For The Love Of Words

   When I finally completed my first novel, the formerly mentioned Blood Ties, I began to research how on earth I go from having a manuscript to having a published novel. Well, it's not easy. There are multiple options to explore. If the only goal is to see my work in print, then I could self publish. This path would entail a great deal of work. I would have to design my own cover art, hire an artist to draw it. Once I finally got the book in print, the marketing would be all up to me. I would have to find every individual store that might be willing to let me have some shelf space, most likely for a cut of the profits. All advertising would be up to me from radio spots to billboards to television commercials to arranging for interviews and book signings. And the money to pay for all of this would come out of my own personal finances.
   The other option is to find myself a literary agent. An agent, if he/she agrees to represent your work, will handle all of the necessary promotions. An agent will negotiate your contract with the publishing house, and they haggle hard for you since the more money you make, the more money they make. You see, your agent will take a percentage of your profits. Probably around 10% or so. But since they will likely increase your profit by at least that much, they are worth the money they take. Not to mention the fact that an agent stands a much better chance of actually convincing a publishing house to print your book. They have all the necessary connections. They have spent years building relationships and establishing a track record of success. They know which house to petition, and which agent in that house would be most interested in your book.
   Guess which option I chose. Slightly more that three weeks ago, I composed my first query letter and submitted it along with the first ten pages of my manuscript. Now comes the most difficult part. The waiting. An average response time from an agent is around two months. Some agents can take as long as six months to a year to respond. The waiting can be maddening. Now, knowing how long it can take to get a response, I decided to send out a query to a different agent at the rate of one every two weeks. I won't submit to a second agent in the same agency until I get a response from the agent I already submitted to. This Thursday will make two weeks since I sent out my second query. It really is awful to sit around in limbo wondering if the agent has even bothered to read your query yet, much less send a response. I will send out my third query in three more days.
   People ask me if I am going to self publish. I tell them that I will if I can't find an agent to represent my work. But I believe in my work and I honestly think that if an agent were to read my full manuscript, then they would be interested in representing me.
   What are your thoughts on this subject? Did you self publish or go with an agent and how did it work out for you?

   Alright. Here's the deal. If you, like myself, do the majority of your work in files kept stored on a USB thumb drive then you need to make sure you have multiple back ups of the important documents. You know, things like, oh I don't know, the book you've just spent four and a half months writing and the next few revising and submitting to agents. Trust me on this.
   Here's what happened. Last night I used my thumb drive, like I always do, in my laptop. When I was finished I put it away. This morning I went to work in my normal Saturday fashion. Afterward I needed to do some work, so I plugged in my thumb drive, like I always do, and waited for my files to magically appear on my screen, like they always do. Well, something appeared on my screen, but it wasn't my files. It was an error message telling me that the device malfunctioned and windows failed to recognize it.
   The sudden dryness in my mouth and hammering of my heart revealed to me the seriousness of what those seemingly innocuous words truly meant. They were wolves in sheep's clothing. They were the fox in the hen house. What they were really telling me was that my work was gone. Forever. Okay, maybe not gone. It's probably still there, floating in some crystalline chip matrix, pounding against the walls of it's prison and screaming at me to get it out. But I can't. I can't.
   I tried another computer. Something in me, some small naivete that took control for the briefest of times, told me that maybe, just maybe, it was the computer and not my precious thumb drive. With trembling fingers, I rushed to the desk top computer in the living room and plugged the drive confidently into the waiting port. I didn't get the error message. Hope welled up in me like Old Faithful. I waited. Nothing happened. Oh, I didn't get the error message. I didn't get anything. The computer didn't even bother to acknowledge that I had plugged any device into any port. I might as well have been blowing into the port. I would have received the same result. No, that's not true. If I blew into the port then perhaps I might at least remove some small amount of dust from it's interior. So it would, in point of fact, have been more useful to do that than to plug my thumb drive in. Now I am left with the option of professional data recovery for at least one hundred dollars expense. If they can get my work back, the price is worth it.
   I'm not sure if someone who doesn't write can fully appreciate the depths of the dismay that is flowing through me. Let me just say that I haven't been so upset in quite some time.It doesn't help matters to know that a five second process could have prevented this situation. So the next time my wife asks "Have you backed up recently?" I will immediately stop what I'm doing and back up my files. I don't ever want to go through this again.
   So here's my advice to you. Stop reading and go back up your files. Go. Why are you still reading this? Your files could be crashing at this very moment. Go. Back. Up.

   Like most, if not all, of you I had dreams as a child. Some children dreamed of being a policeman, or a fire fighter. Others longed to become teachers, or doctors, or lawyers. Maybe even President. All of these are fine dreams and worthy professions. What did I dream? I wanted to be a writer.
   I set out on this path in my early teen years. I wrote many things ranging from poetry to prose. All were composed with as much literary sophistication and vocabulary as I could muster from my fourteen or fifteen years of public schooling. They were crap. I mean it. I still have a folder filled with the stuff. I look at it every now and then and all I can do is shake my head. But I don't throw it away. I just can't bring myself to do that.
   Here's the thing. Like a foreign language, your literary voice must be utilized to stay sharp. Neglect it for too long and it grows rusty, dull, difficult to use. And I went for a very long time neglecting my literary voice. I simply became caught up in the commonality of life and for more than twenty years I didn't write a thing aside from the occasional signature on a check, or a grocery list, things like that.
    Inside, my literary voice was screaming at me in fury. Every now and then it made a desperate attempt to escape the bonds in which I had locked it so completely. It would send a conversation between people who did not exist flashing across the inside of my mind. Or perhaps a paragraph or two of some random creation would erupt, flare briefly and then sputter out as I ignored it. This pattern continued for the next two plus decades, until one day everything changed.
   I was in the middle of my half hour commute home from work. The radio was on National Public Radio. It was a Saturday and I was listening to Garrison Keillor on A Prairie Home Companion when a commercial aired. The commercial was for a writing contest that NPR was calling Three Minute Fiction, the premise of which was to write a complete story that could be read on the air in three minutes or less. My literary voice reached out from the void with gnarled fingers made arthritic from decades of disuse and took hold of my consciousness with a grip that only two things could break, death or writing. I summarily dismissed the former and opted to write. The entire story composed itself in my head on the drive.
   Upon arriving home I went straight to my computer and started writing. My literary voice began cackling in gleeful celebration. It grew stronger with every word that appeared on the screen. By the time I had finished pounding out the some six hundred words of the story I had become something that I had forgotten until that moment that I was supposed to be. A writer.
   Those first few stories were not bad. They were conceived fairly well in plot and were executed as well as could be expected for a literary voice that was just now relearning how to speak. Then one day I bounced an idea that had come into my head off my wife. She loved it. I started writing that day. I remember the date. It was not so long ago. May 23rd, 2010. For the next four and a half months I wrote nearly every day and early in October, I finished my first novel. I called it Blood Ties, though that title is not set in stone, or ink rather. It is intended to be the first installment of a series I am calling Guardians Among Us.
   I have since started work on two more novels, the sequel to Blood Ties and an unrelated novel. My literary voice is floating high and speaks to me constantly. I tried explaining how I feel about writing to my wife once, this is what I told her.
   We all talk to ourselves, but when you're a writer the people you speak to are your characters, and you share those conversations with the world.