Lots of people have been googling costumes for Halloween, of course, but it sort of worries me that a large number of people have landed on this entry about the girl who was going to shave (completely) and go as a roll of duct tape. The employee in question lost track of the date that night (I suggested that she'd had to go to the bathroom and couldn't reassemble her costume from the sheer pain removing it had caused). Weeks later, he ran into her and she'd been out of school due to, ahem, severe rash. I'm not sure if I blogged about that at the time, but geez, you'd think somone in college would have been able to predict the consequences.
For laughs, here's the Halloween costume entry I wrote about a briliant idea I'd had when Luke was a kid. And if you didn't read my ghost story, that's there for your perusal.
(For my regular readers, sorry for the repeats. Fresh insanity tomorrow.)
Jake (19) recently got accepted into LSU's Fireman Training Progam -- a very tough, thorough rookie training class. It's run very well (firefighters from all over the state and all of the chemical plants train there), and it's tough to get accepted into the program, but he did it. It's also run very much like a military organization, with rules, etc., and there seems to be great respect from the trainees for their teachers / Chief. There's a motto on a large sign when you're driving into or out of the barracks, which says, "Your job is walking into HELL. Our job is to make sure you walk back out."
I'm really proud of Jake, and I only had one slight concern about him in this program, and it's probably not what you're thinking (fire). (Well, okay, scared of that, too, but his brother constantly sets himself on fire by accident, so I'll be glad at least one of them knows how to put him out.) Anyway, my biggest concern for Jake was: will he wake up every morning on time? Because these people don't fool around, you have to be up and dressed in complete uniform and ready to go exactly when they say. Unfortunately, Jake could sleep through a freight train running down the middle of his bedroom. He has slept through hurricanes, his brother throwing things at him, his dad pouring ice water on him, various people stepping over and / or on him. My only hope was that, hey, this is at a firehouse and they have a loud alarm, right? Surely that would wake him up.
Every so often I'll see him for a few minutes and get a status report. The majority of the time, they're super positive and he's all lit up, excited. Happy. It's amazing to see him happy. Tonight, though, when he stopped by here for a few minutes, we were talking and he started to reach for something and said, "Ow," just for extending his arm too fast.
I said, "What's wrong?"
"I, um, had to do a bunch of push ups."
(The Chief will give them 80 push ups if they step foot over the threshold of the barracks without one piece of their gear on properly. It's important that they learn they absolutely must do everything in order, consistently, especially when putting on their safety equipment.)
"How many push ups did you have to do?"
He lowered his head, looking a little sheepish. "600."
"Good grief! What did you forget to put on this morning?"
"Well, I forgot my cap.... and my helmet... and my shoes... and I'm not entirely sure I had my pants on."
I cracked up. "What happened?"
"I just couldn't fall asleep last night, and by the time I did, I had one hour's sleep before having to get up. I just sort of stumbled out the door and stood in formation. I'm hoping I had my boxers on. My friend told me later that he kept trying to stop me and that I was talking to him and responding, but I don't remember a thing. I asked him how bad was I, and all he could do was laugh and say, 'Let's just say you weren't anywhere near regulation.'"
(The thing that keeps this story funny and not sad is that this child has passed many a drug tests -- the thorough kind -- to get into the plants and stuff where we have jobs. Thank goodness he's always walked away from that temptation. He just severed two friendships because they'd started getting into drugs and he knows he couldn't have a career as a firefighter if he even has one thin on his record, so he's put himself out of harm's way. An impressive thing for a 19 year-old to do when there's usually so much peer pressure to do otherwise.)
The Chief made him go lie back down for a couple of hours, and then after that, made him get up and do 350 of the original 600 push ups. Which Jake did, to his credit.
But I'll bet you he'll remember his gear a lot better next time.
Assuming he wakes up.
A comment which may or may not have been uttered by someone I know:
"You know what's really crappy and annoying? Exercising and dieting and being all excited because the blue jeans you're currently wearing are finally loose and you've lost about ten pounds, and then you have to get dressed for something fancy and you go to your closet and look around for what baggy thing you own that will look the least craptastic on you, and you put it on and the sucker fits... because you have now lost down into your fattest dress clothes. After all that work."
"How much do I want to bet there's not a single drop of anything chocolate left in the house after that discovery."
