I applied to Writer’s Relief online for full service submission service  in January.  That service requires the full manuscript.  To my surprise, a letter, not email, came yesterday.  I quote:

“Our review board found that your writing is strong enough to place you among our Full Service clients.  We don’t typically offer personalized editorial feedback, but we did want to take a moment to tell you that you’ve done a great job capturing the reader’s attention in the first paragraph.

“We can significantly improve your chances of receiving an offer, we can make the process MUCH easier for you . . .but we can’t promise a six-figure book deal.

“We have accepted you into our Full Service program because we believe that your work is strong enough for submission.  There is a waiting list for our services; up to 80% of writers who apply to Writer’s Relief are rejected.”

It costs, but at least I got a reply.

The first one I published through Airleaf. I don’t remember why. The second
I published through Barnes and Noble’s editing wing, IUniverse. Their editing impressed me. I revised accordingly and scored high on their “shelf-placing” score. Innocently, and to save the extra expense, I did the line-editing myself and missed too many typos to get placed on their shelves.

Third, GAMBLING FOR GOOD MAIL, was published first by Airleaf. It got
excellent reviews and orders on Amazon.com that Airleaf could not supply. That’s when I found out that Airleaf was bankrupt. I had to re-publish through Booksurge.

I just finished polishing THE UNDERBELLY. This time I’m searching for an agent before going back to POD. If you are on the same search, I found some
helpful links to investigate. I have yet to do all the research needed to find at least fifty agents that may fit my submission, but I now know where to start, Here they are:

www.publisherslunch.com Offers free e-newsletter covering book deals

www.publishersweekly.com site has a search box for agents and agencies to get specific website info

Use GoogleBlog search for literary agents

Search Twitter for agents http://twitter.com/agentquery

www.books.google.com Put name of agent in quotes and “acknowledgments” in quotes to find out which books have acknowledged the agent you’re researching.

www.writersdigest.com/101bestsites and www.guidetoliteraryagents.com/blog

www.Agentquery.com offers searchable database of agencies and agents

http://www.Absolutewrite.com Offers good links and resources

Amazon.com and BN.com allow you to browse your genre and look for acknowledgments of top sellers.

Fee based: www.publishersmarketplace.com $20 a month, five invaluable resources

HAPPY HUNTING

Evy Cole

Also, I’ve been reading first pages of novels most like mine and listening to advice on first pages, opening lines.  “Call me Ishmael”  has been taken.  Perhaps I should start with “Call her Dr. Jacquelyn” during the day and “Mrs. Hyde” on the nights of the new moon.  But she’s not the main character.

I believe the rules of including a catchy opening line, setting, emotional desires and hint of conflict on the first page are valid, but they should include the genre of the novel.  Crime stories need a crime.  Appropriate indicators are needed for romance, erotic,  philosophical and science fiction novels.  What’s difficult for me still is deciding on my genre.  I call it adult fiction, whatever that is.  Most of my readers are women, but it’s not chick lit.

So I am re-writing my first page for the umteenth time.

What do you do?

Comments anyone?

Evy

Evelyn Cole

Facing the floor every day for two weeks after retina surgery

In an introduction to Wild Ducks Flying Backwards, a book of his essays, he writes, “Serious Reading is hardly a social activity and every halfway serious reader is perpetually subject to a form of coitus interruptus.  Family members or friends who lack the desire, the courage, or the opportunity to burst in on you when there’s some indication that you could be sexually entwined will seldom hesitate to interject themselves between you and a page, even though the act of reading is often as intimate and intense as a full-fledged carnal embrace.”

This supports my thesis in an earlier blog on the purpose of sex scenes in literature.  Reading a really good novel is an intimate experience.

When asked, “What is the Meaning of Life?” by Life Magazine in 1991, Robbins answered, “Our purpose is to consciously, deliberately evolve toward a wiser, more liberated and luminous state of being; to return to Eden, make friends with the snake, and set up our computers among wild apple trees.

“Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution—a melding into the godhead, into love—is our true task.  Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force because to admit it is to acknowledge that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counterproductive but trivial.  Our mission is to jettison those pointless preoccupations and take on once again the primordial cargo of inexhaustible ecstasy.  Or, barring that, to turn out a good, thin-crust pizza and a strong glass of beer.”

Notice he didn’t write “pizza and a beer.”  He specifies with adjectives, always.

I know I can’t write like Tom Robbins does.  But reading him encourages me to write like I do.

Since I have a fascination with the power of the subconscious mind, I usually create characters who come face to face with the forgotten childhood that shapes their adult decisions. The theme for my novel on teen suicide touches on various levels of hidden shame in an affluent community: Teenagers are particularly susceptible to shame. Shame is a silent killer.

For my novel about a woman addicted to buying stuff from catalogues, the theme is: “We earn, spend, hoard, and share money not so much as we were taught, but as we see ourselves subconsciously.”

The theme of my recently finished novel, The Underbelly, subtitled Dr Jaquelyn and Mrs. Hyde, comes from a quote in the Los Angeles Times by Martin T. Riggs: “Anger unvented becomes pain unspoken, becomes rage released, becomes violence.”

