A Rock in the (Main)Stream

Zestful Blog Post #87

I hope the holidays treated you well. I'm pleased with how Left Field is doing, but I have much more promo work to do. This week we’re back to my journey through the publishing world. This post necessarily contains spoilers from Holy Hell and The Actress. But they’re worth it, baby.

Let’s call this installment:

6) A Rock in the (Main)Stream

It took me about a year to write The Actress, then I sent it to Cameron (McClure, at the Donald Maass agency, who had expressed interest in the idea; see post #84). She liked the book a lot and offered to represent me. At the time, she was fairly new at Don’s agency. Before agreeing, I asked her why she thought she was right for the job.

“You already know I think you’re a great writer,” she said. “I’m young and hungry, and Don’s reputation opens all the doors for us.”

I said that sounded good. She replied, “From now on, it’s my job to be a bitch on your behalf.”

Such lovely, lovely music.

Some agents are hands-off and never make editorial suggestions; others are quite involved with their clients’ projects. I found that Cameron was into making suggestions. She got back to me with a long memo on The Actress, known as ‘notes’. This is the same thing as in Hollywood, where the producer or director or whoever tells the scriptwriter “I have some notes for you.” This can be ominous, signaling a horrifying ordeal for the writer, or it can turn out to be a most helpful, cooperative kind of thing.

Fortunately, I felt Cameron’s notes were valuable. While I rejected some of her ideas (which she insisted upon knowing reasons for), I adopted many of them, and the book became stronger for it.

I might note that early in the process, even before I wrote the whole book, one of Cameron’s suggestions was to kill off a main character. “because once you do that,” she explained, “your readers will never feel safe.” So I made sure to kill off a main character in The Actress.

During this, I reflected that in Holy Hell, my first title with Alyson Books, I made an opposite move. When my editor there got down to work on the book, she called me and said, “You know, I really think you shouldn’t [spoiler alert] kill off Minerva LeBlanc. She’s such a great character. Think what you could do with her in future books!”

I said, “Well, that’s the way the story goes. I needed a dead body to be found in Lillian’s apartment so suspicion falls on her and she has to deal with it. Like, you know, I’ve put her up a tree and now I’m throwing rocks at her. I wrote Minerva solely so I’d have an appealing character to kill off for this purpose.”

“Well, couldn’t you put her into a coma or something instead? So at least you have the option of bringing her back in the future?”

I thought for a minute. “Yeah, I could do that. I could have Minerva be viciously attacked in Lillian’s apartment while she’s away, and it would be attempted murder instead of murder, and Lillian would still be the natural first suspect for a serious crime.”

“OK, that’d be great.” And that’s how it worked out.

When both Cameron and I felt The Actress was in top shape, we discussed strategy. She knew I wanted a contract with a big publisher, so she prepared a list of the top ten, as well as a pitch email and so forth. I did not ask to see her pitch materials, trusting her to get the job done.

I didn’t have long to wait.

A few days after she started telling publishers about my book, she phoned me. We’d gotten one no-thanks from one of the ‘big six’, but another was expressing serious interest. Great, right? Just one hitch.

[Rocks make it dangerous--but fun.]

An editor for this publisher’s main crime-fiction imprint had read The Actress. She told Cameron, “I read the first half and thought it’s fabulous! I jumped up and ran down the hall to our contract department and said, ‘We’ve got to put together a offer for this book! It’s terrific!’ Then I went back to my office and read the second half. When I got to [spoiler alert] Gary’s death, I went, ‘Oh, no! She can’t kill off Gary! Rita and Gary have to get married and then solve crimes in the courtroom together!’”

This editor asked Cameron to see if I’d be agreeable to changing the book and the trajectory of the series. “What do you think?” Cameron asked.

This was a tough situation, but I said, “Well, no. I mean, I could put Gary into a coma”—hey, with one hand tied behind my back, lots of experience with coma-inducing injuries here—“and have him recover in the next book, but this can’t be a lawyers-together courtroom series.” I had initially conceived of a series of linked stand-alones, with some characters recurring, and I wanted to go forward with that. I wanted the next in the series to feature a different protagonist from Rita Farmer.

Cameron said, “Every editor who sees this says it absolutely has to be a series starring Rita. Everybody wants to know what happens to her next.”

“Well, I guess I could keep Rita as the main character, but I don’t have the background to write a lawyer/courtroom series, nor do I want to. I want [spoiler alert] Rita and George [the private eye in the story] to be together at the end of this one, and I’d be comfortable writing them working together going forward. I’m going to put Rita into law school, because she’s so interested in law after this one, but she’s not going to have a career as a lawyer. Maybe she’ll flunk out or something, I don’t know yet. I can write her as an actress, but not as a lawyer.”

Cameron explained all this to the big-shot editor, who said sadly that she wouldn’t be making an offer on the book after all.

She was sad. Righto.

However, Cameron had already heard from another couple of editors who were very interested in the book.

And we’ll have more on that next time. This is getting pretty detailed, but I feel the full story is worth telling.

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Moving Into the Mainstream

Zestful Blog Post # 84

The series about my publishing history continues today.

5) Moving Into the Mainstream

When an artist belongs to some sort of minority, that artist must decide what kind of art to make. Shall I make art that I think/guess/hope will be understood/appreciated/purchased by a mainstream audience, or shall I produce something that speaks more specifically to my own smaller group, whatever that is, and take the risk of obscurity? Shall I be myself, or pretend to be someone else?

