Rejection? Motivation.

Query rejection emails can arrive in my inbox on any day, but lately they’ve been appearing more frequently on Mondays. That’s not to say I don’t get rejections on other days—when you’re deep in the query trenches, rejections come all the time, sometimes even on weekends—but Mondays are particularly evil. Or so I thought.

This Monday I didn’t get a rejection. I refreshed my email several times, thinking there had been some kind of mistake or technical error, but no email appeared. I was buoyed by hope. What if, this one Monday, an agent was considering my query, stowing it in a maybe pile instead of outright rejecting it? I clung to that hope. (Because without hope, I’d have given up on this whole querying thing long ago.)

Tuesday morning, when I would usually be prepping a new query to a new agent, I was still stuck on thinking this week was different. Why send out a new query when something good, really good (like cupcakes when you’re having an otherwise bad day), might be in the works? So instead of checking my agent list and starting on the next query, I did other things, thinking a request for more pages could show up in my inbox at any time.

Of course, my logic was flawed.

A rejection arrived Tuesday afternoon. It wasn’t a Monday, but it was close enough. (And I should have known better.) It contained the typical response, things like Thank you for querying me, but and This isn’t a good match for me and This business is subjective. I’ve seen all these before, but every time it still hurts, just a little bit. I guess you can’t be desensitized to query rejections no matter how many you get. (Or at least I can’t.)

So, suddenly, I was on the internet, checking the submission requirements for the next agent on my list. Turns out, rejections may be negative, but my drive to keep querying feeds off those rejections. Some days, I need someone to dismiss my manuscript to motivate me to keep going, to keep searching for that one right agent for me and my manuscript. That agent is out there. I have to believe that. It just takes persistence to find him or her.

If nothing else, I’m persistent.

I’ve been at this awhile now and even if things don’t work out with this manuscript, I’m prepping another one. A Twitter writer friend told me that’s what separates those who get published and those who don’t. So many writers who get published had been at this a long time, with multiple manuscripts, polishing their writing and their pitches. Then, one day, they queried the right person at the right time, signed with that agent, and found a publisher. If that’s true, then I’m on the right track. And maybe this next agent on my query list will be the one.

Oliver, McGinnis, & Warga

About five years ago, I was living in downtown Cincinnati and often walked across the river (via bridge, of course) to the Barnes & Noble at Newport on the Levee. I love that bookstore, mostly because it has two levels full of books and a café that overlooks the river and downtown. I often bought a book just to have an excuse to sit in that café and read. Back then, I was reading mostly literary fiction. But the YA section of books was close to the café and one day, a beautiful book cover caught my eye.

I put back the literary fiction I’d found downstairs and bought Lauren Oliver’s BEFORE I FALL instead. I fell into a YA world…and my reading and writing haven’t been the same since. Even five years and hundreds of books later, BEFORE I FALL is still at the top of my favorite list of books, YA or otherwise. It’s the book that made me realize I’m a YA writer, that I want to write and publish a book that gives others all the feels I had for BEFORE I FALL.

So when I heard that Joseph-Beth was hosting a discussion and signing event with Lauren Oliver on March 16, I told my best book friend that we had to go. As a big bonus, the event included authors Mindy McGinnis (who’d signed my copies of NOT A DROP TO DRINK and IN A HANDFUL OF DUST at Books by the Banks last October) and Jasmine Warga (who I’d just heard about through a Book Riot post about YA and physics).

In an uncomfortable wooden chair, my tote of to-be-signed books resting on the floor between my legs, I sat at Joseph-Beth last night and listened to Oliver, McGinnis, and Warga discuss their books, their writing, their author lives. And I couldn’t help but be a little jealous. Because I’m not just an average reader. The ways they interacted with each other, laughing and talking about other writers, their own themes, their ideas—all of those are things I either understand (what with my own writing life, working a full-time job, querying, getting 1K words written each and every day) or want to understand (going on tour, using social media to connect with fans, fans).

Not that I’m writing here to dwell on all that. The more important part came after, when I briefly chatted with each of the authors.

