Big News (No, Really)

ICYMI, a series of letters I learned just last week means "in case you missed it," I had a serious announcement this weekend:

I finally signed with a literary agent, namely Dawn Frederick of Red Sofa. In fact, I just sent off the contract to the last person who needs to John Hancock it up.

It's for my humor writing, and it's with my writing partner Mike MacDonald (who founded The Smew, the satire news site I wrote for and eventually helped edit a few years back). In a total bonus move, though, Dawn also represents Young Adult, at least if you're already her client (and may eventually regret telling me that).

You see a lot of these blog posts--the "it's finally my agent soul mate, and in the end, it happened so fast!" posts--but that's kind of how it was. I sent in a query on a Tuesday morning, Dawn got back to me within the hour requesting materials, and by the end of the work day, we were setting up a Skype chat for Thursday night. We chatted about all kinds of book-related things, and life-related things, and while I am 100% sold on Dawn's expertise and her track record, the thing that made it feel so right was her personality (cynical and mordant, practically a pre-requisite for getting along with me) and her enthusiasm. She GOT this book. She loves it. What more could you ask for?

So enough gloating. I'm feeling super-effing-lucky, and it was a fairytale in the end, and dreams come true, sometimes even before you turn 30 (just barely), blah-blah-blah.

The happiest of endings...

But I want to put something out there that I think people don't say enough, and that, as a writer who's still in the middle of the endless-rejections-from-agents phase of your career, you need to hear:

It only happens "overnight" after a LONG slog of nothing happening.

How do you Deal with Failure?

I have a confession that is painfully evident to anyone who knows me: I'm a perfectionist. I like things to be a certain way, I get very hung up on the details, and I believe--deeply--that there is usually a "right" way to do things.

Maybe not in life (or in my house cleaning), but certainly in work. Whether you're building artisanal cheese boards or working as an accountant, do it well. Don't be sloppy. Check, then check again.

This even applies to my text messages and gchats. Usually I double check and copy-edit them...

...and when I hit send too fast and miss something, I follow up with a "sic" to whomever I'm corresponding with. Because I hate the idea that they think I'm sloppy THAT MUCH. (No, I'm not kidding about this.)

I think this is my factory setting, but I also think the drive towards perfectionism was reinforced by rewards. Growing up, I was bright, but if I was also anal-retentive, I could be the best. I could get a perfect score on every test and paper, get the right grades, get into the right college, and generally attain all the rubber-stamps of approval I could want because I was, in my dad's words, "disciplined." Obviously this character trait had serious downsides--like several years of "eating" diet coke for lunch--but by the time they started showing up, it was too late. I was stuck on this track, and why, really, would I want to get off of it?

So I must be a masochist.

Why The CENSORED Wouldn't You Say CENSORED?

Let's just lay it out there: I swear like a sailor.

I'm totally capable of turning off the flow of four-letter words and inappropriate descriptions; I used to be a nanny, and my mother is far too Midwestern to let me get away with saying anything network TV wouldn't approve of, at least without me preemptively pardoning my French, or her post-emptively chastising my "language, Jilly"

Read: it's easier to just cut swears out of my discussions with my mom.

Barring those phone calls, I can express myself without any of my more colorful turns of phrase, of course...but why would I? Deployed correctly, they so perfectly capture not just what I mean, but how I feel about what I mean. Besides, I write comedy (among other things)--if the occasional swear offended me, or if I wasn't willing to push against at LEAST the "appropriate language" envelope, I might as well just give up now.

Or resign myself to the Reader's Digest jokes section, permanently.

A horse with BANGS? Now that's WACKADOODLE!!!!

The Halfway Slump

Let's just start by saying writing is HARD.

All those  people who are all "oh my god I just get so INSPIRED, and I pour out an entire novel in a week!" are either lying, or writing REALLY terrible novels (also known as "first drafts").

As I've mentioned a-multiple-of-five times, I'm pretty OCD, so I tend to write fairly clean drafts. They're probably not working all that well, and there are definitely huge sections that should be cut, or added, or moved, or just BETTER, but the prose usually makes sense, and grammar has been employed.

This means I'm not--will never be--a true "burst of inspiration" type. In fact, I think that type has been made up solely for magazine-bios and romantic ideas of life in a garret. I don't care how good you are (or even how much mess you're willing to tolerate in your drafts), there comes a point in a book where you just say "wait, NOW what?"

Just...don't look down...

Pain Plus Time...But How Much?

There's a cliche among humorists: "comedy equals pain plus time."

