Simple Mystery

Sending out more query letters today.  I tell you, every time I hit send it’s like a cold shot of ice water right through my veins.

And for heaven’s sake, could someone tell me why?  I have confidence in my book, and also confidence in the facts that (1) tastes differ (2) some agents will find my work not to their tastes and (3) that is ok.

But the fact remains that each time I ask a new agent to look at it, I feel queasy and terrified.  Which is nothing compared to how I feel when I realize there’s a new message in my inbox… even though it’s inevitably someone commenting on my Facebook status.

Here’s my query letter:

Dear Mr./Ms. Agent:

I am writing to query you regarding my jazz age mystery novel, The Big Life (75,000 words).  It is the first in a proposed series that looks at the hard-boiled world of guns and gangsters from a feminine point of view.

It’s 1928, and farm girl Kitty Carmichael arrives in Chicago determined to reinvent herself—and to mooch off her rich uncle as long as possible.  Instead she discovers that her uncle has been murdered, his fortune is missing, and his half-Japanese daughter, Koko, has been left in her care.

It’s a responsibility she shoulders less than gracefully.  But as she works to solve her uncle’s murder—and more importantly, get her hands on his cash—Kitty discovers a simple truth: you can’t live the Big Life without a big heart.

Previously I was a story writer for the popular online game City of Heroes, known for its intricate plotlines.  I studied writing at Florida State University.

Thank you for your consideration,

Jane Kalmes

Hell, I even have confidence in my query letter.  Yet still, the terror remains.

Today I’m also writing to one agent who has had a partial of mine for a little over two months.  Just to remind him I’m around, and find out what the situation is.  It could be anything for all I know.  He could have decided I wasn’t a fit, but neglected to write.  He could still be reading it (I did send it just before Christmas after all, so he probably didn’t even look at it for the first couple of weeks).

The letter I’m sending to him is much more casual.  Because, you know, we’ve communicated a couple of times by email, and so sending him a formal, business-y letter seems somehow silly.  Which in turn seems somehow silly.  Because is this isn’t business, what is?

It’s a weird thing about communication in the internet era.  All the new forms we have for speaking to each other seem so casual, so egalitarian, so off the cuff.  E-mail is one of them, but where this mindset really gets you is social networking:  Facebook, Twitter, and blogs.  They’re just so breezy, you know, all “What are you doing right now?”  They feel inherently casual.  But anything that is both permanent and public is inherently serious.

I fret, when I write this blog, over who will see it.  Prospective agents and editors are certainly capable of Googling my name, so what if they read my blog, huh?  And what if they see something they Don’t Like?

I’m just a nested pile of insecurities today.

Conversation at 1:24 this morning:

Mark: “Do you want this flax seed meal that’s in the Amazon cart?”

Me: “Ooh.  I don’t know.  I think so.”

“It sounds weird.”

“I was just planning to put it in our morning oatmeal.”

“Okay.  Why do we want flax seeds again?”

“They’re a high source of omega 3’s.  The highest source.”

“And why do we want omega 3’s?”

“They’re the youth nutrient.”

“The youth nutrient?’

“They’re good brain food.”

“Okay.” Cautious nod.  “I’ll buy the flax seed meal.”

Okay, maybe it’s not funny if you can’t see his face.

Mark and I are in Sarasota, Florida this week for a bridge competition.  Well, Mark is here for a bridge competition.  I’m here to lounge around in the hotel room and use the sauna.

Our friend, Robert, is a bridge pro.  Like, yes, there are bridge pros.  Bridge isn’t like poker; there’s not a lot of money to be made just by playing and winning.  So bridge pros make their living by teaching lessons.  It turns out that the best way to teach a lesson is to take your client to a tournament and just play plenty of hands (except they’re called “boards”), criticizing their play and getting them a lot of tourney level experience.

