In 24 hours, it will be 2007. I usually reserve my whole “year in review” thing for my birthday, since January 1st is an arbitrary designation of some pope observed in my case mainly by when my taxes roll over, but my birthday is a measurable distance that belongs to me. (Also, it’s really convenient that it happens in January.) But what the hell, I’m off to a killer party later tonight, so I guess I will be recognizing Gregorian year changes, and I have some time to kill.
2006 was a good year for me. One of the best I’ve ever had. My first book was released! I got engaged! I began writing full time! I sold my book in both Brazil (to Editora Record) and Portugal (to Aletheia)! I went to a whole bunch of parties and book conferences, I spoke at both conferences and chapter meetings (look, Ma! I teach, too), I read more than 52 books (read: more than last year), I made a whole host of new friends, I took a trip with Colleen (whose book is out now) to New York City and met Scott and Justine, and a trip with Marley to Connecticut and met everybody in the CoLoNY chapter of RWA. I ran the Great Blog Voice Experiment. Both of my critique partners sold their first book contracts. Two of my very good friends, Colleen and Jana, had their debut releases. My little brother graduated from college. I was on the cover of several romance novels.
2007 also promises to be a big year for me. I have three book releases scheduled for next year: The paperback of Secret Society Girl, Everything I Needed to Know About Being A Girl, I Learned From Judy Blume, Ed. by Jennifer O’Connell, and Under The Rose (being the second book in the Secret Society Girl series). My little brother is getting married. I’m getting married. My dad is having a big birthday. My friend Cheryl is having her debut release.
So with all of these wonderful thing going on, what else am I hoping for in the new year? What am I hoping to accomplish?
1. Exercise. (I’ve been a bit of a lump this year.) 2. Keep my apartment clean. (I’d like to be able to entertain more.) 3. Write more. (This year, I wrote one and a half books. Next year, I’d like to double that.) 4. (corollary) Continue writing full time. 5. Contract more books. 6. Read classics. 7. Live bigger.
Number Seven covers a lot of ground. It encompasses a few goals for personal growth that my friends and I have set for ourselves for the coming year, as well as a general injunction against sweating the small stuff.
What are you especially proud of this year, and what are you hoping for in the New Year? Tell me here so I can add your wish to mine when the clock strikes twelve.
Much like the rest of the publishing industry, this blog will be going on vacation until 2007. Happy Holidays, Happy New Year, Happy Dark Cold Weather to our friends in the north, and Happy Warm Glorious Summertime to our antipodean readership (Hi, Nalini, Sally, Justine, and Scott!) Sailor Boy and I are off to Florida.
I’m so grateful to everyone who has joined me on the ride this year, and I’m hoping that this Christmas brings everyone the gifts they most want, and that next year is full of glorious opportunities. I’ve so enjoyed communicating with everyone on the blog, and I want to thank people who keep coming back to read and comment — I’m not going to start naming names, but I do want to give a special shout out to Anonymous — you guys are the best.
If you would like to get involved in the anonymous print run survey, here are the links:
So the final Harry Potter title has been released: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. What do you think? I’m reserving judgment, but I haven’t really been a huge fan of any of the titles since #4 (Phoenix was a great title, but I’m not sure it fit the book). The Washington Postarticle about it quoted a child reader saying:
“Oh I think that’s a really good name. . . . I’m guessing it’s about [Godric's] Hollow, so that tells you a real place where the book is set,” said 10-year-old [DIANA REDACTS KID'S FULL NAME] of Springfield, Va., referring to the place where the boy wizard’s parents were killed.
Good guess, Nick, but it’s hallows in the title, not hollows.
Wow, you intrepid reporter, you… you really got him! On the record, too. And now, in seven years, when that kid is applying to college, the Google search his admissions committee does will turn up some vocabulary mistake he made as a child (did he even see the name written out, or did you simply speak it to him?) and you ridiculing him for it. Kids do say the darndest things! Maybe journalists have to get snarky to keep pace with the bloggers? I think grown-ups making fun of ten year olds in newspapers is over the line.
