Standing AroundPosted by dhoffman on January 26th, 2012
The act of writing, the sitting down and trying to get the story inside your head out onto the screen, is a mainly solitary act. When I’m taptaptapping away on my keyboard, if it’s going well, I’m not thinking about my job, about whether or not the dog needs to go out, what I’m going to do for dinner. I’m lost in my little writing world.
And that’s the great part of writing. It’s the absolute best part. When things are working, when the engine’s firing on all cylinders, the house could be on fire and I wouldn’t notice (protip: this has not be subjected to fieldtesting yet).
But there’s more to it than just telling the story. There’s editing, which I’m in the middle of right now. And there’s all the other stuff which follows the “writing” part and the “you reading it” part.
There’s a lot in there.
And for much of it, a writer can feel like they’re just sort of . . . standing there, watching things happen around them.
As an example: last year I submitted Animals to an editor for consideration. This was a long, slow process involving, in the main, me staring at my phone, willing it to ring, then staring at my email, willing it to popup that I had a new email. When I finally did hear back, it was quite unceremonious. I believe I was in a meeting and I received an email and didn’t notice until sometime later that afternoon. Then we spoke on the phone for about half an hour. It was remarkably like speaking to a regular human being. No thunder from Olympus. So it goes.
That was a process of waiting something around three or four months. The response was better than I’d hoped — she didn’t buy the book, but she had a good many kind and constructive things to say about it (this was a friend of a friend, a real publishing heavyweight, who was doing a favor to give me some guidance. The notion of, “I would like to give you money to print this” was never really in the equation in a real way).
So: three or four months to receive some feedback. Thank God I’ve got a day job.
Following that, I reached out to several agents the editor suggested I speak to. This was actually a worse process than the waiting for the editor. With her, there was no expectation of forward movement. She was taking a look, letting me know what she thought. But the agents (there were four of them) this was supposed to be movement. Four of them! And I had an editor’s referral! So I fired off queries, using her name (as instructed).
And then I waited.
Okay, to be fair, one responded rather quickly. He asked for a ms and I sent it right along. He seemed like a nice, helpful and somewhat interested guy.
Never heard back from him. So it goes.
The other three, well, two sent me emails back telling me what I’d already learned . . . my kind of book wasn’t their kind of book. Hey, that’s cool. I’d looked them up before sending the email and could tell by what they were looking for that the chances they’d be into my narratively weird, Groundhog Day meets Rebecca story were pretty thin. Still, I told myself, it was an exercise and, if she’d told me to talk to them, maybe she knew something I didn’t.
The final agent never bothered responding. I figure I ended up on the spam pile or something. Honestly, I didn’t sweat it because, as noted above, I’m not their kind of author. Animals wasn’t their kind of book.
While this was all happening, by the way, I was lost in my own little world, writing Lions Together are Called a Pride and then The Seven Markets. So, it wasn’t really high on my list of priorities and, if I’m being completely honest, I think I figured if the editor had told me to speak to them, to drop her name, to tell them she loved the book, just that it wasn’t her kind of book (it really is a weird book, but not “eyeballs growing out of the ceiling” weird, which ends up being sort of a bad thing), well, I figured that got me some sort of leg up.
Nope.
The moral of the story or whatever you want to call it is this: I spent 2011 waiting to hear back from these folks. And these folks weren’t exactly keen on getting back to me. That’s cool, and it’s their prerogative, and I suppose that’s the business. If you sell 250,000 books in hardcover in the first week, they call you back right away. Write a weird book where the protagonist doesn’t, strictly speaking, know anything’s going on, and they take longer to get back to you, if at all.
So, I spent 2011 standing around. Okay, I edited Animals and wrote the first draft of two other books, but as far as forward momentum . . . not a whole lot of that.
For 2012, I’ve got some . . . other plans. I’m going to attack the problem of getting stories out there on two fronts. On the one hand, yes, I’m going to see about finding representation or a deal in what we’re calling “traditional publishing”. Some will tell you this is a poor bet but I think, if nothing else, there’s a lot of good stuff I could learn by going that route. I would like to go through the process of working with an agent to refine my book(s), working with an editor to make things “marketable” (whatever that means) and I would like to go through what I’m sure would be the painful process of seeing a book go out into the world.
I think there’d be a lot for me to learn there.
On the flip side, I’m going to gear up for self-publishing. This involves finding a for-hire editor to give the book(s) a look and make some suggestions. This involves working with an artist and/or a designer to create a cover. This involves learning how to put an e-book together and how to market said e-book (or books — it’s worth mentioning that my self-publishing plans involved putting out no fewer than three books between now and the 2012 Holiday E-Book Reader and Tablet Shopping Orgy). Some time ago I looked upon this process with a degree of apprehension. As I learn more and more about the process of self-publishing and e-books and how that world works, the more I’m becoming curious to give it a shake. There’s some exciting stuff out there and I think it’ll be fun to play around a bit.
Instead of standing around during 2012, instead of writing with no clear plan for what I’m going to do once “writing” turns into “written”, I’m going to be working the room. I’ll be pressing the flesh, meeting the professionals, trying my luck with people who actually read and enjoy (and publish) the kinds of stories I write.
I’m also going to be gearing up to do things myself. Creating a network of professionals to work hand-in-hand with so we can take the book I wrote and turn it into the book you’d like to read. This will cost a few bucks but I think it’ll be worth it in the long run.
The world of publishing is in a terrible state of flux right now. I figure I can either stand still for another year, waiting for a phone call that’s not coming (protip: traditional publishers don’t allow “simultaneous submissions” though most agents do), or I can push away from the wall and see what’s going on out there.
If nothing else, it’ll be educational.

