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.

The Story Queen's last hurrah

As noted in my previous post, I recoined my WIP The Vagrant. However, prior to the start of the rewrite, I entered the first few chapters and synopsis in the Indiana Romance Writers' Golden Opportunity contest.

I'm delighted to say the entry has been selected as a finalist in the paranormal category!

What happened to The Story Queen?

Michael Danahey's story about the magical girl who changed his life needed a second voice - Rebecca's. I'm rewriting the book as a third person narrative from both points of view. The new story has been recoined The Vagrant.

Why the change? My original novel just didn't fly with literary agents and contest judges. I want to get the darn thing published. Trying to sell a first person point of view novel is a difficult task for a first-time novelist.

More importantly, several wonderful scenes from Rebecca's POV exploded into my head. She kicked the door down to let herself in.

You might think rewriting an entire novel to change the narrative style is tough enough, but that's the least of my worries. Michael's motivation had to be strengthened, particularly early in the story. Occasional passive sentence structure weakened my voice throughout the book. (Find all uses of that in your own work - a great way to flag passive sentences. Then go to work on other losers such as was, were, so, because, there). Finally, I have a frustrating tendency to tell rather than show Michael's emotions and reactions to things. Somehow, I don't have this problem with Rebecca. Go figure.

I started the rewrite two months ago. Despite the fact I've spent almost all my leisure time on the thing, I'm only a third of the way through the book. But that's okay. This has been the most absorbing, enjoyable project I ever worked on. I'm an alchemist, turning tin into gold! All other WIPs are on the back burner until I finish this one.

Special thanks to eharlequin. I used their bulletin board to find a critique partner. After two unsuccessful attempts, I had the great luck of finding a writer whose skill level matches mine. She's a wizard at identifying duplicate words and the queen of showing not telling. When this novel gets published, she'll be the first one I mention in the dedication.

Joe

The Story Queen is a Finalist!

The Heartland Romance Authors RWA chapter has announced The Story Queen as a finalist in the 2009 Show Me the Spark contest.

I was blown away by the scores and judges' comments. I have three fans out there!

So, now what? Well, for one thing, I need to edit the 17th century Salem passages and sharpen the dialect, using my brother's helpful critique as a guide. And the modern-day dialogue has a bit too much teenspeak in certain passages. I'll fix that, too. After that, I'll wait for the final results and hope one of the final judges asks to see the manuscript. I still have some queries to agents floating around out there, too.

Mostly, though, it's time to move on. I've started a new WIP, tentatively named Invulnerable. It'll be another young adult paranormal romance, this time with a comic book theme. I've completed the first chapter (fodder for a few contests next year!) but only have a vague idea where the story will go. That's the fun part. Getting into that zone and letting the story tell itself.

Joe