We made our own fun

I have a new query letter for The World of Mirrors. This must be the 5th or 6th. Quite different, so we shall see what happens. It can't be any worse. First letter goes out tomorrow.
Yesterday I wrote a little about smoking and how much I always liked it. The very last people on the planet to quit will probably write Smoking Memoirs. Have you noticed how many drinking memoirs are out there now? Must be right up there with the drug memoirs. I haven't read any of the drinking stories, but I can't imagine how a whole book of someone's boozing (and presumably rehab) would be too entertaining. I mean, how much can they remember?
My mother always used to tell me that when she was a girl, "we made our own fun." Today I was trying to think what that meant. It didn't mean that as a girl she drank or that they made moonshine. She grew up in a small Kansas Mennonite town, a farm community, in the years right before the depression. It was a very straight-laced place, I remember from my own youth. For example, if you played outside on Sunday, you could not make noise. Mom was not a Mennonite, but many of her friends were. They didn't drink or smoke or dance or play cards or even go to movies. The problem is, when mother said, "we made our own fun," I probably stopped listening. Willful mother. Willful daughter. You say it's black; I say it's white. I do know that the girls and boys ran around together, and there are lots of photos taken in front of someone's old car. They dressed up a lot. The fun? I think they gathered around the piano and sang while someone played. "You are my sunshine." They laughed and joked and kidded around. Maybe there were so many chores and duties--lots of church, don't forget, that any leisure time was "fun." Wish I knew. Wish I had listened.

I grew up in a small farm town in Colorado and we made our own fun, too. Mostly we went out and got drunk in the rec. room of someone's basement or at Nicks. Nick had a bar in Snyder, Colorado, population less than a thousand. He had a brother John. I remember John, standing there in a white apron drying Pilsener glasses and leering at us. We were 16 or 17 and cute by the standards of the day. The dive had a bar, booths, a dance floor, a juke box, and a bad reputation. Nick served under-aged drinkers, and why he never got caught, I can't imagine. We drank beer with tomato juice in it. Don't ask. I can't remember. We danced up a storm. I don't ever remember a crowd there. Once there were some people from out of the area, and I danced with a girl's boyfriend. She followed me into the john and threatened to beat me up. I apologized and made up a large lie about a boyfriend in the Air Force, blah blah blah. We sort of became friends for the evening after that. My god, did we drink! Binges, parties, tequila, beer, gin, malt liquor. Yuck. I got sick on cherries and gin on an empty stomach and don't drink gin to this day. When I turned 21 I pretty much stopped drinking. The fun was gone. Maybe it was never that much fun to begin with. So that is my drinking memoir. We made our own fun. Still love the girls I drank with. Hey, we all turned out o.k. Where's the moral in that?

All this drinking and smoking confessional stuff is leading into tomorrow's post, which will be the Man Burning at Burning Man, from the standpoint of the narrator, who is, you guessed it, rather drunk. In the meantime, cheers!

Smoking and Writing

Two more rejections. Both form letters. Always apologetic, but it still sounds arrogant when an agent who hasn't read one syllable of your novel when for all they know you could be the next Dan Brown tells you he or she is a very busy person and is very selective (so why is so much boring dreck published?) and doesn't really have time for you, but good luck with another agent who is not so busy or selective or maybe will find your dull plot to his/her liking and will shop your particular dreck around to a publisher of boring dreck. Do I sound bitter? You better believe it. Well, as tI am wont to say: suck it up. So far only four of 28 responses has been personal. The business has really changed for the worse since I started shopping my first pathetic work around ten years ago. It was pretty bad, plot wise, but I had more interest generated than this third novel which seems so much better. Go figure.

The good news is I have 70 (seventy!) pages of the new novel, Festival Madness, aka The Turning Point done, and the part I'm writing takes place at Burning Man and it is such a fun challenge to try to capture the festival as part of the plot. Difficult, but fun, and I love writing and writers and reading and talking about writing and the writing process but the rest of the business you can have.

I still have smoking dreams after fifteen years off the weed. Incredible what a powerful drug nicotine is, and how hard to break its habit. I smoked off and on (but mostly on) and was incredibly skinny. Why have two helpings when you can eat one and then have a cigarette? Once I stopped, I vowed never to smoke again, because I sure as hell didn't want to face another withdrawal. But nicotine comes back in my dreams. I am smoking a cigarette, which is strange because I don't smoke, but as long as I have the lit cigarette I may as well smoke it. The reasoning of my sleeping mind, which nicotine is still trying to seduce, is Byzantine. Sometimes I dream I'm hooked again, and the guilt is overpowering, but I still smoke. In my dreams. It was wonderful. But it's cool to have lower blood pressure, better circulation and smell fresh.

