Sturm und Traum

This morning, it was one of those utterly implausible, plausible, detailed dreams. I was shot in a mass shooting - four times. My right flank, side (right in the imaginary tattoo - though I do have one on my left), shoulder, and right below my eye. As happens in dreams, I was initially terrified of death, but my dream kept going. Something about getting to my house (the one I grew up in, but now mortgagetually "mine"; that address seems to have appeared more, through the past year, hmm), getting to my mom, protecting someone else, and failing, failing, failing, failing to get ME to a hospital. At some point I was driving myself, again through the old neighborhood, not apparently to get care.

In the dream, the medical upshot of my injuries was unclear apart from bruises rising up from each bloodless bullet hole. One wound, indeed, couldn't be seen for the bruising and the tattoo. Even in the dream, I dismissed the caliber as a small one, since I could keep moving. For what seemed like hours.

The thing is, the real impact of the dream was that first moment: that fear of death. The shock.

The stunning truth of it.

I'm not special. ANY of us is subject to dying this way, in the United States. Land that I love. Sigh.



2019 has not been the worst year, for me, in recent memory. Yes, we still endure under the increasingly authoritarian and demented regime of the puppet Drumpf. Yes, there is much still to do. But even with that, much is happening, too. HR8 passed last week, and in a time of inured sensibilities, Cohen's testimony was scathing. (His redemption narrative, I could personally live without, but perhaps the benedictions he has received are not positivities best dismissed.)

And but personally, so far this calendar year is kicking 2018's ass.

The time I have taken off (quite a bit, so early in the year) has been for VACATION, not illness and death and mourning. So far.

I have spent time with far-flung friends, and family-by-adoption, people I love, and a new puppy I don't have to train. Mom's doing better, and my house has not fallen down around my ears. Yet.

Three four-day weekends in, I have celebrated a birthday, a bar mitzvah, and a long-distance visit.

2019 ... well, to quote something I said about 2009: it's been better than it had a right to be.


Breathing is good.


Now if I can just avoid being shot.

Specificity, Magic, and Getting Lost in Cover Art

Talking with Colin Smith recently at his blog got me thinking about the subjective effects of good illustration. We were discussing those pieces of art inside a number of books, but I'm struck time and again by the impact a photo cover has on me versus good old fashioned paintings and drawings. Even a photo of a sculpture is not the same.

When I was a kid, you still saw matte painting in movies and television. Science texts sometimes employed artists for renderings of various objects of study - space, in particular, was fertile ground (so to speak ...) for magnificent paintings of detailed scenes, worlds away from our own, exciting phenomena rendered in bold colors and evoking intensity, heat, movement - danger! - beauty ...

For over a century and a half, there has been a lament that photography destroys art, that it is soulless, that it is unworthy of contemplation. Of course, this is untrue.

And yet, there is something about a photograph - not least the limited and terrifyingly recycled library of stock images used these days in book cover design - that lacks, in comparison with the inspiration of a drawn or painted image.

For one, there is the specificity. As a reader, I dislike being instructed by a book's cover with quite the concreteness a photo provides.

Colin and I talked of the ability to get lost in a simple oil pastel drawing or watercolor, and I remembered the million worlds of Richard Scarry as absorbing adventures that could hold me for hours.

There is also the charm of style. There are covers of books I read growing up I still remember. In histfic, ersatz portraits that took real-life inspiration and transformed old paintings into compositions and costumes that ended up more 60s or 70s in their vibe. Historical figures' new pictures paying homage to known portraiture, but presenting attitudes perhaps less formalized than such images. (Seriously, click on the link, Robert Dudley is kind of perfectly conceived - and not even headless!)

Then there are the comparative studies - the 80s cover whose male model I crushed on, versus the 60s extravaganza of Historical Epicness. Even the 80s one isn't just a straight photograph; its sky is a painted vista, its background a world like so many of those matte paintings I knew from Star Trek as a wee little nard.

