My Week

This week was very emotionally demanding for me.

 This Monday as some of you may know, was a bigger drag than the regular Monday. I had some serious cramps, which I have not had to deal with on this level for a while, and I needed to make some reminder calls to some of my Avon customers, which wouldn’t have been a big deal if I had been feeling well, as it was, I wasn’t even sure I could speak without groaning, but I go through it alright.

Tuesday I went to the Whittier DMV office to take my driving test and I tell you here and now not to go there ever, ever. I got a woman who was determined to flunk me before she got in the car! Before she came all the way up to the car she ordered, didn’t request: ordered me to get the rosary off of the review mirror. I don’t think it made that much of a difference, but, okay, let’s say she’s worried that it would get in the way of me seeing what’s in the mirror, okay I can deal with that, I’m not that religious, I don’t care if it’s there or not; but still, I can think of at least thirty different ways for her to ask me to take it off the mirror that would have been acceptable from one human being to the other. So, I got Jesus down (wow that looks odd, I thought Jesus was supposed to get himself down [for clarification that’s a joke, and yes, I know I’m going to hell]) and stuck the beads in the cup holder. Once the instructor was in the car and we were going down a neighborhood, she didn’t pay any attention to my driving for the whole first half, she was more concerned with the fact that the air-conditioning in the car didn’t work. At some point she realized all the fussing in the world wasn’t going to get the air cooler in that car, and she told me to pull up to the curb behind a white car, then to stop. I did so, then she told me to backup, I did this, then I kept going, and going and going, I asked how far she wanted me to go, she said she’d tell me when to stop. So I kept going, I must have backed up over a hundred feet. The part of my brain that wasn’t occupied with not hitting the curb was wondering when this would be applicable in a real life situation. After that ridiculousness was over, I was thoroughly shaken and forgot to turn my blinker on and check before I pulled away from the curb, because logically, I was just looking back there and I knew no one was there to signal at, I know the rule is you check and signal no matter what because someone could be there, I know this, but it didn’t even cross my mind to do this until the test woman made a big show of looking behind us after I had already pulled away from the curb, and I thought “Crap,” okay so the word was a little stronger than that, “it’s too late now.” I half-heartedly looked over my shoulder and didn’t bother to flick the blinker on; it was way too late for that. After this I drove much slower, the whole time I was thinking, “What the fink” I’m paraphrasing, “is she going to make me do now?”  She complained about my slow driving and marked me down like I was driving too slowly through the entire drive, (which I wasn’t she was too busy with the air-conditioning to notice) so, she flunked me. That sucked, I need my license before the end of summer, or I don’t know what I’m going to do when school starts. Better luck this Monday I guess, Mama is going to try and teach me how to drive backwards between now and then. We’re going to go over the car controls in my brother’s car too, because I didn’t know where some of them were, (we’re in Southern California, when am I going to use the defroster?) So, hopefully I’ll get it this time, if the tester in Pomona is more reasonable; did I write “more reasonable”? I mean reasonable. Someone reasonable would be nice.

Wednesday was a little better; I went to group counseling for college and got my math level boosted up a level, which is great, because I want to spend as little time in that department as possible.

  Thursday, I rested, and my second Avon shipment arrived and I made all my deliveries, save one.

  Today I went over to a friend’s house and did some quilting stuff with them. I gave away some Avon brochures there, and then went shopping with my mom. So today was all about girl time, it was wonderful.

Driving Test

Today I’m taking my driving test, I’m not as nervous as I expected myself to be, but I’m sure that will change the moment I get to the DMV office. Mama is taking part of the day off work so she can drive me down there, which is really nice of her. I’ve never driven in the area of the DMV so it’ll be a new road, and everything, but the driving instructor is going to be giving me directions, it’s probably someone I have never met or even seen before. I don’t understand how anyone can fairly judge someone’s driving in such an alien environment. I’m never going to be in a situation, (at least I hope not) that I’m going to have a complete stranger in the car with me with no one else there. This is probably going to be the only time I will ever do something like that. I don’t know I find it bizarre; maybe I’m just blowing it completely out of proportion because I am a bit nervous, but…it’s still a weird concept if you think about it too much.

