Sending (and receiving, not receiving responses) queries is exhausting work
Boy, let me tell you, sending queries and receiving responses (or, more often than not, not receiving responses) is wearying work.
The scoreboard is up-to-date (and in the hockey version the empty void of the agents’ penalty box is filling up) and, yes, that is an even, round number of 50 between agent rejections and just simply no responses.
So if you’re an agent, it will make a great story, if you do sign me and we become New York Times Best Sellers… “The writer who was overlooked by 50 agents before finally landing the winner!”
Sometimes you’re the least popular, but at least you can console yourself that you’re super highly rated (because no one else has read it to give it a worse review).
Relevant, of course, because William Murphy, protagonist of Trip to the Quiet Room, was a pugilist on the ice, and probably would have appreciated Jack Edwards singing a little bit during his bouts.
If you want to listen to a little more of one of my personal favorite announcers, have a listen to the best of Jack.
“…[F]ighting the good fight is not only the right thing to do, but it can be a heck of a lot of fun. And who has more fun than us?”
There was a great article on the front page of the New York Times Sports section about the rise of concussions in the women’s game as its professional league begins to take off, “Women’s Hockey Grows Bigger, Faster and Dire”.
On the ice
Which would have been a great time to plug my book, which deals with an ex-pro hockey player dealing with a history of concussions (and his wife’s misfiring time machine and a gang of blacksmiths from Old Sturbridge Village, amongst other things). Except it’s not published yet.
So whenever it finally gets published, keep in mind all this great context that’s been coming out in the years prior to it actually being something you can hold in your hand and read.
Listen. What I’m about to tell you may shock and upset you. For a great many people it won’t be surprising, in the least. But I feel it needs to be said.
The Brutal World of Big Picture
For too long, Big Picture has run the picture book business. You know who I mean. Mo Willems. Oliver Jeffers. Drew Daywalt. Maurice Sendak. Sandra “Big Town” Boynton.
Do you guys really want Big Picture to continue to dominate our picture book lives?
We may wind up living in a world of lawlessness where pigeons harass you to borrow your car (despite not having a license), animals are encouraged towards slothfulness with an excessive number of naps, and unionized crayons. Do you really want that? Do you want that on your head? I don’t think you do.
Amongst other things
But a world in which a plucky young hen can raise a family (and all that that entails), write and then publish a book? Well, sir and or madam, that’s the kind of world I want to live in.
Verano in the sea, waiting for your vote… for the little red publishing hen
Also, here’s a very personal anecdote, from 2013. In 2013 a plucky young fish roared into the Goodreads Choice Awards, full of hope and vim and vigor. He kept up with those giants of Big Picture for a few days but was ultimately cast aside in favor of Drew “Da Hammer” Daywalt and Oliver “Bearpaws” Jeffers and their evil army of lazy crayons. Don’t let the same thing happen again. Please don’t let the same thing happen again. Please get out and vote for The Little Red Publishing Hen. Find a relative who may not yet be connected to the internet, connect them to it, and have them visit the Goodreads Best Picture Book page and write in “the little red publishing hen”. Or at least create an account in their name and then vote for them.
So I’ve been told I’m not allowed to go around people’s houses, sign them up for Goodreads accounts, visit the Best Picture Book page, write in The Little Red Publishing Hen and vote for it for best picture book any more.
But, what I can do is tell you how to do it yourself.
Step 1 – visit the https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-picture-books-2015
Next, log in or create an account on Goodreads (it’s free!) and come back to that page.
Step 2: ready to write-in a vote!
Now you’re going to, very carefully, type in “the little red publishing hen”:
Step 3: Write in the little red publishing hen
Then you’re going to click or tap on The Little Red Publishing Hen in that drop-down list. Or you’re going to hit enter…
Step 4: Nearly there!
Then, with all your might (maybe a little less if it’s a new computer or phone and you don’t want to destroy it, just for the sake of voting for The Little Red Publishing Hen), press that big, red Vote button!
Step 5: Wallow in your part in L’affaire Chicken!
And that’s it. Tell your friends, neighbors, Romans, countrymen. Send them here, which will send them over there. Download the book, read it (it’s free to Goodreads members and on the iBookstore), share it with your writerly friends (it’ll give you something else to talk about other than pitching them ideas for a story — and when you see the single solitary tear in their eye you know you’ll have hit a real nerve).
Because precisely no one asked, I’m about to tell you the story of the odd little non-children’s story called The Little Red Publishing Hen. So grab a cup of tea and settle in, folks.
The Little Red Publishing Hen
I woke up a few weekends ago to the urgent call of nature — I had the ghost of a story lodged in my brain and I couldn’t get it out without the aid of pen and paper.
