The Slog

There is a reason why most writers don't keep a blog while they're in the process of writing a book. Neil Gaiman said it best when he explained the reasoning behind starting a blog after his novel, American Gods, was finished:

"It was a bit like wrestling a bear. Some days I was on top. Most days, the bear was on top. So you missed watching an author staring in bafflement as the manuscript got longer and longer, and the deadlines flew about like dry leaves in a gale, and the book remained unfinished."

Boy, do I know the feeling, Neil.

I've set myself a quasi-impossible goal for Seaquel. I turn 21 in 22 days; I want to finish Seaquel on September 8th, so I get to brag about how I wrote three novels before I turned 21. Is that greedy? I can already say I wrote two novels before I turned 20. Let's round it off with three before 21.

Of course, that means I have 22 days to write the last third of Seaquel. It's not impossible. I wrote the second half of Seafear in three weeks, in a fit of creative energy. I wrote 100 pages of Seaquel in about three days last month. It can be done, and now's the best time for that -- I don't have school until September 1, and unless I get a phone call in the next few weeks from one of the jobs I applied for, I'll be completely free.

Right now I'm being dogged by the existential questions I assume every other unpublished writer deals with: Is this really what I'm meant to do? How do I know this book is good enough? I submitted my 28th query letter tonight, so I now have six agents from whom I'm waiting to hear. I'm 300 pages into the sequel of a book for which I haven't yet found representation; it could all end up being a monumental waste of time.

Except it's not, because I'm not doing it, in the long run, to get published. Yes, it's been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember to pull my own books off the shelf at a bookstore, to be a published author, to have readers -- God, I can't even attract readers to my blog, how can I get people reading my book? -- and to have a fancy-dancy author website. Every time I go into a bookstore, I find myself wandering over to the YA section, spotting the "Smiths," and looking for where my books could one day be. But I'm not doing it for that; I'm doing it because I love to tell stories, and I love to write, and this is a story that I very much want to tell.

It's a slog, and it's hard to explain to people who aren't writers. I sound crazy when I talk about it to my friends now: "Oh no, I'm not a published writer at all, I don't have representation. What's that? Yes, this will be the third book I've written." And good God, a lot of people don't even like to read. When I'm meeting new people with my best friend, and the topic of hobbies comes up, I say I like to write and that I've written two books; he says he break dances. Everyone thinks his hobby is cooler. I can't even get my own parents to read my book, but for some reason, I keep on doing it. I write, and I keep on trying to get published. I try my damndest, because I can't not write.

I don't know if that makes me stupid or if it makes me admirable. There's a fine line between the two.

One Year

A year ago, I began submitting Seafear to literary agents for potential representation.

In that time span, I have written to 27 different literary agents, most of them based in New York City. I have heard back from 14 agents, most of them with form rejections. Two agents, one based in New York and one based in San Diego, requested the full manuscript of my book. Only one had anything helpful to say about it, the other just said it wasn't "right" for his list.

It has been an incredibly frustrating slog. It has drained my confidence; there are days when I doubt my book is up to anything resembling snuff. It has left me feeling more elated than I've ever really felt in my life -- the first time an agent asked to read my full manuscript, I felt like I might just be doing something right.

I've sometimes felt like I have no support in this endeavor. My parents, though they fostered my immense love of reading and books, seem to regard my writing as a distraction from my studies in college and my potential future as a lawyer. I gave them one of the two hard copies of Seafear I have, back in May, and they haven't been bothered to read it yet. That certainly hurts.

I've had friends ask me what my book is about, get interested, and then suddenly stop caring when I show them the manuscript. That hurts, too; insincerity is frustrating. But I've also had friends -- a sizable group of them, actually -- who have read Seafear, have told me what they liked and what they didn't, and have been genuinely enthused about what I'm trying to do.

I've been told I should try and write something "more publishable," or that I should stop "pretending to be J.K. Rowling or James Patterson" and write something "more original." I've been told I've written a Pirates of the Caribbean rip-off, I've been told I've written a good book, I've been told I've written a great book.

And still I go on. I am 65,000 words into a sequel to Seafear; this is a story I want to tell, this is the story I am telling. I have lived with these characters and this world for two years now, and I'm not willing to give it up. I've put too much of myself into this, and I believe I've written a good read. No, it's not going to be put in the great Western Canon; I am not by any stretch of the words a superb writer. But I'm decent, decent enough to attract some attention, and I'm not going to give that up.

This novel will get published.

50,000 Words

It seems silly, but every time I hit the 50,000 word mark in a project, I breathe a sigh of relief and know that I'm probably going to finish it. 50,000 words isn't particularly long, and those 50,000 aren't particularly any good, but I feel phenomenal.

