business – Page 9 – Julie Liddell Whitehead

Much Encouragement in Writing

I got a lovely note from a contest the other day about Hurricane Baby:

Dear Julie Whitehead,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to fiction,OSU’s 2023 Non/Fiction Collection Prize. We were gratified by the number and quality of submissions, all of which were read anonymously and with care, and hope you will be glad to hear that although your collection was not ultimately selected as the winning entry, it was among a group of distinguished semifinalists for the prize. We want to acknowledge the time and effort you put into your work and wish you great luck with it elsewhere. You are of course welcome to try us again in 2024.

OSU being The Ohio State University Press.

So that was wonderfully encouraging.

I finished my light rewrite of Hurricane Baby and have it almost ready to send to the newest batch of reading periods and contests that open up in August and September. I’m going to read it through and make sure it’s what I want to send out, then send it first to the guy that asked me directly to resubmit Hurricane Baby to his press. I hope that bodes well. It’s a nice outlet and I certainly hope his words might be a harbinger of success for it there.

Keep going. Persist. Don’t give up. Those are my watchwords for August 2023.

Writing Retreat

Last weekend I went to a writing retreat sponsored by Mississippi Christian Living, a magazine I used to write for way back in the 2000s. It was a lot of fun!

I got to meet Susan Cushman, an author whose career I’ve been keeping up with for a long time–she was the keynote speaker. She published a book with University Press of MS about writing, which I have read, and I won one of her books today as a door prize so that was fun.

During lunch I had some time to talk to her and we turned out to know a lot of the same people, of course. We talked about what we were each working on and that was fun to hear about.

I got to talk to another one of the authors as well just as we were leaving but not for as long as Susan.

We did writing exercises, and some people were not really serious about writing. They wanted to talk about writing, but when it came time to write, they didn’t do it. Weird.

I’ve noticed there are a lot of people like this–they love to read, they love to talk about books, but then they start talking about how they would like to write a book and ask another writer for tips and pointers. Sometimes they even go to college and study creative writing and even get an MFA. But they just like to talk about their plans to write and what keeps them from writing–kids, a job, grandkids, other hobbies, husbands, etc.

I spent six of the most miserable years of my life working a job I hated and not writing after I finished grad school the first time. I didn’t want that to happen again this time. I have worked hard to integrate writing into my life again and even at the bleakest points, kept writing. Blogging was a big part of that. But working to focus, sit down, and write the thing is the best decision a writer can make. Success breeds success. And as Neil Gamian says, finished projects turn into published projects.

So to all those out there who keep talking about writing but don’t do it, i leave you with Toni Cade Bambara’s observation that writing is going to cost you something–that anything worth doing is going to have a cost. And there’s the advice from Gabino Iglesias: “Many people have a book in them, but it takes a special kind of freak to leave the Land of Laziness, cross the Plains of Procrastination and Insecurity Mountain, find the Blade of No One Made You Do This, and use it to cut your chest open and yank that book out.”

Encouragement

I received two very encouraging emails this week about Hurricane Baby–one was from a contest I had entered that directly invited me to revise and resubmit, telling when the new contest deadline was and everything.

I was so shocked I wrote back to make sure I had read correctly.

He (the publisher) responded that that was exactly what he had meant.

So that got me thinking. Another press that I think a lot of had held a pop-up submission window for short-story collections that I had sent to last Thanksgiving and had ultimately been rejected by, but they had a specific short story contest coming up in September that they had not held last year. So I wrote that publisher and asked if I could revise and then resubmit to that contest. She replied that of course I could–people did it all the time.

So i am taking Cheryl’s comments from my last story swap and using them to revise and deepen the reader’s understanding of the characters and pick up on other notes she made about the stories, and I’m going to submit to the last few presses on my list and then to those two in particular. Hopefully we can see results.

I am also putting my other strategy in place of sending a few of the other individual stories to high-quality journals as they open submissions and see if I can place a few in some nice publications and get a little buzz going. So I spent yesterday doing that with the first story, Still Waters. We will see what happens.