Once, when I was in college, a reporter from the school newspaper was doing a story and asking a bunch of us for quotes and after I gave mine, I remember the girl next to me saying something ridiculously stupid and thinking to myself that she would probably be embarrassed when she saw it repeated in the paper the next day. I bet you can guess what happened. The quote appeared with MY name attached. I never asked for a correction, because it seemed silly to get bent out of shape about some human interest story in the school newspaper, but now, all these years later, it’s still online, and it’s still wrong. So I feel for this kid, even though in this case, he did say what he was quoted as saying. It was a miscommunication.
Of course, ask for a correction nowadays and people will assume you’re trying to get grounds for a lawsuit.
Last night I watched The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. (Full disclosure: I haven’t read the book.) (Fuller disclosure: I’ve seen maybe two episodes of The Gilmore Girls, which probably comes as a shock to some people, seeing as how I write books set at Yale.) I’m going to leave aside for a moment that there isn’t a Wal*Mart within fifty miles of Bethesda, Maryland, and talk instead about the lightbulb moment on character likeability I expereinced while watching it.
First of all, I learned that a lot of times, it doesn’t have anything to do with the character. For instance, Sailor Boy and I really like the show Joan of Arcadia, which starred Amber Tamblyn, who plays Tibby in Sisterhood. (I have also said elsewhere that I think Amber Tamblyn would play an excellent Amy, were there to be a movie of Secret Society Girl.) So I was predisposed to like Tibby, especially since I found her character so like Joan. (At one point, I turned to SB and said, “this is kind of like a really long episode of JoA, isn’t it?) So yeah, she was a little rebel-without-a-causey, and I thought the snob attitude was a bit offputting (especially since most of the people she supposedly interviewed also don’t live anywhere near Bethesda Maryland, which is a really, really ritzy suburb of D.C.) but I liked her anyway.
I also like the show Ugly Betty, which stars America Ferrera, who plays Carmen in Sisterhood. I find Ferrera to be one of the most charming young actresses around. I like seeing her on screen. I like her voice. I like her presence. I just like watching her. So I was predisposed to like Carmen’s character, and that was BEFORE she proceeded to have the most sympathetic storyline in the whole movie and Josh Lyman started being a total asshole to her. (I also like Brad Whitford.) She’s SO pretty. I mean, they obviously can’t hide how cute she is in Betty, and so have to make up for it by dressing her in ridiculously unfashionable clothes (come on, just because she’s “ugly” doesn’t mean she’s blind!), but here she gets to be really cute.
As I mentioned previously, I don’t watch The Gilmore Girls, so I’m not very familiar with Alexis Bledel. I had a really rough time getting behind the character of Lena in general, and I suspect it’s due in equal parts to how little I empathized with her situation (come on, a fifty year old feud about fish? If someone had murdered someone, I’d understand all the animosity…) and how little I liked Bledel’s portrayal. I’m not really tempted to give GG another try, even though I hear that there’s this whole secret society plotline once Rory goes off to Yale. Question: does she always talk like that?
Finally, we have Bridget, played by Blake Lively. Now, I was not a fan of Lively’s character in Accepted. Nothing against the actress. And again, nothing against the actress here, but wow, did I not like Bridget. I felt a bit sorry for her at the end, but mainly I think she was the architect of her own unhappiness. However, I really liked Lively’s portrayal and hope I get to see her do a character I actually like one of these days.
Predisposition counts for a lot — if you are expecting to like a character because of previous work, you’re probably more likely to do so, and vice versa. And sometimes, no matter how much you are told to like a character, if something about the voice is off to your ears, you won’t. And at the same time, if the voice is right, you may hate to love a character. Hmmmm…
I’m turning in my copyedits today, and then I’m free as a bird! Look at me! Whee! (except for that proposal due next month. And that critique I owe my C.P. And those revisions on the other proposal. Sigh. Never done…) However, I am free to write things like “email” and “towards” and “missing person’s report” (apparently, it’s “missing persons report. Who knew?”) — at least, until the next round of copyedits.
