rejection

Instant Gratification: I Blame America

| rachelhamm

So, I’ve decided that one of my problems with the whole writing/querying/having a real career thing is that I am used to this instant gratification lifestyle we have here in America.  Who wants to spend month after month after month writing and editing and writing and editing and then sending queries and waiting for rejections and then sending more queries and waiting for more rejections when I can get a meal in 5 minutes from the local McDonalds or a new book online in 2 minutes or a new song in 30 seconds?  The whole writing to publication process takes TOO DAMN LONG and I don’t have the patience for it.  And I blame America.

Growing up, weren’t we told that we could be anything we wanted to be?  That we could do anything we wanted to do?

I was.

But you know what- it’s not true.  Not really.  I worked really hard in high school and college.  I got great grades.  But you know what those great grades got me?  Absolutely nothing.  Because I didn’t really know what I wanted when I was getting them.  And now, I know what I want but am not really in the position to get it.  I don’t have the time to work on my writing.  I don’t have the time to research agents and write and send queries.  Then wait for the inevitable rejections before sending out another round of queries.

I want it to be instantaneous!

I want the first agent I send my first draft of my first novel to read it and say “Yes!  Please let me represent you!”  And then I want to get a call from said agent a day later saying that the first publisher she sent the book to wants it and is willing to pay me a whole boatload of money for it.  And then I want it to go straight to the top of the NY Times Best Sellers list.

I realize this isn’t how the world works.  I just wish it was.  I know it’s probably a good thing the world doesn’t work this way.  But, man, it would make my life a whole lot easier!

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A little thing that makes me happy: single servings of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream!

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An update on my milestones:

This is my 93rd post.

There are 39 days left until the 1 year anniversary!

And I’ve had 4,950 views (only 50 to go!)

I Didn’t Win

| rachelhamm

TNBW’s 2010 Strongest Start Competition for the Romance Category.  It really doesn’t come as a surprise, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck.  Apparently Twenty-Five, the only book I’ve been able to actually finish, is a victim of first book syndrome.  It will never get anywhere because it just isn’t good.  I should put it in a drawer and work on other projects, but it’s so hard to get the characters out of my head.  Ben is the only character I have left who still talks to me- and that’s with 6 or 7 different projects that I’ve started.  Everyone else seems to have thrown in the towel, I think they want me to throw in the towel too.

I don’t want to.

But I’m worried I’m going to have to.

No, I won’t.

I don’t want to be a quitter. But what if this isn’t right?  What if I really do suck?  What if I’m not supposed to be a writer?

Do you enjoy it?

When I actually have time to do it, yes.

Then what makes you think you aren’t supposed to be a writer?

I suck.

Everyone sucks.

Touche.  But I mean, I suck at THIS.  I suck at writing.  I get told all the time that my stories aren’t original, no one seems to “get” what I’m trying to say.

You don’t suck.

Yes, I do.

I’m going to smack you.

You won’t be the first one who’s threatened to do that.

I’ll be the first one to follow through.

No, you won’t.  Because you are me.  And I never follow through on anything.

That’s not true!

Sure it is.  Look at me.  I graduated college Summa Cum Laude with a degree in Criminal Justice.  Have I EVER pursued a career in criminal justice?

You applied to law school.

But I didn’t go.

Do you regret that?

Sometimes.

Why?

Because then maybe I’d be doing something worth while.

You think your life isn’t worth while?

Exactly.

Why not?

Why not?  Why not?  Because I’m stuck.  I work three jobs and I still can’t afford to live on my own.  I’m tired and grumpy all the time.  No guy has ever wanted to be with me and I truly believe no guy ever will.  Nothing I do makes any difference whatsoever.  My writing is crap, I don’t even know why I try.

Isn’t it true that more people tell you they like your writing than tell you they dislike it?

Technically, I suppose.

Technically, you suppose?  You are infuriating.  Why can’t you believe in yourself more?

Because there’s nothing to believe in.

Yes, there is.

No, there isn’t.

We’ve been here before.

