In Which I Shoot My Shot Even Though I'm Not Confident It Will Hit Its Mark

 Last year I had a grand plan to blog every month. It's June 7th and my last post was January 1st, so you see how well that went.

I have, however, for the first time in two years, spent a decent amount of time writing this year. After my beloved middle grade steam/ecopunk book that everyone was SURE would get me an agent went nowhere fast I tried to start a whole lot of stories, included the ill-fated romance that made me think I might be coming out of a dry spell (ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha is what I say to that now) and the quite possibly brilliant Christmas ghost story idea for which I have a lovely, edited outline. But I could never get beyond 20,000 words, and usually not beyond a couple chapters.

I'm almost 2/3 of the way through my current manuscript, my second attempt to write for adults but this time in a genre I enjoy without reservation. It's a cozy mystery. It combines a setting based on my favorite place to vacation as a child, a protagonist that shares a lot of my characteristics while fully being her own person, and a lot of quirky secondary characters. Meet the moodboard for Ordinary Crime, because of course I have a moodboard.

This is the most commercial thing I've ever written. Cozy Mysteries are the second most popular genre, just behind romance (which I made a futile attempt to write). Does this mean I'll be sure to get an agent and a book deal if I actually finish this? Of course not. However, I'm hoping I'll at least get a higher request rate if I actually manage to get this thing query ready.

But what about the actual title of this post, Beth? We're getting there. I'm mostly concentrating on the WIP, but I recently participated in an off-Twitter Pitch contest, and ended up with three requests for queries for Harbor Lightkeep. So, expecting nothing, I sent them off. Two were from agents I somehow never managed to query in the two years I queried the manuscript and one was from an agent I queried with an earlier version. I did disclose this in the query letter, to be clear.

I also found out from a writing friend that a small but solid press that most often only takes agented manuscripts is open to unagented manuscripts this week. Years ago, someone commented on a tweet about my Nutcracker portal fantasy that it sounded like something this press might publish. I looked into it, but at the time I wasn't quite ready to veer away from the agent route. By the time I thought I might consider submitting directly to a small press they were closed to unagented submissions. The chances they'll be interested are tiny, but tiny is still more than zero.

I'm dedicating most of my heart and mind right now to the mystery. I love all my other books and want to see them on shelves someday, but I've come to be okay with the idea that my debut may not be middle grade. That doesn't mean the books will for sure never be published. If the small press snaps up Mousecracker or one of the agents who requested a query falls in love with Harbor Lightkeep, awesome. But if they don't, it's okay. The next thing is already well underway, really and truly underway for the first time in a long time.

In Which I Review My Year in Reading

 I'm done pretending I'm going to update this blog monthly. I'll check in when I'm inspired and have something to say. Maybe that will happen more often if I actually have books on the shelves in the future.

Anyway, it's the first day of 2024 (how is that even possible, by the way?) so it's time to review my 2023 year in reading. I didn't read quite as many books as last year, but still a very respectable number. I think my number dipped for a few reasons. First of all, I started consistently working for pay last year in early October. Since then, I've been working 15 hours a week teaching preschool. That means that for 9 months of last year I simply had more time to read each week. Second, this year has included some personal challenges for me and sometimes I just haven't had the energy to read or even listen to a book. Third, I'm now on the second year of querying the book everyone (including published writers who read the manuscript) was so sure would be "the one" with nary an agent offer or book contract in sight, which has at times poisoned my desire to read other peoples' books. That last one is a pretty small factor. My lack of success with that book has completely sabotaged my own writing.

I've personally found that recording my reading makes it more meaningful to me, and this year I went a step further and bought myself a pretty journal to use as my reading log. It's not full, and should serve me for at least a couple more years.

First, let's make it clear that audiobooks count as reading. So my total number of "books read" includes both print and audio books. I'll get more granular with it below, just wanted to get that out of the way. My total number of books read is 153. That's only 58 less than 2022, not bad given the mitigating factors above.

First of all, 115 were print books while 38 were audio.

I read 140 books that were new to me and reread 13 books.

I read 124 of the books by myself and 29 with my twelve year old.

Most of the books, 149, were in English, but 3 were in Swedish and one was in Spanish.

Again, the majority of the books,131, were fiction while 22 were nonfiction.

