In Which I Hang Onto a Teeny, Tiny, Gossamer Thread of Hope

It's Advent, the season of hope and waiting. I don't talk much about my faith on this blog, so, in case you didn't pick this up earlier, I'm a Christian. As a Christian, during this season of the year I celebrate the creator of the universe coming to Earth as a tiny, helpless, newborn baby. If that's not a miracle to be in awe of I don't know what is.

Even many who aren't traditionally religious think of this time of year as a season full of hope and potential miracles. Many people are hoping for a "Christmas miracle."

I'm not expecting a publishing Christmas miracle. Well, unless it's a certain Big 5 publisher settling the strike and actually listening to their employees (hint, hint HarperCollins). But I certainly wouldn't say no to it. I actually tweeted jokingly about my publishing Christmas wish last week and it went, well, not truly viral but at least viral-adjacent as opposed to most of my tweets that get 0-6 likes.

I'm still hanging onto a teeny, tiny thread of hope for my steampunk airship adventure. It's still in about 20 agent inboxes and until the last one passes there's hope that one of them will be the agent who falls in love with it. But the hope is pretty tenuous. The agent I thought was my best chance, who asked for a revision back in June, recently passed on the manuscript. She didn't like the direction I took the revision in. I guess it's better to find out now that we have different editorial visions than after I sign a contract, but it was still heartbreaking.

As if that wasn't enough, the full manuscript of my Nutcracker reimagining was with an editor who is normally only open to agented submissions thanks to a pitch contest like. Earlier this week she passed on it not because of weakness in the writing but because she just didn't think it was a perfect fit for her.

To be clear, I'm disappointed but I'm not angry with the agent or the editor. Agents spend a lot of time with client manuscripts and need to go through a long slog of pitching them to swamped editors. Editors devote a lot of time and effort to manuscripts they sign and it's not worth their time to work on a book they don't love. Yes, agents and editors receive manuscripts that are poorly written, but at least as often they have to pass on things that are well written and just don't light them on fire. Think about your own reading habits. You don't check out every single book in the library or buy every single book at the bookstore. Most of the books you pass up aren't bad. They're just not books you're currently excited about.

On the heels of two rejections I was pretty hopeful about, I was briefly ready to throw in the towel or just take a long break. It's been a year since I started querying my Steampunk book. I've spent the year doing a bunch of smaller tweaks and one major revision. I've lost count of the times I've tweaked my query and opening pages. According to all the advice out there I've done all the right things and should have been overrun with requests at least if not offers. My book has all kinds of things agents are supposed to be looking for. It has disability rep. It has queer rep. It has a diverse cast. It addresses climate change. It's a mystery to me why it hasn't gotten more full requests.

But I don't get to control what agents and editors think. I only get to control what I write. I tried to start writing something new this spring but I kept stopping and starting with it and never got very far. Only time will tell, but so far I'm much more excited about my new #WIP. I enjoy reading adult contemporary romance and I liked the idea of writing one, but it doesn't excite me the way middle grade does. Reading and writing middle grade lights me on fire in a way other types of books don't. Yes, I can appreciate books in other age groups. Someday I might even write one. But middle grade is where my heart is.

And when it comes down to it, that's why I'm not ready to give up on pursuing traditional publication. When I decided to get serious about writing again three years ago I knew it would be hard. I didn't know it would be "writing and querying three books over three years with three requests between them that all ended in rejection" hard. Some people would have been ready to quit well before this time. And there is nothing wrong with that. Your mental and emotional health is more important than reaching the elusive goal of getting a book traditionally published. 

There are moments when I feel like it might be time to quit. But when it comes down to it I'm not ready.  I've liked all the paid jobs I've had. This fall I started a part time job teaching a two year old preschool class and I might actually like that one best of all. But what really lights me on fire, what really makes me feel like I'm doing what I was created to do, is writing. Until I stop feeling that, I'm going to keep plodding up this mountain path of unknown length full of logs, rocks, and roots. I may stop for awhile and take a rest on one of the logs, but I'm not ready to head down the mountain just yet. 

