By Dame Jackie

As Devon said yesterday, for the next couple weeks, the Deadline Dames will be talking about how we started, where our paths led, and where we are now. No two writers have the same road to publication (if we did, a copyeditor would have caught that along the way and dinged us for repetition). Yesterday, Devon shared her 19-year path to publication. Today, it’s my turn. And so…drumroll, please…

My Path to Publication

When I was a kid, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life: draw comic books. And not Archies, either. Superhero comic books. I wanted to show the good guys bashing the bad guys into next week and getting the Key to the City for doing so. And by “good guys,” I mean gals, of course. My favorite superheroine for the longest time was Kitty Pryde — 13 and a half years old, Jewish, smart, funny, close with bad-boy Logan (Wolverine, yo) and crazy about bighearted Piotr (Colossus, rah!). For my bat mizvah, I drew a huge poster of Kitty Pryde for my sign-in board. And I got X-Men #94 – 100 in mint condition from my folks. (Best present EVER.) Yes, I was all about drawing. It was going to be my career.

Somewhere along the way (roughly, by the time I was in high school), I realized that it was just even more fun to put the words in the characters’ mouths. Sketches started turning into story ideas. I’d always enjoyed creative writing — my written assignments tended to be a few pages instead of a few paragraphs — but it wasn’t until I was a high school upperclassman that I took my first creative writing elective and tried my hand at a short story.

From that point on, I was hooked.

Starting in fall 1988, I was in college…and taking the first of what would be many creative writing workshops. That was a milestone year for me because I started writing the beginning of what I would later coin as my Great American Novel (GAN for short). For the next few years, I plugged away at the GAN and tried my hand at a few short stories.

And man, they were terrible. Awful. Horrific. Perhaps needless to say, none of these early attempts got published. Oh, I had close calls. One time in particular, I’d gotten word that my short story about a witch and her sister was going to be published…only to have that rescinded a few months later when the magazine got a new editorial board. Ouch.

** I am interrupting this blog post to give a random example of just how bad my early writing was.**

From page 50 of the GAN circa 1994 — all spelling and grammatical errors have been preserved:

Tur looked up suddenly, the book he had been pouring though slipping from his numb fingers. The perennial tickle in the back of his mind had blossomed abruptly, and as the sweet intoxication he was so familiar with and had been so long without washed over and through his body and mind and soul, he grinned, pulling loose flesh taut, his perpetual frown finally cracking and giving way.

And throughout the land and beyond, those that had pledged their very lives and more to him heard in their heads as their master cried his triumph to the weeping heavens:

“It has begun!”

** And now, back to our regularly scheduled blog post.**

So I worked on short stories and I plugged away at the GAN. I started my own writing workshop, and every Sunday, four of us “aspiring authors” (God, I hate that term) would critique one another’s writing, which had been handed out the week before. My proudest moment: one of the workshop members took first place in that quarter’s L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Contest with a story he had workshopped with us. Later, when I moved back to New York, I joined the online group Critters.org. And I kept on writing.

Fast forward to 2003. This was the year that I was going to do the GAN right — I was going to rewrite it and this time, get an agent! See, I knew of such things because I had joined an online writers’ forum called Writers.Net. And I was feeling confident because I’d gotten a book review published in a French magazine (payment: one contributor copy). So I took all year and finished the newest rendition of the GAN. I remember sitting on the porch steps after I’d finished, and I smoked a cigarette to celebrate. (Stupid way to celebrate; I should have had chocolate.)

In January 2004, I began researching agents while I learned how to write (a very bad) query letter.

**Jackie’s Very Bad Query Letter (some names have changed to protect the innocent)**

Dear AGENT:

What if you held the magic of the world and didn’t know it? What if you couldn’t control it?

