November Happenings

I’m not doing NaNoWriMo this year, but I am participating in some challenges.

November Poem-A-Day:

Every November, in the same spirit as NaNoWriMo, Robert Lee Brewer (editor for Writer's Digest) hosts a Every November, in the same spirit as NaNoWriMo, Robert Lee Brewer (editor for Writer's Digest) hosts a Poem-A-Day Challenge. Each day he’ll post a prompt on his Poetic Asides blog, and the task is to write a poem based on that prompt.

NaBloPoMo:

National Blog Posting Month helps set the habit of blogging by posting every day for one month. If you’re interested, you can sign up through November 5th. There are even prizes! I figure if I write posts in advance, then my weekends are still free—just hit publish and I’m good to go.

PubSub3rdFri

This is more a year round commitment than a challenge. PubSub3rdFri means submitting something every month, on the third Friday, and was started by Joan Y. Edwards. I definitely need to get back into regular submitting, for both poetry and fiction, and this should give me the encouragement and support I need.

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In addition to these challenges, my poetry group is staring a group blog in anticipation of the publication of our anthology. More on that later.

Busy can be good. Hopefully this birthday month will be a good one. What are your plans this month? Good luck to everyone who is doing NaNoWriMo or any of the other creative challenges.

Tuesday Tally: YA vs Adult

Goals for this week:

• query more agents
• dig back into TC
• write a couple chapters for Rt100D

 

In the last Secret Agent contest hosted by Authoress, the agent said my opening of EotF felt fairy tale-esque, and that she wasn’t convinced the mood works well for adult fantasy. (My entry here) Sometime this last month, I read that a fantasy author of YA books said she wrote for adults, but publishers chose to call it YA. (I can’t for the life of me find the link again, so don’t want to say the author, as I could be remembering wrong and don’t want to misrepresent. If you know who might have said this, or where, feel free to speak up.)

These two things got me thinking. Should I try calling it Young Adult? Traditional fantasy doesn’t seem as strict on protagonist age for the label. Robin McKinley’s books are YA, and she’s always been one of my inspirations. But only one of my other stories (current and planned) have a teen protagonist, so there is a fear of debuting with a YA and following up with one that is not.

Here’s the breakdown for my other books. Title : Main Character(s) : age

• Race to 100 Deaths : Tilara : 30 (maturity=20 human yrs)
• Trinity Coven : Kaelin and Anton : 25 and 26
• Fly With Me : Vincent : 20
• Sienna’s Story : Sienna : 37
• The Blazing Princess : Aurora : birth to 16 (most likely to fit YA)

In Emergence of the Fey, Marian starts at 14, and ends at 20. Barely out of teen range. The secondary POV, Jex, is five or six years older. There are some training years that I could speed up if I wanted to shorten the timeline and end with Marian still a teen.

I never considered EotF a young adult novel. Then again, I rarely think in those terms when it comes to fantasy. As long as I’ve been reading fantasy, I’ve been reading from whatever shelf I wanted. Even now, the only reason I care if a book is Teen or Adult is where in the store do I go to buy it?

I know in the end it’s not up to me, it’s up to the marketing department. Which may be a non-issue if EotF is never picked up. So the question now is what label will best hook an agent?

Agent Update

Last night I got a response from the agent I pitched to. Form rejection. :-( Oh well. Time to get the query train going again.

EotF musings

Now that I’m revisiting EotF, I’ve been wondering if there are other ways to make it stronger. I had a light bulb “what-if” moment, and shared it with my husband (my backboard to bounce ideas off of). My idea:

 

What if magic did have that chance to drive someone crazy if it remains untrained? (Not just a lie the Enchanter Council spreads.) The boys are trained when they are eight, so it prevents anyone from knowing the possibility for them is there. But females that escape the testing go mad: a self-fulfilling prophecy. What takes mental training/overcoming is the sensation of spiders crawling over the skin every time enchanter magic is cast.

 

I know I would go crazy if it felt like bugs crawling on me, but nothing was actually there.

 

My husband had a few suggestions to enhance the idea even more, and agrees that this will add more “incentive/motive/danger for various aspects of the story.” The other part of the idea is Marian getting her own moon spider. Currently, only the higher up enchanters have moon spiders. I need to figure out how Marian is going to acquire hers.

 

So, I need to work in some craziness and spiders with my description, and write an entire new chapter for Marian’s spider bonding, and a few more scenes. It’s not a lot, but I think it will improve it a lot. Querying is on hold until I finish these new revisions.

Query results

Winners have been announced for Authoress’s query contest. I really appreciated the feedback from Jodi Meadows, as well as other blog commenters. For the purpose of the contest, we submitted a query and first 250 words of the manuscript. Mine was number #38.

 

I got nine comments on my query. Four were hooked (though one normally didn’t read the genre). One liked it “with reserve”, and thought it could be tightened. Four were not hooked (including Jodi).

 

Overall, the concept didn’t seem to be the problem. Advice leans toward tightening/more focus, and dry/lack of voice. Hopefully in fixing the first issue, I can bring out my voice more. And fixing the query is easier than fixing the central concept and conflict.

It was also pretty universal to drop the three sentences about Jex and romance which felt tagged on; which is fair, as they were… It was my second version query, that I tried to spin to more romance oriented agents.

 

Jodi also commented that (judging from the opening page) the manuscript starts too soon. I disagree, but that’s harder for me to judge (being the author and all). But if enough agents aren’t hooked by my query and sample pages, then I may have to reconsider. For now, I’m going to revise my query and send it out again.

 

The query is still open for comments if you want to leave any, here or on the contest entry post. All feedback is welcome. :-)