Nothing like a bad query to get you writing!

I won the war with my muse!  Last night I poured out 1700 words in less the 45 minutes and woke up with the next scene racing through my head.  I wish I could give thanks to coffee or even the amazing bottle of merlot my husband bought to cheer me up.  But I can’t.  The credit and my undying gratitude lie with two people – one who challenged me to write the worst query of my life and the other who gave me some insight as to why my creative mind was refusing to cooperate.

Rebekah, an amazingly talented writing friend of mine, is hosting a “Worst ever query contest.” http://rebekahstories.blogspot.com/    I thought what the hell, it’s not like I was writing anything good . . . or anything at all lately.  I laughed hysterically as I read some of the others that were written and then poured 300 grammatically incorrect, cliché laden words out onto her blog.  It was the first time I was able to put pen to paper in over a week and it felt great.

Just last night I received another email from a different, equally amazing, writing friend of mine, Lindsay.  http://www.lindsayncurrie.webs.com/    She knew I was struggling to get my momentum back and wanted to give me some insight into why she thought my muse had gone into hibernation.  For the past few months I’d put an extraordianry amount of time and effort into Cedar.  Agent revisions, grammar checks, and countless re-readings have literally consumed my life.  Now that the editing is over and Cedar is on submission she figured it was only naturally that I’d have some trouble switching gears to my other WIP

She was 110% right.  I still find myself constantly wondering if I should’ve switched this word for that or added this element here.  As long as my mind was stuck on Cedar, nothing else was going to break free.  So, last night I put Cedar to bed.  Literally!  I put the entire edited copy on a new thumb drive, sealed it into a manila envelope, and tucked it into the bottom draw of my desk.  Then I sat down, fired up one of my neglected WIP, and wrote.  The 1700 words that finally flowed from my mind are far from polished and are in desperate need of a few good transition sentences to make it work.   But it’s a start, and a damn good one if I do say so myself!

So hats off to you two ladies.  With one bad query letter and some thoughtful insight you single handiedly jump-started my creative mind!

Waging War Against my Muse

So as many of you know I have been fighting my muse for the past week or so.  Sadly to say I'm losing the battle.  So, at the suggestion of a wise writer frined of mine, I am going to sit down in front of this computer for a solid hour today and write.  As she said, doesn't mattter what it is or how bad it comes out, just write something . . . anything.  After a couple thousand words, something useful is bound to surface.

So I must extend an apology in advance to my three beta readers Rebecca, Natalie, and Regina.  I do apologize for the numerous pages of crap you are going to have to sufffer through as I wage war with my muse.

My Muse is Refusing to Cooperate!

So I have this nasty little habit of letting my mind wander to far and too often. Usually I can rein it in, focus on one task from beginning to end while letting the other ideas fester just below the surface. But lately the creative side of my brain is refusing to cooperate. ARGH!!!! The result is three WIP’s, all past the 45,000 mark, all in desperate need of an ending.

Problem is my muse has gone in to hibernation leaving me staring at three nearly-completed YA novels. I’ve got all three of them out with beta readers, hoping . . . praying . . . banking on one of them making an insightful comment that will jolt my creative mind back into action. To make it worse, I even know how I want each of these three projects to end.  I can hear the characters talking to me though my haze of inaction. But each time I sit down and fire the computer up my mind goes blank, leaving me frustrated, over-caffeinated, and with no outlet for the dozens . . . literally dozens of plot ideas racing through my head.

One of my closest friends told me to lay off the caffeine, that it would make me calmer and thus more likely to tap into my inner muse. But let’s face it – its summer, I have three kids going in seventeen different directions, and company non-stop. Giving up my sacred coffee is sooooo not an option. Ditto goes for my chocolate-covered coffee beans.

So I am open to suggestions. What do you do when your muse refuses to cooperate?

The Bane of my Existance

This blog post has absolutely nothing to do with writing, but I needed an outlet to vent are you are the lucky chosen ones. So as many of you already know I live on Cape Cod where sun, sand, and some of the east coast’s best beaches attract hundreds of thousands of tourists each weekend. Although our community’s economy is dependent on these weekend imports, mine is not, and thus I find them a constant source of aggravation.

 Us Cape Coders love our rotaries, or more formally known as round-a-bouts. They are an effective way to manage traffic flow and alleviate the need for long back-ups at red lights. These large circular movers of traffic seem to stump those not from these waters. First off, yield means to progress slowly . . . cautiously into the traffic circle. Under no circumstances does it mean you should jam on your breaks and wait for a green single that will ever appear. Speaking of brakes, if you happen to miss you exit of the rotary, don’t ever . . . EVER stop and attempt to back up. For God’s sake it is a circle, simply progress around it again until the exit re-appears!

I live on Cape Cod simply because I love the water and for no other reason. With that love comes a host of water toys, many of which need to be launched at the public boat ramp.  The town graciously supplies you with a dock to tie up to for the brief (and I do mean brief) moments it takes to park your car. So here is a shout out to the random guy from Ohio who backed his boat down the public ramp and tied up to the dock, then proceeded to pull out a cooler and fix himself a sandwich. I held onto my Northeastern patience as long as I could (a whopping three minutes) before I kindly asked him to move. He replied with a gentle, In a minute Darlin’  Needless to say I unleashed my own brand of New England sarcasm on him – the kind that had even the burly local fisherman next to me howling in laughter.

Contrary to popular tourist belief, the little sticks floating in the middle of the bay were not place there as a courtesy to out-of-town boaters. They are private mooring, paid for and maintained by locals like me. So next time I pull into Lewis Bay with a boat full of strippers I will not call the Harbor Master and ask him to ticket you. I will not call the Yacht club and ask them to find you a different transient mooring. Although tempted, I will not even cut your boat lose and let if float back to Delaware. I will climb aboard you vessel, make myself a cocktail, and wait until you return, at which point I will not so eloquently school you on whose mooring this really is.

