I just signed my first ever novel contract, and many people are asking me how I went from manuscript to actual advance money!
The bad news is we have to go waaaay back on this one:
High School. I was sending my first novel to publishers, “A” (It would be first in the card catalog! Brilliant!) I thought I might be a scientist or a syndicated columnist when I grew up. I still watched Transformers and G. I. Joe every day after school.
My twin sister drew a sketch of three futuristic punk women with sleek futuristic motorcycles on the divider page in one of our shared notebooks. I immediately started writing about them. I called this novel “Kleptomaniacs” and it took place in the universe of “A”. Brilliant! (One often feels brilliant when one is sixteen and doesn’t know how many of ones ideas are, in fact, ancient.)
I didn’t write down when I started or finished [edit: looks like December, 1989, when I was 15]*, I was not a regular diarist in my teens, but when I attended the NorthCoast Writer’s Conference at Lakeland Community College in 1990 and met Mary Turzillo, I confidently told her I’d written three novels, one of which was “Kleptomaniacs”. (I’ve honestly forgotten what the third one was.). This impressed her, for which I am very lucky and deeply sorry. She invited me to send a short story to audition for The Cajun Sushi Hamsters, her writing workshop. I had never written a short story before!
That’s beside the point. The point is: the novel I just sold (it’s 2020) had its first complete draft by 1990, and I had every advantage of having met a professional writer and joined a pro-level workshop at sixteen. So let that marinate.
Galactic Hellcats’ thirty-year saga was not without epic pauses. Between 1990 and 1993 I sent out “A” to publishers, thinking I had to sell it first, and of course it was rejected. It was a steaming pile of teenage ego. When I turned nineteen in February of 1993 I broke down and stopped submitting novels. I was no longer “a prodigy” and couldn’t bank on my age anymore. Therefore I had to compete on even footing with everyone else, therefore I was already a failure. This is the emotional baggage of teen-me, over-the-hill at 19.
Still, for my first “short story” assignment in college, I wrote what I planned to have be a chapter of a revised “Kleptomaniacs.”
I got over myself and started submitting short fiction in my twenties. I wrote a new novel in college (The Gods Awoke) and an epic fantasy based on my medieval reenactor friends as I got involved in the SCA. Thankfully, both of these novels were lost when my (first ever!) laptop was stolen.
I tried to re-write “Kleptomanics” but I was learning about writing and learning how bad I was. It was hard going and I didn’t finish it. I also tried to write a “mainstream” novel about a young investigative reporter in New York city, because maybe genre is looked down upon? (I discovered that writing anything not science fiction feels like doing the dishes). I graduated college, still unpublished, even more of a failure to properly prodigy.
Once employed, I used my tuition waiver at CWRU to take a novel-writing graduate class, and during it I finished a complete new draft of “The Gods Awoke” that startled me with its beauty. To this day I’m not sure I’ll ever write anything as good. In the process, I learned a lot about what I was missing in novel craft. You know, that Have A Plot part?
I immediately started another novel after that one, called “Mot the Stupid” about orcs and what I think they’d really be like (if science fiction.) That class marked the point at which I became a regular diarist and I kept a novel going at all times. I have never not been working on a novel since then.
In 2006, I had an early success selling a story to one of the first “online magazines”. I discovered fanfic, too, and wrote a TON of that. Also wrote fanfic for “Mot the Stupid” just for me because what I really wanted to see was this one character naked…
Fast forward to 2012. I’d been pining for the Clarion Workshop. I wanted to go to it so badly, and my friend Geoff (a Clarion alum) had been absolutely RIDING me to apply. Didn’t he understand that people with jobs can’t just leave for eight weeks? I learned about the Clarion Write-a-Thon and this seemed the perfect compromise. I couldn’t attend Clarion, but I could use the Write-a-Thon as an excuse to focus on my writing and get a lot of work done.
To make sure I was absolutely pressed to practice and get better, I pledged to write 50 short story drafts in 8 weeks. It was one of the best things I had ever done.
Because it’s hard to come up with 50 damn short story ideas, I dredged up a lot of old drafts for material. The longest piece I wrote for the Write-a-Thon (a staggering 10,000 words in one day) was based on “Kleptomanics”. I called it “The Formation of the Stardust Gang” and it was about how my three heroines met.
