Okay, so this idea hit me - geez, Karen, don't you think your millions of fans would just love to know what really goes on in your fabulously exciting career as a Canadian mystery writer? Well, all right, maybe not. After all, there's only so much boredom any given person can tolerate. It's not like I spend my days out at the pistol range with Patsy Cornwell, or hobnobbing around Hollywood with Michael Crichton, is it?
And yet, the idea kind of gnawed at me. My ideas have a way of doing that. In fact, there's one attached to my foot right at this very moment...no, wait, that's a cat. Never mind. Anyway, for your enjoyment I now present: All the News That Fits.
I've been asked many times how one writes a mystery novel. Well, I don't know how other people do it, but I'll share my secret with you right here: I bumble. When I first started writing Pluto Rising, not only did I not know that I was writing a mystery, I didn't even know I was writing a novel. To me, it was a simple exercise in procrastination: I may be the only Canadian author whose career was launched as a means of avoiding vacuuming. I wrote the first chapter as a kind of a lark one late summer afternoon while my daughter lay napping, and things just kind of took off from there. I wandered the neighbourhood at night, ostensibly walking the dog, but really muttering to myself, plotting and planning my next day's work. That book took about two months from start to finish, not including rewrites, and I had a blast writing it.
Once I had the first book written, though, it began to dawn on me that I might have to write a second book. It seemed only natural to continue telling Katy Klein's story, and thus was Jupiter's Daughter born. I must say, though, that it was a bit trickier writing a sequel to Pluto, if only because I had already set down the cast of characters in the first book, and now I was stuck with them, but I had to fit them somehow into a different plot. I solved the problem by sending a couple of characters away on a winter vacation, and introducing others.
But I followed the same basic prescription that had worked so well when I was writing Pluto: start at the beginning, muddle through until you reach the end, and then stop. I am a great believer in shitty first drafts, and believe me, my first drafts can emit some foul odours indeed. Fortunately, I like editing even better than I like writing (it's all that nit-picky Virgo in my chart), so rewrites are not a problem for me.
However, I've found that as I've written more books, my process has changed somewhat. For instance, when I wrote Mars Eclipsed, the third Katy Klein mystery, I began with an ending. I'd read an interesting story in the newspaper, and it set my wheels turning: I knew the end of the story, but the trick was figuring out how to get there. This book spent a lot more time in my head than the first two, as I had to do a fair bit of cogitating on character, plot and clue.
Deadlines have a fascinating way of sharpening the mind, and in September 2000, I had a call from my editor telling me that they needed "at least a draft" of Mars Eclipsed by month's end. They were planning to take the series to the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, and since two books do not a series make, they needed the third to prove to potential foreign publishers that I wasn't just a dilettante in the writing world. They needed that book. And it was only about half-written.
There was a lot going on in my family at that time, but I put it all aside, hunkered down over my keyboard and bashed out the remainder of the book. On September 29, with a huge sigh of relief, I hauled myself across the finish line, bundled the manuscript up into a nice neat e-mail attachment, and shipped it off to Raincoast. I didn't even have the energy to worry about whether it was any good. I figured that if it wasn't, I'd be hearing about it soon enough.
But apparently it lived up to expectations - when I asked my editor if it was even in the ballpark, she just laughed and said, "Oh, yeah!"
Unfortunately, life has an unpleasant habit of spiraling out of control, particularly when we are foolhardy enough to believe that we might actually be on a winning streak. For me, life's little slap upside the head began in the winter of 2001, continued through the spring with my father's very sudden death on March 1, and then made its point again, none too subtly, the following September, when I had very serious surgery that required a longish convalescence. Just in case I hadn't been paying attention, the following spring I was called back to BC by my mother's final illness. She died May 28, 2002.
