boys, boys, boys

I like boys. I like stories about boys. Or maybe I should say stories about the relationships between boys (and men). Stories about brothers, either by blood or by choice. Frodo and Sam, Joseph and Hyrum, Morgan and Duncan, Hal and Alan, Jonathan and David, Mike and Fisk, Starsky and Hutch, Holmes and Watson. I just finished reading Clockwork Angel and found two more: Will and Jem. The best stories are about guys who got each other's back.

There is a story my mother told me more than twenty years ago. I was not living at home at the time, so I wasn't around to witness this firsthand, but I promise I'm not making this up. I love this story. The only problem is, I asked my mom about it a few years ago, and she had no idea what I was talking about. She didn't remember it at all, and neither did any of my siblings that I asked about it. But I promise I'm not making it up. I am just related to people with sieves for brains.

One of my brothers did a thing called the 50/20. He had to go fifty miles in twenty hours. One part of me thinks twenty hours sounds like an awfully long time to go only fifty miles. The entire rest of me can't figure out why anyone would walk/run fifty miles in the first place. Whichever brother it was (I have four, but the youngest wasn't even a teenager yet, so I'm taking him out of the running for the moment) was getting close to the end of the fifty miles and was really struggling. He wanted to finish, but he had blisters on his feet, he was beyond exhausted, and was staggering along. One of my other brothers came and went the last few miles with him, literally supporting him to the finish line. I don't even know which two brothers I'm talking about (though I have my suspicions) and I have tears in my eyes. That is one of my favorite stories. It's what Sam did for Frodo, and I cry every time I read that passage. There is something about guys doing things like that for each other that is more touching than any romance.

Seeing as how that is my favorite kind of story, you would think that would be the kind of stories I write. You'd be wrong. I think it's like saying your favorite painting is the Mona Lisa so there's no way you would insult her by making a cheap imitation. However, my understanding is that when you really truly admire something, you can't just let it go (I live next door to an artist who has countless--amazing--renditions of Starry Night all over her home). So, I have a story about two brothers, Tristan and Grey, that I guess I'm going to have to write. I'm working on something else right now (romance, because that isn't a bad thing) but I can't let these boys go. I'm terrified I'll mess it up and won't have another Frodo and Sam at all, but I'm going to do my darnedest to get it right. In the mean time, if you know of any good guys stories, send them my way.

Cutting Off Your Nose...

I have to write a synopsis. And it sucks.

But first, let me say that since March I have written that query letter. And submitted it (once). And was (promptly) rejected. Because the agent doesn't like dragons. So I am not taking it personally, but I am still filled with melancholy because now I have to do it again. (Or I suppose it could be said I should have already done it again several times by now. Whatever.)

Which brings me to this synopsis thing. After I was so very quickly rejected, I was determined to jump right back on the submitting horse and submit again, immediately. There was a place I had been thinking about for a several months, and now (the recently-rejected now) seemed like the perfect time. I had a finished manuscript and a needs-only-personal-alterations query letter, so let's do it! Right?

Not so fast.

I did my research and found that the place that was so perfect in my head wanted snail-mail submissions (I don't know why the thought gives me a rash, but it does) and *gasp* a synopsis (I totally know why that gives me a rash. And boils. And probably fleas.)

I have spent the ensuing months 'looking' for someplace else to submit. I say 'looking' because in all honesty it has been a rather more passive verb taking place. It is somewhat overwhelming to look at the universe of agents and say, "I'll try you." It's kind of like looking at the night sky and naming stars that are not in a constellation. Or shine brighter than all the rest. Or have graffiti on them.

So I have been baby-stepping my way toward finding another place to send a query letter. During my search  I stumbled across http://www.literaryrambles.com/. I'm kind of in love with them over there. (Though I don't visit them nearly as often as I should because I don't do the blog thing nearly as well as I should.) They have a thing called agent spotlight which is freakin' BRILLIANT. I spent my evening scrolling through their list of spotlighted agents and jotted down several names. And then I found THE ONE. The one who will be the next agent I send a query to. And she wants a synopsis. Ugh.

Why, you ask. Why are you sending a query to someone who is going to make you break out in a rash and boils and possibly fleas? Especially since there were other agents who don't want a synopsis at all (one even said they give him hives). I will tell you. She will take non-exclusive submissions, but prefers exclusive submissions for at least one month. And guess what? That whole non-exclusive phraseology in the query letter is another thing that causes me stress. Also, that gives me a legitimate whole month to not have to find somebody else to submit to. Score! And her picture reminds me of my daughter's first grade teacher, whom I like very much. And she says she wants stories about siblings, which mine is. Siblings and dragons.