This week Robert had a couple of clients who were interested in hiring on a full team of six.  Which meant Robert needed several of his bridge playing buddies to round out the team, including Mark.  In exchange for Mark’s bridge-playing services, we are getting a hotel room for the week, gratis, and Mark is getting to play one of his favorite games at a competitive level.  It’s a nice life.

All week long Mark has been trying to get me interested in playing bridge.  I’ve written before about my near-dangerous love of gaming, and I have to admit, it feels weird to be traveling for a tournament—any tournament—and not playing in it.  But I’ve tried bridge.  A few times.  And while I finally get how to bid and respond, I’m weak on rebidding and overcalling, and very weak on actually playing the hand.

See, bridge is actually two games: the game of bidding, where you and your partner use a very bare vocabulary (1 Club, 2 Diamonds, etc.) to communicate about your hands and how many tricks you think you can take.  And the game of cards, which is a trick-taking game similar to hearts or spades.

You would think that first game was fairly simple, but I am here to tell you it is Not.  Imagine this conversation if you will.

“Do you play Jacoby No Trump?”

“No, Minorwood.”

“What about Drury?”

“I like Drury with weak twos.  You play Stayman?”

“Stayman!  Well, yeah.  Duh.”

I tend to treat this talk the same way I treat Programmer-ese; I just zone out a bit and listen for the emotional content.

I can’t play any of these strategies (called “conventions”).  Mark keeps insisting that if I just read these three bridge tomes, I could know everything, and we could play together, and oh!  The fun we’d have!  But here’s the problem.  I Don’t Want to read the bridge books.  Not even a little bit.

“I Don’t Want to read the bridge books,” I finally told him in no uncertain terms.

“Ok.  I get it,” he said, and turned his mind to other ways to sway me.

He thought of one last night.  “In bridge,” he said, “there’s bullying.”

“Bullying?”

“Yeah.  First there’s pre-empting.  That’s where you know your opponents can make a good contract, so you jump the bidding up to say, 3 Spades.  You have Spades, but maybe not enough for 3.  But by jumping to the 3-level, you take away all the room they needed to talk.  Now they have to make a guess about where to end up.  Maybe they guess wrong.”

“Ok.  I get that”

“Then there’s the psych.”

“Psych?”

“That’s where you just flat out lie.  You don’t have anything, but you say, oh, 3 Hearts.  You don’t have hearts.  Maybe your opponents are the ones with the hearts fit, but how will they ever find out now?”

“But what if your partner gets fooled by the psych?”

“Yeah, well.  That’s the problem with the psych.”

“Ok.”  I thought about it.  “So there’s bullying.  I like that.”

I think he finally got me.  We played a couple of hours of bridge tonight, and I have to admit I liked it.  It doesn’t have any dragons or zombies in it, so that is a serious minus.  But we won a lot, so that is a serious plus.

Have y’all heard of this phenomenon called “co-working?”  The idea is that just because you are a work-at-home entrepreneur doesn’t mean you want to be cut off from all human contact.  So instead of working at home, you work at an office building, renting space there along with several other entrepreneurs.  And you can talk with them, socialize and share ideas, the way you ordinarily would with colleagues.

Apparently the co-working vibe has hit Atlanta hard.  Just in the last six months or so, no fewer than three co-working businesses have opened up.  They all have comparable rates: around $100 for a monthly membership, and around $30 to come just a handful of times.  This week, Mark and I tried out all three.

Door #1: Ignition Alley

This place was decidedly promising, because they had a monthly website critique group.  We showed up for their February meeting.  We met a lot of nice, smart people.

The major problem with Ignition Alley was that it was cold.  It had a very modern concrete nerd grunge thing going on, so there wasn’t much insulation.  And it was a cold, rainy day.  Anyway, it turned out to be a major problem.  We decided to work there for the day, but after an hour Mark called it quits.  We’re planning to go back at least once to see if they’ve managed to fix their heat problem.

