Archive for the ‘Writing Process’ Category

Or so saying goes, I have a lot going on right now.

The fire that needs to be put out at the moment is at our little lake cabin. Our tenants vacated the place and left many colored walls behind. With the weather being hotter than Hades lately, primer doesn’t want to dry very quickly. Every day I’m not working at a paying job, I’m out there painting.

That was the job I did yesterday. The previous night, as sometimes happens, my brain wouldn’t shut off. I finally fell asleep around 2am. The next morning I woke up at 7:30. Exhausted, I resorted to my old college trick. I stopped at the store and picked up a two liter bottle of Diet Mountain Dew (in college it was full strength, but I have old teeth and an old metabolism now, so diet it is). During the course of the day, I drank half of it, but I worked steadily until 6:30. Once home, the husband and I indulged in microwave lasagna and old SciFi TV shows until he went back to the office down the street to work and I went upstairs to my home office.

I’m in the process of once again re-editing my first two books while I wait for my last of five editors to send me her manuscript of the Third. I did that until about 11:30. That’s probably when the caffeine and artificial sweetener finally wore off enough to let the exhaustion kick back in. I went to bed.

I didn’t’ sleep. The minute I hit the pillow I began thinking about Book 4. My mind wandered around the first 10 pages of the plot that I have written and went, “You need to put this in next.” I was exhausted, mind you. My procrastination really wanted me to just go to sleep and add it in later, except that I knew I wouldn’t remember it right later.

So, up I got again and went back to work. I wrote for another hour until the husband finally came home. “Why are you still up?” he asked, equally tired.

“I had to write in the fourth book,” I told him through my toothpaste.

“Oh,” he said, “That’s good.”

We both slept fairly well last night. So it was a productive day. I’ll worry about the cancer from the diet pop later.

I have a few things in common with the main character in my series, Bernice Hordstrom. We’re both detrimentally stubborn. We both have a heavy dose of indignant self-righteousness. We’re both suckers for chest hair and a nice butt on our guys. But I instilled in Bernice a trait that is sorely lacking in myself, a big ol’ pile of moxie.

Fortunately, I have wonderful woman in my life who do have moxie, so I know what it looks like. It’s that apparent fearlessness that allows a person to feel confident and empowered. Boy, that must be nice.

You know what’s not nice? Living in a constant state of fear and self-doubt.

Never has that state become harder to leave than when I have to show my work to professionals. It’s getting to that point now. I’ve completed my third book, and now I’m trying to convince myself that I am good enough to query for a literary agent. All I have to do is just look at articles about it, and my first instinct is to hide like a hobbit.

It’s one of the reasons I self-published in the first place, that and I have a severe lack of patience (another thing Bernice and I share). Being a fictional author was not even something that I knew I wanted until just a few years ago. The idea of sending out my very first finished book (ever) to a literary agent was simply too intimating to bear.

So I made a promise to myself, and my husband, that when I completed Book 3 in the series, I would pursue the route of getting it published through a publishing house (verses self-publishing). That’s where I’m at now. Mentally, I’m shitting bricks.

Both the statistics and the expectations stagger me. An average literary agency receives THOUSANDS of query letters a year. Out of that gigantic tree of paper, they break out one teeny, tiny branch of 1%. Even if I am the lucky branch, I could sit languishing for months while the agent tries to market my series to publishers who are even more selective than they are. That means that the query letter and those sample pages better be damn near perfect.

By the way, this is not bitterness, this is cold reality. I’m from Northwestern Wisconsin. I come from the land where it’s perfectly possible to freeze to death in your sleep six months out of the year. That fact is less frightening to me than the daunting task of getting published.

I’ll keep you posted.

Met with a very enthusiastic book club at the Hastings Library last night. What a great bunch! They were a hoot! It was well worth the trip. Now I just need to get more of these border events set up. Look out Twin Citians! The Hicks are comin’!