I imagined the little red hen, sick of all that baking, settling in to write a novel. Since writing is a solitary (ish) pursuit, she was in good shape, given the help she got in her baking. But imagine she got to the road to publication part of the process — the agent hunt, the search for a home for her book, an audience, a market. It’s been something I’ve thought a lot about as I’ve researched agent after agent, looking for someone who would be a good fit for Trip to the Quiet Room — a story about an ex-pro hockey player, his family, his old teammate, post-concussion symptoms, Old Sturbridge Village, and a time machine, amongst other things. Surprisingly, there is not a single agent who lists all of those things in their manuscript wish list. So I’ve spent a good chunk of time over the last two years crafting query letters, synopses, query packages for all sorts of different requirements; I’ve hit up old and sometimes tenuous connections for potential leads; I’ve pored over every entry in the PublishersMarketplace email every morning for new candidates and then dove into that agent’s background, previous sales, Twitter feed, Linked In profile, everything available to try and make some sort of connection. Because, as it’s so prominently highlighted on one of my scoreboards, the biggest foe you have to struggle against is that great, empty, soul-sucking void of no response. You begin to doubt your own existence, after so many emails sent with not even the hint of a reply, not even an auto-reply!
The latest score…
So I imagined the little red hen running up against a familiar enemy, for her, and just getting on with it. She’d self-publish!
In order to tell the story of the little red hen I pictured a pretty vivid set of colors, and while the kids did an amazing job on Verano the Fish, I didn’t want to go with the hand-drawn look for this one, going for a more Minecraft-y look (which is handy, as well, since my artistic abilities are lacking). I sketched out a few chickens for proof-of-concept purposes, and found I liked the look. I market tested them on the kids, and they liked them, too. So before I knew it I was blocking out the book, breaking the story up into short, bite-sized chunks that would need some sort of art. The better part of the weekend mornings, some evenings, mornings throughout the next two weeks were spent artifying the whole thing and fleshing out the book in iBooks Author, which is where I did all the layout of the text and pictures.
Proofing
During one of the reviews with the kids they highlighted a number of words they didn’t understand or thought might be improved, and we came up with the glossary, which is built into iBooks, so we chose the words they wanted defined and added those, as well as a single page glossary for the Kindle version.
I wasn’t 100% comfortable pitching this as a children’s book, since it’s more in the vein of the thinly veiled frustrations of a writer comparing himself to a fat red hen than a pleasant bedtime read. I didn’t want an unsuspecting novelist-in-progress downloading this book only to break down in tears as they attempted to read the story to their children as they lay them down to sleep. I also didn’t want unsuspecting children to grab this book from the digital shelf and miss the light sarcasm and think that publishing a New York Times best seller was as easy as the book makes it out to be (or does it?). I didn’t want chickens to get ahold of this book, either, Doreen Cronin-style, and wonder where their laptop and writing desk was. I agonized about this for all of fifteen to twenty minutes, and decided to slap a subtitle, “A Storybook for Writers and Their Children” on it and be done with it. That should clear up any and all confusion.
Some edits and off we go to the publishers!
And then, as it says in the book, it was just a matter of pressing the ‘Publish’ button in iBooks Author.
Well, pressing the button, remembering that I needed to provide screenshots, a decent cover, find the typo I’d missed in a hundred or so re-readings, then do it all over again for Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program. And then do it all again with Barnes & Noble’s excellent NOOK Kids Book Builder, only to remember that the NOOK Kids Book Builder doesn’t generate a book that anyone can read!
Easy as HTML Pie!
Then it was simply a matter of not caring about Barnes & Noble enough to spend a lot more time debugging the problem, and so I sat back, grabbed my (now cold) cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee, and watched the downloads pour in…. just like the little red publishing hen.
And then, and then, good friends, dear readers, as if fated, days after publishing this new picture book, the Goodreads Choice Awards 2015 opened for voting! Now, last time out it didn’t work out quite so well, as Verano the Fish lost out to some very stiff competition. And this time The Little Red Publishing Hen faces some equally starched competition, but this time I think you’re ready. I’m ready.And the little red publishing hen is certainly ready to make that leap from competitor in the Goodreads Choice Awards to winner, Goodreads Choice Awards 2015.
Trip to the Quiet Room (also known as Butterfly, or William Murphy’s Trip to the Quiet Room) started as an in-betweener project (I’ve talked about this before). I had finished the first draft of a novel called, tentatively, Rudyard Kipling’s Chair. It was a tangle of stories about a vast underground black market of goods operating in plain sight at a popular homewares store, a group of cat’s eye enthusiasts, ostensible whalers, coffee farmers, a library theoretician, the cutthroat world of publishing, a band of misfits aboard a suspicious cargo ship, and a solo trip across the Atlantic in a 30 foot ketch.
A tentative book cover
I finished the first draft in February, 2011, put it aside to let it marinate in its own juices, and started the project that would become Trip to the Quiet Room. In between drafts of that book I picked up RKC again, and it currently lies on the operating table, innards spilt all over the floor, walls, probably ceiling. Like I said, it has a tangle of stories, some of which survived the extraction surgery, some of which didn’t. It probably won’t walk again, and if it does it’ll most certainly have a limp.
I had heard the story of his trip across the Atlantic (and its companion trip back from Europe to America that didn’t succeed) a few times, and that alone was inspiration enough to start off a story about a man who would leave the eastern shores behind, headed for Europe, but maybe without that clear intent. While I wrote the book I got to read the manuscript of Carl’s (the privileges of being in an internationally renowned literary family) account, editing notes and all.
