PerNoWriLent March 4, 2013
Posted by philangelus in religion, writing.Tags: discipline, Lent, writing
4 comments
Lent is a superb time to get fed up with yourself.
I’m a writer who’s got a novel-in-progress since, oh, forever. I blogged about it, and everyone liked the idea. I told my agent about it, and eventually she admitted she liked my idea too (she doesn’t want me to get too cocky). Best of all, I liked the idea.
But that was months ago, and it’s not done.
Now to be fair, I’ve been doing other things. I did edits and suchlike on two other novels, one of which you all went out and bought last November (right? RIGHT?). But you know…come on. It should take me 100 days to write a novel. Three months. And then another three months to edit. Nine months? A year? That’s nonsense.
Now when Lent came around, I wasn’t sure what to do, and nothing felt right. Sometimes God will give me a kick in the pants as to what it is I need to be doing, but nothing presented itself this year, and I entered Ash Wednesday with three ideas, none of them front runners. Eventually I punted and went for the no-brainer: I’d read An Introduction to the Devout Life
A few days into Lent, I was talking to my agent, and I realized: I just need to buckle down and get the book done. The problem is lack of discipline. I’m losing my will to go on.
Discipline. Oh, right, yeah.
God gave me two vocations: writer and mother/wife. If I’m not writing, I’m failing a vocation God gave me. And when is a better time to get back to doing what God wants than a time of year set aside by the Church to get closer to God’s will for your life?
So I’m doing a Lent-version of NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month.) I can’t sustain a NaNoWriMo pace without burning out, but I can and have sustained a slightly lower pace for indefinite periods of time.
We’ll call it my Personal Novel-Writing Lent. PerNoWriLent.
A thousand words a day. Few excuses. (Sorry, but I already had one child-related emergency, and as I was packing supplies for what I thought would end up as an ER trip, I told God, You don’t get your words today.) That should get me about 40,000 words by Easter Sunday (on top of the 35K I already had) and if I can’t just whack off an ending after that, then my agent needs to buy a train ticket up to the Swamp and roundhouse kick me in the head.
But she won’t need to do that. Because this is scrupulosity central, and I don’t want to have to tell God I didn’t write enough. Besides, I love ♥My Book♥. It deserves better than to sit neglected. It’s time to be a writer again.
Writing The Next Big Thing November 27, 2012
Posted by philangelus in The New Novel, writing.Tags: fiction, novel, writing
10 comments
I got tagged by Ash Krafton, fellow blogger over at QueryTracker.net, for The Next Big Thing meme.
The object of the meme is to pretend I am the next big thing….and I’m being interviewed by Rosemary DiBattista.
JANE LEBAK: THE NEXT BIG THING?
What is your working title of your book?
Titles are the bane of my existence. They either pop up or else they never come. We didn’t have the new title for “The Wrong Enemy” until the cover artist said, “Guys? I can’t design a cover until you come up with a title,” so at that point the publisher and I narrowed down the list of 45 titles to the one final title. Two of my own children were unnamed for the first 24 hours until we actually had to make a decision between our final two candidate names.
For this one, I picked “Domino Hearts.” Why? Because I think it’s an awesome title — for someone else’s book. I like the feel of hearts breaking like dominos going down in a long row, but it has nothing to do with my story. I’m using this title because the more ill-fitting a working title I choose for this novel at this stage of the game, the better my perfect title will look when it presents itself. No, really.
Where did the idea come from for the book?
When I was twelve, my Great Aunt Millie told us about someone she knew — maybe a relative, but I don’t recall — who was watching the news on vacation and saw someone who looked just like her daughter. The woman had always sworn she’d given birth to twins, so seeing this woman on TV was a huge shock. This story came back to me decades later as an amazing setup for a novel.
The main character is inspired by two separate women: one woman I was helping to polish her resume, and I saw one of her previous jobs had involved testing burn-site specimens for accelerants related to arson. And the other was in grad school after a tragedy had changed everything she thought she would end up doing.
What genre does your book fall under?
Contemporary fiction.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
I average one movie every three years, so I can’t begin to guess. When choosing actors, though, it’s not just how they look — it’s more their mannerisms, their bearing. Some people look just like your character but could never be them because of their delivery or their approach.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Amber Brickman never realized she was separated at birth from her twin, but even worse, neither did her mother.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Assuming my agent likes it, it will be represented.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
Still working on it. I’ve taken several breaks during the writing in order to take a whack at the other projects in my life. In general it takes me three months of solid writing to turn out a 95,000 word manuscript, but I haven’t been doing this solidly.
