Like Glass No Longer a VHP Title
The title pretty much says it all; officially, as of today, Like Glass will not be published by Vanilla Heart Publishing. I will continue to distribute it via the current channels (i.e. Amazon and CreateSpace) at least until the first of the year, though I’m unsure whether I will continue to pursue it after that.
I’m at work right now, so I can’t really discuss the subject too much; suffice to say that it’s better for all parties involved that the novel finds a different home.
I would like to sincerely offer my thanks and gratitude to Kimberlee Williams, the editor at VHP, for the time and effort she and her staff put into what work had already been done on the novel, and for putting up with a rather tedious client. I’d also like to once again thank Mary Quast, the author who introduced me to VHP in the first place; even though it didn’t work out, it was still a wonderful experience that I wouldn’t have had without your assistance.
Okay, back to the rat race.
–Matt
About a Publisher
You’ve probably heard me mention a few times (most likely at the “original” Chocolate for Dogs blog) about having Like Glass “professionally” published — i.e. through an actual publishing house. I wish I could say I was posting now to say it was finally accepted (or even rejected; as I’m sure any author will agree, waiting to hear back is almost as bad as hearing “Sorry, not for us”).
Alas, I’m not, though I wanted to just post a … what’s the phrase … “shout out”? Yeah, that’s as good as any I guess — a shout out to the company, Rager Media. They’re based in Akron, Ohio, and they have a blog I wanted to introduce you to, The Akrocentric. There’s a lot of posts there about publishing (of course), and a lot of stuff about Akron itself — if, like me, you come from an area where the locals look on the city with high levels of contempt, it’s quite a strange and refreshing experience. I honestly never heard of an “Akronism” (not to be confused with an anachronism, a word I more closely relate with my current locale).
The company is quite new for the publishing industry — roughly a year old — but they’re already starting to make a few (albeit small) waves, with Jonathan Baumbach and Gary D. Wilson both getting good reviews — Baumbach’s You, or the Invention of Memory in the LA Times, and Wilson’s Sing, Ronnie Blue reviewed in the Chicago Sun-Times and on Kansas.com (unfortunately, both of those reviews are older than either site allows access to — if you can find a link, by all means let me know).
Rager Media’s “official” website (i.e. .com) is a little … well, under the weather. Which is strange, because when I first made my acquaintance with the company (~ June 2007) it was quite nice — nothing spectacular, but attractive and friendly. As a web developer I admit I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to websites, even though the design aspect (read: the pretty stuff) of web development was always a little beyond me. There is a lot of good information there, though, and a lot more info on their authors than I can put here, so be sure to check it out.
As I said, they’re still quite new to the business, so they’re swamped with submissions at the moment, and they don’t have the staff yet to keep up with it. I was speaking with the editor-in-chief, Christopher White, today, and he was saying that one of the main reasons they haven’t gotten to my novel yet was that they’re trying to give the authors personal attention, and there’s still a few of their “earliest” authors they haven’t gotten to.
That’s the way it should be — I’d much rather know that my work was accepted (or rejected) by someone who was giving it a serious effort, instead of just glancing through it and tossing it out because they just weren’t in the mood to read it. Even if it means having to wait a little longer to hear anything about it, it’s definitely worth it.
Be sure to check out the sites though, and take a look at the two books I’d linked to above (though I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you that your primary interest should lay with my book, of course — which, for the time being, is still in my hands).
Book #2, Where Art Thou?
Thinking about it this morning: it’s been over a year since I typed “The End” on the last page of Like Glass, and the ever-elusive Book #2 is nowhere in sight. Sure, there’s been tons of excuses — too much work, too much on my mind, can’t write this story because it’s too much like Book #1 and I don’t want to be pigeonholed, can’t write that story because it’s too different and I need to create a “brand” of sorts, etc.
I have had a couple of ideas that have stayed with me pretty strongly throughout this past year, and while they will keep me in kind of the same “genre” (whatever genre I’m in), I’m thinking one of them will be Book #2 when the ideas are done simmering. Maybe even both of them — they aren’t formed well enough yet to say they’re entirely separate. Or maybe I’m sitting on #2 and #3, and they’ll just come right out when the time is right.
That’s the main thing that I’m trying to convince myself of — there’s no need to force them out right now, I’m not on any kind of a contract or anything like that, so they don’t need to get written tomorrow.
