Random ramblings

 Good morning! It’s a short post this week due to the Gypsy experiencing issues with chronology (translation: I forgot what day it was.)

Last weekend I attended the All-Iowa Writers’ Conference sponsored by Our Front Porch Books Publishing Company. The event was held in Montezuma, Iowa, and a panel of speakers shared highlights of their writing and publishing journeys. It’s always fun to emerge from my hobbit hole and enjoy the company of other people who create with words. Except it meant I had to step out of my comfort zone and talk to strangers. I did. No one got hurt.

 

As I listened to the speakers, I realized there is no right or wrong way to write, no matter what your genre. It’s easy to commit writing. All you need is a laptop. Or a pen and paper, if you’re kicking it old school. I’m not sure which is more dangerous in terms of losing your work. You can delete entire chapters with the errant push of a button, then frantically pound Command Z while making desperate promises to the deity of your choice, or you can dump coffee all over your hard copy, which doesn’t come with a backup no matter who you pray to.

 

A fast Wi-Fi connection is handy, too, but unless you’re into a heavy research mode, sometimes it’s more productive not to have internet access. If your Wi-Fi has gone dark, you can’t tumble down a rabbit hole, only to emerge two hours later from a quick check of Facebook (fun fact: there is no such thing), to discover that while now you’re up-to-date on everyone’s latest dramas, your protagonist and her love interest are still stuck in a blazing barn with no escape except to launch themselves out the open loft door in a leap that mirrors Luke Skywalker’s iconic swing across the chasm on the Death Star. Except you haven’t written a word of it.

 

I read a bit of advice that went as far as suggesting writers disable their internet connection before sitting down to work so they won’t be tempted to wander off into the fairyland of cyberspace and return 20 years later, only to find that same damn cursor blinking on a blank Word document. Not a chance. My W-Fi connection is sketchy enough out here in my cornfield without deliberately taking it offline. It’s already looking for an excuse not to work. I'm not about to give it permission.

 

The top five things I find useful as I write are, in no specific order:

 

1. A quiet place. I spent more than three decades writing news stories in a busy newspaper office with phones ringing, customers at the front counter, co-workers causing all manner of chaos and a vast off-set press rumbling on the other side of the wall. My career was nearly over before work-from-home became a thing, and the final years when I carved out a home office from a spare bedroom were a welcome change. Left to my own devices, I am a solitary creature. I love my office at the back of our house, even though it’s about as organized as your average broom closet most of the time. 

 

2. A solid idea/scene/dialogue to pursue. I love to step into the momentum of a story in progress and pick up where I left off. Natural progression builds momentum and makes writing easy. Easier. Okay, not as hard. With that in mind, when I quit writing on the previous day, I try to stop at a point that will be easy to pick up and immediately move forward. Starting from a standstill is do-able but harder. Which means that's what happens 97 percent of the time.

 

3. Sticky notes. So. Many. Sticky notes. You have no idea. They’re everywhere. On my desk. In my purse. In my car. On my end table. On the dog. I’m constantly scribbling ideas on sticky notes. Yeah, I confess to looking at some of them later and having zero idea what I was thinking when I wrote them, but when a story-related idea pops into my head, I know better than to think “Oh, I’ll remember that.” I know from experience that I will not, in fact, remember that.

 

4. Coffee. I’m a morning person. I’m a coffee person. I’m a writing in the morning with my coffee leave me alone person.

 

 

5. Possession of time. Not simply time, but time I possess by wrangling it away from all the other daily demands. It’s easy to say, “I’ll sit down and write when I have time.” Guess what? You’re never going to have time. Work, family obligations, household chores, appointments, prying dead squirrels out of your dog’s jaws (don’t laugh, it was in the dark, before coffee, I was in my pajamas and I assure you it was not funny, not one little bit) will cheerfully occupy every waking moment if you let it. I’ve gotten better at carving out time to write. The rest of the world can just get along without me for a bit. Possessing time is a constant wrestling match that pits a fantasy world against the real one, but the more you work at it, the better you get. It's a helpful skill for whatever hobby you choose.

 

 

Thanks for reading, and again, I invite you to follow me at my author’s page: https://www.facebook.com/melinda.wichmann.author. 

