Phyllis Anne Duncan (P. A. Duncan)'s Blog, page 42

Of Synopses and Query Letters

Today’s post is somewhat late because I’ve worked most of the day on a two-sentence synopsis for a query letter for my “baby-in-the-wall” novel. Who knew summarizing 83,000 words into two sentences would be so hard. I mean, I’ve been to several query letter workshops and panels at various writing conferences, so how hard could doing a summary be? A lot harder than I thought.

I will add, I’m having some help from an instructor from a workshop I took this year. He’s doing the shopping to agents, but he needed a summary from me, as well as a writing bio. So here was my first iteration:

“Supreme Madness of the Carnival Season is a literary novel of approximately 83,000 words, which follows a romance novelist’s investigation into the origin of an infant’s skeleton she and her older, literary-minded husband find while renovating a room in a house they’ve just bought in the Shenandoah Valley town of Ewington, VA. The two-track narrative brings a secret from the past into the present and forces the novelist to confront what she has denied about her  life.”

I thought I should have some other eyes on it, so I posted it on the Facebook page of my online writer’s group, Shenandoah Valley Writers, and after some back-and-forth and some really good suggestions, I ended up with this:

“Supreme Madness of the Carnival Season is a literary novel of approximately 83,000 words, which follows a romance novelist’s investigation into the origin of an infant’s skeleton she and her older, literary-minded husband find while renovating a room in a house they’ve just bought in the Shenandoah Valley town of Ewington, VA. The two-track narrative uncovers an old secret, and what she finds forces the novelist to confront what she has long denied about her own life.”

That took the most part of the morning, but I was pretty satisfied with it. Even then, I let it sit for a while, decided it was pretty much perfect, then sent it off to my workshop instructor. A few minutes ago, I got an email from him, indicating he had “tweaked” the summary a bit, and here is what he did:

“Supreme Madness of the Carnival Season follows a romance novelist’s investigation into the origin of an infant’s skeleton she and her older, literary-minded husband find while renovating a room in a house they’ve just bought in the Shenandoah Valley town of Ewington, VA. The two-track narrative uncovers an old secret, and what she finds forces the novelist to confront what she has long denied about her own life.”

Subtle edits in both latter versions but effective. Now, in just about every workshop I’ve taken about query letters, the agents have indicated they want to know genre and word count, the two items my instructor edited from the first sentence. However, he is someone who has dealt with a wide range of agents, so I trust his instincts.

I’m giddy that one of my manuscripts is getting sent to agents, but I’m also trying to temper my excitement. Nothing at all could come of this, but I’m beyond honored that this instructor felt strongly enough about my manuscript to give it his personal attention. I frankly have no clue how to repay that–not that he’s expecting remuneration–but as I said to someone today, the list of people to include in the acknowledgements section of the novel is growing long.

We writers are very often a solitary lot. We lock ourselves into our writing spaces and occupy worlds of our own making, our company only the characters we’ve created. And yet, it turns out the writing is the only solitary part of the process. Being published in the traditional manner means you leave your cozy, self-made world and venture into reality, a reality replete with editors and agents and proofreaders and copy editors, all of whom are working with you to make your novel a success. That’s exciting, well, happy-dance-inducing, but it’s also daunting and, not to mention, a little scary.

Still, I’m all for the process.

Rainy Days and Fridays–Fictioneers, That Is

A gloomy, rainy day in the valley means spending most of the day nursing a sinus headache–for me, at least. For a while it looked as if there’d be no Friday Fictioneers for me today, but somehow the story, “BFFs–Not!” managed to claw its way through my congested head and out into the muted light of day. Well, at least onto the page. Maybe not my best effort, but considering my sinuses have made every single tooth in my head hurt, it’s pretty remarkable. As usual, if you don’t see the link on the title a few lines above, scroll to the top of the page, select the Friday Fictioneers tab, then click on the story from the drop-down list.

And if you have time, consider reading my enter for the Flash! Friday Flashversary contest, “The Dragon Who Breathed No Fire.” It’s a story I’m very proud of, so cross your fingers the contest judges agree.

The Dragon Who Breathed No Fire

My entry for Shenandoah Valley Writers Flash! Friday Flashversary contest:

The Dragon Who Breathed No Fire.

The Company of Writers

You love your family and enjoy your time with them, especially grown children and, if you’re lucky, grandchildren. You look forward to time with friends, old and new; after all, who knows you better than a life-long friend? You approach each of these reunions with anticipation, and the time spent together is some of the best. With grandchildren you get the added joy of giving them back, but I digress.

When you’re a writer, there’s nothing quite like spending time in the company of fellow writers. They talk your language; they understand your ups and downs; they have quirky senses of humor. Socializing with other writers makes you a better writer because you’re part of a community stretching back to the first Cro Magnons who drew the story of a hunt on a cave wall.