To say that all this knocked me for a bit of a loop would be to grossly understate the case. What began as grief and shock gathered steam over the months, culminating in several months' worth of severe depression. It's when this kind of thing happens, though, that one finds out who one's true friends are. My wonderful husband, Mitchell, was steadfast in his support, as were my two children; and of course my sister, Wendy, shared the burden of our parents' deaths in a way that no one else could have done. Some time during this past winter, though, a corner was turned, and I realized that I had the beginnings of a new book gestating in my brain. I approached it cautiously, not wanting to scare it away by pouncing on it too eagerly, and one day in February or March, I sat down to write the opening paragraphs of Venus Wept.
It hasn't been an easy book to write. For one thing, I was out of practice at first, but gradually I felt myself slipping into the place I call "KatyLand" - a world inhabited by people I've never met, but whose voices I hear, whose psyches I feel almost as extensions of my own.
This morning I was doing hamstring curls in my cardio class when I realized that the rest of the class had long since moved on to knee lifts...but I'd been listening in on Katy and Dawn as they hashed out a particular plot point together. While some might interpret this as a sign of incipient psychosis, I prefer to think of it as the return of my writing voice. And I welcome it back, with a glad heart and open arms.
I don't want to be so pretentious as to claim that writing is an 'organic process', or some kind of mysterious creative endeavour that can only be approached with the appropriate reverence and offerings to the goddesses of the written word. If I thought that, I'd have given it up long ago. For one thing, I'm all out of goats.
I do think, though, that there's something wonderful about the way characters pop up in my brain when I least expect them; the way endings come to me before beginnings sometimes; and the way it all seems to come together in that final chapter, and somehow I just know: this is it. The End.
Here's an article I wrote for the RA News, a publication of the Recreation Association. Now get out there and start pumping iron!
The winter wind cuts across my face, and I wish I'd remembered to pull my scarf up, as I walk across the RA Centre's West parking lot. My gym bag weighs a ton -- what's in there, anyway? Bricks? A kind gentleman holds the door for me, and I'm inside, heading for the locker room. I navigate from memory, since my glasses have fogged up in the transition from -24 temperatures to indoors. It takes less than two minutes to change into my gym wear: baggy grey sweats, a tank top that lost its shape several laundries ago, and a pair of cross-trainers that used to be white. In passing, I wonder whether they need to be replaced. Didn't I read something about replacing your workout shoes every six months, after hard wear? Will have to look into this.
And then I'm sprinting up the stairs, grabbing my step on the way into the gym, filling my water bottle at the fountain. The instructor is already there, testing the brand new sound system (yay!), and at the sound of the heavy dance beat my feet begin to march in place, almost of their own accord. Right foot on the downbeat, march it out for eight, now go wide for four, back in...another aerobics class has begun.
Two years ago, I couldn't have imagined myself making it through a class like this without collapsing. Two years ago, I weighed 150 lbs. more than I do now. My doctor said I was "morbidly obese" -- now, there's a phrase with an ugly ring to it. What does it mean, exactly? Morbid obesity is defined as having a Body Mass Index of 40 or above, and it is associated with multiple health risks, from heart disease and Type II Diabetes to urinary stress incontinence and musculoskeletal pain. And that doesn't even count the psychosocial costs. Fat people are one of the last groups it's considered okay to ridicule. Many people assume that fat people are lazy, unmotivated, ugly and stupid. "If only they could control their appetite," the thinking goes, "they wouldn't have this problem. They bring it on themselves."
Many fat people do control their appetites -- they diet, losing and regaining weight in a painful cycle of initial success followed by failure and shame. I was one of those perpetual dieters, losing 25, 50, even 100 pounds at a time. Unfortunately, those pounds always seemed to find me again, and they brought their friends. I went from being moderately overweight in my 20s, to obese in my 30s, and now here I was on the wrong side of 40, with the label "morbidly obese" attached to me like a scarlet letter. I had high triglycerides, and my doctor told me I was a prime candidate for diabetes. My blood pressure was creeping upward. My back, knees, ankles, and heels hurt constantly; sometimes I could hardly stand, let alone walk. I was constantly exhausted. It was time for a change.
Gastric bypass surgery is a drastic measure, one that I only began to consider when I'd exhausted every other possibility. This was serious surgery, not something I'd recommend to anyone who just needs to lose a few pounds; but for me, it was a life saver. In the first six weeks, I lost close to 50 pounds; by the end of November, I was standing at the RA Centre's registration desk, signing up for the aerobics program.
