As I've mentioned sundry times before, I visit YouTube frequently, usually for content whilst I do the domestics. Usually it's not a particularly profound or moving experience--especially when it's simply wondering whether or not I really want the ability to fly like Superman--but there are always surprising moment that catch me off guard.
One such moment is in a Passion of the Nerd video about the Toolbox Fallacy. The whole video is great--though there is a loud swear in it from one of the videos that the narrator is analyzing, so beware if that sort of thing bothers you--but it was the ending that was particularly striking for me. Starting at about 6:30, he says: [… A] lifetime spent failing would still be a life better lived than the one in which I never got started. For some reason, this hit me really, really hard. I mentioned a few days ago that I was struggling with keeping the desire to write fiction alive, and that I'm rather unhappy with my writing output. I even wrote that I wasn't certain I wanted to do NaNoWriMo this year since my writing well has been dipping dry. A couple of things have happened since then: One, I saw Hamlet at the Utah Shakespeare Festival this past weekend, which got me thinking about how I would go about retelling Hamlet (in a similar vein to the Hogarth Shakespeare project, which I wrote about almost three years ago). The entire time I drove, my wife asleep in the passenger seat and my son contentedly fiddling with an iPad, I put pieces together of what could be a story of the prince of Denmark if it were to happen in central Utah during the twenty-first century. The story spark was hot enough to lead me to outlining ten notebook pages worth of summaries and is pushing me toward using this idea for my NaNoWriMo project. Two, I saw that video. I've received a couple of rejections for my War Golem query, and most of those I sent off queries back in March haven't gotten back to me--long enough that I can assume a "no reply means no". This has been quite hard on me for lots of reasons, not the least of which because I'm not confident that I'm doing the right thing at all. That is, I don't know where the problem or disconnect is. Is it my writing? My idea? My choice in agents? My query? There are lots of variables, which makes me uncertain and that uncertainty leads to a lack of confidence in what I'm doing. But the video helped change my mind--at least, to a certain degree. I need to recognize that I will always be torn about spending my time pursuing writing: I don't think there's a way that I could not feel at least partially guilty about using my time in that way. It's part of how I'm programmed, and though I'm trying to rewrite my code, there's a potential for going too far…a problem that isn't really the point of this essay, so we won't worry about it for now. The takeaway is that I'm going to assume that I'm doing something quite selfish and have to learn to deal with that. However, the narrator of the video is right: Writers write, and if I don't at least try to do that, then I've lived a lesser life. Socrates is famous (for lots of things, but also) for saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living." I've abided by that concept for quite some time--probably right around the time I was on my mission and I started thinking more deeply. Perhaps as early as my senior year in high school. Of course, I've made a lot of intellectual missteps, misexamined plenty of things, made faulty assumptions that proved erroneous…in other words, I've failed at examining my life plenty of times. But I still try to understand the world better, to comprehend myself better, to examine existence better. I need to stop fearing failure and expect it instead…and that is something that I've failed to do for a long time. I often use these daily essays to give me a chance to do first draft work on my projects. My NaNoWriMo drafts crop up here (which I'm unsure about participating in this year, if only because I don't know if I have a story that I want to tell that's 50k words long), as well as some of the preliminary Wooden O writings I eventually presented on (which reminds me: I need to write about my experience at the Wooden O). Much like my abstract that got me into the Wooden O in the first place, I thought I would pick up on what I wrote before (included below) and maybe see how I could edit and tweak it to make it a better query. Before I jump into that, I should point out that I've been more proactive than just talking about maybe almost kind of beginning to start getting into the position to perhaps try to commence an attempt at the thought of going after an agent again. I try really hard to keep the rejections from getting me down, though I put a lot of effort and time into the few I send out. This invariably means that I'm placing a great deal of value on the submission and allowing the rejection to hurt more than is proportional. I don't really know how to get myself out of this. I can't remember if I mentioned this before, but I have had a really easy life. I mean, if life were a video game, I'd be playing on the easiest settings on the computer with some of the best specs. I don't have cheat codes (I wasn't born into a lot of inherited wealth), but I've got it pretty good. Cishet white male that has a college degree, married, kids…yeah, most everything goes the way I want it to. Yes, I can't go to Disneyland every summer, but, on the great whole of life, I have little to complain about. That's why, I think, I take it so hard when I fail to get an agent. I normally don't fail. I usually succeed at whatever I'm trying to do. Even the hardest time of my life--when Puck was new and going through heart surgeries--I only had a couple of months total where I was unemployed. After leaving my job as a computer salesman (bleck) to student teach, I graduated with my BS degree in English education. I couldn't find a teaching job for the next year. That was really hard and frustrating, of course, but I never really thought, Well, that's it: You're never going to be a teacher. Like, that didn't seem possible; being a teacher was a goal that had merely been delayed. With writing, though, it's a different experience. It's hard to say why, exactly, this is the case. My hunch is that, while there's always a shortage of teachers in the state, the demand for new books, while enormous, isn't as large as the quantity of people who are trying to publish new books. I'm on the losing end of that equation. Admittedly, I'll never get published if I sit around believing that. I have to keep plunking away at the keyboard, I have to keep scribbling down my notes, I have to keep organizing my spreadsheets of potential agents. In other words, I have to try. Even if I do that, though, there's no guarantee. (Okay, there was no guarantee that I would become a teacher, either--no guarantees in life, after all) It's possible that