We Actually Thought About This

The Best Job Around

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Several years ago, at my local RWA chapter’s annual Christmas party, I struck up a conversation with a young man who happened to be a member at that time. What he wrote was more fantasy than romance, and I never learned how he came to join us romance writers, but there he was.

He took part in fantasy role-playing games. He made costumes and jewelry. When he went on vacation, he did crazy, adventurous things, rock climbing, and maybe gliding, I don’t quite remember. On top of it all, he looked a bit like Legolas, you know, Orlando Bloom in long, flowing blond hair.

For some reason, I thought he wrote games for a living and asked him about it. Not so, he informed me ruefully. He wished he made games for a living but it was only a hobby. Well then, what was his line of work?

He worked in a lab, making dental molds from what dentists around town sent to the lab. According to him, it was numbingly tedious work for not much pay.

For the rest of the night, and well into the next day, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, about the stark disparity between what he loved to do and what he had to do. And I made vow then and there: should I get published, I would never, never, ever complain about my job, because I’d number among the fortunate few who get paid to do what they loved, while so many around me lacked that choice.

Then I got published just as I returned to school. I’m in a one-year master’s program. How come it can be done in one year when most master’s programs take twice the time? Easy, we suffer. Classmates all around me are falling on their faces. And I have to hand in a brand-new, exquisite novel by the end of March.

What this has translated into is twelve to fourteen-hour workdays, every day of the week. In between the cases, the assignments, and the exams, I agonize over character development, pacing, believability, historical accuracy, and emotional cohesion. Is this story even doable? Can I make my deadline? And even if I do, would it be any good?

As with any writing, I’m taking stuff out as I go. But taking out stuff now makes me hyperventilate. I watch my word count the way divers watch their oxygen–every page I take out is a page I might not have time to write later. My nerves, in the meanwhile, fray, like the ends of my son’s shoelaces, the ones that drag on the ground all day long.

There I was last Friday, working at school, wondering why I can’t write faster, and why my first draft is such crap that every hour of output requires twice the amount of time to fix. Two fellow students in the program strike up a conversation next to me. The topic: jobs people in the program got after they graduated.

Some of the best graduates from my program have gone on to work at prestigious New York investment banking firms. And they are worked like dogs, so much so that they marvel at how nice it is to get back home by eleven o’clock at night, rather than two o’clock in the morning. People in their twenties burn out after five or six years. And to hear one student tell it, per hour they really didn’t make all that much more than folks at McDonalds, given the hundred-hour work weeks.

When I graduate, I will get to work in my pajamas, and pick up my children every afternoon from school. Sure, writing never gets easier, and first drafts will always be pure drivel, but you know what, it is still the best job around.

Waiter, There’s a Fly in My Fantasy

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Romance, I’m firmly convinced, is all about the fantasy. What the fantasy is, however, very much depends on each individual reader. And what that fantasy isn’t, is equally idiosyncratic.

For me, some stuff I don’t like in real life I like even less in escapist fiction. There was a time in the early nineties, when every romance I picked up had a scene where the hero gently held the heroine and stroked her hair as she tossed her cookies into the nearest chamber pot. Aie! Now there’s something I would not want to do in front of a man, ever, if I could help it. And reading about someone else doing it doesn’t make it any more romantic.

Conversely, some stuff I have no problem with in real life also gets the thumbs down. For example, I’m happily married to a man five-foot-nine in height and I think he is The Hotness. Yet when I read romances, I’m noticeably less interested in heroes who are noticeably under six feet tall. (And if that makes me shallower than a dinner plate, well, so be it.)

All those, however, are small annoyances. You wanna know what’s the equivalent of a fallen tree across the my personal fantasy highway as I’m barreling down at hundred miles an hour?

Last Friday I bought a reissue of a fave author’s first published book. The book had been out of print for many years and I’d never read it. So I eagerly sank my teeth into it, only to bite into a derailing, stopping-me-dead fly.

The following is a snippet from the book, it’s the heroine addressing the hero as they are in the middle of their affair:

“I wish I could be more sure of how you felt. You know you never give me more than bits and pieces of yourself. And you leave me alone a great deal of the time. For card games. For God knows what else. Why do you never tell me you love me?”