Surgery is not a free ticket to a normal, healthy weight. In fact, most patients lose an average of 65% of their excess weight from surgery alone; to lose more, they must work at it. And working at it means, among other things...(drum roll, please)...exercise. I decided that I was not going to go through a potentially life-threatening procedure, to lose only two-thirds of my excess weight -- I wanted to go the whole way, and that meant dedicating myself to a fitness lifestyle. Before I started, my nutritionist told me, "Never commit to doing anything if you can't see yourself doing it for the rest of your life." Made sense to me.
And so I started out as I intended to continue, with a minimum of three and a maximum of five aerobics classes per week. I chose aerobics because I like the music, I like the structure, I like the instructors, and I like the camaraderie in the classes. It wasn't easy at first, though. I'm sure I terrified my instructors, as I huffed and puffed my way through the routines, often emerging with my face an alarming shade of red. There were days when I seemed to possess three left feet, and other, better ones when I only had two. To put it politely, choreography does not come naturally to me.
I really started to come into my own, though, when I ventured into the muscular strength and endurance classes. I discovered, to my utter amazement, that I liked the feeling I got from lifting hand weights and pushing my glutes and quads into unending sets of squats and lunges. And gradually, as my excess fat burned away, I began to feel actual muscle -- hard muscle! -- building up on my shoulders, arms, legs...even my abs. Who knew? These days, I incorporate at least two weekly weights sessions into my workout routine. The increased muscle mass helps me maintain my new healthy weight, as well as helping keep my middle-aged bones from losing precious calcium stores.
When people ask me about the changes in my life since my huge weight loss, I am hard pressed to answer, because the changes have been so sweeping and all-encompassing. For starters, I no longer have high triglycerides, and my blood pressure is low these days. My clothing has gone from size 24 to size 6, and I shop wherever I like, rather than being restricted to two or three "plus size" stores. Even my feet have shrunk a full size! My husband tells me he likes the feeling of being able to wrap his arms all the way around me, and he recently discovered that he could lift me up, prompting suggestions that we get married again, just so that he can carry me across the threshold in the time-honoured tradition. I'll get back to you on this one.
But mostly, I love the feeling of moving my body, the feeling of freedom and strength that come with physical fitness. In contrast to the person who once found it difficult to trudge a kilometre or two, I now walk or even run, bounding up stairs and playing impromptu games of "doggy hockey" (a complicated game consisting of running and kicking chunks of ice for our dog, who finds this deliriously entertaining). I know that for some people, motivation can be a challenge that gets in the way of a regular commitment to a fitness program. For me, though, the motivation is renewed every day when I look into the mirror, when I remember where I came from. And I know that no matter how unenthusiastic I might be feeling on my way into a class, within minutes I'll be marching it out, and my body will be thanking me for it.
Today you're the lucky beneficiary of a lesson in how you can take the writer out of social work, but you can't take social worker out of the writer.
Back in January 2001, a bunch of Canada's most famous authors, including Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, showed up at the National Arts Centre right here in Ottawa to speak out against censorship of the arts, and to protest the treatment of a sixteen-year-old boy from a nearby small town. This boy, who had a speech impediment, had been tormented by school bullies, who not only targeted him but his family and his pets. At least once, he was 'swarmed' by a gang of seventeen youths, who beat him up. His house was vandalized; and his cat and dog were both poisoned.
One day in November 2000, the boy, who cannot be named under Canada's Young Offenders Act, presented a monologue in his high school drama class. 'Twisted' was a fictional account of a young man, tormented by his peers, who plants bombs in a school cafeteria and blows everyone up. The story led to the boy's expulsion from his school, and his subsequent arrest for uttering death threats. He spent 34 days in jail over the December holidays.