Tune in tomorrow for drinking stories. Fortunately, I never got that addiction. But it was probably a near thing.

In Search of Lost Time

The last two Thursday evenings have been spent at a lecture series at Brown University in Providence. The writings of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf were the topics. Proust’s past came out of a teacup, and I had a similar sensation when the professor walked into the room, handsome, debonair, dressed in black, taking me back to my undergraduate days years ago when Dr. M. walked into the room and spoke a few words in his thrilling voice. It is easy, so easy to fall in love with thoughtful, lucid mind and a voice that talks about memory, and beauty and feeling and poetry. Much more difficult to fall in love with a mind that talks about bits and bites and registers and the stack. It’s not even a contest.
Once upon a time I might have been a scholar, but I turned my back on all that, and occasionally there are regrets, faint ones to be sure, and memories of the days when I fell in love with beautiful minds. One of the good things about maturity is that one can say, I might have been that but now I am this and accept it without more than a pang of regret. I might have had a beautiful mind, but now it’s concerned with direct sales of catalog and web site and writing commercial fiction and finding an agent and none of these things, however meritorious, are the least bit beautiful.
However, my garden is beautiful (or will be in three months) and the cows are lovely, and the act of writing, even commercial fiction, is satisfying and challenging, and sometimes, in a lecture hall or at a concert, I can for an evening have a beautiful mind.

Scottish Highland Cattle on a warm June afternoon 

The Scottish Highland Cattle enjoy a treat on a warm June afternoon.

The herd is now five cows: 2 female and 3 young ones. I guess the bull fathered the dead or stillborn calf before he left, hopefully for greener pastures. I'm also guessing that at least one of the two youngsters are male. Jewel, of course is female. I love it when she recognizes me, bleats and comes running. How often is someone truly glad to see you? Yesterday they had strawberry stems, asparagus stems, lettuce, parsley, and a special Easter treat of whole wheat rolls, 99 cents a package at Roche Brothers. For a while the oldest youngster was always off by himself, but yesterday he, too, was with the herd. The big females have immense pale tongues that accepted the rolls directly from by hand. Wisely, I fed them the vegetables first, because the bread turned out to be a Big Treat. I'm wondering if the 2nd cow will deliver a calf, but since she had one in August (of all times!) I'm thinking she will not. It is nice to have something to think about besides technology.

Critique My Query Letter: would you want to read this book????

I am posting my query letter for World of Mirrors. If any of the 5 people reading this blog would like to comment, I am willing to listen to just about any feedback. Here it is.

Dear Agent du Jour ,

I am seeking representation for my suspense novel, World of Mirrors, complete at 102,000 words. I am enclosing a synopsis and a sample chapter. Another book in the series, featuring cybersleuth Emma Lee Davis is nearing completion, and a subsequent one is in outline form.

My premise of a small band of characters who solve computer crimes is unique in contemporary crime fiction. The computer crime inevitably morphs into a more serious crime, and the characters are drawn into the roll of amateur sleuths. I love putting a humorous, literary spin on technology, and writing about geeks and hackers and their offbeat lifestyles, colorful slang and strange camaraderie without burdening the narrative with techno-talk.

World of Mirrors is set on an East German island in the Baltic the summer after the Berlin Wall comes down. Emma, the cybersleuth, and Peter, a failed spy, have joined forces to go after an amiable sociopath who has fled the U.S. with his company’s ahead-of-the curve computer software and his sex-spy girlfriend. The crumbling old Baltic resort towns and a classic sailboat serve as backdrops when an international cast of miscreants vies for the digital jewels in this dark but comic caper. Emma and Peter, under-cover as a squabbling married couple, mix it up with ex-Stasis, the KGB, and the “Marquis de Sade on steroids,” as they rip a swath through the island’s nude beaches and seaman’s bars in their effort to retrieve the stolen software. The story climaxes with a cat and mouse chase through the shipping lanes of the fog-shrouded Baltic.

Author’s Bio:
A graduate of Rice University with a degree in English Literature, I’ve always worked in Information Technology. My writing life includes memberships in Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America, where I serve on both local boards. I am also a founding member of the New England Crime Bake Mystery Conference. A chapter of World of Mirrors was published in the winter edition of The New England Writer’s Network Journal. I’ve studied writing under Bill Holinger at Harvard, Joyce Carol Oates and Robert McKee.

I look forward from hearing from you soon.

What turns everyone off? East Europe? Hackers? A software heist? Beats me. Someone? Anyone? Hello out there?