Good writing vibes to all!

The Question of Social Media

Let me preface this post by saying–I love blogging. The immediacy, the honesty I can muster up, the value of my ability to produce really clean copy on a rough draft–it all makes me a natural blogger.

Not so much with other social media–especially in a post-literate age.

I once had to do a film project for a class ages ago in my journalism program. We did a TV news story. I only passed it through the efforts of my partner on the project; I was the on-air talent because of my public speaking skills, and she did the technical work–and word got back to me that the professor had commented that I had “a face made for radio” the first time he viewed it.

He wasn’t wrong. I’m not conventionally attractive–the word I used to get was “handsome” rather than “pretty”. I had accepted that about myself and knew I wouldn’t make it a day in TV. But the comment still stung.

So I don’t do TikTok. Or Bookstagram or Facebook reels.

I do have Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/jdlwhitehead/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/julie.whitehead.146), Twitter (https://twitter.com/julielwhitehea1), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-liddell-whitehead-716a259b/), Mastodon (https://writing.exchange/@JulieLiddellWhitehead), and now Pinterest (https://www.pinterest.com/julieliddellwhitehead/).

But I’m at a bit of an impasse as to how to make them work in my favor. Most of my followers are from Twitter, but of course so many people have left that platform that it isn’t as good a resource as it used to be.

So if anyone else is still trying to figure out how to grow their social media program, I think we may be asking the wrong question–how does publishing need to restructure itself so that social media reach is not the important thing, but writing is? I think that’s the question to ask.

Numbers Update

So it’s been a few months, and i thought I would update my query numbers.

Presses queried–53

Rejections–33

Submissions still outstanding–20

Presses left to send to–8

I am still hopeful. But I have a few backup plans in place now, so we will see what happens. I went ahead and sent it off to my workshop mate Cheryl to see what she will say about it. And I will spend time reading her work and see how I may be able to help her improve her new novel project.

We will see what happens. Some really nice places still have the manuscript, so I will see what develops. I will send to a few places tomorrow that open on May 1. So that is the next step. Wish me well! Happy writing!

Ready to Swap Again

I’m on the verge of doing another swap of Hurricane Baby with another writer, this time Cheryl Pappas, who I met through the workshop I attended last summer. She is writing her first novel even as we speak, so I will be beta reading that for her, and she will be reading Hurricane Baby.

I’m not sure what I can actually accomplish by having it read again and revising it again. I may can make it better so it gets accepted at one the eight places left on my list where I haven’t yet sent it. Which is a heck of a tiny margin of error or success, depending on how you look at it.

Or I may can make it better and send it around again in 2030.

That looks like a damn desperate concept when I say it that way.

Or her feedback may convince me to shelve it altogether and start over with my new story idea and just work on that for a while.

Or I may can take the feedback, make each story the best it can be, and try to sell the individual stories around to see if I can get one or three picked up by journals to have a better chance once I start sending it around again.

That sounds more hopeful than giving up. Or simply waiting around after revising.

I guess the moral is: Keep fighting for your work. Even if it means a strategic retreat from time to time. The fight IS the work in that case. So that’s what I’m doing: Fighting.

Encouragement

Well, I got the nicest rejection letter I believe ever written in the history of the world on Monday.

Very clear that they were not going to be able to publish, but also told me why: short- story collections are a hard sell in the best of environments, that this editor was unsure that Hurricane Baby (based on a reading of the first four stories) would be “something greater than the sum of its parts”; and that he didn’t feel he had enough time with each character in each individual story.

But in the letter, he also complimented me on my writing skills, my ability to portray these emotional moments in the characters’ lives, and my ambition in taking on such a topic of import and delivering exactly what I promised in my cover letter: the mental and physical toll Hurricane Katrina took on those experiencing it.

This letter is the kind of rejection you want–kind, respectful, and honest.

Thank you so much, sir. Hats off to you for keeping my dignity and self-worth intact. May your tribe increase.

And Now For Something Completely Different

I am just now hearing about the death last Thursday of one of America’s premier political satirists, Mark Russell, at the age of ninety.