Door #2: 151 Locust

This place was a renovated house in downtown Decatur.  It had a lot of perks: it’s close to our house, the seats are comfy, and also, free snacks!  And I’m not talking just about Saltines and Doritos here.  They had beer and wine in the fridge.  All gratis.

The main downside was that while the other two places are open 24/7, 151 Locust only runs from 9 AM to 7 PM.  Although I sort of think this could be seen as an upside, if you think about it.  Because maybe it would give us the motivation we need to get out of the house early.  Who wants to work past 7 anyway?

The second failing was that the community here was pretty much dead.  I think the household setting is kind of working against them; it was nice to be able to wall ourselves off in a small room and talk privately, but it really exacerbates people’s natural tendency to leave each other alone.  It was also a rainy day.  “Maybe it’s dead today because it’s so rotten out,” I said.

“Who are these people who don’t work when it rains?” Mark said.  I had to admit he had a point.

Door #3: Strongbox West

So Ignition Alley had a live community and a crappy setting, whereas 151 Locust had a dead community and luxe setting.  Strongbox West was very comfortably in the middle, with a sorta comfy setting and a sorta interactive community.  We wanted to think of it as a happy medium, but after a day there we both agreed that there was just nothing pulling us back to it.

(Just in case you’re curious, no, there’s no Strongbox East.)

In the end

I think all these co-working places are really fighting against each other.  Put the community from all three in one place, and you’d have something great, but as is, they are all struggling a little bit.

Co-working is a weird thing.  Everyone comes because they want to network and socialize with the other people–but at the same time, you often don’t say much more than hello to anyone because you’re naturally reluctant to interrupt their work.  Co-working just doesn’t provide the natural opportunities to converse that an ordinary workplace does.

Mark and I decided that what these places really need is a structured lunch time.  Nothing formal, mind you.  But around noon a secretary could circulate with takeout menus, someone could move a couple of tables together, and people would naturally congregate and begin to form relationships.  Which I think is what everyone there actually wants.

My computer organization is still ongoing (or slow-going, as the case may be (and in fact is)).  One of the files I’ve come across is this rather depressing list.

Things I Want More of in my Life

• Healthy food
• Home-cooked meals
• Work
• Reading
• Exercise
• Regular sleeping hours
• Keeping up with family and friends
• Cleanliness

Why so depressing?  Because I’m pretty sure I wrote this list around Christmastime 2005.  And the things I want more of in my life?  Still these.

I’m not saying no progress has been made.  In fact, I think each area has gotten a little better.  But “a little better” was not, you know, what I was going for.  I was sort of looking to solve things, not just edge them along.  And now that I’ve uncovered this document, I have a horrible vision of myself making such a list at age sixty, only to find out it’s composed of the exact same items.

Maybe this is normal.  Maybe the things you care about become the quests of your life.  On the other hand, maybe more could be done.

So.  What to do, what to do, what to do?  Make resolutions?  I like resolutions.  But resolutions, I feel, are good for tackling one thing, or two things, or at absolute most three things.  Never, no, never, eight things.  The last thing you want to do is start the year hip deep in resolutions.  It is a perfect recipe for failure.

Well, then, how to simplify?  I recently heard of the idea of choosing a word to meditate on for the year, rather than a set of resolutions.  I like this because it’s simple (if, unfortunately, not very concrete).  And so, for 2010 I have chosen the word Responsibility.

It was a near thing between Responsibility and Discipline.  Discipline might better encapsulate The List, but Responsibility seems bigger somehow.  Like Discipline is about doing the things you must, but Responsibility is about doing the things you can.  Or something Spider-Man would say.

Here we are in February, and I’d guess that my RQ (Responsibility Quotient) for the first month of the year is… hmmm… 50%.  (Remember, if you’re not ranking and scoring things, you’re not having fun.)  I’ll see if I can improve that in February.  Does anybody else do this Word-for-the-Year thing?  If so, what’s yours?

One of the big items in the news today is the stimulus:  failure or success?  No, this isn’t a political post.  It’s a post, believe it or not, about story.

