The Selfish Writer, #Pitchwars, #Pitchmas, and Yes My Novel is Not the Center of the Universe

Most people, if asked to describe me, would not choose “selfish” as one of their first adjectives. Working for a human rights organization gives one an altruistic sheen, not always deserved, or not completely anyway. Most human rights workers, honest ones, will readily come up with a list of less altruistic reasons they do the work they do. They thought it sounded it like an interesting thing to do for a few years before their “real” careers began; they had friends doing the work; they like to travel; human rights workers are hilarious and often fun to be around (it’s true!)

And then there are the human rights people who are working out “issues” that I won’t go into here.

Hajji Hussein (with child on lap) was a political prisoner for whom CPT’s Iraqi Kurdistan team advocated. He was freed right after an Urgent Action e-mail Campaign we sent out on CPTnet. And right after #Pitchwars. Yes. Hajji Hussein’s freedom was really more important. Really.

I’m writing this entry because I’ve been really conscious over the last couple weeks of how my attention has NOT been focused on the needs of the people my organization serves, nor on the people near and dear to me. Pretty much, all I have been able to think about is getting my novel noticed by an agent.

It all started with the #Pitchwars contest. The premise of the contest is that “mentors”—agented authors, agents’ assistants or other people who have connections in the literary world, read the query letters and the first five pages of the novel that the authors are submitting to the contest and choose one author and two alternates to mentor. Then they read the entire manuscript and help the author sharpen both the manuscript and query for submission to an agent.

I got a mentor interested in my submission based on our shared interest in Joss Whedon, although she was upfront about it being outside her genre, and I began obsessively following the #Pitchwars Twitterfeed to watch her and the other three agents to whom I submitted discussing the entries. Now, I was getting ready to leave the country for another two-month assignment with Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT); I needed to get my three substitute editors situated to take over CPTnet while I was gone; CPT was doing its end of the year fundraising push. I was very conscious that my mind needed to focus on other things.

I think it was at the meeting of my church’s Pastoral Ministry committee when we were discussing the needs of people in my church that I felt the most selfish. The other three people on the committee were discussing these needs–some of them pretty dire–and I realized I hadn’t really been giving them any thought, because I so very, very passionately want my novel–The Price We Paid, formerly Shea–to be published. And this #Pitchwars contest had given me hope that a little mentoring might get me there.

With a little distance now, I know it was a good experience. I am still surprised by how approachable the mentors were to unpublished authors with questions and how much time they put into their responses to the people they chose not to mentor. I think I realized later that the contest was not for literary fiction, and hence, not the best venue for my novel. I don’t mean that in a snobbish sense, but in the sense that the mentors who were critiquing adult fiction had a background in commercial and genre fiction. The mentors who commented said I should look for agents who represented literary fiction.

I also got good ideas for sharpening my query. For example, I think I’m going to have to cut out the Hosea and Gomer reference from all future queries, which hurts a little, since Hosea’s love life was the epiphany that led to the novel. But in my last conversation with Jim Loney, who is taking over CPTnet part of the time when I’m gone, he told me he had forgotten the connection the novel had with the biblical story, and he’s one of the novel’s strongest advocates.

Right before I left, I did a 35 word pitch for the novel in #Pitchmas, knowing I’d be in Hebron when the “Winners” were announced (75 pitches get posted on a blog. Agents pick from among the pitches.) Usually, when I’m on assignment, the work has a way of engaging most of my attention, so I’m hoping the Twitter feed won’t take up as much of my time (our Hebron apartment has spotty internet, anyway.)

Years ago, when I got a fellowship to workshop my first novel manuscript with Lee K. Abbott, based on the first chapter I submitted, he asked if I had completed the novel. Upon learning I had, he said the good news was that most aspiring writers never do that. The bad news was that I would probably have to write five before I got published. And I do have the beginnings of a fourth beginning to inkle about in my brain.

But I am not finished with The Price We Paid. Apart from all the ignoble reasons I want it published, I believe in it; I believe it has a life and that I am supposed to advocate for that life. I just wish I were a better promoter.

