QUERY: JEHOVAH'S HITLIST (another draft)

In September '10, I made a first draft of a query for Jehovah's Hitlist. It's a rule peoples, never go with your first draft. Of anything. Not your novel. Not your query. So I've written a few drafts of JH (and will be doing one more) so it's time to put the nose to the grindstone and get a quality query.

...of course, I suck at queries, so I need your help! Read the below. Help me make it better. PLLLEEEEEAAAAASSSSEEEEEE!!!!!!

Jehovah knows a secret. On Sundays when they parachute down the charity box, he can see where they open the sky to make the drop. First one to the box gets the best charity: ration bars, medicine, ammunition, and what all. Jehovah gets himself real leather boots meant for the Hanged Man with a list of five names stuffed inside.

It lists five people who can lead him up above. He must find them and kill them or the Hanged Man says he will destroy Missouri Avenue. That ain't a threat to take lightly. When the folk on Alaska Avenue betrayed the Hanged Man to the deputies, he pulled himself out the noose and leveled the entire block. He'll do the same again lest Jehovah does what he's told. Go up above and deliver a note for the Hanged Man. Do that and all is forgotten.

That's the dream of everyone in the Nation. Escape the jackals and the marginalized, the spikers and the snake oil addicts to the platform city above. That was Jehovah's mama's dream. She sold him and his brothers to buy her way up and here the Hanged Man was giving him the opportunity. All he need do is kill five people and don't look back. Leave it all behind, friends and family, violence and vice. But at the end of all things when the waters have risen and humanity has fled to the sky above, all one has left is family.

JEHOVAH'S HITLIST (or DOWN BELOW THE UP ABOVE) is a completed 94,000-word adult, dystopian science fiction.

If this is YA, Society is Coming to an End

I have mentioned previously that despite the popularity of YA, I have little interest in trying to cash in on the genre. I like writing adult work. I like deep moral and ethical exploration that comes from an environment of violence, sex, and all the topics that a YA book can ricochet off of but never delve into too deeply.

Admittedly, the genre has been getting grittier. I continue to claim that Janice Hardy's Healing Wars series has become too violent to be considered Middle Grade. That's YA. And YA is getting more violent as well, but it hasn't reached where I write yet.

I'm revising JEHOVAH'S HITLIST to submit for querying next week. The story is much more solid than I remembered and I am pleased to find it so. The main character (Jehovah) is 15 years old. This is perfect for YA, yeah? Teenager. Protagonist. YA dystopian is hot. Here we go! Of course, he kills four people in the first chapter alone. The book has profanity, public nudity, drug use, prostitution, slave trafficking, masturbation, underage sex, racism, and lots of killing. It's a dirty, gritty world, and I would not diminish that a fraction to cash in on the YA market.

...now, if the publisher thinks parents won't mind their teenagers reading about a Nevada Avenue fuck whore or a marginalized too doped up on spike to get hard, then I wouldn't complain about the higher advance that comes with a YA sale. ;)

Holy Balls!

I have been pondering it for months and I finally made a decision. An agent gave me feedback on WANTED: CHOSEN ONE, NOW HIRING. He wanted Bastin to be the main character rather than Nashau. I've discussed that here before. Bastin is clearly the most likable, charismatic of the group, but the story was Nashau's and I didn't want to give that up.

So after a lengthy amount of pondering, I finally saw the story as Bastin's while keeping Nashau's subtext. Thus, I chopped off the initial four chapters (which were all Nashau and Podome) and condensed them to a single chapter 2. I kept the alive/dead juxtaposition that I loved in the original draft (something you won't understand unless you've read it, but take my word for it, it's awesome) and have moved on through chapter three.

You know how people often say they can't go back and read their own work? That they find it embarrassing? Not me. I LOVE this story. LUVRE IT! I wrote the damn thing and after watching Bastin hoodwink Farmer, I was just bouncing up and down on my seat. Holy balls this is a good story!

I will revise Podome/Nashau's story and hopefully inject more of Bastin's early energy later into the story. And then the hardest part: I'll need to write a new query for it.

JEHOVAH'S HITLIST will be the next story I query once I get beta reader feedback, but this one will follow shortly thereafter. I consider it a significant enough revision that requerying is appropriate. I have tentatively changed the name to FLIMFLAM just so I can keep the two stories separate. Not sure if I'll keep WANTED: CHOSEN ONE, NOW HIRING as the final title. It seemed to turn some people off.

(This means I'm suspending work on 7Sac for the moment. I'm having a crisis of confidence following my rejection and can no longer manage the pacing. I'll need to get my feet back under me before I can continue on that one.)

Measuring Progress

On my website, I have a page named the Queue where I list all the ideas I plan on pursuing to completion. This includes novels, short stories, plays, etc. My current wip will have a general word count (I don't update it every day) and those works I've finished will be struck through with a final word count (usually of the first draft).