So it looks like I have to write a synopsis. Better break out the Calamine lotion.

The bear went over the mountain

There's a song I used to sing/listen to when I was a kid that I find depressingly appropriate right now. "The bear went over the mountain to see what he could see. He found another mountain..."

This is me right now. Last night I finished writing my book. Dawson, Cris and Casey and their dragons have arrived at The End, and I must say it is a much better end than it was however many years ago when I finished it the first time. I could hardly sleep last night, I was so excited, and I kind of floated through the day on wings of blissful giddiness. It was a GOOD feeling. Clams have nothing on my happiness this day. And to make it even better, chocolate was added to my joy in the form of a cake with the words "DRAGONS! They Have Arrived" written on top. Yes, I do have the best husband ever. (And sons. My girl was playing with a friend and missed out on the cake-buying expedition, though she's still the best even so.)

So what does that have to do with bears and mountains? I now have to write a query letter, and find somebody to send it to, and possibly even write a synopsis *shudder*. (And assuming I get all of that done, I then have to actually send said query letter to found persons, and that is a whole lot more like jumping off a cliff than climbing a mountain.) I climbed the freakin' mountain (74,000 words, thank you very much) only to find another freakin' mountain on the other side. In fact, I dare say it's a whole entire range, and I'm feeling just a tiny bit deflated. But you know what the bear did? He climbed the other mountain. And so will I.

R is for Robert Frost

(The last two days have been unkind to me as far as posting on my blog is concerned. I wanted to try to play catch-up, but seeing how I have less than an hour left of today, I decided to go forward from where I am and call it good. I'll have to save P and Q for another time.)

I was in junior high when I decided I wanted to be the next Robert Frost. The Road Not Taken was, I am certain, the first of his poems that I was exposed to and fell in love with, but Stopping By Woods On A Snowing Evening was right on its heels. He paints pictures with words, and the pictures he paints include forests and country lanes and old farm houses. Growing up in Oregon, these were images I was familiar with and held very close to my heart. I knew exactly what the places he wrote about looked like, and they were the places I wanted to be. He made me cry with a delicious ache for all of these places he described. More than anything I wanted to be able to paint my own pictures with my own words. I wanted people to see Oregon the way he showed people New England. I wanted to fill people with a longing for my home. I wanted to make people cry.

That's an odd life goal for a thirteen-year-old, but I knew, as Anne Shirley would say, that Robert Frost and I were 'kindred spirits.' When I read his poem Once By The Pacific, I knew it was true. Not only had he seen my ocean (I didn't realize that he born in San Francisco) but he 'got' it:

"The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before."

That is my Oregon coast. Cliffs and rocks and waves and wildness. Exactly how I like it.

Anyway, I set out to become a poet. I saw the world in poems. The words to the poems didn't always come to me right away, and I didn't pursue every poem and commit it to paper, but the feeling of a poem was practically a daily occurrence. Poetry was how the world spoke to me, and when the poetry was silent, I knew something was wrong. (I dated a guy for four months and realized after we broke up that I had not felt a single poem the whole time we were together. That scared the liver out of me, and I knew to pay more attention the next time around. If the next guy I dated quashed the poetry inside of me, then I wasn't going to waste four months on him. It turned out that the next guy I dated not only did not quash my poetry, but he wrote poems to me. We've been happily married for seventeen years.)

I am not going to be the next Robert Frost. Though I took some poetry classes in high school (near disaster) and college (wonderful), I don't even write a poem a year anymore. I took a creative writing class in college that required us to write a short story, and that was the beginning of the end of my poetry-writing days. My 'short' story was easily three to four times longer than any other story in the class (to this day I cannot write a short story) and the ONLY fantasy. It was crap, but once that bug bit, there was no going back. Aside from that, it's not like I actually have Robert Frost's talent.

Recently I read a quote by him that I must have read during the early days of my poetry mania but had since forgotten. The words are so familiar to me, and say so perfectly what I felt:

"A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching out toward expression, an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the word."

That's exactly what I mean when I say I felt poems.

Now I see stories. Everything is a story. I very seldom know what the story is, and I actually have a very hard time coming up with stories (I've never been able to make up bed-time stories for my kids), but every time I turn around I find another thing that wants to be a story. Maybe if Robert Frost was here I could explain it to him and he could paint a picture of my feelings with his words. I bet he could.

O is for Oregon

(Although technically it is now Tuesday, I have not yet gone to bed, so for me it is still Monday, and Monday turned out to be a day when I did not get to write my blog early, which is good because I now have a better idea what I'm going to say. Maybe.)