In pertinent and less-punch-drunk news, Tobias Buckell has posted the results of the survey on how many novels authors wrote before getting published. Apparently, 35% of respondents sold their first. Huh. I thought it would be about half that. I know very few authors who sold their first book, even fewer who sold their first first. He’s kept the survey open, though, so I wonder how it will shake out as time passes. Anyway, a big thank you to Tobias for running his remarkable and useful polls! It’s an invaluable service to the industry.
In keeping with such good works for writers, and because I got a whole bunch of requests in the comments section and over email, here are links to new surveys on print run and sell through percentages. Totally anonymous, of course.
Please take a minute and fill it out, for one or more of your releases. Pass it on! Tell your friends. Post to your blog! Go wild! (Sorry, I warned you I was a bit punchy after turning in those edits.)
The surveys are designed with novel length fiction in mind — please do not respond with information on short story collections and anthologies unless they are single-author. Also, the surveys are about print run, which of course is not an applicable phrase to POD or e-books. Perhaps someone with more knowledge of that facet of the business will design a survey with sales statistics applicable to those kinds of publishing.
Thanks so much for participating, and special thanks to JA and SF for egging me on until I got off my duff.
So is anyone reading the “hook” Crapometer postings on Miss Snark’s blog? I’ve skimmed a few (she says, eyeing her mountain of copyediting) and though I’m not quite sure what she means by a hook (something like a back cover blurb, I’m thinking), it’s fascinating to get a glimpse of what agents have to go through in their query slush every day. I wonder how they do it without losing all sight of what’s really good?
She’s passed on things that I personally, have found interesting, and requested stuff that left me cold. I guess that’s why you query a lot of agents, huh? There’s no accounting for taste. I am mystified by how many have sent her hooks for genres she knows nothing about. (Often, the science fiction and fantasy hooks have responses like, “Um, sounds good, but I really know nothing about this genre.”) I don’t know how helpful her response is to them. It also gives you insight into how many people have truly wacky story ideas. (And how many people have hoary ones.)
And of course, it makes you look at your own work in a whole new light. I honestly have no idea what Miss Snark would say about the hook in my query letter. Probably that it sounds too much like a synopsis. And yet, plenty of people found it hooking indeed. If I cut it back to the first two paragraphs, you basically have my 176-word back cover blurb:
Elite Eli University junior Amy Haskel never expected to be tapped into Rose & Grave, the country’s most powerful–and notorious–secret society. She isn’t rich, politically connected, or…well, male.
So when Amy receives the distinctive black-lined invitation with the Rose & Grave seal, she’s blown away. Could they really mean her?
Whisked off into an initiation rite that’s a blend of Harry Potter and Alfred Hitchcock, Amy awakens the next day to a new reality and a whole new set of “friends”–from the gorgeous son of a conservative governor to an Afrocentric lesbian activist whose society name is Thorndike. And that’s when Amy starts to discover the truth about getting what you wish for. Because Rose & Grave is quickly taking her away from her familiar world of classes and keggers, fueling a feud, and undermining a very promising friendship with benefits. And that’s before Amy finds out that her first duty as a member of Rose & Grave is to take on a conspiracy of money and power that could, quite possibly, ruin her whole life.
The blurb of my second book clocks in at 164 words: Amy Haskel made it into elite Eli University. then she made it into the ultraselective Order of Rose & Grave. Now a senior, Amy is looking her future squarely in the eye — until someone starts selling society secrets. When a series of bizarre messages suggest conspiracy within the ranks and a female Knight mysteriously disappears, no member of Rose & Grave is safe… or above suspicion.
