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Recently, there was news about a former literary agent and the ways in which they essentially lied to the clients they were supposed to be representing. I’m not going into details or names here; this is just context for a couple of links I want to share.

The first is a link to a recent episode of Literaticast, the podcast of Jennnifer Laughran, a Senior Agent at Andrea Brown Literary Agency. In this episode, Jennifer talks with Kelly Sonnack, another ABLit Senior Agent about their thoughts on what a client should be able to expect from an agent (with a little bit about what agents might expect from their authors). It’s a great discussion (like all of the episodes) and a good listen for anyone wondering about how the agent-creator relationship works.

This thread talks about what creators should expect from their agent.

And this one talks about things creators should watch out for.

 

After the episode aired, Kelly posted a couple of follow-up tweets.

So I’m two weeks into the new job, and I’m loving it. I feel like, finally, I’ve found my day-job home.

The job is also having some unexpected benefits on my other life, the writing one. In the past, or at least since I haven’t been driving the boy to school, I’ve scheduled my work hours on the earlier side. I’m not so much a morning person as a not-night person. Getting home at a regular time has felt like getting home too late to do anything but eat, putter, and veg. Not to mention that, around here, later=more traffic.

With the new job, at least for a while, I’m working “normal,” 9-5 hours. Surprisingly, maybe because people are on summer vacations, commute traffic hasn’t been bad. And, even more surprisingly, I’m having extremely productive before-work hours.

I tend to wake up early, anyway, and I’m managing to push that back even a little more. I’m getting in my tiny fitness routine, and I’m having some reading time with my morning tea.

And then I’m writing.

*pause for cheers from the peanut gallery*

Yep. I leave an hour later than I used to, and I’m at my computer or a notebook for that hour. Not every single morning, and I’m not yet perfect at resisting the siren call of social  media. But I’m present, and I’m moving projects forward. I’ve refined a couple of picture books, pulled apart another one, and started letting my brain play with a new idea, inspired by a podcast episode. (Yet another benefit of staying away from the news during my commute.)

We get into ruts. We decide there is one way to be, one way to do things, and we decide we’re already doing it. And then Life happens, even a little bit of Life, and we find out there are other patterns available. When I was younger, I would have dug my feet in and pushed back on exploring those other possibilities. Silly younger me.

Will I keep up the later hours? For now, absolutely. When summer shifts away and night comes earlier, I’ll see if traffic also gets worse. And then I’ll look around at the next set of possibilities and decide which ones to check out.

What can you shake up in your life? When have things changed and led you down a different, better-for-now path?

 

Here’s how it goes:

• You get a picture book idea in October.
• Halloween is in October.
• The story vibe starts with a gently spooky tone.
• The idea comes to you, of course, with a little black cat as the littlehero.
• You play with the idea for a while.
• The story becomes, on paper, less spooky.
• The story becomes, on paper, less about Halloween. Okay, not at all about Halloween.
• You make lots of progress, all the time visualizing the little black cat as surrounded by non-feline characters. Human characters. None of whom seem bothered by the fact that there is a walking, talking little black cat in their world.
• Someone makes a random comment about story animals in clothes. (You have never once pictured your little black cat in clothing. You have, of course, pictured all your human characters in clothes.)
• Just like with Wile E. Coyote and the anvil, the realization hits you: You may have written a story about a little black cat with a bunch of humans, but any rational illustrator is going to think that those humans are other animals you just forgot to identify. 

MAYBE EVEN IN CLOTHING!*

• And then, because that road runner is so cunning, a second anvil hits you on the head. There is absolutely no story reason the hero has to be a cat.
• A brief sense of relief breezes by, followed, or course, by a chill wind reminding you that you now have no idea who or what that hero is. Or why they even need to do the thing you have then doing in Sentence 1. (Even, though, for some reason lost in the mists of musedom, it made sense for a cat. No, really. It did.)
• You procrastinate by writing a blog post about it.
• Then, finally, you open the file and get down to it.

*There is nothing intrinsically wrong with stories about animals wearing clothes. I grew up happily reading my father’s old copies of Thornton Burgess’ Mother West Wind Books, I loved when Santa Mouse got his little suit, and I think Charlotte would have rocked a little goth outfit. Just…not this cat, not this story.

 

 

It’s a special darling. It’s been in my mind for nine years and in a story almost that long.