Another stepping stone

 This week’s topic is cover design, which I know nothing about so you should be able to get on with whatever you were doing in short order.

When you go to the book store, what makes you pick up a book? The cover! 

 

Covers are a marketing device. Like the headline on a news story in the papers (geez, am I dating myself? Anyone still read newspapers?) a cover’s purpose is to make you pick up the book. And let's be honest people, once you have a book in your hand, it can be really hard to put it back on the shelf.

 

Someone once told me she bought a certain brand of dog food because the bag was pretty. See what I mean—marketing. The product on the shelf caught her eye and when her brain started making positive associations between the sparkly pink bag (like seriously sparkly, like a five-year-old's princess-themed birthday party sparkly), it automatically formed a positive association about the quality of food inside. She couldn’t get out her money fast enough. (Forty years of reading dog food labels later, I think we’ve moved past that method of decision making but still, case in point.)

 

When I shop for books by a specific author, I don’t care what’s on the cover design. It’s just icing on the cake. I know John Sandford and Diana Gabaldon and AJ Pearce are going to deliver. But when I wander off into the misty regions of unknown (to me) authors, my hands pick up what my eyes like. 

 

The cover for “Ghost” is currently in the hands of a designer who has not read the book. Don’t panic (says the woman who is routinely panicking about everything connected to publishing this book). This is normal. She doesn’t NEED to read the book. The publisher told her what it was about. Her job is to make YOU want to read the book.

 

To date, I’ve seen one initial mockup for the cover. I liked the type font for the title. Then I went off and quietly had a panic attack. Not to worry. It’s early days. I need more emotional support coffee.

 

Book covers represent the genre of the pages between them. A cover showing a couple walking hand-in-hand along a rainy boulevard in Paris is not likely to be a story about an axe murderer. (Well, it could. But it probably won't.) A cover showing a woman drinking a latte from a to-go cup and talking on her phone as she walks under a ladder with a guy balanced precariously atop is probably not going to be high courtroom drama. 

 

The cover’s sole purpose is to catch the reader’s eye, along with giving you an idea of what to expect inside. And to display the title and the author’s name, but honestly, if you’re a visual person like me, you see the picture first: the cat in the window, silhouetted against a fireplace, or the long, desolate farm lane leading to a house and barn in the distance. Those images make me want to read the book. They are also responsible for my current TBR pile, which I had to recently re-engineer because someone was going to get hurt when (not if) it fell over.

 

There is a caveat. I remember a book I read and loved a number of years ago. The cover showed a young woman wearing an old-fashioned nightgown looking over her shoulder with an expression of terror as she fled barefoot from a castle in the night. I read the entire book, waiting for that scene to take place. It never did. Namely because there was no castle in the story. And the setting was in the 1980s so not many young women were wearing old-fashioned white nightgowns. I suspect the book had been subjected to a stock cover, something slapped on by a publisher who thought—like horseshoes and hand grenades—it was close enough to count. 

 But the point of the cover was to make me get out my wallet. And it worked.

 

Thanks for sharing this journey with me. No idea what’s on deck for next week. I’m headed to the All-Iowa Writers Conference this weekend, harvest is inching ever closer and Raider and I are taking a few weeks off from the show ring to work through some training issues. If Raider wrote a book, I have no doubt the cover art would show a dog frolicking merrily about the ring while the handler throws up her hands in defeat and the judge wonders WTH is going on.

Literary agents and unicorns

Please allow me a bit of self-promotion to kick off this week’s post. It would make me giddy with delight if you would follow me at my newly launched author’s page: https://www.facebook.com/melinda.wichmann.author. This will be the central clearing house for all things “Ghost,” including release date, cover art, pre-order info, etc. when it becomes available. 

“How to Live with a Ghost” is my Novice A book. All my dog training friends are nodding in total comprehension. For the three readers of this blog who are not part of the competitive dog obedience scene, Novice A is the entry level class every American Kennel Club dog obedience trainer enters when they start their trialing career.  Once you’ve titled in that class, you can never enter it again with any of your successive dogs. You only get one Novice A dog and you never forget them. My Novice A dog was a beagle.