"Damn straight."
Yesterday I had to fax something to the General Contractor (GC) at the business location where we were doing some work. He read the business' fax number to me off their letterhead.
I go to fax this. This is a no brainer, right?
The fax rings, and a woman answers the fax line, and I can hear her say (over my fax machine) "a company name" different than the one I thought I was faxing. She hangs up the phone as soon as she hears the fax tone and, of course, the fax doesn't go through.
I call the GC back to make sure I wrote the number down correctly. I certainly didn't want to keep faxing someone's regular line and driving them nuts. But nope, he assures me the number I'm reading back to him is the correct number.
So, I try again, being careful to double and then triple check what I've dialed. Same woman answsers, the company name she's saying is still not the company I'm supposed to be faxing.
By this time, I've spent ten minutes on something that should have taken two.
I call the fax number (since she's answering it) and sure enough, she answers again with the wrong company name. I explain to her who I am and who I'm trying to reach, and she says, "Oh, that's us. This is the fax line."
I comment that she was answering the phone with a different company name.
"That's where I used to work," she says. "I sometimes forget and answer wrong. But the fax line should be working. Maybe my boss is on the DSL and it's keeping the fax from going through."
"The fax line is working because we're talking on it."
"Oh," she says. "Then I don't understand why you're having a problem."
"Because you answered it and hung up."
Now, there are some places where they'll answer the phone and hear the fax tone and then they'll hang up and the fax will take over. I don't know if that's the kind of set up she has or not, so I ask, and she says, "No, usually the fax just goes through. Maybe you dialed the wrong number."
We are, still, talking ON the fax line. I point this out to her. Her next response was, "Oh, well then maybe you should just dial the number part without the area code."
"No," I say, "aside from the fact that it's long distance and I have to dial the area code, remember -- we're talking on the line right now."
"Well maybe that's why your fax won't go through, then."
:::::: toni contemplates a mercy killing :::::::
"I'm going to hang up with you," I say, "and dial the fax again, okay?"
"Okay."
I do. Right then. She answers the fax line again, then hangs up and doesn't forward it.
I find her regular number and call it, and say, "I'm the one who just tried to fax you (again), and you answered the fax line (again)."
"Yeah," she says, "I wanted to make sure it was working. Did your fax go through?"
"Um, no, because you answered the line and then hung up."
"Maybe you dialed the wrong number."
"I'm sure it's the right number, since you answered it."
"You're sure it was me?"
"Yes. It was you. Quit answering the fax line."
"Oh. But how will I know if it's working?"
"The fax will go through."
"Okay. If you say so," she says, very suspicious.
We hang up and I dial again, and then she says, "Hello (wrong company name again)." Then I hear, "Oops! I guess I wasn't supposed to answer that this time."
And she hangs up. And doesn't forward the fax.
I try again. She answers the fax line again.
I call her back on the other line. (She still answers the wrong company name.) I remind her who I am (because at this point, I'm not holding out any hope that anything is registering), and say, "If you answer that fax line again? I'm going to drive over there and rip your arms off your body. Leave the freaking fax line alone."
She says, (I swear), "I still don't think you're dialing the right number. It's not my fault if you're dialing the wrong number."
I read the fax number off to her to demonstrate that I am, indeed, faxing the right number. She agrees that's the fax number, then says, "So, that was you trying to fax just then?"
::::::::: toni's head explodes :::::::::::::
"Yes. Stay on this phone with me. I'm going to dial the fax line. It's going to ring. DON'T TOUCH IT."
So I dial the fax while she's on the phone, and we hear the phone ringing, and she says, "Just a minute, my other line's ringing," and she sets that phone down (doesn't put me on hold) and now I can hear in stereo (through that phone AND the fax machine) how she answers the fax line again with the wrong company name.
She came back to my line and said, "I don't know why that line keeps ringing and then nothing happens."
I ask to speak to her boss, and when he answers, I explain, "She keeps answering the fax line. Are y'all supposed to answer the fax line and then forward it?"
"Nope," he says. "Are you sure you're dialing the right number?"
How the employees there haven't gone postal is a complete mystery to me.
Ten minutes later, I finally manage to fax them once I've convinced him I'm dialing the right number. This entire process took forty-five minutes. I could have damned near driven there and hand delivered the paperwork.
