Taylor Hobbs's Blog, page 2

PNWA

This entire summer was a sprint, and now the finish line has come and gone. Was it worth it? YES. Do I have an agent yet? TBD. My pitch got some great feedback at a few workshops, and a lot of people were really excited by my story. I presented myself and my project as well as I possibly could during my in-person pitch session (The bar was low for this; I was just hoping not to burst into tears from being overwhelmed!) I got requests for more material from 3/3 agents (2 partial requests, 1 full manuscript request), but I’ve also sent some email queries this week to cover all my bases. Mostly, I’m just super proud of myself that I set this crazy goal back in June and actually freaking DID IT.

What absolutely floored me, though, was the response this weekend from so many amazing people in my life. I received videos, messages, and phone calls asking for updates and sending me love this entire month. You guys have so much faith in me, and I am beyond lucky to have a support system like this. Writing is an isolating career, one where I keep the door shut most of the time. I am usually stuck in my own head with self-doubt and criticism. A lot of it centers on not feeling ‘good enough’, especially to attend a conference like PNWA where there is so much talent. Your little messages kept me going, and I was able to make a few new writer friends and get the most out of the seminars.

One of the biggest eye-opening courses was the one on turning novels into screenplays. I’d never given much thought to presenting stories through a different medium, but I think this might be a goal of mine for the future. My takeaway from this weekend was that there is no one path to storytelling success, and I should be open to other options besides strictly novels. I had never written a short story before becoming the Pen Parentis Fellow because I always thought I just wanted to write books. Turns out, I didn’t give myself enough credit!

So for the next few weeks, I’m in the waiting phase while agents assess my work. I promised myself I’d take a little break before starting my next project, but I’m already turning ideas around in my brain while doing the school drop off and pick up routine. This next one might need to marinate for a while, but maybe I’ll be ready for NaNoWriMo this year?

Love,

Tay

2nd conference with the lovely sci-fi writer Anna Schroeder!

Pen Parentis Fellowship

When I started drafting book #7 at the end of June, I did so to try and finish in time to attend the PNWA conference. However, nobody else knew that I quietly submitted a short story back in April to a literary organization that supports parent writers, Pen Parentis, for the chance to win a very prestigious fellowship. The odds of winning were miniscule, one in hundreds of submissions. I told myself that was fine, that writing my very first short story was prize enough in itself. This short story is what got the wheels turning to conceptualize my current novel.  

As I worked away all summer on this novel, a tiny voice wondered what if. What if I actually won? What if I could go into the conference in September with not only a new book to pitch, but also with an award-winning short story of the same topic? The 1/1,000 shot I could take the momentum from that and run with it kept me to my summer deadline. In case luck met opportunity, I wanted to set myself up for as many advantages as possible.  

Y’all. I got a call THE DAY AFTER I finished the first draft of my novel (70,000 words) informing me that I am the 2024 Pen Parentis Fellow.

I will pitch my book in front of an agent panel in ten days. I’ve been trying to get an agent for almost ten years. Is this the final sprint?

Love,

Taylor  

Aspirational, Insane, or Both?

I had a vision for how the summer was going to go—leisurely beach days with the kids, parks, hiking, visits to Seattle, drinks on the back porch, yoga…somewhere in there I was going to start pre-writing my next book. I wanted to take my time with this one and get it right, maybe start it in the fall when the kids go back to school, edit over the holidays, pitch it in January.  

Turns out, that was just a bunch of excuses not to start because I was afraid.

The PNWA Writer’s Conference is coming up at the end of September, and I’m attempting the impossible—planning, drafting, editing, and pitching a project within a 3.5-month period. This is insane, I’m well aware. I’ve never written an entire book on such a short timeline, but when I found out there would be a live agent pitch even there, I had to try.

I could submit my two other completed books, Hedge Dancer, or Catch Me When I Fly, but of course I need to do this the hard way. Here’s the thing—the concept for this book got me really really close to landing an agent about six years ago. The first iteration straddled the line between YA and Adult, so I yanked it apart, rewrote it, and aged it up to Adult to pitch it again. Close a second time, but still a no.