Like Kamikazees, the rejections

Like kamikazees, that's how the rejections are coming in. Yesterday when we came back from our walk and significant other picked up the mail, he said, "just another rejection letter." And he was right. Twenty five by now. My writing group says, keep sending the queries. You may be rejected 45 times and the 46th query will Be The One. I think something is seriously wrong with my query letter. And the concept of a computer crime sleuth hasn't generated a whit of interest. I will never sell the book if I can't find anyone to read a few chapters. Dammit, the book has a lot going for it: interesting characters, locale, an East Europe political thriller plot. No, dammit, I don't have a serial killer, no touchy-feely family stuff, no weird occupation of the month amatuer sleuth, no hero whose wife, child, cousin, brother, sister, you name it has been killed and now it's time for revenge. Tried to avoid the cliches. Big mistake, apparently. Or is it that us IT (information technology) folks can't market? We are at the opposite ends of the corporation. When the word "marketing" comes up in our department, eyes rolls, heads nod knowingly. Yup, the marketing people want something yesterday, or last month. Or they go ahead and do it and expect the weird computer people to read their minds. Marketing. Tch. Tch. So guess who's trying to market? Moi. Guess who really sucks at marketing? Moi. I found a kind soul who has volunteered to look at my query letter which has been re-written about 18 times with a notable lack of success. Enough bitching and moaning. On to the 19th edition of ye olde query letter. Yet another new idea. Time to, you guessed it, suck it up and get busy.

An Unusual House Tour

Phooey on garden tours and decorator show houses and real estate open houses. I've seen all the icky batchelor pads on "Queer Eye." What I want is a totally non-traditional tour. Imagine. 8:30 Saturday morning. You get in the car with your list: the old Victorian by the railroad tracks. The rundown place with the above ground pool and two pickups in the driveway. That funky little cape with green shutters and the red trim. The apartment complex on the way to the supermarket. A gentle knock on the door and in you barge. "I'm taking the non-traditional house tour and your house is it." Consider the living room. Is it devoid of furniture with wall-to-wall toys. Does the kitchen have last night (hell, last week's) dishes in the sink. What's on the floor that shouldn't be? Boots and shoes all over? Newspapers? Is the TV on and no one watching? What kind of sheets on the bed? Have the kids had breakfast? Pop tarts? A burnt smell from the toaster oven? What's on the walls? I confess that on my daily drive to and from work, I am consumed with curiosity about some of the houses that I drive by. Love 'em all. The tiny cottages with the big overgrown evergreens blocking the living room windows, the split level with the really weird shingles, the old farm house with the "fresh eggs" sign in front. Next Saturday morning if there's a knock on the door, it's me. I'll bring a bag of donuts.

The Tsunami: the second wave

When the tsunami hit in southeast Asia, more than one million people were displaced. 150,000 of those were pregnant women. These women, without hospitals and medical care, have been giving birth in the most unsanitary and primitive of circumstances. Some of them are now widows and heads of households with small children. There are many other gender-based problems for women in these countries, including sexual violence, lack of supplies for personal hygiene and becoming the primary caretaker. Schools are gone and hospitals are washed away. For many, the crisis continues.

Where to donate: http://doctorswithoutborders-usa.org/donate/index.cfm
or to UNICEF:
http://www.supportunicef.org/site/pp.asp?c=iuI1LdP0G&b=45523

Four Blogs for the Price of One

Although I would like to talk about writing and getting published, there are long fallow periods between events when one is trying to find editors and agents. I've been on this quest since last fall, and pretty much nothing has happened. 19 rejects, and a few who obviously aren't ever going to respond. A couple "positive" rejects, for she who is grasping at straws. It's pretty boring to say, "well, today I found two agents to query." So I talk about other stuff: food, recipes, cooking- that's one blog, and cats, the Scottish Highland cattle down the street, birds, chipmunks and the local fauna - that's another blog, and then whatever else catches my fancy, yet a fourth blog. Such a deal.

I'm taking the plunge and having the first 100 pages of the Wisconson book, Promiscuous Mode, professional edited, something I've never done. It costs a lot, and I'm hoping there will be some payback, like maying selling the book without taking 4-5 years of this querying and being rejected business, which is deflating for the ego and does nothing for the pocketbook and sure as hell doesn't get the book out to the readers. So, we'll see what happens. BTW, I typed Promiscuous Modem, which shows where my little technical mind is.

Speaking of technical, yesterday I tried to save a draft of one of these posts at work and it crapped out totally with page not found. First real technical glitch on this site except the mysterious business of the posts going to the archives first and the hell of trying to figure out how to get my picture up there. Vanity being stronger than technical idocy, I finally managed once they wrote the instructions in English.

