Editing

I believe in the editing process. (Man, I'm obsessed recently with "The ____ Process" see; my blog, the last blog post, the title of my novel...)

It's hard because I want to re-edit pieces I've had published in Zephyr, or something else...something that I just didn't think of at the time. Right now my manuscript is floating off in space with agents I've submitted to...and while they're reading where I was at at that point...I'm continuing to edit. Why? Because I feel like no matter what, until the piece is published, it can always get better. Always. Even if you've submitted it for revision, you yourself should be revising it...or at least that's how I feel (I could be wrong).

I really enjoy editing with Laura (my sister). She goes through and says "This sounds awkward, I don't like this...I still don't like this. Take this out? This is redundant." I really, really appreciate her honesty with me, and though sometimes it hurts, I know she's doing it to help make the piece, MY PIECE, better, and that, my friends, is the end goal--having the strongest thing you have to offer.

An Interview With Myself About Confessions Of An Immortal Heart

So...I'm bored and tired so I'm going to interview myself to answer all of your lovely questions about Confessions of an Immortal Heart. Why am I asking them? Because they're things I've been wanting to explain to people who are in the process of reading, or potential agents:

When did you write this?

I wrote this my sophomore year of high school? I know it wasn't my freshmen year, but I may have started it then. I finished it sometime in college when I submitted (kind of crappily) to an agent. Of course I got rejected.

Why did you write this?

Erika Wilke told me one day to write a story for her...so I started...and kept going...and it kept going. I felt bad because I kept saying "Oh, you'll have it by Easter, by my birthday...by the time I graduate...." but she still hasn't gotten a copy....(Now she and I don't really talk that much..)

So.....What happens if this gets published?

Well, hopefully I'd be able to do a book tour. I've moved around a lot, so I have three solid fan bases: in the towns of Shepherd, Mt. Pleasant, Auburn, and Bay City, Michigan (my home state), so I feel like that would be a good place to start. (I'd LOVE to have a book signing at Book Mark in Mt. Pleasant, or somewhere in Bay City, and I feel like I would have a good turn out.)
In Biddeford/Portland, Maine, where I attended the University of New England (getting a Med Bio degree!). I have a lot of friends that way who constantly say, "When you get published, I'll be in the store to buy it!" When I was published in Zephyr, a few people made me sign their copies which was HUGELY flattering. I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to have a signing at Bullmoose. And then on the Outerbanks of North Carolina where I currently reside. It's a smaller following, but I work for a pretty big company (Kitty Hawk Kites), so I feel maybe we could do a co-thing? Try to get both of our names out there?
Thankfully with these places, I feel I'd be able to set up the book signings myself (with maybe some research and direction from an agent/editor...but if they don't have time, I could figure it out. It's not that hard to call places and I'm familiar with the areas in question/the bookstores.)

So, the main characters don't have names...why?

When I first wrote it, I just kept going back to "I" and "me" and "he" and "him" thinking that I would name the characters later. But as time progressed, I listened to people talk about their significant others, and they constantly said, "I'm going out with him" "She's mad at me again". The more I listened the more I heard that we as people don't usually use names, and it's seems like it's a sign of affection. If you're with someone, you love them, and everyone else knows. You talk about them without using their names....so...if you're telling a story about losing the person you love, everyone should know who that is without having to say the name.
I feel like this tactic makes the character more relateable (some may disagree, like my sister). But without names, the characters can become anyone they want to be, it can become your story, it can become mine.
Plus, I read Swann's Way in college, and the narrator was "I"...so I felt it was okay.

How many rounds of editing has this piece gone through?

Oh geeze....umm...a million?
When it was first finished, I left it alone for a few years and went back to it. As I read through it, I found that the writing was unGodly weak, but I had some solid ideas behind the writing. Around the same time I read Three Weeks With My Brother, by Nick Sparks, and he talked about his first book, and how he scrapped it, and I considered doing the same with this...but there was something about it saying "Just edit me, just edit me!" so for the last few years, it's what I've been doing.
When I finally got it to the point I started considering submitting to agents, I sent it out to friends who were avid readers and read things like Twilight, or Harry Potter, and things that were slightly outside our realm of comfort (except, again for my sister...this is NOT her genre). They LOVED the idea behind it. My sister on the other hand said, "I read three pages, lost interest. Please don't make me read anymore."

