ENOUGH!

I disappeared for a month! The book's bummed me out, so I'm dropping it for the time being. I'm supposed to be having fun with this, and even though I thought I was ready for this level of rejection - I wasn't. SO! Let it all calm down, start working on something else so I don't take this so personally, and think about querying later.

We went to a goat farm today!! Rebecca should have pictures up in the next day or two. Noble Springs Dairy is just a few miles away from us, and I buy some amazing chevre and feta from them every week - and they had their first tour today.

We milked a goat.

It was fantastic; this weekend feels like the first time in a long time that we've really been social, that we've really been out in the world, and it was fantastic. Even with my new job, it feels like I've put myself into a little bubble, and I've just started making little experimental voyages here and there. It's exciting.

Everything just seems so bright and full of possibilities. I've been feeling it more and more since I left Memphis - especially in the last couple of months. Escape velocity.

FIVE!

One month later, I've just gotten my fifth rejection. Twelve sent out, five form rejections. It's weird - The Dead Rise, even though it was clumsier than a third grader on roller skates, got at least a couple of personal rejection letters and a full manuscript request in the first ten queries. This one - no feedback. Some positive notes at Querytracker, but nothing from agents.

If I knew what was wrong with it - if it was the concept, the query letter, the first chapter, or just the genre - I might be able to fix it! But it's just a crapshoot right now. I'm working on a new query letter to send out when this batch is rejected - it's a little gimmicky, but a lot less 'distant' than the other. I'll post them both when the time comes and see what works best. Feels like like tossing pennies blindfolded, trying to hit a bottle across the room.

ONE!

First rejection! I told myself I'd send out five more query letters when I got my first rejection email. So I'll do that after work today. Weirdly: this does not concern me as much as I'd expected.

:-/

I just sent out the first five queries for The Cherubim. Feeling pretty ill. I've worked so hard on this, and I know that the way things go, there will be a bunch of rejections coming in soon. Still, without query letters, nothing would get published, right?

Description of my favorite hats

Things are getting exciting again.

Last weekend, Rebecca and I started reviewing The Cherubim - giving it that one last layer of polish before I begin querying again. It's good. It isn't The Best, but it's the first thing I've written where, on rereading it a couple of months later, I feel pretty good about it.

That's not true. I used to write short stories, and I *still* think they're funny ten years later. They're my sad little orphans; I feel pretty sorry for them, but they're kind of cute in their rag-tag dirty clothes and funny hats. But this is different - when I finished The Dead Rise, I was kind of embarrassed to show it to anyone. Whenever I sent it to anyone, I'd have this disclaimer of "This is the first thing I've written, I'm still working on polishing it up..."

So maybe this might go somewhere. Maybe not. Who knows! At the very least, I'm finally getting to the point where I'm wrapping it up. I started writing it in December of last year, and when I go back and reread the notes and the original, first draft, I can't believe how much it's changed.

I'll finish it up and start querying next weekend. And then I can move on to the second draft of Mrs. Shadow. And then Rebecca will have another book to read!

The hermit glances dubiously from the cave

Inspiration comes from strange places.

The Dead Rise was rejected again this afternoon. By the first person I queried with my rewrite, six months ago.

The thing is, I didn't expect a reply. Way back in the day, when I first queried the agent, I got a reply twelve hours later. She said she liked the idea of the book, but it was too short. So I rewrote it, pureed it and remolded it and made it something new. And then I queried her again shortly thereafter, and never heard back.

All this time, I've figured - well, it slipped through the cracks, but there's this ant-sized chance that one day, she'll find it in her inbox. And then...

And even though I decided a while back that the book was going nowhere, that it was not only unmarketable, it was pretty... green, to put it politely... it was still a disappointment.

But it made me realize that yes, I need to start everything up again. I need to start writing. Revising. Querying. Rebecca is going to start reading the latest revision of The Cherubim and making notes for me, and when we're back from our vacation next weekend, I'm going to go over it one last time with a fine-toothed comb and get it out.

And when that's done, I want to finish Mrs. Shadow. I haven't looked at it since early July. Feels like a lot longer. It needs a total rewrite. Thing is, I can't wait to start the next book after that. I've been working on it in my mind ever since I finished the first draft of Mrs. Shadow, and I'm *really* excited about it.

Post fifty!

I love my job.

