Amusing Dreams

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I had what I think of as my Water World dream last night.

It’s one of my standard dreams – you know the familiar ones you repeat over and over. Like the being on stage and not knowing your lines one. Or taking the final exam without ever having gone to class. Or being naked in public except for some feathers and a beak.

What, you don’t have that one?

At any rate, Water World is a water park in Denver. No, this has nothing to do with Kevin Costner. It’s one of my very favorite places to go, though I haven’t been in the last couple of years. I love riding the donut tubes down all the different swirly slides. It makes me feel like a kid again, to spend the day in my swimsuit. At the end of the day, my hair is wet and snarled, I’m sun-baked and water-soaked, deliciously exhausted.

Damn, now I want to go!

My Water World dream is one of those “going there but never quite making it” dreams. It’s not a a bad or frustrating dream. We just spend the day going through the admissions turnstile and getting different color wristbands. We get distracted and have to go save people or find treasure. We spend a lot of time in the parking lot, seeing the rides from a distance. Elements from Elitch Gardens, the amusement park of my youth, which has since been relocated and transformed into a Six Flags conglomeration, find their way in. The giant rise of the wooden roller-coaster always figures prominently.

It’s actually a fun dream, full of the anticipation of arriving. I’m eternally poised to have the best day ever. It’s also familiar and, in an odd way, comforting. It’s part of who I am. The sum of so many experiences.

These are the kinds of qualities it’s difficult to give characters. Someone recently told me that common wisdom is that novels about dreams rarely work well, because dreams inherently have no structure, which gives the story a “mushy” feel.

I can totally see that.

In fact, one of the “rules” writers like to cite is that you should never have dream sequences. That editors hate them. I suspect this is the “mushiness” coming into play. Usually if a character has a recurring dream, it’s a nightmare, as JD Robb’s heroine, Eve, experiences. Of course, she has the marvelous latitude of an ongoing series to use that dream as a theme, a device that reveals where Eve is emotionally.

Now I totally want to do something like this. Damn the rules – full speed ahead!

Obsidian Win

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Isn’t this cloud a great metaphor? Sailing along, giving rain to a very select portion of the landscape.

So, yesterday was a pivotal day for me.

I received a contract offer on Obsidian.

This is the novel that started it all. That took me from nonfiction to fiction. My red-headed firstborn. This is the one that everyone told me they didn’t know how to market, because it’s hopelessly cross-genre. One famous author friend who graciously read it said it’s like I wrote an epic male fantasy from a very female perspective. She also said I was forging a new path with it and that it would feel like wading through waist-deep snow.

Boy did she call that one.

So, yesterday, after 3.5 years of wading through waist-deep snow, I finally broke through.

I can’t even tell you how it felt. I sat in stunned silence for quite a while, just exploring the feeling of not STRIVING any more. All those feelings of hope and grief and anger and determined outrage I’d been piling on all that time, just let go. I giggled. I burst into tears when my mom sent flowers. What a ride.

I have to admit – I wouldn’t have felt this so much if it had happened right away.

Now, I’ve let (Possible) Agent who has Obsidian know that I have an offer, as she asked me to do. I’ll wait to see what she says and then move from there. But no matter what, Obsidian will see the light of day and I’m just so, so grateful.

Rain for everyone!

Agency Publishing and Conflict of Interest

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Bows and flows of angel hair and ice cream castles in the air. And feather canyons everywhere.

For those of you old enough to remember this song, you’re welcome for the ear worm. You know, aren’t we due for a really good cover of Both Sides Now? Someone should really get on that.

So, it’s been an interesting week in the publishing world, vis a vis agents and electronic publishing.

On Monday, much-sought agent Jessica Faust announced on the Bookends, LLC blog, that the literary agency would be developing an epublishing arm. At the time I’m writing this, there are 152 comments on the post. See, they’re not the first agency to announce that they’re partnering with their authors to assist them with self-publishing their backlists. Bookends, however, is taking this one step farther and plans to establish an entire epublishing arm, which would involve them screening submissions, editing books, electronically publishing them and marketing. For this, Bookends would receive an unspecified split of the revenue.

This is a huge move, from agenting to publishing.

Yesterday, Courtney Milan, romance author and lawyer, posted an excellent breakdown of the situation in An Open Letter to Agents. Now, she does not specifically address any agency in particular – I’m the one drawing this correlation. Courtney lays out the situation in a clear and logical way. She promises a second part today, which I’m interested to see.

What it comes down to for me is Conflict of Interest (COI). Now – full disclosure – COI is a fairly large part of my day to day considerations. I work for a private environmental consulting firm, funded largely by government contracts, primarily EPA. We have meetings about COI fairly often, because we owe it to our clients to do so.

For example (and you can totally skip this part if it’s too boring), a company that analyzes water samples contacted us. They’ve developed a database system for wastewater plants that processes the results of their water tests, compares the data to EPA’s regulations and tells the plant operator where they are in compliance with the law. This company would like to develop something similar for drinking water. They came to us, because we’re the drinking water experts. All fabulous, right?

Well, no. Because one of the things we do for EPA is assess water system data and their determinations about whether they are in compliance with the law. I’m essentially an auditor. So, if I were to help design a program to determine compliance, while I’m also assessing how well a system using that program does it, then I have the appearance of a COI. Because I could skew the results in my favor.

Now, I would never do that. I’m an objective scientist with strong personal and professional ethics. None of that matters – our company could lose multi-million dollar contracts if there’s any chance of COI. Because my client, EPA, awarded me this contract to be their agent and no one else’s.

We had several meetings on this issue and eventually decided any role we’d play would have to be one step back. I can explain the federal regulations and the nitty-gritty of compliance to the program developers, but how they set it up is up to them.

