Win a Copy of DANI NOIR!

Sometimes there are these incredible, supportive people you run into in the world who believe in you and your book and just want to support you for no other reason than the fact that maybe they’re just really awesome? I swear they exist and the talented YA author Courtney Summers is one of those people! She is holding a contest on her blog where you have two chances to win a pre-ordered copy of DANI NOIR! Seriously, I warned you of her awesomeness!

Her idea for the contest is brilliant… and inspired by none other than the fabulous Rita Hayworth. Enter HERE!

Thank you, Courtney! Guess what I’m going to say? You. Are. Awesome.

Welcome to Firstdraftland

Guess where I am. I’m down here where anything seems possible. Where the words flow—you hope—and the pages multiply—please—and you’re so deep into writing this novel you couldn’t stop if someone dragged you away by the hair, which would hurt, sure, but you’d lose a few hairs over it, it’s your novel.

It’s fun down here. Look at all the colors. The soundtrack is yours to select and I’ve got the same song on repeat and no one can stop me! Down here, it never rains unless you want it to and then you get drenched. We have sparklers. We have rainbows. We have ponies. We have all the time in the world (not really, but we pretend). You can be hella genius in your own mind down here because no one’s read what you’ve written yet. You can be the next Maureen Johnson or the next Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Or you can just be yourself, because down here that’s enough. Down here, you’re someone. You matter. You make perfect sense. Your run-on sentences are to-die-for, darling. Down here, you can say anything you want and go anywhere you want and no one’s going to yell at you to put on some shoes.

Down here, this novel is the best thing you’ve written ever. It is good. It is good. It is good. Keep telling yourself that, it works. Down here, you truly believe that just maybe it’s actually sorta good.

Go with it. The doubts and self-loathing and people calling you names and pelting you with tomatoes will come later.

Down here, everyone still loves you. The dozen red roses and the breakfast in bed and all the rest. Really, it’s so nice down here why would anyone ever want to leave?

So here I am, writing my first draft. I want to write to the end of the book by December so I can have fun line-editing and revising myself into oblivion. (A whole other level of existence I’m looking forward to reaching.)

I know some of you are down here with me. First drafts by the end of 2009. I have at least 40,000 words left to write. Who else?

Protected: With and without an Agent

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I Love You, and You, and You, and…

Here are a few things I love:

You know I love chocolate, that’s old news. I love stripes, though my passion for them can get me into dangerous territory when I have a striped shirt on and the only pants that are clean are the ones with the pinstripes and then I grab my worn but still beloved Marimekko bag with the stripes and rush outside without looking in a mirror first.

I love New York City, especially downtown Manhattan and all its ghosts. I love photos in black-and-white. I love tofu—yes, really. I love rainstorms. I love libraries. I love voicey first-person fiction and unreliable narrators. I love tomatoes, especially the grape ones. I love quirky indie movies. I love Elliott Smith songs, and I love when someone I know whips out the guitar and plays them for me. I love graffiti, especially in subway tunnels. I love magicians and I love not ever finding out how the card tricks are done. I love people who are odd and don’t care and are just totally themselves. I love brown eyes.

But there’s one thing I love that sits near the top of the list. It’s something that holds me together, makes me feel worthwhile. It gets me up in the morning. Sets my heart beating. I am so very excited to have it again:

A deadline.

I’m on deadline now with the novel! For me, writing a novel on deadline is like knowing someone cares. The pressure is exhilarating. You feel like the prettiest, smartest, most fascinating girl in the whole room. At first, anyway. So remind me of this later, when I’m getting up while it’s still dark out to write before a long stretch at the day job and I just want more hours in the day and I wish they’d let me come in at noon. Promise?

The Day You Thought Would Never Come

Something truly AMAZING has happened. Not revealing details here just yet, but I’ll give hints: It has to do with that incredible literary agent I signed with on May 1 and that new novel I’m in the midst of writing.

Here’s another hint: It deserves CAKE.

Technically, it deserves TWO CAKES.