 

Setting out to get my Novice A book published was only marginally more difficult than convincing a beagle not to sniff. One does not simply send a completed manuscript to one of the Big Five publishers (Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon and Schuster) and say, “Here’s my fabulous manuscript that is destined to be a best-seller. Call me and we’ll talk.”

 

Well. You can. It’s a free country. But doing so will get you exactly nowhere because your fabulous manuscript will get tossed into a heap of other unsolicited manuscripts called the slush pile. Someone might look at it before dumping it in the digital trash. But they probably won't.

 

 

To get the Big Five to even spare you a passing glance, you need to hire a literary agent. Such a person is well-versed in the machinations of the book publishing industry. Their job is to pitch your book to the people who might want to publish and sell it.

 

How does one obtain a literary agent? I am the last person you should ask because I am an epic fail in this department. I do not have an agent. Or perhaps I am my agent. Does that make me a free agent? I should refrain from sports analogies since I have never played any variety of sports-ball.

 

You can do an online search for literary agents and find literary services staffed by agents representing all kinds of genres. But be aware, book publishing is a fickle field.

When I was in search of an agent to represent “Ghost,” BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People Of Color) books were all the rage. Agents were screaming for stories with BIPOC characters overcoming adversity. It was also the year of the Me Too movement, and LGBTQ issues were in the spotlight, so if you could combine all three elements, you were an agent’s dream. It honestly felt like those were the only topics they were interested in.

 

I sat at my laptop and looked at my Novice A novel, set in rural eastern Iowa, which is not exactly a seething mass of racial upheaval. I looked at my characters, who are, for the most part, white, straight and untraumatized by sexual assault. Even the agents specializing in the paranormal genre, which was more forgiving than represent-the-world-today general fiction, were looking for sexy vampires and dark shapeshifters. A plain old ghost in a traditional haunting scenario didn’t have them blowing up my phone. But I’d had a lot of fun writing “Ghost.” I wasn’t trying to expose social injustice or create some bizarre new paranormal world. I just wanted to share a story that would let people escape from their day-to-day crazy. 

 

 Literary agents are the gatekeepers of the book publishing industry. So how does one get the attention of a gatekeeper?

 

One writes a query letter. This soul-ripping document boils down the essence of your manuscript into a single page that presents the “elevator pitch” of the story in a style that escalates the drama of the storyline without revealing the ending. It should leave the agent absolutely dying to read the whole thing and share it with the world. What usually happens is, you send it off and if you’re lucky, you get a polite response six weeks later saying “Thanks but no thanks.”

 

As frustrating as that sounds, it’s actually worse.

 

Some agents represent cozy mysteries, cookbooks and young adult novels. Others specialize in historical fiction, Christian fiction and poetry. They have specific areas of expertise and specific themes in the material they are seeking because they know what sells in the current market and what doesn’t.

 

Agents post what they are looking for on their websites. For example: Agent Sue Brown with XYZ Literary Agency is, “Especially seeking stories with female protagonists who run pet rescues by day and ride black unicorns across the countryside by night, turning puppy mill owners into toads with spells brewed by the fairies in her garden.”

 

Oh, yay! You fire off a query letter, extolling the virtues of your female pet-rescuing, black-unicorn-riding protagonist, her spell-brewing fairies and the warty creatures she leaves in her wake. You include the requested first chapter and a synopsis. And then you wait. For. A. Very. Long. Time. Eventually, you receive a painfully polite reply with the inevitable “So sorry. Just not quite what we’re looking for.” 

 

It is my theory the reason you often see authors wearing hats in their publicity photos is because they have gone bald from tearing their hair out while querying. We present agents with exactly what they are looking for, only to be told that’s not what they’re looking for.

 

 I queried. I queried a lot. I got rejected a lot. I also got a few nibbles, with agents asking for a “full,” which meant they want to read the entire manuscript before stomping on my heart with hobnailed boots and the inevitable, “So sorry. Just not a good fit for us at the moment or ever.”

 

Now let’s be honest. Just because you’ve got all the elements the agent is looking for doesn’t mean you have them assembled properly. And that’s a legit point. In the business world time is money, and no one wants to take on a time-consuming project that has to be restructured from the ground up, no matter how wonderful the material is, when another author presents a manuscript that contains the requisite unicorns in the requisite order and actually looks like it’s been through a few serious edits. Looking back, I know my manuscript wasn’t gleaming in full-polish mode.