Now, reading a critical companion to Tom Robbins by Catherine Hoyser and Lorena Stookey, I find several examples of Robbins’ theme. Hoyser writes, “A rejection of organized religion and return to the worship and appreciation of the female principles of sexuality, generation, and connection are two of the themes that recur in Robbins’ novels. The remaining five of the seven veils of Skinny Legs and All outline the other themes that Robbins favors in his work. The veils of political illusion, commerce, human omnipotence, Armageddon, and reliance on others must all be stripped away. People must understand that no one else will live life for them or take responsibility for them.

“Gurus, shamans, priests, and ministers can only point a direction for relating to the divine and the universe, but individuals must discern for themselves their role in the universe.”

If you have ever read a Tom Robbins novel, you realize his major themes revolve around joy that is too often killed by the oppression of women and by male-dominant religions, politics and business.

What are your themes?

I checked my working title on a website that rates various titles in sales draw.  “Good Mail” didn’t fly, but a title with “gambling” in it did.  I renamed my novel “Gambling for Good Mail.”  It’s a bad title, I’ve since discovered from the many rave reviews I got for the novel and pans for the title.  I no longer trust that web site.

Naming non-fiction is easier.  To make a title work, write one that gives your reader what he wants immediately. Not what he needs, but what he wants.  People don’t want advice even if they need it.  They want specific results fast.   Steve Harrision of BookMarketing gives the example of Dr. Leman’s latest book on parenting.  Instead of  “How to Discipline Your child,” the subject of the book, he titled it, “Have a new Kid by Friday.”  This is followed with the sub-title: “How to Change Your Child’s Attitude, Behavior, and Character in Five Days.”

I named my current novel, “The Underbelly” to indicate the story is about social classes but sub-titled it, “Dr. Jacquelyn and Mrs. Hyde” to show that the story contains an obsessive character as well as humor.  I can’t figure out how to include “Be thoroughly Entertained in Two Days.” When it’s published I’ll let you know if my title works.

What works for you?

Almost immediately I received eighteen requests for a copy of the novel to review in various publications online and off, in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and The Netherlands. So far one rave review came in from a blog. The others are still reading, I guess.

I’m not sure if the money was well spent, but I will let you know. I was surprised by the initial response.

Evy Cole

Do you think word length? Do you outline the plot or think characters first?

I start with theme and then characters before plot because I started out life as a day-dreamer, then a philosopher, then a psychologist, and eventually a story-teller.

I’m ending up life as a poet of small things. Here’s how far I have fallen from Aristotle:

READ THE RECIPE FIRST

She poured in a whole quart of love
before the man was warm
didn’t save enough sugar
to sprinkle on anyone else

She melted all of the butter, too
There wasn’t enough left
to grease the pan
let alone the kids

or the skids

She whipped up a frenzy
without separating
the juicy bits
from the facts

She set her oven
too high
let her edges burn
her middle sigh

Next life she vowed
she’d read the recipe
all the way through
measure before she began

The next life she came back
as a pile-driving man

Aristotle gave us story writers a way to plot our dramas. I first learned it as the W diagram. Your main character wants something very much, but slides down the first side of the W, unable to get what he wants. He struggles and gains ground in the middle of the W. Then a rug-pull dumps him to the bottom of his quest. He crawls up the last pillar of the W after he has learned something profound about himself and life.

I can trace my own W. Can you?

One month in, the owner made me re-write their copy in addition to handling my own clients. I asked to be paid the same salary as the hot-shots. He said, “No way. You’re a woman.”

I gave him two weeks notice and then discovered, by substitute teaching, a career–teaching high school English. I realized from one expensive mistake in Yachting Magazine
that I needed to learn English. There’s no better way to learn anything than by teaching.

However, the writing I learned by teaching was non-fiction. Sure, I taught literature and showed my students how to write essays about literature, but I didn’t teach the minor details between pedantry and poetic writing. (A pedant myself, I didn’t know them.)

I’m ashamed to say that I taught my students to vary sentence structure with dependent clauses and to vary their tags in dialogue.

For the last week I have been painstakingly removing all words such as “painstakingly” from my novel manuscript, all paragraphs that open with a clause such as, “For the last week,” and adding “said” to dialogue.

Habits are hard to break. Note to English teachers: want to join my group of pedants anonymous?

I have been Amtrak Ambling from San Luis Obispo, CA to New Orleans and back, four days on the train, five in the French Quarter.  And I’ve been listening to people from everywhere.  Some spoke to me directly.  Others were unaware that I was listening to their conversations.  I eavesdrop a lot.  It fuels my fiction.

On this trip I heard a novel’s worth of dialogue.  Some of it will show up in an article, blog, poem or novel.  Two men on the train discussing their adventures with women gave me some good juice.  Street car driver said his girlfriend moved to Austin after Katrina hit and didn’t come back.  “It’s hard to get used to new lips,” he said.

Today I’m so full I haven’t been able to choose where all these “bon mots” will fall.  But some will hit paper.  This is why I say that writer’s block is a lie.

If you like to write stuff and do write a lot of stuff, why would you suddenly moan, “I have writer’s block!”

I suspect a true statement would be, “I am not able to write anything as well crafted and gorgeous as my snobby internal editor deems worthy.”

There are two good ways to end perceived writer’s block: Fire your egotistical internal editor and then write until your pen, pencil, computer and heart breaks.

Then re-write ans sell it.