Query Letters (Part 1)

I received a question from a fellow aspiring writer, it was about query letters. As you may know I hardly consider myself an expert on the subject, but as I began to think about it I realized that I know a whole lot more now than I did when I first began. My nature of over-studying and trying to ask more questions than I think I need to ask has taught me a lot about writing a query letter, and the delivery of that query letter.

  First off my advice to newer writers is study!! Read books on how to write query letters, on what to do and what not to do. Then find your prospect agents or publishers and then you need to study more!! I know right about now you would say that being told to study is not what you want to hear, you want me to tell you exactly what you need to do, well unfortunately every genre requires a different approach, fiction, non-fiction; what level you’re writing, child, middle school, young adult, adult and it’s sub category, college level, average intelligence, or a specific field. Which is why there are so many reference books on the subject, and the rules keep changing every year. What I tell you now may be different by the time you read this. So what am I blogging about? Well, I’m going to tell you how I get ready to write a query letter, I am not saying this is the only way to go about it, or even if this is the best way to do it, this is just what I do.

  Let me set up the situation. Let’s say that I have a story called “Understandable” (I have no such book, this is just for an example) it’s an urban fantasy (aka. a fantasy story that takes place in our world as to opposed a fantasy that take place in its own world, like Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”) The main character is…a dwarf named…White, (hey, I’m making this up as I go, so stop snickering.) White works in the mines when he returns home to see a lovely lady dressed as a traveling apple sales woman, (wait for it) she’s a powerful sorceress in disguise, and she has come to the dwarf for shelter. This is an unusual occurrence as you may expect, but White lets her in, and that night she explains that she just caught wind of a plot to kill the queen, so she was on her way to stop them, hence the disguise. White offers his help as a….guide (I guess), she says thanks but no thanks, the sorceress refuses the food White offers her, saying she can only eat the apples she has with her, for they are the key to her strength. The next morning however, White and the sorceress find the basket with the fruit has been stolen, and the sorceress will die if they are not found, and the day for the planned murder of the queen is drawing near, and they need to do all of this while keeping themselves hidden from the other people of this world: the Ordinaries (that’s us)….White goes to his seven cousins for help and together they save the sorceress.

  So what do I do first after the story is written and edited?

I go and find agents and publishers that might be interested in this kind of thing. I write out an index card for each company or agent with all their important information.

Side One:

                (1)White (2)great    other project okay                         

       

        (3) 1.16.10                 11.12.07 (4) NO

(5) Fantasy Agency

(6)Aurora Kingly

(7)Fantasy@Imadeitup.com

or Aurorafantasy@Imadeitup.com  

(8) Fantasy Agency

212 I Make It Up St.

New York, MY 99999

Explanation

(1)    I list the books I am currently searching for agent for; usually I am looking for more than one book at a time.

(2)    I make a note at how well I think my project fits the agency or publishing house in question.

(3)    I note the date that I sent the agency the query letter.

(4)    I write down “NO” when I get a refusal or no response so that I can avoid sending a query to the same place twice.

(5)    Next I list the agency name.

(6)    I list the name of the person I wish to contact; there may be more than one noted person in the company, if possible I narrow it down so that I send it directly to my desired agent or publisher.

(7)    I write down the company email and/or the specific email of the person I wish to contact.

(8)    The final thing on this page is usually the physical address of the agency or publishing house.

Side 2

(1)    Picture books, fantasy, Short Stories

(2)    Q letter Snail Mail with 1^st 5 pages & synopsis along with SASE.

(3)    Q letter with QUERY & work title in email subject with 1^st 5 pgs and synopsis of work NO attachments. WILL REPLY, if none, email again.

Explanation:

(1)    I list the preferred genres of the company, or specific person I’m going to be sending the query to, in some cases, they list only what they don’t want sent to them in which case I list those instead with NO at the beginning of the list.