 

 My querying phase began and ended in 2020. I can honestly say 99 percent of the rejections I received were perfectly polite and ended with the generic but optimistic sentiment, “Good luck with your project.” The final one, however, stood out because it was so truly nasty, I put “Ghost” on the shelf and got on with my life until last fall, when the universe conspired to hit me over the head with the manuscript and whisper, “Do something with this.”

 

I did, and stumbled into a publishing contract in the most wonderful of ways, even though they involved talking to strangers, which terrifies me to this day.

Thanks for reading! Please follow me on Facebook! My publisher assures me Things Are Going To Happen Soon. Please also understand book publishing exists in its own space-time continuum, where hours and days spin endlessly without any visible result, then everything happens at once and needs to get done at the speed of yesterday. Which is exactly like showing dogs.

 

My boy Raider at USASA Nationals in 2024. Go fast!
(Photo by Aaron Gold Photography)

Say cheese

Earlier this week I had a professional head shot taken to include in the book. Horrors. Having my picture taken ranks up there with going to the dentist in terms of anxiety-inducing experiences. It’s awkward. It’s tense. And it often produces an unpleasant outcome.

 

My last “professional” photo experience was back in the day when I worked in a corporate-owned newspaper. The higher-ups decreed everyone on staff would provide a head shot to be included in promotional material, and we were to take said pictures of one another. You would think an office full of newspaper photographers could handle the assignment of taking one another’s picture, but you might as well have given a camera to a monkey.

 

 

Collectively, we had photographed town festivals, high school sports, car wrecks, house fires, political candidates stumping through Iowa County, two-headed calves, the 30,000 people on bicycles phenomenon that is RAGBRAI and pretty much anything that can happen at a county fair. But when tasked with taking photos of one another, we approached it with about as much enthusiasm as convicts being prodded along to the gallows.

 

The corporate office, in typical corporate office style, announced the deadline for submitting the photos  was approximately two hours before we knew anything about them, so there was no time to obsess about wardrobe or hair or makeup. That was probably a good thing. We took each other’s pictures in a mechanical, git-er-done approach that produced predictable results. In other words, our head shots all looked like booking photos at the county jail. 

 

Flash forward 15 years and even the thought of someone taking my picture taken sent me into a panic. You're dealing with someone whose social media profile picture is of her dog. I toyed with the idea of just doing a selfie and calling it good, but experience has taught me I am the world’s worst selfie-taker. I would put the pressure of making me look decent on someone else’s shoulders.

 

Exhibit A: Not a good selfie-er. But I love this pic because Phoenix.

 A friend recommended a local studio photographer, and I made the appointment. Then I spent the next two weeks losing my mind. What to wear? What to do with my hair? Makeup, yes? Makeup, no? Should I buy a new outfit? What kind of outfit? Maybe I should have my hair done. Maybe I should wear a hat. I tore my closet apart and reached the conclusion I had nothing to wear. That is not entirely true. I have plenty to wear. Plenty of hoodies and flannels and graphic T-shirts emblazoned with cartoon dogs and clever sayings like “Haulin’ Auss” and “Total Sit Show.” 

 

I didn’t have a particular “look” in mind, mostly because my natural “look” is jeans with a T-shirt or jeans with a hoodie. I wasn’t about to try re-inventing myself for a picture. So back I went to the closet. I barely had anything resembling a professional wardrobe left from my years at the newspapers. My last five years with the papers were work-from-home, and I’ve been retired for two years so any semblance of dress clothes had long gone out the window. I have the requisite black funeral/wedding pants, a few pair of decent brown slacks for showing Raider and more jeans, cargo pants and hiking pants that should probably be allowed.

 

After much agonizing, I settled on a long-sleeved, button-down teal blouse. Simple. Classic. Also, it fit and it didn’t need fussy ironing.

