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DONE!
I. FINISHED. THE. PROPOSAL.
I am so excited! I finished my proposal for Missing and Mentally Ill in Mississippi last week in time for my mentor, Ellen Ann, to look at it and pronounce it good. I worked so hard to finish the last sample chapter. I need to get to work on the second chapter because some of the agents I want to send to require X number of first pages or chapters. So that will be tomorrow night’s writing sprint.
I sent it and a query letter to two agents this past Friday–I want to sell it on proposal so I am not investing my whole life into it only for no one to pick it up. So that is the plan right now.
I also plan to finish my light rewrite of Hurricane Baby this month as well. I know one big change I’m going to make to one of the upcoming stories in the list–I need to lose a scene that was in the original document but sadly has to go in this iteration from Tommy Hebert’s storyline. I hate it but that’s the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.
I feel so accomplished just making the major attempts I am making. Doing things I’ve never done before. Keeping on pushing myself to grow and learn and practice. We will see what happens!
Keep writing. Keep going. Keep dreaming. Keep on keeping on. You can do it!
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Revamp
So I have started in earnest on the quick Hurricane Baby rewrite for July. I am working with the last reading Cheryl gave it and finding new ways to ratchet up the tension throughout. I am on story number 12 so far, and finally ran into one of them I’m not sure I can improve on. But I’m going to keep thinking on it to make sure. I am using Cheryl’s notes to work through problem passages that she pointed out that need either rewriting or cutting.
The story I just went through was a good example of what I am doing. In the last rewrite, I realized that each individual story had three impactful scenes in it, a rising tension one, a big climax, and a third scene leading into the next story in that arc. I just went through the story where Cindi leaves Tommy and realized the third scene was really flat. It didn’t have any stakes for Cindi and Tommy; it was just a memory of Cindi’s. So I made the scene have some more meat to it and added to the stakes of the fight between Cindi and Tommy over his drinking.
Another particular one that Cheryl had commented on was a story told from Rosie’s point of view, and Cheryl felt like it was Wendy’s story to tell. It had been originally in Wendy’s POV, but I wanted it to be in Rosie’s so she could have her say about the events in the book as well. But I hadn’t told a story about her in it. On this rewrite, I made the story about their relationship as sisters. I made it have stakes between them instead of just Rosie finding out about Wendy’s relationship with Judd. Hopefully that gives the story more depth and meaning and makes a better case for Rosie as the narrator.
I’m doing that with every story, checking that the number of scenes is right, that the stakes are high, and that each story is told from the right character’s POV. So we will see how it turns out.
Wish me well–I will need to be sending it back out soon after July to the new places I found to submit to. Here’s to second chances.
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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!
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Moving Right Along
I drafted a first chapter of Missing and Mentally Ill in Mississippi in my writing sprints this week, about 9,000 words. It needs maybe a few stats to fill it out, but I finally worked out the arrangement of the scenes and what order I wanted everything in. I had to figure out what I wanted to accomplish, which was introducing major characters and drawing parallels between us, then summing up what I wanted to do in the book. So I feel good about it.
Now I need another sample chapter and an introduction to my proposal. Then I’ll continue to draft more sections and see if I can get an agent on proposal only. I am selling it as true crime, so we will see how that stacks up with what agents are looking for.
My writing friend is really keeping me accountable. She reminds me it’s a writing day and that we start at 6:30 p.m. and write for an hour. Other times I remind her. But we check in at the beginning, then give a word count and what part of the story we wrote after we’re done. So it’s nice to know someone wants to hear about your writing when you finish.
Onward and upward!
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Progress!
So far I have typed 3000 words on my current work-in-progress. I’ve done the writing sprints with my MFA buddy Shannon and am making progress past my initial fear about taking such a project on. When I start I just think, “It’s only for an hour.” And I just write!
The more I write the more excited I get and the more daunting it gets, but I’m not letting myself think it’s a book; I’m treating each chapter like a newspaper article. That’s helping, too.
I can’t wait to get back to it Monday night!
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New Project!
Time to announce my new project for the year–Missing and Mentally Ill in Mississippi.
I plan to write about working for MCIR and covering mental health issues, specifically the disappearance of Travis Sean Hunt from Choctaw County, which is where I grew up as well. I hope to tell his story as well as mine about being mentally ill and how similar our conditions were and how there but for the grace of God, go I. I will be chronicling the writing of this story the same way I have been doing Hurricane Baby in hopes that it can encourage others who want to tell their own stories as well.
As for Hurricane Baby, here are the latest statistics:
Presses sent to –62
Rejections–37
Presses left to hear from–25
Presses left to send to–6
So I will let the process work its way through the rest of the list and just see what happens. But I am excited to work on this new one and stay busy creating my own future. If I have to put away Hurricane Baby, I suppose that’s just the way it is. But I am excited for this new venture and hope you all can be excited with me!
Onward!
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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.
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New Notebook
I bought a fancy pink suede blank lined notebook today at a Renaissance fair this weekend. Not sure I will ever write in it, but I might. You never know.
(I can hear all the blank notebooks already stashed in my office desks mocking me from afar. You? Write? Ha!)
I’m going to, though. Just you hide and watch.
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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.
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Swap
My writing buddy Cheryl sent me back her read of Hurricane Baby: Stories, and her read was much more favorable that I thought it might be. She noted a very few places in the manuscript where she lost track/got tripped up in the narrative, and she thought I could actually cut some places where I was describing actions that didn’t necessarily move the plot forwards–she urged me to focus on the action throughout, which was a nice surprise. She said she really, really loved it, and her favorite character was Tommy Hebert, the one I turned from a peripheral character to a major one –she said his character arc really held her attention.
So now I think I know what to do with it in the next stage of revision, which I am probably going to take up next year (if it doesn’t get picked up by someone before that) after I draft my new project I want to work on. I am going to make each story as individually strong as I can and start sending them out to see if I can publish them in high-profile places and get them some attention. We will see what happens.
Some of the items she mentioned I can fix now before it goes out to anyone else this year–they’ll be quick. And I need to finish reading and reacting to her manuscript before the end of the month. So i am gong to look for some time to finish that before May 30.
i am very glad I did this new swap. I feel more confident about the manuscript’ strengths and know where to fix the weaknesses. So good. Onward and upward!
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Julie Liddell Whitehead 