So… current draft origin date: Summer, 2012. If you’re still with me… thanks for your patience. I’m getting to the more successful parts, I promise.
May 19, 2013, I gave the ‘short story’ draft to my writing workshop and they tore it apart. Huge chunks of backstory were missing, because of course the backstory was in my head and I didn’t see it missing. A lot of things were summarized instead of “in scene.” They all felt “This needs to be longer.”
“Dang,” I thought, “I need to re-write this novel.”
And so I did it, for NanoWriMo that year, fresh from attending Clarion in Summer 2013. I started with all the notes from my workshop, filling in everything they asked and easily busted out 67,000 words in a month. This, then was the first full draft of the re-born novel. On the suggestion of one of my workshop mates, Mike, I re-named the story “Galactic Hellcats.”
After I finished it, I set it aside, let it stew, worked on other things, then went back and revised it front to back. Then I let my sister Grace read it. And nagged her constantly for feedback. (Sorry, Gracie!) When she’d finished, I did another revision pass, then sent the novel to another first reader.
(This is also when I was regularly selling short stories to pro markets, 4 in 2014, 5 in 2015, 4 in 2016, 8 in 2017.)
After 3-4 revision passes, Galactic Hellcats felt “done” and I solicited my writing workshop to do a novel critique. (Novel critiques are optional for the Cajun Sushi Hamsters.) On April 30th, 2017, I hosted my friends as they went through my manuscript start to end and gave me tons of notes.
The earliest record I have of querying an agent with “Galactic Hellcats” is May 1, 2017. Yes, friends, that’s THE NEXT DAY. (I was riding high on the confidence of 7-8 professional authors saying it was good, and the masochistic belief that I could do all the revisions my workshop suggested and the book would be ‘perfect’ by the time the agent responded.) It was an agent I met at a party. We’d talked about the book and she sounded interested. It was my first query as an adult. It failed.
Over the next three years, I queried 42 agents unsuccessfully. I revised the query letter something like 42 times, sending it to the Hamsters, my Clarion classmates, and the Codex writer’s forum for critiques. I sent the novel to Tor and Baen when they had open calls. I begged my friends to introduce me to their agents. I spent hours on QueryTracker looking for anyone whose guidelines sounded open to what I had.
I was doing the same with “The Gods Awoke.” So double that rejection. So much rejection. The hardest part was not being able to find new places to send to. Unlike in the 90s when I first sent a novel out, you can’t just drop a package in the mail to Ace, Doubleday, or any of the big houses. They all require agents now. I despaired. Do literary agents even really exist, I wondered, or are they rare unicorn creatures that only the pure of heart can see?
I did pitmad three years running with no nibbles. How could “Female biker gang in space rescues a gay prince” NOT work as a hook??
Then, on about March 4th of this year – which feels a thousand years ago – I causally tweeted “I have a lot of things I should be working on, but my brain only wants to revise the space biker gang novel.” (Or something to that effect.) A fellow named J. M. McDermott replied, “Hey would you send that to my tiny new publishing house? I want to see it.”
I private-messaged him for his email and sent him my query letter (which he agreed needed work) and the novel draft, which I had hastily finished another revision pass on.
That was it! He sent it to his partners, and I got a brief email asking if the novel was “still available” (OMG AS IF RIGHT?) and if they could please publish it if so.
Sent the contract straight to my lawyer-friend, Alexandra, who has been advising me on contracts for years for the questionable currency of “Furthering your career” — thank you Alexandra! Emailed the one place the novel was still outstanding – and got a polite one-day “didn’t quite win me over” that both killed me and reaffirmed my feeling of being so lucky a random editor noticed my tweet.
A week of anxious waiting, and I signed the contract, got it back right away, with the advance immediately via PayPal!
Thirty years after a doodle made me dream about space biker girls, there’s a legally-binding document that says it just might become a book!
So that’s the journey thus far. Looking forward to the next leg!
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* footnote: Grace, on reading this, found HER diary from January 1, 1990: “Dear Journal, Happy New Year! Marie just took my pen, she’s working on a new book, it started off as a short story. Anyway she started to write it in my pen and she can’t have a story in two colors so she took it and I’m writing in her pen.” I did not remember that I wrote “Kleptomaniacs” entirely in purple pen. 🙂
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