The worst part

The idea was easy.  The writing was easy.  The research was tricker.  Almost every location is real, and I even researched the best wine to go with a meal that was only mentioned in passing.  Finding beta readers hasn’t been that easy.  It takes a lot of time!  Editing and hoping it’s up to par has had me literally up at night.  The query letter has taken a few months and was started before I’d finished five chapter.  As of a few days ago, I have one that satisfies me.

The worst part is has been deciding which agents to query.  I wish this was due to an overwhelming number of to-notch agents who would be blow away by my query.  Alas, it’s the opposite.  I’m afraid few will be, though I know I have a solid story in a popular genre.  I would like someone with either a solid track record or who is new but has solid connections.  Someone do me a solid and send some of these agents my way.  Oh, my attempts at being punny crack me up sometimes.  This is now one of those times.

I’ve found plenty of agents who have been around for many years, yet have few authors or novels listed on their websites.  I’ve found plenty with websites that go to parked pages.  That doesn’t fill me with confidence.  No website is better than one full of GoDaddy ads.  I’ve found about two dozen who I think may be a good fit for me.

There’s the rub.  I do not want to query just any agent who accepts my genre.  If I do not have a feeling we will be a good fit for each other, then I don’t want to waste their time or mine.  But what if I’m passing up the ideal agent because that gut feeling isn’t there?

Several times to far I have come by agents who I believe would be ideal, not only them for me, but me for them.  Then my eyes land on the “does not accept unsolicited queries,” and my excitement deflates.  It’s slow and painful.  Just rip that excitement off and let me move on to the next.

Twice I have found agents who I think would again be a decent two-way match, only to discover that querying multiple agents at the same agency isn’t allowed.  So how do I decide which to attempt, and what if I pick the one who will say no and pass up the one who would have said yes?

I fully expect to query a many agents.  This doesn’t mean that my book is terrible.  Every writer can expect rejections.  The seventh or eighth agent to respond doesn’t know they’re that magical number that should say yes.  This will not discourage me.  You fall, figure out what you’re doing wrong, and get back in the saddle.

This fear about even starting the process is unusual.  But I do understand it.

Starting the query process is the beginning to a hopeful end.  The end goal is representation and a best-selling hit.  Who goes down this road hoping to end up on the clearance rack?  But obtaining that goal means giving up a measure of privacy and anonymity.  I value these things.  Representation and publication would mean saying sayonara to something important to me.  Rejection means I’m unknown a little longer.  Acceptance means my message has a change to be heard on a larger scale and hopefully loved with the same passion millions have for Christian Grey.

I have a very important message in my book.  It’s the entire reason I wrote it, and it’s one that is vital for young women to hear.  While I see my personal life and privacy as something I would have to sacrifice, it’s one I’m willing to make.  It’s not easy, but I’m willing.  I could be offered millions to put myself out there, and would not do it unless the reason was compelling enough.  Money doesn’t drive this.  The message in my book, its importance, is what does.

So the first real step to giving up what I so highly value is finding the right agent and not wasting anyone’s time on ones I feel wouldn’t be right from the start.  If I’m going to take a big leap, I may as well do it right.

Important message

It’s not my intention to turn this blog into a political space or financial column.  However I’ve found out that almost no one I know realizes that, if nothing happens at the top, every single person in the US who has an income will have higher taxes withheld, and it’s not peanuts.  On the low end, you’ll see a 5% HIGHER withholding, if not higher, in addition to cuts to child tax credits and other write-offs that are reduced or eliminated.  One of my friends has said today that if she had known her family will have $240 less per month, then their shopping this month would have been lighter if not entirely cut.  A whole lot of my fiends are, right this minute, judging by the real-time conversing on a Facebook wall, trying to figure out how on earth the can cut their household budgets enough and still get by.  Most of my friends are college-educated people or very intelligent despite having no degree (I don’t have one), and have still been taken off guard.

Here is some information from Forbes about the increase.  

I am sharing this out of concern for how many people haven’t heard of this, and I am very concerned about how many people will get a nasty shock in their paychecks and not know how they’re going to make up for a shortage they weren’t expecting unless there are some last-minute changes in the next week.

Be prepared to have at least 5% of your gross pay less (if you have other deductions, this 5% will be a larger portion of your take-home pay) and hope for the best.

Now soon I hope to have more time to get back to blogging and finishing some critiques.  I’m so busy I forgot about a doctor’s appointment my daughter had this morning.  Whew.

Tragedies

I don’t even know what to say at this point about the shootings this week.  If I didn’t need to wait for the propane guy, I would have been at the Clackamas Town Center mall when the shooter there was, at a bookstore close enough to where that happened that people ran into that store.  I almost decided to risk going and getting back before the propane guy got here, but decided against it.