Makes me wish there was a way to sort of pre-qualify people... you know, like you can call someone and by popular vote, a recording comes on their line as a warning, "Please be advised that the person you are calling has been voted Too Stupid To Live by 98% of the people who have called this number. Please continue the call at your own risk or dial 9 to vote for a mercy killing."
Alison Gaylin, over on the First Offenders' Blog wrote in that linked entry about how easy it is to slip into thinking negatively whenever there's a gap of time between when she's handed something in... and is waiting for that response. Given the short amount of time, she was a little self-deprecating about how anxious she'd ended up feeling, but I completely empathize.
I once drove over to hand a friend a script, drove home (all five minutes of drive time), and then sat. And waited. Did I go do something useful? Feed the kids? Prevent the dog from destroying the living room? Put out the bread burning in the oven? Nope. Well, I ended up doing the latter, but it was more inadvertent because I was opening it to consider how quick would death-by-electric-oven be, because the waiting was horrendous. I was going nuts, worried about what she thought.
It had been, maybe, twenty minutes.
I'd like to say I'm much better now.
I'd be lying.
The only difference is that now, I'm aware that it's beyond a little nutty to expect anything back from anyone who reads it that fast because, now brace yourselvs, THE WORLD DOESN'T REVOLVE AROUND ME. I know, freaky, huh? Are you going to be okay? Do you need a drink of water? I'll wait....
Back? Still feeling fuzzy? I know, it's really shocking news, and I gotta tell you, I'm a bit flabbergasted, too, but there you go.
My friends, bless them, have not conspired to stab me over this annoying paranoia and have, instead, been very kind and read as quickly as they can. They may be hiring Guido for this next round, though, when I give them the book to proofread for me (next month), since a book is far more to read than a script, and I'll be sitting there, pressing my face on their windows, tapping "Open, open, open," on their IM boxes or e-mails. Luckily, I run faster than most of them.
Of course, I'm not entirely sure I can run faster than Guido, so maybe I'll find something to occupy my time while I'm waiting.
Other than oven cleaning. Wouldn't want to get too tempted there.
I didn't realize so many people were coming into my site looking for the Dancing Drunk video. (I learned it when I switched to statcounter.com, a much better tracker of web stats). Anyway, the video is actually a group of actors from the show Reno 911 Kids (according to one of the comments on that old entry) and it can be found:
At 8:20 this morning, I wrote "The End" on the rough draft of the book. This is after staying up all night because the last section was flowing in a way I hadn't ever experienced before.
The feeling of finishing is... strange. After sleeping / resting today after finishing, I woke up and immediately started feeling weird that I wasn't writing. Disoriented. I've been pushing so hard to write (while still running the construction company, and, of course, family stuff) for the last few months, to finally hit the finish line feels surreal. Like I've misplaced a limb somewhere, maybe just in the other room.
Now starts the next phase: the edit. The first part of the book is fairly well polished, but I'll be spending the next month doing a final edit / polish in order to turn it in by the due date (Nov. 30th). "Final" in the sense that this is the edit prior to turning it in to my agent and editor.
(Okay, full confession -- I was going to wait until at least tomorrow before starting the edit because you're "supposed" to take a break and celebrate, but I've already started on the edit this evening. What can I say? I don't deal well with non-writing, limb-leaving-in-the-other-room.)
So, I went to the endodontist yesterday. Where it turns out that I have a molar which is completely split in half. The only thing holding it in, apparently, is the crown. My tooth does not hurt. Functions fine. Looks completely normal. But for reasons I have no fucking clue about, has decided to vacate the premises.
The endodontist starts talking about how she's going to call my regular dentist for me, and then they'll conference call with the woman who's going to be my periodontist and the person who'll be doing the actual surgery, and while they're at it, they're going to consult with an orthodontist just to make sure that when we do all of this fun work, we don't mess up my smile. She (the endodontist) explained (with great enthusiasm) that they didn't want me to have to try to explain to each of the other dentist types because that was too complex, so they were all going to consult with one another and for me not to worry, because they were going to coordinate like a team.
People. My tooth has a team.
Next thing I know, it's going to want royalties.
So, FEMA needs to be retooled. I have a couple of suggestions.
