I’m pleased to announce that the group blog is officially live. I’ll be posting there on a regular basis, together with my two of my bright and talented crit partners, Tessa Gratton and Maggie Stiefvater ( and ), and I’d like to invite everyone to come check it out.

The purpose of the blog is to discuss craft, research, and books we like, to take turns posting (very) short fiction and above all, to enjoy ourselves. I’ll be posting flash fiction, snippets of scene, and whatever else on Mondays (for instance, today—hint, hint), Tessa will post on Wednesdays, and Maggie on Fridays.

While the blog is a closed community, we heartily encourage watchers to participate in the comments section, and on days when we have a special topic or a common writing prompt, everyone will be invited to play along in their own blogs if the mood strikes them. We hope you’ll stop by and take a look, and don’t be shy about jumping into the discussion. Tomorrow, for instance, we’ll be talking about craft and why we write, so if that sounds exciting (you know it does), come tell us what you think.

So here’s a quick-and-dirty account of my progress so far:

Like a lot of people, I started writing fiction in high school and by the time I was seventeen. I’d produced 60k of a bad, untitled YA thing. Okay, it wasn’t all bad—it’s how I learned how to think about character and voice, but more importantly, it’s how I learned to type. At this point, I certainly wasn’t considering publication and was very clear in my own mind that this was a “practice novel.”

Then I went to college and produced 40k of a bad, untitled YA thing. (I’m seeing a pattern here.) I also regarded this one as a practice novel. It was characterized by imaginative, lyrical prose, relatively functional characterization, and absolutely no plot.

Post-college, I decided that some discipline was in order and I wrote On Earth, a contemporary fantasy with demons and no real target audience. But it was 110k of polished manuscript and I wrote a query letter and a synopsis, and between the revising and the preparation and the research, it officially took the story out of practice-mode and into real/live aspirations-mode.

Now I’m working on draft 1.5 of a contemporary YA fantasy with gritty litfic overtones. Think Tithe meets Under the Wolf, Under the Dog? There must be something wrong with me, because I’m already starting to look forward to the query process again.

On-going projects include the preliminary stages of a YA paranormal romance, and a sequel to On Earth. Lately, I’ve been trying to come up with a strategy to make the sequel a stand-alone, because honestly, I’m ridiculously taken with my demons-in-rural-Oklahoma storyline and would love to pursue it, regardless of the On Earth situation.

Yes, it’s that time again.

I’m giving myself a hard deadline and now I have to meet it, because it’s written down and this is apparently the only way I get things done. So, second draft of the not-a-fairy-story is due April 15th, in time to start querying in May. God, that sounds practically un-doable. I guess I’d better get on it.

In other news, my YA romance now has a playlist, which means the book must actually be happening. And I don’t just mean a handful of songs I enjoy listening to, but a true, specific playlist that belongs to it, like it was a real, independent entity. Musically, the story looks like:

1. Miami – Counting Crows
2. Boys on the Radio – Hole
3. Gold Mine Gutted – Bright Eyes
4. Half a World Away – R.E.M.
5. Time Won’t Let Me Go – The Bravery
6. Siren – Tori Amos
7. Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam – Nirvana
8. Of a Broken Heart – Zwan
9. Breathe Me – Sia
10. Am I Wrong – Love Spit Love
11. Motion Picture Soundtrack – A String Quartet Tribute to Radiohead
12. 9 Crimes – Damien Rice
13. Look on Down from the Bridge – Mazzy Star
14. Motion Picture Soundtrack – Radiohead (live)

Wow, this is going to be the most depressing story ever (but I swear it’s not).

It’s true that I never thought I’d write a love story. The mechanics of romance just never interested me in quite the same way that dissection or cage-fighting did. It’s not that I’m a huge pragmatist, or even very morbid. It’s just that as a teenager, I viewed relationships as a recreational indulgence. And, admittedly, I prided myself on being far more cynical than I actually was. But now, I’m writing this YA romance (bizarre, right?) and I can’t stop thinking about it, because the implications are just so fascinating.

I’m coming to believe that while the adult heart is complicated in its functions, it’s essentially an orderly structure. Like a textbook diagram, it illustrates basic principles, and though its complexity may be daunting, I suspect that some people do become experts, surgical masks at the ready, scalpels in hand.

