... wait for it ...

... because, for my writing friends, this is a REALLY good column about writing.

It's also good for the advice-column that it actually is.

Layers. Mmmmm.

Collection

It happens all the time in casual speech—saying carpe diem rings deeper and graver than “use time wisely.

I know I link The History Blog a lot, but here is a post resurrecting one of the old interests at my own blog, which I haven't touched on in a long time: jewelry design. Take a look at the simply stunning geometrical engraving on this remarkably preserved bulla. Exquisite.

Tom Williams' blog has a great discussion about authorial exposure, participation, and the many varieties of advice authors can find online, on his 12/14 post - this is one of those times I will say, "READ the comments!" (FWIW, I actually do get more engagement on my personal posts, but I think the past few years of caregiving and death have led me to tap into some thoughts and themes that resonate - and, given a lack of actually getting this blog OUT there, those posts are the ones that bring people to pipe up.)

Per usual for this year, I am running short on content but don't want to leave this post in Drafts any longer, so please enjoy these photos of December snow, decorations, and The Poobahs. My spirits of the season ...

SNOWCAKE!

Penelope side-eye is the BEST side-eye

Add caption

... Telling Me Something?

Sometimes, it's hard not to think Janet Reid, with her familiarity with her own community of writers (not clients), is trying to tell us something personal ... Such is both the ego and the insecurity of a fretful writer Woodland Creature.

In this week's week-in-review post, she quoted me ...


DLM said
But there seems really to be no "middle class" in traditional publishing now. You can't be *dependable*: you have to be a breakout, and - never mind the pressure, it's just a matter of numbers, and the numbers dictate, we simply cannot all be The Next Big Thing.

JANET said
We call it mid-list but you're right. It's like the Army; you can't spend five years in the same rank or your career is pretty much over. Get promoted or get out. Like baseball: you can play on the farm teams for a while, but either move up, or hang up your glove.

Publishing is not the only place this up or out pattern applies.  But it only applies to COMMERCIAL publishing.  You can publish and sell your own work forever. That's one of the many great things about the electronic marketplace: it's easy to access and it actually works. I'm not saying it's easy to self-publish (well, it is, but let's assume I mean self-publishing well here) but that the barriers to buyers are much diminished from where they were 20 years ago.


I think she's seen enough of my comments at her own blog contemplating commercial (what I've been calling traditional, which she rightly calls commercial - augh, and now to fix my tags ...) publishing versus self-pub, and certainly she knows my writing, for my interpretation that she's Telling Me Something - or, at least, agreeing with my self-evaluation - not to be completely out of hand.

And even if it is, at the end of the day, she's neither my agent nor my ultimate guide; just a kind reader - and a professional - along the way I am taking.

So whether she meant "anything" or not ... the upshot is the same. I don't know that I want to hold out for the big leagues. I sure know I don't want to be in the military ...

And, really, right now, what I OUGHT to be worrying about is the WIP.

Collection

Jessica Faust at Bookends Literary Agency takes a look at the downside of #MSWL, or the Manuscript Wish List many pre-published love to pore over, hoping to find someone who'll represent our work.

The Arrant Pedant has a great post for those Americans coping with taxes this season: on the task of taxes and axing about the history of etymology. Also, I learned a new word today - palatalization. Not sure when I'll get to use it, but I like it anyway. Syncopated.

Speaking of great words: I'm always a sucker for palimpsest. Not least because, as artifacts, the things are wells of curious information and questions. The History Blog looks at a palimpsest in which the Battle of Thermopylae gets an "all killer no filler" description. Never let it be said the History Blogger is not a History Nerd.

The on-demand economy – or old-fashioned temping? I gave up temping myself twenty years ago, because being pimped is no way to make a living. Gee, and it turns out there are others who don't want to work that way either. Duh.

Collection

First off today, welcome and thank you to JEN Garrett, my 34th follower! Yay!

Next - I'm a bit late with the link, but yay more, for a tribute to writer Leonard Nimoy's birthday.

Megan Sayer has a lovely post about hope. It's hard. But, I've found, sometimes it's even harder not to.

Agent Carly Watters has good advice/encouragement - for the pre-published debut author. Just when I cool it on querying, of course (but she doesn't do my genre, so it's all right by me).