Yesterday, several of us from an online writing group planned to get together to celebrate our NaNoWriMo success. The group is the Shenandoah Valley Writers, and it’s a great, supportive, eccentric, and talented collection of writers of many genres. The only issue is, because the Valley is such a big place and we come from the head and tail and all throughout it, we rarely get together face-to-face. For the post-NaNoWriMo celebration, we selected a spot close to the mid-point, the long-lived Johnny Appleseed Restaurant in New Market, VA. Trust me, this restaurant, which I’ve been going to for more than forty years, is a legend in the Valley and beyond. It’s worth a drive-by to see the Johnny Appleseed statue.

For me, it’s around forty-five miles away. Not a big trip, except when you’re traveling on I-81 on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. But I’d looked forward to this for more than the month of NaNoWriMo–I’d looked forward to it since our similar get-together from last year! Nothing was going to keep me away, so I navigated the kind of traffic which had compelled me to leave Northern Virginia just so I could spend time with writer friends.

Writers are always going to talk about craft, but when the dinner conversation turns to how to kill someone, or someone missing a family event because they’re in jail, or dragons, you get some interesting looks from the other patrons–to the point where we had to announce, loudly, we were writers. Of course, that’s the fun part about it, and, hey, I’m sure at least one of us will write about that occurrence.

The point, however, is, when you have a great writers community, you’ll do anything, including braving holiday traffic, to have face time with the members. So, when a round-trip drive which normally takes about eighty minutes takes nearly two hours, you know you’ve done it for something important to you. I’m lucky to have two great writing groups–a virtual one and one where we meet face-to-face once a month. The wonderful aspect of a virtual writers group is you can meet and interact with writers from around the world or from right up the road. Consider finding and joining one, virtual or real.

An off-shoot of Shenandoah Valley Writers for the past year is a weekly flash fiction contest called Flash! Friday. This week is the one-year anniversary, or, since we’re writers who make up words sometimes, the Flashversary. To celebrate our community of writers, there is a special contest, with real prizes, including the possibility of being published in an online magazine. I’ve judged this contest several times over the past year, and there are some wicked excellent writers who participate. I even gave up judging so I could submit a story for the Flashversary Contest. For submission guidelines and other information click here, and consider giving us a try.

 

Post-Thanksgiving Friday Fictioneers

I cooked turkey, roasted veggies, and made two pecan pies yesterday while watching a James Bond marathon–and even managed to do a little editing/revising–and my Thanksgiving doesn’t happen until Saturday. Because of in-law obligations and custody agreements, Saturday is only time when my family and friends can get together. It works well, the chaos is a bit lessened, and those who are so inclined can take full advantage of all that frantic shopping.

So, despite all the warm and cozy feelings of the season, likely brought on by copious amounts of food and drink, I went to dystopia for today’s Friday Fictioneers prompt. What can I say? Dystopia is my go-to genre for short fiction. Don’t know why, but it works for me. I suppose it’s because sustaining dystopia for novel-length fiction is difficult (believe me, I’ve tried), and for me short fiction can handle all the angst dystopia implies. Today’s story is “Puzzle Pieces,” inspired by a great photo by long-time Friday Fictioneer Ted Strutz. The perspective on this amazingly composed photo seems to push toward infinity, and is it a lakeside restaurant or the dining car of a train crossing a bridge? Frankly, it can be anything you want when you write fiction, and it was certainly inspiring today.

As usual, if you don’t see the link on the title in the paragraph above, scroll to the top of the page, click on the Friday Fictioneers tab, then select the story from the drop-down list.

That Post-NaNo Letdown

Since this is the first time I finished NaNoWriMo with ten days to spare, I’ve had to resist the temptation to start revising that 94,000-word rough draft.

Why not, you ask?

Well, it’s too fresh in my head. I had that whole scene-by-scene outline before me as I did all that frantic writing, so I’d be too tempted this close to the rough draft to say, “Ah, this is fine. It follows the outline perfectly, so why mess with a good thing?”

Now, I’m not saying that rough draft isn’t a good thing. It’s a complete rough draft, and that’s the accomplishment. Frankly, anyone who goes into NaNoWriMo thinking he or she will have a complete and final novel draft in thirty days, and some unfortunately do, is deluding him- or herself and lowering the bar for indie authors.

I know that within that rough draft is the kernel of a good story; otherwise, I wouldn’t have written it. I wouldn’t have put my butt in a chair for eight to ten hours straight for too many days in a row just to write a piece of crap. Right now, that draft is fulsome, i.e., overdone. It’s full of unnecessary words, too many dialogue tags, and long jaunts inside characters’ heads.