I wrote a little bit about work in the post that went into the ether, and maybe that's a sign not to write about work, but of course I am sorely tempted, since work is mostly what I do and the novel writing is evenings and weekends and on planes and trains and wherever.

I discovered another good writing blog for those of you who are collecting same. Just read one post but it looked very thorough and no-nonsense. http://pbackwriter.blogspot.com/2005/03/novel-iv-pitch.html
The post was on how to pitch your novel which sort of assumes you have people who might want to listen. Well, we're all at different stages of the same journey.

More anon. Cool word, anon, but nobody ever uses it. Maybe I'll use it at a meeting. It's fun to liven up business meetings. Mostly you just tell the truth. Such a novel idea.
More anon. :)
Grapeshot

Sunday morning view toward the slough from the living room window.  

Annie the cat contemplates life under the coffee table.  

Annie padding across the kitchen floor  

Annie the Cat has a double

Yesterday after posting to this blog, I hit the "next blog" link and up popped the blog of "Zee" with a photo of his cat Annie. Really, really weird because I have a cat named Annie , adopted from the Buddy Dog Humane Society in Sudbury, Mass five years ago. What's more, my Annie looked just like his. Do we live in alternate universes or what? I tried to get back to his blog but lost it. Where but the internet can you find someone with a cat like yours that shares the name? Picture of Annie to follow once it's off of Significant Other's computer.

Writing blogs tend to be grim but funny and their titles reflect the content: Throw Novel from the Train;Bookangst 101; Suck it Up. If you know of other aptly named writing blogs, please let me know and their names and links will be posted on this blog.

Last night I wrote two terrible pages, but this morning I knew immediately how to fix them. We must edit and re-write in our sleep. Right now I am dithering around because the next scene in my current WIP will be hard to write. Sometimes I have to gird up for a big scene, waiting until the time seems ripe to write it. This is a luxury I shouldn't allow myself.

Onward.

Kitchen still life. Winter weather requires soup.  

Inching along

PublishersMarketplace provided three more likely agent names for me to write to. Queried two by email (they said they like email), and a packet is sitting by the front door with 100 pages, the synopsis and the query letter ready to go out on Monday to the third. This endless research, putting packets together and contacting take up huge amounts of time, time which could be spent writing. Realized I had not put the genre into the querry letter. Ye Gods, how many did I send out without GENRE? Stupid. Stupid. Had mentioned a "dark caper" which my writing group didn't like, dropped that and forgot to add something back. Big no no not to mention the genre. I just thought of another name for this blog very similiar to the one it has, but changing one character. Describes not mentioning the genre. My new discovery is that there are a lot of blogs by people trying to sell a book and/or get published.

Found a mystery novel contest to enter. All past winners are male, and there were few female writers on the sponsers (a small press) web site but what the hell?

This month at Brown University I am taking a short course on the writing of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, a far cry from Emma the technoslut. (My narrator). On the other hand, could there be two more different women than Proust's Odette Crecy and Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway? I just finished reading The Proust Project. Some of the people who wrote the essays just summarized Proust which gave the book a fainty madcap Monty Python air. I am re-reading Mrs. Dalloway.

The snow is general over Boston. We had a white knuckle ride on 95 and 128 through the snow, the slush and the whole yukky Saturday weather mess. Didn't go into town for dinner and a movie. Came home, and I made comfort food, a 50's casserole (my mom's recipe) with chicken, rice, veggies and two cans of condensed cream soup. Cashews on top. Tasted good.

The new calf has not been seen and I can only conclude that she was still born or died shortly after birth. The mother cow seems unconcerned, but am I expecting her to low mournfully by the fence? Yet I feel I am the only one mourning this little tragedy, the 2nd obstretrical cow tragedy in less than a year. These cows are reputed never to have calving problems. Tomorrow I will climb the snowbank (higher still than last week) and feed the cows three bags of kitchen scraps. Good healty vegetable and fruit remnants. Watch for some photots of the cows. They are lovely creatures.

Rejections Piling up like the New England Snow

More rejections! Mostly form letters, actually, not even letters but cards. Another personal letter sent, another anonymous form letter (the gas bill is more personal) received. I find myself developing attitude. A small publisher wrote that if I hadn't sold the Wisconsin book within the next year (fat chance of that), to send it to them. Found a funny blog on Publisher's Marketplace called "Throw novel from the train." Throw agent from the train. Throw self from the train.