On her side, Amy has a few loyal Diggirls — her fellow female Rose & Grave Knights. Against her? Certainly it’s a group of Rose & Grave’s uberpowerful patriarchs who want their old boys’ club back. As new developments in her love life threaten to implode and the case of the vanished Diggirl gets weirder by the moment, Amy will need to use every society trick she’s ever learned in order to set things right. Even if it means turning to old adversaries for help — or discovering that the real foes are closer than she’d thought…
If I were not, as mentioned, up to my eyebrows in copyedits, perhaps I’d be interested in having a discussion about the challenges inherent in writing a hook to a sequel for a cold audience. You’re trying to capture the attention of people who haven’t read the first one as well as those who have. ________ **Sidenote** I just went to the Harry Potter books pages at Amazon to check out the blurb for Chamber of Secrets. Has anyone read the low-star reviews there? OMG. The ones about “witchcraft is evil, these books are satanism” are to be expected, but I was shocked by how many said things like, “I can’t understand why anyone (or, sometimes, the writer’s little brother) wants to waste their lives READING. Seriously, just watch the movie. Who has time to WASTE READING some STUPID BOOK?” That crack you heard was my bookworm’s heart breaking into little bits (SB would like to point out how weird it is that the kids actually came on Amazon to express their ire at anyone who chooses to read.) Also, there are a lot of people who seem to be very angered by what they call the blatant “snake prejudice” in this book. I’m so not kidding. PSA of the day. __________
The other thing I’d do, if I had the time, would be to play around with hooks for my friend’s books. This is actually a favorite pastime of mine, though usually I practice verbal pitches, and upon occasion, fake Publisher’s Lunch announcements. (The latter are usually more like loglines, and yes, I’m a big believer in the power of positive visualization.) Last year, I ran a workshop on pitches for the Romance Divas. I think pitches/hooks/whatever are a lot of fun. (Plus, I’m on the Marley Gibson Pay it Forward Plan, which means that it’s my duty to pitch buddys’ books from here to eternity.) I can see where agents find excitement in taking a great story and figuring out just how to sell it to the audience of editors.
I read a proposal recently that blew me away. I’m already constructing pitches for it in my head, copyedits be damned. Of course, it would help if it was done, so I could talk about the plot. (Hint, hint.)
Right, where was I? Oh, yes, being embarrassed about how quickly my copyediting knowledge has degraded since April. This was easier last year because I was spending five days a week studying this stuff. I wonder what knowledge took its place in my brain. I’m hoping its writing stuff, but I’m a little scared it might be various technical jargon about wedding dress shapes, necklines, and train styles… or perhaps favorite Veronica Mars quotes.
I’m eyebrow deep in copyediting Under the Rose for the next few days, so this is going to be quick.
In passing, here are some things I’ve learned care of my fabulous, fabulous copyeditor:
The thing I refresh approximately 694 times a day is called “e-mail” not “email.
It’s “Daily Kos” not “The Daily Kos.”
One should always double check, when revising lyrics, that one has not ruined the follow up joke that is based on the earlier draft of said lyrics.
The copyediting package include a style sheet that list all the proper names used. People in my book with names starting with O include: Odin, Orpheus, and Oscar the Grouch. I guess Odile is listed under her last name. (Yep, there she is, under D for “Dumas” and right after Darth Vader, Dickens, Dimmesdale, and Nancy Drew.) People in my book with names starting with V include: Cruella DeVille, The Virgin (Mary), and Lord Voldemort.
I can’t tell you how much fun I have with this list. Sailor Boy has gotten sick of my recitations. “Look honey: the Ks are Kali, Kandinsky, King Kong and Kurtz!” It’s totally my favorite part about copyediting.
Topic shamelessly stolen from Ally Carter, though she wants me to pick just one, and I can’t. How about a top ten:
10. Santa Claus: The Movie. I don’t know what it is about this film. Certainly it’s not Dudley Moore’s rather creepy portrayal of an elf. I just love the idea of the Santa Claus origin myth, love how all of the things about him are explained, how the beautiful relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Claus is portrayed, and the great costumes and colors. I pretty much lose interest after we get past the origin part of the story and into the plotline involving John Lithgow trying to steal Christmas. But I love the whole first half so much. (The scene where he reads “The Night Before Christmas” and gets all freaked out about whether or not his belly shakes and goes on a diet never fails to slay me. “Jelly? Jelly!?!?!” “Well… the cookies…” says Mrs. Claus.)