UPDATE: My Twitter Pitch ( “A” stands for “Adult”) was not chosen for the 75 “Pitchmas” pitches: “A/ Literary Dystopian Iz cheats on his wife but also helps her bring down corrupt religious regime that rules U.S. during 2065-2089 #Pitchmas” Again, I’m not sure literary novels lend themselves to Twitter-length pitches.

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.

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.

End of Sabbatical and a new writer friend

Today is the last day of my sabbatical from Christian Peacemaker Teams, which began June 1, 2012. I ran a search on Google images for “sabbatical” and most of them involved beaches.

Mine didn’t.

I wanted to write my novel Shea, which for biblically-interested people is a retelling of the Hosea-Gomer narrative with the gender roles reversed, and a fascist theocratic government running the U.S. instead of a theocratic government that had adopted elements of Canaanite fertility religions running ancient Israel. For those not interested in the biblical aspect, it is the memoir of Islam Goldberg-Jones, written from prison, telling of how he, his wife Hoshea “Shea” Weber, their family and comrades brought down the Christian Republic that ruled the United States from 2065-2087. He also writes about how he betrayed Shea with three increasingly heartbreaking affairs (which is the parallel of Gomer having three children—although to be fair to her only one was officially by another man.) Mission accomplished.

I wanted to get Because the Angels formatted as an E-book. Mission accomplished.

I wanted to get a website set up. Mission accomplished.

I learned how to use Twitter. I have NOT learned how to spend only fifteen minutes a day on Twitter.

What I didn’t get done
I wanted to help a friend who was a dissident in Iran under the Shah and Khomeini regimes write her memoir. The process turned out to be too painful for her so we had to let it go.

I did not finish filing all the papers in the boxes in the hall upstairs, but I have made good progress in throwing out things that don’t need to be filed anymore.

I still have a room full of my mother’s stuff that needs to be listed on Ebay.

I did not work on my Arabic language study AT ALL.

I did not do a retreat with my spiritual director.

So what have I learned? I’ve been on a cycle over the years where I would become overwhelmed with CPT work, get depressed because I didn’t have time to write the novel that was in me, and then had to leave CPT to do it. I need to figure out a way to take depression out of that equation. And that probably means that I need to actually assign times for CPT work, time for housework, and time for writing work. And within the CPT work, I need to assign time for filing, time for e-mail, and time for Arabic language study, or they won’t get done.

So am I happy to be going back? Not sure. I’m not great with transitions. But having spent a year saying that I do human rights work without actually having done any, it will be nice now to be saying it for real. And I will enjoy interacting with my colleagues again and following what’s going on in Iraqi Kurdistan, Colombia, Palestine, and the Indigenous communities we work with. And I’m pretty sure the idea for my next novel will come to me while I am working, as all the others have.

But oh the conference calls; I have not missed the conference calls at all, or the personality conflicts that arise because we tend to attract intensely committed people, and when you get all that intensity in the same room, well, sometimes people of goodwill can be very hard on each other.

I’ve had the good fortune, at the end of my sabbatical, to find a writer friend with whom I can exchange manuscripts for critique. The writer’s group I wanted to get together at the beginning of the sabbatical fell through. I met Sara Selznick through She Writes, a forum for women writers—one of the sabbatical indulgences I’m afraid I will have to put aside when I start work again tomorrow. We had applied for the same fellowship and received identical, “you’re very talented and we hope you apply again, but no” rejections. After we exchanged applications, we became a two-woman writer’s critique group. You will find a description of her writing project The Color of Safety on her blog Three Kinds of Pie.

When I edit colleagues writing for CPTnet, I am doing more than one role. My main role is to make sure they provide a voice to our local partners and communicate the realities of their work effectively. But it is also my job to encourage them to become better writers. Their work in the field is the vital part of what we do. Our writer/editor relationship is a vehicle to enhance that work; the writing is not an end in itself. So I generally DO pull punches. I am not blunt about the deficits in their writing (although some of my colleagues may disagree.)

