I’m not going to get into why this Jezebel piece so personally hits my sweet spot right now, but let’s just leave it at “it does”.
Also, a picture of Ryan Gosling that we’ll leave at “just cause”.
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Tags: things made of awesome
So, instead of having to go through the horrible process of sending out massive amounts of query letters to agents for my novel (and likely receiving massive amounts of rejections) I got incredibly lucky and had two excellent agents from big agencies competing for my book over the last week.
I’m not going to go into specifics here for a variety of reasons but basically one agent came to me via a query I actually sent last year (long crazy story that worked out beautifully) and one agent came to me through a connection. It was a brutal decision (one I never imagined I’d have to make) deciding between these two fantastic individuals, but I finally did make a decision this week and I’m proud to say that I’m officially working exclusively with one of the agents on my book.
We’ll be doing revisions for the foreseeable future – I have no idea how long, but I hope I can get it done quickly so we can continue moving forward – but I thought you’d all like to know about this great moment of happiness and success in the deluge that is usually REJECTION!
Please pause of a moment of pure happiness:
Now if only I can get some of these damn short fiction pieces published. In fact, just to keep my ego in check…let’s do a status update on those. It’s not looking pretty folks…
Phase III Updated Stats: 6 of 10 Rejected. 4 still out there.
Sidenote: this is tagged ‘champagne’ because I will be drinking an entire bottle of it on my own tonight. Whee!
Thank the gods. The novel is finally done.
I do have do a final edit and proofread tomorrow but the novel is officially done. It’s clocking in at a massive 440 pages (119,743 words). I’m hoping to cut that down a little bit tomorrow, getting it closer to 400 pages, but done is done is done. Right?
It goes on Monday to my writing group and an agent that has been waiting for it for months (and by waiting for it I mean he probably has forgotten all about it – but technically I have an email telling me to send it on through when it’s done – so I’ll be sending it).
Monday will be Adam’s and my “big day of celebration that we cannot afford” which will include at least the following things: An afternoon showing of Duplicity in our neighborhood theater (movies on a weekday! this is what unemployment should be about!). Dinner out (probably at a seafood restaurant we like on the West Side). And when we come home we’ll probably watch another movie and just hang out while I drink an entire bottle of champagne, already purchased and chilling in the fridge for the last two months waiting for me to hurry up and finish.
I also already placed an order on Amazon for a few things I’ve desperately wanted but told myself I wouldn’t buy until I finished. I bought them about thirty minutes after declaring it complete
Tuesday a small selection of queries (six maybe?) will go out to agents.
And on Wednesday, glorious Wednesday I’ll move on to new projects, which include posting good posts more frequently, working on Jilted League, building my website, drawing some sample Shiksa pages, and hopefully finding a super talented artist to work on another graphic novel project I have up my sleeve – I’ve actually already found the artist I want for this – but she’s playing hard to get – read: not returning my email 
Man it feels good to move on to something new. I just wish I’d managed it before it turned 85 degrees outside. I hate New York in the summer…and that’s not supposed to mean late April, but apparently this year, it does.
UPDATE: It took an extra day, but the final revisions are done. I wasn’t able to cut as much as I wanted, but font changes alone saved me 50 pages. Final draft is 388 pages (approximately 118,000 words).
Pop Candy, a site I’ve talked about pretty frequently on this blog as an awesome source of all things pop culture, has featured yours truly as their reader of the day. So head on over to Pop Candy and see what Whitney’s talking about (it’s always something good) and if you can’t get enough of ME, then here’s the link directly to my Reader of the Day “interview”.
Thanks for the feature Whitney – it’s an honor!
AND DID HE EVER.
HOT DAMN. I could not freaking be happier if I tried…well, okay, if while winning the election and watching history be made in Obama’s epic acceptance speech, if I had been fed grapes and massaged by strong hands…PERHAPS I could have been happier, but they would have had to be extraordinary (possibly magical?) grapes and Clive Owen’s hands.
YES PEOPLE. YES!
I am optimistic and proud for my country as I have not been able to be in almost eight years…and I cannot wait to get started. I hope that Obama can bridge this country and lead us in doing great things, and maybe eventually this polarized country of ours can find a way to meet in the middle.
*I stole this image from the delightful ladies over at Shapely Prose, though I stole the other one from Jezebel. I’m full of theft lately…what’s up with that?
That’s right. I’m BAAAAACK. And thank the gods. I was sick people. SICK. The sickest and most miserable I have ever been in my life. If I’d been cognizant enough to find razor blades we honestly might not be having this conversation. Which has answered one question for me quite well…my pain tolerance? Must be really really low. I never thought of myself as having a super high pain tolerance or anything, but I assumed I was y’know…average. Apparently not, because there are people that live with chronic pain that I’m sure is worse than what I experienced for a mere seven days…and I just…I don’t know how they live. I was absolutely in hell. It’s not quite over yet, I’m still suffering from headaches and a bad cough, and that kind of baby deer just outside of the womb feeling when I walk around in the world, but I’m not spending my hours imagining ways in which I can kill myself or drill holes in my face to release the pain, so it’s a glass half full kind of thing. Anyway, I hope you didn’t all forget about me, and that you’ll come running back now that I’m back…
Things that happened while I was dead almost dead.
