Lacey Louwagie's Blog, page 29

A Good Day for Catholic Writers!

I was going to simply mention that my newest blog post is up at Young Adult Catholics — a hope that unusually empty Christmas services might be a wake-up call, and a nod to the ways alternative churches have been responding to that call for quite some time. But just a bit ago, I also received the news that the blog has been listed as a “best resource” for young Catholics by the National Catholic Reporter. Thanks, NCR!

New Year’s Resolution off to a Shaky (?) Start

Last week I wrote about how I want to submit once a week in 2013. I attempted this in 2009, and it lasted a few weeks. Last year, I did okay committing to one submission a month, but even that was a bit of a challenge. Because, like many writers, I really dislike the submission process. My introverted nature makes me uncomfortable with “selling myself,” even though I really do believe in the stories I have to tell, and even though it’s clearer than ever to me now that what I truly want to be is a writer.

But there’s a certain despair from knowing something will never be perfect, that there are in fact hundreds of ways to tell the same story, and you could go crazy uncovering which one is “right.” I began submitting Ever This Day after I had put it through enough rounds that it felt “done” to me. All the writing advice urges you to revise, revise, and revise some more. But revision can be a black hole; if you’re so paralyzed about whether the story is the best it can possibly be, it’s still just as unpublished as something you’ve created as a one-off first draft. At some point, you need to “abandon” revisions and see how the world responds. (Orson Scott Card is a little notorious for wanting to revise his books after they’ve already been published, proof that that urge never really goes away.)

So the question weighing on my mind is: at what point do you stop revising? I told myself I would submit Ever This Day for a year; after that, I would re-evaluate it, possibly considering whether I wanted to put it through another round or two of revisions before submitting it again. That year is up now, and the book has earned about 10 rejections — which, in the big scheme of things, isn’t actually that many. I read once that you shouldn’t make major changes or assume something isn’t ready for publication until you get at least 30 rejections; up to that point, you can assume rejections are just a matter of personal taste. So I’m tempted to make 30 rejections, rather than a year, my new “benchmark.”

Here’s what it comes down to: my intent to re-evaluate Ever This Day after a year of sending it out and my intent to submit once a week in 2013 are at odds with one another. And the truth is, I balk at the thought of revising ETD again without professional guidance (meaning, I’d be more than happy to give it a major rework on the advice of an agent or editor). I’m not ready to be done with the story; it still hooks into me in a way that keeps me believing in it. But I don’t want to revise it right now. I’d rather start a reworking of my Rapunzel story from NaNoWriMo, which has managed to get me more excited than any fiction has in a long, long time. I don’t want to lose that momentum. And, on a more short-term note, I really want to have a bit of it ready to show my writers group when I meet with them in person at the end of the month.

So I’m going to keep submitting Ever This Day this year, while revising the Rapunzel and Rumplestiltskin stories, blogging, engaging in various promotions for Hungering and Thirsting for Justice (which recently got a good review here and a mention in the National Catholic Reporter), and continuing to study the craft and the industry. Already, my writing energy is divided in so many directions — but at the same time, I feel like I’ve never loved or wanted to do this more.

I’ve debated posting my query here before, and I’ve ultimately decided to reserve it for agents’ and editors’ eyes, especially since each submission is tailored to the recipient. But I am going to post the synopsis below (which is revised from the one I used last year), in case anyone is curious about what this story is actually about. Feedback is welcome.

All Maddy wants is for life to go back to how it was.

Before her dad lost his job. Before her mom was working all the time. Before the bullying. And before an experimental kiss with her best friend that cost her their friendship.

When she falls into the stream behind her house after her thirteenth birthday, she decides not to come up for air.

But then the angel appears.

Maddy is convinced the angel is Katherine, her mother’s sister who died as a baby. After their brief encounter, Maddy becomes obsessed with bringing Katherine back. When she finally returns, it comes at a high price: she’s now trapped on earth.

But Maddy promises to be at the angel’s side throughout her exile. Soon, Katherine fills every empty space in Maddy’s life. She’s as loyal as a best friend, as nurturing as a parent, and as exciting as a new crush. Maddy learns to ignore the bullying and distance herself from her family’s hardships. She shares Katherine with only one person: her two-year-old sister, Kiana.

When Kiana develops a life-threatening illness, Maddy turns to Katherine for help. Katherine refuses, and Maddy sees a dark side of the angel that may be worse than the reality Maddy sought to escape. Maddy focuses on saving Kiana first. Then, she must find a way to face life on her own—and set the angel free.