Sure, lots of people say that you need to make yourself write, you need to “get in the habit”, you can’t just sit back and wait for your muse. That’s probably true to some degree, but (for the time being at least) writing is an escape from stress for me — why the hell do I want to force it? That takes all the enjoyment out of it, and I’m sorry, but if it’s not enjoyable, it’ just not worth doing in my opinion. And I’m sure anyone who’d read something I’d forced out would be able to tell that my heart just wasn’t in it.
That’s one thing I’m looking forward with the upcoming move. One of the books I’ve had in mind is set in El Paso, and it’ll be much easier to write about the city when I’m there and can see the streets and mountains I’m trying to write. Granted, we’re going to be so damned busy and stressed trying to get settled in down there that I won’t be able to see straight half the time, but with a little patience perhaps the book will find its way onto my computer within a few months of our arrival.
I’m going to go smoke and get ready for work now; it’s a little early yet, but no sense waiting to the last minute.
Writing Tips: Ideas and Planning
(Originally posted at http://mcory.wordpress.com/ on 11/08/07)
This post is directed at one individual who left a comment on the Like Glass page; seemed a little lengthy for a reply, and I figured it’d make for a good post anyways. I don’t mean to single them out in particular — and you have my apologies for doing so — but they said something I felt I needed to talk about: coming up with ideas.
I’m sure you know what it’s like to take pen in hand and just sit there, waiting for that perfect thought to come up that’ll change the literary world forever. After a while — fifteen minutes, half an hour, half a day if you’re really patient — you give up in frustration and you start thinking stuff like “Damn, I just can’t come up with anything.” Or maybe you don’t even bother getting ready to take the idea down, you just get the urge to write and shut it out because you know you can’t come up with anything.
I cry malarchy on that.
You can come up with ideas. Its really easy, but it’s easier to just talk yourself out of it. Maybe you don’t think you have time to bring the idea to fruition. Maybe you think you’ll just be laughed at by anyone who finds out about it. Maybe you don’t want to write something without knowing exactly where it’ll start and where it’ll end. I don’t know why, but I do know the odds are good that you probably have a ton of ideas that you’ve just gotten so used to knocking out of the water that you don’t even know you’ve come up with something anymore.
You need to look inside and see what exactly it is that stops you from taking your idea and running with it — I can’t help you with that. I can tell you that I personally have lots of fear of rejection. “I can’t do this because someone will say it’s stupid.” “I couldn’t get that story published if I paid them to print it.” Stuff like that. I try and work around it, and just realizing that that’s what stands in my way helps, but it’s tough. You just do the best you can and (pardon my french) fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.
I want you to try something. Get a piece of paper, or open up Notepad or Word or some other text editor on your computer. Now, I want you to write a really, really simple sentence. We’re talking first-grader stuff here: The boy ran to the store. The tree fell. The dog barked. Just a simple “noun that did something” sentence, and come up with one of your own — these examples are protected by copyright law now.
Got it? Great. See how easy that was? You just had an idea. This idea — that simple sentence you just wrote out — is the seed for a story. It’s a tiny seed, true, but a seed nonetheless. Now you build on it by asking yourself questions. Why did the boy run to the store? Was he running from something? Was he running to someone? Was the dog barking out of happiness at seeing his owner? Out of fear of something in the back yard?
If you keep asking yourself questions like that, you’ll eventually have a scene, or a story, hell, even a full novel if you ask enough questions.
Of course, coming up with ideas inevitably leads to questions about planning and organizing your ideas. A lot of writers feel the need to have everything planned out, start to finish, before they write the first lines. Then they’ll go through and write everything in the order their plan presents. If that has worked for you in the past, great, by all means keep it up.
Here’s a bit of news for you though: you don’t need to know anything about your story before you write it! Seriously, that’s half the fun of writing: watching it develop in front of your eyes.
When I wrote Like Glass, I had most of it planned out like you’re “supposed to”. I had a series of notes placed in order and it worked decently for me. Then about halfway through the story started to change. For one reason or another, the plan wasn’t quite working anymore, and I got stuck. After freaking out for a bit, I decided “hey, this is the way the story needs to go, and to hell with the plan.” I changed the plan midway and was able to finish the book. Hell, even when I started, I only had a rough idea of the ending, and kept bouncing back and forth between a couple of different options while I was writing the novel. Then when it came time to draw it to a close, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I was glad I didn’t paint myself into a corner with having everything pre-planned.
I wish I could keep writing about this, but the time has come for my cigarette and to run to work.
A Mild Epiphany
(Originally posted on http://mcory.wordpress.com/ on 10/14/07)
Maybe I’m going about this writing stuff all wrong. I keep looking through Wordpress’s writing tag (on the Tag Surfer), hoping that I’ll come across some other website/blog with the magic tip to get me going or the right contact to get me published.