Argh. Major, major fantasy tenet violation. Unless there is a gun held to the heroine’s head and someone is threatening to burn the world’s sole remaining copy of Pride and Prejudice, she is never, ever to ask questions that smack of desperation and helplessness, questions that would make a man justifiably run for the hills.

I will forgive just about everything else—Machiavellian deceit? Okay. Pain-in-the-ass arrogance? Go on. Prior promiscuity? None of my business—but to have my backing, a heroine absolutely, absolutely cannot be weak.

She cannot be weak on absolute terms. And she cannot be weak on relative terms. I hate those Gorilla-and-the-Flea pairs—borrowing a term from figure skating–where the man can save the world in the morning, cook a kick-ass dinner in the evening, and make stupendous love all night long, and all the heroine has going for her are Bambi eyes, T&A, and a heart of gold.

Now the heroine can have all kinds of insecurities, and the hero can catch all kinds of glimpses into her vulnerabilities: she is strong not because she doesn’t have fears, but because she deals with them.

But please, please, save me from heroines who go around begging for affection.

Side note: I worked on a publicity Q&A from my publisher this weekend. And the questionnaire asked if my blog is interactive. I laughed at the question and said yes anyway. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate those of you who take the trouble to leave comments, and such nice ones too. I promise to interact the moment I have my degree in hand, toward the end of next August.

Next Tuesday, Live from New York, Anatomy Lessons

But I’m So Much Better Than What’s Her Name

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My publishing career officially began in July 2006, when my agent accepted a two-book contract offer from Bantam on my behalf. My writing career, however, started eight years before that, with my throwing a tree-killer of a romance against the far wall while experiencing the grand epiphany of “I could write better than this piece of crap.”

I did. Everything I wrote—okay, almost everything—was better than that piece of crap. Yet while I crafted one unique, complex, beautiful story after another—bear with me for a sec—that went unloved and undesired by the publishing industry, the author who was single-handedly responsible for the destruction of the Amazon rainforest and all native habitats south of the equator went on appearing on the NYT charts on a semi-annual basis.

I’m not talking about professional jealousy here. That’s a whole different Pandora’s Box. What I often went through during my pre-published years was not so much envy as bafflement and incomprehension. Why was my story rejected for being “slight” when another book published by that house was clearly 40% filler and fluff? Why do debut books that make me yawn or roll my eyes get put on the shelves while mine, my own, my precious darling languished in slush piles all over the 212? Getting published required talent (check), hard work (check), and luck. Where the hell was my luck?

Looking back, all my questions remind me of the Poisoned Arrow Parable. Shortly after the Buddha attained enlightenment, a seeker came to him and asked what we today would call the “Big Questions.” How did the Universe come into being? Does it have a beginning and an end? What happens when we die? So on and so forth.

The Buddha’s answer was—and I love this phrase—thunderous silence. After a while, he spoke of a man who’d been shot by a poisoned arrow. Rather than letting his servants pull out the arrow, the man insisted on first knowing who shot the arrow, who made the arrow, and the provenance of the poison on the arrowhead. In the meanwhile, he died.

I’m sure you see the analogy here. The time I spent pondering the questions that had no answers was time I didn’t spend obsessing over my story, my characters, my techniques. Time I didn’t use to study better writers. In the grander scheme of things, it was time I didn’t spend being happy.

After a while, I stopped comparing my work to the stuff out there that I really didn’t care for. What’s the point of wondering how those books got published? A book got published because somebody somewhere thought money could be made publishing it. And those books, for whatever reasons, passed the test.

Instead, I changed track and began comparing my work to books I loved, books that made me glad that I’m alive, books that renewed my faith in humanity (yeah, the best romances accomplish all that and more). This has its own risks, the chief among which is that at times I don’t know why I still bother to write, when I could never write as well or as beautifully. But then it becomes exactly the challenge, to write that well, to write that beautifully, to craft a story that steal the breath and break—then heal—the heart.

At the moment I’m in equilibrium. But that’s only because I’m so inundated with work I can’t see beyond the next homework, next test, and the next 4000 words I have to finish in the next week. When my publishing career goes into one of those ineluctable lulls or even setbacks, I’m sure the Big Questions will raise their soft, insidious voices and once again demand why I’m not successful as I should be when it’s obvious to even a room full of illiterates that I’m so much better than What’s-Her-Name.

