In Which I Attend a Writing Conference and Come Home With a Business Card

When I started this blog a year and a half ago I set a goal of blogging once a month, and, given my record of 6+ months between posts on my parenting blog, I'm doing pretty well even though I've missed the mark a handful of times. I was sure I'd missed a month since I've been so busy this winter, but my last post was on February 1st and it's still March, so I haven't failed yet!

I've been in the query trenches for a few months now with my fourth middle grade novel with very little to show for it. It's disheartening since I was so sure this one was going to be "the one". It's not only the best written of my books (it turns out you do get better by writing more books), but it has both queer rep and disability rep (including an adorable glucose alert fox!) in addition to a climate change message. I mean, isn't that everything agents and editors are looking for? Apparently not, or at least not any of the agents I've queried so far. 

I've changed my beginning since the first set of queries, and a conference I attended this weekend showed me that I should try changing it again because both the agent in the First Pages section and my peer critique group were confused by the beginning. At the advice of a CP, I'd pulled a scene that was originally in chapter 6 and stuck it at the beginning to create more tension right away, and it doesn't seem to be working the way I intended.

So now I'm back to playing with what the best beginning might be. I'm even toying with starting with a prologue, which breaks all the rules, but if I do it for the right reasons it's okay to break the rules.

In any case, right now I'm trying to figure out how to cut some words since it's very long for middle grade and I have a feeling some of my rejections might be coming because of that. After I've done that, the right beginning might become clear.

Because querying and editing a middle grade book apparently isn't enough for me, I've started writing an adult contemporary romance. I never in a million years thought I would want to write for adults, let alone write romance, but the idea just fell from the sky on me and I felt compelled to write it. It's a romance between an asexual woman who has given up on love and her first crush who has just returned to their hometown, a widower with a young daughter who believes he buried his heart with his wife. The heroine owns the combination cat cafe and bookshop of my dreams, and there are plenty of cute kittens as well as tea and cookies. Basically all of my favorite things. Here's an aesthetic I worked up.

Despite writing the romance, my heart belongs to writing for kids, so, as I alluded to above, I attended the MidSouth SCBWI conference this past weekend. It was full of wonderful information, and it was also great to hang out with other writers.  I think the two most valuable things I came away with were the clear idea that my current first page isn't working and the business card of an editor from a small press. The second, of course, requires an explanation.

Saturday there was a gala dinner, and we were encouraged to dress as book characters. I chose to dress as Harbor Lightkeep, the main character from the book I'm querying. Because why dress as someone else's character when I can dress as my own? Here's a photo of my dressed for the banquet.

I was talking with a group of women at the cocktail hour and explained the costume and a bit about the book. One of the women asked me if I had an agent and I said no, I was still looking for one. She then handed me her card. She's an editor at a small press! I'm not naming her or the press because I have no idea what will come of this, but even if it doesn't lead to an offer or it does but I decide it's not the best fit, it was still exciting to have an actual publishing professional really love my idea.