In Which a New Idea Grabs My Attention

Querying right now is soul sucking. There. I said it. I don't know if there's a better way for agents to make connections to writers they want to represent. I don't blame the agents for being busy and taking a long time to respond. I do sometimes wish I could go back in time to a time when there were fewer people trying to be published and seriously pursue being published then, but time machines are not a thing. Plus, I know that I'm a better writer now so there's that.

In large part due to the soul-suckingness of querying, I've found it really hard to get into writing something new. Harbor Lightkeep is the fourth book I've queried and I didn't have this problem with the other three, but I think the very fact that it's the fourth and I'm still trying to find an agent is part of what's stopping me. Every single time I finish a book I think "Okay, this one is going to be the one." And so far it never has been. 

It also doesn't help that I recently started a part time job, teaching two year old preschool three days a week. I love the job, even with all the dirty diapers I have to change, but it does limit my potential writing time. At the very least I blame the new job, which I started in October, for me not blogging in October.

I kept telling myself I was going to finish the adult contemporary romance I started in March this fall but no matter how many times I opened my computer and stared at the document I just could not work up the energy to add to the story. I do hope to finish that book someday. I really love the world I dreamed up. But romance just doesn't light my heart on fire the way middle grade does. So I officially gave up pretending my fall goal was to finish that book.

Finally, just over a week ago, a new idea grabbed onto me. I had always been intrigued by the seed of a the 200 word story I wrote last fall for #FallWritingFrenzy and kind of wanted to do more with the idea of a grieving girl summoning the ghost of her twin. But I wasn't sure where to go with it until suddenly I was.

The original story was inspired by a photo of a Dia de los Muertos ofrenda. But, while I feel a deeper connection to Latinx cultures than I often do to the cultures of my own ancestors thanks to the combination of my degrees in Spanish and having a child in a Spanish Immersion school, I don't want to steal a culture that doesn't belong to me for an entire novel. I toyed with the idea of having the story center around Halloween and the autumnal equinox and the traditions from many cultures that involve spirits visiting our world at that time of year. But it just wasn't clicking for me.

Finally I remembered my favorite ghost story from childhood: A Christmas Carol. The tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas never caught on in America, but it was huge in Victorian England and well before that so there's a rich culture to draw from. Plus, I love the idea of the veil between the living and the dead thinning at the darkest time of the year. I still have a lot of planning and research to do before I can do this story justice, but I'm finally really excited about something again. So I present to you the moodboard for what I'm currently calling #SpookyGhostTwinChristmasWIP. Although I've never actually used that hashtag since I'm taking a twitter break while I research and draft. And, no, this is not a NaNoWriMo project. It's just a project I happen to have started in November. 

In Which It Is Banned Books Week Again

I've posted before (here, here, and here if you want to read) about book bannings and #BannedBooksWeek, but unfortunately the topic is perennial and needs to continue being addressed. Books bannings have continued to increase over the past year. The continued increase in books featuring BIPOC and queer characters seems to really scare certain groups of conservative parents, and those groups know how to organize and how to make a lot of noise.

I have to say I'm a bit disappointed in some of the lists I've seen put out this week featuring banned books. A lot of them are classics (such as Lord of the Flies or To Kill a Mockingbird) or older children's books that were the subject of bans in the past but are overall really well known (such as Harry Potter).

The real danger right now is the hundreds of books that are being quietly removed from classrooms and school libraries because parent groups are challenging them. These groups assert that the very fact that a book stars a BIPOC child and mentions racism means it promotes Critical Race Theory and, even more often, that the very fact that a book features a queer character makes it "pornography". There are picture books being challenged as being "pornographic". Think about that for a minute. 

Unfortunately this phenomenon isn't limited to schools either. A small town in Michigan lost funding for its library in a vote this summer after a conservative group raised concerns that the librarians were "groomers" pushing "pornography" on children. Which is not in any way, shape or form what children's librarians who have books with queer characters in their collections are doing. I've heard anecdotes of Pride month displays in libraries all over the country being tampered with, everything from patrons checking out every single book to keep them out of the hands of children to outright vandalism.

