NEVER SKY ARC, Conferences and Celebrations

It is our Blogoversary over at the YA Muses blog, and to celebrate, we're giving away a signed copy of the ARC of Veronica Rossi's beautiful debut UNDER THE NEVER SKY.  This is a wonderful book, with vivid characters and gorgeous prose.  I can't wait to talk about it withe the rest of the world, so hop on over and comment or follow to be entered to win, so we can chat.

In the meantime, the fellow Muses and I are all headed for a weekend of celebration in LA for the National SCBWI conference.  If you will be there, please say Hi. One of the unexpected joys of embarking in the solitary pursuit of writing has been meeting so many wonderful people who love books.

I've reposted my Revision Checklist post for our "Best of" week.  This is my step by step process for taking a manuscript from first draft to finished product.  I hope you find it useful.

Getting Started Again

I started a new book today.

Which got me thinking about first drafts.  I've started exactly five.  I've finished exactly two.

But the thing with those two that I've finished is that there were LOTS of stops and starts along the way.  The first one that I finished was the book now know as BANDIA, and it was really the third version  of a book I tried to write many, many times, over many, many years.  Finally something clicked, but not before I got distracted by a shiny new idea that would become SPIES & PREJUDICE.  I got fifty pages into that one before I set it aside to finish BANDIA.

But then we sold SPIES off of those same fifty pages, and I HAD to finish.  So I did.  In eight weeks.  Which surprised even me.  That experience gave me a great deal of confidence.  I can write another book.  I might even be able to write a lot more of them.  And hey, if I can write a book in eight weeks, I should be able to churn out two or three a year, right?

Um, no.  Since finishing the first draft of SPIES, I've written exactly 10K words on one project, 350 words on another, and 2500 words on this new one.  Yes, you read that right, I have THREE shiny new projects in beginning stages.  I absolutely intend to finish every one of them, but I'm not going to kill myself if I end the year with only one completed first draft by years end.

And since I'm under contract for the BANDIA sequel (which, ahem, is not one of the three), I'm pretty sure that's the one I'll have finished.

Still, it's fun to have new worlds and characters and plots to think about.  And who knows?  I might end the year with two shiny new manuscripts in hand.

I can dream anyway!

New Holding Page!

Still not a website, but today my new holding page went live. 

Thanks to Maddee at Xuni.com for bringing a little piece of me to life on line!

Check it out here.

I love it!  The website itself won't be ready for a few months, but for now I really love this page.

Killing a Darling

I've just started the first round of edited revision on SPIES.  As much a I can't wait to be on the other side of this revision with a finished manuscript in hand, revision is my favorite part of the writing process.  The first draft hurts because it's both overwhelming and unknown.  But revision, revision is where a manuscript becomes a book, where characters become real, where plots have a purpose and where stories come to life.

I love discovering the hidden depths of my characters and the deeper meaning behind my stories.  I love exploring themes and plot threads in more detail.  I love adding layers that make the story richer and more complex.

Bur Revision is hard too.  Not every scene, or plot thread, or character serves the story.  And it can be hard to let them go.

One of my favorite characters got cut today.  It was my idea to cut him, because the overall story loses nothing from his absence.  He was a literal darling, brightening every scene he was in with a touch of humor. He didn't serve any purpose that wasn't being fulfilled by another character though and I needed to simplify.

I've cut characters from manuscripts before.  Body counts are nothing new for my revision process.  But this one hurt more than the others because I loved him so much. 

So tonight I raise a glass to Jason Hiles, thank him for the laughs and friendship, and send him into literary limbo.  For now.  He'll be back.   

And I promise him one hell of a storyline.

UPDATE or WHERE HAVE I BEEN?

So it seems as if I've fallen off the face of the earth right?  Nope, I'm still here.  And I've been very, very busy over the last few months.

Turns out that when you sell a book off of a partial manuscript, you actually have to deliver a finished product.  Who knew?  So I spent three months from September to December writing.  Then writing some more.  Then revising.  Until a finished manuscript of SPIES & PREJUDICE was born.  It was a lot of fun to write, and I'm about to start the editing process.

