SermonsSarah LaPolla

On Literary Agents and Boundaries

 

Back when I first started sending out manuscripts a few decades ago, I relied on books like Writer’s Market and Jeff Herman’s Writer’s Guide to Book Editor’s, Publishers and Literary Agents.  The internet has, of course, increasing supplanted these books, and today researching agents means following their Twitter accounts and blogs and this Brave New World has led to a new problem: squishy boundaries between agents and writers.

When I inserted "squishy boundary" into Google image search, this picture came up. If it were a literary agent that loved my novel and wanted to represent it, I'd probably be okay with that.

When I inserted “squishy boundary” into Google image search, this picture came up. If it were a literary agent that loved my novel, The Price We Paid, and wanted to represent it, I’d probably be okay with that.

Back when connections with agents were primarily made through the postal service,  the lives of agents were more opaque to writers.  Now, writers get a much more intimate glimpse into agents’ lives and thought processes, especially when they follow agents’ Twitter accounts.  And, I have found, that I start liking certain agents and relating to them as people, quite apart from my wanting them to represent my novel (I especially enjoy reading Sarah LaPolla and Jessica Negron’s opinions).

Strike that, I really WANT them to represent my novel because I like them.  I hadn’t realized how many bookish twenty-somethings in New York City loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek and Doctor Who, and care about feminism and racism and oh, so many other things I care about.

And that’s another thing: the age of these agents. In Christian Peacemaker Teams, the human rights organization I have worked for since 1993, I am a veteran activist, accustomed to initiating people their age into the work or putting some of the problems with which they are struggling into historical perspective.  I am the chief writer in CPT, the one who has written two histories, the one who can put out a breaking news release fast, or add a little literary flair to bland reporting.  I edit all the releases coming in from our field projects in the West Bank, Iraqi Kurdistan, Colombia and Aboriginal communities and post them on our website.  I help new writers write better, and enjoy the challenge of preserving the voice of CPTers for whom English is a second or third language as I change what they have written into Standard English.  I am, in a word, competent.

But with the agents, I am a supplicant, someone who has never had a novel conventionally published, and who has never gone through the standard MFA/writing conference literary mills.  I am old enough to be their mother, but they pretty much have all the power when I send them my queries, asking them to consider representing my novel(s).

So it’s kind of a weird relationship, especially with the agents whom I have come to like based on their tweets and blogs.  I have these feelings of kinship with or even maternal fondness for them based on the background research I’ve done and my age on the one handright hand AND I am an unagented fiction writer who desperately wants them to love my novels on the other.

I suppose it keeps me humble.

 

*******************

NEW TWITTER ACCOUNT

And speaking of Twitter and not having an agent, in September, I wrote about entering Brenda Drake’s Pitch Madness Contest and finding that I was better at inventing fake pitches than real pitches.  Like this website, my @KathleenKern Twitter account is a mixture of my author stuff and my human rights stuff.  Fake Novel Pitches (@FakeNovelPitch) is devoted exclusively to fake novel pitches, such as the following:

  1. #YAParanormal genre: Brittany must choose between a mucus-sucking vampire and a werebeagle. “Umm,” she thinks, “why?”

  2. #Mystery: Ace Tabby investigates dating service #ObamaCare set up w/ #RobinThicke; Ace is not prepared for the depravity

  3. #MagicalRealism genre: Unicorns and vampires join forces to save NW old growth forest. They are alarmingly successful.

  4. #Thriller: After #Obamacare kills fox, Detective Ace Tabby accepts mission to find out what it said before it died.

  5. #AlternateHistory: Modern retelling of Book of Judges w/gender roles reversed. Who’s cutting up concubines now bitches?

  6. #Mystery genre: When #wombat corpses begin appearing streets of LA, Detective Kate Nguyen thinks it’s really really sad.

  7. #HF genre: Christians terrorized by Roman empire draw comfort from Book of Revelation Yes that’s what it’s really about

  8. #PoliticalThriller genre: After years at Catholic #madrasa, terrorist #PaulCiancia undertakes suicide mission at #LAX.