A swift perusal of my shelves and my daughter's shelves produced a pile of middle grade books that I know have been challenged and removed from classrooms and/or libraries along with books I don't know for sure have been challenged but are likely to encounter challenges for the reasons cited above. If I looked for longer I could likely find even more books that commit the apparently grave crime of making children aware that racism still happens and queer people exist.

So, what can you do if you want books like this to get into the hands of readers? On a larger scale, if you know books bans are happening in your community, make your voice known. If your community and/or local school library is open to having the kinds of books that are being banned in its collection, request that they purchase books like this if they have funds to do so. If the library doesn't have the funds and you do, consider donating such books to your local school and/or community library, or to your child's classroom library or the classroom library of a teacher in your circle.

If you're a parent, godparent, aunt or uncle, or otherwise have a role in a child's life that involves buying gifts for them, give them books that have been challenged. There are books with queer and/or BIPOC kids in every genre and you can certainly find a book the child in your life will enjoy. Whether the child in your life will see themself in these books or whether they'll see that kids who are different from them can be heroes it's equally important for them to read these books.

I have a lot of hope that the generation nearing and just entering adulthood is going to bring about a sea change in the way our society sees and treats queer people and people of color. I'm not an idiot. I know there will also be pushback and challenges, but the young people I know give me a lot of hope that we're moving in the right direction and the larger part of their generation will be on the right side of history.

In Which I Am Really Bad at Waiting

Eleven days ago I sent my revised manuscript of HARBOR LIGHTKEEP AND THE BROKEN WORLD to the agent who asked me to revise and resubmit it. The same day I sent fresh queries to three other agents. Every time I check my email now I brace myself for bad news, smaller bad news like one of the new agents sending a form rejection or bigger bad news like the agent who wanted the R&R still not loving my book enough to offer rep. Either is a distinct possibility. I also brace myself for good news, like a full request from one of the new agents or an email asking for a call from the agent who got the revised full manuscript.

The agent who asked for the R&R seemed eager to read my book, so I had a vain hope that I'd know one way or the other within a few days, but nearly two weeks later I'm still waiting. To be clear, I'm not upset at this agent. She has clients she's working with on edits and sending on submission to editors. She's reading queries from other writers and reading full manuscripts she's requested. She's also a writer herself and needs to devote time to her own work. She doesn't owe me a fast response. That didn't stop me from hoping she would give me one anyway.

So now I wait, which is one of the things I'm worst at. I told myself, as well as telling my CPs and whoever sees my tweets, that once I turned in the R&R I was going to get back to work on the adult contemporary romance I started this spring and put on the back burner when I got the R&R request. Reader, I lied. Well, I didn't exactly lie. That's what I intended to do and what I still intend to do. But it hasn't actually happened yet. I've opened the document and read through what I've written so far, yes, but I have not added any more words to said document. 

Part of this is that my ADHD brain struggles to complete tasks I'm not excited about. Part of it is that I've never written anything for adults before and it's proving to be harder than I thought it would be.

Mind you, I haven't been staring at the wall or bingeing Netflix while not writing. I've been trying to conquer my large to be read pile instead. I've read some great books, and that's a valuable thing for any writer to do, but if I want to keep being a writer I really do need to actually get back to writing at some point.

I'm almost done with my TBR pile from the library (let's just forget about the 20+ books on my shelves that I haven't read yet for the moment, shall we?) so maybe this will be the week I figure out how to convince my brain that going back to work on the romance is exciting. We'll see.

I don't have a good picture to represent me not writing and holding my breath every time I check my email, so here's a beautiful photo of my cat, Daniel Tiger, instead. He's a reader, as you can see.

In Which Getting Published Isn't Easy

Some of my writing friends are talking about a recent article in the New York Times which purports to talk about how a book went from a messy first draft to a bestseller. Supposedly this is representative of how writing and getting published works. I don't subscribe to the New York Times and the article is behind a paywall, so I will admit from the start that I haven't read the article, I've just heard things about it.

