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?

Honesty in Writing Fiction

Is honesty a concern in writing fiction?

Most people would probably say no. It’s supposed to all be made up. Out of your head. Figments of imagination. If it’s not, then it’s not fiction–it’s nonfiction.

Beginning writers often write about real events that happened to them–and defend themselves when told it’s not plausible by saying, “But that really happened to me!”

So what do we mean when we say we want honesty in fiction?

Well, often what has happened is that the writer has set up a character to be a certain sort of person–honest, villainous, seductive, dogmatic, whatever their defining trait is–and then the writer has those characters do something that readers literally describe as “out of character”. The honest person may lie. The villainous character may rescue a homeless kitten. The seductive character may get to the edge with a seductee and upon finding out she’s married, turn virtuous and say no to sleeping with her.

Often when the reader gets taken out of the story by someone acting “out of character”, it’s because they writer didn’t draw the character as a fully rounded complex individual. I like to write characters where a reader may have no idea what the character might do next–they’re interesting, but often dangerous, just as an unpredictable person might be in “real life”.

Flat characters are actually hard to write about in an interesting way. They may have only one defining trait, and therefore their path is fixed. The honest character will always tell the truth no matter what the consequences. The villainous character would always lie even when there’s no clear benefit to doing so.

Whatever world you create–whether your characters live in the middle of Mississippi or on the edges of the galaxy–readers often want writers to follow the rules the writers create. If a writer builds a world where the atmosphere is unbreathable–until the main character steps foot on it and needs to survive without his spacesuit, which the writer had fail upon atmospheric entry to heighten the dramatic tension–the writer better have a good explanation why that character stays alive that makes sense in the world the writer has created–beyond simply that the writer wants him to survive.

One of the most effective techniques to create dramatic tension around what a character may or may not do is foreshadowing–dropping small hints about how the honest guy is only honest about one aspect of his life but not about another. Another is immediate flashbacking following the character’s uncharacteristic action–where the reader sees what the character did when it was a kid faced with the same type of choice–what did the character do then? Is that character going to make the same choice, or a different one? Why?

Robertson Davies, one of Canada’s leading authors of the twentieth century, once said, “Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground, not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.” If a writer’s world follows certain rules, the writer must be honest with the reader as to why the roles are there–and why they get broken. If a character is rounded, complex and human–those rules can be bent a bit– if and only if the writer is sure to point out how said bend serves the story and is not as “out of character” as the reader suspects.

Why Do You Write What You Write?

I’ve struggled with this question now for almost twenty years.

When I wrote fiction in my first stint in graduate school, I took only one fiction workshop class. The stories I wrote there reflected a few preoccupations I had at the time that continue in my writing today–an affinity for love triangles, characters with southern accents, watching the results of a single action as it unfolded across time.

But they were pretty typical for juvenilia, often not-so-loosely based on people I knew and drawn from some of my own circumstances: one story I remember was a what-if of what might have happened if I had not reconciled with my longtime boyfriend, and another was taken almost literally from life from an incident when I was in high school of me trying to defend a kid from being bullied–and how I wished it had turned out. But–a most important distinction–they had happy endings.

Not so with the fiction that spilled out of me after my youngest child was born. Still Waters was so dark and desperate that I scared myself putting it on the page. I really wondered what had happened to me, that I was writing something that could not end happily–ever. I tried. Having Wendy go back to Ray seemed like a soul-death for her, but having her leave Ray for Judd resulted in something even worse–signing up for what could have been hell on earth.

All my fiction has been that way ever since. Very dark moods, gritty plots, morally gray or actively wretched characters. The truly miserable thing is that I couldn’t stand to read such stories written by someone else. I tried reading some books in my freelance career that were classed as Southern Gothic and wound up throwing them against the wall–literally in at least one case. I enjoyed uplifting stories and nonfiction, where I could learn something.

Where did all of this darkness come from?

It was a long time before I faced down the answer. I remembered all the tales my relatives had told of their hardscrabble lives. Every cheating song that played on country radio the summer of 1983 when we didn’t have the money to replace the lightning-struck television and listened to the radio all day, every day. Every divorce among my cousins. Every untimely, early death in my community from drunk-driving teenagers, suicidal housewives, or gun-toting men.

Desperation and sorrow was my birthright and my history. But even through it all, we–my family, myself, my characters–endured. Imperfect solutions to problems stemming from dark secrets–that was my “stuff”.

So I don’t apologize for it anymore. It’s just life. it ends, continues, begins, endures. The cushiest, most stress-free life you can imagine–it still ends. We all have to die. We’re all equal at the edge of the River Styx. I write about people who live because they’re afraid of what happens when they die.

What do you write about?

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.

Watch Out!

I already addressed in a couple of posts about how writers can get victimized monetarily by publishing companies that charge fees for any number of services they offer their authors–and my one exception to paying presses was the fee that presses may ask for when they run contests for manuscripts once or twice a year.

But new reporting has come out that some presses are charging ALL submitters with fees, and that these certain publishers are owned by known bad actors in the indie publishing world. Read the full article here:

Showcase Magazine, Ephemera, C & R Press, Steel Toe Books, Fjords Review, PANK Magazine, American Poetry Journal…oh my? (substack.com)

I’m transparent enough to admit that I sent Hurricane Baby to two of these publishers. I’m out about $50 to people who may not have even been interested in publishing anyone, much less me. One publisher on this list I withdrew from very early in my querying process after reading a Writers Beware post from Victoria Strauss, an invaluable member of the literary community who researches and collates publishing scams and the scammers that run them.

The other I withdrew my book from after reading this article.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I looked at reputable organizations to find these publishers–various literary magazines maintain databases of small presses. and these trusted publications never had anything indicating that these presses were in any way suspicious. We’re on our own, folks.

Just goes to show that some people will do anything to make a buck. And others will be silent about these bad actors and are therefore complicit in their schemes.

The takeaway? Research, research, research. Make sure you know something about who you are sending your work to. Check them in Google. Scan for their names on Twitter and other social media. Give their website a detailed look–one way I weed out publishers is if I have never heard of any of their authors. If a place gives you bad vibes for any reason, don’t submit there.

The only way we can choke out these people is to decline to be a part of their income stream in order to make our point–that it’s wrong to take advantage of people.