New Year’s Writing Resolutions 2013

Well, I hope I’m not jumping the gun too much when I say that the world didn’t end in 2012 — which is great, because it means I have more time to write (and even to write about the world ending!). So without further ado, these are my writing resolutions for 2013:

To up the ante on submissions from once a month to once a week.
To bring Rumpled through one more round of revisions, and hopefully have it “submission-ready” at some point this year.
To begin revising my Rapunzel retelling.

My New Year’s Resolution last year was to submit once a month, which I mostly pulled off with eleven submissions for the year. I missed April. Weddings are not good for writing (but marriage is!) Although it’s not an official resolution, I’ve found myself recommitted to journaling after my Writing Our Way Toward Wholeness workshop, so I’m hoping to journal more often in 2013 as well.

All this time off for the holidays has been nice, but it’s been a plague for my writing, which thrives in routine. I’m looking forward to establishing my routine again after the New Year begins. For Christmas, though, I did get this nice article from the National Catholic Reporter, which mentions Hungering and Thirsting for Justice.

I hope you’ve all had lovely holidays, and I wish you a happy New Year. Feel free to share your writing resolutions if you have them!

Blended Bits and Some Thoughts on Self Publishing

Since August, I’ve been working with the Teen Writing Club at my library to self publish an anthology of their poems and stories. We’re all proud to finally have the book in our hands, and we celebrated at a book release party last Thursday.

I did a similar project with a library writing class I taught a couple years ago. That time, I published through Lulu.com. This time, I used CreateSpace. Whether it’s a factor of the many changes that have occurred in self publishing over the past two years or a truly better service, I would go with CreateSpace again, hands down.

When I worked on the first anthology, Oh My Gosh, I Can’t Believe I’m Published!, I needed to apply for a grant to afford it. At the time, self publishing was cheaper the more copies of your book you ordered. So for the sake of affordability, I ordered more than I strictly needed, and still have some sad copies hanging around in storage hoping for a home. Now, with Print on Demand, I only had to order as many copies as I wanted, at incredibly cheap prices of less than $3 each. That meant I could get all the contributors their own copies for about $25, total. CreateSpace’s interface was easier to use than Lulu’s, and their ordering process was more straightforward. Most important of all, the final product looked more professional, thanks to the checks they have in place to catch formatting and other issues as well as the features they offer, such as a printed proof (which I used to catch a few lingering errors.)

The writing in the anthology is fantastic, too, reawakening a long-time dream I’ve nursed to open a press specifically geared toward publishing teens. Money from any copies of Blended Bits sold goes right back to the teen program at the library. It’s been so rewarding to work with dedicated teen writers toward more validation and recognition of their talent. Two of the teens in the program have even self-published through CreateSpace on their own (Darksabre by Talitha Black and The Past That Defines Me by Kayla Beth). And while I used to scoff at self publishing, I’m slowly changing my point of view — as is the rest of the culture. With the gate toward traditional publication growing ever more narrow, I’m glad another option exists — one that allows teens to hold copies of their own books in their hands. It’s a long way from the bulky “story binders” I used to cherish — and it costs about the same.

Although we’ll continue to battle lazy self-publishers who give the whole industry a bad rap, at least one group of teens is seeing there’s a different way to do it, as I ran them through rounds of revision and spent hours with the final manuscript to ensure our printed copies were error free. And that’s the sort of thing that can change an industry, one book at a time.

What’s the Least I Can Believe?

My post, What’s the Least I Can Believe?, which touches on my “criteria” for considering oneself Catholic as opposed to Rome’s, is currently up on the Young Adult Catholics blog. Check it out!

Dusting off the Query for 2013

In 2012, it was my goal to submit my work at least once a month. Ever This Day was held briefly by a new Catholic press beginning a young adult line, but ultimately they passed on it. That didn’t come as too much of a disappointment, as I was a little nervous an “officially” Catholic press might urge me to “straightwash” it, which I’m not willing to do. Although Ever This Day doesn’t have overt queer themes, it does deal with homophobia, and a shared, experimental kiss between two 13-year-old girls figures into the plot fairly prominently. Still, I worry I may continue to face the issue that another good friend of mine, who writes more overtly Christian fiction, might face, when she says, “It’s hard to find a home for my work because it’s too secular for the Christian market, and too Christian for the secular market.”

Sounds familiar. But luckily, I’ve read a lot of books that tackle thought-provoking issues of faith published by secular presses. So I’ll hold out. I’m also going to up the ante a bit in 2013, and send my query out once a week rather than once a month. I sent it out twice last week to make up for the fact that I didn’t get it out at all in November.

Also, speaking of submissions, Random House recently launched three new imprints for genre ebooks in the fantasy/sci-fi, mystery, and “new adult” genres, in addition to their existing ebook imprint for romance. What’s most exciting about this is that the imprints appear to accept unagented work, which is nearly unheard of with the big publishing houses. I’m keeping them in mind for future submissions as well, although not for Ever This Day.

