Wendy McClure

Author and Professional Obsessive.

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Til you get enough summer

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I was away for half the weekend, but I got back in time to catch a little of this weird and totally-awkward-to-watch author meltdown on Twitter yesterday.  I can’t say I know what Alice Hoffman was thinking (did she just not get that people read Twitter?), but I feel bad for her, that whatever kind of writerly wretchedness she was experiencing happened to be broadcast all over the internet. Oh well, when all the newspaper book reviews go away, maybe she’ll want advice for dealing with crappy online reviews, and then perhaps she can read this Buzz, Balls, & Hype blog post that Jami and I contributed to back in January (and somehow I never managed to link to it before now) about how not to let Amazon reviews get to you.  I don’t know, I guess writers had somewhat different coping skills before the internet, back when you didn’t get to see reviews in other city newspapers until your publisher found them and clipped them and sent them to you via stagecoach* mail delivery. Now it’s all so much more immediate, and the immediacy goes both ways.

(*Can you tell I’m watching a lot of Little House on the Prairie lately? Remember when Laura won some big writing contest and went to Minneapolis and her publisher wanted her to completely rewrite her books, so they stuck her in a hotel and made her work there because FedEx hadn’t been invented yet?  That’s totally how publishing worked in those days! And then authors were sent off to live in sod shanties for three months while the reviews came out so that they couldn’t recklessly telegraph their vitriolic responses! Really.)

As long as we’re talking about books, you should check out my friend Dave Reidy’s story collection, Captive Audience, which is his first book, and he is just now embarking on a grueling schedule of readings and Quimby’s karaoke parties and no doubt would love any support you can give (i.e., buying the book, coming to the reading, signing up to sing “9 to 5,” etc.).

I can’t believe it’s the middle of summer already. Because of all the work I have to do in my home office this summer, I broke down and got an air conditioner for that room. I tend to hate window air conditioners for the way they make noise, ruin a perfectly good view outside, and just sit there on the windowsill threatening to tip out and kill pedestrians on the sidewalk below. But somehow this year I really love this damn thing; I love that slightly musty air-conditioner scent that it has, because it comes with all kinds of sense memories of grade-school summer vacation. Basically my home office smells like NO SCHOOL FOR THREE MONTHS. I don’t know how that’s going to affect my work ethic, but I am digging it.

Finally, I’m totally late to the elegy party, but here’s how I’ve been breaking my own heart for the past four days…

…by watching all of Michael Jackson’s early low-tech videos. Like the one above and this one.  There’s no John Landis, no gazillion-dollar budget, no fourteen-minute prologue, but holy Jacko, look how exuberant he looks. And look at how funky his moves were! I know everyone loved his moonwalk, but I’m pretty wistful for this era when he was decidedly more earthbound.

Author talks, Bloggangangers and little houses

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Old post office

Alert! I’m doing an author talk at StoryStudio Chicago on Saturday, May 30th, along with Stephanie Kuehnert and Simone Elkeles, and we’ll be talking about living the literary life, Chicago-style (because that’s what the program says), which lately for me involves whole days spent indoors eating nothing but pitas from the Al-Khayyam bakery on Kedzie and watching all kinds of unspeakable stuff that I’ve Tivoed from the Hallmark Channel. (For research!) Anyway, both Stephanie and Simone write young adult novels, and seeing as how I write for an adult market and edit for a children’s one, it sort of balances out to YA, right?  I think between the three of us we’ll be able to help you. And I promise that if you come to this it will way be better than if you’d just written me an email asking whatever it is you want to know about writing and publishing, because when you email me it puts off the completion and subsequent publication of my next book by at least forty-five minutes. I’m almost serious here. Really, just come to this thing on the 30th.

It’s great to be writing a book and working on it every day, and yet there are so many things I would rather be doing than writing a book. For instance I wish to high heaven that I could take part in this VC Andrews Reading Challenge (see also here!) because for the past two years or so Chris and I have been going through the books in the original Dollanganger series, wherein I read them aloud to Chris while we’re on long car trips (he drives, I read) and then we thoughtfully discuss the various motifs that appear throughout the series, such as The Lifestyles of the Rich and Dismal (Do the Foxworths always have to go with the heavy draperies and crystal goblets and extremely long dining tables? With all that money, couldn’t they could figure out how to be less creepy?) and Extreme Ballet (Cathy’s pirouette-and-slap fighting technique is unstoppable!).  We are on Garden of Shadows now, which is way much better than the horribly-paced soapy fizzle of Seeds of Yesterday; so much better, in fact, that I’m pretty sure the ghostwriter studied the proto-feminist themes of Daphne du Maurier in grad school, because it is kind of loaded!  I wish I had time to write a paper on it or something!  But read this excellent recap of Flowers in the Attic instead. You will not be sorry.

Oh, and GUESS WHERE I WAS LAST WEEK.  And I was here, too. That’s practically all I can tell you right now, but I will say that when I was in Missouri I met the awesome Catherine Pond, who saw some of the same stuff I did and became my friend. It made me very pleased to know that another writer could tell I was a writer, because, like I said, when you spend half the week at home eating pitas and rearranging sentences and being stuck for hours at a time in the chewy pita pocket of your own mind, you can kind of forget what you are, and sometimes you just need to get out and see little houses.

