Juniper Fairchild and the Alterwhere | The Search for Agency

Juniper Fairchild and the Alterwhere | The Search for Agency

by | May 14, 2025 | Books, Business, Writing

I’ve finished the third draft, and still frankly doing little tweaks here and there. I’ve learned that most agents, if not all of them, request the first three chapters of the book to read when you submit a query, so I’ve been polishing.  A word here, a phrase there, suddenly it all seems to have outsized importance.  And then, of course, it makes me want to go through the entire book and do that to every chapter.

When I’m alone with my thoughts, when I’m writing the story, that’s the sweetest, most engaging part of the entire process, but now I’m faced with having to do the one thing I’ve never ever been good at, the one thing that terrifies me more than anything else I’ve ever done in my entire life that didn’t involve doing something like playing electric guitar and singing on stage, solo, in front of an auditorium filled with my high school peers and their parents (this was when I was 17), encountering a band of thieves in my own home, led by someone I thought was my best friend (this happened when I was nineteen), or diving in the driver’s side window of my mother’s borrowed car to grab the emergency brake as it was about to dive off a cliff off the end of a pier into the Pacific Ocean (this happened when I was twenty), or having to pull over to blow out an engine fire on my way to work and then get back in the car and drive the rest of the way to work (this happened when I was 40).

I have to sell an agent on the idea of representing my book to a publisher.

I’m terrible at salesmanship.  Throughout my life, any time I’ve been confronted with having to do it, it’s always been a horrible experience and I’ve failed at it miserably.  But this time I can’t afford to fail, because the rest of my career as a writer depends on my being able to pull just one more miracle out of that dark secret place in the back of my trousers where flying monkeys come from.

I’m doing all the things I think I’m supposed to. I’ve gotten myself an annual membership on QueryTracker, which is a web site meant to help you find agents and keep track of whom you’ve submitted to and what they said, or didn’t say, afterwards. I’m considering entering BookPipeline’s unpublished author’s contest.  To be honest, though, I have no idea if that’s a good idea, or if it would help me in the slightest. They don’t even start judging until September, and that seems a very long time from now, and I’m impatient to get started pitching agents.

I’m told that I need to start working on my next book while I work on selling this one, because the publishing industry runs at the speed of books, which is to say, not very speedy at all. Even if I get an agent right away, which isn’t terribly likely, I might see my seventieth birthday before the book is published, assuming it ever gets there. This prospect does not fill me with confidence. I’m sixty-eight now. I don’t want my life to go by while I wait to see if I get to be a real writer. Frankly, the odds aren’t good.

I will tell you something, though. The reason most people fail at getting an agent is that their work isn’t finished before they submit their queries, or they query the wrong agents because they haven’t done any research, or they can’t follow simple instructions given them by the agents. Frequently they just have no idea how writing a novel works, and have written something unreadable, and their books are nowhere near where they need to be to submit. Your book doesn’t have to be in its final, polished, perfect form, but it needs to be as good as you can make it, and it should have been through the hands of a professional editor before you submit (mine now has). The odds of my getting an agent are probably far, far better than I believe they are, because most of the field is just self-disqualifiying.

Now that my manuscript is finished, the real adventure begins.

Wish me luck.

 

 

 

How to Write a Novel

How to Write a Novel

by | Mar 4, 2025 | Uncategorized

Outline.

Write the ending first. Make sure you know how your characters get from one scene to the next for every scene. There’s no such thing as a ‘pantser’. They end up writing a bunch of extra crap and wasting time and going back and working out the outline after the fact, and trust me, it’s twice as hard coming up with an elegant way of resolving your plot and story arcs that way, because you have to retrofit stuff and throw out a ton of crap you thought you needed but don’t.

So, to recap, write the biggest landmarks first. Then fill in the smaller landmarks in between. Then smaller than that. Keep going down in granularity until you’re writing scenes, then write the scenes, and you have a draft.

