Hurrah! You’ve got a contract for that novel or picturebook, and now, you receive a revision letter.

What? A revision letter after the contract? Yes. While the stoy is great and the editor loves it, there are probably minor things to take care of at this point.

Revising with an Editor

• Relax and enjoy the process. Revising with an editor is way more fun than revising on spec. You are assured that the editor loves your story; after all, they’ve paid up front for this privelege of revising with you. Work with confidence that these are only minor problems, and will be easily worked out.
• Address every concern. Editors don’t have time to ask you to do the same thing three times. Get out a red pen and check off every concern as you address it. When you think you’ve finished, go back and check everything once more.
• Communicate. Not sure you understand an editor’s concern? Talk to your editor. You have a working relationship now and it’s OK to call or email–as long as you don’t over do it. Ask questions, explore ramifications of his/her suggestions, gossip about your characters–talk to your editor about any and all concerns you have. Can you disagree? Yes. What you can’t do is ignore a concern. Talk!
• Go to the Heart of the editor’s comments. Just as when you revise on spec, you should look beyond a specific suggestion to the heart of what they are suggesting.
• Meet deadlines. Be a pro and meet every deadline you’re given; or, at least let the editor know when difficulties arise. If you have a sudden family illness, the story takes a surprising turn, or your computer crashes, editors are understanding and deadlines can be fudged a bit. But you must let the editor know what is going on. Otherwise, meet your deadline–every time.

You’ve just gotten an exciting email or letter–an editor has suggested revisions to your story.

Revising on Spec

Unless the editor is backing up this suggested revision with a contract, you will be revising “on spec,” on the speculation that this suggested change will bring the story up to a level where a contract can be offered.

This is tricky business. Should you spend the time doing the revisions, when there is no guarantee of a sale?

First, probably 90% of manuscripts revised on spec are rejected. However, you have to get HERE to get THERE. Unless you revise, it is guaranteed, you won’t get a contract. So, how to proceed?

• Take the time to re-read the suggested changes. Do you agree with the changes? Or will this change take the story off in a direction you didn’t want? Perhaps, the changes are unexpected, but interesting and perhaps, exciting? Evaluate carefully if the editor understood your intent and direction; if they are suggesting a different intent and direction, is it one that you can live with?
• Think about the heart of the suggested changes. If you merely do the “letter of the revision,” you’ll be in the 90% that gets rejected. Guaranteed. You must think hard about the heart of the editorial suggestions. The editor may or may not understand HOW TO FIX a problem, but they may have hit upon the very thing that needs work. YOU must decide how to fix it and the editor won’t care if you did it his/her way; they only care that you did it. (Really. Trust me on this one. If this has happened to you, please add a comment with details of your experience!) What is the editor really saying about your story?
• Re-read the story before and after the revisions. What has changed? Do you like the changes? Did the suggested changes bring up other problems? If so, resolve that, too. Don’t send back a mss until YOU are satisfied with it.
• Take your time. Sigh. This is the hardest thing to do, isn’t it? You’re excited and you want to get this done, sent back and sign that contract. But it’s essential to slow yourself down as much as you can. Make yourself wait until the critique group meets in two weeks and take it to that. Anything. You have only one shot to get it right. Take time–however you have to trick youself–to do it right.
• Send it and forget it. When you finally send it off, then forget it. Move on to the next project, or pick up the project you put off to do these revisions. 90% of these revisions on spec are ultimately rejected; but, by the way, the editor has just made your story better and it may hit the NEXT editor as simply fantastic. And, by the way, 10% ARE accepted after revisions. Either way, 90% or 10%, your job is to do your job, your way, which means–get back to work.

As Always, It’s Easy to Stay Connected

• Darcy Pattison Writing Workshops. April 25–Deadline for signing up for the May-June Novel Revision workshop.
• Sign up for Revision Notes Occasional Newsletter.
• Sign up for Revision Notes feed.
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  Note to LiveJournal Users: If you are reading your Friend’s page and you want to post a comment, you must come to my webpage. Otherwise, the comment stays on your Friend’s Page and I never see it.

Yesterday, I finished the last of my speaking engagements for a while and today I’m taking a deep breath and reminding myself–I’m supposed to be a writer. But there’s always that naggin question–am I a real writer?

10 Things That Mean You’re a Writer

Answer True or False. If at least half of these things are true of you, you’re a writer.

1. I live half in fantasy, half in reality.
2. I hear characters talking.
3. I dream of relationships and events that could only take place in a book.
4. I enjoy sitting before a computer, alone, for hours on end.
5. I love to play with words, the sounds of words.
6. Trying different combinations of words is fun to me.
7. I get grouchy when more than a day or so goes by without writing.
8. When I’m writing, time stops or slows and hours can pass without me realizing it.
9. If I’m not writing, I’m reading.
10. If I’m not reading, I’m writing.

A writer writes. And I’m a writer. I’m glad that speaking is done for a while and I can get back to my real love.

The Read Aloud America website has announced the 2008 lists of books recommended as read alouds.

