Where is he?

Has almost a year gone by since I posted anything to this blog? Clearly I'm not one for writing diaries.

I'm still working on my new novel, A Different Place. Here's the logline: After triggering the birth of a duplicate world, a misguided angel hopes to protect its messiah by manipulating an American couple into a time-bending love affair.

With luck, I might finish the book in June 2011.

Decisions, decisions

The Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold contest requires entrants to select from a list of five possible genres. The options are Romance, Speculative Fiction, Mystery, Mainstream and Action/Thriller.

The contest also requires identification of a subgenre. If I go with Romance as my broad genre, I can choose between paranormal, time travel or fantasy as the sub-genre. On the other hand, if I choose Speculative, I can pick either fantasy or supernatural.

Let's look at sub-genre first. Two of the major characters in my book are a witch and a sorcerer. Neither has what I would consider a super power. For the most part, they're skilled illusionists and hypnotists. Selection of paranormal or supernatural will pit my book against novels whose characters have far more interesting powers. I'm not sure that's the best fit.

Time travel is a major element of my story. However, the majority of the book takes place in the modern era. I suspect most time travel stories take place either in the past or the future for the most part. Therefore, I'm not comfortable selecting this sub-genre, either.

Finally, we have fantasy. My book introduces a vast hallucinatory universe. This is the element that makes my novel unique.

I'm going with fantasy as my sub-genre.

Now, I have to choose between Romance and Speculative. I've entered about eight Romance Writers of America contests and done well in them. I want to see how my book measures up in a different environment, so I'll be entering the book as speculative fiction and hoping for the best.

Agent pitch post mortem

Around the end of April, I began rewriting and praciticing my agent pitch endlessly. I got it down to a couple hundred words and recited it so many times, it will be stuck in my head forever. However, I never used a word of it.

When my timeslot came up, I sat down with the agent and told him I had completed The Vagrant, a 90,000 word paranormal romance. He then asked about my paranormal element. I told him the story involves time travel and dreams. That made him slump in his chair! For a few very good reasons, time travel and dreams aren't popular themes among agents. However, when I got into the particulars of my vision, he shot back up. My idea is unique, and that's the key, particularly for time travel. He asked for a partial before I told him anything about the story.

I really like this agent and hoped I'd perk his interest. I also heard later that he didn't request many partials that day. So, YAY!

Agent pitch

I'm pitching my novel to an agent during the WisRWA annual conference in May. Here's my draft so far:

The Vagrant is a 90,000 word paranormal romance for young adults. The story is set in Modern-day America with a few flashbacks to earlier times. Throw Rip Van Winkle and Alice in Wonderland into a witch's cauldron, stir them up, and you might conjure this tale.

Rebecca, a young Salem witch, escapes a centuries-long slumber and hooks up with an eighteen-year-old boy named Michael. Each has been longing for a sense of purpose and finds it in the other, but their goals conflict. The boy wants to be Rebecca's white knight. He follows a haunted path through magic mirrors and weird illusions trying to free the girl from her exile in the hallucinatory World of Mortal Dreams -- unaware she doesn't want to be rescued.

Rebecca believes she's linked to Michael by prophecy and hopes to use her netherworld as a time capsule to pull him two centuries forward. He'll lead mankind from the edge of darkness and she'll be the pure witch standing by his side, but she can't tell him that. The Witch's code precludes the girl from revealing anything about her quest except through riddles, illusions and dreams.

Rebecca's sworn secrecy becomes all the more difficult when she and the boy fall in love. The ability to keep slipping out of exile and visit him is diminishing fast. She'll soon lose Michael if he doesn't figure things out. But if she relents, ignores the Code and tells him everything, she can't possibly be the pure witch described in the prophecy, and he might not be the messiah.

On New Years resolutions, contests and writer's block

Reading fifty-two novels in fifty-two weeks requires a lot more commitment than I imagined. I've had to give up some TV shows. That's a good thing, right? Anyway, I'm midway through novel #5, and the year isn't four weeks old yet, so yay!

Books read: The Lay of the Land, One Second After, The Financial Lives of the Poets, and The Zero.

Now reading: Then We Came to the End (This is a wonderful book. Anyone who enjoys watching The Office will love it)

I've been posting reviews on Amazon.com and Goodreads.com after finishing each book.

My own little novel, The Vagrant has been picked as a finalist in the Silicon Valley RWA chapter's Gotcha contest. This contest is a bit unusual in that none of the four finalists from each category (I entered paranormal) will be selected as a winner. Each of us has already won by being picked, and we'll each receive a critique from the final judge. In the past, about half of the finalists have received manuscript requests as well. I sure hope to be a lucky one. The final judge is the editor for an independent publishing house about an hour down the road from me.

Ever since completing The Vagrant, I've been plagued by writer's block. A couple of my online friends have explained this to be a form of grieving. After spending so much time with the wonderful characters in my novel, it's hard for me to let them go. I did start a new YA paranormal and get three chapters into it, but I couldn't go any farther. I became fixated with the misguided belief that I'm too old to write a sixteen-year-old's point of view, and YA is no longer the right genre for me.

I tried restarting my new story using adults as protagonists. However, I stalled again when I realized my voice isn't anywhere as good as those of the contemporary adult writers whose novels I've been reading lately.

Finally, I decided to stop worrying about the strength of my voice and just write my own unique novel in my own unique way. I'm going to blend the two story openings by using multiple points of view - two adults and two teenagers.

And today I wrote 300 words.

Besides reading all of those novels and writing one of my own, I made a New Year's resolution to ride 1,000 miles on my bicycle this year. Sadly, the weather has been too cold and icy to get started. When does spring start? I'm ready!

New Years Resolutions

New Years resolutions have always struck me as unsustainable, behavior-changing promises. They might see the light of day, or perhaps a week, but certainly no longer than that. Few of us can escape from ourselves.

Yet suppose we resolve to do things that aren't behavior-changing? Suppose we identify certain positive activites in our lives and simply resolve to engage in these activities more often -- much more often -- in fact, so often that few people in the entire country might match the combination of feats we plan?

I could do that. Yeah.

So here's my list. Three simple things. If I can accomplish these three things in combination, I'll be unique:

WRITING - Write a novel
I've just begun the first draft of my new novel, Invulnerable. I resolve to complete this novel in 2010.

READING - Read a ton
I received a Kindle as a Christmas gift and found I can now read in bed without getting sleepy. I resolve to read one book per week for a total of fifty-two books in 2010.

Exercise - Wear out my bicycle
Here's the really hard one. I live in Wisconsin where we're lucky to have 200 good, bicycle-riding days in a year. I resolve to ride five miles on each of those days for a total of 1,000 miles in 2010.

What's your list?

Moving on

I put the finishing touches on The Vagrant and sent it off it to the Golden Heart contest, followed up with queries to a half dozen agents and publishers, watched some movies, daydreamed, moped, critiqued a chapter for my partner, moped some more, got bored and started toying with ideas for my next novel.

There's the ghost story I think about whenever wondering what to write. And the found a briefcase full of money story. Sadly, Cormac McCarthy raised the bar for that one.

Or a zombie story . . . yeah, like the world needs another one of those.

Then it hit me. A sad, gnawing, abandoned-my-kitten guilt. I spent 10,000 words last spring beginning a story about a brother and sister, a leprechaun, a mysterious girl from another dimension and an angel. They've been frozen in the ether, waiting for me to bring them back to life.

The name of the story is Invulnerable, and I'll be working on it for a good long while.