W. Carl Jackson’s “Log of the Carla Mia”
It’s a fascinating story to read; the daily routines of attempting to sail yourself across the Atlantic, the descriptions of a life at sea and a lot of tension (despite the fact that you can guess he made it safely, if we’re reading his manuscript account of the trip). It was a much different account than I’d expected and while the structure of that story was much, much, much different than the roiling sea of storylines that made up RKC, I think I still pulled some great maritime details that made the practicalities of living at sea for a short time.
But the point of all of this is that another relation of Carl Jackson’s (and mine, by extension), Mike Potter, has created a map of all the locations marked in The Log of the Carla Mia: Being an account of a single-handed passage across the Atlantic Ocean in a thirty-foot auxiliary ketch in the summer of nineteen seventy-eight, so you can feel the trip in pretty intimate detail, watch where things start to unravel, and where he finally ends up. You can check it out here (I think):
While you’re waiting for my book, William Murphy’s Trip to the Quiet Room (you may be waiting a while) to come out, you might want to go grab a copy of The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick deWitt. It’s got the sort of sensibility I love and the cast of characters are flawed and fantastic. Once you’re done with that (or before, I don’t mind), Claire North’s new book, Touch is out, and well worth your time while you sit in your local bookstore in the Fiction aisles by the ‘H’s, camped out on the floor with a halogen lamp, hard hat, blanket, picnic lunch, butterfly net, accosting each and every employee who wanders past, dragging at their cuffs, begging them to let you have the very first copy of William Murphy’s Trip to the Quiet Room, you’ve got to have it. Touch is the slightly larger book, so having that on hand in the bookstore while you sit your vigil will lend itself as a defense when the book store security finally show up to escort you out, as it makes an excellent shield (not that I know from personal experience). On the down side, you’ll also believe that you can simply transition to the security guard’s body by touching their skin, so maybe that book wouldn’t be the better choice. If you’re reading The Sisters Brothers, there is a good chance you’ll try gunning down the security guards in cold blood, which also isn’t a great idea, so perhaps you should read those two books from the comfort of your own home and maybe just read the reviews of the books that follow while you’re slumped against the ‘H’ shelf, hoping that, like some magical fairy or mirage on the horizon, one of the times you look up to check the shelf that there, next to the Kristin Hannah books, is William Murphy’s Trip to the Quiet Room, by Matthew Hanlon.
I haven’t had a lot of success reading books with a blurb along the lines of “Could be the finest comic novel since Flann O’Brien’s…” or anything comparing an author or book to Flann O’Brien, but here I go with my own comparison: “The Sisters Brothers” is like some long-lost cousin to Flann O’Brien’s novels. The American cousin, if you will.
I loved the voice and I thought the way Patrick deWitt developed the brothers’ relationship was excellent, the driving force behind their trip down south to kill a man for the Commodore. But the whole cast of characters — the crying man they meet along their way; Mayfield, the bigwig in a small town; Warm, the man they’re meant to kill; and the boy, abandoned by his gold prospecting party — they would be comfortable showing up in “The Third Policeman” or “At Swim-Two-Birds.” There is an exchange between Mayfield and the brothers, mid-way through their meeting, where Mayfield recounts being robbed by a man with a limp in their hometown of Oregon City, then thinks to ask them if either of them walks with a limp. The dialogue back and forth is pretty snappy and well-timed.
Each and every one of these characters has a little bit of despair at their core that keeps the humor pretty black, and it’s a sometimes matter-of-factly gruesome ride with these notorious Sisters Brothers, but I thought the book was brilliant from start to finish.
Like her own creation, Kepler, I felt like, when I touched the pages of this book, I, too became something else, someone else. The Reader.
The book was paced really well, the action and flips from one person to the next effective. So Kepler is this sort of creature who inhabits people’s bodies upon touching their skin. Their kind has lived for ages, passing from one host to the next, absconding with that new person’s life, leaving their old host suddenly days, weeks, years older and minus the intervening memories. It’s a great idea for a story and it raises so many practical and philosophical questions, and Claire North dredges most of them up and paints an empathetic picture for The Reader — it’s not that the protagonist, this Kepler, is purely good, you get the sense that there is a myriad of shades of grey and all sorts here, and it just makes the story more entertaining.
The author has a great ear for snappy dialogue, and since we’re also dealing with people who realize that the other person to whom they’re speaking has just been in possession of their own body you have the occasion for discussions about what the other has been eating while inhabiting the owner’s body which might get a little dizzying, but fun.
If Claire North started writing the information on the side of a box of cereal I would suddenly start buying a lot more of that cereal, she’s just the business, and I’m very jealous, indeed.
While this book wasn’t as good as the mesmerizing “The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August,” it’s still an excellent read. I worry that maybe I *had* been possessed by something , something that even still has a hold of me and makes me want to rush around the streets, accosting strangers, asking them if they haven’t read “Touch” just yet, and if not, why not?
