Category: general

Terror

So I wrote last week about being really excited that Hurricane Baby had opened for pre-orders.

This week I’m writing about the terror.

I started having really high levels of anxiety about the idea of my book in the hands of readers and thinking about “What if they don’t like it? What will people think about me as a person after reading this?”

And I just kept letting my mind spin out of control with those thoughts.

What finally broke the spiral was an email from Lisa Cooper Ellison, an author I admire very much. She wrote about her recent micro nonfiction that had been published in the Tiny Love Stories feature in the New York Times and how she simultaneously felt a surge of pride and a wave of fear. Fear of not handling all the attention in a good way, fear of not being able to leverage the opportunities the publication might give her, etc.

It felt so validating that someone else felt the same kind of feelings I was feeling when something so wonderful had happened in her writing career. I wrote her an email letting her know that she had helped me come to grips with my anxiety.

So now the fear has worn itself out after bedeviling me for several days. I feel much better knowing that those feelings are common to other writers also and can be overcome.

So I am back to normal now (as close as I’ll ever get to that) and am ready to continue this journey. Onward!

Not Quite Ready

Reading proof pages hopefully for the last time. So that has been the work this weekend.

I’ve also been busy on my work-in-progress Looking For Home. I’ve got the last third as far as I can take it without having the other parts written. And knowing me, I’ll do something in the other two sections that will necessitate more changes in that last third section. So I am pushing along!

It’s been a little difficult doing the switch because that old talk in my head about wasting my time is still there! I was hoping that having a published book would quell that voice forever. But apparently in my mind, I’m still not allowed to write just because I enjoy it and I’m good at it.

I have to remind myself that I don’t have competing priorities anymore. I work for an employer and that’s important. I do some housework and cook meals at night. But otherwise, my free time is for me to work on what I feel led to do. My writing is one way I feel that I can reach out to people and make them think about things they might would rather not. And that’s important. No matter what else needs doing–my writing is important, and I can spend time on it without guilt.

Back to proofreading! Onward!

Liminal Space

So now I am in the liminal space between querying my book and publishing my book. I’ve done what I’m supposed to do (get the manuscript in the best shape I can, look over sample covers, get leads on publicity avenues) and now I’m waiting for the edits and the ironing out of final details before we go to print in February 2024. Suddenly February 2024 doesn’t seem that far into the future as it did in September when I signed the deal.

I am working on When I Went Crazy–I’ve finished the first chapter and am looking at the next. I will likely start on it tomorrow night when I write. I’m also researching places to try to publish my novella Looking For Home as a standalone book. So far I think I’ve sent it six places (I don’t have my list in front of me so don’t. hold me to that.) Not many publishers do novellas, so there aren’t many places to send to. But I’m going to give the ones I can find a shot and see what happens.

I love that I’m finally able to think about a future in writing and publishing my work. I had resolved to myself that if Hurricane Baby didn’t publish by 2025 (the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina) that I would just give up on writing fiction altogether and just stick to my bipolar work and labor for a better world for the mentally ill in my little corner of advocacy and education. But now I feel like I have a chance to do more, be more, get more visibility for the issues surrounding mental illness. And that’s a good feeling.

Bucket List Visit

We went on a trip to Wisconsin for summer vacation and as a side trip, we stopped in Madison and visited a former professor of mine from when I was at Mississippi State University; he’s now at University of Wisconsin-Madison. We haven’t seen each other in thirty years, but we’ve stayed in touch on and off through that time (basically the whole time the Internet was being invented around us).

We had a great visit, and at the end of it, he said something that will stick with me, I think. He said he admired my persistence and always had.

That will keep me going for a while.

To-Be-Read Pile

So I have a nice pile of books to be read stacked up for the new year. I plan to be a lot more intentional about reading now that I am a year-and-a-half out of graduate school. I was so TIRED of reading. But now I plan to really get back into it and see where I go. I am going to list my books out and log when I read them on here as they are completed. The list (so far) contains:

–Defining New Yorker Humor, University Press of Mississippi, 2000

–Positioning Pooh: Edward Bear After 100 Years, University Press of Mississippi, 2021

–Best American Essays 2021, Mariner Press, 2021

–Best American Essays 2020, Mariner Press, 2020

–Best American Short Stories 2019, Mariner Press, 2019

–Best American Short Stories 2018, Mariner Press, 2018

–Always Happy Hour, Liveright Publishing, 2017

–Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond, University Press of Mississippi, 2019

–A Charlie Brown Religion: Exploring The Spiritual Life and Work of Charles Schulz, University Press of Mississippi, 2015

–A Year In Mississippi, University Press of Mississippi, 2017

–Born To Shine, Hachette Book Group, 2022

–What If? 2, Riverhead Books, 2022

–Little Pieces of Hope: Happy-Making Things in a Difficult World, Penguin Books, 2021

–The Potlikker Papers, Penguin, 2017

–American Housewife, Anchor Books, 2019

–Dispatches From The Golden Age, St Martin’s Press, 2022

–Bring Your Baggage and Don’t Pack Light, Anchor Books, 2021

There’s a list. There’s a plan. Off I go!

