The snail is still alive.

It doesn't feel like it, and I hate it, but it's been almost two years since the last blog post. Obviously I was a big fat liar in the last entry. The snail never made it to the finish line. The snail turned out to be in the wrong race. After further revisions (and major additions), cherubs & lavender shifted from novella into full length novel. It's a far cry from the story I originally intended it to be, but I'm much more proud of where it's at now. The thing is terribly creepy. Certain scenes still give me shivers, and the characters are much more developed than in the earlier drafts.

Since it's now commercial length, I hope to go the traditional literary representation → publication route. This means lots of query letters and constantly crossed fingers. Thus far all but one of the replies have been generic responses of thanks, but no thanks. The outlier was still a no, but I appreciated the specific reasoning: Though well written, I’m afraid we felt this was too dark for middle grade, and I’m simply not enthusiastic enough about my ability to sell this work to offer representation.

The twist here is that I never intended the story for a middle school audience. It features twelve and thirteen-year-olds as protagonists, yes, but this doesn't mean I expect the readers to be pre or early-teens. It's geared toward adults (and those teens who don't mind an R-rated movie). Just because characters are X age does not thereby deem readers must be X age. I've read the creators of the recent show Stranger Things ran into a similar attitude with studios outside Netflix: you can't expect adults to watch a show whose main characters are children. I suppose there's a fear that age gaps create inherently unrelatable characters for the reader/audience.

I disagree. Paint the world and what's at stake and we should be good to go. Even if this wasn't true, I'd argue children are easy to relate to because we've all been there. Childhood stands out so vividly from our adult timeline that we're not likely to altogether forget what it was to be ten.

Stranger Things became an unexpected success. The ramifications go beyond the television industry. Literary agents now cite interest in representing the next Stranger Things. Even if this is a little silly since Stranger Things is a loving throwback to numerous other stories—agents may as well claim they want the next Goonies/Carrie hybrid—I've been hoping to capitalize on this because cherubs & lavender features several similarities to the show. We've got children trying to defeat monsters in an otherworldly place where the adults are powerless to help. There's even a mysterious new girl in town.

The catch is, if I'm ripping off widely successful properties in a [desperate] effort to promote my work, cherubs is as much Stranger Things as it is IT or Hellraiser or A Nightmare on Elm Street. The terrors the poor Robin's Lane's kids experience are much more gruesome than what the Stranger gang confronts.

So I understand that agents may worry straight-faced horror isn't as palatable as fantasy/science fiction tinged with occasional darkness. I just happen to disagree. I believe our collective appetite for the sinister is much larger than agents gauge. Which circles back to a different, more controversial point. Yes, I didn't write this book with a middle grade audience in mind, but is it too dark for middle schoolers? Maybe for some. [Full disclosure: we have fifth-grade sisters stabbing themselves to death in a cafeteria. A creature that sexually taunts a boy from inside his mirror. Flayed infants and people being eaten alive.] For readers like the kid I once was, a boy who begged his parents to rent him R-rated horror flicks, who owned the entire collection of Aliens toys, who dressed as Freddy Krueger for Halloween, who went on to realize he would face no censorship in the books he bought (because in the eyes of his loving parents, books could commit no evil), this novel would have been the jackpot.

I suppose you could argue I was the abnormality—that most kids want a horror story's punches pulled—but this is subjective stuff. I believe we underestimate what children are capable of "handling" in their fiction. Others will call bullshit. More will say the obvious: it depends on the kid. And this is all a wild tangent, because cherubs & lavender remains targeted toward adults and the upper teens.

We'll query on.

The snail is almost at the finish line.

Alrighty.

 I’ve [obviously] been slack in updating the blog, but I've made great progress fine-tuning cherubs & lavender.

Last December I thought it was just about ready for copy-editing. But because I'd been immersed in it for so long, I gave myself a little distance so I could look at it objectively one final time. (Copy-editing is expensive. It's vital I have everything just how I want it. If I pay to have it copy-edited and then I rewrite chunks, I'm wasting money.) Unfortunately when I came back and reread, it felt off.

The story worked. It had its moments. But a lot of the time, and this was hard to accept... it was boring.

I wanted to think it was just me. I'm so used to the story, of course I'd think it's boring. It's not boring! It can't be boring! Because shoot, if the book needed another overhaul, that meant I was way off course. This was a ~45K word manuscript that had already devoured weeks of my life.  The first rough-draft was complete mid-late 2013. Other writers could have had a polished product ready for readers’ eyes in a fraction of the time it’d taken me to get here.