What I've heard is that the article paints a rosy view of publishing. The author apparently had connections within the publishing world that helped get her her deal. She also got a high number deal for her middle grade debut, which is uncommon, and a lot of publicity was put behind it. Let me make it clear that this post is not coming from a sense of sour grapes because I've been querying for 2 1/2 years and don't have an agent let alone a book deal. I'm glad this writer has had so much success. I wish success like this for everyone who writes good books. 

The thing is, though, most people don't get that success and articles like that can make it look a lot easier than it is. Even successful writers experience setbacks. Even writers who have had multiple books published get rejections from editors. Selling one book does not mean you've "made it". Selling one book means you've sold one book, no more and no less.

Don't get me wrong. That's a big accomplishment. Many more people write a first draft of a book than go through all the work it takes to get that book ready to query to agents or editors. Many more people query than get an agent. Not all books signed by agents end up being the book that gets that writer a book deal. Sometimes a writer signs with an agent, the agent sends that book on submission to editors, and the writers gets a book deal in a few months. Sometimes it takes a year or more. Sometimes it doesn't happen at all and the agent sends another book instead. I have a few writing friends who signed with agents more than a year ago and have yet to have a book sell to editors. I have other writing friends whose debut book sold in less than a month. 

It's variable, and a lot of it depends on the book getting in front of just the right editor at just the right time, which is difficult to impossible for an agent to predict. The thing is, not even agents, who have a different view into the industry than writers do, can know exactly what an editor has signed recently since deals aren't announced the second they're agreed upon. One friend got a rejection because that editor had just recently signed a book that was too similar. The editor said they might have signed my friend's book if they had received that one first. But they didn't.

I know this post is full of doom and gloom. It's rough out there in the world of traditional publishing. And though some people choose to publish on their own (some would call this indie publishing and some would call it self publishing) that's not actually any easier. There are absolutely indie writers who are successful and make  good income from their writing, but there are many, many more who just sell a few copies and make a few dollars or don't even break even. I don't think the answer is to abandon traditional publishing.

So what is the answer? If you figure it out, please let me know. In the meantime, I'm going to keep writing my stories about kids who don't let their invisible disabilities stop them from going on adventures and keep sending them to agents or (hopefully in the future) have my agent keep sending them to editors in the hope that they will be on the shelves for kids to read someday. With book bans, major bookstores not wanting to carry a variety of hardcover children's books (maybe I'll write more about this next month), and editors quitting making the editors who are left even more overworked, it's tempting to just throw in the towel and stop writing. Or to write only for myself.

There would be nothing wrong with doing this. You are not a bad person if you decided you're done with the query trenches for good or you decide you're done having your books sent on sub and failing if you're agented. Every person needs to make the decision that's best for their own mental health.

Personally, I'm not ready to give up. I have a lot of hope for the current version of my eco steampunk airship adventure, which I hope to finish final edits on and send some queries for by the end of the week. If that one isn't "the one," or it is in terms of getting me an agent but it fails on sub, I have more than a dozen other ideas in mind. I'm in the privileged position of being in a stable marriage to a partner with a good income, having kids in school, and working very part time. I have time to write, and I don't need it to make me money any time soon, if at all. Not everyone is in this position. In fact, I would say most people in the query trenches aren't in this position. There are plenty of people who keep writing and pursuing publication despite having more obstacles than I have. There are others who have the same privileges I have who decide they're done after a certain amount of time. Neither are right or wrong.

Getting a book from a messy rough draft to bookstore and library shelves, let alone to bestseller status, is tough. It takes a long time, a lot of work, a lot of tears, and quite possibly some fairy dust. If someday a reader finds my book and feels seen, finds a book they love to read for the first time, or just spends an enjoyable day or more absorbed in the world I've created, it will have been worth it to me. If I also have a book that reaches bestseller status and gets me a lot of money I will not complain. But for me it's about having my books reach readers first and foremost.

Because I like putting pictures in my posts, I'm ending this with a photo of a photo of an arctic fox that I took this past weekend at the Columbus Zoo. We saw actual arctic foxes, but they were curled up and snoozing and not in a great position for a good photo. This fox is exactly how I picture Crystal, the glucose alert fox in the book I'm querying. Enjoy the cute foxie!

