Category: Writing Daze

A quick kudos to my friend J.R., who is beginning her first semester as part of the Oregon Literary Arts WITS program. WITS stands for Writers In The Schools, and the cool thing is that J – an accomplished poet and author of two picture books, now gets to be the icing on the cake to 9th and 10th graders at her high schools. I would have died to have an actual poet and writer in our classroom for even a day, much less an entire semester. Lucky, lucky kids – and lucky Jo!

For my Valentine’s Gift today, I got a note from my agent telling me that yet another house has passed on my second novel. I just sighed and sort of wandered away from the computer, deciding it was time to raid my stash of chocolate chips again.

There’s a part of me that just knows I’m going to be called on to revise this manuscript — again, and right now, I just can’t even think about it. I have a semi-solid mid-March deadline for the piece I’m working on now (before ye olde Agent, S.A.M., goes to Barcelona for the Book Faire), and I’ll soon be doing final edits on the first novel, so there’s a big “Noooo!” swelling up from my soul at the idea of going backwards yet one more time to mess with this piece. I’ve heard it’s too dramatic, too this, too that, but everyone loves the writing, loves the way it deals with “sensitive subjects.” All right, then… can anyone be more specific about what they don’t love, then?

A trip to Our Jane’s Brain has cured me of my tendency to pout, though. Well, not entirely, but work with me, huh? Jane Yolen spoke at the SCBWI Midwinters Conference in NY, and this is some of what she said, as recorded in her online journal:

“If you enter into revision angrily, hating the editor and all of her notes, you will get little out of the process. So learn to love the process as well…

“Read the letter, put it down, and re-read it again the next day. Call a best friend and read the letter to her or him. Or take a hot bath and let the water soak away that initial anger, which—after all—is just the body reacting to being thwarted in the age-old desire to be loved unconditionally.

Mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers can love you that way. An editor has better things to do with her time and your manuscript.”

And incidentally, so does your agent have better things to do with their time! I have wasted a lot of time repeatedly allowing myself to become emotionally flayed by a guy who is really only doing his job on my MANUSCRIPT, not ME (oh, why is that still so hard to separate the two?).
Granted: rejection stinks. I still HATE hearing him say “No” and his gift for dry understatement in his pithy little margin comments initially brings me to hives — or worse — until I set his note aside for awhile. Writers just live too far inside of their own heads sometimes, and rejection in any form sometimes feels overwhelming. But when I’m sane (and when is that, exactly?) I know it’s really not personal. Really. And though I may never feel comfortable with him, I know my agent knows his stuff. I think highly of him professionally, so maybe… maybe the fact that we’ll never name our (non-existent) children after each other… well, maybe that’s okay.

For Valentine’s Day, I bequeath to myself the gift of realism: not everybody has to be best buddies.

All right, enough navel-gazing nonsense. Back to work…

Last night, a person whom I always think of as a “merry auld grig” (One of my fave Dickensonian words) asked me The Question that nobody has asked — not my mother, not my father, not my curious siblings, not my writing group.

The question? “So, how much was your advance?”

I had a good giggle that he was the one who asked me. I mean, that came entirely out of left field. I had a little mental pool going about who would ask first that didn’t even include him. I assumed it would be a family member, someone like my father, who has never thought that I had a real job (Of course, like many people, he’s also got quite a short attention span, so I haven’t actually bothered to tell him that I’ve sold a book… I’ll show it to him, in 2008, when he can hold it in his hand, and that will be enough notice for him. And then he’ll ask, “How much…?”), or my eldest sister, who is, well… forthright. (Otherwise known as nosy). But I’m glad someone asked, actually.

Not that the dollar amount is the point. The reality is that no matter how much your agent negotiates for, your advance is an advance amount on money that YOU are going to earn. It’s a payment against anticipated royalties, and, in a way, it’s a statement of faith, which explains why JK Rowling received an amount roughly equivalent to $4,000 U.S. (£1500 – £3000 are the amounts I found with some judicious searching), and the gentle suggestion that she keep her day job. Her editors at Bloomsbury UK weren’t convinced she could make a living from writing books. Of course, that explanation doesn’t always work… because it begs the question of what it means that Kaavya Viswanathan received $500K for a pair of books she hadn’t yet written. Little, Brown, & Co. apparently either believed that Kaavya was going to be writing bestsellers forever, or that she was a one-time flash in the pan, and that they’d best pay her off and be done with her.

Anyway. I hadn’t ever really given advances much thought, and I smile now to think how much time S.A.M. spent earnestly trying to elucidate to me the vagaries of royalties (“Okay – you get half the money after contracts, and the other half after you do exactly what she wants in the editorial letter, all right?”) and what it means to receive money. He was disappointed that my advance wasn’t bigger, but I’m okay with what I have… because again, to what do I have to compare the amount? Nada. Maybe I’ll get snotty about it later, but I really can’t see that happening. If you’re trying to write for a living? Honey, just about ANY amount is good.

So to answer The Question? Thanks for asking, the amount is … just enough for me.

This morning I found that I didn’t know how to sign my own name.

That’s always a disconcerting discovery, no? Lo, these many years of flinging off my breezy (and thoroughly indecipherable) signature, now I find it takes… thought. I was squinting over the swoops, and studying the loops.

It was … alarming.

Normally, you never look at your signature, unless you’re buying something and you’ve got one of those clerks who scrutinize the back of your debit card to make sure you’re you (I seem to get that a lot), or you have a particularly scary librarian (as I also used to get a lot) who doesn’t believe you live where you live, when you’ve just moved and you’re dying to just FIND A BOOK TO READ to make all the evil of boxes and moving vans and unpacked linen closets GO AWAY for just awhile…!

Ahem.

But I digress..
I am only obsessing over my signature because I was required to sign four separate book contracts for RH. And initial in various places. And sign my full name. Oh — and read the whole thing. There is nothing like starting your day by reading lawyer-ese. It’s pretty much enough to ruin your appetite. For a minute or two, anyway.
As of this morning, I loathe my signature, I really do. Maybe it was the pen… but something wasn’t right. And it’s not like a cheque, you can’t just — rip it up and say VOID and start over again. That’s a surefire way to start things off on completely the wrong foot with the lawyers at a publishing house, tearing up the contracts they’ve been fiddling with since OCTOBER (and which were delayed at the last minute on Friday because Secret Agent Man emailed to say he’d found errors. There are a lot of things crossed out on this contract [which is apparently common], which give the contracts an air of being a skirmishing ground, where a war of words was fought with black ink. Go, S.A.M.!). I think not only would the lawyers be skeeved out, my agent would be ready to hang me out to dry, too. We’ve both been waiting so long for this whole thing to come together.

On the whole, I am pleased with my contract. (It’s not like I have much to compare it to — duh!) I find that I have retained rights I never knew I had (Thanks to S.A.M., who really does do his job); should I decide my novel needs licensed stationery sold with it, or calendars… well, should I actually do that, somebody find me and smack me (I’m talking to you, a. fortis), but hey, options, people. That’s what agents and contracts are all about.

Should anyone need me, I’ll be scribbling with a black crayon, practicing my book-signing moves.

Not.