Christmas Fantasies

When I was a young boy, my brother Chris and I would lie underneath the Christmas tree and look up at all the lights. The moment was hypnotizing. My imagination stirred. Sugar Plums danced. You get the idea.


I think that so much of what makes the Christmas season so magical is its ablility to hypnotize. Light displays out by the lake. Christmas parades. Shopping in small, specialty local stores that love to decorate for the season. Darkness coming early. Christmas hymns on the radio. Egg nog and feasting. Midnight Mass. There's obviously a lot more to the Christmas season, but the point is that it's addictive, like a drug. I tend to take my first hit somewhere around October when I break out the Charlie Brown Christmas CD. By Thanksgiving, I am exploding.

My newest Christmas addiction has been my fantasy village. Dept 56 is awesome.

http://www.department56.com/index.aspx

I remember staring enchantedly through a store window at winter landscapes: lighted buildings, meandering creeks, porcelin boys on snowy hills, bundled in coats building snowmen. The romanticized scene appealed to me and even molded my young mind. I rather think it affected all aspects of my life. To this day I can't look out my living room window at snow falling without succumbing to the urge to be out in it. I even use the excuse that the driveway needs shoveled--anything to get outside.

So a few years ago my wife's great aunt mailed me Pine Point Pond with three skaters. Immediately I started building around it. First there came Loon Lake Cabin, which was in the Snow Village series, not matching my first piece. I bought another piece, a bed and breakfast with a horse-drawn sled from the Dickens Village collection that better matched it. Complete with a fluffy white blanket for a bed of snow, my humble little village adorned the top of my entertainment center and made me smile.

Last year the collection grew. My intention was to add one piece per year, but I am far too impatient for that, so I picked up a few new buildings, one, a boarding house, from the Snow Village series, and a few sections of a mountain creek, complete with a bridge. The Snow Village pieces went to school and are on the table behind my desk.

The other pieces again went to the top of my entertainment center.

This year I was granted permission to take over the dining room table. More river was added, a cabin, a church, and more figures, one a fly fisherman casting in my little creek, one a wood chopper, and another drilling through some ice. I created mountains out of styrofoam for the cabin, with valleys for the river. I received a couple of seaside pieces, so I then created an ocean front out of a clear plastic flourescent lighting cover and "Deep Sea Blue" paint. Countless hours have gone into many other details that I won't bore you with until the village looked fairly professional.

All of this has been a labor of love, but there's an irony behind it:

I haven't sat down to stare at it yet.  I need to fix that.

Publishing, Part IV

It's sad how the fear of failure can keep us from following our dreams.  As school was letting out in May of 2012, I had just bought a new Writer's Market book and sat down at the table to start doing some research.  Simply getting to that point was not so easy.

In all the years I had been writing, I had tested the market a few times.  All said I had probably sent out a couple hundred queries and book proposals, most of them meeting with impersonal rejections.  The rest of them garnered no responses despite the fact that I had provided each with self-addressed, stamped return envelopes.  I figure there must be a staff member at most publishing houses whose job it is to gently peel stamps off of the return envelopes of sucky writers for future use. 

Anyways, I had gotten used to the idea of rejection, and even started doing the math.  If an average publisher receives 500 queries a year and publishes 10 books, the odds aren't exactly in my favor.  I was pretty sure I could write a decent elevator pitch at this point and was even pretty marketable, especially with a decent readership through my newspaper articles.  Still, I was pretty psyched out.  Deep inside I told myself that if I didn't submit, there would still be hope.

Still, my wife kept at me to submit my work.  Every now and then I would tell her my newest idea for a book and instead of a, "That sounds promising," I always received, "Why don't you try to find a publisher for the five books you have now?"  And I knew she was right.  It was time to stop being such a coward and play another hand.

This time, instead of taking the easy way out and spending as little time as possible, I spent the last week in may and the first few weeks of June pouring over all the publishers, highlighting the ones I deemed to be a good fit, and writing remarks in the margins for later.  I identified 50 publishers for 3 of my books.  Of the other two, one wasn't quite ready, and the other one I just plain don't like.  Most of the publishers I sought were for my Christian young adult novel, The Mentor.  The Mentor was my 2nd book, and the one I liked the best.  I knew I was running out of time on it though because one of the characters was a WWII vet, and unfortunately the "Greatest Generation" is getting to be of an age where there just aren't many left anymore.

Instead of taking the easy way out, I checked out each publisher's website for any insights/clues they might want to share.  I found that many printed things on their websites that directly contrasted what was printed in Writer's Market, so I sent out e-mails, received responses, then crafted a plan for each publisher.  Some were as easy as sending a query as an e-mail attachment.  Others had online forms to fill out.  Still some asked for the works, all to be snail mailed.  This is how I spent the last five weeks of summer vacation.  For each submission, I would write down the publisher, date, and important information like what I sent, how I sent it, and how long it usually took to hear back.  Without this master list, it would be impossible to remember who I sent what, and when.

