B.R. Sanders's Blog, page 43

Submissions Update: A Bouquet of Near Misses

Well, Ariah made it to the ABNA 2013 semi-finals and no further. I wish this year’s finalist the best of luck! In any case, this seemed as good a time as any to write up an update on my submissions process thus far.

I’ve been writing with discipline and with hard-earned skill for about four years now. It’s only been in the last year that I’ve let anyone besides my partners Jon and Sam read any of my writing. Just sending stuff to friends was incredibly scary, and I think I started doing that around last April. And it wasn’t until last October that I sent anything to publishers or agents–that is, it wasn’t until eight months ago that I actually decided I wanted to try getting published.

Eight months later, I still have no published fiction (though I do have some academic and personal experience pieces published), but I feel really good about my prospects! From what I can tell of the publishing world as an outsider looking in, these things take time. Eight months is for most a blink of an eye on the road to publishing. And, the thing is, though I am new at this and my query letters are most definitely rough around the edges, I have been making it pretty far in my pursuits. It’s been all misses as of yet, but they have been near misses, and that’s pretty  awesome.

Case in point: ABNA 2013. I may have only made it to the semi-finals, but HOLY SHIT that’s still pretty amazing! I thought I’d be cut in the first round…and instead my manuscript was in the top 25 of 10,000 entrants! And I have absolutely glowing external reviews of my manuscript which I can use to beef up my query letter for Ariah (and, incidentally, it’s never been queried–I finished it just in time to submit it to ABNA). So, that’s pretty heartening. Don’t get me wrong, it would have been awesome to snag a publishing deal with a $15k advance, but, hell, I got really, really far.

Way back in October, Harper Voyager opened up a digital submissions process. I submitted a couple of manuscripts, and one of them, Sound and Song, was only rejected last week. Last week! I mean, sure, I would have preferred for them to accept it, but being under consideration so long is certainly a good sign. Sound and Song has also resulted in requests for partials and fulls from agents. A couple of weeks ago it was rejected by an agent, but rejected in a very flattering way:

Even in the first few pages you establish yourself as a writer keenly aware of both characterization and world building.

I sent the agent a heartfelt thank you letter, because she most certainly did not have to go out of her way to say that in her rejection. So, this is yet another near miss.

Near misses I can take. I actually handle rejection extremely well (it’s sort of a secret superpower). I might not have gotten any hard bites yet, but near misses signal that I might get one a lot sooner than a bunch of first round rejections would. Again, the very best of luck to all the ABNA finalists this year, and anyone Harper Voyager picks up through its open submissions, and to any clients that lovely agent ends up representing. I feel good about where I am, and how far I’ve gotten at this point.

EDITED TO ADD – Just now, literally two days after I wrote up this post, I got a firm bite on one of my short stories. So one of these near misses is now blooming into a palpable hit, y’all!

Website update!

Hey folks,

Just wanted to let you know that I’ve updated the list of Finished Projects and Projects in Beta. I’ve also created a page that compiles my poetry here.

-B

a spine as strong as spider’s silk

This is a poem about myself to myself. As a trans* person, a gender variant person, a genderqueer person, I experience varying degrees of body dysphoria on the regular. I do yoga virtually every night, alone and in the dark of my bedroom, which helps me reconnect with what my body is, the beauty of its limits and its realities. It’s a simple and purely physical experience, this ritual of coaxing my body into shapes. That experience is what I’ve tried to capture in this poem.

Depression and THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN

I am currently re-reading the Harry Potter series, which I have not done since the last book came out some years back. I have a tendency to read books too fast the first time through–inhaling them as quickly as humanly possible, sprinting through the text like the pages are on fire. This means I have a tendency to miss the nuances of books the first time I read them.

I’m not sure if that’s what happened, or if it’s because in the intervening years since I last read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban that I’ve survived major depression, but I noticed a lot of depressive imagery this time around. Much has been written about the dementors, so we’ll start there. J. K. Rowling has gone on record saying that they are a manifestation of depression, and certainly their portrayal as this vague, unfaceable creature sucking all the joy from your life is accurate for many people. But the depressive imagery in the book, I think, goes far deeper than that.

There’s Sirius’ animagus form, the massive black dog, which lurks around Harry unexplained through most of the book. Harry’s plagued by the constant sightings of the black dog–The Grim, which suggests impending death, the worst of bad omens. It’s no coincidence, I’m sure, that Rowling uses the imagery of a black dog which matches perfectly with Winston Churchill’s personification of his own struggles with depression as a black dog that followed everywhere he went.