1) remove head from ass
2) no no, not just Bush's ass. Your own, Chertoff.
3) Remember America was founded on people who have a helluva lot of initiative. Pay attention to what the volunteers can do. Make a plan which has an organized system to coordinate volunteer efforts -- on the fly -- in large disasters which will work as a stop-gap effort before the "official" response can determine what's needed
4) move FEMA out from under your paper-pushing, ass kissing thumb and let it be the independent agency it's supposed to be. Clearly the extra layer of bureaucracy did not work.
5) pretend like that was your family out there in the Ninth Ward sitting on a roof. Yeah, I don't think it would take you six or seven days to coordinate efforts.
Over on Backspace, a writer's board I sometimes frequent, there was an interesting discussion about how to find one's "voice" in writing. Voice is that elusive thing, part style, part tone, part phrasing that is particular to you, the writer, or particular to your story/setting, and yet, still part mystery alchemy no one quite knows how to qualify. One of the moderators, Karen, quoted David Morrell who emphasized at Bouchercon that authors needed to "keep it real."
Good advice which can be applied to many things. Having not heard Morrell's advice directly, I wanted to elaborate on it a bit in the Backspace discussion, and thought I'd bring over that post here:
I agree, one meaning of "keep it real" is about cutting out the affected writing. It's also about cutting writing the way we think we "should" write because we're aware we're going to eventually be judged when someone reads it. There's a fine line there, which is difficult to perceive when anyone is starting out... the "yikes, I'm a complete newbie and this really sucks" to the "this is breaking the rules, but I know why and it works and I'm doing it anyway." I think the way to know if you've made it to the latter point is through feedback.
But I digress.
I think the thing about making it real as it relates to style is to think about how you would tell this story as an oral story teller, when there wouldn't be a written record to prove later on if you used all the right grammar or syntax or whatever. When you're telling a story, you end up infusing that story with something of yourself, something of your own style of communication, whether it's to know how to scare the bejesus of out everyone or leaving them crying or rolling with laughter. There's something YOU about your delivery. That's style.
Think of some stand up comedianes for example. There's the manic delivery, the dry, slow ironic delivery, the worldy delivery, the baffoon, etc. Each of those people figured out what it was about their delivery in a few jokes that worked, and then organized their material in such a way as to maximize their style.
Take this same notion, then, and think about your story. You have to marry what it is about you and your delivery that works for the story, that gives that extra impact. The same joke told by Rita Rudner is going to be vastly different if told by Dane Cook. (To randomly pick two different deliveries.) If the story would benefit from spare, sparse, staccato delivery, then that's a style. In my particular book, the main character is pretty outrageous, so the whole book has a style that reflects that.
Finally, you can't be embarrassed about your style. You can't beat yourself up and wonder what the critics are going to say, what the literary crowd will say, what the reviewers will say... and I think this fear sits on every writer's shoulders. There will always be people who'll pick anything apart. If you want to succeed, you gotta write like no one's judging and just tell the story. Your voice is already there. You just gotta listen.
I recently e-mailed with Colleen over at her new (very excellent) blog, Chasing Ray that I knew I was risking getting slammed by critics because my style is so very "in your face." Readers, however, seem to love it - it works well with the character. I have no idea what a reviewer will think, and when I was first working on the book, long before anyone read it, I had to come to terms with the idea that one day, I could get crucified for the tone, for the hyperbole, for the unapologetic outrageousness of the main character. She lives out loud. Very. Out. Loud. In the first few (sucky) attempts at finding the voice, I kept reining her in, thinking that no one would ever like her. At some point, I finally just sat down and admitted that this character was who she was. I couldn't judge her. I couldn't keep pulling punches because who she was wouldn't work that way. I had to let go of the fear of rejection for me as a writer. I had to go ahead and risk what people are going to think about me as a person in order to get to the truth of the character. Once I made my peace with that? The story rocked, and then it sold on the proposal... so the gut instinct was right.
That still doesn't mean reviewers will like it. But what the hell. You have to be true to your instincts, or what good are you as a writer? If we all write to be safe, then we're not being unique. And I'd rather be crucified for being legitimately who I am, for writing honestly, than play the safe bets. Safe bets are boring. And the cardinal rule in writing, the only rule we damned well better not break is, don't be boring.
