Playing with Stakes - not the Vampire kind!

Thee first draft of RESET was unreadable. A Great Big Mess.

I painstakingly put the whole thing through a wringer, then mercilessly chopped, pasted, rewrote. That was the FIRST BIG REWRITE.

I was so proud! My story worked!

Er, say again?

I prematurely queried ten agents - not top picks. Well, most weren't. Guess what? TEN form rejections. No surprise there. But that was okay - I was just getting my feet wet...Wasn't I?

After submitting my first five pages to the folks at the QueryTracker.net forums, I began to grasp what was wrong.

Back to the drawing board. I became the Ruthless Reviser yet again, cutting 15,000 words and tightening the story, making the plot clearer. I read the whole thing out loud to my dogs and was pleasantly surprised when I found I enjoyed it!

So, I'm ready to hit the query trenches again... Except, what the hell is my book really about? Sure there's romance, there's a twist, there's a couple of immortal beings.... But the stakes are not high enough. There's a lot of conflict, but no CONFLICT. There's not a whole lot to lose that the character hasn't already lost before.

It seemed I wrote my entire novel without asking any QUESTIONS!!!

Don't know what I'm talking about?

Holly Lisle writes about it HERE.

So the new question is: Can I raise my stakes, or should I stake my novel? Hmm, I'm not sure my MC can be killed that easily!

Happy Question Asking! When in doubt...Just ask "WHY?"

HELP! What Genre?

I can pick up any number of books from my bookshelf and instantly categorize the genre, but there are some that span several. I get to wondering, how did these authors pitch their work to agents? Under which genre did they categorize their work?

How the heck do I categorize MY work?

Can a novel be YA, Romance, Paranormal and Urban Fantasy at the same time? Sure. But you wouldn't want to turn off a potential agent by simply listing all. When you have to pick ONE genre, how do you pick?

I took this little quiz here (link to Timothy fish . net)

Uh. Unhelpful.

The Genre Wizard said my novel is 'Middle Grade Fantasy'.

My novel is standing at 100K words (but currently being edited ruthlessly). My protag is a twenty year old college student. There are issues of mental illness. Narcotics are discussed, there are (non-steamy) emotional love scenes... While perhaps a tween would enjoy, my guess is not.

So, back to the start. Can you help me?

Here is my (ever changing) extended logline slash synopsis:

Plagued by a lifetime of Déjà vu, hallucinations and fantastic dreams, twenty year old Lilly Young is determined to prove she’s not mentally ill. Eager to unlock the secrets in her mind and the identity of Lewis Hunter whose hauntingly familiar voice lives only inside her head and her heart, Lilly insists on undergoing hypnotherapy and discovers she does indeed have a mysterious past – several, in fact. Lilly learns she has been reincarnated – over and over – and in every instance, she dies on her twenty-first birthday.

Lilly has two choices: she must either come to terms with the endless cycle or find a way to break it – a feat that seems impossible, given the history and the fact that Lewis has been trying endlessly to do just that. But now Lilly faces another immortal – a vampire – whose specific mission could finally end the cycle for Lilly, but at what cost?

As her birthday is upon her once again, Lilly must decide if she will die and be reborn again, or if she will draw on the power of her past, her will to keep living and her desperate yearning for long lost love to overcome another ‘Reset’ and risk losing Lewis forever.

What the heck genre is my novel?
If you can help me, let me know!

Some links that may help: The Genre Hurdle and the Genre Table by Linda Rohrbough

How to Keep Your Writing Dream Alive (or Giving Up is easy, but Not Giving Up isn't that hard either)

I am getting responses on my first queries, and none of them have been good.

I thought I dove into the querying process with my eyes wide open, understanding that it wasn't going to be easy; but I have to admit, those form rejections are hard to take - especially since they all seem to arrive in my inbox in the early morning, just as I sit down eagerly to tap out another scene in the sequel to said manuscript.

And poof, there goes my writing drive, my creativity, my belief that I can be published someday - cut down by one sentence that begins with "I'm sorry, but..."

And suddenly it would all be too easy. Just pack it in and admit it. I suck!

Giving up is easy. Slogging away to improve both my finished manuscript and to improve my craft so that my second novel is even better is hard. Way hard.

I read over and over how even the best, most popular and successful authors feel like this sometimes - or at least, they did at some point in their careers. Even J.K. Rowling must have felt the writer's angst each time she saw another blow to her confidence in the form of an agent's rejection. Until one day. There it was.

The golden ONE.

If a series about a boy wizard can fly, and a story centered around a selfish girl who falls for a sparkling vampire can make the hearts of teenage girls (and their moms) go all a-flutter, then my story has a shot, doesn't it? I mean, there's a girl, there's a boy and they are both searching for a way to be together even though their history hints that it's impossible. Okay, so there's a vampire too, but his race is more important in the next book. And besides, vampires are still very much in.

Or at least I hope that Agency The Gatekeeper is right!

Okay, talked myself back into this writing thing! See, that wasn't so painful, was it?

The Timing of Queries

Getting Past the Gatekeeper: The Middle Way: A new method of timing your queries

Because I am currently picking my way through agent listings on Query Tracker (and it seems that many of them are earning that little red heart sign) it was nice to come across this blog post. Whew. Take a deep breath. Cool my heels and all that.

Because of my Wannabe status, I do not want to query my top picks until I'm certain that my query package is great. I have received feedback in several critique forums telling me that it is essentially 'good to go', but no agent has yet seen it...Well, that's not true. After reading that one of my top picks was taking a Query hiatus beginning today until after the New Year, I sent my query off on Friday. I expect she was already on hiatus as of 3 pm on a Friday afternoon, and my query will not be read, but of course I can still hope that it made it under the wire...

Hope. That's what it's all about. I wish on a star every night and if its rainy I imagine a star to wish upon).

To be published...To be published....

The whole process makes me feel like I'm in the first round of auditions on American Idol, about to get up on stage in front of the scary judges hoping my song and dance will get me to round two.