Tag: Looking For Home

Ups and Downs

I’ve had other media opportunities for Hurricane Baby come up in the past week–one on a statewide-syndicated radio talk show, another on a website I wrote some for while I was in grad school that focuses on women’s reinvention journeys. I’m still negotiating with the radio show so I’m not going to announce it yet. August seems like it’s going to be super-busy!

On the flip side, getting into the new point of view for my qork-in-progress is proving difficult. I pretty much know what I have to have happen to get the effect I want at the end of it. It’s the right voice I haven’t nailed. I have this character in the first section and the end section–in both places her interactions are mediated through another character’s consciousness. This section we’re hearing directly from her, and I have to decide how she’s going to react to events, going from one kind of person to another. I’m going to let things go downhill mostly, with three bounce-backs that later blow up in her face. I’ve been writing little microscenes when I think them up.

So I’m being a bit push-pulled with the writing–proud of how much attention Hurricane Baby is getting, but a nagging thought in the back of my mind that I want to finish this manuscript, Looking For Home, so there will be a future book being worked over and possibly sold while I’m promoting the other. We will see how it goes.

Off to write some more! Have a good week! Read a lot! Write a lot, too, if you’re so inclined!

Progress!

If you remember, my current work-in-progress is a set of three novellas that tell a story of a young couple giving up a baby for adoption in the 1970s and the child finding them in the mid-80s. The final novella from the point of view of the adopted child, had been published in a novella collection, and the rights have reverted back to me, and I’ve been developing into a longer work. I started with revising the section that had already been published into something with more weight to it.

After i completed that section, I started on the first section, narrated by the birth father of his moving to Counce, Tennessee and meeting his girlfriend and how their relationship developed. I still had the original novel written in 2006 that I chopped down into the novella in 2017. I pulled flashback scenes from the novel to set up this first section and wrote more material about his life and . . .

Last night I finished the first draft of that section!

So tomorrow I will start on the middle section from the birth mom’s point of view about the years after giving up her daughter. And I have only a handful of half-bakes ideas for this part–I’ll be drafting almost from scratch. So that’s going to be. . . interesting. Definitely stretching my storytelling chops. I hope to finish it before Hurricane Baby publishes in late August this year.

So that’s my new goal. Wish me well!

In the Writing Trenches

I have been letting my work-in-progress, Looking for Home, absolutely kick my fanny the past two months. I started off with a good bit of material that I had pulled out of the older manuscript, and I had one chapter where I could see it absolutely play out like a movie with some filling in.

Then I decided to write the opening chapter and I froze up solid for the better part of a month and a half. I couldn’t figure out how to start it and get in the backstory needed and get into the action, too. I wrote five pages that I knew shouldn’t be the beginning, but I couldn’t think of how else to do it. It had Carlton with his family making the road trip moving from Pass Christian, Mississippi to Counce, Tennesse. After I finished the trip, I cut those first pages and started with the ending scene and wrote 13 new pages to get to an existing three-page scene I already had.

I think those were the hardest 16 pages of my life to date. I was working in the consciousness of a sixteen-year-old boy who’d lost his mama a few months before, and that was foreign territory, to say the least. Trying to get him settled into the world he’d been thrown into and him not doing such a very good job with it. I’m doing one thing a little differently; I’ll have scenes that come in my head, and I know they need to be in the story. But I have no idea where they’ll go. That’s the fun part of it all I suppose.

So that’s why you haven’t been hearing much about the work-in-progress–It’s been absoluely refusing to cooperate. Until now. Maybe I can get the next chapter wrestled to the ground. Until next time . . .

Success?

So last week I told you about my pitch meeting with a publisher at the HOMEGROWN festival. I told you I looked up his email address and sent him a thank-you note for listening to my pitch and taking my materials and being so encouraging. I told you I didn’t know what was going to happen as a result of the meeting, but I felt good about it.

So Monday I got an email back from the gentleman, and he said for when it’s finished for me to send it through the regular submission channel but be sure to specify in my query letter that I had pitched it to him and what event I had pitched at! So that’s a connection I would not have made had I not stepped out and just did the thing. I’d never done an in-person pitch before, but I was calm and confident in my story, and now I feel so much further ahead of the game than I did for Hurricane Baby!

