Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Rewrites, Queries, Political Angst and Courage!

It's sort of funny how things seem to cling to like things...birds of a feather and all that. And cycles of events. So here I find myself finishing the second rewrite of Canyon Flower (improved, improved) and starting to send out queries to agents. I find all of it rather difficult. The rewrites push me to kill my darlings, the queries push me up against that predictable wall of rejections, and the political angst I am feeling, daily, is an almost unbearable push, push, push.

Still, I suppose I have to be grateful to FEEL. I watched a video by Harvey Klinger this morning, a literary agent who said that if you really want to write fiction, you write from passion - not by formula. I guess most of us know that formula usually equates predictable (and sometimes popular) fiction. But for me and people who love literature, passion is the keyword. I like that a lot. Passion is what I like to feel when I get into a story. So that works for me. I suppose angst ultimately leads to passion, no? That's how I'm holding that one! Ha!

A new book is bubbling in my head...and it will involve a family (MY family) in ways that will not be appreciated. Not that much of that family is still alive. Still it gives me a little rush to think about fictionalizing some of the thoughts I've had over a lifetime about certain family members. If it turns out to be black comedy, don't be surprised.

But it's all fair game: (so said Sylvia Plath)

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath


So, I guess I'm seeking the courage to keep trucking with the books I've written (three to date), and the goal I've set for myself (of selling my books to good publishers via the traditional route) and living through these beastly times. I got hit in 2011 by the last recession, so beastly times are sort of my everyday now.