Query Letters

As i said last week, I am pitching Hurricane Baby to independent presses, and I got another full request last week! I thought today I would share my query letter and see if looking at what I have done in it might help other writers craft their queries as well. About half of the presses I have sent to, I went ahead and sent full manuscripts to because they called for them. But I think this query may help answer questions about how to put one together. Mine is going to read differently than yours because I write like I write, and you write like you write. But here it is, with the final paragraph with contact information removed:

Hurricane Baby: Stories (69,820 words) is the first fictional treatment of Hurricane Katrina to approach its subject–the suffering of those who endured the hurricane and its aftermath–through a trauma-focused lens. The characters in this short-story collection face extreme circumstances with only their inner resources to count on–and in many cases. that proves to not be enough to deal with the mental challenges of living through a weather event of this magnitude. Although many of the characters do not experience the typical physical losses of family members or property, they persist in living lives that have become psychological nightmares.

Wendy Magnum of Hattiesburg, Mississippi suffers guilt and remorse after betraying her husband, Ray. by having an intimate encounter with Judd McKay, a friend Ray had trusted to help protect his family during the storm. Tommy Hebert turns to alcohol to help him handle the trauma of what he saw aiding in search-and-rescue in Metairie, Louisiana. Mike Seabrook’s relationships with his God and his wife, Dinah, are sorely tested after he loses a patient in his emergency room; he responds by quitting his nursing job and working in hurricane relief while attempting to rebuild both his home in Slidell, Louisiana and his faith. James and Lori King suffer dual devastating losses –Lori goes into premature labor as a result of the storm, and James discovers on his return to their home in Kenner, Louisiana that his best friend died trying to protect the Kings’ home from looters.

I currently work as a reporter for the Mississippi Center for investigative Reporting, covering stories on mental health, mental health advocacy, and mental health education. My fiction has appeared in China Grove Press, The Esthetic Apostle, and Swamp Ape Review, among others, including the Running Wild Press Novella anthology in 2019 with the story Looking for Home. In 2021, I graduated with an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Mississippi University for Women. A full-length play based on an early version of Hurricane Baby won an award from the Eudora Welty New Plays Festival in 2010 and is slated to be produced by Mississippi Repertory Theatre in 2023.  I have a social media presence of WordPress, Facebook. Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. and Pinterest, for a total of about 2,000 followers.

The stories’ common themes touch on the fragility of morality in a life-or-death situation, the impossibility of chasing normalcy for the psyche after severe trauma, and the reverberations of the characters’ choices on how to deal with their trauma that go far beyond mere survival of the immediate storm. I hope these themes resonate with you as they should other readers who are interested in the study of trauma, the effects of climate change on our communities, and the importance of memorializing the past in a way that honors and enlarges it, all told in the Southern Gothic tradition.

Sincerely,

Julie Whitehead

Hope this helps!

And Just Like That

I. FINISHED. THE. BOOK.

I got on a writing roll the Saturday before Labor Day and did not stop until I finished midweek last week. I wrote like a crazy person. (Which I am, but that’s another blog.) I revised both storylines until the tension was white-hot in each one and the knife was buried up to the hilt in my insides with not being sure what the characters were going to do next. But as all stories do, they ended and my eighth revision of Hurricane Baby is in the books.

And I decided I had enough. I ran it through spell-and-grammar-check a few more times as I refined certain passages and finally found a search-and-replace that fixed the worst of the mistakes I had introduced accidentally. I bit the bullet on some things that my reader said needed to be changed that I had resisted changing when I was rewriting new passages, but I finally broke down and took out some dialogue tags that had been near and dear to my heart. I searched for words that were used too often and found replacements.

And now I am going to start sending it out to small publishers and university presses. I’m entering three contests for short-story collections and sending to someone who already published a novella of mine just for a try to market it as a novel-in-stories. And I picked out two others to send to because they are known to be open to Southern writing. So that’s six so far. Then I will wait and send to others if none of those work out.

It’s an exhilarating feeling to be done with this round. I’m certain that anyone who is interested in publishing it will require more. Because perfection is not of this world. But I think I have taken it pretty far and done some pretty honest work in telling these stories I have carried around in my head and on my hard drive for far too long. (I also finally saved it into the cloud!) That’s all I meant to do–tell some honest stories.

So now we wait. I hope I can have some good news in the coming weeks. I’ll keep you posted!