So now I am starting a list of who this book is going to go to first once it’s finished, beta read, edited, and revised. One is my current publishing company, another is the group that published the original novella, another is this company, another is a contest where Hurricane Baby was a semi-finalist, and another is one where I got the very kind personalized rejection. That’s five for the first shot of it. I hope to start sending it out in January 2025.

Just goes to show where you have to put in the work, be persistent, and believe in yourself. I am learning more and more about this process and what all effort goes into a finished book. I don’t have all the answers, certainly. But I am committed to share my journey with you all and be as transparent as possible about how things are working (or not working) for me. Makes me feel less alone in the journey and makes me feel good that i can provide information that I wish I had known when I was starting out.

Happy writing!

HOMEGROWN: A Writer’s Exchange

I went to a new literary festival this weekend with my friend Mary Jane in–of all places–Kiln, Mississippi. Jami Attenberg was there. Lee Durkee was there. Margaret McMullen was there. And Mary Miller and Ellen Ann Fentress, my MFA thesis supervisors. and I met people I only knew by reputation. So that was super cool!

It was structured a lot like the Mississippi Book Festival–there were panels on various topics–cookbooks, memoir, short stories, novels, publishing, the writing life, etc., etc. A really cool feature was that there were three presses (one of them was University Press of Mississippi) soliciting book pitch meetings directly from authors!

I only found out about this event on Wednesday of last week, and the trip came together really quickly. So I sent in a request to have a pitch meeting with Looking for Home. I really wasn’t expecting to get in to one because of how late i was signing up–but I did! Pelican Publishing picked me up and wanted to hear my story! I didn’t find out until late Friday afternoon, so I didn’t have long to prepare. But prepare I did!

I took my computer and printed out a writing sample of my book, my CV, and a very generic query letter in the hotel’s business center after we got there Friday night. So when I got to the pitch meeting, he asked about the book, and I handed him the letter and talked about the structure and the story. Then I asked if I could read my writing sample aloud, and he said that would be great. So I did, then i handed him my CV with all my publications on it. Then he asked me about myself, hobbies, etc. (That was the hardest part; trying to make myself sound interesting has never been my strong suit.)

I don’t know if I’ll ever hear from him again; I did pull up his email and sent him a thank-you note for the meeting, and I think that was a good idea. I also had another good idea–I printed out copies of my sell-sheet for Hurricane Baby and handed them out strategically–to the guy who organized the event so I could maybe get included in next year’s event, to people who ran publications, to people who do author interviews, etc. And almost everyone I wound up meeting the first time. I handed out about half of what I printed, so that was cool, too.

Anyway. I will be doing a lot of this in the coming months and after publication, I think, so I’m looking forward to that! It felt so good to finally be able to say, “Hey, I have a book coming out, too!” So a good time was had by all.

Hope everyone has a really good week! Thanks for reading!

Juggling The Work

Well, since I don’t have the final proofs for Hurricane Baby yet, I am working on my three-novella project Looking for Home. I only have two more scenes to write for this POV before I’m finished and can go back further into the past and write the first POV character, Carlton Dixon. Right now I’m working on the POV of Cassie Beck, the adopted teenager that comes to find Carlton, claiming to be his daughter by his teenage girlfriend, Merrilyn Beck. (Cassie’s POV is the part that sold for the novella anthology.) I’ve already outlined what I want to do for Carlton’s POV and Merrilyn’s POV, so that changed a few things that happened in Cassie’s POV. And I’m sure that when I’m finished with the first two parts, I will need to revise Cassie’s part again. But that’s OK.

I want to finish the new draft for this project before Hurricane Baby comes out in August. And I am chipping away, bit by bit, paragraph by paragraph. I am keeping up with my daily word count in a notebook so I can see when I write best and have the best production and figure out what goes well on those days. Is the outlining helping or hurting? Is it better to plan out what I’m writing beforehand or write without a net to catch me if it goes awry? That sort of thing. We will see.

Kicking around ideas of who to pitch publicity opportunities to for Hurricane Baby. I’m looking at book podcasts, regional magazines, radio shows, newspapers, festivals. Once I get to pre-orders, I’ll start sharing that link around. Just getting together my ideas and what all I want to do. I hope I can start getting the word out seriously by then. Wish me well!