Ah, the crappy nature of life. Even when you have learned your lesson, you must re-learn it again and again. I hope when the time comes, one of you will reach through the screen, grab me by the lapel, and tell me to shut up and write. Write. Write something so freaking marvelous that trees all over the world would lay down their lives for the immortality of my words upon their cellulose fibers. And screw everything else.

Next Tuesday, you’ll just have to see. I’m so tired I’d kick Brad Pitt out of my bed if he wouldn’t leave me alone. There has to got be some higher purpose for me to have sold just as I returned to school fulltime, but so far all I can think is that God loves the sound of me whimpering.

Why I Don’t Hate Angelina Jolie

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I remember the first time I saw a Lara Croft: Tomb Raider movie poster. I was amazed. Lara Croft is the ultimate wet dream. And yet there exists a person who looks exactly like that.

I’m fuzzy on the timeline. I know this happened after the infamous liplock Angelina Jolie shared with her brother at the Academy Awards, and probably before her sudden marriage to Billy Bob Thornton and those vials of blood. But all the same, it was becoming firmly established in my mind that Miss Jolie is God’s joke on mankind, or rather, on anyone who’s into women. She has it all, eyes, lips, boobs, ass, legs, and a wild, uninhibited sexuality on hyperdrive. Her beautiful mug is on every print and TV tabloid. A giddy Billy Bob gushes to Leno about the-thing-she-does-with-her-feet. And you chance of shagging her is roughly, exactly zero.

In other words, she was that quintessential stereotype, the kinky, kooky sex goddess. She might be alive, but she was not real in any sense, not in the staid suburban existence I led, light years away from L.A.

And then one day—shortly before I quit watching TV altogether—I tuned in to an evening entertainment show and there she was again, doing press for some movie. This was near the end of her marriage to Billy Bob. Speculations were rife but I couldn’t care less. It was Hollywood after all, the American Babylon, everyone got divorced sooner or later. Besides, between the two of them, they already had enough divorces to give Liz Taylor a run for her money.

Angelina looked a little wan that day. She looked like she’d rather be somewhere else, away from the incessant camera flashes. But this was part of her job, so she smiled and took questions.

Eventually, somebody shouted, “How’s Billy Bob?”

An indescribable expression came over her face–resignation, sadness, and a lot of bewilderment. “He’s okay, I guess,” she said something to that effect. “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

Suddenly my heart ached for her. She might be the sexiest woman alive, and the kinkiest. But at that moment, she was just a woman in pain, wondering how everything so right went so wrong. And she had to live that pain with hordes of paparazzi dogging her heels and the intimate details—real and fabricated—of her second failed marriage splashed across supermarket tabloids from sea to shining sea.

Since then, Angelina Jolie has become one of the public figures I admire most, for her dedication to her children and to the forgotten children in forgotten corners of the world who have few other advocates for their plight. But whenever I think of her, it’s back to that moment, that moment when I caught a glimpse of not just her vulnerability, but her valiancy in the face of it, that moment when she ceased being a stereotype and became a real person to me.

In fiction, the best writers manage to catch exactly all those moment, when all a character’s fears and hopes are flayed open, when she must stand amidst the broken pieces of a dream, or simply, when she wants to tell that special person across the table all her aspirations for the future, when she rehearses the speech in her head again and again as the courses come and go, and ends up saying at the end of meal only “The cake was really good.”

I measure my scenes and characters against my Angelina Jolie memory. Do they ever come alive? Is there ever that defining moment when their joy becomes my joy and their pain my pain? A moment after which schadenfreude becomes impossible and I wish for their happiness as ardently as I wish for my own?

I’ll let you know if I succeed. And Angie, you carry on. Don’t let postpartum blues get you down. Things will get better, I promise.

Next Tuesday, He Was A Burning Pyre of Concupiscence in a Sarcophagus of Despair, or, What a Good Agent Does for You

The Great Divide, or, I am not an inspirational speaker, I just play one on this blog

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I used to think there was a Great Divide, a deep chasm, between published and unpublished writers, with the huddled mass of unpublished writers forcibly held back on one side of it, like citizens of the former East Berlin. We stare at the other side, all sunshine and rainbows and professional authors sipping cosmopolitans at publisher cocktails, carelessly gamboling on a lush carpet of publishing contracts. And we wonder what’s wrong with us, damn it, why are we still on this side, and when oh when would we finally be let out from this languishing hell of the unpublished?