If you do not start with the broadest strokes first, building your story framework true and solid so you know where all the corners and leddges are FIRST, you WILL FAIL. The same rules apply to creating in EVERY OTHER ART FORM.

You can do the ‘pantser’ stuff when you get down to the level of writing scenes, and if you hold that off till then, it’ll be fun, because you’ll already know what the scene has to do in your story, what your characters need from each scene, and how everything works relative to the chapter that comes before it and the chapter that comes next.

Then you can do a polish pass and make everything look like you planned it all along in the first place.

Then get beta readers at minimum, a story editor if you can afford one, and a copy editor to make sure there are no spelling mistakes, because nothing pisses off a reader more than finding typos in your book and it makes you look like an amateur. Listen to your editor and your beta readers, they’ll tell you things you don’t want to hear but that you’ll have to fix.

And that’s how to write a novel. If you stick to this and you write a thousand words a day, you can write two full length novels a year.

Go write.

Statements About Questions Are Not Questions

Statements About Questions Are Not Questions

by | Oct 17, 2020 | General, Writing

Here’s a pet peeve of mine: the use of a question mark when you are actually making a statement about your query or curiosity.

For example, I wonder if it will rain tomorrow. Note the lack of a question mark.

Most would write, “I wonder if it will rain tomorrow?” This isn’t a question, it’s a statement.  I wonder if it will rain tomorrow.

If I’m asking a question, I would frame it this way:

“I wonder, will it rain tomorrow?”

I’ve asked an actual question, and therefore I use a question mark. So why does this bother me so much?

Because it’s a sign of intellectual laziness, not of just one person, which is bad enough on its own, but of English speakers as a whole. If people keep doing it, it will become part of the definition of the language to do this, but it flies in the face of logic. The fact that this is a happening isn’t so bad on its own, but it is symptomatic of larger flaws in our society, a sort of erosion of the principles of reason in what we sometimes tout as the Age of Reason.

When I told a friend about my concerns, she said, “My English teacher insisted that was a question and needed the ? mark.”

I replied that her English teacher was quite wrong, and here is why:

The sentence structure belies that. If you replace the object, subject and conjunction but retain the grammatical structure of the sentence, you can derive something like, “I depend on it to rain.” It’s still not a question, and the sentence structure is not a question. There’s no querant in either case. Simply stating “I wonder” does not make it a question, any more than using any other verb in that sentence structure. It’s a statement about wondering, not a question in and of itself.

The word “wonder”, in this case, is a subjunctive verb. The English subjunctive is a special, relatively rare verb form that expresses something desired or imagined. We use the subjunctive mainly when talking about events that are not certain to happen. For example, we use the subjunctive when talking about events that somebody wants to happen, or anticipates will happen.

Statements do not get question marks, therefore the sentence “I wonder if it will rain tomorrow” does not get one. Q.E.D.

The counterpoint to this is that there is a difference between expository writing and dramatic writing. The question mark indicates the tone of the speaking character’s voice, because the character does indeed intend it to be a question.  My friend Joseph Ksander commented:

“This is not a spoken english problem, but a written one. ‘I wonder if it will rain tomorrow’ is in the first person, and has narrative value. And one would argue that the tone of the statement is interrogative (it absolutely is). So when writing, especially in narrative, we are allowed a certain amount (quite a lot) of poetic license to give words and phrases meaning beyond the literal. By giving ‘I wonder if it will rain tomorrow?’ an interrogative mark, we give the reader a hint of how it would sound coming out of a character’s mouth. It has the feeling of a question, and writing is at least as concerned with creating feeling as it is with conveying meaning.”

There is, as Joe points out, a difference between the written word and the spoken word, and using the written word to illuminate the spoken word.

I doubt that my words will have much of an affect. One can only hope that reasonable voices are occasionally heard, but Joe is right, it all depends on context.

I wonder what will happen.

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