 

The next problem — um, project — was my hair. About six months ago, I decided to let my very short, very layered, very no-nonsense cut grow out. And it did. It’s kinda fun. It’s also curly. In the summer, with humidity, it’s very curly in a self-styling kind of way that is borderline defiant. I’m okay with that. I did both high school and college in the 1980s. I spent more time conquering my then-long hair with blow dryers, mousse, gel, curling irons and Aqua Net than I did going to class. I’ve paid my hair dues and have reached the point in life where my hair can do as it pleases. That is not a hill I want to die on.

 

 

Except I thought perhaps I should care just a little because this picture was going to be seen by (hopefully) a lot of people, and I didn’t want their first impression to be “Whoa. How did this woman write a book when she can’t even style her hair?”

 

Accessorizing was minimal, although I had nightmares about the earrings I’d chosen. I dreamed I showed up at the photography studio wearing earrings the size of Buick hubcaps, and the photographer found absolutely nothing wrong with that and proceeded to do the shoot, never questioning why I had barrel hoops in my ears.

 

So, off I went on Tuesday morning, feeling nervous and starched in my button-down shirt, my hair more-or-less behaving itself and the proper earrings in my ears, to have my picture made. That’s what my grandmother always called it — having your picture made. 

 

The photographer was wonderful, in the way good photographers can get you to relax while simultaneously asking you to stand and turn and cross your arms and tip your head left (no, your other left), chin down, shoulders back, weight on your right leg, lean in, smile, smile bigger. In some ways, it was akin to having a mammogram. Ladies, if you know, you know. I kept waiting for her to tell me to hold my breath and not move.

 

The only thing she didn’t ask was for me to put my ears up. Dog show folks know what I’m talking about. If a friend had been standing behind her with a squeaky or shaking a bag of treats (i.e., cupcakes), I would have relaxed into the process even more.

 

I haven’t seen the edited shots yet, but she showed me the raw images when we were done. They looked like me, my hair was not totally out of control and I did not appear to be a candidate for Cell Block A. Really, that’s all I can ask.

Writing habits and other madness

Writing a book is a solitary endeavor. It does not lend itself well to a group activity. You can’t do it while delivering lunches to farmers in the field or show-grooming dogs for the weekend trial or agonizing about what colors to choose for a new custom-braided leash. You can think about writing a book during all of those circumstances, but the actual writing requires quality time alone with a laptop and your thoughts.

 

When I started writing “How to Live with a Ghost,” quality time alone was a prime commodity, regardless of what I did with it. I was juggling a full-time job, a full-time dog training addiction and annoying expectations of life like laundry and meal prep and paying bills. Which explains why it took so long to get The Book done, although there is no hard and fast rule governing how long it should take to write a novel. It will take as long as it takes.

 

I feel the orange slice should be substantially larger.

 I started writing “Ghost” about the same time the newspaper industry started going down the toilet. Corporate’s view on news room employees was that they were unnecessary and there was no need to pay a full staff when two people could do what six had previously done. I was one of the chosen two. I spent the next five years feeling like Indiana Jones in the scene where he’s being chased by that big, rolling boulder. As long as I kept moving forward at high speed, I’d be okay. Probably. 

 

So I wrote to escape reality. I created a parallel universe where I could hang out with characters doing fun, flirty things and not worrying about water treatment plants or school funding issues or why a subscriber in Petaluma, Calif., didn’t get their paper last week. This imagination-fueled escapism wasn’t anything new. In elementary school, my friends and I used to pretend we were characters in our favorite books and TV shows, flying starships and riding wild mustangs and exploring abandoned mansions. I never outgrew that.

 

 

I started carving out time every morning before work to write. Some days it yielded multiple pages. Others, I only managed to chisel out a sentence or two. But I wrote almost every day. It started becoming a habit, and in the way of habits, it was self-rewarding because it yielded tangible results. Pages turned into chapters that eventually turned into an awkward, stumbling first draft.

 

 At this point I should note there are two approaches to writing: outline the entire manuscript before typing the first sentence or fly by the seat of your pants. In spite of being mildly OCD (certain friends are laughing, I can hear you), I fell solidly into the latter category with "Ghost," probably because I never really thought I'd finish it.

 

Neither approach is right or wrong, although after struggling through the mayhem of rewrites to create a sensible beginning, middle and end for “Ghost,” I can appreciate the benefits of outlining. My brain just didn’t work that way on this book. Maybe it will for the next one. (Brain is screaming FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WOMAN, PLEASE OUTLINE AND SAVE YOURSELF 5 YEARS OF MAYHEM AND CONFUSION!)