Leaving aside the question of figuring out one’s identity (which can take a lifetime right there), this can be a challenge. Charlotte Brontë, for instance, knew that in the male-dominated public sphere of her time, female authors were “liable to be looked upon with prejudice” and thus wrote Jane Eyre under the male name Currer Bell. She was just one of many female, or black, or Jewish (etc.) authors who concealed their personas in order to come across as one of the mainstream.

A main stream, with tug. [photo by ES]

Some authors who were gay / lesbian / bisexual or otherwise not part of the bicameral sexual culture have written books strictly about straight people and their lives. And some have been criticized for it by the politically-correct contingent. A subject for another post, perhaps. Incidentally, I believe a lot of gay writers who didn’t want to come out turned to mystery writing, because you can write gripping stories that have little to do with characters’ inner lives.

Finding some success with my Lillian Byrd series, I hungered for a larger audience. That could be achieved if I got published by a major house. And the major houses wanted, almost exclusively, mainstream stuff.

While trying to get Holy Hell published, I wrote a mainstream novel about the bookselling scene, which sparked some interest among the agents I queried, but again no offers for representation. So when strategizing again about getting picked up by a major publisher, I left aside that book and decided to write another novel, a mainstream mystery. This was a business decision.

The story, called Crimes in a Second Language, involves a retired schoolteacher who befriends her Latina cleaning woman by offering to teach her English. Their developing friendship leads to trouble with the cleaner’s husband, who appears to be involved in some dark business. And so on.

I sent excerpts to agents, and finally heard from Cameron McClure at the Donald Maass agency. “I can tell you’re a great writer,” she said, “but I don’t think I can sell this book. Do you have other ideas?”

Yes, I did. I sent her a batch of three or four ideas for crime / mystery novels, including a series of linked stand-alones, and she got back to me with some enthusiasm. She loved the concept of The Actress, in which a struggling actress is approached by a high-end defense attorney to coach his client, an unsympathetic society mom who’s up for the murder of her own daughter. The actress is a divorced mother of a little boy, with a gay best friend and a nasty ex-husband lurking in the background. “If you can write this one,” Cameron said, “I think I can sell it.”

So I spent a year on the project, and sure enough she did sell it to a major publisher. There’s a story to that, which I’ll detail next time.

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Your Ideas Are Your Capital

The other day I was listening to an aspiring writer tell me about the novel he's writing. He mentioned that he had ideas for further novels, but was unsure whether to spend the effort developing them before he saw whether agents / editors / readers would be interested in this first book. He asked what I thought.

I told him that in my own case, ideas have broken through for me before a finished work did. Although I sold my first four novels to a publisher myself, it wasn't a novel that got me representation. Hungry for a bigger audience, I set out to write a novel good enough to score me a hardcover contract with a big house. I wrote the novel and shopped it around to agents. One read it and called me up. "You're obviously a terrific writer," she said, "but I just don't think I can sell this book. What other ideas do you have?" I told her a few, and she asked me to develop them a little more on paper. I did so, and she got back to me saying, "I really like this one about the actress. If you can write that one, I think I can sell it." Which is what happened, and The Actress debuted in hardcover with Minotaur Books (MacMillan). I've been with Cameron McClure at the Donald Maass Agency ever since.

The same thing happened the first time I approached Writer's Digest magazine. I wrote up a detailed inquiry about an article I'd like to write for them, and decided at the last minute to throw in a few other ideas at the bottom, just in case. The editor got back to me and said in a nice way that my main idea sucked, but they'd like me to write an article based on one of the little ones in the last paragraph. So I did, and have written more than 30 feature articles for them to date.

Which, I realized, exactly parallels something I learned in Hollywood. A few years ago I flew to Los Angeles to meet with a television executive to discuss making my first mystery series, the Lillian Byrd books, into a cable TV series. Over a meal at a hip restaurant in West Hollywood (I felt existentially enviable) we talked about my books in detail, how the series might be structured, and even threw around casting ideas.

Then the executive asked if I'd be willing to be a writer for the show.

"Sure," I said, "but I thought you guys usually just bought the material and had other people write the scripts."

She said, "You don't understand. It's not so much that we want this material you've written. We want your talent; we want YOU."

"Oh," I said.

She explained, "You were thinking about how the movies work. The movies want a script. TV wants a writer."

As it turned out, the executive couldn't get the big shots on board with the project. But thinking about all that later, I realized that publishing is like television production: agents, editors, and readers don't want a book, they want an author. They want somebody who can write great, compelling book after great, compelling book. They want an idea machine.

So there you have it, aspiring authors. Write up all of your best ideas and have them in your back pocket. Get started on that next novel! Come the time to start putting your first baby out into the world, your newer stuff just might be instrumental in your breakthrough.

Special notes for this week:

Local friends, check out the Florida Writer's Association Bradenton Mini-Conference in January, just in time for that New Year's writing resolution: http://www.floridawriters.net/FWA_Upcoming_Events.html

I'll be there doing a workshop and a writing-prompts session. Check out the other faculty; some pretty accomplished people will be there, all with the goal of helping you. I guarantee you'll deepen your talent and have fun doing it.

And to follow up on last weeks' post: I've received my package of Dragon software and will set it up soon. The shoulder is improving with drugs and therapy.

[Photo note: Hollywood landscape with smog-induced soft focus by ES.]

Tell me what you think! To post your ideas / comments, all of which I read and try to respond to, click below where it says, 'No Comments,' or '2 Comments,' or whatever.

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