Then Sandy Hook Elementary…on my god.  I’ve spent the last two days crying and lacking the ability to get mad at my daughter when she misbehaves on purpose.  Those parents would give anything for the chance to deal with their kids acting up.  There are significant others who lost their lovers and sons and daughters who lost their parents, parents who lost their grown children. There are presents that won’t be unwrapped.  Futures that won’t get to happen.  No words I could say could come close to expressing how I feel.  

To be blunt, I’ve lost loved ones to gun shots, so I know the pain.  Honestly I think it was easier losing my dad that it ever could be to lose my daughter.  But pain of loss isn’t an Olympics.  Knowing what they’re going through right now is bringing a lot of it back for me and makes me hurt for them.  There’ll be a lot of disbelief and anger and many walls will be punched.  It will tae years for the world to feel right side up again, but the loss will always be there.  

I also feel for the shooter’s brother who was prematurely and wrongly blamed in the media.  He’s been dragged through hell and there still are hate-pages against Ryan.  So many people think he was involved, though the media has corrected their claims.  Ryan lost a mother and a brother and has been condemned and continues to be.  I think it’s wrong to say he shouldn’t feel sad about losing his brother.  If my brother were to do something like that, I’d be mad at him, but still devastated to lose him, at least to lose the brother I thought I know.  The love wouldn’t just die out.  Ryan needs support too, but has received the opposite.

This is a tragedy all around.

50 Shades of No

When I’ve had minutes here and there where I couldn’t write or critique, basically time at stop lights or laying in bed thinking about how I should be sleeping, I’ve been reading recaps of 50 Shades of Grey at Jennifer Armintrout’s blog.  I’ve already got no interest in reading the series, and even less now.  It’s all the bad things about Edward Cullen magnified and includes literal rape.  If a woman says no and a man keeps going until her physiological responses kick in and she starts getting into it*, it’s still rape.  But somehow Christian Grey is seen by millions as the most ideal man ever.  I’m thoroughly disgusted that these books are some of the best-sellig in history.  Romanticizing abuse is disgusting.

Barely a hundred years ago we fought to escape second-class citizenship to have the right to vote. We’re still fighting for equal rights today. The Violence Against Women Act is about to expire at a time when abuse against women is being held up as the ideal by women…who’ve never been there.

I had to stop reading one of Jennifer’s recaps to go cry. Ana didn’t want sex. She wanted to talk about her relationship with Christian. Did he listen? Nope. He wanted sex, so forced her. I posted on Facebook about this, and some of my own friends said that she got into it, so it was okay. What if she hadn’t? Women have orgasmed through rape-by-stranger rape. They are no less victims. Our bodies can lubricate when we’re raped so that we are injured less. How horrible that physiological functions working to protect us can be used as evidence against us being victims! I was shocked, appalled, and upset that only a couple people agreed with me and the rest who posted saw no problem.

Look, Ana hasn’t been willingly consenting to what’s going on. She’s been manipulated. Sometimes she gives pseudo consent only to avoid worse happening. Consent by manipulation isn’t consent. If a rapist threatens to kill a woman if she doesn’t stay still, is she no longer a victim because she did what was necessary to save her life? Or should we expect her to fight and die to prove she’s a victim?

Shall we start in on how Christian has tried controlling who she sees with threats of violence, has her so terrified that as soon as he enters a room, she’s thinking about how to get away because she’s scared of being hurt, he bought the company she worked for so he could be in charge of her, has her on a technological leash (I’ve had a couple people claim that you can’t track someone like he tracks her – au contraire, iPhones have this “Find My iPhone” app you can use to track movement if the app has been installed on the iPhone, and for evidence of this, google people finding the locations of their stolen iPhones by logging into icloud and taking a look, and similar apps are available for other Smartphones). In later books he has someone buy all her clothes subject to his approval, won’t let her do her own shopping, and bruises her body because he decides he disapproves of the clothing he picked out and it’s her fault. He picks her birth control and gives her no chance to say no (how romantic to wake up and find out your boyfriend has a doctor waiting in his apartment to give you a Depo shot you didn’t say yes to, and sitting still while in shock isn’t consent), and then blames her when it fails. He orders her food for her, picks their activities, where they will live, everything. Ana is expected to obey without question. What control does she ever have in anything? Except to not eat. I’m surprised he hasn’t had a tube shoved into her to force her to eat when she refuses. But her name, Ana, being the pet name for anorexia in the eating disorder community (don’t ask me how I know from personal experience and am still actively struggling), and Ana Steele having clear eating issues including not eating must be coincidental, as if the name of Christian’s Alice-like sister, Mia. Ana and Mia, short for AN[A]rexic and buliMIA. Does he still sound so romantic? This hasn’t even touched on the sex aspects.