It was a darling in the first picture book I ever wrote when, as I was dreaming up imaginary picture books to “excerpt” in The Writing and Critique Group Survival Guide, I dreamed up one idea that I didn’t want to just write a few lines of–I wanted to write the whole thing.

I wrote the whole thing. It became a full, complete picture book–my first ever–called Dragon Burps. The darling was a major source of inspiration and took its place in a place of honor–the story crisis. With the help of a Bay Area freelance editor (who is wonderful and now helping me with these other picture books!), I revised and revised. And submitted. I had no takers, but I got a few nice comments. I revised a little more, and it was better, but…

I worked on other things–some YA and middle-grade and those most recent picture books.

And then in February, I went to the 2018 SCBWI Spring Spirit conference and, in Mark Teague’s session on leaving room for the illustrator, I flashed on a new way to revise Dragon Burps. The new way didn’t touch the darling, but suggested a much better handling of the turning point of each scene in the middle. I knew it was going to let me build to the crisis in a much stronger, more tense arc.

I was right. I just sat down with the manuscript today. I cut and I tightened. (This manuscript is currently at 700+ words; my newer ones are all under 500.)

And I scribbled notes to weave in the turning points. It is going to be better. It creates a plot that makes much more sense in terms of setting up the ending.

Just not my darling ending.

As I realized what was going on, the first feeling was that click your brain hears when you make something better, more “right.” Then came the sadness. The recognition that the spark that started not just a single story, but an entire journey, had to go. Select, delete, gone.

This was a biggie.

Luckily, so was the feeling of happiness that flowed in, gave the sadness a nudge, and asked it politely to get out of the way. And luckily, the darling took a gentle bow befitting its stature in my life, then stepped aside.

I made a promise, years ago, to the darling, that I would turn it into an entire story, and I did. Today, I’m making it another promise, that I will turn it into a better story.

Yesterday’s SCBWI California: North/Central Spring Spirit conference was wonderful. All the sessions I sat in on were very good, and I got the best manuscript critique I’ve ever gotten from a publishing professional.  Best in two ways–the agent gave me excellent, concrete, and clear suggestions, and he also gave me some seriously positive and complimentary comments about the story and my writing of it.

The critique made me feel like I’m at least not wrong about getting somewhere with my picture-book writing. The whole day was inspiring, and I came away with new ideas and possibilities. I can’t even tell you where they came from, but this happens just about every time I go to a conference–must be the energy sparkling in the air.

My to-do list from this conference is:

• Revise the manuscript I submitted, based on the agent’s critique.
•  Revise an older picture book that I’ve been meaning to go back to, with the idea for a new (and hopefully better) ending that came to me while I was in one of Mark Teague’s sessions.
• Revise one more picture book that is currently out with my editor (editing editor, not publishing editor).
• Start querying one of my picture books, starting with editors and agents who were at the conference.
• Remember–when I get back to my middle-grade novel–that it’s smartest, at the stage I’m at with this book–to revise one element or strand at a time, rather than trying to fix the whole, tangled mess in one pass. (Oh, yeah, I knew that once!) Got this excellent reminder from a session of Alex Ulyett, from Viking Children’s Books.
• Sign up again for the local rec drawing class. I signed up in the winter, but the class was cancelled for lack of enrollment. I was waffling, but I really would like to have more fun with whatever sketching I do, even if it’s just for me. So I’ll try again for Spring.

Lots to do and looking forward to all of it!

Well, not my mother’s, anyway.

When I was young–maybe 7 or 8?–my family took a trip to Canada. The trip included at least one bookstore. And there, my mom–who spent some of her childhood in England–found new editions of books she had read during those years: Arthur Ransome’s SWALLOWS AND AMAZON books. She bought the set and, so, I got to grow up with them, too.

I bought my own set years later, collecting it in ones or twos as I roamed through Charing Cross bookstores. A few days before I rented a car to drive myself out to Buttermere so I could walk around the lake “with” the children from Ransome’s stories.

To me, Arthur Ransome was a bald man with a pipe on a jacket cover who could tell wonderful stories, who knew how to draw little people waving semaphore flags, and who might have represented himself in his own stories as Captain Flint.

Apparently, though, he was also some kind of spy. Maybe.