Breaking it down by age group, I read:

6 picture books

4 chapter books

93 middle grade books

9 young adult bookss

and 41 adult books

Breaking the fiction down by genre, I read:

61 speculative  books (these were mostly fantasy, but I've also lumped in paranormal, dystopian, and horror)

43 realistic fiction

15 mysteries

and, last but not least, 5 romances

That last breakdown I did was by format:

121 of the books were traditional prose format

28 were graphic (you might call them comics), including three graphic memoirs and a graphic history

3 were novels in verse

1 was a book of poetry

I've always been a big reader, but this is only the second year I've kept a reading log. I highly recommend it. Whether you read four books a year or four hundred, remembering what you read and taking some space to reflect on it can be really helpful. Despite my number of books read being fewer than last year, I know I read more books than average. Averaging it out, I read almost three books a week. Remember though that the majority of these books are written for children, which  makes them quicker reads. Also, I normally have four books going at once: one print book I'm reading on my own, one print book I'm reading to my 12yo, one audiobook I'm listening to on my own and one audiobook I'm listening to with my 12yo. That gets me through books faster than I'd get through them if I took them one at a time. Whether your total number of books read in 2023 is much smaller than mine, much larger than mine, or about the same, if you read something you're a winner in my book.

In Which I Admit I May Only Be A Middle Grade Writer, And That's Okay

Remember my last post when I thought I had worked through my psychological turmoil and might actually be able to finish my contemporary romance? Well, all I have to say to that is, ha ha ha, joke's on me because I've added all of 3,000 words to that book since July. I love the idea of finishing that book, but I don't actually love that book. Maybe I'll finish it someday. It feels wrong to leave unfinished a project that's 25,000 words in. But I've given myself permission to do it. I just don't love writing outside the middle grade space, it turns out.

One of my friends in the #MGWaves is a writing craft nerd, and she offered to do an outline workshop with some of us. That gave me the impetus to dust off an idea I had almost a year ago. I even wrote a few chapters of that version of the idea, but I was trying to narrate it in the voice of Charles Dickens and, surprise surprise, that's actually really hard. I think I nailed the first chapter, but then when my critique group read the second chapter they wondered why Dickens wasn't narrating anymore. Could I have done more reading, gone through a million edits, and eventually gotten it right? Maybe. But in the end I found I just didn't have the ambition to attempt it.

So the Dickens inspired Christmas ghost story was tossed into the bin. But a skeleton of a winter ghost story with darkness and light, grief and joy, remained. So I gave it flesh. The ghost is now the MC's older sister. The first names have changed to match the theme. The family is much more fleshed out and much more flawed. Real wrong has been done to the vengeful ghosts.

Basically it's a whole lot better than the original idea. I still only have an outline (though a pretty detailed one thanks to my awesome friends) and character sketches, but it's something. 

And of course I made a new moodboard/aesthetic, because that's what I do. Here it is, in all its glory. Now let's see if I can actually make this thing into a completed manuscript. Whether that then makes it into a book is not up to me, as I have painfully learned, but finished manuscript is something I can control and I hope I can push past my hard feelings about querying the manuscript that would be "the one" for nearly two years now and get this story written. I think it has the potential to be something really beautiful. Maybe even better than Harbor Lightkeep. And that's saying a lot. Because I did not think I could beat a glucose alert fox.

In Which I Think I Might be Coming Out of a Dry Spell

I had really good intentions last year of blogging here at least once a month, but this year has done everything it can to stop me from doing that. As I mentioned in my last post, a family crisis in February took up a lot of my time and energy for several months. Even though that's essentially over, it's taking awhile to get back to normal, or a new normal. Add to that the fact that the book I've been querying for a year and a half now is still languishing in the trenches and the idea of coming back to this blog just wasn't super attractive. 

But I think I may have made some headway in my own mental health journey that could get me back to writing more regularly, though I make no promises of blogging regularly. As you might remember, I've been working on a contemporary romance on and off since last March. I'm still less than halfway through. That's super slow compared to the pace at which I've written all of my other books, even Harbor Lightkeep, which took a long time compared to my other three finished manuscripts.

I was super excited when I first got the idea and the first two chapters and a working synopsis came to me pretty quickly. Then I slowed down. Way down. I'd write a paragraph and go weeks without even opening the document. Or I'd open the document every day for a week, only to write one sentence and delete it each time. I talked a good talk about wanting to finish the book. I even participated in #RomComMarch on Twitter this year and joined a Slack for it. But actually doing the writing? That didn't go nearly so well.