Even the most specific, detailed painting or drawing is still in some way subjective, and therefore invites inspiration over being a dictation.

Photo book covers, for me, have all the appeal of an over-sentimental film score. Bad scores are didactic - telling me how I must feel, taking away from me the opportunity to come to an emotion on my own with a character or characters.

I believe in the transportive beauty of photography, but I literally cannot THINK of a photographic book cover that has ever taken me to a new world the way other graphic forms can.

And, again, there is the issue of the strangely limited stock of images publishers seem to use. There are websites and fora all over Teh Intarwebs sharing "oh look, this pic again" images of cover after cover after cover - following the extremes of recycling costumes or particular photo shoots, or even single images, again and again and again and again. Some of the costumes used forty years ago in Elizabeth R have had almost embarrassingly over-recycled afterlife in modeling sessions for cover photos for historicals.

Even if you don't know the provenance, where an image has been used but differently cropped or tinted a hundred times before, a photo (so often of the old headless-woman) has only so much power to invite exploration. It feels like photo design covers are by far more prone to anachronism and even inappropriateness. Amongst all those discussions of "this one again" covers online, there are many conversations about how inauthentic design choices are.

A particular floppy red velvet ruff bearing no resemblance to any actual piece of clothing from any period of history ever is notorious, having graced every kind of novel from the Plantagenet to Victorian and back again. Novels taking place in one century sport covers evoking another, or one culture in the world is plundered just to decorate another. Female models wearing makeup abound; everyone must be pretty, after all.

And, not that the covers I've linked are not cosmetically enhanced in their own ways, but at least the living and breathing reality of a girl tottering about in a bad costume and pouting her strong lipstick isn't slamming me out of a story with all the power of ... well, that book I've been reading in which yards and yards of lace have appeared in a time three hundred years before its existence ...

This may be the power of the subjective graphic forms. They don't look entirely "real" to begin with, so their deviations from authenticity are less concrete, less jarring than a photograph's quantified, concrete, recorded verity. There is something banal in the carelessness of recorded anachronism or inappropriateness.

And I know I've couched a lot of my blather in historical fiction, but it is, honestly, in historicals that photography grates *me at least* the most. Because the medium is modern, it feels wrong right at the start, and because so many of the photographs chosen currently seem to have little depth (never mind being threadbare from frequent use), there is no allure.

Like any human attraction, specificity can both amplify and kill it. Specificity - that adorable mole just in front of a lover's ear, or the way they breathe when they first see your face - is magic. But it is also murder - the zipper you can see on the Elizabethan gown, or the Elizabethan gown fitting poorly on the headless model for a Regency romp ...

My Letter to you, Damien Echols

It's hard for me to say for how many years I've followed the story of the West Memphis Three, but fifteen years may be about fair, for paying specific attention and actually seeking reading (and the documentaries) about the tragedy.

For those unfamiliar with the story, I won't link Wikipedia, only provide the simple story. The West Memphis Three were Jessie Misskelly, Damien Echols, and Jason Baldwin. In 1993, amid Satanist panic and public furor, these teenaged boys were convicted of the murder of three young boys in West Memphis Arkansas, in one of the more famous miscarriages of justice in the twentieth century. The details abound, so I will not recount them here, but it is a cruelly fascinating episode, and shameful beyond description.

The most famous, and oldest, of the convicted Three, is Damien Echols. He has become well known both for his past and also for his recovery (I will not use the term rehabilitation), but it is always his writing that clings to me when I look again toward this story. It feels cruel to call it a story, though. Perhaps I should say, look again toward these people.

I wish I had a handful of dust
--Damien Echols

One of the things that always strikes me in the heart about these kids - about this one - is that he reminds me indelibly of two of the three great loves of my life. His melancholy and his coloring are powerfully like Mr. X. And his expression of what a disadvantaged - what a battered - life is like echo sometimes in the communications with my first love, who reappeared almost a year ago, and who still breaks my heart at times (not in the way we once felt, of course).