Thanks for listening to me gripe and do know that usually we locals are more then happy to have you visit. It was just a bad weekend for me.  But be forewarned, this is what you have to look forward to when you and a couple other thousand people decide to leave – Twenty miles and three hours of bridge traffic! But just for you, my writing friends, I will give you a map of the back roads so you can avoid the delays

The Two Sides to Beta Reading

You've spent weeks, months, sometimes years perfecting your manuscript.  With your finger hovering over the delete key, you have taken out entire chapters, re-written complete scenes, and even red-lined some of your favorite lines. You’ve spent so much time with your baby that you can no longer see the forest through the trees. Your next step is a beta reader.

It is a rare occasion now for aspiring authors not to use a beta reader. Not only are they fantastic at finding redundant phrases, kindly explaining to you the appropriate use of a hyper dash (thanks Natalie!), and pointing out plot inconsistencies, but they have an uncanny knack for pushing you the extra inch that takes you ms from great to amazing.

I myself have beta read countless manuscripts from middle-grade fiction to adult, paranormal romance (the later was an experience and a half ) But, there is a flip side to beta reading . . . at least for me.

Sure reading other people's manuscripts has made me a stronger writer, and God knows my education in comma use and proper formatting came from a well polished ms I read a while back.  But to be honest, I have a more selfish reason for taking on multiple beta reads at a time – it frees my mind!

I'm in the middle of two WIPs, polishing up one while cranking out chapters of another.  The first one, Seven Shades of Crazy, was written well over a year ago, but never queried.  It’s actually a series of five books all of which are completely finished.  I just can’t seem to wrangle it into the story I envisioned.  I play with it every day then toss it aside, go back to the new WIP I started three weeks ago.  I am 41,000 words into it and still no title.  I love it, and I hate it, and there is something missing in the characters that I just can’t put my finger on.

So, when my WIPs refuse to cooperate I beta read.  Immersing myself in somebody else work frees my mind, enables my muse to settle down a bit while keeping me occupied with the craft of writing.

So next time you ask me to take a peek at a manuscript you are working on, don’t thank me.  It’s a two way street.  Your WIPs help me immeasurably on days like today when not an inkling of creative thought is flowing from my mind.

Straight YA vs. Paranormal -- Which do you write?

I was reading a recent blog post by my agent last night.  After a rather lengthy tit for tat about the number of aspiring authors referencing, or rather comparing their books to some highly reputable, award-winning manuscripts, some of us got to wondering what the most common query words/themes were. Being efficient and as curious as we were, she went ahead and did a quick search of her query database. Below are some stats she posted on her site http://agencygatekeeper.blogspot.com/

• Harry Potter: 73 (13 were just "J.K. Rowling" without mention of title)
  
• Twilight: 111
  
• Eat, Pray, Love: 104
  
• Vampire: 118.
  
• Werewolf: 35. I imagine most people do not use this much except when referring to the moon-inspired beasties.
  
• Angel: hundreds. Seriously hundreds. But keep in mind that one often uses the word "angel" or "angelic" without directly referring to their own work. Some even have the name of Angel, and it pops up, too.
  
• Demon: 113. Subtract a few (probably 10) for writers simply referring to something non-paranormal as "demonic."
  
• Dragon: 98, though a number of these referred to dragon statutes and other dragon objects that were within the story and mattered but did not refer to living, fire-breathing dragons.

 I am curious to see which, if any, of these words/ references you utilized in your own queries. I’ll start my saying that I used none. Then again, I write straight YA with a dystopian feel so angels, demons, etc . . . didn’t apply to me. I asked her to do another quick search for me . . . determine the skew between straight YA and Paranormal. I’ll let you know those numbers once I get them.

Rejection -- the Necessary Evil

So you have finished your baby. She’s been edited, beta read, hacked to pieces and re-assembled. You’ve doubted yourself, hated and then loved your characters, and if you’re like me, wondered from what dark, disturbed crevice of your mind they surfaced. Now you’re ready to query!

It always amazed me how writers, myself included, could churn out a 70,000 word masterpiece and then crumble when it came to the 250 word query. The task is so dauntless that I can actually name three people with finished manuscripts sitting in the closet for fear of the dreaded query . . . or the inevitable rejection that even the most polished author must endure. Even I put off querying my own novel Cedar for so long that I actually had time to write a completely different manuscript in the mean time.

I, like most aspiring authors, did my research, read countless blogs about the proper length of a query, the form and the placement of the pitch, how to maintain an active and engaging voice while trying to summarize your entire plot into three action-packed paragraphs. Needless to say, I failed miserably, came away from my research more confused then when I started.

My first attempt was poor to say the least. It got shredded by my friends in AW Query Letter Hell. One of them actually questioned whether my manuscript was even viable – all from my 272 word query alone! I went at it again . . . and again . . . and again . . . until I found my saving grace in a trusted beta reader, one who’d read each revision of Cedar, knew the characters as intimately as me, but wasn’t as attached. She came at if from an objective perspective, and with the same supportive criticism she had attacked my manuscript, she took my query letter from blah to amazing. Hats off to you Julie Duck!

And yes, rejection stings. Just last week I got my signed contract back from my top-pick of agents, was silently celebrating the end of my query days when I opened my email and in pops another rejection . . . from a query I sent over five months ago! I’d like to say I laughed, that I thought “your lose,” but I didn’t. It stung just as bad as the first one. I filed it in my huge query rejection folder, ate an entire sleeve of chocolate chip cookies, and then, after dissecting each of my 15+ rejection letters again I moved on.