Some publishers I looked at and said something to the effect of, "Well, such-and-such novel sort of fits into this category.  If I craft the query to say what they are wanting to hear, maybe they will pick it."  Many were pretty good fits, but of all the publishers, there were about five I deemed to be the perfect fit.  Martin Sisters Publishing was one of them (http://www.martinsisterspublishing.com/.) 

So I waited.  Some of the e-mail queries came back immediately with rejections, to which I would go to my master list and mark them off with an unhappy face.  Here I see it important to say that in all of the years I had sent stuff off, ALL I HAD EVER RECEIVED IN RETURN WERE IMPERSONAL FORM LETTERS.  Then mid-September one publisher gave me some hope.  In this rejection letter I was greeted by name, which seldom happened.  The editor went into two very-specific paragraphs, explaining how the fantasy novel I sent (not the one I am getting published) was sub-standard.  I was elated!  Finally somebody was giving me something to chew on.  I was so impressed that I used it as a teachable moment in class. 

In fact, I was about to rock-and-roll with the changes the editor suggested to the novel when I got the e-mail for which I had been waiting fifteen years.  The whole thing went down in a week full of butterflies that led to me signing a contract on Halloween.  What a memorable day that was.

Since that day there haven't been many moments when I wasn't thinking about my novel.  There has been endless work, first with sending in forms that included a biography, back cover blurb, contact information, and you name it.  This is in addition to revising the novel one last time then totally unformatting it to the editor's liking.  That took twenty hours total by itself!

Now, for the first time since all of this has happened, I have had a chance to breathe.  My wife and I have been talking about marketing ideas, and there's plenty of online creation to be done like creating an official website, facebook fan page, and twitter.  All of it is a bit overwhelming, and I've had to take it a day at a time, but something I found the other day reminds me what I should be thinking through this process. 

I was unpacking my Christmas fantasy village and I found a note I had left to myself from last year.  I don't remember writing it, but it is very appropriate.  It runs, "Man, I love Christmas time!  Enjoy every minute of December."  Just as those words are going to inspire me to enjoy the whole Christmas season, from the day after Thanksgiving (who am I kidding?  I've been listening to Christmas CD's since the day after Halloween!) until I put the tree back in the attic, they are also going to serve as a reminder for me to enjoy this process of publishing from signing the contract to the day the book launches, because who knows if it will happen again.  I guess only time will tell.

Publishing, Part III

After I wrote my second novel, I became quite used to the lifestyle of writing a novel a summer.  It's such a therapy to leave the real world enter the new world you are creating.  It's like daydreaming and writing it down at the same time.  Steven King said that the key to writing a novel is to put a few characters in a situation and "watch them work their way out."  This would seem to indicate that the writer is part of the action, just a reporter watching it all happen.  That's what it felt like.

So in the summertime I would get up at 4:00 in the morning, put on a pot of coffee, and watch the sun rise from over the top of my computer screen.  Putting in a half-hearted effort, I sent out quite a few queries, this time paying attention to the publishers' requirements.  Still I only sent to those publishers who wanted just a query letter.  I also branched out to include presses outside of New York and discovered that so many of them specialized in young adult fiction.  I was hopeful, but still received impersonal rejections. 

I decided that maybe I was going about the process all wrong.  Instead of going straight to the publisher, maybe I should leave the process to the experts.  So I started querying agents.  I read two books on the topic and quickly found they were a tougher bunch than editors to impress. 

At this point I had been writing novels for nearly a decade and had managed to sell only one little article to a hunting magazine.  So I focused on writing.  It was so addictive to pump out material, and so disheartening to get rejection letters in the mail that I just wrote. I told myself that I could publish whenever I wanted, but in reality I was hiding behind my computer screen instead. On a positive note, I accumulated quite a bit of material.  I had written three novels and a non-fiction book before I was introduced to Mark.

Mark D. Williams is a writer from Amarillo that impressed me right from the start.  Introduced to me through my sister-in-law, I gave him a call just as he was about to go away to Colorado to fish for a summer.  He and his buddy W. Chad McPhail were researching for a book titled Colorado Flyfishing, Where to Eat, Sleep, Fish. 
http://www.amazon.com/Colorado-Fly-Fishing-Where-Sleep/dp/1555664423/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1352508796&sr=8-1&keywords=Colorado+Flyfishing+Mark+D.+Williams

The two were getting paid to fly fish Colorado for a summer and I was completely jealous!  What a great idea!  That summer we communicated mostly through e-mail.  Whenever he would make it to a wifi zone, he would take care of his book business, but he always had time to talk to me.  Here I was this needy guy who knew very little about the business and he was super busy writing his own book.  Still he always got back to me.

He introduced me to the sports editor at the Amarillo Globe and hoped I would gain a little confidence by getting some articles in print.  So in April of 2010 I sold an article about white bass fishing.  I had been kicked to the curb by the industry for over ten years to that point, and just seeing my name in print was a spirit lifter.  In the next two years I would publish another ten or so articles.  At the same time, Mark taught me how to write a good query letter.  So in the summer of 2012, having now written five books, I decided for the first time to make a real, determined effort to get one of them published. 

But that's a story for another day.