(Incidentally, I’m interested in hearing from people who have intriguing or hilarious anecdotes about visiting any of the Laura Ingalls Wilder sites, so drop me a line if you have something to share.)

Chris and I are off to New York this weekend, but more when I get back. See you on the 3oth, too.

A soddy excuse, indeed!

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I would love for you to think that for the past month or so I’ve been dwelling in a sod dugout with no computer and only a kerosene-fueled Twitter feed, working on the book in pencil in my store-boughten notebooks with the orange covers. (I know that for some of you, that last sentence totally made sense, whereas the rest of you will think I have just lost my shit.)

But yes, I have been working on the book, and I forgot how hard it is to start a book, how completely daunting those first weeks are.  I feel like the last time I was this overwhelmed was when we moved to our current apartment, and now that I think about it, I’m convinced that starting a book is a hell of a lot like those first few days and weeks, when the whole place is just empty rooms with boxes of your stuff and you don’t know which boxes to open first, which ones have the important stuff in them, so you just unpack everything and clutter the whole place up with extension cords and stacks of books and lampshades, and suddenly you’re strangely miserable about the placement of the couch, because even though that’s probably the best place for the couch, you understand all too well that putting it in that spot means that you can’t put it anywhere else, and you can always move it later, yes, but then that means for sure you’ve picked the wrong place, which means you’re probably getting other things wrong; plus then there’s all this new stuff that you need, and this other stuff that you love suddenly doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

That’s how it’s been inside my head for awhile now. But room by room, it’s starting to happen.

Oh, and believe it or not, I’m flying to Italy this weekend. Will any of you be attending the Bologna Children’s Book Fair? If so we should party and try to sell each other U.S. or foreign publication rights!  It will be awesome!

That’s all I have to report right now: cluttered apartment book-brain, impending Italy trip, and exhaustion. Next time I post here I will probably be even more tired, but worldlier, too. Have a good weekend, North America! Catch you on the flip side!

Seven things I would tell you about publishing a children's book if you bought me a drink and didn't mind me getting all worked up

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I’m only at around 10,000 words with NaNoWriMo, but I think that’s pretty good considering I had a BUST column to finish this week. It makes me a little woozy having to go from high-volume unedited spewing to working on something that’s only 850 words. It’s like I spent most of yesterday building a little dainty delicate ship in a bottle with teeny tweezers and now it’s hard to go back to whacking big rocks with a shovel. This is all to explain why this children’s book publishing advice I’m about to give you now probably comes off like…whacking dainty ships-in-bottles with a shovel. My apologies. But here goes:

1. Don’t even think of submitting your picture book story to a major publisher with artwork (unless it’s your own). This means no illustrations drawn by your best friend, or your kid, or your computer, or the professional artist friend-of-a-friend who once did some work for Nickelodeon, or anyone else. It doesn’t matter if the art is good. It’s a bad idea. Art is to children’s book editors what hair is to America’s Next Top Model: the experts get to decide the look, not you. I know it’s hard to hear that the cute kitty pictures your cousin painted are as wrong as Bianca’s pink weave, but IT’S TRUE.

2. This also means that you have to write something that’s not a picture book yet. It will be open to an artist’s interpretation. It will become something very different than what you orginally imagined; you have to write a story that has both substance and possibilty. If this mystifies you or freaks you out, then chances are you’re either not inclined or not ready to write picture books. I won’t say it’s harder to do than other writing, because I don’t think it is—just that it’s a unique skill that some writers have and others (even very good writers) don’t.

3. On a related note, and because someone always asks: no, you can’t write one of those wordless picture books. Not unless you’re also the illustrator. Yeah, sorry, nobody is going to pay you for thinking up pictures you can’t draw.

4. The cover letter is where you mention your previous relevant publishing experience, if you have any. If you don’t have any previous relevant publishing experience, then the cover letter is just something I skim to make sure you’re not incarcerated or blatheringly insane. AND THAT IS ALL. Therefore please feel free to write a cover letter that is boring and standard and not at all the hustling, “attention-getting,” ingratiatingly assertive pageant-mom kind of letter that gives me cancer of the last nerve. Thank you.

5. If you think that you are the first person ever to write a children’s book about a about a specific subject, you’re probably wrong. Then again, not everything in the universe needs to have a children’s book about it, so if there really are no picture books out there about, say, asbestos abatement, maybe the world doesn’t need one that badly! I’m just saying.

6. If your story is something that you wrote for your kids, or your kids’ class, or the class that you teach, or the creative writing class that you’re taking, or if you sent it out as a Christmas card, then it’s probably not ready to submit to a publisher as a children’s picture book, no matter how much it impressed your family/friends/teacher in the first place. Maybe it can be a children’s book eventually, but you’ll have to take the time to learn a little bit about the business and probably rework your story, and the whole process takes awhile, and really, you should do it only if you really want to do it, not because your family/friends/teacher think you should. It’s nice of them to say so, but if you were wondering if your family/friends/teacher know something about children’s books that you don’t know, I’m here to tell you that they don’t. (Unless your family/friend/teacher happens to be me, in which case you have already heard me ranting about this.)

