Imogen Howson's Blog, page 6

Nice things to get in writing

In a letter yesterday:

We assigned you an IRS Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN)

An ITIN, for you lucky people who both live and work in the same country, is necessary for someone like me, who lives in the UK but who receives most of her salary from the US.  Otherwise the people who pay my salary have to withhold 30% for tax purposes.  In order to get this ITIN, I had to take an official letter from Samhain, a form and my passport to the US Embassy in London – and not take my phone, Kindle or laptop because they're not allowed in.

In an email from my agent yesterday:

I'll have your line-edits to you this evening…  I am falling in love all over again.

In a text to me and my sister from Abstract this morning, confirming details of a late birthday present from him:

Hi girls. You two are booked for a super luxury spa day on 28th May with a shared room etc.  You'll just have to arrive at 9:00.  Xx

It's all about good news written down this week!

A day in the life of a working-from-home Immi

Working from home is awesome.  It really is – I often think I must be the luckiest person in the world.  I love the paid-to-work-for-Samhain-Publishing part of my job; I love the writing part of my job; it's wonderful to be able to fit around ill children and school holidays and all that stuff.  I'm very lucky.

The downside is that in order to fit around ill children and school holidays and all that stuff, sometimes it feels like I'm doing three jobs.  We're in the middle of the Easter holidays here, so this morning I made boiled eggs and toast for Gloworm and a sleepover friend, then I unpacked and put away the two weeks' worth of groceries that were delivered in the middle of the egg-boiling, then I did some tidying, then I did some proof-reading on the Kindle, then I made a picnic lunch, then Abstract's mother (who's been staying for a couple of days) and I took Gloworm and Sleepover-Friend out to the local animal centre and butterfly farm, with a quick detour to buy sunhats and get cash.  Which was nice – it was a sunny day and we ate our picnic and bought coffees and icecreams and watched a bird of prey display and met some meerkats and a skunk.

Then we came home and I did the washing-up (the dishwasher has broken, oh woe) and did some laundry and made some drinks.  Then I took Sleepover-Friend home.  Then I washed and cut up a load of crudite-type vegetables, and made baba ghanoush and washed up again, and set the table for dinner.  And answered some emails.

Then we ate dinner and then I did some tidying and sorted out a pile of laundry.  At which point it was about half-past seven.

And then I sat down at the computer with a cup of tea and started paid work for the day.  It's now nearly midnight and I'm going to go to bed with the laptop so I can either answer a few more emails or get some writing done.

I'm not complaining.  I wouldn't change any of it.  It's just that sometimes I think, gosh, it's a good thing I really love my job!

 

Champagne!

Saturday was Abstract's birthday, and we had some friends over for a barbeque. (Ironically, it poured with rain, big huge thunder-drops, ten minutes after they arrived, but it cleared up in time for us to eat in the garden.)

Our friends brought chocolate brownies and a bottle of champagne, which was of course very nice, but when we came to open the champagne they said they'd mostly brought it for me, to celebrate getting an agent. I didn't even know they knew about that (aside from writer friends, who understand what a major step it is, I haven't told many people) but of course Abstract had told them and they'd come prepared to celebrate with me.

Which was lovely. And it happened to be the first champagne I'd had since getting the agent. We tend to prefer wine over champagne, and Abstract had bought me wine the day it happened, but there's something about the symbolic value of champagne that can't be matched by anything else, no matter how alcoholic and bottle-shaped.

So then I was able to do the thing I'd wanted to do since reading about it on said agent's blog (http://mandyhubbard.livejournal.com/248050.html). I wrote my achievement on the champagne cork (agent representation) and put it up on a shelf in my bedroom. I'm going to get the vase Mandy recommends and start drinking champagne (not just wine) with every new goal met, and collecting the achievement-corks.

And I wish I'd done that several years ago.  Because like Mandy says on her blog post, it's never enough.  In 2006 my next goal was to get something published, if not my current novel, at least a short story, even if the payment was $5 and a contributor's copy of a magazine.  And I did get a short story published, and then I got another published, and then I got a novella published, and then a reader wrote to the publisher and asked if I would be contributing to an upcoming anthology so the publisher asked me specially to send in a story, which I did.  And then I won an award, and then I got another novella published with a bigger publisher, and then I got a full-length novel published with that publisher, which means in 2012 I'll have my first print book out. Which is a lot of goals met, and yet still, every time I meet one, I have a couple of days of feeling I've reached the top of the mountain, and then I look up and see range upon range of mountains stretching in front of me, and I remember that I'm only just emerging from the foothills.