Consider the cases of two average (and fictional) Americans; we’ll call them Patty and Paul.  Patty has been laid off from her job as a dental hygienist.  And although she’s been applying and interviewing all over the place, she hasn’t received one offer of a job that pays more than her unemployment benefits.  As a result, she’s just had to move into her mom’s basement.

Meanwhile, Paul was laid off from his construction job, but quickly found new work through a stimulus-funded road project.  Things were a little tight while he was out of a job, but now he is catching up with his bills and starting to breathe a little easier.  He even managed to buy his wife a pearl necklace for their tenth anniversary.

Ask Patty and Paul whether the stimulus worked, and you’ll get fairly predictable answers.  For Patty, it didn’t; for Paul, it did.

Notice I didn’t say Patty thinks it didn’t, or Paul thinks it did.  That’s because I believe our reality is formed by the stories we live, take part in, or hear.  Patty’s got a “moved in with Mom” story, and so she’s existing in a world in which the stimulus was a big, fat flop.  Think of one of the things you most believe in, something you Know to be True.  You have a story to prove this, don’t you?  I suspect you do.  Moreover, I suspect you’ve told it to more than a few people in your time.

Do you live in a world in which a green apocalypse is imminent?  In which processed foods are a deadly scourge?  In which race is a real and relevant part of every social interaction?

I don’t live in any of those worlds, but I know, and respect the heck out of, people who do.  We are all going about, living in our own parallel worlds—and though they may intersect, they’re never fully the same.

Every time we tell someone a story, we allow them a peek into our world.  We allow them an opportunity to change their own world, or to harden its precepts, or to, ever so slightly, allow its boundaries to blur.

If this is true, we writers have a special responsibility.  Yes, our stories are fictional, so people are less likely to build their worlds around them.  But at the same time, we can reach so many, and we can hold their attention for so long, that it behooves us to treat the world we’re projecting with respect.  To make sure it matches up with our values, not just whatever’s convenient for the plot.  To make sure it is our True World, set out there for everyone to see.

So, one of the things I’m doing while I wait for my book to find representation is organize my computer.  It needs organizing in the worst way.  I have all sorts of documents floating around in all sorts of folders, some of which date from the time when I still thought Courier was the only acceptable font.

That’s a long time.

It’s been interesting stuff to comb through.  In a big, unorganized, chaotic kind of a way, it’s a record of my progress as a writer.  You’ve got gems like this:

A family witnesses the death of their grandmother.  Their emotions about it are varied and complex.

From my literary days.  Can I just say, mega-bleh?

(I mean, I’m not claiming it’s an examplar of the literary genre, ok?  It’s a mega-bleh in its own right).

Then there’s Series Ideas.doc, which I put together when I was trying to decide which of several ideas to actually work on.  Eventually I decided 1920’s Chicago was where I wanted to go, and settled into my current book, The Big Life.  But there were lots of candidates in the running, including:

Gamer Mysteries

Skylar Vaughn runs a company that specializes in creating high-immersion gaming experiences for parties– solve-a-mystery weekends, etc.  When one of her clients winds up dead, Skylar must solve the murder in order to keep her company afloat.

Here’s the intro:

“Oh, my God!  She’s been shot!”

My best friend, Polly Polonsky, lay on the kitchen floor in a slowly widening puddle of blood.  I shouldn’t have been upset.  After all, I had known this would happen.  I had planned every step.  But I couldn’t help but be moved to uneasiness by her still pallor.  And reminded of how fragile life really is.

Polly’s a genius at shallow breathing.

This one is interesting to me because although it’s in the same light-hearted sub-genre as my current book, it feels so much… frothier.  Cuter.  It’s fun and all, but it just doesn’t feel like a serious idea to me anymore.  It doesn’t feel like a book that would have any Story apart from the actual plot.  It is, to be blunt, not up to my current standards.