But it wasn’t just me. I paid someone to beta-read my work, and she picked up on the exact same issues I was concerned about. And found a few problems to which I was oblivious.

So I went back to rewriting and editing.

In addition to general polishing and plot-tweaking, here are the primary things I fixed:

Characters. When I wrote cherubs I wanted a short horror story that would hit you from the start and never let up. I threw a group of neighborhood kids at the reader with minimal character development and expected the reader to be happy to immediately accompany them into a haunted house.

I should have known better.

I provided no time to connect to the protagonists, which shortchanged any potential scare in my novel. Most horror comes in fearing for the characters, but to fear for the characters you have to care about them. If you’re not invested, you’re detached. If you’re detached, it’s just going to be words on a page; just actors and special effects and noise on a screen.

Repetitive descriptions. I have a tendency to over-describe things. In the process of writing I see this repetition as stylistic. A descriptive technique. Part of my art arsenal. Something the reader will enjoy. Like giving the reader photographs of a statue taken from multiple angles so the reader can appreciate the statue in all its glory.

Now imagine what I did in those last five sentences happening every other paragraph. Me elaborating on details needlessly. Using multiple analogies to describe a simple concept. My pages were filled with these types of redundancies. They clogged the story’s arteries.

Chapters. The initial design of cherubs was chapter-free. No chapters. No escape. The readers would feel they were being consumed by the story just like the children were being swallowed by the house.

I had to abandon this idea. My story didn’t feel relentless. It felt tedious. cherubs benefits from allowing time to breathe between scenes.  There’s something pleasing about reaching the end of a chapter and looking forward to or dreading what waits in the next section.

On top of that, the story was just begging to be broken up. It features a good bit of time-jumps into the past. Having one continuous take made these awkward. And even in the “straightforward” parts, I’d find drab transitional sentences connecting two parts that simply needed a chapter break.  

--

So where am I? 

Close. 

I’ll give cherubs to my friends and family to read. I’ll wait to see if anything bothers them or comes across as glaringly bad. I’ll comb over it one final time (knock on wood). And then I’ll send it off for copy-editing and it’s game on.

I paid four-hundred-something dollars for a review

Last post I wrote on the importance of reviews. Since then I paid Kirkus to review A Collection of Angels. While this means I literally paid for a review, which has an awful connotation in the implication I paid for a good review, there was no guarantee on the quality of write-up. This isn’t a dirty deed. I could have landed with a reader who hated the novella, or someone who thought it was only passable, and either scenario would have entailed a write-up I’d never want to see the light of day.

Paying Kirkus was a gamble, but I wouldn’t have taken it if I didn’t believe in the quality of my book. Still, Monday I had a moment of anxiety when I saw the email, “Your Kirkus review is ready,” a week earlier than expected. I know it’s wrong to let others dictate how you feel about your craft, but this is a professional reviewing service. They carry clout. A choice excerpt from Kirkus Reviews is much more of a selling point than “The best novel ever!” --Close Friend to Jesse. It would have destroyed my week to discover a professional reviewer had just trashed my book (at my own financial expense, no less).

Here’s the review. 

It’s not AMAZING, at no point does the reviewer actually recommend the book, but it’s not bad. I enjoy (and I say this earnestly, not facetiously) that the single criticism levied against the story is it “threatens to go overboard in creepiness.” A few sentences read awkwardly, and I’m not crazy about ending the article with "will make some cringe and others gag." In the context of the rest of the review it’s not damning, and the part of the sentence that precedes those final words is great, but taken alone, this suggests Collection is nothing more than gross-out horror, and as the last thought, it ends the review with a whimper as opposed to a bang.

So I’ve got a decent Kirkus review. What now? By itself, this review does little. But for the sake of future advertising, I can now superimpose something like:

                              “Leaves a lasting dread.

                                       An undeniably disturbing, reverberating story.” –Kirkus Reviews

on my cover, and I can also take comfort in the fact that any potential buyer browsing the book's Amazon page will see a professional reviewer's comments in addition to reader reviews. Will this prove to be worth the $400+ investment? Way too soon to tell.  

Playing other games while playing the Waiting Game

I’ve read interviews where artists state they don’t pay attention to critics. Positive or negative, reviews cloud their judgment, and so they do their best to avoid them. I understand this logic. If everyone’s expressing love for your work, you could get sloppy. Your ego might inflate and you’ll lose your critical eye. And if everyone hates your work, you might doubt yourself. You’ll lose your confidence. Your style will weaken. You might try to appease those who cannot be appeased and jeopardize your creative identity. And everyone isn’t everyone. My favorite books and movies have their share of trashtalking critics, just as the stuff I’d regard as slop has its diehard fans.