I modified it today and removed the word count on everything except my current work in progress. I only work on one story at a time and with the exception of HOSNR, all of them would be restarted when I get to them. So having a word count there--especially a word count that hasn't changed in years--makes me look like I'm scatterbrained and/or unable to finish work I start on.

So it's all gone. Now, only 7Sac has a word count. I think the page looks much better, cleaner, more focused. It's a laser! bzzzzrrrzzzzzzzz!!!!!

Arbitrary Milestones

I passed 10,000 words on THE 7TH SACRIFICE this morning. This pleases me. I don't know why it pleases me more than passing 9,000 words or 11,000 words. 11,000 is more than 10,000 so why doesn't that please me more?

And it can't be some ridiculous "if I pass 10,000 then I know I'll finish it" because this very novel was abandoned at 27,000 words when last I attempted it (though this time around it's a bajillion times better--I have yet to describe the main character climbing down off his wagon and then climbing back up again).

For all that, I like passing 10,000 words. Perhaps it was all those times in my youth that I said, "I'm going to write a novel" only to fizzle out at 2500 words or some pathetic total that barely qualifies as a short story. 10,000 is progress. It says, you're working toward your goal.

I also like 50,000 words. 50,000 is the big number for me. I've never written a manuscript pass 50,000 words and not finished it. 50k, 100k, 150k are all obvious yet arbitrary milestones we assign because of our decimal-based learning structure. You can rope 10k in there too, as it is the essence of decimal.

It feels good, though. Especially to have done so so quickly. I had a lonely little intro chapter. Then I brainstormed with Liz. Now I have 10,000 words and a week hasn't even passed yet. That's pleasing. That's invigorating. This baby is on its way.

Writing is good.

(I'm coming down with something, though. You should see the stuff coming out of my nose. Not sure how much progress I'll make on the way home.)

Find the Fun in the Boring

I wrote chapter 2 for 7Sac today. This is a big deal because it's the first fully original chapter of this version. Pieces of chapter 1 got held over from my first attempt and much more of it came from the wind sprint I wrote. Chapter 2 was wholly fresh. I actually tried to write a little at the party last night, but how lame was that? And I got stuck on a naming convention (which I figured out either late last night or this morning, I can't actually remember). This morning, though, I knocked out the whole chapter and I am quite enthused.

I am enthused because so much of the chapter was unexpected. I started in a tricky spot with one of the main characters at a gate to a city. Oh how many D&D adventures annoy you with guards who are all flippant and bossy. But at the same time, there isn't a lot of use starting an early chapter with crossing a gate unless it's going to build character or somehow affect the plot. In this case, I quickly recognized the boring that was starting to spread. Cliche and unoriginality threatened to ruin my attempt, and I don't think the story is strong enough to survive a failed chapter this early on. I needed to rescue it. How do you resolve a character vs. gate guard situation without one of them acting a dick or both of them being polite and the scene becoming completely irrelevant?

Introduce another character! Hence Knight General Merchel arrived and saved the day for March Lord Albrecht. We got to skip past the guards and learn a little of both characters. More importantly, they stopped for coffee at a shop and I got to describe people and culture from the Waodian Republic. This is something I had never done in the previous draft and had no thought of doing in this draft. It's awesome that it happened, though, because one of the characters that gets introduced later is Waodian. Woo hoo! Laying the foundation baby!

Mostly, I love writing a chapter where all of a sudden a new and awesome facet of the setting comes into play totally without any planning. And it's rich and involved and I just love it and am so pleased and it gets me all excited.

So...um, yeah. Happy new year.

Beginning Anew

I revised the wind sprint I wrote a few weeks ago into a MUCH better first chapter. There's a little too much there, but I'll pare that down during revision. The tone and the action are so much better. Less description of action and more action. I am incredibly pleased.

The thing is, today is the first day I've written in a week. Granted, it has been an incredibly stressful week at work, but not writing has exacerbated it. Once upon a time, I was able to go a few weeks without writing. Now it seems I can't go more than a day or two.

This is awesome in that I feel I've moved up a level in my abilities as a writer. But it's terrifying because it is having a genuine impact on my daily life. I wrote today over lunch and when I went back to the office, I was whistling a jaunty tune. I was in SUCH a great mood. A better mood than what was appropriate for having such a difficult work and eating lunch alone.

Writing is my heroine. And like a junkie, I think that's awesome.

Afternoon Showers on the Frontal Lobe

I did some brainstorming with Elizabeth Poole today, which was incredibly helpful. I was wavering on 7Sac, as the scope was too large and the story too small. There wasn't enough steak and potatoes. It was mostly pre-dinner rolls. The story was at risk of falling into too many cliches, specifically the "build a team" story where the majority of the story is building the team and not actually dealing with the threat at hand. Plenty of good books have followed this route, but plenty bad books have too and frankly it's a trope I'm incredibly bored with.