My first thought was, “I thought he was already dead!”

But no. He actually lived to cover the 2016 presidential election, after which he retired. (Wouldn’t you? Satire cannot beat Donald Trump running for and winning the US Presidency.)

You may not remember him at all. He did a regular show on PBS, taking what had been a lounge act with musical political parodies of songs to the network after the fall of the Nixon administration in the 70s.

Since PBS was one of the three channels we could pick up regularly out in the country where I grew up, I watched a lot of him at night on the tiny black and white TV in my room. My parents believed that whatever appeared on PBS was educational and let me watch whatever I wanted to on PBS.

Now, fast forward to the start of my freelance career in 2000. I read a flyer online about an arts series at little ol’ Meridian Community College and there it was in black and white–Mark Russell was coming to do a show.

And I thought exactly the same thing I said above. “I thought he was dead already!”

So I asked one of my editors if I could do a story on him appearing and interview him. She said “Sure!” (Probably laughed like a hyena after she got off the phone. I was fangirling big-time.)

So I did have enough sense to call the people putting on the arts series and tell them I would like to speak with him for the story. So they said they would forward my request and number to his people.

His people called and set up the day he could talk.

A few days later, I pick up the phone after it rings. “Hi, Julie! It’s Mark Russell. Is this a good time to talk?” I heard.

Oh, yessir, it is!

We probably talked for twenty minutes, with him tossing off bon mots and me taking notes like aboslute mad. I was thinking, “I have ARRIVED! NOTHING in my professional career will top THIS MOMENT!”

And you know what, I wasn’t far wrong.

I still remember that kind man returning my overture and gifting me with grace when I was as green at this business as a Granny Smith apple.

But I learned dreams can come true. What dreams are you waiting for to come true?

Numbers Update

Total queries sent–48

Presses that sent explicit rejections–20

Presses that have ghosted me–9

Presses where it’s still being considered–19

Presses to still send to–10

Oof.

I’m not depressed. I’m not mad. But I’m sidling up next to being resigned to the book’s eventual fate.

It’s not been without its supporters. One press was kind enough to say that they enjoyed it–but they had a full slate of books already. One press noted they are waiting on a final decision from their executive director.

At least I know I tried. And I will keep trying until I run out of ideas.

Professional Jealousy

I had kind of a bad week the week before last as far as how I felt about my writing. One author in a writers’ group I am in posted the story behind her book deal. I am trying to be charitable and think that she was just posting encouragement. She talked about how long she had been writing in her spare time and how she’d always wanted to write a book, and she got laid off at her job. She decided to take the plunge and try to do a book on a volunteer passion project of hers.

She consulted with another person in this writers’ group, and together they crafted a nonfiction book proposal. Within a month, she had a literary agent. Within six months, she sold the book at auction for a six-figure advance to a Big Five publisher. She hasn’t even written the book yet; she asked for encouragement going forward.

I am trying so hard to be joyful for her and not think of myself.

But it’s so hard to.

I have been kicking Hurricane Baby around for almost twenty years. I got an agent fairly rapidly, and I tried the big New York presses first. No dice. Now I have refined it several times over and am trying to work with the small presses. So far the query letter got some hits, but I’ve collected polite rejections after that. I still have about twenty possibilities for it, but I’m starting to think that maybe it’s just not going to happen for me–a feeling that reading this story intensified.

But as Anne Lamott says, I am comparing my insides to someone else’s outsides. It probably wasn’t as easy as it seems for this person. On social media, you only see the end result. In this blog, I’m trying to counter the myth of the “overnight success” by being transparent about what this process is like. I believe in telling all like it is. And right now, it’s uncomfortable to sit with the idea that Hurricane Baby might never be all I want it to be.

But all I can do for myself is press forward. And press forward I will. It was hard to pick myself back up and send the book off to yet another press this week. But I did it. And I will wait and see what happens with it. Wish me well. And I will take heart in the fact that I have my own tribe cheering me on, here and elsewhere.

Persist. That the word of the month for me. I hope it can be yours as well.