JASMINE WARGA

As she signed my copy of MY HEART AND OTHER BLACK HOLES, I asked Warga not about the darker elements of her story (which I guess draws the majority of reader questions), but about the physics. Was she, like me, a science nerd? The answer was no, with a laugh. Just out of college, she worked for a teaching program where she had to relearn everything she knew about basic math and science to teach her students. The physics elements of MY HEART AND OTHER BLACK HOLES came from that experience.

MINDY McGINNIS

Because McGinnis had signed my copies of her books months ago and because I’d talked to her about them then, we discussed her newer projects instead. Her next book, A MADNESS SO DISCREET, a gothic thriller in an insane asylum, comes out in October. In 2016 she’ll have a dark contemporary thriller (the name of which she didn’t share, though I was too focused on what she said of the story itself to care). I asked how her agent and editor felt about works so different from her other two books. She said they loved them, that they give her free reign when writing…and tell her to scale it back if necessary. I can’t wait to read both.

LAUREN OLIVER

I had three books for Oliver to sign: PANIC, VANISHING GIRLS, and BEFORE I FALL. I started with how much I love BEFORE I FALL. (If you haven’t read it, then you definitely need to give it a go!) Then, I moved on to the fact that I’d finished VANISHING GIRLS the day before. We couldn’t really talk about that one much, not without possibly giving away the huge twist of a climax to nearby readers who weren’t to that part yet. So I asked instead if that nameless climax had been her plan all along or if she’d realized it somewhere along the way. She said she’d been trying to write this book for years, ever since BEFORE I FALL was published, but hadn’t come up with this climax until the most recent draft attempts. I wanted to say that I have one of those books, lurking and churning in the back of my brain, but there wasn’t time and so many other fans awaited their turn with her.

As my best book friend and I left Joseph-Beth last night, I kept thinking about BEFORE I FALL, about the things Oliver, McGinnis, and Warga said. That book I have lurking and churning? It kept coming back to me on my drive home, urging me to find the missing key to writing it, maybe a huge twist of a climax. Because if the current book I’m querying doesn’t find me an agent, maybe that’ll be the book that will. And then maybe someday I’ll have the opportunity to sit on a panel of authors, telling readers and hopeful writers about my stories, just like Oliver, McGinnis, and Warga.

Book Riot Love

I tend to hunker down with my books and writing like it’s winter and everyone else is hibernating. If I have a few extra minutes somewhere, somehow, instead of playing on the internet, I sneak out my latest hardcover book and read a chapter or two. Even when it comes to Twitter, where I love the writing community and author tweets, sometimes I’d rather work on my latest manuscript.

So months ago when my best book friend began talking about this thing called Book Riot, I kind of ignored her. Or, I listened, but not with the intention of checking it out for myself. Finally, in late January, she convinced me to give the thing I try.

Now, I’m addicted. Obsessed. Giddy.

If you don’t know what Book Riot is but if you love books, go here now. Seriously, now. This blog post will still be here in an hour or two when you’ve finally pulled yourself away from Book Riot’s awesomeness. (I even got distracted just opening the site to hyperlink it to this post.)

What’s so great about Book Riot? In general, they talk about books, nerdy book stuff, publishing and writing. In other words, it’s the perfect website for me. But more specifically, what is it about Book Riot that sucked me in like a beautiful black hole? These things:

What Rioters Are Reading posts get me more than almost anything else. The site’s contributors tell you not only what they’re reading, but why they picked it and what they think of it. It’s a dream (nightmare?) for a girl (or boy) with a perpetually growing reading wish list.

Book Fetish posts show pictures of all kinds of book related t-shirts, mugs, posters, jewelry, etc. Not that I’m running out to buy all of it, but I still love looking at it longingly. Or giggling about it. Or scoffing. (Because no way would I ever buy that, otherwise I’d be proclaiming to the world that I’m a book nerd.)

Random posts that catch your attention and lead to random articles you love. Like the one called Give Me Some Money So I Can Open My Dream Bookstore, which is totally a dream for me and my best book friend. Or the one called Read This, Then That: MY HEART AND OTHER BLACK HOLES and Other YA Books That Love Physics, which led me to not only the book in the title (a great book, one whose author, Jasmine Warga, will be at Joseph-Beth here in Cincinnati on Monday evening for a signing), but to several other books. Or this one called Genre Kryptonite: Unreliable Narrators, which is about one of my genre kryptonites and is full of books I haven’t read. (Let’s not get me started on all the YA novels with unreliable narrators that I love.)