9. Bad Santa. This movie is dirty, mean-spirited, gross, and utterly hilarious. I adore it. Billy Bob Thornton plays a pathetic, alcoholic safecracker posing as Santa Claus in order to plan a mall heist. Laura Graham is his Santa-fetish girlfriend, and John Ritter’s last role is as his uptight boss. You’ll hate how hard you laugh, and how much you love it.
8. The Small One. I feel vaguely guilty for including this after the previous entry, because it’s one of the sweetest, most tender, most beautiful holiday movies of all time (and also probably the closest to religious that I’ll be getting on this list), and also for picking it over other Disney holiday cartoon fare such as the Scrooge McDuck Christmas Carol (though I have a lot of those on this list) and The Nightmare Before Christmas, which is also brilliant. But I can’t even think about this movie without wanting to cry. It’s a short film about a young boy from Nazareth who loved his old donkey, Small One, and what happens when his father forces him to sell his donkey at the market. Yep, here come the tears.
7. It’s a Wonderful Life. Sorry folks. It’s a classic for a reason. I admit I was on the bandwagon of “overrated” for a really long time with this film, but over the past few years, I’ve started to love it more and more with every viewing, and now it’s one of my favorites. It’s a gorgeous screenplay, and lovingly acted and directed. You can tell everyone involved in this production believed in it. That scene, where Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart kiss on the phone? *swoon*. And “I don’t want any plastics and I don’t want any ground floors, and I don’t want to get married to anyone, ever! Do you hear me?” *swoon, swoon!*
6. While You Were Sleeping. Not often thought of as a Christmas movie, but it is, and it’s a very Christmasy Christmas movie at that. I love it, not only for the central romantic story, which is really sweet and really funny and really romantic, but for all the awesome secondary characters, including Peter Boyle (R.I.P.) as the patriarch of a loving, close-knit family. I also love it as a writer, because it’s a wonderfully structured screenplay. I can’t figure out why I find this movie so utterly charming. It’s a bit predictable and cliched, but in a totally forgiveable “this is a romantic comedy, and it’s going exactly where you think it is, but isn’t it fun?” kind of way.
5. A Christmas Carol (sometimes called Scrooge) starring Alastair Sim. This is my father’s favorite version of the story, and over the years, it has become my favorite as well. It’s certainly the darkest take on Scrooge. Alastair pulls out all the stops. His conversion at the end comes across almost like madness, and throughout the film, the focus is always, always, always on him, his expressive face, his almost palpable despair… It’s amazing.
4. Scrooged. I really love any and all versions of the Dickens novella, even the one starring Vanessa Williams as “Ebony Scrooge,” but this one might be my favorite adaptation. Bill Murray is a perfect Scrooge (er, Frank Cross), and the supporting cast of Karen Allen, Alfre Woodard, Carol Keene, and Bobcat Goldthwait are phenomenal. It’s funny and dark and oh so eighties.
3. The Ref. Another rather dark Christmas film about a cat burglar who takes a dysfunctional family hostage on Christmas Eve. This is the first time I think I ever saw Kevin Spacey in a starring role, and it remains my favorite of his movies. He’s SOOOOOO good in this film. “Excuse me! The corpse still has the floor!” Denis Leary is brilliant, as is Judy Davis, and the rest of the cast. The script is phenomenal and it ends up being really quite touching. And yet, more than touching, it’s laugh out loud funny. A perennial favorite in my family (where we really go for the sick humor.)
