Life here has truly been a bit of craziness on a cracker. I’m embarrassed at the lack of updates I’ve shared.
And embarrassed is putting it mildly.
I’ve been in a whirlwind of activity since the beginning of September and am only now coming to grips with it all. And just in time. (I’ll talk about an upcoming event in the next post.)
Late in August, I attended an online conference, sponsored by Woodhall Press.
One session was for a new practice: video pitching.
When meeting with agents, a writer needs to pitch their work. This happens, understandably so, remotely nowadays. And it’s good practice to develop a three-minute pitch in video format.
The conference organizers sent guidelines; I followed them to the letter. Gratefully, my video was not chosen for the session, where agents gave honest (yet, to this writer’s unaccustomed ears, brutal) feedback. The organizers, however, said they would share their feedback on every video.
I’m sharing the video, warts and all. I know what I would do differently. Memorize the script. Better lighting. More smiles. Add a logline and comps.
When the feedback came back from Woodhall in early September, I was flabbergasted. Two of the company’s executives asked for the manuscript for Crying in a Foreign Language. I was in the middle of line edits and asked if I could share it when finished? No problem, they said.
Craziness on a cracker? Yes.
I had started the line edits before that email conversation, but now went full bore.
Working my way from the back of the manuscript forward, I reviewed every sentence, hoping to catch grammatical errors, contextual errors, continuity errors, and also any remaining places where the style was too verbose.
By September 21, the edits were done. I compiled the PDF and sent it off to the publisher.
And of course, no sooner had I done so than I noticed a glaring omission. My first chapter mentioned a promise my protagonist made to his mother, but I forgot to add that promise to my protagonist’s coming out scene later in the memoir. I immediately apologized to the publisher and re-sent it. No worries. They have a backlog of submissions. They hadn’t yet started to read it.
Craziness on a cracker!
I next turned my attention to querying. I had some recommendations for agents from agents and also relied heavily on MSWL. Of the initial sets of queries, I had a response on October 1: Send us your full manuscript!
Craziness on a cracker!
And I’ve spent the rest of October working on essays (my second essay was published in Brevity’s blog—the first one went live earlier in the year—and an old employer, the Council of Local Authorities for International Relations, asked me to pen an essay for their upcoming edition), querying, working on my proposal.
And then my good friend Kristen had an idea…