And, seven years younger than I am, I know he's not a child, but his experience sparks in me something like a maternal outrage. The wish it had been possible to protect him. He was just a boy, barely older than the murder victims themselves really, and so the offense at his wrongful conviction and confinement - on death ROW, no less - is compounded by whatever vestige of protectiveness washing around in my guts.



Humanity is filled with so many who respond so much worse to wounds so much less - or illusory - his is an example of grace.

In recent months, face to face with another kind of grace, reading the link above today was inspirational. And, I will admit it, entertaining. In the sense that art entertains, that great writing does - even as it may elevate, or relieve, or release, or evaporate with no ghost but pleasure had - to understand the experience of solitary, of death row, of imprisonment is ... how to choose a word carefully here ... "stimulating" is accurate, but larded with inaccurate implications ... "educational" is right too, but almost so spare of deeper meaning as to fall short rather than overshoot ...

Enlightening. It lightens the soul to know another soul is not burdened by the worst we can do to one another - or has been set free. And it lightens the world to illuminate corners of it most of us will never see, G-d be praised for it.

Image: Wikipedia

His writing is extraordinary, evocative. The piece linked above reads like engrossing fiction; and the fact that it is not is an outrage. Something beyond poignant, something so much more important.

Certain shade of agony have their own beauty
--Damien Echols

Read his writing at the link. It is life itself.

The Celebratory Plan

So Kristi and I just settled on it.  I get agented and the book sells?  I get me a pair of American Duchess shoes.  Oohh, the Pompadours.  Yum.

It'll take the movie rights selling for six figures before I'll go for the Whoopi Shoes (all of which are fantastic, but the "Chicago" ones I would probably put at the top of my wish list ...) - but, when I do, I'll boogie with you.

Dreaming Is Free

Like most of us, I've always got ideas for "what I could do" - either in the case of if only I had more money or if only I had (or took) some time.  Some dreams are easier than others (I've been without a bathroom downstairs in my home since last July), but the time ones are the real temptors.

Penelope has graduated from her cage - on a day it was a blessing to have something good happen - and I am so happy for her.  I never was comfortable with "crate training" (the euphemism for caging, or the practice just in itself), giving a healthy puppy something like four feet by three to endure all day long.

Her graduation - her freedom (and good behavior) means that the room dominated for two years almost by her cage can now become a room again.  Once my back is better, I'll enjoy quite a bit, taking the desk out of the room currently acting as a rather defunct office, maybe reconfiguring what's already there, and having a beautiful sunny place to set up laptop and so on.  A good place to write.

And free.

The restoration of the downstairs bathroom?  Another day.

But soon I'll be able to fix up that West Wing of mine - and even maybe do a couple fun things in the room my desk will be vacating.

I'm trying hard to distract myself from the more harrowing aspects of what makes life so difficult, in that link above.  Some days, it's all I can do.

But do it, I can.  And I am.

Fantasies, Furbabies, My Job and My *Work*

Work on the new novel, right now, is necessarily organizational rather than creative – what happened when, what bits of research I already have need to go where in the progression?  As much as many writers hate the research (and organizational) phase, and want only to deal with the creative part, I like this part pretty well.  For one, it’s educational, and knowing the subject is naturally fundamental to the creative bits being worthwhile.  For two, once again I’m finding the parallel tracks of my job and this work – as I am learning (oy gevault) a new organization, I seem also to be learning my “new” world, the one I need to build for myself so I can populate it someday with you, my devoted readers.  As has happened in the past, I find the one enhances the other, too – the better I feel about getting my arms around my job, the better goes this process at home.

I’m an admitted pants-er, a seat-of-the-pants writer, whose process took years of learning, creating Ax.  There’s no question I came to understand the value of many things along the way – both in terms of publishing and being a pre-published author, but also about the work itself.  I had no idea what I was doing when I set out to write a historical, so its coming together as well as it has (even as long as the process took) may be a prouder accomplishment even than it will be once I’m agented, sold, shilling this WIP, and working on #3 (or 4 …).