For my novel, Shea, I don’t want someone trying to tiptoe around my feelings. I need people to say, “This doesn’t work for me.”; “I don’t understand what you’re saying here.” “I hate this character.” My regular manuscript readers, who know me personally, tell me when something bothers them, but they usually will pull punches. Other writers won’t. I may choose not to change something based on a critique (one writer friend and I have what we call the Jane Austen—William Faulkner spectrum, with his taste leaning heavily toward the latter), but I want to hear it. I will consider it. And I find it liberating to dispense the critiques as well. I suppose I should check in with Sara to see whether she’s as happy with the arrangement as I have been, because I’ve been more on the dispensing end. But let me just say this: her novel is more than 200,000 words long and I was never bored.

I thought my novel DID have a happy ending and “ Most Surprisingly Good Read of the Decade” review for Because the Angels

When I first started getting back comments from people who had read my Shea manuscript, I was taken aback when they referred to the novel’s sad ending, because in my mind, I thought the novel had a happy ending. Good triumphed. The efforts of all the people who sacrificed so much to bring the fascist Christian Republic down succeeded. Iz and Shea reconciled. Yes, a lot of the people who resist the regime die along the way, and my narrator, Islam Goldberg-Jones remains in prison at the end because in the U.S., Federal judges are appointed for life, and the entrenched Christian Republic judiciary and Christian Republic holdovers in the FBI conspire to keep him there. Most of the people who committed the worst atrocities under the Christian Republic never have to pay for their crimes.

But that’s how the world is. Famous and anonymous heroes for millennia have sacrificed their lives, bodies and sanity to bring down tyrants or systems of domination. AIM activist Leonard Peltier, whom most of the world regards as a political prisoner, remains incarcerated today for murder even though the U.S. government lied to get him extradited him from Canada, coerced witnesses, withheld evidence during his trial, and even though an Iowa jury acquitted his co-defendants of the same crime.

Dictators and generals in Latin America like Augusto Pinochet, after their torture states finally fell, lived affluent, comfortable lives for decades afterwards.

People think I’m a glass half-empty kind of person. Sometimes I think that’s true. I think sometimes when the Israeli military occupation of Palestine finally ends, if it does end in my lifetime, that I want to be the one who remembers all the people who gave everything they had to fight it and ended up crippled with despair, as well as the ones who ended up dead. But I also think that while compassion is never wrong, it is also always right to celebrate when grassroots movements succeed in toppling oppressors. We need to take a moment and honor the thousands, even millions of nameless Filipinos, South Africans, Chileans, Serbs, East Timorese, Tunisians etc. who decided simply the time had come when toppling their government was more important than their lives, or, that if they all worked together, they had the power to topple their government with minimal loss of life. By honoring them, we also learn, and when we face tyrants ourselves, we are better equipped.

******
I was tempted to put in a plug for my novel Because the Angels, when the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war rolled around and then decided that was tacky. (The plot is partially based on the experience of my organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams, when four of our colleagues were kidnapped in Baghdad 2005-06). But this morning, I decided I hadn’t plugged it for awhile, so I thought I’d send out a tweet with a link to the Amazon Kindle page. I discovered that someone I didn’t know had written the following review:

Most Surprisingly Good Read of the Decade, April 22, 2013
This review is from: Because the Angels (Kindle Edition)
“BtA wins the most surprisingly good read of the decade. Past the cover art and the anime obsession, the story is fraught with messy, intense, and endearing characters. What’s probably best about the book is the amazingly successful and comedic ending. Without being sappy, the author manages to weave a brilliant resolution to an engrossing tale.”

It’s my first genuinely unsolicited review—probably from the week of free downloads in late February, early March. Davey R. Jones also really like Junot Diaz’s Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a book I really loved, and books by Mario Vargas Llosa, Madeline L’Engle and about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, so he seems like a kindred spirit. I am assuming he’s not the dead Monkee. Glass half full, see?

Twitter timesuck, Agent-cycle, Gilead and Writing that pays

I made a decision today to close my Twitter and HooteSuite tabs (I use both, because I use both 300% magnification for an eye disability so I skim HootSuite to look at writing-related tweets and then read everything else on Twitter.) I have found it basically impossible NOT to check it 10x a day. I haven’t listed anything on Ebay for more than a week, which is my usual downtime activity. But now that I have a May 1 deadline for some Bible curriculum lessons—writing that I actually get paid for, I need to strap in. I’m going to check the feeds just twice a day.