The idea behind it is fairly simple: you can transform any experience--even a terrible experience--into something totally different, but you need to let it sit awhile, first.

Lately I've been wondering if maybe it applies to all forms of art. I feel like "pain plus time" is probably a reliable formula for tons of great literature, amazing songs, and stunning works of visual art, too.

But how much time do you need?

I think medium matters (for example, it's probably fair to assume a good breakup song could be written sooner, relative to the event, than a good breakup novel), so let's just stick to the one I know: writing.

How much time should you give pain--or fear, or trauma, or any other negative-but-powerful experience--to incubate before you try to give shape to it artistically?

Ideally let's avoid this.


I'm sure a lot of this depends on the person, but I think for most of us, there's a risk in trying to "tap" an experience too soon. My first-ever-novel-no-you-can't-see-it had a climactic scene that drew heavily on a specific, traumatic incident I went through in college.

But I started writing the book my senior year OF college, at which point I was still in the thick of  fallout from said event. I'd finished the first--and second, and third--drafts way before I really understood how I felt about what happened (in fact, I finished them before I'd actually worked through the actual real-life-physical consequences, to say nothing of the emotional ones).

So for me, at least, "two-ish years, during which you've made no effort to sift through the experience" is firmly on the "not long enough" side of the line.

The novel I'm shopping now, on the other hand, deals with something that I knew I wanted to write about the moment it started unfolding (it's based loosely on the events surrounding my father's death).

But I knew I couldn't, yet. Instead I jotted down details--scenes that were too crazy to be made up, moments I wanted to be able to look back on and say "oh dear GOD I'd forgotten how totally effed that was"--and sat on it.

For a little over five years.

I know that said novel will still benefit greatly from the molding of a hands-on agent and/or editor, but I feel much more confident that I've actually distilled what happened--chosen the important parts, picked out the emotional details that are most true and necessary to put on the page, found a few places where the whole mess was, in fact, funny.

It's not just a muddle of regurgitated hurt anymore; I've gotten far enough away from it that I can pick and choose from among my memories, lay them over a different scaffolding, and see that the story might need something that the experience didn't necessarily give me.

Apparently somewhere between two-ish and five-and-change years is my magical "okay, I can work with this, now" line.

New Essay on The Toast!

...and it's on one of the earliest works of western smut-lit.

The funny part is that in the end, the book--which, incidentally, would barely get a PG-13 rating today--reads as...dare I say it...feminism??

Here, let me show you what I mean:

Do Your Dreams Ever Have A Plot?

The other night I had a dream that involved two weensie kittens, the smaller of which I saved from certain death through my incredible milk-doling-out-dream-skills.

Dream me didn't have her nails did, though.


I'm not going to bother to try to tell you more about it, because it's a universally-accepted fact that there is nothing on earth more boring than someone else's dreams.

Except maybe young children's baseball games. Those are DEADLY.

That's gonna be another strike.

But sometimes--super rarely, but occasionally--my dreams unfold like an especially awesome children's story (I'm far too immature for them to unfold like an adult story, all layers of meaning and expansive description of setting and lyrical, but often aimless, prose--in fact, this is making me start to think the not-well-plotted dreams are just the literary fiction of my sleeping self...WHOA...).

Leaps of Faith

So here's a question for you creative-types: do you trust your talent?

Do you even trust that you HAVE talent?

I feel like there's a conundrum at the heart of any creative endeavor: on the one hand, we're profoundly fragile people, sculpted out of spun sugar and butterfly wings, ready to fall apart at the first breath of whispered criticism.

A portrait of the artist.

On the other hand, we're arrogant enough to try to create something in the first place, assuming people will want it, even (maybe) want to pay us for the privilege of it.

Sure, there are folks who walk around telling you what an amazing talent they have, and how they just refuse to waste it on less-worthy forms, and how everyone is dying to work with them, and how they would never get out of bed for less than $Large#.

But I'm not those people. I don't even like to be AROUND those people.

The First IMPORTANT Book You Read

I remember dozens of books from my childhood.

I can picture myself breezing through any of the interchangeable dozens of American Girls books my mom had been forced to buy us on the dark, carpeted hallway that led to my father's tiny den. Or see me and my sisters snuggling up against my mother as she read us Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels, or cried through Where the Red Fern Grows. I remember gloating about the 437-page length of Amy's Eyes (though I now have no recollection whatsoever of what the book was about), a book I was directed towards after I exhausted my elementary school library's stock of John Bellairs stories, starting with The House with a Clock in its Walls.

But everyone has a FIRST most-important-book. A book that changed things for you, made you a reader, somehow inflected the literary life you've had since.