I put it aside and focused on other projects. I’ve written four books since then, but this one has always been in the back of my mind. The story I needed to tell but I was too afraid to try again, because to do it right I needed to burn it down to the ground. The only part that’s the same in the book this time around is the concept, which is about a girl and her disabled older sister. The rest is completely fresh, and it’s actually shaping into something I’m really proud of.

My draft is 26,000 words so far, which is a little over 1/3 of the way. I need to write 1,000 words every morning to stay on track to finish in time. The draft will be done by end of August, I’ll edit over two weeks in September, then work on my pitch materials right before the conference. When I make the deadline, I’ll have written and pitched two entire books this year, which is pretty cool.

This book, What I Would Do for You, is lucky #7, and by doing the hard choice, maybe it’s the key to the greatest reward. No matter what happens in September, I’m confident that pulling the trigger on this book is the right call. Currently running on coffee and ice cream (yes, at 9am. Don’t judge me), procrastinating on my draft to write this rambling 500-word post, and reminding myself I can do hard things. 9 more weeks and it will be done!

Love,

Taylor

What the Hoh?

In the last two weeks, we have become a camping family.

I didn’t grow up in a camping family. In the infamous words of my mother, “Why would I take all my regular work to a less convenient place?” I, too, never understood the appeal of getting all the gear, packing, planning, and meal prep just to sleep on the ground and pee in the woods. Then you pack it all back up and come home to five loads of laundry that all smell like smoke. What a vacation.

Conor grew up in a camping family and has many fond memories of boy scout trips and hiking in Philmont. This is why the boat was the perfect middle ground—we could travel and adventure, but all our stuff came with us. Since moving back to the PNW, Conor has embraced the hiking and outdoor lifestyle again. He wants to recreate experiences with the kids and, you know, ensure their survival during an apocalypse. Considering the fact that I am unable to light a fire and lack even a basic internal sense of direction, I told him that if the zombies come to just leave me where I fall. However, he insisted it is not too late for me and blah blah something about “formative memories for the children”. Hence, our back-to-back camping weekends.

This was the car for three adults and two children:

Three adults? Our wonderful friend Corri came with us on what was admittedly an ambitious first camping trip. When she was visiting us back in December, after one whiskey too many, Corri booked a single night at a campsite in the Hoh Rainforest for Memorial Day weekend. Corri lives in Florida.

Logistics aside, we were bound and determined to pull this off. By this, I mean a 4-hour car ride to the Olympic National Park, a 2-hour wait outside the Hoh rainforest, screaming kids who refused to go to bed until 10pm, and a vomit incident on the way home the next day. But damn, if it wasn’t the most magical place I have ever seen. Full-on fairytale. And suddenly, I started to ‘get it’.

I thought it might have been a fluke, so I went into Conor’s birthday camping trip the next weekend with hopeful trepidation. A sunny, gorgeous visit to Dash Point with my bestie Kelly and her fiancée Arlyne, where the kids played at the beach and in the woods, where they went to bed at a reasonable hour, and where we spent the rest of the evening laughing and drinking by the fire under the stars.

Not that it was completely smooth sailing (heh). After all, there are no vacations with kids, only trips. But I think these trips are more important than I realized.

Love,

Taylor

Cultivating Strength

I’m currently being battered in the query trenches. I’ve sent 32 queries, had three requests for more material, am waiting for 6 more responses, and been rejected by the rest. These are low numbers compared to my previous system of throwing out 80+queries per book and seeing what sticks, but the punches are hitting harder this time. I am tired.

Odds of landing an agent are low, which I talked about in this previous post, but it also feels like everything is a dumpster fire. Writer Twitter is in a meltdown right now. There have been reports of literary agencies mistreating their clients, even dropping writers via email while their books are out on submission. Harper Collins workers were on a months-long strike. There is a screenwriters strike happening as I type this. If I hadn’t started down this path so many years ago, would I look at this industry right now and think, yeah, I should do this…?