The Book Riot Podcast may be the best thing to happen to my ninety minute per day commute for work. Rebecca Schinsky and Jeff O’Neal are like my new book best friends…whom I’ve never met. (Plus, you know, they have no idea who I am.) I’ve learned so much about new books, book tech, and the publishing industry. And that’s not to mention all the books I’ve added to my to-read list. Some of them I’ve already devoured – Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, Dare Me by Megan Abbott, The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri—and there’s a whole lot more I have to stop myself from buying when I walk into a bookstore.

The Quarterly Box speaks for itself. Or, if you’re not familiar with Book Riot, maybe not. BUT, I just got my first box yesterday and it’s awesome, perfect in all its book nerdiness. Click here if you want to know more details. But for now, here’s a picture of my first box. (You know you want one, too.)

Last Minute Contest

I’ve said I’m done with contests, that I’m going to stick to just querying (where I tend to have more success). But I’ve also read so many success stories about writers who found their agents through contests. So many of these writers say that they weren’t sure their manuscript was ready, or that they weren’t really in a contest mode, but they entered at the last minute and—VIOLA!—they get into the contest and sign with an agent. It’s like winning the lottery, maybe a bit more likely, but it has to happen to someone, right?

So last weekend I entered Brenda Drake’s Pitch Madness contest at the (sort of) last minute. I plucked a pitch from earlier contests, modified it a bit, and submitted it with my manuscript’s first 250 words. I was so distracted at the time that I don’t even remember a confirmation page for my entry.

With so much going on in my non-writing life, I didn’t have time to follow the contest feed on Twitter. That was probably a good thing, as I’ve found that all these feeds do is make me nervous and tense. Those reading contest entries do their best to give advice, but also to make teases as vague as possible so as to give the most writers hope that their entries will be picked. Because I wasn’t watching the feed, the week or so before the announcement of the contest winners passed quickly.

Rumor has it that there were 900+ entrants into the contest (or some such incredibly high number). With only 60 spots available, that meant not a whole lot of writers got in. My hopes weren’t high (because, as previously stated, I do better querying than contesting), but I still had to check the winners when they were posted.

I didn’t get in.

I’m not surprised for several reasons. First, my manuscript is much easier to pitch in three or so paragraphs than in 35 words. Also, my first 250 words don’t have a hook at the end; my hook comes at the end of the first chapter, with stuff building up to it that starts in the first 250 words. And like I said, I wasn’t part of the party on Twitter. As much as they say you don’t have to be super active on the internet to get into these contests, I’ve learned that it helps your chances if you are.

But no worries about this loss. I’m doing what I always do when I don’t get into contests like this: I’m taking down the list of agents and sending them queries. Like I said, I have more success when I do that than when I enter contests. So we’ll see what happens.

Ten Years

I’ve lived in Cincinnati for years, but it wasn’t until last January that I discovered all the young adult writers in this city. Now, about a year later, I’m still not sure I’m one of their group (what with not having an agent or published book), but they treat me like I am and I love to support them. That’s why, in the last three days, I’ve been to two book launches.

First, Melissa Landers’ launch of INVADED, the sequel to her YA sci-fi ALIENATED, was Saturday afternoon at the Barnes & Noble in West Chester.

I’d bought ALIENATED before I met her, when I’d found a signed copy at a different Barnes& Noble, and loved it. I’d talked to her a couple of times about her INVADED launch, about the story itself and the writing of it, but Saturday I still enjoyed listening to her discuss other aspects of it. She also read a passage, explained the origins of the alien language in the series, and teased us with a description of her next book, which will release next year.

As much as I was there to support Melissa Landers, I was also there to chat with the other Cincinnati YA authors. I wanted to learn more about their newest books and glean what information I could about writer life on the other side (the agented/published side). I also had a couple of query questions, which they enthusiastically answered. I may not be agented yet, but they’re determined to help me get there.