Something happens when your dream starts to come true: You realize there’s more to the dream you’ve been carrying, the one you thought was yours and yours alone—it’s not only your dream anymore. There are all the people who helped you get there—and you hope they know you will never forget. The people who encouraged, and stuck their necks out to speak up for you. The people who wanted to give you a chance. The people who were there with you from Day 1, who remember you at age 18, so naive, sneaking down under the porch of the abandoned house on campus to talk about what you wanted from life, playing with your nose ring nervously and confessing you wanted to be a writer though you had no idea what that even meant. The people who read your very first short stories and encouraged you to keep writing. The people who said yes. The people who said no but took the time to tell you why. The people who said try again.

The dream would be flimsy if it was made up only of the good. There’s the bad too—you can’t forget the bad. That’s what made this all worthwhile. Ten + years of trying and failing and trying and failing makes me appreciate this so much more than if it had happened straight out of the gate, the way I used to wish it would.

I didn’t get the big break when I was 22. Or 24. Or 28. Or… let’s stop counting. I thought that meant I’d failed.

But you know what? I kept trying; I’m so glad I kept trying. And now I will be working immensely hard to prove I’m worth it.

I’m still reeling.

Enough talking in circles. Details soon! But more importantly? Some HARD WORK.

One of Those Moments

I keep having these moments where I’m in the midst of talking to someone about writing and then it’ll hit me suddenly: I’m doing this now. I’m a writer now. After all this time, it’s really, really happening.

It’s easy to not believe it, to just walk through the day doing normal things or forgetting to do normal things—another day in which I forgot my peanut butter sandwich—and hours slip past and it seems less real then, it seems fantastical, like that dream I had this morning that was so vivid and bright and— Sorry, lost it, can’t remember a thing now.

Fact is, I’ve wanted this for so long I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want it. Certainly since junior high. Did I ever want to be anything else? Well, sure, when I was little I wanted to be a ballerina, but then I learned how to read and there went that.

I think this might be happening. To me.

A few more moments like these and I might just start to believe it.

Not-Writing

I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m not writing. The me who is not-writing is exceptionally boring. She loafs around, stares for long periods of time at the wall, and has zero aspirations to do anything substantial. Her goals include: getting through the day; remembering to take her vitamins; finding underwear for tomorrow. On Sunday she cleaned and organized the living room. Not one of you wants to hear how I cleaned and organized the living room. It’s barely even entertaining, except for the moment when I found a hidden stash of dark chocolate with raspberry filling, which had been there for who knows how long, but I didn’t even eat it. Apparently the non-writing me doesn’t care for good chocolate. I feel sorry for her. She also made a shopping list, or started a shopping list for the grocery store, and then got bored and left it half-finished, and never went shopping for the things on it either. At least she made herself useful and found her passport.

I’m not saying I don’t have things to do, I just don’t have much will to do them.

I’m taking a break on the Unmentionable Novel for real reasons, but I know what you’re going to say: Why not work on something else for the duration? I wish I could, but I have this thing with voices. Once I’m in that magic place with a voice I absolutely cannot, should not, stop writing in that voice and switch to another. Such is the danger with first-person, but I love first-person and I won’t mess with the magic, you know?

Non-writing me just replied to three emails. She’s so courteous. Non-writing me updated her website. Actually, she messed it up very early one morning and had to wait for her web designer / adorable husband to wake up so he could fix it. Non-writing me has lots of things to read, but she also has concentration problems. She’s having trouble sitting still. I suspect she may have ADHD.

I can’t wait to start writing again.

Maybe I should start writing again.

Maybe this is proof that, without writing, my life is meaningless.

Maybe, if I don’t have a deadline, I don’t even exist.

Whoa. Scary!

Hours from the Information Blackout

For those of you keeping score, I finished revising the plot synopsis! There were a few days when the synopsis was winning and I was down on the ground eating dirt, but I picked myself up and went back in. And, now, you know what? The book is so much better for it. It was worth all the hard work.

Which brings me to what I am going to say next.

Starting tomorrow, this blog will stop talking about the above-mentioned novel. We are entering an information blackout period in which that particular novel will be stricken from our vocabulary, censored, and scrambled from view. What novel, whose novel, where?

It’s another behind-the-scenes moment, and I have no idea how long it will last.

