Insomnia crash

I'm still off my medication, so my sleep's been nightmarish. Insomnia's not really the right term. I think my last doctor had it right; I've got irregular phase disorder, which means I am sleepy at utterly random intervals. 3pm might feel like the middle of the night to me while I've spent many long nights just tooling around, waiting for sleep to come. It's hard to mother a baby this way, but I hope it won't last too long.

Meanwhile, I have made good progress on my agent subs, all things considered. I've gotten 5 out (that's not a lot by any means, but slow and steady is how I'm going to have to do it) and 2 have already resulted in rejections (also not a big deal - most of these are going to generate rejections. There are a lot of aspiring writers competing for a few slots here.) 1 has resulted in a request for pages - that's the really good news. I need to get still more out. It's my goal to have 12 out at any given time, meaning once I get up to 12, I'll send another out each time I get a rejection. I'll have to do this slow and steady, though.

Today I wasn't up to doing query letters, so I read another novel for research. The less said about the novel, the better. It was awful, from beginning to end. I'm so glad I got that over with!!!!

Agent submissions

I usually hate these. It's all the extra work on top of writing the novel that is hard. Each agent has their own guidelines for what they want to see, be it a query letter, a synopsis, part of the manuscript, etc. How long a part of the manuscript and what kind of query letter also varies by the agent. What also has gotten under my skin in the past is that a lot of writers only do the agent search a couple of times before they get their first agent, but this'll be round four for me.

Round one was when I was 19, when I wasn't a very good writer at all. Round two was after Clarion West when I was still decompressing from drinking from a proverbial firehose. Round three was two years ago, when I was submitting a novel with some technical merit, but very little real heart. I caught on to the fact then that this wasn't the best foot to put forward, since if I got an agent in the deal, it'd be for a kind of book I didn't really want to write. So here we go with round four.

It is amazingly un-excruciating this time around. And by un-excruciating I don't mean that it won't be soul crushing and depression inducing and make me want to cry myself to sleep some nights (hey, if there's anything you really want, your emotions get involved like this.) I'm just not finding the synopsis and query letters so hard to do this time, and I'm not sure why.

One reason might be because of all the practice I've had. Over the years I've developed a strong opinion about how to do a synopsis, and I think it's worked well for me. I have Char Peery to thank for this. She read my synopsis of Time and Eternity, which I'd written the same way I've seen other writers do a synopsis, and she pointed out that it read like a cluttered technical document, so with her help I pared it down and tightened up the central plotline and now I actually find my synopses readable. I've done enough query letters that I know the format by heart and can type them in a couple of drafts. Also, I know these skills I've obtained are working for me because my last round of submissions went really well, to be honest. With that souless little book, I corresponded with three of the first group of agents I queried.

The other reason might be that I care about the book I'm sending out. This isn't a technical exercise for me this time, an attempt to earn another credential or pad the resume, this is me applying for a job I really want. So, tonight while I blog, I'm in a good mood :-) For reasons I won't go into now, I'm off my insomnia medication for the next little while, which means I can't do long marathon writing sessions. So, to get my agent submissions out, I'm going to try to just do one or more a day. Today I managed three.

Pictures from around Glasgow

So, we're home from Scotland, and I uploaded images from our new camera of some if the sights we saw.

This picture and the one below are of Loch Lomand (like the song :-). My son and I took a day trip out to see it - it's just a short train ride from Glasgow. 

Below is a picture of the Loch Lomand Aquarium, the reason I traveled out to the Loch. I have a thing for aquariums. If I can get to one on a trip, I will. On my way up to Clarion West I saw three, for example. This one was a nice one, with tanks that showed local sea life, as well as a big tropical tank.

The Maiden of the Loch.

Then, this is back in Glasgow. It is the world's largest terra cotta fountain and it's located in Glasgow Green, a large public park. That's Queen Victoria at the top, there.

Right next to the fountain is the People's Palace, which has a museum on the history of the city. None of my pictures of the outside of the building look good without cropping - and it's too late at night for me to bother doing that, so here's a picture of the wall of the Palace from inside the Winter Garden, the giant greenhouse connected to the back.

Here's just a picture along the River Clyde, as I was walking back to our hotel. The weather was nice and mild!

In Glasgow

We lucked out yesterday. Trevor had bought us train tickets up to Glasgow (he's got a conference here next week and we came up early to sightsee). First off, we were lucky we opted for the train, because a couple of days ago a volcano in Iceland closed the UK airspace. All commercial flights were grounded.

So the train station was a zoo, and we got there about 15 minutes before our train was to depart. Hundreds of displaced travelers were trying to get seats on the trains, and given the signage wasn't great, we ended up in the line with people who didn't have reserved seats (we did have reserved seats). 2 minutes before the train was to leave, we managed to flag down a railway worker and learn that we could go around and get onto the platform, so we did, at a run.

