The Rewrite has Landed

It's quite remarkable what happens when you set out to revise a novel you first wrote years before. At least, it was remarkable to me. I wound up rewriting an absolute ton of the thing. About two years ago, I revised the Children of Midian, but I don't think my heart was really in it. I'd spent far too much time with the characters, having moved onto a second novel of a "planned" trilogy.

The first "final" draft had several problems. First, it was bloated. I can't say it any simpler than that. No matter what I did to the book, it only got longer. I seemed unable to murder my darlings.

I also discovered that the book wasn't quite as YA as I thought. A few agents provided me some excellent feedback on that very point. And so I learned the real difference between Young Adult and Middle Grade. I also found that neither Middle Grade nor YA are tidy little categories. Midian presented some darker themes than one might expect in a MG boy novel. Given the character ages, issues they faced, and some of the "dark matter", this was an upper middle grade novel. Go ahead. Try explaining that in a query letter.

The dawning realization that Midian was MG also led me back to my original problem. The book was already too long for a YA novel from an unpublished author. How was this going to work as Middle Grade fiction?

Novice that I was, I decided to split the first novel into two middle-grade-sized books. Big mistake. I had written one story, not two. Choosing a dividing point was like throwing a dart at a double-pane window. Don't get me wrong. I knew I needed to add a little something to make it "work". I wrote a new chapter to help augment the first half and to let it stand on its own. The end result? Two smaller halves, neither of which really stood on their own.

I wound up stitching it back together before leaving the book for dead a couple of years ago. Yet, the real problems remained. The plot was too confusing. The kids were melodramatic. Elliot--the protagonist--was sort of likable, but he was just kind of... meh. Above all, there was simply too much gunk--too much stuff I had been too stubborn to remove because I thought it was so neat and indispensable.

I picked it up a couple months ago and reread it. Though fairly horrified by large swaths of the what I'd written, I spotted what drew me to write the book in the first place. So, I decided to give revising it another shot.

I once asked my daughter, "What do you do when life hands you lemons?" She was probably eight at the time, but her answer lingers with me. "Suck on 'em." There would be much lemon-sucking, which completely explains the faces I pulled as I went through the process of rewriting the book.

The Peanuts cartoon atop this post is about where my head was at.  Here are random thoughts that swam in my brain during the process.

1. Get to the point already.

2. He's a total wuss. Can't have that. (about the protag)

3. Cute, but who cares? 

4. Kill it.

5. Did you forget you cut that scene? (upon finding references to aforementioned cut scene)

6. OMG - he/she is turning again. (characters kept turning to SEE things)

7. Great. That's the author, not the story and characters.

8. Hungry.

9. You suck. Whose idea was this?

10. Hey, look, the word-count is way down.

I'm on track for the planned release date on Smashwords to start - 1/21/2012

Querying exclusively

Normally, I will only query to an agent or editor who accepts simultaneous submissions, meaning they are okay with me querying other agents/editors at the same time, as long as I let them know if another party is interested. There was one notable exception, though.

Last year, I attended the New Jersey SCBWI Conference where I was fortunate enough to sit in on a session on character development given by Cheryl Klein, Senior Editor at Arthur A. Levine Books (an imprint of Scholastic). I even thrust my hand in the air and asked a question that she graciously answered.

And then I went up to her and complimented her on her web site, with its many wonderful writer's resources. By the way, her new site is still a bit under construction, but her blog is quite good. I am fairly certain I must've appeared to be a stalker the way I walked up to her in the conference, and had to rush off as the next speaker commenced. Ah, well.

Anyway, I submitted The Children of Midian to her in a query packet via snail mail (which she prefers) last October, with SQUID written on the envelope (if you ready her submission guidelines, you'll understand why), and a series of SCBWI conference stickers affixed in a few prominent places. She also prefers not to receive simultaneous submissions, but will accept them nonetheless. I took the hint and submitted exclusively because, in this case I really thought it was a fit and she was the editor I really wanted to work with.

Well, it's nine months later, and no word. Based on what I know and have read about her--she always responds--I wonder if my packet got lost in the mail. If so, I guess I'll chalk it up to a lost opportunity. I mean, I had the stickers and everything! (I think they help keep you off the slush pile or something.)

But if not lost in the mail, a few months back I assumed that no response meant "no", so I began to query again. I'm not big on sending a reminder eMail or letter to an editor or agent, unless they explicitly say to. The one time I did, the "no" came back fast! I'm sure the "no" would've come back anyway, but I'm superstitious about such things now.

I haven't given up hope, though. Onward, I say!

Have any of you had similar or related experiences?

The Children of Midian

Alrighty then. The Children of Midian is my first novel and it took me a couple years to write and fully revise. It's a story about a fourteen-year-old army brat who passes through a portal disguised as a deserted shack in the woods. Elliot is his name and he winds up in Midian, where he finds a whole mess of kids living on their own in a makeshift camp. No adults at all, except for the evil dude who runs the place. Oh yeah, he's also got minions. Every super-bad guy has to have minions, and in this case, said minions are werewolves.

Elliot, being a really excellent but wise-cracking kid joins forces with the children of Midian to fight back against the bad guy, who goes by the foreboding name of Lycaon. Things get really bad when Elliot's parents follow him through into Midian and wind up captured by Lycaon's lycanthropic army. Lycanthropic - is that even a word?

In the larger scheme of things, this is really part of a larger story, originally conceived of as a trilogy, in which Elliot saves the world after nearly causing its destruction.

So there you have it, and you can click the link in this posting or on the cover image down on the bottom right of the faulty brain. If you do, you can read chapter one.

When I wrote this puppy and then went through, oh, let's say two or three major revisions, I wound up at 98K words. That's long for YA. I began to cut. I got it down to 95k, then landed at 84k. Better, right? It's fantasy, so it can get a bit longer than non-fantasy. I still needed to cut more, but it was a start.

Then I pitched Midian to a series of agents and the BEA/Writer's Digest conference this year as YA. In all my research, I'd read that YA was for ages 13-18, and Middle Grade was 8-12. But once I began pitching, I received an education.

1. Elliot may be fourteen, but he's in Middle School. Middle School = Middle Grade
2. Elliot may be fourteen, but that doesn't mean most fourteen-year-olds wants to read about him. Younger readers want to read about older characters. Once again - Middle Grade.
3. Middle Grade = 50K words or less, esp. for debut authors.
   
4. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe = 36k words

There was no way I could cut Midian down to 50k words or less and keep the story coherent. There's too much plot. So, I'm breaking it apart. It'll be two books, split a little less than halfway through, with additional goings on in book 1. It's not a bad thing, necessarily. It's actually allowing me to add some storyline to the first book that helps with the overall series.

So now I've got two complete Middle Grade fantasy books - The Children of Midian and Return to Midian. And the third book, tentatively titled Abeo, is well underway.

By the way, if you want to know how many words are in one of your favorite children's books and whether it's YA or MG, Renaissance Learning has a great site to help you.