What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
Jennifer Weiner’s later work, for example “And Then Came You,” with its emphasis on multigenerational questions of parents, relationships, and motherhood. “The Unfinished Work Of Elizabeth D” by Nicole Bernier is similar in tone and reach, in terms of how secrets shape families. And I’ll also add Claire LaZebnik’s “The Smart One And The Pretty One,” with its emphasis on sisterhood and a career-minded character who resists romance.
Who or what inspired you to write this book?
It was time. Amber needed to be written.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
There’s a mystery driving the storyline, but the characters are the backbone of this story: how each woman arrived at the place she’s at now, how she thinks this is the way things have to be — and yet how each of them could have more if they could resolve the pain in their past.
There’s humor in the characters’ interactions, and the would-be romantic couple have an amazing chemistry supported largely by their banter. You’re going to laugh out loud at times, but the story itself is driven by needs buried so deep some of the characters aren’t even aware, and I think the humor supports it without overshadowing it, and that will keep the reader remembering the story afterward.
Include the link of who tagged you and this explanation for the people you have tagged.
Ash Krafton tagged me. You can find her at her own blog and at the QueryTracker blog.
I’m tagging BR Myers because she’s my agency sibling and cheerleader, and she’s publishing her short fiction on Wattpad right now, with a novel coming up next year.
Also tagging Amy Deardon, whose book “The Story Template” we reviewed on this blog earlier this year, and whose book “A Lever Long Enough” I helped edit. She’s one of my critique partners, and she’s been working on a project for NaNoWriMo. Maybe she’ll tell us about it.
Also tagging Normandie Fischer, editor for Wayside Press and my critique partner, whose novels (two of them!) will be coming out next year.
Baby goats! And Heifer International! October 12, 2012
Posted by philangelus in kiddos, writing.Tags: baby goats, donation, goat, Heifer International, writing
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Time to make good on my offer to donate $1 to Heifer.org for every copy of The Wrong Enemy preordered. (And it’s also over at Amazon.com now! That makes me feel more official.)
And…{drumroll}…they’re getting a goat!
Heifer International tells us that goats are the most effective livestock for getting a family out of poverty. Goats are easy enough for an eight-year-old to maintain a small flock, and they’re able to eat scrub plants in locations most other animals can’t get to. Two dairy goats can provide a gallon of milk a day, which increases a family’s protein intake, and then the family can sell the extra for a source of income. Plus, it’s easy to pass along other goats to another family within the five year pay-it-forward timeframe.
I don’t have a picture of the actual goat, of course, but I a few weeks ago, I got to see baby goats at a local farm. The first time we visited, we saw a baby goat just an hour old, but I didn’t have a camera. The next week, we got pictures of all the new little ones. I think this is the newest of them. He was still having trouble walking around.
This one was also fairly new.
And these guys were in the older batch.
Out in the parking lot was the escape artist goat. She’s been getting loose all summer, but she doesn’t seem to know what to do with herself once she gets out. So she played with Kiddo3.
He didn’t have any food for her, so she decided to investigate my car. And found something.
Goat, what are you doing?
Goat? STAHP!
Fortunately a goat is (as Heifer reassures us) easy to manage, and I was able to get her out of the car before she took the keys and headed down to Sprouts R Us.
Thank you everyone for your pre-orders, and I hope you enjoy The Wrong Enemy!
Happy book birthday to The Wrong Enemy! October 5, 2012
Posted by philangelus in angels, The Wrong Enemy.Tags: angels, author, guardian angels, publication, writing
1 comment so far
Happy publication day! The Wrong Enemy is now “live” and for sale (still at 20% off) over at MuseItUp Publishing.
In the next few days it should appear at Amazon.com, and eventually at B&N, Kobo and your other friendly neighborhood ebook dealers. (We get a print edition if enough people buy the ebook, so if you’re waiting for print — buy the ebook for your best friend, worst enemy, mailman…everyone!)
Also, my agency-sibling Bethany Myers posted an interview with me, where I talk about what inspired the story.
Thanks so much, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
Like a opening of a horror novel! August 21, 2012
Posted by philangelus in geekery, writing.Tags: horror novels, mood, writing
14 comments
This happened about three minutes ago. I was on the couch when I heard the garage door opening beneath me.
