Out of the writer's closet

I used to be a professional writer. For 13 years, I was a journalist and covered arts/entertainment, education, health and features for newspapers in four states.
Then print media collapsed. When my employer announced cutbacks, eventually shedding 70 percent of us, I took a buyout and decided to switch careers. My goal was to finish grad school by the time my youngest started kindergarten this year and get a job teaching.
Mission accomplished. But the economy still sucks and there are no jobs in my district.
When people ask what I do, I hate saying I’m an unemployed teacher. I also cringe at saying I’m a writer because then they ask what I write, which leads to the confession I’m unemployed at that right now, too.
The fact is, I’m totally employed by writing. I’m just not getting paid yet. And I struggle with confessing something that maybe, just maybe, will never happen. This makes me think of the early auditions of American Idol, the ones filled with delusional people who have no idea they can’t sing. They open their mouths and liquid garbage streams out. When they’re told this by the judges, many of them rail, sob, and deny the simple truth they have no talent.
They’re NEVER going to be singers. It doesn’t matter how much they practice or how many voice coaches they have. The gene pool skipped them.
And I wonder if I’m one of them. Am I just as deluded to think my style, my voice, my story is unique enough to catch an agent’s attention? Yes, I need to persevere. Yes, there will always be somebody who thinks I have what it takes…but I wish there was a litmus test for this business.
In the meantime, I’ll start freelancing again after a 15 year hiatus. I made money doing that before; I can do it again. Nonfiction remains an old friend while Fiction, that skittish bitch, controls the popular crowd I still want to join.
Whether she ever accepts me or not, I cannot stop writing. I want to stop - I’d exchange my miniscule talent for something else in a heartbeat.
A voice for singing, maybe?
My name is Melodie Wright and I’m a writer.

Blogfest story chain

We're almost to the end of Dio's tale and it's been a wild ride. Check out the post before me at awesome Angie's blog

OR read the whole thing at once on Deana's blog tomorrow morning!

My assignment was to begin wrapping up from the climax and use the words: blue, carriage and seldom.

But when Dio looked out the window, she nearly sighed with relief. It was just Tony.
But as he neared, Dio’s relief was short-lived. Because the Tony she knew had a solid face, not one that shifted and moved like pixels on a computer screen. Tony’s entire body was made of Grandoolex. They were tiny, buzzing swarms of blue insect-like creatures. Besides their wings, the biggest things on them were their giant pincers.
“It’s not the pincers you need to worry about,’ Roddern told her quietly. “They seldom use those.”
Dio stared at him. “Well, what should we worry about then?”
Roddern pointed. “That.”
Her eyes followed his finger to Tony’s body, which wavered and then split to make way for a golden carriage pulled by mosquitoes. The Grandoolex bowed as it passed. Dio squinted. Was one of them holding a trumpet?
It was. As the carriage door opened, the blue creature piped a tiny tune. Out of the carriage came Tinkerbell.
Well, Dio thought as she observed more closely, more like a cross between Tinkerbell and Glinda the good fairy. She had a crown and a sky-blue dress and a smile almost wider than her tiny face.
Dio wondered if fangs would pop out of the Grandoolex queen’s mouth. She moved closer to her Dad, who still seemed dazed, and took his hand for courage.
But no. The queen bowed deeply to Dio and then Roddern, who started with surprise.
“Greetings, fair one. We have waited for years to see the All-Seeing Stone to be returned to our land. And now, it’s here.”
Dio blinked. “What is?”
The queen pointed at her father. “The All-Seeing Stone, of course. It has chosen for us a new leader! Thanks to you, my people will live in peace.”
Dio’s Dad cleared his throat. “What are you saying? I’m not royalty.”
The Grandoolex queen nodded. “Now you are. Any human purified by the All-Seeing Stone is worthy. Hail, mighty king!”
“Hail King!” piped the Grandoolex.


Check out the fabulous ending at Kristin's blog, the Neophyte Writer.