In Which I Recommend Another Amazing, Diverse Magic School Book

Though the last book in the series was published almost 20 years ago now, thanks to the popularity of the movies and the theme park attractions based on them, the HP magic school books are firmly ingrained into our culture. 

However, there are new magic books coming out that I have hope may someday dethrone that series in the hearts of children. Last month I told you about Claribel Ortega's Witchlings, which I still highly recommend. But Witchlings isn't alone in creating an imaginative, fun, diverse magical world that holds its own against the HP world. Another fabulous contender is Dhonielle Clayton's The Marvellers, which came out this spring and which I just finished reading. 

In The Marvellers, Clayton imagines a magical society that mostly lives apart from the non-magical, whom they call Fewels. The Marvellers have built floating cities in the sky as well as a school that changes the way it looks every year known as the Arcanum. Starting at age 11, marveller children go and learn to harness their light at the Arcanum. Over the course of their first year, they are exposed to the five Paragons, and at the end of the year they learn their talent and join one of the Paragons. I love that the students aren't immediately boxed into one identity upon arrival. The MC of this book, Ella Durand, is from a magical family but not a Marveller family. Ella is from a Conjuror family. Conjurors are the descendants of slaves living in the Americas and the Caribbean. The Middle Passage changed their magic. They are in charge of the underworld and they use magic differently. They live in enclaves within Fewel cities. Marvellers have looked down on Conjurors for centuries, despite their shared history. Thanks to a change in Marveller law that her own parents pushed for, Ella is the first Conjuror to attend the Arcanum. Any Conjuror child is now welcome, but Ella is the only one who is brave enough to go. She encounters a lot of hate and prejudice, but also makes new friends, including a girl raised among Fewels who hates her magic and a boy with a secret who can talk to animals. The villain in this book is truly nuanced, and there are quite a few morally grey characters. The story tackles prejudice and racism head on, but is able to look at it differently because it takes place in an imaginary world. It tackles tough issues, but it feels like an engaging fantasy adventure and not at all like an issue book. The airborn world of the Marvellers is detailed, well conceived, and incredibly charming. I really want to visit the Arcanum and the floating cities. One thing I love about the book is that the students come from all over the world, which makes for a naturally diverse cast. The language issue is handled by having the students wear magical translation necklaces. As long as two people are wearing their necklaces, they'll hear each other in their native language. One student can be speaking French and another Swahili and there will be no communication problems. This book has so much to offer that the HP world lacks. It has made its way to the New York Times bestseller list. I hope it gets its own movie (or streaming show, which could actually reach a bigger audience) and earns a place in pop culture.

In Which I Gush About Some Queer Middle Grade Books

Before LGBTQIA+ Pride Month ends, I need to get to the post I've been meaning to write recommending some queer MG I've read this summer. First, these books I'm recommending are far from the only ones out there. There's more and more queer kidlit making its way into the world, which is a very good thing. It's a good thing for the queer kids, who are finally able to see themselves in books. It's a good thing for the kids working through their identity to see characters with similar questions. It's also a good thing for cishet kids to see queer kids in the books they read. Both so they understand the struggles those kids can go through and so they see the struggles and joys that are common to all of us, regardless of our sexual and gender identities. Especially in today's climate, when states are passing laws stopping trans kids from getting gender affirming care and/or preventing teachers from talking about LGBTQIA+ people in the classroom, we need to get these books into the hands of kids.  I believe it's my kids' generation that's going to turn the tide and make real progress to stop that toxic heteronormativity of western culture. I still sometimes struggle with "they" as a singular pronoun (even though it's been used in English for hundreds of years to refer to a person whose gender is unknown), but it slips off my kids' tongues naturally. They found out my cousin was gay and marrying another man and they were like, "Hope they have a great marriage." A teen at our church came out as nonbinary, started using they/them pronouns, and changed their preferred name, and my kids along with all the kids in the youth group just rolled with it, even though our church is on the conservative end of the UMC spectrum.