Yet whether or not artists acknowledge reviews doesn’t alter the fact that those reviews legitimize their work.

I’m aware that’s a controversial statement. People who enjoy the what is art? What defines art? conversations may scoff at it. But when we look at art from a business perspective—look at the artist not solely as someone who creates, but someone who supports him/herself through the creating—reviews play a major part. Few people will invest their money and time in the unknown. Just like diners who browse Yelp comments before patronizing a restaurant, readers browse book reviews before making a purchase. Better to invest themselves in something that has been “proven” to hold merit rather than a work that may or may not be decent.

With the free promotion over, A Collection of Angels is completely off the radar. I haven’t sold a single copy. This is to be expected. Eventually I plan to pay to have it advertised on different websites, but only after it has garnered reviews.

A couple risks in this approach:

I’m assuming Collection will be well-reviewed. Given the first two ratings the novella received on Good Reads are three stars (how damning—to have one’s work neither hated nor loved, just judged mediocre), I could be setting myself up for major disappointment. There’s also no guarantee those who downloaded the book (~150 individuals) will even read it, let alone review it. I can cite myself as an example. I’ve read all sorts of books, and I haven’t once posted a review on Amazon or Good Reads. Maybe this is karma. 

In the meantime I’m concentrating on other projects.

For my longer works, I’m still querying agents in the hopes of gaining literary representation. I like the idea of having my foot in both camps: my too-short-to-have-been-represented-novellas published in the indie-world, and my full-length stories published in the traditional way.

Concerning my next self-publishing venture, cherubs & lavender needs a few more proof-reads. More  cleaning of clunky passages. Once done, I’ll send it off for copy-editing. When it’s in top-shape, I’ll be more organized in promoting its release. I threw Collection into the wild and hoped a few it’s-temporarily-free! days would be enough for it to gain momentum, but I realize now, in a world where over a thousand new titles are self-published every single day, it’s going to take a lot more than a free price-tag to get people to download my stuff. 

A post on tone and editing that I'll redo the tone of tomorrow.

Yesterday on Facebook I spent the better part of an hour phrasing how I would announce the availability of my book on Amazon. I toyed with sounding apologetic because, aw man, I don’t want to look like I’m using my friendships for purposes of solicitation, and then I considered being goofy and self-depreciating because, hey, this is a self-published work, and anyone can self-publish, and then decided against that because Jeez, if I sound wishy-washy over the quality of my book, how I can expect other people to want to read it? After this, I wondered if I should warn people it’s a pretty dark story. We’re talking borderline exploitative fiction. But I decided I shouldn’t go out of my way to deter potential readers. The fetuses on the cover do a fine enough job suggesting gruesome material.

In the end, I went with a flavorless straight-to-the-point approach. The book is on Amazon. It’s horror. I’d love for you to read it. You can get it for free on these dates.

This isn’t the first time I’ve wasted 30+ minutes trying to structure and word what amounts to a couple measly sentences. I think the best analogy for my relationship with status updates and messages is akin to me getting ready for a big date. I try on different tones and words, dress up basic information in different button-downs, examine them in the mirror and shake my head—no, this just doesn’t work—move on to something else, and then, frustrated, throw on a T-shirt.  

In this case, with something as simple as a Facebook status update, the plain T-shirt works.

While it’s exciting to be done with the manuscript, I’m disappointed in myself for believing the story was “finished” over a year ago. And then a few edits later, thinking it finished again. And again. And done again. It’s why even though the book is up and live on Amazon, I still experience a frequent heart-flutter and think, good God, what if you’re mistaken like those other times?! What if you were overlooking some detail or plot point that was so silly, everyone's going to think you're an idiot?

It’s such a difficult thing, determining when you can end your project with finality and say, “Alright world. Enjoy it. Hate it. Here it is.”

It doesn’t help that I believe in the artsy-fartsy argument that there is no such thing as done. Five years from now you'll look back on something you swore was polished to the utmost sheen, and you’ll find ways you could mold and shine it further (although who knows, you may accidentally break it). We’re always changing. Those changes affect our perception. They influence our choices.

But we’ve also got to be realistic.

