electric mist

not dead, really

So, I waited for the detailed notes from the friend-with-the-agent. I want you to know I waited patiently and maturely and never even ONCE thought about putting my head in the oven. In fact, I was so entirely mature, that when we were e-mailing (several times) about a completely unrelated item, I did not succumb to the temptation to get her to clarify her thoughts on my chapters, nosirreebob. Because that would be WRONG and WHINY and UNPROFESSIONAL and did I mention WRONG? I would never ever ever be pushy to anyone who was about to give me notes.

Hey. Where are y'all going? Whaddya mean, you want to avoid the lightning strikes? I'm tellin' the truth! I swear!

:::::zap:::::

Well who needed hair anyway?

Okay, so, I maybe sorta asked her at the end of one of the e-mails to clarify, but I swear that was because I was trying to start on the next chapter and I wanted to see what kind of notes she was going to give me.

Now, here's where a weird thing happens, and I recognize that this comes (for me) from my screenwriting background... but I like getting notes from friends. I learn a tremendous amount in a compressed time-frame about stuff that's specific to how I do what I do, and the next jag of writing will be greatly improved as a result. I forget that most novelists do not expect to get big notes or do huge rewrites in the same sort of way a screenwriter expects. (Screenwriters don't even really expect to get to stay on their own projects; when you come from the mindset that you probably won't last and will be fired at any moment, getting notes seems like a lifeline, a way to stay on the project, so you take them, pull them out of the chest or back or wherever they impaled you and you see what you can do to make them work. Novelists? Not so much.) So a novelists GIVING notes is going to be really careful and worried and nice about it.

How cool is that? woo!

Anyway, the original teeny three notes she'd sent were so minor, I felt like it couldn't keep going like that. So she responded with an even lovelier note, and then mentioned the one thing she had questioned, a thing I had already decided needed tweaking anyway, so we were pretty close on that one. And she had to go out-of-town, so I wasn't going to get "detailed" notes until today.

Which I just got.

Detailed.

All 1 page of them. She had such minor notes, I thought maybe I was missing a couple of pages (or ten), but nope, at the bottom of the note, she apologized for being so "nitpicky" but reassured me that she "really, really loved it" and wouldn't have been "so hard" on it if she didn't think it "had a shot."

I'm going to marry that e-mail. I swear, I am so jazzed.

Now, it just so happens, I agree with her notes. They were itsy bitsy things (like forgetting to explain how someone got somewhere specific or mentioning "daylight" when it was too early in the morning for that. Easy to fix. I had my own ephiphanies for some other minor changes, so I'll be working on those this week and sending it back to her for a final polish-through set of notes. At that point, we'll talk about what else I'll need to prep to send to her agent. (I suspect I will need a synopsis. I may have to kill myself, because that's how much I hate writing a sysnopsis.)

The thing is, it's not that I think this is a shoo-in for a sale, or even a big sale. Most books by new authors have very small print-runs, and the advances are low accordingly, and you really have to push hard to get the word out and get at least 60% of those sold or you might not even have a chance at a second book. And most authors don't really break out until they've had four or five books published and have grown their audience, so when I'm talking about all of this, I'm not talking about big money or even medium-sized money, but just getting it published and maybe, possibly, seeing it in a bookstore in the eye-blink of time it will get to be on a shelf. But I gotta start somewhere, right?

So, I'm off to work on the revision. Tomorrow I'm going to work on posting a rant about why teenaged children are guaranteed to drive you COMPLETELY FUCKING BATTY so that you end up at three in the morning babbling like a deranged person and thinking about cancelling Christmas because it's just not going to be the same here ever again (even though you love them and they love you)(supposedly)(but right now, grrrrrrrrrrr). So, all you moms who are battling your kids over putting the PB & J sandwiches into the VCR or bathing the cat in purple KoolAid or feeding their baby brother earthworms and calling it spaghetti? Just wait. They will grow up one day and not be quite 18 and not have a single dime to their name, but they will look you in the eye with all complete seriousness and tell you that they are selling all of their stereo equipment so that they can BUY A MOTORCYCLE, and not just some little dirt bike.... nooooooooooooooooo... that would be too SANE. They are going to buy a bike that is so fast, they have to be strapped on in case it zooms out from under them. So fast, it could break the sound barrier (which you just did when they told you about it in the first place). And they will look at you and explain that this way, they won't have as much to pay in insurance and gas, so aren't they being all MATURE? And you might just say to them, "Of COURSE you're not going to have to spend as much money on insurance or gas because if the first ride doesn't kill you, I WILL." And it will go downhill from there.

Now. Doesn't that peanut-butter filled VCR look great? You're welcome.

Posted by toni at October 11, 2004 05:17 PM