In the meantime, it has been suggested that I need a hobby. I need to be distracted; I’m not just saying that to avoid the guilt over watching TV. Possibilities: I wish I’d learned how to skateboard, but if I tried now I would surely break my face. Baking? I could blow up the apartment. Knitting is not for me. Napping is depressing, and not really a hobby. Should I rent a Wii?

The Easy Part

Write some chapters of a novel, hey, write the whole entire novel; that’s the easy part. Much harder is writing about the novel.

Ever know a writer who couldn’t write a synopsis? Say she could write hundreds of pages, and has before, that she could write the words but not talk about the words she’s written. If asked the dreaded, “So what is your novel about?” she might distract you by saying you spilled food on your shirt, or demand, “What’s your novel about?” And then turn tail and run.

It’s not that her novel is about nothing. She’s not that meta. It’s not that her novel is so ethereal and philosophical it needs hours to get to the core of it and even then you might need to know Heidegger to grasp it. Not even close. Her novel is about things; there are people in it, they do stuff. She just cannot tell you what that is or who they are or why. Not even under threat of force-fed chicken.*

Hi. I’m Nova. I’m a fiction writer, but I can’t write a synopsis to save my life. I’m trying it again, going back for more. I will do it this time. I will.

This may sound like no big deal, but authors have to talk about the books they’ve written, you know. I am not making this up. People expect you to tell them about your novel and then they’ll decide if they want to read it! Horrors! Have you heard of elevator pitches? Can you imagine me, in an elevator, trying to talk actual words out loud about any of my manuscripts?

If you ever step onto an elevator and find me collapsed in the corner hyperventilating, you’ll know why.

Surely I’m exaggerating. Then again, I just spent all this time writing about why I can’t write about what I’m writing. It’s my great talent. Wish me luck at revising that synopsis. Or better yet, come by and write it for me. I’ll buy you dinner.

———
* I’m a vegetarian, obvs. But you know you lead a charmed life when the most horrific thing you can imagine is being force-fed chicken.

The Last of the Rejections

I’m nearing the end of my adult literary fiction rejections. One biggie came today—I expected it—and there are some story responses still trickling in, plus I think one more fellowship, and then I’m done. These things have been out for a while—since before all the good things started happening for me in April—and I just wish they would hurry up and get here already.

I feel done.

I feel unconflicted for the first time in a long time and that helps me know it’s okay to be done. Better than okay.

I’m ready for the next thing. Well, maybe. My plot summary is out of my hands and I will dive in with revisions when the time comes. Emailing with a writing friend who understands how I’m happily complacent in this “gray area” as she called it certainly helps. (Thanks, J!)

And books help to distract me. To those of you who don’t read YA novels, they are not all Gossip Girl. I just finished Living Dead Girl and I’m speechless. In awe. Struck by it. It’s a painful, searing novel to read—intense. I love intense. Not sure what to do with myself now, after devouring that last page.

Confidence, Round 2

Please don’t hate me for yesterday’s post.

So guess what? I will be sending in my plot summary / outline / whatever-it’s-called tomorrow. I will do it. I will.

I’m working more on it right now as we speak. Feeling… I don’t know if I’d say “confident,” but I’ll say excited? I really really really really want to write this novel. So that’s good.

Just keep me away from the TV tonight, okay?

Confidence

I need some.

Submission Avoidance*

Made some serious progress on plotting out this novel and deciding how it ends this weekend, but this morning woke feeling disconnected again, halfway hopeless, wondering if I’m making any sense on the page. I’m guessing I’m just anxious about submission time, whenever that will be, and making excuses to prolong this in-between stage where nothing is happening yet and there’s no reason to stress.

You see, before we go out on submission with this novel all I can do is imagine how it will be. I can hope, and I can picture it, and I can pretend, and I can do it all safely from my seat at this desk where nothing bad can possibly happen. It’s this thing I can see far out in the distance, if I squint. And I don’t have to look if I don’t want to.

Right now, there are no reality checks, no tough decisions, no anxious waiting after answers.

I don’t know how being out on submission will feel—when I sent DANI NOIR out, it was to an editor I was already working with on it, and she had my back, and I didn’t send it to anyone else at all. The whole thing caught me by surprise with DANI. This is probably going to be immensely more stressful.

