agents and editors

Putting on my bravest face I have made first contact with an agent named Daniel Lazar from the writers house. Of course with my luck, the man is now on holiday until March 14th, but secretly I welcome adversity, it gives me more hope to that happy ending. It's silly, I know, but this whole writing experience has suddenly made me very supersticious and almost religious.

With my (poorly written) query letter I had to send the first 5 pages of my manuscript, which is basically my prologue. Though I think my prologue is okay, I don't think it is a great representation of the rest of my manuscript. The characters are very young in the prologue and the first chapter so the writing style is different.

I just hope that if or when he lets me down, Mr. Lazar will let me down gently.

And so today I finished my rewrite and sent it off to Joy, who is going to edit it for me and I will be sending it to Mark for his opinion. This is dead scary and I am afraid my story is going to bomb. The thought of it sucking is keeping me up at night. What if my complex plot is too surreal? What if my characters aren't as likable as I think they are. What if my writing is too childish? What if, what if, what if?? I am driving myself bonkers now that the insecurity has blossomed to it's full extent.

update

A lot has happened since my last post and I should really be more of an active blogger when it comes to my writing process.

First off, Februari 1st was one of those milestone days, because that was the day I finished my rough draft. And it is very rough indeed because half way through my story as I was writing I was changing the ending to the story. All good and well, but that means there are a few indescrepancies that I need to work out.

Now that I have my rough draft finished I am starting to look into getting it published. Not that I will send it anywhere in this state, but my curiosity is peaked. To my horror I found out that my views on publishing are rather out of date and life doesn't exactly 'work like that' any more. I am not to send my work to editors... nay nay, I am to send a query letter to an agent and hope they find me interesting enough to introduce me to a publisher. After some research I have decided to try and hook me an agent at the writers house. This might be a little ambitious, but no guts, no glory... right?

So, let's be honest, I have no friggin clue how to write a query letter. Thank god for google, but all the websites are mildly vague and very contradicting. A friend of a friend is willing to look at my query letter, but I haven't hear back from them still, so I wonder.

And so I cried out on facebook for an editor and two friends from my past stood up to the challenge. As soon as my rough draft is slightly more presentable I shall be sending it to them and shitting myself as they scrutinize it. And I need it because my spelling (as you might have noticed) is appaling.

But another problem reared its ugly head. My query letter must be accompanied with a SASE (self adressed stamped envelope) and that needs to have some nice US stamps, which are impossible to get by in the Netherlands. A man offered to help me, but in retrospect his intentions did not seem as noble as he made them out to be and I ended up blocking him from my facebook page. But then another young old friend came to the rescue offering to get her sister to send me some stamps. So when all is said and done, hopefully in a few weeks I can send of my query letter. I wish I could have just used internet, but I am told (by the actual agency) that emails are not always read and so I will stick to this expensive and difficult way.

At this point doubt is making itself a master of my emotions. Is my book strong enough, aren't there too many inconsistencies? Well, here's hoping that one day my work will be published. I even have a name for the book: Celestials; a vessel's quest.

Hope it will be in a book store near you ;)

quitting my job to become a writer

Many people dream of quitting their job to do what they really love, I am sure of it. Some are already fortunate enough to do what they really want to do. I now belong to the latter category, but only for a day now. Officially I am still employed in my last job, but I have worked all the hours I still had to work and on Wednesday I will have my formal goodbye.

So now I am dedicating my life to writing. To secure myself with a bit of an income I am going to teach poetry and craft lessons to children of a primary school, but I am hoping that one day I can just fully focus on writing.

There are many short stories that I have written, but none are up to standard enough for me to try and publish them. I have only written for “fun” up until now. This time I take it far more serious. There are a few children’s books that I have written and illustrated that I might change a little at one point and try to publish, but I have realised that there is not much want for picture books unless they are at least a hundred pages long. Not by unknown authors anyway. Maybe my work just isn’t up to par. I hope it will be one day.

Right now I am working on a story that has been haunting me for the past ten years. I first wanted to write this as a graphic Novel with my ex boyfriend, who is an excellent artist. Back then it was a story about a demon who escaped hell with her heart, something that is taken from all demons that are grown in hell. The demons were grown from the souls of the sinners. It was a fun story, but it changed a lot over the years. From a graphic novel, I turned it into a play. There was this one part that I liked, which I wrote and I used that part to turn it into a book.

The story has completely changed and it is no longer about the demon woman, although she still plays a small part in it. I have decided I preferred to make this story about the two humans who were supposed to help the demon. Using humans is a lot more relatable. To me it is really important to be able to relate to a character in a book. I don’t have to have the same opinion, but I need to understand the opinions and the choices a character makes.

Reading other books, I have learned what I do and do not like in stories. I hate it when a writer treats his or her audience as if they are a little dumb and they explain everything up to the tiniest details. That being said, I also hate it when writers are vague and leave too much open to interpretation. I want to know what the writer meant, not what I could make of it. If I have to do that, I rather write my own story, not read yours.

Right now I am realising the delicacy of those sort of situations. When do I go too far explaining and when am I keeping it too vague? Are my characters likable? Am I being too silly and humorous or am I being too serious? Do I change my writing voice too often? When are my characters too whiney? And at the same time, I need the things that happen to affect my characters, if else they become too unrealistic. Writing is a difficult process.

The voice I think I have, is meant for young adults. Slightly above the tweens , because I do like to bring a little gore and a little sex (without too much description) to my stories. At the same time I don’t want to be overly serious and that puts me more towards the young adult audience. The voice I have, I believe is pretty young. Trying to be contemporary is difficult too, sometimes that tends to make characters a little too blasé. It’s hard and I am noticing that I am thinking about a lot of different elements. For instance I am afraid I am using everyones name too much. I am trying to deal with that, but in long dialogues and with a lot of opinions it is hard not to. Right now I just need to write and I can change little things later.