OK, so I lied ... or maybe not
When I was a teenager, I promised my parents I would write the Great American Novel.
This got me out of spending a summer as a clerk at Bloomie's, where my mother worked and where she had helped land me a summer job. It's not that I was against making money; I wasn't, although I never put it as the highest priority or even any sort of priority. I just wanted to go cross-country with my friends and camp and hike and explore and learn and watch and smell and taste and soak it all in. So I convinced them that this was all fodder for the GAN I was going to write. Any day. Really soon.
My parents, bless them, said OK.
So now here I am, some 30-plus years later, with a GAN idea. It has nothing to do with anything I watched, smelled, tasted or soaked in on that wonderfully crazy summer trip that eventually sent me to the wedding chapel (the first time) way too soon. But, it has everything with what I have seen and experienced in recent years. However, I could not have gotten here without the past, you know?
So I approached an agent and she said she was intrigued. She asked me to send her the first 50 or so pages. And I did. And now ... nothing. Silence. Like when you look in the mirror after the first cut/color with a new hairstylist because you wanted to shake things up and boy, did she! You're disappointed, shocked and wondering, "Now what do I do? How could she have thought I wanted to look like this?"
What do you even say?
It has been more than a month — two months? I e-mailed her a week or so ago just to "check in" and she assured me she'll be in touch.
Perhaps there is no "more ahead" for me, as I so confidently wrote in my last blog. But can anyone tell me if this agent thing is typical? Should I be worried that she's selling my idea to someone who can spin the story into a book in a month or two? Should I be fantasizing about how that book advance will help me stay in my home a little longer — plus relieve a (lately) always fiscally-worried mind?
And does anyone in Red Room ever even write to one another? Just curious, because it seems kind of lonely here. Ah, the writer's life, right?
About Vicki
After a somewhat nebulous beginning, I have found success in two things in my life: being a journalist and being a mom. Since newspapers are slowly dying and I can't make a living at mothering, it's time to try something new. I have published an essay in an...
Connections
Well, I'm hardly somebody
Well, I'm hardly somebody who should be giving advice about this, but I'll do it anyways.
My advice being: write the novel. Now. Will you sell it or not, this isn't that important. Write the thing as you see it, as you feel it and don't worry if all the right stuff doesn't get in or that you sometimes can't really put into words what you're willing to say or it comes out all awkward or bland.
Write it, get it out of your system, then let it rest. During the process of writing, you will get 20 new brilliant ideas (all tossed at you by the devil just to keep you off your main work, of course). Write these ideas down, promise yourself you'll do one of them when you'll finish what you're writing now.
Then write the next novel, and get 20 awesome distracting ideas out of it.
Then the next.
I think that most of the really cool books are created like this, not on the first and only run but as one of ten or twenty or hundred books. The funny thing being, you never know which one will be The One.
(I think I struggled with the same problem when I started blogging here.)
Good advice
Thank you, Leva for your kind words. I apologize for not responding sooner; haven't been on this site for a while.
Funny — I thought "The One" was reserved for potential partners. I didn't know it worked with books, too!
OK, I'll keep plugging along and get it "out of my system."
Have a happy holiday.
V