At some point, one of the authors mentioned that they’d be attending another launch (for another Cincinnati YA author that I hadn’t met) on Tuesday at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Rookwood, my favorite independent bookstore. I promised I’d be there.

Yesterday evening, Joseph-Beth and Kristen Simmons launched her YA dystopian novel THE GLASS ARROW.

Of all that Kristen Simmons discussed—how grateful she is for the support of her friends and family, her other books, her inspiration, how so many people will let you do just about anything for writing research—what I latched onto most was that it took her ten years to find an agent and publish her first book. Ten years. And now, including THE GLASS ARROW, she’s written and published four books.

After she talked and read from her book, once I’d waited in line to get her autograph, I asked her about those ten years. We only had a few minutes (a small line of people behind me), but she expressed her empathy and gave me a few pieces of querying advice. But the biggest thing, the best part? She wrote this inside my copy of her book:

I won’t give up. I’ve said it many times before and I mean it as much as ever. (Never give up, never surrender! as they say in Galaxy Quest.) I’ll keep going to book launches and signings. I’ll keep talking with authors and listening to the advice they give me. And I’ll query and query and query, for as long as it takes, even if it’s ten years.

a FAIREST evening

Once upon a time, at an enchanted bookstore named Joseph-Beth in the enchanted city of Cincinnati…

Okay, actually, I’ll stop there. I’m not great at writing fairy tales; Marissa Meyer, on the other hand, is amazing at futuristic fairy tale retellings. For a long time, I didn’t know this. When the first book in her Lunar Chronicles series was released in January 2012, I saw it out there on bookstore shelves, but never picked it up. The cover had a foot in a gorgeous red shoe, but the leg looked cyborg:

 And cyborgs aren’t my thing. Or so I thought. 

I didn’t pick up the book until almost two years later. I’d entered Brenda Drake’s Pitch Wars contest and one of my mentors suggested reading The Lunar Chronicles because the books (sort of) fit the genre of the manuscript I’d submitted. The mentor said she loved CINDER and thought I would, too. And since she was a Pitch Wars mentor (and you always listen to your Pitch Wars mentors because they’ve just been where you are and know how to get where you want to be, that is agented), I stopped by my nearest bookstore and bought a copy of CINDER.

Of course, it was still a couple of months before I read it (because I always have a stack of books to read that’s as tall as me, if not taller). But when I finally did, I loved it. I went out before I’d finished the first to buy the second (SCARLET) and the third (CRESS).

Knowing that my best book friend loves fairy tales, I recommended she read them, too.  She was as enthusiastic about them as I was, as well as just as disappointed to learn that we’d have to wait until early 2015 for the release of WINTER, the fourth book in the series. Then, in the fall of last year, she told me that she’d read WINTER wasn’t going to be released until late 2015. In its place in early 2015, there’d be a companion book called FAIREST. I wasn’t thrilled about the WINTER wait, but I’m all for authors taking all the time they need to finish a book the way they want to, even if that means delaying a book’s release.

Around the beginning of December, Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati announced that Marissa Meyer would be coming to their store for a FAIREST book discussion and signing on Saturday, January 31. Of course I had to go. Because my best book friend and I learned from Joseph-Beth’s Deborah Harkness signing that the earlier you reserve your copy of the book, the closer you are to the beginning of the signing line, we both called to order our copies within a few days.

What we didn’t know then was that Joseph-Beth was putting together gift bags for the first few people who reserved their FAIREST copy. We discovered this when we arrived last Saturday evening and picked up our books. Though my best book friend’s gift bag had different books, her other swag matched mine: 

Free books and a book signing?! We were ecstatic.

We weren’t the only ones. Even though few others got the gift bags, there were hundreds of people there that night, many of them in gowns and costumes, most of them teenagers (and their parents). By the time Marissa Meyer began speaking at seven, my view from almost the back of the store was this:

And her view of us (taken by a Joseph-Beth employee) was this:

But it didn’t matter that there were hundreds of people there. My favorite thing about these signings is listening to the authors talk about their writing, and Marissa Meyer didn’t disappoint. She was very animated, her voice bright.