Whoooohoooo, I am so excited and proud for my friend, Rob, who just closed a deal for two more books. He's an excellent writer and I've had the privilege of reading his first, which is a stunning thriller. I can't wait 'til all of you get to read it, too.
Such great news for so deserving a friend! Yay! Go, read his blog. He's got terrific advice there for other writers.
Two quickie things... my Katrina essays below ended up interesting a wonderful publisher of a sort of anthology book on New Orleans, and I'm very pleased to say he requested an essay and as of this morning, it was turned in and accepted, so yay! My understanding from seeing another book from this publisher is that it's going to be really beautiful. More when I know the pub date specifics.
Secondly, I'm madly nearing the end of the writing of the book, which is going well. The first half is already pretty much edited, so I'll have to continue that through the second half. I've been making notes to myself along the way of the things I want to check, the nuances, etc., so there is still work ahead, but I'm pretty much on target to finish it / polish it in time for the deadline to hand it to my editor. (My agent will get it early, of course.)
More rantings and ravings tomorrow(ish).
If you're not listening to Marc Broussard, you're missing the boat. A south-Louisiana boy from Carencro, LA, he's got a soul/R & B funk style that sort of defies description, and the smoky voice of a pro twice his age that will blow you away. My favorite is Home -- that link is to a snippet using Window's Media Player. Google his name for other links to his music via other players.
(That snippet doesn't even do that song justice. Seriously. An addictive song.)
I obviously haven't been doing all that many writing-related posts lately, since the hurricanes riveted my attention to my state, but I received a question via e-mail, and I thought I'd answer it here. The submission process is confusing since so many different things "could" work, and there are a lot of myths out there. I've seen this site referenced on a couple of writer groups as a way of demonstrating that someone "broke the rules," based on the way I submitted and sold / signed a three-book deal, and there's an implicit "so, take that, you rule-makers" feeling... which I don't blame anyone for having, but I wanted to demystify the process a little and give a summary of what happened and why. It's not so simple as "Well, that woman broke the rules, I can too."
The question, as asked by a reader (I.D. info hidden):
I have a question. I am currently working on a novel and have a detailed 20 page section-by-section outline of the plot, setting, characters and themes, with snippets of scenes and dialouge. I have friends in MFA writing programs and they have all told me that if an author has not previously published, then one needs to have a minimum of a partial and a synopsis in order to get an agent and an entire manuscript must be written in order to secure a book deal.
However, recently, I've been hearing of writers that "get book deals" on the basis of just a synopsis. I don't know if that means they are offered the first half of the proposed advance when the manuscript is finished and the second half when the manuscript is edited or if it works in another way. As I work full time and would love to have a little money to take 6 months off to finish this thing, I am of course curious as to your thoughts on how I can make the most of a synopsis (if at all, seeing that I am unpublished).
I'd be much appreciative of any advice!
First, thanks to the reader for asking. (And so nicely!)
Here's my response:
I hope I can be of help. I'll tell you the stats, first, and why they are that way and then why I was the freakish exception. I'll answer the advance question in another post.
To start off, I haven't heard of any writers getting a book deal on "just" a synopsis alone -- unless these are established writers and their talent is already a known factor in the decision-making process. There may have been a tiny number (like four, or five) book deals based on the author's website (as an example) instead of an actual manuscript or sample chapters, and that author may have used a synopsis to show how they were going to turn their source material into a book and the deal was structured off of that synopsis, but this is so rare, you'd be more likely to win two lotteries this year first. Unless, of course, you have a wildly popular website and get thousands of visitors daily. Then, and likely only then, will that work for you. The only other way I've heard of this working is if the publisher is buying an "as told to" account of some event in a person's life (which means there's a ghostwriter doing the actual writing and you can be sure the publisher knows their work ahead of time), or the person is a celebrity (all bets are off for that... most celebs have a ghostwriter or a co-writer, but a small minority write their own books... publishers will make these deals because the popularity of the celebrity is what sells the books, not the quality of writing).
So, then, what's the procedure? How does it work? Why did something else work for me? And what does this mean for you?