One Kiddo is out at her friend’s house; she’s not due back yet, so I figured it can’t be her. I also thought I heard a car motor, so my Patient Husband perhaps? But again, it’s the middle of the day. Bomb threat at his building? Was he ill?
But when no one came up the stairs, I went down to see who had come in. Instead I found the garage empty, the garage door down but the light on. That light meant the door had just been active; it had gone down instead of up.
My minivan sat in its spot, and one of the doors was open.
A really noisy fly circled me endlessly.
I thought, “This would be the great opening for a horror novel!” The stillness. The mysterious door-opening. The buzzing fly in orbit around my head. The sliding door of the minivan, inexplicably open. And above all, that eerie stilless of a garage with nobody in it. Well, nobody except me.
It’s a good thing I don’t spook easily. I shut the minivan door (Kiddo3 had gone down earlier to find something in the car, and it’s a revelation to him that doors shut) and then returned upstairs to find my knitting bag where Kiddo4 and Kiddo3 were playing. I checked in the bag, and sure enough, there’s the remote, right next to a ball of yarn. So it’s easy to reconstruct: one of the kids leaned on the bag, put down the door Kiddo2 left up when she went to her friend’s house, and so on.
But really, it’s not about facts; it’s about mood. It’s about the assumptions you carry with you when you head into the basement and find nothing as you expected, or rather, no people where you expected people to be.
Keep that in mind when you start your horror novel. And let me know if you call it The Half-Open Door.
Tabris excerpt! And the novel’s new title! July 31, 2012
Posted by philangelus in angels, The Wrong Enemy, writing.Tags: angels, excerpt, fiction, MuseItUp, novel, writing
4 comments
This month on the MuseItUp blog is “excerpt month,” and closing it out is my upcoming re-release of The Guardian, which now has a new title (and all new text, and will be published under my legal name…someone please tell me if it’s still the same book?)
For ‘Christmas In July’ we published an excerpt from The Boys Upstairs where Jay tells the three homeless kids how he became disabled in Iraq. This time, we have Tabris and Rachmiel on a rooftop, with Rachmiel desperately fishing for any information on why Tabris did what he did: because Tabris was a guardian angel, and Tabris murdered his charge.
The excerpt is here. The novel’s publication date is this September.
Oh, and our new title? The Wrong Enemy. I hope you’re as pleased as I am!
But you still have to wait to see the cover. 
“Burntime,” beginnings and endings April 21, 2011
Posted by philangelus in writing.Tags: poetry, publication, short story, writing
9 comments
I’m delighted to announce that my short story “Burntime” has been published in the Jet Fuel Review.
There’s a story behind the story, of course, and because this is my blog, I get to tell it. Back in 2006, I read the guidelines for a contest run by a literary magazine, and although I decided not to enter the contest, I came up with the framework of a story that would fit the magazine. I had several scenes in my head, plus the central question of the main character. The main character carried a lot of guilt, and it was visible and unchanging to him in the form of harm he’d done to his daughter.
I had the framework, but the story wouldn’t gel, so I filed it off in the back of my head where I keep a lot of stories-in-liquid-form. They’re all jumbled up on a dark shelf, few of them bearing labels.
Two years later, I pulled the story off the mental shelf and found that while it wouldn’t gel in that form, what if we added this and that and moved it to here. Ooh, now we had something! The main character still had the same flavor, but the daughter was a lot younger. They weren’t raking leaves any longer. They were in a public place. In other words, every one of my vivid scenes was now gone, but that’s par for the course in a mental edit.
I wrote the whole story in a couple of days, but then I froze on the ending. The thing wouldn’t resolve. I mean, I tacked on a couple of paragraphs that worked as an ending, but it didn’t have that amazing slam-it-out-of-the-park feel that you get when a story hits the sweet spot.
A year later, I submitted it to a critique group looking for help on the ending. Nothing. I sent it to beta readers. “Well, it’s okay.” I even gave it to my Patient Husband, who said I’d nailed the tone, but he couldn’t tell what was missing in the ending either. I changed the ending five times. I did some intensive self-psychotherapy to see if I could uncover some hidden meaning where the story pertained to my life, but no. I didn’t need to make a personal realization in order to end the story. I just needed to end the story.
Last fall, for reasons I cannot fathom, I received the ending. Subtle, gentle, perfect. Two paragraphs changed, and the thing went out into the world. And now it’s in print.
If you’ve followed along this far, I also had a poem published in issue 19 of Ruminate Magazine, titled “The Next Lesson.”
Enjoy!
