My Darkest Hour & the Book Deal at the End of the Tunnel

So you guys wanna hear this book deal story or what?

I never know where to start or how much backstory to include.  What can I say? It’s a curse.

How about I’ll start in 2011?

Some of you may recall this post. I’d been on sub pretty much all of 2011 with a book that I loved and my agent loved, but it seemed we were the only two members of that manuscript’s fan club.

Did I mention that I also had a baby in 2011? Yeah. He’s super cute, but he was also a super bad sleeper. SUPER. BAD.

So I was dealing with this groaningly long, painful period of waiting and rejection when my mental and physical reserves were about at -459.67 degrees F. (That would be absolute zero, my friends.)

Not a bit fun.

Now, 2011 was not without a few promising moments. Literarily speaking, I mean. That kid’s sleeping didn’t improve one whit all year despite many, many offers of cash. 

Over the summer I did have a glimmer of hope. I got a revise and resubmit opportunity and I took it, but alas, in December, after having done this exclusive revision—and it was a major overhaul, too—the editor ultimately passed. That’s when I said, “No mas, por favor.”

I felt it was time to set the ms aside and move on. And so I did.

I had started working on the ms that would go on to sell in the fall of 2011, but I’d taken a break from it to do the revision for the editor, and of course, once that didn’t work out, I was kicking myself for having wasted my time. But what are you gonna do? 

Right after the holidays—this would be January 2012—I went into the cave and wrote my face off. The small baby person was still not sleeping well, and thus, neither was I. The extreme sleep deprivation meant that my brain was not at its best, but I kept working as much as I possibly could. I swear, there were days I’d look at my ms and think, “Did I write this? I don’t remember writing this. Hey! This isn’t half bad.”

(As a brief aside, this was around the time that I walked into my kitchen and thought, Oh, wow! Somebody did the dishes! That’s so nice! And then a second later I realized that, no, in fact I had done the dishes twenty minutes earlier, but I momentarily didn’t remember having done them. WTH, man? I was, like, having black outs. Crazy. But, hey, it was nice to imagine that I had a cleaning woman while it lasted.)

I’ll condense a lot here and just say that I finished Tabula Rasa at the end of February 2012 and sent it off to my readers. And, hey, even taking into account the sleep deprivation-writing, they liked it! I then sent it to my agent in March. And she liked it, too! And then it came time for submission again and on the eve of going back on sub I felt so, so proud of myself for having persevered through such a miserable and disappointing 2011. I was getting such great feedback on the story, and I was letting myself think strange and wondrous things like maybe this was finally it. Yes, maybe THIS WAS THE ONE.  

So at the end of May, the ms went out on sub! And I was so excited! I could not have been higher! The book was getting great initial feedback!

WHEEEEE!!!!

And then! 

*cue ominous music* 

One by one those editors … man, they shot out my heart like they were shooting skeet.

I hope this never happens to any of you, but I will tell you, there comes this moment when you’re out on sub when you realize that your book is not going to sell. And nobody wants to really say that, but it’s kind of like that moment when you’re at a party and you just sense, “You know, right now, right this minute, is the time to leave. Before things get ugly.” There’s just something in the air. Some palpable feeling that you can’t explain, but you know the cops are going to show up soon and start macing and tasing everyone. Except the thing is, you can't really leave. You can’t say, “OK, thank you and good night! It’s been great fun, but I gotta go!” No. You’re ON SUB, and you’ve got to be a professional and see it through until the bitter end.

And, bless my agent’s heart, she is a true believer.

She hung in there until the last round. Until not only the fat lady was singing, but the fat lady’s dog was howling along with her. Without dragging everyone through the misery of interminable waiting and neurotic Inbox-checking that was my June 2012, I will just say that we had gotten word that one final editor was still reading and would get back to us by the following week.

(Please note: The phrase “will get back to (you) by the end of next week” often means three weeks after NEVER. Just wanted to make that clear. Carry on.)