2. Holiday Inn. I like this movie more than the very similar White Christmas. Danny Kaye’s dancing is phenomenal, no doubt about it, and Rosemary Clooney kicks ass in her part, but Holiday Inn has more spectacular dancing, better songs, and a more comprehensible (if less emotional) plotline. Here, Bing plays a performer-turned-farmer whose engagement to his female (brunette, the vixen!) co-star was broken when the other partner in the act, Astaire, stole her away. Now, Bing is trying to start an inn open holidays only, and hires an up-and-coming blonde to be his new co-star. Astaire, fresh from having his heart trampled on by the brunette (karma is a killer), now bursts back on the scene and tries to steal the blonde in a series of increasingly showstopping dance sequences (one where he performs a dance off with fireworks). It’s also the debut of the song “White Christmas,” and a much better use of it. I watched it last week, and the romances really don’t make any emotional sense (they fall in and out of love at the drop of a hat), but the musical numbers are still so amazing that I don’t care. I’ve always wondered why it’s not as popular as WC (along with this number, the two films share a set), and think, perhaps, it’s because WC takes place entirely during the holidays, while HI covers a whole year. Also, HI has a rather offensive blackface number that is often edited out in television broadcasts. But it’s still a great flick. I’d watch it just for the firework number, but Astaire’s “drunk dance” and Bing’s Freedom song and rendition of White Christmas are terrific as well.
1. A Christmas Story. This is one of those stories that I wish I’d written. A man recounts his childhood Christmas in the 40s and his all-consuming desire for a bb gun despite the common warning that he’ll “shoot his eye out.” I love it; every line, every scene, every shot. No wonder they now they show it to packed houses at the American Film Institute’s Silver Theater nearby. No wonder they show it for 24 hours straight on television on Christmas Day. Perfect characters played to perfection and directed perfectly to a perfect script in a perfect production. I triple dog dare you to say you don’t love this film.
I realize that I have a somewhat odd taste. I never was a huge fan of Miracle on 34th St., though I don’t actively dislike it. Ditto with the animated Grinch Who Stole Christmas. I do think I actively dislike the Rankin-Bass claymations, however. Sailor Boy wants to know why I didn’t mention his favorites: A Charlie Brown Christmas, Home Alone, and Gremlins 2. My mother, who, conveniently enough, shares a similar taste in Christmas films as me, has a few other favorites in The Bishop’s Wife, The Santa Clause, and (oddly and inconceivably) Jingle All the Way. And Marley adores Love Actually.
Science fiction author Tobias S. Buckell is running a survey on his blog asking published novelists to say how many books they wrote before selling their first novel, and if their first written novel was the one they sold. If you’re an author, please take a minute (it just takes a minute) to fill out the survey. I think (thanks to Justine, who tipped me off about the survey) that it would be great to hear from as many genres as possible. So if you want to spread the word on your own blog… I know we get a lot of romance writers here.
(Buckell actually did an excellent, Brenda Hiatt “Show me the money!” type survey for science fiction authors about what kind of advances SFF houses were paying and whether or not an agent was worth the money. It’s here. Great stuff.)
For the record, I wrote four complete novels, a novella, and a couple of false starts/proposals before I sold my first book. The first book I sold was incomplete at the time of sale, but ended up being my fifth book. I’ve now written six books.
I’m really looking forward to seeing the results of this survey, because, unlike some of the respondents on Buckell’s blog, I think that most writers did not sell the first book they wrote (or at the very least, did not sell it first).
Some writers I know feel paralyzed by a need for their first book to be perfect, such that they never end up writing it in the first place. I understand this desire. You think “I am working so hard on our my book. If I think that it won’t make it, why would I bother working on it?” It’s almost necessary to believe it will sell, otherwise it’s difficult to commit yourself to it. That’s why programs like NaNoWriMo can work — they take some of the pressure of writing saleable work off you for a little bit.
(I only figured out shortly before finishing my first book that it wasn’t “the one” — but not even strongly enough to NOT ask for a published author friend’s advice, not strongly enough to NOT edit it or NOT send out a query. But by the time it was rejected, 9 months later, the scales had been lifted from my eyes.)
I’ve spoken before about what I think a first book is. It’s like a first pancake. But at the same time, I understand the need to believe otherwise — as long as you don’t let it ruin your writing. Do not let the need to sell keep you from the story. Protect the work. (This is my new mantra, by the way. I’m thinking of a tattoo: Opus Contege.) The work is more important than the industry, than the reviews, than the trolls, than the contest judges. Opus contege.