And now, a three-fer from The History Blog:

Scratch any archaeologist (but not on the lower back, their legs will never stop kicking) and you'll hear a midden story. This one may be a little adult for some readers (I'd call it NSFW), but it's still interesting history! Hint: sex toy. Yeah, we didn't invent those in the 20th century either.

Out of the toilet and into ... oh, wait. The sewer. Italian family finds 2500 years of history while looking for a broken sewer line. Man, it's boring when my toilet backs up. You know, by comparison. aaaaaaannnnd I'm okay with that. (Also with my parents not lowering me into the, erm, bowels of our home when I was twelve.)

And last, but least gross (though possibly disconcerting! and that is a pun!), 18th century Swiss automata. I'll embed the punnish clip below ...

Shark-Infested Waters ...

For the record:  Kristi Tuck Austin is the tahini, and Leila Gaskin is the sesame oil.

Gaining Weight

Progress on the final polish has been quite gratifying; nearly one month in, I'm more than one-fourth the way through the whole, doing bits of backtracking here and there, but mostly moving front-to-back in a blissfully (semi-)logical progression.  I *still* find myself having mini-wigs about continuity, and even have adjusted a few nuts and bolts here and there for tightness.  But for the most part, this survey mission is not so grueling a proposition as the last - far too slow - edit.

This evening I've finally hit that point where I had a somewhat less "mini" wig out about the whole project.  You have to have these, and I'm not gnashing my teeth and yelling at furbabies - but it's still a little scary contemplating word counts.

I'd slimmed the work down to 118,297, and it now stands at 126,741.  To my author's sensibilities, this is both good and bad:  we, The Great Unpublished, are fed a steady diet (even for historical fiction) that manuscripts MUST BE SHORT (or, translated more kindly, that "every single word must move the plot forward").  The million sources for advice to aspiring authors is to cut every last bit that isn't propelling the action; even culturally, we've developed a real allergy to exposition and description.

And yet, the agent who told me to "get back to work" told me that the object of this would be to get some meat on the bones.  To put food in the kitchen, as it were.

I had cut scenes to the point that "establishing shots" were the barest "we were in the work room" or "we were on our horses" - with no depth of feeling within the characters, or texture in the world.  Some works, it just ain't easy to trim down to 118.3k.  And so, it is gratifying to be able to go in and provide more, rather than less.

It's also nigh-impossible (even for a pragmatist) not to get a little giddy at the thought of going too far.

Nearly ten-thousand words, and I'm 1/4 the way through.  *Shudder*

But I'm 1/4 the way through.  Close, actually, to 1/3.

Exciting.

I just hope I'm not on the wrong ... track.  Heh.



Also - please, will someone tell me who approved its becoming May 8?  How is it May 8?

Literalism versus Favoritism

Growing up in my family, it didn't do to be reductive.  Superlatives and absolutes tended to be greeted with deconstructive comments (not un-constructive, but rather debunkingly analytical), and so I learned early to avoid stating many extremes.

Well, I didn't learn not to state them.  But I did learn that if I took anything to a descriptive limit, there would always be someone standing by that boundary to prove it was far more distant than anything I could quantify, or that the very boundary itself was imaginary.

So I began at a young age to take the concept of "favorite", for instance, to its illogical conclusion, and to avoid the idea assiduously.  I can actually recall taking my idea, that green was my favorite color, and lying in the backseat of my parents' very green indeed Plymouth Fury station wagon, peering at the physical greenness of my surroundings, and imagining green as the ONLY color I could ever have, and being disappointed.

It's one of the million ways we affect one another as humans, this sort of tiny influencing commentary of a family, which becomes a very silly part of someone's being, far far beyond any real intention or even expectation.  My parents and brother might have wanted me to become a critical thinker, but to provide me a mild neurosis about favorite things could hardly have been their point.  It means (per my blog's very headline) that I contain multitudes, but it also means I make a rotten interview, because I snark on about how reductive questions are instead of answering them.