Publishing, Part II

Having just completed my first novel in a record time of some five years, I saw the next logical step to be figuring out how to publish.  I hadn't put any thought into it before now, so to figure it all out, I headed to the bookstore. 

My eyes bulging at the twenty-some "find-a-publisher" titles I had splayed out before me on the floor of the bookstore, I grabbed for the prettiest one I could find.  Steven King's On Writing. I read the back of the dust jacket.  Half memoir, half writing instruction.  I was already a Steven King fan, so it was second-nature to purchase it. 

Now if you have never read the book, I highly suggest it.  His writing autobiography is downright funny.  He gives such stories as being locked in a coat closet by his baby sitter (perhaps explaining his morbidity) and "yarking" in his mothers shoes, and using poison ivy to wipe while out in the woods.  When I made it to the second part, he gave all sorts of writing instruction, but only said a few things about publishing.  First, find a friend in the business like he did.  His friend just happened to be an editor at one of the big publishing houses in New York, and was the reason Carrie got picked up.  It was, after all, his third novel, the first two receiving complete rejection.  This wasn't very helpful, but his best advice for starving artists such as myself was to buy a copy of Writer's Market.  Some of the best advice I've ever received.

I soon learned that Writer's Market is the bible for publishing.  It shows the whole process of how to get published, including how to write the query letter.  It gives testimonials from other authors.  But most importantly it gave listings of reputable publishirs, mostly American.  I was set.

So taking King's advice, I located about ten publishers and wrote them letters.  Now mind you, each publisher asked for something different.  For example, while one publisher may only ask for a query letter, another might ask for a query, marketing plan, summary, and sample chapters.  Shooting for the stars, I queried only the publishers who had "New York City" in their address. 

My audacity was quite comical, as was my ignorance of just what it took to get published.  Actually, it was pure laziness on my part.  Maybe some of them wanted just queries, maybe some wanted more.  They got poorly-written queries from me.  Over the next six months I got my butt handed to me. When King was starting out, he drove a nail into his wall and shoved his rejection letters onto that nail as a reminder to keep trying.  The idea stuck, so I drove a nail into the wall above my computer (much to my wife's chagrin) and hung my rejection letters.  These responses (the ones who took the time to respond) were about as personal as my queries were.

That next summer, dejected but determined, I put that first novel in my desk drawer and started fresh on a new one.  I had a great idea, based on personal experience from getting cut from my Babe Ruth baseball team, despite being one of the best players.  Small town politics.  Less than three months later I had the first draft of a novel that would one day sell. 

But I'll be getting to that shortly.

Publishing, Part I

I mailed my first book contract today.  It took all of 30 seconds and a few dollars for the transaction to take place.  I watched the postal worker grab the manilla envelope like it was "just any other parcel" and began to put it in the basket with all the other unimportant mail, and I just had to stop her.  She looked sideways at me when I asked her to put it back down on the counter so that I could make the moment last longer.  For good measure I took out my camera phone and and took a picture.  This really made the lady nervous, so to put her at ease, I said, "This is a watershed moment in my life."  And when she didn't respond, I muddied it even further.  "My life is about to change with this package."  When she was sure I wasn't going to say anymore, she snuck my contract into her bin and I walked out, surprised that theme music wasn't playing in the background, cause it sure seemed like a magical movie moment to me.  To quit at these words would be to clarify it for you as much as I did for the lady who obviously thought I was one weird duck.  Let me clarify things: this was the final step in a long, arduous journey that started in 1997.

It was a week before Christmas and a few college buddies and I had free access to a timeshare in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.  I was about to embark on my first fly-fishing trip ever, but secretly I had another plan.  I had spent most of that fall in a coffee shop a block north of Alva, penning what I deemed to be a future world-famous sonnet sequence about a cottonwood tree.  Yeah, riviting stuff.  That was when a professor of mine told me that poetry doesn't sell.  He told me that if I want to make the big bucks, I had better pen the "Great American Novel," whatever that was.  So when we got to Pagosa, I planned to fish the San Juan River by day and pen this novel by night.  By the time I left Pagosa five days later, I had a paragraph to my name.  Quite humble beginnings.

Well, that paragraph turned into a chapter, and that chapter turned into two chapters, and before I knew it, I had 100 pages...FOUR YEARS LATER!  The fact that I was typing it on a 1991 Macintosh should have clued me in to the fact that things were going to go wrong.  Then one night, the computer died.  Picture toast in a toaster.  That puppy was smoking before I got it unplugged!  I quickly pulled out the floppy disk (remember those?) and saw the metal cover rip right off!  I got absolutely no sleep that night.

That next day I took a personal day and called in a favor from a teacher who was more computer-saavy than I.  She called in a favor to a former student who in turn took all his fancy equipment and toyed around with my disk, handling it as a paleoentologist would handle a raptor tooth.  In six nervous hours he was to recover most of the document.  Every twelth page was filled with asteriks instead of words.  I still praised God.

One year and a new computer later, I finished my first novel, and the angels sang, and golden light shined forth from my big computer screen.  I just knew I was on the way to stardom.  I had no idea whatsoever that it would be ten long years before I was going to be able to make a sale. 

I'll be getting to that shortly...