the heroes.

• How can I make her repulsive?  She became mean in my mind.
• What is mean anyway?  Repulsive--no I started with that.  How about society?  What do we value as one of the kindest things that a woman can do?
• That is easy.  Motherhood.
• How can I flip that to make her atrocious?

And that was the question that set me off on it.  In my next post, I will cover just how I decided to make the villain/mother of my novels as cheer-against-able as possible.

When "You've Got Mail" is Keeping Your Life Together

My posts have all published in some wacky order.  *Rubs forehead

I think it is time I admit a few (more) delicately personal things to you.

1. I own a Great Dane/mastiff mix.  I also rent an apartment for my wife, son, and I from family.  They don't know about the dog.
2. At one point in my life I fell asleep at the wheel over fifty-seven times in one trip.  I know, it's criminal.  In my defense, I will never do it again.  Also in my defense, I was nineteen.  Also in my defense, I was in the middle of nowhere between Canada and Duluth, Minnesota.
3. You've Got Mail is amazing.

Nora Ephron, people.  (If you haven't paid attention to the details in that movie, shame on you.)

Few times does film ascend beyond print, and in my very small opinion, I would like to say that You've Got Mail is a movie I will put down a book for.

*Swoons

Every single second of that movie is as delightful of finding a box of chocolates on your doorstep that you know did not come from a homeless man.  Just one quote:

Joe Fox: I like Patricia.  I *love* Patricia.  Patricia makes coffee nervous.

Beyond the silly love Kels and I have for the way that Tom Hanks shakes the fence outside of the coffee shop, there are moments when I think that movie has some of the most lovely things to say about the human soul.

Such as when Kathleen Kelly says, "Sometimes I wonder about my life.  I lead a small life - well, valuable, but small - and sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven't been brave?  So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?  I don't really want an answer.  I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void.  So good night, dear void."

Anyway, here is to You've Got Mail, my I Ching.

Beginning Part 2

Now that I have wet my toes in the water of blogging, I have decided to change my format slightly.

Maybe I just think that endlessly typing about writing tips, although fun, is not necessarily at my heart (however close it comes).

Truly, at my heart of hearts, is a desire to build a publishing career that I can lean on.  So I begin.

My name is Justin, I have a wife and a little boy, 6 months and two days old at the time of this post.  I have worked too many jobs, some of them in respectable, career-potential places.

However, I struck bottom this last fall.  I had exhausted myself trying to become a "good person" who went to work and school every day and held the traditional lifestyle.  I want dearly to provide for my family--they mean more to me than anything in the world.

But I just could not motivate myself to be a computer programmer, or to do any number of those respectable jobs.  I wholeheartedly approve of them; I just carry the extreme talent of berating myself for not loving them.

Maybe you have had the same experience?  Being told, or telling yourself, that you must be lazy or incompetent for it is the worst part.

Finally I hit rock bottom.  I don't drink, so there was no nasty hangover, but I was an emotional wreck.

The hardest part for me is to admit that I dropped out of college.

I knew it would be a let-down, especially since I began with a 4.0 GPA and held it for quite some time.  But somewhere along, I found out that I was fooling myself, and at the time I didn't know why that hurt so bad.  Beyond the regular pain you might feel when you drop out of the modern world's form of getting you into a steady job when you have a wife and a three-month-old baby boy, there was some small vein in my core that throbbed with an otherworldly pain. 

Here is a quick summary of my enlightenment:

• Began an internship with a fancy technology as a last-ditch effort to make myself a computer-job lover.
• Had an incredible boss.  Boss reminds me of personality tests.
• I begin to enjoy a self-awareness moment.
• My brother-in-law recommends another personality test.
• Read the INFP personality description.
• I accepted myself.
• My life changed.

Now, I am back in college with a will.  I have chosen a regular, bread-on-the-table career (child psychology) that matches me, not because I found it on a personality description page, but because I searched within my soul as to what fits my core values, and then moved on it, and best of all, I get to accept, for the first time in my life, that all-too-silly and suppressed fact about myself.

I write.

The Second Step

The biggest step in publishing, I believe, is to continue.

Past the rejection letters that might not ever even come, or the little jerk inside of you who hates your dreams.

And I have made it my goal to be a professional at continuing, until I become a professional author.

A continue-master like Barbara Godwin, who is building a Twitter empire so that she can advertise her lovely books, taking that every-day step even though it is difficult to persist at, I imagine.

For me, it isn't a question of whether I will publish, but when.  Because I am going to keep writing and mailing off books (like Strange Tales of Salem and Sugar Cleveland, and A Cause to Cringe: The Door in the Dust).  And I am going to work myself to the bone to improve them all.

And when a letter comes back that says, "I didn't like your characters," even though I loved them, I will murder the little literary beings on the pages they sleep on and recreate them, or rethink them, or whatever the publishing world requests.

Because I don't mind bowing my un-heralded head to the establishment and following their advice.  For goodness sake, they have been doing this much longer than I have.

That is a good point to make.  Anymore, I don't think it is unique that I first wrote novels at 11 years-old.  And I don't think that my early start is just going to whisk my manuscripts into the lovely hands of an editor who will publish them for me.

No there is no shortcut--I am going to work for it.  And that is the secret to knowing I will succeed.  Because I will never give up.

Anybody feeling that confidence too?

Beginning Part 3

It isn't just that I write.  I burn.  I write more words than some people speak in a day.  My record is 7,000 words in a single afternoon, and I doubt even that will stand for long.

And I want to publish.  Oh, how I want to publish.  Writing fiction distracts me like uneven cracks in the bricks whip OCDers over the head.  I sit in class in college, and every last word funnels through The One All Important Question:

Could this help me write?

And if the answer is yes:

HMMM, I wonder how I might crash the goofiness of this one random fact from my Origins of the Universe class into (insert compelling character here), and make someone delightful.

You know the experience.  What I am here to say moves slightly beyond this.

I love books, and I have set my sight on publishing them prolifically.

I have my ammunition for all of the rejection I receive from agents and editors for the months and years ahead in four words: I believe in myself.

My wife deserves the credit.  I have to bow to her and say, "Thank you darling."  Because, in the most romantically amazing way, she carried me right through my self-disappointment.  Only she and God have stuck with me like that.

I only share that with you for honesty's sake.  I want to be as entirely honest as it is possible to be while hiding (mostly) behind a pseudonym.

That journey, from the crash of my existence to the steady publishing career I am so willing to work for, is what I am going to chronicle here.