 

I was also not a linear writer who started at the beginning and wrote straight through to the end. The story refused to unfold in my head in a chronological manner, so I wrote scenes as they popped up and sorted them out later, then filled in the things that needed to happen in-between to pull it all together.

 

This is an accurate representation of
writing a novel and/or training a dog.
Except for both, the line should go entirely
off the page and disappear for a while.

 The process taught me a few valuable lessons they probably teach in Fiction Writing 101, which I didn’t take because I was across the hall in News Reporting 101.

 

Mainly, just sit down and write already. Get your first draft on paper, even if it’s awful. (Helpful hint: it will be all kinds of awful. Who cares. Now you have something to work with. You can’t edit a blank page.) Write even on the days when you wonder if you have any business writing. You do. The fact you want to do this madness means you should be doing it.

 

I had a lot of doubt. Like, seriously a lot. Who did I think I was to write a book? What if I spent all this time on a project no one but myself would ever read? What if someone did read it and thought it was terrible? Did J.K. Rowling or John Sandford or Craig Johnson ever feel this way?

 

 

But I kept writing because I enjoyed it, and at the end of the day, it felt like time well spent.

 

Next week: I’m not sure what’s coming next week. Maybe book stuff. Maybe not book stuff. Like writing, publishing is a marathon, not a sprint. My publisher assures me Things Are Happening, and has hinted as soon as the cover design is in-hand, there is possibility of pre-orders. That's all I know. Have a great week.

WRITING AND OTHER SELF-INFLICTED TORTURE

Ernest Hemingway said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

 Somerset Maugham said, “There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

 

And there you have it, folks, the essence of writing boiled down into two quotes. 

 

Anyone can write a book. Seriously. The Book Police will not kick your door down and demand you stop. The reason most people do not write books is because they choose to do more sensible things with their time and mental health, like jumping out of perfectly good airplanes or driving armor-plated vehicles into tornadoes.

 

But . . . there are those of us who sat down one day and said, “I’m going to write a book,” and because no one tried to stop us, here we are.

 

 After writing “How to Live with a Ghost,” I wonder how many half-finished or even completely finished manuscripts are gathering digital dust because their authors aren’t ready to take the next step—letting someone actually read their work.

 

Handing over something you’ve written, even to a trusted friend, is terrifying. It’s worse than the dream where you walk into your first day of junior high school wearing nothing but your underwear. Suddenly, all the brilliant, clever, complex, vibrant prose you crafted comes off sounding like “See Jane run.” The characters feel two-dimensional and plot collapses into ash. The idea of letting anyone read it makes you swoon like a Victorian lady whose corset is laced too tight.

 

The first time I finished writing “Ghost,” (yes, the first time. There were many times. Please don't ask how many. Just. Don't.), I had a vague idea it was ready for publication (it wasn’t) and if I queried enough literary agents, one of them would recognize the brilliant charm of the manuscript and want to publish it immediately (they didn’t). So, in the long-held tradition of dog trainers and writers, I started over to fix the stuff I’d screwed up. (I credit 50 years of patient, amenable competition obedience dogs for granting me this skill. It would have been better not to have screwed it up in the first place but writing, like dog training, comes with a learning curve.)

 

 Novels demand the author juggle things like character development and plot arc and rising conflict and realistic dialogue and imagery and structure and voice and setting. If you don’t address those elements—along with whatever the heck Jane is running from and the reason why it is chasing her—you got nothing. When it’s all said and done, how do you find out if you’ve done right by Jane and her pursuer? You let someone read your manuscript. 

Horrors. 

 

Many drafts ago, I stepped onto the relentless, gut-wrenching roller coaster ride of beta readers, manuscript critiques, developmental edits and line edits. I am forever grateful to my beta readers. You got the roughest of rough drafts. You got the first cake baked by a 9-year-old 4-H kid and dutifully eaten by her family, who forced smiles while thinking, “She has to get better, she can’t get any worse.” You got the cake full of air holes, the tough one that was over-mixed and under-baked and maybe had a few ingredients that were mis-measured or left out entirely. You know who you are. We’re still friends. Thank you for your patience. For pointing out the cringe-y spots. For being blunt. And for saying, “I think you could go somewhere with this.”