I submitted a letter/question to The Rejecter a few weeks ago, and she published my letter this week and nicely answered my question. Which is awesome, and makes me four for four in my letters submitted/ published ratio, which pretty much solidifies my theory that submitting letters for publication is my only true gift in life and that I should look for a job doing just that. If anyone hears of such a ridiculous job, please let me know as I’m obviously a shoe in.
Adam got his first awesome paycheck at his new job working on a soon to be awesome film. I don’t think I’m allowed to say more than that, but more to come later.
My parents were in Vegas for a late celebration of my dad’s 60th birthday and did NOT win millions of dollars, but DID come away with the shirts on their backs.
My landlord tried to raise my rent by $200 a month for my new one year lease starting in June, which is not totally ridiculous for New York except that they usually only raise it $100, so it was double what Adam and I were expecting. And it acutally IS a bit ridiculous in our case since the Second Avenue subway line construction is barely a block away from us and is insanely loud, AND they’ve never fixed my ceiling from rain damage from last year, AND our hot water kinda blows. So I sent off a desperate pleading email last week before I got sick, and was rewarded with the landlord agreeing to reduce the raise to a mere $100. Yay!
I’m sure there were other things that happened…but either they are just as boring as the facts above, or I haven’t figured out what they are yet…it’s amazing how quickly your life can unravel when you can’t pay attention to it for seven days.
I just found out I’ve been awarded “Blog Of The Day” over on Fuel My Blog. Check it out!
Thanks Fuel My Blog!
Three times in my life I have submitted a letter (of praise, complaint, or just straight sarcasm) to legitimate publications, all three letters have been printed…including the third which I didn’t even intend for print (e.g. I sent it directly to a magazine’s writer with no thought that it would end up printed).
My letters, in order of appearance are, at the age of about 17 I wrote a letter to the X-men comic book…I think my letter appeared in issue number #53 and it was basically a super geeky praise of what was going on in the book and a few geeky questions. I was delighted to see myself in print.
Cut to 14 years later and I write my second letter to the publication Time Out New York, a sarcastic somwhat bitchy three line email, which won their letter of the week (and won me a book of my choice as a prize…read more about that publication here).
Now, less than two months later I emailed writer Julia Allison directly about a column of hers that I found promising, but ultimately a huge let down. You can read her column about women waiting too long to say ‘I love you’ here. I’ve pasted my published letter below, for your viewing pleasure. Please note that the letter they printed was heavily edited, at least one whole paragraph being cut, but I’m glad, as it was a somewhat personal paragraph about my relationship, something I would not really have wanted to see in print but again, I didn’t really think I was submitting this letter for print, I guess I’ve learned you should always be prepared for it. Fortunately, I still feel the letter is well written and represents pretty accurately what I was trying to say, even with the edits.
So what have we all learned here today? Apparently my superpower is to bitch, whine, and praise my way into useless letters columns everywhere…Yea!!! I will try to use this power for good and not evil…
Love Story
“I pretty much agreed with Julia Allison for her whole “When ‘I love you’ Comes Too Late” column [Seek TONY 633] but then she surprised me by undoing everything she was talking about with this sentence: “There are some guidelines: If you love someone and don’t say it after dating for six months, you probably should.” I guess I just feel like this is really bad advice to come in such an absolute sentence.
Six months in one relationship can be a really long time, and for another it’s really not enough to know for sure that you love someone and should say it. For so many women, myself included, relationships (and life) become about looking for the next thing to check off the list: get boyfriend, check. Get him to say he loves me, check. Get us to move in together, check. What do you do when you run out of things to check off that list, which you’ve been told by society is so all important, and you didn’t bother to enjoy much of it because you were too busy looking for the next item to check off?
I think we’d all be better off following our instincts and the organic process that is life and love.”
So in some backwards kind of way I got a writing acceptance this week….here’s the story…
A couple weeks ago my issue of Tony (Time Out New York to the uninitiated) came and it was an issue titled “Awwww….Ewwww” and on the stark white cover was a picture of a cute little kitten (Awwww) and a disgusting realistic (and large) cockroach (Ewwww). The problem is that this horrible cover caused me to think, every time I looked at it that the realistic looking cockroach was the real thing. Within 24 hours I had been forced to put that issue in the recycling bin, which pissed me off as I didn’t get to read the whole thing.
So I did something unusual for me, I wrote a letter (an email really, and really only like four or five sentences…I’m not sure that qualifies as a letter) bitching about the cover. It was dripping with sarcasm, my email, which I hope they “got”. Anyway, long story short I got an email from the TONY letters department and my “letter” is not only being published, but I won ‘Letter of The Week’ (which basically means I get published, identified as Letter of the Week, and I get Time Out Publication of my choice – I chose 1,000 books to change your life – and I got it yesterday – talk about fast service!). Anyway, I suspect it will be in this week’s issue (today probably) and if not today than next Wednesday.
While this is nice/fun news, I sure would trade it for some other acceptances…*sigh*.
Also of note is that this is only the second time I have ever written in to complain/ask questions/give commentary to a publication, and both times I have written in, I have been published (the other time was to an X-Men comic book when I was but a teenager). I guess I have found my calling. Unfortunately it seems rather unfulfilling.
If you live in the NYC area check for my TONY Letter today, it’s incredibly exciting. Not really.