But Rowling is an enormously subtle writer, and I think Prisoner of Azkaban is deeply steeped with depression. Depression, as anyone who’s survived can tell you, is not just dementors and black dogs. It’s everything, it’s a totality. It’s a sense of foreboding, of loss, all the more confusing because you don’t know where it’s come from or if it will ever lift. It’s a sense of being trapped and missing out (like when Harry alone of the third years can’t go to Hogsmeade), and it’s a threaded through with a twitchy anxiety and this nagging feeling that you’re getting nothing done and never will because the hours have become so slippery (Hermione’s time-turner).

Rowling’s is a textured, multi-layered depiction of depression. It captures the way depression turned into a mindset, a frame for interpreting reality, the way it leaks into any and everything.

Sunday Best – The Proclivities of Paul Ballard

In which Sam and I discuss Paul Ballard’s apparent feederism.

Rewriting THE LONG ROAD – Week 10

seriously, maps for days

 

This is the tenth in a series of posts about the redrafting process of THE LONG ROAD which will be composed and published as I rewrite the book. The other posts in this series are here.

To recap, my goal from last week was:

By this time next week I should have a bunch more character outlines in the can. And maybe this weekend – barring a terrible toddler flu resurgence – I will get a chance to draw some maps.

What actually happened:

Pretty much exactly what I set out to do! I made much progress on character bios:

*pats on own back, gives self a treat*

I’m over halfway done, and the character bios continue to be useful. I am making an effort to keep my eyes on the prize, but I am getting carried away. A lot of these characters reappear, and have lives before and after this story, and I am writing those into the character bios, too, even if that information isn’t immediately useful.

BUT the big thing this week was maps! Maps everywhere! Or, more precisely, one map annotated a bunch of different ways!

Maps! They don’t love you like I love you!!

So what I’ve done here is I drew and painted a watercolor map of southern Aerdh over the weekend, which I then scanned at work (because work has a readily available scanner and my scanner at home is unreliable to say the least) and popped into powerpoint. The map I painted was bare so that I had maximum flexibility to mess around with borders, character routes, etc, digitally. Which means that I have several different types of maps of the same region: the basic outlines of countries at one point, after the war, important war landmarks, etc.

As for the mechanics, they are as follows:

marvel at my powerpoint skillz

I used the scribble feature under shapes to mark out the boundaries. Once I had them set, I selected all of them at once and grouped them so they were easier to manage. And then I duplicated slides with the boundaries in place to do the different kinds of maps. Voila!

For completion’s sake, I stuck one of the basic maps in the Aerdh Bible for reference:

MaaaAAAaaaAAAaaaAAAaaaps! THEY DON’T LOVE YOU LIKE I LOVE YOU!

Note to self: Stick the timeline in here, too, while you’re at it, champ.

The other thing that happened this week is that I’ve begun to revisit The Prince of Norsa. I had a lovely beta reader express interest, but it was written in word and getting the manuscript in a neat and tidy format in Scrivener is a bit of a chore. So, while I whip it into readable shape (getting it into a clean .mobi file), I’ve been poking at the text.

no maps here…yet

Now, one might say this is a distraction, but that person would be wrong. You see The Prince of Norsa intersects with The Long Road in some very meaningful ways. Characters wander from one book to the other. Actions in The Prince of Norsa have a direct effect on the state of things in The Long Road, and vice versa. Given the fact that I finished the first draft of The Prince of Norsa back in October, which has given me some eight months away from it, and given that the books are so intimately linked, I would say it is, in fact, not a distraction at all to work on them in tandem.

So, next week. Well, timelines are done. Maps are done. I suppose I should just finish out these last character bios and use this space next week to sketch out some next steps.

A Review of Flying Cauldron Butterscotch Beer

In which my boo and I nerd out hardcore about Harry Potter.

Rewriting THE LONG ROAD – Week 9

I get invested, ok?

This is the ninth in a series of posts about the redrafting process of THE LONG ROAD which will be composed and published as I rewrite the book. The other posts in this series are here.

To recap, my goal from last week was:

So. For next week, I’m planning to have character sheets written out for all the characters on the timeline and hopefully have then mapped out on the web.

What actually happened:

Well, not that much, actually. I took a break The Long Road to work on a short story, and I took a little break from writing to deal with a sick kid and get sick myself. So it’s only been the last couple of days that I could make much progress on this front. But, you know me: I have fancy graphics for you anyway!

I’ve got about half of the major characters’ bios mapped out. Actually the Aerdh Bible overall is coming along quite well. Check it out:

everything’s more fun with statistics!!
(I am being sincere.)