So rather than assemble the team, I'm going to chase the team.

Here's the quick breakdown. The book begins with the main character, Cheshire. Cheshire meets Albrecht who offers the inciting action. Cheshire and Albrecht meet Ananta the Magician and his two slaves.

That was the mistake. Having Ananta and his slaves all appear at once put too much weight on forward action without explaining why these three people have shown up or why they become necessary for the group. I kept focusing on Ananta. The slaves were window dressing even though both of them are necessary for the plot's advancement.

So, the obvious track is to introduce them individually. But that's where the "build a team" thing comes in. Now Ananta doesn't have slaves. They've become Grant Black and Coeas, demon hunters in their own right. Saying something like "we need to find these men" when Cheshire has been hunting demons for 42 years is totally stupid. The man has killed more demons than the rest of them put together, so to suggest he needs to build a team to accomplish what he's been doing for decades rings incredibly false.

BUT! The same inciting action that applies to Cheshire applies to Grant and Coeas as well...IF they're not being recruited but being stopped. All the demons have to be killed within a 24 hour period, hence the demons Cheshire has killed reincarnating every seven years. If Grant and Coeas found and killed their demons as well, the cycle repeats itself and they'd have to wait another seven years (and Cheshire is already old as dirt).

Sure it's still a team in the end, but the task isn't to go find and recruit people, but to find them and stop them from screwing everything up. That pleases me.

I'm also juggling on POV chapters for people who are possessed by the demons. I have a few ideas for these, some of them safer than the others. I think I'll just have to give it a try and see what happens.

Regardless, in this case, I have enough where this is officially a novel to work on. I'm going to take my computer with me to work tomorrow. Huzzah!

Thanks Liz!

A MAP!

I love maps almost as much as I like titles. If only I had the artistic talent necessary to draw maps. But I knew what I wanted to use as a map (also why I changed the name of the acreages). So after a little tweaking in photofiltre, I have a rough map that I will use for THE 7TH SACRIFICE.

I present to you...the Kingdom!

Plontsing the Sac

I've been on holiday! It is becoming a tradition that each Christmas my wife and I go up into the White Mountains for a few days. Though New Hampshire is a small state, the North country and the South Country are pretty different (as we're often reminded by those that live in the North). You can cut the state in half and vary the temperature by 10 degrees. Life is different there, including living in the lower elevations of the northern Appalachian Mountains. It's a great time, though this year absent snow. We are expecting a blizzard to hit tonight, so that should make up for it. Of course, it was supposed to start snowing 2 1/2 hours ago, so who knows if that will actually materialize.

If you're ever in North Conway, consider staying at the Wyatt House Bed & Breakfast. They were great to us. The food was delicious. And it's ideally situated.

While I was there, Jen too copious amounts of naps, more than usual, which gave me the writing time I needed to wrap up JH and send it off to beta readers. That number is down to two, now, which is disappointing. But people have lives and it's the holidays, so I understand.

I had thought to maybe spend a few weeks reading. I'm going to put attention to finishing Tad Williams' SHADOWHEART. I finished MOCKINGJAY yesterday. It was good, but I don't think it was worth the hype that it got. The ending averted being a disaster and ended up being just okay. The whole trilogy almost seems like it was written just to show which boy the character will choose, which is interesting for all of five pages, not three books.

As for me, spending time reading is turning into prep work for writing THE 7TH SACRIFICE (I've officially changed its name to be 7TH instead of SEVENTH).

For starters, I'm no longer calling the counties the counties. I originally conceived this story between writing WANTED: CHOSEN ONE and THE TRIAD SOCIETY. The former puts a lot of focus on duchies and a king. The latter puts more focus on counties. For 7Sac, I had wanted to use counties as a regional boundary because so often people focus on duchies or kingdoms and I like that county is still a word we use today. When I abandoned my first attempt at 7Sac, that bled over to TTS. The problem is, now TTS is a finished novel and the possible first in a trilogy, so using counties again seems like beating a dead horse.

I went horseback riding on my vacation. The farm was 77 acres of an original 1000 acreage granted to the owner's family in 1771 by King George III. Yup, I went horseback riding on a 239-year-old farm. New England is awesome. This made me tweak things a bit.

Basic breakdown. "The Kingdom" is where this takes place. The Kingdom is broken into four areas, originally called counties. Each of these counts claimed the thrown after the king died under mysterious circumstances. That's getting modified. The counties are acreages. Acreage is a little cumbersome to say. I was watching "Valhalla Rising" yesterday (disembowelment on Christmas!) and they calls Mads a terror from the southerlands. Well isn't that nifty. You always hear highlands or lowlands or East and West or what have you. Hell, I even used Southerland in TTS as Soderland (German), but this feels different. The acreages are delineated by compass.