Then again.  Ax will always be my first baby, of course – but, as I am not so precious about my darlings on the granular level of each delicious little word, passage, even scenes and chapters, I’ve never been more precious about one beloved pet than another either, so maybe someday Ax will just be one of my past loves, no more arresting to my attention than a new work in progress – just as Gossy and Pen have me completely emotionally occupied, now that Sweet Siddy La, Gert, Gossy, and Byshe are gone.  As each pet is encompassing, I imagine, each work will be.  But, of course, the books will always be living – indeed, “more” so as they come to life for other people, though my own work will be done by the time that can occur.

I look forward to finding out how that works, emotionally … and professionally.  (Far be it from me to fantasize about the financial benefits, though it’s not beyond me to have *considerations* …)

This is an exciting time.  As an author, and at work too.  Now, I must run and do some more querying – and perhaps query researching.

Collection

History, hirsute-ory, and The Beards of Gravitas (which, Dave Barry style, would totally make a great name for a band).  A highly entertaining and informative post about beards, from A. L. Berridge.

Leila and the Dream Smashers (also a great band name) - a post about all those wonderful and supportive people who "help" others by deconstructing any hope of success ... not just for writers, but certainly a phenomenon most of us have probably run into.  Ahh, the useful negativity of ignorance.

Beloved Ex (a.k.a. The Nordic G-d) and I were emailing this week, and I hope he takes a look at this blog and finds this link.  A marvelous variety, and absolute beauty - vintage images of Norway.  Courtesy, once again, The Passion of Former Days.

Given my penchant for sword nerdlery, I had to love Anthony Riches' latest swordid post.  Yay!

It's likely that anyone reading much around here has seen Thomas Rowlandson's work at some point - though, perhaps, I don't have enough U. K. readers to know many of them will see this exhibit of Rowlandson's work; oddly, first collected by one of his most visible targets, the Prince Regent (George IV).  Still worth a good look - for those interested in the humor, in the politics, in the technique and the art ...  History Extra has collected a good many images for the post linked above, clickable for a look at the detail.

Greed.  War.  Looting.  And the right of conquest.  *Shudder*  I don't want to comment on this piece, except to note that it is an intriguing contemporary story reaching back to WWII and into many pockets, personal and cultural.  As always, The History Blog is written very well.  Also:  sigh.

Finally, HB also has a good piece on the opening of that sarcophagus at Lincoln, which dates to the century pre-Conquest.

YA Reading ... and Reading ... and Reading

Sixteen years ago next week, apparently, was the debut of the first book in the Harry Potter series.  I remember the first time I heard of it, from a friend of mine with an advanced degree and a penchant for guilty pleasures in the Melrose Place, Buffy, and - obviously - Potter vein.  I remember, too, hearing Diane Sawyer tell the world that reading was in again thanks to the boy wizard.  The book was a phenomenon many of its target audience may not now remember, nor have comprehended at the time.

I remember, more than anything else, being a bit bewildered as to why what I categorized in my mind as a "children's book" (the label YA was not yet the hot trend it's been ever since; many of us were barely aware that such a genre/category as "young adult" lit existed) was such a sensation.  Having had it recommended to me was a little bemusing as well; there's really nothing in my character that points to much interest in preteen boys' adventures in magic-land.  I wasn't offended, merely perplexed at the idea.

It's not something one discusses these days, YA having become the market maker that it is ... but I've never "gotten" why it has come to dominate the market as it now does.  Intellectually, sure, I can easily see that YA is easy reading, and the genre is well suited to the trends of urban fantasy and the genres selling the most right now.  Its accessibility is key, and I've also been told by more than one person that it's nice to get a break from sex in books.

This last bit perplexes me, too, admittedly.

After the death of Parke Godwin this week, I spent a little while after work today perusing his works at Amazon (it's an easy tool, even if Amazon is a terrifying market behemoth) and then took a look at Donald Harington as well.  What struck me was that, in Harington's reviews in particular, the negatives had a very strong tendency to judge his books badly because of the sex.