(2)     I note how they wish the query letter to be sent by mail. Since I am pressed for space I use a mix of my own shorthand, and the generally accepted slang of the writing world. Q letter, meaning they want a standard query letter, which is only one page long. Snail mail, which is regular mail; a lot of agencies will not accept UPS, or other deliveries and will not even let it in through the door. Some will ask for the first few pages from your work, it can be anywhere from the first five to the first fifty pages of the work, depending on the genre. They could also ask for a synopsis, which is basically a summary of the entire book condensed to around three pages for a “Short Synopsis” or around ten pages a “Long Synopsis” they may or may not specify what kind of synopsis they want and you’re left to guess. A SASE is a Self Addressed Stamped Envelope, a lot of companies will not pay for postage to send you a rejection or an acceptance, so you need to send an envelope addressed to yourself with a stamp, even then some do not guarantee a response.

(3)    This is where I note the recommended mode of sending the query by email. Most agencies and publishing companies get a lot of spam, so even if they don’t require it, it’s best to put QUERY in the subject line of your email, with your book title. Most of them are paranoid of viruses, and do not open attachments, so anything that they ask you to send along with the query you should paste to the email, they will most often request it but even if they don’t, you should do it anyways. Some will guarantee a response and will ask you to email another query after a given period of time, because if you didn’t get a response, they accidentally deleted it, or it got lost. Most are not so kind. Most of them will give you a time span of days to expect a reply, and then if they exceed it, you are to assume it to be a refusal.

So, this is how I start my query letter adventure, I think this post is long enough for one day, I’ll be posting more on this subject another time.

Belief

I remember when I was much younger and my family went to church, I didn’t realize for the longest time that people actually believed the stories in the Bible. It was a gradual realization, there wasn’t really a specific moment in time that it struck me that people took those stories seriously and as actual documented events. Like the Ancient Greek stories that my Mama told me, I thought they were good moral stories to learn from, and that church was just a place where people who had a particular connection with those stories gathered (which I found kind of odd, because I found the tales a little hard to understand because of the way they were written, but they were adults, sometimes adults did things that didn’t make sense to me because I’m the kid. It would all make sense once I was grown up, which in my mind was around fourteen or so). I remember not wanting to accept that adults believed these stories, and having to keep on reminding myself that they thought it was all real so I wouldn’t make a comment that might offend them.

  At one point I tried to think it was all true, I even said it out loud, but it rang false in my ears. The statement made me feel dirty, because I didn’t believe, I just wanted to, really badly, I wanted to, but I didn’t like the feeling that the Lord’s Prayer gave me when I recited it, it was the same feeling I got when I was trying to lie to someone.

  So for years I discouraged my family going to church. When my parents asked if I wanted to go, I would just say I didn’t like getting up early, and they would leave it at that and let me sleep. One year on Easter Papa was feeling some pressure from his boss to go to this Easter play his boss’s church was putting on. I tried to pass the “too early” excuse, but it was an evening show. So we went, and I remember feeling some surprise after the show was over and everyone was invited to come up to the alter and be forgiven all of their sins, and neither of my parents budged. Later, our parents bought us some shakes for behaving so well, even though none of us had wanted to go. As we slurped they explained that sometimes in the work world you had to do things that you wouldn’t normally do, and in this case it was either Papa would have to spend hours on his boss’s boat to go fishing, or go to this play; and that if he didn’t do either, it would have been very awkward. We asked what they thought of the Easter story; the most that they would commit to was that if Jesus was a real person, it didn’t really affect us because it was so long ago. I felt a rush of relief, because I felt that way too, though I wouldn’t have been able to put it to words. It wasn’t until years later that I found out that my parents never stated their own beliefs because they wanted my brothers and I to find our own way, and not be influenced by their opinions when we were too young to make our own, and no matter what conclusions we reached, they would accept it and love us no matter what.

