Novel Teas and High Aspirations

When last I blogged, which I realize guiltily was about a month ago, I was waiting on the notes for my novel.

Still waiting. Which is really no big deal, in the larger scheme of things. I want my editor to take her time and be thorough. (I am trying to repeat this, as many times as necessary, until I relax.)

This lapse in writing has given me time to stew on my story and get a bit of headway into Book 2. Everyone, including my agent, my parents, my husband, and my readers for Book 1 (they simply just want to know what happens next) wants me to work on Book 2. According to my contract, the synopsis and first five chapters of Book 2 are due March 1. This alarms me. Not because I don't think I'm capable of writing so much new stuff in so little time (that I know I can do-- heck, the synopsis is already mostly done and I've written some good preliminary stuff) but because I don't feel like I'm in the proper mental condition to begin writing hardcore on the next part of my story. I'm in this terrible state of limbo, where I don't know if I'm going to have to make major changes to Book 1 or smaller ones. So as I dip my toe into the pool of Book 2, which is warm and inviting but will still take several months of hard laps to complete, I hesitate. My mind wanders back to Book 1. I think of scenes. I think of little changes I want to make. I wonder if F will want more of this character or that backstory, if she'll want me to cut 25,000 words or add 25,000. Either way, I would be excited, really. I swear. I try to imagine reading it as F does, and then my entire novel gapes open with the sheer possibility of all that it could be. And Book 2 fades from the forefront of my mind. I'm still treading water in Book 1.

Still, I tell myself, I should work on Book 2. I can't afford to waste time complaining about silly writerly things like limbo and burn my creative energy coming up with clever metaphors that describe my current situation. I need to WRITE. I'm getting mentally flabby.

When I first became a "serious" writer, I made myself get a ritual. When I was going to write, I retreated into my bedroom, where my computer desk was settled in front of a large window. I often slanted the blinds to block out the sight of the rabble of kids who were always hanging around the tennis courts below, and gazed up into th perfect blue sky. I made one cup of tea, Earl Grey, decaf, with milk and sugar, which I brewed in a special tea pot and drank from a special tea cup. In silence, I donned a long black sweater coat, sipped the last dredges of my tea, and began to write. I thought that if I dressed writing up in as much ceremony as possible, it would be easier. And, to some extent, it was. The ritual made me take myself seriously.

This Christmas, my dear friend Wendy sent me a package. It was tea, NOVEL TEAS, to be precise--tea bags with literary tags like "She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain" by Lousia May Alcott. At one point in my life, I would have squealed in delight at this incredibly sweet gift. Now, when I opened the package, I smiled at how thoughtful Wendy was to think of me, her "accomplished writer friend" as she put it, and I plan to thoroughly enjoy the tea, but it occurred to me that I haven't had a cup of tea in ages. When I wrote this novel, I always had to hurry and write before my son woke up from his nap. I had to get the words down before I had to see to dinner or the next mountain of laundry or stack of papers. I wrote in my office, at the kitchen table, in the classroom when my students were working on their own writing, I wrote with a voice recorder dangling from my rearview mirror on the perilous canyon road to and from Malibu, I wrote in a notebook on the shore of Jackson Lake, I wrote everywhere I could find space and time. I had no more time for ritual.

Funny how we change without noticing.

And now I tell myself: WRITE. My single New Year's aspiration: Write every day, shooting for the good ol' thousand words, until I get the notes and finish Book 1 and then finish Book 2.

There's a very cool story waiting to be told.

I think I'll have a cup of Novel Tea.

Waiting

Right now I'm waiting to get notes back from my editor at HarperCollins. It's nerve-wracking business, this waiting. I've decided I'm not very good at just chilling while someone else reads my manuscript. I'm sizzling with nervous energy, checking my email every little bit, anxious to get on with the next part, the next step of this process. I am so eager to revise my book under my editor's care, just to see it become better and stronger and worthy of what I feel is the incredible honor that's been bestowed on me. I want to work!

Next week I'm teaching revision strategies to my creative writing students at Pepperdine. That's where I try to show them how much fun the revision process can be, how cool it is to tinker and play with a story, to tear down and rebuild and reenvision everything. I show them a really early draft of a story I wrote a long time ago, and then the published version that was printed years later, and together we marvel at how far a story can come. And when I read that old story, I am always filled with a sense of awe and mystery of how the story shaped itself into something wonderful. I get excited with the sheer possibility of writing.

Here's what I hope from this process with Unearthly: I hope that I understand clearly what to do, and have the ability to do it, be it big changes or little ones. I hope that I will be able to fix it quickly, but thoroughly. Most of all I hope that what emerges is a rock-solid book, of course, something I will look back on with a sense of delight and amazement that such a thing could come from me. And that I'll be able to survive all the stretches of waiting that are before me in the next few years.