And so I am aware that people are capable of feeling that one color is best, or one food is peerless, but the idea of choosing gives me the distantest echo of Sophie's dilemma, in that I despise to pick one superlative because everything apart from "the best" still creates the richness and variety and context that makes anything truly shine.  Intellectually, I can know that loving one thing most doesn't doom all else to destruction - and yet, the only context in this world in which I can honestly say I have a favorite is in Mr. X, who is my most favorite person in the world with whom I don't share DNA.  I peek around from time to time, just to be sure, but at almost eleven years knowing him, it seems reasonable to state he really did ruin me for all the other boys.

It can be bewildering, though, to run across other people's favorite things, because there can be hard lines in this world it's trickier to negotiate if you don't draw your own.  Other people can put you on a path or hem you in with their ability to hold absolutes - in religion and politics, of course, this can get dangerous.  And, at times, it can be more comfortable to be persuasable ("where do you want to eat?"), but of course there are those who see a certain type of flexibility as waffling.

I have my convictions, but I keep them pretty close and refuse to hand them out to anyone I am not pretty intimate with.  Most of my own hard lines took me decades to draw - and, as I have grown older, I have discarded some of those things I thought were non-negotiable when I was a younger person.  Few of my deepest ... expectations (beliefs can be a different thing) ... have ever actually changed - and yet, I have seen my methods of managing their presence adapt in amazing ways over my lifetime.

This calendar year has seen some of the profoundest philosophical changes in me - without compromise, and yet without radical outward alterations.  It is at the deepest level I've let go of certain boundaries, and in the quietest solitude of my soul I have found liberty it astonishes me to have given myself and my heart.

Relinquishing certain expectations has only solidified the power of what drives and matters to me most.  Letting go of certain ideas of practical living, of faith, and even love, has only deepened these things by providing clarity.  There is great peace in the understanding this can give, and such emotional power, and all over again I find myself grateful with the blessings that seem to provide themselves to me, all undeserving.  Paths are easier to follow, fears are fewer.

I don't know a lot of people who can claim the assurance I feel, simply by letting go of certain ideas about conviction, by questioning those things which are supposed to be "given" for us as human beings.


Question something you hate, or love, or fear.  Really let yourself be wrong ... or, more terrifyingly, right.  There's almost no liberty like it.  Almost no power at all.  It is joyous.

How to Write a Great Query Letter ... What They're Not Saying

There are likely thousands of articles and blog posts out there offering advice on how to get an agent's attention.  There's also no shortage of agents at conferences, explaining what to do/not to do quite passionately.  I've read and listened to my share, and after a while you start to shake your head because either people are stupider, en masse, than you can comfortably contemplate, or it is just far too easy.  Some of the commonest advice boils down thus:

• Address queries to a particular agent - this means, don't send out a blast email query to every agent whose email you could find, without personalizing nor, perhaps, even researching to whom you are sending.  Choose to whom to submit by researching, and know your audience - and create each submission for its recipient.
• Corollary to addressing a particular agent - spell his or her name correctly.  Seriously, getting a name wrong is a pretty basic insult to avoid in an attempt to get someone's professional attention.
• Follow the agency's submissions guidelines - if an agency as a whole or a particular agent prohibits attachments, or specifically says they like to see word count, or requires the use of an electronic form, counting yourself as the Special Snowflake who doesn't have to conform to simple guidelines is a dealbreaker.  Just do it.  It's the low-low price of admission.
• Content - keep it to a page or less.  Don't yammer about the money you're going to make an agent.  Don't cast the movie.  Don't be a braggart, and don't be an apologetic milquetoast either.  Get the synopsis done, introduce yourself as a prospect, include what is required/allowed, and get out.  With THANKS for time, attention, etc.  (Yes:  this kind of thing actually needs to be said.  Sad, isn't it?)
• Mechanics - anything you send represents your writing.  If it's not free of typos, misspellings, outright construction errors, and precious formatting, it will speak very very VERY poorly indeed of your skill in the field of writing.  If it lacks energy and momentum, the assumption will be:  so does your manuscript.  Your main character, setting, and major dramatic question should be clear in your query. (Again, yes:  this kind of thing actually needs to be explained.  Ad naseum, yet.)

