How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

Today, while I was proctoring an exam, I wrote the ending of Electric Boogaloo. Let me back up - in addition to my day job as an attorney, I also teach for The Princeton Review. I usually teach LSAT prep, but today I was proctoring an SAT exam, which is always interesting because the people in the room are the people who I hope will one day read my books. So I view it as sort of research. But I also view it as boring. The SAT takes approximately 6 million hours to take, and the only thing worse than taking it is sitting through it without having my whole future rest on it. There's not even anything at stake! (I'm sure the people taking it would kill me if they heard that.) Anyway, I usually take my computer so I can write during the exam. Even though I am supposed to be working on TNP, I was in an Electric Boogaloo mood today, missing the characters, so I finished a scene in that manuscript. But after I finished that scene, I was sort of stuck. I've always known h...

Recently, I saw Sweeney Todd - the Johnny Depp/Helena Bonham Carter version. It was okay. I prefer the Len Cariou/Angela Lansbury version from the stage, but then, I almost always prefer the original versions of most musicals. I'm a sap that way. But the movie version of Sweeney Todd got me thinking about the role of (and risk of) sidekicks in stories. In case you haven't seen either version, Sweeney Todd is the story of ... Sweeney Todd (I know - you're shocked). He used to be married and have a baby, but then a judge fell in love with his wife and had him sent to prison in Australia. The musical begins when he returns to seek his revenge on the judge. Upon his return, he meets Mrs. Lovett, the proprietress of a meat pie shop, who remembers Todd from before he left. The two form an unlikely partnership when Todd kills someone who threatens his plan of revenge, and Mrs. Lovett bakes the victim into meat pies. Yes, that's right - it's a heart warming musical...

As an attorney (and an eldest child), I am naturally a rule follower. I spend most of my time interpreting or creating rules that govern the nature of the relationship between my company and the other companies it does business with. These are called contracts. So, naturally, when it came time to start submitting queries, I went online and dig a little investigating to see if I could figure out what the "rules" were. If you are an author who has gone through the submission process, you know what I found - chaos. Some agents want this; some want that. Some want pages; some want chapters. Some want the query letter this way; some want that. Some want you to swear fealty to them and only them. Some want you to submit in goat's milk on a parchment written by the light of the full moon. You catch my drift. As a result, some authors have rebelled and decided to do things their own ways. One author--I honestly don't remember who--did a whole submission package that ...

I've been working on the TNP for a while now, and this week a sudden and horrible thought came to me -- what if this book is unsaleable? NOOOO! I don't write with an eye toward selling necessarily. I don't make character choices or plot choices or language choices with an eye toward "the market" or "trends" or what have you, especially not in first drafts. I write what I would like to read. But still, since I'm in the middle of the query process with The Book, the question crossed my mind. See, The Book fits squarely into a precise genre and subgenre. It's a fairly original idea (in my mind, anyway) and excellently executed, OF COURSE :) , but there's no question where it would go in the book store. But the TNP is not of a type that I've seen before. It's ... less specified. And so, as a result of the query process, I started getting concerned that the TNP--which I am writing, you may recall, as a hedge against The Book not s...

One of the writers in my writing group, Cinda Chima, has written three related books (check Cinda's stuff out here ) and while we were reading the third book for her, she had some questions about how much information to include about what had happened in the prior two books. Her books weren't sequels, like Electric Boogaloo is, but the question is still a tricky one, because you have to assume that a large portion of the readership for the second or third book are going to have read the first one. Since her books were related, but were not direct sequels (meaning each book focused on a different main character, but the books took place in the same world as each other, and some of the characters overlapped - a main character in one book, for example, becoming a supporting player in another), Cinda wanted to make sure that she included enough information for the new readers without boring the returning ones. It's a tricky balance - how much back story to include. This is t...

As I mentioned earlier, I'm currently working on two new projects while submitting The Book. The first is the sequel to The Book (we'll call it The Book II: Electric Boogaloo). The second, in case The Book doesn't sell (in which case there's not a helluva lot of use for a sequel, right?), is a Totally New Project. There are a number of cool things about doing two projects at one time - first, I'm in the same first draft stage on both of them, so it's just about getting the words down on paper. I write super fast at this stage - about 1000 words an hour for a couple hours at a time - and the only plotting I worry about is "what comes next?" Transitional material, connective tissue, plot developments that, you know, actually make sense? All happens later. Right now, it's just about what comes next. TNP is a "normal" young adult book, so no supernatural stuff in there, and it's also the first thing I've written in first person ...

Despite my absence from this blog, I am not dead and/or on a beach somewhere. I wish I were (on a beach, not dead), but I am not. I would sing a song about how busy I am with work (true), and how busy I am with teaching (also true), and how busy I am with working on the new projects (true dat), and how busy I am with life in general (double true), but the real reason why I haven't been posting here is because I've been querying. For some reason, querying has made me especially leery of posting here. I've seen posts from agent blogs that talk about how they don't want to know that the author they're considering representing has been rejected by everyone else in the world. Likewise, I don't think it's good form for me to post about the responses I've received when the agents haven't given me permission to do so, although some writers do it. I know I wouldn't want to see my query letter posted on someone's blog and commented on, although som...