This gives you a sense of how much I’ve done already, which is a pretty substantial amount of pre-writing. The Aerdh Bible in total has now surpassed 10,000 words of worldbarfy goodness, and half of it is devoted to character outlines.

The length and level of detail of these character outlines has varied a lot so far. some are short because it’s actually a fairly minor character and there’s not much to say. Some are short because the character is straightforward. Some are way longer than I expected, and some are shorter than I thought they would be because the character meets an abrupt and untimely end. As someone who tends to understand plot in terms of character arcs, building out these character bios is a particularly useful way to nail down the overarching story.

The bios are somewhat standardized. In each, I’m trying to nail down the following:

the lifespan of the character, which I need to know in order to know if it makes sense that they would be around at X event of appear in Y book
Names the character goes by. I have a few characters (the pirates are especially bad about this) who change names like other people change socks, so tracking that it useful.
notable skills and abilities. Since this is a heavily elvish book the bios i’ve been working on currently mostly have to do with magic (both what they can do and what sort of training, if any, they’ve gotten for it), but also things like musical talent, medical training, etc., go here.
physical description. self-explanatory but MAN am I bad about changing eye color and height across drafts and books.
personal history. tracking the character from early childhood to death, which helps me formulate the whys and hows of a given character – personal history plays pretty deeply into motivations and elements of marginalization and privilege.
important relationships with other chracters. I think, actually, that when I say I think of plot in terms of characters what I really mean is I think of plot in terms of characters’ relationships. All my writing is super-grounded in relationships, and I tend to understand one character based in their relation to another, so marking out who the important people are in a person’s life is central to my understanding of that person.

Writing up these character sheets has become a strangely emotional experience for me. I think it’s natural and common for a writer to get attached to characters. I think you need a certain amount of investment in your characters to write them well.  The thing with these character outlines, though, is that I am explicitly nailing down the good and bad things that happen, the death and the losses and abuse suffered and survived along with marriages and children and peaceful endings. At one point yesterday, it got to me:

MAH FEELS

That’s me g chatting with my partner, who very patiently let me bemoan the state of a fictional character’s life. I presume there will be more of the above to come as I finish writing all these other characters up.

By this time next week I should have a bunch more character outlines in the can. And maybe this weekend – barring a terrible toddler flu resurgence – I will get a chance to draw some maps.

NEW SHORT STORY FOR BETA READERS: Proof

Hey y’all! I just finished another short story. The description and info are below; I welcome any and everyone to read it!

When a friend turns up dead, Shandolin suspects her lover, an elvish assassin named Rivna, may be the reason why. Shandolin marshals all her skills to prove Rivna is the killer, while Rivna does all she can to convince Shandolin she’s innocent.

PROOF is a completed short story 5,650 words in length set in the world of Aerdh. PROOF is a glimpse into the chaotic political and personal lives of two strong-willed sharp-tongued young women that will leave you wanting more.

Interested? Let me know!

[contact-form]

Striking a Balance

balance is a tricky business
(image courtesy of wikimedia commons, click through for source)

I didn’t do any writing or writing-related stuff this weekend. Not a bit. Not one iota.

I had plans  – finish a short story, format a manuscript to send to a gracious and patient beta reader, do some worldbuilding, maybe query some agents. But nothing happened. I had an anxiety flareup, my kid caught a cold. Life happened.

I, like a lot of people who live through an anxiety disorder, need self-care strategies to keep me on an even keel. Writing is one of my strategies. I derive a lot of comfort from writing; I do it because it is easy for me, and I feel accomplished, and it lets me engage a different, calmer part of my brain. And, like a lot of other people who are doing their best to live through waves of anxiety, sometimes I skip the self-care or don’t have the time and energy to do it, and sometimes I beat myself up for it.

This weekend I didn’t have the wherewithal to do much beyond feed my kid fruit and watch Dr. Who, and today I am actively fighting this feeling that I’ve shot myself somehow in the foot for taking space.

I am a huge proponent of discipline and routine in my writing, but missing a couple of days does not mean any of the following:

I have lost my Writing Mojo and will never find it again
I am terrible to my beta readers
I have lost momentum on…something?

I go back and forth a lot between wanting writing to be my livelihood and job and wanting to keep it separate. I would LOVE to have more time to write, and I would LOVE to make money off of it, but it is enormously useful for me to be writing in a self-directed way without the imposition of deadlines, without the stress of depending on it financially. It takes active work on my part to establish any sense of balance between the things I do and the life I live. This weekend the pendulum swung toward tissues and TV. Maybe tonight it will swing back to enough privacy to get some writing in.