A lot of it is professionalism and common sense, and of course - unfortunately - it's all too necessary to advise professionalism and simple common sense, particularly in a field so dominated by dreams.  People as a whole aren't super with the self-awareness thing, and self-awareness is unfortunately very necessary when it comes to successfully presenting that self to others in patent bids for attention.  Know your assets, know your work, be confident without being a tool, go forth, and conquer.

The thing is ...

I have heard, personally, and read countless times:  "If you can get these things right, you WILL GET ATTENTION."  I've heard agents say, if you get these things right, you're ahead of 95% of the queries they see.  It is a song oft-sung, and it has a pleasing melody.

It gives a fat whack of us confidence that that's all there is to the magic.

Then we send out several dozen queries, all conforming to these general standards, and - not at all astonishingly - do not receive 100% requests for full manuscripts.  Incomprehensible!

No.

The unspoken fact is this:  the advice above constitutes only the minimum, and only the beginning.  Regardless of how many times I've heard that properly created queries are an extreme minority - and the "if you get this right you are better than ninety-some percent of the queries we see" figure is an often-heard quote, I can tell you - the full scope of a slush pile still leaves that magical ten, or five, or one percent of acceptable queries at a prodigious figure.  If an agent receives one to two hundred queries every week, you're still up against ten or twenty other competent queries in that week.  And you would be beyond fortunate to find an agent who took on even as many as five new authors in a year.  And not all of those new authors' properties even SELL.

So what they're not telling you is that there is still a lot more than just getting it mechanically, professionally correct.  There's actually making a connection with the agent - sparking their imagination with your story, your character(s).  There's the imperative of how good a story is, how artful your words are, how important it is to tell what you have to tell.  There's the chemistry, simply, of getting the right work in front of the RIGHT agent.

The little-known fact is:  any given agent might be the right one at one time and the wrong one at another.  I've had personal experience with this - an agent I'd love to work with was intrigued with my subject in 2011 - and, indeed, was a guiding force in my revisions.  I got priceless feedback, and significant correspondence with this query.  A year later, revisions done, this same agent was very frank in saying this wasn't his current area of interest, and it may take a very long time for him to read it again - if he ever does.  Even with my work in a better place, the agent himself wasn't in the sweet spot where my work would hit the target for him professionally.  Because it's not about "what I like" with agents, and most of them will tell you that very candidly.  The market can exert its demands, and any human being may be subject to fatigue with repetition.  "I loved Work X so much, but I knew I could not sell it" is hardly an uncommon phrase in agents' blogs.  This business - is a business, it's not always about "liking".

You can't make lightning strike, all you can do is set up a lightning rod and prepare, prepare, prepare.

And, keep the faith.  The work is the thing.  Give it a good vehicle, but it has to speak for itself.

Irritating Query Research

I'm going to paraphrase a quote from an agent bio found tonight as I was trying to work on queries.

She wants stories told with an honesty that can only come from the heart of the storyteller. 

Apart from being a bit purply-prosaic, this agent's blurb is maddeningly non-specific as to genres she represents.  It does, however, wax not-at-all-helpful with the encouragement to excite her with the following undefined requirements:  "artful" storytelling, a "unique" voice, and "a new perspective" ...

How is an author supposed to know what this agent finds "new", "unique", or "artful" (something I'd prefer to stay away from, as "artful" is to me a term limited to the coy romantic stylings of young Victorian heroines I find repellant)?  My voice as expressed through Clovis is without question unique - but I get the sense from the schmoop here it would hardly appeal to an agent hunting through her submittors' hearts.

I've said it before and I'll say it again:  we as writers owe a great deal of work and research to our submissions, and gratitude to agents, along with a modicum of respect for submission guidelines.  But agents and agencies owe us the courtesy of *clarity* in those guidelines.

Sheesh.

Good Advice from Denise Marcil

I just started researching this one, but it looks like I'm probably not a fit for this agency.  Even so, the advice at the link is VERY good to always keep in mind.

Wrongers

A short observation about a trend of which the Stupid Naming Business is only one representative symptom:

The older I get, the more I find people essentially telling me "You're doing it wrong" about, basically, life itself.  It appears to be related to my never having remarried, had kids, done the thing we're all "supposed" to do, so there gets to be more and more instruction for me the farther down the road I get.  What's interesting is that this isn't coming from my family (nor from X), but from friends and mere acquaintances.  There's been a sharp, clear, and precipitous drop in people's estimation of my competency since I (successfully, not for nothing) passed forty.  (Subtext here:  "alone" - because that's means something is broken somehow, and I guess I must be presumed to have done the damage.)