Harington takes hillbilly stereotypes and turns them into storytelling and characters.  So one finds an awful lot of incest - consensual and non - a good deal of very youthful canoodling, and not an incidental amount of rape.  Of course (and there's a whole screed in this problem, but I will leave it unsaid for now) rape scenes are called "sex" scenes by reviewers nursed on our seriously deranged culture.

But what interested me is how viscerally people were responding to the sex.

When Fifty Shades is the other bestseller of the moment (and is written, as far as I can tell, with a good deal *less* sophistication than the YA series leading the rest of the market these days).

We have ... an interesting interplay, in the US market anyway, right now where Terrifying yet Titillating sex is concerned.  People seem to hate it, react against it powerfully, find an entire book ruined by it - when it's rarely the whole point.  And then books whose whole points *are* the sex scenes (again, I've never heard anyone accusing the Fifties of being good literature) sell like steaming hotcakes all over the place.


***


NPR, ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

The upshot of all this is that even the adult novels selling right now seem to have become less sophisticated.

Which actually brings me (you thought this was post enough? I'm just getting started) to the thesis of this post, which is that readership nationally has devolved.  In schools, "the classics" (again, deconstructing this is another post, but don't take it as read I think this generic label is necessarily a be-all) have steadily given ground for about 25 years to more accessible, and less complex, reading.

As with everything else we do these days, Americans don't go in much for balance in the written word.  There is a quote in the NPR story linked here:  "Every single person in the class said, 'I don't like realism, I don't like historical fiction. What I like is fantasy, science fiction, horror and fairy tales.'"

Now, most of us know that all of the latter genres mentioned as likable are represented in some of the most sophisticated echelons of our literary heritage.  But the current market has a tendency to gravitate to these genres in YA, and the market has for all of the sixteen years since Potter been stalking YA properties for the Next Big Potter (or Twilight, or Hunger Games, and so on).

In a sense ... the bestseller lists are not much about readers and books, but about product and profit.  We all know this, too, but we don't think a lot about its ramifications.  And the YA-ification of our reading habits is beginning to tell on us, apparently.

I may not be able to lead a literature symposium, but I can at least, thanks to the education I was fortunate to partake of, competently participate in a discussion of Hemingway, Shakespeare, the greater themes and plots through the history of literature, and even manage to avoid appearing an utter dunderhead when it comes to literature beyond (gasp) those Great Classics of Western lit.  I have a little exposure to ancient storytelling beyond my heritage, I have enormous respect for Asian storytelling I adore but would be terrified to try to actually take on.  I can function intellectually precisely because, while we did get to read "accessible" literature when I was young (which I think is an extremely good thing) it was often in the form of a kind of dessert, toward the end of a term or a school year, when we'd been working pretty hard on the sorts of reading which presents greater challenges.

Reading is entertainment, but its value as a literal exercise, a mental challenge, seems to have gone out of vogue.

Again, I have been biting my lip for the past decade and a half - and particularly since trying to make an "author platform" out of this blog - about what I must admit to be a contrarianism about YA.  It isn't politic, if one wants to be a published author (even if not in the Hot Genre du jour) to go around dissing what *is* hot.  It isn't clever to sneer at what's popular, nor at particular authors/works, either.  And it isn't smart to go to a cocktail party and give everybody the finger.  What if I queried an agent who loves YA but also does happen to do straight historical fiction?

It also just isn't nice to be nasty about something just because you don't get it, and don't want to.  Okay, I can't find any part of myself that can understand the fascination for a kid in a magic school.  (Yes, I know that is incredibly reductive - our first impulses on buying/reading anything tend to be so.)  I also don't begrudge my PhD pal for loving the kid, nor anyone else out of the millions of readers.  Reading is entertainment.

I just wonder whether this sixteen year trend will ever turn again.  I'm old enough to be skeptical any market maker is forever.