And some people do sell their first books, either right away or years later. Which is great for them. Fabulous! I’m very happy. But I don’t think it’s common. (And I don’t think it matters, because publishers slap “first novel” on a person’s first published novel, no matter what else they’ve got under their bed. Which isn’t, by the way, “misleading,” because the point is to signal to the customer if there’s anything else you can buy by the person, which there isn’t.) But I’m interested to see if I’m right.
And I’m interested to see how many people care. I know if I say that it doesn’t mean anything if you sell your first, someone who hasn’t visited Fezziwig’s Xmas party for a while will say it’s because I didn’t sell my first. (Seriously, have a truffle. Or some peppermint bark. Eggnog?) But I’ve never spent any time thinking about it. I know some people who’ve sold their first, some who haven’t, some who did and wished they hadn’t, some who did years later, and I never thought it had any bearing on talent. Did anyone else read that article in Wired discussing “experimentalists” vs. “conceptualists?” Interesting, what? Of course, I don’t know how much you can relate it to selling the first book you write, since sometimes that doesn’t have as much to do with quality as whether or not your editor is married/pregnant/offered a job in Sri Lanka.
Honestly, I think I’m more in awe of people who didn’t sell their first, or their sixth, or their twenty-fifth (unless we’re talking about the people who sold their first novel after years and years of rejection). Because those people stuck to it. They weren’t swayed by rejection letters or fickle markets, or editors leaving or lines shutting down or idiots telling them they sucked. They believed in themselves, and their work, and in getting better, and in getting out there. Persistence in this business is so hot.
I know I’m usually the first on the “writing statistics suck” bandwagon, because I do think it means people focus on the wrong things. Like thinking that if an agent gets 20,800 queries and requests 54 manuscripts, that you have a 1:385 chance of getting a request, when in actuality, most of these people have a pretty terrible chance, and a tiny percentage have a reallly good chance. But this survey of Bucknell’s doesn’t fall under the statistics umbrella so much as the myth busting umbrella. In this case, it’s the myth of the overnight sensation, the person who scribbles the book idea on the back of a napkin and is offered a million bucks. So statistics on real world first advances and real world writing career trajectories are actually helpful for the writer, so they can make realistic assessments that will actually help them with career planning. All hearing the stats on manuscripts submitted to manuscripts requested to manuscripts represented to manuscripts bought does is make them stress about their submission.
So, go respond to the survey. I’m eagerly awaiting the results. Meanwhile, back to the peppermint bark.
For the past two years, I’ve been keeping an ongoing list on my blog of what books I’ve read throughout the year. This year, I added little codes like “authors new to me” or “YA novels.” You can see them in the borders of this blog.
I started it in 2005 as a lark, but I wound up really loving the exercise, and what I learned from it. Not only does it help me remember books I read and when I read them, but it helps me remember all the books I read MORE. I also like making myself accountable for reading more books. It’s one of my favorite things about keeping this blog. (On the other hand, I find I’m much lazier about updating which movies I’ve seen, so I probably won’t try that again next year.) Last year, I read 52 books, one for each week. This year, I made the same goal, and surpassed it. (We’ll see by how much on December 31st.)
For 2007, I think I’m adding an extra challenge to my “book a week” diet. More classics. Despite my literature degree, I find I have a big gaping hole in my education where certain classic novels belong, so I’ve slowly started making a list of Classic Novels I Never Read But Probably Should. Here’s the list so far: Moby Dick East of Eden The Trial Catch-22 The Catcher in the Rye Jane Eyre anything by Virginia Woolf
I’m sure I’ll add more as the year goes on. (I’m equally sure I’ll get suggestions and warnings here; feel free).
In addition to the classic novels, I already have a whole bunch of “on deck” books to read in the coming year. My TBR pile is pretty much out of control.
Somewhat later, I’ll be posting my thoughts on my favorite books of the year, and also, because it’s December and that makes me reflective, I’ll post about my thoughts, a year later, of books from 2005.
