On the merry road to get FINDERS KEEPERS published, I certainly expect to hit a few–okay many–snags along the way. I know it’s innevitable. Poo-poo happens.
But here’s a doozy.
Last month I attended a writer’s conference at in NYC, and while the conference overall was just so-so, the final session of the day was called "2
pages, 2 minutes," wherein writers–in advance of the conference–could submit 2 pages of their novel. If selected at random, it would be read aloud in On the merry road to get FINDERS KEEPERS published, I certainly expect to hit a few–okay many–snags along the way. I know it’s innevitable. Poo-poo happens.
But here’s a doozy.
Last month I attended a writer’s conference at in NYC, and while the conference overall was just so-so, the final session of the day was called "2
pages, 2 minutes," wherein writers–in advance of the conference–could submit 2 pages of their novel. If selected at random, it would be read aloud in front of the attendees (the writers), and the panel of 3 agents would either say "hey, great, send me more to read; I like what you’ve got so far" or else essentially give you the gong, and explain why they stopped reading.
This is actually a pretty cool opportunity for writers looking to get published, because here you have the chance to make a splash with agents who–like it or not–are the gatekeepers to getting published. For the most part–although not always–you need an agent before you can get published, so agents actually wield some significant influence in the publishing world.
So like most of the writers who attended, I submitted my first 2 pages, and got tremendous early feedback from the event coordinator (also a writer), and went in to thet session feeling pretty good. I submitted the one-page prologue to FINDERS KEEPERS that opens the novel, and then a few paragraphs from CHAPTER 1.
Like most of the attendees, I wanted my pages to be selected at random, and once read aloud, to have the agents go, "Dude! Wow! You HAVE to send me more. I love this! Let’s do lunch!"
This final panel lasted an hour. And with only 5 minutes left, mine still hadn’t been selected. Making it worse was that, while the agents definitely gonged some writers, they really did ask others to send in complete manuscripts, and really gushed over some of the work read aloud. And some of it was quite good.
Which really made this even more torturous. If it can–and did–happen for some of these writers, then it’s just GOTTA happen for me.
But tick tock. Times running out.
And then …
I hear the first few words read aloud, and I know the work is mine. My skin tingles, my heart races a little.
This is it. This is it.
But when I hear the girl read my work, she’s got the voice all wrong. It doesn’t sound right. It’s not her fault, she’s never seen this material before, but it just ain’t right. And so a bad feeling comes over me. A very. Bad. Feeling.
It wasn’t that the agents didn’t like my opening?I can handle that–it’s that they took the verbal equivalent of a motorcycle chain and lead pipe and beat me into oblivion. Now, I’m not particularly thin-skinned when it comes to my work being reviewed, but one agent (who I will not name, but will from here on out refer to as TrollSkank) outright mocked and belittled the writing, and took a lot of glee in doing so.
But at least I paid $170 for it and it was in public, so I had that going for me.
Ahh. Good times. Good times.
Now, here’s where I had to dig a little deep and just shake it off. Which took a few days, I admit. I was black and blue for a while.
Regardless of the agent panel’s "critique," such that it was, I still felt that it was important to take their reactions seriously, even, as another I writer I’ve spoken to said: "Screw agents. They only know how to sell books. They don’t know shit about writing them." Which very well may be true at lof of the time. And bless him for saying so.
The better news is that two other agents I met at the conference earlier that day had asked me for early chapters of FINDERS KEEPERSl based on the premise alone, so I was pretty jazzed up about that. But I would hate for them to reject a book they might otherwise like and support just because my first two paragraphs don’t grab them.
So I consulted a few writers and took another look myself, and in the end, I removed the prologue. Since the earliest days of FINDERS KEEPERS I’ve had mixed reactions about it. For every person that liked the prologue another either didn’t like it or thought I didn’t need it. It’s been split 50-50. So I decided to lose it, and make a minor tweak to CHAPTER 1.
Indeed, I took a public flogging, but I got something out of it. First, I was alerted (although harshly) to the fact that my opening was not quite working as well as I’d hoped. Good to know. Second, it was a great reminder about expectations, which I wrote about in more detail in my last blog entry. Had my expectations about the panel been tempered from the outset, getting my butt kicked liked that–and in public!–probably wouldn’t have stung so much. It was a good reminder not to get ahead of myself.
And third, when FINDERS KEEPERS gets published–and it will–I’m going to take a signed copy, find that little TrollSkank, and shove it right up her … well, you get the idea.
Hey, I’m a pretty forgiving guy. But I won’t forget …
Post edited by: rcolchamiro, at: 2006/12/13 06:54:evil:
Post edited by: rcolchamiro, at: 2006/12/13 07:03
Post edited by: rcolchamiro, at: 2006/12/13 14:03