  In my late teens whenever I made a statement about beliefs or religion in general, Mama would present the opposite side of the arguments, which baffled me, then she told me she just wanted me to have my arguments down to the letter, so my opinions would be complete, like a house with four walls, a door and a roof (I’m paraphrasing, she didn’t say this exactly.) As I became more observant and I just saw more of the world in general, I learned that there were people out there who had their opinions, and stood by them, even though their “house” was very incomplete, the one thing that they had finished was a closed and padlocked door to keep all other options and opinions out. So because of my parent’s unique and wise way of upbringing, I feel confident in my house, and that I try to keep all doors and windows open, and I’m not afraid of remodel as circumstances change in my life.

Wolves - If everyone cared

I found this yesterday. I believe it to be a great representation of the beauty of these animals. Wolves have been greatly misunderstood for centuries. If we all learned to think with clarity and logic, we would all understand that the wolf is a needed animal in the wild to keep the balance of life and death. The elimination of this vital strand of the web of life can only lead to disaster. Not to mention the wolves serve as a reminder for us humans that all things of nature have a place and are beautiful.

Driving

I recently received my driving permit (RED ALERT! Watch the roads!!) No I’m kidding…a little. I’m keeping most of my driving in abandoned parking lots, so you don't really have to worry about bumping into me...or me bumping into you, I guess would be more accurate.

So far I’ve managed to crash into six imaginary cars while backing out of parking spaces, which I was pretending was a crowded mall parking lot (rather than an empty college parking lot); and I’ve hit two more imaginary cars by forgetting to look before changing lanes. Just for laughs, I gave backing into a parking space a whirl, and I’m not even going to tell you what happened. All in all, I’m getting better, and I was unleashed upon a real road with real cars yesterday, and I didn’t freak out…not on the outside anyways.

My car of choice hasn’t sustained any damage, and I haven't given Mama (who has been my licensed driver in all of my driving adventures) whiplash. So all in all, I guess I haven’t done that badly.

The Face of a Clock

When I was in first grade, I got so bored, I memorized all of the little cut out crafts that were pined to the cork board plaque on the wall. The teacher had made them all, which never made sense to me. Why would a teacher take the time and the energy to cut out colorful flowers for the spring, Suns for the summer, and leaves for the fall (winter was the only time we students actually made the paper decorations, they were paper snowflakes, of course, but then we had to clean up the mess after we were done.)
Then there was the Alphabet that was taped to across the top of my desk, the capital letters right next to the little letters, and all of the vowels (Except Y and W)were red, the rest were in black type. Beneath the alphabet was out first name, spelt out by the teacher on the first day of class. This entire arrangement always confuse me...
I had learned the alphabet when I was about two (thank you Barney!) and how to spell and write my name long before I had ever set foot in a school room. (Actually that's a bit of a lie, Mama was going through college when I was a baby, and she used to take me with her to the classes.) The first time I set foot in a class room where I was the one who was supposed to be learning....(No, that's not true either, I don't think I was meant to learn anything in school and anything I did learn was probably an accident.) But that's all besides the point. Why were they taking all of this trouble to make sure that the alphabet and my name were right under my nose? And why didn't they make Y and W red too? Or maybe purple, since they don't always work as vowels. The whole thing just confused me, and it shook some of the foundation blocks of my reading and writing skills in the process.....so it was more of a hindrance than a help.
When the teacher was taping that table alphabet/name table tag to the desk, I told the teacher that I already knew the alphabet, and I knew how to spell my name. She said "that was very nice" but she was putting it down so that I would always know which desk was mine. I told her not to worry about it, I was sure that I could remember which one it was. Then she said it was for the other kids so that they would know that desk wasn't theirs. But this didn't make any sense either, because these kids had already been in school for a longer time than me, and I had just arrived from another state; wouldn't they know their own desk from another desk? Especially since their desk had their name written on it? I just said "Oh." and we moved on.

Another thing I remember about first grade is the face of the clock. Either I was looking at the clock as I waited for the other kids to stop talking so that the class would start; or when I was waiting for the kids to be quiet and get in a line so that we could go out to recess, or to go to another class, or to eat lunch; or when I was waiting for the "appropriate time" to go the bathroom.
In the class room, Cogsworth and I got along really well. He was as silent as I was, and his face was filled with disapproval as he looked at the screaming Rug Rats that were my classmates.....yes, he and I got a long really well.