To make certain the non-elective surgery to come is successful, I need to let it sit awhile, let it get out of my head, which is hard because it’s book two of a three-book series; I’m already plotting and planning book three. What’s more, I left a major issue between two characters unresolved at the end of the rough draft, and that’s driving me nuts trying to figure out how to address it.

In the past I’ve put a rough NaNo draft aside for up to six months before I’ve delved back into it. That may seem like a long time, but that has worked in the past for clearing the deck in my head and allowing me to take a look at the draft with a fresh perspective, or rather, an editing/revising perspective. I’m much more likely, after that interval of time, to cut those unnecessary words and extra dialogue tags, to turn the internal musings of a character into dialogue or action.

Writing is a process, a long, convoluted, and sometimes painful process, but the first step is having a draft to work from. Regardless of the critics of National Novel Writing Month–we call them “NaNo Haters”–having that draft kicks the process off, and it’s all uphill from there, uphill as in working hard and making the climb to reach that apex of a polished, readable, publishable draft. And that’s a good thing.

1 Photo, 50 Authors, 100 Words

This anthology, which contains my 100-word story, “The Elusive Pursuit of Perfection,” is now available in eBook form for Kindle, and it’s only 99 cents.

All the stories in this collection of flash fiction are short, sweet, and oh, so good. This is a little book with big writing. You’ll enjoy it.

To purchase your copy, click here; then you can go to Authorgraphs and get a digital autograph from me (as Phyllis Anne Duncan) for your copy.

My Generation’s Day of Infamy

If you’re my age or older, even a little younger, you will remember exactly where you were on this day fifty years ago, what you were doing, what went through your mind when the news flash came from Dallas, Texas. I won’t go into detail about my feelings and reactions here because I’ve done that on my political blog, and you can read that by clicking here.

What I will say was this was an act we young babyboomers in some way never got over. It snatched our innocence and optimism away. If hope for the future could be taken from us so quickly, so easily, then what did the future hold? It was a despairing time, and I can still remember it with obscene clarity.

Whether she intended it or not, Rochelle Wisoff-Fields, who manages all of us Friday Fictioneers flash fiction writers every week (an admirable job because organizing writers is like herding cats), picked a photo with the briefest of echoes from that day. After you read my story, “A Conversation at the Site of Jennifer Juniors,” you may think it’s a stretch, even a long reach, but I just call it dramatic license. As usual, if you don’t see the link on the story title above, scroll to the top of the page, click on the Friday Fictioneers tab, and select the story from the drop-down list.

By the way, I was thrilled my story in the upcoming anthology “1 Photo, 50 Authors, 100 Words” was voted by the other contributors the best along with Rochelle’s story–we tied. It’s an honor to be in her company not only in the anthology but as a top story as well.

NaNoWriMo – Day 20, and Done

Twenty days, thirty-four chapters, and 93,446 words later, and I’m finished with NaNoWriMo for 2013. Well, there are a couple of ends to tie up. Namely, I need to donate to the Office of Letters and Light, so they can do this again next year, as well as do all the things they do between Novembers to encourage writers, particularly young writers, to write. Then, when the time comes in a few days to verify the word count to “win,” I’ll need to upload the rough draft to their word-counting bot. I think 43,446 words is a good cushion over the 50,000 goal, don’t you?

And lest we forget, later, a few months from now, comes the editing and revising piece. Though I don’t do a lot of research for a NaNoWriMo project while I’m writing, I do some perfunctory research to verify dates and events, so there’s a lot of work ahead of me to dig deeper than Wikipedia for some things.

Today’s word count was “only” 2,177, which also happened to be the “least productive” day of the twenty days I spent writing those 93,466 words. I averaged more than 4,600 words per day, and in terms of the quantity of the output, this has been my most successful year of NaNoWriMo. The quality, of course, remains to be seen after revisions.

Today’s final chapter was Chapter 34, The Lady or the Sheik. Before I post the excerpt, let me thank everyone who began following the blog, who retweeted Tweets about this NaNoWriMo experience, and who commented on or liked specific excerpts. Those are the things which keep me writing.

Here is the final excerpt:

Then, the tunnel widened into a larger “room,” but before she entered, she held up a fist to stop Yuri and Kolya. They had switched on the lights attached to their rifles as well. She pointed to herself then to her eyes, then pointed forward, telling Kolya she would go see. Rifle up, she entered the room and saw Abdullah struggling with someone then she heard Alexei’s voice telling Abdullah to leave him alone.

She put her light on Alexei, now barely ten feet away, and looked upon a stranger. Then, a shadow shifted as an AK-47 nosed past her. A rifle barked twice, a figure fell back into the dark, and she left it to Kolya to figure out. She lowered her rifle.

“Alexei,” she said.

His eyes slid away from hers, a hand came up as if to ward her off.