Making Sure It’s Ready

I really pulled a rookie mistake last month.

I got enamored with the idea of trying to republish a novella, Looking For Home, that had appeared in a novella anthology, as a standalone book. I thought it would be a quick and easy way to get another book out–the book had already been edited well and didn’t need any more work on it, right?

And so in typical Julie fashion, I got ahead of myself. I sent it out to eight publishers that take novella submissions with a total list of about seventeen publishers I could find that would be interested in a short-form book.

What I didn’t anticipate was how enamored I would get with the story itself, thinking about how I could improve it. And that whole idea began to grow–of turning it back into a novel-length book like I originally wrote it after I completed Still Waters back in the mid-2000s.

So after much careful thought and cogitation (and talks with writer friends about the options), I have started revising the material I already have back into the novel form–but better organized and better written (I hope).

I wrote notes for the new parts I was going to have to create, pulled source material from the original manuscript (that I had to dig out of my computer archives), and did a little thinking over how that material would have to be restructured to have a character arc of its own, that would necessitate changes in the novella part as well.

The project started to feel like a giant snowball rolling uphill.

But I am interested in how I can make this work. Much more interested than I am in trying to revise my bipolar memoir.

So I’ve committed to that.

But I still have those eight premature novella submissions in my Submittable queue, grinning at me. Do I withdraw them, or just let the selection process run its course?

I think I am going to see what kind of progress I can have on my revisions throughout December, and if I can stick with the project and not give up on it, I think I am going to withdraw them after the first of the year.

What have I learned?

–Always get input on my project before submitting it. I may think it’s ready. But someone else might can look more objectively evaluate my ideas.

–Always think through the ramifications of what I am doing. Selling this story as a novel exponentially expands the number of publishers I can send it to. What I should have done was get all the list together so I would have realized that before I made any submissions.

–Remember nothing worth doing comes easily. I didn’t need an “easy” sale. And selling two books released too close together is not the smartest move I could make. I don’t need to make impulsive decisions on submissions.

So I am to continue working on this book, and if the motivation/passion for it is still there in the new year, i will cancel those submissions. Wish me writing favor as I embark on another writing journey!

Professional Milestone

I experienced an important professional milestone this week—I got my first rejection of Hurricane Baby: Stories on Friday.

Why do I phrase it that way? Let me explain.

The rejection was from the same group that included my novella, Looking For Home, in their 2018 novella anthology. I enjoyed working with them and felt like they should get a crack at this project as well as other presses that I have not worked with before. I pitched it to them as a novel-in-stories (which may be a misnomer for this project, but I thought it was worth a try). They sent a very nice note saying it wasn’t a fit for them and wishing me the best of luck with it.

So what did I do?

I got back online and found another strong, independent press to send the manuscript to, checked over my list of further places I want to send it as they open up for submissions, and kept typing away at whatever I wanted to work on.

Back when I was pitching my first novel to New York publishers in 2006 (when there were more than the Big Five), I was just that sanguine about those rejections, too. But as the rejections kept coming, I sank into a depression. At first I was saying, “I’ve been rejected by X of the finest publishing houses in New York.” But as the time wore on, I started to seriously doubt myself and my work.

I’m not doing that this time.

I have set a date for when I will stop sending it out. I am the only one that knows that date. And I have a plan for what I will do if everyone I have already sent to and plan to send to rejects it. What I know now that I didn’t know then is that rejection letters are not grades. The world will not end every time I receive a rejection. I need to act with grace and humility for my own sanity. Grace for myself and humility about my work.

One of my MFA mentors said one time in class “Not everyone gets an agent and a New York publisher.” I have to trust that the work will find its audience when the time is right and the audience is ready.

Different writers handle rejection differently. One of my MFA mates sends her work to two more outlets every time she gets a rejection. Others delete the rejection from their email and never think about it again. Others say they wallpaper their office with their rejections. Still others shoot for 100 rejections in a year—and say that if they experience only a five percent acceptance rate, that’s five places their work appears during that year.

The journey doesn’t end with one rejection. That’s the takeaway.