When I first heard this story, I was taken aback at the stupidity and narrow-mindedness of the authorities involved in arresting a teenager who was clearly screaming for help. If we didn't live in a post-Columbine High School world, would people have been so quick to jump on this kid? Maybe not. But we probably wouldn't have helped him much, either. Thirty years ago, a thirteen-year old girl was terrified to go to school. Each morning, she steeled herself, never knowing whether this would be a good day - one in which she was merely ignored - or a bad one. She walked through the parking lot behind her apartment building, feeling her body tense, her stomach clench, as she approached the narrow driveway that led to the road.
The first rock, a pebble really, stung her on the back of the leg. She walked faster, held her face immobile, masking the pain. She would not let them win. The second rock, a bit bigger, hit her on the buttocks. She suppressed a yelp of pain. She did not turn to see who'd thrown it. She didn't need to.
'Mo-o-o-o-o-nster!' The taunt came from behind her. Tears sprang to her eyes, and she hurried down the driveway, choking on sobs of rage and humiliation.
But the worst was far from over. At school, the Cool Girls, the ones who decreed whether one lived or died socially, had given this girl the thumbs-down. Everywhere she went in the school, she was shunned, even by girls who'd once been her friends. To make their point more eloquent, the Cool Girls sat behind her in several classes, poking and prodding her, whispering taunts. They taunted her for being fat, for overachieving academically, for not fitting in. Nor were they particularly subtle - they'd poke at her, kicking her through the gap in the back of her desk. They threw things: paperclips, erasers, pens. They attacked her in the school yard, grabbing her books, scattering her papers to the winter winds, pushing her down the steep embankment at the back of the school.
The teachers saw, they knew, they said nothing.
If the girl could have killed her tormentors, each and every one, she would have done it. Twenty-five years later, on the other side of the continent, another girl, Reena Virk, was beaten, punched, kicked and finally tossed into the waters of the Gorge, a waterway that runs through Victoria, BC. Reena's crime was that of being an outsider: dark-skinned, plain, a little chubby, she made a good target for the Cool Girls at her particular school. Reena died because the Cool Girls decided she needed to be 'taught a lesson'. The difference between these girls and the unnamed boy who wrote 'Twisted' is this: the boy actually stood up and said something in public about what was happening to him. He gave voice to some of the pain and rage of the outsider, the kid who's been tortured once too often. He said it in front of a class, a teacher - and for once, a victim of bullying was not ignored. He was arrested.
To my mind, this boy's actions and subsequent arrest have much less to do with free speech than they have to do with our society's response to the systematic terrorization of children and teens in our schools. We have a range of options here: we can decide to put an end to the bullying when it occurs; we can work to empower and heal victims; we can initiate early intervention programs to prevent bullying in the first place; or we can close our ears and eyes and pretend that it's not really happening. Like the people who arrested the boy who wrote 'Twisted', we can blame the victim, toss him in jail, and walk away.
As a society, and as individuals, we have responsibilities. We also have choices. Let's not blow it.
It's been a couple of years now, but there is still a movie option deal in the works for the Katy Klein series. The saga has run longer than any of the titles on the New York Times bestsellers' list, but it's proof positive that good things often come to those who wait. And wait.
Back in August 2000, I was lucky enough to be invited to the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, in Sechelt, BC. I had an absolutely groovy time, and was treated like visiting royalty. A side benefit was that both of my books at the time, Pluto Rising and Jupiter's Daughter, were the subject of reviews in "The Islander", a supplement to the Victoria Times-Colonist.
The article came to the attention of someone in Vancouver, who passed it along to Nadine Schwartz, an independent film producer in Toronto. Nadine, no slouch when it comes to answering the door when opportunity knocks, called Kevin Williams, VP at Raincoast Books, and asked if anyone had taken out an option on Pluto Rising yet. At this point, I was in Denver, attempting to adjust to its extraordinary altitude, as well as my brand new progressive-lens glasses, while attending the 2000 edition of Bouchercon, the gigundo mystery con that takes place every fall. Kevin phoned me with the news that someone wanted to option Pluto. To say I was ferklempt would be understating the case. I lay on the hotel bed, hyperventilating and trying to remind myself to breathe.