You know what? I’m just going to spend the week working on this plot and not think of what could possibly happen in the future.

I can’t know.

I don’t want to know.

When do writers relax? Is there a point after you sell the book, between deadlines, before reviews, and before people actually read it, when you can just take a nice little nap or something?
——–

* Apparently this is a reoccurring theme in my writing life. I’ve already written a post with this exact same title!

That Thing I Shouldn’t Talk About

On my mind right now, that thing never to talk about in mixed company, or any company, ever: Money.

Just came back from shocking someone into a stupor with the realities of our situation. I think she felt very sorry for us. Or thought we were very stupid. Or both. Hey, artists: If you’re seeking an MFA and can’t pay for it yourself out-of-pocket, maybe don’t get one. And, on that note, if you want to travel to Paris and can’t pay for it yourself out-of-pocket, maybe don’t go to Paris.

Anyway, we’re moving ahead at long last with trying to get our heads above water, or closer to it anyway. There’s this weird reality we’ve been living in now in which you only buy things you can afford. Real people do this all the time! In our case, it just means we’re not buying much of anything. I won’t be getting new clothes for the summer and I will be gluing my sandals together so I can wear them another season. There’s nothing wrong with that. This week I wore a purple-striped concoction to work with some weird shirt over it because I found both in the suitcase and hadn’t seen them in so long so they felt like new clothes. Of course, once I saw myself in the full-length mirror at work I regretted that I’d gotten dressed in the dark and didn’t notice that my blacks didn’t match. I hate when a warm black clashes with a cool black, don’t you? Then again who cares. Fact is, I just really like stripes.

In other weird news, I’ve lost a little weight lately due to this new medication I’m on, which also happens to be giving me a lot of energy, and I am totally cool with both side effects.

Also, if you’re curious about the writing:

My agent likes my new chapters

He’s awesome. I’m so happy I picked him. Best decision I’ve made in a long time.

All I have to do now is, um, write that plot summary—AND IT’S KILLING ME AND PLEASE SOMEONE HELP ME!—oh, I’m so dramatic. Give me a week; it’ll be fine.

I’m in this strange spot where some things are falling apart all around me and yet other things are pretty good. So there are ups and downs and that’s life and I never thought I’d be here eating a bag of raw string beans talking about some agent who likes my chapters, but here I am, eating vegetables, voluntarily, and being responsible, voluntarily, like a grown-up with a literary agent and everything.

Just…

Wow.

All the Things You Can Do When Not Writing

Sleep late
Answer two dozen old emails
Put away papers scattered all over the living room since late April
Recycle old manuscripts
Shred old rejection letters
Watch Hollywood movie
Attempt to find clothes to wear
Give up
Listen to blip.fm playlist on repeat
Organize finances
Freak out
Walk to Chinatown
Eat far too much vegetarian dim sum
Try not to step on dead fish
Head to Wholefoods to shop for diet food
Drop fruit
Wander around aisles saying, “I won’t eat that. I won’t eat that.”
Eat something
Walk home down Houston Street, dodging hipsters
Try not to think about book
Try not to obsess
Try not to worry
Freak out on Bleecker Street
Send angsty emails to angsty writer friends
Tweet about chicken
Eat a nectarine
Watch an indie movie
Stare at the ceiling
Wonder what will happen next?
Fall asleep not knowing
Wake up still not knowing
Repeat

And Then… Sleep (+ Bonus Back Cover!)

I’ve been pushing myself for the past three weeks. May 1 was the day I picked my agent; three weeks later, May 22, was the day I turned in new chapters and revisions to the awesome agent after an hour of nerves over hitting Send.

May 1, I had 25 pages; May 22, I had 59.

For me, the writer obsessed with how every word matters, who can spend a full day carving out one opening paragraph and then throw it away the next morning, that’s a lot of work done in a short amount of time. And it never felt like work: It was a joy, most of the time. (The war with page 1 that some may have witnessed not withstanding.)

But you can’t keep a full-time job and write scads of paragraphs on a new novel without letting something slip.

