Am for now
Tomorrow is the first day of the open submission period I've been aiming at with all the recent refinements and edits. Honestly, I finished the last, latest read-through a week early. Early morning head aches and close-faced line reading made for some dizzying moments. I felt better and worse about everything at the same time. I took a couple days off and went back through the submission guidelines again. Last year they got over 1200 entries, and 300 were rejected because the authors failed to follow instructions. Recent events prompted me to go through some extreme measures to ensure I wouldn't be in that unfortunate group.
A one-sentence summary and a synopsis no longer than two, double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman font pages. At first, I thought I had three books to send, then I read how they don't want young adult. Then I did some heavy deliberation on what young adult fiction is and how the term is defined. What clinched it, I think, is that when I went to write a sentence to summarize the book, or a synopsis to concisely detail its qualities, I kept coming back to the phrase "coming of age." I couldn't betray the story by trying to wedge it into a box any more than I could do the work a disservice by mislabeling it. I was also a little surprised at how easy the summaries and synopses came. I had a moment where I thought it was going to be a painful hurdle, was going to be difficult (after all, I freeze up at the thought of the elevator pitch), and then in the next moment the sentences were coming to me. I also thought it would be difficult because I could remember the last time I stopped to seriously make some submissions. Things were harder then.
I worked on them yesterday, the sentences the synopses, in the morning. I set them down and circled back at lunch, when I looked over them again, and fiddled with the diction, the cadence, the punctuation. I peeked one more time before bed, and I got up today to rinse and repeat. Sometime in the night a west coast writer friend traded some thoughts with me. I lamented the idea that synopses seem, on principle, to be a kind of deflowering, an unveiling of all the discovery and nuance. I once heard a story of a young woman auditioning to be an exotic dancer. A shady man in a shady office told her to disrobe completely while checking his fantasy team's scoring. He explained in matter of fact terms to her horrified face that he had to sample the goods before he could put them on display. My west coast friend opined that there could be some mystery, that it needed to be alluring in its own way, even as it revealed everything the story was. I woke up with that on my mind and went back to work.
I feel confident that I have done my due diligence. And because I so often feel that way, I have come to really despise luck, on a fundamental level. I rather prefer the control of direct input and output. I pull the lever, the door opens. But that just isn't how it works with the kinds of opportunity people dream about. We work, and we work, and we work, all the while hoping that it would result in something commensurate. That we can tabulate the bitter alchemy of how much sweat, and how much blood, is equivalent to a mote of success. Sometimes it is very difficult to be satisfied that we tried our best, yet still fell flat on our faces for reasons outside of our control. I met a person recently who admitted that she had done very little work, that she had an agent waiting, and that she just couldn't commit to putting words down.
I caught up with another friend, too, local, but I still never see her. She's a dreamer, like so many of the people I get along with are dreamers, and in the time since we last saw each other she had earned some mentors in her field, and definitive numbers for what she had to achieve to get to where she wanted to go. I was really happy for her. I was also really happy for myself, relieved to remember that I had those kinds of people still in my life. Another item that had to go into the submission package was a paragraph about me, the author. I didn't mention it, but dredging up who I was made me remember who I came from, and how my parents and I don't talk about my stories, or my dreams. Haven't for years. And maybe there's something to unpack in all of that, but in every way, I want nothing more than to abandon that on the nearest flat surface and distract myself with things I can control.
I want to go, so badly, and have no idea where I'm headed.
A one-sentence summary and a synopsis no longer than two, double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman font pages. At first, I thought I had three books to send, then I read how they don't want young adult. Then I did some heavy deliberation on what young adult fiction is and how the term is defined. What clinched it, I think, is that when I went to write a sentence to summarize the book, or a synopsis to concisely detail its qualities, I kept coming back to the phrase "coming of age." I couldn't betray the story by trying to wedge it into a box any more than I could do the work a disservice by mislabeling it. I was also a little surprised at how easy the summaries and synopses came. I had a moment where I thought it was going to be a painful hurdle, was going to be difficult (after all, I freeze up at the thought of the elevator pitch), and then in the next moment the sentences were coming to me. I also thought it would be difficult because I could remember the last time I stopped to seriously make some submissions. Things were harder then.
I worked on them yesterday, the sentences the synopses, in the morning. I set them down and circled back at lunch, when I looked over them again, and fiddled with the diction, the cadence, the punctuation. I peeked one more time before bed, and I got up today to rinse and repeat. Sometime in the night a west coast writer friend traded some thoughts with me. I lamented the idea that synopses seem, on principle, to be a kind of deflowering, an unveiling of all the discovery and nuance. I once heard a story of a young woman auditioning to be an exotic dancer. A shady man in a shady office told her to disrobe completely while checking his fantasy team's scoring. He explained in matter of fact terms to her horrified face that he had to sample the goods before he could put them on display. My west coast friend opined that there could be some mystery, that it needed to be alluring in its own way, even as it revealed everything the story was. I woke up with that on my mind and went back to work.
I feel confident that I have done my due diligence. And because I so often feel that way, I have come to really despise luck, on a fundamental level. I rather prefer the control of direct input and output. I pull the lever, the door opens. But that just isn't how it works with the kinds of opportunity people dream about. We work, and we work, and we work, all the while hoping that it would result in something commensurate. That we can tabulate the bitter alchemy of how much sweat, and how much blood, is equivalent to a mote of success. Sometimes it is very difficult to be satisfied that we tried our best, yet still fell flat on our faces for reasons outside of our control. I met a person recently who admitted that she had done very little work, that she had an agent waiting, and that she just couldn't commit to putting words down.
I caught up with another friend, too, local, but I still never see her. She's a dreamer, like so many of the people I get along with are dreamers, and in the time since we last saw each other she had earned some mentors in her field, and definitive numbers for what she had to achieve to get to where she wanted to go. I was really happy for her. I was also really happy for myself, relieved to remember that I had those kinds of people still in my life. Another item that had to go into the submission package was a paragraph about me, the author. I didn't mention it, but dredging up who I was made me remember who I came from, and how my parents and I don't talk about my stories, or my dreams. Haven't for years. And maybe there's something to unpack in all of that, but in every way, I want nothing more than to abandon that on the nearest flat surface and distract myself with things I can control.
I want to go, so badly, and have no idea where I'm headed.
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