Part of it has to do with NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing Month. The goal in that is to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. When I first heard of that, 50,000 words seemed like a good length for a novel, and it's generally when a book is no longer classified as a novella and starts to be understood for what it is, a novel.

This is the third time I've hit 50,000 words in a project. I came dangerously close one time, when I was fourteen in the first book I ever tried to write. The first book I did finish passed the 50,000-word mark four months after I started writing it. Seafear hit 50,000 the same month I finished it (I doubled the size of that book in about five weeks, a feat I've yet to duplicate). I started writing Seaquel in earnest in December 2009, and it's July 2010 now, so that's seven months' work right there.

Just wanted to share :)

What I'm Up To

I realize that, since I'm trying to get actual readers for this blog (i.e., I'm conning all of my Facebook friends into following links I post on my Wall), I should probably explain just what I'm up to. Given that this blog is two years old anyway, and was sporadically updated in that time frame, some background should hopefully prove helpful.

In August 2008, I started work on what would eventually become my second completed novel, Seafear. It's a story about pirates, adventure, kidnapping, magic, overcoming your fears, with a little bit of sexual tension thrown in for good measure. It took me a little under a year to write, and I completed the manuscript in late June 2009. Seafear is about as long as the first Harry Potter book, for a reference.

After finishing the first draft of the novel, I spent about two months editing. I printed the whole thing out (and it was 370 pages with the font I used, so that took a while) and three-hole punched all the pages with my mother's help, and then set to rereading the thing. Only another writer can really understand how surreal it is to read a book you wrote, to see things you thought were crap when you wrote them down seven months ago fitting in with the overall arc of the narrative.

Editing was a slow process, and it's a continual process. I went line by line, taking notes on things I felt worked or didn't work, things that needed to be moved, reworded, deleted, emphasized. The notes I took varied from "change 'being carried' to 'carried'" to "no odd symbol. What was I going for?" to "Snide doesn't fit Captain Monday's character." The writer is never the best judge of his own work, so the fact that I'm not actively editing Seafear right now does not mean that it's complete.

Following the revision process, I sent a few copies out to friends to see what they thought about it. That alone was frightening. Here was something that nobody else had ever heard of, a whole world that existed only in my head, and now a few of my friends could sit down and tell me about the plot. To this day, I still think it's weird hearing one of my friends say any of the characters' names -- the characters may be real to me, but to say their names out loud sounds very foreign.

After the feedback, I made the decision to go ahead and try and get Seafear published. A lot of you have been asking things like, "What publishing house did you send your book to?" or "How much does it cost to get your book printed?" Publishing doesn't work like that, I'm afraid.

Going from finishing your book to seeing it on the shelves at a bookstore is a lengthy process that begins ultimately with a literary agent. A literary agent is sort of like a lawyer who negotiates your publishing contract. But they're more than that; a literary agent helps you edit your book, helps you usher your ideas from a few scraps of paper to a completed manuscript, and helps you find the best home for your book. But they don't just take up any project that passes under their nose; no, a literary agent must be wooed. To do this, the author (and prospective client) must undertake an excessively difficult task: the query letter.

A query letter is one part business letter, one part jacket copy, and a whole lot of agony. A lot of agents ask you to kindly summarize your book into a few sentences to hopefully entice them into wanting to read more. You also have to do some background research on the agent you're querying; a surefire way to get a rejection letter is to send your young adult thriller novel to an agent that only represents historical Christian romances. On top of all that, they ask for any relevant background information that could show why you're qualified to have written this book, or any publishing credentials you have.

Then, between the time span of a few minutes to several months, the agent will get back to you. (They receive a lot of email every day, on top of having to manage the clients they represent. It's understandable that it takes a while.) Sometimes it's a rejection letter, saying "Sorry, not for me, thanks" (the extent of one of the rejection letters I've sent), and sometimes they'll ask to see more. If they ask to see more, and they like what they see, they offer you representation, and then the hunt begins for an editor and a publisher.

So where am I in this whole process? Well, I've been sending query letters out for almost a year now, although not with any consistency. I sent a bunch out back in August 2009 and didn't get any positive response -- in fact, most of the agents I queried back then didn't even send me an email back. I rewrote my query letter and sent out a few more emails, and tend to only remember to query more agents once a month. All in all, I've sent out 23 query letters.

I've had two positive responses from agents who, after seeing my initial query letter, asked to see the full thing. Unfortunately (though both said they enjoyed Seafear), they chose to pass. As of now, I'm waiting a response from three different agents, one of whom I queried about five minutes before writing this blog post.