So far, I’ve sent out five agent queries and gotten three rejections. I’ve also just heard from the Dana Awards that my manuscript didn’t make even the honorable mentions. So the honeymoon is over. Not everyone sees how exquisite Shea is. I’m back to “if you’re going to be a writer you have to be able to take rejection and x received 60 thousand rejections before it was finally published blah blah blah” mode. I am being a bit more careful about my querying though. Even though I have a template, I’m not sending out the query e-mails on the same day I write them. I’m let them sit and tweaking at them until I feel good about them.

The first draft of my query today—meaning first draft of my final paragraph, “Why I am sending this query to you, Ms. Agent”—was about our shared enthusiasm for Marilynne Robinson’s 2005 novel Gilead. That novel made me feel really hopeful when I read it (or listened to it, since I can’t read normal size fonts anymore.) It made me realize there is a place, post-Tolstoy, for novels about people of faith. Great novels. It’s sad really, that the term “Christian fiction” immediately brings to mind a genre that is formulaic and trite, when faith should be deep, and awesome and profound. Which, of course, Gilead is.

With this agent, I’ve shared a little more personal information than I usually do—like that I’ve not used the link to the Kirkus Review of Because the Angels with some other agents because it has “an interesting approach to Christianity” in the title. I’ll let the letter sit a couple days and see whether I think it’s still a good idea. Wouldn’t someone who loves Gilead be interested in that? But does she get fifty queries a day from people claiming a Gilead kinship? Aaargh!

The downside of the shared enthusiasm is that you become more emotionally invested. Even though I never met this woman, it means more when someone who loves a book you’ve loved rejects you.

But of course, I have a lot to occupy my time. Six weeks until my sabbatical is over, and I have these thirteen lessons about Jesus’ use of the Hebrew Bible to get done, as well as a bunch of boxes in the hall that I said I was going to go through and get out of the hall before my sabbatical was over.

Passionate Christian Characters, sex, the F-word and Maundy Thursday

I spent this week reading through my novel manuscript carefully, since I had added a big chunk of manuscript—a diary of a teenage character I wrote about in a previous posting— and wanted to make sure that the rest of the novel was in sync with it. Often, when I am at this state this stage of the editing process I enter a state of what I call “Tweaking madness.” I see clunky sentences or awkward paragraphs and I think “How could I have written this? This is so awful! How could I have ever thought this novel was any good?” And usually that’s the time to put it aside until I can look at it with fresh eyes. Because the clunky parts are usually very isolated, and most readers simply breeze past them.

This time, I did catch some awkward phrasing and did some revision, but overall didn’t escalate into “Tweaking Madness.” What I did find as I read through Ralph’s diary, interspersed with the letters and other writings of Shea, my Hosea figure, was a growing sense of unease regarding how Christian the novel was.

I’ve been spending a lot of time learning how to use social media effectively to promote my writing–definitely not there yet–but part of it involves following on Twitter, Facebook, etc. the work of writers and artists whose work you admire. And most of these are secular, for me. Chaim Potok is dead and Marilynne Robinson doesn’t have a Twitter account. I was wondering if Joss Whedon or Margaret Atwood (or more likely fellow Whedon and Atwood enthusiasts) ever stumbled onto Ralph and Shea’s letters, whether they would just zone out immediately, because of their overtly Christian perspective on the world–even if Ralph and Shea were using that perspective to bring down a fascist regime ruling the the United States.

And then there’s the converse problem, Shea is not really “Christian fiction” in the way that the contemporary publishing world defines Christian fiction.It is written from the viewpoint of a philandering husband, and while the sex is not graphically described, it is plentiful and the F-word appears throughout the novel (It’s really odd, my characters can say the F-word, but writing as myself, I say “F-word instead “F—“)

Here is the climactic scene, in which Islam Goldberg-Jones is on trial for providing weapons to the guerrillas trying to bring down the Christian Republic (but the real object of the trial is to defame his wife, Shea.) It’s kind of appropriate actually, for Easter weekend:

“Tell me Mr. Islam Goldberg-Jones. Are you Muslim or Jewish?” the prosecutor began.