7. I’m telling you all this stuff just for today, but this lady does it every week, so if you want more, read her.

Nanobot

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Chris thinks “NaNoWriMo” sounds like the name of a hipster white rapper. NaNoWriMo is like a backpacker MC whose beats aren’t any good because he’s decided to base them on algorithms. And then he spits rhymes like, Tha numbers don’t lie, and neither do I! I’m NaNoWriMo!

Oh my God, I signed up, and I’m at something like four thousand words now. Tha numbers don’t lie! I’m really not sure if I’m in it to win it. I’m doing it because I’ve had a certain idea for a while now, and maybe if I set the freakish goony strength of this NaNo thing lumbering after it, something will happen. I just don’t know if I need 50,000 words for it to happen, because I actually kind of like my inner editor, and I might not be hardcore enough to totally banish her for a whole month and just dwell in my own filth that way. But I’ll let you know how it goes. I like it so far.

Per my last entry I’ll still be posting Stuff I Know About Getting Published (Though of Course I Don’t Know Everything) this month, too. If you read the comments you already know that you shouldn’t submit a children’s book manuscript with a friend’s illustrations, because I will lose my shit and lecture you mightily! But keep the questions coming.

In other news, I would like to congratulate my downstairs neighbor, Gracie, for peeing in the potty. Gracie, your parents are very, very enthusiastic about your progress. Or so I hear, in the laundry room. Well, good for you. And when that stuff gets old, you can always try NaNoWriMo.

When a stranger calls

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Things I am looking forward to: 1. Dinner this week with Weetabix! 2. The COMEDIANS OF COMEDY show at the Vic on Thursday. 3. Slightly colder weather. 4. Having stuff in two anthologies to be published sometime late next year. 5. Getting this last book I’m editing at work off to press. 6. The holidays and all the dippy stuff I will do to enjoy them, savoring them like fat schmoopy sugarplums. Are you with me on this?

Things you should not do: Call me at work. Really it’s just the one thing, but it’s a big thing. I mean, if you are actually part of my life you can call me at work, because of course I gave you the number and we have to figure out what time we’re going to Pequod’s for lunch. Obviously, if you’re someone I work with, you can call me at work. And if you happen to be one of the idly curious souls who randomly call my company with questions about the big weird confusing world of children’s book publishing, questions like, uh, do I need to draw the pictures and stuff? (FYI: no), I tend to forgive you on the premise that you don’t know me and therefore don’t even know not to call me, because of course you don’t know anything; you’re like a lumpy little baby at the beginning of time, and your head is all soft, and you’re usually friendly and harmless enough that I don’t mind taking five minutes to tell you to check out SCBWI or The Purple Crayon.

(And now that you’ve just read this and know not to call? That still means you should not call. Just so you know. Your innocence is over.)

But here I haven’t even gotten to when you should really really not call me at work, so I will tell you now: Do not call me at work if you know who I am and think I can help you get your children’s book published. I don’t know how to stress this enough. This doesn’t happen very often, but each time it’s happened it’s been awkward and disastrous and traumatic, both for me and the Person Who Thought I Could Help Him/Her Get Published. Because Person always wants to take me out to lunch or coffee so that I can see what a totally nice person Person is, and then he/she can tell me his/her idea and I can give a few pointers. But see, this never works, because a.) explaining how to become a published children’s book writer is just too complicated and involved to attempt in the timespan of “coffee,” much less in pointerly fashion; b.) Person invariably isn’t interested in becoming a children’s writer anyway and instead has just an Idea—This One Idea, from which at least three books can be made, and probably also an animated series and a line of interactive toys; and c.) nice gets you nowhere, especially when you’re in truth being kind of pushy.

Because the kicker here is that I work for a publisher where you can actually just send your manuscript, unsolicited and without an agent, and I will read it. Thus when people call at work and try to pitch me something it’s doubly uncomfortable, because either they have no idea their whole weird Glengarry Glen Ross schtick is totally unnecessary—or else they do know, but think that those guidelines we post are for chumps and not for People-with-Ideas like themselves. And if you feel this way, DO NOT CALL ME AT WORK, because, like I said, it will not go well. Like I can’t even bring myself to tell the story of the last Person who called me at work, because it was just that horrible for both of us.

(Well, maybe I will, but another time, with many details changed.)

At the same time, I realize that I do know some stuff about writing and publishing—both from my children’s book job and my own experience with the memoir, and for the past couple years people have been writing me (not calling me at work) with questions, and I actually like to be helpful. So in order to make karmic amends for the rage I feel towards People Who Call Me at Work I think I’ll be posting any advice I may have here on the blog. I know I won’t be able to answer every question, but feel free to ask away about children’s publishing, adult publishing, blog-to-book stuff, whatever. And I’ll give it my best shot. (Tip#1: do not call me at you-know-where.)

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