 

In order to go somewhere, I needed professional help. Now the people reading my work were getting PAID to do it. They got out a microscope and scalpel and brought up issues I didn’t even know existed. And they were without exception, encouraging and helpful. I couldn’t have gotten “Ghost” to this point without any of them.

 

 

It also got weirdly funny—funny, in the way that if you don’t laugh, your brain is going to explode. The editing process is insanely subjective. Fortunately, I’m in a position where I get the final word (providing it’s not libelous) regarding content. That’s not as easy as it might sound.

 

In an early draft of “Ghost,” an editor questioned my use of the word “township.” She was not a Midwest native and had only lived in larger cities since moving to Iowa, so knew nothing of county layouts in rural Iowa. She advised me to elaborate on what a township is for the reader’s benefit. Fair point. I hoped my book would sell far and wide and perhaps someone in Timbuktu would also want to know what a township is. So, I wrote a brief explanation of the nature of townships as geographic divisions of counties.

 

Only to have another editor, further down the line, bluntly say, “Take this out, it’s a waste of words. You’re not teaching a geography class.”

 

Well, then.

 

I took it out. But I’m thinking about putting it back in. Shhhh . . . .

 

That’s the nature of editing. One person will enthusiastically say “More of this! Less of that!” while the next editorially-inclined person to get their paws on your manuscript will, with equal enthusiasm, say “Dear God, woman, what are you thinking? Less of this! More of that!”

 

 

I read somewhere that the first draft and the final draft will never look like twins. Cousins, perhaps. Still the same family tree but a different branch. As I worked on it, “Ghost” changed in both plot and length. At one point, it was a lumbering, unwieldy 110,000 words. Unless you’re Diana Gabaldon or George R.R. Martin, you don’t get to publish 110,000-word books. Also, Diana Gabaldon has never in her life written anything lumbering and unwieldy. 

 

At this point, “Ghost” is now a statuesque 91,000 words, which is still a bit hefty but acceptable. Why the fuss over word count? Paper and ink cost money, and publishers have a bottom line that they would prefer to keep in the black. This is less of an issue for digital versions, but in a world where many readers remain adamant about preferring hard copy over e-readers, word count became my new obsession.

 

Cutting nearly 20,000 words was . . . painful. Again, I have editors to thank for making me aware of scenes that stumbled on for too long, dialogue that rehashed the same topics, too much exposition and occasional passages that galloped off into the sunset as if their GPS had gone haywire. Most of my over-writing fell under the heading of “It sounded like a good idea at the time.” This meant I liked the way it sounded, and I wanted to leave it there, chiseled in stone forever, because d*mnit, I wrote it!

 

 That’s what first drafts (and to be honest, second and third and twenty-eighth drafts) are for. Write the stuff that sounds like a good idea. You can sort it out later.

 

 

Thanks for coming along on this journey with me. Next week: developing writing habits and other ridiculous expectations.

HOW THIS ALL BEGAN

This week I will tell all (most? part? some? just a little?) regarding what The Book is about and why it took me so ridiculously long to write it. The Book is titled "How to Live With a Ghost," but I still call it The Book because that's how it has identified itself since the beginning of the beginning. 

It's about a woman who doesn’t believe in ghosts who buys a house rumored to have a ghost.

It took me forever to write because life.

Now you can get on with your day.

 

Oh. You want more?

 

It's about woman who doesn’t believe in ghosts or love who buys a house rumored to have a ghost and a hot neighbor. (He's real, not a rumor.) He doesn’t believe in love, either. Of course he doesn’t. They’re already perfect for each other. Oh. And there are dogs. Of course there are dogs. I can't tell you any more.

 

Okay, what kind of book is it? This is where things got complicated. Books are categorized by genres, and there are fairly specific guidelines about which content qualifies for what genre. To make matters worse, there are sub-genres, which go down all kinds of rabbit holes. I struggled to identify which genre The Book belonged in. I called it a paranormal because ghost. It’s also kinda a romance because hot neighbor. And mysterious things happen which the protagonist must solve, so mystery.