Last week, I finally set up my author page on Amazon.com, too. Here’s hoping 2013 brings more titles to add onto it!

Writing Book Review: No Plot, No Problem by Chris Baty

No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days by Chris Baty

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think this book would have been more helpful if I hadn’t done NaNoWriMo so many times before reading it, or if NaNoWriMo wasn’t as established as it is now (this book was written a few years in). As it was, there weren’t a ton of “tips” that I hadn’t already tried or found my own workaround for, and it really read like a longer version of the weekly pep talks. Still, I can see how it could be useful for someone who was attempting NaNo for the first time, or someone who felt nervous about the undertaking. I think reading it did allow me to “let go” and “write badly” a little more than in previous years (maybe that’s why this NaNo seemed easier?), and the chapter on revision at the end is especially helpful, and makes some suggestions for revision that I haven’t used before and that might be useful to me. I liked the humor and the “can-do” tone of the book, although the attempts at humor that masqueraded as dubious advice (i.e.: how to get away with writing your novel at work) got on my nerves, and made me glad that I didn’t marry Chris Baty after all. [I used to have fantasies about marrying him because, you know, he started NaNoWriMo.]

View all my reviews

Writing My Way Toward Wholeness

Last weekend, I had the good fortune to do something I haven’t done since I was a teen — attend a writing retreat.

The retreat to mark my long absence from writers retreats, workshops, and conferences was Writing Our Way Toward Wholeness, an exploration of writing as a spiritual practice. It was incredibly nourishing, and just what I needed after the frenzy of NaNoWriMo — a nice chunk of time to reflect, to slow down, to reconnect with my inner self, and to write in my journal — something I sorely missed when most of my words were going toward Rapunzel in November. Most of all, I appreciated that the retreat was not focused on craft or achievement, but on rediscovering writing as a tool in a spiritual journey.

This retreat has come at the right time for me, as I continue to adjust to life as a married woman and call often upon the depths of my spirit to stay in touch with the person I most want to be, for myself and for my partner. It’s also reaffirmed the turn I’ve felt my writing life taking recently, which is slightly inward. When I quit full-time employment at the end of 2007 to do freelance work full-time, one of my goals was to have more time for my writing so that it could achieve more — so I could publish, write more for a real audience, and overall start to take myself more seriously as a writer. I did accomplish those things, and that’s a journey I continue to take. But there’s another, equally important path emerging, and that is a reconnection with writing for the sake of writing.

I’ve always written as a way to cope with my life in various ways — to escape, to feel worthwhile, to remember, to give voice to my joys and heartbreak and confusion. But since a fifth-grade teacher put the idea in my head that I was good at this, there’s been an achievement-orientation behind a lot of my writing. I desperately wanted to be published, and saw much of the time I spent writing as a way to bring me closer to that goal. Now I have achieved that goal, although not in the ways I most yearn for — but I find I don’t yearn for that as strongly as I once did. My dreams of publication are not slumbering, but whether I publish or not has less power now to influence my self-perception as a writer.

Continuing to write despite an accumulating pile of rejections, continuing to write now truly understanding and believing that many of my novels will probably never see publication, has reminded me that writing does not have to be about finding an audience. The joy and frenzy of NaNoWriMo drove this home for me, too — that writing is valuable for its own sake. That it’s valuable for the way it gives me a new way to experience the world, for the way it allows me to connect with myself, for the way it clears some of the clutter in my mind. And that if what I’ve written does not get published or does not even prepare me for publishing something else at a later date, that’s okay. Because in some crucial way, it has deepened my soul, and brought me closer to my most authentic self — and what could be more important than that?

I leave you with a “nested meditation” from my retreat, which is when you start with a single line (provided by the facilitator in this case) and add to it with each repetition. It reminded me of a pantoum, which is one of my favorite forms of poetry.

In the other I find

the pieces missing from myself.

In the other I find

the pieces missing from myself

and hidden in his heart.

In the other I find

the pieces missing from myself

and hidden in his heart

where he surrounded his fear of death.

In the other I find

the pieces missing from myself

and hidden in his heart

where he surrounded his fear of death

with laughter.

All Done!

Announcing my win to the Internet! Now I’m going to go announce it to my husband. And then I’m going to bed.

The novel is “complete” at 50,712 words, but far from finished. I can’t wait to take this one on for a few more rounds. This is only the beginning.

Why I Work for Scribendi

Scribendi recently released this infographic that sums up perfectly why working with them is a good deal for freelancers. (Click on the graphic to see it full-size).