  9. #CorporateThriller: After #ObamaCare claims to have co-created #Twitter, journalist Ace Tabby must uncover the truth

  10. #PictureBook: Tuxie the Penguin and Shimmy the Naked Molerat decide to switch homes for week. Of course they both die.

  11. #LegalThriller: #ObamaCare assassinating Supreme Court justices to repeal laws of physics. Only Ace Tabby can save them

  12. #YA genre:When Toby learns Maya’s secret he must choose. Will her disability tear them apart? My Gluten-Free Girlfriend

  13. #Thriller: Only Ace Tabby’s heroic dolphins can stop #ObamaCare‘s radioactive sharks from terrorizing U.S. coastlines.

  14. #Memoir genre– Pathos and Fervor: My Life as a Seatbelt Retractor Box Designer and Manufacturer.

  15. #PoliticalThriller genre: Detective Ace Tabby foils #Obamacare plot to kidnap #PopeFrancis and shoot him into space.

  16. #Biography She Made Ego Her Monument: Author Dared to #FF Her Own Spinoff Twitter Acct @fakenovelpitch

  17. #Dystopian genre: Trombones are reserved for the aristocracy. Secret society of peasant trombone players arises.

    I will retweet submissions (at least the ones I like, anyway). Send them to @FakeNovelPitch.  Make sure you begin your pitch with a genre and to leave at least 21 characters, so that it can be retweeted–and thus attributed to you.

Pitch Madness

indexTwo weeks ago, I participated in author Brenda Drake’s “Pitch Madness” contest, in which you have 35 words to “pitch” your novel followed by the first 250 words of the novel. Mine was eliminated before it reached the literary agent round. I’ll include it below. I think the first 250 words could have lead the early readers to believe that it’s a religious novel, as opposed to a novel with some religious characters in it, but it still seems like a strong opening to me.

Anyway, this week Drake sponsored #Pitmad, in which authors could pitch their novels within the constraints of a Twitter post—140 characters, which had to include the hashtag #pitmad, and the genre. You weren’t allowed to post more than once an hour and if an agent favorited your tweet, you sent him/her your submission.

Here were mine, which did not attract any agents:

#pitmad Dissident recounts struggle w/wife to bring down fascist U.S. regime, how his infidelities devastated her Dystopian/literary

#pitmad Islam Goldberg-Jones recounts how he cheated on wife as they brought down fascist US regime. Dystopian Literary

But then I discovered #FAKEpitmad, which had offerings such as

Britney visits an exotic foreign country and finds non-Americans have better things to do than facilitate her self-discovery. #fakepitmad

Really Average Girl attracts Really Hot Guy with murky past who wants her for no reason we can understand. #FakePitMad

For some reason, over the course of four hours, fake pitches kept popping out of my head. Given that I am leaving the country at the end of the month and am REALLY pressed for time, I consoled myself by thinking they really did only take seconds to produce. So here they are, from most to least recent.

His coal black eyes looked down at her from the dune. She would follow his path now. THE WAY OF THE GERBIL #fakepitmad

When Nazi cult resurfaces in Indianapolis, Chief Detective Lisette McCoy thinks “Stupid History Channel” #FakePitMad

“We will never get past the race issue,” said the hare to the tortoise as they stared into their whiskeys. #fakepitmad
I confess I plagiarized this one from a framed cartoon in my office.

When evil Christian Romance antagonist folds ingénues into his arms he actually turns them two-dimensional #fakepitmad

Buffy Slayeresque heroine attracted to Westboro Baptist fanatic picketing her church. Hilarity ensues. #NA #fakepitmad

Migraineurs discovered to have epic powers to heal planet. Will they choose to live w/projectile vomiting? #Fakepitmad

Very pragmatic woman with spastic bosom must deal with people under assumption she is always overwrought #fakepitmad

Slave laborer in oil fields eventually discovers he is mining sebum from blackheads of giant human’s nose #fakepitmad This got me an “ewww from a fellow participant.