One or two of these happen to be the sort who find opinionated people (and being opinionated) invigorating or bracing.

The older I get, the less "invigorating" opinions are to me.  I prefer courage, conviction, and energy spent on being interested and interesting.  By a stunningly wide margin.


***


There is a LOT about me that seems to set people on edge.  Women who use the term secretary non-ironically freak people out.  Middle aged women living on their own bug people.  I never liked the idea I was getting to people simply by existing, but the longer I do it the more palpable other people's discomfort over my perceived failures (non-conformity, thank you) becomes.

Oddly enough, I'm a bit like Douglas Adams' money:  "On the whole, it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."

But my movements increasingly concern people who have no say (and no stake) in my lifestyle.  And sometimes, THEY get to ME.  What a lot of wasted, and yet far too eagerly generated, negative energy.

(Unexpectedly) In Defense of Mary

I've posted about Mary Sue before, and feminist anachronism in historical fiction, but this morning I was cruising one of my fora and ran into a thread about what tropes would you throw in the bin, as a histfic reader?  Apart from the "Dark Ages = Land of the Stupids" dirty Barbarian foolishness, a clear winner in this discussion was the presence, in so much historical fiction, of the modern, BEAUTIFUL, feminist heroine main character.  Ugh/sigh.

One poster said,

But . . . it seems like every young woman in every historical novel doesn't want to get married and just wants to be "free" (to do [I]what [/I]for the rest of her life?). I would like to see a real examination of the other young women who made the best of things.

I responded:
In my first novel, there are two significant marriages, and two scenes involving the prospective brides' acceptance of their arrangements.  In the first case, I wrote the character as seeing her marriage as a sort of dynastic opportunity - a role to which she not only had been raised, but had aspired personally.  She is eager to fulfill a certain type of feminine glory, queen to a great husband, and she sees a clear potential to become mother of a dynasty.  The second case is a more prominent character, who comes to her marriage out of faith, a sense of fate, and a certain amount of attraction to both the role and the husband.  The relationship is developed pretty deeply, and is loving, difficult, committed in a way modern people don't always understand, and fruitful (also in a way modern people don't always understand).

In the WIP, the main character is a princess who is ... physically uncompelling.  She cultivates her intellect and personality, and she also uses her position to make up for the idea that those around her find her ugly.  She marries very young and against all the rules, and watches her husband pay for this sin.  She seeks power through the channels available to her, and eventually herself pays for her heterodoxy, pride, and ambition.  (Her story, by the way, is not fictional.)


***


In one of those moments which can be a bit too on-the-nose "meta" to tolerate (but which I hope I handled well), I wrote this:

Cholwig gave me back a smile as we slowed near the threshold of the hall.  “I think a woman submits to her lord, and power is in the eye of the beholder.  It is possible marrying a king is more servitude than success.  Do you remember the old way a tribe might attack the Empire, when Rome was strong?  A small king would say, ‘we’ll attack Rome, and surrender, to be absorbed into its protection and wealth, and that way, the people will prosper’.”  He regarded me for a moment.  “A woman can do the same.  Make a sally at a formidable man, a king.  And, in surrender, wage peace of a comfortable nature.”

The military strategy is a historically documented one - and, in fact, not exclusive to the Empire in Rome.  Just recently, I ran across a film from I believe the 1960s or thereabouts, in which a fictional, tiny European nation was going to pick a war to lose, either with the US or perhaps the British Empire, for precisely the same reason.

It seems to me extremely likely the strategy, with women, was a real one as well - shoot, though we hate to admit it, there are *today* still plenty of women and girls raised on the idea of men-as-providers, who look to relationships this way.  Not necessarily gold-digging, but certainly a tendency to mercenary gender relations is not a thing of the past completely.  I know plenty of women who have never lived on their own financial terms, and have never intended to.  My autonomy may not be the anomaly it once was, but it's still not standard for women either.