And the title is. . . .

That's right folks, I now officially have a title for my book!

I seriously didn't work even half this hard to name my son. I've been up late nights staring up at the ceiling, pondering, rolling different words and phrases around in my mouth like hard candy, seeing how they taste. I've received so many great ideas from my friends, family, and students (thanks, everybody, for your awesome possibilities!) and scoured the pages of my book looking for it to be hiding in there somewhere. And guess what? It was! This title jumped off the page at us from a list of words and phrases I found in the book during my last pass at revision. And the amazing people at HarperCollins agreed (unanimously, even!) that this is the one.

So the title is. . .

UNEARTHLY

What I love is the sense of mystery and possibility in this simple word, and how it operates on so many levels that speak to not only the arc of Clara's story, but the world she comes to know.

Yay! So glad that it's settled! So excited thinking about this word on the cover of MY book. (And now, we do the dance of joy!)

Ahem. Now, back to work.

Stephanie Meyer and Pudding on the Brain

Tis the season for Twilight. I realized this in Nordstrom's, where I was perusing the makeup counters and came across the new Twilight lip gloss: Venom. It's this strange mix like those science experiments in grade school where you put oil and water in a 2 liter soda bottle with a little food coloring and spend hours shaking it up and watching it separate. With Venom, it's a clear substance and a dark red stuff churning around in a tiny $16 container. The clear stuff is a gloss with a plumper in it, which tastes like cinnamon and is supposed to irritate your lips enough to swell. The red stuff is meant to stain your mouth the color of blood. And in the five minutes I was standing there, the clerk sold three vials.

Twilight lip gloss, people. A sign of the apocalypse? :) I can't help but wonder if Stephanie Meyer thinks it's absolutely bonkers too. I've been thinking a lot about Stephanie Meyer lately. I remember her in those earlier interviews, where she was just aglow with the excitement of it all. She was having dinner with her characters, in costume! She was sitting on a movie set while they shot the meadow scene! Could a writer's life get better than that?! And last week I saw her on Oprah and she looked. . . strained. And I wondered, have we crossed the threshold where everything's gone from really super cool for her to where it's just totally insane?

Lately I've seen a lot of attacks on Stephanie Meyer and the Twilight saga. I can't cruise around Facebook without seeing some comment about how lame Twilight is and how stumped people are (especially other writers) by its success. Some of this I rack up to the anti-mob mentality. In order to feel like they are true individuals with good taste, many people will staunchly oppose the "it" thing. Titanic. Harry Potter. Twilight. And there's something to that, I suppose. I cried like a baby at Titanic, but even I was ready to chuck my radio out the window when "My Heart Will Go On" came on for the umpteenth time every hour. There's such a thing as death by overexposure.

Like most "it" things, I came to Twilight late. I'd heard of it. But I was busy. I only started to pay better attention when the movie came out. I love movies. And I love vampires. I am a Buffy fan to the core, and a big fan of Sookie Stackhouse to boot. So I rented Twilight the weekend it came to DVD. The first thing I remember thinking about it was that I would have LOVED it when I was sixteen. I would have been writing fan-fic about Bella and Edward for sure. And at age 30, I still found it mysteriously compelling.

So I went off to Barnes and Noble and bought the book. Then went back that afternoon to get Book 2. And the next day to get 3 and 4, which I read in less than 48 hours. After I finished the series, I sat down, stared at the mound of books on my desk and thought, I could do better. Now I have to laugh at the outright arrogance of this assumption, but my novel hadn't come to me yet. I wasn't thinking in specific terms. I was just thinking that I was a writer, a practiced, educated writer, and I could write something better. I could immediately see Meyer's flaws. The books seemed to me full of rookie mistakes, which makes total sense as Meyer never wrote so much as a short story before she came up with Twilight. I joked that if I had to read that Edward's voice was like velvet one more time I might have to choke somebody. I would have, in those days, completely agreed with Stephen King in his infamous interview last February (Meyer is a good storyteller, he claims, with something unique and compelling to offer her readers, but "can't write worth a darn.")

But that was BEFORE I wrote my novel. When my novel did come to me, not much later, Stephanie Meyer was constantly lingering in the back of my mind, and not simply because of her success, not because she supposedly sold Twilight for a $750,000 advance or made 52 million dollars last year or all the other things that make her the epitome of what it is to be a triumph as a YA writer. But because I knew more about her by then. She was a mother with small children. And one day she just started writing, not to become a gazillionaire or a world-famous author, but because she wanted to know how a story ended. And she wrote to find not only the story, but herself again.