And we’ll be back again.

Why did you enter the contest in the first place?

I was hoping to get some validation, I suppose.  Something quantifiable.  I’ve never won a single contest I’ve entered, writing or otherwise.  I just wanted to feel like I could do something right.  That I could be a winner.  I thought maybe Twenty-Five would have a shot.  I was wrong.

It made it to the finals.

The finals isn’t winning.

It’s closer than losing.

Well, aren’t you clever?

I like to think so.

Do you really think I can ever get anywhere with this?  Is there even a chance that someone out there will ever think that my writing is great, or at least good enough?

Yes.

Really?

Sometimes.

But not all the time?

Well, of course I have doubts.  I’m you.  You’re me.  You’re having this conversation with yourself, idiot.

I AM an idiot.

And you’d be hella boring if you weren’t one.

Thanks for that.

You’re welcome.

But a little thing that made me happy today:  My friend, Ang, DID win the Strongest Start Competition in the Romance Category.  Congratulations Ang!  You’re an amazing writer and I’m happy to call you a friend!

Starting with Action…

| rachelhamm

When I was workshopping Twenty-Five on TNBW, several reviewers told me I needed to delete the opening scene and jump straight into the action.  So many reviewers in fact, that eventually I broke down and listened to them.  And I didn’t have second doubts about following that advice until I got my rejection from Scott Eagan.  He said that there was a lack of character development.  I wondered at the time if my character development suffered because I deleted the opening scene.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately.  I’ve read 13 books since the start of the year.  And not a single one of them starts off going straight into the action.  Granted, one is Jane Austen and no books from the early nineteenth century started with action (at least none that I’ve read), but the other 12 are all late twentieth or twenty-first century.  So….  My thoughts on that are that maybe I don’t need to start with action immediately.  Maybe that’s just a rule they throw out in writing workshops and on agent blogs because it sounds great in theory and because books that do it well, do it great.  But it doesn’t make sense for my romance novel which is based around the characters and not around what happens.

I took a couple days and re-read my MS.  Again.  And I really noticed the lack of character development at the beginning.  I was shocked, honestly.  I never thought that was a problem I had.  I assumed the biggest problem with Twenty-Five was that the plot wasn’t unique enough, which is still a problem when it comes to writing the query, but I actually think it kinda works for this book.  Anyways, my point was, it looks like you can’t listen to everything reviewers say.  Now, I’m not stupid or vapid or naive enough to believe that if I add that scene back in it’s going to magically fix my character development problem.  The opening scene is going to need a lot of editing and the action scene is going to need a lot of editing to make it work with the opening.  It’s going to be a lot of work.  But I believe in this book.  And I know I’ve said that a million times.  But I do.  So I’m going to do the work and I’m actually kind of excited about it.  It kind of makes me sick at the same time, but I’m going to focus on the excitement.

Irritated and Inadequate in North Carolina

| rachelhamm

Dear fellow Bloggers,

I’m slightly irritated.  I know, big shocker.  I tend to get irritated at the drop of a hat, but at least I recognize that about myself, right? Possibly why I’m still single?  But I digress…

Okay, so why am I irritated?  I just finished reading a book.  I both enjoyed the book and hated it.  Isn’t that the worst?  I enjoyed it because I was rooting for two of the characters and really wanted a love story for them.  I hated it because it did all the things we aspiring writers are told not to do and did not do them in a way that made me say, “Well, if you’re going to break the rules, do it like that.”  It broke all those rules and did it in way that I was annoyed throughout most of the book thinking, I SO would have loved to critique this book before it went to the agent, maybe then there’d be fewer instances of POV head-hopping, information backstory dumps, more explanation of what certain things that may not be familiar to the entire world are, and a helluv a lot more character depth, growth, and development.