And we’ve even got a few nonfiction ideas:

Be Prepared

Each chapter focuses on a different event a family might have to go through: the death of a loved one, the long absence of a spouse, a serious illness.  Each chapter is short and easily digestible, and full of simple, practical tips for dealing with the chosen situation.

Of all the ideas in my big mess of files, this is the one I most regret not having the interest to pursue.  I think it would be something people could really use, because, you know, shit happens.  And shit tends to be complicated and expensive.  And when shit happens, people rarely have the time—or the emotional fortitude—required for a long Google search to figure out how to handle it.

What they might have time for is reading a brief 10-20 pages that tell you how to get a casket without paying an insane markup, or how to acquire your partners’ power of attorney so that you can make decisions in his absence, or how to apply for charitable aid.

But realistically, I am not going to pursue that book.  As much as I like the idea of it, it’s just not a project I’d enjoy.

So there you have it: one idea I hate, one idea I like, one idea I kind of love.  None of which I am ever going to pursue.  I’m not vain enough to think that anyone reading this blog actually wants one of these ideas; I presume that other writers have their own truckloads of discarded ideas to plumb.  But if anyone wants one, have at.

As for me, I am wondering how many of these old files to keep, how many to consolidate, and how many to just pitch.  It’s always hard letting go of stuff completely.  But for the sake of grok-ability, that may be what I need to do.

Yesterday, Mark and I watched 9.  You know, that kid’s movie with the kickass trailer that looked like it was going to be so, so amazing?

Many parts of it were.  It was a fabulously original film with great graphics, cool action sequences, and a really wonderful hook.  The plot built, engaged, twisted, and then at the end it just kind of rolled over and died.

I was with 9 right up until that ending, because it was clearly a movie that was loved by its creators.  All the little ragdolls, with their unique looks and characters, spoke of love in a big way.  So did the unique use of music. And all of the wonderful detail.

When a project is loved, that usually means it’s going to be awesome.  Up was clearly loved.  So were Alien and Apollo 13. In the game world, we’ve got offerings like Lego Star Wars, Plants vs. Zombies, Guitar Hero.   And so many other movies, books, games, and TV shows that I can’t possibly list them all.

Loving your project means being willing to abide with it long enough to find all the little details that bring out its heart.  This is not an easy thing.  It is fundamentally sort of terrifying to spend time in a world of your creation.  Because if something is askew, amiss, feeble, or overwrought, it is all your fault.

Loving your project, then, requires faith not just in your work, but in yourself.

9 was loved.  I’m sure of it.  But 9 also fell flat at the end.  Why, I don’t know.  But here’s a guess: perhaps 9 illustrates one of the pitfalls of loving your project: loving it too much.  Loving it so much that you are no longer able to view it critically, so much that you become wed to your initial ideas and fail to seek improvements.

Whenever I decide to sell my house, I guess I get to sell it as a 2.75 bath instead of a 2.5.  That’s because about a month and a half ago Atlanta brought me an early Christmas present in the form of a porta-potty for my lawn.  And at this point, I guess it’s here to stay.

You have no idea how happy I was to see the thing arrive. A couple of months back Atlanta had some flooding. Some fairly serious flooding. And one of the casualties of that flooding was a big water pipe at my curb.

Emergency services hustled out and dug up the pipe, leaving behind what Mark and I have come to call, affectionately enough, the Hole. The Hole was vast and impressive, and seemed destined to be a permanent feature of our landscape.

It’s not that the city government wasn’t concerned. A few days after the flooding, a pair of orange cones appeared flanking the Hole. About another week later, the Hole was strewn all about with plastic orange fencing. A month after that, a missive arrived requesting our permission for city workers to enter our property in order to fix the Hole.

We signed the form and sent it back with enthusiasm. About a month after that, the workers arrived, porta-potty in tow, and began the various and sundry tasks associated with filling in the Hole.

So far their usual M.O. is to work about six hours, then leave for a week.  Although their last visit was on December 23rd, so we’ve just hit the three mark week.  The rest of the time they leave the digger there for the neighborhood boys to admire, which is a lovely public service.