So tangible markers of the journey from when you didn't think you'd even manage to climb over the fence at the bottom of your garden (is this metaphor getting a little strained?) – they're pretty darn important.

Do you have any rituals for when you reach a goal?  And if not, are you going to adopt some?

Lines I wish I'd written

Abstract and I have been working our way through the first two seasons of True Blood.  (Incidentally, that sometimes creates an odd surfeit of contradictory vampires for me, because I'm currently watching Buffy Season 4 with Gloworm and Angel Season 1 with Sparkler.  And recently I've been reading the Sookie Stackhouse books, too, which means I get a whole lot of not just contradictory vampires, but the same characters from the True Blood world acting out totally different storylines.)

Anyway, we watched the Season Two finale last night.  The whole show has some great writing and fabulous characters (I love what they've done with Lafayette – so much better than his book character!), but last night had some stand-out funny lines.

Abstract's favourite was "If a tree falls in the forest, it's still a tree, right?"  Mine was "You're the maid of honour.  You have to lick the egg."

Getting an agent

So, on the 3rd of January I queried a literary agent with my young adult space opera: Telepathic Twins in Space, aka The Book That Will Not End, aka The Secret Project, aka Linked.  I've queried agents before (with a different book) and with that experience in mind I was resigned to a long wait before I got a reply.

Imagine my surprise when I got a reply later that same day, asking for the full manuscript.  I sent the manuscript off the next morning, and again resigned myself for a long wait–quite possibly with a form rejection at the end of it.  Have I done this before?  Oh yes.

However, the next day (the next day!) the agent emailed me saying that she would like to work exclusively with me on some revisions.  At which point I wrote OMG OMG OMG on Twitter, and then had to field (perfectly understandable!) questions about what the heck I was OMGing about.

I said I would love to work exclusively with the agent on some revisions.  At that point I didn't have a detailed picture of what those revisions were, but hello, the chance to work on my manuscript with an agent?  People enter contests and bid in charity auctions to get that sort of input on their work.

The next day I got the revision notes.  Five pages of revision notes for the first two-thirds of the book.  Five pages of incredibly detailed revisions notes that would mean extensive rewrites.  But reading through them, I could see exactly why the agent was asking for certain things.  And more importantly, I could see how her suggestions would make the story stronger, the plot tighter, the characters more interesting.  I was scared I couldn't do it, but I was going to try!

The next three months were kind of fascinating.  I followed the agent's suggestions, even when I wasn't sure I could pull them off, and found, over and over again, not only that I could, but that by doing so I'd opened up new insights into the characters and the world.  I realised that, even if the agent eventually turned down this new revised manuscript, her suggestions had made it so much better than it had been.

I wrote nearly every morning before I started work, and when I didn't make wordcount for the day I wrote in bed at night.  I took the laptop everywhere.  I sat in freezing cold McDonald's restaurants while Sparkler went to her dance and drama club (three hours most Saturday mornings, and for a couple of months while she rehearsed as a backing dancer for Hairspray, three hours every Tuesday evening).

Life tried to interfere.  People got ill.  Other people visited.  There were parents' evenings and youth group meetings and orthodontic and doctors' appointments and half-term-holiday outings.  And my day job at Samhain, and the editing I'd picked up again.  And the constant necessity to feed my family and give them clean clothes to wear!  I bought a slow-cooker and hired, for the first time in my life, a weekly cleaner.

I could have rushed and got it done sooner, but this felt like a big chance for me, and I didn't want to get it wrong.  I wrote and rewrote and cut out rewritten scenes, and found snippets of discarded scenes from the first draft that suddenly fitted back in.

Eventually, many writing hours, innumerable new scenes, and several new characters later, with the manuscript as good as I could get it by myself, I sent it off.

By this time I knew that this agent didn't hang around, but I was still expecting to wait a week or so to hear back.

Instead, the next day (I know, I should have picked up the pattern by now!) she emailed to say she loved the revisions and wanted to talk on the phone.