The thing about Mary Sue is this:  once upon a time and not so long ago (cue Bon Jovi, for those who are hating me right now), she was an innovation.  I have to forgive the temptation to write her.  Women authors may use her as an avatar to be glamorous, rich, and sexy to everyone on feet - but it hasn't been long since Mary actually had something to say.  When you think about how many centuries literature endured under the yoke of systematized oppressions for us ALL (not just women), it's hardly surprising that writers in the 20th century began breaking out magical characteristics - and, given the 20th century in much of Western, and particularly American, culture, it's less surprising still all the main characters had to be supernaturally endowed with superior characteristics, and not least of these was sex appeal.

It's tiresome now, but when you look at the reasons Mary Sues sprang up, the bumper crop she became is easy to understand.

It's also easy to understand why people are so judgmental now.  It's been JUST long enough in literary time, and perhaps eons worth of time in millenial insta-news-cycle/short attention span terms, the backlash is just as obvious as the initial popularity was.  When "Mists of Avalon" came out, the character of Morgaine was groundbreaking.  She spawned copies, and a more general trend, and looking backward maybe she looks like a Mary Sue too - modern humanist/liberal morality, femininity, beauty, the whole package.  But like many early iterations of what become larger phenomena, Morgaine had more depth than perhaps later, more watered-down examples would carry.  And Morgaine was a teaching tool.

Cry about Mary Sue as we will, she apparently has taught a lot of readers ... *something* ...

So my resistance isn't to the forces and the motivations that gave us Mary Sue in the first place.  It's to the weak tool she has become - it's to the subversion of a feminist point-making into a plethora of pneumatic, gorgeous, goddesses (though I'll never stop blessing Michelle Brower for coming up with the genuinely insightful analysis of urban fantasy heroines' changing roles, in her comment, "the boobs are getting smaller").  It's to the easy-way-out insertion of modern feminism and attitudes onto characters who, in all fairness, could never have even developed some of "our" ways of thinking - never mind enacted them.  It's to the injustice, of ignoring the real obstacles and opportunities ANYone (again, not just women - but, yeah, particularly women) had, the real context of history, whatever a given period.

Sure, we're all fascinated by those who fought against a given system - there are reasons books about feisty medieval women do sell, and we can hardly pretend Aliaenor of Aquitaine (kids, that's Eleanor to your modern spellin'-style) was a dainty little thing.  It's perhaps unjust to pretend all women were shrinking violets, in a similar way it's dangerous to pretend none of them were.

But that is just what chafes me as an author.  Characters don't exist outside their time - but they also don't exist in the prejudicially-defined prisons modern judgment presumes "the past" had to offer, depending on era.  The Middle Ages (ugh, what a nicely imprecise term - you should see the wildly erratic definitions people have for it) wasn't all about wimples and tiny rosebud mouths, any more than the 19th century was all about consumptive milquetoasts nor hookers-with-hearts-of-gold, any more than the Dark Ages were summed up in Boudicca, nor Rome by Valeria Messalina ... OR Cornelia the Mother of the Gracchi.

Characters need to be about more than just their context, whether we choose to manipulate the context or not.  Write to them - not to a didactic point, nor to a stifling set of assumptions or required set of actions.  If they're honest, they should fit.  Wherever we end up putting them.

Editor Tips

Adrien Luc Sanders' daily editor tips are always smart and useful advice, especially for actively querying authors.  Yesterday's are a particularly juicy batch.  *Grin*

Start Writing

There may be some readers who will see the name Collins and roll their eyes, but there are reasons some authors people might get snobby about are as successful as they are.  I've never actually read Jackie, but the fact is I've heard enough about her and even seen scraps of adaptations of her work, and she knows how to grab people.  "Strong women" is one of those phrases with a LOT interpretations - but her strong women have been bestsellers for some decades now.

So take a look at this great little vid Day Al Mohamed posted, and think about what is said, even if you do go a bit twee at the source.  It's solid advice, and some interesting observation, too.

For that matter, take a spin around all the vids she's put up (the link with her name).  It's a remarkable variety, and some of it is refreshing and pithy.

Writerliness

Okay, Arianna Huffington on Colbert says "The Huffington Post is not about Right versus Left, it is about Right versus WRONG ..."

Oh, honey.