Statistic-wise, it's really freakishly rare for someone to get an agent or a publishing contract without having finished the whole book. At a minimum, when you are querying an agent, you need to have about 50(ish) pages to submit -- OR -- three sample chapters (even if that means going over the 50 page guideline). My first three chapters took 83 pages, for example. Other people write really short chapters (like five pages), so that would be too little, and therefore, they'd need to submit more chapters.
Now, here's the gut-check: if an agent likes what they read of the first three chapters, they are going to want to see the whole book. Right then. They're not going to be too thrilled with having to wait until you finish it. Most agents, most of the time, will not even consider taking a partial manuscript out to publishers, *especially* if that author is unpublished. For one thing, writing the whole book is hard, even if you've got the money to do it, and publishers have been burned numerous times by "pro" writers who were supposed to finish a book and then didn't. Or finished it and gave the publisher something so radically different than what was agreed upon, the publisher didn't accept it. If it's that hard for previously published authors to finish something, publishers assume -- unfairly or not -- that an unpublished author would have an even more difficult time because the terrain is so new to them. The publishers are therefore highly unlikely to take a risk, or at least a risk for very much money. Which means it's not very lucrative for an agent to try to sell a partial. As a result, most agents are not willing to waste their time trying. So if you query an agent and you're not finished with the novel, there's a decent chance that many who requested it will be annoyed and won't bother with you later, when you do have it finished. Other possibilities: they will pressure you to finish it "soon" OR you'll end up trying to do so in a shorter span of time than what you normally would have had available and everything can suffer as a result.
(Believe me, I completely empathize with the working full-time and needing to have extra money in order to take time off to write... but it just doesn't usually happen that way.)
Second, a synopsis isn't the detailed type of thing described in the reader's question above (though that's good he's done that -- it'll help in the writing process). A synopsis is a 10 to 15 page (double-spaced) selling tool. It's the telling of the story as if you were sitting down telling it to a friend: you hit the highlights of the emotional track of the story while giving the most important (and only the most important) plot beats / twists, all the way through the end of the story. (I will write more on how to write a synopsis later.) The synopsis is written in third person, present tense, regardless of what you've used for the actual novel. It does not include character lists, character outlines, or an entire beat sheet for the novel.
Never send an agent a bunch of stuff they don't request, by the way. For example, the character stuff the reader mentioned doing above in his question -- good to have, good to use, not good to send.
Please note the NEVER above. When my agent read the query letter, she requested the whole manuscript instead of just the sample chapters. I didn't have the whole manuscript, so I wrote back and asked if it was okay to send the sample chapters and a synopsis. I asked before assuming it would be okay. She said fine, and it worked well for me. But I think she appreciated knowing the truth ahead of time -- that the book wasn't finished.
So why, if all of this can't be done, did I do it? Well, flukes, lots of amazing good luck and a lot of hard work.
First, the hard work: I've been writing and getting published for years. I've sold a lot of non-fiction and edited a magazine (regional), sold a small number of national non-fic articles to big magazines before switching gears into fiction; I also had nearly finished an MFA in Screenwriting, landed a screenwriting agent and had a script optioned. I wasn't new to writing, and the people who ended up helping me knew that. Second, I've finished a lot of full-length works (scripts) and through the years, made a tremendous number of contacts with other writers who read my stuff and vice versa. This is, perhaps, the most important thing I did -- learn how to get feedback, learn how to know what to use of that feedback, learn how to seek out really good writers who were also interested in trading works. I didn't think of this as a "network" and, at the time, I'm pretty sure none of these people were sold / published. This has changed a lot over the years, but the core group are all excellent writers, and I admire their work. Even so, it wasn't about trying to network as much as it was about trying to learn to be a better writer. (This isn't a lecture, by the way -- this is just what worked for me. Lots of other people hate to show their stuff and they end up selling fine. More on how to know when you're ready to submit in another column.)
Anyway, I have a track record with friends. I originally wrote this story as a script for my own use -- I wanted the story outlined so I could write the novel, and since I'd written many scripts, doing a script-as-an-outline was easy for me. It was still a royal pain-in-the-ass to move from script format into prose format in the beginning (a subject for another column.)
So, having written it as a script, I showed it to a friend who was staying here at the time. She loved it (laughing out loud very often from the other room -- which is still, to this day, one of my top ten days as a writer, because that laughter was like gold... it was so shocking and wonderful to hear), and then she asked if she could send it to a friend of hers who would enjoy it. Since she trusted this friend, "E," I figured, "why not?"
