So no one saw my email query letters and immediately jumped up saying “I’ve been waiting my whole life to work with someone like meghan!” This was, obviously, to be expected, but one can still dream that one is so talented that people trip all over their internet feet to get to me.
Faerie story this week and start of wolf children rip-off. Or sinus infection. We’ll see which of the two win.
I read:
Thoughts:
Favourite book of the month:
Oh, I liked this book. So funny.
Most promising book on the wishlist:
I’ve been trying to cut back my wishlisting. So I didn’t have a lot to chose from and am not super inspired this month. So nothing.
I watched:
I wrote:
A story about cutlery. Slushed it out. New story came out at Found Press. Feeling middling about writing as a whole. Had some nice compliments from a neighbour and from Geoff about my writing, so I’ll keep going for now.
Probably it’s apt that I started this in March as the snow starts to melt and mix into the mud on the ground, because I’m going in the slush piles. That’s right — I’ve started sending out a collection of stories to agents and publishers.
And rather than the fist-pump-feeling that at least I’ve gotten this far, I just feel resigned. Like I’ve already had the months and months and months of radio silence that will ensue.
Still, it only takes one.
(Obviously, if you are a publisher or agent, I’d love to send my work to you if you’d like me to. Contact me please!)
So now what – by the end of the summer I hope to have a full Book One of The Faerie Story completed. I want to have written my Wolf Children rip-off short story. I should probably plot out Book Two of The Faerie Story while I’m at it. I don’t know what to do with my faerie story. It’s about an eleven year old, so teenagers won’t read it. I don’t know if it’s an appropriate middle-grade novel. And I think adults might be bored.
I did manage to put up the floating bookshelf Neil gave me three years ago yesterday. So, if nothing else, a book win there.
And in my experience, well-read people are less likely to be evil.
Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events #12
My story Deep Breaths Underwater is now available at Found Press: please check it out!
I am trying to think of a hook for my query letter. But all I can think of is a haiku that I wrote a long time ago when I had to run database extraction programs on an overloaded server:
Very slow server.
If my program does not run,
I will kill you all.
Obviously, a few edits to make it more appropriate to this situation can be made:
Hate query letters.
If my book is not published,
I will kill you all.
That is what I will be thinking about the next few days: how to describe my collection of short stories in a few intriguing and inspiring sentences so someone somewhere will take a chance on me.
Possibly, I might still kill you all :p
Huh.
The back of my copy tells me that this is a character study. I guess so.
We have a protagonist who, in her head, presents herself as meek and mild, yet in interactions with others seems quite formidable.
She gets what she wants, almost all the time, with the exception of one thing: her husband dies before the beginning of the book.
So it’s a meditation on grief, I suppose.
Here in Canada, there are days that only really occur in November and February, days that could best be described as slush. I know some of you are nodding along right now; you know exactly what I mean. This novel is like the feeling of those slush days but bookified. Even the cover of my copy is that dull grey that dirty piles of snow get when they melt. If this book is to be taken as fact, Ireland in the 1970s was a whole decade (at least) of slush.
It’s so dour. Bits of hope and sunshine come through. But almost every conflict that arises is resolved within minutes by Nora, so her struggle towards normality doesn’t seem to have much agency. She doesn’t like her job, so she gets another. She needs a painter, so he comes. She needs someone to buy her cottage, so someone does. She needs to find her daughter, so she does. We could maybe call this book so she does.
The grief is quiet, but there. The conflicts are small, but there. But the book is a sustained note held, a low one, quiet, you have to strain to hear. The similar smallness and dullness of my own life makes me crave more excitement in my living-vicariously-through-reading life.
When bad things happen, life keeps going. The end.
Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín went on sale October 14, 2014.
I received a copy free from a goodreads giveaway in exchange for an honest review.
Continuation of here.
Even with a snow day on Monday and Wednesday, I finished my story-that-I-can-never-actually-publish-since-I-took-a-bunch-of-things-that-actually-happened-to-my-family-growing-up-and-storified-them. I even typed it up. Almost four thousand words in three days.
Don’t expect this pace to last. I keep getting distracted by horror films in Spanish on Netflix and meditation apps.
I have to admit I never got into picture books that much with Tesfa. I could do the nonsense Dr Seuss again and again (I am very good at reading Fox in Socks super quickly and there was a point where I had all of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish memorized) and a few one off books (I really liked Doggie in the Window by Elaine Arsenault, even though it is really sappy at the end). The same Robert Munsch I read when I was a kid (not so much the newer ones). And my favourite book that no one else ever seems to know Sometimes I like to curl up in a ball.
But I was ecstatic about two years ago when we made the jump to me reading chapter books to Tesfa. There are so many chapter books and I love chapter books.
But every now and then, I read posts like Pickle Me This’s and I think that maybe I should have spent more time on picture books with Tesfa and found some great ones. I guess it’s one of those things I’ll put in my time machine list, to go back and look harder in the picture book section of the library. Among other things I’m going to do with my time machine that is.
Taking a break from rewriting, I am writing a brief short story about a cutlery drawer, that likely I can’t ever publish anywhere because it steals things that actually happened and makes them funnier (like I do with conversations I have with Geoff, which he complains about even though I almost always take his wittiness and Oscar Wilde-ify it so everyone can marvel at how clever he is). At first, I was all happy because I’m tired of fixing my old stories and I thought that writing new stories would cheer me up. Then I remembered that writing new stories is just as miserable as fixing old stories. In fact, writing is miserable. Especially when there’s still snow everywhere. Especially when I have to shovel it.
Winter. Awful.
But I can see, with this new story, where I’ve plateau’d. All I do is tell, when the whole point of fiction is to show. I used to show everything and people were confused. Now I tell too much and people are bored. I’m bored.
At a plateau, you’re supposed to keep going. It should even be easy because unlike going up, you’re just walking straight along. It’s not like I enjoy hiking up. In fact, any incline, no matter how small, I whine from top to bottom because I hate it so much. But, apparently, I don’t like walking straight along a path either. I’m a self-entitled child of the eighties and nineties: why can’t I be great at something instantaneously and without having to work at all?