My picturebook, 19 Girls and Me, tops the list of K-1 list! This pleases me, because when I write picturebooks, I’m most concerned with the sound of the language. Making a picturebook text a great Read Aloud is one of my biggest goals.

I’m still poking around for ideas for a new novel.

These are Crazy Days

• I’m avoiding writing, or I’m writing frantically about nothing or everything.
• I’m doing small chores which I’ve put off forever.

• Shameless Commerce Division: If one of those small chores YOU have put off is posting a review of Novel Metamorphosis on Amazon, please do that small chore.

  Thanks! I appreciate my friends.

• I’m messing around with a speech for the Arkansas Association of Instructional Media on Monday.
• I’m getting handouts ready for that speech.
• I’m wondering if I’ll ever find a new story, new characters to commit to.
• I”m wishing I had characters to talk to and to follow around. Well, there is one, but he’s mighty strange, even if he is handsome, in a foreign sort of way. And he wants something about himself in the title of the book. But if he’s the protag, then who is the antag? So, maybe, he’s the antag?
• I’m even avoiding writing anything helpful here on the blog. Sigh. Someone kick me!

I have finished a big project. I’ve done lots of small housekeeping and bookkeeping chores. And I have to face it. The decision of what novel to write next.

Deciding What to Write Next

This is the hardest thing to me: what to commit to. I’m playing with ideas, but nothing has struck me yet as worthy of a year’s commitment. I like the ideas–sorta. I like the beginnings of a characters, but I don’t love them yet. For me, these are the drudge days of writing, not knowing if anything will come of the day’s work. No progress on a real draft, no real character development because that was a dead end trail, or this is interesting, but I can’t find a setting that works.

• I’m looking at novels I like to see why the worked.
• I’m listening to books on tape while driving.
• I’m trolling for characters.
• I’m searching maps and old maps and drawing maps for settings.
• I’m re-reading how to create character conflict.
• I’m working, but it seems like I’m going nowhere.

How do you start a totally new novel?

If you are in Europe, you can still order Novel Metamorphosis: Uncommon Ways to Revise on the UK Amazon site. Delivery is faster, easier and cheaper for European sites from the UK Amazon.

And you can still find it at the US Amazon.

This is part of a series of posts on Plotting Difficult Topics

In Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking About Difficult Stories by Loren Niemi and Elizabeth Ellis, the authors recognize that how you approach a difficult subject can make huge differences in voice, POV, plot and resolution. They suggest 32 different approaches and this series of posts works out those approaches for the following scenario.

The Scenario: A girl watches her mother place a box of candy on the highest book shelf; the candy is meant as a birthday gift for the girl’s grandmother. The girl decides to sneak up and steal/eat some of the candy.

Loss, Actions

• Loss, Actions, Testimony

  Why on earth that child stole from her grandmother, I don’t know. It was hard times and I’d saved pennies for a month to buy that box of candy for the old saint. She always gave up things for us and just for once, I wanted to honor her. Mother-in-laws are sometimes a trial, I know, but not mine. A true saint.
  So when I caught Mel hanging on that bookshelf with chocolate on her hands and lips, I got me a switch and lit in. Then I made her set up a table and try to sell the rest of the candies to her siblings, hoping to get enough for another box. In the end, I had to pinch a dime from my own hidden stash to add to the girl’s cash to afford another box.
  That girl. Nothin’ good will come of her.

• Loss, Actions, Confession

  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. Gluttony. Let me name them ALL. Gluttony. Jealousy. Coveting what belongs to another. Disobedient. Unkind. Selfish.
  “Child, how did you manage all that sin?”
  “I stole the candy meant for my grandmother’s birthday.”
  “Yes, and what else?”
  “That’s it.”
  I saw and I wanted. Coveting.
  I ate more than one piece. Gluttony.
  I didn’t care that it was for Grandma. Unkind.
  Ma told all us kids to leave the box along. Disobedience.
  I didn’t share any of it, not a single piece. Selfish.
  I wish I HAD shared with Bella, so she’d be in trouble, too. So, more sin. In my heart, anyway. Chocolate is the source of lots of sin.

• Loss, Action, Therapy

  It was three days ago, so I’d totally forgotten it. Old stuff. Not important. Water under the bridge, to use Mom’s expression.
  But Mom was trippin’. Yelling and stuff.
  “How could you?”
  Shrug.
  “It was for Mimi.”
  “What’s the big deal?”
  It was the first time I connected things – my actions and punishment. She made me take every single book off the library shelves and dust them. Then I had to sort them into categories: fiction and non-fiction (sports, war, hunting, child-rearing). Then re-shelve each book, placing it just so on the lemon-polish-scented shelves.
  It Tom Sawyer hated painting that fence of his –man– I hated cleaning her library.
  Only good thing to come of it? I stopped and read a couple of the child-rearing books and I’ve got some good arguments now in my arsenal. Next time she pulls one strategy on me, I can counter that so-and-so suggests she do this-or-that instead.
  Looking forward to the next conversation we have about my behavior.