So, let’s look at a literary agent publishing her clients’ work. A writer engages a literary agent to represent her work to publishers. The agent has the contacts, the sales experience and the business savvy to get her client the very best possible deal. The agent represents the writers’ interests.

If the agent becomes a publisher, she now has an interest on the other side of the fence. To my mind, this is more than even just the appearance of COI. Arguably, agents who are also writers have this same conflict. Breezily declaring that, oh they have no COI and, besides, they have integrity simply means nothing at all.

In fact, that some agents fob off COI as irrelevant says to me that they haven’t seriously considered the issue.

I’d believe that. It might be that you only really think about these things when you have to go through three meetings investigating all the possible COI ripples for each new project, that it becomes a serious consideration.

The thing is, it’s only a consideration for them if it becomes a problem in their contract with their clients: the authors. Just like I would be in trouble if I violated my contract with my client, EPA, an agent would be in trouble for violating the terms of their contract with their client, the author, only if the author came down on them. Now, EPA and the federal contracts office can come down on us like Armageddon. Will an author come down on her agent in the same way?

I think we all know the answer to that.

I venture that this is why literary agents aren’t terribly concerned about COI. There’s really no reason for them to be. The only people hurt by any COI on their part is the writers.

It remains to be seen whether we’ll do anything about it.

How Not to Revise

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This monsoon season has been a tease. The clouds loom, promising rain, and then evaporate. I watch it on the weather radar – the greens condensing, flashing orange and red – and then it dissolves away again.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been in revision mode, refining The Body Gift. Actually, now that I think about it, I’ve been in revising/editing mode for quite some time now. Between revising Obsidian for a revise & resubmit, working on developmental,, line and copy edits for Sapphire and Feeding the Vampire, and now adding to TBG to send to this agent, I haven’t done any real drafting since March.

Sure, some of this has involved adding new words, but really, working on a story that’s already *there* is a different process.

You know how sculptors (it might be a specific one, but I forget who and I’m feeling too lazy to try to find it) say that sculpting is carving away the extra stone, to find the shape that already exists within? (Maybe it was Michelangelo?) I’ve always loved this idea. This is how writing and revising often works for me.

Once a draft is complete and the story is pretty much *there* (this is a technical word I’ve used twice now. feel free to borrow, but use carefully – it’s a powerful term), it’s like a block of marble. Maybe it’s like a rough outline. Or like the horrible, globulous beings that are what remains of people when the transporter malfunctions. Kind of shaped like something, but not really discernible. Not alive, for sure.

I think it works this way for me because I don’t really plan my stories. It’s more like I download big chunks from elsewhere. Unlike A.S. Byatt, however, I don’t get mine in perfect dictation. So there I am, with my amorphous thing, that has some really lovely bits and some pretty damn icky ones. That’s when I begin carving.

Revision is an acquired skill, I believe. It takes care and judgment. You have to be brave enough to knock off big pieces that must go, but also patient enough to do the detail work. Over and over, you have to step back and see how you’re doing. It takes objectivity and precision.

And, oh yes, you can ruin it. I truly believe that.

There comes a point where, instead of refining and polishing, you’re hacking it to bits. Sure, with writing, you can always add it back in. This is the advantage the writer has over a sculptor who accidentally whacks off the nose. The story, however, that brilliantly alive creature, can slowly suffocate, wither away and die if pummeled too much. You’re left with a corpse. Maybe a pretty corpse, but a dead body nonetheless.

I know no one wants to hear this. We all want to believe that, with enough crit, enough time and dedication, we can make the book PERFECT. Maybe a truly practiced writer can. But, just as with sculpting, it takes skill and experience.

This is what I’m learning about revising: it’s important to keep the final image in mind.

We all start with a seminal image or idea. That changes as we go along. But, at some point in the process, (yes, yes, I know you pre-plotters claim you know it before you even start writing) you have to decide on what you want it to look like when you’re done. All revising should be directed to that idea. Don’t get halfway through polishing your Running Dog sculpture and then think, hey! a Running Cat would be way cool! Write down the Running Cat idea and go back to working on the DOG.

Having editorial notes helps with this, because you can keep going back to the line where your editor says “do this.” I’ve started keeping a list of what I’m revising towards. To remind myself of that final image.

I imagine that few sculptors create a perfect sculpture on their first try. This is why most writers I know have at least one novel under the bed, maybe several. Those are the corpses.

Like clouds promising rain, sometimes they don’t produce.

May they rest in peace.

Recalibrating

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I caught a bit of sun on this one, but I love the happy look on Granddaughter Aerro’s face.

We spent the weekend with family, celebrating David’s birthday and Tobiah’s a bit late. It’s fun to do these things, to see everyone, but I ate lots of food I don’t normally eat, got no writing done and got all out of my routine.

I know – I’m cantankerous.

I think this is why so many people dislike Mondays though. It’s much easier to stay with a routine than to start it up again. My folks are retired and they don’t notice the days of the week so much, except for planning events. Sometimes I think that’s the best way, just to let the flow of time be even. When I’m home for the weekend, though I sleep a bit later, it’s not by a huge amount – maybe an hour – and my exercise and writing schedule is pretty much the same. Then Monday isn’t so much of a shock.

This morning, though…

So I’m gearing up. Lots to do this week. I’m almost done revising The Body Gift. I’ve been strengthening the hero and it’s working. I found myself mooning over him the other day, which is lovely, because he’s been very difficult to get to know. I’m 70% done, with 15 chapters to do over the next 7 days. Totally doable, right?

(There is the small matter of adding an entirely new scene where my characters end up in this very particular image I have in my head, but I don’t really know how they get there or what happens. The story magic will fill that in, right?)

Then I send it off to my (potential) agent who is enthusiastically (I like to think) waiting for it.

Okay, off I go to catch a wave. Wish me luck!