Anyway, the word finally came after a long, excruciating wait, and my agent had to give me the bad news that the editor had passed. Coincidentally, this was one of those weeks where it seemed everyone was blasting good news about book deals on Twitter, and I was so, so upset. So emotionally churned up. When I got that final "no," I actually felt sick to my stomach.

Oh, wait.

That wasn't it. I wasn’t sick to my stomach because I was upset. I came down with the FREAKING STOMACH FLU.

Yes, indeed. About three hours after the last nail had been banged into the coffin containing my poor, bedraggled dreams, I was tossing my cookies. And as if this wasn’t bad enough, at almost that exact moment when I realized, You know, I’m kinda not really feeling very well right now and started shoving people out of my way so I could get to the bathroom, Washington, D.C. got hit by this freak storm called a derecho, and all the power went out. So I spent the night hurling in the pitch, black swelter (because, of course, no power = no air conditioning) and then spent the next 48 hours flat on my back in 102 degree heat (still no power) with nothing to think about except my own rotten, sweaty miserable failure.

Well, what could I do? This was truly my darkest hour. After several long days of feeling like dog poop tartare, I did recover from the stomach bug. The disappointment, though…ugh, that took much, much longer. I'd been knocked down before plenty, but this was a massive face punch like nothing I'd ever felt. I spent the next few weeks trying to get my equilibrium back and regroup, but I just couldn’t seem to bounce back. I was sad. Not disappointed, not angry, just horribly sad. Sad like "episodic crying in the bathroom and then washing my face so my kids wouldn’t see and be worried about me." That kind of sad. That lasted about six weeks, I guess.

I tried not to jump to any conclusions about what to do or where to go but how could I not? This was my second time on sub and both times I’d come up short. I suppose you may be wondering if I thought about quitting writing at that point.

Unbelievably enough I did not.

And that was the weird bit.  

At some point in between those bouts of overwhelming sadness, I realized that I’m a writer, and success or failure—well, it was pretty much beside the point. It was just a fact of my existence. Come what may, I was a writer. 

Certainly I did think that I would very much like to quit trying to get published. I really felt like something snapped inside me during that time, and ultimately I decided it was a good thing that it did. The whole crushing experience made me realize that I was expecting publication to give me something that it couldn’t possibly give me. I had completely and utterly lost perspective, and I needed to tend to that.

And here’s where I’ll skip ahead again and just say that my agent and I had a long talk, and we decided to give it one more go. Because, yes, the feedback after the first sub round was pretty clear and consistent. I still felt like Tabula Rasa was a kick-ass story, and I didn’t want to give up on it because I knew I could make it even better.

So.

Submission again.

As you can imagine, I wanted to go back out on sub like I wanted to put my eyeballs on skewers, roast them like marshmallows, and serve them up with chocolate on graham crackers. But there was nothing for it. I had to man up and move forward. 

We went back out on sub at a very non-optimum time of year—right after Thanksgiving. The holidays were bearing down on us, and we knew that there probably wouldn’t be much movement, possibly until the new year. But a week later, a certain editor at Egmont named Alison Weiss—who now has first dibs on my vital organs should she ever find herself in need of kidney or slightly-ill-used liver—was the first to say those magic words, “I love it!”

At this point I could go on and on and post a whole lotta GIFs of flailing Muppet arms to express how I felt when I got my official offer letter, but actually the real sense of triumph came upon me in a very quiet moment later that night, when I realized that as hard as it had been, as much as I'd suffered, as often as I had wished I could quit because I didn’t think I could take the disappointment for one more second—despite all that—I DID NOT EFFING GIVE UP. And that was a deeply satisfying thing to feel.

Here’s the last thing I’m going to say and I hope it helps, because really, what’s the point of a book deal story but to give you some hope? We all yearn for the same things, the sense of validation that we hope publication will bring. We all hope we’ll finally get to say, “I’m a writer” and not feel like some silly imposter. But, you know, I really, truly felt like a writer back when I was in the depths of my post-puking despair, and I still believed I had a story worth telling and hopefully a story worth reading.

