Archive for July, 2009

Wanderlust

I am moving to San Francisco in late August. Packing up three bookcases of books and other various possessions to haul them across the state. Again. At least this time I managed to stay put for six years in Orange County. Prior to that, I moved about once every other year. As a singleton, I don’t feel tied to a particular place, though Southern California is where I grew up and where my family lives. While I’ll miss them (and will break my brother’s back by asking him to help me move 30 boxes of aforementioned books), I know I’m doing the right thing by venturing back to the city.

Aside from the fact that I’ll most likely be paying a fortune to live in a shoebox, have nowhere to park my car, and have to walk two blocks to a Laundromat, there’s something about living in a large city that invigorates me. I love the energy, the way everything is open late, how people populate the streets with their bikes, dogs, and parade-of-the-day. I love how people form small groups to combat the anonymity of the city.

This may sound completely prejudiced, but it also seems literature is more alive and present in the cities. In New York City, you get on the subway, and people are reading. They’re in the cafes and at the parks reading. There is a newsstand on every corner, in every underground station, and the bookstores… Eighteen miles of shelves in one building.  I swear, if I’d stayed in New York they would’ve found my dead body rotting on the bottom floor of the Strand bookstore amongst the shelves of reviewer’s copies. I read Jasper Fforde’s LOST IN A GOOD BOOK long before it was released, spelling errors and all. Be still my heart!

When I lived in New York, there were also more free readings and interesting panels on an on-going basis. I started a book club with no shortage of attendees, but in California, I can’t find enough people who’d be willing to drive fifteen minutes to take part. Perhaps it’s the nature of Southern California that everything is sprawling and far away that makes it difficult. Still, I can’t wait to be in the hub of things!

Query Me Crazy

**UPDATE: My agent, Laura Bradford, broke down my query letter over at YA Highway to reveal why she asked to see my novel.

So you wrote your novel, and you want to get published. So you send your manuscript to editors at all the major publishing houses and bam! Done deal. You’ve got a contract and your book will be on the NY Times Bestseller list and you’re bragging to your friends. NOT! Most publishing houses won’t even open the envelope with your manuscript: they only talk to agents of writers.

Okay, you regroup and research agents and send a bunch of them your manuscript and they decide to rep you and they get you a contract with a publishing house. Back up a minute… Did I hear you right? Agents want a one-page query letter before they even decide to look at my work? Seriously, the whole publishing business is a mystery.

For the last few months I’ve been in query letter hell. I sent a bunch of letters out following the standards I’d found online from culling information from various writer/agent websites. When the rejections came pouring in, I wrote to an agent who had a reputation for being helpful and asked why she rejected me – was it my idea or was it the query letter? She extended some invaluable advice. I promptly sent out my revised letter to new agents. Within two weeks, I had seven agents asking for full or partial requests. I can only believe it’s the letter, so I offer this up to you in hopes that it helps. This is also posted in the Absolute Write Water Cooler SYW Query Letter forum where you can have your query letter critiqued by other writers.

Original Query vs. Revised Query
ORIGINAL:
Dear Agent,

I would like you to consider Touched, my YA novel. The manuscript is complete at 102,000 words.

Seventeen-year-old Remy O’Malley knows nothing of Healers or their formal allies, the immortal Protectors, who have hunted them for over a century. All she knows is that her secret ability to heal others has kept her and her mother alive despite her alcoholic stepfather’s cruelty. When the abuse goes too far, Remy’s absent father finds out and insists she come to live with him in the small town of Port Townsend, Washington.

To Remy’s surprise, she loves her new home, family and friends. But the true transformation comes when she meets eighteen-year-old Asher Blackwell, who has powers like hers. Sparks literally fly the first time they meet, as Asher has a secret, too; he’s a Protector who has sacrificed his ability to touch, taste, or smell to become immortal. Befriending Remy goes against everything he’s believed for the last century. Enemies at first, Remy and Asher learn to trust and love one another as their powers begin to change; he soon discovers he can read her mind and that Remy has the power to make him feel human again.

For the first time in years, Remy isn’t looking over her shoulder, but she’s far from safe. She is the first Healer with the power to hurt others, and she must learn to control her powers before she kills someone she loves. Remy must find the strength to fight the stepfather who wants revenge for using her powers on him and the Protectors who are hunting her because she is the key to what they fear most: the power to take away their immortality.

I have a Master’s in English Literature. I received a scholarship to and am working on my MFA in Fiction at Spalding University. My work has been published in Dash Literary Journal. I’ve included the first five pages and synopsis of Touched per your submission guidelines. I’d be glad to send my complete manuscript for your review. Thank you for your time and consideration, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,
My Name

TIPS FROM AGENT ASST:
Refocus query on what’s unique in my story, like the part about sacrificing senses
1.Protag and their problem
2.What they’re going to do about problem
3.Conflicts that keep them from achieving goal
4.Stakes: what happens if they don’t succeed. Why the reader should care
Limit to 150-200 words and only include essentials. Don’t talk about the plot, but the characters and the struggles they must overcome.

REVISED:
Dear Agent,

I would like you to consider Touched, my YA suspense novel. The manuscript is complete at 102,000 words.

Seventeen-year-old Remy O’Malley heals people with touch, but her power comes at a steep cost. Every illness or injury she cures becomes her own. The pain she can handle, but she worries a day will come when she won’t recover from healing some terrible disease. Then she meets eighteen-year-old Asher Blackwell. Scarred and dangerous, he knows more about her abilities than she does, and she can’t resist wanting to know everything about him.