This particular book was the third one published by this author.  I wonder if the glaring rule-breaking was present in her first book.  I wonder if she was able to get the first book past agent gatekeepers with these same really annoying elements.  Actually makes me want to read the first book.  Isn’t that weird?  But my point is, that I think it’s so much easier once you have an agent and you’ve had other books published to produce a mediocre book.  Why weren’t the obvious instances of POV head-hopping addressed before this book was published?  My guess is because it didn’t go through as much editing before it went to the agent and publisher.  Because the author already had the agent and publisher.

And of course, thinking this way about a book that I’m holding in my hands and reading makes me think about my own book.  Makes me wonder if I’ll ever have the courage to attempt another round of queries, if I’ll ever be able to hold it in my hands, bound, with a cover bearing my name as the author.  I think that it should be out there in the world, that it would make people happy to read it.  But I can’t pluck up the courage to sit down, write a query, and send it out.  I believe the book is good.  I know that the only thing holding me back is me, I’m just not really sure why I’m holding myself back.  Isn’t that what cripples most people in pursuing their dreams?  Themselves?  What am I afraid of?  Being told I’m not good enough, I think.

In all honestly, I think that fear has plagued me my whole life.  The fear of being inadequate.  And yet, I make myself inadequate by not just going for it, by not believing that I AM good enough.

I told that story the other day about the waiter who hit on me and I tried to make it funny, because when I step back and think about it, it really was funny.  But the truth is, I didn’t find it that funny when I wrote about it.  When he told me I was beautiful, my first instinct was to laugh and immediately dismiss it as a joke.  I certainly didn’t feel beautiful and couldn’t really understand why he would say that.  The more I thought about it the less funny it became.  When I left the restaurant and got into my car, I imagined telling people what had happened and my next thought was that no one would believe me.  Or that people would believe that it had happened, but not that the guy actually meant what he said.  I did tell a few people, I guess in the hopes that they wouldn’t have that reaction, and no one did.  And you know what my next thought was?  That they did have that reaction internally but were keeping it to themselves.

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THAT PICTURE?

I’m never going to have confidence in myself if my brain automatically goes to that place where I can’t believe it when someone says something nice about me.  I’ll always be “not good enough” if I don’t allow myself to be good enough.  I don’t know why I’m sharing this with the world, if indeed the few people who read this blog can be considered the world.  I guess because I write now.  Even if sometimes it does make me feel inadequate.  And maybe writing this will force me to be good enough for myself so that I can take my book, that I spent a year pouring my heart into, and actually try and get it into the hands of someone who can make it good enough for the world.

Sincerely,

Irritated and Inadequate in North Carolina

What the F***

| rachelhamm

You may remember a few weeks ago when I found a brand new motto for life: What the hell?  It can’t hurt to try.

Yeah.

Well, that’s pretty much down the drain.

The contest I entered, I didn’t make it through to the next round.  1000 entries made it through.  Mine was not one of them.  So, yeah.

I knew going in I wasn’t going to win.  I knew going in that no one thinks my attempts at queries are any good.  So it’s not a surprise that I didn’t make it through to the next round.  But it does suck.  It kinda pisses me off that no one in the publishing world is ever going to read my book because I can’t write an interesting query.

Maybe my book sucks.  Maybe it isn’t just the query.  But I don’t really believe that my book is bad.  I really don’t.  It’s not the greatest thing ever written, but I think it’s pretty good.  And yet, I can’t move forward with it because I can’t get an agent interested in it.

Or maybe that’s my real problem: my book is bad, but I don’t realize it.  Which may just be the saddest thing ever.

So my new motto is What the F***.  I like it better than the other one.  It’s more me, I think.

Creative Void

| rachelhamm

I’m feeling a bit of a creative void.  It’s not writer’s block, it’s more of a listlessness.  A non-desire to write, create, produce.

I got a really bad review of a chapter of Twenty-Five a couple of weeks ago.  The reader said the characters were cookie cutter, the sentence structure monotonous, and the dialogue cliche.  They said “there’s no story here.”

Of course, reading a review like that is like diving head first into freezing cold water.  It’s a shock to the system.  You wonder- did this person read my work and actually think that?  or were they just being mean and spiteful?  I have to believe that it’s a little bit of a mixture of the two extremes.