The adolescent heart is different. It seems to more closely resemble a piece of religious iconography. Structurally, the design is simple. No chambers, no valves or aortas, just a chunk of muscle the size of your fist. Often on fire, it mystifies the scientific mind. Bristling with arrows and unidentified protrusions, it bleeds on a regular basis. Sometimes, it’s wreathed in thorns.

I don’t pretend to understand the actual physics of the flaming heart. At 15, I figured out that sharing infatuations was a way of socializing—that the answers you gave didn’t matter. It was simply about the act of conspiring. When other girls asked for confessions, I deflected. I had a smile that pleaded sincerity. It said, I am a forthright, honest girl who is telling you everything. Once, for roughly eight months, I let everyone around me believe that I was very taken with the star of the debate team, because that somehow seemed preferable to revealing the boy I was actually interested in. I realize this is strange behavior, but I was not the kind of girl who named names, and I’m beginning to think that’s not unusual.

There’s the other kind of teenager, of course; the 17-year-old who declares passionate and undying love, gazing raptly on bent knee, and then declares it again two months later to someone else. One of my best friends was the declaration-type, desperate over the captain of the soccer team one week, and preferring the drummer in jazz-band the next. We strategized together, planning conversations and chance meetings, and it was entertaining and satisfying. She liked the conquest. I liked the logistics, the tactical reconnaissance, but mostly I liked how safe it was to borrow someone else’s infatuation. I was the lieutenant with the clipboard and the diagrams—high involvement and low risk.

So, now I’m starting to admit that this is interesting to me—high school romance—the pursuit, but more importantly, the delicate cultivation of subterfuge and denial. When I was 17, one of my favorite words was obfuscation. I’ve always been interested in the keeping of secrets.

The story itself is messier and meaner than it first appeared, and becoming more complicated by the second. But maybe that’s just what happens when your starting question is a simple one:

What would you do if you could do anything you wanted and there was no risk involved? And then, what if it turned out that there was?

Over at the League of Reluctant Adults, mdhenry held a trivia contest awhile back. It was ostensibly to celebrate the release of his first novel, Happy Hour of the Damned and—I suspect—also because he likes zombies. The prize was a rubber duck of the zombie-devil persuasion and I thought to myself I like bathing, and more importantly, when it comes to zombie trivia, I have a depth and breadth that is unrivaled by any girl I’ve met.

So, because there’s nothing like feeling special over knowing pop-culture minutia that no one in their right mind would bother to retain, I was compelled to show off my Skillz. As a result, I recently received this unassailably cool duck in the mail.

Its brain is showing. Tell me that’s not cool. Plus, it glows in the dark.

Needless to say, I was extremely pleased with the duck, and have been leaving it around for house-guests to stumble upon, but the real windfall was this:

It’s a known fact that I’m a sucker for the undead. But, and here I reveal the true depths of my nerdiness, I’m an even bigger sucker for footnotes. The. Book. Has footnotes.

If you’re bothered by copious amounts of bodily fluids, I can’t in good conscience recommend it. If, like me, you are not bothered by copious amounts of bodily fluids and you like your protagonists with great shoes and a taste for human flesh, maybe just don’t read it at the gym, because then the woman on the adjacent stationary bike will ask you what’s so funny and you will be forced to:

A) tell her
B) make up something completely unconvincing, but wholesome
C) tell her in a euphemistic, round-about way that actually, when you think about it, sort of makes a ménage-à-quatre-turned-bloodbath in a cheap motel sound even worse

Because I’m a remarkably bad liar and also find it expedient to avoid using the phrase gang-bang in conversation with strangers, I picked C. Saying that it could have gone better is being generous. The situation is, of course, compounded by the fact that Happy Hour has a pretty innocuous cover. It would not look out of place on the sassy beach-read shelf, but don’t be fooled. It’s not chick-lit, but if it was . . . well, basically, I’d read a lot more chick-lit.

This is not a post about defeat and I certainly don’t mean it to sound like recreational angsting. I’m actually a very optimistic person, but at the moment, I’m also feeling surreal and a little disappointed—although preemptively.

Back at the end of September, I queried my first-ever real/live novel. It occurs to me now that I never got around to posting the quick-and-dirty about that, so these are my stats.