We arranged a time for the next evening, UK time.  And at about twenty to nine Wednesday, the 6th of April 2011, I put down the phone an agented writer.

It's not over yet, of course!  I'm working on the rest of the book now, and the agent is sending me line edits (eek) for the first part.  And even when that's done, well, as every writer knows, agent representation is not a publishing contract.  But this is a massive step in my career, and right now I couldn't be happier.

Oh, and the agent?  I'm now represented by (it's going to be a while before I get tired of saying that!) Mandy Hubbard of D4EO Literary Agency.

Writing cave

I came out of my writing cave yesterday, blinking blearily at the April sunshine like a post-hibernation bear.  My Secret Project is done for the moment, and now I have to refuel and crawl into my editing-and-working cave for the week.

Expect nothing but mini-blogs for the next few days…

 

Fun with Amazon Wish Lists

When I first discovered Amazon Wish Lists, I basically used mine as a shopping list for myself.

At some point I made it public, and was charmed and surprised when The Model Auntie actually got me something from it for Christmas (The Little House Cookbook).

So then I started adding lots more things to it, helped by Amazon's Universal Wish List, which you can add as a button to your browser toolbar and which lets you add stuff from other shopping websites (Clinique and Lakeland are my favourites).

Then I discovered that using the toolbar button means you can add things from any website, not just shopping ones.  At which point I got, um, a little carried away.

What would you put on your fantasy wish list?

 

All over the net

Yes, I may not have appeared on my own blog for some time, but that's because I'm wandering promiscuously round elsewhere. (Incidentally, although "round" as I've written it there is perfectly correct and acceptable as an alternative to "around" in the UK, it's horribly incorrect in US English and needs to be written with an apostrophe: 'round.  Like 'flu and 'bus and 'phone used to be.)

On Wednesday you could win a copy of Blood of the Volcano over at The Romance Studio (future giveaways are scheduled for April 12th and May 7th).

Yesterday I went for lunch at Stephanie Cage's house (butternut squash soup and lemon cupcakes, hooray!) and did a mini-interview and reading of my short story Dust and Dead Roses for local radio programme Book It.  You can listen to me next Thursday, I think, and the show will be available to listen to from the Book It site for a week afterwards.

Then today, I'm being interviewed over at the Romantic Novelists' Association blog.  Come and visit me!

Blood of the Volcano contest winners!

Thank you to everyone who entered the Blood of the Volcano Release Month Contest, whether by commenting here, emailing me, or commenting on Twitter or Facebook.  I apologise that the results are being announced two days late.

The third prize, of a $5.50 gift certificate to the Samhain store, goes to Kay A (from Facebook).

The second prize, of a $5.50 gift certificate to the Samhain store plus delicious chocolate sent all the way from England, goes to Annabel H (also from Facebook).

The first prize, of a $10.00 gift certificate to the Samhain store plus a gorgeous Clippy bag customized with the Blood of the Volcano cover and containing delicious chocolate all the way from England, goes to Inez Kelley.

Congratulations to the winners!  I'll be contacting you all today, but if you don't hear from me please do email me at imogenhowsonATgmailDOTcom.

End of half-term holiday

Well, the half-term holiday kind of interfered with blogging, the photo project, writing and work. I seemed to spend much of the week driving Sparkler to her performances of Hairspray. Which was excellent, by the way! At the end of March I'll be doing the same thing driving her to performances of Broadway and Beyond.

Today is the last day of the half-term and we're off for a family trip to the cinema to see I AM NUMBER FOUR. Whenever we say it we have to say it like that, IN CAPITALS to show how impressive and dramatic it is.

In other news, Blood of the Volcano released on Tuesday, and although it hasn't reached the Samhain bestseller list, it has crept onto the bestseller lists in fantasy and the Samhain theme Ghosts and Psychics. And my free read In the Shadow of the Volcano has continued to get a nice number of downloads from Smashwords, although no one yet has rated it.

Oh, my editor thought it would be a good idea to have a title for the whole series, so it's now named Volcano Fire and you can find both books under that heading on Samhain's series page.

This week I can get back to normal with work, writing etc.  Except on Wednesday, when I'm going down to London for an RNA meeting.  And Thursday, when I'm meeting a friend for lunch.  But, honestly, lots of work and writing will happen between those things!