And I read HuffPo from time to time.



But THAT.  Is writerliness.  And this finally gets me off my bum to write that Writerly post I've been thinking and saying I was going to get to soon.


***


Okay.

Writerly writing goes past self-consciousness and ends up in self-satisfaction instead, skewing either twee or superior depending upon its point.  And it always has a point, which itself is tiresome.

More often than not, the latter seasons of M*A*S*H represent for me the sins of writerliness - the didactic sentimentality, the heavily over-ground axes - but it is popular even in journalism.  In fiction, it can get pretty thick.  Fiction peopled with auto-characters, avatars for an author's self (or dreams of self) modeled into *ary *ues, cheap exposition working to be clever, would-be clever verbiage straining to teach.

The writerly writer can be heard finding their own work witty and charming.  On television, Sorkin productions sometimes fluff a writerly writer.  Sitcoms of course do it, see the old war horse referenced above.  In the seventies, before irony, archness, and meta came along (we did not know of these concepts of course, the human race before Teh Intarwebs), earnestness was done to a scale which might appear ostentatious to the wiser eyes of today.  (Is Diane being writerly?  The world may never know.  But as Mr. X knows, I was never suBtle.)

Cleverness and sincerity had a dangerously passionate relationship, and of course audiences had no critical eye for it.  This stuff was ENT-ertaiment!  (*Cue Lovitz doing his Thespian character.)  Even the quiet writerly moment - *especially* the quiet writerly moment - was thick with portent.  "Portent!" these moments cried, with their contrived intensity.  "Portent ..." they whispered, with the profundity of Lesson.

Ahh.  Writerly writing.

It's hardly gone the way of the dodo, since all us hayseed pre-'netters grew up and got iPhones.  Even reality TV occasionally falls prey to writerliness, don't kid yourself.  And reality serves us up intimate, powerful personal monologues by the multi-ton.  Purported human beings sell their lives to the highest bidder so they can touch people - and get touched - and let's not pretend this stuff isn't scripted.

Still, for me, the worst writerliness is the CLEVER writerly moment - the scene in "Sports Night" where the implied emotional payoff is pride in condescension, when an inconceivably wealthy white dude offers a sandwich to a homeless person ... and the older guy *cuts it in half* because sharing is so cool and so deep, man, and we're all just the same, even though one dude is going home to his posh bachelor pad in half an hour.  Hey, but he was HUNGRY - and the homeless guy was hungry - and we're all just in this together, man.

I resent these things most when I let them affect me, which is perhaps why I am suspicious of emotionalism in my own writing.

That - or ... Ax, at any rate, happens to be first-person male, and I'm steeled to the teeth for all the XY-chromosome-sporting Guitarists who're just sneering in wait for me to "fail" writing my character.  And guys have no hearts, or whatever the stupid cliche' (err, common wisdom) is.  Ahm.

But sometimes, writerly writing DOES work, mechanically.  It's egregious and overheated, but damn if the tricks aren't effective, even when you see them for what they are.  Good writers can be writerly - and those buggers can be lethal when you are having a good week's PMS.

But effective or no, I still speak out against the onanistic (that's writerly speak for Jillin' off, kids) and controlling will of the writerLYer.  I play Guitarist to their performances, I scoff and snub and pretend I'm superior.

Don't be a writerly writer.

ESPECIALLY if it is "what you know".  Writing what you know is almost odoriferously overrated.

And that whole, profoundly overacted, breathily delivered right/left/right/wrong thing above is SUPER writerly.  Don't be That Writer.  That dude is a tool (even if the dude's a woman).

For the Record

"Feminist" is in fact not defined as "woman who hates men."  For one, I happen to quite like men, and boys too.  My first crush, at about the age of five, was on Mohammed Ali, and I haven't stopped having crushes for almost 40 years now.  Men are awesome - and any ex of mine, or Mr. X for that matter, would be unlikely to testify I'm a hater.

For two:  MEN can be feminists.

And should.

Men with daughters who refuse to call themselves feminists are doing their children a disservice, and the language to boot.  Perpetuating foolish stereotypes reflecting the narrow and hateful perceptions of what people who are not feminists wish to propogate *about* feminists reinforces the strength of those of little minds.