That being said, I got an email today from our parent company urging me to exercise my voice in the ongoing healthcare debate. I also got a letter containing four preprinted postcards with my representatives' names and addresses and MY name and address preprinted. There's a cute note asking me to slap on postage and send them off. Each postcard says I support healthcare reform, but NOT anything that might compete with private insurers.

>:-(

His Blog has Four Posts; All Apologies

I read something the other day about when people are mentally engaged with work, they don't seek out alternative forms of brain-exercise after hours. At least, I think I did; it was a fast skim in-between projects.

The good news is this: I've been at my job a month and a half, I've been doing real work for two weeks, and I love it. It's never repetitious and rarely tedious. Every day, I'm assigned anywhere between two to five ideas for possible insurance screw-ups. It's my job to figure out how to take that idea and to find as many refunds as possible. I pass them along to the rest of the team and they see what they can make off of it. In return, I get a very tiny cut of whatever refunds are found.

I think I've explained all that before, but I don't think I can get across how much my mind has latched onto it. This is the first time I've worked somewhere and I'm genuinely interested in what I do. I like it. I think I've said that enough.

But I haven't worked on any writing projects in the last few weeks. I finished off The Cherubim, polished up a query letter, and sent it off to the Query Shark for analysis. That was about a month ago. I figure soon enough, I'll give the whole project another once-over and then start querying it. I think it's good; I think that it might go somewhere. But I'm not as invested as I used to be. My mind is elsewhere of late.

Which doesn't make me happy. I hope that I snap back into it soon; if not, I'll have to set a date and get started then. I can't wait to get back to Mrs. Shadow; I had a few ideas for the second draft, and I think that when everything's said and done, it might be the first thing I've written that has something to say.

But there's not any rush. We moved three weeks ago to a quiet suburb of Nashville; there's a farmer's market selling food from dozens of farms, and the weather's just lovely, and I wake up in the morning now looking forward to getting to my desk, and the day flies by. And in the afternoon, I can't wait to come home and spend the evening with my best friend. Everything feels wonderful, and I want to enjoy it as long as possible. I think this is the first time in my adult life I haven't felt any stress or pressures. I know how lucky I am, and I know it won't last forever.

Why I was Late for Work Today

What follows is a true story, unexaggerated in any way.

Last Thursday, as I've mentioned, Rebecca and I were in an accident. Just a little one – the car behind us smacked our bumper, and we got pushed into the back of a pickup truck. No major problems, except that the hood was crunched.

We were both off the Friday before the holiday weekend, so we went to a nearby auto body shop, hoping to get everything done before the weekend. Knowing that there was no way that would happen. Was there any way that the hood could be popped back into shape, we asked the mechanic. Unfortunately, no. Not with this make. We needed a new, unblemished hood. But the good news was that he could order one and have it in by Monday.

“Do you happen to work on the weekends?” I asked. “See, the thing is, this is our only car, and I work fifteen miles away…”

He gave us that look that says, "Oh, if only I could!" Of course not. But he could get us in for Monday. Rebecca suggested that she take me to work in the morning and pick me up after the repairs were finished, and our new mechanic friend, Kevin, agreed that the plan sounded fine.

So, as these things go, he told us on Monday that there was no possible way he could do it by the end of the day, he had to keep it overnight, no other possible way. The tone he used suggested that we were naive, dippy children. Of course there was no way that he could do it all in one day. What was he, Santa Claus? This was after I was already stuck at work, fifteen miles away from our apartment. What could I do? Well, suggested Kevin, if I could get a ride home from work that afternoon, he could deliver the car to us Tuesday morning. And we thanked him again profusely.

My friend Chandrika drove out to Franklin to pick me up, and it turned out she had a flat, so I had to put on the spare and then we went to get it changed. This is the kind of thing that always happens when I go to a mechanic. I inevitably get neck pains the night before I have to go, because I know that a series of unforeseen problems will arise. It’s never, ever failed. Once, I went to get a tire changed and had to go back five times because the tire wouldn't stop leaking. Even after it was replaced. I never managed to get that problem sorted out.

So today, I get up early to call and ask when the car will be delivered. I’ve already told my boss that I’ll be a couple of hours late getting in. He understands; after all, we can't be sure when the car will be delivered. So when I call and Kevin tells me it’s ready an hour early, I’m ecstatic.

“When are you going to deliver it?”

“Deliver? Son, I wish we had the manpower to deliver repaired vehicles. But we don’t.”