“Alexei, it’s me. I’m here,” she said.

“Do you have to haunt me in the daytime now?” he said. “Leave me alone to get the revenge you seek.”

“I’m not the one seeking revenge, and I’m not a ghost,” Mai said.

From Kolya’s or Abdullah’s radio or both, she heard, “Daisy, Daisy.” They had twenty minutes to live or die.

“Look at me, Alyosha,” she said, then harsher, “Look at me!” She took a step toward him then saw his finger move to the trigger of his AK. “Alexei, shoot me, and I will fucking haunt you.”

Mai moved until she could look into his eyes, the only thing about him she could recognize. The lean, lined, bearded face seem to belong to someone else, but the eyes were his.

Abdullah moved to Alexei’s side and began to murmur to him, low so only Alexei could hear. The flat glare Alexei gave her didn’t waver.

“Look, you bastard,” she said, interrupting Abdullah, “I haven’t cut throats and shot Taliban over half this country to stand here and have you think I’m a fucking ghost. I clawed my way out of hell with the sole thought you were waiting for me, and where the fuck were you? Spending Russian money on mercenaries and who knows what else? I get shot, I meet your girlfriend, I find prisoners Dostun murdered, and piss off the Vice President in the process, and you stand here and won’t even speak to me. Well, fuck you, Alexei, and fuck your bin Laden vendetta. You put that gun down and talk to me, or, since we’re in a Muslim country, I’ll get an Islamic divorce, right here, on the spot.”

Something flickered in his eyes, and she knew him well enough to know he was processing her words, balancing her presence against his emotion. Abdullah murmured to him again.

“All I have to do is say it three times,” she said. “I divorce you.”

He didn’t lower the gun, and Mai heard Kolya, of all things, praying in Russian.

“I divorce you,” she said, taking a step closer.

His eyes slipped away from hers again, but he lowered the rifle. He glanced around, his expression uncertain, as if he were unaware how he came to be in this place at this time. When he looked at her again, his expression was wary.

“In Islam,” he said, “that only works for men.”

“That figures,” she replied.

 (c)2013 by Phyllis Anne Duncan

NaNoWriMo – Day 19

I was down and out for most of the day with a really bad sinus headache. I finally gave in and went back to bed for a while then woke with some energy–enough, I thought, to finish the novel’s rough draft. I anticipated two more chapters to wrap it up (with a cliffhanger, of course), but I only lasted through one chapter.

So, 3,110 words today for a word count total of 91,269, and today’s new chapter is Chapter 33, The Heart of a Mujahideen. Here’s an excerpt:

She clenched her teeth, as she always had, at the next phrase, and resumed, “I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a Mujahideen! I have fought here before, in the time of the Shurovee.” They didn’t need to know she’d fought for her life against the Mujahideen. “Like you, I scorn the outsiders, the Egyptians, the Yemeni, the Saudis, or any other not of this land who dare invade the borders of this realm. Rather than that dishonor to the people, I myself will take up arms. I will be a general, a judge of the evil ones, and, as Saradi has promised, a rewarder of your virtues and bravery. Today, enshallah, we might make the journey to where the springs run with clear, cool water, where the date palms drop their fruit at our feet, but before that we will make the outsiders, the non-believers, fuel for hell!”

Alexei wasn’t the only one who could quote the Quran, she thought. More cheers erupted, but no one stirred to charge up and over the hill.

“Today,” she began again, “by your valor in the field, we shall have victory over your enemies, the enemies of Afghanistan, the enemies of Allah!”

They sat or stood enraptured, yes, but not exactly what she had hoped for. Again, her love of history brought her the answer, a story even an illiterate farmer had heard a mullah tell.

Aila, the favorite wife of the Prophet—probably because she was the youngest and prettiest in his old age—had rallied her ailing husband’s armies by stripping off her veil and using it to wave the men into battle then fought, her hair unbound, at their sides.

“Our enemy lies between us and Saradi,” she said. “Let us show Saradi our hearts, our mind, our blood, our…” Her words caught briefly, then she continued, “…our love are his!”

She turned and dashed up the remainder of the hill, making her team and Burdette’s men scramble to keep up with her. At the crest, she stood, waif-like against the backdrop of the White Mountains, her black clothing making her a perfect target. A bullet struck at her feet, but she didn’t move. Several of her team returned fire.

Mai dropped the bullhorn then reached with her left hand and pulled the keffiyeh off, and the breeze caught her hair and splayed it like a halo around her head. She held the keffiyeh aloft, like a flag and saw hundreds of men rise to their feet. Abdullah appeared at her side and held the radio at her lips. Her strong, clear voice echoed in the hills.

“Allahu ackbar!”

She charged over the hill, an army at her back.

(c)2013 by Phyllis Anne Duncan