Pitch contest with agent Vickie Motter

Here's another one - first 50 entries only! YAtopia.

Pitch blogfest

I just saw this opportunity via Twitter: Pitch contest with agent Kristin Miller (D4EO Literary). Good luck!

The next big idea...

Up until this week, summer here in Alaska has been fantastic. Our weather's been better than average - 3-to-1 for rain/sun, when it's usually 5-to-1. My kids kept busy and although hubby dearest (HD) has been gone for almost two months, we were cruising along pretty well.

Then I finished Saving Andromeda. For the past six weeks, I'd lived, breathed, and dreamed this story. When other writers described this experience, in my heart-of-hearts, I was a bit skeptical. Seriously? I thought.  Lived, breathed AND dreamed? Uh huh. Sounds to me you're trying to make other writers feel insecure/jealous/not-like-real-writers.

Then, like a stroke of literary lightning, I got zapped. Every day for hours I could fall, entranced in this world hardly able to stop typing. I wrote chapters surrounded by five year-olds playing Thomas the Train, took the laptop into the kitchen to type while making sure the Rice-A-Roni wouldn't boil over. At night I couldn't sleep for plotting. (The daylight helped, too.) During conversations with real people, I'd drift away thinking about my imaginary people. I was a ditzy as a teenager in love for the first time.

Now, alas, it's over. The MS is in the vault and I'm twiddling my thumbs wondering what happened to the magic.  Because when I re-read my precious darling after a month away, the honeymoon will be over. I'll see all its warts and back hair, wonder why certain scenes smell like my son's dirty socks and roll my eyes at misplaced sentimentality. Or dive into despair because there's NO passion at all even during the kissing scenes. My relationship with this MS is a beautiful illusion - of course I know this, I knew it even in the middle of my fall - but oh, I hate when the magic fades.

I'm forcing myself to finish The Weight of Angels, the MS I abandoned chasing after SA. It's a good story but I'm thinking that it'll always be my rebound relationship. Meanwhile, I wait  for the Next Big Idea to strike....
Anytime now.

The road to query success

I'm a slow learner. It's taken me years to realize this (ha!) because in school, when someone is handing me information or on the job when I have to think quickly, I was one of those kids who rolled her eyes at every question and wondered why everyone else was so dense.

So in my first query experience this past year, I did all the wrong things. I queried too early and had no idea there were so many web sites to get critiques on a query. Also, my first pages weren't great AND my concept was overused. Honestly, if I had to do it over again, I wouldn't have written the WIP for that last reason. But I had no idea of any of this until I queried and was rejected. Our of 54 queries, I had 5 requests and no offers. Yikes. So I shelved the MS and wrote Saving Andromeda in six weeks.

This time around, I wrote my query when I was halfway through my MS. I posted it on several boards - including an agent critique on Pitch University. The agent who reviewed that rough query wants to see pages when I'm ready to seriously submit. (Yay!) I revised the query about five times w/ input from betas and decided to send a test query to this agent who has fast responses and is also totally awesome. I sent it two days ago, figuring it was July 4 week and it'd take her a few weeks to respond. My plan was to use that time to polish and revise in case she bit. (I didn't think she would, tho - she's awesome, but her list doesn't include a lot of YA mysteries and her standards are high.)  She responded with a partial request five minutes later.

So now I know my query rocks. I'm also much more confident in my story  - it's based on a true crime in Nova Scotia that's haunted me all my life.  Hopefully these two elements will get me an offer this time around...as long as I don't rush revisions.

So  - do you have a query success story? Or how about a revision method (outside of critique groups) that works for you? How do you know when to ignore your beta?

 

Gearing up to find an agent blogfest writing questions

For week 1:

Thanks to Deana Barnhardt for hosting this fest!!  I have two burning questions - please pick either one to answer.

1. For unpublished writers: do you have a cut-off point when you'll stop trying to get published and just write for fun?

2. Can you recommend a good critique site for YA writers?