“My mother was brought up in a conservative Jewish family, but both of my parents considered themselves atheists. They taught me that God did not exist.”

I heard gasps from the courtroom. They had vetted the audience.

“And did Hoshea Weber know you were an atheist when she married you?”

“Yes.”

“And did she try to convert you?”

I paused and then said, “Not in the way that you mean.”

The military judge said, “Answer his question, Mr. Jones.”

“Goldberg-Jones,” I corrected him.

The bailiff punched the left side of my head, and I heard a consistent high hum in that ear for the rest of the proceedings.

The lawyer rephrased his question. “Did she try to convince you that God exists and that Jesus was the Son of God? Do you believe that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and buried, rose again and will come to judge the living and the dead?

Shea ascribed what happened next to the Holy Spirit. I will say only this—a quick succession of holos appeared before me, superimposing themselves over the audience in courtroom: Ralph saying—earnest brown eyes wide at having met his first atheist—“But it’s like love, Uncle Iz, you can’t see or hear or touch love, but love still exists”; Ralph clinging to me and sobbing at the border of Akwesasne before he turned back with Hank because Gladys and Edna needed him; Shea smiling at me as we walked and talked in Rock Creek Park and when we lay naked under the ancient Weber family quilt; Leah leaning against the fence at the farm on Thanksgiving day thirteen years ago. Al calling me “son.” My own parents reading Dr. Seuss to me. L’Merci running across the yard at Al and Deborah’s house with Gladys and Edna. All the Webers and I laughing ourselves sick over an only moderately amusing story, because we loved each other. Bernie calling my name, “Ih-ihz.”

“I don’t know whether God is real,” I said. “But I can tell you right now that he’s a hell of a lot more real than you guys and your god are to me. It’s the god you speak of that presides over your tortures and murders and atrocities that doesn’t exist. As for Jesus rising from the dead, today, and today only, I choose to believe in the resurrection because that was Jesus saying ‘Fuck you’ to the Empire who crucified him. And yeah today I believe he will come again to judge us and you all should be really, really afraid.”

I saw the bailiff descending on me with his baton and then everything went black.

So you see my dilemma.

Anyway, I went to the Maundy Thursday service at my church last night and in thinking about Jesus’ sacrifice, it kind of hit me that it’s really not much of a sacrifice for me to be true to who my characters are. They are entitled to be devout Christians, and if a secular public has a problem with that, well, may I not be ashamed of the Gospel of Christ. And if a religious public has a problem with Iz, well, he probably agrees with their assessment of his character. And if their problem with him is that he uses the F-word, that really is their problem, not Iz’s.

When I got home, I found a letter from the Posen Foundation saying I was not among the five finalists in their fiction prize, but that they thought my writing sample had been impressive and they encouraged me to submit again next year. Not sure if that was something they said to everyone, but it sounded like more than boilerplate. The timing after the Maundy Thursday service seemed apropos, since the Foundation is designed to promote secular Jewish culture. I actually knew that Shea would be a longshot for the fellowship, but reasoned that since Iz is a very secular Jewish character, and Hosea was a Jewish prophet, and secular Judaism does have some connection to the Jewish prophetic tradition, it was worth the application. But I also knew that since I applied for the Posen Fellowship, the novel had gotten progressively more Christian. I had kind of thought I might be able to up the Jewish content, if I got the Fellowship, but that just wasn’t happening, so there was a small measure of relief, too. Kind of like dating someone you know you’re ill-suited for, and then being glad that s/he later finds a good match.

Diary of Ralph

I’ve finished Ralph’s diary and have interspersed his entries between the heavier prophetic writings of my character Shea, the Hosea figure in my novel.

I think Ralph’s diary entries serve a dual purpose. They’ll help break up those denser sections and they’ll give another view of my narrator, Iz, and possibly make him less “static” as the agent said.

Ralph can ask the questions, how is it that Uncle Iz, a man I like and look up to, whose company I much prefer to that of my father’s, could cheat on my Aunt Shea? How is it that Juanita and Hank, two people who share my faith, can care about my Uncle Iz, knowing what he did to my Aunt Shea? Maybe in the answering of those questions, some readers will have the patience to stick with Iz until his later transformations.