I had no clue E would end up doing all that she did.
E read it, loved it, and said if I ever decided to write it as a book, to let her know. I was already doing so, and told her that. Turns out that E -- unbeknownst to me -- was a best-selling author in another genre. She writes under a pen name and my friend here hadn't told me because E liked to protect her privacy. E loved the sample chapters. She gave me notes and I thought they were brilliant and helpful. (Small notes, but extremely enlightening.) She then helped a great deal in teaching me how to do a synopsis well. (That poor woman had the courage to keep reading drafts after a particularly atrocious first attempt. She really deserves a halo.)
After I had revised the chapters and synopsis, E re-read them and asked if she could pitch my book to an editor she knew. She also gave me a referral to an agent. The editor asked to see the project about the same week that the agent read the partial (three chapters and synopsis) and was interested in representing me. (She asked if the book was a stand-alone or a series. I said, "series" -- at which point, she asked if I could put together a synopsis for two more books. I did so over a weekend. Hardest weekend of my writing life.)
The agent gave the editor one week to have the material as an exclusive; after which, St. Martin's Press made a pre-emptive bid for a three-book deal. The rest, as they say, is history.
Would my query into this same agent have worked if I hadn't been referred by E to her? I have no idea. I did have a lot of writing experience to note in my query, and I have run a business for years -- which says a lot about the kind of person I am to a potential agent. (Finishes projects on time, self-starter, etc.) (This is a question I should let my agent answer.)
It's possible that the editor would have read it, too, but then, I never would have known which editor to pick and she's absolutely wonderful, so again, would I have gotten to the right person? I'll never know.
I went around for months after the sale still absolutely gobsmacked over my luck... because it's a helluva lot of luck going on in this story, and I couldn't fathom it. But several of my friends pointed out that I wasn't doing anyone reading this scenario here a true service if I didn't also mention all of the years of hard work that went into that luck. Yes, I had the right project at the right time and place for the right person to see, and that's just damned lucky, no matter how you slice it. But getting that project to that point? Well, lots of hard work. My friends (who have annoyingly good memories) remind me of earlier drafts which sucked, which I knew sucked with the massive suckage of a Grand Cayon sized vacuum, so great was the suckage, and I'd toss it all and start over, until I found the right voice, found the right way to create the world. I have a blessedly short memory where none of that happened. (heh) But, when forced to remember the growing pains of the project I remember too well that earlier drafts just weren't ready to be seen yet, by anyone other than my regular writing friends.
What this means to you:
All the luck in the world isn't going to help if you don't have the right project at the right time. There are a lot of people who are happy to point out the negative odds against writers, but I find that pretty useless. Odds don't mean anything if you're in the right place at the right time, and you've done the work. If I had handed my friend something she'd mildly liked, she probably would have given me some encouragement and notes, but I doubt she would have referred me on to her friend, the published writer. After all, she wouldn't want to burn that relationship by sending E a lot of stuff that E wouldn't love, ya know? So the real question to you is, are you getting people you already know to read it and if they are, are they going nuts over how good it is? Not just nice comments, encouraging words, but full out luuuuuuuuuuuuuuvvvvvvvvvvvve. If they're doing the latter, then by all means, query an agent. There are a lot of agents and you'll get read by at least a couple and you just never know. If, however, you're not getting that sort of reaction, then be honest with yourself and don't push to do this so soon - because you don't want to shoot a good project in the foot by getting it out there too early. Workshop it with friends. Get notes. Don't do all the notes unless they really resonate with you, of course, but learn where your weaknesses are, etc.
I have no idea what will eventually happen with the book. There's a wonderful designer working on the book's site now, and when it's live, I'll post a link back here. I'm not one to post all of the ups and downs and play-by-plays, but I do have a few more ideas as mentioned above that I'd like to write about or occasionally answer a question.
Best of luck...
Accidentally deleted two comments from the "my louisisana" entry below, and have no clue how I managed to do that, as I was not even editing that particular entry. To Kitty and G. -- my apologies. The comments were much appreciated.
I'm going to be taking down this entry in the next day or so because I'm editing it for another purpose. It may be back up later, so there will be a placeholder here.