Truth is, I just really really really love books. And deep down, I know I was always meant to be a writer. If I’m feeling battered but have no plans to walk away, it just means I need to get stronger.

My mental fortitude is almost inseparable from my physicality. If I feel strong, I am strong. A lot of this message ties back to athletic identity and pressure cultivating my self-worth from a young age, and it probably isn’t the best way of handling the emotional turmoil of the writing world, but I’m doing what I can. A person’s body is not their worth, OBVIOUSLY. I’m just referring to my own coping mechanisms when I’m feeling fragile. Out of my control: the market, an agent’s client load, an editor’s pre-existing bad mood the morning my book crosses their desk. Within my control: how much weight I can squat.

Consequently, I’ve been upping my workouts while pitching this book, and that progress is helping me through this career stagnancy. My burning muscles remind me that I can do hard things. I am strong enough to keep going.

Love,

Taylor

SLC+AWP=OMG

The last two weeks have turned me inside out. They revealed the version of myself that is usually too preoccupied with an internal ‘to-do’ list to make an appearance. Between the SLC retreat that left me both raw and comforted, and the AWP conference that pushed me out of my comfort zone, I can’t remember the last time I dedicated so much time to my own development.

SLC stands for ‘Smart Ladies Club’, a name that started as a placeholder with our founder but has stuck due to accuracy. Believe me when I say that the women in this group are truly awe-inspiring bad asses who embrace the ups and downs of life with open arms and a ‘nothing will break me’ attitude. We are a support group, each other’s biggest cheerleaders, listening ears, and strong arms to collapse into when one of us needs rest.

Last year our retreat was in California, and this year we all journeyed to Annapolis. Everyone moved heaven and earth to make it happen—organizing kids, childcare, jobs, spouses. I flew from Seattle, the others traveled from San Diego, Hawaii, Florida, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and DC. It sounds crazy for just the weekend, but it is incredibly special to show up for ourselves and each other in such a meaningful way. After an intense three days of courageous connection, I flew home exhausted, but my proverbial ‘cup’ was filled, just in time for my first writer’s conference later that week!

AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, held their conference in Seattle this year. The first one since COVID, over 10,000 writers attended at the Seattle Convention Center for three full days of developmental seminars. I had a hard time narrowing down my schedule to just one panel per timeslot, but my nerdy, note-taking heart was so happy to go back to ‘school’. Here is a full list of all the seminars I attended:

From Poetry Hotlines to Kate Bush: Writers on Creative Book PromotionCrafting Voice in YA FictionOut of the Boneyard: Keeping Dead Manuscripts AliveFrom Slush to Sale: Literary Agents Explain It AllReading, Writing, and Revising for Style and SoundDefying the Data: Literary ImpostorsStealing Time: On Purpose, Permission, and Putting Writing FirstThe Small Press Author’s Guide to Cultivating Community and PublicityNeither the Madonna nor Mommy Dearest: Why and How to Write Real MothersNevertheless, They Persisted: The Writer and the Long GameShow Me the Money: New and Creative Ways to Fund Your Writing LifeImpossible Balance: Re-Examining the Narrative about Writing and Parenting

It ended up totaling around 18 hours of seminar, and I greedily gobbled up every bit of this food for my soul. I’ve been in a bit of a slump lately while pitching my 6th book, and I had no idea how much I needed the reminder that although writing is solitary day-to-day, there is also a rich community that has experienced everything I am going through. My biggest takeaways were that writing is a LONG road, and I’m not running anyone else’s marathon but my own. I’ve been focused on getting an agent and getting frustrated with the process. I have neglected to celebrate all that I have accomplished because it isn’t my version of “complete success”. I’ve also failed to acknowledge that I am in a very tough season right now with two kids who aren’t in elementary school yet. I am needed intensely—physically and emotionally—all day, every day, and I do not have the capacity to give everything to the craft like some writers can.