Turns out, she decided to set The Lunar Chronicles in New Beijing because the earliest version of Cinderella came from China. Even better, she had been to China. But before she’d decided to set the Lunar Chronicles in China, before she’d even decided to write The Lunar Chronicles, she started with a futuristic version of Puss in Boots, which she had entered into a writing contest years ago. Later, when she began writing the series, she said, she was going to have a fifth book in the Lunar Chronicles series that incorporated her Puss in Boots story. Poor Puss in Boots eventually got cut.

After talking about the series, reading from WINTER, and answering questions, Marissa Meyer began signing books. Because my best book friend and I had called early (and because I have a Joseph-Beth card), we were very close to the front of the line. Even so, as we climbed the stairs to where Marissa Meyer was stationed on the second floor, I still had time to dream that someday, maybe, if I’m very lucky, I’ll have a published book and a book signing. Someday, maybe, I’ll have even a tenth the number of people waiting in line for my autograph. But in the meantime, I was more than happy to exchange a quick hello with Marissa Meyer and go home with these: 

H2O (the novel, not a chem lesson)

I love sci-fi apocalypse stories. Not the post-apocalypse, dystopia ones, but the ones that take place as the world’s falling apart. Like, for example, Stephen King’s THE STAND. Or Rick Yancey’s THE 5TH WAVE, a YA novel about an alien invasion where most of the human population dies. When the sequel to THE 5TH WAVE was released, I rushed to the bookstore to buy it.

Not that this post is about THE 5TH WAVE or its sequel; it’s about the book I discovered because of it. As the girl behind the counter was scanning THE INFINITE SEA, we started talking about apocalypse stories. Her recent favorite, she said, was H2O by Virginia Bergin. She made the premise sound intriguing, so I promptly took out my phone and added the book to my ever-growing Amazon wish list. The cover further got my attention:

Months later, my husband bought H2O for me for my birthday…along with several other books. I started with the other books. Big mistake. Because I ended up loving H2O the most and here’s why:

THE PREMISE

Seven years before the novel begins, an asteroid was headed toward Earth all Armageddon style. Some people got together and shot the asteroid out of the sky…sort of. What they didn’t count on, or didn’t think to even consider, was that the asteroid was already caught in Earth’s gravitational pull and the remnants after the explosion continued to fall toward Earth. Theoretically, those pieces of asteroid shouldn’t have been a problem, but they contained a bunch of extremophile bacteria that, when combined with the water in Earth’s atmosphere, turned deadly for humans. Basically, killer rain. Which in turn got into the water table, poisoning every bit of fresh water on the planet. Most of the human population died in the first rainfall or by drinking tap water shortly thereafter. Ruby, the novel’s narrator, survived.

THE HUMOR

Most apocalyptic stories are dark. Very dark. And that’s not to say H2O isn’t. But I love Ruby’s humor. First off, she’s British. Second, she brutally honest about her own flaws. And third, well, there’s this part about a Carpenters song (playing on a car stereo while Ruby and her stepdad are trapped inside watching people outside die all around them) that had me laughing out loud on my lunch break. (Luckily, the lab was empty.)

THE SCIENCE

Bergin nails the science. I’m always (consciously and otherwise) on the lookout for errors in science in such books and I couldn’t find any here. Bergin’s very specific about the properties of the extremophile. She also details what water’s contaminated, what’s not, and what that means for Ruby and the story’s other characters. Further, the whole time I read, I kept wondering about the future. Was there a way to beat this bug? (Ruby quickly discovers boiling the thing doesn’t kill it.) And if so, would that be something a character would figure out?

THE END

Don’t worry. I’m not going to ruin the end for you. But I loved it…and that’s saying a lot because I’m pretty picky when it comes to endings. For starters, I hate epilogues. (See Harry Potter for a great example of why epilogues suck…because who didn’t know all that stuff anyway?) For another thing, I don’t want sappy endings where everything’s all perfect. Life’s not perfect. But the ending of H2O is.

While I don’t know the name of the girl who mentioned H2O to me that day at the bookstore, I’m happy to pass on her recommendation. If you like dark YA sci-fi with some humor, you should check out Virginia Bergin’s H2O. You’re welcome.