Susan, polydactylic cellist from Labrador, must enter the ring with Yo Yo Ma. Only one will leave alive. #Fakepitmad

Jane Austen, sent forward in time, gets job working for Amnesty International; Told her reports too wordy #Fakepitmad

Modern retelling of Book of Judges with gender roles reversed. Whose cutting up the concubines now, guys? #fakepitmad

An exiled elf returns to compete for the hand of her love with a troll offering 8265 REALL FOLLOWERS!! #Fakepitmad This pitch relates to the fact that the #pitmad feed was beset by spammers after awhile promising thousands of followers for twitter accounts. I sort of assume that authors I haven’t heard of who have like, 20,000 followers have bought them from these people.

One piece of encouragement I took away from the lack of response to my pitches were some agents’ responses to the pitch madness contests:

Sarah LaPolla ‏@sarahlapolla 12 Sep
I don’t mind things like #pitmad. They can be fun & force you to conceptualize your novel. But a full query + sample pages is always better.

• Jim McCarthy ‏@JimMcCarthy528 12 Sep
I’m always looking for new clients, but I need more than a sentence to gauge interest. Content over concept, people. #pitmad
• Kate McKean ‏@kate_mckean 12 Sep
@JimMcCarthy528 This is exactly why I don’t think these are very helpful events for writers.
12 Sep
@kate_mckean I saw someone tweet that she was giving up on writing today to focus on it and thought BAD CHOICE! BAD CHOICE! #pitmad


My pitch for the original Pitch Madness:

Kathleen Kern
The Price We Paid: My Life with Hoshea Weber and the UPS Underground
Genre: Dystopian Literary
Word Count: 103,000

Political dissident Islam Goldberg-Jones recounts in prison memoir how his infidelities devastated his wife, the iconic activist Shea Weber, as they participated in the struggle to bring down the fascist (U.S.) Christian Republic regime 2065-2086.

I came to God late in life. It was not because I feared hell or longed for heaven. When you finish reading this account, you will understand why I have some anxiety about reunions with the people I’ve loved after I die. Ironically, it was the Christian Republic that in the end made me a believer, when it put me in solitary confinement. By the second year, my sanity had eroded to the point where I thought if I were talking to something besides myself, it meant that I was less crazy. So I began praying, and after about a week of rambling on to some invisible deity (saying essentially the same things I rambled on to myself about), I finally felt a presence in my cell. But it wasn’t God; it was Shea, praying for me, and then her parents, and then all the Wayvers on the outside who had the mistaken belief I was a hero. Sometimes I could almost make out the words, but mostly, I felt those prayers in my chest, breaking the iron bands of fear and depression that made breathing difficult. It would be a while after that before God and I spoke, and I believe that I was ungracious enough to tell him/her that I was much more impressed by feeling the connection to people praying for me than I was with direct contact to the Divine.

Yes, I was angry. Apparently, God decided to work with it.

Help! My novel’s narrator is a sexist jerk!

If you have read my previous postings, you know that my novel, Shea, switches the gender roles in the biblical narrative about the prophet Hosea and his wife, Gomer the prostitute. Instead of having three children by other men, my main first person POV character, Islam Goldberg-Jones (Iz) has three increasingly heart-breaking affairs. (Actually, upon rereading, I realized that only the first child is by another man. The paternity of the other two isn’t specified. So I’m saying, let’s cut Gomer some slack, people, and assume they were Hosea’s, and let’s wag our finger at Hosea for giving his children names that probably got them teased on the playground.)

A google image search of "sexist jerk" got me Mad Men's Don Draper. "Sexist creep" got me Rep. Louie Gohmert.

A google image search of “sexist jerk” got me Mad Men’s Don Draper. “Sexist creep” got me Rep. Louie Gohmert.