What I've realized is that I've spent a very long time thinking of myself as a middle grade writer. I mean, there's a reason the blog has the name it has. I still love Middle Grade books. I still dream of having middle grade books published someday. But because in my head I've been a middle grade writer for so long, I haven't allowed myself to own the idea that I could also be a romance writer. If I actually finish this book and actually start querying it I'll be querying as an adult contemporary romance writer, and that isn't what I thought I was going to be.

Of course, my brain knows that writing this one book, or even multiple books, in a genre and age group I didn't originally think I wanted to write doesn't mean I can never write or publish middle grade. But that's what my heart has been telling me. 

I've been trying to get a handle on my own mental health since my family crisis in February, and part of that has included seeing a therapist. One of the things my therapist is teaching me, which isn't super brilliant or groundbreaking but is still really hard for me, is the concept of responding rather than reacting. That is, if someone (usually my husband or one of my kids) says something that pushes my buttons, I need to take some breaths, walk away if necessary, and respond when I'm ready to respond calmly instead of reacting right away with anger that will inevitably hurt people.

I'm still just okay at this. But working on this has helped me realize that my tendency to react rather than responding has bled into my writing life. Rather than respond to the idea that actually finishing and querying this romance would make me something other than the middle grade writer I wanted to be with the logic that the two weren't mutually exclusive, I reacted by actively avoiding finishing the book.

I can't say for sure that having this knowledge will allow me to finish the book in a reasonable manner. I might just find another excuse. But at least now I know why it's taking so long.

I don't have a photo representing what's been going on in my heart and mind, but I hate not including a photo, so here's my gorgeous cat, Daniel Tiger, on one of  his favorite perches, the bookshelf that holds my 12yo's graphic novel collection.

In Which Kids Need Diverse Books

I've written about this topic in some fashion before (here, here, and here if you'd like to check it out), but I'm sorry to report that the need to talk about this is perennial. Book bans around the nation still going at full steam. Teachers and librarians are being called groomers for the audacious act of providing kids access to books with queer characters.

Before I go on, I want to apologize to my half dozen regular readers for not fulfilling my promise to blog monthly. A major crisis hit my family not long after the last post. It took up most of my mental energy for the rest of February, all of March, and well into April. I'm just now approaching a new normal and getting back into the things I set aside because they weren't top priority during a crisis.

I do want to note that, when my mental health was at its worst during the epicenter of the crisis, the two best ways to escape were reading and writing. I wasn't able to get in the right frame to work on my adult contemporary romance often, but when I did it, it was refreshing to escape to the world I created for a little while. 

All that taken care of, let's talk again about diverse books and why kids need them. I'm going to keep this simple.

1) Kids that are part of a minority group in some way (BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent, disabled, there's probably more I'm not thinking of) need to see kids like them. They need to see these kids as the heroes of the story. They also need to see them as background characters, just part of a functioning society.

2) Kids that are not part of any minority group, or are part of a group other than the one being represented need to see kids who aren't like them in stories. They need to see that it's not just the white, cishet, able-bodied, neurotypical kids who save the day or just have an every day experience they can relate to. They also need to see kids who are different from them as side characters, just part of a normal, functioning society.

Upper elementary and middle school age kids (you know, the age group middle grade books are written for?) in particular are in a stage in which they're beginning to figure out who they are. My 12yo has three classmates who came out as nonbinary between the end of elementary school and the beginning of middle school. And I'm sure that's just the start of the queer kids she'll meet. Many kids at this age are still figuring out how they identify, who they might want to date, etc. They might not sort themselves out until they're almost done with high school, or even well into adulthood. Heck, I'm 48 and I'm still figuring things out about myself.

But if both cishet kids and queer kids (whether or not they know yet that they're queer) grow up reading a diversity of books that feature a spectrum of queer experiences, we're a whole lot more likely to end up with a loving and accepting society.

Unless you live under a rock and literally never talk to a single kid, the odds are high that you know a queer kid and/or a BIPOC kid, probably a lot more than one of each. But how would I even know that, you ask? You don't need to. If the queer kids in your life see you as a safe person and come out to you, great. But just because none of them have doesn't mean they're not there. Oh, but everyone I know is white, you say. Do you know? Like for real know? Have you asked them all about their racial background? Could they be mixed race and white-appearing? Even if you have defied the odds and somehow really do know only white people, those white kids still need to read books with BIPOC kids.