Wow, that was harsh....what did you do?

Well...I looked at from the reader/author relationship. If she's not connecting well enough to the character, it's a problem on my end of things. I ended up cutting the intro from about 20 pages, down to 5. I described in more detail the world the narrator lived in and rearranged a million scenes.
She later had a problem with the first meeting scene, so I added more dialog with that. I also completely deleted chapter 9 because...well...it sucked. I'm not afraid of changing things as long as it conveys what the story is about

And what is the novel about?

Hahahaha, I hate this question. Actually after the first rejection today, I went to Taco Tuesdays and told the bartender about being rejected after she asked me how I was. We finished our conversation and I heard someone behind me say "So...what's your novel about?"
I laughed and said, "Okay, but you gotta not judge me."
So in short: The narrator is immortal (and unnamed as previously discussed). While most stories have the man stronger, this one revolves around her trying to protect him in some way. Well....he gets murdered, and she basically loses her mind and goes on a killing rampage.
(In this description, I leave out the fact that 90% of the novel builds up to that moment, and explains their relationship together. It follows their meeting where she hated him, to falling in love with him, right up to his death).

Wow. That's pretty intense. What is your inspiration behind this?

Well...there's a lot. The relationship/emotional aspect of the story revolves around my relationship with the guy I loved in high school. Some of the stories are based around things we did, and really it gives me the strongest sense of love and the ability to write about what I felt at that time period.
The death scene and those emotions around it are tied into the death of my best friend, Kellie Lynne Wheeler, who was killed in a car accident when she was seventeen. (I was in my sophomore year of high school when my sister called and told me the news...). It's hard going from returning home from school each day and waiting by the computer to chat with her...to suddenly never seeing her log on again. I wanted something to cement the fact that it's okay to grieve forever, to be in pain from the absence of someone you love. I was so pissed when I went to school, and a week later one of my friends said, "It's been a week, you're not over it yet?" I wanted to strangle him.
I wrote the murder scenes when I was pissed off at my sisters for one reason or another. It helped manage my anger :)

What do books do you consider to be similar?

Umm....the romances are similar to that of the Twilight Saga (the whole "Oh man, this person is my entire world, and I feel like I'd die without them) and the Kissed By An Angel Trilogy (the guy dies and she has to learn how to function again....)

What is your target age group?

When I started this, I was in high school, so that was my original target. But now I'm 22, and have friends my age, and older, and younger. Most of the people who've been reading this are between the ages of 20-40+, but most of us still feel like young adults. I think because of the LOSS and LOVE factors of the novel, anyone who has lost someone can related to the narrator's story. So really, all ages, I guess (though there are some rather graphic scenes)...so maybe young adult and older? If you're making me be specific, I'd aim for 14 and older.

Would you be willing to do an audio CD or anything like that?

I would be. I'm not sure how those work, like...would I be the one reading, or do they hire someone to do it? I'd honestly kind of like to be the reader (don't get me wrong, I hate the sound of my voice), but I LOVE Sylvia Plath, and for the first time last year, I heard a recording of her reading, and it was....horrifying, and inspiring, and if my work reaches anyone, I'd like them to be able to hear -me-. If not...that's okay, I'm sure I'll get to do a partial reading at some point in my life :) Yey youtube!

What other things are you working on?

Well, I'm midway through my second novel, which I started writing because of the great Tammy Henry. If that one gets published, it will be dedicated to her. It's tentatively called The Secret Keeper. I've been working on the ending for quite some time now....
I also write short stories, nonfiction, and poetry, so a lot of my time has been spent submitting things to competitions and trying to bulk up my resume/publishing background.


