Unhappy.

Blogger's new format can suck my ovaries.

Have not been having a good time of things lately. Several attempts to find work that pays better have ended in bait-and-switch interviews, where the job that's advertised, the job I'm told they want me for, is not the one they interview me for. Do you know how hard it is to maintain a professional demeanor in the middle of an interview when they tell you you're actually here to interview for something minimum-wage? When they tell you you shorted your already limited sleep by several hours for nothing?

On top of that, querying is not going as well as I'd hoped it would. I've looked into some small presses and have been compiling a list of ones that seem worth submitting to. I like that small presses take more risks and publish more art rather than just more of what we've already seen before. I have great respect for small presses and their forward-thinking authors. what I don't like is that small presses don't have capital, so I can expect nothing as an advance, and I can also expect a wait of up to two years before the book is published and before royalties start to come in. Two years is a distressingly bleak span of time to face when you already can't keep your head above water. I'm not foolish enough to think I could have expected anything major for this book from a Big Six publisher, but a simple advance of maybe $10,000 seemed like a reasonable hope. Even $5,000 in the bank would have kept us from panicking, would keep us from losing our home and our minds for another year or more. The money situation is so dire. We're both stretched so thin. And I see shit like Twilight fanfiction getting big money, while I will count myself lucky if I see a few hundred bucks from two years' worth of work...two years from now.

Everybody tells me not to get discouraged, to just start on the next book. Why? It will be just as impossible to sell as the others. It will bring me more years of torment and nothing in the bank. What's the point?

I've got to go to a friend's birthday party. He's one of those friends who always tells me what a great writer I am, yet he's never read anything I've written. I hate being treated that way by the people I love. I know they mean well so I never call them out on it, but I hate to hear those words from them. They're just patting me on the head, just smiling and nodding at this little hobby of mine. Libbie likes to write books; isn't that cute.

Dad used to hate it when he'd set up his French easel and paint en plein air, and hikers and tourists would come up to him and say, "Hey, my aunt paints!" He hated it when people told him that, hated it. Because they couldn't see the difference between the awful crap their amateur aunts painted and the beautiful, nuanced, skilled things he made. It made him feel like it was pointless. Why keep painting at all, if every painting was the equivalent of aunt-painting?

So these people who love me, they mean well and they want to support me, but I'm just playing to them. I'm just a hobbyist with no real potential beyond that. Shit, they're not even interested enough in my "hobby" to READ what I write. They tell me it's good and think I won't notice that they've never even tried to find out whether it is.  It doesn't occur to them that maybe I'm doing something worth more than Twilight fanfiction, so they pat me on my head and say, "You're a good writer, Libbie. Don't worry. You'll get published."

My aunt paints.

This friend -- he just got his acceptance letter to the university he wants to attend. I'm so happy for him. He's worked so hard, and he and his wife have both sacrificed so much so that he can achieve this goal. And I love them both like crazy. They're the best people. But now I've got to pull my shit together and go celebrate with them. His life is coming together. Mine is stagnant. I am thirty-two. When I was younger I thought of my thirties as that decade when I'd have my life on its track, when I'd be writing full-time and maybe not making great money at it, but getting by.

So I guess now the conventional wisdom is that I start the next book. For whatever good that may do me. I can't muster any enthusiasm for it. I don't see the point in trying to make something good and real when that doesn't matter to publishers anymore.

Querying update.

It's going well. I'm sending out a couple new queries each day and have been steadily for over two weeks now. I am getting some nibbles here and there. I am feeling hopeful about this book. It's definitely not a "sure thing" kind of book (if there is such a thing at all) -- I know it will require a lot of luck to find the absolutely correct agent for it, and to hit him or her at just the right time. And then it will require the same amount of fortuitous timing (and agent savvy) to find precisely the right editor. And then that editor will have to convince Acquisitions to actually buy it. So I'm expecting a lengthy process, but I am feeling hope.

More news when something becomes news.

Querying.

I am currently in Query Hell. It's good to be back. I feel I'm not getting nearly enough responses (rejection or otherwise) compared to how many queries I've sent out, but maybe the process is different with agents who focus on literary fiction and not genre fiction, as was the case with my last visit to Q.H. Plus I went after the upper crust of agencies only, so perhaps their backlogs of emails are larger. Probably.

Doing my written test for 911 dispatching today. First step in a long process. But it will be a good backup if my book never sells and I wither up in shame and die unpublished, surrounded by angry cats, with a bunch of brilliant manuscripts rotting in my sock drawer which my niece and nephew will discover long after I'm gone, posthumously publish, and make the millions I should have earned off my own genius. You're welcome, Henry and Agatha. Auntie loves you.

Also looking at taking a second job, working on my three days off a week. Doesn't that sound fun.

Pre-emptively setting the record straight

So...when I wrote my query letter and then submitted it for critique at Absolute Write, I expected a few people to object to the general content of my book. Vladimir Nabokov once said that there were three taboos in American publishing: incest, interracial marriage, and "the total atheist who lives a happy and useful life, and dies in his sleep at the age of 106."

Happily, interracial marriage is no longer the taboo it was in the 1950s. Incest will always remain a taboo -- or at least I predict it will remain taboo in my lifetime. Who knows what the future might hold. As for the third publishing taboo, obviously Nabokov was being hyperbolic when he described that scenario. A book about a happy, useful person who never has any troubles and dies in his sleep is boring, and boring will always be verboten in publishing. But the point he was trying to make was sound, and unlike interracial marriage, a book which portrays atheism as a solution to a problem, or at least as something that's okay, something that doesn't need to be fixed, is still going to have a tough time getting off the ground.

That doesn't mean I think my book is doomed. It merely needs to meet the right agent and editor, and I then I think it has quite a good shot of selling well. But finding the right people to work with this book may be difficult, and my experience with my query letter on AW points out why.

DONE!!

54,474 words. First draft, anyway. There are a lot of scenes I intend to work back into what I've already written. I still think the final version will come in somewhere around 60K.

But after two years and a lot of setbacks, Baptism for the Dead has reached "The End."

I feel relieved. Now I'm going to have some wine.

Update

46,000 words. Past a major turning point in the book. Heading toward the final conflict and the resolution. Looking like it might top off at 60K, which is short, but not absurdly so. I hope.

Progress

I'm making good headway on Baptism. I am very relieved and happy to report this. In the past three days I've written over 5000 words, which is more than I've written over the past eight months or so. Long story short: One of my biggest stressors seems to be all wrapped up and as out of my life as it's ever going to be, and the psychological effect on me has been incredible. I feel awesome.

I've set a goal for myself to finish the first draft by the end of February. After that, revisions should come together swiftly, since I've actually been doing a lot of revising as I've worked on the first draft. I am planning to start searching for a new agent by mid-March. I've already got my first one targeted, researched, and ready to query.

Let's sell this goddamn book already!