Marshmallow Persistence

Guys, I’m a marshmallow. It’s Veronica Mars movie release day—P.I. day—and I thought it’d be good to confess that and to tell you why we writers (or, hey, all of you with dreams) can never give up. If you’re a marshmallow too, then you already know where I’m going with this. If you’re not, give me a few paragraphs and I’ll show you.

Veronica Mars was a TV show awhile back about a teenage girl who helped her father with his P.I. business. I loved it because Veronica was the teenager I wanted to be—smart, confident, cute, sarcastic. The show lasted for three seasons before it got canceled. Thing is, the final episode wasn’t a finale—it wasn’t an episode where everything gets tied up in a neat little bow so you can move on with your life. There was no bow, not even ribbon from which to make a bow. It just ended.

I wanted more, other fans wanted more, the cast and crew (Rob Thomas, Kristen Bell, et al.) wanted more…and for years they tried to get it. YEARS with no success, but they didn’t give up. Finally, last March Rob Thomas launched a Kickstarter campaign—two million dollars raised in one month and Warner Brothers would make a Veronica Mars movie. Well, we marshmallows with our dreams of more Veronica Mars stepped up and donated way more than two million in way shorter than a month. (You can Google this if you want more information.) And a year later, today the Veronica Mars movie is released.

For years, I’ve been trying to get an agent and publish a book. I queried a manuscript when I got out of college and failed epically because I didn’t know what I was doing (and the MS was crap). I gave up, stopped writing, and didn’t think about my dream for a few years. Stupid me.

I can’t say it was the whole Veronica Mars movie thing that got me dreaming again, but maybe it was. Last fall, I queried another manuscript, thinking I knew what I was doing…but I still didn’t. I had too much to learn and I’ve spent months since then learning it. Maybe I haven’t learned it all, but another query failure hasn’t stopped me from dreaming, not this time.

Now, I’m submitting my third manuscript to contests, most recently to Brenda Drake’s Pitch Madness. I don’t know if I’ll make it to the agent round because—like I said in my last post Why the Odds Don’t Matter—it’s not about my odds but about whether slush readers/agents want what I’ve written and how polished my writing is. I’m a realist and I’ve been reading the slush tweets about all the awesome entries, so I’m not sure I’ll make it. Even if I don’t, that doesn’t mean I’ll give up. I’m going to query.

And if I don’t have query success this time, I still won’t give up. I’ll go back to that MS I queried last fall and make the revisions I know it needs. (See my January post Let’s NOT Start at the Very Beginning if you want to know more on that.) I’ll enter that MS into contests while I write another one. And so on until I either get a book published, my priorities change, or I die. (Morbid, yes?)

I’m a sci-fi girl (who entered a YA sci-fi for Pitch Madness), so whenever I think about how I have to keep going, I think of Galaxy Quest and Tim Allen’s battle cry: NEVER GIVE UP. NEVER SURRENDER. I also think of Rob Thomas, Kristen Bell, Veronica Mars, and how the show was canceled in 2007 and now SEVEN YEARS later there’s a Veronica Mars movie. Dreams sometimes take years to become reality and I’m willing to work at it as long as it takes. I’m not giving up on my dream and I hope you aren’t either.