My name is Michelle and I am from Oregon. I've been from Oregon my whole life. The last time I lived in Oregon was almost 30 years ago. The last time I was in Oregon was seven years ago. In the fall I wear green and gold, even though the university I went to is ten minutes from my house and their colors are blue and white. (I don't really like football all that much to begin with, but I'll cheer for the Ducks over anyone else.) I can be in a canyon in the mountains in less than fifteen minutes, but I still miss mountains with individual peaks that I used to know the names of (Mt Hood will always be my mountain) and glaciers. And trees. And rain. I actually miss rain that stays for days, not the stuff that blows through here in a couple of hours and is gone. And I miss the ocean. Not just any ocean, but the wildness of the Oregon coast, the driftwood and the agates and the tidal pools. And waterfalls. And the color green.

Several years ago I heard a visiting poet from Wales give a presentation at BYU. He read some of his poems, and one in particular had a Welsh word in it that he had to define for us. The word is hiraeth, and he described it as being "how a Welshman feels about Wales." I instantly teared up and started to cry. I know EXACTLY what that word means. That's how I feel about Oregon. (If you google it, you will generally find two things: it does not translate into English, and when they do give a definition, it's homesickness or longing.)

So I'm from Oregon, and I can be pretty snobby about it. It's the prettiest state in the Union, as most Oregonians will tell you (we're all a bit snobby about it).

N is for Networking

True story: When I was about five years old, my mom got locked in the bathroom in our apartment. She asked me if I knew where the manager lived, and I did, so she told me to go down and knock on the manager's door and ask him to come rescue her. I walked down the sidewalk and stood in front of the manager's apartment, sobbing, because I COULD NOT BRING MYSELF TO KNOCK ON HIS DOOR. After several minutes I went back home, still crying. My mom asked me if the manager was coming and I told her no (there was a lot of tears and snot involved). She asked me if I had even talked to him and again I told her no (even more tears and snot). She sent me back down to the manager's apartment, but this time I didn't even bother going the whole way because I KNEW I was not going to talk to the man. It wasn't going to happen, even though I was going to be an orphan and my mom was going to be locked in the bathroom forever.

Those are some pretty high stakes when you're only five, but talking to an actual stranger was an even worse option. So I went back home and sat in front of the bathroom and produced copious amounts of tears and snot until my mom somehow extricated herself from the bathroom on her own.

This is how I feel about networking. I have been to several workshops/conferences. I have met several agents/editors/authors. I read a lot of blogs. And I do not have anything that anybody would consider a 'network'.

Because I am scared to death to talk to people.

Okay, it's not really (quite) that bad. I would totally go get the manager if my mom was locked in the bathroom again. In fact, having been the manager of an apartment building for a few years, I could probably get her out of the bathroom on my own. But it's still hard for me to talk to complete strangers. When I go to these conferences, or read blogs, it's hard for me to believe that I have anything to say worth bothering somebody else about. It's not like I'm on the verge of being orphaned again.

However, sometimes I get worried that my book is. It's so easy to sit and not say anything. But I'm working at it.

M is for Mulligatawny

It's halfway through the month and halfway through the alphabet, so I guess it's appropriate that I find out about this A to Z challenge and get started, since I only halfway know what I'm doing anyway.

I have talked about the naming of my dragons before, and how it all started with the movie The Glass Slipper and the fairy godmother and her pickle-relish. Jambalaya was the first word to present itself as a perfect dragon name, and then came Mulligatawny. At first it wasn't intentional that they were food words (in particular soups), but as the cast of characters grew and I needed more dragon names for the other kids' dragons, sticking with food just seemed easier. There are simply too many cool and fun words to say in the world, and it actually is easier to pick one when you limit your options. Instead of fishing out of ALL the nouns and adjectives and whatnot in the ocean, I toss my net in the relatively smaller lake of 'exotic' food (I can pretty much guarantee that I will never name a dragon Hamburger or Milk). Once I decided to stick with food, it seemed natural to keep naming the boys' dragons after soups and name the girls' dragons after desserts or sweet stuff (Sassafras is another awesome word to say). And I'm really hoping that when I get through with this round of editing (the goal is by this summer!) and start sending it off to agents that they won't think it's too kitschy.

There is no hidden meaning to Jambalaya and Mulligatawny. They are just fun words to say, and since these dragons represent whatever children might imagine a dragon to be, they seemed prefect. (Mulligatawny is camo-colored because my son loves camo. How cool would it be to have a dragon that looked like camo?)