Deadline Brain

I’m pretty caught up in my book right now. I feel like the Little White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. “No Time To Say Hello, Goodbye! I’m Late I’m Late I’m Late!” (Except I’m not late yet.)

Justine talks about YA SF here. Aside from Uglies trilogy (and Peeps, too, if you want to be technical), and Feed, which is mentioned in the comments, I don’t think I’ve read a lot of YA SF either. I wonder why that is? Would After be considered SF? What about Lois Lowry’s The Giver books? Those were awesome. And there was this book I saw maybe a year ago, adn I failed to pick it up at the time and now I can’t remember what it was called, but it was set in the future and people were worried about germs or something, and this boy gets a rash and is sent to reform school in Alaska…? Ah… RASH. See I knew I’d remember!

A debut author friend of mine just got her first cover. And it rocks. I have so much cover envy that it’s not even funny. I’d put the elements in her cover in my book just so I could get a cover that cool. Speaking of covers, Colleen Gleason just got her newest, too. Where is the Cover Gods altar, folks, and what sort of sacrifices do they prefer? Animal, vegetable or mineral?

There’s been some interesting talk on one of my lists about whether or not you have to “know someone” to get anywhere in publishing. The answer to that is no. I really don’t understand why this myth is so pervasive, as pervasive as the one that says that you can’t get an agent until you’re published, but you can’t get published until you have an agent (both happen, rather frequently), or that no one publishes debut writers (this last one is particularly shocking to me because it means that the believer somehow missed the myriad articles written about debut authors in every paper in town).

When I started writing, I didn’t know a single, solitary other writer, and the only person I knew in publishing was a friend of a friend who was an assistant copy editor at a non-fiction reprint and translation imprint at Penguin, which, if you’re making a friend for networking’s sake, is kind of like trying to meet the President by buddying up to the man who trims the thorns in the Rose Garden. When I joined RWA, it wasn’t trying to meet people so much as it was trying to figure out how this whole writing industry worked. It’s not quick, and it’s not always intuitive. Luckily, there are a lot of resources to help you out. I’ve even written a few.

But the thing to remember is that no matter how many people you meet, how many connections you have, they are only as good as the work you have to present. By the end of my apprenticeship, I was face-friendly with a bunch of editors. They’d wave, we’d chat, they’d even hug me when they saw me at conferences, and then they’d merrily send me rejection letters for my books. It wasn’t personal. I’m sure they thought I was a fun gal, but that didn’t mean they were going to publish me. A total stranger with drop-everything-and-read material is going to trump the BFF with mediocre stuff every single time. This is a fact. And the person who did buy my book? (In fact, every person who bid on it?) Had no clue who I was. Because, think about it — the readers don’t know you either. They’re only buying because of the material.