Once a Protector of Healers, Asher sacrificed his ability to touch, taste, and smell to become immortal. Only by killing a Healer can a Protector feel a shadowy echo of their human senses, and Remy’s kind have been hunted into near extinction to feed their enemy’s hunger for sensation. After a century of living a half-life, Asher yearns for mortality. Remy is more powerful than any Healer he’s known, and the intense pain he feels each time he touches her shocks him, almost more than his inexplicable desire to be near her.

Falling in love is against the rules between these two enemies and could destroy them both. Because Remy has the power to make Protectors human again, and when they find out, they’ll be coming for her, if Asher doesn’t kill her first.

I have a Master’s in English Literature and am working on my MFA in Fiction at Spalding University. My work has been published in Dash Literary Journal. I’d be glad to send my complete manuscript for your review. Thank you for your time and consideration, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,
My Name

PS. I’d love to give the agent credit, but I worry she would be inundated with requests for help, so I withhold her name to protect her since she did me a kind favor.

The Elusive Muse

Where do ideas for stories come from? For me, it’s a combination of everything I see, my experiences, and things I’m interested in. Is that vague enough for you? Honestly, my best ideas are born out the things I feel most passionate about.

My mixed-genre (fiction and poetry) work, “Loss for Words,” came from some feelings I have toward my father. My father’s health is not great, and my sister and I were discussing how I would feel when the man who abandoned me – who is mostly a stranger – died.  The novella-length work was divided into five parts – the five stages of grieving – as I explored how people write on each other and scar each other with their actions. Very morbid stuff, but I can’t tell you how cathartic the process was.

With my first novel, TOUCHED, a YA suspense novel with hints of sci-fi and romance, inspiration came from a very different place. I saw the movie TWILIGHT and read all four books in three days. While Stephanie Meyer is a great storyteller, there were things I reacted to in a not-positive way. I wished Bella was stronger. I wanted her to save herself instead of always waiting for a man to save her. I mean, even her power was a passive one in MIDNIGHT SUN. I also didn’t want her to be so ready to throw away her entire future and family for love. Shouldn’t this be a balancing act?

After my marathon TWILIGHT weekend, I couldn’t stop thinking about my reaction to the book. Suddenly, a character popped into my head. A girl who will kick the ass of anyone who harms her family and stands up for herself. To complement her, a boy was born who was strong enough to let a girl to do the saving when the situation calls for it. Remy and Asher are independent characters who compromise to be together, but they never lose their sense of self in order to be together.

What about you? Where do your ideas come from?

Get to Know Me in Ten

I’m not the diary type. I am fervently opposed to keeping a diary. As an aspiring writer, I have received umpteen blank journals as gifts, which I’ve promptly re-gifted, along with all the bookmarks I never use. (I am one of those horrible people that fold the corner of the page I’m on, though I would never, ever do this to a library book. Promise.)

Recently, at a residency for my MFA program, the students were asked to keep a journal of our experience abroad in Barcelona. I had the best of intentions. I bought the Barcelona edition of the Moleskine journals, sat on my scratchy hotel bedspread, cracked the spine, and watched my pen float over the paper. No words flowed. Stumped, I wrote a banal entry about my flight from LAX to Europe that included the idiotic line, “How must the sardines feel!” [Insert mockery here.]

Something about the permanence of ink on paper stumps me and turns me into a fourteen-year-old gushing about my crush on that boy we saw at the mall – you know, the one with the square jaw and dreamy blue eyes? I hope for my sake – and that of any readers – that I manage to avoid this prepubescent trap as I embark on this blog, recording my foray into becoming a writer. Below are the top ten things you should know about me.

1. My Guilty Pleasure – celebrity gossip delivered in any format. Sad to say, I have an RSS feed for People.com headlines.
2. My Favorite Pastimes – watching people and spinning unbelievable, outlandish tales about them. My sister is my favorite partner-in-crime.
3. Where I Write – Starbuck’s. I know, I know. Total cliché, right? I can’t help it. I work better without the distraction of my TV or the internet since I refuse to pay the internet access fees.
4. Major Pet Peeve – my name is pronounced Cor-reen, not Cuhr-een or Cor-in or any of the other massacred versions I’ve been called in my life.
5. Strangest Idiosyncrasy – At work, I am a neat freak. I organize and label and color code every spreadsheet. But at home…Whoa, Nelly! I am a slob of epic proportions. I believe it is possible to use up one side of your personality in the workplace so that there’s nothing left at home.
6. Ridiculous Fact – I’ve been to 9 colleges in the last fifteen years.  My college transcripts are a nightmare to decipher and the Admissions Office of anywhere I apply are mystified. What can I say? I love to learn.
7. What People Say When They Learn About My Family – “You’re surprisingly normal.” This is because my mother has been married/divorced five times and my father is on his fourth marriage. I have eight full/half siblings, plus an assortment of steps. The net result? I am a self-proclaimed expert observer of human nature with Grand Canyon-sized trust issues and an inherited romantic streak – if my parents weren’t romantics, why would they have kept trying?
8. Favorite first line of a novel – “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” From Pride & Prejudice. Jane Austen is my hero.
9. Favorite Obsessive Behavior – searching for new apps for my iphone. Seriously, it’s like getting lost on Google for hours when you look up wine tasting and an hour later you’re somehow reading about the indigenous behavior of aardvarks in Texas. When I find a great app, I tell everyone about it like I’m Christopher Columbus discovering new lands.
10. What My Closest Friends Tease Me About – it’s a tie between my love for sci-fi and my penchant for watching kid’s programming. I watch more Disney and Nickelodeon than friends with kids. Truly embarrassing and something I hang my head in shame for.

Have questions? Feel free to ask.