Last night I was part of a group tour of a local prison, a county jail, not a state or federal prison, so most of the inmates had drug or alcohol problems that had led to their crimes. Most looked clean cut and 100 % normal. Bad decisions and impulse control problems. Hmmm. Haven't we discussed this before? 80% of the inmates return. Some young ladies (a figure of speech) were being processed. Must have been hookers. Very cool, insoucient. Fresh looking. Dressed normally. They would be hauled off to Framingham-MCI which is the woman's prison. Apparently female jailbirds are a breed apart. Squabling raptors excelling a verbal abuse but pretty good in a brawl. The mens' prison is a clean well-lighted place, and there are probably many worse places to be. But it is what it is.

It is what it is. That's the latest saying these days in the business world, which seems a lot more dysfunctional than the prison. Corporate America is a pretty weird place right now. Sarbanes-Oxley is making IT a living hell. Thank you, Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Andrew Fastnow and all the jerks at World Com and all those businesses where they cooked the books like they were a pot of chili. The auditors are so freaked out that someone might do something bad that it's becoming impossible to do anything at all.

Tuesday night PBS had a pledge night, and they sweetened the pot with a show about The Mamas and The Papas. This might be making its 10th appearance, but I almost never watch TV. Such great songs! What good memories. The sixties and the summer of love and all those groovy times just flowed right into the living room, a blast of sunshine in a dreary winter week.

Winter really sucks by now. No other way to put it. My car is a mess of salt and frozen ice. Gloves almost worn out. Sick of heavy sweaters and bundling up and all that filthy snow, although it keeps getting replentished so the filth has to creep back and then we get another storm dumping on us. Supposed to snow tomorrow and Saturday. Maybe it's time to make another pot of beef stew and send out a few more queries. Time to suck it up. Somebody else now has a similarly named blog. Wouldn't you just know it!

The Gatekeepers

A little housekeeping first: Visited the Highland Scottish cattle today, with big bags of vegetable scraps. Noticed one of the cows had recently given birth, but we didn't see any calf, so now I am stewing about what happened. Is the calf in the barn? If so, why isn't her mother with her? Do I dare stop and ask the farmer? The cows acted normal, but then they are always pretty laid back.

I haven't posted because I have been writing and sent out more queries, so that is a Good Thing. Martha is sprung and that is another Good Thing. She seems to have been very empathetic with her fellow felons. I hope she'll be able to do something to improve their lot now that she's out. The only difference that you and I aren't in the slammer is less drugs and alcohol, better impulse control and a good education. Right?

There is a huge scandal at one of the prep schools in the Boston area. If you read a paper where the news it not fit to print, you surely read about it. My friend, who had a son in another prep school last year, kind of freaked out about the whole thing, empathizing, if you will, with the poor parents who had anted up big bucks and sent their kids off to this wonderful, expensive, hard-to-get-into school, expecting, no doubt some in loco parentis care.
Apparently boys will always be boys, and girls will sometimes be sluts, although the young lady in question was described in the paper as "a wonderful kid." At 15, she is certainly a kid, and when I think back to my 15 year old innocent life of a few kisses and a little necking, we are certainly living in a different world nowadays and definitely not a better one.
The boys, (did we already mention poor impulse control) unless they end up in the slammer like Martha , will survive and go on to do whatever life has in store with or without the fancy prep school. The girl will always be marked as long as anyone has a memory, and believe me, in sex scandals, memories are long. Think about Bill and Monica and Paris and whoever. Would you want your son to marry Paris Hilton? I doubt it. The prep school girl is the loser, and will still be the loser 40 years from now. That hasn't ever changed and probably won't
Girls used to be the gatekeepers, the ones who mostly said no and occasionally yes to a fiancee or a steady boyfriend, but not to the hockey team. Apparently that has changed and now they are the initiators. Even the biggest high school slut would have not done that. Fast Times at Ridgemont High indeed.

Last night on the 'net I was reading about the Humboldt Trail across northern Nevada and the pioneers who treked across alkalai deserts and mountains and died along the trail, trying to get to California and a better life. Some of them got stuck one winter in Donner Pass. If you've spent any time around Tahoe or in the Nevada desert, their feats and their hardships seem incredible. Theoretically, we have the better life now, but sometimes you have to wonder.

A last note about the winter. The squirrel still hasn't figured out how to get at the suet, but he found the bread sticks Significant Other put out on the porch. The breadsticks, flavored Pesto, tasted dreadful, and are only fit for squirrels and chipmunks and the odd raccoon. Squirrel grabbed one and took off, ate it, came back and got another, buried it in the snow and did the same for the rest. So now we have a front yard full of buried breadsticks, which will get all yukky when the snow melts. One can only hope that some critter will eat them before that. I am off to write.