Marcus Sedgwick’s Blood Red, Snow White is in part the story of whether or not Ransome was a spy and whether he was a spy for England or Soviet Russia. The novel, as far as I can tell, is based on some facts–Ransome’s failed first marriage; his travels as a reporter to Russia across the years of the last tsar, WWI, and the Russian revolution; and his falling in love with the woman who would ultimately become his second wife. He was at the places the book says he was, and it seems true that some people in England thought he was a Russian spy and some people in Russia thought he was an English spy.

I think what Sedgwick has done is filled in, with fiction, the spaces between the facts. He has imagined a man and a story that connect the dots of those facts. The Arthur Ransome of the book has the personality that makes sense of the real activities, and the fictional activities lend credence to the path the fictional Arthur follows.

This is all making it sound as though Sedgwick has pulled off a clever trick, dropped down a basic timeline of history and taken crayons to the gaps in the timeline. But it’s much more than this: the prose is nice, often sliding over into lyrical. The choices Arthur has to make, the one he avoids and the ones he steps toward, are real and challenging. And the setting–physical and history–feels at once tangible and symbolic. It’s an intriguing story, whether or not you know anything about Arthur Ransome the writer.

And both Arthurs–fact and fiction–do come home to England’s Lake District and do write about the Swallows, the Amazons, the Coot Club, Mrs. Barrable, and William the pug. That, for me, adds up to two happy endings.

Spoiler alert: some whining ahead.

Picture book writing status: Excellent. I have been on a roll. I’m loving the time I spend on them, and I’m getting what feel to me to be amazing compliments from the editor I’ve been working with.

Novel writing status: I feel like I am getting my butt kicked. Over the past years, I have finished one novel–a middle-grade mystery–to my basic satisfaction. It got several “nice” rejections from agents. It still needs work, mostly–I think–in connecting the action plot to a stronger character plot and in amping up the stakes. But I finished it, it came together into a full package, and I was essentially happy with it. Especially for a first novel.

A few years ago, I spent a chunk of time .on a YA historical. Trying to write a YA didn’t work for me, and the historical piece–while I loved it–was another layer of skill I don’t think I was ready to take on. More than all of that, though, I am pretty sure my tangle came about by switching from a plot-driven story (the mystery) to a character-driven story. Without the mystery goal, I couldn’t seem to plot out the things my hero would do, and I couldn’t connect any actions I did come up with to her personality, her needs, or her goals.

I looked and waited for another idea, and it came. Back to MG for me, and with a twist of magic that I thought added the right layer of “symbolism” for the hero’s struggle. I also thought the magic might play a similar role as the mystery did in my first book–something to hand my plot and character arcs on. A few drafts in…I feel like I’m back into the same kind of tangles as my YA.

I am still waiting for a critique back from the same editor I’ve been working with on my picture books, so some of this may resolve itself when I see what she has to say. But as I get closer to getting back her notes, I’ve been spending my own time trying to think about where I want this book to go and how I might get it there. Or at least closer. I spent a few hours on it yesterday and, frankly, I just got more and more frustrated.

I am pretty sure that, as with the YA, my problem is with the character-driven part. Which, if I weren’t feeling so good about the picture books, would be breaking my heart. I love novels. I have read novels since before I can remember, and for decades I have actively chosen them over any other genre: I know short stories and poetry have characters and certainly have depth, but they don’t pull me in like novels, and they don’t let me stay with all the characters and character dynamics for nearly enough time. If you had asked me twenty or thirty or–oh, heck–forty years ago–what kind of book I wanted to write (when I grew up, when I had grown up), I would have said, every single time, “novels.”

And yet…here comes the whine: novels don’t seem to love me.

Obviously, I need to see what comes back from my editor. Maybe I need to take a class. (If anyone knows a really good online novel-writing class that isn’t budget-breaking and isn’t directed at beginners, please drop a rec in the comments!). Maybe I need to read some more plot books.

Maybe I need to stick to writing picture books.

When I say that, a bit of me sings out…oh, yes! Another bit, though, says, But…I write novels. (And, yes, I know that voice is silly, but whenever wasn’t a negative voice silly?)

Okay, no resolution here. Today, I’m going to go back through my files and see if one of the picture-book ideas wants to come out and play–just identify it and get it simmering in my brain. And then I’m going to go back to some classics: —James Scott Bell’s Plot & Structure and (this is way back) Phyllis A. Whitney’s Writing Juvenile Stories and Novels—and I’m just going to reacquaint myself with what the two of them have to say.

And I’m going to be grateful that I love to write and that I get to write and even that I get to have this confusion about what to write.