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Monthly Archives: January 2009
Monthly Archives: January 2009
On my list of writing goals for 2009 is to send out my other mss to an agent who requested it an embarressing length of time ago. I don’t know if she’ll be interested after all this time, but I have to give it a try. I certainly owe her the right of first refusal if nothing else.
Expecting to be rebuffed, I’m drawing up a list of further agents to query. A friend of mine from OWW just landed an agent who was not on my list before because I didn’t have enough information about her. (There are too many poor agents out there to just send your mss to anybody.) A recommendation makes a difference in both directions.
There are a few other agents I’ve never written to before, names I’ve found through a variety of sources, including Publisher’s Lunch. I want to find ten new but reputable agents and then send out my Rainbow Dancer query package.
I hope to complete the new book so I can start from the top of my agent list again, re-sending to agents who previously turned down the first mss.
How many times should one send out the same book before one gives up on it? The rule of thumb I’ve heard is to hit triple digits before abandoning ship. So I need to compile a list of 99 good agents. On my previous send-out, I had a list of 31. I don’t know if there *are* 99 agents out there with whom I would be equally happy. Yes, writing is always an agents’ market, because there are more good writers than good agents. But I don’t think it behooves me to settle for a poor agent. I think it’s better to re-write and send to the same agents over again, until something clicks, than to get accepted by an agent you can’t live with.
Actually, I speak from experience. I did have one agent accept me. But I had sent to her without doing proper research first. I only researched her afterward, when I was actually faced with the the decision to sign on. I discovered her “agency” was opearated by three nice ladies out of the midwest. Now, I’m not snobbish. K Nelson does just fine operating out of Denver. But these nice ladies had no publishing experience, and not a single book credit to their agency’s name. They were former librarians and would-be authors turned agents, probably in an attempt to sell their own books while they were at it. I realized I was not likely to be well-represented.
By the way, this was several years ago and their agency no longer exists.
I’ve made a lot of newbie mistakes, and am likely to make many more, but at least I try not to repeat the same mistake twice. Now I will respect myself and the agents I query more than that. I promised myself after that, I will only query agents I respect, agents I would be giddy to sign on with if they offered me a contract.
I do wonder if I could get myself in trouble sending out MSS 2 and MSS 1 at the same time. Suppose Agent A offers on MSS 2 (having already rejected MsS 1) at the same time Agent B offers on MSS 1 (knowing nothing about MSS2)? I want to do everything professionally and not be a rube.
My son is sick, so I can’t work much. It’s ok — I’m in a between state anyhoo. I’ve finished Part I of my wip, and I’m not sure yet how to move on with Part II.
Meanwhile, I’ve read the four books of the Twilight series. My sister-in-law (and according to comments on my My Space page, quite a few of my other female friends and relations) are reading it or just completed it also. Naturally, as a writer, I’m reading it half admiringly, half-jealously, trying to figure out what Sephenie Meyer did right. I have to admit, this is my least favorite part of being a writer, this sense of jealousy which creeps into what would have been a totally innocent pleasure in my younger years.
I have a new toy — a program called Delicious Library to index all my books. All I have to do is hold the bar code in front of my computer camera, and the program pops up an adorable miniture picture of the book cover and places it on a lovely screen book shelf. The program automatically supplies all sorts of information about the book, including its’ present value if one were to sell it used on Amazon. I could make a lot of money if I sold off my library. But I could never bear to part with them. I hoard books like a dragon hoards jewels.
So far, I’ve scanned in about 100 books, a mere sliver of my collection. It will be fun to scan them in over the several weeks — or months, depending on how long it takes. Now if only my house had enough real bookshelves to hold all my gems. We have a very tiny house, and my husband, completely unreasonably, doesn’t want every single wall lined with books. Most unfair…
My loved ones all know to gift me with books, and I have many delicious new ones.
One is called “Eunoia.” It means “Beautiful Thinking.” It’s neither fiction nor nonfiction. Here’s a taste, in which the book explains itself:
Enfettered, these sentences repress free speech. These sentences repress free speech. The text deletes selected letters. We see the revered exegete reject metred verse: the sestet, the tercet — even les scenes elevees en grec. He rebels. He sets new precedents. He lets cleverness exceed decent levels. He eschews the esteemed genres, the expected themes — even les belles lettres en vers. He prefers the perverse French esthetes: Verne, Peret, Genet, Perec — hence, he pens fervent screeds, then enteres the street, where he sells these letterpress newsletters, three cents per sheet. He engenders perfect newness wherever we need fresh terms.
It sounds a bit odd doesn’t it? The only vowel used in the paragraph above is the letter “e”. Eunoia is the shortest word in the English language which uses all five letters. The book has five chapters, A, E, I, O and U, and in each chapter, only one vowel is permitted. It reads quite strangely, but it’s a wonderful book for a writer to read, because it forces you to reflect deeply on words, their sounds and relationships and meanings. Also, it’s a wicked ass vocabulary builder.
Eunoia is a univocal lipogram, in which each chapter restricts itself to the use of a single vowel. Eunoia is directly inspired by the exploits of Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle) — the avant-garde coterie renowned for its literar experimentation with extreme formalistic constraints….
Eunoia abides by many subsidiary rules. All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage. All sentences accent internal rhyme thrrough the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire… [and] must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary (so that, ideally, no word appears more than once). The letter Y is suppressed.
It makes more sense once one realizes that Eunoia is more poetry than prose. Twentieth Century poetry freed poets from all contraints of “the sestet, the tercet” and all metred verse, but this anarchy proved deadly to beauty and creativity. So the poets re-imposed rules upon themselves, sometimes queer rules.
Christian Bok spent seven years writing Eunoia. I don’t think I could do that. As much as I enjoy word play, the words remain, for me, stepping stones to stories.
However, I do employ some deliberate contraints on the formal structure of my stories. Not so much at the sentence or word level — usually in the chaptering. I used to have great difficulty with outlining, and in particular, with restraining my stories from overflowing into excessive length. So I would decide ahead of time how many chapters I wanted, how many words each chapter could take to itself, and I would try to stick by that. I found that having the chapters in front of me, like empty boxes, both helped me to fill and at the same time, not overflow
Of course, it also makes re-writes a bitch.
The structure of my present epic is quite strict. I have two protaganists, Palem and Jaxel. One is from Demaitria and one from Thedros, two warring nations. They are destined to meet in gladorial combat in a contest which will determine which of their nations shall be ascendent for the next hundred years.
Chapters each begin with an epigram, a salutation to one of the patheneon of story’s universe. There are 5 sections to each book, with twelve chapters each – sixty chapters in all. The chapters alternate between the PoV of the two progatanists. Later, when other PoV characters are introduced, they must all appear on either “Palem’s Side” or “Jaxel’s Side”, reflecting the deepening division of the world into two opposing and antagonistic camps. Furthermore, subsidiary characters must go in the right spot, so I can’t put two members of Palem’s camp in a row. Each book is allowed to have a Prologue which doesn’t have to be clearly on one side or the other, or can violate the order of alternating chapters.
This is all very well, but it makes it hard, when I suddenly realize I need to add a scene in between two others, to figure out where the scene should go. The story also needs to move forward in approximately chronological order, so I prefer not to have a Jaxel scene take place in 9991 if the Palem scene following it takes place back in 9987. I had this very problem on my recent revisions. Nonetheless, I have successfully revised Section One, after suffering a bit of writer’s block over the holiday.