• Loss, Action, Transformation

  The library shelves were covered with boxes of chocolate.
  “Where did they come from?” the woman asked in wonder.
  “I bought them. I want Mimi to have the finest birthday ever. Not just one box of chocolates, but dozens and dozens.”
  “But, why?”
  “Sit down,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I did when I was just ten years old and what I’ll never do again.”

This is part of a series of posts on Plotting Difficult Topics

This is part of a series of posts on Plotting Difficult Topics

In Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking About Difficult Stories by Loren Niemi and Elizabeth Ellis, the authors recognize that how you approach a difficult subject can make huge differences in voice, POV, plot and resolution. They suggest 32 different approaches and this series of posts works out those approaches for the following scenario.

The Scenario: A girl watches her mother place a box of candy on the highest book shelf; the candy is meant as a birthday gift for the girl’s grandmother. The girl decides to sneak up and steal/eat some of the candy.

Loss, Grief

• Loss, Grief, Testimony

  When she lost the battle of her will and ate the chocolate, she knew it would send her blood sugar crazy. And it did. She wound up in the hospital, learning how to give herself insulin shots.

• Loss, Grief, Confession

  I climbed up there just to get candy. But when Tommy came into the room, I realized he could see my underpants. Worse, I realized I wanted him to. It was all my fault what happened next. And afterward, we ate the whole box of chocolates together. (Young adult story!)

• Loss, Grief, Therapy

  It was the constant denial of self that ate at her. When was it HER turn to be special? No one had EVER given her a birthday party, yet, her old grandma had a big party year after year. So, when she accidently saw Mom hide the candy, she told herself that she deserved it. But it didn’t satisfy–not really. Because it was stolen–it wasn’t a gift meant for her. It was a start of the bitterness and every bag of chocolate–her main obsession, now–after that, made it worse.

• 
  Loss, Grief, Transformation

  She had sold exactly zero boxes of candy for the fun raiser, she was such a lousy salesman. No Girl Scout troop would want her on the cookie sales team. So when Mom finally bought two boxes–out of pity–she was excited.
  But then, nothing happened. Stuck at the pits of Salesmen’s Heaven.
  Then, her baby sister snuck in and ate one box and had to buy a replacement for her allowance, since it was a gift for grandma. And then, Grandma tried a piece of the candy and love it and called her friends and took orders and soon–
  She was an ace salesman, selling more than anyone else in fifth grade.
  She owed her career to a box of chocolates and a thief for a little sister.

This is part of a series of posts on Plotting Difficult Topics

This is part of a series of posts on Plotting Difficult Topics

In Inviting the Wolf In: Thinking About Difficult Stories by Loren Niemi and Elizabeth Ellis, the authors recognize that how you approach a difficult subject can make huge differences in voice, POV, plot and resolution. They suggest 32 different approaches and this series of posts works out those approaches for the following scenario.

The Scenario: A girl watches her mother place a box of candy on the highest book shelf; the candy is meant as a birthday gift for the girl’s grandmother. The girl decides to sneak up and steal/eat some of the candy.

• Loss, Guilt/Shame, Testimony
  From the moment I saw the box, I knew what would happen. Secretly, I watched Dad hid the box and knew he would make it as hard for me as he could. That was OK. I enjoyed the challenge.
  He left it on the table in plain sight until I was abed, and he thought I was asleep. Then, yes, then, he hid it while I watched, hiding so he wouldn’t see me. When he checked my room a moment later, he found me tucked in still asleep. So easy to fool him.
  So, when the candy was gone the next day, he never suspected me. Or rather, he suspected me, but had no idea how I had found it and no way to prove that I had done it.
  I should have felt guilty; instead, I was thrilled.
• Loss, Guilt/Shame, Confession

  As soon as I fell, I saw my arm. It went along straight from my shoulders until just before my wrist. Then, there was a step down, a waterfall, an unnatural interruption of the long line of bone. Broken.
  Shock. No pain–yet.
  I jumped up and ran out the back door around the house to the front yard and there–finally–I allowed myself to scream: “I fell!”
  Mom and Dad came running.
  “Oh, Tom, she fell off the porch!”
  “It’s broken,” Dad said grimly. “Get the car.”
  “I tried to climb. I fell.” I tried to confess. I had run around the house to keep from confessing, but now, I wanted to , but no one listened. “I tried to climb. . .”
  Later, Dad told the doctor, “She was climbing up the porch and fell.”
  They never found out I was climbing the bookshelves to steal candy. I’m so sorry I never told them the truth.

• Loss, Guilt/Shame, Therapy

  The shame of getting caught was bad enough. But then the demands started. It was blackmail and by my own sister. But I could do nothing but pay up. Week after week, she took my allowance, leaving me nothing.
  In the end, I realized that telling the truth would have been far less punishment than this.

• Loss, Guilt/Shame, Transformation

  I could face the punishment–which was bad. I could face the shame–which made me hide in my room for a month. What I couldn’t face was the fact that I was a glutton.
  When I finally drew a gargoyle with my face and named it Glutton, it was the beginning of a true repentance, a true change. Naming the sin, it freed me. I could finally face it and start to make changes. I shed 150 pounds that year.

This is part of a series of posts on Plotting Difficult Topics