I know, deep in my heart, that my characters are not cookie cutter.  They have histories, dreams, plans for the future.  I know what they look like, how they act, their likes and dislikes.  I’ve thought them through completely and I didn’t just base them on the archetypal characters you see in book after book, story after story.  However, I can understand how, in an isolated chapter, without the buildup of the beginning of the story and their relationship, a reader would miss their complexity and depth.

With the monotonous sentence structure comment, I think the reader may have a point.  I’ve been reading through my book slowly the last couple of nights and I think I do have issues with varying sentence structure.  There just aren’t that many ways to structure a series of actions without getting into lavish descriptions and similes and metaphors, which I hate.  So, one of my goals is to find fresher ways of saying what I want to say.

As far as the dialogue being cliche, I have to say- WHOA.  I am really surprised anyone would say that about my dialogue because if there’s one thing  that 99.99% of my readers have agreed on, it’s my realistic dialogue.  I can only assume that this is another instance of the isolated chapter, but will defend myself a little in saying that real people in real life use cliches when they talk.  Cliches are around for a reason- they are recognizable, memorable.  Just about everything we say in everyday life can be considered cliche.  For example, if I write this exchange:

“Hey.”

“Hey, how are you?”

“Fine, you?”

“Fine.”

is the cliche police going to strike it down and tell me I can’t use it?

The last comment is the one that really hurt.  “There’s no story here.”  I’ve put my blood, sweat, and tears into this book for the past year (and yes, I realize blood, sweat, and tears is cliche, too) and for someone to tell me there’s no story there, I mean, I can’t even express how much that hurts.  I know its not the first bad review that I’ve gotten, and I know it won’t be the last, but DAMN!  I would never tell someone that there was no “story” in their story.  Because anyone who writes has a story they are trying to tell.  And yes, some stories need more work than others, but everything is a story.  Life is a story.

So all of that to say that it’s been really hard for me to write lately.  I don’t want to be a failure and yet that’s how a review like that makes me feel.  Everyone says, “you’ve got to have a thick skin to make it in this industry.”  But isn’t that true of any industry, of any career?  Is that why I’m still stuck in limbo, I don’t have a thick enough skin?  Am I going to be a failure for the rest of my life?  Am I going to be stuck in the void for the rest of my life?

What the Hell

| rachelhamm

I’m entering a contest.  A writing contest.  SCARY.  The Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.

I know that I am not going to win this thing.  It’s a 1 in 5000 shot.  Literally, they accept 5000 entries and choose one winner.  There’s no way I have the talent or luck to make it.  I spent days, no, weeks, convincing myself not to enter because there was no point.  But tonight I said to myself, four hours before the site was open to entries (10 minutes and counting right now), “What the hell?  You have nothing to lose!”

Why can’t I think and act like that more often?  I never have anything to lose, and yet I live my life in constant fear of failure and rejection.  I stop myself from truly living, from taking risks and going after the things I really want because there’s no scariness in the status quo.  There’s nothing to be afraid of when you never try for anything.

So, my new motto: What the hell.  Give it a whirl.  What can it hurt?

When I get hurt, well, that will be another story.

Am I a Writer?

| rachelhamm

What is a writer?

Am I a writer?  I’ve written a book and I write a blog and I have a couple of works in progress, but does any of that make me a writer?

What is a writer exactly?  Is it anyone who can pick up a pencil and make markings on a piece of paper that resemble letters and words?  Or is it someone who knows how to string together those letters and words into sentences and paragraphs and pages– into pieces of art.  Or is it someone who not only makes art out of words, but someone who gets paid to make art out of words?

Today, I had a horribly jealous reaction to the idea of a friend of mine beginning to work on a new book.  I thought to myself, how can this person start a new story when I’m so pathetic I can’t complete mine.  Which of course made me wonder, yet again, if Twenty-Five is just a fluke.  I wrote the one story I’ve wanted for myself my whole life.  Maybe I have nothing else in me.