And I've been blogging as a regular member of the YA Muses blog.  I blog weekly usually on Wednesdays.  You can find me over at http://www.yamuses.blogspot.com.  The Muses is a blog featuring my entire critique group.  We've learned so much in the last year as we've moved closer to becoming published writers, and the blog is place to share our experiences, writing processes, books we love and more.  Plus, my critique partners are some of the most amazing writers I've had the privilege to read. 

Finally, I've been working on a new project, a new manuscript that for now is just for me.  It's fun to write without any deadlines or expectations. 

Writing a book under contract was wonderful and terrifying.  It's a great feeling to know your writing will be published, but it also brings a lot of pressure that you don't have when you're writing on your own.  In order to keep from becoming completely paralyzed and get a draft of SPIES on paper, I had to shut all of that out and just write the book for me.  It wasn't easy though, and I'm still not sure how I managed to do it.  I imagine published authors experience this to an even greater degree, because they not only have a publisher, but a legion of fans who they don't want to let down.  Talk about pressure.

As stress goes, this is definitely the good kind, because you know how lucky you are to have people who are looking forward to your next book.  And having a deadline really motivated me to sit down and write, as opposed to meandering my way to a first draft like I did in the past.  I proved something to myself.

I am really doing this.

I am a writer.

The Craziness of Publishing

So, if you follow me on YA Muses, Twitter or the Blueboard, you might have heard that I got my first book deal, and my second, all in the same day.  How did this happen?  I'm still trying to figure it out, but near as I can tell social networking and conferences had a lot to do with it.  And while a personal connection won't sell a book by itself, it can open the door to unexpected opportunities.

Circa April 2010:  I had just signed with Sarah Davies with my very first novel, a Celtic YA paranormal called BANDIA, involving forbidden love and hot guys with no shirts.  We were discussing a pretty major rewrite when I attended my local SCWBI conference in Rocklin, CA.  Unbeknownst to even Sarah, I had started a second novel while I was querying BANDIA, the book that would become SPIES & PREJUDICE, a Veronica Mars style retelling of Pride & Prejudice.  I submitted the first fifteen pages of SPIES for a conference critique, and through luck of the draw, I drew Flux editor Brian Farrey.  Brian approached me at a break and when I wasn't hyperventilating, I think I heard him say that he really liked my writing voice and would love to see the whole manuscript for SPIES.  I told him the book wasn't finished, but that I had a paranormal I was revising with Sarah.  Brian and Sarah talked, and we made sure he was on the submission list for BANDIA.

Fast forward to May 2010:  I was fumbling around on Twitter when I found editor Elizabeth Law (@egmontgal) on an #askagent thread.  I started following her and happened to catch a tweet about an off-Broadway show called Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson that she enjoyed.  Oddly, my husband and I had once joked about writing a musical about James K. Polk and had even written a few bars of a song about Manifest Destiny, so I sent a reply to Ms. Law asking about the AJ show.  She replied with the details, and my husband and I got tickets to see it a few weeks later when we were in NYC.  When I got back to CA, I let Elizabeth know that we'd seen it and really enjoyed it.  We exchanged some Tweets over the summer as I rewrote BANDIA, and I continued to follow Elizabeth, learning that we liked a lot of the same books and that she really seemed to care about YA and MG books. 

August/September 2010:  BANDIA, all revised and on submission for just over a week, got an amazing offer from Brian Farrey.  A multiple book offer, with options for even more books featuring the characters from BANDIA.  I was over the moon.  I'd met Brian and heard him speak.  I knew Flux would be a good home for my books, and that it wouldn't flinch at some of the edgier aspects of BANDIA.  And one of my favorite YA authors is Simone Elkeles, whose LEAVING PARADISE is with Flux.  (Congrats to Simone for hitting the NYT list last week with the sequel, RETURN TO PARADISE).