This turned out to be lucky too. Our reserved seats were in carriage D, and we couldn't make it down there before the train left, so we jumped on one of the first class cars. As we tried to make our way down the train (which started moving seconds after we got on) we got stuck in a first class car just as the crew declassified it. They told us to forget about getting down to our carriage and just grab seats where we were. Which meant, yes, we rode up to Glasgow in first class seats across a table from each other. We even got free wifi. Our son behaved himself wonderfully, eating the food we'd hastily grabbed on our way to the station and even napping for a couple of hours.

80 people with reserved seats were left behind on the train platform, and many people were confined to standing room only for the entire 4+ hour trip. By the end of the journey, there were people standing in the aisles all up and down the length of the train.

The only bad thing that happened (to us, that is - no offense meant to the people standing) was that we lost our camera, but since I've been uploading pictures daily for my Etsy business, we lost no actual pictures. So, that too is okay. Sad, but okay. Now we're in Scotland, seeing the sights and playing with our kiddo. I'm spending the evenings revising my novel. I finally feel over the initial editing fatigue and ready to do the final round of fixes before sending it to agents. It's a long process, but the end is in sight!

Trunk stories and, what's this? A submission that isn't writing?

Well, I'm settled into our new home enough that I've started sending my trunk out again. "Trunk stories" for any non-writers reading, are stories that you've written but not yet sold. Most of us have pretty big trunks full of stories, and once they get to be too old, they retire to the trunk for good. There is also such a thing as a trunk novel, meaning a novel you wrote to learn the process or try out an idea, but again, never sold. Usually the term "trunk novel" means one you aren't trying to sell anymore either. I've got four of those.

I've been bad about keeping up my short story submissions, but I've been moving all over the place. Now, I hope, our address will stay fixed long enough for me to get my trunk all circulating again. My mother was kind enough to send me some American air mail stamps so that I can include a S.A.S.E. with each submission (much easier than international reply coupons.)

Yesterday I also did a submission of an entirely new kind, a jewelry submission. One night I was posting items in my store, including a bracelet that I didn't think was exceptional. Minutes later, a convo (Etsy message) arrived from a jewelry magazine editor asking if I'd be willing to submit to Jewelry Affaire. I, being clueless, emailed her a thank you and then asked how I was supposed to submit. I didn't know if she wanted step-by-step photos of how I made the item and a tutorial or what. Turns out, she just wanted the item or an item like it to consider for featuring in the magazine. Then, a few minutes after that, the bracelet sold to someone I don't personally know. I had no idea it was so special. There are 198,765 bracelets for sale on Etsy right now, to give you an idea of how small a needle one bracelet is in the proverbial haystack. The majority of my sales are to people who know me and my work and  come to Etsy specifically to find my shop.

So I made another bracelet in the same style and a few coordinating pieces and sent them off yesterday. Wish me luck on my "subs"!

Chasing down rejection letters

I've been very lax about keeping up my reject-o-meter on this blog. The reason I started it was to give people some idea of how many rejection letters it takes to get a sale. I.e. my short story, Coyote Discovers Mars was rejected by SciFiction (though Ellen Datlow did later give the story an honorable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror), F&SF, Asimov's, Analog, Talebones, Interzone, Flytrap, Polyphony, Cicada, Glimmer Train, The Black Gate, twenty academic publishers, Orson Scott Card's IGMS, and Strange Horizons, and I queried Ellen Datlow to see if I could submit it to her anthology, The Coyote Road, she said no. I sold it, five years after I wrote it, to Coyote Wild, and you know? That's not really that brutal a list of rejections. Not by a long shot. My rejection lists tend to be short because I focus more of my energy on my novels, and so after about 30 rejections, I usually put the story aside and move on.

One of the rules of submission is that you can rarely do a simultaneous submission, so before you send the story somewhere else, you need your rejection letter from the last market you sent it to. Chasing down those rejection letters can be a nightmare. Sometimes you just send a couple queries, then a letter saying that you withdraw the submission, and move on. One market can hold onto a piece for a year or more - though lately I've been withdrawing my subs after 6 months from any market where I've never met the editor.

Novels are like this, but can be even harder, because it isn't unheard of for a novel publisher to take a year to two years to respond. There's a huge backlog - and this is why my next novel's going to agents first because that's the only way to get around it. I do submit straight to publishers in the LDS market, where the number of writers is smaller and agents are almost unheard of. My first LDS novel got rejected by Deseret Book, then picked up by Covenant (really easy compared to national market short stories, no?) My second novel was rejected by Covenant and Deseret Book, and I decided to shelve it because I had issues with how it had turned out anyway. My third novel was under contract with Covenant, until I blogged my frustration about their contract guy not returning my phone calls for four months at a time. So I started sending it around again. I sent it to Scott Card, then three months later asked for a progress update. Kristine Card told me to go ahead and send it elsewhere because they weren't on the verge of starting up their LDS publishing line just then, so I sent it to Deseret Book, where the response time is supposed to be 8 weeks.

Only, right after I sent it, I moved 3 times, so once I was settled in the UK, I sent them an updated SASE and assumed my rejection letter would be in the mail shortly. It had, after all, been nearly five months. When no rejection letter arrived, I emailed them, getting rather annoyed at how hard it was to get my rejection letter so that I could move on.