I hate that I doubt myself.  I really do hate it.  But I do.  I doubt myself constantly.  I never believe I am good enough or that anything I do is good enough.  And I don’t even know why I’m like that.  I shouldn’t be like that.  I know I’m smart- I’ve never doubted that, though maybe I should.  Why does anyone doubt themselves?  Fear, I think.  For me, fear of failure and fear of rejection.  It’s a hard life, trying to be a writer, trying to be published.  I just know that I’m going to fail at it, like I’ve failed at so many other things.  And I can’t stand it.  Because I want it so bad.  I want to do something worthwhile, be someone worth while.  That’s what got me started on this whole writing kick in the first place.  I wrote a book, with a main character who is a lot like me, but I made her prettier and I gave her a boyfriend and a career with the potential to go somewhere.  And she got everything she ever wanted.  I still cry reading the ending of my book.  Imagining that a wonderful man could be so in love with a girl so like me.

And now I wonder if this wonderful book about the girl who is like me but isn’t me whose dreams all come true is the extent of my writing abilities.  Do I have any other stories inside me.  Am I really a writer, or was I just desperately seeking to make something out of the life I have but hate?

All of this doubt comes just two days after I find out that a poem I wrote (the poem which inspired the title of this blog, BTW) is going to be published in an online magazine.  That has to mean something, right?  A poem I wrote was selected for this magazine’s next issue, and yet, I still doubt myself.  Maybe because I have no one but an online community to share it with.  I told my mother and her only reaction was “That’s great.  Wait- is that a good thing?”  And nothing else.  No one is excited for me, well no one that I know in real life.  Is that where doubt comes from- lack of validation?  Lack of enthusiasm?

It all brings me back to the same question: Am I a writer?  Or am I just kidding myself?

What’s at Stake

| rachelhamm

My desperate wish is for someone out there to see something valuable in the stories I’ve written.  I’ve been feeling really pessimistic about Twenty-Five lately, but deep down, I don’t think it’s a bad book.  Even though the subject matter isn’t really unique, it isn’t a formulaic book about love.  That’s where I have a problem in writing my query letter.

I keep getting the suggestion to answer three questions in my query:
1. What does the MC want?
2. What does she have to do to get it?
3. What happens if she fails to get what she wants (the stakes)?

Okay, so I’m going to try, but this is where I’ve been having problems, answering these questions.  You would think this would be easy, but I don’t think it’s so black and white as these questions seem.  Here goes:

1. Abigail wants love.  She wants it so badly she doesn’t believe she’ll ever find it.  She wants to be a journalist, she wants to have a column published in the magazine she works for.

2. To get love, she just has to be open to it.  She has to believe that Ben really does care about her and that she deserves his love.  To get her column, she has to persevere and write from her heart.  She has to not care what others think.

3. Here’s the issue.  She can’t have both, but she gets both.  Ben falls in love with her, she falls in love with Ben.  She gets her “Facing Your Fears” column and then she gets offered a column in London.

She can take the column in London and advance her career, but doing so means leaving Ben behind.  Why does it mean leaving Ben behind?  Because she’s scared- her old insecurities pop up and once again she thinks she’s not good enough for him.  She thinks that he won’t be willing to do long distance and when he doesn’t encourage her to take the job she takes that as him saying their relationship can only exist while she stays in America.

She could pass up on the column and stay in America with Ben, but to her that means facing a lifetime of regret and resentment.  Regret that she didn’t take the opportunity to advance her career further, knowing that turning down one job puts her in a negative light with her editors and the possible chance that she won’t be given any more opportunities.  And resentment of Ben that he didn’t support her and allowed her to pass up the opportunity.

To her it seems like an impossible decision.  She chooses to take the job and break up with Ben.  She’s wrong- but that’s the decision she makes.  He would have been willing to do the long distance, but she never asks him to.  Of course, the fault isn’t all on Abby, he doesn’t offer it either.

So what’s at stake?  Her relationship with Ben and her job.  In the end, they find a way to make both work, but it’s a long time coming.

So now, how the HELL do I put all that in a query letter?