Other authors promptly started telling me their stories of being wooed by producers, only to be dropped like hot potatoes, so I sort of expected that Nadine's interest would be a temporary one - but I was wrong. In fact, meetings happened, I was taken out to the requisite lunch, the scriptwriters put together the "treatment", the option deal was eventually extended to Jupiter and Mars, and things have moved along at what would still be considered a fairly brisk pace. In publishing/movie terms, that is.
I get asked fairly regularly, "So how's that movie deal going, anyway?" Good question. I'll let you know as soon as anyone fills me in!
"No one ever warned the girl, pub-lish-ing is a vicious game...."
This is a long one, so settle in with a cup of coffee. We're going to talk about the nuts and bolts of publishing, so if that subject is not dear to your own heart, feel free to skip ahead. Go ahead, I give you permission. Get outta here!
Every now and again I get a request from a young (or middle-aged) writer who wants to know "how I did it." Not how I wrote my books, but how I actually succeeded in getting them out of the side drawer on my desk and into print with a real live publisher. I understand where these requests come from, because as a friend of mine once pointed out (and I repeat at every available opportunity), no one is born published. We all get to that exalted state via a long, often tortuous route, and the road maps are few and far between.
My problem is that as a writer, I rarely have huge gobs of time available to sit down and provide those who would follow my path with instant enlightenment. So I've decided that a useful addition to this compendium of odds and sods will be something along the lines of an FAQ on getting published, except that it won't actually be in Question & Answer format. Okay, so maybe it's not a FAQ. All I can say is that if, once you've finished reading this, you still insist on attempting to get your work into print, your destiny is in your own hands. You will have been warned. The management takes no responsibility.
The first thing I'd say about getting published is that you really need to make sure you've got a finished product that you want published! That sounds really obvious, but the terror I felt right before my first book came out stemmed in large part from the fact that as soon as I saw the thing in galley form (the typeset pages that they send authors to check, right before the book heads off to the printers, where it is irrevocably condemned to print), I realized all the places I could have made it better. I don't think there's any way of completely avoiding that (because as every writer knows, there's always something you could have fixed!), but the best way is to try to make sure you're submitting the best work you can at the time. Oh, and grammar and spelling do count. If you're a lousy speller, get someone you trust to check your work for you. Editors don't have time to sit around and actually edit things. Strange, but true.
The second thing is that the Canadian and US publishing industries share some things in common, but there are an awful lot of glaring differences, too. One of them is that, because of Canada's small population relative to our esteemed neighbour to the south, the Canadian publishing industry has always relied on government assistance to make ends meet. This means that in general, Canadian publishers will give priority to Canadian authors. Some US authors are published here, but in general that happens in conjunction with the release of their books in the States.
All my books are technically "bestsellers" in Canada, which means they've sold more than 5000 copies apiece in Canada. In the US market, that would be a drop in the bucket! When you realize that publishers make perhaps $.20 on the dollar per book, you can see that their profit margins cannot possibly support those occasional massive million dollar deals that happen in the US; here, a book advance of $150,000 would be considered huge beyond anyone's imaginings, and would only go to very very established, very very bestselling authors, such as Margaret Atwood or Pierre Berton. So: if you are American, stick to your side of the border. This is not unfriendliness, but simple good sense. You are more likely to get published in your own country.
And finally, the agent thing. In the US, it's considered de rigeur to get an agent first, who will then market your books to the appropriate publishers. Here, it's still considered appropriate for first-time (and second-time!) authors to approach publishers on their own, build a reputation through them, and eventually move on to acquiring an agent, who will help them build their careers. It's quite a different path, since the job of an agent is to sell your work, and s/he will get 15% of the earnings from your books, so in Canada an agent has to be certain that s/he is getting in on a reasonably good bet. In the US, the market is more wide-open, and while most first-timers don't earn huge advances, some of them actually do.
That said, I can give you some general advice that I hope you will find useful.
First: never, ever give anyone money of any kind to publish your book. Real publishers pay you, not vice versa. The other stuff is called "vanity publishing" and just as its name implies, it's for those who just can't stand not to see their name in print. However, no matter what any vanity press tells you about fabulous marketing plans etc., vanity publishers do not get ordered by real booksellers. And if your goal is to have your book make it into a real bookstore...well, you get the picture.