Okay, I feel like that's sufficient. If you guys have any questions about the novel, the submission process, or anything else, feel free to let me know and I'll answer!

The Frustrations

There is nothing worse than getting a stack of edits back, well after you've submitted the manuscript, and finding errors in the first story. Your heart sinks, and  you fear, Oh God, I'm going to get rejected. But it's still an awful waiting game. Then there's always that hope, What if what I wrote is still good enough....?

Everyone knows that when submitting something, revise, revise, revise. I do. The manuscript in question is the short story chapbook I submitted to Burnside Review. Each story had been written on their own over the last year or two, and were clumped together into what is/was known as Kitchen Floor Confessions. I had been editing the stories pretty much any time I got  bored--throwing something new into the mix, finding spelling or tense errors. Then for a month straight they were hit hard, by me and everyone else I sent them to, and then by me a few more times.

As far as the manuscript as a whole is concerned, Laura and Alyssa were the only ones to send back ANY edits. Peter never went through. Nor did Mike. Tammy and Elizabeth are excused as I gave them to them WAYYYY late. Just today, I got Sandy's back. Laura and Alyssa didn't get through all the stories, and by the end I had re-ordered many of them (so the last story originally is now the first). The first story, did not get re-edited by them, only by me...the person who wrote it and was so used to reading it that everything came out the way it was supposed to...or so I thought.

I'm not going to lie, the processes is exhausting. I think that's why we (as writers) need distance from our work. So we can go back to a story once we've forgotten what it was about, and re-edit, and make it polished and pretty and ready to submit again.

Game On (Game On).

Well Hello There

The first thing you need to know about me is that by this time next year, I will be published. It may be a short story, a long short story, more poems, a novel...but my name will start getting out there. It is for this reason, and this reason alone that the world will not end in 2012.

I've been writing ever since I can remember. I wrote stories, and once upon a time I used to also illustrate for them. Since then I've become lazy, and moved up in the world (no longer writing the same story, over and over and over again about a horse named Buttercup).

Now I write more fiction than anything else. I still write poems, and sometimes short non-fiction stories, but I like making things up much more.

I'm also on the path to "SELF DISCOVERY", so maybe that will cause a few more stories to pour out. By the time I'm 30 I'd like to have my memoir written, and maybe published. But written feels like a good goal.

Before you start thinking "Wow, this girl is ambitious," let me give you some background:
I am 22 years old. I graduated with the class of 2010 from the University of New England with a degree in Medical Biology. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. I'm a writer, not a biologist. But some day, I'd also like to save animals, too. I've been published minimally: in each edition of Zephyr (the schools literary journal), and had an essay in Authors of Tomorrow. Those are my credentials.

Outside of that, like the greats before me, I too have had my share of rejections:
Burnside Review (too many times to count)
MakeOut Creek
Poetry Foundation
Missouri Review
Tin House
Boston Literary Magazine (Also too many times to count, but they at least give reasons why)
Copper Nickle
Men in Bed Anthology Collection
....And probably more, but it was before the time I was aware of e-mail submissions. Either way, as stated, I will be published.

Right now I'm in the process of looking up literary agents and editing stories for upcoming competitions. I'm flat broke. I have less than $30 in my bank account ($20 of which will need to go to an oil change). I am always accepting donations for reading or submission fees. In the mean time, if you'd like to edit and be on an acknowledgement page someday....let me know :)

I'm not going to lie, I'm not the happiest kid who's ever been created, but all of that is in this blog. This blog however is writing focused, to tell you how I'm doing, what I've submitted to where, and to thank people like: Laura Schmidt, Tammy Henry, Mike Appel, Sandy Scarboro, Elizabeth Henry, Patrick Gagnon, Chris Butler, and all the others who put up with me reading to them, forcing them to read for me. Most of them push me to be a better writer, tear apart what I write so that it can excel, so I have something to be proud of. They are friends and they make my life go around. But that's enough of that.

Until then, this is me saying Keep On Keeping On (Joe Dirt rules).