The novel never tunes into a jocular “boys will be boys” vibe. I have been on the receiving end of infidelity and it brought life as I knew it to a crashing halt. Literally decades passed before I felt stable in a relationship again. I knew from the beginning that Shea, the prophetic character in my novel, was not going to tolerate Iz’s behavior. She was going to be stronger than I had been when she responded to Iz’s infidelities, although the political circumstances of bringing down the fascist regime ruling the United States and the fact that she had adopted his daughter as her own child would get in the way of her writing him out of her life.

And yet…I kind of love Iz. Of course, I knew at the beginning he was going to undergo a transformation, and perform a major sacrifice that would redeem some of his skeeviness. That redemption, of course, is a major theme in Hosea: he said Israel could still turn away from its idol worship and save itself, just as Gomer chose to leave the man she ran off with and return with Hosea when he came to fetch her (As it happens Israel fell to the Assyrian Empire in 722, but never mind.)

The problem is, will people be willing to wait for the transformation to happen? The head of the first literary agency I sent a query for my current novel manuscript to, praised the query and asked me to send the manuscript to one of her underlings. The underling, after Iz had his second affair, decided she just couldn’t stomach him.

I’ve been following with interest commentary by agent Sarah LaPolla and writer Seanan McGuire on sexism in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy genres (see esp. McGuire’s blogs on cover art and rape.) While my novel, Shea , is not hardcore Sci-fi, more Speculative, I had to set it in a dystopian future, because I needed a theocratic government to make it work (I’m a little afraid of Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale comparisons, actually. For my Christian Republic setting in the U.S. 2065-2087, think Atwood’s Republic of Gilead, but with empowered women like Michele Bachmann taking part in running things.) I work for a human rights organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams, that takes Undoing Oppressions seriously, and my colleague, Tim, who has been one of the greatest encouragers of my fiction writing, told me that he also finds Iz’s whoring around distressing, and wonders whether I am not promoting sexism by allowing Iz to do it for as long as he does.

On the other hand my very feminist friend in Jerusalem feels strongly that Iz needs to stay the way he is for his redemption to be meaningful at the end (of course, we dated the same guy for awhile…). My other seven readers are more or less fine with Iz and the pace of his transformation.

My writer friend, Sara Selznick has another suggestion. Between chapters, I have inserted little fictional nonfiction news items, e.g., this:

LCC HOMES REPORT HUNDREDS OF CHILDREN FINDING SALVATION

U.S. Christian News Service

January 15, 2053 YOL
Washington, DC-A recently released study by Christian sociologists shows that children placed in Let the Children Come (LCC) homes outperform their peers in all areas, including sports, academics and mental health. LCC children are also twice as likely to accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior as the average American child.

LCC began three years ago as an initiative developed by the U.S. Department of Christian Affairs (DCA) to provide a safe haven for children suffering abuse from deviant parents—usually Muslims, atheists, sexual perverts and anti-U.S. terrorists.

While the parents spend time in rehabilitation, their children receive superior education, nutrition, and recreation. The ultimate goal of the LCC program is to reunite families and give adults the psychological and spiritual tools they need to raise healthy, patriotic, Christian children.

“Before I came to LCC,” fourteen-year-old Alice Christian (formerly Alia Tamimi) said at a press conference held to announce the release of the report, “my parents would beat me if I did not worship their false god. At LCC I finally felt safe and loved. I’ve made so many good friends in my home.” Smiling broadly, she concluded, “But the best friend I’ve made is Jesus.

Sara is suggesting I put in more of these, from the viewpoint of other people that know Iz, who is writing a jailhouse memoir as an old man, riddled with guilt about what a sexist jerk he was (although he doesn’t use those words.) She thinks that if I share other POVs that show what people found lovable about him, it might break up the long narrative of his philandering and insensitive fathering. Trouble is, the novel is already over 100,000 words. Since, as I reported earlier, Sara’s is over 200,000, she doesn’t think this presents an obstacle!

Thoughts?

Oh, and for Christian friends who might have been offended by the above news item, Shea, the prophetic figure in the novel is a devout Christian, but I believe, with her, that when you mix religion with government it pretty much messes up both.