• Queries sent: 14
• Rejections of query with no comment: 3
• Rejection with suggestion to query mega-agent: 1 (this comes back later)
• Requests for more material (array of fulls and partials): 6
• Non-responders: 4
• Offers of representation: 0

I realize that there are many people who might look at these numbers and be scandalized that I only sent out 14 queries, particularly since my hit rate was very good. However, and I’ve said this before, the feedback I’ve gotten has been consistent. There is agent-consensus. I am the author of what is essentially a flawed manuscript, which is fine, since it was also a first manuscript. Honestly, I’m pretty proud that the book isn’t awful, as that tends to be an occupational hazard of first manuscripts. Upshot=I promise that in the future, I can do way better.

However, on the topic of the mega-agent:

In my mind, this woman is basically the pinnacle as far as literary agents go, but I was way too scared to query her, because she is Impressive. So, instead, I queried someone else at the same agency—younger, hungrier, building his list, you know the drill. He was very courteous and wrote saying that while he didn’t think the project was right for him, I should query his colleague (big, fancy agent) because it sounded like the type of thing she might be interested in.

Until yesterday, I counted her as a non-responder (you’ll remember, all this was happening back in September). But yesterday, she requested a partial. Here’s where the defeat-part comes in. Six months ago, it would have meant everything to get a request from this agent. Now, what it comes down to is, I don’t have a lot of faith in the project. I’m at a loss regarding how to fix the thing on a structural level, although over the past few months, I’ve taken several runs at making it less ugly. I wish I had something really knock-out. It seems like such a waste to get a request from from one of my most-coveted agents for something I don’t feel is strictly viable, but there’s nothing to be done.

Defeat time is over now. I sent it anyway.

This is what I’ve got so far, but I’m at that bad point where I’m not sure it’s comprehensible even to me.

Help . . . ?

Mackie Doyle is the dirty secret that no one in his family talks about. All he wants is to pass for normal—and maybe get a date—but he’s running out of convincing explanations for why his eyes turn black in dim light and why the smell of stainless steel makes him sick. To top it off, his allergy to iron is getting worse and despite his sister’s best attempts to come up with a miracle cure, the prognosis isn’t good.

When Mackie encounters a tribe of people living under the local slag heap and calling themselves the Unforgiven Dead, he doesn’t want anything to do with them, but when they offer a tonic that will restore his health if he’ll put in a few hours a week as their courier, it seems like a small price to pay. Now, acting as personal messenger to their shark-toothed child queen, Mackie’s finding that the Dead aren’t so bad and that for the first time in his life, he actually fits in.

As Halloween approaches, however, Mackie finds himself entrenched in the longstanding animosity between the Dead and their sister court, the Living. Although he’d rather align himself with the Dead, who treat him like family, he discovers that he has a binding obligation to the Living, despite the fact that they abandoned him a birth. Now, either alliance means honoring the seven-year teind to a creature whose currency is sacrifice, and the simplest solution is to pay out some blood. The problem is, he didn’t think to ask how much.

So, right now I should be working on the New Manuscript. I’ve been working on the New Manuscript pretty much nonstop since the first of the year, and whenever I do stop, a little voice comes on in my head and says, I should be working on the New Manuscript. I think this is good. It indicates drive. And also that I’ve finally started to respect my own deadlines.

I did some rudimentary arithmetic yesterday. My calculations are telling me that I’m at 95% of a first draft. Of course, I’ve never been particularly good at arithmetic. Or at gaging the length at which a story will come to rest. So I may be completely wrong.

Also, I’ve gotten to that useless point where I’ve stopped putting new material on the page in favor of obsessing about the stuff that’s already there, and it’s really slowing me down. I keep realizing again and again that no one has ever explained to me about pacing. I’m convinced that there’s some identifiable secret to it and I just don’t know the mechanics, all the gears and cogs.

In my off-time, I’ve been trying to think of a nice hook, and have started drafting a query letter. The manuscript is obviously nowhere close to a submittable state, but I’ve decided that I should be getting the jump on these things. At some point, I might post the hook here and see if anyone feels like weighing in on it. It’s still just very hard for me to tell if I’m communicating well in two paragraphs. Overall, though, the whole process is going much, much faster than last time.

I got a lot of personalized rejections on that first manuscript. They were all worded a little differently, but if you condensed them into one missive, the basic message is:

This is not really my thing. But it’s competent. So keep querying, because sooner or later, someone might like it. Just not me.