The corollary to this is: never, ever believe an agent who tells you, "Yes, this is fabulous, just what we need, but the writing needs a bit of polishing. Let me refer you to this editor I know, who will help you clean it up." This latter scam is called "book doctoring", and the agent is receiving a kickback from the alleged editor. This is, if not strictly illegal, at least unethical. Your work is no more likely to see print than it was before, and you'll be out a considerable amount of money, usually ranging into the thousands. This is the kind of thing that makes eager, excited and often talented authors into jaded, cynical people who expect the worst out of life, and who give up because they think there's no real way to get their stuff published. Is that what you want? I didn't think so. Listen to your Aunt Karen, she knows what she's talking about.
Second: research your little brains out. Just as there's no substitute for good writing, there's no substitute for doing the necessary legwork to get your book published. Most authors don't feel as comfortable during the marketing phase of getting the book out there, because we are by nature solitary creatures who are happiest when we're living in our little caves with our keyboards and monitors, bashing out deathless prose. Marketing implies putting one's self forward, tooting one's own horn, getting one's hands dirty with (gasp!) money issues! Plus which, it can be tedious as hell. However, I promise you, this work must be done, and I'm afraid you're the only one with the expertise to do it.
You are going to need to get yourself to a library or bookstore and pick up copies of "The Writer's Market", and possibly Jeff Herman's guide to agents, editors and publishers. I pored over the Canadian equivalents of these books for ages before I decided which publishers would be the best bets for my work; you will need to do the same, except that you'll likely be looking for an agent, not a publisher, if you live in the US. There are some very useful general articles in these books that tell you some of the ins and outs of the publishing business. It's your job to be as informed as possible about this, since you are, in essence, applying for a job as a writer. The one thing that makes it different from other job applications is that you can do much of it while munching on Cheerios in your basement office, while wearing your jammies and fuzzy pink slippers. However, don't let that blind you to the reality that you must present yourself in the most professional, positive, upbeat way possible. In other words, keep the jammies and slippers by all means, but don't let anyone else even begin to imagine that that's what you're doing.
Third, you need to make sure you have more than one book in you. Agents and publishers who are interested in your first book (and there will likely be at least one or two, but more on that in a second) will want to know that they can continue to make money from what you produce, and that means that you must commit yourself to a life (or at least a long time) of writing stuff that is saleable. If you think your current magnum opus is the pinnacle of your writing career, and you'll never be able to match it, you might as well stop now. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a "Sunday author" (like a Sunday painter, only with words...you get the idea), but to be a professional writer, dare I even say an "author", you need to know that writing will henceforth be your life.
I hope that doesn't sound unnecessarily cruel, but the reality is that publishing is far more business than art, and there's not a huge amount of allowance made for the sensibilities of we, the toilers and drudges. We writers are essentially at the bottom of the publishing food chain, and our survival as writers depends on our ability to keep churning it out. Publishers are not looking for that one gleaming jewel of prose -- they are looking for a brand name that they can build upon, much as Kraft or Toyota does. Example: when I'd published my first two books and was working on the third (rather slowly, since I was busy doing a lot of promotional work on the first two), I had a call from my editor telling me to pick up the pace, as she was planning to take my series to the big book fair at Frankfurt, where foreign rights are sold by the bushel every year.
Apparently two novels by the same author about the same characters do not a series make, and she needed a third to present to potential foreign buyers, as proof that I really was "series material". Accordingly, I wrote my little brains out for a month or so, and finished up just in time. As it happened, what I produced wasn't the dreck I feared it might be, but that was almost immaterial. What mattered is that my publisher could say, "Here's the Katy Klein series -- three books and counting." One-offs don't count in this game. And who wants to be a one-hit wonder anyway? Or worse, someone whose first book sinks without a trace? The industry is not a forgiving one. If your book, whether it's your first or your fifteenth, dies on the vine, your worth as an author-commodity will go down, and your next advance will show it. If you have another advance at all.