Cumberland Acreage, the Westerlands
Arostook Acreage, the Northerlands
Somerset Acreage, the Easterlands
Kennebec Acreage, the Southerlands

Now, instead of counts, each of the Acreages is rules by a prince or princess, with Cumberland being home to the Crown Prince and rightful heir. The rest claim he assassinated their father and thus forfeited the throne. Each of them now call himself/herself King/Queen, but most just refer to them as the Pretenders (a term I made the first time around that was used much less).

I also used Tinkers in JEHOVAH'S HITLIST, so it wouldn't do to include them again in 7Sac. But I love the tinkers I've created, so really I'm just changing the name since the two types of tinkers were completely different. Now they'll be called Peddlers.

One thing that's getting dropped all together is the varying naming structures. Each county represented a different European culture in terms of naming. I think I'll just stick with Brittany this time as I so often move into other areas of Europe for inspiration. Main character's name is Cheshire, after all, and don't want to change that. So it wouldn't make sense if everyone else had a Russian name.

The visuals in "Valhalla Rising" were pretty amazing, enough to make up for the fact the story (there was a story?) made no sense whatsoever. Quite inspirational. Gave me a lot of ideas on description for the Four Corners, where the four acreages meet and where the abandoned royal palace still stands. I had thought to write the description here, but I'm not in the mood any more, so I'll save that for next time.

Hope you all had an enjoyable week while I was away. Time to get back to work. :)

(Oooo, and I got a Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock t-shirt in my stocking! Woo hoo!)

(And a titanium spork!!!!)

Telegraphing the Play

Writing a novel is like writing a sports play, it may look familiar, but you don't want the reader to know the play that's coming. I know some people read for the experience, but some people (like me) read for the surprise. That's why I hate spoilers so much. If the surprise is ruined for me (like the end of CRYOBURN), it really lessens the experience.

So here I am editing my own work and I get to chapter 15. A lot has been happening. The pacing is pretty fast and yet another event happens. It's starting to feel like Jurassic Park 3 where one chase scene ends and another begins. They never overlap, mind you, but the characters never really stop running. You could see the plays coming. "Chase A is over, cue Chase B!"

I'm reading chapter 15 and it says to me "the author thinks things are moving too quickly. Let's slow this down."

A, it's bad that it reads that way. B, it's worse because it's EXACTLY what I was thinking at the time. The chapter has nothing to do with properly advancing the plot and everything to do with throwing a speedbump in the character's way so that he doesn't reach the first name on his list too quickly. (And reading the previous chapters in succession, it's not too quickly. It's just right given the other events.)

So chapter 15 is getting ripped apart. I don't even know if there will be enough left to warrant a chapter when I'm done. We'll see.

Time Out

I have two thousands words left before I complete JEHOVAH'S HITLIST. I just bought SHADOWHEART, the fourth and final volume of the Shadowmarch Tetralogy written by my favorite author, Tad Williams. This is a time for writing and reading a big ass book.

...yet SHADOWHEART sits on my table (damn that thing is heavy to carry) and I haven't opened my computer since yesterday morning. Why?

A book came out earlier this year, MOCKINGJAY by Suzanne Collins. The tweet-o-sphere erupted in various expostulations of worship. No genre is more represented on Twitter (or the internet, really) than YA, and there was no one that didn't love this series. I'm not a big YA reader myself, limiting that to Rawling and Hardy and that's about it. So when I see such a one-sided outpouring, I tend to stay away. Especially since a lot of the outpouring began with agents. Popular online agents tend to have a trail of sycophants behind them, so I find their corroboration of the agent's opinion to mean little.

Then a few actors hired a production company to film them in an 8-minute trailer in hopes of landing parts in the forthcoming movie. This trailer spoke to me. I downloaded the book preview (a genuine previous and not some front matter plus two pages crap I so often find) and immediately bought the book.

Dude!

DOOD.

Finishing a novel? That can wait. SHADOWHEART? That thing weighs a lot. Why wasn't there an ebook?

THE HUNGER GAMES by Suzanne Collins? Believe the hype. This thing is good.

He Makes the Turn! He Approaches the Finish Line! ...OH NO, HE'S TRIPPED!

So all other obligations were set aside for this evening. Yes, I'm supposed to be making left overs so my wife has something to eat for lunch tomorrow, but she'll understand. This is ART!

I'm flying along and get to the last chapter (now considering making it the second to last). I'm about to have the protagonist parachute from a platform city after killing a few people when I realize...

These two people can't be here at the same time. And those two items which I just described can't be there at the same time. In fact, none of these people can be here. Dammit! This entire scene isn't possible!

So, end of the book is postponed until tomorrow. Poop.