Or not. But I think maybe I can’t just change Iz to to please the ideologies of people I like or want to impress.

Now there’s the question, can I write authentically in the voice of a gay biracial Mennonite teenage boy?

I really want to send this section to my readers, but I know I need to let it sit for a couple days before I do that. I’ll use the time to revise my timeline.

On my way home and a little novel augmentation

I am sitting at JFK airport–Mad Props to Jet Blue for providing free Wi-fi and ample electrical outlets–in a four hour layover. Took the red-eye from Burbank. My body thinks I landed at 2:30 in the morning and my husband really thinks I need to attend this with him after I land in Rochester at 10:30 a.m.:

Meet the Authors:

Sharon Morgan and Thomas DeWolf

(gatheratthetable.net)

GATHER AT THE TABLE: THE HEALING JOURNEY OF A DAUGHTER OF SLAVERY AND A SON OF THE SLAVE TRADE

Thursday, March 14

12:12 to 1:00pm

Central Library at the Rundel Auditorium

115 South Ave. Rochester, NY

Free of Charge

Normally I would say, “You know, that DOES sound interesting,” but I’m going to be in an altered state for the rest of the day.

Even though the memoir writing trip was abortive, writing-wise, the trip wasn’t a complete write off. I did a big promotional giveaway of my novel Because the Angels and it was at the top of the free downloads in the political novel genre and did surprisingly well in the literary novel downloads as well (although I’m not sure other literary novelists would think it belonged there.) I also got to spend an afternoon with my CPT colleague and friend Tim Nafziger, who gave me the idea to incorporate journal entries of one of my characters, Ralph, into Shea, my current novel. As I started spinning this out in my head, I realized Ralph, who is writing during the years he is 14-16, is gay. That’s one of the things that gives me the deepest satisfaction when I write–when characters seem to tell me who they are instead of me telling them who they are. So thanks, Tim. And thank you for being chief among my encouragers over the years, letting me know that my fiction was something more than a promoter of my mental health.

Bad News and Good News in that order.

So day before yesterday I heard back from the agent who had my manuscript and she said that she got about halfway through it and decided the setting wasn’t convincing and that the character of Iz was too static, i.e., he did not transform fast enough. One of the regular readers and cheerers-on of my other novels also gave the same critique. From a previous posting, you know that I was almost anticipating rejection and knowing that a rejection from this particular person would hurt more.

Some of her suggestions I can work with to improve the manuscript. I’m not sure about Iz, though, because I happen to know that there are some men who can be basically kind-hearted and heroic and know that their infidelities cause a lot of pain but still keep cheating on the women who love them. When I was walking yesterday in botanical gardens at UCLA while my friend was at a dental appt. I thought about a way I could bring transformed Iz from the future back into the place in the novel just before he has the affair with Zeinab/Dolores. But then I thought, am I doing that just to make people I like more ideologically comfortable? Does that “cheat” the transformation at the the end?

This is where I could really use a writing mentor. I asked for one on She Writes yesterday, and got some sympathetic responses, but no takers (because there really was no Marilynne Robinson or Chaim Potok among them.) Rebecca Forster, who writes legal thrillers noted that she bases her books on real cases but that sometimes she has step back and make sure she isn’t following them too closely because they become plodding if she does. I actually think my book doesn’t follow Hosea that closely. I’m sure Hebrew Bible scholars won’t think so! There’s as much if not more Amos in her climatic speech at the President Coulter campaign rally as there is Hosea. But anyway, I’m going to try inserting a section from future Iz today and hope for a mentor.

The good news is that I based on reading someone else’s experience on She Writes, I offered Because the Angels as a free download for five days, and the day after the rejection, I found out that it was the #1 top free download in the political fiction genre and #31 in literary fiction–and most of the ones in the literary fiction category were public domain novels like Moby Dick and Wuthering Heights. I spent most of the day sending out tweets and posting on Facebook pages. It slipped down to #3 yesterday, but was back up to # 1 today, and it was featured on the Progressive Christian Kindle. Now, that’s only 259 total downloads, I found out, but it will be interesting to see if something comes of it–reviews, for example.

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