And finally, I would recommend that you start growing a very thick skin as quickly as possible. You are going to be rejected -- I can say this without having read a word of your work, and it's nothing to do with you, your talent, your brilliant ideas, or your stupendous ability to turn a phrase. You have to understand that there are about a zillion reasons for agents and/or publishers to say, "No" or "Not at this time" or even "Please go away and don't bother us again." And you have to realize that when they say this, it really is not personal. As I have said, we writers are the plankton in the sea of publishing -- we are eminently replaceable, and we're quite literally a dime a dozen.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to try to make your story shine just a little more brightly than all the other plankton around you, so that you can attract enough attention to convince someone slightly higher in the food chain to swallow your work. I won't get into the business of writing excellent query letters, learning to do brilliant synopses of your work that encapsulate its essence in a way that causes agents and/or editors to swoon with anticipatory joy...that's all covered in the part above, about doing your research. Many people have actually written books about it, and I can't add much to what they say. But I will say that you have to be completely committed to doing this, and prepared to suffer the slings and arrows of people who will tell you that your work is not worth the paper it's written on, if you want to forge ahead and eventually get published.
You need to learn to savour "good rejections" -- the kind where an editor has taken the time to say "I liked this story but can't use it now", rather than just stamping it "Rejected" and firing it back to you by return post. You need to pretend that you are confident that you will one day be published, even though that seems just about as likely as winning the lottery. And you need to learn to laugh off the horrible, condescending, nasty rejections that some editors and agents feel compelled to write, as though our poor egos hadn't taken enough battering already. Adopt a Zen attitude. Breathe deeply, and say, "Om....."
I hope I haven't thoroughly depressed you with this scenario. It is a rather depressing one, in some ways, but the rewards can be great. Not the monetary rewards, which usually suck and don't even pay a month's rent, let alone set you up in Salinger-esque royalties and residuals for the rest of your life. The reward happens when that package arrives in the mail and you open it and discover your book, printed and bound with a bad picture of you on the back page, and your name on the front...and you get to cart it around with you like a newborn baby, showing it off to all and sundry. The reward doesn't happen to everyone who plays, nor even to the majority, and it tends to be a tribute less to raw talent than to persistence, stubbornness and pigheadedness...but it's a good one nonetheless. At least, I like to think so.
Important Note:
I do get frequent requests to look at the work of aspiring authors, and I'm afraid I must regretfully decline. When I am not in the middle of churning out deathless prose myself, I am engaged in the business of marketing or publicizing my books, and that takes up a great deal of my time and energy. However, I can give you a couple of pointers. I would suggest that you wait until you've finished the whole thing, put it away in a drawer for at least two months to age properly, and then give it a good rewrite once or possibly twice, before you let too many people see it. You will be amazed at how puerile and stupid your words sound when you have a little detachment from them. Don't let this get you down: it's what all writers feel. Just use your feelings of mortification to spur you on to greater literary heights.
And when people do see it, take their critiques to heart. I was told by a trusted source that my first book moved too slowly at the outset, and rather than take offense and grab the manuscript back, clutch it to my chest and vow never to show that nasty person another word of my work, I hung my head, took the manuscript away and thoroughly revised it. And it turned out that the revised version was the one that got published, give or take a dozen edits or so.
Oh, and don't get too attached to your own brilliant turns of phrase. A very common first-timer's mistake is to be blinded by one's own verbal pyrotechnics. Unfortunately, readers care a whit about this; they just want a story that works for them. And that means that publishers don't want it either. Unless you're Joyce Carol Oates, no one is really interested in your fabulous metaphors or unparalleled use of onometopoiea...they're all philistines, and won't appreciate how hard you've worked on that part of things anyway. Keep your story, whatever it is, moving at a good clip; make your characters jump off the page; make your reader want to immerse him or herself in your fictional world...and you've pretty much got it made. At least, insofar as producing something saleable. As noted above, this is all subject to market forces, and your mileage may vary, but at least you'll have more of a chance.
Good luck!