But we still hadn't heard form Egmont.  And I was torn. Because I really wanted to work with Elizabeth too.  So when Elizabeth called Sarah to talk about BANDIA, somehow it came up that she wanted to see my other projects.  SPIES had been put on the back burner while I revised BANDIA, but I sent over the partial manuscript.  Two hours later, I was on the phone with Elizabeth, who was even more delightful in person.  We had an offer on SPIES that same afternoon.

But could I really do both deals?

Sarah immediately started talking timelines and delivery dates, and it soon became clear that the timing would work out so that, yes, it was definitely doable.

And so I get the best of all worlds.  I get to work with the two editors that I connected with on my own, in completely unrelated ways.  I have no doubt that these personal contacts went a long way to getting Flux to read and offer on BANDIA so quickly, and Egmont to dig a little deeper to discover SPIES.  But none of it would have happened if I didn't have a wonderful editorial agent like Sarah, who helped me turn BANDIA into something marketable and went above and beyond to get me my first deal and my second. On the same day!

If you haven't seen them, here are the announcements from Publishers Marketplace:

Talia Vance's debut SPIES AND PREJUDICE, pitched as Veronica Mars meets PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, in which a teenage private investigator goes undercover to discover that the mother she thought was dead is actually in the witness protection program, and the guy she was determined to hate is the one person who can save her life, forcing her to re-evaluate everything she thought she knew about herself, her family, and love, to Elizabeth Law at Egmont, for publication in Spring 2012, by Sarah Davies at the Greenhouse Literary Agency (NA).

And:

Talia Vance's BANDIA, rooted in Celtic mythology, a story of forbidden love, as a girl discovers too late that she's descended from a deadly Irish goddess, having accidentally bound her soul to the hot guy whose tribe is sworn to destroy her; falling for the one boy it would kill her to love, and with her survival depending on his death, she must find a way to break the power of her dark inheritance, to Brian Farrey at Flux, in a two-book deal, for publication in Fall 2012 and Fall 2013, by Sarah Davies at the Greenhouse Literary Agency (NA).

And now I need to stop bouncing off the walls and get to work.  I have deadlines :) 

 


 

My Manuscript has a Body Count

My manuscript is bloody.  It's been hacked and cut and beaten.  It's had its guts pulled out and put back in.   And it's been retitled.  And retitled again.  My manuscript has a body count.

The fist casualty- subplots.  Some of these subplots were funny, others had shocking twists.  A select few even had some achingly beautiful prose.  But don't feel sorry for them either.  They were guilty as sin.  They distracted from the main character arcs, complicated the plot unnecessarily, stopped moving the story forward, or *gasp* were a little too convenient. In short, they had it coming.

The second casualty- characters.  Some lovely characters with invariably witty dialog and secret agendas.  The gay son of a macho warrior who gets off on disappointing his father and has a wicked sense of fashion?  Sadly, gone.  The little girl with magical healing powers that are never explained but critical to the climax of the story?  Axed.  Not that anyone really misses her.

The third casualty- werewolves.  What??  But this was a WEREWOLF book.  Surely the werewolves had to stay.  Nope.  The werewolves were guilty too. Turns out that the werewolves were weighing down the story with my own preconceived notions and baggage associated with the wolf mythology.  Getting rid of the wolves freed me up to reimagine the story and focus on the characters.  And as a bonus, no bestiality undertones!

The fourth casualty-almost the entire second half.  Forty thousand words. Some of them really good words, but words that didn't serve the main characters or conflict. Some great scenes died here.  And I can't lie. It was bloody. 

The fifth casualty- fear.  You'd think with all this cutting and shredding, that there would be no getting rid of the fear.  And at first, there was a lot-seriously, a lot- of fear.  Fear of cutting out some of the best parts of the book.  Fear that I couldn't write anything better or even as good.  That fear was killed off the old-fashioned way.  Not by slashing (even though I wished I could), but by creating.  Writing.  Who new that writing could be such a powerful weapon?

So don't worry about my manuscript and it's body count.  It's fully recovered.

And then some.