It’s crap; it’s a stupid, idiotic waste of time.
I think a couple of books might’ve been written way back in the stone age, before everyone had a blog and a cell phone. Someone surely wrote a short story or a poem or two without wigging out over who to send it to or how quickly it’d hit the search engines and feed aggregators. No worries about “social networking” or who to link to or who’s blog to comment on.
It’s stupid.
Anyways, Patti just got home so I’m wrapping this up early. Just wanted to share that little epiphany real quick. I think I’ll try to stop surfing the web in order to market something I don’t have yet or get inspirations for something I can’t write and just worry about making something up on my own.
After a smoke and a nap though, of course.
What, Me Publish?
(Originally published on http://mcory.wordpress.com/ on 10/25/07)
I don’t read many posts from others’ blogs — which may contribute a healthy amount to why I don’t get much traffic myself — and it isn’t from a lack of interest, just other things I feel I need to do. (Okay, maybe that technically is a lack of interest, but I trust you understand…)
The other day, however, I broke form and wandered around WordPress’s Tag Surfer, looking at the “writing” tag. I came across two posts in particular that stuck out so much I felt the need to comment. As implied only two sentences ago, they were posts that dealt with (imagine this!) writing, and, to some degree or other, contained the negativity that most writers experience at some point in their life.
The depth of the ocean, from http://tendell.wordpress.com/, and What do you call an unpublished writer?, from http://ptbertram.wordpress.com/ are the two posts I’m referring to. You can go check them out; I’ll wait.
Back? Okay, let’s continue.
Between the two of them, and not necessarily through any fault of their own, they made me realize just how wrapped up I got in trying to get Like Glass published. They made me see just how stupid it is to worry so much about, as Tendell puts it, “writing good literature,” or worrying about being #5 on Bertram’s list.
(Shhh…he’s starting to justify his failure. This ought to be good!)
Yeah, you’re probably right. And I feel like that’s exactly what I’m doing, that if Like Glass had found an agent or a publisher I’d think completely differently.
But that’s not how I want to think. I don’t want my self-image wrapped up in the beliefs of some jackass sitting at a desk in New York, eating a bagel and drinking a Red Bull, laughing at the hordes of ambitious young writers flooding their inbox. Why should they matter to me?
What I’ve been trying to get through my head the past week or so, is that there’s really only two opinions of me that matter: my wife’s and my own. You could say my boss’s opinion matters as well, because I’m sure my wife’s opinion would drop a little if I lost my job. If her’s didn’t, mine would.
And that’s what, as a writer, I’ve conditioned myself away from. I’ve put my self-worth in what someone I’ll most likely never meet thinks of what I’ve written, when there’s no need for them to even see what I’ve written. I don’t need to get published; I pay the bills quite well as it is, and probably better than a good portion of professional writers out there. If I have something that needs to be said, I can say it here. If people think it’s worth something, they’ll pass it on to their friends and relatives. If they don’t, there’s no reason for them to come back. Fuck ‘em; no skin off my back.
Patti loves — or at least claims to, which is good enough for me — my book. And yet I’ve pushed that out of my mind. Why? Rule #5,671 of writing a “good”query letter is “It doesn’t matter if your friends or family like your book; everyone’s friends and relatives like their book.” So I start worrying more about impressing “important” people, the people who’ll get me that big book deal so I can get a writing “career”. Why the hell should I disregard her opinion just because someone writing yet another book/article/blog post on how to get published tells me it doesn’t matter to someone who doesn’t even have the time to sign a rejection email?
Yes, I’m still rationalizing, still justifying my failure in my attempts to get published. But it’s because I’m still — even after not sending a query in over month — frustrated with it. I still tie the writing process to getting published, to getting praise when I’m done, to expecting criticism when I send it out. And I hate that. I started seriously trying to write fiction over a year ago, and I loved it. It was wonderful, something I never knew I always wanted to do. (Okay, well, I knew, just didn’t know that I could, if that makes any sense.) And now it’s miserable. Now I’m too concerned about what people will think of the story I’m trying to write, and I can’t concern myself with the damned story itself, and it’s just fucking stupid — all that matters is writing the story, and, if anything else at all, if I have to impress anyone, it needs to be Patti’s opinion I seek.
As for everyone else, fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke. Or, joke ‘em if they can’t take a fuck. I don’t really care.
I need to go smoke — running late now.
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