 

 

At this point I feel compelled to make one thing clear. This book is rated PG13. The language is generally clean, but sometimes people have to say what they have to say and everyone has their favorite words. There is no mention of thrusting or moaning or throbbing male members or quivering thighs or any other anatomically correct body parts doing things you would not want to read aloud to your grandmother. Everyone keeps their clothes on—more or less—and there are smoldering looks and witty repartee for your enjoyment. If you're looking for Laurell K. Hamilton, this isn't it.

 

I think your grandmother could read this book
and not have a cardiac event.

It might be easier to tell you what The Book is NOT. It’s not a romance, dark romance, fantasy, romantasy, suspense, horror, thriller, police procedural, Western, paranormal, sci-fi, mystery, cozy mystery, literary fiction or biography. Good grief—by the time I dismissed all those genres, I was starting to wonder if The Book was destined to wander aimlessly through eternity, un-genre-fied.

 

The Book doesn’t take itself too seriously. It doesn’t have deep philosophical themes you would discuss at a book club, aside from the usual crap life throws at a person. It would be enjoyable to read on a rainy evening with a glass of wine in hand and a warm dog on your lap. Or on a sunny beach with an umbrella drink and your toes in the sand. You probably won’t need therapy after you read it. (It’s been two years and I’m still recovering from Grady Hendrix’s “How to Sell a Haunted House.” That’s a great book, just not when you’re cleaning out your childhood home. Alone. The stuffed animals are watching me. Make them stop.)

 

 

So I went along calling it a paranormal/romance/mystery. Then I was informed by People Who Know More Than I Do About These Things, that it is not.

 

It’s women’s fiction.

 

When the first editor told me my paranormal/romance/mystery was women’s fiction, I smiled politely and hoped I didn’t look like the village idiot. No idea if I succeeded. Google informed me women’s fiction is a commercial fiction genre (oh holy hell, then I had to figure out what commercial fiction was—basically, it’s mainstream fiction—dear God in heaven why couldn’t they just have called it that in the first place) that centers on a female protagonist’s emotional journey and personal growth and explores themes of relationships, identity and life challenges.

 

That sounds like a lot to unpack. The Book is not that heavy, I promise. It’s women’s fiction with elements of paranormal, mystery and romance. So there. (Sticks tongue out)

 

It took me forever to write it and I thought about it for twice that long before I typed the first sentence. I’d always wanted to write a story about a woman who bought a haunted house, which is a pretty vague plot line and probably why it took so long for me to actually hang a story on it. I started writing somewhere around 2015 and messed with it off and on in the manner of someone doing something they don’t seriously expect to finish. I just enjoyed escaping into my self-designed parallel universe, you know, where the unicorns run by and everything sparkles. It was so different from the grind of city council and schoolboard stories I did for my day job. Community journalism is great, but there’s only so much waste water treatment plant angst and county supervisors wind turbine feuds a girl can take. (Disclaimer: there are no sparkly unicorns in the book. Sorry.)

 

 The element of time played a big part in getting “How to Live with a Ghost” out of my head and onto a Word document. Specifically, having enough of it to sit down and create coherent sentences (paragraphs, scenes, chapters and sections that sounded like they knew each other) without interruptions. When you add spouse, pets, day jobs, domestic engineering and the need to avoid slowly calcifying into a desk goblin, it’s a challenge to find time.

 

I am pretty sure I looked like this several times while writing "Ghost."

 Plus, there was the reality that when I finished it, I would have to get serious about letting other people read it, otherwise I'd just committed a gigantic waste of time. This was even scarier than looking out the kitchen window and seeing a cow wandering by. Followed by another cow . . . and another . . . and another . . . and just when your brain registers that the cows are out, you realize they are not your cows. The neighbor's cows being out are only marginally less terrifying than your own cows being out. Cows were definitely a reason it took so long to write The Book. Or at least I’m blaming them.

 

These critters are where they are supposed to be. Behind secure fences.
That is not always the case with critters.

Next week: drafts, editing and other things that panic first-time novelists. Maybe they panic veteran novelists, too. That’s the weird part about being a writer: you write things for people to read, then you're terrified when you have to let someone to read them.