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.

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!