Tim and Kelly thought their biggest challenge was passing their midterms. But when they and their friends suddenly find themselves prisoners on a strange world, their college problems seem very small. These five students must discover which of them holds the Rock, the focus of the world’s magic, which had been stolen from its rightful owner. Of course, being hunted by a band of bloodthirsty warriors doesn’t do much for their stress level. Neither does the fact that they all possess magical abilities that they don’t understand and can’t control.

But their problems don’t end with returning the Rock to the proper ruler, whom they first have to find. They must avoid getting shanghaied by the reigning group of magicians, play nice to a rather whimsical godling, and try to figure out how to get back to their own reality, one where magic means catching David Blaine’s latest act.

All in all, they would rather be cramming for midterms.

BOOKTITLE, a novel of 120,000 words, is Book One of SERIES, a contemporary fantasy series. (Book Two, BOOK2TITLE, is already in the works.) I am confident that BOOKTITLE is a well-told, engaging story that focuses on a unique system of magic, including the price one must pay for wielding such power. I would be happy to send you the synopsis, chapter outlines, sample chapters — or, of course, the entire manuscript.

I am a senior editor and copy chief for COMPANY. Previously, I have written four articles for COMPANY’s internal magazine; my review of Stephen King’s The Eyes of the Dragon was published by Tenebres.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Regards,
Jacqueline Kessler

** Very Bad Query Letter ends**

Perhaps not surprisingly, I began collecting rejections. Tons of them.

But I kept writing. Yes, I made the mistake of constantly tweaking the GAN based on whatever feedback I could glean from form-letter rejections (“How do I make the agent fall in love with this? I know! I’ll merge these two characters and switch to close third person instead of omniscient narrator!”), but I also was writing short stories. Lots of short stories. I was aiming for one new story a week, basically to see if I could do it. I joined a small, closed-to-the-public online SF/F writers workshop, which helped save my sanity. I left Writers.Net and joined the newly formed Backspace, an online writer forum, where I learned a lot about the publishing industry and how to start thinking about my writing not as art but as a potential career. And I collected short-story rejections along with the agent rejections. By fall 2004, I was nearly convinced that I would never get published.

And then in November 2004, I received my first “yes.” It was from Peridot Books, an online magazine, which was going to publish my short story “Guilty Pleasures” in winter 2005. Oh my God, I didn’t completely suck! Hooray!!!

That being said, by January 2005, I was morose. Triple-digit rejections will do that to a person. Why was no one taking a chance on me? Why wouldn’t agents even consent to read the full manuscript? Maybe I really did suck after all. This was when Loving Husband somehow convinced me to try writing a completely different novel rather than keep rewriting the GAN.

** Random excerpt from The Second Book I Ever Wrote **

I carefully removed a sleeveless, black rubber dress from a cardboard box, then unfolded it, shaking off a few desperate Styrofoam peanuts. Giving the dress the once over, I decided that except for it being short enough to see if the wearer needed a shave — and I don’t mean the armpits — it looked harmless. I placed it against my body, pointedly ignoring how my hips and thighs protruded behind the material. (It was 9:30 on a Wednesday morning; I wasn’t scheduled for a reality check until after lunch.)

Raising the dress up a bit, I tried to stretch the straps, picturing how the top part of me would look covered in PVC rubber. Although my breasts are more than a handful, my cup doesn’t exactly runneth over. So I was surprised to see that no matter how I angled the dress, or pulled the material, it wouldn’t begin to cover more than about an inch of each breast. June would definitely be busting out all over if I tried to wear something like this.

I scanned the label and bit back a laugh. ONE SIZE FITS ALL, the tag promised. Yeah, right. All size zeros, if they stop eating for a week, maybe.

** excerpt ends**

Around this time, I joined another online writing workshop. One of the members was an editor at Wild Child Publishing, an online magazine. Later in 2005, I would become the Fantasy acquisitions editor for WCP. Before that, WCP published my first (and only) poem as well as my first (and only) contemporary short story. I also scored another short story sale to Byzarium, and then one to From The Asylum. I also attended the first Backspace Conference, which was my first-ever writer conference, eek! As terrified as I was, it was truly wonderful getting to meet other writers, both published and aspiring to be published, and pitch agents (without vomiting during the process). I finished writing the second novel and started querying for agents.