At a certain point it’s time to move on. Barring sequels, an actor shouldn’t revisit and perfect a performance from a decade-old film. It’s over. Sure he might come up with better choices after having had ten additional years in life to gain experience and wisdom, but he’s better off dedicating his energies to creating brand new characters as opposed to tinkering with past ones.

What I’ve learned with myself, however, is that I need to take repeated hiatuses from a work to whittle it into a form that pleases me. This isn’t me desiring time to grow as a person so I can look upon my story with enlightened eyes. No. It’s that I get too easily sucked into my books. This may sound like a good thing, but it’s like getting trapped in a single room of the building you need to reassemble. You can’t see the big picture. Sure you might consider repainting the walls—that’s what your editing will become—but if you were looking at the house from afar—thinking outside the box—you’d realize the walls don’t need painting, they need demolishing.

Readers/editors help in this department. They comment on things you never saw, force you out of the room because they’re now leading you to a cracked roof. They get you thinking in ways you weren’t before. But when I reflect back on all the times I mistakenly thought A Collection of Angels was done, I attribute it to my proneness to literary tunnel vision. 

~~Novella update + BLURB~~

My initial estimate that A Collection of Angels was only a month from release was mistaken. However, the book should make it out this month, and what better time for a horror story than October?  

The cover is almost finished. My Aunt Goddess Claire, the coolest aunt a guy could have (I’ll write a post in her honor soon—ever since I was young she’s been a supportive influence when it comes to my writing), sketched a wonderful picture that captures the story’s essence, and another artist is now tweaking and coloring and bookifying it, and I’m stoked. Although you’re not supposed to judge a book by the cover, a good cover can make or break an e-book, and what my aunt has drawn is spectacularly creepy.

In the meantime I’ve been tweaking my blurb. A book-jacket-esque description to entice a reader to purchase the story. I’m not proud of the amount of hours I’ve sunk into drafting something less than two hundred words. Trying to describe a work in an engaging yet concise way is tough. Too vague and no one wants to read it. Too detailed and there’s no point in reading. It feels good to finally—knock on wood—have the blurb where I want it:

  

In the bowels of the boat there is a secret collection.

It reeks and it rots and had Galen known about it, he would never have gone aboard. Forget the cute girl at the docks: he would have run home and locked the doors and prayed.

But of course he didn’t know.

He mistook hell for heaven, and now he is trapped in a broken reality, held captive by creatures who aren’t just interested in him. They want his little brother too.

To survive, Galen will need to shed wings he never knew existed.

Otherwise he and his brother join the collection.

This is why I date myself.

I once wrote a scene in which high-schoolers were excited for The Simpsons Movie, and someone asked, “Shouldn’t you just write that they’ll be going to the movies? Aren’t you worried mentioning the Simpsons Movie will date your story?”

I wasn’t.

I believe it’s important to know in what year your characters exist. That story I set in 2007. It began in the summer. The Simpsons was released July 27^th, 2007. It made sense the characters would watch it, and mentioning it by name better cemented the characters in the story's reality.

Some writers refrain from referencing popular culture out of fear of dating their work. They want their stories to forever take place in the present, in the here and now. This is impossible. In writing there is no such thing as a permanent present. Be as nondescript as you want, as vague about jobs and entertainment and world issues as you can, and it won’t matter: eventually (or quickly) your story will become dated.

It can’t be helped.

Language and society and the world change in unforeseeable ways.

Back in the eighties, you could have done your damndest to write a middle-class coming-of-age novel that would always read like it was occurring in modern day, but by not mentioning smart phones or social media, by a total lack of texting or tweets or snapchats, a 2014 reader would sense your story was written in a different era.

Does that mean the 80’s story has lost its relevancy?

Maybe a smidgen, but for the most part, no.

Novels aren’t like pieces of hardware. As newer stories emerge, older narratives don’t turn obsolete. Books aren’t timeless because they avoid details a modern mind would find antiquated. They’re timeless because they immerse a reader in the world of the pages. Readers can empathize with the characters on account of the story’s given circumstances. It doesn’t matter if those circumstances occur during ancient times or the Elizabethan era or the eighties or now.

So accept the inevitable. Any modern story is bound to become a period piece. Date yourself. Now, I’m not advocating writing unnecessary pop culture references. Don’t be superfluous. Don’t obsess with trivial details, where your writing is like a camera focused on background scenery while the main characters walk around blurred and out-of-focus. Just recognize your characters inhabit a world that has its own technology and cultural consciousness and, depending on the story you’ve chosen to create, know that to gloss over this might rob the work of its verisimilitude.