They emailed back that day, apologizing for taking so long, and let me know they were still considering it and it had passed a round or two of review already. This was a blindside. I was getting pretty worn down with writing (this happens pretty regularly) and was stunned to learn that the novel I'd put a ton of hard work into was still holding its own. After so many years of working so hard, having my career show any sign of a heartbeat, even a faint one, is not what I expect.

This still will most likely end with a rejection letter, but that's okay. This is how the business works.

London Etsy Meetup

Last night I went to my first ever Etsy meetup and met a lot of magnificently talented people, too many of whom did not have business cards (I didn't have any of my own either.) So here I'll blog about the people I do have contact info from, and I'll spend the next little while trying to track down the rest.

The meetup was in the Fashion and Textile Museum, and I'm terrible at guessing the size of a crowd on sight alone. There were perhaps fifty people? The running joke of the evening was dialogue that went like this:

Person A: Wow, your work is amazing. How do you do that?

Person B: Oh, that's easy, really.

Everyone else: Don't say that! You're giving away your secrets!

The thing was, every single crafter I spoke to said this, when in reality the things that they called "easy" aren't at all. They just have a talent for it.

One of the people I met was Janine Basil, who is a milliner (that's a hatmaker for the non-fashion educated, like myself). She had a whole hatbox full of her wares, which include everything from vintage style fascinators to rhinestone encrusted comic art and even a crown. When someone asked her how long it took to make the crown, she said, and I quote: "Oh, nearly a whole day. I woke up that morning and thought, I'd like to make a crown, but I didn't really know what I was doing so that's why it took a long time." Yes, according to her, one day is "a long time" to figure out how to make a glitter and ermine crown from scratch. When I pointed out to her that most people could not accomplish this, she admitted, "Well, it wasn't really that morning. I had the thought the night before."

I also got to meet Maria Frederiksen of Porsby Design who does beautiful work with pearls and other semi-precious stone. She claims that pearl knotting (where a jeweler knots the stringing cord between each pearl so they don't scratch each other) is "easy" and apparently learned to do it merely by looking at other pieces (I am currently trying to learn from tutorials that are laid out step-by-step with a ton of pictures.) She has a gorgeous necklace of chunky turquoise beads up for sale in her shop that we got to see last night and she explained that you can tell whether turquoise is authentic by its temperature. Turquoise is cool to the touch while fakes are not. And yes, her piece is definitely made of the real stuff.

Then there was also Heidi of Polka Dots and Blooms who makes textile items out of vintage fabric. One of my personal favorite pieces are these little cat purses she does, such as the one here (and if that link fails because the item has sold, just go to her shop. There are others.) Her IPod/IPhone covers make me wish I had an IPod to cover!

Heidi Adnum was also at the meetup with tons of advice on how to take good pictures for selling items online, something that continues to give me fits. But I picked up her handout and will be reading through it most carefully.

Over the next little while I'd like to find the Etsy shops of other sellers I met who, like me, didn't have business cards printed up, so if you were one of these people, please email me or post a comment or convo me on Etsy!

Tamye Messmer Photography

I have been promising myself for the last month, at least, to blog about another talented cousin of mine, but life's been crazy. I'm not complaining; the support for my jewelry business has been amazing and I'm grateful for it. You can imagine how consumed I was with guilt when my very first jewelry sale went to said talented cousin, though, the very one I'd been intending to blog about.

Anyway, here I finally have a moment to try (and probably fail!) to do her justice. Tamye Messmer is my husband's first cousin and a professional photographer. She is based in Mesa, Arizona. Check out her website to see her style (though she's very versatile, so I suppose "styles" is more like it), rates and learn a little more about her. She also has a blog and a Facebook fan page. She and I also share the hobby of digital scrapbooking, and I can tell from parts of her site that we enjoy shopping at some of the same internet stores for art. Perhaps I've got good taste after all!

I love her work, and her services are affordable without being cheap (quality matters, after all). If you're in her area, I recommend her to you for high school senior pictures, weddings, family portraits, and any other event you want captured for your posterity.

Jewelry site is up

This last weekend at EasterCon, I got to see Patrick Samphire, one of my Clarion West classmates. He does professional web design, although lately he's been writing and parenting full time. I asked him if he wanted to get back into web design, and he said he did whenever he saw how bad people's websites are. Well, if he's back in business in the next five seconds, it'll no doubt be because he saw this website: Emily Mah Jewelry Designs.

It's "quick and dirty" as they say. I just used a Blogger template and a whole bunch of widgets. It'll serve for now. Meanwhile, as you can see, this blog's had a makeover. It will probably have several over the next few days as I tool around with Blogger's new template designer. This is what writers call "waxing the cat", which means doing a bunch of busywork that isn't actual writing in order to feel like we're making progress in our writing.

But I've earned it today. I got the last round of edits done on the novel yesterday. Now it's just a matter of waiting for my volunteer readers to finish and then open fire on me with all the things I've done wrong.