First up in my rundown is Michael Leali's lovely contemporary debut, The Civil War of Amos Abernathy. The writing and narrative style themselves are worthy of note. MC Amos' voice is classic middle grade and a treasure trove for a writer wanting to learn how to master voice. The novel is written alternating Amos' letters to a Civil War soldier who would likely have identified as a trans man if he had lived today with a present tense narrative covering one important day. The narrative combined with the letters slowly reveal what's happening and how important it is for Amos and his community. Amos has spent most of his life volunteering at a living history park of which his mom is the director. He has been out as a gay boy since elementary school, and he suddenly realizes in seventh grade that there are no queer people portrayed at the LHP. Along with his best friend and a new friend on whom he's developed a crush, he goes searching for queer people in the 19th century, including one I won't name who will likely surprise you. Amos' new friend and crush is from a conservative Christian family and he struggles with his feelings for Amos because he's been told his whole life that they're wrong. One thing I especially love about this book as a queer identifying and LGBTQIA+ affirming Christian myself is that Amos' family are also faithful churchgoers. They just attend a different, open and affirming church. So often religious characters in queer novels are painted exclusively as bigots, or at best as people who are reluctantly accepting but not happy about it. While that is absolutely the case for a portion of people of faith, that doesn't describe anywhere near all of us and I was glad to see both sides shown in this novel.

In the Key of Us by Miriam J. Lockington gives us two queer Black girls experiencing first love at a prestigious music summer camp. I know from twitter interactions with the author that the camp was inspired by a camp that my brother attended for many years and, based on what I know of it from him, the portrayal of the environment at a camp like that was pretty spot on. In addition to giving us a sweet first love story between two girls, this books addresses what it's like to be a BIPOC in a heavily white environment. It also tackles issues of grief, guilt, self-harm, and family pressure. Told in dual POV, this book and is thoughtful and tackles important issues without feeling like a heavy "issue book".

The Mirrorwood by Deva Fagan is a secondary world fantasy loosely inspired by the story of Sleeping Beauty. While the MC, Fable, is cishet, I believe it deserves a mention in a rundown of queer kidlit because the world Fagan has created is queernormative. Fable has a nonbinary sibling who uses they/them pronouns and this is not in any way remarkable. Families with two dads and two moms are mentioned in the villages Fable visits as a matter of course. In the world created for this book, being queer is just a part of some people's identity. There's no indication that they encounter prejudice or pushback of any kind. Both queer kids and cishet kids (and adults!) can benefit from seeing a world like this.

If forced to name the queer MG book I read this summer that's the most important, it would have to be David Levithan's Answers in the Pages. It's a short little book (I read it in one afternoon) following a boy whose mom starts a campaign to have a book his teacher (who is gay) assigns based on one sentence at the end about the two boys in the book loving each other. The MC's story is interspersed with chapters from the (made up) book showing just how incredibly innocuous and age appropriate the book is. A third narrative, which seems to sit apart from the other two until they all dovetail at the end, follows two junior high boys whose friendship is growing into a mutual crush, and who aren't sure how to handle their feelings for each other. This book resonated with me as a parent because, when my 17yo was in elementary school, my reaction to a book with two boys who might be in love with each other would have been closer to the MC's mom's reaction than I would like to admit to myself. I don't think I would have moved to have such a book removed from the classroom, but I would have been uncomfortable with it and would have at least thought internally along the lines of the argument his mom gives. She's not portrayed as a bigot who hates all gay people. She just has an idea that kids don't need to think about their sexuality until at least high school and for that reason it will just confuse them to have gay people mentioned in books they read in elementary school. That's a pretty common view for Gen Xers and millenials who are the parents of kids in school right now. We were never exposed to gay characters in books until high school at the very earliest and it can feel weird to us for our kids to read the books available now. Yes, some of the people (maybe even most of the people) moving to ban books really are hateful bigots. Others are like the MC's mom, people who have a generational misunderstanding of what kids can "handle" in the books they read, and whose minds can be changed (as this mom's mind is) when they stop to really listen to the other side.

I hope you'll pick up some of these books if you haven't read them and consider passing them on to the children in your life. If you have other great queer kidlit recs, I'd love to hear about them in the comments.