I had two books published by a small press before I was 30, while raising two kids. I should be proud of that, damnit. I am also still growing, still learning, and writing brings me great joy. I got turned inside out this month, but also forced out of my own head. Que será, será. I’m not going to whine about the 12 rejections I’ve received for book #6 so far. Time to get to work on my short story submission for a $2,000 grant for parent writers.

Love,

Taylor (and all the supportive people in my life who picked up the slack while I was away. You rock)

The Baby on the Fire Escape

I believe that books come into our lives at the exact right time, and The Baby on the Fire Escape by Julie Philips is proof of that. How fitting that I just finished reading one of the best books on creativity, motherhood, and identity just as the door is cracking open to show me what the future looks like after five years of being a stay-at-home mom and struggling writer. R is headed to preschool on Tuesday. It’s just one day per week, a mere three hours, but the symbolism of it staggers me. The infant and toddler years are filled with so much joy and wonder, but, as Louise Erdich explains, “In the face of mother love, one’s fat ambitions, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike before that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence.” I still tried to claw out writing time, but I didn’t want to admit that my brain had changed.

The women in this book explain what I’ve been struggling to define the last few years more eloquently than I ever could. I truly connected with the author when she said, “Early motherhood asked more of me emotionally than any experience ever has, sometimes insisting on my capacity for bliss and tenderness, sometimes leaving me despairing at my limitations. Motherhood challenged me and revealed me to myself; in that sense it was like writing, only more so, but it also, for long stretches, made my work nearly impossible I felt more myself in one way, lost to myself in another. To regain my footing, I had to learn about this new place; I had to undergo a psychic transformation.”

Moving back to the PNW and restructuring our lives has been hugely beneficial to my creative side. One of the points in this book is that the second thing a creative mother must have (along with time) is self. “She requires boundaries and the conviction that she has the right to make her art. She needs not to give away too many pieces of her being.” This, however, is almost laughable with very young children. The mother and child are one and the same for the longest, shortest time. “One day as I am holding baby and feeding her,” Louise Erdich writes, “I realize that this is exactly the state of mind and heart that so many male writers from Thomas Mann to James Joyce describe with yearning—the mystery of an epiphany, the sense of oceanic oneness, the great YES, the wholeness. There is also the sense of a self-merged and at least temporarily erased—it is deathlike…Perhaps we owe some of our most moving literature to men who didn’t understand that they wanted to be women nursing babies.”

I am under no illusion that I should be comparing myself to such incredible artists. The biggest factor I struggle with, as Clarie Dederer explains, is that “Creative work is a series of small selfishness. The selfishness of shutting the door against your family…The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one… The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.” I have trouble giving myself this permission, especially because it is the selflessness of my husband and family members picking up the slack that allows me to do it.     

My New Years goal this year is to be deliberate in where I place my energies and thrive in a space where motherhood and creativity converge. It will be a place of constant interruption, but also deep reflection. For now, it might only be three hours per week, but this is just one chapter in a long life story. My kids are only little once.

Love,

Taylor (and Conor, W,& R)

Christmas Magic

I blinked and two months went by.

This holiday season has been a sprint from Halloween through to, well, today actually. Conor left shortly after Thanksgiving to do his reserve drill for two weeks in North Carolina, during which I switched to ‘survival mode’, a phase that usually involves me not working out, eating cheese and crackers for dinner, herding children like a pack of cats, and falling asleep at 9pm. Somehow during this time, I miraculously managed to finish my NaNoWriMo project, 85,000 words of energy that did not get directed toward anything else in life. I didn’t manage to send out Christmas cards (a promise I have literally made to myself EVERY YEAR since W was born, and never succeeded), or take any family photos, really. I opted against forcing my children to sit on a strange man’s lap and tell him their innermost desires. We got our tree only 4 days before Christmas, which did nothing to preclude the influx of new toys I am still trying to organize. Tinsel and lights came down on the 26th to make way for W’s birthday, a party that included 10 preschoolers, zero volume control, and a theme of ‘rainbow unicorns/dinosaurs/Star Wars’.