“…What?” I'm already an hour late to work. This is the thing: Kevin seems genuinely bewildered and angry, as if we’ve repeatedly asked him for a bucket of chicken on the side. This is the same mechanic who we talked to Friday, the same one who offered transportation yesterday. Apparently, as far as he’s concerned, we’re lunatic troublemakers who take wrecked cars to shops and then try to game the system. A free delivery, sure, right. Another damn kid with pipe dreams of freebies. All I can do is stammer and say that I guess we'll figure it out.

The only thing I can think to do is ride the bus. I hate buses. There’s a set of unexplained rules that all bus riders know and I don’t. There's no way to ask; the driver is surly, the riders are distant. The website says the bus will arrive in ten minutes. I get exact change, throw on some clothes, and rush to the stop. When the bus arrives (right on time!), I ask for a transfer ticket.

First off, they don’t do ‘transfers’. After telling me this, the driver gives me a transfer card. Bemused, I sit down and wait to get to my first stop.

Only no one bothers to explain that they don’t automatically stop. You have to watch out for it and pull a rope. This is not explained, and I’ve been too ashamed to ask for a tutorial. I only realize that this is how it works when I see another passenger do it So when the bus stops for another guy and I recognize I’m sort-of-kind-of near my stop, I hop out.

I manage to find the transfer point, which has a giant sign next to it and three covered bus stop areas. Then I wait twenty minutes to see the bus casually zoom by the other side of the street. I curse profusely and cross the street. There is another, tinier sign on the other side. I’ve just missed my bus.

I call Rebecca and she tells me that the mechanic is just a couple of miles away. It’ll actually be faster to walk than to wait for the next bus. By this time, I’m two hours late for work. I start running.

That’s when the first hobo flags me down. He shakes my hand four or five times in a row, never letting go, only slowing down between sentences, as he asks me my name, where I’m from, where I’m going. When I tell him about my dilemma, he offers me a handful of spare change and says that he’ll travel with me and give me a $200 book of food stamps.

“Thanks,” I say, “but I just need to walk there alone, I think.”

“Oh, that’s great. That’s great,” he tells me. I give him my unused bus transfer card in gratitude.

I run down the street as far as I can, which is about a block, and then a man wearing a fishing hat and carrying a violin under his arm approaches me. I assume he’s going to ask for money, but the day is full of surprises. He says, “Do you know where the violin shop is at?”

“What?”

He speaks slowly, as if I’m feeble. “Do you know… where the violin shop… is at?”

“Uh? I don’t think so.”

“You from around here?”

“Not really.”

“You got any cigarettes?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t.”

He looks frustrated, and wanders past me. “Good luck!” I call.

It is at this point that the bus that I was supposed to transfer to drives past me. Somehow, I've managed to *walk* faster than this bus over the past mile and a half. It stops right next to me, as if to laugh, and I really, really wish I hadn't given my transfer pass to a homeless person.

I’m another half mile down when another hobo stops me, hands me a leather CD case, and asks if his rock CDs look any good. I tell him they’re great, but I’m out of cash, and he asks if I have cigarettes. I apologize and tell him that I don’t, and keep walking.

It's hot. I mean, like, stomach-achingly hot. I'm indubitably late for work now, sweating like crazy, and when I see a sign offering 'spaghetti with goat', I actually consider grabbing a plate. But I perservere, and at last, I reach the mechanic's shop.

“Oh,” Kevin says, smirking. “Guess you finally got a ride, huh?”

My first week

So how was my first week at the new job?

Really good. Too good, I think. I've done enough similar work so that I'll be able to easily start pulling queries on insurance data after training, and there's enough new stuff to learn soI'm kept interested. This is the first job I've had where I really like going in the mornings.

That's why it's almost too good. When I get home - at least, so far - I haven't felt like writing. I figured I'd edit the last 100 pages over the course of several evenings, but so far, I haven't even looked at The Cherubim.

I planned to start on it today, as it's a three day weekend. And then last night, we were involved in a minor fender bender. Not too bad, but we were sandwiched between two cars and the hood is crumpled. Today, we have to go around to body shops to see what exactly needs to happen, and so there goes day one of writing.

Other writers - if anyone's still reading this - when do you take the time to write, and how do you work around your schedule? My old job, I had enough downtime so that I could write uninterrupted in the middle of the day. I don't think that's an option in my new job.