Now, I don’t mean to sound too sour about it.  I am happy that the Hole is getting fixed.  And I have faith that eventually the digger and porta-potty will return from whence they came.  It just kind of boggles my mind that they can leave what must be a fifty thousand dollar vehicle sitting around on my lawn for three weeks.  I mean, don’t they need it for anything?

Last night, my writing group hit a bit of an awkward moment.  Outlander was talking about having read a Michael Connely novel, and I commented that Michael Connelly is the mystery writer’s mystery writer.  He is the person people describe as their major influence, their hero, their dream blurb.  And I said that I thought the reason for this was Connelly’s prose.

“Really?” said Outlander.  “I didn’t know genre writers cared about prose.”

“Of course we do,” I said.

So, yes, hr hmm, awkward.  But we breezed right past it, because really I understand. There’s a huge rift between literary writers and genre writers, and although I’m now on the genre side, I wasn’t always.

When I was in college, I bought into the idea that in order to write anything worthwhile, I had to write something literary. It was the idea espoused by all around me, all my professors — the very first grown-up, professional authors I had met. And I was too young and naive to understand that the view they were putting forth was not the view of the Community of Grown Up and Professional Authors. It was the view of the Academic Community.

When I entered college, I wanted to write science fiction.  It took them about one year to convince me I had to write literary, and I spent about nine years (!) doing it.  I read Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry Awards every year.  I subscribed to the New Yorker.  I met a lot of truly awesome friends in the literary scene, including the writing group I’m still part of today.  During this time I also wrote some decent stories, but there’s only about one I’d now proudly display to my friends.  Partly this is because, well, I was just a young writer.  But I think it is also partly because I was trying to write stuff that didn’t really get me jazzed.

What finally jolted me out of this literary mindset was NaNoWriMo, the online challenge where people sign up to write a novel (or 50,000 words) in a month.  Something about the excess and sheer wonderful craziness of the idea let me decide to try something genre.  After all, it was an insane challenge.  I wasn’t going to really produce something worthwhile.  And therefore I could try something fun.

That book became my first, unpublished novel, Murder 101: Introduction to Death.  Even after I finished it, I thought of my foray into genre work as a diversion, a way to jumpstart my career.  But not (no, never!) the real meat of my career.  No, that had to be literary.  It was probably another two years before I gave up on the idea of being a literary writer altogether.

And doing that made me happy.  Not wildly, ecstatically happy–just content.  At peace.

But I have been on the literary side of the fence for too long to expect all my friends to understand completely.  Outlander wasn’t being a jerk when he asked me whether genre writers cared about prose; he was just expressing the belief of his community.  Literary writers tend to believe that genre writers don’t care about good prose, that they don’t care about meaning or nuance or writing something “real.”  You can hear their attitude in the term they sometimes use to describe literary fiction:  “serious fiction.”  As though genre writing were inherently silly.

Similarly, genre writers tend to believe that literary writers don’t care about plot, or tension, or actually telling a cohesive story.  They believe that literary writers like to wade around in a marsh of emotion without giving the reader something they can hang onto and clearly understand.  In their own way, they believe that literary writers are not “serious –” serious about story, about structure, about scene.

I’ll tell you a little secret:  there’s some truth to both these sides.  Genre writers do care more about plot than prose, and literary writers do care more about prose than plot. But both groups do care about both things; both groups are earnestly trying to put out the best books, the very best books that they can.

And that is the way of things.  And though I am glad both kinds of fiction exist, I am happy to find myself on the genre side of the fence.  It’s the side that’s never going to get me access to the Nobel or the New Yorker.  It’s the side that’s not likely to pave my way into book clubs or high society galas.  But it’s the side, I guess, where I’m comfortable.  Frankly, it’s the side where I think I’ve always been meant to be.

And yes, I do care more about plot than prose.