Which brings us through to today, when I realized how long it has been since I posted on here and how my end-of-the-year slideshow is not going to happen, either. If you are disappointed not to get a montage of the suburban madness that I just described, I apologize. Instead, my time and my incredibly advanced technological skills(/s) are being put toward launching our next project. A year ago, Conor and I came up with an idea for a website to help Marines who are transitioning out of active duty. It’s a volunteer project that we think will make a huge difference against such a confusing process. The site is supposed to go live in January.

January seemed so far away when I made all these lofty goals—It was 2023-Me’s problem! 2022-Me was such a bitch. Wish me luck.

Love,

Taylor (and Conor, W, R, and Scout)

Cheers to everyone for making it through 2022!

NaNoWriMo

PSA: National Novel Writing Month starts on Tuesday! If you’ve ever tried to write a novel or promised yourself, “One day I’ll do it!”, now is your chance. NaNoWriMo sets a goal for contestants to write 1,667 words per day for 30 days. The minimum word count for a book to be considered a novel (instead of a novella or novelette) is 50,000 words. So, by the end of the month, you’ll have a novel-length project!

Granted, most of the popular fiction for YA and adults hovers around 80-85,000 words (depending on genre) so you might end up with over half your book drafted in just one month, which is still pretty good. I signed up at nanowrimo.org to try and meet other writers in the area and participate in some write-in events.

I’m not sticking to the ‘true’ spirit of NaNo and starting from page one, because…I already hit 50k on my current draft this past week! As I type this, I’m at 53,152 words, and I have no idea how I’m going to fit the rest of the story into the next 30,000 words. However, my NaNo goals will be to FINISH my draft this month and get a jump start on editing. December will be for polishing and writing query letter/synopsis, and I’ll start to pitch in January if all goes to plan. Maybe by voicing this to all you people I’ll be able to stick to it!

This may be the fastest I’ve ever written a book—from concept/prewriting at the end of July, to a completed project by December. Title reveal and details once this thing is done, but here’s a little hint with this mood board

Love,

Taylor (and Conor, W, and R, who support my writing every day)

1 in 6,000

What if someone told you that your chances of winning the lottery were 1 in 6,000? You don’t even have to pay cash to play! The cost of entry is simply two years of your time, part of your sanity, and oh yeah, a piece of your soul. How do you feel about the odds now?

The chances of landing a literary agent are estimated to be 1 in 6,000. The best book agents get upwards of 1,500 queries per MONTH. They will only sign a handful of clients per year. Other writers say you’re getting close when you’ve had a handful of full manuscript requests. “It just needs to get in front of the right eyes!” and “You just have to keep going!”

Agents that request are first wowed by your query letter. Then they have to love the sample pages. Then they spend the time and energy to read through the projects that they think have potential, and if you’re lucky, they give you feedback along with their pass. That is the best an author can hope for until they get the fateful email that offers representation.

I’ve had full requests on manuscripts since 2015. Does trying for 7 years still mean I’m close? Yet I still get my hopes up every time I send one off. “This is it! I’m going to be let into the promised land of publishing!” What is the deal with this ever-loving HOPE that keeps me doing this? Rationally, I know the odds. What amount of writer’s hubris do I possess that makes me think I deserve to be the one?

I shelved Hedge Dancer this week. The full manuscript was rejected (with very kind and thoughtful feedback) by a lovely agent and I’m feeling rather down about it, if you can’t tell by the previous four paragraphs in this post. I will no longer be pitching that project and it will reside in my metaphorical desk drawer until when and if I ever decide to revisit it.

I’m pouring all my energy into this next project. Word count update: I am 31,000 words in. Around 50k left to go. Then I’ll edit. And write a query letter. Then I’ll research agents. Send it out. And hope.

Damnit.

Love,

Taylor

Sometimes we gotta keep on dancing