the millions of words that I've written since starting college (not even counting what I did in high school) will never get more exposure than what this website affords. So this is me trying. (It's also me stalling, I don't know if you noticed that.) Here's my old version and then, afterward, the new one that I'm thinking about doing. You'll notice on the second version is a bit longer and personalized. Having done a lot of research on the process, I know that seeing the agent as a human who has interests aside from her job can go a long way to forming a worthwhile relationship. Since that's what I'm after--a business relationship in which the agent and I work together to make a great book that sells copies--I'm trying to be a bit more personable. Okay, enough stalling. Round One War Golem takes place in a world embroiled in horrendous war where massive war-machines known as golems are used--but only as support creatures. In the nasty mire of the trenches, Cori Nettleson decides to use her golem, Channa, as an offensive weapon instead. Round Two Dear Kate, Analysis
Well, of the two, I think I prefer the second one. I think it's more detailed. It's longer, which is okay. At 224 words, it's still on the short side, as far as queries go. You may have noticed that I changed Cori's last name, as well as shifting the emphasis of what the story has. What makes this whole process really tricky is the fact that there are 90k words (increased because, as I'm editing the thing, it keeps growing instead of shrinking) that I'm trying to distill into about 300. I don't mention anything about the other members of the squad, the fact that there's a magical replacement for electricity called feluvium (which is a word that I keep changing my mind about), and the dynamics between Cori and her best friend. In fact, when I rewrite this pitch, I'm going to try to incorporate that, too, in order to show some of the personal and emotional stakes of the story. Well, that's another step. I'm putting my edits into the computer--which I count as my third draft--right now. I'm on chapter seven (of thirty-one), but I'm not really worried about the fact I said the "manuscript is available" because there's usually a window of six weeks or so between submission and rejection/response. By the time she answers--whether I send this to Kate or not--I'll be done with the manuscript. … Yeah, now that I say that, it means that I'll get the agent interested, not really have the manuscript when she wants it, and then I'll have blown my chance. Maybe I shouldn't send my War Golem query yet. Hmm. I wrote one essay during June, deciding to dedicate the mental energy necessary for slapping one of these daily writes instead toward my War Golems manuscript. Every day, I tried to edit at least one chapter. With thirty-one chapters, it was guaranteed that, unless I did two on one day, I was going to finish on 1 July. What ended up happening was, during my first writer retreat in June, the one with friends, I didn't have the extra time I needed to edit the manuscript. One day I tried to make up for it, but then I missed--in other words, despite my best efforts, I was still a chapter behind, all month long. "Easy," I can hear the strawman say, "you just make it up the next day." "Go away," I can hear me say to the strawman, "you know naught of what you speak." The process of editing has slowly become more refined for me. I'm now at the point that my pages aren't a complete mess (most of the time), as I've learned how to account for how I want to work on the manuscript after the redline edit. As you can see in the picture, I have in-line editing wherever it fits, striking out unnecessary or incorrect words, shifting parts of a sentence about, and--this is the important part--using circled numbers to indicate what needs to be added but won't fit in the single spaced lines. You can even see a page that has an entire change to a scene. I used to write "add detail" or something equally useless to my manuscripts, shifting the onus of rewriting to when I was at the computer, making my changes. I no longer do that, save when I'm without my notes and can't remember the actual detail I need. Instead, I find empty white space and fill it up with the additional scene. This goes a long way to making me feel less overwhelmed when I sit down to approach the manuscript again. In terms of that step--going from redline to computer--I haven't done that in over a year. The last book I did that to was Conduits and, after having a beta reader read through it as a whole entity, rather than a chapter-by-chapter response as my writers' group does, I realized there were quite a few changes needed and I didn't want to do them. So I moved on. Now I'm at that step again. I've made some changes to it that will help the sequel I just finished writing (for example, since this is the first book, I've gone through and made all of the chapter names a single word; in Book II, each chapter name has two words). Since I now have two unfinished books, there's a temptation to hold off on any large changes to Book I until I've slapped Book II into a more logical shape. But I'm also feeling almost brave enough to want to start the agent hunt. And that puts me squarely in the conundrum of the next step. It is really hard for me to want to query anything. I simply don't have the confidence in my product to be anything that someone in a position to help me get published would want to read. Yet, at the same time, I really wish I had a manuscript out there. It's the only way that I can come closer to the goal of being published: So long as the manuscript sits on my desk/hard drive, it is an impossibility of me getting an agent and having her shop it around--and that's not a hyperbolic impossibility, it's just the nature of reality. So here I sit, on my son's 5th birthday, trying to convince myself to do the hardest part: Writing a query letter. I did this sort of thing for the Utah Shakespeare Festival Wooden O Symposium (to which I did get accepted!) and so I figure that this is a good way to slap down a first draft. Therefore, without further ado, here's the first draft to the pitch and query for War Golems (although I'm thinking of doing a Ridley Scott thing and have the first book be War Golem and the second War Golems, see, because it's a sequential thing, singular and then plural…okay, enough procrastinating, here we go): Pitch: Cori defeats her former best friend as she tries to end a pointless war while keeping her war-machine golem alive. Query: War Golem takes place in a world embroiled in horrendous war where massive war-machines known as golems are used--but only as support creatures. In the nasty mire of the trenches, Cori Nettleson decides to use her golem, Channa, as an offensive weapon instead. Okay, so it needs work.
I guess that's part of my next step, too. |
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