My letter is pretty solid; it's gotten me some positive response, which is more than a lot of unpublished writers can say. I don't have any background in publishing, or any previously published material. Generally these are short stories that have been published in literary magazines, but I think I'm categorically incapable of writing a short story. Instead, this is what I put in my letter where my credentials should be: "SEAFEAR is the kind of story I wanted to read when I was a younger teenager – it doesn’t revolve around the piddling troubles of Mary Sue and her vampire/werewolf/demon/wizard/custodian boyfriend, it revolves around adventure and intrigue." No the most professional bit, but it gets a bit of my personality out there.

Oh, and on top of trying to get Seafear published, yesterday I reached page 200 of its sequel. It has a real title, but for purposes of being coy and annoying, I'm calling it Seaquel. It's not even halfway done yet. So all in all, I've been keeping quite busy.

The Terror of New Beginnings

I tend to plan books far in advance of when I'm going to actually write them. I started taking notes on the first book I completed back in the summer of 2005, and didn't really get started on anything until May 2006. Before that, during my first attempt at writing a novel ever, I started planning it in 1999. Yes, I was ten, and very precocious, but I still used the same world, characters, and general plot that I wanted to use when I started writing in 2003.

When I plan my novels, I like to do chapter-by-chapter outlines, detailing exactly what will happen in each chapter, giving it a title, and trying to shoehorn some character development elements into it. I usually stick to the outlines while I'm writing, occasionally adding a chapter or removing one when I don't feel it's necessary to take the story in that direction.

The one exception to both of these rules was Seafear. Seafear was a kind of fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants novel, which I'd never really done before. I wrote my first notes down for it on August 3, 2008, and I started writing it twelve days later. Yeah, I did an outline for it, but that was abandoned by Chapter Five and I never looked at the outline again until the very ending, when I needed to steal a chapter title. It was a very different experience than what I'd normally done, but it worked out well.

With Seaquel, unlike Seafear, I've been much more strict about adhering to the outline. I already have the bedrock of the first book to build off, so I need to stick to continuity. Seaquel is also the second part of a trilogy (because every debut young adult series needs to be a trilogy is why), so threads that I began to lay in the first book need to be carried through in this one.

With all this in mind, I began plotting out Threequel this weekend (get it?), and it's scaring the bejeesus out of me. If I stick to my outline, this book is going to be a very long one, maybe the length of the sixth Harry Potter book. While overly thick volumes seems to be standard fare for a lot of fantasy series, I've never written anything that crosses over the 100,000-word mark. My longest work was 85,000 words. If Threequel goes as I think it will, it's going to pass 150,000.

That petrifies me and excites me at the same time. Right now I'm focused on Seaquel, but Threequel is going to ultimately be the most difficult, most complex, and hopefully most fulfilling book I'll have written to date. Too bad it won't get written until at least 2011.

Writer's Block

The pithy answer to "What is writer's block?" is "There's no such thing."

This is, ultimately, true. There is no such thing as a disease that prevents you from sitting down and writing. A lot of times, it's a case of lazy. It's when you suddenly realize there are an unlimited number of websites out there, a whole lot of video games to play, friends to talk to, TV to watch, blog posts to write, et cetera, et cetera. Writing on the computer is a dangerous habit, because (for me at least) Facebook inevitably opens.

I've had a hard time making headway in Seaquel lately. (Yes, I'm still being coy about the title. Shut up.) After my last rejection, I've been feeling down about the prospects of Seafear, and it's very hard to force yourself to write when you feel like you can't. I know it's bullshit that I feel that way; both agents who looked at my book said they enjoyed it. But I still worry that it's not going to prove fruitful.

Then I remind myself that I put two years of my life into this thing. On the 25th, the complete manuscript of Seafear will be a year old. On August 15, the story itself turns two. I've put too much into this to be stymied by the inevitable rejection letters that come before that sweet, elusive acceptance letter.

So I'm telling myself I have writer's block right now, because I can't get much done with Seaquel. My poor merry band of pirates have been standing around in a dark corridor for almost two months now, and they really would like to move on with their mission. I'm tantalizingly close to passing 200 pages, which will feel like an accomplishment, so I have reason to write. But I have a severe case of scared and self-doubt (not to mention a little bit of lazy).

The lazy is definitely showing through. After all, there were four seasons of The West Wing to watch when I came home from school, plus plenty of hours to play the Sims 3, and three separate video games that required my immediate and undivided attention.

I need to get back to work. Starting next week, no more nonsense.

More Rejection

I'm writing this mostly in annoyance to the fact that I've now gotten my 13th rejection letter, this one from an agent who requested a full copy of the manuscript.

The one thing I don't get -- and I don't know I ever will, unless I become a literary agent myself -- is what makes a book the right fit for an agent. I've researched these people, plied them with my query letters, have created a "compelling concept," a "vivid world" that I've put "a lot of care into creating" (mushing together a few different agents' words here), but I'm still rejected because Seafear is "not the right fit."

I don't know. It just doesn't make sense to me.