I don't care to change people's beliefs.

But I do care to challenge those who hold to the equality of women, who believe in fair play and who do not believe in chauvinism, pigeonhole-ing human beings by genre, the imbalance of power and resources, and holding down those who do not share their pigmentation, age, geography, chromosomal asymmetry, or whatever else irrationally bolsters their faulty self-worth - and yet who squeal and clutch at their pearls at the merest whisper of the word feminism.

This word has too long been deployed as a weapon against itself.  Reclaim it, PROclaim it, love it, repeat it, be it.

Being it alone - unspoken - as if it is a dirty thing - simply is not enough.  SPREAD the word.  And take back the fight.

Smokers, Please Take Note

When you ignore the giant red and white sticker in the rental car prohibiting you from smoking in the car?  WE CAN ALL TELL.  And, for the record, the stench of stale old smoke and stale old outgassing plastic is genuinely disgusting to those of us retaining our sense of smell.

Thank you.

Giving Up Fantasy to Get the Dream

The thing about getting down about querying is that it's easy, but it's smarter not to give up precious time to it.  Indulge the frustration, sure - at least from time to time.  But do the work.

All of us think we are the Special One ... the one for whom querying will NOT, somehow, turn out to be a lengthy process.  All we have to do is hit a list repping our genre, and it won't take but a few agents to find the one(s) who'll fall in love with our work.

Take a walk down the street, though, and consider definitions.  What I write, in historical fiction, is only one kind of many, many types of stories that are also historical fiction.  The general definition of the genre is WWI or earlier ... but a person born after a certain period, writing about it - someone born in the 1970s, setting their work in the 1950s - may be considered to be writing historical fiction.  Taken to a certain kind of conclusion:  there is histfic set in the duration of my own lifespan, kiddies.

Sobering.

But a good object lesson.  Just because an agent lists histfic among her or his interests does not mean they all see the exact same sepia-toned portraiture when they envision the genre.  They don't all even see the same cultures and countries (and it's all too easy for us hidebound writer-types to forget about this).  Many love stories of historical figures, or royalty, or the notorious - but many others want their characters to be closer to the ground, not the celebrities of the historical record.

Good writing is key, of course - but it does NOTHING to abbreviate the process.

In a room of 200 people, maybe ten will all share a certain type of taste.  The job of querying is to politely approach these 200 strangers, to tell them what you've produced, and to find out whether they are one of those magical ten.

There's no way, in advance, to really KNOW what someone likes.  Even reading interviews and researching, as necessary as it is, only eliminates:  it doesn't guarantee that elusive simpatico.  As we do with finding images in the clouds, or recognizing ourselves in our horoscopes, when we read interviews, we may create "matches" the other party doesn't subscribe to.  Just because *I* think Josephina Doe will surely adore my work because she repped a histfic set in France, or said that thing in an interview about loving old musty castles, doesn't mean she doesn't prefer a little bodice-ripping or happens to find the religious-history aspects of my story deadly boring.  Or that she's not in a bad mood the day she receives my query, or has had sixteen other musty castle lovers quoting that same interview at her in the space of a single week.

You just have to go through the room full of strangers.

EVERY one of us will think, at the beginning:  "I won't have to do that."  That first in-person pitch that was so animated and friendly, ending in a request for a partial ... feels so good.  As to that, so does the second, and the third.

Doesn't matter.

Every author with any brains will get over the fantasies, and get down to work.

And learn that eight weeks go by less painfully if you let go of the entitlement  of talent, and take on the job at hand.



I have said (at the top of this very page):  hope is what ambition is made of.

Hope is great, and beautiful.  But ambition is the only way to get an agent.

WeBook

I got a list of TWENTY EIGHT agents off this site, supposedly all repping histfic.

So far, of the maybe two who did, neither one has anything but historical romance in their catalogue.  I'm twenty-one eliminations into this list, with only a solitary prospect.  This prospect is for an agency from whom WeBook listed an agent whose name is, outside their website, essentially nonexistent.  Not an encouraging sign.

Not a recommended resource.



Oh, I'm going to finish the list.  I'm a completist.  Or a neurotic.  Or both, being one and the same.

But I am incredibly disappointed.