Whatever the trends - and I don't think I ever will write to them - books like The Ax and the Vase still have a place.  They have, as long as literature and publishing have been in anything like the forms we recognize today, since Walter Scott's romantic adventures in historical fiction, and there are plentiful authors keeping histfic not merely alive, but fascinating.  To intellectually mature readers of whatever age.

The fantasy I have about Ax's "place" in this world remains the same.  It is:  on that shelf at some old relative's house, where a kid, thirty years from now, is going to find it and pull it down, some boring summer day.  And they will love it for the rest of their life.


I've been that kid.  I know that kid's still alive.  I know that kid doesn't need to be talked down to, that the story of Clovis will be enough.

I can't wait for that kid to stumble across him, and dog-ear him to death, till something is on fire inside.

Agents

Every year, I get a little less frothy about MEETING AGENTS at the JRW conference, but every year it's easy to watch other attendees who are almost in awe just being in the presence of anyone they think might "make" them.  Everyone is so lovely, but the more I watch the more I see how deeply generous agents kind of have to be, in the quasi-magical world of publishing.  These people love to read in a pretty rare way - and the discipline it must require to parlay that into a career, in which some days must be spent enduring page after page after query after hope of hopeless writing, or writing at least mismatched to their catalogues, kind of floors me.  To love something enough to endure really bad writing on a not at all infrequent dosage schedule - to love it enough to encounter GOOD writing, and have to say no - to love it enough to immerse their whole lives in reading, to a proportion most of us don't even dream of indulging - that's a pretty massive saturation.

And they do this because they want to make dreams come true.  They want to sell, they want to advocate.

One of the things I find in common, among many of the agents I have met or just seen, is a kind of pained expansiveness.  These are people who have to make a living rejecting dreams - just so they can fulfill a few.  Saying no to excruciatingly formed personal memoirs, saying no to good writing when it's not the right time, or it's not the right fit, saying no to *people* they like, whose work just isn't quite ready.  Saying no just because this week yes has already been said to its limit.

There are poker faces and almost overly kind faces, but even if only for a moment, it's not unusual to see an agent express at least just a moment of the conflict this expedient requires.

What Dreams May Come ...

I shared my dorky fantasy at Historical Fiction Online, and got this in response:

Originally Posted by DianeL  

My great fantasy as a writer is that my work will be the dusty book some kid picks up out of boredom when he's spending a summer at some horrid old great aunt's house with nothing to do. I know the dread condition of juvenile boredom has been electronically outlawed and (theoretically) obliterated by the implantation of gaming systems into every single child's hands 24/7 since the 1990s ... but all the better for *dreaming* ...  

Originally Posted by LoveHistory

The setting: post-apocalypse. The time: 2500 AD (or CE if you want to get PC). The scene: an attic in an Indiana farmhouse.
A young boy (or girl, doesn't matter which really) is rummaging through poly-carbon storage cubes in an attempt to find something to do. Numerous small rectangular devices which no longer work in a world sans-electricity have been discarded after use as target practice. At the bottom of one cube is a rectangle of paper and ink. An ancient amusement device of unknown origin. Flipping open the archaic cover flap, the child reads the following words: this book is a work of fiction. A book! Granny used to tell stories about these things, but he/she never believed they existed. Here is proof. Now to see what magical lure they used to hold, and test whether that value could still exist in the year 2500.

Hee.

Awesome.  (It's always a boy in my head, though.  Don't know why, I guess I'm just being gender egalitarian - or maybe it's because A&V itself is told from the male POV.)

My Conference

It's coming!  New digs this year; I'll be very interested in this.  And new timing; it used to be the sessions began Friday and went through Saturday, but this year it'll be Saturday/Sunday.  I'm excited, and very intrigued by some of the opportunities these changes may bring!

Worse Than a Nightmare

Dad walked into a dream this morning, to be with us at a bad time. My body seized up, stopped breathing, and I awoke. G-d damn it.