So if you’re reading this and you’re having one of your down days, I will tell you this: You send your work out to be judged and evaluated, and that’s an act of bravery. That’s when you should feel proud. Agents and editors may read your stuff, and they may tell you where your manuscript stands, they may tell you what is or is not working. In other words, maybe they can tell you where you ARE in your publication journey. And that place might be, for now, “not quite there yet.” But nobody—NOBODY—can tell you where you’re going to go. Because no one knows what’s inside you except you. 

I’ve gone on too long. Sorry about that.

You just keep at it, and if you believe, deep down, that you've got a great story to tell, do not effing give up.

SOLD!

That's my new favorite 4-letter word.

More details when I can pull them together but here's the big news:

Alison Weiss at Egmont has acquired world English rights to debut author Kristen Lippert-Martin's Tabula Rasa. In this contemporary YA thriller, a 16-year-old girl held in an isolated research hospital undergoes a forced experimental treatment to erase all recollection of her past. But when the procedure goes awry, she must face off against mercenaries sent to eliminate her once and for all. The projected pub date is fall 2014; Molly Jaffa at Folio Jr./Folio Literary Management brokered the deal. 

Here's the link for the announcement in Publishers Weekly!

Sneaking Up on It

"As God is my witness, I will meet my writing goal for the day!"

Do you do this sometimes?

It’s slightly past that hour in the day, the hour you swore a blood oath upon the souls of your ancestors that you were going to get some writing done.

But you KNOW—you just know that it’s going to be hard going. You need to fix that plot hole and then there's that other thing that doesn’t make any sense, but you’re not sure what to do about it. Oh, and don't forget that character who’s acting like an ass, and you kind of hate him right now.

But you can’t face it.

Not yet.

So you think, OK, I’ll push it off. I’ll deal with that later. Today’s kind of busy, and anyway, I need to [insert good excuse here, eg., "need to re-bait those raccoon traps in the back yard with more peanut butter."]

But then you’re walking past your computer and you have this paltry little idea to fix this totally minor thing, and so you figure, OK, I can at least do THAT. So you sit down.

Next thing you know, it’s an hour later, and gosh darn it, you done did your writing for the day, and now you don’t have to sit in the box of shame for being an avoider-procrastinator person.

Sometimes we must use our mental jujitsu to out-maneuver our inner critics.  

And sometimes you’ve got to sneak up on your manuscript, real quiet like, so it doesn’t see you coming. 

Oh, yes, manuscript, I see you. You're not getting away this time.

What trick do you use to get your butt into your chair? Is it a carrot or a stick?

Space Log: Twenty-thirteen

 Oh, my. I’ve become one of those people.

One of those bloggers who only posts once in a while and then sheepishly slinks back to the Internets, hoping no one will notice how very long it’s been since my last post.

Go on, go ahead. Judge me if you must. I can see those pursed lips, that quizzical, Oh, are you still blogging? I didn't realize.

I deserve it. I do. But I swear I’ve got excuses a-plenty, and trust me, they’re extra good excuses that may or may not involve a very time-consuming fiddling duel with the Devil down in Georgia. (Charlie Daniels wasn’t the only one who’s landed in that situation.)  

I truly meant to blog this past week, but I’ve been digging out from the holidays. Like, literally. All I can say is thank gawd I had the foresight to buy the “post-holiday hell pit” attachment for my vacuum cleaner or else I’d be in big trouble. 

Resolutions, you say?

Sure. Yeah. I guess.

Here they are:

1)       Stop making fun of yoga and maybe do some myself because I’m about as limber as a saltine cracker these days. When I walk there’s so much popping and crackling in my knees it sounds like somebody dancing on a stage covered in bubble wrap. I’ve got to see what can be done about this.  

2)      Write an awesome novel.

That’s it. I like to keep things simple if I can. I’m already hard at work on the second resolution, and I’m very excited about my WiP. That first resolution may take even more effort especially since it involves the acquisition of yoga pants. Oh, boy.

Tell me two of your resolutions, writing or otherwise. I promise I won’t be all like this:

"Oh, really? That sounds ... promising."

(As ever, click on the post title to get the comment box to come up.)