Lately, I’ve been reading some discussions online where people are of the opinion that in the event of rejection, you should keep querying, query widely, etc. I think this can be deceptive. I think that when people said nice things about my manuscript, it was because I tricked them into thinking it was viable just because it read cleanly. Like, this house is structurally unsound, but it has great counter-tops.

Anyway, my newly-defined goal for the year is to get to a point where I can just sit down and write something that reads cleanly and also has a good structure—where all the parts come together like well-choreographed ballet. Or Tinker Toys. So I’m taking stock of what I perceive to be my strengths and trying to come up with new strategies to minimize my weaknesses. I still don’t know if this manuscript is good enough, and won’t know until I start submitting it, but I do know that it is already much, much better than the last one.

I’ve decided that 2008 will officially be my Year of Hard Work, so I made some goals. Then I immediately realized I’d made too many, and narrowed them down to these:

• I will finish the first draft of the current YA by January 30th.
• Counting the current project, I will finish and polish two YA manuscripts to shop-able condition by the end of the year.
• I will make an actual effort to produce and submit short fiction and will make at least one sale, preferably to one of these places:
  • Cemetery Dance
  • Chizine
  • Strange Horizons
  • Weird Tales
• I will make an actual effort to be more social, writing-wise, by attending events, readings, signings, conferences, etc. I will possibly even talk to strangers.

These are things that seem within reason. Also, they’re written down. In public. Which means that I am now committed to them.

So, remember when I said a while ago that the first draft of this whole YA suburban fantasy thing would probably come in at 60-65k? That was a complete and total lie.

I’m now creeping up on 65k, and while the end is definitely in sight, there’s still plenty more story to flesh out. The second draft is going to take some dedicated pruning.

The main character’s speech patterns are consistent in the sense that they tend to duplicate themselves to the point of redundancy, and there’s an obscene amount of expository dialogue that was really just me working out the plot. The good news is, the plot still—you know—exists. And yeah, the transitions are a disaster and some of the characters are still standing around waiting to be useful and I have no idea how to denouement the thing (if I can misappropriate the word denouement for a second), but these are issues that seem fixable. I haven’t spotted any of those pesky fundamental flaws yet. Which doesn’t mean they’re not there, but I think it means that if they are there, they’re not completely glaring.

What I’m trying to say is, I like it. I like the characters and the story and the way everything is interconnected and fairly compact. I won’t say that it’s as economical as I was shooting for, but I think it’s still the best thing I’ve written. Or maybe it just feels like that. It’s the first thing that’s come about entirely without me being in some form of school—the first truly independent thing I’ve written. Obviously, I still carry a lot of the academic stuff in my head, but without professorial feedback, and research papers and copyediting exercises and reader’s reports, it stays near the back. Just enough to tell me how to format an ellipsis and not so much that I hear my adviser demanding fewer fantastical elements and more in-depth exploration of Lilith’s marital relationship. Not so much that I constantly hear generic workshop-voice saying things like, so, when the skeleton key melts the doorknob, is that supposed to be a metaphor for something?

I’ve dismantled and restructured the beginning of my demon fantasy, based upon invaluable first-reader feedback and contest-critique (and completely edited out the non-metaphorical skeleton key). I’ve sent out my queries and my partials and all that, but I still have a nagging feeling that it isn’t enough. The point at which the manuscript actually gets good coincides directly with the real-time date of when I graduated from college. This is not a coincidence. I know it, but I don’t quite know how to salvage it. My quick-fix solution was to chop out as much of the pre-graduation stuff as was functionally possible, combine the remaining scenes as often as was plausible, and completely rewrite large portions of the dialogue. I’m unconvinced that it’s enough, but I’m a point where I feel like, okay, this as good as it’s going to get right now, so it’s time to move on to something else. I think I can objectively say that it’s not a bad book. Unfortunately, it still just kind of has a bad beginning.

Even so, the post-critique beginning is still infinitely stronger than the pre-critique one, and more than that, the agent feedback continues to reverberate. It’s funny, that critique was of the opening pages of a second draft of something specific and self-contained, but it’s had unexpected ramifications. Because she’s a stranger and a professional. Because she said nice, complimentary things that boosted my morale. But mostly because she said true things and they were the kind of structural comments that don’t just apply to that one manuscript. I keep thinking about that other story as I write this one. I keep seeing the pitfalls, the mistakes I made, and then going around. It may be too soon to tell, but right now, it seems like the feedback on that book has had the unexpected benefit of making this one better.