Guitarists

One of the fora I belong to has a lively thread right now, discussing authors' expectations - specifically, how it feels for a writer seeing scathingly negative user reviews at Amazon and the like.

I've made a point of developing a process callus; a good level of tolerance for criticism on a piece I am working on.  I also have a sort of dividing line, I think - between actual critique and what I think of as "the guitarist at the back of the bar" (someone smarming about perceived shortcomings, but whose commentary has less meaning than the comments of those who put thought into criticism).  The Guitarist is the person watching a band on stage, sneering how much better she or he could do than those performing.  The Guitarist is speaking more for the value of what he or she has to say than in response to what's really happening live up front.  The Guitarist, in terms of literary criticism, is the person reading who "hates" a work because they disagree with choices an author makes, rather than because it's poor storytelling or just not compelling for one reason or other.  The Guitarist is the person most likely to come up with cruelty, ugliness, and insult in critique.

The Guitarist is an element I expect to crop up once I am published, but *hope* will not upset me much.  Because, very often, Guitarists represent the power of backlash against something particularly large, successful, or culturally prominent ... it's entirely possible I won't hear a lot of their thrumming.  Successful as I expect to be, I'm not under any illusions that J. K. Rowling need ever step aside to make room for my publishing accomplishments.

Actual criticism, however, fascinates me.

The critic is someone who really reads, and who develops sincere - and not necessarily emotionally-based - opinions.  The critic is someone who may well not like my work - but will be able to say that this is because the subject matter didn't engage them, or because the language was overwrought for their taste, or perhaps because the choices I made didn't work - and here's why.  This isn't someone who'll be crowing about what a hack I am, nor insulting me personally for the temerity of writing my novel at all.

The scary thing is that the critic is no one identity.

As I have learned that "historical fiction" has no single set definition - and that an agent claiming to rep it isn't necessarily the agent for me - so it is true that a reader who likes histfic, even military or religious or royal histfic, isn't necessarily going to like my work.  Even those who enjoy authors and works I consider similar enough to my own that I've used them in my proto-marketing may not glom to my stuff for one reason or another.  I think people who watch Game of Thrones might like The Ax and the Vase - but the Venn diagram illustrating both subsets and any shared audience is never going to come out to a zero sum.

It becomes necessary at some point to honestly realize, and accept, the inevitability that some people who read Ax will dislike it.  The question, then, is how much does that matter?  I'm not the sort for whom imperviousness to opinion is strong enough I'll be able to just sniff, dismiss, and say "I've sold x-number-of-thousands of copies" and tell critics and myself that it doesn't matter.  There are times my state of still being in potential - as opposed to having experienced being published ... being *seen* ... has clear advantages to me.  The future can still be so many things.  I can still hear my own chords, not that Guitarist at the back of the bar.  So far, there's no heckling and jeering to be hurt by, worried about.

I'm still nearly alone with my love of the work I was somehow able to produce.  It's recognizeable how precious a time, in some ways, this is.



At the end of the day, though ... the point of picking up the instrument is to play.  Is to go out there.  Is to present myself to everyone - Guitarists and all.

I may be nervous about that.  But it doesn't make me want to quit.

Wow

I just pulled up to an agency on my list with the most intensely well-written and inviting copy I have seen YET on any site in all of the research I have done so far.  And this agency, yes, does histfic - and reps some works I would absolutely WIGGLE to get in alongside.

It can be an incredibly hard job, just finding an agent at all who does my genre, or does my particular type of my genre, or who is open-minded, seems intelligent, and manages a diverse catalogue.  This place is exceptionally intriguing.  Not by dint of their obvious success.  But because it is so obvious how they should have become so.