When you wish for a publishing contract with every set of birthday candles you blow out, and birthdays come one after the next without that wish coming true, the label of “unpublished” begins to chafe, and chafe badly. I stopped telling people that I wrote. And I learned, when people who already knew about my literary aspirations asked that dreaded question—“So did you publish your book yet?”—to shrug as if my failure to attract a publisher mattered no more to me than my inability to grow the world’s heftiest tomato.

Then, one fine day, The Call came. I was toasted, garlanded, and feted. People wanted to ask me questions. They wanted to hear my opinions. I was now a Published Author. I’d leaped the Great Divide at last.

Or did I?

The day I had my first offer, I was so proud of myself. And what was I proud of? Only one thing, my persistence.

Why is that remarkable? Isn’t everyone proud of their persistence? Well, no. I’d been no admirer of persistence. In fact I thought persistence a crock of bleep. Only those who failed had to persist. Why did I want to be among those who failed?

Indeed, wise readers, forgive me for having been so shallow and blind. I’ve been among the most inspiring collection of human beings—Those Who Strive—and saw only what they, what we, as a group, did not yet achieve.

There is no Great Divide. The never had been. It was a construct of my mind, a silly yet dangerous concept. Because of it, I regard my own struggle with scorn, rather than the respect it deserved. I saw only failure, when I was but a learner making the necessary mistakes.

The true watershed events in my quest for publication happened not on the day I got bought, but on the day I first sat down to write the story in my head, on every day that I filed away rejections and did not quit, and on the day when I finally realized that rejections are meant to be learned from, not just filed away. The publishing contract is but a delayed recognition, the slapping on of an inspection sticker after the iron ore has already been forged into steel.

May I always be a member of Those Who Strive.

Next Tuesday, we interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you The Life and Times of Sherry Thomas, an author interview

A Tale of Two Queries

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Long ago, in a cinema not too far, far away, I saw the first trailer for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. To this day I remember the collective gasp in the theater as the Lucasfilm logo flickered onto the screen. Oh, that familiar, haunting music. Oh, the ravishing images. Spring 1999 couldn’t come fast enough.

I attended the motion picture event of the decade the day after its opening, late at night, with a pumped, overflowing crowd all hoping for the same thing: magic. We clapped and hollered at the start of the movie, as the lovely crawl scrolled into infinity. Alas, the applause at the end was scarce and half-hearted.

The query letter for Heart of Blade is like that trailer, full of enticing promises of a rollicking good tale that would make you forget for a few hours that the fridge is breeding new life forms and the grass in the backyard is taller than the kids. Every agent who received only the query letter asked for a partial.

Heart of Blade itself, unfortunately, is more like The Phantom Menace. There is a really good story in there somewhere, but it got lost in the telling. In hindsight, my manuscript opened six chapters from the real beginning, didn’t go anywhere deep enough with the characterization, and for all its dangling of geopolitical intrigue, was less than breathtaking in scope.

The query letter for Schemes of Love, on the other hand, was written with an entirely different mindset. The failure of five manuscripts in seven years finally beat into me the lessons I’d been too arrogant to learn earlier. Begin in the thick of things. Excise everything unnecessary. Put your characters in situations that rip them apart. And rip them apart some more. You know, those fundamental rules of good writing that I barely paid attention to anymore because everyone and her critique partner were always yammering on about them.

By the time I decided to find presentation for Schemes of Love, I knew I had a really good story. I didn’t need to compose the Wonder Query. I just needed to not mess up. And let the manuscript take care of the rest, which it did, ably.

The moral of the tale—tales always have morals, right?—is that a query letter doesn’t have to shock and awe, though that certainly won’t hurt. Aim for clarity and competence. And remember to back it up with a mind-blowing work, in which every scene has been worked and reworked at least as many times as the query. Trust me, it hurts a lot worse to have requested partial rejected, because then you can’t just say, “Dang, guess I needed a better query letter.”

Next Tuesday, The Great Divide, yeah that one, between writers who have publishing contracts and writers who don’t, yet.

Post Script

To answer your questions, Heart of Blade took 16 months to write, Schemes of Love 10 months. I’m currently a grad student. And about Bridget Jones’s age.