Let’s just say no one I know is allowed inside my apartment. I have one Very Important Thing needing to be dealt with that I promise to do next week. I have a husband, poor guy, who’s barely seen me. I need to start working on publicity for DANI NOIR! And on top of that I’m pretty stressed out at work.

So, yesterday, it was a half day at the office and I got home early. So much to do and now I had the free time to do it… What did I accomplish? Falling asleep on top of an open library book. Awesome.

I’m excited for upcoming revisions and more work on the plot summary. In the meantime? I slept in this morning and had a dream where I kept climbing up this steep, grassy hill toward a stone city in the distance. I kept saying, “I can’t wait to get back on my island!” But then the dream would shift and I’d be back at the bottom of the hill, climbing up and squealing about being back on my island. Either I’m nervous about what’s about to happen with this book or I’m not yet ready to move to Brooklyn. Who knows.

But check this out. Here’s the back cover for DANI NOIR, with Dani herself revealed!

DANI NOIR by Nova Ren Suma / cover art by Marcos Calo (out in bookstores 9/22/09)

Yes, that’s Dani, playing noir detective, spying on the mystery girl in the polka-dot tights. The artist is amazing!

So This Novel I’m Writing?

The one that’s consumed me all month? The one whose pages I covered in red pen this morning, slashing lines and scribbling details and hammering new paragraphs onto the backs of the paper then crossing them out?

It’s going well, thank you.

No, seriously. I got the 50 pages I needed to have a decent-sized partial. (As of this morning we are at 56 pages. By tomorrow that may become 55 because writing backwards is my specialty.) I wrote to the end of the chapters—there’s now a total of four. I can give them to my agent (OMG!) (it may take me months to stop doing that, be warned) whenever I’m ready… he’s patient. Which is good, because I want to play around with them more. The red pen has more ink and I should at least make use of it.

Someone saw me today—hair sticking out crooked, eyes glassy, rambling about the six hours I spent Sunday rewriting page 1—and said maybe I should take a break. You know, for a couple days. You know, like sane people do.

If she is reading: I may not be able to do that tomorrow morning, sorry!

I’m just… in the zone. At this point, I could keep writing and just write the whole first draft by the end of June. I might collapse afterward and lose permanent use of my two main typing fingers, and maybe all my hair would fall out, but I’d feel really, really satisfied with the book, you know?

Don’t worry—I’m chilling out. No stress. All is good; no interventions needed.

Writing the book is waaaaay more fun than emailing people the book to read and then waiting to see if they like it. If I keep writing it, I’ll never know the truth. Maybe that’s why I can’t stop, hmm?

What 50 Pages Look Like

I got to page 50, fyi. Reached it, looked around, spent a few paragraphs there, then looked ahead in hopes of finding page 51.

You see, the chapter’s not done yet, so I can’t just stop mid-sentence on page 50 and curl up under the desk to take a nap.

Still working! Every time I work on this chapter I go back to the first page and move forward from there. Momentum, I tell myself. It’s pretty annoying.

The First 25

Still here, working hard. The goal is to have 50 pages at least to show M (MY AGENT OMG!) as soon as is humanly possible. He’s not giving me any pressure at all; I’m the one giving myself all the pressure. I like pressure when there’s a point to it. I thrive under pressure; you will find that on my résumé.

I started with 25 pages, I just need 25 more. But 25 more good pages, not 25 pages to send M running for the hills. Also a more fleshed-out outline, you know, so people know for sure what happens in the book. Which will involve articulating what happens in the book, like in actual words.

I have been writing a lot this week, so I have 49 pages now. Wait, no. I just cut some pages. Now I have 42.

But every. word. matters. The amount of pages won’t matter if the words on them fall flat.

The first 25 pages I wrote, you know… the ones that caused all the commotion? They’re like your first love who you’ll carry in your heart always and no girlfriend afterward will ever compare. Will I, can I live up to the first 25?

One Week Later

So, guys? A week has passed and I’ve gone from complete shock to lesser shock to stunned silence to insane delirium to shock again to relief to happiness to wanting to sleep for days to writing up a storm of pages to—

Just sitting here. Really, really excited.