I could relate.

And I was finding that being a good storyteller is a heck of a lot harder, in many, many ways, than being a good writer. I've always had a good ear for the language. But the story, the complexities of the characters, the way you have to keep all their threads untangled in your head, the way you must set them in tense, powerful moments that resonate with the reader and follow through with them, that, is really freaking hard. And with that kind of thing, the proof is in the pudding. And Stephanie Meyer is all pudding, no matter what you think of the writing itself. Her story speaks to people. That's undeniable.

When I find myself tempted to come to Stephanie Meyer's defense these days, I remind myself: pudding. The girl can take care of herself. So I'm content to simply cheer for her, to show solidarity for a fellow writer. And I try not to envy her for her incredible success. And I try to allow myself to dream of big things, because sometimes big things happen to unsuspecting people, and sometimes the little things can change absolutely everything. Sometimes the universe gives you a gift. A story. And it's worth it.

I know that even if my book doesn't make a dime, that's the case for me.

YA Soul Sisters

I've been reading Steve Weber's Plug Your Book, which is all about how to use the internet to market your book and yourself as a writer. Too soon? You'd think so, since my novel is not due out for more than a year. But Weber claims that, in the ideal world, a writer would begin to publicize a book 3 years before it's published! Crazy, I thought. But then I was a good student and got right to networking my bad little self.

In a week's time I've made connections, some by email, some via facebook, with tons of YA soul sisters: Melissa Marr, Aprilynne Pike, Cassandra Clare, Alyson Noel, Richelle Mead, Carrie Ryan, Becca Fitzpatrick, Lauren Bjorkman--the list just goes on and on. And everybody is so incredibly welcoming. It's like they're all sitting in the nice warm waters of the publishing pool, and I come to the steps and timidly say, "I'm a debut author with HarperCollins, book out next year. Can I join you?" and they wave me over and call out, "Come on in, the water's great!" I got goosebumps (which you'll find ironic, if you know anything about the book) when Maggie Stiefvater responded to my facebook friend request with a sweet congratulatory message. I read her novel, Shiver, a few weeks ago during a time when my own revisions were really making me sweat, and her book was so lovely, so tense and well thought out and beautifully written that it gave me hope that my book could be good too.

I wonder if writers in the other genres are even half this sweet?

Like a Madwoman

Bear with me, people. I've got a November 6 deadline to meet. Which means that I am currently revising. . . (see above)

More posts around Nov. 7. I swear.

Get Smart

Every time I call my dad this week, he asks, "Are you any smarter today?"

A funny way of putting it, I guess, when he's basically just asking for the latest news on my book.

I always say, "Yes, I'm smarter."

Boy, am I ever smarter.

Things I learned about the publishing process so far, things I will tell myself if I am lucky enough to ever have this happen again:

On celebrating the sale of your book: Consider your health, please, for the love of God, please think about your poor body and what will happen if you march yourself over to Barnes and Noble and order a huge Pumpkin Spice latte. The combination of adrenaline over your amazing news and the gigantic dose of caffeine will have you shaking like a leaf within twenty minutes. Eyes like roadmaps of Georgia within an hour or two. Finding previously undiscovered patterns in the plaster on your ceiling at three o'clock in the morning.

Then, when you continue your celebration the next night by enjoying a heavy Italian dinner and two glasses of chianti plus a glass of champagne at the end of the evening, you will suffer. You will remember that you don't drink. That you typically go straight from fine to sick. You will feel like crap when you are supposed to be feeling great.

Just say no, dear.

On the passage of time: Time moves differently for you and the publisher. When a publishing house says that they want to publish your book fast, this does not mean fast in your time, but fast in publishing time. As in Winter 2011. Which seems like a long way off. Take back what you said in the previous post about your book being on the shelf in a year. But, you will quickly learn, fast in publishing time also means FAST. As in "you need to have a polished draft to your lovely editor for the first round of editorial revisions by November the 6th, 2009." As in "final draft due January 11." As in "quick, we need your ideas for the book's cover in the next twenty minutes so we can present them in a meeting."

Roll with it, C.

On your priorities: Remember that you have a family. People who count on you to think about them once in a while. If you forget this and spend a week floating on Cloud 9, your head in your book all day, talking about nothing but your book, your book, your freaking book and how exciting and terrifying and crazy your all-important book is, they will inevitably revolt. Your husband will get that glazed look in his eyes whenever you open your mouth. Your kid will resort to jamming play dough into his ears.

It's a pretty steep learning curve.