There are lots of things we as a nation need to do to create a just and safe society for the rising generation and the generations that come after them. I don't know what they all are, and I don't know how to do the majority of them. But what I do know is that one important aspect is giving them the opportunity to read a diversity of books.

I'll end with a picture of my 12yo's graphic novel collection. She's white, and as of this time she identifies as cishet, though that could change as she ages and gets to know herself better. Regardless, her shelves are filled with books about BIPOC kids, books about queer kids, and, yes, books about cishet white kids. Because we don't need to throw anyone under the bus to make bookstore and library shelves reflect the actual world we live in.

In Which I Get to Meet Some Of My People

I missed writing a blog post in January, in large part because I was busy feeling sorry for myself, but I blogged twice in December, so that makes up for it, right? Right? Whatever. All six of you who regularly read these posts can rejoice over me having a new one. 😂

Remember that new idea I was excited about? Or that thread of hope I was hanging onto in December? Yeah, that new idea is currently stalled in chapter 5. So I started a rewrite of the contemporary MG I wrote almost three years ago. It also stalled in chapter 5. Since my contemporary romance is also stalled in chapter 5, it's clear this is a theme for me. Don't ask me why chapter 5 is the one that breaks me.

A couple weeks ago I had a full on meltdown at dinnertime because my son didn't want to eat the dinner I had made with him specifically in mind. I am over having kids who are picky eaters despite everything I've tried to change that and who have only gotten worse with age (they're way past preschool), but that's not what the meltdown was really about. It was really about the fact that I feel like all my years of effort in writing have gotten me nowhere. Empirically I know that's not true. I've continued to develop my craft. I've formed great relationships within the writing world. I've gotten to know the industry much better than I did three years ago. But none of that is any guarantee I'll get an agent, let alone a book deal, and in the end that is still both my dream and my goal.

My breakdown was well timed, because it happened not long before something that was planned back in October: a retreat in Nashville, Tennessee with some of the other women in the #MGWaves. In case you don't want to look back at the linked post, in brief, the Waves are a writing support and critique group that began as a group for people who had submitted middle grade books to Pitch Wars in the fall of 2020. Some of the original members left after Pitch Wards ended, and some others came in through friends. Over the years, we've developed real friendships, though most of us had never met in person.

This past weekend 14 of us rectified that with a retreat in Nashville, Tennessee. This was not a writing retreat, though a couple people did write while we were together. It was a gathering of friends who write. It was also exactly what my soul needed. I still don't know if I will every be agented or published. But even if that doesn't happen for me, I'm thankful I started the journey because it led me to an incredible group of friends.

In Which I Review My Reading Year

I've always read a lot of books, but before this year I've never kept a record of which books I've read or how many. This year I decided to keep a reading log and, since this is the last day of the year  it seems an appropriate time to review the year. Here's the cover of the reading log. I just used an old notebook and decorated it with stickers.

I used a different color pen for each age group. Here's an example of a two page spread showing books of different age groups. The crossed out part is a book I started but quite reading after a few chapters.

As you can see, I recorded more than the book's title. I record the author (and illustrator in the case of picture books and graphic novels with more than one creator), the genre, the dates I started and finished the book, and a sentence or two about the book.

Before I break down the numbers, let me make some things clear. First, I count audiobooks as reading. My 11yo and I almost always listen to an audiobook while we drive back and forth to school and other places around town. I listen to own audiobook both while I'm driving by myself and doing things around the house. That's how most of the adult books made it on the list. I only count books I read for the first time. I reread a few books with my 11yo that I read a previous year and didn't add them to the list. I teach two year old preschool three days a week and I also don't count the dozens of board books I read to the kids again and again at work. I do count picture books I read on my own to study picture book craft (which I still have a lot to learn about).

My grand total of books read in 2022 is 217. Yes, that's a huge number, but keep in mind that most of these aren't 300+ page novels written for adults. The large majority are middle grade books, which do tend to be quicker reads. Breaking it down by age category, I read:

58 adult books

4 young adult books

137 middle grade books

5 chapter books

13 picture books

Of these, 153 were print books and 64 were audiobooks.

Only 6 of the books I read were nonfiction. The other 211 were fiction.

This number may seem amazing to you, or you may have read even more books this year. It doesn't really matter. If you read this year (and remember, audiobooks count as reading) you're a winner in my book.