**Jackie’s Query Letter for Book #2**

Dear AGENT:

I was very pleased to see your listing on AgentQuery.com, which indicated you represent chick lit. I am looking for representation for my 80,000-word novel, BOOK NUMBER TWO.

Would you work for a man who introduces himself as “Charles or Judy, darling–it’s all the same to me”? Lee Segal doesn’t have a choice. It’s her own fault; she shouldn’t have waited two weeks before graduating college to decide not to return home to her overbearing mother in New York City. In a pinch, she becomes the new stock girl at Charles’ Apparels, a clothing shop in Chester, Massachusetts, that everyone knows also sells sex toys. So maybe she can’t put the job on her resume. At least it pays the bills. And it promises to be…interesting. Almost as good as getting a job is getting a boyfriend, which Lee does. At first, Noel seems to be the man of her dreams. But as time goes on, Lee comes to realize that there’s less to Noel than she first thought.

BOOK NUMBER TWO is an 80,000-word chick-lit novel about love, relationships, and the American Wet Dream.

I am the senior editor of a business management journal. My work has been published in PERIDOT BOOKS and TENEBRES, and humorous horror (yes, really) story has been accepted for publication in FROM THE ASYLUM.

Would you be interested in reading BOOK NUMBER TWO?

Best wishes,
Jackie Kessler

**Query Letter ends**

I did much better with this query and this manuscript. (Yes, writing query letters is a skill authors have to master. You can read this for more about query letters.) Still no offers of representation, but hardly any of the rejection letters were form letters. Moving on up! Except I was still convinced that I sucked.

One of the things I did religiously starting back in 2004 was to scan Media Bistro — especially the Avant Guild section, which included agent and editor interviews. (I also kept tabs of current deals thanks to Publishers Marketplace.) During the summer of 2005, I came across an editor interview in which the editor suggested that “magical chick lit” would be the next big thing.

And I thought, “God damn it, I can do that!”

So I dropped everything (read: obsessing over every form letter rejection for the GAN and sending out new queries for Book Number Two) and started writing a book about a succubus who’d run away from Hell, hidden on Earth as an exotic dancer, and learned the hard way about true love. Sex, strippers, demons…what’s not to like? I wrote Hell’s Belles in two months.

And got five offers of representation. And then got a three-book deal the week after I’d signed with my agent. This was December 2005. After so many years of “No,” this was a whirlwind. I think I was lightheaded for most of 2006.

Hell’s Belles was published in January 2007, and The Road to Hell in November 2007. That was right around the time I parted ways with my former agent, and then signed with Agent M. Hotter Than Hell came out in August 2008. Black and White in 2009. Shades of Gray in 2010. Also coming in 2010: my debut young-adult novel, Hunger, which I never would have written if not for Agent M’s ginormous enthusiasm. Rage will come out in spring 2011. Four Hell short stories will also appear in 2011.I’m currently writing Loss.

Whew.

I’m not in either of the writing groups anymore, nor am I freelancing as the WCP Fantasy editor. Just too busy. I’m also not part of Writers.Net or Backspace anymore. I do check in at Absolute Write every once in a while. I had been an active member in my local RWA chapter, but sadly, no more. However, I have my beloved Crit Partner, my faithful Beta Reader, and, of course, the Deadline Dames, all of whom provide reality checks, kicks in the ass, hugs, and chocolate, depending on what’s needed.

So that’s my path to publication. The big lessons here are…

1. Never Give Up. If you do, you definitely won’t get published.

2. Don’t Be Afraid To Try Something New. If you don’t experiment, how do you know where your strengths are?

3. Keep Writing. Because hey, that novel you’ve trunked because it really was Just Plain Awful? You might give it another shot one day. And maybe that next version is the one that finally piques an agent’s interest.