Unless you’re intimately aware of how BDSM works, seeing the problems in the sex in the book will be harder to get anyone to understand. I’ll be frank. I used to be entertainment at a certain club in San Francisco. I’ve seen and participated in things that most people would only see on a BDSM video. So yeah, I have some authority on the topic. The lack of trust and level of genuine fear with the “love means not needing a safe word” all crosses the line. But what do I know, according to some friends of mine who’ve never participated in any of this. I have, but they’re 50 Shades fans, so obviously know better than the one who was into real life BDSM in a safe situation. Even without debating this part of it, Christian’s out-of-the-bedroom activities are abusive.

I’m truly concerned that this series and the defense of Christian’s actions are helping keep women in bad relationships.  If a woman, say, Jane Doe, is being hurt like a novel’s victim, but so many others wish they could be the Ana in that book and have Jane’s relationship, how easy do you think it will be for Jane to find support in leaving because she’s leaving a life they want?  It’s going to be isolating being the lone women not wanting that, not wanting what you have, and wondering if there’s something wrong with you for wanting to leave what everyone else wants.  Peer pressure is powerful, even among adults.

I don’t want my daughter to grow up in a world where men are told to be like a rapist and women are told it’s the most romantic thing ever.  We’re sliding backward.  Instead of running more toward women being strong and capable, we’re starting to go back to a time when women are property and need someone to take care of us.  Or at least this is the way of novels.  Let’s not get into politics.  Let’s keep this to novels.  The popular novels read by women and teens (50 Shades has a massive TEENAGE fan-base) have a repeated theme of women needing to be saved.

I’m sure I’ve said it before, so I may be repeating myself in my fuzzy-headed, bleary-eyed state (thank you, red lines, for letting me know when I misspell something), but the sole reason I started writing these books is to counter the dangerous message today’s popular lit is telling women to expect. My goal is to present some popular books that tell women that they deserve better than abuse, and they don’t have to take it, and that it’s perfectly fine to be a woman who opens a can of whoop-ass.  You can be a strong woman and still have times where you let someone you trust be strong for you.  That women don’t have to be “on” all the time, nor should they always be “off.”

Women need an example of a good relationship where a man cares for his significant other without suffocating her, where he may falter and sometimes be a bit overprotective, but that minor imperfections are okay.  Christian Grey refusing to let Anastasia Steele leave her workplace, even though part of her job is running errands, after he bought the company she was working for to control her for her “safety,” is terrible.  Tristan Larocque (rhyming fist names wasn’t intentional – I named Tristan after an old schoolmate of mine) trying to talk Juliette St. Claire into not going on a dangerous journey because he’s afraid she’ll get hurt, but ultimately realizing he needs to respect her and trust her to make decisions like this for herself is good.

Christian and Ana have fights that result in her being “beaten” (her word, not mine) and afraid.  Ana is scared to death of angering Christian.  Tristan and Juliette have some fights, but work through them.  She does have instinctive fear of being hit because of her relationship with Nathaniel, but she trusts that Tristan won’t hurt her.  She is not afraid of him.  Bella was too plain mindless to fear Edward, and accepted his actions without thinking.  Ana is scared to death and often wants to escape when Christian enters the room.  Juliette knows she’s safe, and Tristan doesn’t hurt her.

I’m somewhat worried that Juliette’s relationship with Nathaniel, the abusive one, will be the ones readers will dream about.  I hope that what happens to bring their relationship to an end will signal to readers that he, and everything he does, it wrong.  I want it to open dialog and for women to say that living in fear of being hit isn’t romantic and that rape is terrible.  I can’t even believe that, at the end of 2012, I even have to mention that we should be calling rape a horrible thing instead of idealizing a rapist and condoning rape by doing so.

I also can’t believe that a fanfic version of Edward can be so bad that the original Edward Cullen is Prince Charming by comparison.  Yes, 50 Shades is Twilight fanfic.  It even had the names of Edward and Bella.  The recaps show just how closely the two series parallel each other down to similar names and the non-white friend of Ana/Bella working on her car that was once owned by Jacob’s/Jose’s single parent.  And it manages to be worse, much worse, in every way.

I really hope that, should my books be published, that readers take away the message that abuse is terrible and that they guy they should want all guys to be like is Tristan, not Edward of Christian. If we had more Tristans in the world, we’d have less abuse.  Should we all not be hoping for this?

Now my eyes are watering from exhaustion.  Long day ahead of me starting with going to the Oregon Ballet Theater’s opening performance of The Nutcracker.  Then day-job work, then critiquing and hopefully some time to finish a chapter I’m working on.  Maybe, just maybe, I’ll fit a glass of birthday wine in there.