The Rs Have It

Maybe it's the process of contemporary querying, but these numbers seem to me more comically low than intimidatingly *high*.  I've queried more agents, both in in-person meetings and in correspondence, than most of these apparent over-a-lifetime sbumissions add up to.  And I am good - with a great story - no question.  I am acquainted with plenty of authors, too - and, these days, as far as I can tell, querying 100 or 200 agents is in no way overdoing it.  The guy who only managed 160 in his lifetime, and is considered the most-rejected author by this list, must have measured the term "rejection" by a different standard than I understand.  Were these rejections from agents, or the post-agenting-process rejections by PUBLISHING houses?

That simply has to be it.  Because the rejections from agents list, as far as I can tell, should never - ever - stop at TWENTY.  Holy smokes, if I'd been agented twenty queries in ... ?  I'd consider myself a veritable wirting goddess of some sort.


***

Also ... not for nothing, but who actually has the luxury to gnash their teeth like this at every rejection?  No, I mean seriously.  Nobody loves it - but is it actually the case that there are people with time for histrionics such as those described here?

I don't know, maybe I am simply not human enough, that I don't consider my work to be inviolable by other people's opinions.  It's bewilderng to consider a mindset that affords rejection such a high allowance for reaction.  Sure - there are those who would think my attitude that every R is "one step closer to success" to be insufferably Pollyanna, or unrealistic, or maybe requiring too much sanguinity - but anyone who knows me is aware I am hardly a cockeyed, grinning fool when it comes to my writing (or anything else).  I refuse to let the bastards get me DOWN.  But that doesn't make me a delusional, unable to see the real lack of value in my talents.  I just can't understand expending much energy on non-starters.  There are so many options available to me (*and* to agents) I don't think I can approach this Highlander-style, and decide "there can be only one" ... and cry and wail, when that "one" doesn't like me back ...

Something A Writer Does

In between all this work I do related to writing, every now and then I actually work creatively - and, you know, *write* things.  Other than this blog.  Yesterday, I enjoyed adding a couple of character descriptions to the WIP.  There is a wonderful difference between the creative effort and the labor (birth entendre intended) of getting a completed story onto the market.  Like pretty much any author, I prefer the former by far.

My career has made the latter - or perhaps has made me - a straighforward job of organizing.  It's well suited to my skills, and I like this sort of work ... yet, of late, I feel I do it constantly.  Through nine hour days, four days a week, I am paid for my professional effort - and then I come home, and spend at least a couple hours every night, lately, doing more of much the same.  This will pay too, of course - but the return is definitely deferred.

There's more than one reason I feel like Jacob, laboring seven years for Laban, only to sign on for more labor to get to what I really want.


Going back to the point of all this - going back to simply creating - is an entertainment for me.  It feels less like "work" to me, by far, than all this time querying has been.  I have as much fun in storytelling as I hope my readers will have in going along for this ride.

"What DO Klingons Dream About?"

"Things that would send cold chills down your spine ... and wake you in the middle of the night.  It is better you do not know."  Hilarious moment's pause.  Massive tonal shift.  "'Scuse me."



I adore Michael Dorn.

Lists and Dreams

The priest preached this morning about Jacob's Ladder, and said that dreams might still - even with modern theories of psychology, and dream interpretation, and physiology - be gifts from G-d.  I've never had a dream such as she described, which had me waking rested and stronger.

But just now I did have a dream about an agent coming to this blog and, unqueried, contacting me because they were so interested in my work.

Heh.  I think I know where that one came from.



In other news ... that resource I am working through now, to create a new list, so far has yielded something like fifty names - and I am less than halfway through cherry-picking it.  I don't know whether to be daunted or pleased.

I could almost hope this could be the last list I will have to put together and research.  Good grief, this will take a while ...

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.

Dreamy

I've had TONS of dreams this weekend; bringing me to realize how few I seem to have had that I remember for a good while now. None of it's been bad, mostly just disconcertingly weird.

I know the signifcance they have in my real life - I used to see them all the time during the exquisitely beautiful morning walks into my exhaustingly ill-fitting previous job - but ...

What is the significance of dreaming you're hugging a Great Blue Heron ... ?



I *said* they were just strange.